Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  At the Oberaussem cemetery, however, we had practically nothing to say to each other. Perhaps it was the sight of all those graves that robbed us of speech. But the smoking chimneys of Fortuna Nord gave a very clear message: Life goes on, life goes on …

  The mourners were surrounded by tombstones of dolerite, Silesian marble, limestone, and Belgian granite, set between rows of boxwood hedges. The stones could all have come from Göbel’s workshop, and while senior journeyman Korneff and I had transported single or double stones to several neighbouring villages in the firm’s small van we had never gone to Oberaussem.

  We stood at the grave with Father’s neighbours and fellow-workers. I can’t be certain if it was raining or snowing or if there was already a layer of snow on the ground. I don’t know exactly who came and who didn’t. I can recall nothing about the service except that the priest had only one acolyte. I was empty, or I felt empty. I tried to cry, but in vain. Though what does that matter.

  And when the weeping sister asked – we had left the cemetery by then – ‘What will become of me? What should I do?’ the brother had no answer, so preoccupied was he with himself, only himself.

  FATHER DIED AT the age of eighty in the summer of ’79. The coffin was still open when I arrived. He looked good, well-groomed as always and peaceful. He is buried in Opladen with the Widow Gutberlett, who preceded him there. Whenever we saw each other, he felt the need to encourage me: ‘Keep it up, boy. Keep it up.’

  His wallet contained positive reviews of my books, none of which he had read. When my son Raoul was an apprentice radio technician at Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne – and with long curly hair was trying his best to look like his idol Frank Zappa – he and his friends would drop in on his grandfather for an occasional game of skat, his innocent passion.

  During the mid-sixties when the extreme right party, the NPD, or National Democrats, came out with yesterday’s slogans, I asked him who he had voted for in the Bundestag elections. ‘The Socis, of course,’ he said. ‘As usual.’ Then after a pause he added, ‘If I didn’t vote Social Democratic, you’d stop sending me money.’ We understood each other well.

  Several years before his death, by which time he was in a nursing home, Ute and I brought him to our house for a visit. He enjoyed the long car ride and refused to take a nap, taking in the rich meadowland and the cows, cows everywhere. But in our Wewelsfleth kitchen nook he sat dozing for hours on end. And at noon, before Bruno, Malte, and Hans came home hungry from school and their various noises took over, he would sit near the stove and listen to the potatoes cooking. ‘I always liked to hear them boiling in the pot,’ he said, ‘when I cooked for Lenchen and then Klärchen …’ He wasn’t much for talking any more and was at his happiest when Ute gave him a good-night kiss: ‘A real one. On the mouth.’

  AND MY SISTER? The question she asked me at the Oberaussem cemetery or after the service was one I would hear many more times: ‘What will become of me? What should I do?’

  Towards the end of April, right after the wedding, for which she had come to Lenzburg, she drove with Anna and me to my in-laws’ summer cottage in Ticino, where she tried to assuage her sorrows with mounds of Swiss chocolate, milk and bittersweet, and didn’t know what to do, except weep in the most beautiful weather. Yet her never-ending complaints had a social element to them, a desire to help others, help them in practical ways, here and now.

  And when she came to visit us in Berlin in the autumn of ’54, shortly after our trip through Franco’s grimly locked-up Spain, which gave me the material for my first story, ‘My Green Meadow’ – by then we were living in the Dianasee basement flat – and asked the same question with the same urgency – we were coming home from a film and waiting at Budapester Strasse for the light to change – I finally gave her a piece of advice that came out less than brotherly, more like a command.

  In a flash of inspiration I snapped, ‘Cut the whining, dammit! Be a midwife! There’ll always be kids to deliver.’

