by Günter Grass
I said it was worth trying. Her reaction was: “What’s the use?” Her idea was to have her sleep out. I made my invitation more definite, and when she still couldn’t make up her mind, concluded mysteriously with the words: “A little gumption, Sister Gertrude. We’re only young once. I know someone who’s got plenty of cake stamps.” I illustrated this last remark with a light, stylized tap on my breast pocket and offered her another piece of candy. Strange to say, I was rather terrified when this strapping Westphalian lass, who was not my type at all, said as though to the medicine chest: “All right, if you feel like it. Let’s say six o’clock, but not here, how about Cornelius-Platz?”
As though I would ever have expected Sister Gertrude to meet me or anyone else in or near the hospital entrance! At six o’clock I was waiting for her under the Cornelius-Platz clock, which was still feeling the effects of the war and did not tell time. She was punctual, as I could tell by the not very expensive pocket watch I had bought some weeks before. I hardly recognized her; if I had seen her a little sooner, on her descent for instance from the streetcar some fifty paces away, before she could notice me, I should have slipped quietly away; for Sister Gertrude did not come as Sister Gertrude in white with a Red Cross pin, she came in miserably cut civilian dress as Miss Gertrude Wilms from Hamm or Dortmund or one of those towns between Dortmund and Hamm.
She didn’t notice my dismay, but told me she had nearly been late because, just to be mean, the head nurse had given her something to do just before five.
“Well, Miss Gertrude, may I offer a few suggestions? Let’s first relax a while in a pastry shop and after that whatever you say: we could go to the movies, it’s too late to get theater tickets, or how about a little dance?”
“Oh, yes, let’s go dancing,” she cried with enthusiasm. It was too late when she realized, but then with ill-concealed distress, that despite my finery I was hardly cut out to be her dancing partner.
With a certain malice—why hadn’t she come in the nurse’s uniform I was so fond of?—I confirmed the arrangements; she, for lack of imagination, soon forgot her fright, and joined me in consuming—I one piece, she three—some cake that must have had cement in it. After I had paid with money and cake stamps, we boarded the Gerresheim car, for if Korneff were to be believed, there was a dance hall below Grafenberg.
We did the last bit of the way slowly on foot, for the car stopped before the uphill stretch. A September evening by the book. Gertrude’s wooden sandals, obtainable without coupons, clattered like the mill on the floss. The sound made me feel gay. The people coming downhill turned around to look at us. Miss Gertrude was embarrassed. I was used to it and took no notice. After all it was my cake stamps that had fed her three slices of cement cake at Kürten’s Pastry Shop.
The dance hall was called Wedig’s and subtitled The Lions’ Den. There was tittering before we left the ticket window, and heads turned as we entered. Sister Gertrude was ill at ease in her civilian clothing and would have fallen over a folding chair if a waiter and I hadn’t held her up. The waiter showed us a table near the dance floor, and I ordered two iced drinks, adding in an undertone audible only to the waiter: “But toss in a couple of shots, if you please.”
The Lions’ Den consisted chiefly of a large room that must once have been a riding academy. The rafters and bomb-scarred ceiling had been decorated with streamers and garlands from last year’s carnival. Muted colored lights swung in circles, casting reflections on the resolutely slicked hair of the young black marketeers, some of them fashionably dressed, and the taffeta blouses of the girls, who all seemed to know each other.
When the drinks were served, I bought ten American cigarettes from the waiter, offered Sister Gertrude one and gave another to the waiter, who stored it behind his ear. After giving my companion a light, I produced Oskar’s amber cigarette holder and smoked half a Camel. The tables around us quieted down. Sister Gertrude dared to look up. When I crushed out my enormous Camel butt in the ash tray and left it there, Sister Gertrude picked it up with a practiced hand and tucked it away in the side pocket of her oilskin handbag.
“For my fiancé in Dortmund,” she said. “He smokes like mad.”
I was glad I wasn’t her fiancé and glad too that the music had started up.
The five-piece band played “Don’t Fence Me In.” Males in crêpe soles dashed across the dance floor without colliding and appropriated young ladies who as they arose gave their bags to girl friends for safekeeping.
A few of the couples danced with a smoothness born of long practice. Quantities of gum were being ruminated; now and then a group of young black marketeers would stop dancing for a few measures to confer in Rhenish leavened with American slang while their partners, held vaguely by the arm, bobbed and joggled impatiently. Small objects exchanged hands: a true black marketeer never takes time off.
