by Günter Grass
The reserve lieutenant began at once to inspect Dora Seven. He began with the outside, and Lankes raised no objection. Herzog filled out charts and examined the land and sea through his binoculars. Then for a moment he caressed the gun embrasures of Dora Six as tenderly as though fondling his wife. When he wished to inspect the inside of Dora Seven, our villa, our summer house, Lankes wouldn’t hear of it: “Herzog, man, what’s the matter with you? Poking around in concrete. Maybe it was news ten years ago. Now it’s passé.”
“Passé” is a pet word with Lankes. Everything under the sun is either news or passé. But the reserve lieutenant held that nothing was passé, that the accounts were still unclear, that some of the figures would have to be rectified, that men would always be called upon to give an account of themselves before the judgment seat of history, and that was why he wanted to inspect the inside of Dora Seven: “I hope, Lankes, that I have made myself clear.”
Herzog’s shadow fell across our table and fish. He meant to pass around us to the pillbox entrance, over which concrete ornaments still bore witness to the creative hand of Corporal Lankes.
But Herzog never got past our table. Rising swiftly, Lankes’ fist, still gripping its fork but making no use of it, sent Reserve Lieutenant Herzog sprawling backward on the sand. Shaking his head, deploring the interruption of our meal, Lankes stood up, seized a fistful of the lieutenant’s shirt, dragged him to the edge of the dune—the track in the sand was remarkably straight, I recall—and tossed him off. He had vanished from my sight but not, unfortunately, from my hearing. He gathered together his surveying instruments, which Lankes had thrown after him, and went away grumbling and conjuring up all the historical ghosts that Lankes had dismissed as passé.
“ He’s not so very wrong,” said Lankes, “ even if he is a nut. If we hadn’t been so soused when the shooting started, who knows what would have happened to those Canadians.”
I could only nod assent, for just the day before, at low tide, I had found the telltale button of a Canadian uniform in among the empty crab shells. As pleased as though he had found a rare Etruscan coin, Oscar had secreted the button in his wallet.
Brief as it was, Lieutenant Herzog’s visit had conjured up memories: “Do you remember, Lankes, when our theatrical group was inspecting your concrete and we had breakfast on top of the pillbox? There was a little breeze just like today. And suddenly there were six or seven nuns, looking for crabs in the Rommel asparagus, and you, Lankes, you had orders to clear the beach; which you did with a murderous machine gun.”
Sucking bones, Lankes remembered; he even remembered their names: Sister Scholastica, Sister Agneta… he described the novice as a rosy little face with lots of black around it. His portrait of her was so vivid that it partly, but only partly, concealed the image, which never left me, of my trained nurse, my secular Sister Dorothea. A few minutes later—I wasn’t surprised enough to put it down as a miracle—a young nun came drifting across the dunes from the direction of Cabourg. Pink little face, with lots of black around it, there was no mistaking her.
She was shielding herself from the sun with a black umbrella such as elderly gentlemen carry. Over her eyes arched a poison-green celluloid shade, suggesting dynamic movie directors in Hollywood. Off in the dunes someone was calling her. There seemed to be more nuns about. “Sister Agneta!” the voice cried, “Sister Agneta, where are you?”
And Sister Agneta, the young thing who could be seen over the backbone of our codfish: “Here I am, Sister Scholastica. There’s no wind here.”
Lankes grinned and nodded his wolf’s head complacently, as though he himself had conjured up this Catholic parade, as though nothing in the world could startle him.
The young nun caught sight of us and stopped still, to one side of the pillbox. “Oh!” gasped her rosy face between slightly protruding but otherwise flawless teeth.
Lankes turned head and neck without stirring his body: “Hiya, Sister, taking a little walk?”
How quickly the answer came: “We always go to the seashore once a year. But for me it’s the first time. I never saw the ocean before. It’s so big.”
There was no denying that. To this day I look upon her description of the ocean as the only accurate one. Lankes played the host, poked about in my portion of fish and offered her some: “Won’t you try a little fish, Sister? It’s still warm.”
I was amazed at the ease with which he spoke French, and Oskar also tried his hand at the foreign language: “Nothing to worry about. It’s Friday anyway.”
But even this tactful allusion to the rules of her order could not move the young girl, so cleverly dissimulated in the nun’s clothes, to partake of our repast.
