by Günter Grass
Today Oskar is bedridden. Then, in the Zeidler flat, I found Klepp in the leftovers of a bed, cheerfully rotting. Within reaching distance of him, I observed an old-fashioned, extremely baroque-looking alcohol lamp, a dozen or more packages of spaghetti, several cans of olive oil, a few tubes of tomato paste, some damp, lumpy salt wrapped in newspaper, and a case of beer which turned out to be lukewarm. Into the empty beer bottles he urinated lying down, then, as he told me confidentially an hour or so later, he recapped the greenish receptacles, which held about as much as he did and for the most part were full to the brim. These, to avoid any misunderstanding born of sudden thirst, he set aside, careful to segregate them from the beer bottles still properly deserving of the name. Although he had running water in his room—with a little spirit of enterprise he might have urinated in the washbasin—he was too lazy, or rather too busy with himself, to get up, to leave the bed he had taken such pains adjusting to his person, and put fresh water in his spaghetti pot.
Since Klepp, Mr. Münzer I mean, was always careful to cook his spaghetti in the same water and guarded this several times drained-off, increasingly viscous liquid like the apple of his eye, he was often able, aided by his supply of beer bottles, to lie flat on his back for upward of four days at a time. The situation became critical only when his spaghetti water had boiled down to an oversalted, glutinous sludge. On such occasions Klepp might, of course, have let himself starve to death; but in those days he lacked the ideological foundations for that kind of thing, and moreover, his asceticism seemed by its very nature to fall into four– or five-day periods. Otherwise, he might easily have made himself still more independent of the outside world with the help of Mrs. Zeidler, who brought him his mail, or of a larger spaghetti pot.
On the day when Oskar violated the secrecy of the mails, Klepp had been lying independently in bed for five days. The remains of his spaghetti water might have been fine for posting bills. This was his situation when he heard my irresolute step, a step preoccupied with Sister Dorothea and her correspondence, in the corridor. Having observed that Oskar did not react to his mock cough, he threw his voice into the breach on the day when I opened Dr. Werner’s coolly passionate love letter, and said: “Would you, kind sir, please bring me some water?”
And I took the pot, poured out the tepid water, turned on the faucet, let the water gush until the little pot was half-full, added a little, and brought him the fresh water. I was the kind sir he had guessed me to be; I introduced myself as Matzerath, stonecutter and maker of inscriptions.
He, equally courteous, raised the upper part of his body a degree or two, identified himself as Egon Münzer, jazz musician, but asked me to call him Klepp, as his father before him had borne the name of Münzer. I understood this request only too well; it was sheer humility that impelled me to keep the name of Matzerath and it was only on rare occasions that I could make up my mind to call myself Oskar Bronski; I preferred to call myself Koljaiczek or just plain Oskar. Consequently I had no difficulty whatever in calling this corpulent and recumbent young man—I gave him thirty but he proved to be younger—just plain Klepp. He, unable to get his tongue around Koljaiczek, called me Oskar.
We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would ultimately have to die, but he was much less sure that all men had to be born; he was convinced that he himself had been born by mistake, and again Oskar felt a strong sense of kinship with him. We both believed in heaven, but when Klepp said “heaven,” he gave a nasty little laugh and scratched himself under the bed covers: it was clear that Mr. Klepp, here and now, was hatching out indecent projects that he was planning to carry out in heaven. When the subject of politics came up, he waxed almost passionate; he reeled off the names of some three hundred noble German families to which he wished to hand over the whole of Germany on the spot, all except the Duchy of Hanover, which Klepp magnanimously ceded to the British Empire. When I asked him who was to rule over the erstwhile Free City of Danzig, he said he was sorry, he had never heard of the place, but even so, could offer me one of the counts of Berg, descended, he could assure me, in an almost direct line from Jan Wellem himself. Finally—we had been trying to define the concept of truth and making definite progress—I found out by an adroitly interpolated question or two that Mr. Klepp had been rooming at Zeidler’s for the last three years. We expressed our regrets at not having met sooner. I said it was the fault of the Hedgehog, who had not told me nearly enough about his bedridden roomer, just as it had never occurred to him to say anything about Sister Dorothea, except that a nurse was living behind the frosted-glass door.
