by Günter Grass
Seventy-five Kilos
Vyazma and Bryansk; then the era of mud set in. In mid-October of forty-one Oskar too began wallowing robustly in mud. I hope you will indulge me if I draw a parallel between the mud-logged victories of Army Group Center and my victories in the trackless and equally muddy terrain of Frau Lina Greff. Just as tanks and trucks bogged down outside Moscow, so I too bogged down; of course the wheels did not stop spinning there, throwing up mud, nor did I slacken my efforts—I managed literally to whip up a little froth in the Greffian mud—but no territory of any note was gained outside Moscow, or in the bedroom of the Greffian flat.
I'm not yet ready to abandon this comparison: just as future strategists would draw lessons from those bogged-down muddy campaigns, I drew my own conclusions from my battle with that Greffian phenomenon of nature. One should not underestimate these campaigns on the home front during the last world war. Oskar was seventeen back then, yet in spite of his youth he developed into a man on the treacherously convoluted training grounds of Lina Greff. Abandoning the military comparisons, let me now measure Oskar's progress in artistic terms: if Maria taught me the minor modes in her naively bewitching vanilla fog, familiarizing me with lyrical forms like fizz powder and mushroom gathering, I found in the stringent, sour, and multilayered Greffian effluvium that expansive epic breath which today allows me to combine victories on the front and victories in bed in a single sentence. Music! From Maria's childlike and sentimental yet ever so sweet harmonica straight to the conductor's stand; for Lina Greff offered me an orches tra of a depth and range found only in Bayreuth or Salzburg. There I learned to blow, strum, puff, pluck, and bow, whether it involved continuo or counterpoint, twelve-tone or atonal, the entry to the scherzo or the tempo of the andante, my emotional tone was at once rigorously precise and softly flowing; Oskar drew all there was from Frau Greff and, though satisfied, remained dissatisfied, like any true artist.
It was only twenty short steps from our grocery store to the Greffs' vegetable shop. Their shop was conveniently located just across and down the street, and was far easier to reach than the flat of Alexander Scheffler, the master baker, on Kleinhammerweg. It may have been due to this more favorable location that I made more progress in female anatomy than in the study of my masters Goethe and Rasputin. Perhaps this gaping disparity in knowledge, which persists to this very day, may be explained and even excused by the difference between my two female teachers. While Lina Greff had no interest in educating me but simply placed her riches straightforwardly and passively at my disposal, to be viewed and experimented with as I wished, Gretchen Scheffler took her role as a teacher all too seriously. She wanted to see progress, wanted me to read aloud, wanted to see my drummer-boy fingers engaged in penmanship, wanted me to make friends with fair Grammatika and even profit from that friendship herself. When Oskar nonetheless refused to show any visible signs of progress, Gretchen Scheffler lost patience, and soon after my poor mama's death, following what had after all been seven years of instruction, returned to her embroidery and, since her baker's marriage remained childless, merely favored me now and then, particularly on major holidays, with sweaters, socks, and mittens she had knitted herself. There was no more talk of Goethe and Rasputin, and it was only thanks to the excerpts from the works of both masters which I continued to stash away here and there, mostly in the drying attic of our building, that this side of Oskar's studies didn't bog down entirely; I educated myself and formed my own judgments.
The ailing Lina Greff was confined to her bed, however, and could neither avoid nor abandon me, for her illness was indeed a lingering one, but not serious enough that Death could snatch my teacher Lina from me before her time. But since nothing on this star lasts forever, it was Oskar who abandoned the bedridden woman the moment he considered his studies complete.
You will say: What a narrow world this young man was reduced to for his education! Forced to piece together his armor for a later manly life from a grocery store, a bakery, and a vegetable shop. Though I must admit that Oskar received his first, all so important impressions in extremely stuffy petit-bourgeois surroundings, he also had a third teacher. To this man fell the task of opening up the world to Oskar, of making him what he is today, a person upon whom, for want of any better designation, I bestow the inadequate title cosmopolitan.
