The Box: Tales From the Darkroom

by Günter Grass

She was a sly one with that box of hers.

  I saw it more as miraculous.

  In those days we still believed in miracles.

  Maybe because we were all baptized.

  That sounds too Catholic for the father’s taste. The children were gullible, even Taddel, who always had both eyes wide open … Mariechen would snap pictures into the blue, and another miracle would be checked off. Wishes would be fulfilled, tears dried, and Lara would smile, which she did so seldom that it was all the more precious.

  The father, however, placed his bets on doubt. His response to the never-ending wars, the proliferating inequities, the Christian hypocrites, was a definitive No. Sometimes too loud, sometimes not loud enough. Later, doubt took the form of a person, surviving underground and convinced that only snails were immune to doubt. Much of what was printed and accepted as fact actually happened quite differently, heading credulously in the wrong direction. What appeared to be rock-solid crumbled. Hopes melted as the climate changed. And love, too, went astray.

  Yet everything followed the calendar: one date after another. Only Mariechen had the ability to suspend and reverse the natural course of time. Suspicions captured in snapshots. Longings pursued and pounced on by a box that had some screws loose but could reveal hidden states of affairs … Which is why the children must never find out what their father has suppressed. Not a word about guilt and other unwelcome deliveries. The only thing about which there should be no doubt is that once upon a time there were guardian angels, when Mariechen could prove everything in black and white.

  God-awful Mess

  ONCE UPON A time, there were four, and later eight, children, who now qualify as adults. But what does it mean to be an adult? Regression is permissible.

  At this particular moment three of them are sitting together. As soon as Taddel can get away from the nearby film studio where he is shooting—he was the one who invited his siblings to his table—he will join the conversation. Definitely, he said in his last e-mail.

  Lena is busy with her role in Kleist’s Schroffenstein Family. Nana has the night shift at Hamburg’s Eppendorf Hospital. Jasper and Paulchen have not been asked yet. The three eldest fast-forward through the things that are happening in their lives, or are about to happen, or are at a standstill. They lapse into Swiss German, their mother’s tongue. Pat complains of marital discord; Georg, known in these pages as Jorsch, is determined to get his temporary financial issues under control. Lara is glad she doesn’t have to worry, not yet, about her youngest children. All three enjoy teasing one another as they drink tea and nibble on snacks. Jorsch is the only one smoking.

  The many, far too many, kitchen clocks on shelves and atop the cupboard testify to Taddel’s mania for collecting at Hamburg’s flea markets. His wife, who is pregnant and so smiles for no reason, will later bring to the table a pot of goulash, prepared in advance by her husband, and tiptoe out of the room to commune, still smiling, with her computer. Before being put to bed, her little boy stormed through the apartment and along the corridor to the kitchen, asking the kinds of questions four-year-olds ask, questions for which it is hard to come up with suitable answers.

  Now the siblings are eating. Intermittently Pat is on his cell phone, taking care of what he describes as long-overdue business. Once they’ve polished off the goulash, they sit on the balcony, which offers a view of backyards and a school playground, deserted at this time of evening. Yesterday it rained. More rain is forecast. Yet there are few mosquitoes. In pots on the balcony Taddel’s herbs are flourishing, tokens of the domesticity he likes to boast of.

  The air quivers with things unspoken. Only gradually do the brothers and sister wend their way into the confused tangle of their childhood. Their speech regresses, sometimes animated, sometimes irritable. They insist that their feelings are still hurt. Because his father wants him to, Pat goes first, stressing pre-emptively that he has no desire to start a fight with Jorsch.

  Sometimes I was okay, sometimes not so okay. It hasn’t changed that much. But what difference does it make? Anyway, at some point Mariechen would say, Oh dear, oh dear, and Such a god-awful mess, whenever she saw us.

  As she always did when something was wrong.

  She had a nose for that kind of thing.

  Well, it was hard not to notice that things were going downhill with us. Slowly at first, but soon there was nothing more to be done.

