by Günter Grass
All that was left me was the stairwell and the attic. Under the roof tiles I devoted myself to my usual reading matter; on the staircase I would knock at the first door left on the second floor whenever I felt the need for human company, and Mother Truczinski always opened. Since she had held my hand at Brenntau Cemetery and led me to my poor mother’s grave, she always opened when Oskar plied the door with his drumsticks.
“Don’t drum so loud, Oskar. Herbert’s still sleeping, he’s had a rough night again, they had to bring him home in an ambulance.” She pulled me into the flat, poured me imitation coffee with milk, and gave me a piece of brown rock candy on a string to dip into the coffee and lick. I drank, sucked the rock candy, and let my drum rest.
Mother Truczinski had a little round head, covered so transparently with thin, ash-grey hair that her pink scalp shone through. The sparse threads converged at the back of her head to form a bun which despite its small size—it was smaller than a billiard ball—could be seen from all sides however she twisted and turned. It was held together with knitting needles. Every morning Mother Truczinski rubbed her round cheeks, which when she laughed looked as if they had been pasted on, with the paper from chicory packages, which was red and discolored. Her expression was that of a mouse. Her four children were named Herbert, Guste, Fritz, and Maria.
Maria was my age. She had just finished grade school and was living with a family of civil servants in Schidlitz, learning to do housework. Fritz, who was working at the railway coach factory, was seldom seen. He had two or three girl friends who received him by turns in their beds and went dancing with him at the “Race Track” in Ohra. He kept rabbits in the court, “Vienna blues,” but it was Mother Truczinski who had to take care of them, for Fritz had his hands full with his girl friends. Guste, a quiet soul of about thirty, was a waitress at the Hotel Eden by the Central Station. Still unwed, she lived on the top floor of the Eden with the rest of the staff. Apart from Monsieur Fritz’ occasional overnight visits, that left only Herbert, the eldest, at home with his mother. Herbert worked as a waiter in the harbor suburb of Neufahrwasser. For a brief happy period after the death of my poor mama, Herbert Truczinski was my purpose in life; to this day I call him my friend.
Herbert worked for Starbusch. Starbusch was the owner of the Sweden Bar, which was situated across the street from the Protestant Seamen’s Church; the customers, as the name might lead one to surmise, were mostly Scandinavians. But there were also Russians, Poles from the Free Port, longshoremen from Holm, and sailors from the German warships that happened to be in the harbor. It was not without its perils to be a waiter in this very international spot. Only the experience he had amassed at the Ohra “Race Track”—the third-class dance hall where Herbert had worked before going to Neufahrwasser—enabled him to dominate the linguistic volcano of the Sweden Bar with his suburban Plattdeutsch interspersed with crumbs of English and Polish. Even so, he would come home in an ambulance once or twice a month, involuntarily but free of charge.
Then Herbert would have to lie in bed for a few days, face down and breathing hard, for he weighed well over two hundred pounds. On these days Mother Truczinski complained steadily while taking care of him with equal perseverance. After changing his bandages, she would extract a knitting needle from her bun and tap it on the glass of a picture that hung across from Herbert’s bed. It was a retouched photograph of a man with a mustache and a solemn steadfast look, who closely resembled some of the mustachioed individuals on the first pages of my own photograph album.
This gentleman, however, at whom Mother Truczinski pointed her knitting needle, was no member of my family, it was Herbert’s, Guste’s, Fritz’, and Maria’s father.
“One of these days you’re going to end up like your father,” she would chide the moaning, groaning Herbert. But she never stated clearly how and where this man in the black lacquer frame had gone looking for and met his end.
“What happened this time?” inquired the grey-haired mouse over her folded arms.
“Same as usual. Swedes and Norwegians.” The bed groaned as Herbert shifted his position.
“Same as usual, he says. Don’t make out like it was always them. Last time it was those fellows from the training ship, what’s it called, well, speak up, that’s it, the Schlageter, that’s just what I’ve been saying, and you try to tell me it’s the Swedes and Norskes.”
