by Günter Grass
Not you but we,
the thirds at the Conradinum, were taken out to Nickelswalde near Stutthof by our school. The Party had acquired the old Saskoschin country annex and turned it into a staff school. A piece of land between Queen Louise’s mill in Nickelswalde and the scrub pine forest was purchased half from miller Matern, half from the village of Nickelswalde, and on it was erected a one-story building with a tall brick roof. As in Saskoschin we played schlagball in Nickelswalde. In every class there were crack players who could hit flies sky-high and whipping boys who were encircled with hard leather balls and made into mincemeat. In the morning the flag was raised; in the evening it was taken down. The food was bad; nevertheless we gained weight; the air on the Island was nourishing.
Often between games I watched miller Matern. He stood between mill and house. On the left a sack of flour pressed against his ear. He listened to the mealworms and saw the future.
Let us assume that I carried on a conversation with the lopsided miller. Maybe I said in a loud voice, for he was hard of hearing: “What’s new, Herr Matern?”
He definitely answered: “In Russia the winter will set in too early.”
Possibly I wanted to know more: “Will we get to Moscow?”
He oracularly: “Many of us will get as far as Siberia.”
Then I may have changed the subject: “Do you know a man by the name of Haseloff, who lives mostly in Berlin?”
No doubt he listened at length to his flour sack: “I only hear about somebody who had a different name before. The birds were afraid of him.”
I’d have had reason enough to be curious: “Has he gold in his mouth and does he never laugh?”
The miller’s mealworms never spoke directly: “He smokes a lot of cigarettes, one after another, though he’s always hoarse because he caught cold once.”
I’m sure I concluded: “Then it’s him.”
The miller saw the future with precison: “It always will be.”
Since there was no Tulla and no Jenny in Nickelswalde,
it cannot be my job to write about the adventures of the thirds in Nickelswalde; anyway the summer was drawing to an end.
The fall brought changes in the school system. The Gudrun School, formerly the Helene Lange School, was turned into an Air Force barracks. All the girls’ classes moved to our Conradinum with its stench of boys. The school was operated in shifts: girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon, or vice versa. Some of our teachers, among them Dr. Brunies, also had to teach girls’ classes. He taught Tulla’s and Jenny’s class history.
We no longer saw each other at all. Because we went to school in shifts, we had no difficulty in avoiding each other: Jenny no longer had to blush; I ceased to go red in the face; exceptions are memorable:
for once, around noon—I had left home early and was carrying my school satchel in my right hand—Jenny Brunies came toward me under the hazelnut bushes on Uphagenweg. She must have had five periods that morning and stayed on at the Conradinum for reasons unknown to me. In any case she was coming from school and also carrying her satchel in her right hand. Green hazelnuts and a few pale brownish ones were already lying on the ground, because a wind had been blowing the day before. Jenny in a dark blue woolen dress with white cuffs and a dark blue hat, but not a beret, some thing more like a tarn, Jenny blushed and shifted her satchel from right to left when she was still five hazelnut bushes away from me.
The villas on either side of Uphagenweg seemed to be uninhabited. Everywhere silver firs and weeping willows, red maples and birches, dropping leaf after leaf. We were fourteen years old and walked toward each other. Jenny seemed thinner than I remembered her.
Her toes turned out from all the balleying. Why was she wearing blue when she could have said to herself: I’ll turn red if he comes along.
Because I was early and because she flushed to the edge of her tam, because she had shifted her satchel, I stopped, also shifted my satchel, and held out my hand. She briefly let a dry anxious hand slip into mine. We stood amid unripe nuts. Some had been stepped on or were hollow. When a bird in a maple tree had finished, I began: “Hi there, Jenny, why so late? Have you tried the nuts? Want me to crack you a few? They haven’t any taste, but after all they’re the first. And what have you been doing with yourself? Your old man is still mighty chipper. Only the other day he had his pocket full of sparklers again: must have been ten pounds of them, or at least eight, not bad. And all that tramping around at his age, but what I wanted to ask you: how’s the ballet going? How many pirouettes can you do? And how’s the instep, improving? I wish I could get to the old Coffee Mill one of these days. How’s the first soloist, the one you got from Vienna? I heard you’re in The Masked Ball. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to, because I. But they say you’re good, I’m mighty glad. And have you been back to the icehouse? Don’t be like that. It was only a joke. But I remember well because when I got home my father. Have you still got the necklace, the one made of bottle washers? And what about Berlin? Have you heard any more from those people?”
