by Günter Grass
TWENTY-EIGHTH MORNING SHIFT
After a punctual change of shifts, and business worries—the Brussels agricultural agreements are going to create marketing difficulties for the firm of Brauxel & Co.—back to the gravel in the playground. School life promised to be gay for the two friends. Scarcely had they been moved from Sankt Johann to the Conradinum, scarcely had they grown accustomed to the musty dormitory with its smell of nasty little boys—who doesn’t know a few stories about dormitories?—scarcely had the gravel in the Big Playground impressed itself upon them, when word went around that in a few days the sixth would be going to Saskoschin for two weeks. They would be supervised by Dr. Brunies and by Dr. Mallenbrand the gym teacher.
Saskoschin! What a tender word!
The country school annex was situated in Saskoschin Forest. The nearest village was called Meisterswalde. Thither the class and two teachers were conveyed by bus via Schüddelkau, Straschin-Prengschin, and Gross-Salau. A village built around a market. The sandy market place big enough for a cattle fair, consequently surrounded by wooden stakes with worn iron rings. Shining puddles, ruffled by every gust of wind: there had been a violent shower shortly before the bus arrived. No cow dung or horse droppings, but several bevies of sparrows, which kept regrouping and raised their hubbub to the third power when Amsel alit from the bus. The market place was bordered by low peasant houses with small windows, some roofed with thatch. There was one new, unfinished two-story structure, Hirsch’s emporium. Brand-new plows, harrows, tedders were asking to be bought. Wagon shafts rose skyward. Directly across the way a brick-red factory, deserted, with boarded-up windows. Not until the end of October would the sugar-beet harvest bring life, stench, and profit. The inevitable branch of the Danzig Savings Bank, two churches, the milk pool, a spot of color: the mailbox. And outside the barbershop a second spot of color: the honey-yellow brass disk hung slantwise, sending out light signals as the clouds shifted. A cold treeless village.
Like the entire region to the south of the city, Meisterswalde was part of the Danzig Heights district. Compared to the marshland of the Vistula estuary, the soil was wretched. Beets, potatoes, Polish beardless oats, vitreous stunted rye. At every step the foot struck a stone. Peasants crossing their fields would bend down between steps, pick up one out of a nation of many, and hurl it in a blind rage: it would fall on someone else’s field. Such gestures even on Sunday: holding umbrellas in their left hands, peasants in black caps with shiny patent-leather visors walk through the beet fields, bend down, pick things up, throw them in every direction. The stones fall: petrified sparrows, and no one, not even Eduard Amsel, could devise any kind of scarestone.
That was Meisterswalde: black humped backs, umbrella tips menacing the heavens, stones picked up and stones thrown, and an explanation for so many stones: It seems that the Devil, when refused what the peasants had solemnly sworn to give him, had punished them for their breach of faith by driving around the countryside all one night, vomiting up the damned souls that had accumulated in his stomach and scattering them over the fields and meadows. And the souls of the damned turned out to be stones, which there was no way to get rid of, let the peasants pick up and throw till they were old and bent.
The class was obliged to hike in loose formation for two miles, with Dr. Brunies at the head and Dr. Mallenbrand bringing up the rear, first over hilly country where the road was bordered on both sides by stunted, half-grown rye standing amid stone souls, then through the edge of Saskoschin Forest, until whitewashed walls behind beech trees announced the country annex.
Thin, thin! Brauxel, the present writer, suffers from inability to describe unpeopled landscapes. He knows how to begin; but once he has brushed in a rolling hill, rich green, and behind it innumerable graduated hills à la Stifter, ending in the distant gray-blue of the horizon, and gone on to scatter the stones inevitable in the region around Meisterswalde, as the Devil did in his time, through his still unformed foreground; once he has put in the bushes that consolidate the foreground—the moment he says: juniper, hazelnut, broom glossy-green, underbrush, bushes, spherical conical bushy up hill and down dale: withered bushes, thorn-bushes, bushes in the wind, whispering bushes—for in this region the wind is always blowing—he always itches to blow life into Stifter’s wilderness. Brauksel says: And behind the third bush counting from the left, just a little above the one and one-half acres of feed beets, no, not the hazelnut bush—Oh, these wretched bushes!—there there there, below that lovely moss-covered stone, well anyway behind the third bush on the left, in the midst of this unpeopled landscape, a man is hidden.
