by Günter Grass
When Bruno left the room with the breakfast tray, with the yolk-yellow folding rule next to the revolting, natural-colored strawberry jam, he glued his eye to the peephole in the door from the corridor for one last look—his gaze made me feel as old as the hills, until he finally left me alone with my four foot height.
So Oskar's that tall! Almost too tall for a dwarf, a gnome, or a midget. What was the altitude of my Roswitha, La Raguna's summit? What height did Master Bebra, descended from Prince Eugen, choose to maintain? Nowadays I could even look down on Kitty and Felix. Whereas all those I mentioned once looked down in friendly envy on Oskar, who until his twenty-first year had measured a mere ninety-four centimeters, or three foot one.
It wasn't till that stone hit me on the back of the head at Matzerath's burial in Saspe Cemetery that I began to grow.
Oskar says stone. So it seems I've decided to expand my report on events at the cemetery.
After I had discovered, by a little game, that "Should I or shouldn't I?" no longer existed for me, but only "I should, I must, I will!"—I un-slung my drum, tossed it and the sticks into Matzerath's grave, decided to grow, suffered an immediate roaring in my ears, and was only then hit on the back of the head by a stone about the size of a walnut, which my son Kurt had flung with all his four-and-a-half-year-old might. Though not surprised by the blow—I'd sensed that my son had something in mind for me—I still plunged into Matzerath's grave right behind my drum. Old man Heilandt pulled me from the pit matter-of-factly with an old man's dry grip but left my drum and drumsticks below, and, once my nosebleed was evident, laid the back of my neck against the iron of the pickax. The nosebleed soon abated, as we know, but my growth pro gressed, albeit at such a slow pace that only Crazy Leo, fluttering and light as a bird, noticed and proclaimed it with a loud screech.
So much for this addendum, which is basically superfluous; for my growth began before the stone was thrown and I fell into Matzerath's grave. As far as Maria and Herr Fajngold were concerned, however, from its onset there was only one reason for my growth, which they termed an illness: the stone on the back of the head, my fall into the grave. Maria spanked little Kurt right there at the cemetery. I felt sorry for Kurt, for he may well have meant to help with his stone, to speed up my growth. Perhaps he wanted a real grownup father at last, or at least a substitute for Matzerath; for he has never acknowledged or honored the father in me.
In the course of my growth, which went on for nearly a year, there were plenty of male and female doctors who confirmed that the stone and my unfortunate fall were to blame, who stated and entered into my medical records: Oskar Matzerath is deformed because a stone hit him in the back of the head—and so on and so forth.
At this point let us recall my third birthday. What did the grownups say about the actual start of my story? At the age of three Oscar Matzerath fell down the cellar steps onto the concrete floor. His growth was cut short by this fall, and so on and so forth....
One recognizes in these explanations mankind's reasonable desire to provide a rational basis for every miracle. Oskar has to confess that he too examines miracles from all angles before casting them aside as totally implausible fantasies.
Returning from Saspe Cemetery, we found new lodgers in Mother Truczinski's flat. A Polish family of eight populated the kitchen and both rooms. They were nice people and offered to take us in till we found something else, but Herr Fajngold, who objected to such mass overcrowding, suggested we move back into his bedroom and said he would make do temporarily with the living room. Maria opposed that in turn. She found it improper, in her newly widowed state, to share such close quarters with an unattached gentleman. Fajngold, who was unaware at the time that he no longer had a wife named Luba and a family, and constantly sensed his energetic wife looking over his shoulder, could see Maria's point. Both propriety and his wife Luba spoke against that plan, but he could still turn the cellar over to us. He even helped us rearrange the storeroom, but wouldn't let me move into the cellar with the others. Because I was ill, so miserably ill, a temporary cot was set up for me in the living room beside my poor mama's piano.
It was hard to find a doctor. Most of the doctors had left the city along with the troops, since the West Prussian Insurance Fund had already been transferred westward in January, and many doctors had trouble conceiving of people as true patients anymore. After a long search, Herr Fajngold managed to scare up a female doctor from Elbing who was amputating limbs at the Helene Lange School, where wounded soldiers from the Wehrmacht and the Red Army lay side by side. She promised to come around, and four days later she did, sat down by my sickbed, smoked three or four cigarettes in a row as she examined me, and fell asleep while still on the fourth.
