by Günter Grass
When the east wind turned the helmet on the brewery chimney and rolled black smoke over the chestnut trees, across Aktien Pond, the icehouse, and Indian Village in the direction of the airfield, a sour smell came down: surface-fermented yeast out of copper kettles: Bock Pils Malt Barley March-Beer Urquell. Not to mention the waste. Despite persistent claims that it drained somewhere else, the discharge from Aktien Brewery mixed with the pond, turned it sour and fetid. Accordingly, when we drank Tulla’s leech soup, we drank a bitter beer soup. Anyone who trampled a toad was ipso facto opening a bottle of bock beer. When one of the tobacco ruminants threw me a hand-size roach and I cleaned the roach beside the swan house, the liver, the milt, and the rest were overdone malt candy. And when I browned it over a crackling little fire, it rose for Jenny like yeast dough, bubbled, and tasted—I had stuffed it full of fresh dill—like last year’s pickling fluid. Jenny ate little of the fish.
But when the wind came from the airfield and blew the vapors of the pond and the smoke from the brewery chimney against Kleinhammerpark and the Langfuhr railroad station, Jenny stood up, withdrew her gaze from the ice-filled tar-paper cube, and described numbered steps in the dill. Light to begin with, she weighed only half as much when she balleyed. With a little leap and a graceful curtsy she concluded her act, and I had to applaud as in the theater. Occasionally I gave her a nosegay of dill, having drawn the stems through a rubber beer-bottle washer. These never-fading, ever-red flowers floated by the hundreds on Aktien Pond, formed islands, and were collected: Between the Polish campaign and the taking of the island of Crete, I accumulated over two thousand beer-bottle washers, and felt rich as I counted them. Once I made Jenny a chain out of rubber washers. She wore it like a real necklace, and I was embarrassed for her: “You don’t have to wear those things on the street, only by the pond or at home.”
But to Jenny the necklace was not without value: “I’m fond of it, because you made it. It seems so personal, you know.”
The necklace wasn’t bad-looking. Actually I had strung it for Tulla. But Tulla would have thrown it away. When Jenny danced in the dill, the necklace actually looked very nice. After the dance she always said: “But now I’m tired,” and looked past the icehouse: “I still have homework to do. And tomorrow we rehearse and the day after tomorrow too.”
With the icehouse behind me I made a try: “Have you heard any more from the ballet master in Berlin?”
Jenny supplied information: “Not long ago Herr Haseloff wrote us a postcard from Paris. He says I have to exercise my instep.”
I burrowed: “What does this Haseloff look like?”
Jenny’s indulgent reproach: “But you’ve asked me that a dozen times. He’s very slim and elegant. He’s always smoking long cigarettes. He never laughs or at most with his eyes.”
I systematically repeated myself: “But when he does laugh with his mouth for a change and when he speaks?”
Jenny came out with it: “It looks funny but also a little spooky, because when he talks, he has a mouth full of gold teeth.”
I: “Real gold?”
Jenny: “I don’t know.”
I: “Ask him sometime.”
Jenny: “I wouldn’t like to do that. Maybe they’re not real gold.”
I: “After all your necklace is only made out of beer-bottle washers.”
Jenny: “All right, then I’ll write and ask him.”
I: “Tonight?”
Jenny: “Tonight I’ll be too tired.”
I: “Then tomorrow.”
Jenny: “But how should I put it?”
I dictated: “Just write: Herr Haseloff, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. Are your teeth real gold? Did you have different teeth before? And if so, what became of them?”
Jenny wrote the letter and Herr Haseloff answered by return mail that the gold was genuine, that he had formerly had white teeth, thirty-two of them; that he had thrown them behind him into the bushes and had bought himself new ones, gold ones; that they had been more expensive than thirty-two pair of ballet slippers.
I said to Jenny: “Now count how many bottle washers there are in your necklace.”
Jenny counted and didn’t understand: “What a coincidence, exactly thirty-two.”
Dear Tulla,
it was inevitable that you should come around again with your scratched-up legs.