“Do you always live here?” her curiosity impelled her to ask. Our pillbox struck her as pretty and a wee bit comical. But then, unfortunately, the mother superior and five other nuns, all with black umbrellas and green visors, entered the picture over the crest of the dune. Agneta whished away. As far as I could understand the flurry of words clipped by the east wind, she was given a good lecture and made to take her place in the group.
Lankes dreamed. He held his fork in his mouth upside down and gazed at the group floating over the dunes. “That ain’t no nuns, it’s sailboats.”
“Sailboats are white,” I objected.
“It’s black sailboats.” It wasn’t easy to argue with Lankes. “The one out there on the left is the flagship. Agneta’s a fast corvette. Good sailing weather. Column formation, jib to stern-post, mainmast, mizzenmast, and foremast, all sails set, off to the horizon and England. Think of it: tomorrow morning the Tommies wake up, look out the window, and what do they see: twenty-five thousand nuns, all decked with flags. And here comes the first broadside…”
“A new war of religion,” I helped him. The flagship, I suggested, should be called the Mary Stuart or the De Valera or, better still, the Don Juan. A new, more mobile Armada avenges Trafalgar. “Death to all Puritans!” was the battle cry and this time the English had no Nelson on hand. Let the invasion begin, England has ceased to be an island.
The conversation was getting too political for Lankes.
“The nuns are steaming away,” he anounced.
“Sailing,” I corrected.
Whether steaming or sailing, they were floating off in the direction of Cabourg, holding umbrellas between themselves and the sun. Only one lagged behind a little, bent down between steps, picked up something, and dropped something. The rest of the fleet made its way slowly, tacking into the wind, toward the gutted beach hotel in the background.
“Looks like her steering gear is damaged or maybe she can’t get her anchor up,” said Lankes, running his nautical image into the ground. “Hey, that must be Agneta, the fast corvette.”
Frigate or corvette, it was indeed Sister Agneta, the novice, who came toward us, picking up shells and throwing some of them away.
“What are you picking up there. Sister?” Lankes could see perfectly well what she was picking up.
“Shells,” she pronounced the word very clearly and bent down.
“You allowed to do that? Ain’t they earthly goods?”
I came out for Sister Agneta: “You’re wrong, Lankes. There’s nothing earthly about sea shells.”
“Whether they come from the earth or the sea, in any case they are goods and nuns shouldn’t have any. Poverty, poverty, and more poverty, that’s what nuns should have. Am I right. Sister?”
Sister Agneta smiled through her protruding teeth: “I only take a few. They are for the kindergarten. The children love to play with them. They have never been to the seashore.”
Agneta stood outside the entrance to the pillbox and cast a furtive, nun’s glance inside.
“How do you like our little home?” I asked, trying to make friends. Lankes was more direct: “Come in and take a look at our villa. Won’t cost you a penny.”
Her pointed high shoes fidgeted under her long skirt, stirring sand that the wind picked up and strewed o
ver our fish. Losing some of her self-assurance, she examined us and the table between us out of eyes that were distinctly light brown. “It surely wouldn’t be right.”
“Come along. Sister,” Lankes swept aside all her objections and stood up. “There’s a fine view. You can see the whole beach through the gun slits.”
Still she hesitated; her shoes, it occurred to me, must be full of sand. Lankes waved in the direction of the entrance. His concrete ornament cast sharp ornamental shadows. “It’s tidy inside.”
Perhaps it was Lankes’ gesture of invitation that decided the nun to go in. “But just a minute!” And she whished into the pillbox ahead of Lankes. He wiped his hands on his trousers—a typical painter’s gesture—and flung a threat at me before disappearing: “Careful you don’t take none of my fish.”
But Oskar had his fill of fish. I moved away from the table, surrendered myself to the sandy wind and the exaggerated bellowing of Strong Man Sea. I pulled my drum close with one foot and tried, by drumming, to find a way out of this concrete landscape, this fortified world, this vegetable called Rommel asparagus.
First, with small success, I tried love; once upon a time I too had loved a sister. Not a nun, to be sure, but Sister Dorothea, a nurse. She lived in the Zeidler flat, behind a frosted-glass door. She was very beautiful, but I never saw her. It was too dark in the Zeidler hallway. A fiber runer came between us.
