by Günter Grass
I tried Greff the greengrocer. Without my drum, for Greff didn't like hearing it, I paid several visits to his basement shop across the way. The preconditions for a thorough course of study seemed present: scattered all about the two-room apartment, in the shop itself, behind and on the counter, even in the relatively dry potato cellar, lay books, adventure stories, song books, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, the works of Walter Flex, Wiechert's Simple Life, Daphnis and Chloe, artists' monographs, stacks of sports magazines, and picture books filled with half-naked boys, most of whom, for some inexplicable reason, were leaping at a ball in sand dunes on the beach, displaying their oiled and gleaming muscles.
Greff was having all kinds of trouble with the shop at the time. Inspectors from the Bureau of Weights and Standards were less than pleased when they tested his weights and scales. The word fraud surfaced. Greff had to pay a fine and buy new weights. Beset by cares, only his books, youth meetings, and weekend hikes with the Boy Scouts could cheer him up.
He was filling out price tags and barely noticed me when I entered the shop; seizing the opportunity offered by this price-tagging operation, I grabbed three or four white paper tags and a red pencil, and using the finished tags as models, made a great show of imitating his Süt-terlin script.
Oskar was no doubt too little for him, not wide-eyed and pale enough. So I laid the red pencil aside, chose a tome full of naked youths I thought would leap out at Greff, and held photos of bending or stretching boys I assumed meant something to him at an angle so Greff could see them.
Since as long as there were no customers in the shop demanding red beets the greengrocer kept penciling away with exaggerated precision on his price tags, I was forced to either clap the book covers loudly or flip noisily through the pages to make him emerge from his price tags and pay attention to me, the illiterate boy.
Simply put, Greff didn't understand me. When Scouts were in the shop—and there were always two or three of his lieutenants around in the afternoon—he didn't notice Oskar at all. If Greff was alone, however, nervous, strict, and annoyed by disturbances, he was quite capable of springing up and issuing orders: "Put that book down, Oskar. There's nothing in it for you. You're too dumb and too little for that. You're going to ruin it. Cost me more than six gulden. If you want to play there's plenty of potatoes and cabbages!"
He took the trashy old book away from me, leafed through it with no change of expression, and left me standing among Savoy cabbages, red cabbages, white cabbages, among sugar beets and spuds, alone and growing lonely; for Oskar didn't have his drum.
True, there was still Frau Greff, and after being brushed off by the greengrocer I would usually make my way to the couple's bedroom. Back then, Frau Lina Greff would lie in bed for weeks at a time, playing the invalid, smelling of a decaying nightgown, taking just about anything in hand except a book that might have taught me something.
In the days that followed, nursing a slight envy, Oskar eyed the school knapsacks of boys his own age, from the sides of which sponges and little rags for wiping the slates fluttered self-importantly. Nevertheless he can't recall ever having thoughts like: You brought this on yourself, Oskar. You should have put on your school game face. You shouldn't have ruined things permanently with Spollenhauer. Those urchins are getting ahead of you. They have their big or little ABCs down pat, while you still haven't learned how to hold the Neueste Nachrichten properly.
A slight envy, I've just said, it was no more. It took only a sniff to get a noseful of school once and for all. Have you ever gotten a whiff of those poorly rinsed, half-eaten sponges and little rags for yellow-framed flaking slates, which, in knapsacks of the cheapest leather, retain the sweat of all that penmanship, the vapor of big and little multiplication tables, the sweat of squeaking, halting, slipping, spit-moistened slate pencils? Now and then, when pupils on their way home from school laid their knapsacks down somewhere near me to play soccer or dodge-ball, I would bend down to those little cloudlike sponges drying in the sun and imagine that if Satan existed, such would be the sour stench of his armpits.
So the school of slates was hardly to my taste. But Oskar can scarcely maintain that Gretchen Schemer, who took his education in hand soon thereafter, was precisely the answer.