At the end of September—the dill went to seed and turned yellow, and the choppy waves of Aktien Pond made a soapy wreath of foam along the shore—at the end of September came Tulla.
Indian Village spat her out, and seven or eight boys. One was smoking a pipe. He stood behind Tulla, using her for a windbreak, and handed her the boiler. Speechlessly she smoked. Slowly, by a calculated detour, they approached, stood looking in the air, looked past us, turned back and were gone: behind the fences and whitewashed cottages of Indian Village.
And once toward evening—we had the sun behind us, the helmet of the brewery chimney sat on the bleeding head of a bleeding knight—they appeared to one side of the icehouse and came goose-stepping through the nettles along the front tar-paper wall. In the dill they spread out, Tulla handed the pipe to the left and said to the gnats: “They’ve forgotten to close up. Wouldn’t you like to go in, Jenny, and see what it’s like?”
Jenny was so friendly and always polite: “Oh no, it’s late and I’m rather tired. We have English tomorrow, you know, and I have to be rested for my dancing lesson.”
Tulla had the pipe again: “O.K., if you don’t want to. Then we’ll go tell the caretaker to lock up.”
But Jenny was already on her feet and I had to stand up: “You can’t go, Jenny, it’s out of the question. Anyway, you’re tired, you just said so.” Jenny wasn’t tired any more and wanted to look in just for a second: “It’s very interesting in there, please, Harry.”
I stuck by her side and got into the nettles. Tulla in the lead, the others behind us. Tulla’s thumb pointed at the tar-paper door: it was open just a crack and scarcely breathed. Then I had to say: “But I won’t let you go alone.” And Jenny, slender in the door jamb, said ever so politely: “That’s awfully nice of you, Harry.”
Who else but Tulla
pushed me through the doorway behind Jenny. And I had forgotten to disarm you and the boys outside with a crossyourheartandhopetodie. As the breath of the icehouse took us in tow—Jenny’s little finger hooked itself into my little finger—as icy lungs drew us in, I knew: now Tulla, alone or with that young thug, is going to the caretaker and getting the key, or she’s getting the caretaker with the key: and the gang are palavering in nine voices so the caretaker won’t hear us while he’s locking up.
For that reason or because Jenny had me by the finger, I didn’t succeed in calling for help. She led me surefootedly through the black crackling windpipe. From all sides, from the top and bottom too, breath made us light until there was no ground under our feet. We passed over trestles and stairways that were marked with red position lights. And Jenny said in a perfectly normal voice: “Watch out, please, Harry: we’ll be going downstairs now, twelve steps.”
But hard as I tried to find ground from step to step, I sank, breathed in by a suction coming from below. And when Jenny said: “Now we’re in the first basement, we’ve got to keep to the left, that’s where the entrance to the second basement is supposed to be,” I would gladly, though busy with a skin itch, have stayed in the first basement. That was the nettles from before; but what was beating down on my skin was the breath coming from all sides. And every direction creaked, no, crackled, no, crunched: piled blocks, complete sets of teeth rubbed against each other till the enamel splintered, and the breath of iron was yeasty stale stomach-sour furry clammy. The barest touch of tar paper. Yeast rose. Vinegar evaporated. Mushrooms sprouted. “Careful, a step,” said Jenny. In whose malt-bitter maw? The second basement of what hell had left pickles uncovered to spoil? What devil had stoked the furnace to subzero?
I wanted to scream and whispered:
“They’ll lock us in if we don’t…”
But Jenny was still her methodical self: “They always lock up at seven.”
“Where are we?”
“Now we’re in the second basement. Some of these blocks are many years old.”
My hand wanted to know exactly: “How many years?” and reached out to the left, looked for resistance, found it, and stuck fast on prehistoric giant’s teeth: “I’m stuck, Jenny! I’m stuck!”
Then Jenny rests her hand on my sticking hand: instantly I am able to remove my fingers from the giant tooth, but I keep hold of Jenny’s arm, arm lovely from dancing, arm that can lie and sleep on air, the other one too. And both rubbed hot by breath in blocks. In the armpits: August. Jenny titters: “You mustn’t tickle me, Harry.”
