by Günter Grass
And yet the customs service offered wages and bread. It offered green uniforms and a border that was worth guarding. Herbert didn’t go to the customs and he didn’t want to be a waiter anymore; he only wanted to lie on the couch and mull.
But a man must work. And not only Mother Truczinski was of that opinion. Although she resisted Starbusch’s pleas that she persuade Herbert to go back to waiting on tables in Neufahrwasser, she definitely wanted to get Herbert off that couch. He himself was soon sick of the two-room flat, his mulling had become purely superficial, and he began one fine day to look through the Help Wanted ads in the Neueste Nachrichten and reluctantly, in the Nazi paper, the Vorposten.
I wanted to help him. Should a man like Herbert have to look for work other than his proper occupation in the harbor suburb? Should he be reduced to stevedoring, to odd jobs, to burying rotten herring? I couldn’t see Herbert standing on the Mottlau bridges, spitting at the gulls and degenerating into a tobacco chewer. It occurred to me that Herbert and I might start up a partnership: two hours of concentrated work once a week and we would be made men. Aided by his still diamond-like voice, Oskar, his wits sharpened by long experience in this field, would open up shopwindows with worthwhile displays and stand guard at the same time, while Herbert would be quick with his fingers. We needed no blowtorch, no passkeys, no tool kit. We needed no brass knuckles or shootin’ irons. The Black Maria and our partnership—two worlds that had no need to meet. And Mercury, god of thieves and commerce, would bless us because I, born in the sign of Virgo, possessed his seal, which I occasionally imprinted on hard objects.
There would be no point in passing over this episode. I shall record it briefly but my words should not be taken as a confession. During Herbert’s period of unemployment the two of us committed two medium-sized burglaries of delicatessen stores and one big juicy one—a furrier’s: the spoils were three blue foxes, a sealskin, a Persian lamb muff, and a pretty, though not enormously valuable, pony coat.
What made us give up the burglar’s trade was not so much the misplaced feelings of guilt which troubled us from time to time, as the increasing difficulty of disposing of the goods. To unload the stuff profitably Herbert had to go back to Neufahrwasser, for that was where all the better fences hung out. But since this locality inevitably reminded him of the Latvian sea captain with the stomach trouble, he tried to get rid of the goods everywhere else, along Schichaugasse, on the Bürgerwiesen, in short everywhere else but in Neufahrwasser, where the furs would have sold like butter. The unloading process was so slow that the delicatessen finally ended up in Mother Truczinski’s kitchen and he even gave her, or tried to give her, the Persian lamb muff.
When Mother Truczinski saw the muff, there was no more joking. She had accepted the edibles in silence, sharing perhaps the folk belief that the theft of food is legitimate. But the muff meant luxury and luxury meant frivolity and frivolity meant prison. Such were Mother Truczinski’s sound and simple thoughts; she made mouse eyes, pulled a knitting needle out of her bun, and said with a shake of the needle: “You’ll end up like your father,” simultaneously handing her Herbert the Neueste Nachrichten or the Vorposten, which meant, Now go and get yourself a job and I mean a regular job, or I won’t cook for you any more.
Herbert lay for another week on his mulling couch, he was insufferable, available neither for an interrogation of his scars nor for a visit to promising shopwindows. I was very understanding, I let him savor his torment to the dregs and spent most of my time with Laubschad the watchmaker and his time-devouring clocks. I even gave Meyn the musician another try, but he had given up drinking and devoted his trumpet exclusively to the tunes favored by the Mounted SA, dressed neatly and went briskly about his business while, miserably underfed, his four cats, relics of a drunken but splendidly musical era, went slowly to the dogs. On the other hand, I often, coming home late at night, found Matzerath, who in Mama’s lifetime had drunk only in company, sitting glassy-eyed behind a row of schnaps glasses. He would be leafing through the photograph album, trying, as I am now, to bring Mama to life in the little, none too successfully exposed rectangles; toward midnight he would weep himself into an elegiac mood, and begin to apostrophize Hitler or Beethoven, who still hung there looking each other gloomily in the eye. From the genius, who, it must be remembered, was deaf, he seemed to receive an answer, while the teetotaling Führer was silent, because Matzerath, a drunken little unit leader, was unworthy of Providence.
