by Günter Grass
This grinding had its effect on Harras: it drew his lips above his scissors bite. He drooled at the lips. The holes on either side of his nose dilated. The bridge of his nose puckered up to the stop. The noted shepherd ears, erect but pointing slightly forward, became uncertain, tilted. Harras drew in his tail, rounded his back from withers to crown to cringing hump, in short he cringed like a dog. And several times Eddi Amsel produced a painful likeness of these shameful positions with dashing rich-black brush, with scratching spread-foot pen, with gushing and gifted bamboo quill. Our buzz saw, Walter Matern’s grinding teeth, and our Harras, whom the buzz saw and the grinding teeth turned into a mongrel, played into the artist’s hand of Eddi Amsel; taken together, the buzz saw, Matern, the dog, and Amsel formed as productive a work team as Herr Brauxel’s authors’ consortium: he, I, and yet another are writing simultaneously and are supposed to be finished when the apple sauce with the stars begins on the fourth of February.
But my cousin Tulla,
who stood by, more furious from day to day, refused to stand aside any longer. Amsel’s power over Pluto the hell hound became for her a loss of power over our Harras. Not that the dog stopped obeying her—just as before he sat when Tulla said “Harras, sit!”—but he carried out her commands, which she snapped out more and more sternly, in a manner so absent and mechanical that neither could Tulla conceal it from herself nor I from myself and Tulla that this Amsel was ruining our dog.
Tulla,
blind with rage, started out by throwing pebbles, and several times hit Amsel’s round back and the blubbery back of his head. He, however, gave it to be understood by a graceful shrug of the shoulders and a lazy turn of the head that though aware of the blow, he did not acknowledge it.
Tulla,
with tiny white face, tipped over his bottle of India ink. A black puddle with a metallic sheen stood on the sand in our yard and took a long time to seep away. Amsel took a fresh bottle of India ink from his coat pocket and nonchalantly showed that he had a third bottle in reserve.
When Tulla,
storming up from behind, threw a handful of sawdust that settled in the drive belt casing of the buzz saw at an almost finished, still damp and freshly glistening picture, Eddi Amsel, only briefly astonished, gave a partly annoyed, partly good-natured laugh, sedately shook a sausagelike fore finger at Tulla, who watched the effect of her performance from a distance, and then began, more and more interested in the new technique, to work the sawdust clinging to the paper and to give the drawing what is nowadays known as structure. He developed the amusing but short-lived method of making capital of chance. Reaching into the drive belt casing of the buzz saw, he made a mixture in his handkerchief of sawdust, of the knotty shavings from the lathe, the short curls of the power plane, the fine-grained droppings of the band saw, and with his own hand and no need of an assault from Tulla gave his brush drawings a pimply relief, the charm of which was further enhanced when a part of the superficially blackened wood particles fell off, revealing the white paper ground in mysterious islands. Once—probably dissatisfied with his overly conscious strewings and sawdust groundings—he asked Tulla to storm up from behind and to fling sawdust, shavings, or even sand as though at random. He expected a good deal from Tulla’s collaboration; but Tulla declined and made “bashed-in windows.”
My cousin Tulla was unable
to get the better of Eddi Amsel, artist and dog tamer. It took August Pokriefke to trip him up. Several times, laden with sawhorses, he stood beside the artist, accompanied words of criticism or praise with crackling glue fingers, spoke in elaborate detail about a painter who had used to come to Koshnavia summer after summer and had painted Osterwick Lake, the church at Schlangenthin, made oil portraits of a few Koshnavian types, such as Joseph Butt from Annafeld, Musolf the tailor from Damerau, and the widow Wanda Jentak. He too had been painted while cutting peat and then been exhibited in Konitz as a peat cutter. Eddi Amsel expressed interest in his colleague but did not interrupt his deft sketching. August Pokriefke left Koshnavia and began to speak about our watchdog’s political career. He explained in great detail how the Führer on the Obersalzberg had come by the shepherd Prinz. He told about the signed photograph that hung in our parlor over a pear-wood miniature and figured up how often his daughter Tulla had been snapshot and printed in the papers with or in between long articles about Harras. Amsel voiced gratification at Tulla’s early triumphs and began to sketch a seated Harras or Pluto. August Pokriefke expressed the opinion that the Führer would set everything to rights, you could bank on that, he knew more than all the rest of them lumped to gether, and he could draw too. What was more, the Führer wasn’t one of those people who always want to act big. “When the Führer rides in a car, he sits next to the driver and not in back like a bigshot.” Amsel found words of praise for the Führer’s homespun modesty and made the hell hound’s ears stand exaggeratedly erect on his paper. August Pokriefke asked whether Amsel was still in the Hitler Youth or already a Party member; for he, Amsel—that was his name, wasn’t it?—must be in the movement somewhere.
