by Günter Grass
Oh yes: halfway through the evangelical Jugendweihe the organist played an Adagio and Andante by Torelli, accompanied by a cello. That was as beautiful as the weather outside.
On the Back Pew
I like to sit in empty churches,
although my faith, quite early on,
as my pimples were first surfacing,
did a disappearing act.
But contending with the Holy Ghost—
attempting to refute
the old dovekeeper
with tales of rats—
is something I still enjoy.
Superstition
I’ve always counted along, even if it’s not rational. How happy I was whenever he kept on. At times two called together, back and forth or in duet. Those didn’t count, or were meant for someone else. On my way to the heath, I would stop the moment he called and shut my eyes.
Just a game that tells how many years you have left. I’ve only seen him in pictures. He’s considered nondescript. And laying eggs in someone else’s nest isn’t restricted to birds. Perhaps he taught humans to count. Once—I don’t remember when—I reached twenty-seven.
But when I stepped out the door today, the sun suddenly broke through the clouds, and the Great Promiser set my allotted time. Joy and shock. Now he calls again. But I don’t believe him.
He Called Three Times
The cuckoo, of course. Who else?
His fourth call broke off in the middle,
rattled away, died out.
So little time left:
three and a half years?
Ah, so what, that long at least . . .
Too little and too much.
Yet the next time I tested it,
I was barely out the door into the open air—
me with my doubt and my belief—
when he stopped again at three
and that gift of a half.
I’m making plans.
I’ll plant a sapling,
beech or cherry or plum.
I’ll risk a trip,
don’t know where yet,
sharpen my pencils, more than three,
and blow on feathers
as I’ve done since I was a boy.
Dear Schnurre
Once, when you, the shadow photographer, were still with us, you told me a story from your rich store as a gift for later use.
It was about a childless couple who lived in a house near the Italian border. I don’t remember what the village was called. One day their car was gone, stolen. Not that unusual a loss, you might say.
But a few days later their Fiat was back in the garage, without a dent or scratch, and washed clean. A letter lay on the driver’s seat beside the car keys; it was from the thief, thanking the couple for the emergency “loan” and inviting them to La Scala in Milan; enclosed were two tickets for a Verdi opera, La Traviata no doubt.
Pleased, the couple set out on the trip, but when they returned home shortly after midnight, still enraptured by the powerful strains of the music, they found their house empty, stripped bare.
I write to you, dear Schnurre, because after a theft further back in time, something similar happened to us, though with a different gift.
Stolen Goods
They’re back again,
both boxes,
oblong and inviting.
Stolen last winter, they stood
undamaged in the cellar,
covered in blue tarp,
one summer day
when we returned from a trip to Poland.
Only the dahlia bulbs were missing,
having bloomed elsewhere, perhaps.
What moved the thieves,
at no small effort, to return
our nearly forgotten boxes—
one made of pine,
the other of birch—
to the place from which they came?
No letter or note explained their return,
but lying in my box, side by side,
cushioned in tissue paper,
were two dead mice
of delicate beauty: their finely outlined
empty skulls, their dainty rib cages.
We puzzle over it still.
Found Objects
at rest, then rolling when struck. The sorts of thing sold cheaply at flea markets. I’ve always fingered objects my eye fell on, silent under questioning till I conned them with one of my stories.
No finder’s fee. Early on, heading for school, I came upon a curly-bearded key for which I sought the lock all my life.
Heirlooms passed down over time, bomb fragments and jagged bits of every shape. Something casts a shadow. Something useful that was lost. Something lying unnoticed in the dust. A plum-size piece of amber that brought me joy, in its innermost chamber a Darwinian insect that disproved God.
On trips I watched at the city’s edge as children poked about in the trash, finding things, tossing them back. And I saw myself among them, till the many-fingered horde drove the stranger off.
In What’s Left of the Altstadt
Since big-jawed excavators
laid bare the traces of a medieval sewer,
construction projects
considered urgent
have been halted by order
of the city’s Office of Historic Monuments.
They hope to find undigested bits of food.
What filled stomachs in the past
will be compared in value with current
nutritionally balanced meals.
Dances of Death
What drives me, summer after summer, to collect toads and frogs dried to scarred leather?