After following this theme to its abortive end on the fiber rug, I tried to convert my early love for Maria into rhythm and set it down on the concrete like quick-growing creepers. But there was Sister Dorothea again, interfering with my love of Maria. A smell of carbolic acid blew in from the sea, gulls in nurse’s uniforms waved at me, the sun insisted on glittering like a Red Cross pin.
Oskar was glad When his drumming was interrupted. Sister Scholastica, the mother superior, was coming back with her five nuns. They looked tired and their umbrellas slanted forlornly: “Have you seen a little nun, our little novice? The child is so young. The child had never seen the ocean before. She must have got lost. Sister Agneta, where are you?”
There was nothing I could do but send the little squadron, now with the wind in their stern, off toward the mouth of the Orne, Arromanches, and Port Winston, where the English had wrested an artificial harbor from the sea. There would hardly have been room for all of them in the pillbox. For a moment, I have to admit, I was tempted to surprise Lankes with their visit, but then friendship, disgust, malice, all in one, bade me hold out my thumb in the direction of the Orne estuary. The nuns obeyed my thumb and gradually turned into six receding, black, wind-blown spots on the crest of the dune; their plaintive “Sister Agneta, Sister Agneta “ came to me more and more diluted with wind, until at last it was swallowed up in the sand.
Lankes was first to come out. Again the typical painter’s gesture: he wiped his hands on his trousers, demanded a cigarette, put it into his shirt pocket, and fell upon the cold fish. “It whets the appetite,” he said with a leer, pillaging the tail end which was my share. Then he sprawled himself out in the sun.
“She must be unhappy now,” I said accusingly, savoring the word “unhappy.”
“How so? Got nothing to be unhappy about.”
It was inconceivable to Lankes that his version of human relations might make anyone unhappy.
“What’s she doing now?” I asked, though I really meant to ask him something else.
“Sewing,” said Lankes with his fork. “Ripped her habit a bit, now she’s mending it.”
The seamstress came out of the pillbox. At once she opened the umbrella and started to babble gaily, yet, it seemed to me, with a certain strain: “The view is really divine. The whole beach and the ocean too.”
She stopped by the wreckage of our fish.
“May I?”
Both of us nodded at once.
“The sea air whets the appetite,” I encouraged her. Nodding, she dug into our fish with chapped, reddened hands revealing her hard work in the convent, and filled her mouth. She ate gravely, with pensive concentration, as though mulling over, with the fish, something she had had before the fish.
I looked under her coif. She had left her green reporter’s eye-shade in the pillbox. Little beads of sweat, all of equal size, lined up on her smooth forehead, which, in its white starched frame, had a madonna-like quality. Lankes asked for another cigarette though he hadn’t smoked the previous one. I tossed him the pack. While he stowed three in his shirt pocket and stuck a fourth between his lips, Sister Agneta turned, threw the umbrella away, ran—only then did I see that she was barefoot—up the dune, and vanished in the direction of the surf.
“Let her run,” said Lankes in an oracular tone. “She’ll be back or maybe she won’t.”
For an instant I managed to sit still and watch Lankes smoking. Then I climbed on top of the pillbox and looked out at the beach. The tide had risen and very little beach was left.
“Well?” Lankes asked.
“She’s undressing.” That was all he could get out of me. “Probably means to go swimming. Wants to cool off.”
That struck me as dangerous at high tide, especially so soon after eating. Already she was in up to the knees; her back was bent forward and she sank deeper and deeper. The water could not have been exactly warm, but that didn’t seem to bother her: she swam, she swam well, practicing several different strokes, and dove through the waves.
“Let her swim, and come down off that pillbox.” I looked behind me and saw Lankes sprawling in the sand and puffing away. The smooth backbone of the codfish glistened white in the sun, dominating the table.
As I jumped off the concrete, Lankes opened his painter’s eyes and said: “Christ, what a picture! Nuns at High Tide.”
“You monster,” I shouted. “Supposing she drowns?”
Lankes closed his eyes: “Then we’ll call it: Nuns Drowning.”
“And if she comes back and flings herself at your feet?”
Wide-eyed, the painted declaimed: “Then she and the picture will be called: Fallen Nun.”