Not a sower. Not the plowman so often seen in oil paintings. A man in his middle forties. Pale brown black impudent, hidden behind the bush. Hook-nosed rabbit-eared toothless. This more, this man, has an angustri, a ring, on his little finger and in the course of future morning shifts, while the schoolboys are playing schlagball and Brunies is sucking his cough drop, he will take on importance, because he has a little bundle with him. What is in the bundle? Who is the man?
He is Bidandengero the Gypsy, and the bundle whimpers.
TWENTY-NINTH MORNING SHIFT
Schlagball was the school sport in those days. In the gravel-strewn Big Playground at the Conradinum a fly had once been hit so high that while the ball was piercing the heavens and leathernly falling, a part of the team responsible for this feat had been able to run in fan formation to both goal posts, unmolested, and run back and collect points—an achievement compared to which twenty-five knee swings or skinning the cat seventeen times in a row were everyday occurrences. At the Saskoschin country annex schlagball was played morning and afternoon. A very moderate amount of class work was done before and after. Walter Matern, his friend Eduard Amsel, and Dr. Mallenbrand looked upon this game with three different sets of eyes.
For Mallenbrand the game of schlagball was a way of life, a philosophy. Walter Matern was a master of the high fly. He hit them and caught them openhanded, and when he caught one, he threw the ball directly from the catching position to a teammate: which brought in points.
Eduard Amsel, on the other hand, waddled about the schlagball field as though waddling through Purgatory. Stout and short-legged, he was perfect for blocking out and bouncing the ball off of. He was the team’s weak spot. He was tracked and hunted down. Hedging him round, four players would execute a dance in which a leather ball figured prominently. Delectable feints would be practiced over his dead body until he rolled whimpering in the grass, smarting under the taut leather before it even reached him.
The ball spared Amsel only when his friend hit a fly; and the truth of the matter is that Walter Matern hit flies only to let Amsel make his way over the field in peace, under the protection of the soaring ball. But the flies didn’t always remain in the air long enough: after a few days of philosophy played according to the rules, several black-and-blue moons blossomed on Amsel’s freckled flesh—blooms that were long in fading.
A change of shift even then: after Amsel had enjoyed a gentle childhood to the right and left of the Vistula, Amsel’s torments began far from the Vistula. They will go on for some time. For Dr. Mallenbrand passed as an expert and had written a book, or a chapter in a book, about German field games. In it he discussed the game of schlagball with succinct thoroughness. In the preface he expressed the opinion that the national character of schlagball was brought out most strikingly by a comparison with the international game of soccer. Then he went on to formulate the rules, point for point. A single blast of the whistle means: The ball is dead. A goal that counts is registered by the referee with two blasts of the whistle. A player is not allowed to run with the ball. There were many different kinds of ball: high-flying, known as flies, long balls, flat, corner, short balls, popflies, rollers, grounders, dribblers, goal balls, and triple-run balls. The ball was propelled by vertical blows, long blows, thrusts, or swings, by flat blows with underarm swing and by the two-hand blow, in which the ball must first be thrown to shoulder height.
In catching a high-flying ball, a so-called fly—so spake Mallenbrand—the catcher’s eye, his catching hand, and the falling ball must form a straight line. More over, and this was his title to fame, the field was lengthened from fifty to fifty-five yards at his suggestion. This feature which—as Amsel could testify—made the game more arduous was adopted by nearly every high school in eastern and northern Germany. He was the declared enemy of soccer and many regarded him as a strict Catholic. From his neck and alongside his hairy chest hung his metal referee’s whistle. One blast meant: The ball is dead. Two blasts meant: Score obtained by hitting Eduard Amsel with the ball. Often enough he blew for flies that Walter Matern had struck for his friend: Out of bounds!
