by Günter Grass
Until—sure thing—my big brother got bored with that, too.
Not true! There were other factors: after the Wall came down and unification altered market conditions …
And because your Italian wife …
But you were really happy with that vendor’s tray full of buttons, which good old Marie had conjured up with her magic box.
Poor Lara, things weren’t so happy for you after I left for my apprenticeship in Cologne and Pat moved in with his little family on Handjerystrasse, where his girlfriend helped him with maths and other school stuff till he finally graduated.
After which the whole thing came to an end. Actually she booted me out. But what difference does it make? Maybe the relationship didn’t last because I was just too young. At some point later on I hitchhiked to Norway, where I knew a girl who shared my tent till I set out alone for Finnmark. But that’s another story.
Oh, come on. The only reason you went north was that when father was your age he hitchhiked way down to the south of Europe.
But before I started on that trip that took me almost to the North Pole, Mariechen had me pose for her box wearing my backpack with a tent strapped to it.
And what wishful image resulted? May we guess?
Probably my brother with a blooming young Lapp girl.
No way. I’m not saying. Except: when I got home she pulled out a few photos of me wandering through the Nordic pampas all by my lonesome. With no compass or map. I was lost. Sitting down on a mossy boulder, howling. Even praying: Don’t let me die, dear Lord, I’m so young … At any rate, those photos that had known everything ahead of time showed how despondent I was. I even scribbled something like a will in my diary. Eventually someone turned up, a game warden, I think. He told me how to get back to civilization.
See, brother, prayer does help sometimes.
But nobody helped me. You were all elsewhere. Before he went off for his apprenticeship, Jorsch was always in the basement with his boys, making the racket they called music. And before you took your big trip up north, Pat, you were hanging out with Sonja, who wore long dresses that looked like nightgowns. It’s true—all you thought about was buttons and what you called your new family. I mean your bride and her daughter, who also wore granny dresses with all kinds of flounces and bows. What a farce. And Taddel was always somewhere out there—I wonder what’s keeping him now? He was supposed to be here ages ago. His friends were mainly caretakers’ children who spent most of their time outdoors. Wishing did no good, either, because old Marie didn’t come by nearly as often, and when she did, she just muttered, Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, such a god-awful mess. She knew exactly why things weren’t working out for us family-wise. Father and mother were staying together only out of habit, while both wanted something entirely different. She was focused on her young man, who acted all helpless and looked as if the world was about to come to an end, and father visited us only every two weeks, but didn’t feel at home under his own roof. He moped around and acted like a stranger even in the kitchen, because he was actually living with another woman and had bought a house out in the country to that end.
He always seemed to buy a house if enough was left over from a new book.
That book was about the election, but also about the Jews who were driven out of his home town.
All four of us turn up in that snail book. You’re in there, Lara, looking for goats on a mountain with him, so they can lick salt from his hand and yours.
And there’s even a poem about Pat. It sounds sad, or worried, rather.
And about Taddel, who when he was little hung the word unfortunately onto almost every sentence. In the book he remarks, That’s my father, unfortunately. Some of his other expressions are in there, too.
When he read parts of the snail book aloud to me before it was finished, the way he combined different eras I found exciting.
He was working on it before the new woman came into his life.
She was soon pregnant by him.
In the beginning everything was what he’d wished for, he told me when I visited him in the country with Joggi. I really liked it there. The new woman had two daughters, both as blonde as their mother. The whole area was flat as a pancake and so low-lying there were dikes everywhere. The fields were criss-crossed by drainage ditches called Wettern. And from the main dike you could look out over a river. There was a ferry you could take from Glückstadt to the village. And not far from there, from another dike, you could see where the Stör flowed into the Elbe. And on the banks of the Elbe you could tell whether it was high tide or low tide. Cows everywhere, and an enormous sky. It was all completely new to me. Later, father gave me a horse, which I’d always wanted. How I used to beg him when we were still a proper family in the city: Please, please. I won’t mind if it’s small. Just a little bigger than Joggi. It can sleep next to my bed. And old Marie comforted me, Make a wish, little Lara, she would say, and then snapped pictures of me with her magic box, because I used to hang around feeling so miserable hemmed in by my three brothers. As she took the pictures, she mumbled sayings in some old language, and when she showed me what she had conjured up in her darkroom, I was mounted on a real horse, riding like a pro.
Okay, okay, Lara. We know that story.
Just like with your Joggi …
So what. In the pictures the horse looked exactly like the one father gave me when he went to live out in the country with his new woman and in the beginning seemed happy. He laughed a lot. Apparently he was crazy about the new woman, who was at least half a head taller than him, and usually wore such a solemn expression that our father had to clown around to make her laugh. But it didn’t last long, their happiness. He and the new woman fought too much. Especially after she got pregnant. They fought over everything. Even over a dishwasher. Yet both of them had wanted a child, our Lena. Still, constant quarrelling was something father wasn’t used to.
Nothing like that with our mother.
Right. I never heard the two of them so much as yell at each other.
At least not when we were around.