  We’re no strangers to such experiences in our own adult lives.

  The moment comes when the flame just goes out.

  And in school we were constantly messing up.

  Even you, Lara. I know I was.

  And Taddel was driving the new nanny—what was her name?—to distraction.

  But that didn’t trouble father one bit. Maybe because at school he’d been no shining light himself, staying back a year and such.

  He hated school.

  Well, his mind was always elsewhere.

  Still is.

  You can never be sure whether he’s really listening or just pretending.

  I think I remember what he had in the works at the time. Something about a dentist, a teacher, two pupils, and a dachshund that was supposed to be set on fire on the Kudamm, right in front of the Kempinski, to protest against the use of napalm in Vietnam.

  It also had something to do with father’s underbite.

  Dysgnathia, it’s called.

  When the book was finished—the title was Local Anaesthetic—and the jacket image showed—maybe him—holding a finger in the flame of a lighter, it caused him no end of grief.

  Man, did the critics ever tear into him when the book came out.

  I assume the media jackals wanted him to write about the past and not about the present.

  And at some point he started to draw snails and more snails, snails racing and snails in two-way traffic, as he called it.

  He was behaving as if at home and otherwise things were perfectly normal.

  And our mama’s thoughts were elsewhere, too. Maybe because a friend of theirs was getting sicker and sicker. He lived way off in Prague with his family and had …

  Mother was especially fond of him.

  Father liked him, too.

  We didn’t know what was going on. As for me, I was off on a trip of my own, moved to the basement, because down there …

  All right, Jorsch, go ahead, tell us.

  Well, it started when all of a sudden you had a girlfriend. Maxi was her name. And everybody said, She’s so adorable, what an adorable girlfriend our Pat has!

  She was really attached to you.

  Obviously, because the girls all ran after my big brother, but not after me. It galled me. I was having a streak of bad luck. One time I was hit by a car in front of our house—fortunately all I got was a bruise. Once I tore a hole in my shin on a rusty nail. Father’s comment was, It heals fast when you’re young—once you’re through this phase, Jorsch, things’ll get better. He was actually right about that. Besides, I had friends, especially the four boys who started a rock band with me when I was barely fifteen. It was called Chippendale. I think old Marie came up with the name. We were allowed to practise in the cellar.

  What a racket you made!

  Two of the boys played guitar, one of them bass, and one percussion. I handled the sound. We were pretty loud down there, I’ll admit. That’s why we only practised when father wasn’t working up in the attic. Us boys, we were ambitious, some day we wanted to play a stadium. But the fact is, we never got beyond practising. Then one day old Marie showed up while we were hard at work in the basement, and, holding her box in front of her stomach, she snapped a whole series of photos. Once developed, they showed us on what looked like an outdoor stage where the Stones had put on a huge show recently …

  You mean the one that ended in a brawl …

  … and there was our rock band performing before a crowd of thousands. No question, it was us up there on the stage. Playing our big number. Hard rock. The crowd was wild. When old Marie
showed me the prints, I was speechless. With a bit of a grin, she said, I’ll get a freebie when the time comes, you promise, Jorsch? I never showed the pictures to the other boys. I’d have been embarrassed, because those four really had something going for them musically, and they’d have been even more disappointed that we never quite got it together. There was no hope for us, no matter how good they were. Though I had a good ear, I wasn’t really musical, and you, Lara, were the only one who practised on that old piano we had standing around, right? But I handled the band’s sound engineering: amplifiers, sound board, whatever else was needed. So after I finished my apprenticeship in Cologne, I worked first as an electronics technician and then, after an interval as just a regular electrician, installing sockets, I became a sound engineer. I spent years standing around film and TV sets with head-phones on, holding a boom pole. That’s how I still earn my modest bread, though now as head soundman. And Pat, our firstborn, had a slew of girlfriends, but he couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Admit it, big brother! When people asked you, What do you want to be when you grow up? you said, A cloud pusher. Yet old Marie pointed you in a direction that could’ve brought a very different outcome. That’s right. I mean the idea of the button shop.

