The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Piątkowska’s text, written and spoken in Polish, is brief; I’ve had it translated. Announcing her resignation, she says: “Since it is the duty of an honorary chairwoman to do honor, since the people she chairs should do her honor, and since in this Association I find no honor but only greed, I hereby terminate my membership.”

  Reschke’s declaration is longer. Once again he projects his favorite subject, the Century of Expulsions, on a wide screen, beginning with the Armenians, omitting no refugees’ exodus or forced resettlement, and finally bringing himself up to date with the expulsion of the Kurds. From the worldwide loss of homelands he then develops his and Alexandra’s original idea, the homecoming of the dead, the idea of reconciliation, and cries out: “Two-and-a-half square meters of home soil are and remain a human right.” He juxtaposes this right with the limited supply of cemeteries, goes on to question the quality of the soil contaminated by sewage, pesticides, and the excessive use of fertilizer, and now reflects, with the help of the foreshadowing sight experienced recently on the shore of a Kashubian lake, on the environmental consequences of the Bungagolf projects now in the planning stage, makes use of words such as “thieving,” “abomination,” “devil’s work,” paints a picture of ruthless land grabbing, says, “swan song, never again, a world lost,” and then suddenly, without transition, looks back on the activities of the German-Polish Cemetery Association from a distance of ten years. “Now that I am forced to recognize that the leases taken out on cemetery land have in many places become titles of ownership, and worse, that the shores of the Masurian and Kashubian lakes, which used to mirror the clouds, have been overbuilt, made ugly, and laid waste by greed, I am assailed by doubt: Was our idea good and right? Even with right thinking and good intention, it led to evil. Today I know we failed, but I also see that some good has come of it. Right can come from wrong. Frugal Asia is setting the table for German gluttony. The Polish-Bengali symbiosis is blooming into marriage. It is proving to a nation of shopkeepers that titles of ownership are of limited value. It announces the predestined Asian future of Europe, free from nationalistic narrowness, no longer hemmed in by language boundaries, polyphonically religious, superrich in gods, and above all blessedly slowed down, softened by the new warm and wet climate …”

  As I did with Alexandra’s few words, I hear the song of the low-country toads accompanying these of the future. After each image, their melancholy song sets a caesura. Our couple could not have conceived of a more beautiful exit.

  It was red-bellied toads, which have always been abundant in the low country of the Island. Ah, how frightened we children had been of the osier willows in the evening mist, ghosts coming ever closer. And then the alluring call of the males with their vocal bladders, who floated on the surface of the intricate system of drainage ditches. When the water temperature rose, the intervals between toad calls shortened. On a warm day in May a red-bellied toad, also known as a low-country or fire toad, could emit as many as forty calls a minute. If several were calling at once, their lament, echoing over the water, would swell to a single endlessly vibrant call.

  I assume Reschke taped a chorus only as an overture, then took single low-country toads from the tapes. In this way he was able, between call and call, to highlight words such as “German” or “thieving” or “rights,” or for that matter “homeless” or “nevermore.” In no better way could the future Polish-Bengali symbiosis have been celebrated than with the help of the word “marriage” highlighted by toad song, a word, incidentally, that occurred more and more often in Reschke’s diary as his wedding day approached.

  But before I can put the couple in the registry office, something more must be said on the subject of Reschke’s relation to automobiles. Since my classmate had occasionally made disparaging remarks about Mercedes drivers and scribbled contemptuous notes about the drivers of BMWs, and since I suspect a connection between his elegantly old-fashioned way of dressing and his taste in cars, I always imagined him driving archaic models on his trips between the Ruhr and Gdańsk, Gdańsk and Bochum; but when shortly before Erna Brakup’s resignation I read in his diary, “My car stolen from unattended parking lot,” I was sure that the car thieves, whose fences serve as middlemen all over Poland, would never have been tempted to steal and disguise a Skoda or any such ancient jalopy as a 1960 Peugeot 404; no, it would have to be something expensive and Western. Had Reschke tempted thieves with a Porsche? Someone advised me to saddle him with an Alfa Romeo; in the end I decided on a Swedish make, a Saab or Volvo.

