The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Reschke answered this letter personally. But he was able to entrust his secretary with most of his correspondence; for years, her letter-writing style had been his. There was no more than that between them, no sticky intimacy, nothing to upset Alexandra … and anyway, I refuse to bring in a subplot.

  Erika von Denkwitz, of whom I have no photograph, was five years old when her mother, with her and three other children and the estate manager and his wife, all left Stuhm with two jam-packed horse carts and headed west. Two of her siblings and the wife of the estate manager died on the way. Only one horse and wagon made it. Erika lost her dolls.

  Reschke in his notes expresses surprise that “the details of West Prussian rural life should be so deeply embedded in my secretary’s childhood memories.” Interestingly enough, she did not wish to be entered in his card file of the burial-ready. He claims to understand her reluctance, makes no attempt to win her over, praises her “unswerving loyalty regardless of deep-seated doubts,” and after less than two weeks leaves town, putting her in charge of the office. My former classmate was good at delegating; otherwise I wouldn’t be saddled now with this report.

  Back in Gdańsk, Alexander had to reassure his Alexandra, who because of the recently enacted currency unification was worried about poor Poland now doomed to live next door to the deutschmark. “What will we do when you come with fat moneybags to buy us?”

  Reschke was sure the deutschmark would have its hands full putting the East German economy on its feet. “There won’t be much left for Poland. But even so, I’m confident the Cemetery Association will not be seriously affected by the changing economy. Preparing for death frees one from worry about economic trends. Believe me, Alexandra, no one economizes on his funeral.”

  This conversation took place one weekend soon after his arrival from Bochum. The two of them had driven to Kashubia. A fine summer day, though the rape was no longer in bloom. There were still poppies and cornflowers and peasants with horse-drawn plows. The cock out of the picture book was crowing on his dunghill.

  Alexandra had bought food for a picnic, which she prepared on the shore of a lake near Zuckau and spread out on a pretty red-and-blue embroidered tablecloth: coarse garlic sausage, cottage cheese mixed with onions and chives, a jar of mustard pickles, radishes, too many hard-boiled eggs, mushrooms in oil and vinegar, bread and butter, nor did she forget the salt shaker. She put four bottles of beer in the lapping water by the shore. They found a sandy bay between clumps of rushes, small enough for the two of them. Both sat barefoot on folding chairs, he with rolled-up trouser legs.

  No, no toad noise. Once in the distance, a motorcycle. Dragonflies over the water, bumblebees, cabbage butterflies, what else? Little by little it grew dark. Now and then a fish jumped out of the water. Cigarette smoke against mosquitoes. And then suddenly the call of a single toad! More a ring than a call. “When we had almost given up hope, the bell struck three times: short, long, long … The still surface of the water made the ringing especially clear. Where did it come from? I couldn’t say; from near, from far. No other sound, except perhaps larks, who held the stage from morning till night over the prematurely ripe fields. And sacks of white cloud drifting from the northeast were part of the Kashubian summer. The toad call went on and on …”

  And into the silence and over the endless croaking Piątkowska said, “We should stop now.”

  It seems to have taken Reschke a moment to answer:

  “You mean what we began can’t succeed?”

  “Only what I said. Stop now, because it’s going well still.”

  “But we’ve just begun …”

  “I still say.”

  “We haven’t yet filled three rows of graves …”

  “Believe me, Aleksander, any better it won’t get.”

  “We’ll have to let the business take its course, because no one can stop it now …”

  “Just because we had idea?”

  “… which will be a mess if we leave it unfinished.”

  Alexandra Piątkowska put an end to this dialogue which paralleled the croaking of the toads. Her laughter is recorded on Reschke’s tape.

  It goes without saying that they went on—and damn-it, even I now want them to go on—but the suggestion that they stop while it was going well marked a turning point in their story. Later I find entries that confirm this caesura. “It was the solitary toad that advised Alexandra to put an early end to our endeavors. Should I have listened?”

  Of that picnic it remains to be reported that the four beer bottles refused to cool in lukewarm lake water. “We should have brought bathing suits, as I had advised,” writes Reschke. But I personally am glad they didn’t, because it spares me the need to portray the art historian and the gildress, the widower and the widow, the pale and skinny Reschke and the lean-to-overflowing Piątkowska, that belated pair, in bathing suits.

