by Günter Grass
I don’t believe it was I who finally said: “It’s true that Dr. Brunies dipped into the Cebion tablets, three or at the very most four times. But we couldn’t begrudge him his little pleasure. We knew he was fond of sweets, always had been.”
During the questioning and answering I noticed how absurdly and helplessly Dr. Brunies was rummaging left right left through his coat pockets. In so doing he moistened his lips excitedly. The man in civilian clothes ignored this rummaging through pockets and licking of lips. First he spoke, beside the tall window, with Dr. Klohse, then he motioned Tulla over to the window: she was wearing a black pleated skirt. If Brunies had only had his pipe; but he had left it in his overcoat. The plain-clothes man whispered obscenely in Tulla’s ear. The soles of my feet burned on the soft carpet. Dr. Brunies’ restless hands and the perpetual motion of his tongue. Now Tulla is taking steps in her black pleated skirt. The goods rustles until she comes to a stop. With both hands she takes hold of a brown apothecary jar half full of Cebion tablets. She lifts it down from the shelf and no one stops her. Around the unoccupied green conference table she moves, step by step, in her pleated skirt, her eyes small and narrowed. All look after her and Brunies sees her coming. She stops an arm’s length from Dr. Brunies, draws the jar to her bosom, holds it with her left hand, and with her right hand removes the glass cover. Brunies wipes his hands dry on his jacket. She puts the glass cover down to one side: the sunlight strikes it on the green felt of the conference table. Dr. Brunies’ tongue has stopped moving but is still between his lips. Again she holds the jar with both hands, lifts it higher, stands on tiptoes in her pleated skirt. Tulla says: “Won’t you have some, Dr. Brunies?”
Brunies offered no resistance. He did not hide his hands in his pockets. He did not avert his head and his mouth full of brown tooth stumps. No one heard: “What is the meaning of this nonsense?” Dr. Brunies grabbed, he hastily put his whole hand in. When his three fingers emerged from the jar, they raised six or seven Cebion tablets; two fell back into the jar; one dropped on the light-brown plush carpet and rolled under the conference table; what he had managed to keep between his fingers he stuffed into his mouth. But then he felt badly about the one Cebion tablet that had been lost under the table. He went down on his knees. In front of us, the principal, the man in civilian clothes, and Tulla, he went down on both knees, searched with groping hands beside and under the table; he would have found the tablet and raised it to his sweets-craving mouth, if they hadn’t interfered: the principal and the man in civilian clothes. To right and left they picked him up by the arms and set him on his feet. A second opened the oiled door. “Good gracious, Herr Colleague!” said Dr. Klohse. “Really!” Tulla bent down to pick up the tablet under the conference table.
Later we were questioned once again. One after another, we entered the conference room. The business with the Cebion tablets hadn’t proved sufficient. The seconds had written down some of Dr. Brunies’ utterances. They sounded subversive and negative. All of a sudden everybody said: He was a Freemason. Though none of us knew what a Freemason was. I hung back, as my father had advised me to do. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about Dr. Brunies’ perpetually ungarnished flagpole, but after all he was our neighbor, and everyone saw that he never put out a flag when everybody was putting out flags. The man in civilian clothes knew all about it and nodded impatiently when I said: “Well, for instance on the Führer’s birthday, when they all put out flags, Dr. Brunies never hangs out a flag, though he owns one.” Jenny’s foster father was placed under arrest. I heard that they let him return home for a few days and then took him away for good. Felsner-Imbs the pianist, who came to the apartment in the Aktienhaus every day and looked after Jenny, said to my father: “Now they’ve taken the old gentleman to Stutthof. If only he lives through it!”
