by Günter Grass
The launches killed their motors. Relentless eyes searched the surface of the water. But Koljaiczek was gone for good, had escaped the band music, the sirens, the bells of the ships and His Majesty's Ship, Prince Heinrich's christening speech and His Majesty's frantic gulls, es caped Heil dir im Siegerkranz and His Majesty's Soap used to launch His Majesty's Ship, escaped America and the Columbus, escaped the police and their search beneath the endless expanse of logs.
My grandfather's body was never found. Though I firmly believe that he met his death beneath the raft, I feel compelled, in order to maintain my credibility, to recount all the versions in which he was miraculously saved.
It is said that he found a chink between the logs under the raft, just big enough to keep his respiratory organs above water. This chink supposedly narrowed toward the top in such a way that it remained invisible to the police, who continued searching the rafts and even the reed huts on the rafts far into the night. Then, under cover of darkness—so the story goes—he floated till he arrived, exhausted to be sure, but with a little luck, on the far shore of the Mottlau and the grounds of the Schichau shipyards, took cover in the scrap yard there, and later, probably with the help of Greek sailors, boarded one of those greasy tankers said to have offered asylum to many a fugitive.
Others maintained that Koljaiczek, a strong swimmer with even stronger lungs, not only swam under the raft but continued across the whole remaining breadth of the Mottlau under water and arrived with luck at the festival area of the Schichau shipyard, mingled among the workers without being noticed, then joined the enthusiastic crowd in singing Heil dir im Siegerkranz, listened with appreciative applause as Prince Heinrich christened His Majesty's Ship Columbus, and after the launch, his clothes now half-dry, drifted away with the crowd, to advance the very next day—here the first and second versions of the rescue converge—to the rank of stowaway on one of those famous infamous Greek tankers.
For the sake of completeness I should mention a third preposterous tale, according to which my grandfather floated out to sea like driftwood, where he was promptly fished out by fishermen from Bohnsack and handed over to a Swedish deep-sea fishing boat beyond the three-mile limit. There, on the Swede, the tale allows him to slowly and miraculously recover his strength, reach Malmo—and so on and so forth.
All that is nonsense and fishermen's tales. Nor do I give a fig for the reports of all those equally unreliable eyewitnesses in various ports who claim to have seen my grandfather shortly after the First World War in Buffalo, USA. Called himself Joe Colchic, they say. In the timber trade with Canada. Stockholder in match factories. Founder of fire insurance companies. Filthy rich and lonely my grandfather was, they say, sitting at a huge desk in a skyscraper, rings with glowing stones on every finger, drilling his bodyguards, who wore firemen's uniforms, could sing in Polish, and were known as the Phoenix Guard.
Moth and Light Bulb
A man left everything behind, crossed the great water, came to America, and grew rich. I think I'll leave it at that with my grandfather, whether he calls himself Goljaczek (Polish), Koljaiczek (Kashubian), or Joe Colchic (American).
It's not that easy, using a simple tin drum of the sort you can buy in any toy shop or department store, to search through rafts floating downriver almost to the horizon. I have, however, managed to drum my way through the timber port, through all the driftwood lurching in its inlets, tangled in the reeds, and, with less effort, through the building slips of the Schichau and Klawitter shipyards, through all the boatyards, some doing repairs only, the scrap yard at the railroad-car factory, the rancid coconut heap by the margarine factory, all the hiding places I know of on the Speicherinsel. He's dead, doesn't answer, shows no interest in imperial ship launchings, in the decline of a ship that begins with its launching and often lasts decades, in this case a ship named the Columbus, known as the pride of the fleet, which obviously set off for America and was later sunk, or scuttled, was perhaps raised and refitted, renamed, or scrapped. Perhaps the Columbus, like my grandfather, merely dived under and is still knocking about today with her forty thousand tons, smoking salon, marble gymnasium, swimming pool, and massage booths, at a depth of, say, six thousand meters, in the Philippine Trench or Emden Deep; you'll find the whole story in Weyer or in the naval calendars—I think the first or second Columbus was scuttled because the captain couldn't bear to go on living after some sort of disgrace connected with the war.
