by Günter Grass
As the bar filled up in rapid-fire succession and bursts of merriment erupted, Reschke paid up, unwilling to subject Piątkowska to that crowd. The gentlemen casually dressed, the ladies in traveling outfits with lots of jewelry. Listening to their voices, Reschke thought he could identify most of the flat-rate tourists as of local origin. “More loudly than need be, they showed off their familiarity with the city. Most of them no younger than we, in other words at an age that will make them beneficiaries of our venture—sooner or later.”
In this speculation he was not alone. The widow shared his thought and whispered too loudly, “Every one will be customer soon.”
“Alexandra, please …”
“Certainly have plenty deutschmarks …”
“But this isn’t the place …”
“All right, I didn’t say nothing.”
Then her laugh. Alexandra was not to be suppressed. She would have been quite capable—after only two drinks—of launching an outright publicity campaign, if he hadn’t asked her to dinner in the hotel restaurant.
She declined. “Expensive as sin and food no good,” and invited him out instead. “All right. We go.”
It wasn’t far, only a few steps past St. James’s Church. She had reserved a table for two in a small restaurant. They ate by candlelight, and as Piątkowska had promised, “Real Polish cooking like Mama’s in Wilno.”
During the meal—appetizer, main course, dessert—the two of them behaved like a couple who have a great deal to say to each other. Not that he spoke of his dead wife or she of her husband who had died so young. Nothing that rankled, only well-digested memories. Brief reference was made to her son, who was studying philosophy in Bremen, and to his three working and more or less married daughters. “The man you see before you is twice a grandfather.”
The conversation was a little disjointed. It touched briefly on politics—“Now soon the Wall comes down”—exchanged national clichés for a while, the qualities that are supposed to be typical of Poles and Germans, and slipped back time and again into shoptalk, particularly since Alexandra had for months at a time been busy gilding the inscriptions and ornaments of wooden and stone epitaphs, most recently in St. Nikolai. The names and escutcheons of extinct patrician families, from magistrate and alderman Angermünde to merchant Schwarzwaldt, whom Holbein painted in London and whose escutcheon, despite the red of the tongue and the blue of the helmet, was basically black and gold, to Johann Uphagen’s coat of arms, in which the knobby beak of the silver swan held a golden horseshoe—she was familiar with them all, including Ferber and his three pigs’ heads, down to the most finicky curlicue and helmet ornament. The gildress moved with less assurance in the field of smooth-trodden memorial slabs, so it was not out of mere politeness that she asked Reschke to send her his dissertation someday. “You see, Herr Professor, when people get as old as us, feeling is not enough. We have to know. Not everything, but lots details.”
If I am to believe his notebook, Reschke felt hurt at being addressed as Herr Professor. It was only at dinner—they were drinking Hungarian wine—that the widow in the heat of an argument resorted to the affectionate diminutive of the academic title; they were discussing whether the graphic artist Daniel Chodowiecki, who hailed from Danzig, should be admired as a Pole or reviled as a Prussian government official. Several times she said “Professorchen,” and then over their glasses not only said but whispered “my dear Professorchen.” Reschke felt, as he later noted, “somewhat surer of Alexandra’s affection.”
Actually, they came close to quarreling over Chodowiecki. Piątkowska was capable of strong national feeling. She called the draftsman and etcher, who toward the end of his life reformed the Royal Prussian Academy, “a traitor to the Polish cause” because, when he found himself in dire need after the partition of Poland, he offered his services to Berlin—Berlin of all places.
Reschke disagreed. He termed her view too “narrow” and evaluated the artist as important and of European stature, “because he pointed the way beyond the Baroque.” Though a Protestant, Chodowiecki remained loyal to his Polish origin. True, he trusted the Huguenots who had emigrated to Prussia more than he trusted the Catholic clergy. “Nevertheless, dear Alexandra,” he cried, raising his glass, “you should take pride in him as a Polish European!” Whereupon the widow clinked glasses with him and gave in for the first time. “You reconcile me with great Polish artist. Thank you, Professorchen! You dear Professorchen.”