Herr Fajngold was afraid to wake her. Maria poked her timidly. But the doctor didn't stir till the cigarette burned down and singed her left forefinger. She immediately stood up, stamped out the butt on the carpet, said tersely and irritably, "Sorry. Haven't slept in three weeks. Trying to get kids trucked in from East Prussia on the ferry at Kásemark. No go. Troops only. Four thousand kids. Blown to bits." Then she patted my growing kid's cheek as tersely as she'd told of the kids blown to bits, stuck a new cigarette in her mouth, rolled up her left sleeve, pulled an ampoule from her case, and said to Maria as she gave herself a pickup shot in the arm, "Can't say what's wrong with the boy. Got to get him to a clinic. But not here. Be sure you get away, and head west. His knee, wrist, and shoulder joints are swollen. His head is bound to start swelling too. Make cold compresses. I'll leave you a few pills in case he can't sleep."
I liked this terse doctor who didn't know what was wrong with me and said so. Over the coming weeks Maria and Herr Fajngold made numerous cold compresses, which helped, but couldn't keep the joints of my knees, wrists, and shoulders from continuing to swell painfully, along with my head. My expanding head scared Maria and Herr Fajn-gold the most. The pills they gave me ran out all too quickly. Herr Fajn-gold started charting the curve of my fever with a ruler and pencil, but wound up experimenting as he did so, recording my temperature in a boldly executed graph, measuring it five times daily with a thermometer he obtained on the black market in exchange for synthetic honey, a graph which then appeared on Herr Fajngold's tables as a shockingly jagged mountain chain—I thought of the Alps, the snowy peaks of the Andes—while in reality my temperature wasn't half that adventurous: in the morning it was usually thirty-eight-point-one centigrade, or one hundred point five, by the evening it would rise to thirty-nine; the highest point it reached during the period of my growth was thirty-nine point four, or one hundred two point seven. I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; it was like riding a carousel I wanted to get off but couldn't. I was sitting with a lot of little children in fire engines, scooped-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, round and round and round, wanting to get off but unable to. All the little children were crying, wanted out of the fire engines and scooped-out swans as much as I did, wanted off the cats, dogs, stags, and pigs, wanted to end the carousel ride but couldn't. The Good Lord stood beside the carousel owner and kept treating us to yet another ride. And we prayed: "Oh, Our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change and like watching us ride the carousel, that you enjoy proving to us that the world is round and round. Please put your purse away, cry stop, halt, fertig, shop's closed, everybody off, basta, stoi—we poor little kids are dizzy, they've trucked four thousand of us to Käsemark on the Vistula, but we can't cross, because your carousel, your carousel..."
But the dear Lord Our Father, the carousel owner, smiled as the good book says, let another coin hop from his purse, and four thousand little children, with Oskar among them, were whirled about in fire engines and scooped-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, and each time my stag—I still think I was on a stag—carried me past Our Father the carousel owner, he had a different face: there was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer's teeth; there was Goethe, prince o
f poets, plucking coins from his finely embroidered purse, each one stamped with the profile of Our Father, then Rasputin drunk, then Herr von Goethe sober. A little craziness with Rasputin, then for reason's sake a little Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe. The masses in revolt with Rasputin, calendar mottoes from Goethe ... and finally someone bent down—not because the fever abated, but because some soothing presence always bends down in a fever—Herr Fajngold bent down and stopped the carousel. He turned off the fire engine, swan, and stag, cashed in Rasputin's coins, sent Goethe down to the Mothers, sent four thousand dizzy little children floating off from Käsemark across the Vistula into the kingdom of heaven—and lifted Oskar from his sickbed, then sat him on a cloud of Lysol; that is to say, he disinfected me.