  And a midwife she became, after completing her training at the Women’s Clinic in Hanover. She worked in Rheydt, Bonn’s University Clinic, and in Lüdenscheid, outside Düsseldorf, and presided over roughly four thousand births. Her agile hands and no-nonsense words stood her in good stead over the years, and she eventually not only supervised and instructed midwives at her own institution but also headed committees for improved working conditions and higher salaries at a number of hospitals. She still does a lot of travelling as the representative of her trade union’s Senior Citizens Committee. She is loved – and a bit feared – by our children and grandchildren as someone who knows her own mind and can hold her drink at festive gatherings, and as a Catholic Social Democrat and friend of a nun by the name of Sister Scholastika, also known as Scholli, she takes a firm stand. Even at her advanced age she finds occasion to inject her rough-and-ready humour into conversations, but she can also lose her temper and give the representatives of officially sanctioned wrongdoing here a piece of her mind. ‘I mean, really. It’s outrageous!’ is one of her refrains. She is also working on the declining birthrate with my youngest daughter Nele, who is herself a midwife. They console each other: ‘Luckily there are enough foreigners to keep the world going …’

  So a word spoken on a street corner while waiting to cross can mark the direction of an entire life. Which reminds me of Professor Enseling, who in the ice-cold winter of ’47, when the Düsseldorf Academy of Art had temporarily closed for lack of coal, pointed me in the only right direction.

  THERE IS A picture from our wedding – Anna in a wine red suit, me in the pinstriped trousers – showing us smiling at each other as if we’d just pulled off a hilarious prank. She is twenty-one, I’m nearly twenty-six. It means a lot to us that we don’t yet need to be quite grown-up. We are wearing our rings on our left hands; they are gold and therefore valuable. But, given that I already thought of Anna as property acquired, the most valuable yield of the hasty wedding was the wedding gift of an Olivetti portable typewriter, the Lettera model, which, if not immediately, then little by little, made me a writer.

  To all intents and purposes I have remained faithful to her: I’ve been neither willing nor able to give her up. I have always treated my Lettera with deference. She has me in her thrall to this day. She has always known more about me than I wished to know about myself. Her home is one of my stand-up desks, where her keyboard is always waiting for me.

  Granted, I did try other models along the way – short-lived affairs, so to speak – but the Olivetti never wavered in her devotion, nor I in mine, not even after it could only be found in flea markets. Every so often someone would make me a present of one he no longer had use for, with the caveat that it had seen better days. Which was wrong.

  My everlasting Lettera. She has stood the test of time because she is so easy to repair. She looks so discreetly elegant in that blue-grey, rust-free metal cover. Her light touch, so attuned to my two-finger system, is music to my ears. Sometimes one or another letter jams and teaches me patience, just as she is patient with me when I keep typing wrong letters.

  Oh, she has her quirks. The ribbon tends to get stuck. Yet while she may be ageing, I am confident she will never grow old. The clatter passing through the open window tells the world we’re alive, both of us. Listen! Our dialogue is far from over: To her I am Catholic enough to confess.

  At present three Letteras occupy my stand-up desks in Portugal, Denmark, and the Behlendorf studio. As a trinity, they take care that my flow of stories does not dry up. The mere sight of one or the other or the third is enough to give me an idea, and soon they are babbling away, sisterly, cheerfully, filling the silences.

  All three are mechanical muses; I have no others. I devoted a quatrain to them in Lost and Found Items for Non-Readers, a volume of verse from the end of the last century listing my belongings in the genre I call aquaverse. The Portuguese Olivetti is never jealous of the Danish one or the Behlendorf Olivetti of the two foreign ones. And just as they lo
ve me with their three voices, so I am devoted to them and them alone.

  No matter how many new and newfangled goods have come on the market, nothing has lured me away. Neither the electric model nor the computer has proved seductive enough to replace even one of my Olivettis, just as no one has succeeded in dumping me on the scrap heap as ‘old iron’.

  In the mid-seventies, when my marriage was on the rocks and I was no longer assured of a roof over my head – which is why the manuscript of The Flounder didn’t know what happened to it – I fled Berlin for London with one of my Olivettis, and once I had found refuge with a kind-hearted colleague by the name of Eva Figes, it took to clattering in the new setting until, thanks to Ute, I settled down again.

