Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  Now I see a handsome lieutenant gesticulating out of an open turret as if trying to change the direction of the barrels with his bare hands; I see Silesian peasants refusing to let their possessions go; I see doll-like children on carts sliding off the road, I see women screaming but fail to hear their cries, I see grenades exploding, sometimes far off, sometimes nearby – silently they find their targets – so as not to see, I stare now at the remains of the soup in my mess tin; on the one hand, I am still a hungry man, on the other, a dumbfounded observer, a mere witness, a non-participant in the silent-film-like action; and now, with the stroke of a pen I become the young Grimmelshausen, stringing story after story, battle after battle, through the savage years of war, there’s a stranger whispering in my ear, I see myself watching everything that happens. I seem to be dreaming but I am and remain awake until the helmet, its strap now flapping, flies off my head now, this very minute, and my senses vanish.

  For no more than an instant, insofar as time could be measured. What happened to me and around me a minute later flashes on and off in sharp, then eerily fuzzy images: gone the all but empty mess tin, gone too the Kienzle wristwatch.

  Where is my lance corporal? Where is the sub-machine gun, the two magazines of ammunition? Why am I still standing – or standing again?

  The badly bleeding wound in my right thigh drenching my trousers. The pain in my chin caused by the helmet strap. A limp arm dangling from my left shoulder refuses to obey when I try, with the help of someone else, to lift – there he is! – my lance corporal.

  His legs ripped to bits. His torso apparently intact. His eyes open wide, amazed, unbelieving …

  Then a whirl of sand dust shifts my gaze to the field kitchen, still steaming, unscathed, where it remains until we – he carried, I supported – and another wounded man are loaded into a field ambulance. An orderly climbs in. Other victims left behind, curse, one of them insists on coming with us and clings to the vehicle. … At last the door is shut and bolted.

  We rumble along, presumably to the dressing station.

  THE SMELL OF Lysol. I must have felt safe in the ambulance. The war had taken a break. At any rate nothing much was going on, especially as we were so slow in finding the way. The lance corporal lay flat on his back. His formerly smooth, pink, shiny face – the result of frequent shaves – was tinged with green, and stubble was beginning to show. He seemed to have shrunk. His legs were bandaged, wrapped in gauze.

  He lay, conscious, on a plank bed, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, his head straight. He was trying to form words, and finally, in a soft version of his drawl, managed to ask for a cigarette. I extracted one out of the crumpled packet in his breast pocket, together with his lighter.

  I, the non-smoker, lit it for him, and stuck it between his lips. The lips suddenly stopped trembling. He took a few greedy puffs, shut his eyes, but immediately opened them in terror, as if he had only then understood his condition. Now I saw fear written on his face, and it startled me. Then, after an interval, during which I heard the groans of the wounded and the curses of the orderly – he was short on gauze – and wondered at my own oddly pain-free condition, my lance corporal asked me, no, ordered me to open his trousers and his underpants too and reach in and check between his legs.

  Having received confirmation that everything was present and accounted for, he let out a quiet groan, took a few more puffs, then dropped off, breathed calmly, looked tranquil.

  Twelve years later, while committing the defence of the Polish Post Office to paper, I had Jan Bronski perform the same trouser inspection, that is, confirm the unscathed virility of the reluctantly dying porter Kobyella with his five fingers.

  WE WERE SEPARATED at the dressing station: he was put in a tent, I left out in the open. When the time came for my thigh to be bandaged, I became a laughing stock for the following obvious reason: the gas-mask case, which was still attached to me, had been slit open by a finger-length grenade-splinter and the contents had gushed out and made a mess of strawberry or cherry jam on my trousers. From then on, my trouser seat stuck to me whenever I sat down. In time it attracted ants, which was nothing to laugh at.

  The injured gas-mask case stayed behind at the dressing station. As for the splinter of the Soviet grenade, which had spared me and therefore granted the future father of sons and daughters survivor status, I would have liked to show it in all its glory to my children and theirs. You see before you a clear-cut example of what I had to go through as an enlisted man in order to have a taste of anxiety, learn the meaning of fear. Look, children. See how long and jagged the splinter is?

