by Günter Grass
Once the old man got a grip on those eels, which wasn’t easy, he’d hack off their heads with one blow and then saw the rest, still jerking and writhing, into finger-length segments.
Not only those segments but also the heads, which he lined up in a row on the chopping board, were still alive and would even jump off the board. I liked to stand there and watch the eel slaughter, and one time, when I poked a pointy eel’s mouth, it locked onto the tip of my index finger and held it so tight that I was scared to death and had to tug like crazy to get my finger free. Marie captured the slaughter of the eels, during which they often slithered away from your father, and the business with my finger, not with her Leica or her Hasselblad, which she hardly used, but with her Agfa box, and later, when she came back to visit, she showed me a stack of six-by-nine prints. You know the kinds of things that came out of her darkroom: weird stuff. These particular pictures showed both my hands, sometimes the backs, sometimes the palms, and to the tip of every finger, including the thumb, an eel’s head was attached. In a way it looked quite normal, but also completely unreal, like something out of a horror movie. Right, Lara, it was enough to give one bad dreams. And when I told you about the pictures, Jasper, remember? you didn’t want to believe me. It must be a photomontage, you said, and gave a complicated explanation involving American animated films. Yet Marie and her box gave you the willies. You were terrified of her.
That’s how it was, I guess. I wonder why, though, because actually she was perfectly okay. She showed us how the Leica worked. And she even let you use the Hasselblad.
Little by little she taught me the technical stuff, aperture settings, the proper shutter speed, and so on. Which is why I later became a photographer, going to school in Potsdam and earning the diploma. No doubt it had something to do with our Marie, who let me watch and learn all kinds of things when I was young. And when your father bought the house behind the dike for her, she let me join her in the darkroom, something she never let Jasper or Taddel do. She’d set it up with what she needed—a red light, trays for developer, fixer, and rinse water, and a printing frame. But she never let me use the Agfa box.
That was the camera she used when she made photos specially for the old man—your father, I mean. From every position, but mostly holding the camera at waist height, without looking in the viewfinder.
And there was a whole series of those eels’ heads, still alive, which she’d arranged on the cutting board in a rough semicircle, so they were rearing heavenward and gasping for air—exactly eight of them, I still recall.
And then Camilla’s husband, your father, whom we were now calling by his first name, took those photos and etched similar images onto his copper plates.
After the images were printed, it looked totally bizarre, as if the eels were growing out of the ground.
He’d slaughtered the eels for Easter, which may explain why he called the picture Resurrection.
Then there were the other pictures she had to take for him, usually, as Jasper said, shooting from the waist. Sometimes she also shot weird images from a squatting position, or lying flat on her stomach on the bank of the Elbe.
Picture this: our Paulchen almost always trotted along behind her when she strode along the top of the dike or across cow pastures to snap pictures of the cows’ bulging udders for the old man. But I couldn’t believe it when Paulchen told me that the photos showed long, fat eels locked onto every teat, four of them on each udder. For the milk, of course—what else would they be after, Lena? You don’t believe it? Neither did I. But Paulchen swore it was true. And before long there they were, on the copper plate the old man was working on—four fat eels clinging to the udder. The stories he told us, though, were pure fabrications. For instance, that at night, and only when the moon was full, the eels would slither out of the Stör river and over the dike, then snake their way across the meadows to the cows, which cows then lay down as if they’d been expecting them, so the eels could attach themselves to their teats and suck and suck until they were full, then let go, so the next eels, and so on. You said so, too, Taddel: Complete fabrication! because you knew the kind of cock-and-bull stories your father told. That was when you moved in with us in the village because you couldn’t take it in the city any more, right?
Well, the reason was …
Oh, we understand why you left.
And I should have been glad, because as siblings Taddel and I, purely in terms of sibling relations … But once you were gone …
I had to find a new family, no question about it. In Friedenau I felt absolutely superfluous. I was in the way. That’s what I heard all the time. So I turned into a holy terror. That I was good at. Whenever my father came from the country to visit and take care of stuff with his secretary, I’d put on a show, but it was the real thing, because I no longer knew which end was up. And I did that every time, till finally he said, Well, all right, if your mother doesn’t mind. At first our mother cried a bit, and then she said yes. I assume she liked Camilla. You’ll be in good hands with her, that I’m sure of, she said as I was leaving. And I gave away the two parakeets father had given me earlier to cheer me up, gave them to my friend Gottfried. I adjusted pretty fast to that strange old house, which I first got to know when father lived there for two years with Lena’s mother and Lena’s two half-sisters. Though in the beginning I was still a holy terror. For instance, I shut Jasper’s and Paulchen’s cat between an inner window and the storm window, where she went into a frenzy. I know. It was totally insane. Honestly, Paulchen! I must have been out of control … What do you think?
Well, yes, but actually you were okay.
You just needed time to settle down.