  In any event he had been without a car since the middle of March. As reported, the couple took the streetcar to visit Erna Brakup’s sickbed. On longer trips they were driven by Jerzy Wróbel. And for the funeral at Matarnia they also used the Polski Fiat. Not until their drive to Kashubia to record toad calls—no toad called—did he introduce the “new car” in a note. Again no make is indicated, but it must have been an expensive model, since there was aggravation connected with its purchase.

  Immediately after our couple’s resignation from the honorary chairmanship, just as they were beginning to feel free, liberated, the board of directors was summoned to a special meeting. Because in her summons Frau Dettlaff had requested the presence of the former honorary chairmen, Reschke and Piątkowska had to submit to questioning about their finances in general and the financing of a new car in particular.

  At first the tone was civil; Timmstedt praised the “imaginative and already profitable investments in the firm of Chatterjee & Co.,” and Marczak wanted “no scandal.” But then the interrogation began. Vielbrand and Dettlaff took turns attacking. There was no hard evidence, true, but plenty of grounds for suspicion. He, Reschke, since the start of the Gulf crisis had speculated on the fluctuations of the dollar; he, Reschke, had accepted special discounts from West German funeral companies without disclosing their amounts; he, Reschke, could not show from which account his new car, the car which must now be considered a private vehicle, had been financed—possibly from bequests?

  Here Alexandra intervened: “Why not tell them your rickshaw man made you nice present?”

  “That would be inappropriate.”

  “But if they treat you like thief?”

  “Let them.”

  “But people stole old car from parking lot …”

  “That’s my business.”

  “All right, I tell them. Expensive car was given for his help in bicycle rickshaw production.”

  “Alexandra, please …”

  “Why don’t somebody laugh? Is funny, no?”

  Timmstedt seems to have started the laughter, and Marczak gave it weight by seconding it. All the new members laughed as though infected. Finally even Vielbrand and Dettlaff discovered the funny side of Chatterjee’s gift. Vielbrand was said to have “giggled at first, then burst into a loud, neighing guffaw.” The best Dettlaff could manage was a “pinched smile,” which suddenly turned to ice and put an end to the general merriment.

  It was Alexandra’s turn to be subjected to a barrage of questions. When nothing could be pinned on her but failure to make a sufficiently clear record of a donation for the Corpus Christi Church organ, Dettlaff got personal. She poked around in Piątkowska’s past, quoting from a private file she had somehow got hold of. “You as a Communist of long standing,” she thundered, “ought to know …” Or: “Even from a Communist one is entitled to expect …” She treated Alexandra’s Party membership as a crime, even had Alexandra’s 1953 hymn to Stalin at her fingertips, and with barbed vagueness conjured up “a disastrous connection between Stalinism and the Jews,” “especially disastrous for Poland, am I right, Pan Marczak?” And Marczak nodded.

  Piątkowska made no reply, but Reschke did. After presenting himself to the assembled board of directors as a former troop leader in the Hitler Youth, he asked Dettlaff what her rank had been in the League of German Girls; “You see how it is, my dear? Our generation ran with the hounds.” Whereupon Johanna Dettlaff blushed to the roots of her silvery
hair. And when Marian Marczak cast down his eyes and broke the general silence with “No one here is without a past,” all acquiesced.

  Reschke writes: “Even Gerhard Vielbrand was able to share this insight. He cried out, ‘Enough discussion.’ The young members of the Board, in any case, could not have cared less about the old stories. Timmstedt’s mocking confession, ‘To think that at the age of nineteen I was a Young Socialist, Statemonocap,’ sparked more laughter, but the meeting ended on a sour note. And Chatterjee’s controversial gift? Well, it didn’t bring us luck …”

  No one was unmasked, the special meeting had no consequences, the couple remained unshorn, and Reschke’s new car, a Volvo—yes, now I’m sure a Volvo—was in the attended parking lot between the theater and the Stockturm, across the way from the Arsenal, in mid-May, when the wedding provided an occasion for celebration.