When they stopped talking, laughing, and dancing, they simply fell silent, which was just as bad.
Maybe worse than fighting, which can be bad enough.
Maybe in the end there was nothing left for them to fight about.
At any rate, I was glad I had my Joggi and now a horse, though I couldn’t ride it that often, only when I visited them in the village. The rest of the time Nacke stood around in a farmer’s field and was sad, because the two daughters of father’s new woman didn’t know how to ride.
Mieke and Rieke, you mean.
It’s too bad that once we were all grown up we didn’t get to see them much.
Well, with Rieke living in America …
With her Japanese husband and their son …
And Mieke has two daughters with an Italian …
I was thirteen or almost fourteen when I got that horse—I’ve no idea why we called him Nacke. But around then my behaviour changed drastically. Before I’d always been so serious, as you say. Now I’d giggle without the slightest provocation and do the stupidest things. But Taddel—too bad he’s not here yet—found me idiotic with my adolescent exploits. Fortunately I had two girl friends my age. The three of us could be silly together. One of them was Sani, whose father was Ethiopian. The other one—remember?—was Lilly, and her mother was Czech. We’re all still friends, though we don’t see one another often. At the time we were thick as thieves. And whenever the three of us got together, we laughed. Taddel—what in the world is keeping him?—said we three made him puke. But old Marie fell all over herself when she saw us. I can’t believe it, she said, the three Graces! The same thing father said later to Lena, Nana, and me—My three Graces—when he took us on a three-daughter trip to Italy and we came upon pictures of the Graces in museums. And that’s how dear Marie had us pose for her box, time and again …
In her attic studio?
Wherever.
And that was what the three of you had really wished for?
Please, please, Mariechen, take us doing a striptease?
In our thoughts, yes. But good old Marie showed us those pictures—there were more than eight of them—only for a few seconds, then tore them all up, the Eve-style ones last, because, she said, not a soul should see you this way, prancing along naked. As she tore them up, she laughed: Ah, to be young like you three duckies, so young! But I didn’t always have that much fun. For a long time things were pretty grim. I’m not going to talk about it. When I was sixteen I left school. To become a potter. And father said, You’ve got what it takes. All that was missing was an apprenticeship. There was no such thing in the city …
Well, finally, Taddel.
We were beginning to wonder.
The goulash was delicious …
… none left for you.
I couldn’t get away—too much to do. How far along are you?
Just past the first god-awful mess, when Pat had moved out, Jorsch left for his apprenticeship, father was busy with Lena’s mother, nothing was going right family-wise, you were hanging around, and I insisted on having my picture taken with my girl friends on the Kudamm, because …
I understand. The house felt emptier and emptier. I was the only one left. And no one, not mother, not father, would explain to me why everyone wanted to run away and why everything was so different, so fucked up. Most of the time I hung out with my friend Gottfried, whose family was like a substitute for my own. And as I said, no one would explain to me why nothing was the way it had been before, Pat and Jorsch least of all. The two of you just left home. When I couldn’t figure out what was out of whack or broken between my parents, dear old Marie whispered to me, That’s love, little Taddel. Love has a mind of its own. There’s no cure for it. Love comes, and it goes. When love’s gone, it hurts a whole lot. But sometimes love lasts till death. And then she talked about her Hans, only …
That’s what Mariechen always did when she was feeling down and wasn’t in the mood to smoke her hand-rolled cigarettes in the long holder.
And when she talked about her love for her Hans, she would always say, It lasts, that kind of love, even when there’s nothing left to love any more.
Confused as I was, I begged her, Take a picture, Mariechen, so I can see what’s going to happen with father and mother. Your box knows such things … Even though I never wanted to believe that the box could see more than was really there. But she refused. There was absolutely nothing to be done. Not a single photo. Neither of father and his new woman nor of mother and her lover. All I wanted was a couple of snapshots, to show how long love would last, and so on. And whether the two of them, when they’d finally had enough, would get back in the groove and be together the way they’d been before, when they still talked, laughed, and danced, before the god-awful mess … But old Marie didn’t want to snap pictures. Absolutely not. And even though she did take a few, far off in the country, where father lived part of the time with Lena’s mama, or of our mother having breakfast in the kitchen with her lover, with whom I couldn’t seem to get along, she never showed me what came out of the darkroom. When I asked, all she said was, Oh dear, oh dear, and That’s how it is with love. That was all I could get out of her. I cried a lot in those days. Only when no one else was around. Up in the attic, where all that was left were father’s books, his upright desk, his stuff … None of you noticed, not even you, Lara, that I’d been crying. You and your girl friends were forever giggling like ninnies. And if I wanted to go into town or somewhere with the three of you, you’d say, You’re in the way, Taddel, or You’re too little to go where we’re going. But before old Marie tore up all the porno pictures she’d cooked up of the three of you in the darkroom, I got to see every one, though just for a second.
You did not!
Yes, I did. The three of you …
Old Marie would never have shown a single one of those photos.
You want to bet? All eight of them, and others, too. You and your girl friends, those sillies, without a stitch on, parading down the Kudamm …
Shut up, Taddel.