I'm referring, as the most attentive among you will have noted, to my teacher and master Bebra, direct descendant of Prince Eugen, scion of the house of Louis the Fourteenth, the dwarf and musical clown Bebra. When I say Bebra, I include of course the lady at his side, the great somnambulist Roswitha Raguna, the timeless beauty to whom my thoughts were often drawn during those dark years after Matzerath took my Maria from me. How old, I wondered, can she be, the Signora? Is she a blooming girl of twenty, or even nineteen? Or is she that delicately graceful ninety-nine-year-old lady, who, a hundred years from now, will still indestructibly embody the small-scale format of eternal youth?
If I recall correctly, I ran into these two kindred souls again shortly after the death of my poor mama. We drank Mochas together in the Café Vierjahreszeiten, then parted ways. There were slight, but not insignificant, political differences; Bebra had close connections with the Reich's Ministry of Propaganda, frequented, as I clearly gathered from hints he dropped, the privy chambers of Herr Goebbels and Herr Goering, and went to the greatest lengths to explain and justify this political derailment. He spoke of the influential role of court jesters in the Middle Ages, showed me reproductions of pictures by Spanish masters depicting some Philip or Carlos with his royal retinue, and in the midst of those rigidly formal groups a few jesters could be seen in ruffles, peaked caps, and baggy pantaloons who were about Bebra's size, and Oskar's as well. Precisely because I liked these pictures—for today I am an ardent admirer of the brilliant painter Diego Velázquez—I refused to let Bebra off that easily. So he gave up trying to compare the role of dwarfs in the court of Philip the Fourth of Spain to his own position in the entourage of the Rhenish upstart Joseph Goebbels. He spoke of difficult times, of the weak, who must temporarily give way, of resistance that blooms in secret, in short, the phrase "inner emigration" was uttered, and that was the parting of the ways for Bebra and Oskar.
Not that I bore the master any ill will. In the years that followed I scanned every poster pillar, looking for Bebra's name among the placards for circuses and variety shows, and found it listed twice, along with Signora Raguna, but did nothing that might have led to a meeting with my friends.
I left it up to chance, but chance failed me, for had Bebra and I crossed paths in the fall of forty-one, instead of the following year, Oskar would never have become a pupil of Lina Greff, but instead a disciple of Master Bebra. As it was, however, I would cross Labesweg every day, often at an early morning hour, enter the vegetable shop, spend a half-hour or so for appearance's sake with the grocer, who was developing more and more into an oddball amateur mechanic, watch as he built his whimsical, jingling, wailing, screeching machines, and poke him when a customer entered, for at the time Greff hardly noticed the world around him. What had happened? Why was this gardener and friend of the young, who had once been so open and convivial, now silent; what caused this loneliness and isolation, what was turning him into a crank, and a rather poorly groomed older man?
The young no longer came to see him. The new generation didn't know him. The war had scattered his Boy Scout entourage to all fronts. Field-post letters arrived, then only field-postcards, and one day news reached Greff indirectly that his favorite, Horst Donath, first a scout, then a squad leader in the Hitler Youth, had fallen as a lieutenant on the Donets.
Greff began to age that same day; he neglected his appearance and threw himself totally into his tinkering, till there were more jingling machines and wailing contrivances visible in his vegetable shop than potatoes and cabbages. Of course the general food shortage played a role too; deliveries to the shop were few and far between, and Greff was not, like Matzerath, able to
fall back on a good customer's connections with the wholesale market.
The shop had a dismal air, and one could only be grateful for the decorative way in which Greff's absurd noisemakers, even if they did seem ludicrous, filled up the space. The creations that sprang from Greff's increasingly confused tinkerer's mind appealed to me. When I examine my keeper Bruno's string knotworks today, I'm reminded of Greff's display. And just as Bruno enjoys my smiling yet serious interest in his artistic flights of fancy, Greff was happy, in his distracted way, whenever he noticed that one or another of his music machines gave me pleasure. He who for years had paid no attention to me was now visibly disappointed when, after a brief half-hour, I left the store he had transformed into a workshop and visited his wife, Lina Greff.
