by Günter Grass
During Harry’s term of service in the Kaiserhafen battery, there were only two air-raid alerts; but rats were hunted every day. When once a four-engine bomber was shot down over Oliva Forest, the Pelonken and Altschottland batteries shared the credit; the Kaiserhafen battery came off empty-handed, but could point to increasing success in purging the battery area of water rats.
Ah yes, this being-in-the-midst-of surpassed itself, attaining the dimension of a world-project! And Harry’s hunt group was among the most successful. But all the groups, even the volunteer auxiliaries who worked behind the latrine, were outdone by Störtebeker, who joined no group.
He withdrew rats in broad daylight and always had an audience. As a rule he lay on his belly in front of the kitchen shack, right next to the drain cover. He grounded with long arm in a drain which provided Störtebeker with overarching withdrawal from the sewer that ran from Troyl to the drainage fields.
O manifold why! Why thus and not otherwise? Why water rats and not other essents? Why anything at all rather than nothing? These questions in themselves contained the first-last primordial answer to all questioning: “The essence of the rat is the transcendentally originating threefold dispersion of the rat in the world-project or in the sewage system.”
You couldn’t help admiring Störtebeker, although a heavy leather glove, such as welders wear, protected his right hand that lurked open in the drain. To tell the truth, we all waited to see rats, four or five of them, chew up his glove and lacerate his bare hand. But Störtebeker lay serenely with barely open eyes, sucking his raspberry drop—he didn’t smoke—and every two minutes with suddenly rising leather glove smacked down a water rat with rat head on the corrugated edge of the drain cover. Between rat death and rat death he whispered in his own tongue, which however had been infected with obscurity by the tech sergeant’s language, rat propositions and ontological rat truths, which, so we all believed, lured the prey within reach of his glove and made possible his overarching withdrawal. Imperturbably, while he harvested below and piled up above, his discourse ran its course: “The rat withdraws itself by unconcealing itself into the ratty. So the rat errates the ratty, illuminating it with errancy. For the ratty has come-to-be in the errancy where the rat errs and so fosters error. That is the essential area of all history.”
Sometimes he called not-yet-withdrawn rats “latecomers.” He referred to the piled-up rats as “foretimely” or as “essents.” When, his work accomplished, Störtebeker surveyed his ordered prey, he spoke almost tenderly and with a mild didacticism: “The rat can endure without the ratty, but never can there be rattiness without the rat.” In an hour he produced as many as twenty-five water rats and could have withdrawn more if he had wanted to. Störtebeker used the same wire as we did for stringing up water rats. This tail-knotted and enumerable demonstration, repeated every morning, he termed his being-there-relatedness. With it he earned quantities of raspberry drops. Sometimes he gave Harry’s cousin a roll. Often, as though to appease the ratty, he tossed three separate drops ceremonially into the open drain outside the kitchen shack. Concepts gave rise to a controversy among schoolboys. We were never sure whether the sewer should be termed world-project or errancy.
But the smell that grounded on the battery came neither from world-project nor from errancy, as Störtebeker called his multirelational drain.
There was once a battery,
over which, from first gray to last gray, there flew busy, never-resting crows. Not gulls but crows. There were gulls over Kaiserhafen proper, over the lumber warehouses, but not over the battery. If gulls ever invaded the area, a furious cloud immediately darkened brief happening. Crows do not tolerate gulls.
But the smell that hung over the battery came neither from crows nor from gulls, which weren’t there anyway. While p.f.c.s, corporals, Ukrainian volunteer auxiliaries, and Air Force auxiliaries slew rats for reward, the ranks from sergeant to Captain Hufnagel had a different distraction: shooting—though not for promised rewards, but only to fire and hit something—individuals crows out of the agglomeration of crows over the battery. Yet the crows remained and became no fewer.