After the final ecstasy they lie on the sandy path to the heath, squashed flat.
I keep them in a basket, filled on good days with plundered brown-capped mushrooms.
Later, strung out in a row, the dancers form a circle.
Quickly, before the music ends, my pencil renders them immortal.
Stared Right Through
by the cow behind the fence,
I whistle the dog back.
Barking for no reason.
Nothing troubles her gaze.
Tracing Tracks
Beside the waves’ fringe
I meet myself—coming and going—
barefoot in the sand.
Hunting Season
Picasso’s bird of peace has changed into a clay pigeon. Traps spit them to the heavens. Hit after hit. Anyone can take a shot—even with a pointed finger. Woe to those caught in the crosshairs. Facebookers make lists of who’s to be shot. Not a fashion show runway that doesn’t boast the latest outfit: bulletproof vests. They wear them to school in America, as they soon will here.
Open Season
They fire their shotguns,
filling the air with lead.
Early on I learned to find the gaps,
avoid the scattered shot,
though now and then I lost some feathers.
Summing Things Up
Gone, gone, gone! Like all the others, broken off above the root. Lying among odds and ends, near the mosquito sealed in amber and last year’s tattered peacock feather, yet clearly on its own, a solitaire on the shelf above the standing desk, bare now and barely used.
No more toothaches. I can finally say “finally.” I still know a few stories: the short one about a dog that bites its own tail, and the longer one where the milk turns sour. And I think of some so funny you’d die laughing, like a Nobel Peace Prize for the arms maker KraussMaffei. But someone else will have to tell that one, someone with a bite.
More words wear out. People keep dying before their time. Reality comes secondhand. I’m on the sidelines. Running short of matches. I’m slow to say Now.
Someone who means well tells me to sum things up before my hand starts to tremble.
Balancing the Books
in a row, pressed close together,
name and titles on their spines,
my identity ca
rd, still valid,
though long since expired, well thumbed.
I no longer know which of my selves
filled page after page with words,
nor scarcely sense where the drive came from
to capture solid, hand-held objects
in sentences short and long.
I only know I had to write
the words that stood there
in white chalk on a blackboard,
telling me what to say, whom to defy, why,
told to what end.
Books in a row, side by side.
A wooden shelf, walls left and right,
supporting them through time
in case there are readers yet to come.
They ceased to be mine long ago,
and yet they’re still a heavy burden.
That’s the sum total. Is something missing
that could add to the bottom line?
August
The leaves grow weary. Spiders hang swollen in the web. Wars are breaking out. In the kitchen Inforadio reports rapidly developing fronts. An epidemic spreading. Body counts. Slight volatility in the market. Scotland just wants to be Scotland.
The hundredth birthday of the First World War draws near. The age-old question of guilt is posed again. As Walther once did, I sit on a stone and prop up my chin.
In This Summer Filled with Hate
With drought here, rain-swollen floods there,
shocked by the destruction of sacred art,
we thought of the First—as the Third
broke out in several places—as simply
a rehearsal, practice for the real thing.
As always in August,
the moment the fields are shorn bare,
the harvest brought in,
the daily labor paid,
I sat motionless in shadow
on a stone.
My left hand holding my head,
my arm propped on my knee—
thus I sat,
sat and sat
and held my breath
in this summer filled with hate.
Herr Kurbjuhn’s Question
Each morning on my way to work, just short of the house beyond the dike where my studio awaited, Herr Kurbjuhn stood among the sunflowers behind his garden fence, gave me a smile that broadened his furrowed face, and said in Kashubian, “Well, my friend, what’s new in politics?” My reply went on too long.
The village we lived in at the time, like all villages between the North Sea and the Baltic, took in large numbers of refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania at the end of the war—a presence you couldn’t help hearing. Some of the older ones enjoyed telling stories from the past. They talked just like Herr Kurbjuhn, but he was the only one who called me “my friend,” till the day he no longer stood among the sunflowers.
They were called displaced persons. A language died with them that has warmed me since childhood, and whose remnants I’ve tried in vain to save. I remember only Herr Kurbjuhn’s question: “What’s new in politics?” But not my answers on those mornings at the garden fence.
Of All That Ends
All finished now.
Had enough now.
Done and dusted now.
Nothing stirring now.