  With rolled-up trousers and hiked-up skirt they dabbled in the shallow water by the shore. He might contemplate his feet in the water, how they blur, how, distorted this way and that, they seem strange and remote to him. She smokes with her left hand while holding her skirt with her right.

  Now Reschke has picked up flat, barely wet stones from the sand. “In my youth there were crayfish here,” he said, when nothing stirred under the stones.

  Piątkowska said: “When I was here with Mama and Papa just after war, there were lots of crayfish still.” And added: “They’re gone now.” And Alexander agreed: “Gone forever.”

  The next day Reschke had to put on his suit for special occasions. Three burials were on the agenda, two Protestant, one Catholic. In each case the mourners had brought their clergyman, pastor, priest, which the rules of the Association permitted.

  Mourned by numerous family members, women far advanced in years were buried. The burial according to the Catholic rite would start the fourth row of graves. To judge by the photos taken by Reschke and dated on the reverse side, the Polish pallbearers might just as well have been German. By that time, in addition to the gravediggers two cemetery gardeners had been hired. In the brick building facing Grosse Allee there was now a guard, who in the daytime provided visitors with information and was also in charge of the hearse and the gardeners’ and gravediggers’ tools.

  Frau Brakup would gladly have filled this post, which at first seemed peaceful. Jerzy Wróbel had a hard time convincing her that a job in the cemetery was incompatible with her position on the board of directors. It was only when he impressed on her her high degree of responsibility as speaker for the German minority and promised good money for her taped monologues that the old woman was satisfied. “Oh well, if it can’t be done, it can’t be done. But I’d have fixed the little house up comfortable and made it cozy. Nice at night, too, when it’s spooky dark outside. And I’d have kept a lookout for rowdies wanting to raise the roof. It don’t matter. But I sure always wanted to watch over a cemetery.”

  It wasn’t only Reschke who loved listening to her, when possible with the tape recorder. At the end of the war, Jerzy Wróbel, who came from Grodno, drifted to the ruins of Gdańsk, grew up amid scaffolding, and was keen about stories from the old days, because he lacked the East Polish background of his parents and grandparents and his only source of information about the past of this city that had grown up from the rubble was the piles of documents at the registry of deeds. Teachers and priests led him to believe that Gdańsk had always been Polish, a hundred percent Polish. When cracks appeared in this childhood faith, Wróbel wanted to know more than could be found in documents. The bundles of German-language litigation concerning boundaries and rights of way, the obsolete property deeds and estate papers, the accumulated fug of centuries-old claims to rightful ownership did not satisfy him. But Brakup could provide him with details that had smell and taste. Her adage—“Speak well of what’s foreign, but don’t go where you’re foreign”—bore witness to a life of unbroken roots. From time-displaced memories she dredged up gossip and political sludge. She knew who
had lived in the patrician houses along the Allee, that is, in the neighborhood of the United Cemeteries: “Directors all and filthy rich, with cooks and nursemaids and handymen. Take here, Hindenburgallee up as far as Adolf Hitler Strasse, which is what they had to call Hauptstrasse. I still know all about it, because I went to Doctor Citron’s villa for my heart. I tell you, Pan Wróbel, he was a fine doctor, never mind if he was a Jew. They gave him a bad time, they wouldn’t let him be a doctor, so he got out to Sweden …”

  Everything that was important to Wróbel, even the routes of streetcar lines and which preacher in what church had been permitted to speak out and for how short or how long a time in praise of God or the Führer—he only had to ask Brakup. Married to a shipyard worker who was killed in the Crimea in 1942, she knew who hated whom during the Free State years. “Let me tell you, Pan Wróbel, here in Schichau and in the railroad car factory it was hell. Red fighting Brown, and the Brownshirts with their clubs fighting the Red Front. Until Adolf came along and made them all equal …”

  Wróbel couldn’t hear enough of that. If Piątkowska was there with Reschke when these endless stories were being told, she would draw comparisons with a great-aunt who, whenever she got started on ancient history, ended up with Marszał Piłsudski marching into Wilno, his eyes blazing, his mustache bristling, and his white horse dropping turds. Alexandra laughed. “To believe all that we don’t have to.” And Reschke wrote in his diary: “We shouldn’t stir up these old stories too much, because, as Brakup says: ‘You step into a bog, and you splatter yourself with mud.’ The cemetery is mission enough. Our idea is forward-looking, even if all it does is promise the dead a narrow patch of home soil.”

