Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  After closing the shop, my mother not only played languorous pieces on the piano, she also subscribed to a book club, though which one I cannot recall. She must have let her membership lapse, because shortly after the war began the books stopped coming.

  Still, the case contained Dostoevsky’s Possessed, Wilhelm Raabe’s Sparrow Street Chronicle, Schiller’s Collected Poems, and Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berling. Something by Sudermann stood side by side with Hamsun’s Hunger, Keller’s Green Henry next to his Holiday from Myself. Fallada’s Little Man, What Now was between Raabe’s Hunger Pastor and Storm’s The White Horseman. Dahn’s Battle for Rome was most likely the support for the illustrated volume with the title Rasputin and Women, which I later gave to a certain character to read as an antidote to Goethe’s Elective Affinities, though he was book-mad for a completely different reason, using the explosive mixture to teach himself his ABCs, in upper and lower case.

  All these and more were grist to my mill. Did Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Picture of Dorian Gray have a place in the treasure trove behind the blue curtains? What did it include of Dickens, of Mark Twain?

  I am certain that neither my mother – who had less and less time to read as her business gave her more and more trouble – nor her son realized that one of the books in her bookcase was on the blacklist: Vicki Baum’s Helene Willfüer, Chemistry Student. Baum’s novel, which had unleashed a scandal even before the Nazis took power in 1933, is about a young woman who is as diligent as she is without means, about love and longing for death in the idyllic atmosphere of a university town, and, because the heroine becomes pregnant, about quacks and abortionists – the latter subject illicit by definition. I assume my mother never actually read the account of the brave chemistry student’s sufferings, because when she saw her fourteen-year-old son sitting at the living-room table totally absorbed in the heroine’s misfortunes – and in the joy Helene later finds in motherhood – she made no objection whatever.

  Over the years I’ve gone back to Vicki Baum. I read People in a Hotel, the novel the famous Garbo film, Grand Hotel, was based on. And in the early eighties when I was working on a travelogue that appeared under the title Headbirths, or The Germans Are Dying Out, and predicted the self-serving lives of the childless and the continuation of their me-generation ego-cult to the present day – as well as the greying of the German population, the long-term crisis in the pension system, the dreariness of forced togetherness – Baum’s exotic story ‘Love and Death on Bali’ helped me to fill in the melodramatic background. But never again have I given myself up to her books, considered to be mere entertainments, with such abandon as I did in my youth.

  AS SOON AS it was time to set the table for supper, Father would say, ‘Books won’t fill your stomach.’

  Mother, however, liked to see me with my nose in a book. Beloved by customers and sales representatives alike, she was, though inclined to bouts of dreamy melancholy, of a basically cheerful and at times even bantering nature; nor was she averse to harmless practical jokes, which she called ‘pranks’, and she enjoyed demonstrating to her visitors – a friend she had apprenticed with at Kaisers Kaffee, for instance – how lost her son became in the printed page by replacing the slice of bread and jam I bit into now and again as I read with a slab of Palmolive soap.

  Her arms crossed, her face smiling, sure of success, she would wait for the result of the exchange. She was especially jubilant when her son bit into the soap and noticed only after another three quarters of a page what he had demonstrated to the amused visitor. Since then, my palate instantly recognizes the taste of Palmolive.

  The boy with the protuberant lip must have bitten into Palmolive quite often, because in my memory, which tends to get caught up in variations, the food the soap replaced is now a sausage or cheese sandwich, now a slice of raisin cake. As for the lower lip, its brashness came in handy whenever I needed to blow my hair from my eyes. And I needed to all the time when I was reading. Every once in a while Mother would remove a hair-clip from her carefully permed hair and pin back the offending shock of soft hair. I put up with it.

  Her one and only. Despite the worry I caused her – by having to repeat the third year at the gymnasium, by being expelled from two schools for obstreperous behaviour – she maintained an unwavering pride in her son, forever reading, forever sketching, but easily lured back from his dream-world to become, as they both desired, her darling little boy.