They had come to the dessert. It couldn’t have been one of his favorites because it isn’t mentioned in his papers, though he gives the borscht, the piroshki, and the carp in dark-beer sauce their due.
Then complications. She insisted on paying. He had to give in. But when she took him the short distance back to his hotel and was about to return to Hundegasse alone through the poorly lit streets, he asserted himself, took her arm and shuffled along beside her, while she clack-clacked in her high heels, as far as the steps of her front terrace, in whose sandstone relief the games of the putti and little cupids were barely discernible.
From street corner to street corner they seem to have spoken less and less. He notes only her sudden fear that when the Wall between West and East came down, everything might be more difficult. “In Dresden no more People-Owned gold leaf. Shortages will be …”
And then the widow dismissed him with a quick kiss and a routine “Write if you feel like it …” Left standing at the door, the widower started shuffling back to his hotel.
No, Reschke did not take refuge in the half-timbered house by the Radaune. Shortly after eleven, he asked for his key, took the. elevator to the fourteenth floor, opened the door to his room, changed into the slippers that accompanied him on every trip, washed his hands with his own soap, sat down, bent over his notebook, opened his glasses case, and put on his reading glasses. Then shut the case and reached, as if in a hurry to gain written assurance of his own existence, for his fountain pen.
It might have been the memorial slab in St. Mary’s with his name on it that made him invoke in writing the patron of the square highrise hotel, the astronomer Johann Hewelke, known as Hevelius, and his wife Catharina, née Rebeschke, also known as Rebeschkin, in order, as his father had tried in vain to do, to follow a line of kinship with the brewery-owning Rebeschkes back to the seventeenth century, and thus lend some meaning to the terrifying apparition of his own tombstone, when there was a knock at the door. Twice softly, once loud.
“It’s me again,” said the widow Alexandra Piątkowska when shortly before midnight she called on the widower Alexander Reschke.
She arrived breathless, carrying not only her shoulder bag but also a loaded heirloom, Mama’s string bag. This time it was a brown and blue one with a zigzag pattern. In haste, as if someone had lit a fire behind her, she had picked up this, that, and the other, and without stopping to catch her breath run after Alexander, who by then must have been passing St. Dominic’s Market, run with short, clattering high-heel steps.
“I completely forgot. You take this on your trip.”
The contents of the string bag: a jar of pickled beets, a few dried boletus mushrooms on a knotted string, and a walnut-size chunk of amber “with a gnat in it!” She took off her mouse-gray raincoat and her jacket and stood before him in a glossy light-blue silk blouse with dark sweat stains under the armpits, still breathless.
Should I be there holding a lamp in spite of the hotel room lighting? He saw her sweat spots. She saw him in bedroom slippers. She let the string bag with contents slip to the floor. He took off his glasses and still found time for the case. She took a short step, he a stumbling step, then she another, and he likewise. And they fell, lay in each other’s arms.
That’s how it must have been. Or how I see their fall, though Reschke confided few details to his diary. Immediately after the horror of treading on his own tombstone and the speculation about his family tree—“Unfortunately Hevelius’s first marriage remained childless …”—came the string bag
, the dried mushrooms, the pickled beets, the amber with the gnat, and the dark-blue spots of sweat. As the widower noticed next morning, the widow had brought her toothbrush—“an astonishing but sensible precaution,” he called it. And in the solemn tone reserved for glad tidings, he cited Alexandra’s words, laughingly spoken after midnight or early in the morning: “We are lucky, Alexander, because, my change of life gone by already.” “How frankly Alexandra calls a spade a spade.”
Then references to the narrow single bed and the repulsive spots on the carpet. And after the barest suggestion of a disagreement—he wanted to turn off the light, she didn’t—his confession: “Yes, we loved, we had the power to love, and no one stopped us. And I—O God—I was capable of love!”