One Tuesday—so accurate is my memory thanks to my drum—Herbert finally made up his mind. He threw on his duds, that is, he had Mother Truczinski brush his blue bell-bottom trousers with cold coffee, squeezed into his sport shoes, poured himself into his jacket with the anchor buttons, sprinkled the white silk scarf from the Free Port with cologne which had also ripened on the duty-free dungheap of the Free Port, and soon stood there ready to go, stiff and square in his blue visor cap.
“Guess I’ll have a look around for a job,” said Herbert, giving a faintly audacious tilt to his cap. Mother Truczinski let her newspaper sink to the table.
Next day Herbert had a job and a uniform. It was not customs-green but dark grey; he had become a guard in the Maritime Museum.
Like everything that was worth preserving in this city so altogether deserving to be preserved, the treasures of the Maritime Museum occupied an old patrician mansion with a raised stone porch and a playfully but substantially ornamented façade. The inside, full of carved dark oak and winding staircases, was devoted to records of the carefully catalogued history of our seaport town, which had always prided itself on its ability to grow or remain stinking rich in the midst of its powerful but for the most part poor neighbors. Ah, those privileges, purchased from the Teutonic Knights or from the kings of Poland and elaborately defined in elaborate documents! Those color engravings of the innumerable sieges incurred by the fortress at the mouth of the Vistula! There within the walls of the city stands Stanislaw Leszczynski, who has just fled from the Saxon anti-king. The oil painting shows exactly how scared he is. Primate Potocki and de Monti the French ambassador are also scared out of their wits, because the Russians under General Lascy are besieging the city. All these scenes are accurately labeled, and the names of the French ships are legible beneath the fleur-de-lys banner. A legend with an arrow informs us that on this ship King Stanislaw Leszczynski fled to Lorraine when the city was surrendered on the third of August. But most of the exhibits consisted of trophies acquired in wars that had been won, for the simple reason that lost wars seldom or never provide museums with trophies.
The pride of the collection was the figurehead from a large Florentine galleon which, though its home port was Bruges, belonged to the Florentine merchants Portinari and Tani. In April, 1473, the Danzig city-captains and pirates Paul Beneke and Martin Bardewiek succeeded, while cruising off the coast of Zealand not far from Sluys, in capturing the galleon. The captain, the officers, and a considerable crew were put to the sword, while the ship with its cargo were taken to Danzig. A folding “Last Judgment” by Memling and a golden baptismal font—both commissioned by Tani for a church in Florence—found a home in the Marienkirche; today, as far as I know, the “Last Judgment” gladdens the Catholic eyes of Poland. It is not known what became of the figurehead after the war. But in my time it was in the Maritime Museum.
A luxuriant wooden woman, green and naked, arms upraised and hands indolently clasped in such a way as to reveal every single one of her fingers; sunken amber eyes gazing out over resolute, forward-looking breasts. This woman, this figurehead, was a bringer of disaster. She had been commissioned by Portinari the merchant from a sculptor with a reputation for carving figureheads; the model was a Flemish girl close to Portinari. Scarcely had the green figure taken its place beneath the bowsprit of a galleon than the girl, as was then customary, was put on trial for witchcraft. Put to the question before going up in flames, she had implicated her patron, the Florentine merchant, as well as the sculptor who had taken her me
asurements so expertly. Portinari is said to have hanged himself for fear of the fire. As to the sculptor, they chopped off both his gifted hands to prevent him from ever again transforming witches into figureheads. While the trials were still going on in Bruges, creating quite a stir because Portinari was a rich man, the ship bearing the figurehead fell into the piratical hands of Paul Beneke. Signer Tani, the second merchant, fell beneath a pirate’s poleax. Paul Beneke was the next victim; a few years later he incurred the disfavor of the patricians of his native city and was drowned in the courtyard of the Stockturm. Ships to whose bows the figurehead was affixed after Beneke’s death had a habit of bursting into flames before they had even put out of the harbor, and the fire would spread to other vessels; everything burned but the figurehead, which was fireproof and, what with her alluring curves, always found admirers among shipowners. But no sooner had this woman taken her place on a vessel than mutiny broke out and the crew, who had always been a peaceful lot until then, decimated each other. The unsuccessful Danish expedition of the Danzig fleet under the highly gifted Eberhard Ferber in the year 1522 led to Ferber’s downfall and bloody insurrection in the city. The history books, it is true, speak of religious disorders—in 1523, a Protestant pastor named Hegge led a mob in an iconoclastic assault on the city’s seven parish churches—but we prefer to blame the figurehead for this catastrophe whose effects were felt for many years to come; it is known at all events that the green woman graced the prow of Ferber’s ship.
