by Günter Grass
And right she was: he took the guest in without batting an eyelid. I must have set myself up quickly in his empty, all-but-unused studio because I have a fuzzy picture of a clay head of my curly-haired, carefree, idle host with which to document the interlude. Expressive but unfinished, it looks like a sketch of a fawn.
He and I and the other guests, whose work on their art was diverted into ever escalating conversations, which I understood only through gestures, would eat elaborate meals at a long antique marble table. We smoked before, between, and after each course. With a hidden camera a director of the wave the French would soon call new, could have captured scenes typical of the times.
Situated above the Spanish Steps, the Villa Medici was like a sanatorium for burnt-out artists: the spacious garden was full of shady stone benches.
By day I walked the streets of Rome, when the heat allowed. Only churches and chapels were cool. Another thing I noticed: every fountain, every pillar stump became a metaphor. Hordes of priests clad in black and with broad-brimmed hats, inspired rapid sketches of motion. I drew with pigeon-and gull-feathers dipped into a bowl of diluted Indian ink. Everything was amazing, everything became a motif: dozing cab horses, frolicking street children, the washing on long lines. The fat woman on her balcony. The empty, shadowless squares.
I bought a straw hat for myself. Nazionale were the cheapest cigarettes, except for the Gauloises that Dina Vierny’s former husband, who lived the life of a banished prince in his Villa Medici residence, provided free of charge. My supply of Schwarzer Krauser roll-your-own tobacco had run out early on.
EVERY DAY A gift. I went a long way on that first journey alone, and though limited in time that journey has never ended: even now, in old age, every new trip I take – and Ute and I have gone from continent to continent, travelled all over China, India, Mexico – no matter how carefully planned, predictably profitable yet reasonably priced, pales in comparison with the daily enrichments I experienced on that first excursion up and down the boot.
I lived: that is, I took in everything, could never get enough, and hard as I tried, I was unable to narrow down the splendours on view. I stood thunderstruck before gesticulating marble, entranced before hand-size Etruscan bronzes. I looked up Vasari in Florence and Arezzo. At the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and the Palazzo Borghese in Rome I saw more and more of the cigarette cards of my youth turn into pompously framed originals.
I drew whatever landscape, street, or square had to offer, excreting verse as usual, evoking the stagnant heat of the midday calm or a fountain in a shady park.
Happy, sad, I followed the traces of the Deutschrömer painter Fohr, who drowned in the Tiber at an early age, made friendships that did not last, met and parted at crossroads, treated myself here and there to a lemon gelato, raced up the Spanish Steps, let my sister take a snapshot of me in my straw hat as further proof of my identity, restored a damaged plaster Madonna and Child in an Umbrian monastery in exchange for room and board, let myself be carried along Perugia’s corso, danced in a vine-covered pergola with an English girl who looked like nothing less than a Botticelli angel, got lost in the maze of Naples, wrote a long letter from there to my mother, feeding her longings with minutiae of local colour, earned a bit more travel money by painting ButanGas advertisements, set off for Palermo – a story I often later dined out on – in the guise of a pellegrino, surrounded by the local mafiosi, who gave me tomatoes and goat cheese for the road.
I thought of myself as an outlaw, an adventurer with an insatiable wanderlust who felt chosen, but I was just one of thousands of young men in those post-war years who put their notion of freedom to the test by crossing borders, now finally open, who set off haphazardly yet with a goal, for places like Assisi, Pompeii, and Agrigento con mezzi di fortuna, as the Italians call the art of hitch-hiking. I met hitch-hikers who, seven years previously, in this or that uniform, had survived the battle for Monte Cassino or had met as enemies when the Allies landed on the beach at Anzio-Nettuno, but were now peacefully inspecting the site as equals in mufti. I saw signs to soldiers’ cemeteries with neat rows of crosses in battalion strength; I saw rubble quickly overgrown. The sea was lukewarm.