But I did listen to your mother. Soon began calling her Camilla, too, because she had a way about her, not too soft, not too loud. When Camilla said yes, it meant yes, and when she said no, it meant no. From the beginning she forbade me to call people names like spastic, Turkish pig, and even worse, or rather, she gradually broke me of the habit. She made a halfway tolerable person out of me. It wasn’t only old Marie who said so, but you, too, Lara, when you came to visit now and then—without Joggi …
We had to have him put to sleep. He was old. Didn’t have any spark left.
Taking the Underground, for free—not interested any more. Just lay around under the stairs. And when he did want to cross over to the playground at the corner of Handjery, he no longer looked left or right. Finally I had to give in when everyone, even my girl friends, said, You have to have him put to sleep, no two ways about it—he’s just suffering and he stopped smiling ages ago. By then I was the only one left at home. I swear, Taddel, I even missed you, because I felt so lonely. Jorsch was off in Cologne and never sent so much as a postcard. He might as well have vanished from the face of the earth. And Pat was all wrapped up in his Sonja. And then you were gone, Taddel, which I did regret a bit, no matter how much you’d got on my nerves. To make things worse, my first real love went sour. He was a lot older, the kind who couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. The girl he took up with after me was even younger, I heard. It’s not something I like to talk about. Not at all. And once I’d finished secondary school, I’d had it. I was sick of maths and the whole bit. I wanted to become a potter—I had a talent for making things with my hands, mostly animals, but I didn’t want to do artistic stuff like father, rather something that was both useful and beautiful. When I couldn’t find an apprenticeship in the city, your Camilla came to my rescue. After driving all over Schleswig-Holstein, she finally found me a spot on Dobersdorf Lake, a lovely area, where her sister was living in a cottage on an estate. I signed up for an apprenticeship with a master potter who was very skilled but a miserable person, which didn’t become apparent till later. I really don’t like to talk about it, Lena, not even now. At any rate, I was looking forward tremendously to that apprenticeship. And with Camilla, who was practical like me, I got along very well. She took care of everything. Earlier she’d been a professional church org
anist, in spite of having you two boys, and she’d also managed to take courses in something else. Now she did a terrific job of running the household in that big old place, where something was always going on. Lots of company and such. And our Taddel—you must admit it—was utterly transformed. You took on the role of older brother, and always referred to Jasper and Paulchen as My little brothers.
Paul, whom we always called Paulchen or Paule, was on crutches for a long time. It was father who noticed one day when we were out for a walk that Paulchen was limping on his right leg.
As the village doctor discovered, it was a nasty disease of the bone.
It had some strange name.
Which is why he had to go to a specialist in Berlin to be operated on.
It took a long time before I could get off crutches.
And my father, who was much calmer now that he was living out in the country, was able to laugh like in the old days, and finally finished his massive book. He was determined to have old Marie take a picture with her box of the special shoe Paulchen had to wear on his left foot before the operation.
But Camilla wasn’t okay with that. She was somewhat superstitious and wouldn’t give Marie permission to take a picture of the shoe.
The old woman actually gave in, though she muttered some kind of witch’s curse under her breath.
I had to wear that shoe on my good foot. I called it my monster shoe, because it was so clunky. My right leg was in a brace. And the disease I had was named after the doctor who first identified it. Perthes was his name. It was in my hipbone, which was gradually crumbling away, like dirt, as Camilla said, which was why a section had to be cut out, like a slice of cake. It happened while we were still living in town. I spent a long time in the hospital, sharing my room with a Turkish boy, who was very quiet, even though he had a lot of pain, and was really nice. But I didn’t complain much either, Camilla said, though lying in bed so long got tiresome. The nurses were quite gruff, but the head of surgery, who took the saw to my leg, was cool. He was famous for fixing up players from the Hertha football club when they injured their knees or other parts. He set my hipbone so it could grow together properly. And it did, but slowly. Except that since the operation, my right leg’s been a bit shorter. Once I didn’t need crutches, I got a shoe with a slightly thicker sole.
But you were incredibly fast.
You sure could move on those crutches.
I was amazed when I came to visit.
You were faster than we were crossing the cemetery.
Which is why our Mariechen wanted you to pose for her box, again and again …
She shot a whole roll, and then another.
Camilla didn’t mind, either.
It was only the monster shoe she couldn’t …
And Taddel, who otherwise didn’t believe in such hocus-pocus at all, would yell, before she snapped a picture of you on your crutches, Make a wish, Paulchen! Quick, make a wish!
But I’m the only one she showed those photos to. A dozen or more. You could see me in a huge department store, KDW, I think—or was it the Europa Centre?—running up and down the escalator on my crutches, even going up the down escalator. I looked utterly insane. Leaping over three steps. And at the top and bottom people were clapping because I moved so skilfully on my crutches. Certainly something I hadn’t wished for. I even jumped from the down escalator to the up escalator. And in another set of pictures you could see me back in the village running up and down the sloping bank of the Stör dike. I could leap over fences. I even managed a somersault on crutches. But only in those photos.
After that you trotted after her like a puppy whenever she crossed the dike and headed off towards Hollerwettern.