That’s all. I have no intention of crowding into that narrow hotel bed any more than my classmate revealed. In the light of day or in the half-darkness: he thin but not withered; she firm and round but not fat. They’ll do as a couple.
Alexandra and Alexander slept little. They seem to have mastered the task of making love. At their age patience is needed and the kind of humor that ignores the possibility of defeat. As they were able to assure each other at breakfast in the hotel restaurant, neither snored during their brief spells of exhausted sleep. At a later point in their story, however, he noted her only moderately bothersome snoring, and she no doubt was equally tolerant. I owe her suggestion, that they finally get some sleep, that is, lie back to back, to his note: “Suppose we make double eagle.”
Did they talk intermittently about their idea? Was there at least some passing mention of cemeteries in Gdańsk and Wilno, of adequate supplies of deutschmarks? Or with all that love was there no room in the narrow bed for cemeteries here or there? Or was their idea, still short of fuel, oxygenated by love? When Reschke asked her at breakfast whether she had obtained his room number at the reception desk, her answer, followed by laughter, was: “But you tell me how high your floor and number when we argue about great Polish artist in Prussian Academy.”
They handled their parting quickly. After paying for the single room he said: “Have no fear, Alexandra. You’ll hear from me. You’ll never get away from me now.”
And as his suitcase stood beside them ready to be picked up, she is reported to have said: “I know, Alexander. And on highway don’t drive too fast. Now I am no longer widow.”
Piątkowska left before Reschke carried his suitcase to the parking lot. That’s what they had arranged. He tipped the porter, but didn’t allow him to carry the suitcase. A sunny to partly cloudy morning. A north-west wind blowing the sulfur stench of the docks in the harbor to other places.
When Reschke stepped out of the hotel shortly after eight o’clock, there were no taxis but across the street three rickshaws stood invitingly in the sun. Chrome and enamel gleamed. The three drivers were talking. One of them was Chatterjee in his cap. The third driver looked foreign. Chatterjee noticed Reschke carrying the suitcase and was beside him in three steps. He introduced the Pakistani as a new employee. “There are more outside the Novotel.”
My former classmate offered congratulations, all the more so as a second Pole had swallowed his pride.
Chatterjee said: “When will you be back, Mr. Reschke? I invite you to a tour of the city. You know what I always say: If anything has a future, it’s the bicycle rickshaw.”
Reschke’s account of this parting makes several references to the Bengali’s sadly remote look. Chatterjee gave Reschke one of his brochures—Chatterjee’s Sightseeing Tours: “For your friends in old Germany. Gridlock, stress, noise! The solution? Ask Chatterjee. He has the answer for the cities.”
Alexander Reschke put the brochures in his glove compartment. On the passenger’s seat he laid his other present: a crocheted string bag full of little mementos, such as dried boletus mushrooms.
3
NOW THIS COULD be the beginning of an epistolary novel, one of those crackling exchanges in which the voice is replaced by omissions, by eloquent gaps. Candor restrained only by punctuation. Famished interrogative sentences and passion narrowed strictly to two persons, which achieves expression on paper with no commentary from outside …
But their idea has already taken wing; it is on its way, bringing in other participants who, as the bylaws provide, want to join in the discussion and not just whisper indirectly. Soon there will be demands for an agenda.
Since my former classmate put his fountain pen in with the rest of his junk, I am able to specify the make of pen (whereas the brand of car was up to me): a black Montblanc, as thick as a Havana cigar, with a gold nib, and which he, for my use, filled by suction with blue-violet ink. Ah, Reschke, I write, what stupid business have you got me into?