At this point Amsel slowly let his hand and brush drop, glanced once again with tilted head at the drawing of the seated Harras or Pluto, then turned his full, shining, and freckle-strewn face toward the inquirer, and answered with alacrity that, he was sorry to say, he was a member of neither nor, that this was the first time he had heard of the man—what was his name again?—but that he would be glad to inquire who the gentleman was, where he came from, and what plans he had for the future.
Tulla
made Eddi Amsel pay for his ignorance the following afternoon. No sooner was he seated on his stable camp chair, no sooner was he holding cardboard and drawing paper on his bursting left thigh, no sooner had Harras as Pluto taken up his new pose, lying with outstretched forepaws and sharply alert neck, no sooner had Amsel’s brush steeped itself in India ink, than the door to the yard spat out first August Pokriefke, the glue cook, then the glue stirrer’s daughter.
He stands with Tulla in the doorway, whispers, casts side long glances at the heavily laden camp chair, vaccinates his daughter with orders: and there she comes, first lazily and by sauntering detours, holding thin arms interlocked across the back of her dirndl dress, flings bare legs aimlessly, then describes quick, narrowing semicircles around the brush-guiding Eddi Amsel, is now to the left, now to the right of him: “Hey!” and then from the left: “Hey, you!” again from the left: “What are you doing around here anyway?” Spoken from the left: “I’m asking you what you’re doing around here” and from the right: “You got no business here!” Spoken from the left: “ ’Cause you’re…” and from close up on the right: “Do you know what you are?” Then from the left into his ear: “Want me to tell you?” Now, threaded into the right ear: “You’re a sheeny. A sheeny. That’s right, a sheeny. Or if you’re not a sheeny, what do you come around here for drawing pictures of our dog if you’re not a sheeny?” Amsel’s brush stops. Tulla at a distance but inexorably: “Sheeny.” Eddi Amsel with rigid brush. Tulla: “Sheeny.” The word flung into the yard, first only for Amsel, then loud enough to make Matern withdraw his ear from the buzz saw that is just starting up. He reaches out for the thing that’s screaming sheeny. Matern fails to catch Tulla: “Sheeny!” The cardboard with the first still moist India ink entries has fallen, sketch down, into the sand. “Sheeny!” Upstairs, on the fourth, fifth, then the second floor, windows are thrust open: Housewives cool their faces. From Tulla’s mouth: “Sheeny!” Above the sound of the buzz saw. Matern grabs but misses. Tulla’s tongue. Swift legs. Amsel stands beside the camp chair. The word. Matern picks up cardboard and drawing. Tulla bounces up and down on planks laid over sawhorses: “Sheeny, sheeny!” Matern screws the top on the India ink bottle. Tulla bounces off the plank—“Sheeny!”—rolls in the sand: “Sheeny!” Now all windows occupied and carpenters at the windows on the second floor. The word, three times in succession the word. Amsel’s face, overheated while he was sketchin
g, cools off. A smile refuses to fade. Sweat, but now cold and clammy, runs over fat and freckles. Matern lays his hand on Amsel’s shoulder. Freckles turn gray. The word. Always the same one word. Matern’s hand is heavy. Now from the stairs leading to the second floor. Tulla giddily jumping about: “Sheenysheenysheeny!” On his right Matern leads Amsel by the arm. Eddi Amsel is trembling. To the left, Matern, already charged with the portfolio, picks up the camp chair. Released from constraint, Harras relinquishes his pose. He sniffs, understands. Already his chain is taut: The dog’s voice. Tulla’s voice. The buzz saw bites into a sixteen-foot plank. The finishing machine is still silent. Now it too. Now the lathe. Long twenty-seven steps to the yard door. Harras tries to move the lumber shed to which he is chained. Tulla, dancing wildly, over and over again the word. And by the yard door, where August Pokriefke with crackling fingers stands in wooden shoes, the smell of glue battles with the smell from the little garden outside the piano teacher’s windows: the scent of lilacs strikes and wins. It’s the month of May after all. The word stops coming but it’s still in the air. August Pokriefke wants to spit out what he’s been storing up in the hollow of his mouth for some minutes. But he doesn’t spit, because Matern is looking at him with clamoring teeth.
