by Günter Grass
I, Gottfried Vittlar, append this prayer only because, confused as it may seem, the indications contained in it concerning the owner of the ring finger coincide very largely with the testimony regarding the murdered woman, Sister Dorothea Köngetter. However, I am not trying to cast doubt on the accused’s allegation that he did not murder Dorothea Köngetter and never saw her face to face.
It seems to me, in any case, that the extreme devotion with which the accused prayed and drummed—he was kneeling and had wedged his drum between his knees—to that preserving jar argues in his favor.
I had further occasion, in the year or more that followed, to see the accused pray and drum, for he was soon to offer me a generous salary—which I accepted—to accompany him on his tours, which he had interrupted for a considerable period but resumed shortly after finding the ring finger. We visited the whole of Western Germany and had offers to play in the East Zone and even abroad. But Mr. Matzerath preferred to remain within the boundaries of the Federal Republic; as he himself put it, he didn’t want to get into the usual international rat race. He never drummed or prayed to the jar before performing. But after his appearance and a long-drawn-out dinner we would repair to his hotel room: then he drummed and prayed, while I asked questions and wrote; afterwards we would compare his prayer with those of the previous days and weeks. The prayers vary in length. Sometimes the words clashed violently, on other days the rhythm was fluid, almost meditative. Yet the prayers I collected, which I herewith submit to the court, contain no more information than my first transcript, which I incorporated in my deposition.
In the course of the year, I became superficially acquainted, between tours, with a few of Mr. Matzerath’s friends and relatives. I met his stepmother, Mrs. Maria Matzerath, whom the accused adores, though with a certain restraint. And the same afternoon I made the acquaintance of Kurt Matzerath, the accused’s half brother, a well-behaved boy of eleven. Mrs. Augusta Köster, the sister of Mrs. Maria Matzerath, also made a favorable impression on me. As the accused confessed to me, his relations with his family became more than strained during the first postwar years. It was only when Mr. Matzerath helped his stepmother to set up a large delicatessen store, which also carries tropical fruit, and helped financially whenever business difficulties arose, that relations between stepmother and stepson became really friendly.
Mr. Matzerath also introduced me to a number of former colleagues, for the most part jazz musicians. Mr. Münzer, whom the accused calls familarly Klepp, struck me as a cheerful and amiable sort, but so far I have not had the energy or desire to develop these contacts.
Though, thanks to the generosity of the accused, I had no need to practice my trade during this period, love of my profession led me, between tours, to decorate a showcase or two. The accused took a friendly interest in my work. Often, late at night, he would stand out in the street, looking on as I practiced my modest arts. Occasionally, when the work was done, we would do the town a bit, though we avoided the Old City because the accused, as he himself explained, couldn’t stand the sight of any more bull’s-eye panes or signs in old-fashioned Gothic lettering. One of these excursions—and I am coming to the end of my deposition—took us through Unterrath to the car barn. It was past midnight.
We stood there at peace with the world and each other, watching the last cars pull in according to schedule. It’s quite a sight. The dark city round about. In the distance, because it was Friday, the roaring of a drunken workman. Otherwise silence, because the last cars, even when they ring their bells and squeak on the curves, make no noise. Most of the cars ran straight into the barn. But a few stood outside, facing every which way, empty, but festively lighted. Who had the idea? Both of us, but it was I who said: “Well, my dear friend, what do you say?” Mr. Matzerath nodded, we got in without haste, I took the motorman’s place and immediately felt quite at home. I started off gently, but gradually gathered speed. I turned out to be a good motorman. Matzerath—by now the brightly lit barn was behind us—acknowledged my prowess with these words: “You must have been baptized a Catholic, Gottfried, to be able to run a streetcar so well.”
Indeed, this unaccustomed occupation gave me great pleasure. At the car barn no one seemed to have noticed our departure, for we were not followed, and they could easily have stopped us by turning off the current. I took the direction of Flingern; after Flingern I thought of turning left at Haniel and going on toward Rath and Ratingen, but Mr. Matzerath asked me to head for Grafenberg and Gerresheim. Though I had misgivings about the hill below the Lions’ Den Dance Hall, I acceded to the request of the accused. I made the hill, the dance hall was behind me. but then I had to jam on the brakes because three men were standing on the tracks.
Shortly after Haniel, Mr. Matzerath had gone inside the car to smoke a cigarette. So it was I, the motorman, who had to cry “All aboard! “ Two of the men were wearing green hats with black bands; the third, whom they held between them, was hat-less. I observed that in getting on this third man missed the running board several times, either because of clumsiness or poor eyesight. His companions or guards helped him, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they dragged him brutally, onto my motorman’s platform and then into the car.
I had started off again when suddenly from behind me, from inside the car, I heard a pitiful whimpering and a sound as of someone being slapped. But then I was reassured to hear the firm voice of Mr. Matzerath giving the new arrivals a piece of his mind, telling them to stop hitting an injured, half-blind man who had lost his glasses.
“ You mind your own business,” I heard one of the green hats roar. “This time he’s going to get what’s coming to him. It’s been going on long enough.”
