by Günter Grass
Such things happen everywhere.
To me, to Lara also, and to you as well.
But such break-ups are always awful when children are involved, aren’t they, Lena?
It was hardest on me.
And not on me?
On you, too, Taddel, I’m sure. But these days I tell myself, Let it go. I survived. The rest of you did, too. Let’s talk about that old house instead. I think I still remember the floor tiles in the main room, maybe because I learned to crawl on them or took my first steps. They were glazed in yellow and green, and in the area where the parish overseer had had his long, massive table, round which the village elders would gather, the tiles were so worn that only a little of the bright glaze was left. My papa, who always loved old houses, told Mieke and Rieke, The elders would sit round this table smoking their pipes and debating urgent measures that had to be taken, such as raising or repairing the dikes, because the area was always threatened by floods, which drowned many people and animals. And then he told them about the exorbitant tribute the marsh farmers and Elbe fishermen had to pay the Danes in the form of grain, bacon, and salt herring. Unfortunately I don’t remember the times you came to visit, Lara, with your little dog. Nor do I have the faintest memory of when my papa bought a horse for Lara, and also partially for us. He bought it from a real gypsy, Mieke and Rieke said, with a handshake, a horse that was three years old. But Mieke, my big sister, didn’t want to ride. No way. So when Lara wasn’t visiting, the horse just stood in its stall or was out to pasture on a farm, feeling sad. Or do you think horses can’t be sad? You see. I didn’t learn to ride until much later, long after the great love between my mama and my papa was over and we were living in town. But then, just like you, Lara, I became horse-crazy, as often happens with girls at a certain age, don’t ask me why. I suppose that was why I enjoyed spending the holidays on the pony farm, just like Taddel. But you weren’t there for the horseback riding, because actually you were terrified of horses; you came along to look after us, the so-called little ones. You certainly had a big mouth.
What if I did?
You were a real slave driver, ordering us around: Listen, everybody. Pay attention to Taddel.
Well, I was responsible for you kids.
We had to obey you to the letter. First thing in the morning, when everyone was half asleep, we had to shout in unison, Good morning, Taddel!
It got you out of bed, didn’t it?
Oh, well, those are just memories. But I dimly recall another feature of that old house: I mean the general store right inside the front door, which had a bell that chimed every time the door opened or closed. That store, which regrettably was no longer in business, had a wooden counter. Behind the counter hundreds of drawers were built into the wall, all of them painted a rich golden yellow, with little enamelled plates that told you what the drawers had contained once upon a time: rock candy, semolina, potato flour, hartshorn salt, barley, cinnamon, dried scarlet runner beans, and who knows what else. My sisters often played in there with me, so good old Marie took pictures of Mieke, Rieke, and me with that box of hers, which struck me as somewhat mysterious when I was older. My papa would come to see us every two weeks and usually stayed with us for two weeks, and sometimes Marie would come with him. On her next visit, she’d bring the pictures she’d developed in the meantime. I hear we looked pretty funny, like in a proper fairy tale. As if we’d stepped off the page of an old picture book, in pinafores and long woollen stockings. With bows in our hair and wearing wooden clogs, we little snotnoses lined up in front of the shop counter. And in those pictures an old woman stood behind the counter, her white hair wound up in a bun, with knitting needles sticking out of it. You could see Alma Junge—that’s who she was, the one the villagers said was thumping around in the attic and the broom cupboard—selling my sisters, Rieke and Mieke, but also me, tiny as I was, rock candy and immensely long liquorice laces. You could see the three of us sucking those long, looped-up strings. We must have looked adorable. Maybe that’s why I’m still crazy about liquorice drops.
Just as I’m nuts about Nutella, because our cleaning lady, when I was feeling miserable …
Hush up, Taddel, it’s my turn now. But I hear that my mama, who didn’t get to see your Mariechen’s photos, was very upset when that blabbermouth Rieke told her about them, and burst out, That’s not true. Ghost stories, the worst kind of superstition! My mama and your old Marie apparently had a couple of fights because my papa was forever having private chats with her, and she listened only to him. He must have been utterly dependent on his Mariechen and her box for the photos she made exclusively for him, which he allegedly needed for his book. You know the kind: pictures from the Stone Age, the Great Migration of Peoples, the Middle Ages, and so forth, through the centuries and up to his current confusion. With his typical proclivity for male fantasies, he came up with a new woman for each new phase, and for each of them he crafted one of his typical female stories, until eventually he got stuck and simply couldn’t finish the book.
But later it turned out to be a best-seller.
And for a while even the reviewers took a break from …
Only a few women’s libbers sounded off, because …
Let Lena tell us why he couldn’t finish The Flounder.