I chatted stammered repeated myself. I cracked hazelnuts with my heel, picked half-crushed kernels from splintered shells with nimble fingers, gave some took some; and Jenny amiably ate soapy nuts that dulled the teeth. My fingers were sticky. She stood stiffly, still kept all her blood in her head, and replied slowly monotonously compliantly. Her eyes had agoraphobia. They clung to the birches, weeping willows, silver firs: “Yes, thank you, my father is very well. Except he’s been teaching too much. Sometimes I have to help him correct papers. And he smokes too much. Yes, I’m still with Madame Lara. She’s really an excellent teacher and widely recognized. Soloists come to her from Dresden and even from Berlin for a little extra workout. You see, she’s had the Russian style in her bones ever since she was a child. She learned all sorts of things from watching Preobrajensky and Trefilova. Even if she does seem dreadfully pedantic, always correcting and fussing over something, she never loses sight of the dance, and we learn something more than technique. There’s really no need for you to see The Masked Ball. Our standards here aren’t really the highest. Yes, Harry, of course I remember. But I’ve never gone back. I read somewhere that you can’t or shouldn’t repeat certain things, or they disappear entirely. But I wear your necklace sometimes. Yes, Herr Haseloff has written again. To Papa of course. He’s really a funny man and writes about thousands of little things other people wouldn’t notice. But Papa says he’s a great success in Berlin. He’s been doing all sorts of things, stage designs too. He’s said to be a very strict teacher, but a good one. He goes on the road with Neroda, who really directs the ballet: Paris, Belgrade, Salonika. They don’t only dance for soldiers. But Papa says I’m not ready for it yet.”
Then there were no nuts left on the ground. And a few schoolboys had passed by. I knew one of them; he grinned. Jenny hurriedly let her right hand disappear in my right hand. I turned her hand over for a moment: five smooth light fingers; and on the ring finger she was wearing a tarnished, primitively wrought silver ring. I took it off without asking.
Jenny with empty ring finger: “That’s Angustri, that’s its name.”
I rub the ring: “Angustri? How come?”
“That’s Gypsy language and it means ring.”
“Have you always had it?”
“But you mustn’t tell anybody. It was on my pillow when I was found.”
“And how do you know its name?”
Jenny’s blush rises, falls: “That’s what the man who left me there called the ring.”
I: “A Gypsy?”
Jenny: “His name was Bidandengero.”
I: “Then maybe you’re one too.”
Jenny: “Certainly not, Harry. They have black hair.”
I clinch it: “But they can all dance!”
I told Tulla all about it:
she, I, and a lot of other people were crazy about the ring. We thought there was some hocus-pocus in the silver, and when the conversation revolved around
Jenny, we called her not Jenny but Angustri. Undoubtedly those of my fellow pupils who had fallen in love with Jenny’s ballet slippers from the start were now pining for Angustri. I alone remained calm-to-curious toward Jenny and Angustri. We had been through too much together. And from the very start I had been contaminated by Tulla. Even as a high school student, in relatively clean clothes, she still had her smell of bone glue; and I stuck fast with hardly a struggle.
When Tulla said: “Swipe the ring next time,” I said no, and when I waylaid Jenny in Uphagenweg I only half meant to pull the silver off her finger. Twice in one week she blushed, because I crossed her path. Both times she had no Angustri on her, but was wearing the silly bottle-washer necklace.
But Tulla, who was in mourning for her brother Alexander,
soon arranged nevertheless for Jenny to wear mourning. By the late fall of 1941—the special dispatches about victories in the East had stopped—the Conradinum boasted twenty-two fallen Conradinians. The marble tablet with the names, dates, and ranks hung in the main entrance between Schopenhauer and Copernicus. The fallen included one holder of the Knight’s Cross. Two holders of the Knight’s Cross were still alive and when they had leave regularly visited their old school. Sometimes they made terse or long-winded speeches in the auditorium. We sat spellbound and the teachers nodded approval. After the lectures questions were permitted. The students wanted to know how many Spitfires you had to shoot down, how many gross register tons you had to sink. For we were all determined to win the Knight’s Cross later on. The teachers either asked practical questions—were replacements still coming in all right?—or they indulged in high-sounding periods about sticking it out and final victory. Dr. Brunies asked a holder of the Knight’s Cross—I think it was the one from the Air Force—what his thoughts had been on first seeing a dead soldier, friend or foe. The fighter pilot’s answer has slipped my mind.
