by Günter Grass
What then was he holding? What was so important, so eminently worth showing me?
I reached out between his warm jaws, I had the thing in my hand, I knew what I was holding but pretended to be puzzled, as though looking for a word to name this object that Lux had brought me from the rye field.
There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and accurately when detached, when alienated from the center. It was a finger. A woman’s finger. A ring finger. A woman’s ring finger. A woman’s finger with an attractive ring on it. Between the metacarpus and the first finger joint, some three-quarters of an inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be chopped off. The section was neat, clearly revealing the tendon of the extensor muscle.
It was a beautiful finger, a mobile finger. The stone on the ring was held in place by six gold claws. I identified it at once—correctly, it later turned out—as an aquamarine. The ring itself was worn so thin at one place that I set it down as an heirloom. Despite the line of dirt, or rather of earth under the nail, as though the finger had been obliged to scratch or dig earth, the nail seemed to have been carefully manicured. Once I had removed it from the dog’s warm muzzle, the finger felt cold and its peculiarly yellowish pallor also suggested coldness.
For several months Oskar had been wearing a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He laid the ring finger down on this square of silk and observed that the inside of the finger up to the third joint was marked with lines indicating that this had been a hardworking finger with a relentless sense of duty.
After folding up the finger in the handkerchief, I rose from the cable drum, stroked Lux’s neck, and started for home, carrying handkerchief and finger in my right hand. Planning to do this and that with my find, I came to the fence of a nearby garden. It was then that Vittlar, who had been lying in the crook of an apple tree, observing me and the dog, addressed me.
The Last Streetcar or Adoration of a Preserving Jar
That voice for one thing, that arrogant, affected whine! Besides, he was lying in the crook of an apple tree. “That’s a smart dog you’ve got there,” he whined.
I, rather bewildered: “What are you doing up there?”
He stretched languidly: “They are only cooking apples. I assure you, you have nothing to fear.”
He was beginning to get on my nerves: “Who cares what kind of apples you’ve got? And what do you expect me to fear?”
“Oh, well! “ His whine was almost a hiss. “You might mistake me for the Snake. There were cooking apples even in those days.”
I, angrily: “Allegorical rubbish! “
He, slyly: “I suppose you think only eating apples are worth sinning for?”
I was about to go. I hadn’t the slightest desire to discuss the fruit situation in Paradise. Then he tried a more direct approach. Jumping nimbly down frem the tree, he stood long and willowy by the fence: “What did your dog find in the rye?”
I can’t imagine why I said: “A stone.”
“And you put the stone in your pocket?” Blessed if he wasn’t beginning to cross-examine me.
“I like to carry stones in my pocket.”
“It looked more like a stick to me.”
“That may well be. But I still say it’s a stone.”
“Aha! So it is a stick?”
“For all I care: stick or stone, cooking apples or eating apples…”
“A flexible little stick?”
“The dog wants to go home. I’ll have to be leaving.”
“A flesh-colored stick?”
“Why don’t you attend to your apples? Come along. Lux.”
“A flesh-colored, flexible little stick with a ring on it?”
“What do you want of me? I’m just a man taking a walk with this dog I borrowed to take a walk with.”
“Splendid. See here, I should like to borrow something too. Won’t you let me, just for a second, try on that handsome ring that sparkled on the stick and turned it into a ring finger? My name is Vittlar. Gottfried von Vittlar. I am the last of our line.”
So it was that I made Vittlar’s acquaintance. Before the day was out, we were friends, and I still call him my friend. Only a few days ago, when he came to see me, I said: “I am so glad, my dear Gottfried, that it was you who turned me in to the police and not some common stranger.”
If angels exist, they must look like Vittlar: long, willowy, vivacious, collapsible, more likely to throw their arms around the most barren of lampposts than a soft, eager young girl.
You don’t see Vittlar at first. According to his surroundings, he can make himself look like a thread, a scarecrow, a clothestree, or the limb of a tree. That indeed is why I failed to notice him when I sat on the cable drum and he lay in the apple tree. The dog didn’t even bark, for dogs can neither see, smell, nor bark at an angel.
