by Günter Grass
Actually, if it had come to brass tacks, we should have had no objection either to Niobe and her wrestler’s frame. Herbert was perfectly well aware that the degree of passivity or activity he liked or disliked in naked or half-clad women is not limited to the slender type to the exclusion of the buxom or stout; there are slim young things who can’t lie still for a minute and women built like barrels who show no more current than a sleepy inland waterway. We purposely simplified, reducing the whole problem to two terms and insulting Niobe on principle. We were unforgivably rude to her. Herbert picked me up so I could beat her breasts with my drumsticks, driving absurd clouds of sawdust from her sprayed and therefore uninhabited wormholes. While I drummed, we looked into her amber eyes. Not a quiver or twinge, no sign of a tear. Her eyes did not narrow into menacing, hate-spewing slits. The whole room with everything in it was reflected perfectly though in convex distortion in those two polished, more yellowish than reddish drops of amber. Amber is deceptive, everyone knows that. We too were aware of the treacherous ways of this ennobled, ornamental wood gum. Nevertheless, obstinately classifying all things womanly as active and passive in our mechanical masculine way, we interpreted Niobe’s apparent indifference in a manner favorable to ourselves. We felt safe. With a malignant cackle, Herbert drove a nail into her kneecap: my knee hurt at every stroke, she didn’t even flick an eyelash. Right under her eyes, we engaged in all sorts of silly horseplay. Herbert put on the overcoat of a British admiral, took up a spyglass, and donned the admiral’s hat that went with it. With a little red jacket and a full-bottomed wig I transformed myself into the admiral’s pageboy. We played Trafalgar, bombarded Copenhagen, dispersed Napoleon’s fleet at Aboukir, rounded this cape and that cape, took historical poses, and then again contemporary poses. All this beneath the eyes of Niobe, the figurehead carved after the proportions of a Dutch witch. We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all.
Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn’t God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coat-hanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe, can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.
We came to work in the Maritime Museum for two weeks or more. Herbert made me a present of a drum and twice brought Mother Truczinski home his weekly wages, which included a danger bonus. One Tuesday, for the museum was closed on Monday, the cashier refused to sell us a child’s ticket; he refused to admit me altogether. Herbert asked why. Grumpily but not without benevolence, the cashier told us that a complaint had been made, that children could no longer be admitted; the little boy’s father was against it; he didn’t mind if I waited down by the ticket window, since he, as a businessman and widower, had no time to look after me, but he didn’t want me in the Kitten’s Parlor any more, because I was irresponsible.
Herbert was ready to give in, but I pushed him and prodded him. On the one hand he agreed that the cashier was right, on the other hand, he said I was his mascot, his guardian angel; my childlike innocence would protect him. In short, Herbert almost made friends with the cashier and succeeded in having me admitted “one last time”, those were the cashier’s words, to the Maritime Museum.
Once again my big friend took me by the hand and led me up the ornate, freshly oiled winding staircase to the second floor where Niobe lived. The morning was quiet and the afternoon still more so. Herbert sat with half-closed eyes on his leather chair with the yellow studs. I sat at his feet. My drum remained silent. We blinked up at the schooners, frigates, and corvettes, the five-masters, galleons, and sloops, the coastal sailing vessels and clippers, all of them hanging from the oak paneling, waiting for a favorable wind. We mustered the model fleet, with it we waited for a fresh breeze and dreaded the calm prevailing in the parlor. All this we did to avoid having to look at and dread Niobe. What would we not have given for the work sounds of a wood worm, proof that the inside of the green wood was being slowly but surely eaten away and hollowed out, that Niobe was perishable! But there wasn’t a worm to be heard. The wooden body had been made immune to worms, immortal. Our only resource was the model fleet, the absurd hope for a favorable wind. We made a game out of our fear of Niobe, we did our very best to ignore it, to forget it, and we might even have succeeded if suddenly the afternoon sun had not struck her full in the left amber eye and set it aflame.
