by Günter Grass
After long hesitation—the selection was too small to permit me to make up my mind quickly—I picked out first Rasputin and then Goethe. I had no idea what I was taking, I was just following the well-known inner voice.
The conflicting harmony between these two was to shape or influence my whole life, at least what life I have tried to live apart from my drum. To this very day—and even now that Oskar in his eagerness for learning is gradually plowing his way through the whole hospital library—I snap my fingers at Schiller and company and fluctuate between Rasputin and Goethe, between the faith healer and the man of the Enlightenment, between the dark spirit who cast a spell on women and the luminous poet prince who was so fond of letting women cast a spell on him. If for a time I inclined more toward Rasputin and feared Goethe’s intolerance, it was because of a faint suspicion that if you, Oskar, had lived and drummed at his time, Goethe would have thought you unnatural, would have condemned you as an incarnation of anti-nature, that while feeding his own precious nature—which essentially you have always admired and striven for even when it gave itself the most unnatural airs—on honeybuns, he would have taken notice of you, poor devil, only to hit you over the head with Faust or a big heavy volume of his Theory of Colors.
But back to Rasputin. With the help of Gretchen Schemer he taught me the big and little alphabets, taught me to be attentive to women, and comforted me when Goethe hurt my feelings.
It was not so easy to learn how to read while playing the ignoramus. It proved even more difficult than impersonating a bed-wetter, as I did for many years. In wetting my bed, after all, I merely had to offer purely material proof each morning of a disorder that I did not really need in the first place. But to play the ignoramus meant to conceal my rapid progress, to carry on a constant struggle with my nascent intellectual pride. If grownups wished to regard me as a bed-wetter, that I could accept with an inner shrug of the shoulders, but that I should have to behave like a simpleton year in year out was a source of chagrin to Oskar and to his teacher as well.
The moment I had salvaged the books from the baby clothes, Gretchen cried out for joy; she had sensed her vocation as a teacher. I succeeded in disentangling the poor childless woman from her wool and in making her almost happy. Actually she would have preferred for me to choose Debit and Credit as my reader; but I insisted on Rasputin, demanded Rasputin when she produced a common primer for our second lesson, and finally resolved to speak when she kept coming up with fairy tales such as Dwarf Longnose and Tom Thumb. “Rasputin!” I would cry, or occasionally: “Rashushin!” Sometimes Oskar would lay it on really thick with “Rashu, Rashu!” The idea was to make it perfectly clear what reading matter I desired but at the same time to leave her in ignorance of my awakening literary genius.
I learned quickly and regularly without much effort. A year later I had the impression of living in St. Petersburg, in the apartments of the Tsar of all the Russias, in the nursery of the ailing Tsarevich, amid conspirators and popes, an eyewitness to Rasputin’s orgies. The tone of the thing appealed to me; here, I soon saw, was a dominant figure. How dominant was also made evident by the contemporary engravings scattered through the book, showing the bearded Rasputin with the coal-black eyes, surrounded by ladies wearing black stockings and nothing else. His death made a deep impression on me: they poisoned him with poisoned cake and poisoned wine; then, when he wanted more cake, they shot him with pistols, and when the lead in his chest made him feel like dancing, they bound him and lowered him into the Neva, through a hole in the ice. All this was done by officers of the male sex. The ladies of St. Peterburg would never have given their little father Rasputin poisoned cake, though they would have given him anything else he wanted. The women believed in him, whereas the officers had to get rid of him if they were ever again to believe in themselves.
Is it any wonder that I was not the only one to delight in the life and death of the athletic faith healer? Little by little Gretchen recovered her old pleasure in reading. Sometimes, as she read aloud, she would break down completely; she would tremble at the word “orgy” and utter it with a special sort of gasp; when she said “orgy” she was ready and willing for an orgy, though she certainly had very little idea of what an orgy might be.
Things took a salty turn when Mama came with me and attended my lesson in the flat over the bakery. Sometimes the reading degenerated into an orgy and became an end in itself; little Oskar’s lesson was quite forgotten. Every third sentence produced a duet of giggles, which left the ladies with parched lips. Beneath Rasputin’s spell the two of them moved closer and closer to one another; they would begin to fidget on the sofa cushions and press their thighs together. In the end, the giggling turned to moaning. Twelve pages of Rasputin produced results that they had hardly expected in mid-afternoon but were perfectly glad to accept. In any case Rasputin would not have minded; on the contrary, he may be counted on to distribute such blessings free of charge for all eternity.