Oskar didn’t wish to start right in burdening Mr. Münzer with his troubles. And so I did not ask for any information about the nurse. Instead, I asked him about himself. “Apropos of nurses,” I said, “are you unwell?”
Again Klepp raised his body by one degree, but when it became clear to him that he would never arrive at a right angle, he sank back again and confided his true reason for lying in bed: he was trying to find out whether his health was good, middling, or poor. He hoped in a few weeks to gain the assurance that it was middling.
Then it happened. This was just what I had feared, but hoped that a long and widely ramified conversation might avoid. “Ah, my dear sir, won’t you please join me in a plate of spaghetti!” There was no help for it. We ate spaghetti prepared in the fresh water I had brought. I should have liked to give his pasty cooking pot a thorough scouring in the kitchen sink, but I was afraid to say a word. Klepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured movements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery. When the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water into a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his body, reached under the bed and produced a plate incrusted with grease and tomato paste. After what seemed like a moment’s hesitation, he reached again under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under the bed. He breathed on the smudged plate as though to blow away a last grain of dust, and finally, with a gesture of noblesse oblige, handed me the most loathsome dish I have ever seen and invited Oskar to help himself.
After you, I said. But nothing doing, he was the perfect host. After providing me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense portion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of his noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato paste, to which, by deft movements of the tube, he succeeded in lending an ornamental line; finally he poured on a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate out of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste, sprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share, and motioned me to do likewise. “Ah, dear sir,” he said when all was in readiness, “forgive me for having no grated parmesan. Nevertheless, I wish you the best of appetites.”
To this day Oskar is at a loss to say how he summoned up the courage to ply his fork and spoon. Strange to say, I enjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp’s spaghetti became for me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have measured every menu that is set before me.
In the course of our repast, I managed to take a good look round the bedridden gentleman’s room—but without attracting his attention. The main attraction was an open chimney hole, just under the ceiling, through which a black breath invaded the room. There were two windows, and it was windy out. Apparently it was the gusts of wind that sent clouds of soot puffing intermittently from the chimney hole into the room, where the soot settled evenly on the furniture. Since the furniture consisted solely of the bed in the middle of the room and several rolled carpets covered with wrapping paper, it was safe to say that nothing in the room was more blackened than the once-white bed sheet, the pillow slip under Klepp’s head, and a towel with which Klepp always covered his face when a gust of wind wafted a soot clo
ud into the room.
Both windows, like those of the Zeidler living room, looked out on Jülicher-Strasse, or, more precisely, on the green leaves of the chestnut tree that stood in front of the house. The only picture in the room was a color photo of Elizabeth of England, probably cut out of an illustrated weekly. Under the picture bagpipes hung on a hook, the plaid pattern still recognizable beneath the pervading blackness. While I contemplated the colored photo, thinking less of Elizabeth and her Philip than of Sister Dorothea, torn, poor thing, perhaps desperately, between Oskar and Dr. Werner, Klepp informed me that he was a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the British Royal Family and had consequently taken bagpipe lessons from the pipers of a Scottish regiment in the British Army of Occupation; Elizabeth, it so happened, was colonel of said regiment, which was all the more reason for him to take these particular pipers for his bagpipe teachers; Klepp had seen her in newsreels, wearing a kilt as she reviewed the regiment.
Here, strange to say, the Catholic in me began to stir. I said I doubted whether Elizabeth knew a thing about bagpipe music, tossed in a word or two about the cruel and unjust execution of the Catholic Mary Stuart, and, in short, gave Klepp to understand that in my opinion Elizabeth was tone-deaf.
I had been expecting an outburst of rage on the royalist’s part. But he smiled like one graced with superior knowledge and asked me for an explanation: had I any grounds for setting myself up as an authority on music?