We sat the first dance out and the next foxtrot as well. Oskar took an occasional look at the men’s feet. When the band struck up “Rosamund,” he asked a bewildered Sister Gertrude to dance.
Remembering Jan Bronski’s choreographic arts, I, who was almost two heads shorter than Sister Gertrude, decided to try a schieber; I was well aware of the grotesque note we struck and determined to accentuate it. With resignation she let herself be led. I held her firmly by the rear end, thirty percent wool content; cheek to blouse, I pushed her, every pound of her, backward and followed in her footsteps. Sweeping away obstacles with our unbending side arms, we crossed the dance floor from corner to corner. It went better than I had dared to hope. I risked a variation or two. My cheek still clinging to her blouse, my hand still supported by her hips, I danced around her without relinquishing the classical posture of the schieber, whose purpose it is to suggest that she is about to fall backward and that he is about to fall on top of her, though because they are such good dancers, they never actually fall.
Soon we had an audience. I heard cries such as: “Didn’t I tell you it was Jimmy? Hey, take a look at Jimmy. Hello, Jimmy. Come on. Jimmy. Let’s go, Jimmy.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t see Sister Gertrude’s face and could only hope that she was taking the applause in her stride as a well-meant homage. A nurse, after all, should be used to embarrassing flattery.
When we sat down, those around us were still clapping. The five-piece band did a flourish and another and another; the percussion man outdid himself. There were cries of “Jimmy!” And “Say, did you see those two?” At this point Sister Gertrude arose, mumbled something about going to the ladies’ room, took her handbag containing the cigarette butt for her fiancé in Dortmund, and blushing scarlet, shoved her way, colliding with everything in her path, between chairs and tables, toward the ladies’ room, which happened to be near the exit.
She never came back. Before leaving, she had drained her drink at one long gulp, a gesture that apparently means goodbye; Sister Gertrude had walked out on me.
And Oskar? An American cigarette in his amber holder, he ordered a straight schnaps from the waiter who was discreetly removing Sister Gertrude’s empty glass. He was determined to smile at all costs. His smile may have been a bit sorrowful, but it was still a smile; folding his arms and crossing his legs, he waggled one delicate black shoe, size five, and savored the superiority of the forsaken.
The young habitués of the Lions’ Den were very nice; it was a swing number, and they winked at me from the dance floor as they swung by. “Hello,” cried the boys and “Take it easy” the girls. With a wave of my cigarette holder I thanked the repositories of true humanity and smirked indulgently as the percussion man gave a sumptuous roll and did a solo number on the drums, cymbals, and triangle, which reminded me of my good old rostrum days. The next dance, he then announced, would be ladies’ invitation.
A hot number, “Jimmy the Tiger,” meant for me no doubt, though no one at the Lions’ Den could have known about my career as a disrupter of mass meetings. A fidgety little thing with a henna mop came over to me and, pausing a moment
in her gum chewing, whispered in my ear with a voice husky from smoking: “Jimmy the Tiger.” I was the partner of her choice. Conjuring up jungle menaces, we danced Jimmy; the Tiger walked—for about ten minutes—on velvet paws. Again a flourish, applause and another flourish, because my hump was well dressed and I was nimble on my legs and cut a pretty good figure as Jimmy the Tiger. I asked my admirer to my table, and Helma—that was her name—asked if her girl friend Hannelore could come too. Hannelore was silent, sedentary, and hard-drinking. Helma, on the other hand, was addicted to American cigarettes, and I had to ask the waiter for some more.
A fine evening. I danced “Hey Bob A Re Bop,” “In the Mood,” “Shoeshine Boy,” chatted between dances, and entertained the two young ladies, who were not very exacting and told me that they worked in the telephone exchange on Graf-Adolf-Platz and that lots of girls from the exchange came to Wedig’s every Saturday and Sunday night. They themselves came regularly when they weren’t on duty, and I too promised to come often, because Helma and Hannelore were so nice, and because telephone operators seemed so easy to get along with when there was no telephone—a little joke that they were good enough to laugh at.
It was a long while before I went back to the City Hospital. When I resumed my occasional visits, Sister Gertrude had been transferred to gynecology. I never saw her again except to wave to from a distance. I became a welcome habitué at the Lions’ Den. The girls exploited me but not immoderately. Through them I made the acquaintance of several members of the British Army of Occupation and picked up a few dozen words of English, I made friends with a couple of the musicians, but controlled myself, that is, I kept away from the drums and contented myself with the modest happiness of cutting inscriptions at Korneff’s.
