by Günter Grass
As might be expected, the run-of-the-mill art students didn't know what to do with us, made her arms too long, my head too big, falling prey to the beginner's standard error: they couldn't get us the right size and shape.
It was only when the Goat and Raskolnikov discovered us that paintings were produced worthy of Oskar and the Muse.
She's sleeping, I'm startling her awake: Faun and Nymph.
I'm crouching, she's leaning over me with small, always slightly shivering breasts, stroking my hair: Beauty and the Beast.
She's lying there, I'm playing between her long legs with the mask of a horned horse: the Lady and the Unicorn.
All this in the style of the Goat or Raskolnikov, sometimes in color, then in elegant grays, sometimes detailed with a fine brush, then again, in the Goat's manner, splattered on with the spatula of genius, sometimes hinting at the mystery surrounding Ulla and Oskar; and then it was Raskolnikov who found his way, with our help, to surrealism: Oskar's face became the honey-yellow dial of our grandfather clock; roses bloomed in mechanical profusion from my hump and were picked by Ulla; Ulla was smiling above and long-legged below as I sat in her cut-open body, crouching between her spleen and liver, leafing through a picture book. They liked to costume us too, transforming Ulla into a columbine and me into a mournful, white-faced mime. Finally it fell to Raskolnikov—they called him that because he was always talking about crime and punishment, guilt and atonement—to paint the truly great picture: I sat on Ulla's lightly downed left thigh—naked, a deformed child—she was the Madonna; Oskar held still for Jesus.
This painting, entitled Madonna 49, was later shown at several exhibitions, and also proved effective as a poster, thus reaching the respectable bourgeois eyes of my Maria and initiating a domestic quarrel, yet nevertheless was purchased for a tidy sum by a Rhenish industrialist—and no doubt still hangs today in the conference room of some high-rise office building influencing members of the board.
I was amused by all the gifted shenanigans occasioned by my hump and proportions. In addition, given the high demand for our services, Ulla and I were taking in two marks fifty an hour each for posing together in the nude. Ulla enjoyed being a model too. Lankes the painter, with his big, slaphappy hand, treated her better once she started bringing money home on a regular basis, and hit her only when his abstract paintings required the angry hand of genius. Even though, speaking purely in visual terms, he never used her as a model, she was his Muse too in a sense, for only the slaps he gave her could lend his painter's hand its true creative power.
In fact Ulla's lachrymose delicacy, which was in reality the indestructibility of an angel, made me feel like slapping her myself at times; but I was always able to control these urges, and whenever I felt inclined toward the whip, would invite her to a pastry shop, or, with a tinge of snobbery engendered by my intercourse with artists, take her for a stroll along a crowded and gaping Königsallee, a tall, rare plant set off against my own special proportions, or buy her lilac stockings and pink gloves.
It was a different story with Raskolnikov, who, without actually approaching her, knew her most intimately. He had her pose on the turntable with her legs spread wide, yet did not paint, but sat instead a few steps away on a stool and, staring at her private parts, whispered urgently of guilt and atonement till the Muse's sex grew moist, opened, and Raskolnikov too, merely by speaking and staring, achieved the release he sought, sprang from his stool to his easel, and set to work with grandiose sweeps of his brush on Madonna 49.
Raskolnikov sometimes stared at me as well, but for different reasons. He felt I was missing something. He spoke of a vacuum between my hands, had me hold a series of objects one after another, never at a loss for ideas, given his surrealistic imagination. He armed Oskar-Jesus with a pistol and had me aim at the Madonna. I had to hold out an hourglass toward her, then a convex mirror that distorted her terribly. I held scissors, fish bones, telephone receivers, death's-heads, model airplanes, tanks, steamships in both hands, and still—as Raskolnikov quickly saw—the vacuum was not filled.
Oskar dreaded the day when the painter would bring the object that alone of all objects was made to be held by me. When he finally brought the drum, I cried out, "No!"
Raskolnikov: "Take the drum, Oskar, I know who you are."
I, trembling: "Never again. All that has ended."
He, darkly: "Nothing ends, all returns, guilt, atonement, guilt again."
