by Günter Grass
Not a word out of Matern. And the little birdies, who were already awake, pretend to be sleeping again. The usual grinding of teeth starts up. The aimless groping of a shoe on flat pavement: no stone. What will I? Nowhere a zellack. My change of socks and shirts? I left my razor in the smoke-filled shanty. It looks like I’ll have to. Or I’ll clear out, beat it to the Soviet sector. That’s where I was going in the first place, and I’m still hanging around here. So I’ll just…
He thrusts his closed hand behind him, a wind-up; what a fine powerful thrower’s stance! Goldmouth delights in the harmony of the movement. Pluto tenses. And Matern throws—well, what do you think?—the newly recovered pocketknife far away. What the Vistula, not without resistance, gave up, he gives to the Berlin Landwehr Canal, at the point where it forks. But no sooner has the pocketknife vanished with the usual splash, and seemingly for good, than Goldmouth is on the spot with well-meaning advice: “Don’t worry, my dear Walter. For me it’s the merest trifle. That section of the canal will be drained. There isn’t much current at this point. You’ll have your good old pocketknife back in two weeks at the most.—It made us into blood brothers, you know.”
O impotence brooding eggs from which rage will hatch: naked and without fuzz. Matern releases a word. O human rage, always looking for words and finding one in the end. Matern flings a single word, which aims and strikes home. Human rage, which never has enough and heaps up repetitions intended as intensives. Several times in succession the word. The dog stands still. The canal forks. Goldmouth neglects to take a light from an almost burned-down cigarette. Leitmotive slips into murder motive. Matern takes aim and says: “SHEENY!”
At last the sparrows wake up. O lovely balmy May dawn under a bipartite sky. O night gone and day not yet come. O long in-between moment when the word “sheeny” is spoken, and doesn’t feel like falling to the ground, but wants to hang in midair awhile!
It’s Matern who sinks to the ground. He’s overreached himself. It’s really been too much for him: “First the interzonal trip with all the fuss and bother. Then the round from bar to bar. The change of air. The joy of finding his friend again. Most anybody would be floored. Every explanation applies only to the circumstances. Every word is too much. Do what you please with me.”
And so Goldmouth’s ebony cane summons a taxi: “Tempelhof Airport. Departure gate. This gentleman, the dog, and I are in a hurry. We’ve got to catch the first plane for Hanover. We have to visit a plant that’s situated below ground. The firm of Brauxel & Co. You’ve heard of it?”
THE HUNDRED AND THIRD AND BOTTOMMOST MATERNIAD
Anyone wishing to travel below ground will do well to take a start in the air: ergo, British-European Airways to Han-over-Langenfeld. The remaining miles on the flat surface are diminished by a company car: past cows and building sites, guided by detours and feeders, through a spring-green yet pallid countryside. A striking sight from the distance, the destination is stuck to the horizon: the conical waste pile, the brick-red buildings: lab, changehouse, boiler house, administration building, storehouse—and over all the roofs, towering above the waste pile and the dumping gear that goes with it: the stilt-legged headframe.
Who would want to build cathedrals in a day when the sky is held up by stagesets like this! This is Brauxel & Co., a firm which, though registered with the Hanover Potash Association and responsible to the Hanover Bureau of Mines, extracts not so much as a single ton of potash and yet lowers men in three shifts: powdermen, licensed muckers and drillers, all told one hundred and eighty-two miners.
And as long as pulleys in the headframe continue to drive cables over the whim, the man who alights first from the company car will no longer be called Goldmouth, but Heir Director or Herr Brauxel: so says the driver, so says the porter.
And the figure who gets out of the company car behind Brauxel is not yet Matern, but a black, full-grown shepherd, whom both Brauxel and the finally alighting Matern call Pluto.
But when they pass through the wrought-iron gate, which was installed in potash-mining days, the porter takes his cap off to greet Herr Director Brauxel. Thereupon Matern, whom neither a night rich in wonders and not poor in startling conversations, nor a wonderfully serene flight along the Berlin-Hanover air corridor has deprived of his native capacity for amazement, cannot help asking a question: “How is it that the porter employed here looks so embarrassingly like my father, miller Anton Matern?”