During the hard winter of 1947 to 1948, I kept up my contact with the telephone girls. At no great expense, I obtained a certain amount of warmth from the silent, sedentary Hannelore, though we never went beyond the noncommittal manual stage.
In the winter the stonecutter took care of his equipment. The tools had to be reforged, a few leftover blocks were trimmed and made ready for their inscriptions. Korneff and I replenished our stores, which had been thinned out during the autumn season, and made a few artificial stones from shell-lime waste. I also tried my hand at some simple sculpture with the stippling machine, did reliefs representing angels’ heads, heads of Christ with crowns of thorns, and doves of the Holy Ghost. When snow fell, I shoveled it away, and when there was none, thawed out the water pipe leading to the polishing machine.
At the end of February, ‘48, soon after Ash Wednesday—I had lost weight during carnival and may have been looking rather ethereal, for some of the girls at the Lions’ Den took to calling me Doctor—the first peasants from the left bank of the Rhine came over to look at our offerings. Korneff was absent on his annual rheumatism cure, tending a blast furnace in Duisburg. When he came back two weeks later, parched and boilless, I had already sold three stones, one of them for a tomb for three, on favorable terms. Korneff sold two slabs of Kirchheim shell lime; and early in March we began to set them up. One slab of Silesian marble went to Grevenbroich; the two Kirchheim stones are in a village cemetery near Neuss; the red sandstone with my angels’ heads can still be admired in the cemetery at Stomml. At the end of March we loaded the diorite slab with the thorn-crowned Christ and drove slowly, because the three-wheeler was overloaded, in the direction of Kappes-Hamm, meaning to cross the Rhine at Neuss. From Neuss via Grevenbroich to Rommerskirchen, then left on the road to Bergheim Erft. Leaving Rheydt and Niederaussem behind us, we reached Oberaussem without breaking an axle. The cemetery was situated on a hill sloping gently toward the village.
Ah, the view! At our feet the Erftland soft coal country. The eight chimneys of the Fortuna Works, steaming heavenward. The new Fortuna North power plant, hissing as though about to explode. The mountains of slag surmounted by telpher lines. Every three minutes a train empty or full of coke, no larger than a toy, moving to or from the power plant; a larger toy, a toy for giants, was the high-tension line that swept across one corner of the cemetery on its way, three abreast, buzzing with high tension, to Cologne. Other lines hurried horizonward in other directions, to Belgium and Holland: hub of the world. We set up the diorite slab for the Flies family—electricity is generated by… The gravedigger with his helper, who substituted for Leo Schugger on this occasion, passed by with their implements. We were standing in a field of tension. Three rows away, they started to dig up a grave preparatory to moving its occupant—war reparations flowing over high-tension wires—the wind carried the smells typical of a premature exhumation—not so bad, it was only March. Amid the coke piles the green fields of spring. The bows of the gravedigger’s glasses were mended with string, he was arguing in an undertone with his Leo Schugger, until for exactly one minute the Fortuna siren gave a gasp, leaving us breathless, not to mention the woman whose remains were being moved, only the high-tension lines got on with their work. The siren tipped, fell overboard, and drowned—while from the slate-grey slate roofs of the village rose coils of smoke betokening the lunch hour, followed by the church bells: pray and work, industry and religion, boon companions. Change of shifts at Fortuna. We unwrapped our smoked pork sandwiches, but exhumation suffers no delay and the high-tension current continued without interruption on its way to the victor powers, to light the lamps of Holland, while here the juice was constantly being shut off—but the dead woman saw the light.