I, with my last strength: "Oskar has repented, spare him the drum, I'll hold anything, but not the drum."
I wept as the Muse Ulla leaned over me, and blinded by tears could not prevent her kiss, could not prevent the terrible kiss of the Muse—and all of you who have ever been kissed by the Muse will surely understand that, branded by that kiss, Oskar took up the drum at once, the drum he had rejected years before and buried in the sand of Saspe Cemetery.
But I didn't drum. I simply posed and was painted—which was bad enough—as a drumming Jesus on the bare left thigh of Madonna 49.
That's how Maria saw me on the poster announcing an art exhibition. Unbeknownst to me, she went to the exhibition and must have stood before the painting a long time, her anger building, for when she took me to task, she struck me with my son Kurt's school ruler. Having found a well-paid job in a large delicatessen some months earlier, first as a salesclerk and soon thereafter as cashier, given her talents, Maria was no longer an Eastern refugee trading on the black market, but now a well-established citizen of the West, and could thus call me, with some conviction, a pig, a pimp, and a total degenerate, and scream that she wanted nothing more to do with the filthy money I was earning with such smutty filth, or with me either.
Though Maria soon retracted this last statement, and two weeks later restored a not inconsiderable portion of the money I was earning modeling to the household budget, I still decided to stop living with her, her sister Guste, and my son Kurt, and to move far away, to Hamburg or perhaps to the seashore again, but Maria, who had quickly accepted my plans to leave, persuaded me, backed up by her sister Guste, to look for a room near them and little Kurt, or at least in Düsseldorf.
The Hedgehog
Built up, chopped down, wiped out, hauled back, dismembered, remembered: Oskar first learned the art of drumming up the past as a lodger. It wasn't just the room, the Hedgehog, Herr Münzer, and the coffin warehouse in the courtyard that helped—Sister Dorothea offered a special stimulus.
Do you know Parsifal? I don't know it very well either. The only thing I recall is the story about the three drops of blood in the snow. That story seems true because it fits my case so well. It probably fits anyone who gets an idea. But Oskar is writing about himself, so it's almost suspiciously well tailored to him.
I was still serving Art, letting myself be painted in blue, green, yellow, and earth tones, letting them blacken me in charcoal and place me before backgrounds, fructifying the Art Academy in collaboration with the Muse Ulla for the entire winter semester—we gave our Muses' blessing to the summer semester that followed as well—but the snow had already fallen which received those three drops of blood that transfixed my gaze as they did that of the fool Parsifal, of whom the fool Oskar knows so little that he can effortlessly identify with him.
My clumsy image will be clear enough to you: the snow is the uniform of a hospital nurse, the red cross, which most nurses, including Sister Dorothea, display in the center of the pin that closes their collar, shone like the three drops of blood. There I sat and couldn't take my eyes off it.
But before I could sit in the former bathroom of Zeidler's flat, I had to look for that room. The winter semester had just ended, students were giving up their rooms, heading home for Easter, and were either coming back or gone for good. My colleague Ulla, the Muse, who helped me search, went along with me to Student Administration. There I was given several addresses and a written recommendation from the Art Academy.
Before looking at flats, I visited Korneff the stonecutter, whom I h
adn't seen in some time, in his workshop on Bittweg. I made the trip in part because I liked him, but I was also looking for work during the semester holidays; the small number of hours I'd set up to pose privately for a few professors, with and without Ulla, would barely feed me for the next six weeks—and I had to come up with enough money to rent a furnished room too.
I found Korneff unchanged, with two nearly healed boils on his neck and one still ripening, bending over a slab of Belgian granite that he had smoothed and was now providing with hatching, blow by blow. We chatted a while and I played with a few lettering chisels by way of a hint, looking around for benched slabs, cut and polished, ready for their carved inscriptions. Two standard meter-high stones, one of shell limestone and another of Silesian marble for a double grave, looked as if they'd been sold by Korneff and were crying out for an expert letter carver. I was happy for the stonecutter, who'd had a rough time after the currency reform. Yet even back then we'd consoled ourselves with the wise observation that no matter how life-affirming the currency reform was, it couldn't keep people from dying and ordering gravestones.
