Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  The tables and shelves on the veranda, which he used as studio space, were covered with groupings of vases, jugs, and bottles on low pedestals standing in front of taut cloths and positioned seemingly at random. At one time models for typical Morandi still lifes, they had taken on a layer of dust over time, and the collected vessels had turned a uniform grey-brown, thus giving a hint of the spare charm of the maestro’s pictures.

  He wore round-rimmed glasses and smiled when we gazed in wonder at the models for the art we so admired. Cobwebs, some even inhabited, had formed between vases and bottles. Nowadays, dust-laden and randomly positioned as they were, they would have appealed to an undemanding art world as Concept Art and would certainly have found a buyer.

  After we drank green liqueur, sweeter than sweet, from tiny glasses, the maestro’s sisters, dressed all in black, bade us farewell. I should have asked whether he had any proofs from his etchings. Had the old man been in a generous mood, Anna and I might have come away with a signed Morandi. But it was empty-handed that we left Bologna, Bologna la rossa, la dotta, la grassa, the red, the well-read, the well-fed.

  NEAR THE HARBOUR in Naples we saw a band of tearful German scouts whose rucksacks had been stolen and who could think of one thing only: how to get home. Colourful washing hung out across the street to dry. Hordes of noisy children. Adrift in the narrow streets, we saw processions whose heathen Catholic pomp we knew from neo-realist films. The stink of fish and rotten fruit.

  Otherwise nothing left its mark except for the poste restante letter from my mother. She, whom I’d promised fairy-tale journeys to the south, the land where the lemons bloom, to Naples, she, who dressed her promising little darling in the name of a theatrical hero, a man whose life’s onion, after skin upon skin had been peeled off, proved devoid of any meaningful core; she, who despite all my boastful promises had ended up as empty-handed as Peer Gynt’s mother, she who had a sense of beauty and hungered after beauty all her life, was overjoyed that her ‘dear boy’ was yet again ‘lucky enough to see all that beauty’, and with ‘such a nice young woman from a good family’.

  Not until the very end of the letter, which urged me ‘to be considerate with Fräulein Anna’, was there a reference to her illness – ‘It keeps refusing to get better’ – which could hardly be missed, but which I failed to take seriously: everything that happened afterwards happened without her knowing, beyond her suffering.

  NO SOONER HAD we returned to Lenzburg than Anna’s father called me in for a man-to-man talk. While we were away, his daughter’s Berlin landlady had sent him a letter filled with dubious insinuations. He was not one for lending credence to idle gossip, but one thing was unambiguous: I had repeatedly spent the night in his daughter’s room. In his wife’s view, a view to which he too subscribed, my relationship with his daughter, which, he assumed, was based on genuine affection, now needed to be accorded legal status. He spared us both further words.

  We were standing beside shelves full of books whose titles I tried to decipher from their spines. Anna’s father found the conversation embarrassing. I didn’t, especially as I responded pointblank Yes and Amen. All that remained was to set a date for the wedding.

  The father of three daughters, Boris Schwarz would have liked to see us married if not immediately then as soon as possible, preferably before the end of the year. But I didn’t want to be married in corduroys to say nothing of my threadbare Caritas jacket; I wanted to earn enough money during the winter semester to fit myself out in brand-new clothes, that is, to be able to stand before the Lenzburg justice of the peace in a suit fresh off the rack. Anna was also in favour of a spring wedding. She wanted to have perfected a solo dance to a Bartók piano piece for an important exam.

  We were as nonchalant about this marriage as if it had been a pill for mumps or measles. It doesn’t hurt. The quicker it’s over the better.

  We settled on a day in April. I was against the twentieth, Hitler’s birthday, but my future father-in-law said that as tainted as the day might be in Germany it had no political overtones in Switzerland; besides, hadn’t he heard from his daughters that as a young soldier I had survived an attack on the twentieth of April 1945, wounded, but only lightly.