  However, they did not ride to the registry office in the product of a Swedish assembly line but in a bicycle rickshaw of Bengali-Polish make. This—what a surprise—was Alexandra’s wish. She who had found “this Mr. Chatterjee” creepy, who had called the Bengali a “phony Englisher” and in her Catholic godlessness accused him of witchcraft and worse, “devilry—she, the gildress, absolutely insisted on riding to the Right City Rathaus in a rickshaw. “I want to drive up like queen, if not in carriage then in rickshaw.”

  It was probably just a whim, for Chatterjee and his cousins remained alien to her. Her standard pronouncement, which Reschke collected along with Piątkowska’s other sayings, was: “I will never get used to so many Turks in Poland as soon as Russians gone.” As often as he tried to explain the origin of the rickshaw manufacturer to his Alexandra—going so far as to spread the atlas out before her—she stuck to her rejection of the Turk, all Turks, in other words, all foreigners. She despised them all, even more than the Russians.

  Piątkowska took a historic view of the matter. As a Pole, she tended to see everything in terms of the martyrdom of the Polish people. She usually went back to the battle of Liegnitz, in which a duke of the glorious house of Piast met his death while turning back the Mongols. After this first rescue of the West by Polish heroism, it was the turn of Jan Sobieski, the Polish king who defeated the Turks at the gates of Vienna. Once again the West could breathe easy. “Ever since that battle,” said Alexandra, “all Turks are thirsting for revenge, and that goes for your Mr. Chatterjee too.” Recently, she began to sniff out a plot. “Already see German gentlemen bringing their Turks with them to turn us into political coolies.”

  She often laughed after her historical snap judgments, as though implying by her laughter that it need not come to the worst. And yet she overcame her prejudice, for she liked the many sparklingly clean rickshaws with their melodious three-note bells that brought life into the Old and Right cities. “Air already much better,” she cried.

  In Reschke I read: “At last the time had come. A pity Chatterjee wasn’t in town, or he would have taken us to the Rathaus himself. Even Alexandra was delighted with his wedding present, the delicate model of a bicycle rickshaw wrought in gold wire. Her childlike clapping after unpacking the miniature replica and discovering the two of us as dolls in the passenger seat of the golden rickshaw. ‘Aren’t we beautiful!’ she cried. In time she and Chatterjee would surely have made friends. Unfortunately, just as we were exchanging rings, he had to take a quick trip to Paris and then on to Madrid, where the chaotic inner-city traffic awaited remedy by means of the bicycle rickshaw. One of his cousins pedaled us. And today, after so many years, when I remember that day in May …”

  Of course their ride in the rickshaw was good for several photos, which I have before me in color. According to Reschke’s labeling, it was the very latest model of the shipyard production. On the back of one photo, written in handsome script: “After a rigorous trial run, most recently outside Europe—in Rio—it can be said that the future belongs to this model.”

  The rickshaw carrying the bridal couple in the photos is adorned with flowers. No, no asters this time, tulips. “Peonies are late this year, like everything else.” In a second rickshaw of the same model sit the witnesses Jerzy Wróbel and Helena, a gildress colleague of Alexandra’s, who specializes more in calligraphy. The photos transmit neither sunshine nor showers. It must have been cool, because Alexandra is wearing a large woolen scarf over her suit. Nevertheless the couple are dressed for summer: he in a linen suit the color of sea sand and a straw hat with a narrow brim; she in a broad-rimmed violet hat and a snug tailored suit whose color Reschke described as “a warm Neapolitan yellow veering to gold.”

  From the house on Hundegasse—cocktails for friends and neighbors had been served on the front terrace—the two rickshaws pedaled down the street to the Riding Academy, past the National Bank and the Stockturm, then by way of the Coal Market and the Lumber Market to the Big Mill, from where they turned into familiar Old City territory—Kiek in de Köck, covered market, Dominican church. From there they passed through everyday market bustle, went down Wollwebergasse past the Arsenal, turned left into Langgasse, to the left of which, just before the Leningrad Cinema, still named after Leningrad, a gambling casino the width of two house fronts had been open only a few days. While above, deceptive imitations of Renaissance gables were rotting, below, Western glitter promised lasting riches. TRY YOUR LUCK! said a sign in English.

