Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

It came up to me, ran after me. It turned me into a hermit tantalized by the dial, the number. It appeared, open and inviting, in the Schlüterstrasse subtenant’s dreams. In the dreams I was often defeated by the engaged tone, though only in the dreams did I ever get an answer and a long, pleasurable conversation. To call me a coward would be only half correct: I would recite the number over and over, like a litany. That helped, but only briefly.

  Once, while queuing for the phone, I thought an intense flirtation with a girl called Christine from Sintenis’s class might prove beneficial. There was something foal-like about her. In any case, she had a ponytail, and all I had to do was stroke it, nothing more. But I didn’t, and when she stepped into the booth before me someone who looked just like me and had the same ingrained fear of commitment fled.

  So timorous was my love in its raw state, buried lifeless under tender words meant to suffice, that I positively enjoyed my procrastination and feared, and therefore avoided, anything leading beyond it, since every time I made for the booth I knew that if you contribute two groschen to the slot and dial one number after another, you will hear one beep after another followed by a voice announcing that you have reached the office of the Mary Wigman Studio, and you, courteous or gruff as the spirit moves you, give the first and last name of a person to whom it is your urgent desire to speak, and you wait until she dances up to the phone and says ‘Ja, bitte’, in the most beautiful High German, and you’re done for, there’s no going back, you’re tied, hooked. Something is happening, coming close, becoming flesh and blood, whose name has until now been written in the clouds.

  And when I finally did exchange a few sentences over the telephone with a dance student by the name of Anna Schwarz, they resulted in our first date. All it took was one call.

  HARD AS IT is for me to remember the birthdays of our younger children and grandchildren, I still remember that date: we met on January 18, 1953. For me – I have always perceived historical events such as battles and peace treaties as occurring in the present – the date Bismarck willed the Second Reich into existence is still helpful, a fact that comes to mind whenever I remember that ice-cold day, was it Saturday or Sunday? – and its less clear course of events.

  We had agreed to meet at one o’clock at the U-Bahn exit of the Zoologischer Garten station. Since the time I had been wounded and lost my Kienzle wristwatch between Senftenberg and Spremberg, I had no means of telling the time. I arrived at the station clock early, paced back and forth, withstood temptation for a while, then had two glasses of schnapps at a nearby stall, which meant that my breath smelled when Anna turned up on time, looking younger than twenty.

  There was something angular and boyish about the way she moved. Her nose was red from the cold. What was I to do with this young thing all afternoon? Dragging her back to the subtenant’s room, where women were not allowed, did not enter my mind except as something to be strenuously avoided. We could have gone to the cinema on nearby Kantstrasse, but the Western showing there didn’t seem right. So I did what I’d never done before, I gallantly invited Fräulein Schwarz to join me for coffee and cake at Schilling’s on Tauentzienstrasse, or was it Kranzler’s on the Kudamm?

  I’m at a loss for words as to how and where we spent that long afternoon. We must have talked: What’s it like to dance barefoot? Did you have ballet lessons as a child? And what’s the famous Mary Wigman like? As strict and demanding as you’d hoped?

  Or did we talk about the uncrowned kings of poetry, of Brecht over there in the eastern part of the city and Benn here in the west? Did we get political?

  Or did I let on, before the first piece of cake, banking on the effect, that I was myself a poet?

  I am like a gold miner shaking his sieve, I shake and shake, but no sparkling nugget, no speck of wit, no echo of a daring metaphor turns up. Nor is how much cake or pie we polished off, and in how many places, listed on any of the onion’s skins. We got through the afternoon in one way or another.

  Things didn’t take off until evening, when we got sucked in by the then famous dance hall known as the Eierschale. It’s not enough to say we danced: we found each other in dance. Looking back over the sixteen years of our marriage, I must admit that no matter how lovingly we tried, the only times we were truly close, one and the same, a couple, was when we danced. Too often we avoided each other’s eyes or strayed, looking for something that didn’t exist or existed only in phantom form. And when we became parents, duty-bound, and felt lost to each other, the children were the only thing that kept us close. Bruno, our last, didn’t know what to make of it.