I met girls along the way, alone or in pairs, girls from Sweden, Canada, and Scotland, sending postcards from wherever to Haparanda, Toronto, and Glasgow, but I was unavailable, still under Swabian lock and key. It was not until Palermo, where the putative pilgrim presented himself to Professor Rossone at the Accademia di Belle Arti rather than – as he promised his Mafia patrons – to Saint Rosalia, and there, while attending his sculpture class, I was suddenly taken with his pupil Aurora Varvaro. The bolt slid open; the curtain tore. What can I say? Love at first sight …
SHE WAS NO more than seventeen, with charms so closely guarded that it was only in the back pews that I could tell her in few words and less grammar all the things I saw in her, what I felt for her, the lovesickness I sought to assuage by her unknowing presence, and why her closely guarded beauty pained me so. Of course I also loved the sound of her name.
When I was granted permission by Rossone to do a portrait of Aurora in clay, we were constantly under the surveillance of her younger, sinister-looking brother or her grandmother, who would nod off now and again. Nothing more than glances were allowed, though fingertips managed to meet, and we could go a little further with English words than with Italian. But what had begun to take the shape of love never took flight; nor did the head, whose elongated form I exaggerated, get beyond a sketch, though one of Rossone’s pupils apparently made a plaster cast of it after I left.
I left – she stayed. But even now, after a separation of more than fifty years, broken only once, in the early sixties, which led to something I shall pass over in silence, we keep in touch and have forgotten nothing, not the back-pew secrecy, not the whispered words, not the moments of fleeting closeness.
What would have happened had I stayed in Palermo belongs in a completely different film, a tragicomedy under Sicilian skies that would take me into doddering old age. And whatever was left of Greeks, Saracens, Normans, and Staufers on that insular pile of historic debris would have come together and formed the raw material for a wide-ranging epic novel.
Then what would have become of Danzig? How would I have envisioned the lost city from the perspective of Palermo?
In the lorry that gave the hitch-hiker a front seat on his way back up the boot in the direction of Cefalù, I opened the package she had presented to me as a farewell offering and found a slice of cake, some dried figs, and a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs. So caring was my Aurora, my unlived but lasting love, preserved in amber.
I arrived back in Düsseldorf in mid-September, just in time for the beginning of classes. The nearly ready remodelled Kirchstrasse studio in the suburb of Stockum no longer looked desolate and lifeless: I immediately set out a paper-thin profile of Saint Francis and Etruscan-looking figurines. There was also Horst Geldmacher with his collection of instruments and his all-pervasive smell.
Pankok gave a positive, if perfunctory acknowledgement to my drawings and watercolours from my travels: many of his pupils had come back from far-flung places with things to show.
UP TO NOW, my memories of the journey to Italy have overshadowed a side plot rich in characters that later took on a life of its own and provided fodder for the practically omnivorous novel, so that only leftovers can be used for this account.
Pictures taken by Trude Esser’s brother Hannes show Geldmacher and me smoking what look like cigar butts, together with Franz Witte. We are taking ourselves seriously, each in his role. Oh, my friends! I miss them still. Neither lived long: both were brought low by their talents and by their very selves; I was robust enough to outlive them.
My friendship with Horst Geldmacher, ‘Flute’ to his close friends, and my long-standing love for ragtime and the blues resulted in a jazz band of three, with Günter Scholl on guitar and banjo. Günter, who was studying to be an art teacher, did in fact teach drawing late
r on and always seemed to be in a good mood.
For percussion I used a household item that had served jazz since its earliest days – in New Orleans! – the washboard, beating out the rhythm on its corrugated steel with eight thimbled fingers.
We played three times a week in the Czikos, a two-storey, slit-narrow Old Town restaurant with a pseudo-Hungarian aura. A gypsy cymbalom player with his son on double-bass filled the rest of the week. Wedged into the space under the stairs leading to the gallery, we played our hearts out for meals and a moderate fee, before a nouveau riche audience and some more or less successful artists and their hangers-on. And because the owners, Otto Schuster and his wife, might as well have stepped out of a novel, they later stepped into the episode in which the washboard takes over from the tin drum.