“Will you be kind enough, my dear Gottfried,” I asked him the day before yesterday, “ to send me a copy of the statement you made to the police just about two years ago?” It was this statement that led to my trial and formed the basis of Vittlar’s subsequent testimony.
Here is the copy, I shall let him speak as he testified against me in court:
On the day in question, I, Gottfried Vittlar, was lying in the crook of an apple tree that grows at the edge of my mother’s garden and bears each year enough apples to fill our seven preserving jars with applesauce. I was lying on my side, my left hip embedded in the bottom of the crook which is somewhat mossy. My feet were pointing in the direction of the Gerresheim glassworks. What was I looking at? I was looking straight ahead, waiting for something to happen within my field of vision.
The accused, who is today my friend, entered my field of vision. A dog came with him, circling round him, behaving like a dog. His name, as the accused later told me, was Lux, he was a rottweiler, and could be rented at a “dog rental shop” not far from St. Roch’s Church.
The accused sat down on the empty cable drum which has been lying ever since the war outside the aforesaid kitchen garden belonging to my mother, Alice von Vittlar. As the court knows, the accused is a small man. Moreover, if we are to be strictly truthful, he is deformed. This fact caught my attention. What struck me even more was his behavior. The small, well-dressed gentleman proceeded to drum on the rusty cable drum, first with his fingers, then with two dry sticks. If you bear in mind that the accused is a drummer by trade and that, as has been established beyond any shadow of a doubt, he practices his trade at all times and places; if you consider, furthermore, that there is something about a cable drum which, as the name suggests, incites people to drum on it, it seems in no wise unreasonable to aver that one sultry summer day the accused Oskar Matzerath sat on a cable drum situated outside the kitchen garden of Mrs. Alice von Vittlar, producing rhythmically arranged sound with the help of two willow sticks of unequal length.
I further testify that the dog Lux vanished for some time into a field of rye; yes, the rye was about ready to mow. If asked exactly how long he was gone, I should be unable to reply, because the moment I lie down in the crook of our apple tree, I lose all sense of time. If I say notwithstanding that the dog disappeared for a considerable time, it means that I missed him, because I liked his black coat and floppy ears.
The accused, however—I feel justified in saying—did not miss the dog.
When the dog Lux came back out of the ripe rye, he was carrying something between his teeth. I thought of a stick, a stone, or perhaps, though even then it did not seem very likely, a tin can or even a tin spoon. Only when the accused removed the corpus delicti from the dog’s muzzle did I definitely recognize it for what it was. But between the moment when the dog rubbed his muzzle, still holding the object, against the trouser leg of the accused—the left trouser leg, I should say—to the moment when the accused took possession of it, several minutes passed—exactly how many I should not venture to say.
The dog tried very hard to attract the attention of his temporary master; the accused, howeve
r, continued to drum in his monotonous, obsessive, disconcerting, I might say childish way. Only when the dog resorted to indecency, forcing his moist muzzle between the legs of the accused, did he drop the willow sticks and give the dog a kick with his right—yes, of that I am perfectly sure—foot. The dog described a half-circle, came back, trembling like a dog, and once again presented his muzzle and the object it held. Without rising, the accused—with his left hand—reached between the dog’s teeth. Relieved of his find, the dog Lux backed away a few feet. The accused remained seated, held the object in his hand, closed his hand, opened it, closed it, and the next time he opened his hand, I could see something sparkle. When the accused had grown accustomed to the sight of the object, he held it up with his thumb and forefinger, approximately at eye level.
Only then did I identify the object as a finger, and a moment later, because of the sparkle, more specifically as a ring finger. Unsuspecting, I had given a name to one of the most interesting criminal cases of the postwar period. And indeed, I, Gottfried Vittlar, have frequently been referred to as the star witness in the Ring Finger Case.
Since the accused remained motionless, I followed suit. In fact, his immobility communicated itself to me. And when the accused wrapped the finger and ring carefully in the handkerchief he had previously worn in his breast pocket, I felt a stirring of sympathy for the man on the cable drum: how neat and methodical he is; now there’s a man I’d like to know.
So it was that I called out to him as he was about to leave in the direction of Gerresheim with his rented dog. His first reaction, however, was irritable, almost arrogant. To this day, I cannot understand why, just because I was lying in a tree, he should have taken me for a symbolic snake and even suspected my mother’s cooking apples of being the Paradise variety.