To this Director Brauxel, who leads his guest straight to the changehouse, meanwhile whistling Pluto to heel as though the dog belonged to him, has the ultimate answer: “Porter Anton Matern does not look like miller Matern, he is the miller, he is your father.”
Whereupon Matern, who likewise, but without results, whistles the dog to heel, draws the obscure but high-sounding conclusion: “In the end every father becomes a porter to every son.”
The changehouse attendant submits to Matern a paper that has to be signed. Regulations prescribe that strangers to the mine, desirous of being lowered below ground with a view to visiting same, must confirm their intention with a signature. Matern signs and is led to a bathroom where, standing beside a dry tub, he is expected to remove his traveling clothes and put on light denims, woolen socks, high clodhoppers, a woolen scarf, and a new, yellow-varnished, and ill-fitting hard hat. He changes garment for garment and through the partition asks Director Brauxel in the adjoining bathroom: “What’s become of Pluto?”
And Brauxel, who though director also has to exchange traveling clothes for a mine outfit, garment for garment, answers through the same partition: “Pluto’s with me. Where else would he be?”
And thus attired, Brauxel and Matern, followed by Pluto, leave the changehouse. Each carries a carbide lamp in his left hand. The lamps as well as the denims and the twice-yellow hard hat efface the differences between director and visitor. But as they are passing the administration building, a hunchbacked little man, whom cuff protectors identify as the chief clerk, steps out of the door and obliges the gentle men to pause. At the supposed chief clerk’s request, Brauxel has to sign some papers that have accumulated during his absence. The chief clerk is glad to meet Herr Matern Junior. Then wishing them good.luck, he lets them proceed to the headframe.
Followed by the dog, the two of them, Matern and Brauxel, cross a yard, where quantities of nailed-up crates are being hauled back and forth by forklift trucks; but there is no potash either in the crates or in warehouse bins.
And when they reach the foot of the headframe and Brauxel is about to step on the iron staircase leading to the shaft collar, Matern asks a question: “Is the dog going down too?” Brauxel isn’t joking when he says: “Every dog comes from below and has to be lowered again in the end.”
Matern has misgivings: “The dog has never been below ground.”
Whereupon Brauxel with authority: “The dog is company property and will have to get used to it.”
This loss—a few hours ago he was still a dog owner—is too much for Matern: “He’s my dog. Heel, Pluto!” But Brauxel whistles up ahead and the black shepherd takes the stairs to the shaft collar, which straddles the headframe at mid height. It’s drafty on the platform. From obliquely below them, the drive wheel moves the pulleys above their heads: upper and lower cable tense in anticipation of the mine run.
But when strokes of a bell—four strokes meaning “go slow”—announce the arrival of the cage from the bottom, Matern wants to make a suggestion before it is too late: “Why not leave Pluto on the platform? God knows what the rapid descent will do to him, and I hear it’s hellishly hot down below.”
Only when they are weighing down the cage—Pluto wedged in between Brauxel and Matern—is the director prepared to answer. The cage gate is closed. The trammer signals “ready” with three strokes, “go” with five strokes, and Brauxel says: “Every hell has its climate. The dog will have to get used to it.”
And now the last daylight has been left upstairs. The descent from the platform (a hundred fe
et above the earth’s surface) to the fill level on the pit bottom (twenty-eight hundred feet under the earth’s surface) marks the beginning of the official tour of inspection, intended to give the stranger Walter Matern on-the-spot instruction.
He is advised to open his mouth and to breathe evenly. The pressure on his ears is explained by the speed of the lowering, the slight burnt smell by the friction between the falling cage and the guide rails of the shaft. The fingers of the updraft become more and more southerly; it finds its way through denim and up trouser legs. Matern claims to have noticed that Pluto is trembling; but Brauxel says everybody shivers who has to drop so far in barely one minute.