What shall I tell you about my visits to the bedridden Lina, which usually lasted two to two and a half hours? When Oskar entered, she beckoned from the bed: "Oh, it's you, little Oskar. Come on closer and get under the feathers if you want, it's cold in here and Greff's so stingy with the heat." So I slipped in under the featherbed with her, left my drum and both the drumsticks I'd just been using by the bed, and allowed only a third drumstick, worn and somewhat frayed, to come along with me and pay a visit to Lina.
Not that I undressed before getting in bed with her. In wool, velvet, and leather shoes I climbed in, and long afterward, in spite of the heat generated by my strenuous efforts, I emerged from the matted feathers in the same nearly undisturbed clothes.
After I'd gone several times to the greengrocer straight from the Linabed while still steeped in his wife's effluvia, a ritual was adopted that I all too gladly observed. As I lingered in bed going through my final exercises with his wife, the greengrocer would come into the bedroom with a basin of warm water, set it down on a little stool, place a hand towel and soap beside it, and leave the room without a word, not having burdened the bed with a single glance.
Generally Oskar tore himself free quickly from the warm nest, went over to the washbasin, and subjected himself and the former drumstick that had functioned so well in bed to a thorough cleansing; I could readily understand that Greff found his wife's smell unbearable, even if it assailed him secondhand.
But freshly washed, I was welcomed by the amateur inventor. He demonstrated all his machines and their noises to me, and I wonder to this day why, despite this late intimacy, no real friendship ever developed between Oskar and Greff, why Greff remained a stranger to me, arousing my interest but never my sympathy.
In September of forty-two—I'd just put my eighteenth birthday be hind me, unheralded and unsung, while on the radio the Sixth Army took Stalingrad—Greff built the drum machine. He suspended two evenly balanced pans filled with potatoes in a wooden frame, then removed one potato from the left pan: the scales tipped and released a lever that freed a drumming mechanism installed on top of the frame: it rolled, banged, rattled, scraped, pans clashed together, a gong rang, and the whole thing came to a final, clattering, tragically discordant finale.
The machine pleased me. I had Greff demonstrate it for me time and again. For Oskar believed that the tinkering greengrocer had invented and built it especially for him. Soon my error became all too clear. Greff may have received an inspiration or two from me, but the machine was meant for him, and its finale was his finale.
It was an early, fresh October morning, as only the north wind delivers free of charge to your doorstep. I'd left Mother Truczinski's flat in good time, stepped onto the street just as Matzerath was raising the roller-shutter in front of the shop door. I stood next to him as the green painted slats rattled upward, was engulfed by a cloud of grocery-store odors that had been pent up overnight inside the shop, and then received Matzerath's morning kiss. I crossed Labesweg before Maria had put in an appearance, casting a long shadow westward across the cobbled pavement, for to the right, in the east, over Max-Halbe-Platz, the sun was rising under its own power, using the same trick that Baron Münchhausen must have used as he pulled himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail.
Anyone who knew the greengrocer Greff as well as I did would have been equally surprised to see his display window and shop door still shuttered and shut at that hour. It's true that the past few years had rendered Greff increasingly peculiar. Still, up to now, he had always managed to open the store on time. Perhaps he's sick, Oskar thought, and quickly rejected the notion. For how could Greff, who as recently as last winter, though perhaps not as regularly as in past years, was still chopping holes in the Baltic Sea to bathe in, how could this man of Nature, despite a few signs of age, fall ill from one day to the next? The privilege of staying in bed was already being fully exercised by Greff's wife; I knew, moreover, that Greff scorned soft beds, that he preferred sleeping on field cots and hard plank beds. The illness didn't exist that could confine the greengrocer to his bed.
I took up a position outside the closed vegetable store, looked back at our shop, saw that Matzerath had gone back inside, and only then rapped out a few cautious beats on my drum, banking on Frau Greff's sensitive ear. Just a few sounds and the second window to the right of the shop door opened. La Greff in her nightgown, her hair up in rollers, clutching a pillow to her breast, appeared above the window box with its winter flowers. "Come on in, little Oskar. What are you waiting for, it's cold out there!"