  Not until after the thigh was bandaged did they bandage my left shoulder, which was hardly bleeding, though it was likely that a foreign object made of metal, however small, had lodged itself there. The hole it had made in my new uniform jacket was all but invisible. The dangling arm was now supported by a sling. Since the dressing station happened to be in the immediate vicinity of a marshalling yard, I retain no images of intermediary stations. As evident as the war was all around, it was suddenly over for me.

  We were loaded onto the train that evening. It must have been the night of the twentieth to the twenty-first of April, because the army doctor, the orderlies, and my fellow walking wounded were making the same complaints I’d heard being bandied about the field kitchen that afternoon: Where were the extras they’d passed around every year on the Führer’s birthday? No cigarettes, no sardines, no bottle of Doppelkorn per four men, no nothing. All of the soldiers – even me, a non-smoker – found this situation more upsetting and of greater import than the fall of the German Reich so obviously taking place all around us. The moanings and groanings were peppered with curses the likes of which I’d never heard.

  WHERE THE FREIGHT train in which I lay with all the wounded was headed I had no idea. It made frequent endlessly long and occasional short stops and was shunted several times to different tracks. Soon it was dark out. The only light we had came from a primitive acetylene lamp.

  We lay on rotten, piss-smelling straw. The man to the left of me, a member of the mountain troops with a bandage round his head, was reading a religious book by the glimmer of a pocket torch. He was moving his lips. The man to my right had been shot in the stomach and writhed and screamed until he writhed and screamed no more.

  There was no water to be had, no orderly to tend to the pleas of the wounded. Voices and sobs, whether the train was moving or not. Sudden silences after the last groan.

  My neighbour to the left prayed sotto voce. A man driven mad by pain tore his bandage off, leapt up, fell, leapt back up only to fall again and stay down. The man to the right of me had stopped moving altogether.

  The night seemed never ending; it lasted in my dreams through the early post-war years. No, I had no pain as yet, but I slept fitfully, starting each time I awoke, till in the end I fell into a deep sleep, for how long I can’t say.

  When the freight train came to its final stop, the goods, both the quick and the dead (my neighbour with the stomach wound), were unloaded, and an army doctor checked off our names on the list, separating the seriously wounded from the rest. A glance was enough. It took no time at all.

  THE ANCIENT AND miraculously undamaged cathedral town of Meissen lay bathed in the spring morning light. True to the folk song, the birds were all there. Those of the wounded who could, myself included, reached greedily for the glasses of juice passed out by representatives of the League of German Girls, who were clearly used to trains with this sort of content.

  The seriously wounded were hauled away in trucks; the rest of us, propping each other up, hobbled along the path leading up to the fortress, which had been turned into a military hospital. Locals, mostly women, lined the path, and many helped the disabled. I see myself being helped uphill by a young woman.

  Last year, my eldest son, Franz, a forty-something so enterprising that his goals keep changing, and my youngest daughter, Nele, who was in Dresden learning the skills it take
s to be a midwife while trying to keep her affairs of the heart under wraps, undertook a family pilgrimage to the newly restored Meissen. They sent me a shiny picture-postcard view of the town with a message that could be read as a sign of filial affection: they had lit candles in the cathedral to commemorate my chance survival.

  I was anything but well cared for up there in the fortress. The hospital was full to bursting, its corridors lined with emergency pallets. Exhausted doctors, harried nurses. Everything was in short supply, especially medicine. All they could do for me was put fresh bandages on my right thigh and my left shoulder, in which – it was now official, confirmed by a signed and stamped document – a small grenade-splinter had been lodged. They did not deem me worthy of an operation, nor did they waste a tetanus shot on me.