Dear Cousin Tulla,
I skip: Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern were turned out of our yard. Nothing was done to you. Because Amsel had spoiled Harras, Harras was sent to the trainer’s twice a week. You like me had to learn reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. Amsel and Matern had their oral and written examinations behind them. Harras was trained to bark at strangers and to refuse food from strange hands; but Amsel had already spoiled him too radically. You had trouble with writing, I with arithmetic. We both liked school. Amsel and his friend passed their examinations—the former with distinction, the latter with a certain amount of luck. Turning point. Life began or was supposed to begin: After the devaluation of the gulden the economic situation improved slightly. Orders came in. My father was able to rehire a journeyman whom he had discharged four weeks before devaluation. After their final exams Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern began to play faustball.
Dear Tulla,
faustball is a ball game played by two teams of five in two adjacent fields with a ball that is roughly the size of a football but somewhat lighter. Like schlagball it is a German game, even though Plautus in the third century B.C. mentions a follis pugilatorius. In corroboration of the strictly German character of the game—for Plautus was assuredly speaking of faustball-playing Germanic slaves—it is worth recalling that during the First World War fifty teams were engaged in playing faustball in the Vladivostok PW camp; in the PW camp at Oswestry—England—more than seventy teams participated in faustball tournaments which were lost or won without bloodshed.
The game does not involve too much running and can consequently be played by sexagenarians and even by excessively corpulent men and women: Amsel became a faustball player. Who would have thought it? That soft little fist, that fistling, good for concealing a private laugh, that fist that never pounded a table. At the most he could have weighed down letters with his fistling, prevented them from flying away. It was no fist at all, more like a meat ball, two little meat balls, two rosy pompons swinging from abbreviated arms. Not a worker’s fist, not a proletarian’s fist, not a Red Front salute, for the air was harder than his fist. Little fists for guessing: which one? The law of the fist pronounced him guilty; fist fights made him into a punching bag; and only in the game of faustball did Amsel’s fistling triumph; for that reason it will be related here, in chronological order, how Eddi Amsel became a player of faustball, in other words, an athlete who with closed fists—to stick out the thumb was forbidden—punched the faustball from below, from above, from the side.
Tulla and I had been promoted;
a well-earned vacation took Amsel and his friend to the Vistula estuary. The fishermen looked on as Amsel brushed in fishing boats and nets. The ferryman looked over Eddi Amsel’s shoulder as he sketched the steam ferry. He visited the Materns on the other side, exchanged oracles about the future with miller Matern and sketched the Matern postmill from all sides. Eddi Amsel also attempted a chat with the village schoolteacher; but the village schoolteacher was said to have snubbed his former pupil. I wonder why. Similarly a Schiewenhorst village beauty seems to have given Amsel a saucy rebuff when he wished to draw her picture on the beach with the wind in her hair and her dress on the beach in the wind. Nevertheless Amsel filled his portfolio and went back to the city with a full portfolio. He had, to be sure, promised his mother to study something serious—engineering—but for the present he frequented Professor Pfuhle, the painter of horses, and like Walter Matern, who was supposed to study economics but much preferred to declaim into the wind in the role of Franz or Karl Moor, couldn’t make up his mind to embark on his studies.
Then a telegram came: his mother called him back to Schiewenhorst to her deathbed. The cause of her death seems to have been diabetes. From the dead face of his mother, Eddi Amsel first did a pen-and-ink drawing, then a red crayon drawing. During the funeral in Bohnsack he was said to have wept. Only a few people were at the grave. I wonder why. After the funeral Amsel began to liquidate the widow’s household. He sold everything: the house, the business, the fishing boats, the outboard motors, the dragnets, the smokehouses, and the store with its pulleys, tool boxes, and variously smelling miscellaneous wares. In the end Eddi Amsel was looked upon as a wealthy young man. He deposited a part of his fortune in the Agricultural Bank of the City of Danzig, but managed to invest the greater part on profitable terms in Switzerland: for years it worked quietly and did not diminish.