  The litany of my boasts, which would open with ‘When I’m rich and famous, you’ll …’, never failed to beguile her. Nothing seemed to please her more than to be showered with extravagant promises: ‘And then we’ll travel to Rome together and to Naples …’ She, who dearly loved beauty and all things melancholy, who would don her Sunday best and go off to the Municipal Theatre on her own or with my father as an appendage, had a name for me whenever I took it into my head to promise her the moon: she would call me her little Peer Gynt. This blind devotion granted her braggart of a mama’s boy presumably had its roots in the passing of her youth.

  MY FATHER’S FAMILY could not have lived closer – just round the corner on Elsenstrasse, where the circular saw in Grandfather’s workshop set the tone from morning till night – and I had great trouble keeping out of their constant feuding, which let up for only brief periods of reconciliation. They were always at it – ‘Not another word to them’ and ‘They’ll never darken our door again, they won’t’. My maternal grandparents and my mother’s three brothers and only sister, on the other hand, were known to me only through stories and a few mementoes. Apart from the sister, who was named Elisabeth but called Betty, and who had married ‘into the Reich’, my mother was on her own.

  True, there was the Kashubian side of her family, but they lived in the country; besides, they weren’t really German and didn’t count any more, now that there were reasons to keep them under wraps. Mother’s parents, who had adapted to middle-class city ways, had died young. Her father fell in battle at Tannenberg early in World War I. Then, after two older sons were killed in France and the youngest, likewise a soldier, was carried off by influenza, her mother died as well: she had lost the will to live.

  Arthur had made it to twenty-three, Paul to twenty-one; the influenza took Alfons at the very end of the war, when he was nineteen. My mother, née Helene Knoff, spoke of her brothers as if they were still alive.

  One dateless day – was I fourteen by then or still twelve? – in the attic of the Labesweg apartment building, where we occupied one of nineteen units, I was on the way to my favourite reading place, the threadbare armchair under the hinged skylight, when in one of the storage areas allotted to each of the units and partitioned off by slats I found a suitcase bound by string. I – or the boy in whom stories started accumulating at an early age – had made a momentous discovery. Under piles of junk, between abandoned pieces of furniture, this suitcase had been waiting for me. At least that was how I interpreted the find.

  Was it under a tattered mattress?

  Was a pigeon that had flown through the skylight dancing on the leather, cooing?

  Had my presence scared it into leaving a dropping?

  Did I rush to undo the knots?

  Did I grab for my pocket knife?

  Did I hold back out of fear?

  Or did I drag the suitcase down the stairs like a good boy and hand it over to Mother?

  There are other, mutually interchangeable possibilities: according to air-raid regulations promulgated in mid-1942, all attics had to be cleared; the suitcase had turned up during the process and was opened by her, me, or a third party.

  In any case, it contained the few possessions of both brothers who died in the First World War and the brother taken by the epidemic that impartially dispatched friend and foe.

  Everything my mother had so often told me, the ineradicable pain of this loss, which she would evoke with tears, was confirmed by the contents of that suitcase: three young men prevented from living the lives for which their inclina
tions and talents had prepared them.

  Each of the three piles she had bound with a silk ribbon had its own distinct tale to tell. The middle brother, Paul, had wanted to be a painter and had tried his hand at theatrical scenery. I found colour drawings of stage settings and costumes for the operas Der Freischütz and Der fliegende Holländer, or maybe it was Lohengrin, because what I now see in my mind’s eye are sketches for a stageworthy swan that want me to think of them as belonging to the coloured-pencil stack left behind by Uncle Paul, who died near the Somme. There were no medals among the sheets of paper.

  The youngest brother, Alfons, who died of the Spanish influenza, had been trained as a professional cook and dreamed of rising to the rank of chef in a grand hotel in some European capital – Brussels, Vienna, or Berlin – in recognition of the exquisite menus he had concocted. He poured it all out in letters written on the Baltic Sea island of Sylt, where he had his first and last job, as a cook at a resort, just before he was conscripted and sent to basic training.

  The letters he wrote to his sister Helene were long and packed with breezy boasts. After hinting at adventures with the noblewomen taking the cure at the resort, he would detail the dishes he had learned to make: cod stewed in mustard sauce, fillet of loach on a bed of fennel, eel soup spiced with dill, and other fish dishes that I later attempted myself, with Uncle Alfons in mind.

