by Günter Grass
At some point the divorce was final.
But none of us really knew about it, because the two of them handled it in their usual way, without saying anything.
The only people present were lawyers and, of course, Mariechen, who was always there when something special happened involving father.
I didn’t hear until later that they divided everything fifty-fifty, quite peaceably.
At least they didn’t fight over anything.
Well, the two of them never fought.
Sometimes I thought: If only they’d had a real knock-down-punch-up, smashing crockery and such, maybe they’d still be together.
Except that then the two of us wouldn’t exist, Nana and me.
I suppose the divorce had to happen, because father was determined …
But then—listen!—when he and his new wife were already living in the country with Jasper and Paulchen, in the same house where he’d lived for a while with Lena’s mother and half-sisters, Mieke and Rieke, and where they put on a grand wedding with lots of guests, your mother brought you into this crazy world, Nana.
So old Marie had another reason to mutter about a god-awful mess.
And as usual we didn’t find out about it until long afterwards, in bits and pieces.
Maybe there are other children somewhere or other …
No, I wasn’t happy that my papa didn’t confess to me till much later that I had a little sister called Nana …
… in Sicily, say, where he spent time when he was young …
Because he wanted to spare my feelings, he said.
… and not even Mariechen’s box knew anything about it.
It took me a long time to figure out how many children there were besides me. Theoretically it was nice, because otherwise I’d have grown up as an only child and would have felt lonely much more often, but this way …
So it wasn’t all bad the way our father handled it, right?
Right, what difference does it make? A few more or less.
Now Jasper and Paulchen joined the family.
Hey, you two got here at exactly the right moment. We were just talking about you and the house in the flatlands along the Elbe.
I understand. You can see it that way, and I’m okay with however you interpret the situation. At any rate, when Taddel joined us in the village, I wasn’t the eldest any more.
But they tell me I cried when Taddel said, Your mother’s divorced now and can marry my father.
It wasn’t only Paulchen who cried at that time; I cried an awful lot, too. I was often so miserable that Mieke and Rieke had to comfort me.
My own situation was much the same, except that now I had a substitute father who didn’t come to see my mother regularly, but was always there when I was feeling really sad because Christmas was around the corner, or my birthday, and I wanted to cry, as I do now, but only because I’m hearing that Lena and Paulchen cried in those days and I tear up easily …
What did I tell you.
And all because our poor father had to look for such a long time …
I don’t believe my ears! You’re feeling sorry for him again?
You’re right, Lena. At the time I was pissed off, at least for a while, though it certainly wasn’t boring—what was going on in the family, I mean. But what difference does it make, I asked myself. At least he was always involved with strong women, all four of them, or even five, if you count Mariechen. Much later, when she was thin as a rail, so thin you could blow her away—or, as father said, Mariechen’s just a Masurian handful—she showed me a stack of photos with all the women, each one by herself, but all strong, each in her own way. By then I had my organic farm in Lower Saxony and was politically affiliated with the Greens. Once, when I had a few days off, I paid a brief visit to our dear old Marie in her Berlin studio, where she was living on nothing but boiled potatoes and pickled herring. Her health was poor, but she was glad to see me. Pay attention, Pat, she said, I’m going to show you something that’ll make your eyes bug out. She disappeared into her darkroom, and I sat and waited, though I’d intended to be on my way much sooner to visit friends in East Berlin, because over there … But when she came out of the darkroom, my eyes really did bug out. A whole stack of prints, all six-by-nines, and all showing things father’s various women may have wished for. But more likely the pictures showed those women the way he wished them to be, each one strong in a different way. At any rate, the first photos in the stack showed our father and my mother when they were young. They were dancing, but not on an ordinary floor or a meadow or any kind of solid surface; no, they were dancing on fluffy clouds. It looked like a tango or some such old-time dance.
Rock’n’roll, maybe …
Their favourite music to dance to was the blues …
… whenever a Dixieland jazz band played …
These I snapped when they got divorced, Marie explained. Anyone can take wedding pictures, but an amicable-divorce photo like this, looking back to the early days, when everything seemed so easy and both parties were so full of love and tra-la-la that they thought they could fly—that’s the kind of thing only my box can pull off. The box remembers everything, even barrettes—look at this one—that fell out while they were dancing. Then Marie screwed up her face, as she always did when she was furious, and said, I didn’t show it to them, this dance in the clouds. They were divorced and finished with each other. Well, I’m not so sure father and mother were finished with each other yet. But what difference does it make? Life goes on. The next photos in the pile from Marie’s darkroom showed something like scenes from a silent film. Or rather, like a scene from a Western. Father was leaning against the wheel of one of those covered wagons in which the pioneers set out, going west! With a bloody bandage round his head and his mouth open, he looked dead. And next to him, standing ramrod-straight, was a tall blonde woman clutching a rifle to her chest—Lena’s mother, with her hair blowing in the wind. She was squinting as if she were scanning the prairie for Indians, maybe Comanches.
No way. That can’t be my mama; she scrambles onto the nearest chair if she sees a baby mouse skittering across the floor.
