by Günter Grass
And after the final curtain—the moon rang it down—the line began with tiny little steps to look for something in the dance-furrowed clearing. But it wasn’t looking for lost teeth, its mouth wasn’t drawn with pain like the young man’s to Amselward of the Erbsberg, but rather with the ghost of a frozen smile, which didn’t expand or grow warmer when the line found what it was looking for: with Jenny’s new sled the line moved across the clearing, no longer a dancer but a somewhat hesitant child, picked up Jenny’s fallen fuzzy coat, threw it over its shoulders, and—Gutenberg raised no objection—vanished in the woods, in the direction of Jäschkentaler Weg.
Instantly, now that the clearing was deserted, terror was back again with cast iron and murmuring trees. Turning my back on the deserted clearing, I hurried through the beeches, and when the woods stopped and the street-lamp-studded Jäschkentaler Weg welcomed me, my hopping and hurrying did not abate. I didn’t stop till I was on Hauptstrasse, outside Sternfeld’s department store.
Across the square the clock outside the optician’s indicated a few minutes after eight. The street was full of people. Moviegoers were hurrying into the movie house. A picture with Luis Trenker was being shown, I think. And then, probably after the picture had started, the young man came along, ambling and yet tense, with a suitcase. It couldn’t have held much. Which of Amsel’s spacious garments could the young man have taken with him? The streetcar came from Oliva, meaning to continue toward the main railroad station. He got into the trailer and stayed on the platform. When the car began to move, he lighted a cigarette. Sorrowfully sunken lips had to hold the cigarette. I’d never seen Eddi Amsel smoke.
And no sooner was he gone than primly, step by little step, the line came along with Jenny’s sled. I followed it down Baumbachallee. We were going the same way. Behind the Church of the Sacred Heart I speeded up till I was beside the line, keeping step. I spoke more or less as follows: “Good evening, Jenny.”
The line wasn’t surprised: “Good evening, Harry.”
I, to be saying something: “Have you been coasting?”
The line nodded: “You can pull my sled if you like.”
“You’re late getting home.”
“I’m good and tired, too.”
“Have you seen Tulla?”
“Tulla and the others left before seven.”
The new Jenny had just as long eyelashes as the other: “I left a little before seven too. But I didn’t see you.” Jenny informed me politely: “I can see why you didn’t see me. I was inside a snow man.”
Elsenstrasse grew shorter and shorter: “What was it like in there?”
On the bridge over the Striessbach the new Jenny said: “It was awfully hot in there.”
My solicitude, I think, was sincere: “I hope you didn’t catch cold in there.”
Outside the Aktienhaus, where Dr. Brunies lived with Jenny, the new Jenny said: “Before I go to bed, I’ll take a hot lemonade as a precaution.”
Many more questions occurred to me: “How did you get out of the snow man?”
The new Jenny said good-by in the entrance: “It began to thaw. But now I’m tired. Because I danced a little. For the first time I did two successful pirouettes. Cross my heart. Good night, Harry.”
And then the door closed. I was hungry. I hoped there was something left in the kitchen. It seems, incidentally, that the young man took the train at ten o’clock. He and Amsel’s suit case rode away. It seems that they crossed both borders without any trouble.
Dear Tulla,
Jenny didn’t catch cold inside the snow man but on the way home: the ballet in the clearing must have overheated her. She had to stay in bed for a week.
Dear Tulla,
you already know that a young man slipped out of the corpulent Amsel. With a light step, carrying Amsel’s suit case, he hurried through the station and took the train to Berlin. What you don’t know yet: in his suitcase the light-footed young man has a passport, and it’s forged. A certain “Hütchen,” a piano maker by trade, manufactured the passport some weeks before the double miracle in the snow. The forger’s hand thought of everything: for strange to say, the passport is graced with a photograph reproducing the tense, somewhat rigid features of the young man with the painful lips. Moreover, Herr Huth didn’t issue this passport in the name of Eduard Amsel: he named the owner of the pass port Hermann Haseloff, born in Riga on February 24, 1917.
Dear Tulla,
when Jenny was well again, I showed her the two teeth that the young man had flung into my gorse.