Yet this inflammation need not have surprised us. We were quite familiar with sunny afternoons on the second floor of the Maritime Museum, we knew what hour had struck or was about to strike when the light fell beneath the cornice and lit up the ships. The churches round about did their bit toward providing the dust-stirring movements of the sun’s beam with a clock-time index, sending the sound of their historical bells to keep our historical objects company. Small wonder that the sun took on a historical character; it became an item in our museum and we began to suspect it of plotting with Niobe’s amber eyes.
But that afternoon, disinclined as we were to games or provocative nonsense, Niobe’s flaming eye struck us with redoubled force. Dejected and oppressed, we waited out the half-hour till closing time. The museum closed on the stroke of five.
Next day Herbert took up his post alone. I accompanied him to the museum, but I didn’t feel like waiting by the ticket window; instead I found a place across the street. With my drum I sat on a granite sphere which had grown a tail that grownups used as a banister. Small need to say that the other side of the staircase was guarded by a similar sphere with a similar cast-iron tail. I drummed infrequently but then hideously loud, protesting against the passers-by, female for the most part, who seemed to take pleasure in stopping to talk with me, asking me my name, and running their sweaty hands through my hair, which though short was slightly wavy and already looked upon as attractive. The morning passed. At the end of Heilige-Geist-Gasse the red and black brick hen of green-steepled St. Mary’s brooded beneath its great overgrown bell tower. Pigeons kept pushing one another out of nooks in the tower walls; alighting not far away from me, they would chatter together; what nonsense they talked; they hadn’t the faintest idea how long the hen would go on brooding or what was going to hatch, or whether, after all these centuries, the brooding wasn’t getting to be an end in itself.
At noon Herbert came out. From his lunchbox, which Mother Truczinski crammed so full that it couldn’t be closed, he fished out a sandwich with a finger-thick slice of blood sausage and handed it to me. I didn’t feel like eating. Herbert gave me a rather mechanical nod of encouragement. In the end I ate and Herbert, who did not, smoked a cigarette. Before returning to the museum, he went, with me tagging after him, to a bar in Brotbänken-Gasse for two or three drinks of gin. I watched his Adam’s apple as he tipped up the glasses. I didn’t like the way he was pouring it down. Long after he had mounted his winding staircase, long after I had returned to my granite sphere, Oskar could still see his friend Herbert’s Adam’s apple jumping up and down.
The afternoon crept across the pale polychrome façade of the museum. It sprang from cornice to cornice, rode nymphs and horns of plenty, devoured plump angels reaching for flowers, burst into the midst of a country carnival, played blindman’s buff, mounted a swing festooned with roses, ennobled a group of burghers talking business in baggy breeches, lit upon a stag pursued by hounds, and finally reached the second-story window which allowed the sun, briefly and yet forever, to illuminate an amber eye.
Slowly I slid off my granite ball. My drum struck hard against the stone. Some bits of lacquer from the white casing and the red flames broke off and lay white and red on the stone steps.
Possibly I recited something, perhaps I mumbled a prayer, or a list: a little while later the ambulance drew up in front of the museum. Passers-by gathered round the entrance. Oskar managed to slip in with the men from the emergency squad. I found my way up the stairs quicker than they, though by that time they must have beg
un to know their way around the museum.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing when I saw Herbert. He was hanging from Niobe’s façade, he had tried to jump her. His head covered hers. His arms clung to her upraised, folded arms. He was bare to the waist. His shirt was found later, neatly folded on the leather chair beside the door. His back disclosed all its scars. I read the script, counted the letters. Not a one was missing. But not so much as the beginning of a new inscription was discernible.
The emergency squad who came rushing in not far behind me had difficulty in getting Herbert away from Niobe. In a frenzy of lust he had torn a double-edged ship’s ax from its safety chain; one edge he had driven into Niobe and the other, in the course of his frantic assault, into himself. Up top, then, they were perfectly united, but down below, alas, he had found no ground for his anchor and his member still emerged, stiff and perplexed, from his open trousers.
When they spread the blanket with the inscription “Municipal Emergency Service” over Herbert, Oskar, as always when he incurred a loss, found his way back to his drum. He was still beating it with his fists when the museum guards led him out of “the Kitten’s Parlor”, down the stairs, and ultimately stowed him in a police car that took him home.