That proved to be true. People were dying and buying again. And the currency reform brought in new business: butchers had their shops lined inside and out with colored Lahn marble, and many a bank or department store removed damaged squares of sandstone or tufa from its facade and had them replaced to make it look respectable again.
I praised Korneff's industry, asked him if he was able to handle all the work. He was evasive at first, then admitted he sometimes wished he had four hands, and finally proposed I work half days at his place doing lettering; he paid forty-five pfennigs a letter for inscriptions in limestone, fifty-five a letter for granite and diorite, and sixty and seventy-five pfennigs for lettering in relief.
I started right in on shell limestone and was soon back in the swing of things, attacked the letters, incised in cuneiform script: Aloys Küfer— b. 3 Sept. 1887 — d. 10 June 1946—finished all thirty-one letters and numbers inside of four hours and received as I left, per scale, thirteen marks and ninety-five pfennigs.
That was about a third of the monthly rent I thought I could afford. I didn't want to pay more than forty marks, nor could I, for Oskar felt duty bound to continue contributing, at least modestly, to the household finances in Bilk, for Maria, the boy, and Guste Köster.
Of the four addresses provided by the friendly staff of the Academy's Student Administration, my first choice was Zeidler, at Jülicher Straße 7, because I would be near the Art Academy.
Early in May, on a hot, hazy Lower Rhenish day, I set out, provided with sufficient cash. Maria had brushed my suit and I looked quite presentable. Zeidler's three-room flat was on the third floor of a building with a crumbling stucco facade hidden by a dusty chestnut tree. Since almost half of Jülicher Straße was in ruins, one could hardly speak of buildings to either side or across the way. A huge mound to the left, shot through with rusty T-beams and sprouting greenery and buttercups, suggested the prior existence of a four-story building. To the right a partially destroyed property had been restored as far as the second floor. But the funds had apparently run out. The facade of polished black Swedish granite was badly cracked and had gaps here and there which were still in need of repair. The inscription Schornemann's Funeral Parlor lacked several letters, I don't recall which ones. Fortunately the two deeply carved palm branches decorating the still mirror-smooth granite remained intact, and helped lend the damaged shop a halfway pious air.
The coffin warehouse of this seventy-five-year-old firm was in the courtyard, and was often worth viewing from my room, which looked out to the back. I watched the workers roll a few coffins out of the shed in good weather and place them on wooden sawhorses, then use various polishing agents to brighten up the caskets, which tapered toward the foot in such familiar fashion.
Zeidler himself opened the door when I rang. Short, squat, breathless, and hedgehoggy, he stood in the doorway wearing thick glasses, the lower half of his face hidden beneath fluffy shaving lather, holding the brush to his cheek with his right hand, looked like an alcoholic and sounded like a Westphalian.
"If you don't like the room, just say so. I'm shaving and I've still got to wash my feet."
Zeidler didn't stand on ceremony. I looked at the room. I could hardly like it, since it consisted of a nonfunctioning bathroom half-tiled in turquoise green, with the rest uneasily wallpapered. Nevertheless I didn't say I didn't like it. Disregarding Zeidler's drying lather and unwashed feet, I rapped on the bathtub and asked if we couldn't just as well dispense with it, since it had no drainpipe in the first place.
Smiling, Zeidler shook his gray hedgehog head and tried in vain to whip up more lather with his brush. That was his reply, whereupon I declared myself willing to take the room and tub for forty marks a month.
When we stood once more in the dimly lit, tubular corridor, lined with several doors painted various colors, some partly glassed, I asked who else lived in Zeidler's flat.
"Wife and lodgers."
I tapped on the frosted-glass door in the middle of the corridor, which could be reached with a single step from the entrance to the flat.
"The nurse lives there. But that's no concern of yours. You'll never see her anyway. She only sleeps here, and sometimes not even that."
I won't say Oskar gave a start at the word "nurse." He nodded, didn't dare ask about the other rooms, knew about his own room with tub; it was on the right, behind the door at the end of the hall.