The Pokriefkes and the Liebenaus,
your family and mine, put off their mourning because your brother Alexander had been dead for a full year; Jenny had her clothes dyed. Once a week a social worker visited the house across the street; Jenny received her in black. At first we heard that Jenny was going to be sent to a welfare home; the Brunies apartment was being vacated. But black-clad Jenny found people to intercede for her. Felsner-Imbs wrote letters; the principal of the Gudrun School put in a petition; the manager of the Stadttheater appealed to the gauleiter’s office; and Madame Lara Bock-Fedorova had connections. And so Jenny, though in black, kept on going to school, to ballet classes and rehearsals, wearing a soft black tam and a black coat that was too big for her, advancing step by step in black cotton stockings. But in the street her face showed no sign of tears. A trifle pale, but that may have been the effect of her black clothing, rigid from the waist up, her shoes turned outward as befits a ballet dancer, she carried her school satchel—which was brown, of artificial leather—to school and her leek-green, dawn-red, and air-blue gym bags, dyed black, to Oliva or to the theater, and returned punctually and pigeon-toed, more well behaved than rebellious, to Elsenstrasse.
Yet there were voices that interpreted Jenny’s daily black as a rebellious color: in those days you were allowed to wear mourning only if you could produce a stamped and certified reason. You were allowed to mourn for fallen sons and deceased grandmothers; but the terse notification of the Danzig-Neugarten police that it had been necessary to place Dr. Oswald Brunies under arrest for unseemly conduct and crimes against the national welfare, was not a document acceptable to the rationing office; for there alone, in the clothing section, were purchase permits for mourning garments obtainable.
“What’s the matter with her? He’s still alive, isn’t he? An old man like him, they wouldn’t. She’s certainly not helping him any, on the contrary. Somebody ought to tell her she’s not doing any good, only making a spectacle of herself.”
The neighbors and the social worker spoke to Felsner-Imbs. The pianist tried to persuade Jenny to stop wearing her mourning. He said it wasn’t the externals that counted. If there was mourning in her heart, that was quite sufficient. His grief was hardly less, for he had lost a friend, his only friend.
But Jenny Brunies stuck to her external black and continued to wear it in accusation all over Langfuhr and on Elsenstrasse. Once at the car stop of the Number 2 to Oliva I spoke to her. Of course she turned red, framed in black. If I had to paint her portrait from memory, she would have light-gray eyes, shadow-casting lashes, brown hair parted in the middle, flowing smooth and lusterless in two tired curves from her forehead down over her cheeks and ears, and plaited into a stiff pigtail behind. I would paint her long slender face ivory-pale, for her blush was an exception. A face made for mourning: Giselle in the cemetery scene. Her inconspicuous mouth spoke only when asked.
At the streetcar stop I said: “Must you wear mourning the whole time, Jenny? Why, Papa Brunies may be home again any minute.”
“My feeling is that he’s dead, even if they haven’t notified me.”
I cast about for a subject, because the car wasn’t coming: “Are you always home alone in the evening?”
“Herr Imbs often comes to see me. We sort out the stones and label them. He left lots of unsorted stones, you know.”
I wanted to shove off, but the car didn’t come: “I suppose you never go to the movies, or do you?”
“When Papa was still alive, we sometimes went to the Ufa-Palast on Sunday morning. He liked educational films best.”
I was more interested in the feature: “Wouldn’t you like to go to the movies with me sometime?”
Jenny’s car approached, straw-yellow: “I’d be glad to if you feel like it.” People in winter coats got out: “It wouldn’t have to be a funny picture, we could go to a serious one, couldn’t we?”
Jenny got in: “They’re playing Liberated Hands at the Filmpalast. Young people of sixteen and over are admitted.”