  The eldest brother, Arthur, whom Mother spoke of as her favourite, saw himself – until a shot in the belly finished him off – as a poet crowned in glory. During his apprenticeship in a branch of the Imperial Bank near the High Gate, a building that survived the last war and currently supplies a Polish bank with all the pomp of the Bismarck-era boom, a local Danzig paper occasionally published verses of multiple stanzas under his name, a dozen or so spring and autumn poems, an All Saints’ Day poem here, a Christmas poem there, and these clippings I found collected in the suitcase – in my momentous discovery, as Mother was later to call it.

  Her son too was tempted to see it as momentous and, in the mid-sixties, when, having suffered enough under the burden of lengthy novel manuscripts, he found himself producing short stories, he decided to sign them with the name of his mother’s favourite brother and published them in a series of pamphlets put out by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, a pleasure I indulged in partly to shield them from the malice of capricious critics, partly to illuminate the brief life of Arthur Knoff with a bit of posthumous glory.

  Knoff’s debut – apart from poetic juvenilia, which owed much of its colouring to Eichendorff – was quite well received. Despite his recognizable similarity to a well-known author of the day, critics believed he was gifted and had a future. An Italian publisher felt it was too early to think of translating the stories, but she hoped they could expect something more monumental from him soon, something along the lines of a family chronicle. It was clear, people said, his talent was more conducive to the novel.

  The stories of Arthur Knoff were in print for more than two decades, holding their own under the pseudonym until Klaus Roehler, who when sober was a rather fussy editor with Luchterhand-Verlag, unmasked my literary uncle one day when he was plastered.

  THE ATTIC WITH its slatted storage areas full of odds and ends and spider webs, where later Oskar Matzerath, like me, would find refuge, that is, until the neighbourhood children followed him up there and tortured him. Oskar could practise his powerful song there; I had my suitcase.

  I can still see the sun dappling its smooth leather surface. No, no cooing pigeon gave me advice. I was the only one privileged to open it, up there in my secret reading place. Impatient. With my three-blade penknife. I was hit by a smell, as if a tomb had been opened. A cloud of dust danced in the light. I took what I found as a sign: it sent me on a lifelong journey. Only now is the traveller beginning to tire: looking back is all that keeps him awake.

  I was drawn again and again to my hiding place. The hinged skylight gave me an unobstructed view of the back courtyards, the chestnut trees, the tarred roof of the sweet factory, the postage-stamp gardens, the half-covered sheds, the carpet-beating frames, the rabbit warrens, all the way to the houses on Luisenstrasse, Herthastrasse, and Marienstrasse, which bordered the spacious square. But I saw farther than that. From the place of my meeting with the painter, the poet, and the chef – Paul, usually gloomy, Arthur, often dreamy, Alfons, always blithe – I followed a flight pattern into the somewhere, just as now on my flight back, I am trying to land in a place where no relics, no worn-out armchair, nothing I can touch or lay my hands on awaits me.

  Oh, if only there were a suitcase, or at least a cardboard box, full of my earliest scribblings. But not a fragment from my first poems, not a page from the Kashubian novel remains; not one of the muddled fantasies or fastidiously detailed moss-covered bricks I drew or painted has survived. Neither the rhymed verse in Sütterlin script nor the black-and-white hatched drawings found a place in the luggage my parents packed for our escape. Nor is there an exercise book of school compositions that earned ‘good’ or ‘very good’ despite my execrable spelling. There is no record whatsoever of my beginnings.

  Or should I tell myself, ‘How good not a scrap has remained!’?

  For how embarrassing it would be if the pre-adolescent’s gushings included a poem, dated April 20, influenced by the panegyric style of such Hitler Youth bards as Menzel, Baumann, or von Schirach and celebrating the Führer in hymn-like terms reflecting the young poet’s unbending faith. Rhymes like Ehre gebäre (‘may honour give birth to’), Blut und Glut (‘blood and ardour’), Fanfaren und Gefahren (‘fanfares and dangers’) would have been awful to face later on. Or if some racist claptrap had found its way into a passage in my first novel at the expense of the poor Kashubians: A long-faced knight beheads round-faced Slavs by the dozen. And suchlike products of the delusions that come of brainwashing.