Well, because between my papa and my mama, no matter how passionately they’d loved each other, the problems and conflicts kept multiplying till their relationship grew extremely stormy. Their love suffered more and more, and so one day my papa took off, with his unfinished manuscript under his arm. He was simply gone, and unfortunately never found his way back to us. I don’t know who was more to blame. No, I really don’t want to know. Trying to fix blame does no good. But sometimes, Lara, I find myself wondering. Maybe it was just that my mama didn’t mind fighting; she found it perfectly natural, whereas my papa couldn’t deal with it, at least not in his own home, where he needed peace and quiet and seemed almost addicted to having things harmonious. I feel sorry for both of them, even though I know from experience that love is rarely an eternal flame. In the plays I act in, seemingly lasting relationships are always breaking up. The theatre couldn’t live without crises, the so-called battle of the sexes …
Our Pat could tell us a thing or two about that, right, Pat?
As could Lara.
No one’s disputing that. But what we children …
Come on, Lara, it’s your turn now.
I don’t know where to start, with all the confusion, or god-awful mess, as old Marie called it, when our father began to turn up more and more often and then came back altogether, with his tail between his legs, and our mama certainly didn’t jump for joy when all of a sudden he was standing there, saying, Hello, I’m back. Then he started to settle under the eaves again, but not for long. He looked so sad, sitting up there and riffling through his stacks of paper. In the long run it didn’t go well, because our mama was living downstairs with her young man, the one our father had helped get out of Eastern Europe, from Romania, and who was now her lover … The house was big enough for all of us, because Pat had been off living in the home of the girlfriend with a child for quite a while, and Jorsch was usually down in the cellar, but soon after went off to Cologne, where father had found him an apprenticeship. Taddel and I were the only ones left. But Taddel spent most of his time hanging out with his friends, and ran around with his shoelaces untied, probably as a form of protest. So that’s how it was; life wasn’t easy with all of us under one roof, even though father sometimes came out with pronouncements he may have believed in: Don’t worry about me. I’ll be quiet as a mouse up there. Have to finish something. It won’t be long.
A good thing he had something in the works.
Otherwise he might have gone off the deep end.
But he could have gone back to be there for Lena, couldn’t he?
No, that was over and done with. Besides, I don’t know whether my mama would have put up with that.
Maybe she would have,
Lena. One time your mama came to see us, without you, to have a good talk with our mother, woman to woman, as she supposedly said. And picture this: our father did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He cooked some fish dish for the two of them and himself, but also for old Marie, who was there as backup for him. See, your mother and mine talked exclusively about him and his problems, agreeing that he was actually quite nice, solicitous, they both said, but unfortunately he had a bad mother complex or the like. Also that something absolutely had to be done—that’s how good old Marie summed it up for me later—to put an end to it: his neurotic behaviour and his conflict-averse tendency to run away from problems, and so on. But apparently father dug in his heels. He refused to go where they wanted to send him.
But there was something to it, don’t you think?
They must have gone after him with a vengeance, his two strong women …
… and together.
The poor man!
Oh, I see, now you two are feeling sorry for him.
In the beginning he just listened, but then, so I hear, he exclaimed, You’re not going to get me on the couch! and he lit into them, shouting, I’m the only one who makes a living off my mother complex! And when the two women fell silent for a bit or were busy dealing with fish bones, he added, And on my gravestone it will say, Here lies, with his untreated mother complex … But actually, Lena, your mother wanted him back with her and you in the country, which is understandable. And our mother would certainly not have minded, because father was in the way, even when he sat quietly up there under the eaves, the more so because she had enough problems with her young man, who purely character-wise wasn’t that easy to get along with. At any rate, while the two women were talking about father and his mother complex as if he weren’t there, old Marie managed to snap a few pictures, quickly, as she said, from the edge of the table. But any pictures that emerged from her darkroom she didn’t show anyone.
You can only guess …
You want to bet they showed our father stretched out on a couch, and the psychiatrist sitting on a chair nearby was unmistakably mother’s lover?
Right, he was going to school to study something along those lines …
… and for that reason was trying—in the picture, I mean—to get father to talk about how even as a little boy he’d told his mama all kinds of made-up stories.
The kind he still likes to tell.
Wait a minute, now I remember exactly what our father cooked for your mother and mine: it was a flounder, steamed with fennel. And that book he was having such trouble finishing was named after the fish he’d steamed.
And the book describes a similar situation—I mean, where two women, and then more and more of them, are talking about one man while they …
At any rate, he stayed holed up in the attic, sitting, or sometimes standing, at his desk and typing on his Olivetti, even though mother would say now and then, At last! At last he’s looking for an apartment. But my little brother and I pretty much agreed about one thing, though we often bickered: He’s no trouble when he stays up there. And I told my mother, If father has to go, I go, too.
