by Günter Grass
Herbert waved her off, headed for the can, his suspenders dangling, his shirt trailing along behind him. He went angrily, added angrily, "And that's the scar!" and undertook the journey as if to distance himself once and for all from the church and all its knife fights, as if the can were the one place to sit where one is, becomes, or remains a freethinker.
A few weeks later I found Herbert wordless and in no mood for a question session. He appeared grief-stricken but didn't have the customary bandage on his back. Instead I found him lying quite normally on his back on the living room sofa. He wasn't lying in bed like a wounded man and yet he seemed severely wounded. I heard Herbert groan, cry out to God, Marx, and Engels, and curse them. Now and then he shook his fist in the air, then let it fall to his chest, joined in with the other fist, and hammered himself like a Catholic crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Herbert had killed a Latvian sea captain. The court had acquitted him—he'd acted, as so often in his profession, in self-defense. But the Latvian remained a dead Latvian in spite of the acquittal and weighed on the waiter like a ton of bricks, even though the captain was supposedly frail and delicate, with a bad stomach to boot.
Herbert stopped going to work. He'd quit his job. Starbusch, the owner, visited several times, sat by the sofa near Herbert or at the kitchen table with Mother Truczinski, pulled a bottle of Stobbes Machandel Double Null from his briefcase for Herbert, and a half-pound of un-roasted real coffee from the Free Port for Mother Truczinski. He tried either to talk Herbert into coming back, or to talk Mother Truczinski into talking Herbert into coming back. But Herbert was now hardened, or softened—whichever way you see it—he no longer wished to be a waiter, and certainly not in Neufahrwasser, across from the Seaman's Church. He no longer wished to be a waiter at all; for waiters always get stabbed, and one fine day someone who's stabbed will strike a little Latvian captain dead, just because he's trying to make him keep his distance, because he's not about to let a Latvian knife add its Latvian scar to all the Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Free Port, and German scars that crisscross the plowed back of a Herbert Truczinski.
"I'd sooner go to work for customs than go back to waiting in Fahrwasser," said Herbert. But he didn't go to work for customs.
Niobe
In nineteen thirty-eight the customs duties were raised and the borders between Poland and the Free State temporarily closed. My grandmother could no longer take the narrow-gauge railway to the weekly market in Langfuhr and had to close down her stand. She was left sitting on her eggs, so to speak, but in no mood to brood. In the harbor the herring stank to high heaven, the goods piled up, and statesmen met and reached an agreement; it was only my friend Herbert who lay on the sofa, jobless and at odds with himself, brooding like a man with plenty to brood about.
Meanwhile the customs service offered bread and wages. It offered a green uniform and a green border worth guarding. Herbert didn't want to work for customs, had no wish to wait tables, he just wanted to lie on the sofa and brood.
But a man must work. Mother Truczinski wasn't the only one who thought so. Though she'd declined Starbusch's request to talk her son Herbert into going back to Fahrwasser as a waiter, she was all in favor of getting Herbert off the sofa. He too soon grew tired of the two-room flat, his brooding became purely pro forma, and he started reading through the Help Wanted ads in the Neueste Nachrichten and, reluctantly, the Nazi Vorposten, in search of some temporary dock job.
I wanted to help him. Other than a proper occupation in the harbor suburb, should a man like Herbert really have to go looking for makeshift ways to earn money? Part-time dock work, odd jobs, burying rotten herring? I couldn't imagine Herbert on the Mottlau bridges spitting at gulls, falling prey to chewing tobacco. It occurred to me that I could enter into a partnership with Herbert: two hours of concentrated work once a week, or even once a month, and we would have it made. Oskar, with his still diamond-hard voice, his wits sharpened by long experience in the field, would slice open shop windows with valuable displays and play lookout, while Herbert would, as they say, be light-fingered. We would need no blowtorches, skeleton keys, or tool kits. Nor any brass knuckles or shooting irons. Green Minna, as we called the Black Maria, and us—two worlds, and never the twain should meet. And Mercury, the god of thieves and trade, would bless us, since, born in the sign of Virgo, I possessed his seal, which I stamped now and then on solid objects.