  We were given marching rations, enough to fill the haversack I’d managed to hang on to. The only thing gone was my watch. But I now wore a field cap, one that fitted. I wouldn’t have minded a change of trousers; their sticky bottom was an embarrassment.

  Finally, along with a document promising the shot and another pair of trousers, I was handed new marching orders, my last, destination Marienbad. Then a military hospital centre, once a spa for the rich and famous, much celebrated in literature – as an old man, Goethe had fallen in love with a young thing there, was given the brush-off, and sublimated his grief in a ‘Marienbad Elegy’ – it lay on the far side of the Ore Mountains, deep in the Sudetenland.

  While I waited for the orders – they were the only way I could prove my identity – the lance corporal was pushed out of the operating room in a wheelchair. His nose more pointed. It was the first time I had seen my guardian angel unshaven. A legless torso wrapped in gauze rolled past deep in sleep, leaving behind the question of whether his coming out of that sleep was to be desired or feared.

  He was rolled down a corridor whose walls were studded with armaments dating from the Middle Ages: halberds, crossbows, battleaxes, arrows, cudgels, and swords bound together, and muskets that may well have dated from Grimmelshausen’s war-torn times – an arsenal of the artefacts man has discovered for dealing with his fellow man at various points in history.

  I watched my lance corporal go. This picture of him being silently wheeled away, which I can call up at will, balks at the question of whether he is still alive and, if so, where he is living. As for his name, he never told me, and it must remain unspoken.

  Well-trained soldier that I was, I addressed him only as lance corporal: Herr Obergefreiter, whether we were in the pitch-black pine wood or the cellar filled with preserves. He was my superior, and whenever I strayed from the straight and narrow he called me to order using the familiar du, but addressing me as gunner. His intonation brooked no familiarities.

  That is why I hesitate to trust my memory, which has him called Hans after the hero of the children’s song I sang to him in the dark wood until he sang back, which even has him referring to himself as Hänschen and saying in the ambulance, anxious to learn the condition of certain irreplaceable body parts and his present status as a man, ‘Check in Hänschen’s trousers.’ No, nothing was missing. But my guardian angel had no soulmate of his own. Without him I would have been nabbed. Whenever danger was in the air, he would say, ‘Watch out you don’t get nabbed, gunner.’

  During the early post-war years and even later, as long as amputees in wheelchairs were part and parcel of our street scene or given jobs sitting at desks stamping papers, I couldn’t help asking myself, Is that him? Could that puny invalid of a bureaucrat drawling out questions without looking up and issuing you the pass you need to get to Berlin-Charlottenburg, could that be my Hänschen with the Berlin accent?

  I have no idea how I made it over the Ore Mountains. Some stretches by train and – since trains were then a rarity – by horse and cart through villages whose names now escape me.

  Once I was sitting in an open wood-and-gas-powered truck that was puffing its way uphill when suddenly an American fighter-bomber swooped down and the truck went up in flames seconds after I jumped off and rolled into a ditch at the side of the road: I had seen the plane coming. Had the scene been shot for an action movie called As Everything Fell to Pieces, they would have had to use a stuntman for my part.

  Then – a total blank. Nothing to attach to the plot. Somehow I managed to make progress. And never did I deviate from my marching orders. Detours were out of the question.

  I spent one night in the mountains with a couple who kept rabbits behind the house. Man and wife were both teachers. I had begun to run a temperature, and they offered to look after me, give me civilian clothes, and hide me in the cellar until, as they said, ‘it’s all finally over’. Their son, whose picture, ringed in black, I saw in a bookcase, had fallen at the Battle of Sevastopol. He was about twenty years young. His clothing would have fitted me. I could reach out and take down his books. Like me – I could see from the picture – he parted his hair on the left.

  I didn’t stay. I wanted to go where my travel papers ordered me to go, to cross the mountains in my own trousers, which after a thorough washing had ceased to attract ants. The couple stood in front of their shingle-roofed cottage and watched me disappear.