  With this evocation of a fully occupied cemetery only coffin burial could be meant; but by the end of July an urnfield had to be added to the Cemetery of Reconciliation, because an increasing number of burial-ready persons preferred cremation. Many applications from the provinces of East Germany, which by now had all but ceased to exist as a state, requested cremation, making no mention of a Christian funeral service. Without calling themselves atheists, the applicants from Stralsund, Neubrandenburg, or Bad Doberan wished “only a simple burial without a priest or speeches at the graveside.” This probably because of the lower cost, since only urns had to be shipped, particularly as the new currency, convertible on a one-to-one basis only to a limited degree, may have not yet lost its shine but was becoming scarce.

  Since it was not possible to reactivate the old crematorium on St. Michael’s Lane—a video rental establishment had moved into the basement rooms—the first urnfield was laid out in the western part of the Cemetery of Reconciliation, parallel to Grosse Allee.

  The urn burials were attended by fewer mourners, often only members of the immediate family. The reduced attendance is also explained by the practice, which soon became common, of shipping the ashes of persons long dead. Undoubtedly such belated shipment was done in accordance with a wish expressed in the lifetime of the deceased, that is, to make one’s last resting place in the land where one was born. Such wishes from beyond the grave would soon create problems for the board of directors of the German-Polish Cemetery Association; but let’s not anticipate.

  So far everything was running smoothly. Yet Reschke, an aesthete by training, was bothered by the urns that were arriving. He therefore sent a letter with revised Cemetery Regulations to all persons stored in his computer. By prohibiting the use of synthetic urns, he was able to promote the production of urns made of hard-baked potter’s clay.

  Then it became necessary to discuss the nature of the tombstones to be erected after the graves had settled. Through Piątkowska, Reschke made contact with some stonemasons who were doing restoration work for the city. Because restoration of the terraces had been completed, most particularly on Brotbankengasse, they complained that work was becoming scarce. On receiving the promise of an interest-free loan of DM 200,000, which the board of directors approved after a brief discussion, partly by telephone, a group of stonemasons set up business on the site of the former crematorium and soon began to build stock for the Cemetery of Reconciliation.

  Reschke insisted that not a single stone violate the Cemetery Regulations, which in separate paragraphs specified that “every tombstone must be stable and firmly attached by dowels to the pedestal or foundation … It is forbidden to affix photographs, artificial wreaths, or glass or enamel plates …” The use of synthetic stone was likewise prohibited.

  But Reschke did not content himself with regulations. Some of the models recommended to the stonemasons’ workshop—I have copies of them—suggest a revival of the Baroque tombstone. He favored traditional emblems and ornaments. To judge by quotations from his doctoral dissertation, he would have favored pictorial low reliefs retelling Biblical motifs: the Fall of Man, the parable of the Prodigal Son, the miraculous raising of Lazarus, the Burial of Jesus, the Resurrection of the Dead … With plenty of acanthus leaves and clusters of fruit.

  More difficulties were created by some of the epitaphs requested. Many had to be rejected, which often led to unpleasant correspondence with family members. In the notes of my ultrapunctilious classmate I find a few epitaphs that were never hewn in stone, for instance: “What the Foe from Thee Has Taken, Thou Hast Now in Death Retaken.” Or: “Here Rests Our Beloved Father and Grandfather Adolf Zollkau in German Homeland Soil.” Or: “Driven Out and Now Returned, Here Rests Elfriede Napf in God and Native Soil.” Or short and sweet: “Here Lies in German Soil.”