Still dated in Poland—Hotel Merkury, Poznań, where, being overtired, he interrupted his journey and wrote his first letter. I’m not going to make things easy for myself by reproducing his pages-long handwritten letter with its even margins and clear, neat penmanship, which would merit an “excellent.” This is not the beginning of an epistolary novel. For one thing, the unabridged publication of such a document might give offense, since, on three of the five pages, written on both sides, Reschke, in fits and starts, lives through a night in a single bed, in which connection he comes up with circumlocutions of all kinds, some in bad taste, others inventive, all concerned with the sex organs of two lovers. Rhapsodic flights flow from his pen but give little idea of the actual feats performed in the narrow bed, though they do make it clear that sex reduced him to a state of geriatric adolescence. As if a pipe had burst, obscenities, too long contained, pour forth in a flawless hand to fill page after page. Here I must admit that only once does the professor’s free-flowing imagery appeal to me—when after a baroque accumulation of adjectives he refers to his penis as “a retarded young fool.” He is positively itching to go the limit, and with school-boyish abandon. In one or two passages he uses words or expressions that Alexandra whispered to him in the heat of action, e.g. on completion of the act of love: “Please, in my junk room stay little longer.”
Understandably, Piątkowska, in her reply, which took ten days to reach Bochum over intricate Polish pathways, protested. Yes, the night in the narrow bed was unforgettable, and she hoped for “happy returns and soon.” But she never again wanted to read such crude outbursts, especially those dictated to her by passion. “Is question of manners, and not because I am afraid of censorship still.”
Then she takes up the last third of the letter, the content of which was more businesslike and called for few exclamation marks. Reschke, cautiously, and still with hedging ifs and buts, nevertheless had made headway toward the future of their common idea: “After all the injustices that people have inflicted on each other, it should be possible—now that the horizons are brightening and much that seemed unthinkable only a year ago has become reality—not only to open up a better future for the living but also to secure the rights of the dead. The expression ‘silent as a tomb’ has often been used negatively; now it should take on new meaning—no, Alexandra, I can see your frown—it must. The Century of Expulsions will come to an end under the sign of homecoming. Only in this way can that end be fittingly celebrated. We must hesitate no longer. As I promised you, dearest, on my return I shall contact individuals and groups, not least those of religious orientation, and at the same time start setting up a card file …”
Piątkowska had something similar in mind: “You must know that in Gdańsk and Gdynia, no, in whole województwo, more than third of people come from Wilno and they like to lie there when their time is up. Not all, but many. In Church of St. Bartlomieja right near your Hotel Hevelius they have meetings of friends from Wilno and Grodno. I will write to Bishop, who sits in Oliwa, and ask him, carefully because with Church you must be careful always, because in Poland Church is wszystko, everything …”
Reschke restrained himself in the letters that followed. Nevertheless, the affair between Alexander and Alexandra, called by him “our incomparable love,�
� assumed vast proportions. He no longer put the sex organs of the two lovers in a variety of costumes, but let their “transcendental juxtaposition and introition” resound, now with the fullness of an organ blast, now with the delicacy of a plucked instrument. “Our late communion, our joyous Gloria, our restrained Credo, never cease to reverberate within me. And even your laughter, which I often thought mocking, finds ever-new echo chambers, though it makes me painfully aware of your absence.”
While Reschke’s penmanship has been found praiseworthy, it must now be admitted that I find it hard to decipher Piątkowska’s letters down to the last hen-scratch. It is not her word order or economical use of articles, which she rejects on principle as a “typical German torture,” that gives me trouble, but the way her pen either storms forward or lurches backward. Her words, and the letters, too, seem to be suffering from epilepsy. They step on one another’s heels, they push and shove, leaving no space between lines or words. Or they dance in ecstasy, a performance not lacking in visual charm.
Yet what emerges from this scribble-scrabble seems perfectly sensible and to the point, for example, her attempts to channel the outpourings of her Alexander: “Maybe we had a little luck because we chanced to meet in market, which made us argue right away about flowers and money. But I knew even then that funny gentleman next to me is something special.”
I admit that I take more interest in Alexandra than a reporter should. My feeling that a different man might have been better for her is beside the point.
In her letters from first to last she writes their first names in the Polish way. It’s always Aleksandra writing to Aleksander. She never writes Alex, or Aleks. No nicknames have come down to us. “Shuffler” would have been conceivable. Only “dear Professorchen” turns up now and then, when his lecturing invites it.