  And I made it, heaven knows how, all the way to Karlsbad, that other spa with literary and – given its connection with Metternich – political connotations, and where I fell to my knees in the street and couldn’t get up.

  I had a fever. It may have been caused by the grenade splinters in my shoulder or the lack of a tetanus shot. My left arm was now stiff down to my fingertips, but I don’t recall being in pain.

  It was a good thing I had a properly stamped document, because, as I later heard, one of the infamous bloodhounds was known to go up to soldiers lying in the street and immediately check their marching orders, the only piece of paper they had. The military policeman who picked me up followed my marching orders to the letter even though both spas were designated hospital centres. He apparently draped me over the back seat of his motorcycle – I was unconscious – buckled me down, and drove me to neighbouring Marienbad, where for the panzer gunner the war had indeed ended, and the fear drained out of him; it did, however, return to haunt my sleep, where it had taken up long-term residence.

  GUESTS AT TABLE

  BY THE TIME the military policeman had dropped me off in Marienbad and I had been placed, still feverish, in a freshly made bed, the Führer was no more. Word had it he had fallen in the last battle for the Reich, for Berlin. His departure was taken as only to be expected. Nor did I miss him particularly, since his often cited and never doubted grandeur was as naught under the hands of the ever busier nurses, whose fingers did not stray beyond my left arm yet made themselves felt in every bone of my body.

  Nor did I later – my wound cured and one of thousands in the far-flung network of prisoner-of-war camps, first in the Upper Palatinate, then under Bavarian skies – suffer withdrawal symptoms. He was gone as if he had never been, had never quite existed and was now to be forgotten, as if you could live perfectly well without the Führer.

  By the same token, his ‘heroic death’ was lost in the mass of individual deaths and was soon no more than a footnote. Now you could even make jokes about him, about him and his mistress, who had been all but invisible till then but was now good for a rumour or two. Much more tangible than his figure, wherever he may have been, was the lilac blossoming in the hospital garden in early May.

  Everything that happened in the military hospital or shortly thereafter in the POW camps seemed to have escaped the tick-tock of time. We breathed inside an air bubble, and everything that had till so recently been accepted as fact now existed only approximately. There was only one certainty: I was hungry.

  WHENEVER MY CHILDREN and grandchildren ask me for details about the end of the war – ‘What was it like then?’ – I respond with the utmost self-confidence: ‘From the moment I was behind barbed wire, I was hungry.’

  But what I really should say is that hunger o
ccupied me like an empty house, holding its place whether I was in barracks or out under an open sky.

  It gnawed. We talk about gnawing hunger. And the youth I am trying to imagine as an early damaged edition of myself was one of the thousands who were plagued by the rodent Hunger. As part of a portion of the now disarmed but long since bedraggled, out of step German Army, I was a pitiful sight, and not even if it had been possible would I have sent my mother a picture of her boy.

  The initials stencilled onto the backs of our jackets in an indelible white paint had turned us into POWs. For the time being, our only activity from dawn to dusk and into our dreams, was ‘sniffing the steam from the cabbage pot’.

  Of course, much as my hunger gnawed away at me, it was nothing compared to what I later learned had been the prescribed variety in the concentration camps or our camps for Russian prisoners of war, which caused hundreds of thousands to starve, starve to death. But the only hunger I can put into words is my own; it is the only hunger inscribed in me, so to speak. I am the only one I can ask, How did it feel? How long did it make itself felt?

  Once it appeared, it took over, making a noise that has stuck in my ear ever since and to which the expression ‘stomach rumblings’ does not begin to do justice.

  MEMORY LIKES TO refer to blind spots. What has stuck turns up uncalled for, under various guises; it enjoys disguise. Often it gives only vague information. Moreover, its mesh is sometimes large, sometimes small. Scraps of feeling and thought literally fall through it.

  But what was I after besides something to chew on? What moved the youth bearing my name once his faith in the final victory was gone? Only the lack of food?

  And how can the gnawings of resident hunger be remembered? Can an empty stomach be filled after the fact?