by Günter Grass
What were the daughters’ names? One of the girls – I can’t quite remember which – was called Elke. Our discussions could get pretty heated. But during the syrup-making sessions we steered clear of politics.
SHORTLY AFTER MY nineteenth birthday, also the day on which the sentence condemning war criminals to be hanged was carried out in far-off Nuremberg, and which I celebrated with a few of my pals on the 950-metre floor just before the sugar-beet harvest began – I located the name and address of a distant relative who had found refuge in Lübeck with his wife and daughters. Did I write immediately or after some hesitation?
In towns and villages all over the occupation zones, the corridors of municipal buildings were hung with the names and dates of the missing and, often enough, the dead. The Red Cross and other organizations were responsible for their distribution and maintenance of the lists. Small photographs of children were displayed to one side. Refugees and people driven from their homes in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland, and my native city, Danzig, soldiers of every branch and rank, the evacuated and the bombed-out, millions of people were looking for one another. Mothers needed to find sons and daughters they had been separated from during their flight; infants without names needed to find parents. Often pictures of small children were captioned only with the name of the place where they had been found.
Seeking and finding. Women still hoping for the return of their fiancés or husbands. Girlfriends and boyfriends missing each other. Everyone was missing someone. I, too, scoured the lists, posted weekly, for signs of my parents and my three-years-younger sister.
Against all reason I still pictured them at home – Mother never budging from behind the counter, Father mixing dough in the kitchen, sister playing with her plaits in the living room – I couldn’t or wouldn’t imagine my family away from home: evicted, without the familiar furniture and oleographs, far from the tile stove that heated both living room and bedroom.
Was the radio still standing on the sideboard and who listened to which station? What had become of Mother’s glass-fronted bookcase that had actually been mine? Who was leafing through the albums full of meticulously pasted cigarette-card pictures?
Anyway, either immediately or after brief hesitation, I wrote to the distant relatives, who had once lived in Danzig-Schidlitz. But before I heard back from them, one of my barrack mates, who was from Upper Silesia, got married. The bride, a widow, came from the local village.
SHE STANDS BEFORE me in all her glory, a blonde always good for a laugh. First she is in curlers, then in a wedding dress made of parachute silk that had been acquired in exchange for hundredweight sacks of potash salt. Another coupler boy and I had to serve as witnesses because nobody in the village would do it. The bridegroom, who spoke the Polack German that was to be expected of a Kattowitz native, played a mean harmonica and performed a song with endless stanzas, of which I can recall only the lines ‘If there’s a flea/on Antek’s knee,/He wants to run,/And find a gun.’
The celebration in the war widow’s one room got rather boisterous. There were only the four of us: nobody from Gross Giesen, the surrounding villages, or Sarstedt – no relatives, no neighbours had come. Neither the sister nor even the parents of the bride had deigned to sit at the same table with what to their Lower Saxon understanding was a foreigner, hence a ne’er-do-well. And once a foreigner, always a foreigner.
We drank an inordinate amount, as if to quench the thirst of the missing guests. The groom, the witnesses, and – most of all – the bride were determined to whoop it up, have a grand old time. We washed down our pig’s neck with alcohol out of tumblers. I don’t remember who drank more, who less. There was plenty of potato schnapps and whatever else was available on the black market, even egg liqueur. We downed so much of the suspicious liquids that all four of us could have ended up blind: there had been reports of collective poisoning as a result of family celebrations, the cause being methyl alcohol in otherwise watered-down schnapps. But we just kept toasting the bride’s health and loudly cursing the absent guests.
At some point the four of us tumbled into the marriage bed of the one-time war widow. Not blind but blindly. What transpired then among so much flesh no onion skin wished or wishes to recall. The bride, perhaps, is the only one who knew, felt, or sensed what did or did not happen during the rest of the night and with whom definitely, with whom probably or definitely not, and with whom many times over.
On the wall at the head of the marriage bed hung an oil painting depicting either two beautiful swans, a couple, or a lone stag belling.