Brunies asked the same question of Sergeant Walter Matern, who, because he wasn’t a holder of the Knight’s Cross, was only entitled to deliver a lecture from the teacher’s desk in our classroom on the “Role of Ground Forces Anti-Aircraft in the East.” I’ve also forgotten the answer of the sergeant with the Iron Cross first and second class. All I see is that field-gray, at once haggard and bullish, he clutches the desk top with both hands and stares over our heads at an oleograph on the rear wall of the classroom: the spinach-green Thoma landscape. Wherever he breathes, the air be comes rarefied. We want to know something about the Caucasus, but he talks unswervingly about the Nothing.
A few days after his lecture Walter was sent back to Russia, where he came by a wound which made him unfit for combat in the Ground Forces AA: with a slight limp he was assigned to the home front AA, first in Königsberg, then in Danzig. In the Brösen-Glettkau shore battery and the Kaiserhafen battery he trained Air Force auxiliaries.
He was liked and feared by all, and to me became a shining ideal; only Dr. Brunies, when Matern came for a visit and stood behind the desk, questioned his sergeant’s existence by turning on irony lights and asking Matern, instead of delivering a lecture about the fighting at Orel, to read us a poem by Eichendorff, perhaps: “Dark gables, lofty windows…”
I can’t recall that Dr. Brunies seriously taught us anything. A few subjects for compositions come to mind: “Preparations for marriage among the Zulus.” Or: “The destinies of a tin can.” Or: “When I was a cough drop, growing smaller and smaller in a little girl’s mouth.” Apparently his idea was to feed our imaginations, and since out of forty students two can reasonably be expected to have an imagination, thirty-eight thirds were permitted to doze while two—another and myself—unrolled the destinies of the tin can, thought up original marriage customs for the Zulus, and spied on a cough drop growing smaller in a little girl’s mouth.
This topic kept me, my classmate, and Dr. Brunies busy for two weeks or more. Tuberous and leathery-crinkly, he sat huddled behind his worn desktop and, by way of inspiring us, gave an imitation of sucking, nibbling, and drawing juice. He made an imaginary cough drop move from one cheek to the other, almost swallowed it, diminished it with closed eyes, let the cough drop speak, narrate; in short, at a time when sweets were rare and rationed, Dr. Brunies’ addiction to candy redoubled: if he had none in his pocket, he would invent some. And we wrote on the same topic.
Beginning roughly in the fall of ‘41, vitamin tablets were distributed to all our students. They were called Cebion tablets and kept in large brown-glass apothecary jars. In the conference room, where previously Meyers Konversations Lexikon had stood back beside back, there now stood a row of labeled jars—sixth to first. Each day they were carried by the class teachers into the classrooms for the vitamin-deficient schoolboys of the third war year.
Of course it did not escape our notice that Dr. Brunies was already sucking and that there was sweet enjoyment around his old man’s mouth when he entered the class with the apothecary jar under his arm. The distribution of the Cebion tablets took up a good half of the period, for Brunies did not let the glass pass from seat to seat: in alphabetical order, in strict accordance with the class roster, he let the students step forward one by one, reached elaborately into the glass jar, acted as if he was fishing for something very special, and then, with triumph in every wrinkle, brought out one of the perhaps five hundred Cebion tablets, displayed it as the outcome of a difficult magician’s act, and handed it to the student.
We all knew that Dr. Brunies’ coat pockets were full of Cebion tablets. They had a sweet-sour taste: a little like lemon, a little like grape sugar, a little like a hospital. Since we liked to suck Cebion tablets, Brunies, who was wild about everything sweet, had good reason to fill his coat pockets. Every day, on his way from the conference room to our class room, he would stop in the teachers’ toilet with the brown apothecary jar and a moment later would be back in the corridor, sucking his way forward; his pocket flaps would be powdered with Cebion dust.