Zeidler tapped me on the lapel: "You can cook in your room if you've got an alcohol stove. And use the kitchen now and then for all I care, if the stove's not too high for you."
That was his first allusion to Oskar's stature. He took a cursory glance at my letter of recommendation from the Art Academy, which did its job, since it was signed by the director, Professor Reuser. I responded to all his do's and don'ts with yes and amen, noted to myself that the kitchen was on the left next to my room, and promised to have my laundry done elsewhere, since he was worried the steam might damage the bathroom wallpaper, a promise I could make with some assurance, for Maria had agreed to do my washing.
I should have left then, fetched my luggage, filled out the change-of-residence forms. But Oskar didn't do so. He couldn't bear to leave the flat. For no reason at all, he asked his future landlord where the toilet was. The latter gestured with his thumb toward a plywood door reminiscent of the war years and their aftermath. As Oskar prepared to make immediate use of the toilet, Zeidler, starting to itch from the lather now crumbling on his face, switched on the light in the little room.
Once within I was irked, for Oskar felt no need at all to go. I waited stubbornly, however, till I could pass a little water, trying hard not to wet the seat or tile floor in the cramped space, which was difficult, given my insufficient bladder pressure, and because the wooden seat was so near. My handkerchief dabbed traces from the worn-down wood; the soles of Oskar's shoes had to efface a few unfortunate drops on the tiles.
In spite of the unpleasantly hardened soap on his face, Zeidler had not sought a shaving mirror and hot water in my absence. He was waiting in the corridor, seemed to have taken a fancy to the joker he sensed in me. "You're really something. Haven't even signed the lease and already using the john!"
He approached me with a cold, crusty shaving brush, probably planning some silly joke, but then, without pestering me, opened the door leading out of the flat. While Oskar backed past the Hedgehog into the stairway, keeping an eye on him as he did so, I noticed that the door to the toilet was located between the kitchen door and the one with frosted glass, behind which, from time to time, on an irregular basis, a hospital nurse bedded down for the night.
When Oskar rang again at Zeidler's flat late that afternoon with his luggage, including the new tin drum given to him by Raskolnikov, painter of madonnas, and brandished his change-of-residence papers, a freshly shaved Hedgehog, who by now had no doubt washed his feet as well, ushered me int
o his living room.
It smelled of cold cigar smoke. Of cigars lighted several times. To which was added the effluvia of several possibly quite valuable carpets piled on top of one another and rolled up in the corners of the room. It also smelled of old calendars. I saw no calendars, however; the smell came from the carpets. Strangely enough, the comfortable leather-upholstered chairs had no smell at all. That disappointed me, for Oskar, who had never sat in a leather chair, nonetheless had so vivid a notion of the redolent leather on which one sat that he suspected the leather on Zeidler's armchairs and side chairs of being artificial.
In one of these smooth, odorless, and, it later turned out, genuine leather armchairs sat Frau Zeidler. She wore a gray, sportily tailored outfit that didn't quite fit her. She'd let her skirt scoot up over her knees and showed three fingers' worth of slip. Since she didn't adjust her dress and—it seemed to Oskar—had been crying, I didn't risk introducing myself and greeting her. My bow remained silent and was already turning in its final stages toward Zeidler, who introduced me to his wife by jerking his thumb toward her and briefly clearing his throat.
The room was large and square. The dark shadow of the chestnut tree in front of the building enlarged and diminished the space by turns. I left my suitcase and drum by the door and carried my registration papers over to Zeidler, who was standing between the windows. Oskar could not hear his own footsteps, for he was walking on four—I counted them later—superimposed carpets, each smaller than the one beneath, their fringed or fringeless borders of differing hues forming a multicolored staircase, the lowest step of which began near the wall in reddish brown and disappeared under the next, more or less green step, covered for the most part with furniture such as the heavy sideboard, the display cabinet filled with liqueur glasses, dozens of them, and the spacious marriage bed. Even the border of the third carpet, in a blue pattern, lay in full view from corner to corner. To the fourth carpet, a wine-red velour, fell the task of supporting the round pull-out table protected by oilcloth, and four leather-covered chairs with evenly spaced metal studs.