by Günter Grass
"I'm sure they're on their way right now. And the English fleet must be plowing through the Baltic this very minute!" Viktor Weluhn, who loved strong, ringing phrases, paused on the stairs with the wounded body of the janitor draped over his right shoulder, threw one hand in the air on the left as if he were on stage, and let all five fingers speak: "Come, you proud and mighty Britons!"
While the two men slowly bore Kobyella toward the emergency aid station, earnestly deliberating Polish-French-English relations, Oskar mentally leafed through Gretchen Schemer's books for relevant passages. Keyser's History of the City of Danzig: "During the Franco-German War of eighteen-seventy, on the afternoon of the twenty-first of August, four French warships entered Danzig harbor, crossed the roads, and trained their guns on the harbor and the city; the following night, however, the propeller-driven corvette Nymphe under Lieutenant-Commander Weickmann forced the formation, which had anchored in the small inner bay at Putzig, to withdraw."
Shortly before we arrived at the dead-letter room on the first floor, I reached a troubling conclusion, which was later to be confirmed: while the Polish Post Office and the whole plain of Poland was under assault, the English home fleet lay more or less comfortably sheltered in some firth in northern Scotland; the grand army of France was still dawdling over lunch, confident that a few scouting patrols in the general vicinity of the Maginot Line had fulfilled the Franco-Polish mutual-defense treaty.
Outside the mailroom-cum-emergency-aid station we were intercepted by Dr. Michon, still wearing his steel helmet, the silk handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, and a delegate from Warsaw, a man by the name of Konrad. Jan Bronski's fear was immediately activated across a broad spectrum, simulating the most serious of wounds. While Viktor Weluhn, who was not wounded, and equipped with his glasses should make a good marksman, was sent down to the main hall, we were given permission to enter the windowless room, dimly lit by tallow candles since the Municipal Power Plant of Danzig was no longer prepared to provide current to the Polish Post Office.
Dr. Michon, who had his doubts about Jan's wounds but no high opinion of Jan's military prowess in defense of the post office either, ordered his postal clerk to watch over the wounded men in a sort of quasi-medical capacity, and—he patted me briefly, and with what I sensed was a touch of despair—urged him to keep an eye on me too, lest the child wander into the action.
The field howitzer scored a hit on the main hall below. We were tossed about like dice. Michon the steel helmet, Konrad the Warsaw delegate, and Weluhn the money-order man raced to their battle stations. Jan and I found ourselves with seven or eight wounded men inside the sealed-off room where the sounds of combat were muffled. The candles hardly flickered when the howitzer got down to business outside. It was quiet in spite of the moaning around us, or perhaps because of it. With awkward haste Jan wrapped strips of torn sheets around Kobyella's thighs, then started to tend to himself; but my uncle's cheek and the back of his hand had stopped bleeding. The cuts maintained a crusty silence, but they must have been painful enough to feed Jan's fear, which found no outlet in the stuffy, low-ceilinged room. Nervously he searched through his pockets and found the full deck. Then, till the final collapse of our defenses, we played skat.
Thirty-two cards were shuffled, cut, dealt, and played. Since all the mail baskets were already occupied by casualties, we propped Kobyella against a basket, and then, when he kept sliding down, bound him to it with another wounded man's suspenders, sat him up at attention, and forbade him to drop his cards, for we needed Kobyella. How could we have done without a third for skat? Those men in the mail baskets could hardly tell black from red and had lost all interest in games. In fact Kobyella didn't feel much like skat either. All he wanted was to lie down. Just leave it to chance, let things slide, that's what he wanted. To witness the final demolition work with his janitorial hands idle for once, as he closed his lashless lids. But we weren't about to put up with such fatalism, we bound him fast, forced him to play third, while Oskar played second—and no one was surprised at all that the toddler could play skat.
When I lent my voice to grownup speech for the first time and said "Eighteen!" Jan did, it's true, emerge from behind his cards and give me a brief and incredibly blue look, then nodded, to which I responded, "Twenty?" Jan didn't miss a beat: "Keep going." "Two!" I said, "And three? Twenty-four?" Jan gave up: "Pass." And Kobyella? He'd nearly collapsed in spite of the suspenders. But we hoisted him back up and waited for the noise of a shell that had struck somewhere far from our card room to die away so Jan could hiss into the sudden stillness, "Twenty-four, Kobyella! Didn't you hear the boy's bid?"
