Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  So I must confess I find it difficult to sound out my past for demonstrable facts. No sooner do I get down to business than someone seems to butt in. As a publicly acknowledged protagonist he insists on his birthright and at the same time badgers me for the biblical pottage of lentil whenever an exchange is possible.

  Oskar must always be first, Oskar knows all and tells all, Oskar laughs at my porous memory. For him, as is plain for all to read, the onion performs a different function, has a different meaning.

  TO RELIEVE THE tension and shake off my immaturity for which I have only myself to blame, I shall now turn without delay to my first important travels. Long summer holidays lasting from July to September made them possible.

  Starting in ’51 any citizen of West Germany could apply for a passport. Visa requests were approved with relative speed. In anticipation, I had earned enough to travel on by working not only as a stonecutter in construction but also as a float designer for the Cologne carnival. One float showed Adenauer and Ulbricht (in plaster over wire-netting and burlap) swaying arm-in-arm, the picture of pan-German harmony. I can still hear the carnival hit of those years, ‘Who Will Pay the Piper? Who’s Got Money Now?’

  But my main source of pecuniary gain came from work on shell-lime and travertine façades: stone window ledges were still in need of repairing. The hourly wage was one mark seventy.

  By mid-July I was ready. I promised my parents if not letters, then regular postcards. My rucksack was light: a shirt, spare socks, a box of watercolours, a case of brushes and pencils, a sketching pad, and a few books. I picked up a cheap sleeping bag in a shop selling off US Army supplies. I also bought a pair of marching boots, now billed as hiking boots.

  True to the most basic of German instincts and thus following in the footsteps of the Teutons, Hohenstaufen emperors, and Deutschrömer art worshippers, I was drawn to Italy, my ultimate destination being Palermo, where I had felt so at home in my childhood dreams as a squire or falconer for Frederick II and a member of Konradin’s retinue when the Staufers went under. Another reason to cross the Alps was a wound that refused to be healed by hasty excretions of verse or increased tobacco consumption: my first great love – apart from schoolboy infatuations – had come to nothing.

  SHE, ANNEROSE, HAD set out like me to be a sculptor. Her eyes were grey – or were they blue? – and she struck me as beautiful, and I knew why: it was the way she swung her skirts and the fact that she came from Stuttgart, where she had studied with the sculptor Baum. It happened in March or early April, in any case at a time when spring was not quite in the air, but inviting changes.

  Just before our love bloomed I had finally – and without fanfare – moved out of Caritas House. In a Jülicher Strasse apartment building I had found an empty bathroom with a tub unconnected to the water main and furnished with a dresser and a camp bed.

  Since my sister, who was still an apprentice at Saint Mary’s Hospital, had managed to negotiate free meals for me there, I not only found myself charitably looked after by Franciscan nuns but also with an opportunity to take one or another nurse out dancing and then for a short visit to the Jülicher Strasse subtenant’s camp bed. The former bathroom also contained a carpet made of coconut fibre, but I refuse to describe it in detail because Oskar will interrupt, move in on me, take over.

  My assignations with nurses in the Jülicher Strasse bathroom did not last long. They came to an abrupt end when Annerose entered my field of vision, banishing every other female figure from the throng. She was the only one I could or would see. And as so often happens when one zeroes in on a single subject, everything boiled down to possession: I immediately set about building us a roomy nest, the bathroom with no water having proven too cramped and fraught with past exploits.

  And so, with the painter and musician Horst Geldmacher, and assisted by a former Langfuhr neighbour, the master bricklayer Werner Kappner, I undertook to remodel the upper storey of a stable in Düsseldorf-Stockum, turning it into a studio with a side room. The goal was to bestow a durable roof upon our homeless love, and upon myself four walls of my own after so many years in rooms packed with bunk beds. The enthusiasm I brought to building was thus sparked equally by love and self-interest, which in later years always sought outlets: the studio in the ruins of Berlin-Schmargendorf; another, larger one in the Friedenau part of town; yet another in the marshy village of Wewelsfleth; a small one on the Danish island of Møn, in the Baltic Sea; an old Portuguese structure; and finally my Behlendorf stable, thereby assuring me, and only me, the space for new headbirths.

