The Box

by Günter Grass

  But I couldn’t really believe in it, even when old Marie showed me the prints.

  Whether you believed or not, I’m sure it helped that all four of us Niedstrasse children were baptized, though we no longer believe in …

  Or only a bit …

  Like father: I remember at some point he was talking to Pat and me about religion, and he said, The only time I’m religious is when I’m sitting in the woods with paper and pencil, admiring what nature has come up with.

  That was his way, whether he sat down after shopping at the open-air market in Friedenau and sketched chopped-off cod heads or did drawings of mushrooms we’d picked on a hike through the Grunewald, back in the days when we were still a proper family.

  Remember when Taddel had just been christened and mother and father brought us real Indian outfits from America? They took a ship over, because mother was scared to fly, and they hit gale-force winds and almost sank.

  I remember those outfits—deerskin, with fringes.

  There was a story in the paper about that Italian ocean liner …

  And you, Lara, wore your Indian outfit the longest …

  There were even some deaths, because an enormous wave …

  You looked like Winnetou’s daughter, if he’d had a daughter …

  … a gaping hole just under the bridge …

  It was a luxury liner, the Michelangelo, I think …

  Just imagine, if Mariechen had snapped a picture of the ship with her box before it left port, the funnels, the bridge …

  At any rate, our family life was still perfectly normal.

  Every year we got a new nanny, so mother could have time to herself.

  First it was Heidi, then Margarete, then …

  And our father, when he wasn’t travelling, would sit up there under the eaves, happy as a clam, writing something for which he didn’t need old Marie this time, because it was all in dialogue.

  You want to bet she snapped pictures of him while he was writing?

  It was the play in which workers on Stalinallee and raggedy ancient Romans rehearse an uprising at the same time.

  He didn’t mind at all when Mariechen took pictures while he was writing.

  But some people booed when The Plebeians was produced onstage.

  When the pictures came out of the darkroom, the theatre looked as if it were going up in flames.

  He didn’t pay much attention to what the nitpicking reviewers wrote.

  It wasn’t long before he was up there again, working.

  Like that man Uwe, our neighbour in number 14. He sat under the eaves and wrote, too.

  A beanpole in glasses, he was.

  It bothered him no end that my big brother and I had such strong Berlin accents.

  He often sat with father on the terrace in front of the house and had one more beer, and then another.

  Those two talked and talked.

  Father could make him laugh. We never could, no matter what we did.

  There was a lot happening in our clinker house, guests all the time, including some crazy characters.

  One night, when father was off working on an election campaign, and you’d just been born, Taddel, the front door was set on fire.

  Apparently it was right-wing nuts, who’d used rags and petrol in a bottle.

  Things got pretty wild after that.

  At night we had cops in the house, guarding us. They were nice, in a quiet way.

  And then we went to France for the holidays. All of us, with a new nanny, Margarete. She was a minister’s daughter, I think, and she blushed whenever someone spoke directly to her.

  And father had only to say the word, and old Marie came along.

  Maybe she was his girlfriend.

  No way. Mother would have noticed.

  I hadn’t the faintest notion what was going on.

  At any rate, in Brittany, and especially on the long, sandy beach where we were staying, there were all these bunkers left over from the war. Some of them had tremendously thick walls. You could crawl into them—if you weren’t scared the way I was.

  But they stank of piss and shit.

  And from one of those bunkers, a huge dome of concrete with gun slits, hanging askew in the dunes, the two of us jumped off again and again. Jorsch, who weighed less than me, jumped further.

  That’s why father called me Little Feather. And I remember old Marie snapping picture after picture with her Agfa box as we jumped as far as we could into the dunes.

  She crouched in a hollow in the sand and aimed up at us.

  Those were instant shots that a normal camera, even the Agfa Special with its three settings, would never have captured, but old Marie’s box …

  … which happened to be a magic box and had some screws loose, which was why she could catch us in midair …

  But later, when Marie developed the photos in her darkroom and showed them to father, he ripped them up, because the box—so he told mother—had turned us into very young soldiers with enormous steel helmets on our heads and gas mask cases dangling round our necks.

  Those photos supposedly showed us—first you, brother, then me—taking a running start on the roof of the bunker, then jumping as far as we could, because the invasion had begun along that beach, which you could see in the background, with shells exploding and so forth, and because the bunker may have taken a direct hit, or because we were both scared shitless and wanted to get away, take off, make ourselves scarce, beat it back through the dunes, where …

  You can understand why father wouldn’t want to see that kind of thing: you two as seventeen-year-old soldiers in boots, wearing steel helmets, and possibly armed with submachine guns … He must have looked just like that during the war. He dreamed about it for a long time afterwards, moaned in his sleep …

  You’re going too far, Marie! he shouted. Probably pretty furious, because he ripped up all the photos.

  But Mariechen had a response for him: Who knows what the future holds. That kind of thing catches up with you before you know it.

  Otherwise our holidays on the beach where the Atlantic Wall used to be were loads of fun. We went swimming and diving. Father cooked all kinds of fish, including live shell-fish, and walked along the beach with you, Lara, at low tide.