I would like to say that Brunies knew that we knew. Often he vanished behind the blackboard during the class, victualed up, and showed us his busy mouth: “I assume that you haven’t seen anything; and if you have seen something, you’ve seen wrong.”
Like other teachers Oswald Brunies had to sneeze often and sonorously; like his colleagues he pulled out a big handkerchief on such occasions; but unlike his colleagues he sent Cebion tablets, whole or broken, tumbling from his pockets along with his snot rag. Those that went rolling on the waxed floor we rescued. A cluster of bowed zealously collecting schoolboys handed Dr. Brunies half and quarter tablets. We said—the words became a stock phrase—: “Dr. Brunies, you’ve dropped some of your sparkling stones.”
Brunies answered gravely: “If they are common mica gneiss, you may keep them; but if you have found one or several pieces of double spar, I should like you to return them.”
We, and that was our tacit agreement, found only pieces of double spar which Brunies caused to disappear between brownish tooth stumps and tested by letting them travel from cheek to cheek until he had attained certainty: “Indeed, you have discovered several pieces of extremely rare double spar; how gratifying to have found them.”
Later Dr. Brunies dropped the detours; he stopped going behind the blackboard and never again referred to lost pieces of double spar. On his way from the conference room to our classroom he gave up visiting the teachers’ toilet with his apothecary jar, but avidly and openly helped himself to our Cebion tablets during class. The trembling of his hands was pitiful. It overcame him in the middle of a sentence, between two stanzas of Eichendorff: he didn’t pick out a solitary tablet; with three bony fingers he seized five tablets, tossed all five into his insatiable mouth, and smacked his lips so shamelessly that we had to look away.
No, Tulla,
we didn’t report him. Several reports were turned in; but none came from our class. A few members of my class, it is true, and I was one of them, were later called into the conference room to testify; but we were extremely reserved, all
we said was yes, Dr. Brunies had eaten candy during class, but not Cebion tablets, only ordinary cough drops. This, we said, was a habit he had always had, even when we were in sixth and fifth; and in those days no one had even heard of Cebion tablets.
Our testimony didn’t help much; when Brunies was arrested, Cebion dust was found in the linings of his pockets.
At first it was rumored that Dr. Klohse, our principal, had reported him; some said it was Lingenberg, a mathematics teacher; then word got around that certain pupils in the Gudrun School, some of the girls in Brunies’ history class, had turned him in. Before I had time to think: It must have been Tulla, Tulla Pokriefke’s name came up.
You did it!
Why? Because. Two weeks later—Dr. Brunies had been obliged to hand our class over to Dr. Hoffmann; he was suspended from teaching but not yet under arrest; he was at home on Elsenstrasse with his sparkling stones—two weeks later we saw the old gentleman once again. Two of my classmates and I were called to the conference room. Two seconds and five girls from the Gudrun School were already waiting; among them: Tulla. We put on a strained grin, and the sun grazed all the brown apothecary jars on the shelf. We stood on a soft carpet and were not allowed to sit down. The classical authors on the walls exchanged disparaging looks. Over the green velvet on the long conference table sunlight wallowed in dust. The door was oiled: Dr. Brunies was led in by a man in civilian clothes, who however was not a teacher but a plain-clothes man. Dr. Klohse came in after them. Brunies gave us a friendly, absent-minded nod, rubbed his brown bony hands, turned on irony lights as though eager to get down to business and tell us about the marriage preparations of the Zulus, the destinies of a tin can, or the cough drop in the mouth of a little girl. But it was the man in civilian clothes who did the speaking. He termed the meeting in the conference room a necessary confrontation. In a drawling voice he asked Dr. Brunies the familiar questions. They dealt with Cebion and the removal of Cebion tablets from jars. Regretfully and headshakingly, Brunies answered all questions in the negative. The seconds were questioned, then we. He was inculpated exculpated. Contradictory stammerings: “No, I didn’t see anything, only hearsay. We always thought. We knew he was fond of candy, so we supposed. In my presence, no. But it’s true that he…”