It may well be a favorite habit with the Tempter to lie in the crooks of trees. In my case, it was just boredom, a state of mind I come by without effort, that impelled me to assume a recumbent position several times a week in the aforesaid tree. Perhaps boredom is in itself the absolute evil. And now let me ask: What motive drove the accused to Gerresheim in the outskirts of Düsseldorf that sultry day? Loneliness, as he later confessed to me. But are not loneliness and boredom twin sisters? I bring up these points only in order to explain the accused, not in order to confound him. For what made me take a liking to him, speak to him, and finally make friends with him was precisely his particular variety of evil, that drumming of his, which resolved evil into its rhythmical components. Even my denunciation of him, the act which has brought us here, him as the accused, myself as a witness, was a game we invented, a means of diverting and entertaining our boredom and our loneliness.
After some hesitation the accused, in response to my request, slipped the ring off the ring finger—it came off without difficulty—and onto my little finger. It was a good fit and I was extremely pleased. It hardly seems necessary to tell you that I came down out of the tree before trying on the ring. Standing on either side of the fence, we introduced ourselves and chatted a while, touching on various political topics, and then he gave me the ring. He kept the finger, which he handled with great care. We agreed that it was a woman’s finger. While I held the ring and let the light play on it, the accused, with his left hand, beat a lively little dance rhythm on the fence. The wooden fence surrounding my mother’s garden is in a very dilapidated state: it rattled, clattered, and vibrated in response to the accused’s drumming. I do not know how long we stood there, conversing with our eyes. We were engaged in this innocent pastime when we heard airplane engines at a moderate altitude; the plane was probably getting ready to land in Lohhausen. Although both of us were curious to know whether it was going to land on two or four engines, we did not interrupt our exchange of glances nor look up at the plane; later on, when we had occasion to play the game again, we gave it a name: Leo Schugger’s asceticism; Leo Schugger, it appears, is the name of a friend with whom the accused had played this game years before, usually in cemeteries.
After the plane had found its landing field—whether on two or four engines I am at a loss to say—I gave back the ring. The accused put it on the ring finger, which he folded up again in the handkerchief, and asked me to go with him some of the way.
That was on July 7, 1951. We walked as far as the streetcar terminus in Gerresheim, but the vehicle we mounted was a cab.
Since then the accused has found frequent occasion to treat me with the utmost generosity. We rode into town and had the taxi wait outside the dog rental shop near St. Roch’s Church. Having got rid of the dog Lux, we rode across town, through Bilk and Oberbilk to Wersten Cemetery, where Mr. Matzerath had more than twelve marks fare to pay. Then we went to Korneff’s stone-cutting establishment.
The place was disgustingly filthy and I was glad when the stonecutter had completed my friend’s commission—it took about an hour. While my friend lovingly lectured to me about the tools and the various kinds of stone, Mr. Korneff, without a word of comment on the finger, made a plaster cast of it—without the ring. I watched him with only half an eye. First the finger had to be treated; that is, he smeared it with fat and ran a string round the edge. Then he applied the plaster, but before it was quite hard split the mold in two with the string. I am by trade a decorator and the making of plaster molds is nothing new to me; nevertheless, the moment Mr. Komeff had picked up that finger, it took on—or so I thought—an unesthetic quality which it lost only after the cast was finished and the accused had recovered the finger and wiped the grease off it. My friend paid the stonecutter, though at first Mr. Komeff was reluctant to take money, for he regarded Mr. Matzerath as a colleague, and further pointed out that Oskar, as he called Mr. Matzerath, had squeezed out his boils free of charge. When the cast had hardened, the stonecutter opened the mold, gave Mr. Matzerath the cast, and promised to make him a few more in the next few days. Then he saw us out to Bittweg through his display of tombstones.