But the smell which hung over the battery, which stood between barracks and gun positions, between the computer and the shrapnel trenches, and scarcely moved its supporting leg, the smell which, as Harry and everyone else knew, was projected neither by rats nor by crows, which arose from no drain and hence from no errancy, this smell was wafted, regardless of whether the wind was working from Putzig or Dirschau, from the harbor-mouth bar or from the open sea, by a whitish mound blocked off by barbed wire and situated to the south of the battery. This mound stood in front of, and half hid, a brick-red factory, which from squat chimney discharged self-involved smoke, which probably dropped its fallout on Troyl or the Lower City. Between mound and factory ended railroad tracks leading to the Island Station. The mound, neatly conical, rose just a little higher than a rusty shaking-conveyor similar to those used in coal yards and potash mines for piling waste. At the foot of the mound tip cars stood motionless on a movable track. The mound shimmered faintly when struck by the sun. It stood out, sharply silhouetted, when the sky hung low and touched it. If you disregarded the crows that inhabited it, the mound was clean; but it has been written at the beginning of this concluding tale, that nothing is pure. And thus, for all its whiteness, the mound to one side of the Kaiserhafen battery was not pure; it was a pile of bones, and its components, even after processing in the factory, were still overgrown with remnants; and the crows couldn’t stop living there, rest lessly black. So it came about that a smell, which hovered over the battery like the bell that didn’t feel like going to Rome, injected into every mouth, Harry’s too, a taste which, even after immoderate consumption of raspberry drops, lost none of its heavy sweetness.
No one talked about the pile of bones. But everybody saw smelled tasted it. Anyone who stepped out of a barracks whose doors opened southward had the cone-shaped mound in his field of vision. Anyone who like Harry, the Number 6, sat upraised beside a gun and who, in gunnery practice, was swung around with gun and fuze setter in accordance with instructions given by the computer, was time and time again, as though computer and bone-pile were engaged in conversation, confronted with a picture: a whitish mountain beside a smoke-spewing factory, an idle shaking-conveyor, motionless tip cars, and a moving blanket of crows. Nobody spoke of the picture. Anyone who dreamed teeming images of the mound remarked over his morning coffee that he had had a funny dream: about climbing stairs or about school. At the most, a phrase which had been used emptily until then took on, in the usual conversations, a vague weightiness that may have come from the unnamed mound. Words occur to Harry: placedness—instandingness—nihilation; for in the daytime workers never moved tip cars to diminish the placedness, although the factory was under steam. No freight cars rolled on tracks and came from the Island Station. In the daytime the shaking-conveyor gave instandingness nothing to chew on. But once during a night maneuver—for one hour the eighty-eight had to chase a target plane caught in four searchlights—Harry and everybody else heard work sounds for the first time. The factory was still blacked out, but lanterns red and white were waved on the railroad tracks. Freight cars bumped each other. A monotonous clanking started up; the shaking-conveyor. Rust against rust: the tip cars. Voices, commands, laughter: for an hour activity prevailed in the nihilation area, while the target plane flew over the city again from the sea side, slipped away from the searchlights, and, caught again, became a Platonic target: The Number 6 manned the fuze setter, trying with cranks to make two mechanical pointers coincide with two electrical pointers and unflinchingly nihilating the evasive essent.
The next day the placedness took on a quality of growth, for Harry and all those who had been disregarding the mound. The crows had received visitors. The smell remained unchanged. But no one inquired after its meaning, although Harry and everyone else had it on their tongues.
There was once a pile of bones—
>
so it was called, ever since Harry’s cousin Tulla had spat out the words in the direction of the mound.
“That’s a pile o’ bones,” she said, helping with her thumb. Harry and many others contradicted, but didn’t state exactly what was piled up to the south of the battery.
“Bet you it’s bones. And what’s more, human bones. Everybody knows that.” Tulla offered to bet with Störtebeker rather than her cousin. All three and others were sucking raspberry drops.
Though freshly uttered, Störtebeker’s answer had been ready for weeks: “We must conceive of piledupedness in the openness of Being, the divulgation of care, and endurance to death as the consummate essence of existence.”
Tulla demanded greater precision: “And I’m telling you they come straight from Stutthof, want to bet?”
Störtebeker refused to be pinned down geographically. He declined the bet and became impatient: “Will you stop chewing my ear off with your threadbare scientific concepts. The most we can say is that here Being has come into unconcealment.”
But when Tulla kept harping on Stutthof and called unconcealment by its name, Störtebeker evaded the proffered bet with a grandiose gesture of blessing which took in the battery and the mound of bones: “There lies the essence-ground of all history.”