At length, when both ladies had said “goodness, goodness” and sat back in embarrassment, Mama expressed some misgiving: “Are you sure little Oskar doesn’t understand?” “Don’t be silly,” Gretchen reassured her, “you can’t imagine how hard I work over him, but he just doesn’t learn. My honest opinion is that he’ll never be able to read.”
As an indication of my incorrigible ignorance, she added: “Just imagine, Agnes, he tears the pages out of our Rasputin and crumples them up. They just disappear. Sometimes I feel like giving up. But when I see how happy he is with the book, I let him tear and destroy. I’ve already told Alex to get us a new Rasputin for Christmas.”
As you have no doubt suspected, I succeeded very gradually, over a period of three or four years—Gretchen Scheffler went on teaching me that long and a bit longer—in carrying away over half the pages of Rasputin. I tore them out very carefully while putting on a wanton destructiveness act, crumpled them up, and hid them under my sweater. Then at home in my drummer’s corner, I would smooth them out, pile them up, and read them in secret, undisturbed by any feminine presence. I did the same with Goethe, whom I would demand of Gretchen every fourth lesson with a cry of “Doethe.” I didn’t want to stake everything on Rasputin, for only too soon it became clear to me that in this world of ours every Rasputin has his Goethe, that every Rasputin draws a Goethe or if you prefer every Goethe a Rasputin in his wake, or even makes one if need be, in order to be able to condemn him later on.
With his unbound book Oskar would repair to the attic or hide behind the bicycle frames in old Mr. Heilandt’s shed, where he would shuffle the loose leaves of Rasputin and The Elective Affinities like playing cards, so creating a new book. He would settle down to read this remarkable work and look on with intense though smiling wonderment as Ottilie strolled demurely through the gardens of Central Germany on Rasputin’s arm while Goethe, seated beside a dissolutely aristcratic Olga, went sleighing through wintry St. Petersburg from orgy to orgy.
But let us get back to my schoolroom in Kleinhammer-Weg. Even if I seemed to be making no progress, Gretchen took the most maidenly pleasure in me. Thanks to me, though the invisible but hairy hand of the Russian faith healer also had something to do with it, she blossomed mightily and even imparted some of her newfound vitality to her potted trees and cactuses. If Scheffler in those years had only seen fit once in a while to take his fingers out of his dough, to relinquish his bakery rolls for a human roll! Gretchen would gladly have let him knead her and roll her, brush her with egg white and bake her. Who knows what might have come out of the oven. Perhaps, in the end, a baby. Too bad. It was a pleasure she had coming to her.
As it was, she sat there after an impassioned reading of Rasputin with fiery eyes and slightly tousled hair; her gold horse teeth moved but she had nothing to bite on, and she sighed mercy me, thinking of flour and dough, flour and dough. Since Mama, who had her Jan, had no way of helping Gretchen, this part of my education might have ended in grief if Gretchen had not been so buoyant of heart.
She would leap into the kitchen and come back with the coffee mill; embracing it like a lover, she would sing with melancholy passion while grinding, “Dark Eyes” or “Red Sarafan,” and Mama would join in. Taking the Dark Eyes into the kitchen with her, she would put water on to boil; then as the water was heating over the gas flame, she would run down to the bakery and, often over Scheffler’s opposition, bring back cakes and pastries, set the table with flowered cups, cream pitchers, sugar bowls, and cake forks, and strew pansies in the interstices. She would pour the coffee, hum airs from The Tsarevich, pass around the sand tarts and chocolate dewdrops. A soldier stands on the Volga shore, coffee ring garnished with splintered almonds. Have you many angels with you up there?, topped off with meringues filled with whipped cream, so sweet, so sweet. As they chewed, the conversation would come back to Rasputin, but now things appeared to them in their proper perspective, and once glutted with cake, they were even able to deplore, in all sincerity, the abysmal corruption of court life under the tsars.