  The board of directors had to be consulted, and the industrialist Gerhard Vielbrand and vice president Marian Marczak disagreed when the epitaph “After Injustice, Justice Was Born, His Homeland Now Has Been Restored” came up for debate. Following a short tug of war, in which German self-righteousness and Polish sensitivity seemed evenly matched, Erna Brakup’s argument—“I won’t talk about justice, because there ain’t any, but homeland is homeland and that’s that”—seems to have brought about a compromise, according to which the first line of the epitaph was dropped and the second authorized to be hewn in stone.

  Vielbrand apologized in writing for using the word “censorship” in a telephone conversation; Marczak in return asked Vielbrand not to attach too much weight to his own outbursts of temper. Piątkowska seems to have shrugged this quarrel off with a laugh. “Why epitaphs? Isn’t name in stone enough?”

  In many ways August lived up to its reputation as the month of crisis. In Gdańsk and elsewhere tourists were conspicuously absent. True, the zloty had been stabilized somewhere very low (from the Polish point of view) and was now convertible, but prices rose higher and higher, in utter contempt of wages and salaries. The Iraqi invasion of the oil sheikdom of Kuwait, far away but brought close by television, sparked a crisis, which soon became known as the Gulf crisis. Not to mention the worsening of the crises in Georgia, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. But even without looking across the border, the situation was not good: trouble was brewing for the German-Polish Cemetery Association.

  Soon after the founding of the Cemetery Association the question came up of putting a fence between the parkland now known as the Cemetery of Reconciliation and the Engineering School and Polyclinic, but it was tabled as not urgent. Then flowers and wreaths began to disappear from fresh grave mounds, and worse, it was reported that the stolen goods, with the ribbons removed in the case of the wreaths, and in every case very fresh, were being sold at stands in St. Dominic’s Market. Although the affected families were compensated for the loss, they complained and complained. When an urn was overturned, brutally and maliciously overturned, though not broken, the board of directors, which barely had the quorum needed to make decisions (members Karau and Vielbrand were absent on the German side), resolved—after too little discussion, at the insistence of Frau Johanna Dettlaff, who spoke of “unspeakable outrage”—to protect the cemetery with a fence and moreover engage night watchmen, at the expense, it goes without saying, of the Cemetery Association.

  All thi
s because Piątkowska and Reschke had not asked for voting rights on the Board. Their argument that the fence would be a source of quarrels and hard feeling carried no weight. Even Wróbel voted for the fence.

  By mid-August, when the Gulf crisis had no more news value than any other crisis report, posts were set up along Grunwaldzka, designed to support a six-foot fence later to be covered with greenery. The press was quick to take up the matter with headlines such as CEMETERY-CONCENTRATION CAMP, and GERMANS LOVE FENCES, and the suggestion that “instead of wasting money on expensive wire, why not import sections of the now dismantled Berlin Wall into Poland duty-free, and set them up again for the defense of the German Cemetery?” Concluding with the slogan: “We need the Wall!”

  All in all, there was more laughter than recrimination. No sooner was the fence put up than parts of it were torn down. This was done carefully, avoiding damage to the materials, for the posts and wire reappeared, put to good use in the fencing of community gardens or the building of henhouses. The dismantling turned into a local fete.

  “And yet,” writes Reschke, “it’s an ugly sight.” Each day there were eight to ten burials. The seventh row of grave sites had now been filled, and the urnfield would soon have to be expanded. The cemetery was flourishing when the fence trouble struck; small wonder that various groups of mourners began to make inquiries about the safety of their dead. One indignant family left town with the ashes of their father and grandfather. When finally demonstrations were held around what was left of the fence and chanting profaned the quiet of the tombs, the board of directors after a telephone conference decided to reverse their decision and do without fences. No one, they declared, had wanted a political row.

  The remains of the fence vanished overnight. No objection was raised to planting a quick-growing hedge—Reschke suggested juniper. The board of directors publicly expressed its regrets, and the media lost interest. In spite of the night watchmen, the theft of flowers and wreaths did not stop entirely, but at least the cemetery was quiet again. Not so the world crises. New weapons systems were tried out in the Arabian desert; the far-flung regions of the Soviet Union were threatening to fall apart. The crisis month of August suffered from an overcrowded schedule; only from Germany came news that claimed to be gratifying: a date was set for the day of unity.