But I just want “to hold tight, Jenny.”
She lets me and is again “a little tired, Harry.”
I don’t think “there’s a bench here, Jenny.”
She is not of little faith: “Why shouldn’t there be a bench here, Harry?” And because she says so, there is one, an iron bench. But because Jenny sits down, the iron bench turns, the longer she sits on it, into a cozy well-worn wooden bench. Now Jenny, precociously motherly, says to me in the second basement of the icehouse: “You mustn’t shiver any more, Harry. You know, once I was hidden inside a snow man. And I learned a great deal in there. So if you can’t stop shivering, you must hold me tight. And then if you’re still cold, because you weren’t ever in a snow man, you must kiss me, that helps, you know. I could give you my dress too, I don’t need it, I’m positive. You mustn’t be embarrassed. We’re all alone. And I’m perfectly at home here. You can throw it around your neck like a muffler. Later on I’ll sleep a little, because I have to go to Madame Lara’s tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow I have to practice again. Besides, I really am a little tired, you know.”
And so we sat through the night on the iron wooden bench. I held Jenny tight. Her dry lips were tasteless. I threw her cotton dress—if I only knew whether it had dots, stripes, or checks—I threw her short-sleeve summer dress over my shoulders and around my neck. Dressless but in her slip, she lay in my arms, which didn’t tire, because Jenny was light even when she slept. I didn’t sleep, for fear she’d slip away from me. For I’d never been inside a snow man, and without her dry lips, without her cotton dress, without her weightless weight in my arms, without Jenny, I’d have been lost. Surrounded by crackling, sighing, and crunching, in the breath of the ice blocks, breathed on breathed in: the ice would have held me in its clutches to this day.
But as it was, we lived to see the next day. The morning rumbled in the basement above us. That was the icemen in the leather aprons. Jenny in her dress wanted to know: “Did you sleep a little too?”
“Of course not. Somebody had to be on the lookout.”
“Imagine, I dreamt my instep had improved and in the end I was able to do the thirty-two fouettés: and Herr Haseloff laughed.”
“With his gold teeth?”
“Every single one of them, while I turned and turned.”
Without difficulty, amid whispering and interpretation of dreams, we made our way to the first basement and then up some more steps. The red position lights showed the path between piled ice blocks to the exit, the rectangular light. But Jenny held me back. We mustn’t let anybody see us, because “If they catch us,” said Jenny, “they’ll never let us in again.”
When the glaring rectangle disclosed no more men in leather aprons, when the hefty Belgian horses pulled up and the ice truck rolled away on rubber tires, we dashed through the door before the next ice truck drove up. The sun slanted down from chestnut trees. We slipped along tar-paper walls. Everything smelled different from the day before. My legs were in the nettles again. On Kleinhammerweg, while Jenny was saying her irregular English verbs, I began to dread the carpenter’s hand waiting for me at home.
You know,
that night we spent in the icehouse had several consequences: I got a licking; the police, notified by Dr. Brumes, asked questions; we had grown older and left Aktien Pond with its smells to the twelve-year-olds. I got rid of my collection of bottle washers the next time the junkman came around. Whether Jenny stopped wearing her bottle-washer necklace, I don’t know: We elaborately went out of each other’s way. Jenny blushed when we couldn’t avoid each other on Elsenstrasse; and I went red in the face every time Tulla met me on the stairs or in our kitchen, when she came in for salt or to borrow a saucepan.
Is your memory any good?
There are at least five months, with Christmas in the middle, that I can’t piece together. During this period, in the gap between the French campaign and the Balkan campaign, more and more of our workmen were drafted and later, when the war had started in the East, replaced by Ukrainian helpers and one French carpenter. Wischnewski fell in Greece; Arthur Kuleise, another of our carpenters, fell right in the beginning at Lemberg; and then my cousin, Tulla’s brother Alexander Pokriefke, fell—that is, he didn’t fall, he was drowned in a submarine: the battle of the Atlantic had started. Not only the Pokriefkes, but the master carpenter and his wife as well, each wore crape. I too wore crape and was very proud of it. Whenever anyone asked me why I was in mourning, I said: “A cousin of mine, who was very close to me, was on duty in the Caribbean Sea in a submarine and he didn’t come home.” Actually I hardly knew Alexander Pokriefke, and the Caribbean Sea was hokum too.