Everything about the furnishings of the Schemers' flat over the bakery on Kleinhammerweg offended me. Those ornamental coverlets, those cushions embroidered with coats of arms, the Käthe Kruse dolls lurking in the corners of the sofa, those stuffed animals underfoot everywhere, all that china crying out for a bull, the souvenirs wherever you looked, all the pieces she'd started, knitted, crocheted, embroidered, woven, plaited, tatted, and trimmed in tiny mouse teeth. I could think of only one explanation for this sweetly dainty, charmingly cozy, stiflingly tiny household, overheated in winter and poisoned with flowers in summer: Gretchen Schemer was childless, longed for little ones to ensnare in her knitting—ah, was Herr Scheffler to blame, or was she?—hungered so for a baby, would so happily have crocheted, beaded, trimmed, and covered a little one with cross-stitch kisses.
This is where I came in to learn my big and little ABCs. I made sure no piece of china or souvenir was damaged. I left my glass-shattering voice at home, so to speak, and closed one eye when Gretchen felt we'd had enough drumming for now and, baring her equine gold teeth in a smile, pulled the drum from my knees and laid it among the teddy bears.
I made friends with two of the Käthe Kruse dolls, clutched the little brats to my bosom, and strummed the lashes of their permanently startled eyes as though in love with them, so that this false and therefore even more genuine-seeming friendship with dolls might knit and ensnare Gretchen's knit-one-purl-two heart.
My plan wasn't bad. By the second visit Gretchen opened her heart, that is, she unraveled it as one unravels a stocking, showed me the whole long, threadbare thread, with little knots in places, opened all her cupboards, chests, and little boxes, spread out before me all her beaded rubbish, heaps of baby jackets, baby bibs, baby pants, enough to clothe quintuplets, held them up to me, put them on me, and took them off again.
Then she showed me Schemer's marksmanship badges from the veterans' club, followed by photographs, sometimes the same as ours, till finally, as she turned back to the baby clothes, looking for rompers of some sort, books at last appeared: Oskar had counted fully on finding books beneath the baby clothes, had heard her talking about books with Mama, had known how eagerly the two, engaged and then married at almost exactly the same young age, had shared and borrowed books from the lending library near the Film-Palast, so that, pumped full of reading material, they could impart a more worldly scope and glamour to their grocery-store and bakery marriages.
Gretchen had little enough to offer me. Since she now devoted all her time to knitting, she no longer read, and like Mama, who never got around to reading anymore because of Jan Bronski, she no doubt gave the handsome volumes of the book club to which they both belonged for some time to people who still read because they did not knit and had no Jan Bronski.
Even bad books are books, and therefore holy. What I found was a jumble of odds and ends that no doubt came in large part from the book box of her brother Theo, who had met a seaman's death on Dogger Bank. Seven or eight volumes of Köhler's Naval Calendar, full of ships that sank long ago, The Service Ranks of the Imperial Navy, Paul Benke: Naval Hero — these could hardly have been the fare for which Gretchen's heart longed. Erich Keyser's History of the City of Danzig, and A Struggle for Rome, evidently undertaken by a man named Felix Dahn with the help of Totila and Teja, Belisarius and Narses, had no doubt likewise lost their luster and firmness of spine at the hands of her seafaring brother. To Gretchen's bookcase I attributed a book that balanced debit and credit and something about elective affinities by Goethe, as well as a thick, copiously illustrated volume entitled Rasputin and Women.
After hesitating for some time — the choice was so limited I didn't want to decide too quickly — I stopped, not knowing why, simply responding
to that familiar inner voice, I stopped first at Rasputin and then at Goethe.
This double stop was to determine and influence my life, or at least the life I tried to live apart from my drum. To this very day — as Oskar, ever zealous to learn, gradually lures the library of the mental institution into his room — I turn up my nose at Schiller and his consorts and oscillate instead between Rasputin and Goethe, between the faith healer and the know-it-all, between the dark and gloomy figure who cast a spell on women and the luminous poet-prince who so happily allowed women to cast a spell on him. If for a time I felt closer to Rasputin and feared Goethe's intolerance, it was because I had a faint suspicion that if you, Oskar, had been drumming in Goethe's day, he would have thought you merely unnatural, condemned you as the very incarnation of the unnatural, while feeding his own nature—which you have always admired and strived for, even when it gave itself such unnatural airs—feeding his natural temperament, on sugary sweet confections, then beaten you, poor wretch, to death, if not with his fist or his Faust, then with a thick volume of his Theory of Colors.
