by Günter Grass
Maxie said comforting words: “You just looked too sweet in your sleep. So innocent. We couldn’t resist. We were gentle. You wouldn’t have noticed a thing if Frankie hadn’t come down on you like a load of bricks. Come on, be nice. I’ll help you with the dishes. We’ll make ’em shine. And if you still want one, you can have a new dishwasher for the house, with all the gadgets.”
And Siggie also spoke up: “It had to be. Now it’s really Father’s Day. Let’s drink on it. Come on, Billy. Take a swig.”
Frankie popped open a beer bottle and, with a “Cheers” to nature, drank the health of the thrice-willed son.
But Billy didn’t want to be nice. And she didn’t want to wash any dishes with Maxie. She didn’t want to drink anyone’s health. Slowly, as though still weighed down with sleep, she stood up, took a few uncertain steps, and then said firmly, “I’m leaving. I never want to see any of you again. I didn’t want that.”
And looking each one full in the face, she said, “When I want that, I’ll take a real man. It’s better. I’m saying that as a woman. See? As a woman.”
As though to get a different, fresher, more precise view of things, Billy put on her glasses, which as a rule she wore only at work. Then she walked away, without looking back through her horn-rimmed glasses. Verifiably, she took step after step. The crows followed her from pine tree to pine tree. The motorcycle boys saw what direction she took and started their motors, to carry the latest news around the Grunewaldsee.
Maxie, Siggie, and Frankie looked after Billy as she vanished step by step. They were pretty well disheartened, even though Frankie said lightly, “If they want to travel, let ’em.”
After that the three drank beer and schnapps and schnapps and beer, so keeping Father’s Day on its feet until dusk. Elsewhere the conversation may well have hinged on football, the state lottery, the income tax, and expense accounts; our three remaining heroes, however, recollected where and how often they had demonstrated their procreative powers in past centuries. Possibly the schnapps helped them to suspend time.
Maxie related how throughout the long Thirty Years’ War, now here, now there, when Magdeburg burned, in Westphalian Soest, before Breisach, immediately after the Battle of Wittstock, and during periods of inaction in garrisons and winter quarters, he had tossed his pennies into hundreds of slots. “That was when my name was Axel Ludstrom of the Oxenstierna regiment. We were camped on the Hela Peninsula. Swedish cavalry, youngsters with hardly a bit of fuzz on our cheeks. It was May when I laid a Kashubian chick by the name of Agnes in a hollow in the dunes. The other boys took a quick turn at her, too… .”
As for Siggie, he saw himself as a Polish uhlan and painted a colorful picture of how the heroic young Count Wojczinski met Napoleonic Governor Rapp’s prim little cook deep in the forest, where she was gathering mushrooms for the governor’s table. “But naturally, when I got down off my horse, kissed her hand, and made her a few flowery compliments, she couldn’t resist. We lay on a bed of moss. Around us grew morels, egg mushrooms, puffballs, and big parasol mushrooms. Ah, how they smelled! How we took our fill of being one flesh. What a delight! Only the ants were a bother. Sophie was her name. Later, the patriotic little vixen poisoned the whole lot of us with a stuffed calf’s head. Only Rapp escaped. But I have no regrets… .”
Finally, Frankie related at length how as a Prussian dragoon in Ole Fritz’s day he had taken care of a farm cook between battles. “Good old Amanda. After Rossbach, Kunersdorf, Leuthen, or Hochkirch, whenever I stopped with her to heal my wounds, every time it took. After seven years of war, I had begotten exactly that many sons, for which reason I was appointed inspector of crown lands. Oh, Kashubia! That wonderful, sandy soil! Whereupon, with hard discipline, I implanted the potato in Prussia. My sons helped me in my task, all seven of them… .”
And more such feats, until Siggie said, “She’s just hypersensitive. I don’t know. We shouldn’t have let her go like that. Maybe she’ll get into trouble. There’s nothing but drunks running around at this hour. Guys you can’t fool with.”