If Tulla had said:
“One in the orchestra,” the cashier would certainly have asked for Tulla’s identification; but we didn’t have to prov
e we were sixteen, because Jenny was in mourning. We kept our coats on, because the movie house was poorly heated. No acquaintances in sight. We didn’t have to talk, because they kept playing potpourris. Simultaneously the curtain purred up, a fanfare introduced the newsreel, and the lights went out. Only then did I put my arm around Jenny’s shoulder. It didn’t stay there long, because for at least thirty seconds heavy artillery shelled Leningrad. As an English bomber was downed by our fighter planes, Jenny didn’t want to see and buried her forehead in my overcoat. I let my arm wander again, but my eyes pursued the fighter planes, counted Rommel’s tanks advancing in Cyrenaica, followed the foaming track of a torpedo, I saw the tanker rocking in the sights, quivered when the torpedo struck, and transferred the flickering and quivering of the disintegrating tanker to Jenny. When the newsreel camera visited the Führer’s headquarters, I whispered: “Jenny, look, the Führer is coming on in a second, maybe he’ll have the dog with him.” We were both disappointed when only Keitel, Jodl, and somebody else were standing around him amid trees on gravel paths.
When the lights went on again, Jenny took her coat off, I didn’t. The educational film was about deer which have to be fed in the winter, because otherwise they would starve. Without her coat Jenny was even thinner. The deer were not shy. The pine trees in the mountains were laden with snow. In the movie house everybody’s clothes were black, not only Jenny’s mourning sweater.
Actually I wanted to during the educational film, but I didn’t until the feature had started. Liberated Hands wasn’t a crime thriller with shooting and handcuffing. The hands belonged to a sculptress, who was nuts about the sculptor who was her teacher, and her real name was Brigitte Horney. Just about every time she did it on the screen, I did it to Jenny in the movie house. She closed her eyes; I could see her. On the screen hands were always kneading lumps of clay into naked figures and frolicking foals. Jenny’s skin was cool and dry. She had her thighs pressed together and I was of the opinion she ought to relax. She complied at once but kept her eyes on the feature. Her hole was even smaller than Tulla’s; that’s what I’d what I’d wanted to know. When I inserted a second finger, Jenny turned her head away from the feature: “Please, Harry. You’re hurting me.” I stopped right away, but left my other arm with her. Horney’s sultry, brittle voice filled the sparsely attended movie house. Shortly before the end I smelled my fingers: they smelled like the unripe hazelnuts on our way to school: bitter soapy insipid.
On the way home I became impersonal. Along Bahnhofstrasse I chattered away to the effect that the feature had been tops but the newsreels were always the same old stuff; the thing with the deer had been pretty boring; and tomorrow back to that stupid school; surely it would all come out all right with Papa Brunies: “What do they say about it in Berlin? Have you written Haseloff all about it?” Jenny also thought the feature had been good; Horney was really a great artist; she too hoped it would come out all right with Papa Brunies, though she felt in her bones that he; but Herr Haseloff had written twice since then; he was coming soon to take her away: “He says Langfuhr isn’t the right place for me anymore. Herr Imbs thinks so too. Will you write me some times when I’m in Berlin with the ballet?”
Jenny’s information cheered me up. The prospect of soon having her and her mourning black far away from me inspired friendly words. I took her good-naturedly by the shoulder, made detours through dark side streets, stopped with her in February or March under blue blackout lamps, propelled her along to the next lamppost, pressed her against wrought-iron garden fences, and encouraged her to go to Berlin with Haseloff. Over and over again I promised to write not just now and then but regularly. In the end I commanded her to leave Langfuhr, for Jenny transferred the full responsibility to me: “If you don’t want me to leave you, I’ll stay with you; but if you think Herr Haseloff is right, I’ll go.”
I invoked someone who had been taken to Stutthof: “I’ll bet that if Papa Brunies were here, he’d say exactly the same as me: Off to Berlin with you! It’s the best thing that could happen to you.”
On Elsenstrasse Jenny thanked me for the movies. I kissed her again quickly dryly. Her concluding words as usual: “But now I’m a little tired and besides I have English to do for tomorrow.”
I was glad she didn’t ask me up to Dr. Brunies’ empty apartment. What could I have done with her amid crates full of assorted mica gneiss, amid uncleaned pipes, and with desires in my head that asked nothing of Jenny but a good deal of Tulla.
Dear Cousin,
then, shortly before Easter, snow fell. It soon melted away. At the same time you started carrying on with soldiers on furlough, but didn’t contract a child. Then shortly after Easter there was an air-raid alarm; but no bombs fell around our way. And early in May Haseloff came and took Jenny away.