Did something else happen?
My father received big orders. His shop was turning out nothing but doors and windows for Navy barracks in Putzig. Suddenly and for no apparent reason he began to drink, and once, on a Sunday morning, beat my mother because she was standing where he wanted to stand. But he never neglected his work and went on smoking his seconds, which he obtained on the black market in exchange for door frames.
What else happened?
They made your father a cell leader. August Pokriefke threw himself body and soul into his Party claptrap. He got a certificate of disability from a Party doctor—the usual knee injury—and decided to give indoctrination lectures in our machine shop. But my father wouldn’t allow it. Old family quarrels were dug up. Something about two acres of pasture land left by my grandparents in Osterwick. My mother’s dowry was itemized on fingers. My father argued to the contrary that he was paying for Tulla’s schooling. August Pokriefke pounded the table: the Party would advance the money for Tulla’s school, you bet they will! And he, August Pokriefke, would deliver his indoctrination lectures come hell and high water, after hours if necessary.
And where were you that summer?
Off in Brösen with the thirds. If anyone went looking for you, he found you on the hulk of a Polish mine sweeper, which lay on the bottom not far from the harbor mouth. The thirds dived down into the mine sweeper and brought stuff up. I was a poor swimmer and never dared to open my eyes under water. Consequently I went looking for you in other places and never on the barge. Besides, I had Jenny; and you always wanted the same old thing: a baby. Did they make you one on the mine sweeper?
You showed no sign of it. Or the kids in Indian Village? They left you no reminders. The two Ukrainians in our shop with their perpetually frightened potato faces? Neither of them took you into the shed, and nevertheless my father was always grilling them. And August Pokriefke knocked one of them, Kleba was his name, cold with a spirit level between finishing machine and lathe, because he was always begging for bread. Whereupon my father threw your father out of the shop. Your father threatened to put in a report; but it was my father, who enjoyed a certain standing with the Chamber of Commerce and with the Party as well, who did the reporting. A court of honor of sorts was held. August Pokriefke and master carpenter Liebenau were instructed to make up; the Ukrainians were exchanged for two other Ukrainians—there were plenty of them—and the first two, so we heard, were sent to Stutthof.
Stutthof: on your account!
That little word took on more and more meaning. “Hey, you!
You got a yen for Stutthof?”—“If you don’t keep that trap of yours shut, you’ll end up in Stutthof.” A sinister word had moved into apartment houses, went upstairs and downstairs, sat at kitchen tables, was supposed to be a joke, and some actually laughed: “They’re making soap in Stutthof now, it makes you want to stop washing.”
You and I were never in Stutthof.
Tulla didn’t even know Nickelswalde; a Hitler Cub camp took me to Steegen; but Herr Brauxel, who pays me my advances and calls my letters to Tulla important, is familiar with the region between the Vistula and Frisches Haff. In his day Stutthof was a rich village, larger than Schiewenhorst and Nickelswalde and smaller than Neuteich, the county seat. Stutthof had 2698 inhabitants. They made money when soon after the outbreak of the war a concentration camp was built near the village and had to be enlarged again and again. Railroad tracks were even laid in the camp. The tracks connected with the Island narrow-gauge railway from Danzig-Niederstadt. Everybody knew that, and those who have forgotten may as well remember: Stutthof: Danzig-Lowlands County, Reich Province of Danzig-West Prussia, judicial District of Danzig, known for its fine timber-frame church, popular as a quiet seaside resort, an early German settlement. In the fourteenth century the Teutonic Knights drained the flats; in the sixteenth century hard-working Mennonites moved in from Holland; in the seventeenth century the Swedes several times pillaged the Island; in 1813 Napoleon’s retreat route ran straight across the flats; and between 1939 and 1945, in Stutthof Concentration Camp, Danzig-Lowlands County, people died, I don’t know how many.