It began because of the lice, then it became a habit. He first discovered lice on little Kurt, then on me, Maria, and himself. The lice were probably left behind by the Kalmuck who took Matzerath from Maria. The cries Herr Fajngold let out when he discovered the lice! He summoned his wife and children, suspected that the whole family was infested with vermin, traded synthetic honey and rolled oats for a wide variety of disinfectants, and began to administer a daily dose of disinfectants to himself, his whole family, little Kurt, Maria, and me, as well as my cot. He rubbed, sprayed, and powdered us. And while he sprayed, powdered, and rubbed, my fever blossomed, his words flowed, and I learned of whole boxcars filled with carbolic acid, chlorine, and Lysol, which he had sprayed, strewn, and sprinkled when he was still disinfector at Treblinka, where every afternoon at two, as Disinfector Mariusz Fajngold, he sprinkled a daily dose of Lysol over the streets of the camp, the barracks, the shower rooms, the cremation ovens, the bundled clothes, over those who were waiting, having not yet showered, over those lying still, having already showered, over all that emerged from the ovens, over all yet to enter the ovens. And he listed the names, for he knew every one: he told me of Bilauer, who on one of the hottest days in August told him to sprinkle the camp streets of Treblinka with kerosene rather than Lysol. Herr Fajngold did so. And Bilauer had the match. And old Zev Kurland from the ŻOB administered oaths to the lot of them. And the engineer Galewski broke into the arsenal. And Bilauer shot Hauptsturmführer Kutner. And Sztulbach and Warynski took care of Zisenis. And the others handled the Trawniki men. And still others cut open the fence and died. But Unterscharführer Schöpke, who always made little jokes while taking a group to the showers, stood at the camp gate firing. But it was no use, they all fell on him at once: Adek Kave, Motel Levit, and Henoch Lerer; Hersz Rotblat and Letek Zagiel were there too, and Tosias Baran with his Debora. And Lolek Begelmann cried out, "Get Fajngold too, before the planes arrive." Herr Fajngold was still waiting for his wife Luba. But even then she no longer came when he called. So they seized him left and right. On the left Jakub Gelernter and on the right Mordechaj Szwarcbard. And running before him little Dr. Atlas, who had advised sprinkling Lysol liberally at Treblinka and later in the woods near Vilna, who maintained: Lysol is more important than life! And Herr Fajngold could confirm this, for he had sprinkled the dead with Lysol, not just one corpse, no, but the dead, why bother with numbers, the dead. And named names for so long it grew tedious, since for me, floating in Lysol, the question of the life and death of a hundred thousand names was less important than the question of whether life, and if not life, then death, had been disinfected in time and thoroughly enough with Herr Fajngold's disinfectants.
But my fever waned, and April arrived. Then my fever rose again, the carousel spun round once more, and Herr Fajngold sprinkled Lysol on the living and the dead. Then my fever waned again, and April drew to a close. By early May my neck grew shorter and my chest grew larger, pressing upward till I could rub Oskar's chin against my collarbone without lowering my head. Then more fever and Lysol. And I heard Maria whispering words that floated in Lysol: "If only he don't grow crooked. If only he don't wind up with a hump. If only he don't get water on the brain!"
Herr Fajngold consoled Maria, however, recalling stories of people he'd known who managed to make something of themselves in spite of a hump and water on the brain. He told of a certain Roman Frydrych who had emigrated to Argentina with his hump and opened a sewing-machine business that later expanded into a large concern and made a real name for itself.
The story of Frydrych the successful hunchback did little to console Maria, but it catapulted its narrator, Herr Fajngold, into such a state of enthusiasm that he decided to give our grocery store a facelift. In mid-May, shortly after the war ended, new merchandise showed up in the shop. The first sewing machines appeared, along with spare parts, while groceries remained for some time and helped ease the transition. Idyllic times. Almost no one ever paid in cash. Things were traded and re-traded, and synthetic honey, rolled oats, the remaining packets of Dr. Oetker's Baking Powder, sugar, flour, and margarine were transformed into bicycles, the bicycles and spare parts into electric motors, these into work tools, the tools into furs, and the furs, as if by magic, Herr Fajn-gold transformed into sewing machines. Little Kurt made himself use ful at this trade-and-retrade game, brought in customers, helped make deals, adjusted to the new line much more quickly than Maria. It was almost like the old days with Matzerath. Maria stood behind the counter, served those of the old customers who were still around, and tried to decipher the wishes of the newly arrived customers with her painfully limited Polish. Little Kurt was a gifted linguist. Little Kurt was all over the place. Herr Fajngold could count on little Kurt. Though not quite five, little Kurt became an expert, picking out high-quality Singer and Pfaff sewing machines with ease from a hundred poor to mediocre models being offered on the black market on Bahnhofstraße; and Herr Fajngold valued little Kurt's knowledge. When, toward the end of May, my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek came on foot from Bissau to Langfuhr by way of Brentau to visit us, and plopped herself down on the sofa breathing heavily, Herr Fajngold praised little Kurt to the skies and extolled Maria too. When he told my grandmother the story of my illness in lengthy detail, pointing out again and again the efficacy of his disinfectants, he found words of praise for Oskar too, because I'd been so calm and well-behaved, and never once cried throughout the whole ordeal.