I don't know from where or what depths the janitor surfaced. It looked as if he was raising his eyelids with a winch. At last his watery gaze strayed over the ten cards that Jan had discreetly pressed into his hand, taking care not to peek at them.
"Pass," said Kobyella. That is, we read it from his lips, which were too dry for speech.
I played a club single. Jan, who was playing contra, had to shout at the janitor and give him a sharp, good-natured poke in the ribs during the early tricks to get him to pull himself together and follow suit; first I drew all the trumps from the two of them, sacrificed my king of clubs, which Jan took with the jack of spades, but since I was void in diamonds I trumped Jan's ace of diamonds, regained the lead, and captured his ten with the jack of hearts—Kobyella discarded the nine of diamonds and there I sat with a run of hearts that was good: one-hand-two-contra-three-schneider-four-times-clubs-is-forty-eight-makes-twelve-pfennigs. It wasn't till the next hand—I risked a more than risky grand without two—when Kobyella, who had both jacks but stopped bidding at thirty-three, took my jack of diamonds with the jack of clubs, that the game began to liven up. The janitor, emboldened, it seemed, by having taken a trick, came back with the ace of diamonds, I had to follow suit, Jan snapped down the ten, Kobyella raked in the cards, pulled out his king, I should have trumped but didn't, discarded the eight of clubs instead, Jan threw on whatever points he could, even led a ten of spades, I trumped in, and damned if Kobyella didn't top it with his jack of spades, which I'd forgotten or thought Jan had, but it was Kobyella who overtrumped me and guffawed, came back with a spade, of course, I had to discard something, Jan threw on what points he could, and they finally led a heart to me, but it was far too late: I'd counted fifty-two in all the back and forth: without-two-one-hand-three-times-grand-minus-sixty-one-hundred-twenty-makes-thirty-pfennigs. Jan loaned me two gulden in change and I paid up, but in spite of having won the hand, Kobyella collapsed a second time, didn't take his money, and even the first antitank shell to strike the staircase, which landed just then, didn't mean a thing to the janitor, though it was his staircase, which he'd never tired of cleaning and polishing over the years.
Fear overcame Jan again, however, as the door to our mailroom rattled and the flames of the tallow candles had no idea what was happening to them or which way to head. Even when relative calm returned to the staircase and the next antitank shell exploded some distance away, against the facade, Jan Bronski shuffled as if he'd gone crazy and misdealt twice, but I let it pass. As long as they were firing outside, Jan was unreceptive to any comment, he was overwrought, failed to follow suit, even forgot to discard the skat, and constantly kept one of his small, well-formed, sensuously fleshy ears trained outside while we waited impatiently for him to play. Though Jan's attention to the game was rapidly losing focus, Kobyella, when he wasn't about to collapse and needed a poke in the ribs, was always in it. His play wasn't nearly as bad as the state he was in. He never collapsed till he'd won a hand or spoiled a grand for Jan or me. Winning or losing no longer mattered to him. He was playing for the game itself. And while we counted and re-counted the score, Kobyella the janitor hung there at an angle in his borrowed suspenders, giving no sign of life but the terrifying spasms of his Adam's apple.
This three-man skat game was putting a strain on Oskar too. Not that the sounds and concussions c
onnected with the siege and defense of the Polish Post Office placed too great a burden on my nerves. It was this first sudden abandonment of all disguise, which I resolved was only temporary. Up till then I'd been my true unvarnished self only with Master Bebra and his somnambulistic Lady Roswitha, but now I laid myself bare to my uncle and presumptive father, as well as a disabled janitor—men who would never come into question as later witnesses—as the fifteen-year-old adolescent indicated on my birth certificate, playing skat somewhat recklessly but not without skill. This strain, which was not too much for my will but far too much for my gnomelike proportions, produced the severest of headaches and bodily pains after barely an hour of skat.
Oskar felt like giving up, and could easily have slipped away at some point, between two blasts that rattled the building in quick succession, say, had not a previously unknown feeling of responsibility told him to hold on and counter his presumptive father's fear by the only effective means available: a game of skat.