While I drove on slowly in the direction of Gerresheim, my friend Matzerath asked what the poor fellow had done. Then the conversation took a strange turn: We were carried back to the days, in fact to the very first day, of the war: September 1, 1939: it seemed that this man, who was so nearsighted as to be almost blind, had participated as an irregular in the defense of some Polish post office. Strange to say, Mr. Matzerath, who could not have been more than fifteen at the time, knew all about it; he even recognized the poor devil as one Victor Weluhn, a nearsighted carrier of money orders, who had lost his glasses in the battle, escaped while the battle was still on, and given his pursuers the slip. But the chase had continued, they had pursued him till the end of the war, and even then they had not given up. They produced a paper issued in 1939, an execution order. At last they had him, cried the one green hat; the other agreed: “And damn glad to get it over with. I’ve given up all my free time, even my vacations. An order, if you please, is an order, and this one has been hanging fire since ‘39. You think I’ve nothing else to do? I’ve got my work.” He was a salesman, it appeared, and his associate had his troubles too, he had lost a good business in the East Zone and been obliged to start up from scratch. “But enough’s enough; tonight we carry out that order, and that’s an end to the past. Damn lucky we were to catch the last car! “
Thus quite unintentionally I became a motorman on a streetcar carrying two executioners and their intended victim to Gerresheim. The Gerresheim marketplace was deserted and looked rather lopsided; here I turned right, meaning to unload my passengers at the terminus near the glassworks and start home with Mr. Matzerath. Three stations before the terminus, Mr. Matzerath came out on the platform and deposited his briefcase, in which as I knew the preserving jar stood upright, approximately in the place where professional motormen put their lunch-boxes.
“We’ve got to save him. It’s Victor, poor Victor! “ Mr. Matzerath was very upset.
“He still hasn’t found glasses to fit him. He’s terribly nearsighted, they’ll shoot him and he’ll be looking in the wrong direction.” The executioners looked unarmed to me. But Mr. Matzerath had noticed the ungainly lumps in their coats.
“He carried money orders at the Polish Post Office. Now he has the same job at the Federal Post Office.
But they hound him after working hours; they still have an order to shoot him.”
Though I could not entirely follow Mr. Matzerath’s explanations, I promised to attend the shooting with him and help him if possible to prevent it.
Behind the glassworks, just before the first gardens—if the moon had been out I could have seen my mother’s garden with its apple tree—I put on the brakes and shouted into the car: “Last stop! All out!” And out they came with their green hats and black hatbands. Again poor Victor had trouble with the running board. Then Mr. Matzerath got out, but first he pulled out his drum from under his coat and asked me to take care of his briefcase with the jar in it.
We followed the executioners and their victim. The lights of the car were still on, and looking back we could see it far in the distance.
We passed along garden fences. I was beginning to feel very tired. When the three of them stopped still ahead of us, I saw that my mother’s garden had been chosen as the execution site. Both of us protested. Paying no attention, they knocked down the board fence, not a very difficult task for it was about to collapse of its own accord, and tied poor Victor to the apple tree just below my crook. When we continued to protest, they turned their flashlight on the crumpled execution order. It was signed by an inspector of courts-martial by the name of Zelewski and dated, if I remember right, Zoppot, October 5, 1939. Even the rubber stamps seemed to be right. The situation looked hopeless. Nevertheless, we talked about the United Nations, collective guilt, Adenauer, and so on; but one of the green hats swept aside all our objections, which were without juridical foundation, he assured us, because the peace treaty had never been signed, or even drawn up. “I vote for Adenauer just the same as you do,” he went on. “But this execution order is still valid; we’ve consulted the highest authorities. We are simply doing our duty and the best thing you can do is to run along.”
We did nothing of the sort. When the green hats produced the machine pistols from under their coats, Mr. Matzerath put his drum in place. At that moment the moon—it was almost full, just the slightest bit battered—burst through the clouds. And Mr. Matzerath began to drum… desperately.
A strange rhythm, yet it seemed familiar. Over and over again the letter O took form: lost, not yet lost, Poland is not yet lost! But that was the voice of poor Victor, he knew the words to Mr. Matzerath’s drumming: While we live, Poland cannot die. The green hats, too, seemed to know that rhythm, I could see them take fright behind their hardware in the moonlight. And well they might. For the march that Mr. Matzerath and poor Victor struck up in my mother’s garden awakened the Polish cavalry to life. Maybe the moon helped, or maybe it was the drum, the moon, and poor, nearsighted Victor’s cracking voice all together that sent those multitudes of horsemen springing from the ground: stallions whinnied, hoofs thundered, nostrils fumed, spurs jangled, hurrah, hurrah!… No, not at all: no thundering, no jangling, whinnying, or shouts of hurrah; silently they glided over the harvested fields outside of Gerresheim, but beyond any doubt they were a squadron of Polish Uhlans, for red and white like Mr. Matzerath’s lacquered drum, the pennants clung to the lances; no, clung is not right, they floated, they glided, and indeed the whole squadron floated beneath the moon, coming perhaps from the moon, floated off, wheeled to the left, toward our garden, floated, seemingly not of flesh and blood, floated like toys fresh out of the box, phantoms, comparable perhaps to the spooklike figures that Mr. Matzerath’s keeper makes out of knotted string: Polish cavalry of knotted string, soundless yet thundering, fleshless, bloodless, and yet Polish, down upon us they thundered, and we threw ourselves upon the ground while the moon and Poland’s horsemen passed over us and over my mother’s garden and all the other carefully tended gardens. But they did not harm the gardens. They merely took along poor Victor and the two executioners and were lost in the open fields under the moon—lost, not yet lost, they galloped off to the east, toward Poland beyond the moon.