It was her, though, looking like the last man standing. And peeking out nervously from under the canvas were her daughters, Mieke and Rieke, and between them you, little Lena. All three of you had on old-fashioned bonnets, but you were plainly flaxen-haired like your mother, Lena a bit darker, because … And in the foreground lay at least five dead Indians. Maybe your mother would have been capable of such a thing, after all. Father could have gone through thick and thin with her, but he didn’t want to. And when dear old Marie had straightened the photos and shoved them under the pile, she said, There’s that good old German expression for someone you can trust: he could have gone stealing horses with her. But your father had his heart set on buying horses. And that’s what he did, too.
Only one, for Lara. I hear you were quite the sight riding Nacke through the village …
With little Joggi trotting along behind us.
This you’ve got to believe—you, too, Nana. The third batch of photos was even crazier. You would have seen our father wearing a sailor’s cap and looking like a revolutionary from the olden days. And standing next to him, laughing and with her hair all tousled, your mother. I’m not lying; neither of them looked worried in the slightest. They were laughing, showing all their teeth. Both of them were positioned behind a barricade and apparently found the whole thing hilarious. They had cartridge belts over their shoulders and a machine gun from the First World War, which another picture showed them aiming and apparently firing. And to their left waved a flag, a red one, I assume—the photos Mariechen showed me were black and white. This kind of thing happened here in Berlin when the revolution came, she said. I don’t believe it, I responded. No one, not even a strong woman like Nana’s mother, would have got our father anywhere near a barricade. He’s never shown any interest in revolution. Was always a reformer. At that Marie giggled: But maybe th
e mother of your little sister Nana wanted such a thing, and your father, too, just a little. As you children know, my box makes wishes come true.
In reality my mother is totally different. You know her, Pat and Jorsch, and so do you, Lara. All she cares about is books, books written by other people, which she has to edit painstakingly, word for word and sentence for sentence.
Still, Nana, it’s not out of the question that at least secretly she may have harboured a wish …
Oh, come on. That’s the kind of thing only father could have dreamed up.
But the craziest part was what Marie’s wishing box had produced in the fourth batch of photos. You could see a real zeppelin, a medium-size one, tethered to an airport’s docking tower. And in front of the cabin, which is quite spacious, with many windows, our father and your mother, half a head taller, standing as if posed for a group photo. In front of them are Jasper and Taddel, and you, Paulchen, are crouching in front of the others. But it’s not our father who’s wearing the captain’s cap. Instead, the pilot of the zeppelin is his second wife.
Obviously, because father can’t even ride a bicycle, let alone drive a car.
So are we to assume that he managed to persuade your mother to get a licence to pilot midsize dirigibles?
I know she could do it.
Besides, father always loved the idea of not having a fixed place to live but rather a zeppelin, big enough for him and his stuff—the standing desk and such—and also for his family, so he could land wherever he felt like and be independent location-wise, always on the move and never …
That’s exactly why good old Marie fulfilled his wish: a strong woman at the helm, and he can devote himself to whatever he happens to have in the works …
… which also gives him pleasure …
Your father always likes to be somewhere else and with someone else, she said. I’m the same. Must have got it from him. Tell me, I asked Mariechen when she was about to gather up the pile of photos and take them back to the darkroom, aren’t there any photos of you with father? The make-a-wish kind, I mean. After a long pause, she said, That’s enough about your father and his women. For me, it was always dream on, darling. I had to be right there, on the spot, whenever he had a special wish. Then I was to disappear into the darkroom. That was it. Tough luck, ducky! As far as your father was concerned, I was always his snap-away-Marie; there was never more to it than that.
I didn’t think old Marie was that bitter!
Maybe she was his sweetheart after all, somewhere in between.
Then I went off to East Berlin, to Prenzlauer Berg, because …
Who knows what else we don’t know …
… and what other pictures old Marie had to take …
… to keep our father supplied, purely in terms of his writing …
… so when people read him, they could never tell how much of it was true …
It’s possible even we, sitting here and talking, are just figments of his imagination—what do you think?
That is what he is allowed to do, what he does best: dream up things, imagine things, until they become real and cast a shadow. He says, Your father learned this at an early age. And yet we know, dear Lena, that life does not take place only on the stage. Do you remember the time we left the West far behind, when the lilacs were blooming everywhere, because it was May, and travelled farther and farther into the East, and I asked you, before we set out for Polish territory, to remove all the little birds and butterflies from the nests into which you had braided your hair, because too much bizarre adornment might alarm our Kashubian relatives? A pity that old Marie wasn’t there when we sat between Uncle Jan and Aunt Luzie on the sofa under the Sacred Heart picture and you refused to eat the pig’s head in aspic. I was so proud to see my little daughter assert herself.
But you, Nanette, she managed to capture with her box even when I could not be with you, but in my thoughts was right there, holding your little hand that completely disappeared into mine. Mariechen knew our wishes, after all. That made it possible for me to be near you when you had dropped your house key or your pocket money again. I helped you look; it was a long way between home and school. Cold, I would say, warm, warmer, warmer, hot … And sometimes more turned up than had been lost. The pleasure we both took in found objects.