And so we played, and would not let Kobyella die. He just couldn't get around to it. I made sure the cards kept circulating. And when the tallow candles fell beneath the onslaught of an explosion in the stairwell and gave up their little flames, it was I who had the presence of mind to do the obvious thing and reach into Jan's pocket for his matches, pulling Jan's gold-tipped cigarettes out with them, I who restored light to the world, lit a calming Regatta for Jan, and set one little flame after another alight in the darkness before Kobyella could take advantage of that darkness to make his getaway.
Oskar stuck two candles on his new drum, placed the cigarettes close at hand, disdained tobacco himself, but kept passing them to Jan, hung one in Kobyella's crooked mouth, and things went better, the game got livelier, the tobacco comforted, calmed, but could not stop Jan Bronski from losing game after game. He sweated and, as always when deeply involved, tickled his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. He got so fired up that in his excitement he called me Alfred or Matzerath, thought Kobyella was my poor mama playing. And when someone out in the hall yelled, "They got Konrad!" he looked at me reproachfully and said, "Please, Alfred, turn that radio off. I can hardly hear myself think."
Jan really got annoyed when the door to the dead-letter room was torn open and Konrad, who was at the end of his rope, was dragged in.
"Shut the door, there's a draft!" he protested. There really was a draft. The candles flickered wildly and didn't calm down till the men, who had stuffed Konrad into a corner, closed the door behind them. The three of us appeared strangely romantic. The candles lit us from below, gave us the look of all-powerful magicians. And when Kobyella bid his heart without two, calling out, no, gurgling out twenty-seven, thirty, his eyes rolling out of sight, and something lodged in his right shoulder started pushing its way out, twitched, seemed crazily alive, quieted down at last, then tipped Kobyella forward, set the basket he was tied to rolling, the basket filled with letters and the suspenderless dead man, Jan brought Kobyella and the laundry basket to a standstill with one powerful blow, whereupon Kobyella, hindered once more from departing, finally piped up with "heart hand," Jan hissed "contra," and Kobyella forced out his "double contra," Oskar understood then and there that the defense of the Polish Post Office had succeeded, that those attacking had lost the war from the very start, even if they managed in the course of that war to occupy Alaska and Tibet, the Easter Islands and Jerusalem.
The only sad thing was that Jan, having declared schneider schwarz, was unable to play out his wonderful bulletproof grand hand with four.
He began with his club run, called me Agnes now, thought Kobyella was his rival Matzerath, played the jack of diamonds as innocent as could be—I preferred being Agnes for him to Matzerath, by the way—then the jack of hearts—under no circumstances did I wish to be confused with Matzerath—Jan waited impatiently for Matzerath, who in reality was an incapacitated janitor named Kobyella, to make his discard; that took some time, but then Jan slapped the ace of hearts down on the floor and simply couldn't understand, couldn't believe, could never understand, was always just a blue-eyed boy who smelled of cologne, never understood much of anything, couldn't understand why Kobyella suddenly dropped all his cards, tilted the laundry basket with the letters and the dead man at an angle, till first the dead man, then a layer of letters, and finally the entire carefully woven basket tipped over, delivering a flood of mail as if it were meant for us, as if the thing for us to do now was to shove our playing cards aside and start reading these epistles or collecting stamps. But Jan didn't want to read, didn't want to collect, had spent too much time collecting as a boy, he wanted to play, to play out his grand hand, wanted to win, did Jan, to triumph. And he lifted Kobyella up, set the basket back on its wheels, but left the dead man lying there, didn't shovel the letters back in, didn't put enough weight in the basket, and seemed surprised even so when Kobyella, hanging from the now unstable basket, showed no staying power, leaned farther and farther forward, till Jan yelled at him, "Alfred, please don't be a spoilsport. Just this one last hand and we'll go home."
Oskar rose wearily, overcame the increasing pain in his limbs and his head, laid his little, tough drummer-boy hands on Jan Bronski's shoulders, and forced himself to speak, softly but insistently: "Leave him alone, Papa. He's dead and can't go on. If you want we can play Sixty-six."