“OK, time to pack!” cried Frankie, and gave Maxie, who didn’t want to get up, a kick in the ass. Quickly they stowed the iron grill, the unwashed plates, and camel’s-hair blanket, the empty bottles, and everything else that was lying around—only Billy’s top hat was left behind—in Frankie’s three-wheeler and drove off to look for Billy. (The fraternity brothers shoved off at the same time, singing, “High on the yellow chariot …”)
Aboard their three-wheeled crate, their fifth-hand heap, their handy little pickup for quick deliveries and small removals, in Frankie’s thick-and-thin, antediluvian, Stone Age, prefashionable vehicle, barely and perhaps for the last time tolerated by the new motor-vehicle code, Siggie and Maxie sat in the trailer with the Father’s Day paraphernalia, the rolling beer bottles, the unwashed plates, which now proceeded to shatter one by one, while at the wheel Frankie the wagoner steered a sinuous course—“We’ll find you! We’ll find you, Billy!” Over sticks and stones they drove in their indestructible, all-purpose vehicle, around the Grunewaldsee, which lay still and reflected the sunset, to the hunting lodge, and back to the lake, past departing Father’s Day groups, hemmed in by the caterwauling of a thousand half-drunken and totally drunken men. Maxie whimpered softly; only Siggie rasped angry words between thin lips: “Just runs out. Leaves us flat. Can’t take a joke. Goes off in a huff …” And then, on a sand road made bumpy by uncovered roots, they dimly, in the failing light, saw a shapeless something, which in the beam of the headlights proved to be a pair of bunched-up jeans.
“Those are Billy’s,” cried Frankie, Siggie, or Maxie. (Off to one side lay her blue-and-white-striped sweater and her bra.)
Alone and forsaken, she had gone off through the trees, deeper and deeper into the woods. Because at the lake, in the clearings, outside the refreshment stands, men shouted abuse: “Look at the chick!” “What’s she doing here on Father’s Day!” “I guess she’s got the itch.”
Just to be alone. And undo it all. She cocooned herself in loneliness. It, too, can warm you and keep you company. She felt (so she mumbled to herself) as if the scales had fallen from her eyes. “It took those bastards to buck some sense into me.”
What a new feeling: to be a woman. Even if she was hopelessly alone. But her mind was made up. No going back. Burn bridges. Form forward-pointing sentences: “I come of a family of fugitives. All I went through even as a child. I know what it is to make a fresh start. Through with that stuff, through with it for good. Start again from scratch. From where I left off. I won’t leave Heidi with her grandparents any longer—I’ll go and get her and give her a real home. A child needs a mother’s warmth and affection. I’ve got plenty of that. Ridiculous. As if I couldn’t afford a dishwasher of my own. What do I need her for? Stupid mistakes we all have to get behind us. But now I’ll … A woman and nothing but. I’ll …”
Through mixed forest and bushes, on sand roads and paths, over pine needles and moss, deeper and deeper into the woods, Billy carried her beautiful Father’s Day illumination. Loudly she offered the weaker sex. Jubilantly she cried, “I’m a woman, a woman, a woman!” Triumphantly she flung out the bait: “A butterball, a butterball!”
And they bit. They hadn’t lost sight of her for a moment. Inveterate trackers. Advancing from treetop to treetop, the crows helped. And the seven black-leather boys ran her to earth. Came jogging along over roads and paths on their still-unlit motorcycles. The motors hummed rather good-naturedly. Just a game, after all. The real thing for a change, just to see what it was like. Suddenly flashing light from three times seven headlights, they drove Billy, the woman, the cuddly butterball, the by now pretty-well-frightened rabbit, ahead of them, this way and that way, into sheltered hollows, where only sandwich papers and beer bottles still bore witness to Father’s Day.
Billy still protested: “Hey, kids. Stop the nonsense. Come on, we’ll have a couple of drinks at the Roseneck or someplace… .” But already
the circle had closed. Snap! went the trap. The old, familiar script.’ In this movie there was no escape. The end was set in advance.
“Clothes off!” said one, very softly. The motors had stopped humming. As under a shower, Billy stood plump and cute and awkward in the converging beams, her hair falling resplendent over her shoulders. She did as she was told but kept on her panties, shoes, and socks. That was as far as she would go. (“You don’t seriously think …”)
The rabbit broke loose. “You guys must be nuts!” she screamed and ran in zigzags when seven motors resumed their good-natured hum. She ran into a thicket, curved around tree trunks, broke crackling through underbrush, ran and ran until at last she fell on a soft bed of pine needles, with all seven around her again. “Please, boys, please …”
They said nothing at all, or only “Slut! We’ll show you, you slut!” or “You’re going to get fucked, you slut!” Already they had their leather trousers open. One after another, as though by command, had a hard-on. And they lined up for Communion. And found the whole thing perfectly normal. And one after another shot their gook into her, until she was overflowing. And kicked her with their big boots before they and after they: “Take that, you slut!”
And one of them, when they had all finished, shoved a jagged pine cone into the wound. “All right, you superslut, now you can run. Go on, run.”