We laughed and cried together. We could have been seen walking through the Tiergarten or holding hands in the zoo as we stood watching the apes. At any rate, I was with you more often than could have been recorded. All the snapshots showing our happy times together. Ah, if only all those six-by-nine pictures still existed, showing the two of us …
Looking Back
TODAY ONLY FOUR of the children have gathered, but later, right after St Pauli’s home game against Koblenz, Taddel will join them. Lena has stopped by on her way through Hamburg. And Lara, who grew up with twin brothers and has raised twins of her own, thinks it would be nice to have them absent for a change. Pat is cramming for a test, and Jorsch sent word he could not get away because for weeks he has been doing the sound for a detective series. Nana reported that she is busy delivering babies at the hospital in Eppendorf, and it is not her turn, anyway, but she wishes her siblings a less painful evening than their last get-together, when the sole topic was early sorrow.
They are sitting in the eat-in kitchen. Contemporary art hangs on every available wall. Since the main subject of discussion will be life in the country, Jasper is hosting the gathering. He returned only the previous day from London, where he was involved in precarious negotiations over financing for a film. Paulchen has managed to join them by moving up a planned trip from Madrid, where he lives with his lovely Brazilian wife. Jasper’s wife, who identifies herself as a proponent of contemporary art and a professed Mexican, has just returned from putting their two sons to bed. Now she places a spicy dish in the middle of the table: chili made with black beans and ground beef. Assuming a serious expression and intent on resembling Frida Kahlo ever so slightly, she takes in what she sees as this very German gathering and remarks, Don’t pass judgment on your father. You should be glad you still have him. Then she turns and leaves the room. The rest of them remain silent, as if waiting for the echo of her words to die away. Only now does Paulchen say to Jasper, You start this time.
Okay. Someone has to go first. So, Paulchen and I called our mother Camilla. I’m the one who supposedly came up with the name, because our mother, who’s the daughter of a doctor, after all, always had a healing touch. On the Danish island where we spent our summers she picked all kinds of medicinal herbs, especially chamomile, and hung bunches up to dry. Chamomile was very good for tea or hot compresses. It was more than just a saying: chamomile is good for what ails you. That’s why we’d given her that name when we still lived on the outskirts of town, in the Fuchspass district, where our father only came by occasionally for breakfast, which was okay because he and Camilla had worked things out a while ago. But the new man who turned up one day didn’t call our mother Camilla, but used her real name, and added a diminutive ending.
And later he called her Sweetie or Dearest, which we found rather embarrassing.
To me he looked like an old man, though he wasn’t yet fifty. Paulchen and I continued to call your father the old man, even after he suggested that we call him by his first name. He resembled a walrus with that moustache. But I didn’t call him that to his face, because in fact we thought he was okay. It wasn’t so easy for you, Paulchen, in the beginning, because you had the habit of crawling into bed with Camilla when you woke up in the middle of the night—you know you did. But more and more often the old man was there, the walrus. And then he brought along this older woman and just said, This is Mariechen. The only explanation he offered was: Mariechen’s a very special photographer, because she has an old-fashioned camera, an Agfa box, which survived bombs, fires, and burst water pipes during the war, and since then doesn’t work quite right, or works differently: it’s all-seeing and takes the most extraordinary picture
s. And then he added, Mariechen snaps pictures for me of things I need at the moment or things I wish for. I’m sure she’ll do the same for you boys if you have a very special wish.
We called her Marie.
Taddel also called her old Marie.
At any rate, from then on she was our Marie, too.
In the beginning I was scared of that old woman. I had an uneasy feeling about her, as if I sensed that later on, when I got caught up in something quite embarrassing, she and her box would find me out.
So what was this embarrassing thing, Jasper?
Yes, do tell.
I don’t like to talk about it. I really don’t. But my little brother—right, Paulchen?—thought Marie was okay. He was thrilled when she snapped pictures with her impossible box of him standing by the garden fence or in front of our row house.
And when we moved from the city to the country with Camilla and the old man, it was fine with me when she came to visit and brought her equipment, not only the Agfa box. We took over the big house that Lena was familiar with. It had all kinds of secret hiding places. And an old-fashioned smell. It even had sleeping cupboards, alcoves, from long ago. And in the front, where you came in off the street, there was a general store, also from long ago—I’m sure Lena’s already mentioned it. And our mother’s new husband—your papa, I mean, Lena—had settled upstairs in the big room with the yellow and green floor tiles, where he was soon busy with his various projects. He cooked all sorts of weird things for us—pigs’ feet, rams’ kidneys, cows’ hearts, and calves’ tongues. But it didn’t taste so bad, says Jasper. And he also went to Kelting, the fishmonger in the village—who was slightly hunchbacked but the nicest person—and bought not only sprats and all kinds of smoked fish but also eels, still alive and all slimy.
Once the old man got a grip on those eels, which wasn’t easy, he’d hack off their heads with one blow and then saw the rest, still jerking and writhing, into finger-length segments.