  You remember?

  Looking for mussels …

  And mother practised dance steps. Without music. Just like that.

  Margarete looked after you, Taddel, because you were tiny. All I remember is that from the beginning you liked to play with a ball.

  You two are talking total nonsense. I mean that stuff about the bunker and the ripped-up photos. A complete fabrication, just like father’s … The only part that may have some truth to it is the part about me being ball-crazy before I could even walk.

  Later you collected pictures of Beckenbauer, Netzer, and god knows who else.

  That’s true. But the one I modelled myself on wasn’t little bowlegged Müller, even though he scored the most goals, but Wolfgang Overath. That story about the guardian angel, though, that’s something you came up with, Lara, or maybe someone else did. I’m sure old Marie would have shown me that photo once I’d left Berlin and was playing on the village team. I even persuaded father to play in our club with the older guys when we were missing a forward in a friendly match with the dockers’ team. I got him everything he needed—football boots, a strip. He looked totally cool on the field. At first he couldn’t trap the ball, but when we put him on the left wing he made a couple of good crosses. He was even applauded because he stuck it out till the second half. But then he was subbed. Later the Wilster newspaper had a big headline: New Left Wing! They meant it in a political sense, of course, because in those days our father was often accused of being a Red. And in the village a few diehards railed against him. But he didn’t score, though it may have looked that way in the photo Marie took of him. When our veterans were trailing four to nothing, she posted herself with her box behind the dockers’ goal, and from the photo
she took you would have sworn he got the consolation goal, heading it into the top left corner, but she must have pulled off some trick in her darkroom. Anyway, the score was four–one when he was subbed. He was limping and couldn’t go on. But he was still proud three days later when he showed me the photo of his headed goal. His left knee was badly swollen, because he was out of shape. He lay on the sofa with an ice pack on his knee and moaned, If only I hadn’t … I did feel rather guilty, because I’d talked him into it. Right, I said, that header of yours was super! even though the referee from Beidenfleth and everyone in the village was sure it was fat old Reimers from the savings bank who’d scored the goal. I’d like to know how old Marie pulled that one off with her weird box. That and my guardian angel. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were real? I could use one. But the picture with father’s header is still a mystery.

  Well, to this day he believes …

  So do you two, apparently, with all your talk of the wish box, magic box, miracle box! What’ll it be next? I have my doubts. Always did. My thinking was: another example of deceptive packaging. But I didn’t say a word to her, because I was never completely sure. At one point Mariechen took pictures of me in my room, with my big Overath poster as a backdrop. I had my Cologne FC scarf on for the picture-taking, and when she showed me the pictures, straight from the darkroom, it looked as though Wolfgang Overath had climbed out of the poster and was standing right next to me, putting the scarf round my neck, then shaking my hand. Too bad those photos have vanished. They were cool. They must have gone missing when I—well, you know why—left Berlin and moved in with father and his new wife in the village. I was the eldest then, and must have really irritated my new brothers, Jasper and Paulchen.

  I’m sure it was because everything was so screwed up in the family, on Niedstrasse …

  You just hung around, feeling like an extra wheel.

  Which was why our little Taddel needed a new family.

  That’s how it was. Absolutely. But earlier—all of you say so—everything was normal, but it only seemed that way. You two, my big brothers, whom I should have looked up to, were constantly fighting, and no one knew why. And you, Lara, whined incessantly. Only your mutt could cheer you up, and he was ugly as sin, but maybe I was a little jealous of him. At first I refused to believe that Joggi was taking the Underground back and forth across the city, changing trains. Our mother was often preoccupied with herself, and father sat up there under the eaves, hatching out his crazy stories, or he had to travel to other countries or go campaigning, so in the beginning, before I was old enough for school, I always pictured him hunting whales, because Wahl, the word for campaign …

  In the playground at the corner of Handjerystrasse you told the other children, My father’s fighting a whale, with a real harpoon.

  Well, none of my friends laughed at me, but at home everyone laughed, even our mother, who was getting her driver’s licence around that time, because our father absolutely refused …

  He still can’t, and won’t, learn.

  Our first car was a Peugeot.

  There was a lot going on in the city in those days, when father was away so often campaigning.

  You could see it on television: protests all the time, cops in riot gear with water cannons.

  I was three or maybe four by then. I’ve been told I was always asking questions. But no one gave me any real answers. Certainly not you, my big brothers. You had entirely different things on your minds. With Pat, I’m sure it was girls. With Jorsch, it was his technical stuff. And my father was off hunting whales—I couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. It didn’t help matters, either, that old Marie showed me at least a dozen pictures, saying, I made these just for you, little Taddel, so you’ll know what your father’s up to. They were a little blurred, she explained, because there were huge waves in the North Atlantic just then. Still, you could make him out clearly on the cutter, the spitting image, with his walrus moustache, though he was wearing a funny wool cap. He looked terrific. He stood in the bow holding an honest-to-goodness harpoon, taking aim—with his left hand to boot—at something you couldn’t make out. But in other photos you could see that he’d hurled the harpoon and hit his mark. The line was completely taut because the whale was pulling, and the cutter was slicing through the water. And so on, till in the last photo you could see the whale’s hump with the harpoon sticking in it. I would have been willing to bet I saw my father scramble onto the hump to tie the whale, which was not properly dead yet, to the cutter with a rope. An operation by no means free of risk with such big waves. But unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to keep any of the photos. They’re a secret, Taddel. No one’s supposed to know where your father is and what he’s up to, said old Marie.