The author did as he pleased with his cast of characters, granting the Czikos a chapter of its own, ‘In the Onion Cellar’, and therefore great importance, moving the jaded yet life-loving patrons of the exquisite establishment to tears with the aid of knives and chopping boards: the minced onions, a very specific sort of purgative, were well suited to poke a few holes in what later came to be known as post-war society’s ‘inability to mourn’. This is how it went. For a fee you could cry your eyes out. Paid-for tears brought relief. Paying guests were reduced to babbling infants who then followed nice Oskar’s drumbeat. Which leads me to conclude that of all products of the soil the onion is the best suited to literature. Whether it unwraps the memory skin by skin or moistens dried-up tear ducts and causes tears to flow, it is a valid metaphor, and as far as the Onion Cellar was concerned it was good for business.
Nothing more needs to be said: what is transformed into literature speaks for itself. But even if the Onion Cellar was meant to outlive the Czikos, I can’t get Otto Schuster’s clip joint – the mood that came of the stuffy air and the dim oil lamps – out of my mind.
WE THREE OCCASIONAL musicians rarely took a break. Not until long after midnight, when the last customers had left, did we sit down and stuff ourselves with Szegedin goulash. I did not overdo the smoking, but I did drink too much marc and slivovitz, brandies bought for us by screaming lady customers. It was a noisy operation, and its prices had learned to climb from the so-called economic miracle.
I was going to the dogs. The Academy scarcely saw my face. Each night swallowed the following day. Dreary talk. Boozy breath. Customers’ grotesque faces, one snuffing out the next. More holes in an already porous memory. And yet there is something I can make out, as if behind a pane of milky glass, something I can halfway believe I remember: the three of us – Geldmacher pushing his flutes to raucous limit, Scholl sometimes picking sometimes thrashing his banjo, and me, now holding back, now giving it my all on the washboard – once had a famous late-night visitor.
After a jam session before a large audience – it had been sold out weeks in advance – the idol of our early years showed up at the Czikos, complete with retinue. From the distance of a few tables back he heard and apparently took pleasure in our kind of jazz, or at least in Geldmacher’s ear-splitting eruptions; his sound was unusual.
The prominent guest, as we later learned, had a taxi bring his trumpet from his hotel room, and the next thing we knew, there was his unmistakable presence in our corner under the stairs – I can see him now – lifting the shiny brass to his lips, joining a bunch of poorly paid nobodies who were merely trying to outdo the noise in the restaurant, with a bright clarion call, then taking his cue from the flute’s wild stutter, his eyes rolling, launching into a solo, which our soloist, Geldmacher by name, answered with his alto flute and which, while it played on the consonance between brass and wood, was a hundred per cent Satchmo, the Satchmo we knew from coveted records, from the radio, from glossy black-and-white photographs. Then he muted his trumpet and pulled back, blending his sound with ours for a brief eternity – letting me and my thimble-fingers switch to a new rhythm, urging on Scholl’s banjo, and causing general jubilation – and, once our Moneymaker, Geldmacher, had come down from his piccolo tightrope act, blew one last trumpet blast of gratitude, and giving each of us a friendly, somewhat avuncular nod, was gone.
What a visitation! It was not Scholl and his banjo or me and my thimbles that had lured him, but Flute Geldmacher, who had a knack for turning German folk songs into restless emigrants and transplanting them to Alabama: it was his version of ‘A Huntsman from the Palatinate’ – or was it ‘O Tannenbaum’? – that had caught Louis Armstrong’s ear.
Risky enterprise that it was, the quartet had come together with dreamlike certainty. It had lasted no more than six or seven minutes – when does bliss last longer? – but the scene, which no flashbulb registered, remains fresh in my ear and eye. The honour with which it crowned our attempts at entertainment means more to me than all the prizes I later won, including the most prized of all, which, having been granted me in my biblical old age, gave me an ironically distanced pleasure and has since stuck to me like one more job title.
Yes, even if the writer’s occupational hazard were to have tempted me to experience with hindsight what is believable and durable on paper, that is, even if this monumental meeting were not to have taken place in bland reality, it retains a figurative meaning for me: always within reach, trumpet gold, interpretation-free, above suspicion.
NOTHING MUCH WENT on in Pankok’s menagerie other than the miserable failure of Franz Witte’s and my daring attempts to soar on canvas or brown paper. There was no miracle to convert us other than Trude Esser’s fish soup, which she made for hungry friends out of numerous herrings reminiscent of Peter’s miraculous catch.