Jan, whom I'd just addressed as my father, released the janitor's bodily remains, stared at me with those blue eyes, the blue overflowing, and wept: Nonononono.... I stroked him, but he kept saying no. I kissed him with meaning, but he couldn't get his mind off the grand hand he hadn't finished.
"I would have won it, Agnes. I'm sure I could have brought it home." Thus he lamented to me in my poor mama's stead, and I—his son—threw myself into the role, agreed with him, swore he would have won, that he'd already basically won, he just had to believe in it firmly and listen to his Agnes. But Jan believed neither me nor my mama, wept loudly at first in high lament, then fell into a soft, unmodulated babbling, scratched skat cards from beneath cold Mount Kobyella, mined between his legs, the letter landslide yielded a few, Jan didn't rest till he'd gathered up all thirty-two. Then he cleaned off the sticky sap that had seeped onto them from Kobyella's trousers, working hard on each card, shuffled, and started to deal again, when his finely shaped forehead, which was by no means low but somewhat too smooth and impenetrable, finally admitted the thought that there was no third skat man left in this world.
A deep silence fell over the dead-letter room. Outside as well, an extended minute of silence was devoted to the last skat player and third man. It seemed to Oskar that someone had quietly opened the door. And looking over his shoulder, expecting some sort of supernatural apparition, he saw Viktor Weluhn's strangely blind and empty face. "I've lost my glasses, Jan. Are you still here? We've got to run for it. The French aren't coming, or they'll be too late. Come with me, Jan. Show me the way, I've lost my glasses."
Perhaps poor Viktor thought he was in the wrong room. For when he received neither answer nor glasses nor Jan's flight-ready arm, he withdrew his unspectacled face and shut the door, and I listened for a few more steps as Viktor, feeling his way forward through the fog, set out in flight.
Who knows what comical incident transpired in Jan's small head to make him break into laughter, softly at first, still amid tears, then loudly and joyfully, to let his tongue play, pink, poised for tender caresses, to throw the deck of skat cards high and catch them, and finally, since a windless Sunday-like calm fell over the room holding the silent men and letters, he began, with careful, well-balanced movements and bated breath, to construct an extremely delicate house of cards: the seven of spades and the queen of clubs provided the base. Both were topped by the king of diamonds. Then he built a second base beside the first from the nine of hearts and the ace of spades, topped by the eight of clubs. Then he connected both bases with tens and jacks set upright, with queens and aces laid crosswise, so that all parts supported the whole. Then he decided to place
a third story upon the second, and did so with spellbinding hands my mother must have known from similar rituals. And when the queen of hearts leaned against the king with the heart of red, the edifice did not collapse; no, airily it stood, sensitive, breathing softly in that room full of breathless dead and living beings with bated breath, and permitted us to fold our hands, allowed even a skeptical Oskar, who saw through a house of cards and what held it up as well as anyone, to forget the acrid smoke and stink that crept sinuously and sparingly through the cracks of the mailroom door, making it seem that the little chamber with the house of cards stood door to door with Hell.
They'd brought in flamethrowers and, shying away from a frontal assault, had decided to smoke out the remaining defenders. This had moved Dr. Michon to take off his steel helmet, seize a bedsheet, and when that didn't seem enough, pull out his silk handkerchief, wave them both, and offer the surrender of the Polish Post Office.
And out they came, some thirty scorched, half-blind men with arms raised and hands crossed behind their necks, from the left side entrance to the post office, then stood by the courtyard wall, waiting for the slowly advancing Home Guard. It was said later that during the brief interval before the attack force arrived, while the defenders were still standing in the courtyard, three or four escaped by way of the post office garage, passing through the adjoining police garage into houses on Rähm that had been evacuated and were hence unoccupied. There they'd found clothes, complete with Party badges, had washed, tidied themselves up, and slipped away one by one; and one of them, it's said, visited an optician's shop on Altstädtischer Graben and got fitted with a pair of glasses, having lost his own during the battle at the post office. Newly bespectacled, Viktor Weluhn, for it was he, even had a beer, and then another, for the flamethrowers had made him thirsty, and then, with his new glasses, which indeed lightened the fog he gazed into, but by no means lifted it as his old glasses had done, set out on a flight that continues to this day, so persistent have been his pursuers.