Rats went on being slain after duty hours and even during policing-and-mending period. The ranks from sergeant up shot crows. The smell clung to the battery, no relief showed up. And Tulla said, not to Störtebeker, who was standing aside, drawing figures in the sand, but to the tech sergeant, who had twice exhausted the magazine of his carbine: “Want to bet that they’re not honest-to-God human bones, a whole pile of them?”
It was Sunday, visitors’ day. But only a few visitors, mostly parents, stood strange in civilian clothes beside their sons who had shot up too fast. Harry’s parents hadn’t come. November was dragging on, and rain hovered the whole time between low clouds and the earth with its barracks. Harry was standing with the group around Tulla and the tech sergeant, who was loading his carbine for the third time.
“Want to bet that…” said Tulla and held out a small white hand ready to shake on it. Nobody wanted to. The hand remained alone. Störtebeker’s stick projected the world in the sand. On Tulla’s forehead pimples crumbled. Harry’s hand played with pieces of bone glue in pants pockets. And then the tech sergeant said: “I bet they’re not…” and shook on it, without looking at Tulla.
Instantly, as though in possession of a complete plan, Tulla turned on her heels and took the broad strip of weeds between two gun positions as her path. Despite the damp cold she had on only a sweater and a pleated skirt. She strode along on bare spindly legs, arms locked behind back, hair stringy, colorless, and far removed from her last permanent. She grew smaller as she walked, but remained distinct in the damp air.
At first Harry and everybody thought: Moving so unswervingly, she’ll pass straight through the barbed-wire fence; but just before the barbs, she dropped to the ground, lifted the bottommost strand of the fence between battery area and factory area, rolled under without difficulty, stood again knee-deep in withered-brown weeds, and strode again, but now as though bucking resistance, toward the crow-inhabited mound.
Harry and everybody looked after Tulla and forgot the raspberry drops on their palates. Störtebeker’s stick hesitated in the sand. A grinding gathered strength: somebody had grit between his teeth. And only when Tulla stood tiny in front of the mound, when crows lazily rose up, when Tulla stooped down—bending in the middle—only when Tulla about-faced and came back, more quickly than everybody and Harry had feared, the grinding between the tech sergeant’s teeth ebbed away; whereupon silence broke out, the silence that scoops out the ears.
She didn’t come back empty-handed. What she carried between two hands rolled under the wire of the barbed-wire fence with her into the battery area. Between two 88-millimeter guns, which in line with the last order of the computer pointed to northwest at exactly the same angle as the other two guns, Tulla grew larger. A short school intermission takes as long as Tulla’s trip there and back. For five minutes she shrank to toy size and then expanded: almost grown up. Her forehead was still pimpleless, but what she carried in front of her already meant something. Störtebeker started a new world-project. Again the tech sergeant ground gravel, coarse gravel this time, between his teeth. The silence was hatchmarked with self-grounded sounds.
When Tulla stood in front of everybody and to one side of her cousin with her gift, she said without special emphasis: “See? Do I win or don’t I?”
The tech sergeant’s flat hand struck the left side of her face from the temple over the ear to the chin. Her ear didn’t fall off. Tulla’s head grew hardly smaller. But she dropped the skull, the one she had brought back, on the spot.
With two clammy yellow hands Tulla rubbed her struck cheek, but didn’t run away. On her forehead crumbled exactly as many pimples as before. The skull was a human skull and didn’t break when Tulla dropped it, but bounced twice in the weeds. The tech sergeant seemed to see more than the skull. A few looked away over barracks roofs. Harry was unable to pry his eyes away. A piece of the skull’s lower jaw was missing. Mister and little Thrasher cracked jokes. Quite a few laughed gratefully in the right places. Störtebeker tried to make the oncoming manifest itself in the sand. His narrow-set eyes saw the essent which clings to itself in its fate, whereupon, suddenly and unexpectedly, world came-to-be; for the tech sergeant shouted with his carbine on safety: “You bastards! Get moving! To your barracks! Policing-and-mending time!”
All moved lethargically and made detours. Jokes congealed. Between the shacks Harry turned his head on shoulders that didn’t want to join in the turning: the tech sergeant stood rigid and rectangular with dangling carbine, self-conscious as on the stage. Behind him held geometrically still: placedness, instandingness, nihilation, the essence-ground of history, the difference between Being and the essent—the ontological difference.