He drove up in a black Mercedes with a chauffeur and got out: slender smooth strange. A much too spacious overcoat with strikingly large checks hung loosely over his shoulders. He rubbed white-gloved hands, inspected the front of the Aktienhaus, appraised our house, every floor: I, half behind the curtains, stepped back into the room to the edge of the carpet. My mother had called me to the window: “Say, would you take a look at him!”
I knew him. I was first to see him when he was still new. He threw me a tooth into the hazelnut bush. He went off in the train soon after being reborn. He began to smoke and still smokes—with white gloves. I have his tooth in my change purse. He went away with a sunken mouth. He comes back with a mug full of gold: for he’s laughing, he trots down Elsenstrasse a little way and back a little way, laughs, trots, and takes it all in. The houses on both sides, house numbers, odd and even, little strips of garden, pansies. Can’t look enough, and breaks into open laughter, showing all the windows Haseloff’s mouth full of gold. With thirty-two gold teeth he spits soundless laughter, as though in all this egg-shaped world there were no better reason for showing one’s teeth than our Elsenstrasse. But then Felsner-Imbs comes out of our house, respectfully. And then the curtain falls on too much gold on a sunny day in May. Foreshortened as seen from my curtain, the two men greet each other with four hands, as though celebrating a reunion. The chauffeur is stretching his legs beside the Mercedes and takes no interest. But all the windows are loges. The eternally sprouting younger generation form a circle around the reunion. I and the sparrows on the eaves understand: he’s back again, takes the pianist by the arm, breaks through the eternally sprouting circle, pushes the pianist into the Aktienhaus, respectfully holds the door open for him, and follows him without looking back.
Jenny had her two suitcases ready, for in less than half an hour she left the Aktienhaus with Felsner-Imbs and Haseloff. She left in mourning. She left with Angustri on her finger and without my bottle-washer necklace; it was in with her underwear in one of the two suitcases that Imbs and Haseloff handed to the chauffeur. The kids drew little men in the dust on the black Mercedes. Jenny stood undecided. The chauffeur took off his cap. Haseloff was about to push Jenny gently into the interior of the car. He had turned up his coat collar, he no longer showed Elsenstrasse his face, he was in a hurry. But Jenny didn’t want to get into the car just yet, she pointed at our curtains, and before Imbs and Haseloff could hold her back, she had vanished into our house.
To my mother, who always did what I wanted, I, behind curtains, said: “Don’t open if she rings. What on earth can she want?”
Four times the bell rang. Our bell wasn’t the kind you press, it was the kind you turn. Our turnbell didn’t just scream, it snarled four times, but my mother and I didn’t stir from our place behind the curtains.
What our bell repeated four times will stay in my ears.
“Now they’re gone,” said my mother; but I looked at the miniature chests of walnut, pearwood, and oak in our dining room.
The diminishing engine sound of a receding car has also stayed with me and will probably stay forever.
Dear Cousin Tulla,
a week later a letter came from Berlin; Jenny had
written it with her fountain pen. The letter made me as happy as if Tulla had written it with her own hand. But Tulla’s hand was writing to a sailor. I ran about with Jenny’s letter, telling everybody it was from my girl friend in Berlin, from Jenny Brunies or Jenny Angustri, as she now called herself, for Haseloff her ballet master and Madame Neroda, the managing director of the Strength-through-Joy Ballet, now the German Ballet, had advised her to take a stage name. Her ballet school had already started, and in addition they were rehearsing country dances to early German music which Madame Neroda, who was actually an Englishwoman, had unearthed. This Madame Neroda seemed to be an unusual woman. For instance: “When she goes out, to make calls or even to attend a formal reception, she wears an expensive fur coat but no dress under it, only her dancing tights. But she can afford to do such things. And she has a dog, a Scotty, with eyes exactly like hers. Some people think she’s a spy. But I don’t believe it and neither does my girl friend.”