A second taxi ride took us to the Central Station. There the accused treated me to a copious dinner in the excellent station restaurant. From his familiar tone with the waiters I inferred that he must be a regular customer. We ate boiled beef with fresh horseradish, Rhine salmon, and cheese, the whole topped off with a bottle of champagne. When the conversation drifted back to the finger, I advised him to consider it as someone else’s property, to send it in to the Lost and Found, especially as he had a cast of it. To this the accused replied very firmly that he regarded himself as the rightful owner, because he had been promised just such a finger on the occasion of his birth—in code to be sure, the word actually employed being “drumstick”: further, certain finger-length scars on the back of his friend Herbert Truczinski had forecast this ring finger; finally, the cartridge case he had found in Saspe Cemetery had also had the dimensions and implications of a future ring finger.
Though at first I smiled at my new-found friend’s arguments, I had to admit that a man of discernment could not fail to see through the sequence: drumstick, scar, cartridge case, ring finger.
A third taxi took me home after dinner. We made an appointment to meet again, and when I visited my friend three days later, he had a surprise for me.
First he showed me his rooms. Originally, he had rented only one, a wretched little place formerly used as a bathroom, but later on, when his drum recitals had brought him wealth and fame, he had undertaken to pay a second rent for a windowless recess which he referred to as Sister Dorothea’s room, and ultimately he had rented a third room, formerly occupied by a Mr. Münzer, a musician and associate of the accused. All this cost him a pretty penny, for Mr. Zeidler, the landlord, was well aware of Mr. Matzerath’s prosperity and determined to profit by it.
It was in Sister Dorothea’s room that the accused had prepared his surprise. On the marble top of a washstand—or perhaps I should call this article of furniture a dressing table because of the mirror behind it—stood a preserving jar about the size of those which my mother, Alice von Vittlar, uses for
putting up the applesauce she makes from our cooking apples. This preserving jar, however, contained not applesauce but the ring finger, swimming in alcohol. Proudly the accused showed me several thick scientific books which he had consulted while preserving the finger. I leafed absently through them, pausing only at the illustrations, but admitted that the accused had done an excellent job and that the finger’s appearance was unchanged. Speaking as a decorator, I also told him that the glass with its contents looked interestingly decorative at the foot of the mirror.
When the accused saw that I had made friends with the preserving jar, he informed me that he sometimes worshiped it and prayed to it. My curiosity was aroused and I asked him for a sample of his prayers. He asked me a favor in return: providing me with paper and pencil, he asked me to write his prayer down. I could ask questions as he went along; while praying, he would answer to the best of his knowledge.
Here I give in testimony the words of the accused, my questions, his answers: Adoration of a preserving jar: I adore. Who, I? Oskar or I? I, piously; Oskar, with distraction. Devotion, perpetual, never mind about repetitions. I, discerning because without recollections; Oskar, discerning because full of recollections. I, cold, hot, lukewarm. Guilty under examination. Innocent without examination. Guilty because of, succumbed because of, remitted my guilt, unloaded the guilt on, fought through to, kept free of, laughed at and about, wept for, over, without, blasphemed in speech, blasphemed in silence, I speak not, I am not silent, I pray. I adore. What? A glass jar. What kind of a jar? A preserving jar. What is preserved in it? A finger. What sort of finger? A ring finger. Whose finger? Blond. Who’s blond? Medium height. Five feet four? Five feet five. Distinguishing marks? A mole. Where? Inside of arm. Left, right? Right. Ring finger where? Left. Engaged? Yes, but not married. Religion? Protestant. Virgin? Virgin. Born? Don’t know. Where? Near Hanover. When? December. Sagittarius or Capricorn? Sagittarius. Character? Timid. Good-natured? Conscientious, talkative. Sensible? Economical, matter-of-fact, but cheerful. Shy? Fond of goodies, straightforward, and bigoted. Pale, dreams of traveling, menstruation irregular, lazy, likes to suffer and talk about it, lacks imagination, passive, waits to see what will happen, good listener, nods in agreement, folds her arms, lowers eyelids when speaking, opens eyes wide when spoken to, light-grey with brown close to pupil, ring a present from boss, married man, didn’t want to take it at first, took it, terrible experience, fibers, Satan, lots of white, took trip, moved, came back, couldn’t stop, jealous, too, but for no reason. Sickness but not, death but not, yes, no, don’t know, I can’t go on. Picking cornflowers when murderer arrived, no, murderer was with her all along… Amen? Amen.