  The band in the Eierschale went from Dixieland to ragtime to swing. We danced every dance, giving our all. It was if we had practised together our entire lives. A dance couple made in heaven. We took up a lot of space. We barely noticed others were watching. We could have gone on for a small eternity, at arm’s length, cheek to cheek, eyes making brief contact, fingers pressing lightly, swinging apart the better to merge, swirling as one on feet made to swirl, playfully earnest, out and then back, up she goes weightless, faster than thought, dragging more slowly than time.

  After the last blues – it was around midnight – I saw Anna to the tram. She had a room in Schmargendorf. The story goes that between dances I said, ‘I’m going to marry you,’ and she said she had a friend she was serious about, which prompted me to say, ‘That’s all right. We can wait it out.’

  Easy beginnings make up for the hard times to come.

  AH ANNA, THE time we shared. The gaps that couldn’t be filled, the things best left forgotten. Things we never asked for that came between us and then had to be treated as desirable. How we made each other happy. What we thought beautiful, what deceitful. Why we became strangers, hurt each other. Why for so many years, and not only because I like diminutives, I called you Annchen.

  A picture-book couple, people said of us. We seemed inseparable, made for each other, and we were equals. You wilfully proud, I self-taught to be self-assured. In a rapid sequence of images designed to celebrate the young couple I see us as united: In theatres east and west, where we saw The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Waiting for Godot, or in the Steinplatz cinema, where we saw the French classics Hôtel du Nord, Casque d’or, and La Bête humaine. I wanted to go up to your room, not yet, you said. We would match Lud Schrieber glass for glass at Leydicke’s long bar until you had to drag me home, blind drunk. You would come and see me at our studio, where Hartung called you the Helvetian muse, and I watched your barefoot dance at Mary Wigman’s highly disciplined establishment. You couldn’t cook, so I showed you how tasty and cheap mutton could be with lentils, and how simple it is to remove the flesh from the bones of a fried herring. And when I missed the last tram and asked to stay over, we hoped your landlady, that battleaxe, wouldn’t notice.

  Our mutual friends: Ulli and Herta Härter, with whom we put God and the world to rights. Rolf Szymanski, whom we called Titus and with whom, dead drunk, I pissed at the gate of the Berliner Bank because we thought it was one big urinal, for which we paid the hefty fine of five marks each. And later Hans and Maria Rama, who took the first pictures of you dancing: you brightly lit in tutu and à pointe. Even then you wanted to switch from modern dance to classical ballet, though your arches were too low and your legs too short. More often than I would have liked we went to the Hebbel-Theatre for ballet: all those endless pirouettes and flashy grands jetés. Ulli and I would whistle the moment the curtain fell.

  We wanted to see ourselves intertwined on paper as well. I drafted the libretto for a short ballet in which a frightened, trembling young man in a baker’s cap, with two policemen at his heels, seeks and finds refuge under the skirts of a ballerina dressed as a peasant woman, which could have been you, until the danger has passed and he can come out and dance a pas de deux with her: a funny, vulgar piece, as far from classical discipline as could be. It remained a draft and never saw the boards, though it later turned into narrative prose, its slow-motion leaps and pantomimed sprints injec
ting some jerky, silent-film-like motion into the first chapter of The Tin Drum.

  We loved each other and we loved art. And when we stood at the edge of the usually deserted Potsdamer Platz in the middle of June and watched the workers hurling stones at Soviet tanks, we didn’t leave the American sector, we remained at the eastern edge but experienced power and lack of power at such close range that the symbolic stones and their ricochet made an indelible impression on us. That is why twelve years later I wrote my German tragedy, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, in which the rebellious workers, lacking a plan, run around in circles, while the intellectuals, who are good at using plans to find the right words, are brought low by their arrogance.

  At the time we merely looked on. We didn’t dare do more. Since you had been protected by the safe haven that was Switzerland, your horror was new; mine was revived by a long-dormant fear. I knew the panzers: they were T-34s.

  We had seen enough, it was time to go. Violence scared us. Throwing stones at panzers could succeed only in the imagination. We had ourselves and art. That was nearly enough.