And before they reach the bottom, he enlightens Matern, for educational purposes, about the activities of potash-mining days and days within the memory of Brauxel & Co. The words “gangue rock” and “mine rock” drop fifty feet a second with them. At the same lowering speed there is talk of shutdowns and cable inspections: the cage cable consists of seven times thirty-two wire strands wound around a hemp-clad steel core. Loosening of the outer strands, overloaded steel cores, screw dislocations resulting in kinks, and cable jumping—these are the main causes of cable breaks, which, it should be added, are infrequent. Nor should rust erosion be forgotten, which digs its grooves even while the cable is running. For this reason grease, but it has to be non-acidic, must be applied to the cable, which has to be dry, and never must grease be applied to the whole length of the cable, but only in three-hundred-foot stretches, for fear that fresh grease will get on the drive wheel, for this cable that’s lowering us is the soul of the whole plant, its alpha and omega, it raises us to the light of day and carries us down below, so God help us if it.
And so Matern has no leisure to pay attention to the stomach flutter which is sometimes felt even in ordinary elevators. Pressure on the temples and watering of the eyes go unnoticed, because Brauxel is giving him a mental diagram of the shaft from the pulley covers to the return guides for cable and the so-called shaft sump.
With four warning strokes and the single stroke that calls the engine to halt, the trammer puts an end to the lesson which Brauxel has been able to funnel into the visitor in barely a minute; so vastly does a drop by cable enhance man’s gift of assimilating and remembering.
The fill level has light, electric light, in readiness. And as they set foot on the pit bottom with Pluto in the lead, they return the “Glück auf” of Wernicke, the head foreman, who, in response to instructions from the surface, has come from the waste stall, where he had been checking the trap doors, to give Matern, the stranger, an account of the mine.
But Brauxel, who is as familiar with all scooped-out stalls, drifts, adits, and blind shafts as with the labyrinthine Old City where he went to school, admonishes the foreman: “Don’t wander. Begin, as customary in our country, with a description of the situation after 1945; then come to the main point, how we stopped mining potash and began to turn out finished products bearing the trade mark of Brauxel & Co.”
Thus admonished and accompanied by the three-tracked activity of the fill level, the foreman launches into his account of the mine: “Well then, in 1945, as our director has said, we in West Germany were left with only 39 per cent of Germany’s over-all prewar potash production. The rest and, there’s no denying it, the largest and most modern potash works were at the disposal of Soviet-occupied Central Germany. But even if things looked dark for us at first, West Germany had overtaken the East zone by the middle of ’53, though by then our plant had given up potash and gone into the manufacture of finished products. But to get back to potash: Our operation was based on a large deposit extending from the Salzdetfurth Works in the eastern part of the Hildesheim Forest through Gross-Giessen, where our mine was located, to Hasede, Himmelsthür, Emmerke, and Sarstedt. As a rule these salt veins are situated almost ten thousand feet below the surface, but here they are compressed into domes covered only by a layer of sandstone. Our mining rights covered roughly fourteen miles along the dome, some four miles of which had actually been tapped at the time when Brauxel & Co. gave up potash mining. Our company owns two shafts, two miles apart, going down to the twenty-eight-hundred-foot level. These two shafts, the one a mining, transportation, and fresh-air shaft, the other a vent shaft—are connected horizontally by four main galleries. On these galleries drifts lead to the stalls. Formerly the twenty-four-hundred-foot level was the pit bottom. There the rich Ronneberg deposit, containing for the most part 24 per cent of sylvinite and barely 14 per cent of carnallitite, was worked to a width of as much as sixty-five feet. In February 1952, when the drilling and blasting began on the Stassfurt reserve deposit, Wintershall AG took over the Burbach Potash Works, and our mine, allegedly because the Stassfurt deposit wasn’t rich enough to be profitable, was first leased and then sold to Brauxel & Co. But most of the men stayed on because, in addition to our base pay and the tax-free miner’s bonus of two marks fifty per shift, we were promised an extra indemnity for work unrelated to mining. But it wasn’t until June 1953, after we had struck the plant for two weeks, that our bonus was paid regularly. It might also be worth mentioning that our own power plant, equipped with steam generators and substation, provides us with power and heat. Of the sixty-eight stalls, only a fraction of which had been worked out in mining days, thirty-six have had to be filled in with waste for reasons of safety. After a long-drawn-out inspection by the Bureau of Mines, Brauxel & Co. obtained permission to use the remaining thirty-two. Though at first it was hard for us experienced miners to give up our usual business of working muck holes, of operating scoops and shaking-conveyors, though the new working conditions struck us at first as unbefitting a miner, we finally got used to them. Thanks to Herr Brauxel’s firmness, we were allowed to keep our membership in the miners’ union.”