With him it was always either-or, head or tail, drowned or fallen. He took my cigarettes, threw the lieutenant off the dune, ate my fish, showed the inside of a pillbox to a little girl who was supposed to be the bride of Christ, and while she was still swimming out to sea, drew pictures in the air with his big lumpy foot. He even listed the titles and plotted the formats: Nuns at High Tide, eight by five, Nuns Drowning, Fallen Nuns, Twenty-five Thousand Nuns. Nuns at Trafalgar. Nuns Defeat Lord Nelson. Nuns Bucking the Wind. Nuns Before the Breeze. Nuns Tacking. Black, lots of black; dingy white and cold blue: The Invasion, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. And on our return to the Rhineland Lankes actually painted all these pictures, in formats ranging from wide and low to high and narrow. He did whole series of nuns, found a dealer who was wild about nuns, exhibited forty-three of these Runsuch canvases and sold seventeen to collectors, industrialists, museums, and an American; some of the critics even saw fit to compare him, Lankes, to Picasso. It was Lankes’ success that persuaded me, Oskar, to dig up the visiting card of Dr. Dösch, the concert manager, for Lankes’ art was not alone in clamoring for bread. The time had come to transmute the prewar and wartime experience of Oskar, the three-year-old drummer, into the pure, resounding gold of the postwar period.
The King Finger
“So that’s it,” said Zeidler. “So you’ve decided not to work any more.” It riled him that Klepp and Oskar should spend the whole day sitting either in Klepp’s or Oskar’s room, doing just about nothing. I had paid the October rent on both rooms out of what was left of Dr. Dösch’s advance, but the prospects, financial and otherwise, for November, were bleak.
And yet we had plenty of offers. Any number of dance halls or night clubs would have taken us on. But Oskar was sick of playing jazz. That put a strain on my relations with Klepp. Klepp said my new drum style had no connection with jazz. He was right and I didn’t deny it. He said I was disloyal to the jazz ideal. Earl
y in November Klepp found a new percussion man, and a good one at that, namely Bobby from the Unicorn, and was able to accept an engagement in the Old City. After that we were friends again, even though Klepp was already beginning to think, or perhaps it would be safer to say talk, along Communist lines.
In the end Dr. Dösch was my only resort. I couldn’t have gone back to live with Maria even if I had wanted to; Stenzel was getting a divorce, meaning to convert my Maria into a Maria Stenzel. From time to time I knocked out an inscription for Korneff or dropped in at the Academy to be blackened or abstracted. Quite frequently I went calling, with nothing definite in mind, on Ulla, who had been obliged to break her engagement to Lankes shortly after our trip to the Atlantic Wall, because Lankes wasn’t doing anything but nuns and didn’t even want to beat Ulla any more.
Dr. Dösch’s visiting card lay silently clamoring on my table beside the bathtub. One day, having decided that I wanted none of Dr. Dösch, I tore it up and threw it away. To my horror I discovered that the address and telephone number were graven on my memory. I could read them off like a poem. I not only could but did. This went on for three days; the telephone number kept me awake at night. On the fourth day, I went to the nearest telephone booth. Dösch spoke as though he had been expecting my call from one minute to the next and asked me to drop in at the office that same afternoon; he wanted to introduce me to the boss, in fact the boss was expecting me.
The West Concert Bureau had its offices on the eighth floor of a new office building. Expensive carpeting, quantities of chrome, indirect lighting, soundproofing, crisp, long-legged secretaries, wafting their boss’s cigar smoke past me; two seconds more and I would have fled.
Dr. Dösch received me with open arms though he did not actually hug me—a narrow escape, it seemed to Oskar. Beside him a green sweater girl was typing; her machine stopped as I entered, but speeded up almost instantly to make up for lost time. Dösch announced me to the boss. Oskar sat down on the front left sixth of an armchair upholstered in English vermilion. A folding door opened, the typewriter held its breath, a hidden force raised me to my feet, the doors closed behind me, a carpet, flowing through the large, luminous room, led me forward until an enormous oak table top supported by steel tubing said to me: now Oskar is standing in front of the boss’s desk, I wonder how much he weighs. I raised my blue eyes, looked for the boss behind the infinitely empty oak surface, and found, in a wheelchair that could be cranked up and tipped like a dentist’s chair, my friend and master Bebra, paralyzed, living only with his eyes and fingertips.