First you come late, then you stir up trouble.
Just one more thing, then I’ll shut my trap.
Promise?
Word of honour, absolutely. In one of those photos you were sitting at a table in the Kranzler Café, naked as the day you were born, surrounded by women stuffing themselves with cakes, in proper clothes, of course.
Enough, Taddel.
And you were spooning up ice cream. But I …
Switch off the recorder, Jorsch.
… just hung around, clueless, and often cried because all I ever heard was, You’re in the way, Taddel! That’s enough out of you, Taddel! Only old Marie took pity on me, because everything had changed, and whispered to me …
Now the father does not know what to do—should he erase what has been written? Come up with something innocuous in its place, something that skirts the sore points? Or let the debate drag on? Or, against his sons’ will, hint in asides at the weed that both of them secretly … the smell gave them away? All water under the bridge … Or what do you say, Pat and Jorsch?
Some of the children objected earlier when references to father’s new woman and mother’s lover came up. They were unwilling to accept his wording any longer. The daughters and sons baulked at being participants in his tales. Leave us out of it, they exclaimed. But your tales are also mine, he said, the happy ones and the sad ones. God-awful messes are part of life.
And then he had to admit that Mariechen, who was there with her box even when something out of line happened, had left the really awful things, things that could hurt, in her darkroom or had cut up the negatives. Sheer idiocy! she exclaimed. My box turns away and is ashamed, it has that ability …
Now the inadequate father hopes the children will feel some compassion. For they cannot sweep aside his life, nor he theirs, pretending that none of it ever happened.
Make a Wish
EVEN AFTER SO much time has passed, the tears refuse to dry. It’s painful, Nana says, and smiles. This time Taddel is punctual and apparently has something up his sleeve, as he had hinted earlier. Jasper and Paulchen are expected later, but will want to chime in as soon as their turn comes. And Pat and Jorsch, who have had theirs, have decided, Jorsch says, To shut up for the time being.
But then Pat insists on contributing a small detail, whereupon Jorsch suddenly casts doubt on the lengthy life of the Agfa Special. He suggests that in the year ’36, in time for the Olympic Games, Marie might have purchased an Agfa Trolix with a Bakelite housing. This model had just come on the market and was selling like hot cakes for nine marks fifty. But then he cannot recall any of the particular features of this camera, such as the rounded corners: Maybe she did keep on using the Agfa Special.
In the old half-timbered house near Kassel, the beams, the stairs, and the floors creak. But there is no one around to evoke their past. The summer has been rainy. No one w
ants to talk about that, only about the two chickens out of five that the weasel got recently.
This time they are meeting at Lara’s house. Her three older children from her first marriage have left home, trying to be grown-up, and the two little ones are already asleep. Lara’s husband wants to keep his nose out of the family’s dirty linen, and has retreated to the next room, presumably thinking about his bees. On the counter sit metal-lidded glass jars of rape honey, presents for the visiting siblings.
Before settling down to talk, the group enjoyed deep bowls of hearty stew: beef with green beans and potatoes. Bottles of beer and juice still stand on the table. Nana has said she prefers to listen: After all, I didn’t join the rest of you until later. So Lena, who has just reported on her most recent role, mentioning in passing a rather turbulent love affair, acting out scenes and rendering them comical with imagined dialogue, is now urged to let it all hang out at last. Without hesitation she tries out the table mike, says Testing, testing, this is Lena speaking, and plunges in.
It must have been like in the cinema. Unfortunately it was a lousy film, even if the story had its moments, and at times really heated up. No question, it was love, even a great love, which was why neither of them could let the other go. My papa still says it was passionate. But by the time I’d learned to walk, he was gone, unfortunately. That’s why I know only what my sisters told me—they have a different papa, who was also gone, unfortunately. Mieke, the sensible one, filled me in. Both of them liked my papa, though he cooked things that Mieke, who usually ate everything, found totally yucky—like chopped pork liver in mustard sauce. But it must have been quite nice living with him in that big house, which he’d bought just for us and which my mama, who was an architect, had had renovated from top to bottom, lovingly and historically correct down to the smallest detail. It would have made a perfect set for interior scenes in a movie, such as Storm’s Rider on a White Horse. It was called the Overseer’s Residence or the Junge House, because when it was built, several hundred years ago, the whole region was under Danish rule, and the Danes had installed a parish overseer, and much later a shipbuilder named Junge had lived there. Eventually only his daughter Alma was left in the house, and in the village they said she still thumped around up in the attic and in the broom cupboard—I heard all this from Mieke. Anyway, my papa sat around in the big room upstairs, scratching his disturbing images onto copper plates. For example, my sister Rieke’s broken doll falling out of the slit-open stomach of a fish, with her legs spread wide and a startled expression on her face. Or he wrote and wrote, trying to make headway on his new novel, the one with a talking fish. But he couldn’t seem to finish it, because either in him or in my mama or in both of them at once love would suddenly, or at first hesitantly but then violently, grind to a halt or get too powerful and overheat. Too bad.