By the time we awoke the next morning, no, it was closer to noon, the blonde newlywed had laid the table for breakfast. The room smelled of fried eggs and crisp bacon. She was smiling her blonde smile, beaming it at her husband and the two coupler boys, all three of whom were staring past one another into space, hardly speaking, and when they did, it was about the next, the late shift.
SUCH WAS THE depressing and fuzzy end of a wedding night, at the surface in the lee of the pit tower and with a view from the bedroom window of the slag heap dominating the countryside, which resulted rather than happened. Below the surface, during the outages, miners went on with their disputes. Tired of hearing the same things over and over, I kept my distance. I seemed to have sweated out my one-time Young Nazi sympathies once and for all and wanted nothing more to do with that troublesome past dragging along behind me. But I found none of the miners’ hackneyed ideas alluring, even though in the place where the only valid idea had once bound everything with everything, a gaping hole opened up.
What could fill this void, invisible though it was?
The basis for the coupler boy’s self-rescue operation appears to have been an unremitting, if diffuse search for meaning during the periods of enforced silence when, removed from his argumentative comrades and lit only by his carbide lamp, he memorized the vocabulary and iron-clad rules of a dead language, thereby becoming a scholar in the end.
This absurd situation has remained so clear for so long that I can still hear myself conjugating verbs. There can be no doubt: the coupler boy trying diligently, doggedly to improve his miserable Latin 950 metres below the earth’s surface is none other than I. As in his schooldays, he still grimaces as he reels off his qui quae quod, cuius, cuius, cuius …
I mock him, I call him a figure of fun, but nothing deters him: he is out to fill the void if only with the slag of the language his pal in the Bad Aibling camp knew so well and called world-dominating for all eternity. Joseph had even claimed to dream according to its incontrovertible rules.
I was most kindly lent a grammar and a dictionary by a retired gymnasium teacher who resided in the bishopric of Hildesheim, mercilessly destroyed at the tail end of the war, and who in exchange for the non-smoker’s cigarettes tutored me in her attic room.
I had met her by chance, where I can’t remember. She wore thick glasses and would sit, cat in her lap, in an armchair upholstered in wine red. ‘A little Latin never hurts,’ she would say.
Whenever I had a day off, I would hop on a bus for Hildesheim. She never offered me more than a cup of peppermint tea after the sessions.
BUT THEN A series of postcards from relatives close and distant brought my reversion to scholarship to an end. The message was always the same: Your parents and sister survived the war and the expulsion from Danzig with no visible damage. They have recently managed to move from the Soviet to the British Occupation Zone. They had been living in Mecklenburg and crossed the border with only two suitcases. After a brief stay in Lüneburg, where your grandparents had found refuge, they have been sent to the Rhineland, near Cologne (the north had long been overcrowded) and housed on a large farm in the Bergheim-Erft district.
The far-flung relatives had other things to say as well. About the ravaged city they came from – ‘Our Danzig is no more’ – and all the terrible things they had suffered. Their response to the ‘reputed crimes’ they couldn’t have known about was: ‘But n
ot a word about the injustices the Poles visited upon us.’
They also wrote about the violence they had endured, about the missing, the dead. They reported that Grandpa complained all the time. He couldn’t accept losing his carpentry workshop: ‘the circular saw, the planing machine, all the door-and window-mountings he had stored in the basement’.
And they complained about the general poverty, which was steadily increasing: ‘Those expelled like us are the worst off. Nobody wants us. And we’re as German as anybody here …’
IT MUST HAVE been the Gross Giesen mayor’s office that gave me my parents’ Rhineland address. In any case, I took off by bus one day after the early shift without quitting my job. It would have been shortly before Christmas or rather early in the new year. Something had held me back until then. Was it the pit foreman’s affectionate daughter?