  What a bizarre story.

  Sounds like Moby Dick, which I’m sure we saw on the goggle-box, and maybe you did, too.

  Pat and I knew what the election campaign was about, even if we didn’t grasp why it was so important to father that he couldn’t let it be. Speeches, speeches, always speeches.

  That was the second campaign he threw himself into. Four years before, when you’d just been born, Taddel, the campaign was for Brandt, who at the time was still mayor, and about the Social Democrats, and father painted a poster for them, with a rooster crowing EsPeeDee.

  Back then old Marie took entirely different pictures with her Agfa Special. As I was saying, it was before the election campaign that we went to France on holiday …

  But you couldn’t tell from looking at the box what it was capable of. It was a simple rectangular object with three eyes in front. One big one in the middle, two small ones above it on the right and left.

  Those were the Agfa Special’s brilliant finders, and the big one in the middle was the lens …

  That’s what I’m saying. And on top was a little window for framing the picture, but Mariechen never had to look. And on the lower right side was the shutter release and a crank to advance the film.

  And three stops and three distance settings.

  That’s about all there was to it. Nothing else to see. I held my ear to it—Mariechen told me I could. Nothing to be heard. It was simply a magic box, as you called it, Lara. Or a miracle box.

  For a long time I thought that was nothing but talk—the notion that the box could see things that never happened.

  That’s no big deal, Taddel. Nowadays, with everything computerized and impossible things becoming possible virtually …

  Back then we were wild about the Beatles …

  … and compared to that, the kinds of fantasy and special effects you see on TV nowadays …

  One time, when father was in London, he brought us the latest album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with Lovely Rita and When I’m Sixty-four …

  But old Marie’s magic box could hardly compete with Harry Potter, visually, I mean.

  All you wanted to listen to, Lara, was your stupid Heintje: Mammy dear, get me a pony …

  A pony’d be heaven to me.

  Or when dinosaurs come to life on the cinema screen …

  For us it was only the Beatles, until for Pat the Stones became number one, while I remained faithful to the Mop Tops till I was turned on to Jimi Hendrix, and then Frank Zappa …

  … and all done with computer animation … flying lizards and such.

  At any rate, we grew our hair long. Pat’s was curly, mine more straight, but soon longer than Lara’s.

  Besides, the stuff going on around us—in the city, I mean—was much more interesting. I was hardly ever bored any more, except on a Sunday now and then. We were too young to be there when the Shah of Iran visited Berlin and the pro-Shah demonstrators went after the students with pipes and roof slats. One student was killed, shot by a cop, but on any surface we could find, Jorsch and I spray-painted Make Love, Not War, and wished we could be downtown where all the action was.

  And old Marie caught us in the act of wishing and shot pictures that showed us brothers marching down the Kudamm
arm in arm with Rudi Dutschke, a Chilean, and a few other types. Sure, because we were against war, obviously.

  Certainly against the one in Vietnam.

  But the pictures of us right at the head of the procession, yelling Ho-ho-ho or something, aimed at the newspaper publisher Springer, were only wish photos, like Lara’s wish photos or the ones old Marie showed me later. There were a few of me sitting in a car I’d assembled myself that could drive normally but could also fly. It looked like the model I’d constructed from bits and pieces, half Land Rover, half helicopter. But the pictures showed my model full-size … In all the prints you could see me piloting it high above the roofs of Friedenau, swooping to the left, then to the right. Below my multipurpose-mobile, on the left, you can make out the tower of the Friedenau city hall. The weekly open-air market is set up in front of the building, with the fat fishwife and the loony florist, both of them waving to me. You can also see Niedstrasse with our clinker house … What is it, Taddel?

  Just a simple question: How did those totally crazy aerial photos come about?

  I’ll give you a simple answer: in my room—Pat had his own, which was always neat as a pin, because mother had had a partition put up to separate us squabblers, as she called us—in my room I had all kinds of technical junk, and metal toys I’d received for various birthdays, and I’d constructed a car that could fly. When old Marie saw me fooling around with that flying-mobile in my chaos, as father called my workshop, she exclaimed, Make a wish, Jorsch, quick, make a wish, and in an instant she had her Agfa Special at waist height and aimed, and then she stretched out on her back and pointed it in the air, where there was nothing to see, and snapped a whole roll of film. Later, with her box she even smuggled me into a photo of the Beatles, because that was my dearest wish: I’m playing the drums in place of Ringo Starr, dressed in those cool rags.

  She was a sly one with that box of hers.

  I saw it more as miraculous.