  Langgasse as usual was crawling with tourists, who according to Reschke’s note applauded when the flower-bedecked rickshaw with the bridal pair rolled slowly past in the direction of the Rathaus. Congratulations were shouted in Polish and German. One of a multitude of pigeons let something fall on the brim of his hat. “Brings luck, Aleksander. Brings luck!” cried the bride.

  Actually, weddings were performed in the Rathaus only in exceptional cases, but Alexandra had succeeded in elevating this particular administrative act, and with it our couple, to the rank of an exceptional case. Over the years she had made a significant contribution to the interior of the late-Gothic edifice; past consoles, up the winding staircase, past Baroque drapery and luxuriant mirror frames—everywhere she was able to cry out: “This was done with gold leaf from my gilder’s cushion.”

  About the actual ceremony Reschke writes only that it was performed “on the dot of eleven” in the Red Hall, in the presence of a wall-wide painting entitled The Tribute Money, in the center of which Jesus with a Biblical retinue stands in the Long Market, knowing that the Rathaus, where the couple are saying yes to each other, is behind him. An appropriate setting for an art historian who is getting married to a gildress. Not only the bridal couple but the witnesses as well believed themselves, so long as the ceremony was in progress, to be inside a treasure room of another time.

  Because the sun suddenly broke through, pictures were taken, showing the newlyweds beside the Neptune Fountain and the Artushof, sometimes with, sometimes without, their witnesses. He in his beige linen suit, already wrinkled, she in her Neapolitan yellow suit, he in his narrow-brimmed straw hat, she shaded by an extravagantly overhanging brim—both look as if they were already traveling far away.

  Then they walked across the Long Market into Ankerschmiedegasse. Everywhere street signs in several languages. Reschke had reserved a table for four in a restaurant nearby. No relatives had been invited, for our couple had notified neither his daughters nor her son; since the disastrous Christmas trip, I find no reference to family.

  In the diary it is recorded in time-leaping retrospect: “We had perch filets in dill sauce followed by roast pork. Alexandra was in infectious high spirits. The girlish exuberance with which she—successfully, as I know today—was matchmaking between Wróbel and Helena, and her laughter of that day, both have remained true to themselves. If I remember rightly, she said, ‘Why hasn’t silly goose Alexandra been riding in rickshaw whole time!’”

  No wonder Jerzy Wróbel and Alexandra’s colleague were soon on easy terms. They laughed about the president of the Republic and his court at the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw.
They talked about the impending visit of the Pope—Wróbel expected the Pope to have more influence on conditions in Poland than Piątkowska was willing to give the Vicar of God credit for. Then the discussion turned to S. Ch. Chatterjee. Speculations that the recently reported assassination of an Indian politician might have necessitated the Bengali’s sudden departure gave way to other horrors. The eruptions of Mount Pinatubo. Not a word about the Cemetery Association until coffee was served.

  Out of the blue, Wróbel suggested that someone should write a history of the Cemetery of Reconciliation, no matter in what language, not forgetting the history of the United Cemeteries of Sts. Catherine, Mary, Joseph, Bridget, etc., nor the brutal way in which they were leveled. In his black suit—rented, Reschke presumes—Wróbel grew solemn: Considering how much has been achieved in a single year, he said, it should be possible to write an account of the German-Polish Cemetery Association which would of necessity include a certain amount of criticism but should on the whole be positive. He said this even though for certain unpleasant reasons he had been obliged to resign. Such a history could place everything in a proper perspective. In Poland as well as Germany there would be no lack of interested readers. There was plenty of material. The one thing needed was a writer keen on detail.

  Did the employee of the municipal land office see himself as the author? Or was he thinking of Reschke, whom he would be glad to assist with his knowledge of the registry of deeds?

  Alexandra said: “We are much too deep in everything what happened and everything what went wrong.”