But back to Rasputin. With Gretchen Schemer's help he taught me my big and little ABCs, showed me how to be properly attentive to women, and consoled me when Goethe hurt my feelings.
It was no easy task to learn to read while playing the simpleton. That turned out to be harder than pretending to wet the bed for years as a child. With bed-wetting all I had to do was demonstrate each morning a failing I could easily have dispensed with. But playing the simpleton meant hiding my rapid progress under a bushel, waging a constant struggle with a nascent intellectual pride. If grownups wished to regard me as a bed wetter, I could accept it with an inner shrug, but that I had to present myself to them year in and year out as an ignoramus hurt both Oskar's feelings and those of his teacher.
The moment I rescued the books from the baby clothes, Gretchen gave a cry of joy; she recognized her vocation as a teacher then and there. I managed to lure this childless woman from the wool in which she had become entangled and made her almost happy. Actually she would have preferred to see me choose Credit and Debit for a reader; but I insisted on Rasputin, demanded Rasputin when she produced a proper little ABC primer for our second lesson, and finally resolved to speak up when she kept turning to idyllic stories of farm life in the mountains and fairy tales like Dwarf Longnose and Tom Thumb. "Rapupin!" I would cry, or "Rashushin!" Now and then I acted completely silly; Oskar could be heard babbling "Rashu, Rashu!" so Gretchen would know what he liked, yet remain in the dark about his awakening genius for pecking at letters.
I learned quickly and steadily without thinking much about it. Within a year I felt at home in Petersburg, in the private chambers of the autocratic ruler of all Russians, in the nursery of the sickly Tsarevich, among conspirators and popes, and not least as an eyewitness to Rasputin's orgies. There was a tone to all this that appealed to me, and it all revolved around a central figure. You could see it too in the contempo rary engravings scattered throughout the book, showing a bearded Rasputin with eyes of coal among women in black stockings and little else. Rasputin's death preyed on my mind: he had been poisoned with poisoned cake and poisoned wine, and then, when he wanted more cake, they shot him with pistols, and when the lead in his chest made him feel like dancing, they tied him up and dropped him through an ice hole in the Neva. All that was done by male officers. The ladies of metropolitan Petersburg would never have given their little father Rasputin poisoned cake, though they would have given him anything else he asked for. Women believed in him, while officers had to remove him from their path before they could again believe in themselves.
Is it any wonder I wasn't the only one who took pleasure in the life and death of the athletic faith healer? Gretchen groped her way back to the reading of her early years of marriage, let herself go occasionally while reading aloud, trembled when the word orgy appeared, breathed the magical word orgy with a little gasp, was ready and willing for an orgy when she said orgy, yet had no real idea what an orgy was.
Things took a turn for the worse when Mama came along to the flat over the bakery on Kleinhammerweg and sat in on my lessons. This sometimes degenerated into an orgy, ceased to be a lesson for little Oskar and became an end in itself, turned into a duet of giggles every two or three sentences, left their lips dry and cracked, scooted the two married women closer together under Rasputin's spell, made them shift restlessly on the sofa cushions and feel like pressing their thighs tight; what began as silliness ended in sighs, and after a dozen pages of Rasputin something happened on that bright afternoon they had perhaps neither desired nor expected, but gladly accepted, something to which Rasputin would not have objected, indeed would have gladly bestowed free for all eternity.
Finally, when both women had said ohGodohGodohGod and pushed at their tousled hair in embarrassment, Mama asked with concern, "You're sure little Oskar doesn't understand any of this?" "How could he" Gretchen said soothingly. "I try so hard, but he just can't learn a thing, and he'll probably never learn to read."
To bear witness to my unshakable ignorance, she added, "Just think, Agnes, he tears pages out of our Rasputin, wads them up, and they're gone. Sometimes I feel like giving up. But when I see how happy he is with the book, I let him tear it up and ruin it. I've already asked Alex to get us a new one for Christmas."