  The highly principled ironmonger and reserve officer of the ever ready Swiss Army was at heart a mild-mannered man. He was obviously under a great deal of pressure. But looking into his eyes while re-examining my blithe Yes, the loner precipitantly turned bridegroom did not feel pressured. I was willing to make good on the promise I had made. I could already see myself decked out in finery, buttonhole carnation and all, gazing into the future.

  WHAT FOLLOWED SPED by so fast that I would be hard put to reduce it to a chronology, especially as it proceeded so differently for my far-off, suffering mother.

  I am uncertain as to whether it was during those weeks in Lenzburg or on our visit there the following year that my in-laws’ richly stocked bookcase became more important than the marriage discussion that took place next to it. In any case, I read and read. I devoured Klabund’s Brief History of Literature, then the sumptuous soft-leather, two-volume edition of Ulysses published by Rhein-Verlag in Zurich and translated by Georg Goyert. I still treasure it. Anna’s mother, who read widely and into a ripe old age – she was 104 when she died – found Joyce too difficult, too ‘ungainly’, and made me a present of it, little suspecting what the miracle of its language would set in motion, especially when combined with another piquant work lent to me shortly thereafter by Anna’s Uncle Paul, an eccentric who lived with his equally eccentric sister in a large villa and who kept a monkey on a chain in the garden: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, the masterpiece of an author whose every book I later used as a writing manual and in whose honour I created a prize.

  Then there was the edition of Charles de Coster’s Uilenspiegel illustrated by Frans Masereel, a tale teeming with picaresque incidents that would eventually fuel my as yet pent-up mania for writing. And that was only the beginning of it. It was as if I had to build up a reserve before the wedding to last me on the long road ahead: Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos, The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, Churchill’s memoirs, which brought me the war from the victors’ point of view, and Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry for the second time. I had come across the latter in my mother’s bookcase when I was a boy, and now she was undergoing radiation for the cancer in her abdomen.

  Or was it in Berlin that I did all that reading while she suffered? Could it have been Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber who pressed his all-time favourite on me: the adventures of Uilenspiegel and his pal Lamme Goedzak? Because Lud, who grew more Catholic with every drink, cursing the Inquisition as the Devil’s handiwork – to hear him, it was still going on – would, whenever he was drunk at Leydicke’s long counter, shout, ‘Tis tydt van te beven de klinkaert, ’which meant more or less ‘Let us clink glasses’ and thus prompted, he smashed the glass he had just emptied. But no matter who set me on the endless narrative trail, it began with a teacher by the name of Littschwager, who gave his pupils injections of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus – my in-laws’ bookcase was Anna’s dowry: marrying her enriched me in this way as well.

  THE BÄUMLIACKER, OR Tree Field, as the house and garden in Lenzburg were called, had another asset: Anna’s two sisters. The elder, Helen Maria, could have made me waver and did so in secret, while the younger, Katharina, was a strapping girl still at school. And just as the bookcase set me off on a life of telling stories, with varying degrees of truth, and retying the string when it snapped, so the three-sister pattern has remained with me, one might say inexorably, over the years: Veronika Schröter, the mother of my daughter Helene, is the middle of three Saxon sisters; Ingrid Krüger, to whom I owe my daughter Nele, grew up the youngest in a Thuringian three-sister family; as for Ute, who has stuck with me through thick and thin and who brought her sons Malte and Hans into our extended family, she is the eldest of a doctor’s three daughters from an island off the coast of Pomerania.
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  No, I can’t come up with any more threesomes, except perhaps the pit foreman’s three daughters, the eldest of whom the coupler boy had taken a shine to. I might put all these three-star constellations in my life down to some quirk of fate, but wasn’t it the Devil – or my one-time caraway-chewing friend Joseph, the current pontiff? – who said ‘All is chance!’ on the long-ago day when, having asked the dice about my future with women, I rolled three threes four or five times in a row?

  Like so many Graces the sisters waved goodbye as I left Lenzburg for Berlin via Brugg with the mulberry-speckled, reddish-orange tent in my pack. Shouldn’t I have made a detour and paid a visit to my parents in Oberaussem? Mother was still suffering at home, though she took the bus into Cologne for her radiation, more and more radiation.