I ate much too much cake in those years. As the photographs show, I grew no taller, just fat and lumpy. After the cloying sweetness of those lessons in Kleinhammer-Weg I would often sneak into our shop and await my opportunity. As soon as Matzerath had his back turned, I would tie a string around a piece of dry bread, dip the bread in the pickled herring barrel, and remove it only when the bread was saturated with brine. You can’t imagine what a blissful emetic that was for one who had eaten too much cake. In the hope of reducing, Oskar would often vomit up a whole Danzig gulden’s worth of Scheffler’s cake in our toilet. That was a lot of money in those days.
I paid for Gretchen’s lessons in still another way. With her passion for sewing, knitting, or crocheting baby clothes, she used me as a dressmaker’s dummy. I was compelled to try on little frocks and little bonnets, little pants and little coats with and without hoods, in all styles, colors, and materials.
I do not know whether it was Mama or Gretchen who transformed me, on the occasion of my eighth birthday, into a little tsarevich who fully deserved to be shot. Their Rasputin cult was then at its height. A photo taken that day shows me standing beside a birthday cake hedged about by eight dripless candles; I am wearing an embroidered Russian smock, a Cossack’s cap perched at a jaunty angle, two crossed cartridge belts, baggy white breeches, and low boots.
Luckily my drum was allowed to be in the picture. Another bit of luck was that Gretchen Scheffler—possibly I had asked her to do so—tailored me a suit which, cut in the unassuming, electively affinitive style of the early nineteenth century, still conjures up the spirit of Goethe in my album, bearing witness to the two souls in my breast, and enables me, with but a single drum, to be in St. Petersburg and in Weimar at once, descending to the realm of the Mothers and celebrating orgies with ladies.
The Stockturm. Long-Distance Song Effects
Dr. Hornstetter, the lady doctor who drops in on me almost every day just long enough to smoke a cigarette, who is supposed to be taking care of me but who, thanks to my treatment, leaves the room after every visit a little less nervous than she was when she came, a retiring sort who is intimate only with her cigarettes, keeps insisting that I suffered from isolation in my childhood, that I didn’t play enough with other children.
Well, as far as other children are concerned, she may be right. It is true that I was so busy with Gretchen Scheffler’s lessons, so torn between Goethe and Rasputin, that even with the best of intentions I could have found no time for ring-around-a-rosy or post office. But whenever, as scholars sometimes do, I turned my back on books, declaring them to be the graveyards of the language, and sought contact with the simple folk, I encountered the little cannibals who lived in our building, and after brief association with them, felt very glad to get back to my reading in one piece.
Oskar had the possibility of leaving his parents’ flat through the shop, then he came out on Labesweg, or else through the front door that led to the stairwell. From here he could either continue straight ahead to the street, or climb four flights of stairs to the attic where Meyn the musician was blowing his trumpet, or, lastly, go out into the court. The street was paved with cobblestones. The packed sand of the court was a place where rabbits multiplied and carpets were beaten. Aside from occasional duets with the intoxicated Mr. Meyn, the attic offered a view and that pleasant but deceptive feeling of freedom which is sought by all climbers of towers and which makes dreamers of those who live in attics.
While the court was fraught with peril for Oskar, the attic offered him security until Axel Mischke and his gang drove him out of it. The court was as wide as the building, but only seven paces deep; in the rear it was separated from other courts by a tarred board fence topped with barbed wire. The attic offered a good view of this maze which occupied the inside of the block bordered by Labesweg, by Hertastrasse and Luisenstrasse on either side, and Marienstrasse in the distance. In among the irregularly shaped courts that made up the sizable rectangle there was also a cough-drop factory and several run-down repair shops. Here and there in the yards one could discern some tree or shrub indicative of the time of year. The courts varied in size and shape, but all contained rabbits and carpet-beating installations. The rabbits were present and active every day; carpets, however, as the house regulations decreed, were beaten only on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Fridays it became evident how large the block really was. Oskar looked and listened from the attic as more than a hundred carpets, runners, and bedside rugs were rubbed with sauerkraut, brushed, beaten, and bullied into showing the patterns that had been woven into them. With a great display of bare arms a hundred housewives, their hair tied up in kerchiefs, emerged from the houses carrying mounds of carpets, threw the victims over the rack supplied for that very purpose, seized their plaited carpet beaters, and filled the air with thunder.