And so I succeeded—as you will have noticed—little by little, over the course of three or four years—Gretchen Schemer taught me that long and longer—to remove over half the pages in the Rasputin book, wadding them up carefully, while feigning wanton disregard, so that afterward, in my drummer's nook at home, I could pull the pages from under my sweater, smooth them out, and pile them up for secret reading sessions undisturbed by women. I used the same tactics with Goethe, which I demanded from Gretchen every fourth session, calling out "Dote." I didn't wish to rely solely on Rasputin, for all too soon it became clear to me that for every Rasputin in this world there is a Goethe, that Rasputin draws Goethe in his wake, or Goethe draws Rasputin, if necessary even creates the other, so he can subsequently condemn him.
When Oskar sat in the attic with his unbound book, or crouched behind bicycle frames in old Herr Heilandt's shed, shuffling loose leaves of Elective Affinities with a bundle of Rasputin like a deck of cards, he read the new book with growing astonishment, and at the same time with a smile, saw Ottilie strolling demurely on Rasputin's arm through gardens in central Germany, and Goethe, seated in a sleigh with a dissolute, patrician Olga, sliding from orgy to orgy through a wintry St. Petersburg.
But let us get back to my schoolroom on Kleinhammerweg. Though I seemed to be making no progress at all, Gretchen took the most maidenly pleasure in me. Beneath the invisible but still hairy hand of the Russian faith healer raised in blessing, she blossomed mightily in my presence and even swept her potted lime tree and cactuses along with her. If only Herr Scheffler had occasionally withdrawn his fingers from the flour back then and swapped the bakery rolls for another little roll. Gretchen would gladly have been kneaded, rolled, brushed, and baked by him. Who knows what might have come out of the oven? No doubt a child eventually. Gretchen would have enjoyed such baking.
There she sat, however, after the most impassioned readings of Rasputin, with fiery eyes and slightly disheveled hair, shifted her gold and equine teeth but had nothing to bite, said ohGodohGod, and thought of the primal sourdough. Since Mama, who had her Jan, after all, could not help Gretchen, the minutes following this portion of my lesson might have ended unhappily if Gretchen had not had such a joyful heart.
She would jump up and go to the kitchen, return with the coffee grinder, clutch it like a lover, sing "Dark Eyes" or "Red Sarafan" with a melancholy passion as she coarse-ground the coffee, with Mama joining in, then take her dark eyes to the kitchen, put on the water, run down to the bakery while the water heated over the gas flame, select freshly baked and day-old pastries, often over Schemer's objections, set the little table with fancy flowered cups, a little pot of
cream, a little sugar bowl and dessert forks, then strew pansies among them, pour the coffee, switch to airs from The Tsarevich, offer love tarts and honey almond cakes, "A Soldier Stands on the Volga Shore," Frankfurt coffee ring sprinkled with sliced almonds, "Are There Many Angels Where You Are," and meringue kisses with whipped cream, so sweet, so sweet; and as they chewed, having achieved the necessary distance, the conversation would come back to Rasputin, and now, following that brief pastry-sated interlude, they could honestly deplore the abysmal corruption of the Tsarist era.
I ate far too many pastries in those years. As can be seen in the photos, Oskar grew no taller, just got fatter and lost his figure. After those sugary sweet lessons on Kleinhammerweg I didn't know what else to do but hide behind the shop counter on Labesweg and, as soon as Matzerath was out of sight, tie a piece of dry bread on a string, dunk it in the small Norwegian barrel filled with pickled herring, and not pull it out till it was saturated to overflowing with brine. You can't imagine how effective an emetic this snack was after having overstuffed myself with pastries. To lose weight, Oskar would often throw up a gulden's worth of cakes from Schemer's bakery into our toilet, and that was a lot of money back then.
I had to pay for Gretchen's lessons with a different coin. Since she loved to sew and knit things for children, she turned me into a doll she could dress and undress. I was obliged to try on and put up with all sorts of little smocks, bonnets, pants, and coats with and without hoods in a wide variety of styles, colors, and materials.
I don't know if it was Mama or Gretchen who transformed me, on the occasion of my eighth birthday, into a little Tsarevich who fully deserved to be shot. The Rasputin cult of the two women was then at its height. A photo taken that day shows me standing beside a birthday cake fenced in by eight non-drip candles, wearing an embroidered Russian smock, under a Cossack cap perched at a jaunty angle, behind crossed cartridge belts, in wide white trousers and low boots.