But Billy couldn’t wouldn’t. Tears were all she had left. And a gaping emptiness that opened like a last wish: Oh. With their throttled-down motorcycles they nudged, pushed, bumped Billy—“Go on! Get moving!”—until first one, then another gave full throttle and ran over her legs and belly. Then, because all seven were doing the same thing, they did it over and over again. With dead-serious thoroughness.
That was how Frankie, Siggie, and Maxïe found their Billy, mangled, mashed, no longer human, on a bed of pine needles off to one side of the thicket. Beside her, broken, her glasses. Not the least shred of beauty left. All life had gone out of her. The one thing to do—and Frankie did it—was say “Shit!” Maxie vomited against a tree. Frankie hammered herself with her fists: “God damn it!” So Siggie had to keep cool. “We’ll have to leave her here. And phone on the way back. There’s nothing we can do right now.”
So they drove their three-wheeler for quick deliveries and short removals out of the thicket over sand tracks and roads, leaving the dead Billy in the woods. Sharing Clayallee with the returning Father’s Day traffic, they drove to the Roseneck, where Siggie got out and went to the phone booth by the bus stop. Frankie stayed at the wheel, cleaning her pipe. Maxie was out of chewing gum. Siggie said into the phone: “You turn right from the Clayallee, that’s it, then right again, then left and again left, then another right turn into the thicket. Take fifty steps, turn left, take a few steps more, and there you’ll find a naked woman. Dead. No, it’s the truth. Right. You said it.”
After that, life went on.
The Ninth Month
Lud
CAPABLE OF FRIENDSHIP—that’s the way we men are. From Ludek to Ludger and the prelate Ludewik, from Ludwig Skriever the woodcarver to Ladewik the executioner and the Swede Axel Ludström, from my old crony Ludrichkait and Bavarian Captain Fahrenholz to Ludwik Skröver, who went to America, and Frankie Ludkowiak, the old wagoner—we stuck together through thick and thin. Friends! Blood brothers! Oh, yes, and Jan. Jan Ludkowski. They shot him in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage. I miss Lud. How I miss Lud!
My friend Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber died recently. Whether he was coaxing form from inert plaster or laying fillets of smoked fish on grilled rounds of celery root and topping the whole with scrambled eggs (for himself and me), or sitting silent behind his glass and dipping his little finger for a drop to cool his forehead with, or relating his war experiences, as unchanging and familiar as a litany (“On the Arctic front, when the Ivans came creeping up in white parkas …”), or gnashing his teeth in anger, or caressing an uncarved stone—Lud was always and unmistakably the same: man, boulder, bull, activist, angel fallen in sin.
And so it had always been. When he fashioned the hand ax into a symbol. When he was a prelate and came with the Bohemian Adalbert to bring us heathen the cross. Later, when he carved the (High Gothic) altar for the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, and, just for the fun of it, a cherry-wood Madonna who looked like my wife, Dorothea, and stared at a distant point with her inlaid amber eyes.
Usually he died after me. But now, while I’m telling the tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife” in an entirely different version and my Ilsebill is nearing her confinement, he has died on me. And so I must sing a memorial for Lud, my friend in every time-phase. And then Ludek the fisherman, whom the neighboring horde looked upon as their artist, sighed when he saw my ceramic knickknacks. And then Comrade Ludwig Skröver, who lived next door to us on Brabank and later, under the pressure of the Socialist Laws, had to emigrate to America, dragged driftwood out of the Dead Vistula with a long hook. And then Colonel Axel Ludström, who had served on Hela as an ensign with the Oxenstierna regiment, squeezed a lemon over the white-eyed codfish that Agnes, my kitchenmaid, served up to us. And then it so happened that Ladewik the executioner was obliged to sever the head of his friend the blacksmith Peter Rusch, whose last supper of tripe he had shared the night before. And then with one blow Frankie Ludkowiak hammered the nail into the table. And after scowling at his students’ clay figures, the sculptor Schrieber, who died recently, spoke of himself and the Hittites, of Mycenae and of Minoan serenity, and with cool rigor of form.
Lud knew all that. He was always present as a sculptor, or simply as the man carrying a bull calf. The neolithic Lud and his hand-sized fertility idols. Those big Pomorshian mother goddesses, hewn from glacial boulders, that were dug up by Polish archaeologists near Oxhöft are all the work of his hands. When Lud became Christian at an early date (converted by Saint Augustine), he never portrayed the suffering of Christ on the cross, but always the triune principle. And when the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting visited him on his building site (next to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul), where he had carved a terrifying wooden Madonna after a likeness of my Dorothea, Lud cooked sheep’s kidneys in their envelopes of fat over a bed of coals.