I hobbled all the way to the Elbe dike, where she snapped pictures of ships far off in the distance with her Agfa box, which was meant to be used only for close-ups in good weather. And those pictures she took in foul weather showed huge tankers and freighters loaded with containers, coming from Hamburg or heading towards Hamburg. From that dike she also photographed warships, both domestic and foreign. One time it was an aircraft carrier coming from England for a naval visit. What a sight. I didn’t say anything, but I thought to myself, I’d really like to know.
I’m willing to bet she was snapping those pictures for father, because he’d finished that long book and now had something short and sweet in the works, to help him recuperate, he told Camilla.
The story was supposed to take place during the Thirty Years’ War, shortly before it ended.
He wanted the box to help him rewind.
In those days the entire Krempe Marsh and also the Wilster Marsh were apparently occupied by the Danes, and in the middle of the war Glückstadt and Krempe came under siege from—I’m not sure, either the Swedes, who had it in for the Danes, or from Wallenstein. The old man knew all kinds of stuff about him, including the fact that in addition to the sieges, a real naval battle took place on the Elbe. That was why those photos our Marie snapped from the Elbe dike of the most modern warships, with nothing but her plain little box and a few tricks, were supposed to bring back to life all the things we’d slogged through in history class.
That’s how it was. See, father, who really knew his history, wanted every detail to be, as he told her, as graphic as possible: I want to know how many sails the Swedes have hoisted and how many cannon are mounted on the Danish ships …
Historical snapshots is what the old man called that kind of thing. And she delivered, singly and serially …
… because she did everything father wished for, whatever the weather …
Even in the middle of a nor’wester you could see her up on the Elbe dike. She leaned into the wind, snapping picture after picture. And our Paulchen, on crutches at the time, always by her side.
So? Camilla had no problem with it. At least she never objected when Mariechen supplied the most unbelievable material.
The comment we always heard was, There are some things your imagination can’t dream up.
And sometimes Camilla said, Later, when the whole story’s been told, you’ll be able to read it.
She gave us stacks of books written by other people.
More and more of them.
One I remember was The Catcher in the Rye.
But Jasper was the only bookworm. He read everything he could lay his hands on, though nothing by father.
When he was young, Pat read Bravo comics, and only got round to newspapers and novels much later …
… but Jorsch read almost every word Jules Verne ever wrote …
It’s true: there were too many books in the house, with the result that education-wise we didn’t get interested till later, much later.
Jasper was the only exception.
He read enough for all the rest of us.
Certainly for me. In those days the only thing I cared to read was Kicker, which published all the football scores.
But for the new book, which wasn’t supposed to turn out as long as the one before, he was still hunting for motifs, as Camilla said …
Which was why old Marie was constantly roving through the cemetery.
She snapped pictures of the ancient gravestones around the church.
You want to bet that when she disappeared into her darkroom all the dead people scrambled out of their graves and hopped around, one hundred per cent alive, wearing outfits from bygone times such as knee breeches and wigs?
At any rate, the old man set out for the Münster region with Camilla, Paulchen, and me in our Mercedes station wagon—you didn’t want to come along, Taddel …
… without Marie this time, who maybe didn’t feel like it, like Taddel, or was just in a bad mood …
But she lent your father the box, something she never did otherwise.
And when we got to Telgte, he snapped pictures with Marie’s box of the motifs and such that he still needed.
He, who never took pictures, snapped several rolls.
At that point I didn’t nee
d the crutches any more. I showed him how to use the Agfa; obviously he couldn’t do it by feel, holding the box at waist height, the way Marie did.
But I saw that all he had in the viewfinder was an ordinary parking lot, almost deserted. The shot would have shown nothing but concrete.
It was an island, that parking lot, because a river curved round it on the right and the left, and where the river came together again stood the ruins of an old mill …
He also snapped pictures of what was left of the mill.
But mainly he was intent on capturing the completely paved-over lot. Because, he said, in this very spot a good three hundred years ago stood the Brückenhof, which will be the scene of the action. It must have been a sort of hostel for travelling merchants who planned to take the bridges over the Ems with their wares, I mean bales of cloth and full kegs.
In those days, your father said, there was a war going on that wouldn’t end, though peace talks had been under way for years in Münster and Osnabrück. And all the rooms in the hostel that existed in this spot were at one time occupied by writers, who planned to meet where today there was nothing but the nearly deserted parking lot.
And the writers apparently read aloud from their books. Complicated stuff, baroque poetry and such.
And all this because when Taddel’s father was a very young writer himself he attended similar meetings with a bunch of other writers in one location or another.
He must have shot at least three rolls of film in that parking lot. And I helped him put in the rolls and take them out. They have to be positioned on the spool with the red side of the protective strip facing out. He didn’t know how to do that. But he caught on fast. The main thing in any case was that the box secretly …
There were only a few people in the parking lot who stared, because they’d recognized the old man as he snapped away.
It was awkward.
Maybe father looked familiar and they were wondering what this fellow with the moustache was doing there.
Of course, Lara. They probably thought bodies were buried there that he intended to dig up, one at a time.