Herbert’s ear—I couldn’t see his face—turned red to the brim: “God-damn Heinies, always shooting their yap and throwing their weight around.”
“Leave them be. What business is it of yours? They always look respectable when I see them in town on their time off. You been lecturing them about Lenin again, or starting up on the Spanish Civil War?”
Herbert suspended his answers and Mother Truczinski shuffled off to her imitation coffee in the kitchen.
As soon as Herbert’s back was healed, I was allowed to look at it. He would be sitting in the kitchen chair with his braces hanging down over his blue-clad thighs, and slowly, as though hindered by grave thoughts, he would strip off his woolen shirt.
His back was round, always in motion. Muscles kept moving up and down. A rosy landscape strewn with freckles. The spinal column was embedded in fat. On either side of it a luxuriant growth of hair descended from below the shoulder blades to disappear beneath the woolen underdrawers that Herbert wore even in the summer. From his neck muscles down to the edge of the underdrawers Herbert’s back was covered with thick scars which interrupted the vegetation, effaced the freckles. Multicolored, ranging from blue-black to greenish-white, they formed creases and itched when the weather changed. These scars I was permitted to touch.
What, I should like to know, have I, who lie here in bed, looking out of the window, I who for months have been gazing at and through the outbuildings of this mental hospital and the Oberrath Forest behind them, what to this day have I been privileged to touch that felt as hard, as sensitive, and as disconcerting as the scars on Herbert Truczinski’s back? In the same class I should put the secret parts of a few women and young girls, my own pecker, the plaster watering can of the boy Jesus, and the ring finger which scarcely two years ago that dog found in a rye field and brought to me, which a year ago I was still allowed to keep, in a preserving jar to be sure where I couldn’t get at it, yet so distinct and complete that to this day I can still feel and count each one of its joints with the help of my drumsticks. Whenever I wanted to recall Herbert Truczinski’s back, I would sit drumming with that preserved finger in front of me, helping my memory with my drum. Whenever I wished—which was not very often—to reconstitute a woman’s body, Oskar, not sufficiently convinced by a woman’s scarlike parts, would invent Herbert Truczinski’s scars. But I might just as well put it the other way around and say that my first contact with those welts on my friend’s broad back gave promise even then of acquaintance with, and temporary possession of, those short-lived indurations characteristic of women ready for love. Similarly the symbols on Herbert’s back gave early promise of the ring finger, and before Herbert’s scars made promises, it was my drumsticks, from my third birthday on, which promised scars, reproductive organs, and finally the ring finger. But I must go back still farther: when I was still an embryo, before Oskar was even called Oskar, my umbilical cord, as I sat playing with it, promised me successively drumsticks, Herbert’s scars, the occasionally erupting craters of young and not so young women, and finally the ring finger, and at the same time in a parallel development beginning with the boy Jesus’ watering can, it promised me my own sex which I always and invariably carry about with me—capricious monument to my own inadequacy and limited possibilities.
Today I have gone back to my drumsticks. As for scars, tender parts, my own equipment which seldom raises its head in pride nowadays, I remember them only indirectly, by way of my drum. I shall have to be thirty before I succeed in celebrating my third birthday again. You’ve guessed it no doubt: Oskar’s aim is to get back to the umbilical cord; that is the
sole purpose behind this whole vast verbal effort and my only reason for dwelling on Herbert Truczinski’s scars.
Before I go on describing and interpreting my friend’s back, an introductory remark is in order: except for a bite in the left shin inflicted by a prostitute from Ohra, there were no scars on the front of his powerful body, magnificent target that it was. It was only from behind that they could get at him. His back alone bore the marks of Finnish and Polish knives, of the snickersnees of the longshoremen from the Speicherinsel, and the sailor’s knives of the cadets from the training ships.