  A good part of the material I used – cement, stone, the metal frame for the skylight, and the door leading to an outside iron stairway – came from unguarded building sites or had been rustled up at low cost by our former neighbour, a policeman’s son who had become a construction foreman.

  We bought the stairway, also at low cost, from a demolition contractor. Geldmacher came up with an iron stove and several metres of stove-pipe to transport the exhaust fumes through the wall and out into the world. From my father, whose job with the brown-coal company was still remunerated partly in kind, I got a delivery of briquettes, which people began collecting in spring for the following winter.

  The stable, for which we paid very little, was located behind an apartment building with a ground-floor toilet we were allowed to use. There was a stunted tree, I can’t recall what type, growing in the courtyard.

  Geldmacher, with his recorders, bagpipes, and doctor’s bag full of painting material, occupied the anteroom; Annerose and I had the studio with the skylight, which meant that on clear nights we could count the stars overhead. Our mattress was embedded in a wooden frame designed for stretching canvases. Day or night, when we became one multi-limbed flesh, we were accompanied from next door by Geldmacher’s recorders alternating blues with children’s ditties.

  OUR SHORT-LIVED HAPPINESS lasted until early summer. Annerose and I could have kept each other warm through the cold season and our coupling instinct would scarcely have abated had my first love not been brought to an abrupt end.

  My beloved’s mother, a menace from afar and from the beginning, had ordered her in the end obedient daughter in a flood of letters and telegrams to return to Stuttgart immediately: no ifs or buts! The letters included clippings of the terrible things she had read in the local tabloids. One was a long article about the violent murder of a young girl by a stonecutter with his hammer and stippling iron, pictures of which accompanied the story. I was compared in the vigorous calligraphy of a raging mother to the homicidal stonemason. The article moreover described the murderer as from the east and left-handed.

  Annerose hesitated for one long night and half a day, but her mother won out. A heartbreaking farewell. I felt terribly lonely in the nearly finished studio with skylight. The bed now too wide. I missed her Swabian intonation. Her short, strong fingers. Deprived of her tenderness, I was left the poor, whining whelp whose yelps I am now trying to put into words, but all attempts at deciphering the thoughts of that abandoned soul are in vain.

  Until then he had been the one who had done the abandoning, leaving women and girls, of whom he tired quickly, with no farewell.

  My friend Geldmacher, who spent night after night luring German-accented jazz out of his recorders and flutes, was unable, for all his virtuoso blues variations on the folk song ‘At the Fountain by the Gate’, to console me.

  Work on the house helped a bit. In exchange for a collection full of rare Free State stamps that my mother had saved from the chaos of expulsion, the janitor at the Academy of Art expropriated a complete outfit of studio equipment – modelling stand, two rotating platforms, several metal compasses, and an easel – from the basement reserves for me. The easel, with Nude Room II inscribed on it, still has its place in my Behlendorf studio, though I can’t for the life of me say how it got there.

  Not even this exchange – nothing – could have made up for the loss of my beloved. Except perhaps a journey. I quickly applied
for a visa. And while I waited I did some more façade work, so that by the time I left I carried a good 300 marks in a leather pouch against my skin. The departure seemed like flight.

  I MADE RAPID progress hitch-hiking southwards until a wild impulse led me to break the journey at a Stuttgart rest stop. I hitched a ride into the city. Hasenbergsteige was the address. I made my way up the hill, looking for the villa hidden behind pine trees, in which the love of my life had taken shelter from a murderous stonecutter and where she was now held captive by her wicked mother, whose insinuations had frightened her into believing the story.

  Did I want to play the Knight in Shining Armour? Was I motivated by vengeance? Or by a shred of hope?

  I rewind and stop the film to see myself standing at the garden gate at dawn – or was it dusk? The gate is rusty and slightly awry but locked. Cast-iron with flourishes. I jiggle it, shake it. I wave my arms, demanding they let me in, cursing mother and daughter, whistling on two fingers. Nobody comes. The gate refuses to open. I curse again. Then beg, plead, weep perhaps.