But his next fly is a good one. And the one after that. The following fly goes wrong: the hitter is out of position, the ball leaves the field and comes down with a whish and a tearing of foliage into the woods bordering the playground. In response to Mallenbrand’s whistle—The ball is dead!—Walter Matern races to the fence, he’s over and looks around in the moss and bushes at the edge of the forest: a hazelnut bush tosses him the ball.
He catches it and looks up: from a tangle of leaves grow the head and torso of a man. On his ear, the left one, a brass ring jiggles, because he is laughing soundlessly. Dark pale brown. Hasn’t a tooth in his mouth. Bidandengero, that means the toothless. Under his arm he has a whimpering bundle. Holding the ball in both hands, Walter Matern moves backward out of the woods. He doesn’t tell anyone, not even Amsel, about the soundless laughter behind the bush. The very next morning, or at any rate no later than the afternoon, Walter Matern intentionally hit an oblique fly that came down in the woods. Even before Mallenbrand could blow, he raced across ball field and fence. No bush and no underbrush threw him the ball. He found one ball under the ferns after a long search; as for the next one, the ants must have hauled it away.
THIRTIETH MORNING SHIFT
Diligent pencil strokes and sparrows: shading and open areas; breeding and explosions.
Diligent bees, diligent ants, diligent leghorns: diligent Saxons and diligent washerwomen.
Morning shifts, love letters, Materniads: Brauxel and his co-authors have taken an example from someone who worked diligently all his life—on lacquered tin.
And the eight planets? Sun Moon Mars Mercury Jupiter Venus Saturn Uranus, to which, such is the awesome rumor spread by the astrological calendars, the secret moon Lilith might be added. Can it be that they have orbited diligently for twenty thousand years solely in order to bring off that evil conjunction day after tomorrow in the sign of Aquarius?
Not every attempted fly was successful. Consequently the hitting of flies, as well as the hitting of oblique, intentionally off-center flies, had to be practiced diligently.
The meadow was bounded on the north side by a long wooden shed, the so-called rest porch. Forty-five wooden cots, forty-five shaggy, sour-smelling blankets neatly folded on the foot ends of the cots stood in readiness each day for the noonday rest period of the sixths. And after the noonday rest period Walter Matern practiced hitting flies to the east of the porch.
The country annex, the rest porch, the schlagball field, and the chickenwire fence running from end to end were surrounded on all sides by the dense, silent, or rustling Saskoschin Forest, a mixed woodland containing wild boar, badgers, adders, and a boundary line that cut across it. For the forest began in Poland, started out with pines and low-lying bushes on Tuchler Heath, acquired an admixture of birches and beeches on the mounds and ridges of Koshnavia, and continued northward into the milder coastal climate: the boulder glaze nurtured a mixed forest, which became purely deciduous as it approached the sea.
Sometimes forest Gypsies slipped back and forth across the border. They were regarded as harmless and lived on rabbits and hedgehogs, and by tinkering. They provided the school annex with wild mushrooms. The forester also needed their help when wasps and hornets nested in hollow tree trunks near the forest roads and made the horses of the timber wagons shy. They called themselves Gakkos, addressed one another as More, and were generally called Mänglsche, but sometimes Ziganken.
And once a Gakko tossed a high school student a schlagball after an unsuccessful fly had landed in the forest. More laughed soundlessly.
The student began to practice hitting out-of-bounds flies whereas previously he had only practiced regular flies.
The student succeeded in hitting two out-of-bounds flies that fell in the woods, but no Gypsy tossed him a ball.
Where did Walter Matern practice hitting good and no-good flies? At the east end of the rest porch there was a swimming pool, roughly twenty-five feet square, in which no one could swim, for it was out of order, clogged, and leaky. At the best rain water lay evaporating in the square of cracked concrete. Although no schoolboys were able to swim in the pool, it always had visitors: cool and active little frogs no bigger than a cough drop hopped about diligently as though practicing the art of hopping—less frequently, big heavily breathing toads—but always frogs, a congress of frogs, a playground of frogs, a ballet of frogs, a ball field of frogs; frogs you could blow up with blades of straw; frogs you could put down somebody’s collar; frogs to stamp on; frogs to put in people’s shoes; frogs that could be mixed with the always slightly burned pea soup; frogs in beds, frogs in inkwells, frogs in envelopes; frogs to practice flies with.