  And so we bought a tent for two. Reddish orange. And with that tent rolled up in a rucksack we set off for a summer in the south. Ah, Anna …

  WHILE CANCER, SOUNDLESS

  THIS TIME OVER the Gotthard Pass. But before we set out on our first hitch-hiking venture together, Anna and I visited my parents, and then my sister, who was in Aachen doing her novitiate at a Franciscan convent. That journey before the journey is still painful.

  Grey skin, shadows under her eyes, Mother was ill; Father was worried. Both suffered from having lost their daughter, but they had turned their grief inwards. They did their best to welcome us, though they were a bit surprised: this was the first time I had introduced them to one of my ‘conquests’, as my mother put it. Anna had never experienced such cramped quarters. My sister had bought some new furniture with money she had saved up.

  When I try to recall our visit, I feel unsure of myself because I have trouble picturing the place where the kitchen cabinet stood, the colour of the curtains. Was the floor made of wood – pine boards – or covered with artificial material of a nondescript colour? Did the tablecloth have a crocheted trim? Why did we eat in the tiny kitchen and not in the main room? Or was it the other way round?

  I can picture Anna standing next to the stove, which used brown-coal briquettes from the Fortuna Nord mine for fuel, and try to see her at the kitchen table, which was covered with oilcloth for the occasion. Father had probably cooked one of his favourite dishes for our visit: Königsberger Klopse in pickled-caper sauce with boiled potatoes.

  Now Anna lifts a ‘nice little teaspoonful’ of the sauce to give it a taste. Mother is darting here and there, not knowing what to say. Now Anna sits at the table and answers questions in the beautiful High German she learned in school, questions about the war-free wonderland known as Switzerland. Now she gazes out of the window in the direction of the mine and sees smoking chimneys.

  At one point, shortly before we leave, mother takes son to one side: ‘You can’t treat Fräulein Anna like your other girls. She’s from a good family, you can tell.’

  We hardly speak about my sister and then only in guarded tones: the cloudy waters of grief have settled somewhat, and there is no point in roiling them again. I probably say something light-hearted like ‘If she’s happy there …’

  I look around as if for the last time. I see the asters I painted, I see the newly acquired furniture, piece by piece. I see the dresser in their bedroom. It has a framed picture of my sister on it. She is smiling – showing her dimple – and wearing a flowery dress.

  Now I hear Father saying, ‘She’s passed the postulant stage, as they call it; she’s a novice, our little girl. Her name is Sister Raffaela …’

  There is also a picture of her as a nun. Framed in black and white, her face looks childlike. It also looks proud, though a bit worried that her new outfit doesn’t become her. Her body is gone, as if it had never existed. Her parents stand on either side of her, both in hats. They look uncomfortable, out of place.

  NUNS PEOPLED MY prose and poetry from the late fifties well into the sixties: Magical Exercise with the Brides of Christ is the title of a verse cycle I wrote then and accompanied with my own illustrations. ‘They are made for the wind./They always sail, even without sounding the depth.’

  I did drawings of nuns as large-scale études in the play of black on white, using a brush soaked in Indian ink on large-format paper: nuns kneeling, flying, and hopping, crossing the horizon against the wind; abbesses domineering, assembled at Eucharistic congresses; nuns on their own and nuns in pairs, habitless except for wingèd coifs – all these I have my sister’s misfortune to thank for – and then to see her, all devout and pious, taken in by organized cant, and anxiously, in the negative sense, awaiting the vow when Anna and I visited her at the Aachen convent.

  Draped in heavy cloth, she stood weeping in the inner courtyard. Old brick walls on all sides, ivy running up to the rain gutters. Flat, neatly trimmed boxwood hedges lining carefully measured paths and surrounding long, narrow beds of decorative plants. Everything in perfect order. No weeds. Gravel raked. Roses smelling of curd soap.