  I wish I could see what the film, now running forward again, fails to show: an angry young man tearing the gate from its hinges and flinging it into the garden of the terrified villa with both hands.

  I must have been strong enough for that in the years of my youth. The seething maniac must have hurled the cast-iron gate into the garden. So painful was the loss, I didn’t know how to deal with this excess of love.

  But the film shows something very different. In Dog Years a garden gate is torn from the hinges in a fit of rage by someone not me and – as a symbol of thrownness – hurled into the garden of a philosopher with a pointed hat, but that takes place in the Black Forest, on completely other grounds, whereas I stood idle on Stuttgart’s Hasenbergsteige, arms hanging by my sides.

  There he stood, mute, at the padlocked gate, looking up at a lighted attic window – now I am sure he visited the house at night – and waiting in vain for the silhouette he knew so well, musing on his pain. Nothing moved behind the curtain; no owl hooted, no nightingale trilled. End of film. I made my way down the hill.

  A SERIES OF cars and lorries – at Innsbruck even a motorcycle – took me and my sorrow, which waned perceptibly from vehicle to vehicle, over the Brenner Pass to where the lemons bloom. There I made my way on three-wheeled delivery vans, donkey carts, and in a Topolino, the much loved two-seater of the time. Down the boot. And on to the island of Sicily, where at one point between Syracuse and Palermo – I felt I was in the middle of nowhere – after hours of waiting for a car, a cart, anything on wheels, after the shadows had packed up for the night, I spied a group of armed men emerging from a hollow between two rocky hills, and the closer they came the clearer it grew that they were no hunting party, but a band of rural Mafia emissaries. Before long they had formed a circle round the strange straw-hatted foreigner.

  I emptied my rucksack and spread out my belongings for them to see. No sooner had their leader, who wore a long gown similar to a monk’s habit, enquired after my provenance and destination than – what else – a Topolino came into view, puffing its way closer and closer up the hill. He raised his rifle to stop it. Its terrified driver, a country doctor, took the guest imposed on him to Caltanissetta, where he let me off in the marketplace.

  And other adventures, which I have told my children too often and in too many variations to be able to determine which is true: for example, this one I like to end with a shot warning me to move on, coming from a rifle of German origin, the .98 carbine I had been trained to handle myself – in other words, loot from the still-recent occupation. After all, the Mafia in the person of its leader and New York godfather Lucky Luciano was said to have helped the American troops take Sicily in ’43.

  In my encounter with the local members of the island-wide ‘honourable society’, I was taken for a pious pilgrim: the repentant pellegrino on the way to Saint Rosalia, who was known to have her seat in Palermo. So they helped me. And from Caltanissetta, a lorry driver took me voluntarily to my final destination.

  BY THAT TIME I had travelled through Tuscany and Umbria and visited Rome. In the Uffizi I had finally seen the originals of Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and in the Pitti Palace of Sodoma’s Saint Sebastian, his boyish, arrow-ridden body writhing against a wooded landscape: works that thanks to the coloured cigarette cards had made me the art-addicted youth I was. I can easily picture myself standing before the portrait in profile of a man with an aquiline nose and a red hat, by Piero della Francesca.

  I slept in youth hostels and monasteries, under olive trees and in vineyards, occasionally even on park benches. Wherever I found a mensa popolare open, I would eat cheap pasta, bread soup with globules of fat floating in it, and trippa alla napolitana, the latter being my first taste of a poor man’s staple the world over, made of the rumen, the first stomach of the cow, which when brushed and given a good wash looks like a terry towel.

  I was later to serve this stew many times, with tomatoes, garlic, and white beans, to guests I set particular store by. I made it for the Master of the Naumburg Cathedral and his models – all of whom came from artisan or peasant families that had settled on the banks of the Saale after the military occupation of their land in the early thirteenth century.

  They stood the master in good stead when he came to carve limestone likenesses of the cathedral’s founders, Countess Gerburg and Count Konrad, Margrave Hermann and his merry Reglindis, the pensive Count Syzzo and melancholy Thimo von Küstritz, and last but not least the second Ekkehard and his childless wife, the famous Uta von Naumburg.