Afterward, with tallow-coated tongues, we talked about everything and nothing. He was dissatisfied. At odds with the times. He gnashed his teeth. He could easily, as sculptor Schrieber did later, have felled one or more of these shits with his famous edgewise chop. When shortly thereafter the guilds rose up against the patricians, Ludwig Skriever the wood carver was with them. First it was about beer from Wismar, then about the rights of the guilds. Naturally the uprising was crushed. Lud escaped and was outlawed. I didn’t see him again until two centuries later, when they started the big clean-up of the churches.
Though a coppersmith by trade, Lud, who now called himself Ladewik, got bored with art. It wasn’t for Calvin, but entirely to suit himself that he became an iconoclast, one of Hegge’s crew. With his own hands he smashed a copper baptismal font that he had (allegedly) fashioned in the dimensions of Mother Rusch and elaborately enchased. And then he lost interest again, became executioner in the Stockturm, and was obliged to behead me, his friend.
What was Lud against? He was against curlicues and filigree, against colorful donors’ altars, against pomp and circumstance, against all images, against the word, against himself. With a heavy hammer, with well-aimed edgewise chop, with the executioner’s sword. That was Lud: violent. Slash and thrust. Primordial phonemes in his roar. Couldn’t help crushing the Devil in every petty Nazi.
But after Ensign Axel Ludström came to the Hela Peninsula with other cavalrymen of the Oxenstierna regiment and assaulted the still-childlike Agnes, she long remembered his voice. It went through and through her. It was archangelic, no longer earthly. For when, steeped in all the horrors of war, Colonel Ludström, along with Thorstenson’s cavalry, wrought Swedish-style havoc in Saxony, he helped out by singing the tenor part—“Naked came
I out from my mother’s womb”—when, on February 4, 1636, a Requiem Mass was sung for Count Heinrich von Reuss; the long-drawn-out war had left Court Kapellmeister Schütz few musicians or singers.
As a Swede, Lud was a handsome man. His gentle earnestness. His cool zeal. His sternness, his anger. But when we met again at the start of the war in the next century, Lud had come down in the world. Now he was known as Ludrichkait (His Slovenliness). Everybody laughed at him. Except me. We always had a supply of brandy. War makes for comradeship. Through thick and thin. For seven years. We were at Leuthen and Hochkirch together. Toward the end, he lost a leg at Burkersdorf. But he always hobbled back to Zuckau, where the good Amanda always had Glumse with potatoes in their jackets and linseed oil to spare for us veterans.
It may have been Lud who as a Bavarian captain under Napoleon’s Governor Rapp was downright heroic when, during the siege of Danzig, the Cossacks caught Sophie Rotzoll foraging, and with her in tow he hacked his way through. I didn’t know Fahrenholz. (I was at Graudenz under fortress arrest.) But beyond a doubt my good old Lud was the revolutionary socialist shipyard worker who proclaimed the strike at Klawitter Shipyard and the Germania Bread Factory, in the timber port, and at the Kafemann Print Shop. Ludwig Skröver and Otto Stubbe were friends. Many a time, the two of them, unbeknownst to Lena, cooked a rabbit over the fire in the Saspe woods. Later the strike fund was robbed. After receiving an expulsion order, Skröver, with family, bag, and baggage, took a ship to New York. No letter came, only a postcard. He is thought to have been active as an anarchist in Chicago.
Up and down. Time and again. Lud was never humbled. In time of need, Lud would turn up. When there was a tricky job to be done, Lud knew how. Without Lud nothing worked. Even when in his present time-phase he became a teacher at an art school and began where he had left off in the Middle Ages (as an iconoclast), Lud was a center. People met at Lud’s. Getting drunk with Lud. The legend of Saint Lud. For though he was sometimes harsh and sometimes brutal, he was always pious, especially when drunk. No one could stare at an empty glass like him, at the same time singing (with what was left of his archangelic voice) something Catholic and looking back through the bottom of his glass to where, as a Bohemian prelate and (soon after Adalbert’s death) bishop of Pomerania, he ordered the forced baptism of all Pomorshians. As a self-portrait in bronze suggests, he saw himself as a prince of the Church or an abbot or a martyr: unapproachable, withdrawn, legendary, and soon to be canonized.