By way of explanation I tapped one of my drumsticks against the metal slats shielding the display window.
"Albrecht!" she cried, "Where are you, Albrecht? What's going on?" Still calling out for her husband, she withdrew from the window. Doors slammed, I heard her rattling around in the shop, and shortly thereafter she started screaming. She was screaming in the cellar, but I couldn't see what she was screaming about, because the hatch they dumped potatoes through on delivery days, which were increasingly rare during the war years, was also closed tight. When I pressed my eye against the tarred boards of the hatch I saw that the electric light was burning in the cellar. And I could make out the top part of the cellar steps with something white lying on them, probably Frau Greff's pillow.
She must have dropped the pillow on the steps, for she was no longer in the cellar but screaming again in the shop and a moment later in the bedroom. She picked up the phone, screamed and dialed, then screamed into the phone; but Oskar couldn't understand what she was saying, all he could catch was accident and the address 24 Labesweg, which she screamed several times, then hung up and soon thereafter filled the window in her nightgown, without pillow but still in her rollers, screaming, poured herself and her entire double stockpile, with which I was well acquainted, onto the window box with the winter flowers, thrust both hands into the fleshy, pale red leaves, and screamed into the air so that the street seemed to narrow, and Oskar thought, Now La Greff's going to start singshattering glass; but not a pane broke. Windows were thrown open, neighbors appeared, women called out questions, men came running, Laubschad the clockmaker, still pulling on his jacket, old man Heilandt, Herr Reißberg, the tailor Libischewski, Herr Esch, from the nearest buildings, even Probst, not the barber, the one who sold coal, came with his son. Matzerath sailed up in his white shop apron while Maria stood in the doorway of the grocery store with little Kurt in her arms.
It was easy for me to submerge myself in the swarm of excited grownups and evade Matzerath, who was looking for me. He and the clockmaker Laubschad were the first to spring into action. They tried to enter the flat by way of the window. But La Greff wasn't letting anyone up, let alone in. Scratching, flailing, and biting all the while, she still found time to scream, more and more loudly, and to some extent intelligibly. They should wait for the ambulance to come, she'd already called, no one else needed to, she knew what to do in cases like this. They should mind their own business. Things were bad enough already. Curiosity, that's all it was, pure curiosity, you always learned who your friends were when disaster struck. And in the midst of all her hue and cry she must have spotted me in the crowd outside her window, for she called out to me, stretched out her bar
e arms toward me, having meanwhile shaken them free of men, and someone—Oskar still believes it was the clockmaker Laubschad—lifted me up, tried to hand me in over Matzerath's objections, and in fact Matzerath almost caught me just short of the flower box, but Lina Greff already had me in her grasp, pressed me to her warm gown, and stopped screaming, just wept in a high whimper, gasped in a high whimper for breath.
As the screams of Frau Greff had whipped the neighbors into a frenzy of shameless gesticulation, so now her thin, high whimpering transformed the throng below those winter flowers into a silent, embarrassed, foot-scraping mob that hardly dared face her tears, and turned all its hope, all its curiosity, and all its interest toward the eagerly anticipated ambulance.
Oskar found Frau Greff's whining less than pleasant himself. I tried to scoot lower so I wouldn't be so near those sounds of lamentation. And I did manage to let go of her neck and seat myself partly on the flower box. Oskar felt all too closely observed, for Maria stood in the shop door with the boy in her arms. So I gave up this perch as well, fully aware of the embarrassing position I was in, and, thinking only of Maria—I couldn't have cared less about the neighbors—I cast off from the Greffian coast, which trembled more than I cared for and always meant bed.
Lina Greff didn't notice my flight, or else she no longer had the strength to hold back that small body which for the longest time had so diligently served her as a substitute. Perhaps Lina also sensed that Oskar was slipping away from her forever, that with her screams a sound was born which on the one hand would become a wall, a sound barrier between the bedridden woman and the drummer boy, and on the other would shatter a wall that existed between Maria and me.