  Throughout the autumn and winter I did a number of plaster death masks for a Berlin undertaker. It brought in enough money to finance a black jacket that fitted me, from the department store Kaufhaus des Westens, and pinstriped trousers, a silver-grey tie, and black brogues, which I never wore again. I had nothing in my pockets, but I wanted to cut a fine figure as a bridegroom.

  WHAT WENT ON before and after the wedding, while other things began, began and ended, was only briefly interrupted by a hurried change of living quarters and reports of my mother’s suffering – now she was in a hospital in Cologne-Nippes – things that later nearly tore me to pieces, made me a cripple, set me free, then ended up on paper or in clay, bringing in a bit of money and my first taste of success – the sale of a bronze crab the size of a hand – it all proceeded according to a certain order, one thing hiding another, all striving to be present, vying for priority.

  It was around the time that Anna and I first saw the black-and-white flickering of a television screen in the window of a radio shop near Roseneck, and while the art controversy between Karl Hofer and Will Grohmann was shaking the School of Fine Arts down to its plastering room, that my mother was moved to the hospital for treatment and we moved to the Schmargendorf district, where our landlady, a German Russian, had her cleaning woman, who came from the eastern part of the city to earn West German marks, read the coffee grounds once a week. Far from a death in the family, she predicted nothing but fame and glory: ‘Good fortune is your constant companion …’

  We had a large room and were allowed to use the kitchen. While I was writing my four-liners or drawing my animals, while Anna was dancing barefoot to her Bartók, while we were out watching French films of the thirties, far away my mother was slowly dying.

  We were there when debates were held before a politically divided public, sometimes in East, sometimes in West Berlin, the Cold War providing ample tinder and the winter proving neither particularly severe nor particularly mild. While the disputes between East and West covered the same ground over and over, we watched Bert Brecht smiling up there on the podium as if he had no opinion about the Korean War or the nuclear threat. But as poor B.B. chomped mutely on his cigar and the intellectual representatives of the world powers – Melvin Lasky for the West, Wolfgang Harich for the East – enumerated each other’s crimes and threatened each other with pre-emptive nuclear strikes, cancer was eating away at my mother.

  We bought a used refrigerator, our first purchase as a couple – my mother’s insides burned under the radiation.

  We danced at every opportunity, and thought being young was all there was – her abdomen became a wound that would not heal.

  I would like to report on other things that happened before our wedding, one after another or all together; however, her slow dying, of which I know nothing, took place outside our time and with nothing much happening at our end.

  The discussions between East and West – the comparison was always between the victims of Stalinism and the estimated number of deaths caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never a word about Auschwitz – may have moved the world, as had Stalin’s death the year before; my mother’s death proceeded in silence.

  My teacher, Karl Hartung, who belonged to a men’s drinking club that assembled weekly in Bayerischer Platz around the poet Gottfried Benn, showed a few of my poems to the otherwise inaccessible master; my mother, who was in completely different company, had no part in the transmission of rhymed and unrhymed verse.

  And when my sister – or was it my father? – wrote to say I should come, come immediately, the end was near, I left – it was just after I’d heard from Hartung that Benn had called my poems ‘highly promising’ but added ‘Your pupil will eventually write prose’ – without Anna on the inter-zone train for Cologne, where my mother lay dying in Saint Vincent’s Hospital.

  Gradually she came to recognize me. She kept asking to be kissed by her son. And I kissed her lips twisted in pain, her forehead, her restless hands. Her bed had been rolled out of the ward into a storeroom that served as the death chamber, a windowless hole lacking even the obligatory cross on the wall. The only light came from what I judged to be a forty-watt bulb up near the ceiling.

  She could no longer speak, but her dry lips kept moving. I talked to her, what about I don’t know. My father and sister were there too. We would take turns keeping her mouth moist. As soon as I was alone with her, I would lean down and speak softly into her ear, make the usual promises, the same old story: ‘When you’re better, we’ll both of us go … down to the sunny south … yes, where the lemons bloom. … It’s so beautiful, beautiful everywhere. … All the way to Rome and on to Naples. … Take my word for it, Mama …’

  Every now and again nurses and nuns came by. Shielded by their wimples, they would take away bandages, bedpans, a wheelchair. They were always in a hurry. Later I was inspired by the wimples to do frontal and profile drawings of the Vincentians.