When Stefan Batory vainly besieged the city fifty years later, Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of the Oliva Monastery, put the blame on the sinful woman in his penitential sermons. The king of the Poles, to whom the city had made a present of her, took her with him in his encampments, and she gave him bad advice. To what extent the wooden lady affected the Swedish campaigns against the city and how much she had to do with the long incarceration of Dr. Aegidius Strauch, the religious zealot who had conspired with the Swedes and also demanded that the green woman, who had meanwhile found her way back into the city, be burned, we do not know. There is a rather obscure report to the effect that a poet by the name of Opitz, a fugitive from Silesia, was granted asylum in the city for some years but died before his time, having found the ruinous wood carving in an attic and having attempted to write poems in her honor.
Only toward the end of the eighteenth century, at the time of the partitions of Poland, were effective measures taken against her. The Prussians, who had taken the city by force of arms, issued a Royal Prussian edict prohibiting “the wooden figure Niobe”. For the first time she was mentioned by name in an official document and at the same time evacuated or rather incarcerated in that Stockturm in whose courtyard Paul Beneke had been drowned and from whose gallery I had first tried out my long-distance song effects. Intimidated perhaps by the presence of the choice products of human ingenuity of which I have spoken (for she was lodged in the torture chamber), she minded her business throughout the nineteenth century.
When in ‘25 I climbed to the top of the Stockturm and haunted the windows of the Stadt-Theater with my voice, Niobe, popularly known as “the Green Kitten”, had long since and thank goodness been removed from the torture chamber of the tower. Who knows whether my attack on the neoclassical edifice would otherwise have succeeded?
It must have been an ignorant museum director, a foreigner to the city, who took Niobe from the torture chamber where her malice was held in check and, shortly after the founding of the Free City, settled her in the newly installed Maritime Museum. Shortly thereafter he died of blood poisoning, which this over-zealous official had brought on himself while putting up a sign saying that the lady on exhibition above it was a figurehead answering to the name of Niobe. His successor, a cautious man familiar with the history of the city, wanted to have Niobe removed. His idea was to make the city of Lübeck a present of the dangerous wooden maiden, and it is only because the people of Lübeck declined the gift that the little city on the Trave, with the exception of its brick churches, came through the war and its air raids relatively unscathed.
And so Niobe, or “the Green Kitten”, remained in the Maritime Museum and was responsible in the short space of fourteen years for the death of three directors—not the cautious one, he had got himself transferred—for the demise of an elderly priest at her feet, the violent ends of a student at the Engineering School, of two graduates of St. Peter’s Secondary School who had just passed their final examinations, and the end of four conscientious museum attendants, three of whom were married. All, even the student of engineering, were found with transfigured countenances and in their breasts sharp objects of a kind to be found only in maritime museums: sailor’s knives, boarding hooks, harpoons, finely chiseled spearheads from the Gold Coast, sailmakers’ needles; only the last of the students had been obliged to resort first to his pocketknife and then to his school compass, because shortly before his death all the sharp objects in the museum had been attached to chains or placed behind glass.
Although in every case the police as well as the coroner spoke of tragic suicide, a rumor which was current in the city and echoed in the newspapers had it that “The Green Kitten does it with her own hands”. Niobe was seriously suspected of having dispatched men and boys from life to death. There was no end of discussion. The newspapers devoted special columns to their readers’ opinions on the “Niobe case”. The city government spoke of untimely superstition and said it had no intention whatsoever of taking precipitate action before definite proof was provided that something sinister and supernatural had actually occurred.