  Though at the time the west choir came by these sculptures – later called Early Gothic – there were no tomatoes or white beans, so I had to leave out the tomatoes and substitute fresh broad beans. Still, it was the same tripe that had filled me up for so little in Rome’s soup kitchens.

  Even a cooper’s wife, the fair Gertrude, who served as a model for the unapproachable Uta von Naumburg, had a taste; the grim carter who became the spitting image of Count Syzzo couldn’t get enough of it; and Walburga, the goldsmith’s daughter, whose cheery dimples were transferred to Reglindis, the Polish king’s daughter, requested a second helping.

  Back in the days of East Germany, when the authorities of that so painstakingly insulated state finally allowed me to go on a reading tour of Magdeburg, Erfurt, Jena, and Halle – it was two years before the wall came down – Ute and I visited Naumburg Cathedral. While we admired the august figures on high, Ute looking up at Uta, our guide laid out the real-socialist background of these stone-hewn representations of reality: ‘The master made a conscious choice to replace canonized saints with working people, who as early as the Middle Ages were imbued with class-consciousness …’ She went on to state that not even Fascist propaganda, which made a cult of Uta, could diminish the lifelike beauty of these statues. As we left, I could hear Reglindis laughing.

  I HAD BROUGHT three addresses with me to Italy. The first, the Hasenbergsteige in Stuttgart, had already served its purpose. The second came from my sister Waltraut, who had completed her commercial apprenticeship in the spring and was offering her services to a group of nuns just outside Rome who belonged to an order based in Aachen but looked after a number of hospitals abroad as well as at home. The Roman branch included a nursery school, and my sister helped the nuns who ran it.

  The nuns were always rushing around or slaving away in the convent’s vegetable garden. They seemed to have no time for prayers. Even the abbess did her bit, folding laundry and helping to bring the olive harvest in. It was a convent of open doors and active concern.

  On my way to Sicily and on my way back they offered me hospitality in an annexe, in a cell with a view of the Alban Hills. Every evening I found a jug of wine waiting for me. The meal was served by a rotund kitchen nun of Westphalian origin who before trundling away liked to leave me with an edifying thought or two.

  She would use the as yet empty wineglass, pier
ced by a diagonal ray of sun, to give the non-believer an eternally valid explanation of the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, pointing by way of proof at the glass pierced by light, yet whole.

  So did the evening sun acquire an archangelic function, and strength of faith a Westphalian accent.

  While enlightening me, though as far from sexuality as heaven is from earth, my kitchen nun would smile a smile so transparent that she, too, might have been made of glass and constantly expecting the miracle. Then, as if there was nothing more to be said, her hands would disappear into the sleeves of her sheltering habit.

  No sooner had she left than I drank wine out of the inviolate glass. Lewd thoughts went through my head. Even as a youth I played an archangel who did more than annunciate. And again as a prisoner of war when during our dice sessions my pal Joseph did his best to win his pal over to the One True Faith, I would call the Virgin names and list all the instruments of torture that had been used to torment people of both sexes in the name of the Mother of God.

  My sister, though, seemed content among the bustling nuns. Her childhood faith, lost in the face of the violence committed by soldiers at the war’s end, had been restored. Which had its consequences.

  THE THIRD ADDRESS had been passed on to me shortly before I set off, by the energetic Dina Vierny, Aristide Maillol’s last model, who was doing a swift business with his sculptures from her Paris base. She had come to Düsseldorf to sell the city a life-size bronze. The naked girl, a representation of herself in her earlier years, would eventually adorn a pedestal in the Hofgarten.

  For us, who looked upon her presence as a natural phenomenon, she would sing German and Russian revolutionary songs. She completely turned my friend Geldmacher’s head and stole Trude Esser’s beloved Manfred out from under her, spiriting him off to Paris, where he eventually became hard of hearing. But I, immunized against infections of the sort by my recent bout of lovesickness, took away with me the address of her divorced husband, who was doing time on a French government grant at the Villa Medici in Rome. She gave me to understand: ‘He likes visitors …’