  One of the nuns who came and went made an unsolicited promise as she rushed past: ‘The Dear Lord will release the poor soul before long.’

  Had I brought flowers? The asters she so loved? The onion isn’t saying.

  While I sat there sleeping – how long I don’t know – she died, Father said. ‘Lenchen, my Lenchen …’ he kept stammering.

  SHE, OUT OF whom I crawled screaming one Sunday – ‘Sunday’s child, that’s what you are,’ she liked to tell me; she, whose lap I still sat in at the age of fourteen, a mama’s boy who clung to his complex; she, for whom I promised, evoked, and painted riches, fame, and the south, her Promised Land; she, who taught me to collect her customers’ debts in small increments – ‘Knock on a Friday, when there’s still something left of their pay’; she, my good conscience appeased, my bad conscience repressed; she, upon whom I heaped cares and woes that multiplied by the dozen like rodents; she, for whom I bought the electric iron – or was it a crystal bowl? – on Mother’s Day with the money I’d earned from debt-collecting; she, who refused to come to the station when I, silly boy, volunteered for the army – ‘They’re sending you to your death’; she, who said not a word when I asked her in the train from Cologne to Hamburg what had happened to her when the Russians arrived with such force – ‘Bad things should be forgotten’; she, who taught me skat and who counted out banknotes and ration coupons with a moistened thumb; she whose fingers played languorous piano pieces and who put books she didn’t read on the shelf for me; she, who had nothing left of three brothers but what could fit easily into a medium-sized suitcase and who saw her brothers living on in me – ‘You get it all from Arthur and Paul, and some from Alfons too …’; she, who stirred sugar into egg yolk for me; she, who laughed when I bit into the soap; she, who smoked Egyptian cigarettes and sometimes blew smoke rings; she, who believed in me, her Sunday’s child, and so always opened the Academy’s end-of-year report to the same page; she, who gave me, her darling boy, everything and received little; she, who is my vale of joy and my vale of tears and who, when I wrote before and write now, looks over my shoulder even after death and says ‘Cross that out; it’s ugly’, but I rarely listened to her and when I did it was too late; she, who was born in pain and died in pain, set
me free to write and write; she, whom I would so like to kiss awake on paper still-white, so she could travel with me, only me, and see beauty, only beauty, and finally say, ‘That I should live to see such beauty …’; she, my mother, died on January 24, 1954. Though I did not weep until later. Much later.

  THE WEDDING GIFTS I RECEIVED

  AT THE FUNERAL in the Oberaussem village cemetery I stood next to my sister, who stood next to my father. The only job she could find after leaving the convent was as a lowly filing clerk in a Cologne hospital. She was languishing there and didn’t know what to do. Who could lessen her grief now that, for her, God was no longer within range?

  Mother disappeared along with the coffin on which clods of earth reverberated. The brother thought only of himself and the good fortune he had been rashly assured of; he was detached as always, in his own world. The father, who, like the sister, remained behind, disconsolate, seemed smaller somehow, even shrunken.

  He looked as if he would be unable to withstand so much solitude. Soon after his wife’s death he took up with a widow who like him eventually drew a pension, and lived in what was known as an ‘uncle marriage’. He was content in his own way. The two of them would indulge themselves on occasion, taking pensioners’ bus trips to Bacharach on the upper Rhine for wine tastings, or to Spa in Belgium for the thrill of risking their minuscule savings in the casino.

  Years later, when I had, as he put it, ‘made a name’ for myself, the father claimed to be proud of his son, in whom, as he assured me, his blue eyes unblinking, he had ‘always believed’. And I replied, ‘Yes, Papa, where would I be without you,’ and from then on our meetings were always peaceable: whenever he and his new wife Klärchen came to call on us and the children, she, Frau Gutberlett, would sit on the sofa leafing through magazines and he would play skat with Anna, who was on her best behaviour, and me.