When Herbert had had his lunch—three times a week there were potato pancakes, which no one could make so thin, so greaseless, and yet so crisp as Mother Truczinski—when Herbert had pushed his plate aside, I handed him the Neueste Nachrichten. He let down his braces, peeled off his shirt, and as he read let me question his back. During these question periods Mother Truczinski usually remained with us at table: she unraveled the wool from old stockings, made approving or disapproving remarks, and never failed to put in a word or two about the—it is safe to assume—horrible death of the man who hung, photographed and retouched, behind glass on the wall across from Herbert’s bed.
I began my questioning by touching one of the scars with my finger. Or sometimes I would touch it with one of my drumsticks.
“Press it again, boy. I don’t know which one. It seems to be asleep.” And I would press it again, a little harder.
“Oh, that one! That was a Ukrainian. He was having a row with a character from Gdingen. First they were sitting at the same table like brothers. And then the character from Gdingen says: Russki. The Ukrainian wasn’t going to take that lying down; if there was one thing he didn’t want to be, it was a Russki. He’d been floating logs down the Vistula and various other rivers before that, and he had a pile of dough in his shoe. He’d already spent half his shoeful buying rounds of drinks when the character from Gdingen called him a Russki, and I had to separate the two of them, soft and gentle the way I always do. Well, Herbert has his hands full. At this point the Ukrainian calls me a Water Polack, and the Polack, who spends his time hauling up muck on a dredger, calls me something that sounds like Nazi. Well, my boy, you know Herbert Truczinski: a minute later the guy from the dredger, pasty-faced guy, looks like a stoker, is lying doubled-up by the coatroom. I’m just beginning to tell the Ukrainian what the difference is between a Water Polack and a citizen of Danzig when he gives it to me from behind—and that’s the scar.”
When Herbert said “and that’s the scar,” he always lent emphasis to his words by turning the pages of his paper and taking a gulp of coffee. Then I was allowed to press the next scar, sometimes once, sometimes twice.
“Oh, that one! It don’t amount to much. That was two years ago when the torpedo boat flotilla from Pillau tied up here. Christ, the way they swaggered around, playing the sailor boy and driving the little chickadees nuts. How Schwiemel ever got into the Navy is a mystery to me. He was from Dresden, try to get that through your head, Oskar my boy, from Dresden. But you don’t know, you don’t even suspect what it means for a sailor to come from Dresden.”
Herbert’s thoughts were lingering much too long for my liking in the fair city on the Elbe. To lure them back to Neufahrwasser, I once again pressed the scar which in his opinion didn’t amount to much.
“ Well, as I was saying. He was a signalman second class on a torpedo boat. Talked big. He thought he’d start up with a quiet kind of Scotsman what his tub was in drydock. Starts talking about Chamberlain, umbrellas and such. I advised him, very quietly the way I do, to stow that kind of talk, especially cause the Scotsman didn’t understand a word and was just painting pictures with schnaps on the table top. So I tell him to leave the guy alone, you’re not home now, I tell him, you’re a guest of the League of Nations. At this point, the torpedo fritz calls me a ‘pocketbook German’, he says it in Saxon what’s more. Quick I bop him one or two, and that calms him down. Half an hour later, I’m bending down to pick up a coin that had rolled under the table and I can’t see ‘cause it’s dark under the table, so the Saxon pulls out his pickpick and sticks it into me.”
Laughing, Herbert turned over the pages of the Neueste Nachrichten, added “And that’s the scar,” pushed the newspaper over to the grumbling Mother Truczinski, and prepared to get up. Quickly, before Herbert could leave for the can—he was pulling himself up by the table edge and I could see from the look on his face where he was headed for—I pressed a black and violet scar that was as wide as a skat card is long. You could still see where the stitches had been.
“Herbert’s got to go, boy. I’ll tell you afterwards.” But I pressed again and began to fuss and play the three-year-old, that always helped.