Oskar abhorred this hymn to cleanliness. He battled the noise with his drum and yet, even in the attic, far away from the source of the thunder, he had to admit defeat. A hundred carpet-beating females can storm the heavens and blunt the wings of young swallows; with half a dozen strokes they tumbled down the little temple that Oskar’s drumming had erected in the April air.
On days when no carpets were being beaten, the children of our building did gymnastics on the wooden carpet rack. I was seldom in the court. The only part of it where I felt relatively secure was Mr. Heilandt’s shed. The old man kept the other children out but admitted me to his collection of vises, pulleys, and broken-down sewing machines, incomplete bicycles, and cigar boxes full of bent or straightened nails. This was one of his principal occupations: when he was not pulling nails out of old crates, he was straightening those recovered the day before on an anvil. Apart from his salvaging of nails, he was the man who helped on moving day, who slaughtered rabbits for holidays, and who spat tobacco juice all over the court, stairs, and attic.
One day when the children, as children do, were cooking soup not far from his shed, Nuchi Eyke asked old man Heilandt to spit in it three times. The old man obliged, each time with a cavernous clearing of the throat, and then disappeared into his shanty, where he went on hammering the crimps out of nails. Axel Mischke added some pulverized brick to the soup. Oskar stood to one side, but looked on with curiosity. Axel Mischke and Harry Schlager had built a kind of tent out of blankets and old rags to prevent grownups from looking into their soup. When the brick gruel had come to a boil, Hänschen Kollin emptied his pockets and contributed two live frogs he had caught in Aktien Pond. Susi Kater, the only girl in the tent, puckered up her mouth with disappointment and bitterness when the frogs vanished ingloriously into the soup without the slightest attempt at a swan song or a last jump. Undeterred by Susi’s presence, Nuchi Eyke unbuttoned his fly and peed into the one-dish meal. Axel, Harry, and Hänschen Kollin followed suit. Shorty tried to show the ten-year-olds what he could do, but nothing came. All eyes turned toward Susi, and Axel Mischke handed her a sky-blue enamel cook pot. Oskar was already on the point o
f leaving. But he waited until Susi, who apparently had no panties on under her dress, had squatted down on the pot, clasping her knees, looking off expressionlessly into space, and finally crinkling her nose as the pot emitted a tinny tinkle, showing that Susi had done her bit for the soup.
At this point I ran away. I should not have run; I should have walked with quiet dignity. Their eyes were all fishing in the cook pot, but because I ran, they looked after me. I heard Susi Rater’s voice: “What’s he running for, he’s going to snitch on us.” It struck me in the back, and I could still feel it piercing me as I was catching my breath in the loft after hobbling up the four flights of steps.
I was seven and a half. Susi may have been nine. Shorty was just eight. Axel, Nuchi, Hänschen, and Harry were ten or eleven. There was still Maria Truczinski. She was a little older than I, but she never played in the court; she played with dolls in Mother Truczinski’s kitchen or with her grown-up sister Guste who helped at the Lutheran kindergarten.
Is it any wonder if to this day I can’t abide the sound of women urinating in chamberpots? Up in the attic Oskar appeased his ears with drumming. Just as he was beginning to feel that the bubbling soup was far behind him, the whole lot of them, all those who had contributed to the soup, turned up in their bare feet or sneakers. Nuchi was carrying the pot. They formed a ring around Oskar. Shorty arrived a moment later. They poked each other, hissing: “Go on, I dare you.” Finally, Axel seized Oskar from behind and pinned his arms. Susi laughed, showing moist, regular teeth with her tongue between them, and said why not, why shouldn’t they. She took the tin spoon from Nuchi, wiped it silvery on her behind, and plunged it into the steaming brew. Like a good housewife, she stirred slowly, testing the resistance of the mash, blew on the full spoon to cool it, and at length forced it into Oskar’s mouth, yes, she forced it into my mouth. Never in all these years have I eaten anything like it, the taste will stay with me.