Not even a fart now.
No more trouble now,
and all will soon be well
and nothing remain
and all be at an end.
The Wide Skirt
GRANTED: I’M AN INMATE in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can’t see through blue-eyed types like me.
So my keeper can’t possibly be my enemy. I’ve grown fond of this man peeping through the door, and the moment he enters my room I tell him incidents from my life so he can get to know me in spite of the peephole between us. The good fellow seems to appreciate my stories, for the moment I’ve finished some tall tale he expresses his gratitude by showing me one of his latest knotworks. Whether he’s an artist remains to be seen. But an exhibition of his works would be well received by the press, and would entice a few buyers too. He gathers ordinary pieces of string from his patients’ rooms after visiting hours, disentangles them, knots them into multilayered, cartilaginous specters, dips them in plaster, lets them harden, and impales them on knitting needles mounted on little wooden pedestals.
He often plays with the notion of coloring his creations. I advise him not to, point toward my white metal bed and ask him to imagine this most perfect of all beds painted in multiple hues. Horrified, he claps his keeper’s hands to his head, struggles to arrange his somewhat inflexible features into an expression of manifold shock, and drops his polychrome plans.
My white-enameled metal hospital bed thus sets a standard. To me it is more; my bed is a goal I’ve finally reached, it is my consolation, and could easily become my faith if the administration would allow me to make a few changes: I’d like to have the bed rails raised even higher to keep anyone from coming too close.
Once a week Visitors Day disrupts the silence I’ve woven between my white metal bars. It signals the arrival of those who wish to save me, who find pleasure in loving me, who seek to value, respect, and know themselves through me. How blind, nervous, and ill-mannered they are. Scratching away at my white bed rails with their nail scissors, scribbling obscene, elongated stick figures on the enamel with ballpoint pens and blue pencils. My lawyer, having blasted the room with his hello, routinely claps his nylon hat over the left-hand bedpost at the foot of my bed. This act of violence robs me of my inner balance and good cheer for as long as his visit lasts—and lawyers always have plenty to say.
Once my visitors have placed their gifts on the little white oilcloth-covered table that stands beneath a watercolor of anemones, once they’ve laid out some future plan to save me, or one already under way, once they’ve managed to convince me, by their tireless attempts to rescue me, of the high quality of their brotherly love, they find renewed joy in their own existence and depart. Then my keeper arrives to air out the room and gather up the string from the gift wrappings. Often after airing he finds time, sitting by my bed and disentangling the string, to spread a silence so prolonged that in the end I call the silence Bruno, and Bruno silence.
Bruno Münsterberg—I’m talking about my keeper now, I’m done playing with words—bought five hundred sheets of writing paper on my behalf. Should this supply prove insufficient, Bruno, who is unmarried, childless, and hails from the Sauerland, will revisit the little stationery shop, which also sells toys, and provide me with whatever additional unlined space I need for my recollections, which I hope will be accurate. I could never have requested this favor of my visitors, my lawyer, or Klepp, say. The solicitous love prescribed for me would surely have prevented my friends from anything so dangerous as bringing me blank paper and allowing my incessantly syllable-excreting mind free use of it.
When I said to Bruno, “Oh, Bruno, would you buy me a ream of virgin paper?” he looked up at the ceiling, sent his finger pointing in that same direction to underline the comparison, and replied, “You mean white paper, Herr Oskar.”
I stuck with the word virgin and told Bruno to ask for it that way at the shop. When he returned later that afternoon with the package, he seemed a Bruno lost in thought. He stared long and hard a few times at the ceiling, that source of all his bright ideas, and then announced, “That word you recommended was right. I asked for virgin paper and the salesgirl blushed bright red before she gave me what I wanted.”
Fearing a long conversation about salesgirls in stationery shops, I regretted having emphasized the paper’s innocence by calling it virgin, and said nothing, waited till Bruno had left the room. Only then did I open the package with the five hundred sheets of paper.
I lifted the resilient stack for a moment and tested its weight. Then I counted off ten sheets and stored the rest in my bedsi
de table. I found the fountain pen by my photo album in the drawer: it’s full, it won’t fail for lack of ink; how shall I begin?
You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backward and forward to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all reference to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you’ve finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists. I’ve also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.