  There’s something to what you say about the girls, at least every now and again. That’s how I am. Nothing ever lasted very long. Not with Maxi, either, no matter how adorable she was. She lived way out in the Britz housing estate. We were invited out there to Sunday afternoon coffee, to meet the family. Father and mother and me. Maybe you, too, Lara. Well, maybe you weren’t there, it doesn’t matter. Father bought flowers for Maxi’s mum from a vending machine at the Underground station, which embarrassed me no end. But we had a very nice time in that high-rise. Their apartment had a terrific view of the city. They had a proper cloth on the table and carpets. And wallpaper in several different flowered patterns. Very homey. Not bare like our house. We didn’t even have curtains. And I remember how nervous Maxi was. Even so, it wasn’t a relationship for the long haul. All she wanted to do was listen to Mireille Mathieu twittering, and soon I found the whole thing boring—maybe Maxi did, too. There were tears and so on.

  And we had to comfort her.

  She pined after you for a long time, poor thing.

  I felt awful, too. Then I got involved with Sonja, who already had a daughter, a little younger than Taddel. Man, what a difference. A real woman. She knew her way around. Even helped me with my schoolwork. And at some point I packed up and moved in with her, but only one street over, on Handjerystrasse. I was sixteen then, and in our brick house nobody knew which way was up any more. It was so bad that Mariechen didn’t feel like snapping pictures of us with her wishing box. All she said when she saw us was, Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

  Or What a god-awful mess.

  Because no one knew what was going on.

  I didn’t get it either, not till later. Father had come back from one of his trips with a young fellow from Siebenbürgen, in Romania. He’d helped him get out, which can’t have been easy.

  He looked a little like our father in photos, from the days when he was young and skinny as a rail.

  So he was living with us, because our parents thought he was very talented. He’ll amount to something one day, they kept saying. First he has to get used to the West; he needs support.

  Which is why our mother went all out supporting him, but then …

  Obviously he needed taking care of.

  He was an interesting character. He always looked so solemn, almost tragic.

  But father was hardly home, only when he wasn’t off campaigning for the EsPeeDee.

  Then in Prague, where the Russians had moved in with tanks a couple of years earlier, our parents’ friend died from a brain tumour, which I assume was hard on both of them, in different ways, though.

  Even so, they went to the funeral together.

  They were very silent when they came back.

  Spoke to each other only when they couldn’t help it, about who would do the grocery shopping and such.

  It was impossible not to notice, because in the old days they’d always had lots to talk about—books, films, music, paintings, anything to do with the arts. Never bored, not like me.

  And they’d laugh and dance like maniacs when friends came.

  We had lots of visitors.

  That changed.

  Everything changed.

  Nothing to laugh about any more.

  Everyone tiptoed around the house, because our mama and …

  As I was saying, you couldn’t help noticing, even if I wasn’t home very often. I suppose I thought: It’s none of my business. I started keeping something like a diary. Still do, whether things are going well or not. At the time I was doing all right, with my steady relationship. We were like a little family. One time my girlfriend and her daughter and I needed buttons for something or other, and we went to a haberdashers on Rheinstrasse. Well, you know the story: that shop had everything. Buttons made of horn, plastic, mother-of-pearl, metal, wood. Some were varnished, some covered with cloth. Every colour under the sun, gold, silver, uniform buttons, too. Square and hexagonal ones. Whole drawers full of buttons in little cardboard boxes, one button glued to the front as a sample. We were amazed. And when the old woman who owned the shop saw how impressed we were, she said, You can have the whole lot. I can’t do this any more; my legs are shot. What do you say? I’m not asking much. At that my girlfriend asked, almost as a joke, Well, how much? and the old woman said, Only two thousand marks. It really wasn’t that much, but where would we have got that kind of money? There was no point bringing it up with mother, so I spoke to father, who’d just come back from a trip. More as a lark, really: Could you spare two thousand? You’ll get it back, I promise. I’ll admit it was a whole lot of dough. Mariechen was standing next to him, up there in the attic where the two of them were talking, and I simply asked. First they had to put their heads together. After a lot of whispering, Mariechen must have persuaded father …

  She could do that …

  He always listened to old Marie.