  There we stood, waiting for her to stop crying. Stumbling, as if every word required courage, she told her woe. Life at the convent wasn’t at all the way she’d thought it would be … The way it was when she’d done social work two years before in Italy … that was the true Franciscan spirit, full of joy … Here she had to pray all the time, do what she was told, self-flagellation even … There were punishments for the slightest infraction of the rules, and everything was a sin … She liked to whistle, to take three stairs at a time – even that was forbidden … You had to eat everything put in front of you, even bread smeared with lard … and not a word about aiding the poor and sick; just repentance, introspection, that kind of thing … She wanted out, as soon as possible, that very day …

  Then she paused and said, the tears still running down her cheeks, ‘The supervisor of novices is so strict … you have no idea how strict she is …’

  And so I requested or, rather, demanded, a meeting with this much-feared disciplinary officer. She immediately crossed the inner courtyard and came up to us, introducing herself as Alfons Maria and thus giving the impression of bisexual legal authority, a kind of archangel sent from on high to run a reformatory here below.

  My demand that she release my sister from the convent bounced off her as if it had not been made. She spoke instead of well-known temptations and enticements and how a heart imbued with faith could learn to withstand them, ‘couldn’t it, Sister Raffaela?’

  The enclosed courtyard awaited her word; it heard only sparrows twitter: the novice held her tongue. The bespectacled archangel spake with the authority vested in him/her, enunciating each word precisely: ‘We shall embark upon a novena and, thus fortified, find our peace …’

  Anna and I were appalled to see my sister respond to the order from that narrow mouth with a devoted nod of the head. Alfons Maria’s spectacles registered triumph.

  And we departed. When the nine-day period was up, we received a letter in a childlike hand informing us that prayer and humble introspection had granted her the strength to use her faith to defy temptation in general and, by the grace of God, the wiles of Satan in particular, and to continue renouncing the world. Though not in so many words, the role of the Devil was imputed to me, her brother.

  Any answer we might send would presumably pass through the supervisor’s hands. I made it menacingly clear that my period would be fewer than nine days: If my sister were not released from her convent prison forthwith, I would pay it another visit. Daddau later maintained it was a telegram rather than a letter whose intimidating contents had the desired effect.

  Be that as it may, my threat succeeded in opening a chink in the red-brick-walled bastion. The moment she emerged, my sister, whose sense of earthly essentials had clearly remained alive t
hrough her period of convent captivity, sought out a hairdresser, who for a pittance – the nuns were not particularly charitable to her in their severance pay – and with great skill managed to turn the hair left by the regulation shear into the semblance of a hairdo. ‘Okay, girl. Now you can venture out into the world again,’ he is said to have told her.

  The atmosphere of my ailing mother and depressed father’s two-room flat brightened up a bit, though not for long: even after returning home my once lively sister never laughed.

  AT WHITSUN OF the year now ending my sister and I visited Gdańsk to bring back Danzig and our childhood. I also invited the older grandchildren, that is, Laura’s daughter Luisa and her twin boys Lucas and Leon, Bruno’s daughter, Ronja, and Raoul’s eldest daughter Rosanna, plus Frieder, a friend of the twins, and took them on grandfatherly walks through the town and nearby Wrzeszcz, the former Langfuhr, and to get-togethers with our Kashubian relatives. The two of us chatted while the children searched the foam of the listless Baltic waves for slivers of amber, and eventually came to the convent interlude of more than fifty years ago. I had the feeling Sister Alfons Maria, the harsh supervisor of novices, was still breathing down my sister’s neck. And what was even more surprising: Daddau had retained her Catholic faith, though with the leftist bias of the former midwife and trade union official. She turned a sceptical eye on the newly elected Pope Benedict: ‘As he may be German, I can’t say I’m thrilled.’ And after a short pause: ‘Now if they’d chosen a Brazilian cardinal or an African one …’

  While the two of us old-timers – she in her compact rotundity, I with my round back and faltering step – made our way through the sand between Glettkau and Zoppot, and the children, energetic Leon out in front, dreamy Lucas bringing up the rear, Rosanna, energetic as ever on her stork legs, Luisa, hesitant at first, and Ronja, self-assured, were gathering nuggets of amber, the two of us condemned the public death of the previous, the Polish pope as shameless histrionics, I calling it ‘repellent’, she ‘impertinent’, though I could have come up with worse adjectives, and she swallowed a few that might well have trumped mine.