  At best, I can be certain that should a stack of drawings be found, if not in the attic then in the basement, not one of them would depict a highly decorated war hero like Lieutenant-Commander Prien or Galland the fighter pilot, though I thought of them both as idols.

  What if? The speculations induced by the contents of lost suitcases are as futile as they are inevitable.

  What treacherous whispers might go on in a detergent box that the mother used to pack her son’s belongings when the family was forced to flee and that she overlooked in the rush to depart?

  What else would it take to expose a man needy of a fig leaf?

  Having grown up in a family that was expelled from house and home, in contrast to writers of my generation who grew up in one place – on Lake Constance, in Nuremberg, in the North German lowlands – and are therefore in full possession of their school records and juvenilia, and having ipso facto no concrete evidence of my early years, I can call only the most questionable of witnesses to the stand: Lady Memory, a capricious creature prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder.

  SO WHAT WE need here are other means, helpful in other ways. Objects round or angular waiting on the shelf above the stand-up desk. Found objects, which, when invoked with sufficient intensity, will begin to reveal their mysteries.

  No, not coins or clay shards. They are honey-coloured and translucent, their hues are autumn’s red and gold. Fragments the size of cherries, and this one, large as a duck’s egg.

  The gold from my Baltic pond: amber. Found on Baltic beaches or bought a year ago now in a Lithuanian town once called Memel from a dealer hawking his wares on the street. The standard tourist fare, polished and buffed – amber chains and bracelets, amber paperweights and boxes – but some of it uncut or only partially smoothed pieces.

  Ute and I had gone there with Jürgen and Maria Manthey by ferry from the Kurische Nehrung. Actually we only intended to visit the monument to Anke von Tharau and pay tribute to the poet Simon Dach. A windy day with fast-moving clouds. I made my selection, hesitated, then took the plunge.

  Objects were preserved in all the pieces I
found or bought: in the petrified bead there are pine needles, in that found object mossy lichen, in this one a mosquito, its tiny legs countable, its wings poised for flight. Holding the duck’s-egg piece up to the light, I see a fossilized, ice floe-like mass wedged in tight and surrounded by minute insects. A matter of encapsulation. Is this a worm? Is that a centipede halted in mid step? Only under prolonged scrutiny does amber yield the secrets it once presumed secure.

  Whenever my primary means, the imaginary onion, has nothing to say to me or delivers its message in all but indecipherable codes, I reach for the shelf above the stand-up desk in my Behlendorf studio and rummage among the bought and found fragments there.

  This honey-coloured piece is transparent all the way to its crusty rim, where it turns milky. If I hold it up to the light long enough and switch off the tick-tock in my head and refuse to allow current events – or anything current – to sidetrack me, that is, if I am completely and utterly focused, what I see instead of the object, which until then claimed to be a tick, is the full-length outline of my own person, fourteen and naked. My penis, which at rest was still boyish, like Cupid’s, as painted by a brilliant yet potentially homicidal artist on one of my cigarette cards, claimed grown-up status the moment it stiffened, wilfully or after a brief fumble, and freed its glans.

  Cupid’s willie, as created by Caravaggio, has a sweet, innocuous look to it – a nice little nib – though the winged rascal is smirking as he climbs out of a bed where he has initiated or promoted the proceedings, but my willie, harmless as it was when asleep, once awake, would rise to the occasion of sin with grim determination: relentlessly manly, it tried to penetrate whatever bore penetration, be it only the knotholes in the Brösen Baths changing cabins.

  The amber will reveal even more if you persist in questioning it. The member attached to me – or as willie, to my self-portrait, embedded in resin – lacks reason and intends to remain without reason to the bitter end. It may be appeased daily and for brief intervals by the traditional biblical method, yet the hand alone is insufficient. Its head, also yclept glans, will have its way and swift deliverance. Its proven idiocy notwithstanding, it grows inventive when in need. It claims athletic prowess, nor is it free of ambition. Recidivist that it is, it shrinks from no penalty.