The roads were covered with snow and the snow kept falling. My luggage included a kilo of butter I had saved up and two big bromine bottles, lifted from the mine laboratory, of beet syrup, my share of the harvest. No, I don’t remember any tears from the pit foreman’s eldest daughter or words of farewell to the rapidly departing coupler boy from her father. Even so, another piece of pit property must have made its way into the duffel bag I was using as a suitcase, because when more than twenty years later I was travelling through the region to help set up voter initiatives in preparation for the elections to the Bundestag – the issue at hand was Brandt’s ‘New East-Bloc and Germany Policy’ – and told the Social Democrat candidate after a rally in Hildesheim about my underground past and the outage debates, thus revealing how far back Social Democratic uncertainty began to colour my political outlook, he must have found my résumé a bit too artfully constructed, a kind of complement to an episode in the novel Dog Years, and had a look at the rolls of the still highly profitable Burbach-Kali Limited, which stated that someone bearing my name had left the Siegfried I Mine ‘having absconded with a pair of the company’s clogs’.
Potash is no longer mined there and more rape is grown than sugar-beets, but the white slag heap still rises out of the flat fields and shows no signs of disappearing, a reminder of a time when sugar-beet theft and power outages were the order of the day, gruelling work meant special ration coupons, a clever girl corrected a fledgling poet’s spelling mistakes, freedom went on trial in verbal battles, and a stupid coupler boy received an education in the pit of the Siegfried I Mine.
FROM HANOVER I took the train to Cologne, from Cologne the bus again through a now familiar Lower Rhineland, accompanied all the way by frigid weather. No one who experienced it has forgotten that early winter: it began in late November and went on and on, bringing heavy snows and relentless frosts. Rivers froze, water pipes burst. Coal and coke distribution broke down. There were no warm public places. The freezing starved, the starving froze.
The winter of ’46–’47 was especially deadly for children and elderly people living alone. Coal supplies were looted, trees cut down, tree stumps uprooted. Tugs laden with coke stuck in the frozen canals had to be guarded day and night. Humour became ersatz fuel. That perhaps explains why the municipal theatres of Hanover and Cologne were performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the actors cavorting lithely and the audiences clapping wildly to keep warm.
The lack of heat and calories notwithstanding, life went on. I too, who had recently escaped from the warmth of 950 metres below ground, now froze in the unheated train, the cold, wet bus.
All the passengers froze, but I felt worse hit than any of them despite the preventative pit-heat and coupon-calories I had garnered as a coupler boy and the mittens the pit foreman’s eldest daughter had knitted for me as a going-away present.
Perhaps the physical cold was exacerbated in my case by the inner fear, lurking just behind the joyful anticipation of a family reunion, that the encounter with Father and Mother would be disappointing, and because the parents and the sister had grown distant, the cold would be even more piercing, and the son and brother would stand before them a stranger.
Meanwhile I held tightly to my duffel bag and its contents, the kilo of butter I had saved up, and the bottles of beet syrup.
I DID NOT announce the return of the prodigal son: I wanted it to be a surprise. But when I stepped off the bus, who was waiting at the Fliesstetten stop, as if wanting to surprise me, but Mother, Father, and Sister? They were on their way to Bergheim to get refugee papers stamped. A coincidence?
Later, Mother would say it was Fate. She firmly believed it. Everything that occurred, fortune and misfortune, my very survival – in fact I should have been dead – she put down to Fate: it all happened according to a higher will, providence. Besides, a gypsy woman had predicted the return of the son: ‘Mama’s pet’ would come laden with gifts, she had said, which could only have meant the butter and syrup.
The son was horrified. There they stood, in coats now too large for them. The mother looked careworn. The father had managed to save his felt hat all through the war. The sister, without her plaits, a child no longer.