Jenny was delighted. “Oh,” she said, “why, those are Herr Amsel’s teeth. Will you give me one?” I kept the other tooth and still carry it on me; for Herr Brauxel, who could claim the tooth, leaves it in my purse.
Dear Tulla,
what did Herr Haseloff do when he arrived in Berlin-Stettin Station? He moved into a hotel room and went next day to a dental clinic where he had his sunken mouth filled with gold in exchange for good, erstwhile Amselian, now Haseloffian money. In the new passport Herr Huth had to note, after “Distinguishing Marks”: “Artificial denture. Gold crowns.” Henceforth when Herr Haseloff laughs, he will be seen laughing with thirty-two gold teeth; but Haseloff seldom laughs.
Dear Tulla,
those gold teeth became famous; they still are. Yesterday as I was sitting in Paul’s Taproom with some associates, I made an experiment to prove that Haseloff’s gold teeth are not a myth. This bar on Augsburger Strasse is frequented mostly by wrestlers, shippers, and unaccompanied ladies. The upholstered bench around our table—the one we always occupied—offered the possibility of arguing hard on a soft foundation. We talked about things people talk about in Berlin. The wall behind us was papered helter-skelter with the photographs of famous boxers, six-day bicycle racers, and track stars. Signatures and dedications offered reading matter; but we weren’t reading, we were pondering, as we often do between eleven and twelve o’clock at night, where we could go when we had to leave. Then we joked about the impending fourth of February. The end of the world over beer and gin. I told them about Herr Brauxel, my eccentric employer; and that brought us to Haseloff and his gold teeth, which I called genuine whereas my colleagues refused to believe they were anything more than a myth.
So I called over to the bar: “Hannchen, have you seen Herr Haseloff lately?”
Over her rinsing of glasses Hannchen called back: “Naw. When Goldmouth’s in town, he’s been going someplace else lately, he’s been going to Diener’s.”
Dear Tulla,
so it’s true about the false teeth. Haseloff was and is known as Goldmouth; and the new Jenny, when she was allowed to get up after her bad cold, was given a pair of toe-dancing slippers covered with glittering silvery silk. Dr. Brunies wanted to see her standing on silver points. From then on she danced in Madame Lara’s ballet room: Little Swans. The pianist Felsner-Imbs, whose dog bite was healing, poured out Chopin. And I, at Herr Brauxel’s request, dismiss Goldmouth and listen to the scraping of silvery exercising ballet slippers: Jenny is holding the bar, embarking on a career.
Dear Tulla,
at that time we were all transferred to different schools: I was sent to the Conradinum; you and Jenny became pupils at the Helene Lange School, which soon had its name changed to the Gudrun School. My father, the master carpenter, had suggested sending you to high school: “The child is bright but unsteady. Why not give it a try?”
From sixth on Dr. Brunies signed our report cards. He taught us German and history. From the start I was conscientious but no grind and nevertheless first in my class: I allowed others to copy from me. Brunies was a lenient teacher. It was easy to divert him from strict insistence on his actual subject: someone only had to bring a piece of mica gneiss to class and ask him to talk about this kind of gneiss or all kinds of gneiss, about his collection of mica gneiss specimens, and instantly Brunies would drop the Cimbri and the Teutons to lecture about his science. But he didn’t restrict himself to his hobby; he reeled off his wh
ole litany of minerals: plutonite and pyroxenite; amorphous and crystal line rocks; it is from him that I have the words: multi-faceted, tabular, and needle-shaped; the colors: leek-green, air-blue, pea-yellow, silver-white, clove-brown, smoke-gray, iron-black, and dawn-red are from his palette; he taught me tender words: rose quartz, moonstone, lapis lazuli; I adopted little words of reproach: “You tufahead, you hornblender, you nagelfluh!” But even now I couldn’t distinguish agate from opal, malachite from labradorite, biotite from muscovite.