It would be pointless to pass over this episode. I'll record it briefly, then, though I'm not making a confession: Herbert and I committed two relatively minor break-ins at delicatessens while he was unemployed, and one juicy burglary at a furrier's which netted us three blue foxes, a sealskin, a Persian lamb muff, and one pretty, but not terribly valuable, pony coat that my poor mama would surely have enjoyed wearing.
What caused us to give up our life of crime was not so much the misplaced yet oppressive sense of guilt we occasionally felt as it was the growing difficulty we had fencing the goods. To unload goods profitably, Herbert had to take them to Neufahrwasser, since that was where the only reliable middlemen hung out. But since the place was a constant reminder of the skinny Latvian sea captain with the bad stomach, he tried to move the goods anywhere else he could, on Schichaugasse, in Hakelwerk, in Bürgerwiesen, anywhere but Fahrwasser, where the furs would have sold like buttered hotcakes. Fencing our loot was thus such a long-drawn-out affair that the delicatessen items finally wound up in Mother Truczinski's kitchen, and Herbert even gave her the Persian lamb muff, or at least tried to.
When Mother Truczinski saw the muff, the fun was over. She'd accepted the food quietly enough, perhaps justifying it as sanctioned theft based on necessity. But the muff was a luxury and luxury meant irresponsibility and irresponsibility meant prison. Such was Mother Truczinski's simple, straightforward line of thought, she made mouse eyes, jerked a knitting needle from her bun, said with the knitting needle, "You're going to end up just like your father!" and shoved the Neueste Nachrichten at Herbert, or the Vorposten, which was the same as saying: Now look for some honest work, and not any old odd job, or I'm done cooking for you.
Herbert lay for another week on his brooding sofa, was insufferable and unavailable for questioning about his scars or an assault on promising shop windows. I was very understanding with my friend, let him drain his sorrow to the dregs, hung around Laubschad the clockmaker and his time-devouring timepieces, tried Meyn the musician again, but he no longer touched schnapps, chased nothing but Mounted SA band tunes with his trumpet, gave off a well-groomed and energetic air, while his four cats, relics of a drunken but highly musical era, were so poorly fed that they were slowly going to the dogs. On the other hand I would often find Matzerath, who drank only socially while Mama was alive, sitting glassy-eyed behind a shot glass at some late hour. He would be leafing through the photo album, trying, as I do now, to bring Mama to life in the small, more or less properly exposed rectangles, cried himself elegiac around midnight, then spoke to Hitler or Beethoven, who still faced each other gloomily, addressing them with the familiar du, and seemed to be answered by the genius, though he was deaf, while the tee-totaling Führer said not a word, since Matzerath, a small-time drunken cell leader, was unworthy of Providence.
One Tuesday—my drum allows me to recall this precisely—things came to a head: Herbert spruced himself up, that is, he let Mother Truczinski brush his flared blue trousers with cold coffee, squeezed into his low shoes, stuffed himself into the jacket with anchor buttons, sprayed the white silk scarf he had from the Free Port with eau de cologne that had likewise mushroomed from the duty-free dung heap of the Free Port, and soon stood stiff and square beneath his blue peaked cap.
"I'm going to look round a bit for a job," said Herbert, tilting his Prince Heinrich Memorial Cap rakishly to the left, and Mother Truczinski let her newspaper sink.
The next day Herbert had a job and a uniform. Decked out in dark gray and not customs green, he was a guard at the Maritime Museum.
Like everyth
ing worth preserving in this city, itself so deserving of preservation, the treasures of the Maritime Museum filled an old patrician mansion that had its own historic air, having retained its imposing stone porch, a playfully yet richly ornamented facade, and an in terior carved in dark oak and spiral-staircased. Here was displayed the carefully catalogued history of our seaport city, whose fame had always been based on growing and remaining filthy rich in the midst of several powerful but largely impoverished neighbors. Ah, those privileges purchased from Teutonic knights and Polish kings and invested in detail by charter! Those color engravings of the endless sieges of the fortress at the mouth of the Vistula! There stands the unhappy Stanisłaus Leszczyński, holed up within the city walls, fleeing his rival the Saxon anti-king. One can see in the painting just how frightened he is. The primate Potocki and the French ambassador de Monti are equally frightened, for the Russians under General Lascy are besieging the city. Everything is clearly labeled, even the names of the French ships sailing under the fleur-de-lis banner are legible. An arrow indicates: On this ship King Stanisłaus Leszczyński had to flee to Lorraine when the city was forced to surrender to the third Augustus. The majority of the items on display, however, were trophies from war victories, for lost wars seldom if ever provide a museum with trophies.
