The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Reschke notes for my benefit: “The West Germans are the least inhibited about using rickshaws. Most of them grew up here and come back in order to refresh, as they say, old memories. I gathered from the women’s chatter that they wished, after a short tour of the city, to take Grosse Allee from Danzig to Langfuhr and back, as they did years ago in their schooldays; evidently old friends, they had often covered this ground on bicycles. Indeed, they amused themselves rattling off street and place names; and Mr. Chatterjee nodded.”

  The Bengali put on a bicycle racer’s cap. Reschke wished him a pleasant ride. The two school friends cried out: “It’s great fun. We can’t recommend it too highly. You’re from here too, aren’t you?” And stepping powerfully on the pedals, as if transporting two portly ladies in his well-sprung vehicle were part of his fitness program, he cried out again: “See you, Mr. Reschke.”

  All right, if you insist. As a schoolboy I swallowed toads on request. It’s possible, too, that I necked on park benches with Reschke’s cousin Hildchen during the blackouts, or even during air-raid alerts until the all clear sounded. Yes, Reschke and I may well have sat next to each other in school, and it’s probably true that he let me copy from him in math and Latin. Still, having to follow him step by step is too much. Everybody knows he shuffles. Not all his detours must be mine. I let him go, just as he is, without beret and camera case, while my thoughts for a moment follow the rickshaw which, wherever it may be, is rolling toward the future …

  The few tourists and a sprinkling of pious Poles were lost in the three-aisled church, whose newly raised dome will be supported by twenty-six octagonal pillars until the next destruction. The last time the dome came down, a few memorial slabs cracked under the debris. Nevertheless the passage along the side chapels, through the central nave or transept and past the sanctuary, has famous pavingstones full of meaning. According to Reschke, the dog growing out of vines in the Neuwerg escutcheon still gnaws a bone of stone despite the crack, as it has done since 1538, when the embossed slab of Sebald Rudolf von Neuwerg was laid.

  Once again, as though to take leave of the smooth-trodden objects of his assiduous research, the professor walked over the floor slabs whose raised inscriptions, now barely legible, gave the names and death dates of once-powerful patricians as well as Bible quotations in Baroque German. Family arms and heraldry, all worn flat and smooth by generations of awed churchgoers and later by tourists. For example, right next to the Beautiful Madonna is the memorial slab in the floor of the north lateral nave, whose ornamented shield shows, in the left half of a vertically bisected field, two stars above a tree, and in the right a crown over an hourglass, and below, a skull with a swan looking over the shield—an allusion to the “Silesian Swan,” as the poet and court historian Martin Opitz von Boberfeld, whom the Plague placed under this slab in August 1638, was called by the members of the Fruit-Bearing Society.

  Reschke, and not for the first time, was irritated by the inscription added in 1873 from stupid local patriotism: “To the poet, from his countrymen.” But he took pleasure in the inscription engraved in 1732 on the memorial slab of husband Mattias and wife Lovise Lemman: “Their bones are still green and their name will be praised in their children, to whom it is bequeathed …”

  Then something extraordinary in the diary: “I have encountered my tomb, in the central nave, to be exact. On a gray granite slab, quite smooth, I saw my name freshly chiseled in cuneiform though spelled in the old way, expanded by the first names of my brothers. Thus I read my name as Alexander Eugen Maximilian Rebeschke. I read it over and over again, in the end aloud though under my breath. Without a date, of course. Nor was I favored with an epitaph, let alone an escutcheon. Unable to bear the thought of lying under granite, I fled as if I had gone mad, my steps echoing on the flagstones, so that worshipers looked up in dismay and stared at me. Familiar as I was with the postulate of mortality since my earliest student days, I could not endure this anticipation. So I ran, ran away from myself and out the southern side door, ran as I hadn’t run for a long time, and was glad to know where I was going …”

  For Alexander had an appointment to meet Alexandra Piątkowska at the stroke of twelve at the Neptune Fountain on Long Market. The widow had taken half the day off. They would find a suitable spot in which to hammer their idea into shape, since the widower had to start for home the following day.