“All right, just to keep you quiet. But I’ll make it short.” Herbert sat down again. “That was on Christmas, 1930. There was nothing doing in the port. The longshoremen were hanging around the streetcorners, betting who could spit farthest. After midnight Mass—we’d just finished mixing the punch—the Swedes and Finns came pouring out of the Seamen’s Church across the street. I saw they were up to no good, I’m standing in the doorway, looking at those pious faces, wondering why they’re playing that way with their anchor buttons. And already she breaks loose: long are the knives and short is the night. Oh, well, Finns and Swedes always did have it in for each other. By why Herbert Truczinski should get mixed up with those characters, God only knows. He must have a screw loose, because when something’s going on, Herbert’s sure to be in on it. Well, that’s the moment I pick to go outside. Starbusch sees me and shouts: ‘Herbert, watch out!’ But I had my good deed to do. My idea was to save the pastor, poor little fellow, he’d just come down from Malmo fresh out of the seminary, and this was his first Christmas with Finns and Swedes in the same church. So my idea is to take him under my wing and see to it that he gets home with a whole skin. I just had my hand on his coat when I feel something cold in my back and Happy New Year I say to myself though it was only Christmas Eve. When I come to, I’m lying on the bar, and my good red blood is running into the beer glasses free of charge, and Starbusch is there with his Red Cross medicine kit, trying to give me so-called first aid.”
“What,” said Mother Truczinski, furiously pulling her knitting needle out of her bun, “makes you interested in a pastor all of a sudden when you haven’t set foot in a church since you was little?”
Herbert waved away her disapproval and, trailing his shirt and braces after him, repaired to the can. His gait was somber and somber was the voice in which he said: “And that’s the scar.” He walked as if he wished once and for all to get away from that church and the knife battles connected with it, as though the can were the place where a man is, becomes, or remains a freethinker.
A few weeks later I found Herbert speechless and in no mood to have his scars questioned. He seemed dispirited, but he hadn’t the usual bandage on his back. Actually I found him lying back down on the living-room couch, rather than nursing his wounds in his bed, and yet he seemed seriously hurt. I heard him sigh, appealing to God, Marx, and Engels and cursing them in the same breath. Now and then he would shake his fist in the air, and then let it fall on his chest; a moment later his other fist would join in, and he would pound his chest like a Catholic crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Herbert had knocked a Latvian sea captain dead. The court acquitted him—he had struck, a frequent occurrence in his trade, in self-defense. But despite his acquittal the Latvian remained a dead Latvian and weighed on his mind like a ton of bricks, although he was said to have been a frail little man, afflicted with a stomach ailment to boot.
Herbert didn’t go back to work. He had given notice. Starbusch, his boss, came to see him a number of times. He would sit by Herbert’s couch or with Mother Truczinski at the kitchen table. From his briefcase he would produce a bottle of Stobbe’s 100 proof gin for Herbert and for Mother Truczinski half a pound of unroasted real coffee from the Free Port. He was al
ways either trying to persuade Herbert to come back to work or trying to persuade Mother Truczinski to persuade her son. But Herbert was adamant—he didn’t want to be a waiter any more, and certainly not in Neufahrwasser across the street from the Seamen’s Church.
Actually he didn’t want to be a waiter altogether, for to be a waiter means having knives stuck into you and to have knives stuck into you means knocking a Latvian sea captain dead one fine day, just because you’re trying to keep him at a distance, trying to prevent a Latvian knife from adding a Latvian scar to all the Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Free-City, and German scars on Herbert Truczinski’s lengthwise and crosswise belabored back.
“I’d sooner go to work for the customs than be a waiter any more in Neufahrwasser,” said Herbert. But he didn’t go to work for the customs.
Niobe
In ‘38 the customs duties were raised and the borders between Poland and the Free City were temporarily closed. My grandmother was unable to take the narrow-gauge railway to the market in Langfuhr and had to close her stand. She was left sitting on her eggs so to speak, though with little desire to hatch them. In the port the herring stank to high heaven, the goods piled up, and statesmen met and came to an agreement. Meanwhile my friend Herbert lay on the couch, unemployed and divided against himself, mulling over his troubles.