That I don’t recall. All I know is that things were tense. And at some point Lena’s mother moved out of the house in the country with her daughters and back to town. It’s true, in those days I always ran around with my shoelaces untied and sometimes tripped over them and fell in the slush on Perelsplatz or wherever. I’d yell, Shit! The situation was enough to make you run away. No one cared what happened to me. The only place I felt halfway at home was at my friend Gottfried’s, in the caretaker’s apartment round the corner from us. And now and then our cleaning lady would give me a roll spread with Nutella. Old Marie couldn’t help me, either. All she did was moan, Oh dear, oh dear. But she never thought to snap a picture of me with her battered old box. Not even my box can handle such a god-awful mess, she said, it’s taking a break. And when father wasn’t stewing in his own juice upstairs, supposedly he was out looking for a suitable apartment. But he didn’t find one; instead, he found a new woman, and later, supposedly at a birthday party, yet another, and she turned out to be the right one for him, finally.
Mariechen must have been happy.
Right, big brother! She’d had an eye out for this kind of woman when the Wall was first built.
And that’s why she’d made a point of positioning herself at Checkpoint Charlie with her box when the blonde with the fake Swedish passport …
… and an Italian helping her to escape …
… in an Alfa Romeo, no less …
You’re both totally nuts. Besides, all that was far off in the future. In between, when father happened not to be living with one woman or another, he was allowed to pick you up from your mother now and then for a couple of hours, Lena. You were the sweetest thing, with your bright little mouse eyes. You had a high, squeaky voice and liked to sing or cry. You sat up in father’s studio and played with buttons that I’d picked out for you from Pat’s button stock, so you’d have something colourful to play with. Meanwhile father scribbled page after page, because he was determined to finish his book at long last. He wasn’t into playing with you, Lena.
He never really played with us, either, when we were little.
You can believe that, Lena.
You too, Nana. Or did he play with you?
But he told us about the book that refused to end, that it would be a sort of fairy tale about a fish that could speak and a fisherman’s wife who always wanted more, more, more …
Right, he had no trouble telling stories …
… but he was never keen on playing with his children like other fathers.
So what? He just wasn’t a play-father.
Anyway, at some point the house was partitioned.
But not until he had Jasper’s and Paulchen’s mother all to himself, the woman who was the right one for him, as Mariechen had predicted.
Except there was another involvement before that, which we didn’t find out about until later, much too late.
Does that really have to be mentioned?
We didn’t suspect a thing, honestly, Nana. About our father and your mother, I mean.
Supposedly it started long before the house was partitioned.
Between one woman and the next, there was one in between.
He really had some screws loose, the old man.
You have to try to understand, Taddel, though it’s not easy. Both of them, I mean Nana’s mother and our father, had worries of their own. So simply on the basis of worries, the two of them got close, then closer and closer.
And I’m supposed to be the product of all that worry?
That’s a form of love, too.
Just look at you, Nana. You turned out so well.
Everyone loves you.
Don’t cry, now. There, there.
At any rate, because I’d said that if father had to leave, I’d go, too, the house was simply partitioned. He got the smaller section, to the left of the staircase, and his lair up under the eaves. His part included the pantry as a kitchen, and the room below it with its own shower that had once been our parents’ bedroom, and below that was his office, where his secretary sat and typed his letters. It was certainly the best solution. But my girl friends both made fun of the arrangement: It’s like having the Berlin Wall down the middle of your house—all that’s missing is barbed wire!
And a spiral staircase was installed on our side for access to the rooms upstairs.
Probably there was no other way, and theoretically it should have made sense, because after all the turbulence your mother no doubt wanted to live there undisturbed with her young man, whom she loved, after all.
That’s how it was. But he sat where my father used to sit in the kitchen when he’d roasted a leg of lamb, studded with garlic and sage. And now he was the one in the passenger seat of our Peugeot, next to mama, who was driving, because just like father, he refused to get a licence.
As a consolation priz
e, our father also got the garden behind the house, which was now overgrown with weeds.
I still remember looking out of the kitchen window and seeing him digging up the garden all by himself.
It alarmed us to see him out of there dripping with sweat; he’d never done any gardening. Then he had some rich topsoil delivered, which he carted in a wheelbarrow from the front of the house to the back. Your friends, Gottfried and another boy, helped him. And while digging, he came upon all the Matchbox cars you’d stolen from your brothers and buried out back.
And little Lena was supposed to play with the unearthed cars, but you liked playing with Pat’s colourful buttons better … or alternated between singing and crying.
In the beginning I thought: Now he’s really lost it, because he’d never done anything like gardening. But then I thought, Maybe he’s working off his anger, or he’s digging because he’s happy to have found a woman at last who’ll make it possible for him to finish the book. That was the main thing for him, see. And then, when old Marie came by with her wishing box and snapped pictures from all sides of father digging the garden, I thought, Now we’ll get to see how things are going to turn out for him in the future, with one woman or the other. But she didn’t show us any of the photos. And when I asked about them, all she said was, What are you thinking of, girl? That’s going to stay my darkroom secret.