My grandmother wanted kerosene, because Bissau had no electricity. Fajngold told her about his experience with kerosene in the camp at Treblinka, and about his multifarious duties as camp disinfector, had Maria fill two liter bottles with kerosene, added a package of synthetic honey and a broad assortment of disinfectants, and listened, nodding absently, as my grandmother reported on all the things that had burned to the ground in Bissau and Bissau-Abbau in the course of the fighting. She also described the damage in Viereck, which was now called Firoga again. And Bissau was once more Bysewo, as before the war. As for Ehlers, who was once Party leader of the Local Farm Association in Ramkau and very able, who had married her brother's son's wife Hedwig, whose Jan had stayed at the post office, the farmhands had hanged him outside his office. And almost hanged Hedwig too, because she'd switched as a wife from a Polish hero to the Party leader of the Local Farm Association, and Stephan had been a lieutenant and Marga had been in the League of German Girls.
"Well," said my grandmother, "they couldn't hurt Stephan no more, cause he was killed up in the Arctic. They wanted to take Marga away and stick her in a camp. But Vinzent started jawing and talking like he never did before. So now Hedwig is with Marga, helping in the fields. All that talking near wore Vinzent out, and he might not last much longer. As for Granny, her heart's bad and everything else, her head too, where some oaf whacked her because he thought he ought."
Thus the lamentations of Anna Koljaiczek; stroking my growing head and holding her own, she delivered a few meditative insights: "That's Kashubes for you, little Oskar. Always getting hit on the head. But you are going where things are better now, and leaving old Granny behind. Because Kashubes don't move around a lot, they always stay put, and hold their heads still for others to whack, because we
ain't really Polish and we ain't really German, and Kashubes ain't good enough for Germans or Pollacks. They want everything cut and dried."
My grandmother laughed loudly, stowed the kerosene bottles, the package of synthetic honey, and the disinfectants under her four skirts, which, in spite of the extreme violence of military, political, and world-historical events, had lost none of their potato color.
As she was about to leave, Herr Fajngold asked her to wait a moment, since he wanted to introduce his wife Luba and the rest of his family to her, and when Frau Luba failed to appear, Anna Koljaiczek said, "Well, let her be then. I'm always calling out, Agnes, that's my daughter, come help your old ma wring out the wash, and she don't come, just like your Luba. And Vinzent, that's my brother, goes out sick or not in the dark at night and wakes up the neighbors, crying out for his son Jan that was at the post office and got killed."
She was standing in the door, pulling on her scarf, when I called out from my bed, "Babka, Babka!" which means Grandma, Grandma. And she turned, lifted her skirts slightly, as if she wanted to let me in under them, take me with her, when she probably recalled the kerosene bottles, the synthetic honey, and the disinfectants already occupying that space—and left, left without me, left without Oskar.
At the beginning of June the first convoys headed west. Maria said nothing, but I could see she too was taking leave of the furniture, the shop, the flat, taking leave of the graves on both sides of Hindenburgallee and the mound in Saspe Cemetery.
Sometimes in the evening, before she went down to the cellar with little Kurt, she would sit beside my cot at my poor mama's piano, hold ing the harmonica in her left hand and trying to accompany her little tune with one finger of her right hand.
The music made Herr Fajngold sad, he asked Maria to stop, yet the moment she lowered the harmonica and started to close the piano, he would ask her to play a little more.