  I’ve coddled her, believe me: I’ve never hurled curses meant for others at her. Nor do I blame her if I’m too lazy to change the ribbon and the print gets dimmer and dimmer. I’ve never lent her to anybody.

  By the same token she has never let me down, no matter what demands I make on her. A change of climate after a long flight, for instance. In Calcutta, where we took up residence for quite some time, she had to endure great heat and humidity and was plagued by insects using her innards as breeding grounds. Though the earlier years were even worse.

  In the early eighties, when humankind seemed to me on the way out for good, I developed a writer’s block that went on for four years, during which time the only thing I used my fingers for was modelling clay into sculptures and all three Letteras felt forsaken. They sat there collecting dust until stories began coming to me, apocalyptic farewell stories, which I first scribbled out with my brush on sheets of white-burning clay, then by hand on the blank pages of a thick printer’s dummy in cramped lines under the title The Rat, and which then needed to be brought together and typed up in definitive form.

  Day after day. Sheet after sheet … For five decades. Two or three typescripts after the handwritten version. The Olivetti can take anything: novellas and novels, an occasional poem by way of relief, so to speak, as well as dry Social Democratic election speeches and – after reunification in ’89 – speeches about the bargain buy-up of the East by the West.

  If I vented my anger on her, I never meant it personally. And I held on to her when my evaluation of the privatization swindle quite isolated me, when The Call of the Toad had died down, and while Too Far Afield grew and grew into something substantial enough to encompass the sorted detritus from two centuries of German history, as well as of my hero Theodor Wuttke – also known as Fonty. As ribbons for my Olivetti portable were no longer on the market by then, my writing would definitely have come up against a material, if not existential, crisis had it not been for the help of friends.

  During a visit to Madrid with Ute – I was being given the hidalgo, an award in the form of a walking stick fashioned from a reed, by the elder of a group of gitanos who had their camp near a dump outside the city, an object that would soon come in handy as I was having more and more trouble walking – some young people who had read a newspaper article that waxed ironic over my out-of-date writing habits presented me with a box of typewriter ribbons fresh from the factory, enough to keep me going for some time …

  But my first Olivetti – a wedding present from my father-in-law’s sister Margot and her husband Urs and currently in the possession of my youngest son Bruno, who is preserving it as if it were an integral part of me – was of special consequence: it was the one I used to type up the poems that would soon become my first book, The Merits of Windfowl.

  THEY MUST HAVE come to me without effort because there are no drops of sweat or other traces of exertion on any onion skin. There can be no doubt that the germ for the poems came from a damp cellar room with a window overlooking a garden, a room Anna and I took in a house whose upper storey, complete with turret and bay window, had been gutted in the war and was inhabited since by changing weather and pigeons. We had discovered this half ruin between the Königsallee and the reedy waters of the Dianasee and had no trouble renting the cellar room, which had once been part of the janitor’s living quarters, for a modest sum. The only people living above us were a professor and his wife, whom we would greet and who would greet us.

  The quarters were cramped, but we could always go out into the overgrown garden, happy or at least living a fairy tale that promised a happy ending. Anna felt more at home there than I did, because after a sheltered childhood in safe Swiss surroundings our idyll in the ruins gave her the illusion of freedom. She allowed her thoughts to wander much less than I did. In summer the window, which faced the garden, was left open all evening to let in the sunset.

  I would cook lentil dishes on the two-ring gas stove and fry green herrings and whatever else was cheap – sausage, kidneys, spare ribs – in a cast-iron pan. On Sundays, when we had guests, I stewed beef hearts stuffed with prunes, and in autumn I put lamb chops with beans and pears on the table. ‘Beans and Pears’ was the name of one of the poems I typed on the Olivetti. Another one, ‘The Midge Plague’, had its origins in the nearby Dianasee, the mosquitoes’ breeding ground.