When we were unable to distract him with minerals from teaching according to the curriculum, his adoptive daughter Jenny had to fill the bill. The class speaker politely requested permission to speak and asked Dr. Brunies to tell us about Jenny’s progress as a ballet dancer. The class, he said, would be pleased. Everyone was eager to know what had happened at the ballet school since the day before yesterday. And just as regularly as the key word “mica gneiss,” the key word “Jenny” was able to lead Dr. Brunies astray: he broke off the migrations, let Ostrogoths and Visigoths rot by the Black Sea, and shifted to the new topic. He no longer sat motionless behind his desk: like a dancing bear he hopped about between bookcase and blackboard, seized the sponge and effaced the just outlined itineraries of the Goths. And over a still wet ground he made chalk squeak swiftly: not until a good minute later—he was still writing in the lower lefthand corner—did the wetness begin to dry at the upper right:
“First position, second position, third position, fourth position.” That is what was written on the blackboard when Dr. Oswald Brunies began his theoretical instruction in ballet dancing with the words: “As is customary throughout the world, we shall begin with the basic positions and then turn our attention to the bar exercises.” The schoolmaster invoked the authority of Arbeau, the first theoretician of the dance. According to Arbeau and Brunies there were five basic positions, all based on the principle of turned-out toes. During my first years in high school the word “turned-out” acquired more weight than the word “spelling.” To this day a glance at a ballet dancer’s feet tells me whether they are turned out enough; but spelling—with or without an h, for instance, or how many r’s in porridge—is still a puzzle to me.
We uncertain spellers, five or six ballet fans, sat in the gallery of the Stadttheater and looked on critically at the recital that the ballet master had ventured to stage with the help of Madame Lara. The program consisted of Polovetsian Dances, Sleeping Beauty with Petipa’s ambitious choreography, and the Valse Triste, which Madame Lara had rehearsed.
My opinion: “La Petrich has plenty of sparkle in the adagio, but she’s not turned out enough.”
Little Pioch blasphemed: “Man, take a look at la Reinerl: those lopsided pirouettes, and her turnout is just plain embarrassing.” Herbert Penzoldt shook his head. “If Irma Leuwelt can’t develop a better instep, she won’t hold on as first soloist very long, even if her turnout is terrific.”
In addition to the word “instep” and the word “turnout,” the word “sparkle” took on importance. So-and-so “may have plenty of technique, but there’s no sparkle.” Or a certain superannuated male dancer at the Stadttheater, who had to start in the wings when venturing a grand jeté, but then described a magnificent slow arc, received a magnanimous testimonial from the gallery: “With his sparkle, Brake can do what he likes; it’s true that he only does three turns but they’ve got something.”
A fourth word that was fashionable during my days in sixth was “balloon.” In the entrechat six de volée, in the grand jeté, in every variety of leap, a dancer either had “balloon” or he didn’t have balloon. Which meant either that in leaping he was able to hover weightlessly in air, or that he did not succeed in calling the laws of gravity into question. In fifth I coined the expression: “The new first soloist leaps so slowly a pencil could follow.” That is what I still call leaps that are skillfully delayed: leaps that a pencil could follow. If only I could do that: follow leaps with a pencil.
Dear Cousin,
my class teacher, Dr. Brunies, did not content himself with teaching the ABC of ballet as a substitute for a ballad with seventeen stanzas and a regular joggle; he also taught us exactly what stands on tips when a ballet dancer succeeds in remaining faultlessly and effortlessly on her toes for the length of a single pirouette.
One day—I don’t remember whether we were still on the Ostrogoths or whether the Vandals were already on their way to Rome—he brought Jenny’s silver ballet slippers to class with him. At first he acted mysterious, huddled behind his desk, and hid his potato face with all its little creases behind the silvery pair. Then, without showing his hands, he set both slippers on their tips. His old-man’s voice intoned a bit of the Nutcracker Suite: and between the inkwell and the tin box with his ten-o’clock sandwiches he made the slippers practice all the positions: petits battements sur le cou-de-pied.
When the show was over, he whispered, flanked by the silver slippers, that on the one hand the ballet slipper was a still-modern instrument of torture; while on the other hand, a ballet slipper must be regarded as the only kind of shoe in which a young girl can go to heaven in her lifetime.