Panting, we waited for the night to quiet down, for the heavens to close again and remove the light that alone could have persuaded those riders long dead, long dust, to mount a last charge. I was first to stand up. Though I did not underestimate the influence of the moon, I congratulated Mr. Matzerath on his brilliant performance; a triumph I called it. He waved me aside with a weary, dejected gesture: “Triumph, my dear Gottfried? I have had too many triumphs, too much success in my life. What I would like is to be unsuccessful for once. But that is very difficult and calls for a great deal of work.”
This speech was not to my liking, because I am the hardworking, conscientious type and have never met with the least success, let alone a triumph. It seemed to me that Mr. Matzerath showed a lack of gratitude, and I told him as much. “You are being very arrogant, Oskar,” I ventured—by then we were calling each other by our first names. “All the papers are full of you. You’ve made a name for yourself. I’m not thinking of money. But do you suppose that it is easy for me, whom no newspaper has ever so much as mentioned, to live side by side with a darling of fame like you. Oh, how I long to do something big, unique, spectacular like what you have just done, to do it all by myself and get into the newspapers, to appear in print: This was the achievement of Gottfried von Vittlar.”
I was offended at Mr. Matzerath’s laughter. He lay on his back, rolling his hump in the loose earth, pulling out clumps of grass with both hands, tossing them up in the air, and laughing like an inhuman god who can do anything he pleases: “Nothing could be simpler, my friend. Here, take this briefcase. Luckily, the Polish cavalry hasn’t crushed it. I make you a present of it; it contains a jar with a ring finger in it. Take it; run to Gerresheim, the streetcar is still there with all the lights on. Get in, drive to the Fürstenwall, take my present to Police Headquarters. Report me, and tomorrow you’ll see your name in all the papers.”
At first I rejected his offer; I argued that he wouldn’t be able to live without his jar and his finger. But he reassured me; he said he was sick of the whole finger business, besides he had several plaster casts, he had even had a gold cast made. So would I please make up my mind, pick up the briefcase, get in that car, and go to the police.
So off I went. I could long hear Mr. Matzerath laughing behind me. He stayed there, lying on his back, he wanted to savor the charms of the night while I rode off ting-a-ling into town. I didn’t go to the police until the following morning, but my report, thanks to Mr. Matzerath’s kindness, brought me quite a lot of attention in the papers.
Meanwhile I, the kindly Mr. Matzerath, lay laughing in the night-black grass outside Gerresheim, rolled with laughter within sight of several deadly serious stars, laughed so hard that I worked my hump into the warm earth, and thought: Sleep, Oskar, sleep a little while before the police come and wake you up. Never again will you lie so free beneath the moon.
And when I awoke, I noticed, before noticing that it was broad daylight, that something, someone was licking my face: the quality of the sensation was warm, rough but not very, and moist.
Could that be the police so soon, awakened by Vittlar and now licking you awake? Nevertheless, I was in no hurry to open my eyes, but let myself be licked a while: warmly, moistly, not too roughly, it was quite pleasant. I chose not to care who was licking me: it’s either the police, Oskar conjectured, or a cow. Only then did I open my blue eyes.
Spotted black and white, she breathed on me and licked me until I opened my eyes. It was broad daylight, clear to cloudy, and I said to myself: Oskar, don’t waste your time on this cow even if there is something divine in her way of looking at you. Don’t let that rasping-soothing tongue of hers tranquilize you by shutting off your memory. It is day, the flies are buzzing, you must run for your life. Vittlar is turning you in; consequently, you must flee. You can’t have a bona fide denunciation without a bona fide flight. Leave the cow to her mooing and make your getaway. They will catch you either way, but why let that worry you?
And so, licked, washed, and combed by a cow, I fled. After the very first s
teps of my flight, I burst into a gale of fresh, early-morning laughter. Leaving my drum with the cow, who lay still and mooed, I embarked, laughing, upon my flight.
Thirty
Ah, yes, my flight, my getaway. There’s still that to tell you about. I fled in order to enhance the value of Vittlar’s denunciation. A getaway, I said to myself, requires first of all a destination. Whither, O Oskar, will you flee? Political obstacles, the so-called Iron Curtain, forbade me to flee eastward. It was not possible to head for my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek’s four skirts, which to this day billow protectively in the Kashubian potato fields, although I told myself that if flight there must be, my grandmother’s skirts were the only worthwhile destination.
Just in passing: today is my thirtieth birthday. At the age of thirty, one is obliged to discuss serious matters like flight as a man and not as a boy. As she brought in the cake with the thirty candles, Maria said: “You’re thirty now, Oskar. It’s time you were getting some sense into your head.”