Even now, in the mental hospital, when he recalls this attempted love affair between flesh and wood, he is constrained to work with his fists in order to explore once more Herbert’s swollen, multicolored back, that hard and sensitive labyrinth of scars which was to foreshadow, to anticipate everything to come, which was harder and more sensitive than anything that followed. Like a blind man he read the raised script of that back.
It is only now, now that they have taken Herbert away from his unfeeling carving, that Bruno my keeper turns up with that awful pear-shaped head of his. Gently he removes my fists from the drum, hangs the drum over the left-hand bedpost at the foot end of my iron bed, and smoothes out my blanket.
“ Why, Mr. Matzerath,” he reproves me gently, “if you go on drumming so loud, somebody’s bound to hear that somebody’s drumming much too loud. Wouldn’t you like to take a rest or drum a little softer?”
Yes, Bruno, I shall try to dictate a quieter chapter to my drum, even though the subject of my next chapter calls for an orchestra of ravenous wild men.
Faith, Hope, Love
There was once a musician; his name was Meyn and he played the trumpet too beautifully for words. He lived on the fifth floor of an apartment house, just under the roof, he kept four cats, one of which was called Bismarck, and from morning to night he drank out of a gin bottle. This he did until sobered by disaster.
Even today Oskar doesn’t like to believe in omens. But I have to admit that in those days there were plenty of omens of disaster. It was approaching with longer and longer steps and larger and larger boots. It was then that my friend Herbert Truczinski died of a wound in the chest inflicted by a wooden woman. The woman did not die. She was sealed up in the cellar of the museum, allegedly to be restored, preserved in any case. But you can’t lock up disaster in a cellar. It drains into the sewer pipes, spreads to the gas pipes, and gets into every household with the gas. And no one who sets his soup kettle on the bluish flames suspects that disaster is bringing his supper to a boil.
When Herbert was buried in Langfuhr Cemetery, I once again saw Leo Schugger, whose acquaintance I had made at Brenntau. Slavering and holding out his white mildewed gloves, he tendered his sympathies, those sympathies of his which made little distinction between joy and sorrow, to all the assembled company, to Mother Truczinski, to Guste, Fritz, and Maria Truczinski, to the corpulent Mrs. Kater, to old man Heilandt, who slaughtered Fritz’ rabbits for Mother Truczinski on holidays, to my presumptive father Matzerath, who, generous as he could be at times, defrayed a good half of the funeral expenses, even to Jan Bronski, who hardly knew Herbert and had only come to see Matzerath and perhaps myself on neutral cemetery ground.
When Leo Schugger’s gloves fluttered out toward Meyn the musician, who had come half in civilian dress, half in SA uniform, another omen of disaster befell.
Suddenly frightened, Leo’s pale glove darted upward and flew off, drawing Leo with it over the tombs. He could be heard screaming and the tatters of words that hovered in the cemetery air had no connection with condolences.
No one moved away from Meyn the musician. And yet, recognized and singled out by Leo Schugger, he stood alone amid the funeral company. He fiddled embarrassedly with his trumpet, which he had brought along by design and had played beautifully over Herbert’s grave. Beautifully, because Meyn had done what he hadn’t done for a long time, he had gone back to his gin bottle, because he was the same age as Herbert and Herbert’s death, which reduced me and my drum to silence, had moved him.
There was once a musician; his name was Meyn, and he played the trumpet too beautifully for words. He lived on the fifth floor of an apartment house, just under the roof; he kept four cats, one of which was called Bismarck, and from morning to night he drank out of a gin bottle until, late in ‘36 or early in ‘37 I think it was, he joined the Mounted SA. As a trumpeter in the band, he made far fewer mistakes but his playing was no longer too beautiful for words, because, when he slipped on those riding breeches with the leather seat, he gave up the gin bottle and from then on his playing was loud and sober, nothing more.