The pride of the collection was the figurehead from a large Florentine galleon, which, though its home port was Bruges, belonged to the Florentine merchants Portinari and Tani. The Danzig pirates and city captains Paul Beneke and Martin Bardewiek had managed to capture the galleon in April of fourteen seventy-three while tacking off the coast of Zeeland near the port city of Sluys. Soon after its capture, most of the crew, as well as the officers and captain, were put to the sword. The ship and its cargo were brought to Danzig. A folding triptych of the Last Judgment by the artist Memling and a golden baptismal font—both commissioned by the Florentine Tani for a church in Florence—were displayed in the Church of the Virgin Mary; the Last Judgment, so far as I know, brings pleasure to this day to the Catholic eye of Poland. What became of the figurehead after the war remains unclear. In my day it was kept in the Maritime Museum.
A voluptuous wooden woman, green and naked, her arms raised and languidly crossed, all fingers on view, gazed ahead with sunken amber eyes across breasts striving toward their goal. This woman, this figurehead, brought disaster. The merchant Portinari had commissioned it, modeled on a Flemish maiden he was close to, from a sculptor who'd made a name for himself carving figureheads. The carved green fig ure was barely mounted beneath the bowsprit of the galleon when the maiden, as was customary back then, was tried for witchcraft. Before she went up in flames, having been asked a few painful questions with regard to her patron, she accused the merchant from Florence as well as the sculptor who had measured her so carefully. It's said Portinari hanged himself, because he feared the fire. As for the sculptor, they chopped off both his gifted hands to prevent him from turning any more witches into figureheads. While the trials were still under way in Bruges and causing a stir, since Portinari was a rich man, the galleon with its figurehead fell into the piratical hands of Paul Beneke. Signore Tani, the second merchant, fell beneath a pirate's grappling iron, Paul Beneke was next: a few years later he fell out of favor with the patricians of his native city and was drowned in the courtyard of the Stockturm. Ships to whose bows the figurehead was affixed after Beneke's death burst into flames while still in the harbor shortly after she was in place, and spread fire to other ships; everything burned, except of course for the figurehead itself, it was fireproof and with its shapely curves always found new admirers among the ship owners. No sooner had this woman taken her accustomed place, however, than once peaceful crews broke out in mutiny behind her back and decimated each other. The failed expedition of the Danzig fleet against Denmark in the year fifteen twenty-two under the leadership of the highly talented Eberhard Ferber led to Ferber's downfall and bloody insurrection in the city. History speaks of religious conflicts—in twenty-three a Protestant pastor named Hegge led a mob in an iconoclastic assault on the city's seven parish churches—but we prefer to place the blame for this long-standing disaster on the figurehead: she graced the bow of Ferber's ship.
When, fifty years later, Stefan Báthory besieged the city in vain, Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of the cloister at Oliva, delivered penitential sermons in which he blamed the figurehead, the sinful woman. The king of the Poles, who had received her as a gift from the city, took her along to his field camp, and was badly advised by her. The extent to which the wooden lady influenced the Swedish campaign against the city and impelled the long incarceration of Dr. Ägidius Srach, who had conspired with the Swedes and had demanded that the green maiden, who'd meanwhile found her way back to the city, be burned, is unknown. A somewhat murky report maintains that a poet by the name of Opitz fled Sile sia and sought refuge for a few years in the city, but died an early death because he hunted down the insidious carving in a storeroom and tried to sing verses to her.
Only toward the end of the eighteenth century, at the time of the various partitions of Poland, did the Prussians, who were forced to take the city by storm, issue a royal Prussian decree against the "wooden figure Niobe" For the first time she was mentioned by name in an official document, and evacuated to, or, more precisely, incarcerated in, that same Stockturm in the courtyard of which Paul Beneke was drowned and from the gallery of which I successfully tested my first long-distance song, so that, confronted by the most refined products of human imagination, instruments of torture, she would hold her peace for the whole of the nineteenth century.