My sister returned from Rome and her cloistered existence oddly different, as if transfigured. My parents were horrified to learn that she intended to become a nun. Father yammered, while Mother ailed. I drank more than was good for me. Franz Witte began muddling his words, and Geldmacher raged and banged his head against walls that were really and truly hard. Wars had started up in Korea and elsewhere. We had lost faith in ourselves and were living on credit while the nouveau riche crowd flaunted their new riches.
They also left large enough tips at the Czikos to finance my second great journey, in the summer of ’52. I saved all winter, wanted to get away, out of Düsseldorf, a town which saw itself as a ‘little Paris’, and whose artistic folk dressed bohemian style at guild get-togethers.
AT ABOUT THIS time I inherited two easy-to-lead dance partners from the carnival festivities – one after another and for several weeks both at the same time. They took turns paying visits to my Kirchstrasse studio in Stockum, where, to their horror, I served up dishes hot off the iron stove like hasenpfeffer, sour pig’s kidneys, fried horse liver.
One was long legged, the other well proportioned, but my heart or, rather, its chambers, was still uninhabitable even if I was doubly attracted – by desire and opportunity – to them both. After completing dress-making apprenticeships, they had decided, unclear though their talents were, to serve art.
Yet we had a good enough time. There was no question of possession, so our criss-crossing, though not free of tension, was without any tragic finale. We enjoyed one another until further notice.
Both of them had studied with a French mime at the Brücke, a cultural centre sponsored by the British occupying forces, and later, when I was long out of the picture, one of them, whose name was Brigitte, followed her teacher to the socialist camp and made a career as a choreographer in East Berlin, but even while we were still together she had started giving her name the French pronunciation, which, light-hearted Rhinelander that she was, she pulled off with aplomb.
The other, though from Pomerania – she was a fascinating, fragile creature who when she strode along in her bilious green-and-purple stockings turned the Königsallee into a catwalk – remained true to Düsseldorf and pantomime for a time. Years later she appeared as a muse by the name of Ulla in a novel often cited since, but this side of literature her name was Jutta and she was called Angel by me
and others because of her demeanour. That is what I call her tenderly to this day when we two old-timers greet each other from afar.
I PLANNED MY tour of France without Brigitte and Jutta, who were mostly to be found in slow-motion pantomime poses or practising off-beat walks and neck-stretching before the mirror. Again I hitch-hiked, spending most of my time on the way to Paris and between the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in lorries, next to dog-tired drivers. I often had to sing to keep them awake. At dawn it was easy to get a ride out of Paris in the direction of Marseilles or Cherbourg or Biarritz by going to Les Halles, the now defunct central market. No matter where I rambled, to the beaches of whichever coast, I made Paris my base, first at the cockroach-infested youth hostel near Porte-de-la-Chapelle, then in a room with a view of Saint-Sulpice, in the flat of a Kleist translator by the name of Katz.
The linguistic pandemonium of Kleist’s bloodthirsty plays infected Katz with a kind of antic lunacy: he would summon man-killing amazons from his work in progress and greet everyone with ‘My swan sings Penthesilea even after death’. He held court at the Café Odéon wearing a monocle, which I found embarrassing. He apparently came from Mainz or Frankfurt. And garrulous as he was he would clam up whenever the subject of his origins or how he made it through the war came up.
If the need arose, I could always find a place to sleep among the ex-servicemen back from Algeria or Indochina. They had war written all over them in ways I could recognize, and we understood one another in whatever jumble of languages we used. Anyone who has seen not only individual corpses but corpses in piles looks on every new day as a gift.
For a while I found rent-free accommodations in an attic room with a view over roofs and chimneys in exchange for washing up after a couple belonging to the old nobility – Saint-Georges – who were, both figuratively and literally, at each other’s throats. Every morning after breakfast the din of their duel would travel from the living room down the long hallway to the kitchen. I often stood between the two of them, trying with sign language to calm them down, but they, oblivious to the onlooker, would continue throwing the plates I had just washed, or not.