  He arrived breathlessly on time, didn’t say what had put him in a sweat, but cried out while still running, as though to keep up the momentum of his flight: “We’d better take the car …”

  Reschke in the driver’s seat. No photograph shows him at the wheel. Though I have many photographs of the couple, they are never in front of a car. No Mercedes star in the picture with them. His diary says nothing about the car of his choice. Never anything but: “We took the car …” or: “After leaving the car at the attended parking lot …”

  So I can only guess, or type something or other at random. Was he driving one of those Skoda limousines that make an exotic impression west of the Elbe? Since Reschke indulged in extravagances, such as a velvet collar on his tailor-made autumn coat, a nostalgic Peugeot 404 with leather upholstery but an expensive catalyzer might have been right for him. For when Reschke tanked up, he tanked up on unleaded. I definitely do not see him driving up to the Hevelius in a Porsche.

  So I’m left with his “We’d better take the car …” Since he was pursuing his study of the city’s principal churches on foot, he had left the car in the hotel’s parking lot. When widow and widower met under Neptune’s curved trident, Piątkowska brought a complete plan for the afternoon, which could only be carried out with the help of a car. Before they left the parking lot, Alexandra wiped the sweat from his forehead—“Why, Alexander, you are all outworn!”—and only then did she put on his head and adjust the beret he had forgotten the night before.

  Reschke explains briefly that at first he considered the country between Brentau and Matern suitable for a woodland cemetery, especially because “the tall beeches are well spaced and provide the project with a natural setting. Only a few need be cut down. But much underbrush will have to be removed. Because the homecoming dead are to be sheltered beneath a canopy of leaves, not hidden away.”

  The only objection to this ideal cemetery site was the proximity of the Gdańsk airport, whose runways occupied level ground where once the farms of the village of Bissau had gathered its rolling fields around them. And Rembiechowo Airport was sure to expand as far as Matarnia. Plus the noise of planes taking off and landing. Who wants to take his eternal rest in a flight path?

  Unfortunately the long valley to the west of Oliwa was also unsuitable. Where Reschke remembered forest clearings and Sunday family outings, tentlike wooden houses huddled together amid community vegetable gardens. Neatly as the cheerful community gardens were fenced off, dense as the mixed forest was that covered the valley, the trees barely touched by blight, Reschke nevertheless suggested that they turn back. There was no room here. This beautiful land all wantonly built up …

  They drove back in the early afternoon. I see driver and passenger silent, pensive if not disappointed: their idea bruised, their decision, scarcely made, stymied, and their enthusiasm, which had flared up only yesterday, decidedly dampened.

  As they rode down Grosse Allee, which is now called Grunwaldzka and links the suburb of Wrzeszcz to the city, and passed the former Sports Stadium on their way to the attended parking lot, Reschke slowed down and pointed at the large park to the right: “That’s where the United Cemeteries used to be, where my paternal grandparents …”

  Piątkowska told him, no, ordered him to stop: “Not worry, will be again cemeteries, same as before …”

  “But Alexandra …”

  “But what? We just get out.”

  “But it is now a public park …”

  “Exactly. Now is only now …”

  “But we can’t reverse the course of history.”

  “We’ll see if we c
an’t.”

  While Reschke parks the car and the two of them discuss the reversibility of historical facts, I have to survey in retrospect the United Cemeteries, leveled by government decree, giving their acreage: An area circumscribed on the one hand by the Polyclinic and the Engineering School and on the other by St. Michael’s Lane, leading to the crematorium and the parallel Grosse Allee, this area, later named Park Akademicki, encompassed the roughly four-acre cemetery of the St. Bridget and St. Joseph Catholic congregations, which, like all the other cemeteries, was leveled starting in 1966. On the adjoining eight-acre Evangelical St. Mary’s Cemetery, where it fronted St. Michael’s Lane, the Szpital Studencki was built. The roughly nine acres of what used to be the Evangelical Cemetery, at the east end of several new buildings of the former Technische Hochschule, now belong to Politechnika Gdańska. The Catholic cemetery of the congregations of St. Nikolai and Royal Chapel measured about six acres, and there was a roughly four-acre crematorium cemetery situated on the other side of St. Michael’s Lane, where the crematorium, an imposing Dutch-brick building with a chapel and two chimneys, still stands. This crematorium cemetery was also leveled in the late sixties and then renamed Park XXV-lecia PRL, which means Park of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of Poland, and thrown open to the public.