When in nineteen thirty-two I climbed the Stockturm and ravaged the lobby windows of the Stadt-Theater with my voice, Niobe—popularly known as "the green maiden"—had, thank God, long since been removed from the tower's torture chamber. Otherwise who knows whether my assault on that neoclassical edifice would have succeeded.
It must have been some uninformed museum director from out of town who fetched Niobe from the torture chamber where she'd been held in check and installed her in the newly furnished Maritime Museum, shortly after the founding of the Free State. Soon thereafter the overzealous man died from a case of blood poisoning he'd brought on himself while putting up a sign saying that the lady displayed above it was a figurehead answering to the name of Niobe. His successor, a cautious man well acquainted with the city's history, wanted to move Niobe out again. His idea was to present the dangerous wooden maiden to the city of Lübeck, and it was only because the citizens of Lübeck refused the gift that, except for its brick churches, the little city on the Trave made it through the wartime air raids relatively unscathed.
So Niobe, or "the green maiden," remained in the Maritime Museum, and over a period of barely fourteen years of museum history caused the death of two directors—not the cautious one, he'd managed to get himself transferred—the expiration of an elderly priest at her feet, the violent end of a student from the engineering school and two seniors from St. Peter's Gymnasium who had just passed their final exams, and the demise of four reliable museum guards, most of them married.
They were all found, including the engineering student, with transfigured countenances and chests impaled by sharp instruments of the sort kept only in the Maritime Museum: sailor's knives, grapnel, harpoons, finely chiseled spear-tips from the Gold Coast, sailmakers' needles; and only the last of the gymnasium students had been forced to resort first to his pocketknife and then to his school compass, since shortly before his death all sharp objects in the museum had either been chained up or placed behind glass.
Although the detectives from the homicide squad described each death as a tragic case of suicide, a rumor ran through the city and the newspapers too: "The green maiden's doing it with her own hands." Niobe was seriously suspected of having dispatched men and boys to the other world. The discussions went back and forth, columns were set aside in newspapers for the free expression of opinions on the Niobe case; people termed them sinister events. The
city administration spoke of outmoded superstition: they had no intention of taking any precipitate action till they had proof that something supernatural had really and truly occurred.
And so the green wooden figure remained the showpiece of the Maritime Museum, since the Regional Museum in Oliva, the City Museum on Fleischergasse, and the administration of the Artushof all refused to take in the man-crazy creature.
There was a shortage of museum guards. And they weren't the only ones who wanted nothing to do with the wooden virgin. Museum visitors also avoided the room with the amber-eyed woman. For a long time silence reigned behind the Renaissance windows that lent the necessary lateral light to the fully rounded sculpture. Dust piled up. The cleaning ladies no longer came to clean. The photographers who had once been so obtrusive, one of whom had died shortly after taking a photo of the figurehead—a natural death, but one that still raised eyebrows, given the connection—no longer furnished the press of the Free City, Poland, Germany, and even France with flash photos of the homicidal statue, but instead destroyed whatever portraits of Niobe they had in their archives and henceforth photographed only the arrival and departure of various presidents, heads of state, and exiled kings, living in the sign of whatever stood in the program of the day: poultry shows, National Party congresses, auto races, and spring floods.
And so things remained, till Herbert Truczinski, who no longer wanted to be a waiter and least of all to work for customs, donned the mouse-gray uniform of a museum guard and took his place on the leather chair by the door of the room popularly known as "the green maiden's parlor."
On his very first day at work, I followed Herbert to the tram stop on Max-Halbe-Platz. I was worried about him.
"Go home, little Oskar. I can't take you along." But I stood so steadfastly before my big friend with my drum and drumsticks that Herbert said, "Well, come along then as far as Hohes Tor. And then be a good boy and go home." At Hohes Tor I refused to get on the Number Five; Herbert took me along to Heilige-Geist-Gasse, tried to get rid of me again on the museum steps, sighed, and bought me a child's ticket at the desk. I was fourteen and should have paid full price, but that was no business of theirs.