For a long while Oskar gazed at Klepp. Unwittingly, he had touched off a spark within me, and from my head that spark leapt to my hump. It was as though all my old, battered, exhausted drums had decided to celebrate a Last Judgment of their own. The thousand drums I had thrown on the scrap heap and the one drum that lay buried in Saspe Cemetery were resurrected, arose again, sound of limb; their resonance filled my whole being. I leapt up from the bed, asked Klepp to excuse me for just one moment, and rushed out of the room. Passing Sister Dorothea’s frosted-glass door—half the letter still protruded—I ran to my own room, where I was met by the drum which Raskolnikov had given me while he was painting his “ Madonna 49.” I seized the drum and the two drumsticks, I turned or was turned, left the room, rushed past the forbidden room, and entered Klepp’s spaghetti kitchen as a traveler returns from long wanderings. I sat on the edge of the bed and, without waiting to be asked, put my red and white lacquered cylinder into position. Feeling a little awkward at first, I toyed for a moment with the sticks, made little movements in the air. Then, looking past the astonished Klepp, I let one stick fall on the drum as though at random, and ah, the drum responded to Oskar, and Oskar brought the second stick into play. I began to drum, relating everything in order: in the beginning was the beginning. The moth between the light bulbs drummed in the hour of my birth; I drummed the cellar stairs with their sixteen steps and my fall from those same stairs during the celebration of my legendary third birthday; I drummed the schedule at the Pestalozzi School, I climbed the Stockturm with my drum, sat with it beneath political rostrums, drummed eels and gulls, and carpet-beating on Good Friday. Drumming, I sat on the coffin, tapered at the foot end, of my poor mama; I drummed the saga of Herbert Truczinski’s scarry back. As I was drumming out the defense of the Polish Post Office, I noted a movement far away, at the head end of the bed I was sitting on: with half an eye, I saw Klepp sitting up, taking a preposterous wooden flute from under his pillow, setting it to his lips, and bringing forth sounds that were so sweet and unnatural, so perfectly attuned to my drumming that I was able to lead Klepp to the cemetery in Saspe and, after Leo Schugger had finished his dance, Klepp helped me to make the fizz powder of my first love foam up for him; I even led Klepp into the jungles of Mrs. Lina Greff; I made Greff’s drumming machine with its 165-pound counterweight play its grand finale and run down; I welcomed Klepp to Bebra’s Theater at the Front, made Jesus speak, and drummed Störtebeker and his fellow Dusters off the diving tower—and down below sat Lucy. I let ants and Russians take possession of my drum, but I did not guide Klepp back to the cemetery in Saspe, where I threw my drum into the grave after Matzerath, but struck up my main, never-ending theme: Kashubian potato fields in the October rain, there sits my grandmother in her four skirts; and Oskar’s heart nearly turned to stone when I heard the October rain trickling from Klepp’s flute, when, beneath the rain and the four skirts, Klepp’s flute discovered Joseph Koljaiczek the firebug and celebrated, nay represented, the begetting of my poor mama.
We played for several hours. After a number of variations on my grandfather’s flight over the timber rafts, we concluded our concert, happy though exhausted, with a hymn, a song of hope, suggesting that perhaps the vanished arsonist had been miraculously saved.
Before the last tone had quite left his flute, Klepp jumped up from his warm, deep-furrowed bed. Cadaverous smells followed him, but he tore the windows open, stuffed newspaper in the chimney hole, tore the picture of Elizabeth of England to tatters, announced that the royalist era was ended, ran water into the washbasin and washed himself: yes, Klepp washed, there was nothing he feared to wash away. This was no mere washing, it was a purification. And when the purified one turned away from the water and stood before me in his dripping, naked corpulence, his ungainly member hanging down at a slant, and, bursting with vigor, lifted me, lifted me high in the air—for Oskar was and still is a lightweight—when laughter burst out of him and dashed against the ceiling, I understood that Oskar’s drum had not been alone in rising from the dead, for Klepp too was as one resurrected. And so we congratulated one another and kissed each other on the cheeks.