  More might be said about other leveled cemeteries on the opposite side of Grosse Allee; for behind the Small Drillground (later named Maiwiese) and St. Stephen’s Park lay the United Cemeteries of St. John, St. Bartholomew, Sts. Peter and Paul, and the adjoining cemetery for the Mennonites—and then came railroad tracks, the Neuschottland Housing Development, the shipyard, and the harbor. But since Reschke was thinking only of the particular area where the double grave of his paternal grandparents had been reserved, he parked his car near the brick and half-timbered building which once housed the cemetery administration and guarded the entrance and so remained etched in his memory.

  The widow remembered too. “Was in Gomułka time when last German cemeteries they bulldozed. Why didn’t I get out of Party then, instead of already too late when came martial law?”

  The avenue, bordered by evenly spaced linden trees, still led from the brick building to St. Michael’s Lane, and there, on bulldozed burial ground, or, as the widow put it, “On dead people bones,” stood the newly built, flat-roofed Special Hospital for Students.

  Halfway down the avenue of lindens was a traffic circle, from which other avenues of lindens branched left and right. Thus four large burial grounds, with single trees and clumps of trees, could still be imagined. These formal cemetery avenues created a cross from which radiated all the main and secondary avenues. Tall, shade-promising trees, chestnuts, elms, weeping willows. Dilapidated park benches occupied by men busy with beer bottles and by mothers with small children. Here and there people reading newspapers, a student couple, a lone student who, Reschke maintained, was reading poems in French under his breath.

  When widow and widower had paced the length of the avenue of lindens from the Engineering School entrance to the Polyclinic on the city side and roughly calculated the size of the Academic Park, during which expedition Piątkowska counted Reschke’s measuring strides aloud in meters, he gazed at the hospital built in the early twenties and said, “That’s where they took my tonsils out. And then they wouldn’t let me eat anything but ice cream.” And she said, “Funny, me too, both tonsils out, when I was teenager already.”

  After surveying the whole area, Alexander and Alexandra estimated the total size of the alienated cemeteries. She exaggerated. His twenty-five to thirty acres came close to the official figures. The sight of all this fallow land filled them both with enthusiasm. Having the gift of looking into the future, Reschke saw burial ground merging with burial ground. When she spotted additional ground for tombs and urns beyond St. Michael’s Lane—today bearing the name of Traugutt, the leader of the insurrectionaries—and the crematorium, her enthusiasm increased by a good three and a half acres. This area, too, they paced off. Right behind the disused crematorium, whose chapel, Alexandra seemed to remember, was used for Orthodox services by the Ukrainian minority that had settled in Gdańsk since the war, there was a broken-down fence, and then the park gave way to community vegetable gardens. “Farther on,” writes Reschke, “there are big athletic fields, all part of the Soccer Stadium.”

  In his diary he sees fit to remind me that soon after the Anschluss year 1939 the Heinrich-Ehlers athletic fields were rebuilt and later named after a gauleiter from Franconia, who had been favored with the reichsgau of Danzig-West Prussia.

  Yes, Reschke, you’re right: We students of St. Peter’s were often present at the annual Reich Youth Games in the Albert Forster Stadium. Sweat, whistles, commands, boredom. Hideous memories …

  I can only add to those recollections. I remember soccer games—Danzig, hardly a first-class team, against visiting clubs, Breslau, Fürth, even Schalke. The names of then-famous players such as Goldbrunner, Schön, Lehner, and Fritz Szczepan come to me. And I remember that on June 21, 1941, a Sunday, the day the Russian campaign started, I witnessed from my place in the standing area in that sunken bowl a game I don’t remember against whom.