I read part of my raft story aloud to Bruno, and then, asking him to be objective, posed my question.
"A beautiful death!" Bruno exclaimed, and immediately began transforming my drowned grandfather into one of his knotworks. I should rest content with his response, he says, and not head for the USA with some harebrained idea of cadging an inheritance.
My friends Klepp and Vittlar came to see me. Klepp brought me a jazz record with two pieces by King Oliver, while Vittlar, with a mincing little gesture, held out a chocolate heart dangling from a pink ribbon. They clowned around, parodied scenes from my trial, and to please them, as always on Visitors Day, I put on a cheerful face and managed to laugh at even their worst jokes. In passing, as it were, and before Klepp could begin his inevitable lecture on the relationship of jazz to Marxism, I told the story of a man who, in nineteen-thirteen, shortly before all hell broke loose, wound up under a seemingly endless raft and never came up again; they never even found his body.
In reply to my question—I asked it casually, in a decidedly bored manner—Klepp twisted his head grumpily on his fat neck, buttoned and unbuttoned himself, made swimming motions, and acted as if he were under the raft. Finally he shook off my question and blamed the early hour of the afternoon for his failure to respond.
Vittlar sat stiffly, crossed his legs, taking care not to disturb the crease in his trousers, displaying that bizarre pinstriped arrogance shared perhaps only by angels in heaven: "I'm on the raft. It's pleasant on the raft. Mosquitoes are biting me, that's annoying—I'm under the raft. It's pleasant under the raft. The mosquitoes aren't biting me, that's pleasant. I think I could live under the raft if I didn't plan to live on the raft and let the mosquitoes bite me."
Vittlar paused in his practiced manner, regarded me closely, raised his already lofty eyebrows as he always did when he wished to look like an owl, and spoke with strong theatrical emphasis: "I take it the drowned man in question, the man under the raft, was your great-uncle, perhaps even your grandfather. He went to his death because, as your great-uncle, and even more so as your grandfather, he felt he owed it to you, since nothing would have been more burdensome to you than a living grandfather. You not only murdered your great-uncle, you mur dered your grandfather. But since, like any true grandfather, he wished to punish you a little, he didn't give you the satisfaction of a grandchild who points proudly at a swollen, waterlogged corpse, and declaims: Behold my dead grandfather. He was a hero. He jumped in the river while they were chasing him. Your grandfather cheated the world and his grandchild of his corpse so that posterity and his grandchild would be worrying their heads about him for years to come."
Then, springing from one sort of pathos to another, a cunning Vittlar leaned slightly forward, as if placating me: "America! Be happy, Oskar! You have a goal, a task. You'll be acquitted, they'll release you here. And whither, if not to America, where you can find everything, even your long-lost grandfather."
However mocking and endlessly offensive Vittlar's answer may have been, it offered more certainty than my friend Klepp's grumbled refusal to choose between life and death, or the response of my keeper Bruno, who found my grandfather's death beautiful only because shortly thereafter the HMS Columbus slid down the slips and made waves. And so I praise Vittlar's America, conserver of grandfathers, a chosen goal, an ideal I can set for myself when, fed up with Europe, I choose to lay aside my drum and my pen: "Keep on writing, Oskar, do it for your filthy-rich but weary grandfather Koljaiczek, plying the timber trade in Buffalo, USA, playing with matches in his skyscraper!"
When Klepp and Vittlar had finally taken their leave, Bruno drove the disturbing smell of my friends from the room with a vigorous airing. Then I returned to my drum, but no longer drummed up death-concealing timber rafts; instead I beat out that quick erratic rhythm all men obeyed from August nineteen-fourteen on. Thus it is inevitable that my text too, as it brings us to the hour of my birth, will sketch but briefly the path taken by the group of mourners my grandfather left behind in Europe.