Here Brauxel, the director, puts in: “That will do, Wernicke. And I hope no one will dare to set potash, coal, and iron ore above our finished products. What we raise from below can bear inspection from all sides.”
But when Walter Matern, the stranger below, asks why it stinks so here at the fill level, where the smell comes from and what it’s composed of, the director and foreman have to admit that the place still smells predominantly of potash-mining days: “The smell of brine oozing from the still damp waste blends with the earthy smell of sandstone and with lingering powder smoke, which is full of saltpeter because they used blasting gelatin to open up the roof. In addition, sulphur compounds deriving from algae and diatoms, mixed with the ozone generated by the sparks of electric cars and tramways, impregnate the air throughout the galleries and stalls. Further ingredients of the smell are: the salt dust that fills the air and settles everywhere, billows of acetylene from the lamps, traces of carbon dioxide, and stale grease. When the ventilation isn’t too good, you can even guess what brand of beer was consumed here and is still being consumed in the era of Brauxel’s finished products, namely, Herrenhauser Pilsner, the bottled beer with the horse of Lower Saxony on the label.”
And Matern, the stranger below, enlightened about the smell prevailing in all the well-ventilated galleries and in the poorly ventilated stalls, is of the opinion that in addition to the acrid smell there is also an oppressively warm draft blowing from the pit bottom to the fill level, although any amount of fresh spring air is available on the surface.
When they begin—and Pluto is not left behind—to move at first horizontally through the gallery on an electric trolley, and then vertically by cage to the waste stall—two thousand feet below the surface—they enter into a sultry August fug, the content of which is brine on top, sulphur compounds in the middle, and at the very bottom ancient blast smoke compounded with recent trolley ozone. The sweat dries faster than it breaks out.
“This is hell itself,” says Matern.
But foreman Wernicke corrects him: “This is the place where our materials are made ready for the manufacturing process. This stall, which we call the first in accordance with the program of our visit, is whe
re our new materials, requisitioned from above, are degraded, as we call it.”
Dog in the lead, they enter the first stall through the narrow gangway. A room the size of a church nave opens up. Marked by neatly-halved drill holes, layers of salt—overhang ing cuts, face cuts, and underlying cuts—extend toward the far wall of the stall, which towers in such sacral remoteness as to suggest a chancel. But the room contains only two rows of enormous vats, sixteen on each side, extending at knee height from the narrow gangway to the far wall of the stall. In the narrow passage between the rows, Hinrich Schrötter, formerly a powderman, services the vats with a long spoon-billed pole.
And the man in charge of the brine baths in stall No. 1 informs the stranger Matern: “We chiefly process cotton, synthetic wool, popeline, twill, calico, quick-shrinking flannel, jersey, taffeta, and tulle, but also raw silk and rayon. Not so long ago we handled a sizable lot of corduroy and twelve bolts of shot silk; occasionally there is a demand for small to medium lots of cashmere, cambric, and chiffon. Today, since the beginning of the night shift eight bolts of Irish linen, forty-eight inches in width before treatment, are in the first stage of degradation. We also have furs on hand, mostly pony, Persian lamb, and South African goat, and in the last three vats, on the upper left, a few brocades, an assortment of Brussels lace, and small quantities of piqué, crepe de Chine, and suede are in process of degradation. The remaining vats are degrading lining materials, denim, onion sacks, English sailcloth, and rope of every thickness. We work for the most part with cold caustic solutions, consisting of the usual waste brine with an admixture of magnesium choride. Only when intensive degradation of new materials is required do we make use of a hot sylvinite solution to which magnesium bromide is added. Actually all our degradation baths, especially those containing bromide, call for above-average ventilation. But unfortunately, and Herr Wernicke, our foreman, will back me up, the ventilation on the two-thousand-foot level wasn’t up to regulation even in the past, when they were still blasting open the stalls.”