But the volunteer auxiliaries were batting the breeze as they peeled potatoes in the kitchen shack. The noncoms’ radio was dishing out a request concert. The Sunday visitors took their leave in an undertone. Tulla was standing right next to her cousin, rubbing the struck side of her face. Her mouth, distorted by her massaging hand, muttered past Harry: “Is this the way to treat me when I’m pregnant?”
Naturally Harry had to say: “By whom?”
But she didn’t care about that: “Want to bet I’m not?”
Harry didn’t want to, because Tulla won all bets. Outside the washroom he pointed his thumb at the half-open door: “In that case, you’d better wash your hands right away, with soap.”
Tulla obeyed.—Nothing is pure.
There was once a city—
in addition to the suburbs of Ohra, Schidlitz, Oliva, Emmaus, Praust, Sankt Albrecht, Schellmühl, and the seaport suburb of Neufahrwasser, it had a suburb named Langfuhr. Langfuhr was so big and so little that whatever happens or could happen in this world, also happened or could have happened in Langfuhr.
In this suburb, with its kitchen gardens, drill grounds, drainage fields, slightly sloping cemeteries, shipyards, athletic fields, and military compounds, in Langfuhr, which harbored roughly 72,000 registered inhabitants, which possessed three churches and a chapel, four high schools, a vocational and home-economics school, at all times too few elementary schools, but a brewery with Aktien Pond and icehouse, in Langfuhr, which derived prestige from the Baltic Chocolate Factory, the municipal airfield, the railroad station, the celebrated Engineering School, two movie houses of unequal size, a car barn, the always overcrowded Stadium, and a burned-out synagogue; in the well-known suburb of Langfuhr, whose authorities operated a municpal poorhouse-and-orphanage and a home for the blind, picturesquely situated near Heiligenbrunn, in Langfuhr, incorporated in 1854, a pleasant residential section on the fringe of Jäschkental Forest where the Gutenberg monument was located, in Langfuhr, whose streetcar lines went to Brösen, the s
easide resort, Oliva, the episcopal seat, and the city of Danzig—in Danzig-Langfuhr, then, a suburb made famous by the Mackensen Hussars and the last Crown Prince, a suburb traversed from end to end by the Striessbach, there lived a girl by the name of Tulla Pokriefke, who was pregnant but didn’t know by whom.
In the same suburb, actually in the same apartment house on Elsenstrasse, which like Hertastrasse and Luisenstrasse connects Labesweg with Marienstrasse, lived Tulla’s cousin; his name was Harry Liebenau, he was serving as an Air Force auxiliary in the Kaiserhafen AA battery and was not one of those who might have impregnated Tulla. For Harry merely cogitated in his little head what others actually did. A sixteen-year-old who suffered from cold feet and always stood slightly to one side. A knowledgeable young man, who read a hodgepodge of books on history and philosophy and took care of his handsomely wavy medium-brown hair. A bundle of curiosity who mirrored everything with his gray, but not cold-gray eyes and had a fragile, porous feeling about his smooth but not sickly body. An always cautious Harry, who believed not in God but in the Nothing, yet did not want to have his sensitive tonsils removed. A melancholic, who liked honey cake, poppy-seed cake, and shredded coconut, and though not a good swimmer had volunteered for the Navy. A young man of inaction, who tried to murder his father by means of long poems in school copybooks and referred to his mother as the cook. A hypersensitive boy, who, standing and lying, broke out in sweat over his cousin and unswervingly though secretly thought of a black shepherd dog. A fetishist, who for reasons carried a pearl-white incisor tooth in his purse. A visionary, who lied a good deal, spoke softly, turned red when, believed this and that, and regarded the never-ending war as an extension of his schooling. A boy, a young man, a uniformed high school student, who venerated the Führer, Ulrich von Hutten, General Rommel, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, for brief moments Napoleon, the panting movie actor Emil Jannings, for a while Savonarola, then again Luther, and of late the philospher Martin Heidegger. With the help of these models he succeeded in burying a real mound made of human bones under medieval allegories. The pile of bones, which in reality cried out to high heaven between Troyl and Kaiserhafen, was mentioned in his diary as a place of sacrifice, erected in order that purity might come-to-be in the luminous, which transluminates purity and so fosters light.