When Koljaiczek disappeared beneath the raft, my grandmother, her daughter Agnes, Vinzent Bronski, and his seventeen-year-old son Jan were standing frightened among the family members of the raftsmen on the sawmill's landing dock. Slightly to one side stood Gregor Koljaiczek, Joseph's older brother, who had been summoned to the city for questioning. This Gregor was wise enough to keep offering the police the following standard answer: "Hardly knew my brother. All I'm really sure of is that he was called Joseph, and the last time I saw him he was ten, maybe twelve years old. He shined my shoes and went out for beer, if Mother or I wanted some."
Even though it turned out my great-grandmother did in fact drink beer, Gregor Koljaiczek's answer was of no help to the police. But the elder Koljaiczek's existence was a great help to my grandmother Anna. Gregor, who had lived for some years in Stettin, then Berlin, and finally Schneidemühl, settled down in Danzig, got a job at the Bastion Kaninchen powder mill, and, after a year had passed, when all complications such as her marriage to the counterfeit Wranka had been cleared up and filed away, married my grandmother, who planned to stick with Koljaiczeks and wouldn't have married Gregor, or at least not so quickly, if he hadn't been a Koljaiczek.
Gregor's job at the powder mill kept him out of the colorful uniforms that soon turned uniformly gray. The three of them lived in the same one-and-a-half-room flat that had sheltered the arsonist for years. It turned out, however, that not all Koljaiczeks were necessarily alike, for after barely a year of marriage my grandmother found herself forced to rent the basement shop that was standing empty at the time in the apartment house on Troyl to try to make some extra cash by selling odds and ends ranging from pins to cabbages, since Gregor, though he made good money at the gunpowder mill, failed to provide even the bare necessities at home, but drank everything away instead. While Gregor, taking after my great-grandmother no doubt, was a real drinker, my grandfather Joseph was a man who merely enjoyed a schnapps now and then. It wasn't sorrow that drove Gregor to drink. And even when he seemed cheerful, which was seldom enough, since he tended toward melancholy, he didn't drink because he was in high spirits. He drank because he was a thorough man who liked to get to the bottom of things, including his liquor. As long as he lived, no one ever saw Gregor Koljaiczek leave a half-full shot glass of Machandel gin standing.
My mama, a plump fifteen-year-old girl back then, made herself useful, helped in the shop, pasted in food stamps, delivered groceries on Saturday, and wrote clumsy but imaginative reminders meant to bring in cash from customers who bought on credit. Too bad I don't have one of those letters. How nice it would be at this point to quote a few half-childish, half-maidenly cries of distress from the epistles of this half orphan, for whom Gregor Koljaiczek offered less than full value as a stepfather. On the contrary, my grandmother and her daughter were hard-pressed to shield their cashbox, which consisted of one tin plate clapped on top of another, filled mostly with copper and very little silver, from the melancholy gaze of the eternally thirsty powder miller Koljaiczek. Only when Gregor Koljaiczek died of the flu in nineteen-seventeen did the profit margin of the odds-and-ends shop increase slightly, but not by much; for what was there to sell in seventeen?
The smaller room in the one-and-a-half-room flat, which had been standing empty since the powder miller's death because my mama was afraid of ghosts and refused to move into it, was now taken over by Jan Bronski, my mother's cousin, around twenty years old at the time, who, having left Bissau and his father Vinzent behind, graduated with good marks from high school in Karthaus, served his apprenticeship at the post office in the small district capital, and was now entering the second stage of his career at the central post office in Danzig I. In addition to his suitcase, Jan brought an extensive stamp collection to his aunt's flat. He'd been collecting since he was a little boy; his relationship to the post office was thus not merely professional but also personal and deeply engaged. The slender young man, who stooped slightly when he walked, offered a pretty, perhaps overly sweet oval face with eyes blue enough that my mama, who was then seventeen, fell in love with him. Jan had been called up three times but had been rejected on each occasion owing to his poor physical condition, which, given that in those days anyone who could stand even halfway straight got sent to Verdun to assume the eternal horizontal on France's soil, tells you all you need to know about Jan Bronski's constitution.