That same day—we went out toward evening, drank beer and ate blood sausage with onions—Klepp suggested that we start a jazz band together. I asked for time to think it over, but Oskar had already made up his mind to give up his modeling and stonecutting activities and become percussion man in a jazz band.
On the Fiber Rug
There can be no doubt that on the day just recorded Oskar supplied Klepp with grounds for getting out of bed. He leapt overjoyed from his musty bedclothes; he allowed water to touch him, he was a new man, the kind that says “Terrific” and “The world is my oyster.” And yet today, now that it is Oskar who is privileged to lie in bed, here is what I think: Klepp is trying to get even with me, he is trying to throw me out of my bed in this mental hospital, because I made him forsake his bed in the spaghetti kitchen.
Once a week I have to put up with his visits, listen to his tirades about jazz and his musico-Communist manifestoes, for no sooner had I deprived him of his bed and his Elizabeth-of-the-bagpipes than he, who as long as he lay in bed was a royalist, devoted heart and soul to the English royal family, became a dues-paying member of the Communist Party, and Communism has been his illegal hobby ever since: drinking beer, devouring blood sausage, he holds forth to the harmless little men who stand at bars, studying the labels on bottles, about the benefits of collective endeavour, of a jazz band working full time, or a Soviet kolkhoz.
In these times of ours, there isn’t very much an awakened dreamer can do. Once alienated from his sheltering bed, Klepp had the possibility of becoming a comrade, and illegally at that, which added to the charm. Jazz was the second religion available to him. Thirdly Klepp, born a Protestant, could have been converted to Catholicism.
You’ve got to hand it to Klepp: he left the roads to all religions open. Caution, his heavy, glistening flesh, and a sense of humor that lives on applause, enabled him to devise a sly system, combining the teachings of Marx with the myth of jazz. If one day a left-wing priest of the worker-priest type should cross his path, especially if this priest should happen to have a collection of Dixieland records, you will see a Marxist jazz fan starting to take the sacraments on Sunday and mingling his above-mentioned body odor with the scent of a Neo-Gothic Cathedral.
Between me and such a fate stands my bed, from which Klepp tries to lure me with throbbing, life-loving promises. He sends petition after petition to the court and works hand in glove with my
lawyer in demanding a new trial: he wants Oskar to be acquitted, set free—he wants them to turn me out of my hospital—and why? Just because he envies me my bed.
Even so, I have no regret that while rooming at Zeidler’s I transformed a recumbent friend into a standing, stamping, and occasionally even running friend. Apart from the strenuously thoughtful hours that I devoted to Sister Dorothea, I now had a carefree private life. “Hey, Klepp,” I would cry, slapping him on the shoulder, “what about that jazz band?” And he would fondle my hump, which he loved almost as much as his belly. “Oskar and me,” he announced to the world, “we’re going to start a jazz-band. All we need is a good guitarist who can handle the banjo maybe if he has to.”
He was right. Drum and flute would not have been enough. A second melodic instrument was needed. A plucked bass wouldn’t have been bad, and visually there was certainly something to be said for it. but even then bass players were hard to come by. So we searched frantically for a guitarist. We went to the movies a good deal, had our pictures taken twice a week as you may remember, and over beer, blood sausage, and onions, did all sorts of silly tricks with our passport photos. It was then that Klepp met his redheaded Ilse, thoughtlessly gave her a picture of himself, and just for that had to marry her. But we didn’t find a guitarist.
In the course of my life as a model, I had gained some knowledge of the Old City of Düsseldorf, with its bull’s-eye window-panes, its mustard and cheese, its beer fumes and Lower Rhenish coziness, but it was only with Klepp that I became really familiar with it. We looked for a guitarist all around St. Lambert’s Church, in all the bars, and most particularly in Ratinger-Strasse, at the Unicorn, because Bobby, who led the dance band, would sometimes let us join in with our flute and toy drum and was enthusiastic about my drumming, though he himself, despite the finger that was missing from his right hand, was no slouch as a percussion man.