  She listened to him, too.

  They were on the same wavelength.

  Maybe because they were both from the East.

  At any rate, I got the two thousand and gradually cleared out the old woman’s shop. All those boxes, with more than ten thousand buttons. I kid you not. Also cartons full of thread, cotton and silk, and zippers, knitting needles, thimbles, all sorts of stuff. I stowed everything neatly—not like you, brother, right?—in the basement on Handjerystrasse. I built special shelves for all the supplies. Then I labelled every little box with the exact number of buttons it contained.

  Also the boxes with the other stuff, the spools of thread, that sort of thing?

  Right, all of it! One day Mariechen turned up in the basement and with her wishing box …

  … and—sure thing—without a flash, as always …

  … photographed the entire wall of little boxes and cartons—no need for me to say, Snap away, Mariechen! But no one could have guessed what would come out of her darkroom, not even you. Quite a sight! No kidding, me with a vendor’s tray. The kind you wear on a strap round your neck, and in it my most beautiful buttons, including some rare ones, all neatly laid out. Chamois buttons, mother-of-pearl buttons, enamelled buttons, silver-plated buttons. There I stood like a street vendor, with the tray at my waist and my long hair, looking absolutely adorable, as Mariechen trilled. Other pictures showed me selling buttons by the dozen or more. To one boutique or another. And as you could clearly see, all for cash. The boutiques’ sales clerks looked ecstatic, because my tray displayed buttons you couldn’t find anywhere else, and maybe because they also fell for my long locks. At any rate, one picture showed me being kissed by an older lady. When I saw those photos, I thought: Well, why not, Pat? What harm can it do? Something different for a change. And in the basement, where father had set up a workbench with tools to keep us occupied, I made a ven
dor’s tray out of beech, just like the one I was carrying in Mariechen’s photos. It came out nice. You were good with your hands, too, brother.

  But more with technical things.

  As far as that went, my twin and I were totally different from father, who couldn’t screw in a light bulb properly. So with my vendor’s tray, which was made of natural wood but stained reddish brown, I went up and down the Kudamm and all the side streets, in and out of chic fashion boutiques, and raked in a heap of money in a short time. At sixteen I was old enough to get a vendor’s licence. It was no trouble, and that way everything was on the up-and-up. A year later, when father swung by Niedstrasse on one of his rare visits, I was able to count out two thousand marks into his hand. I was proud of myself, and I assume he was proud of his son, too. But true to my old pattern: just when my business was humming along—because I was selling not only the buttons but also the various threads and the zippers—the fun went out of it. I got sick of making dough, sick of the snazzy ladies in those boutiques.

  Right, big brother. You shut up shop because you were bored with buttons.

  Or bored of them, as you said at the time.

  Your heart just wasn’t in it any more.

  At any rate, I sold the whole lot to a friend of yours, including the vendor’s tray and all the buttons and other inventory …

  Right, to Ralf …

  … simply unloaded it.

  And that same Ralf, whom we all came to refer to as Buttonralf, has kept that button business going.

  He bought new stock, too, and eventually started making buttons himself, out of cow horn. There was no end to your buttons.

  And as I’ve heard from my friend Lilly, Buttonralf makes a decent living off them.

  Which is why you two, but also Taddel, and sometimes even father, kept hounding me: Oh, Pat, if only you’d stuck with the buttons.

  For a while there you wanted to become a sort of missionary, and later you had your heart set on farming.

  You even pulled it off. And one hundred per cent organic, too. On a real farm, with a barn, a cheese-making operation, and a pipeline from the barn to the milk tank, but unfortunately no horses. You were milking more than twenty cows, twice a day for years …