Their flirtation should actually have started as they pored over stamp albums together, examining the perforations of particularly valuable items tête-à-tête. But it began, or first erupted, when Jan was called up for the fourth time. Since she had to go into town anyway, my mama accompanied him to district headquarters, waited outside next to a sentry box manned by a reservist, and felt, as Jan did, that this time he would surely be heading to France to cure his ailing chest in the iron- and lead-rich air of that land. My mama may well have been counting the reservist's buttons with varying results. It wouldn't surprise me if the buttons of all uniforms were arranged so that the last button always stood for Verdun, or Hartmannsweilerkopf, where men got buttoned down, or some little river called the Somme or the Marne.
When, after barely an hour, the little fellow who'd been called up for the fourth time slipped through the portal of district headquarters, stumbled down the stairs, and, falling on the neck of my mama Agnes, whispered the then popular saying, "No neck and a skinny rear, rejected for another year," my mother hugged Jan Bronski for the first time, and I doubt she ever hugged him more happily.
The details of that young wartime love are not known to me. Jan sold part of his stamp collection to meet the needs of my mama, who had a lively sense for pretty, dressy, and expensive things, and is said to have kept a diary back then, which unfortunately has been lost. My grandmother seems to have tolerated the bond between the two youngsters—one can assume that it went beyond the familial—for Jan Bronski lived in the cramped flat on Troyl until shortly after the war. He didn't move out until the existence of a certain Herr Matzerath proved undeniable and undenied. My mother must have met this gentleman in the summer of nineteen-eighteen, when she was serving as an auxiliary nurse in the Silberhammer Military Hospital at Oliva. Alfred Matzerath, a native Rhinelander, lay there with a clean shot through his upper thigh and, with his merry Rhenish ways, was soon the favorite of all the nurses—Sister Agnes not excepted. Half healed, he hobbled along the corridor on the arm of this or that nurse and helped Sister Agnes in the kitchen, both because her round face looked so pretty in her little nurse's cap and because, as a passionate cook, he could convert his emotions into soups.
When his wound had healed, Alfred Matzerath stayed on in Danzig and found work straightaway as a local salesman for his Rhenish firm, one of the larger enterprises in the paper-manufacturing industry. The war had worn itself out. Peace treaties that would give cause for further wars were being crudely crafted: the region around the mouth of the Vistula—from roughly Vogelsang on the Nehrung along the Nogat to Pieckel, from there down the Vistula to Czattkau, taking a right angle leftward to Schönfließ, then tracing a hump around Saskoschin Forest to Lake Ottomin, leaving Mattern, Ramkau, and my grandmother's Bissau behind, and returning to the Baltic Sea at Klein-Katz—was now proclaimed a Free State and placed under the control of the League of Nations. In the city itself, Poland received a free port, the Westerplatte with its munitions depot, control of the railroad, and its own post office on Heveliusplatz.
While the Free State postage stamps spread a splendid display of Hanseatic cogs and red and gold c
oats of arms on letters, the Poles stamped them with macabre scenes in violet illustrating the histories of Casimir and Báthory.
Jan Bronski moved to the Polish Post Office. His transfer seemed spontaneous, as did opting for Poland. There were many who felt his choice of Polish citizenship was a reaction to something my mama did. In nineteen-twenty, the year Marszałek Piłsudski defeated the Red Army at Warsaw—a Miracle on the Vistula attributed by people like Vinzent Bronski to the Virgin Mary, and by military experts to either General Sikorski or General Weygand—in that eminently Polish year, my mama became engaged to Herr Matzerath, a citizen of the German Reich. I tend to think my grandmother Anna approved of the engagement as little as Jan did. Turning over the basement shop on Troyl, which had begun to prosper in the meantime, to her daughter, she withdrew with her brother Vinzent to Bissau, that is, to Polish territory, took over the farm with its turnip and potato fields, as she had in the pre-Koljaiczekian era, left her increasingly grace-ridden brother to his association and conversations with the Virgin Queen of Poland, and was content to squat in her four skirts behind autumnal potato-top fires and squint out blinking toward a horizon where telegraph poles still formed a grid.