When SA Man Meyn lost his long-time friend Herbert Truczinski, along with whom during the twenties he had paid dues first to a communist youth group, then to the socialist Red Falcons; when it came time for his friend to be laid in the ground, Meyn reached for his trumpet and his gin bottle. For he wanted to play beautifully and not soberly; his days in the equestrian band hadn’t destroyed his ear for music. Arrived at the cemetery, he took a last swig, and while playing he kept his civilian coat on over his uniform, although he had planned to play in Brown, minus the cap, of course.
There was once an SA man who, while playing the trumpet too beautifully for words after drinking plenty of gin, kept his overcoat on over his Mounted SA uniform. When Leo Schugger, a type met with in all cemeteries, came forward to offer condolences, everyone else came in for his share of sympathy. Only the SA man was not privileged to grasp Leo’s white glove, because Leo, recognizing the SA man, gave a loud cry of fear and withheld both his glove and his sympathies. The SA man went home with a cold trumpet and no sympathy. In his flat under the roof of our apartment house he found his four cats.
There was once an SA man, his name was Meyn. As a relic of the days when he drank gin all day and played the trumpet too beautifully for words, Meyn still kept four cats, one of which was called Bismarck. One day when SA Man Meyn came home from the funeral of his old friend Herbert Truczinski, sad and sobered, because someone had withheld his sympathies, he found himself all alone in the flat with his four cats. The cats rubbed against his riding boots, and Meyn gave them a newspaper full of herring heads. That got them away from his boots. That day the flat stank worse than usual of the four cats who were all toms, one of which was called Bismarck and was black with white paws. But Meyn had no gin on hand and that made the stench of the cats more unacceptable. He might have bought some gin in our store if his flat hadn’t been on the fifth floor, right under the roof. But as it was, he dreaded the stairs and still more he dreaded the neighbors in whose presence and hearing he had sworn on numerous occasions that never again would a drop of gin cross his musician’s lips, that he had embarked on a new life of rigorous sobriety, that from now on his motto was order and purpose, away with the vapors of a botched and aimless youth.
There was once a man, his name was Meyn. One day when he found himself all alone in his flat under the roof with his four tomcats, one of which was called Bismarck, the smell was most particularly distasteful to him, because he had had an unpleasant experience earlier in the day and also because there was no gin on hand. When his thirst and displeasure and with them the cat smell had reached a certain point, Meyn, a musician by trade and a member of the Mounted SA ban
d, reached for the poker that was leaning against the cold stove and flailed out at the cats until it seemed safe to assume that though the cat smell in the flat had lost none of its pungency, all of them, including the one named Bismarck, were dead and done for.
Once there was a watchmaker named Laubschad who lived on the second floor of our apartment house in a two-room flat, with windows overlooking the court. Laubschad the watchmaker was unmarried, a member of the National Socialist Welfare Organization and of the SPCA. He was a kindly man who liked to help all tired humans, sick animals, and broken clocks back on their feet. One afternoon as the watchmaker sat pensively at his window, thinking about the neighbor’s funeral he had attended that morning, he saw Meyn the musician, who lived on the fifth floor of the same building, carry a half-filled potato sack, which was dripping and seemed wet at the bottom, out into the court and plunge it into one of the garbage cans. But since the garbage can was already three-quarters full, the musician had trouble getting the lid back on.
There were once four tomcats, one of which was called Bismarck. These tomcats belonged to a musician by the name of Meyn. Since the tomcats, which had not been fixed, emitted a fierce, uncompromising smell, the musician clouted them with a fire poker one day when for particular reasons he found the smell particularly distasteful, stuffed their remains in a potato sack, carried the sack down four flights of stairs, and was in a great hurry to stow the bundle in the garbage can in the court beside the carpet rack, because the burlap was not water– nor bloodproof and began to drip before he was even half down the stairs. But since the garbage can was a bit full, the musician had to compress the garbage and his sack in order to close the lid. No sooner had he left the court in the direction of the street—for he had no desire to go back to his flat which though catless still stank of cats—than the compressed garbage began to expand, raised the sack, and with it the lid of the garbage can.