  “This is where,” said Alexandra Piątkowska when they returned to the traffic circle. She took in all four burial grounds, pointed a short arm in each direction. Alexander Reschke was impressed by her sweeping gestures of taking possession: “Not only I but Alexandra as well saw what until then had been a mere idea. She spoke of rows of graves and of German names on rows of tombstones. She even murmured, in a tone of incantation, inscriptions such as ‘Rest in Peace’ or ‘Here Lies …’ Her eyes reflected her words: ‘Here, right here will be return of dead Germans!’ Much as I hope that her too-loud exclamation—people were looking at us—will come true, nevertheless her vision frightens me.”

  The widow must have calmed his fears. Nothing could put her off. Convinced that the dead had a right to come home and that her idea was convertible into reality, she said, as they finally left the park: “Must no more be terrible, Alexander. We Poles with bulldozer was terrible. Because politics is everywhere always sticking its nose in, and I saw too late what Communism was supposed to be but wasn’t. Terrible everywhere. What now comes brings happiness, believe me, because is human. But account must balance. You understand, rachunek?”

  On the former burial ground, among the evenly spaced linden trees, and on the way to the parked car, Alexandra Piątkowska talked about the yield of her almost sleepless night, about the money that would be needed as initial capital. Now she high-heeled ahead, now she stood still. She counted on all her fingers. The gildress’s short, powerful fingers, practical and eloquent: Since the zloty was worthless, the foundation of her idea, now an enterprise, must be the currency of the West German state. That’s the way it was, since everything, even death, costs money. “With deutschmarks it works. Already I see how beautiful it will be!”

  As they were riding toward the city, night fell. Mentally calculating, they forged ahead. As an experiment, I imagine the two of them in a Saab. She says, “A million deutschmarks we need to start.” A solid car that guarantees safety. Both belted up, exuberance and all. Now they are silent. Just before Oliwa Gate, Reschke thought he passed a bicycle rickshaw with two passengers. All that registered was the rickshaw and Chatterjee’s racing cap “… I’m sure it was he who was powerfully plying the pedals. I only hope that we progress as auspiciously with our cemetery plans …”

  Saab or Volvo, or Peugeot for that matter. Never mind what kind of car. He parked it in the hotel parking lot. But a hug must be added before action again speeds up their story. The widow, Reschke reports, hugged him as, standing at the traffic circle, she beheld the future cemetery. The embrace came as something of a shock to him. Standing on tiptoe, the small, firmly built woman rose to almost his height. He felt awakened, revived even in a region from which he had ceased to hope for much. She threw her arms with all their many
constantly clinking bracelets around his neck, kissed him on both cheeks, and cried, “Oh, Alexander! Now all we need is a space in Wilno!” His arms would not obey him. “I stood there moved, but stiff as a board.”

  The widow’s physical exuberance may have irritated the widower, but he withstood the assault of her body clad in skirt and tweed jacket, felt its warmth, and did nothing to oppose the joy she had communicated to his body. Later—in Bochum on November 9—he went so far as to answer Alexandra’s contention about plenty of deutschmarks with, as he admitted, a frivolous sentence: “Dear Alexandra, let me worry about that. It would be too absurd if I were unable to come up with the required sum. In times like these, when everything is uncertain, one must learn to take risks. We shouldn’t be reckless, of course, but not too timid either. In any case our joint venture calls for total commitment.”

  When Reschke parked the car to one side of the Hevelius, the city was shrouded in November darkness. Not rickshaws but taxis waiting as usual outside the hotel. He knew well that bittersweet mixture of exhaust fumes and sulfur. Undecided what to do with the early evening, the widower asked the widow to join him for a drink at the bar behind the reception desk. Because the Orbis buses with flat-rate tourist groups had not yet returned from their day excursions to Marienburg and Pelplin, Elbing and Frauenburg, the two of them were alone at the bar long enough for a first, then a second whiskey. After so much recent intimacy, they may have felt somewhat awkward. The clinking ice in their glasses, I would think, spoke for them.