Then he let Jenny’s ballet slippers, accompanied by the class monitor, pass down the rows from desk to desk: Jenny’s silver slippers meant something to us. Not that we kissed them. We barely caressed them, we gazed upon their frayed silver glitter, tapped their hard unsilvered tips, played absently with silver ribbons, and all of us attributed magical power to the slippers: out of the poor roly-poly they had been able to make something ethereal which, thanks to ballet slippers, was capable, day in day out, of going to heaven on foot. We dreamed sorrowfully of ballet slippers. Boys who suffered from exaggerated love for their mothers saw her enter their room at night dancing on her toes. Those who had fallen in love with a movie poster dreamt of seeing a film with a toe-dancing Lil Dagover. The Catholics among us waited at altars of Our Lady to see whether the Virgin might not deign to exchange the customary sandals for Jenny’s ballet slippers.
I alone knew that it wasn’t the ballet slippers that had metamorphosed Jenny. I had been a witness: with the help of plain snow Jenny Brunies had been miraculously alleviated, and so had Eddi Amsel—it all came out in the same wash.
Dear Cousin,
our families and all the neighbors were surprised at the obvious change in the child who was not yet eleven. But with an oddly smug wagging of the head as though they had all had a presentiment of Jenny’s metamorphosis and prayed for it in common, they expressed their approval of what the snow had brought to pass. Punctually every afternoon at a quarter after four Jenny left the Aktienhaus across the street from us and walked primly, with a small head on a long neck, up Elsenstrasse. She propelled herself entirely with her legs and scarcely moved her body. Many neighbors pasted themselves to their streetside windowpanes every day at this hour. As soon as Jenny hove in sight, they said over geraniums and cactuses: “Now Jenny’s going to balley.”
When my mother missed Jenny’s entrance by a minute for housewifely reasons or because she had been gossiping in the hallway, I heard her complaining: “Now I’ve gone and missed Brunies’ Jenny. Well, tomorrow I’ll set the alarm clock for a quarter after four, or maybe a little earlier.”
The sight of Jenny had the power to move my mother: “What a string bean she’s got to be, what a little broomstick.” Yet Tulla was just as thin, but thin in a different way. Tulla’s wiry figure frightened people. Jenny’s figure made them pensive.
Dear Cousin,
our walk to school shaped itself into a strange procession. The girls of the Helene-Lange School and I went the same way as far as Neuschottland. At Max-Halbe-Platz I had to turn off to the right, whereas the girls took Bärenweg in the direction of Christ Church. Because Tulla waited in the half-darkness of our entranceway and made me wait until Jenny had left the Aktienhaus, Jenny had a head start: she walked fifteen, sometimes only ten paces ahead of us. All three of us took pains to maintain the interval.
When one of Jenny’s shoelaces came undone, Tulla had to retie a shoelace. Before I turned off to the right, I stopped behind the advertising pillar on Max-Halbe-Platz and followed the two of them with my eyes: Tulla was still behind Jenny. But one never had the picture of a dogged chase. On the contrary, it became clear that Tulla was running after Jenny without wishing to overtake the girl with the stiff, artificial gait. Sometimes when the morning sun was halfway up and Jenny cast her shadow, long and as wide as a telegraph pole, behind her, Tulla, prolonging Jenny’s shadow with her shadow, stepped pace for pace on Jenny’s shadow head.
Tulla made it her business to follow in Jenny’s wake, and not only on the way to school. Also at a quarter after four, when the neighbors said: “Now Jenny’s going to balley,” she slipped out of the stair well and dogged her steps.
At first Tulla kept her distance only as far as the street car stop and turned back as soon as the car bound for Oliva clanged away. Then she began to spend money for the car, taking my pfennigs. Tulla never borrowed money, she took it. She reached into Mother Pokriefke’s kitchen cupboard with out asking. She rode in the same trailer as Jenny, but Tulla stood on the rear, Jenny on the front platform. Along the Oliva Castle Park Tulla followed in Jenny’s trace at the usual distance, which was slightly diminished only in narrow Rosengasse. And beside the enamel sign “Lara Bock-Fedorova, Ballet School,” Tulla stood for a whole hour and no amount of stray cats could distract her attention. After the ballet lesson, she stood with locked-up face, letting the bevy of chattering ballet rats pass with their swinging gym bags. All the girls walked slightly pigeon-toed and carried overly small heads on stem-necks that seemed to need props. For the time it takes to draw a breath Rosengasse smelled, although it was May, of chalk and sour jerseys. Only when Jenny stepped through the garden gate beside the pianist Felsner-Imbs, did Tulla, once the two had a suitable head start, set herself in motion.