While Korneff dug the five-foot holes for the foundation, she was brought up into the fresh air. She hadn’t been lying very long down in the darkness, only since the fall, and already she had made progress, keeping pace with the improvements that were everywhere under way. Those who were dismantling industrial plants in the Ruhr and Rhineland had progressed like anything; during the winter that I had frittered away at the Lions’ Den, this woman had made serious progress and now, as we were laying on concrete and putting the pedestal in place, it was piece by piece that she had to be persuaded to let herself be dug up. But that’s what the zinc casket was for, to prevent anything, even the most negligible part of her, from getting lost. Just as when free coal was distributed at Fortuna, children ran behind the overloaded trucks and picked up the chunks that fell out, because Cardinal Frings had proclaimed from the pulpit: Verily I say unto you, it is not a sin to filch coal. But for this woman there was no longer any need to keep up a fire. I don’t think she was cold in the proverbially chilly March air, she had quite a good deal of skin left; to be sure it had sprung leaks and runners; but these were compensated for by vestiges of cloth and hair, the latter still permanently waved, hence the term. The coffin fittings were also worth moving and there were even bits of wood that wanted to go along to the other cemetery, where there would be no peasants or miners from Fortuna, for this next last resting place was in the city where there was always something doing, nineteen movie houses operating all at once. For as the grave-digger told us, she wasn’t from around here, she had been evacuated: “She was from Cologne, and now they’re taking her to Mülheim on the other side of the Rhine.” He would have said more if the siren hadn’t gone off again for another minute. Taking advantage of the siren, I approached the grave; tacking against the siren, I wanted to witness this exhumation, and I took something with me which turned out, when I reached the zinc casket, to be my spade, which I put into action, not in order to help but because I happened to have it with me. On the blade I picked up something that had fallen on the ground. This spade had formerly been the property of the Reich Labor Service. And what I picked up on the Reich Labor Service spade was or had been the middle finger and, as I am still convinced, the ring finger of the evacuated woman; they had not fallen off but had been chopped off by the gravedigger, an unfeeling sort. But it seemed to me that they had been beautiful and adroit. Similarly the woman’s head, which had already been placed in the casket, had preserved a certain regularity through the winter of ‘47 to ‘48, which was a severe on
e as you surely remember, and it was reasonably possible to speak of beauty, though on the decline. Moreover, this woman’s head and fingers were closer to me, more human, than the beauty of Fortuna North. It seems safe to say that I enjoyed the industrial landscape as I had enjoyed Gustaf Gründgens at the theater—a surface beauty which I have always distrusted, though assuredly there was art in it, whereas the effect produced by this evacuee was only too natural. Granted that the high-tension lines, like Goethe, gave me a cosmic feeling, but the woman’s fingers touched my heart. They still touched my heart when I began to think of her as a man, because it was more compatible with my thing about making decisions and with the fancy that transformed me into Yorick and the woman—half of her still in the earth, half in the zinc casket—into Hamlet. And I, Yorick, Act V, the fool, “I knew him, Horatio,” Scene I, I who on all the stages of this world—“Alas, poor Yorick!”—lend Hamlet my skull so that some Gründgens or Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of Hamlet may ponder over it: “Where be your gibes now? your gambols?” I held Gründgens’ Hamlet fingers on the blade of the Labor Service shovel, stood on the solid ground of the Rhenish soft coal fields, amid the graves of miners, peasants, and their families, and looked down on the slate roofs of the village of Oberaussem. The village cemetery became for me the center of the world, while Fortuna North stood there as the redoubtable demigod, my antagonist. The fields were the fields of Denmark; the Erft was my Belt, whatever rot lay round about was rotten in the state of Denmark—and I was Yorick. Charged with high tension, crackling, the high-tension angels, in lines of three, sang as they made their way to the horizon, to Cologne with its fabulous Gothic monster, heavenly hosts over the beet fields. But the earth yielded up coal and the corpse, not of Yorick but of Hamlet. As to the others, who had no parts in the play, they lay buried for good—“The rest is silence”—weighed down with tombstones just as we were weighing down the Flies family with this ponderous diorite slab. But for me, Oskar Matzerath Bronski Yorick, a new era was dawning, and scarcely aware of it, I took another quick look at Hamlet’s worn-out fingers on the blade of my shovel—“He is fat and scant of breath”—I looked on as Gründgens, Act III, Scene I, labored his dilemma about being or not being, rejected this absurd formulation, and put the question more concretely: “My son and my son’s lighter flints, my presumptive earthly and heavenly father, my grandmother’s four skirts, the beauty, immortalized in photographs, of my poor mama, the maze of scars on Herbert Truczinski’s back, the blood-absorbing mail baskets at the Polish Post Office, America—but what is America compared to Streetcar Number 9 that went to Brösen? I considered Maria’s scent of vanilla, still perceptible now and then, and my hallucination of Lucy Rennwand’s triangular face; I asked Mr. Fajngold, that disinfector unto death, to search for the Party pin that had disappeared in Matzerath’s windpipe. And at last, turning to Korneff, or more to the pylons of the power line, I said—my decision was made, but before coming out with it, I felt the need of a theatrical question that would cast doubt on Hamlet but legitimize me, Yorick, as a citizen—turning, then, to Korneff, who had called me because it was time to join our slab to the pedestal, I, stirred by the desire to become an honest citizen, said, slightly imitating Gründgens, although he could scarcely have played Yorick, said across the shovel blade: “To marry or not to marry, that is the question.”