  We would have friends over. Hans and Maria Rama, who decided our love needed to be made permanent in black-and-white photographs. I also made friends with another flautist, this one curly-headed, with Mozart pigtails, a master of the silver flute and surrounded by swarms of young girls. Aurèle Nicolet was his name, and he was Anna’s other love, a love always waiting in the wings but never lived. The Härters would come to visit and with them we enjoyed making fun of people. Then there was Fridtjof Schliephacke, an architecture student who later designed furniture and a floor lamp, now bearing his name, for the student community of Eichkamp, and the sculptor Schrieber, sober by day, with his pupil Karl Oppermann, who before long took up advertising on the side and went to work for a large dairy, Bolle. Some time later Oppermann commissioned me to put together a pamphlet celebrating the dairy’s seventy-fifth anniversary and the opening of its first self-service store.

  And so on my Olivetti wedding present I wrote a squib of six or seven pages with the title ‘Convert the Heathen or Sell Milk?’, which was then dispatched in a mass mailing of supposedly 350,000 copies to West Berlin households. They were my first large audience.

  Only a by-product, of which I don’t possess a copy to quote from, but it celebrated Carl Bolle, the first and legendary purveyor of fresh milk to a large city (‘Bolle on the Milk Cart’), in amusing terms and earned me 300 marks then and a good deal more some thirty years later, when the still thriving firm reprinted my milk fairy tale, thereby fulfilling Gottfried Benn’s prescient judgement of my poetry: ‘He will one day write prose …’

  Yet the Olivetti kept spitting out poem after poem. I had found my tone, or a stray tone without a master had found me. I kept the poems together in a folder, and one day Anna and my sister – who had come for a visit – selected a half-dozen and sent them off to Süddeutscher Rundfunk, South German Radio, because the station had announced a poetry contest in the newspapers and together they persuaded me to give it a go. Their choice included the all too metaphor-laden ‘Lilies from Sleep’. And it was not the beautiful hymn to smoking, ‘Credo’, or the lyrical inventory, ‘Open Wardrobe’, or even ‘Beans and Pears’, but those anaemic flowers, lilies born of my perfectly healthy sleep, that won me third prize and – as my debt-collector mind recalls – 350 marks. I also received the air fare to attend the award ceremony in Stuttgart. It was my first flight.

  Thus blessed, I bought myself a winter coat off the rack at Peek & Cloppenburg. The rest of the prize money went for the asphalt-grey mohair skirt that Anna and I bought at Horn, the most elegant shop on the Kurfürstendamm, so matter-of-factly, as if we knew we would never again want for funds. I can still feel the texture of the material, picture its fine cut: so gracefully did Anna move in the proceeds of my poems.

  THIS COULD BE the beginning of a tale that I did not write and that does not belong to those collected by the Brothers Grimm. Perhaps only Hans Christian Andersen c
ould have come up with something of the sort: Once upon a time there was a wardrobe in which memory hung on hangers …

  That wardrobe is still open, reciting stanza after stanza – what is kept on the bottom, what on top, what is almost new and what is threadbare – and whispering to itself.

  Our wardrobe was a narrow affair we had picked up at a junk shop, in which only Anna’s mohair skirt hung. When open, it told a tale of white balls sleeping in pockets and dreaming of moths, of asters and other flammable flowers, and of an autumn that turns garment …

  And so the tale with no attested author became reality: Once upon a time there was a sculptor to whom verse came occasionally and in passing, and who had written a poem called ‘Open Wardrobe’. When he received a modest prize for another poem, he immediately bought a skirt for his beloved and a coat for himself. From then on he thought of himself as a poet.

  And so the tale continued: The poet – also a sculptor, who made chickens, birds, fish, and suchlike creatures – responded with poems in his pocket to an invitation delivered to the cellar flat of his villa in the ruins during the spring of ’55. The lilacs were in bloom in the villa’s overgrown garden; the evening wind blew mosquitoes from the nearby lake to the open window.

  The telegram was signed by a man named Hans Werner Richter. It requested the young poet in a reticent telegraphic style to present himself at Rupenhorn House, on another, larger lake, the Wannsee, where the literary coterie Group 47 met at his invitation. It ended with a terse command: ‘Bring poems.’