They tell me I greeted her with a ‘Look at you, Daddau! You’ve become a young lady.’ And since whenever there is room for doubt she remembers things differently from her brother, ‘closer to the truth’, she says, she insists to this day that the fortune teller existed. ‘Honestly. She predicted …’
Not long ago on a visit to our estranged native city with a few grandchildren, the two of us were walking along the beach between Glettkau and Zoppot lost in brother-sister talk about this and that, including the new pope, when suddenly, while the children were inspecting the foam of the waves for amber, she said, ‘Even though we couldn’t give her anything to eat – we didn’t have anything – the gypsy woman read Mama’s palm just before you came and promised, “Your darling son will be home in three days.” ’
SOME TWO YEARS earlier – though it seemed a lifetime – in September of ’44, when Danzig still had all its towers and gables, Father had accompanied me to the Central Station. He had carried my cardboard suitcase in silence. His round party badge was pinned to his suit jacket. I, still sixteen, stood next to him on the platform in knee-length trousers and a jacket already too small, my induction letter was in the breast pocket. Mother had refused to see her son be packed off to Berlin and, as she believed, to his death. Now Fate had brought us back together.
We embraced, compulsively, over and over. Wordlessly, or with meaningless phrases. Too much, more than could be put into words, had happened in the course of a time that had no beginning and could have no end. Some things came up later, others were too horrible for words.
The repeated violence done to my mother had muted her. She was old now and ailing. Little of her liveliness and wicked tongue remained.
And was that shell of a man my father? He who set such great store by dignity and self-possession.
Only my sister seemed unharmed by what had happened. She seemed almost too mature, looking up at me, her ‘big brother’, with bright, inquisitive eyes.
IT WAS NOT until then that I began to see what had not been sufficiently clear during the last years of the war, in the hospital, in the POW camps, and in my desultory, ambulatory freedom, when my only concern had been myself and my dual hunger. Everything was different, everything altered by loss. No one was unscathed. Not only houses had been reduced to ruins. In hindsight the crimes coming to light with peace, the flip side of war, were making victims out of perpetrators.
The people standing before me had been expelled from their homeland as individuals, but among millions they were of mere statistical value. I embraced survivors who, as the saying went, had got off with a scare. They went on with their existence somehow, but …
We knew nothing about one another. ‘Our boy is back!’ my father cried out to the people getting off the bus or getting on the bus to Bergheim. But I was no longer the boy he had seen off at Danzig Central Station, when all the churches of a city built for all eternity tolled their bells in farewell.
The officials in charge of relocation had moved my parents and sister in with a farmer. This kind of thing was usual at the time, because volunteers willing to take in refugees and those expelled were few and far between. Especially where no damage was visible – where house and stable would continue to pass from father to son and not a hair on the head of either father or son had been touched – the farmers refused to accept the notion that defeat, instead of the much ballyhooed final victory, applied as much to them as to the wretched refugees.
Only because he had been forced into it by the authorities did the owner of the farm let my parents stay in the partitioned, cement-floored room, a former fodder kitchen for force-feeding pigs. Complaining got you nowhere. ‘Go back to where you came from!’ the man would reply, cocksure of himself and his land and as Catholic as the farmer I’d run away from the year before. People here had always been suspicious of, even hostile to, outsiders and what they now called interlopers; there was no reason to change now.
The general cold was made worse by the cement floor, which had no cellar underneath. The small supply of winter potatoes had suffered from frost damage. When thawed, they caved in if you poked a finger at them, and when cooked, peeled or not, they were watery and waxy and cloyingly sweet to the tongue. The pigsty stank, and the wall of the fodder kitchen was coated with ice.
We slept in one room. The sister with the mother in one bed, the son with the father in the other. We were even more crowded than in my childhood, when we’d also slept four to a room, in the Langfuhr two-room flat, but then we’d had the white tile stove. Here there was only a cast-iron stove in the anteroom. We would gather around it in the evening, pressing as close as we could, saying what could be said, then escaping into eloquent silence.
We fed the fire with briquette pieces that Father brought home from work in his rucksack. He had found a job in the porter’s lodge of the local open-cast brown coal-mining operation, where his neat, legible penmanship served him well. He kept track of who came and went during shift changes and signed visitors in and out. The briquettes were payment in kind. When my parents finally found a place to live, in Oberaussem, a village near his work, they were allotted an even larger quantity of ‘black gold’, both oblong pieces and briquettes.