Every day Walter Matern practiced in the dry swimming pool. He picked slippery frogs out of the inexhaustible supply. If he hit thirty, thirty gray-blue frogs lost their cool young lives. As a rule, only twenty-seven brownish-black frogs were sacrificed to Walter Matern’s dedicated devotions. It was not his purpose to send the green-gray frogs high in the air, higher than the trees of the rustling or silent forest. Nor did he practice hitting a common frog with just any portion of his bat. He had no wish to perfect himself in the hitting of long-distance balls, grounders, or treacherous bunts—besides, Heini Kadlubek was a past master at long-distance balls. What Walter Matern wanted was to hit the variously tinted frogs with that part of the bat which, when the bat was correctly raised alongside the body, gave promise of an exemplary, strictly vertical fly that would waver only slightly in the wind. If instead of the variously tinted frogs the dull-brown leather schlagball, shiny only at the seams, had offered resistance to the thick end of the bat, Walter Matern would have succeeded in half a midday hour in turning out twelve extra-special and fifteen to sixteen passable flies. In fairness it must be added that despite all this diligent fly swatting the frogs in the waterless swimming pool grew no fewer: merrily they hopped unequal heights and unequal distances while Walter Matern stood among them dealing death to frogs. They failed to understand, or else—like sparrows in this respect—they were so conscious of their numbers that there was never any possibility of a frog panic in the swimming pool.
In wet weather there were also newts, fire salamanders, and plain lizards in the death-shadowed pool. But these agile little creatures had no need to fear the bat; for the sixths developed a game, the rules of which only cost newts and salamanders their tails.
Courage was tested. The point was to take the twitching, wildly wriggling tail ends that newts and salamanders shed when you grab them with your hand—you can also knock them off with the flip of a hard finger—and swallow these living fragments in their mobile state. If possible, several tails should be swallowed successively as they leap from the concrete. The one who does it is a hero. Moreover, the three to five animated tails must go down unflushed by water and unpushed by crusts of bread. But even if the hero harbors three to five indefatigable tails, newt, salamander, or lizard, in his innards, he is also forbidden to make the slightest grimace. Amsel can do it. Harried and tormented on the schlagball field, Amsel understands and avails himself of the opportunity offered by the swallowing of salamander tails: not only does he successively incorporate seven vivacious tails into his round short-legged body, but he is also able, in return for a promise to set him free from the impending afte
rnoon schlagball game and have him assigned to potato peeling in the kitchen, to withstand a counter-ordeal. One minute after his sevenfold swallowing and without putting his finger down his throat, he manages, thanks to sheer will power and even more to his abject terror of the leather schlagball, to yield up the seven tails: and lo and behold, they are still twitching, though with rather less abandon because inhibited by the mucus that has come up with them, on the concrete floor of the swimming pool, amid hopping frogs that have grown no fewer although Walter Matern, shortly before Amsel’s feat of salamander swallowing and the ensuing counter-ordeal, was practicing flies.
The sixths are impressed. Over and over again they count the seven resurrected tails, slap Amsel on his round freckly back, and promise that if Mallenbrand has no objection they will dispense with his services as the afternoon schlagball victim. And in case Mallenbrand should take exception to Amsel’s K.P., they will only pretend to victimize him with the schlagball.
Numerous frogs overhear this bargain. The seven swallowed and vomited salamander tails fall gradually asleep. Walter Matern stands by the chickenwire fence, leaning on his schlagball bat and staring into the bushes of the towering, enveloping Saskoschin Forest. Is he looking for something?
THIRTY-FIRST MORNING SHIFT
What is in store for us? Tomorrow, on account of the many stars that are forming a clustering ferment above us, Brauksel is going to ride down with the morning shift and spend the day in the archives on the twenty-five-hundred-foot level—the powdermen used to keep their explosives there—concluding his record and endeavoring to the last to write with equanimity.