Thus the green statue remained the prize piece of the Maritime Museum, for the District Museum in Oliva, the Municipal Museum in Fleischergasse, and the management of the Artushof refused to accept the man-crazy individual within their walls.
There was a shortage of museum attendants. And the attendants were not alone in refusing to have anything to do with the wooden maiden. Visitors to the museum also avoided the room with the amber-eyed lady. For quite some time utter silence prevailed behind the Renaissance windows which provided the sculpture with the necessary lateral lighting. Dust piled up. The cleaning women stopped coming. As to the photographers, formerly so irrepressible, one of them died soon after taking Niobe’s picture; a natural death, to be sure, but the man’s colleagues had put two and two together. They ceased to furnish the press of the Free City, Poland, Germany, and even France with likenesses of the murderous figurehead, and even went so far as to expunge Niobe from their files. From then on their photographic efforts were devoted exclusively to the arrivals and departures of presidents, prime ministers, and exiled kings, to poultry shows. National Party Congresses, automobile races, and spring floods.
Such was the state of affairs when Herbert Truczinski, who no longer wished to be a waiter and was dead set against going into the customs service, donned the mouse-grey uniform of a museum attendant and took his place on a leather chair beside the door of the room popularly referred to as “the Kitten’s parlor”.
On the very first day of his job I followed Herbert to the streetcar stop on Max-Halbe-Platz. I was worried about him.
“Go home, Oskar, my boy. I can’t take you with me.” But I stood there so steadfast with my drum and drumsticks that Herbert relented: “Oh, all right. Come as far as the High Gate. And then you’ll ride back again and be a good boy.” At the High Gate I refused to take the Number 5 car that would have brought me home. Again Herbert relented; I could come as far as Heilige-Geist-Gasse. On the museum steps he tried again to get rid of me. Then with a sigh he bought a child’s admission ticket. It is true that I was already fourteen and should have paid full admission, but what people don’t know won’t hurt them.
We had a pleasant, quiet day. No visitors, no inspectors. Now and then I would drum a little while; now and then Herbert would sleep for an hour or so. Niobe gazed out into the world through amber eyes and strove double-breasted toward a goal that was not our goal. We paid no attention to her.
“She’s not my type,” said Herbert disparagingly. “Look at those rolls of fat, look at that double chin she’s got.”
He tilted his head and began to muse: “And look at the ass on her, like a family-size clothes cupboard. Herbert’s taste runs more to dainty little ladies, cute and delicate like.”
I listened to Herbert’s detailed description of his type and looked on as his great shovel-like hands kneaded and modeled the contours of a lithe and lovely person of the fair sex, who was to remain for many years, to this very day as a matter of fact and even beneath the disguise of a nurse’s uniform, my ideal of womanhood.
By the third day of our life in the museum we ventured to move away from the chair beside the door. On pretext of cleaning—the room really was in pretty bad shape—we made our way, dusting, sweeping away spiderwebs from the oak paneling, toward the sunlit and shadow-casting green wooden body. It would not be accurate to say that Niobe left us entirely cold. Her lures were heavy but not unshapely and she wasn’t backward about putting them forward. But we did not look upon her with eyes of covetousness. Rather, we looked her over in the manner of shrewd connoisseurs who take every detail into account. Herbert and I were two esthetes soberly drunk on beauty, abstract beauty. There we were, studying feminine proportions with our thumbnails. Niobe’s thighs were a bit too short; aside from that we found that her lengthwise measurements—eight head lengths—lived up to the classical ideal; beamwise, however, pelvis, shoulders, and chest demanded to be judged by Dutch rather than Greek standards.
Herbert tilted his thumb: “She’d be a damn sight too active in bed for me. Herbert’s had plenty of wrestling matches in Ohra and Fahrwasser. He don’t need no woman for that.” Herbert’s fingers had been burnt. “Oh, if she was a little handful, a frail little thing that you’ve got to be careful not to break her in two, Herbert would have no objection.”