Amsel took but a few tangible possessions with him from Schiewenhorst. Two photograph albums, hardly any letters, his father’s war decorations—he had died a reserve lieutenant in the First World War—the family Bible, a school diary full of drawings from his days as a village schoolboy, some old books about Frederick the Great and his generals, and Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character rode away with Eddie Amsel on the Island narrow-gauge railway.
This last standard work had meant a great deal to his father. Weininger attempted, in twelve long chapters, to prove that woman has no soul, and went on, in the thirteenth chapter entitled “Judaism,” to develop his theory that the Jews were a feminine race and therefore soulless, that only if the Jew overcame the Jewishness within him could the world hope to be redeemed from the Jews. Amsel’s father had underlined memorable sentences with a red pencil, with the frequent marginal comment: “Very true!” Reserve Lieutenant Albrecht Amsel had found the following very true on p. 408: “The Jews, like women, like to stick together, but they have no social intercourse with each other…” On p. 413 he had entered three exclamation marks: “Men who are middlemen always have Jewish blood…” On p. 434 he had several times underlined the tail end of a sentence and written “God help us!” in the margin: “… things that will forever be beyond the reach of the authentic Jew: spontaneous being, divine right, the oak tree, the trumpet, the Siegfried motif, self-creation, the words: ‘I am.’ ”
Two passages endorsed by his father in red pencil took on meaning for the son as well. Because it was said in the standard work that the Jew does not sing and does not engage in sports, Albrecht Amsel, by way of disproving at least these theses, had founded an athletic club in Bohnsack and lent his baritone to the church choir. In regard to music, Eddi Amsel played the piano in a smooth and dashing manner, let his boy soprano, which even after graduation refused to come down from the upper story, jubilate in Mozart Masses and short arias, and in regard to sports threw himself body and soul into the game of faustball.
He who for years had been the victim of school schlagball slipped of his own free will into the chrome-green gym pants of the Young Prussia Athletic Club and moved his friend, who had hitherto played field hockey at the Danzig Hockey Club, to join with him the Young Prussians. With the permission of the head of his club and after pledging himself to suppor
t his hockey club at least twice a week in the Niederstadt field, Walter Matern signed up for handball and light athletics; for the leisurely game of faustball would not in itself have made sufficient demands on the young man’s physique.
Tulla and I knew the Heinrich Ehlers Athletic Field
situated between the Municipal Hospitals and the Heiligenbrunn Home for the Blind. Good turf, but run-down wooden grandstand and locker room, through whose cracks the wind found its way. The large field and the two small subsidiary fields were used by players of handball, schlagball, and faustball. Sometimes football players and track men came too, until the sumptuous Albert Forster Stadium was built not far from the crematory and Heinrich Ehlers Field was thought fit only for school sports.
Because Walter Matern had won the shot-put and the three-thousand-meter run at the interschool track meet the preceding year, so earning the reputation of a promising athlete, he was able to gain admission for Eddi Amsel and make him into a Young Prussian. At first they wished to use him only as a handyman. The field manager handed him a broom: locker rooms must be kept spotlessly clean. He also had to keep the balls greased and sprinkle the foul lines of the handball field with lime. Only when Walter Matern protested was Eddi Amsel assigned to a faustball team. Horst Plötz and Siegi Lewand were the guards. Willi Dobbeck played left forward. And Walter Matern served as line player in a team that soon came to be feared and was to become first in the league. For Eddi Amsel directed, he was the heart and switchboard of the team: a born play maker. What Horst Plötz and Siegi Lewand picked up in the rear and conveyed to the center of the field, he deftly, with supple forearm, dispatched to the line: there stood Walter Matern, the smasher and line player. He received the ball from the air and seldom hit it dead center, but put a twist on it. While Amsel knew how to receive treacherously dealt balls and turn them into neat passes, Matern was unstoppable, piling up points with balls that had been harmlessly roaming around: for when a ball lands without spin, it rebounds at exactly the same angle, it is predictable; but Matern’s balls, hit on the lower third of the ball, took on backspin and bounced back the moment they landed. Amsel’s specialty was the seemingly simple forearm shot, which however he handled with unusual precision. He picked up low balls. When the opposing team laid down smashes at his feet, he saved them from dopping dead with backhand shots. He recognized spin balls at once, tapped them up with the edge of his little finger, or slammed them with a swift forehand. Often he ironed out balls that his own guards had bungled and, Weininger’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, was a smiled-at, but respectfully smiled-at non-Aryan faustball player, Young Prussian, and sportsman.