by Günter Grass
The trip from Stolp to Stettin took two days. There were frequent involuntary stops, to be sure, and more visits, which were slowly becoming a habit, from teenagers armed with paratroopers' knives and tommy guns, but the visits grew shorter and shorter, since there was almost nothing left to take from those on board.
My patient claims that during the trip from Danzig-Gdańsk to Stettin, within a single week, he grew three and a half to four inches. His upper and lower legs stretched out, while his chest and head barely changed. On the other hand, though my patient lay on his back throughout the trip, he could not prevent the growth of a hump, rather high up and slightly displaced to the left. Herr Matzerath also admits that beyond Stettin—German railway staff had taken over the convoy in the meantime—the pain increased and could no longer be forgotten by simply leafing through the family photo album. He screamed aloud and at length on several occasions, but did not damage any train station windows with his screams—Matzerath: My voice had lost its glass-slaying power—but his screams did summon up the four nuns, who gathered about his resting place and remained in a state of constant prayer.
A good half of his fellow travelers, among them the Social Democrat's family along with Fräulein Regina, left the convoy in Schwerin. Herr Matzerath was sorry to see them go, for the sight of the girl had become so familiar and necessary to him that once she was gone, he was overcome by violent, convulsive fits accompanied by a high fever that left him shaken. According to Frau Maria Matzerath, he cried out desperately for someone named Luzie, called himself a mythical beast, a unicorn, and seemed frightened of falling, wanted to fall, from a ten-meter diving board.
In Lüneberg Herr Oskar Matzerath was taken to a hospital. There he made the acquaintance of a few nurses in his fevered state, but was soon transferred to the university clinic in Hanover. There they managed to lower his fever. Herr Matzerath saw Frau Maria and her son Kurt only rarely, and not on a daily basis until she found a job as a cleaning lady at the clinic. Since there was no place for Frau Maria and little Kurt to stay at the clinic, or even in the neighborhood, and because life in the refugee camp was becoming increasingly unbearable—Frau Maria had to travel three hours a day in overcrowded trains to reach the clinic, often standing on the running board—the doctors agreed, in spite of grave misgivings, to transfer the patient to City Hospital in Düsseldorf, especially since Frau Maria could produce a residence permit: her sister Guste, who had married a headwaiter living there during the war, had made one room of her two-and-a-half-room apartment available to Frau Matzerath, since the headwaiter wasn't taking up any space; he was currently in a Russian prison.
The flat was conveniently located. City Hospital could be easily reached without having to change lines on any of the trams leaving Bilk Railway Station in the direction of Wersten or Benrath.
Herr Matzerath remained hospitalized there from August nineteen forty-five till May of forty-six. For over an hour now he's been telling me about several nurses at once. Their names are Sister Monika, Sister Helmtrud, Sister Walburga, Sister Ilse, and Sister Gertrud. He recounts long snatches of hospital gossip from memory and seems obsessed by the minor details of the nurses' daily lives and their uniforms. Not a word about the hospital food, which if I remember correctly was terrible in those days, or the poorly heated rooms. Just nurses, nurses, and the extremely boring social life of nurses. Someone whispered something in strictest confidence, Sister Ilse mentioned it to the head nurse, the head nurse had the nerve to search the quarters of the nurses in training just after lunch hour, something had indeed been stolen, and a nurse from Dortmund—Gertrud, I think he said—was unfairly accused. Then he tells long-winded tales of young doctors who want only one thing from the nurses—cigarette stamps. An inquiry into an abortion that some lab assistant, not a nurse, supposedly gave herself, or attempted with the help of an intern, strikes him as worth retelling. It's beyond me how my patient can waste his intellect on such trivialities.
Herr Matzerath has just asked me to describe him. I'm happy to oblige, and to skip over a number of those stories which, because they deal with nurses, he paints with a broad brush and embellishes with fancy phrases.
My patient measures one meter and twenty-one centimeters, or just under four feet tall. He carries his head, which would be too large even for someone of normal stature, between his shoulders on a nearly atrophied neck; his chest and back, which can only be termed hunched, protrude noticeably. He gazes forth from brilliant, at times ecstatically widened blue eyes alive with intelligence. His dark brown hair is thick and slightly wavy. He likes to display his arms, which are powerful in comparison to the rest of his body, and his hands, which he himself describes as beautiful. Especially when Herr Oskar drums—which the administration allows him to do three to four hours daily—his fingers seem to take on a life of their own, to belong to another, more successfully formed body. Herr Matzerath has grown rich through his recordings and still earns money from them. Interesting people seek him out on Visitors Day. Even before his trial was under way, before he was sent here, I knew his name, for Herr Oskar Matzerath is a prominent artist. Personally, I believe he is innocent, so I'm not sure whether he will remain with us or be released and resume his successful career. Now he wants me to measure him, although I just did so two days ago.
Without bothering to read over what my keeper Bruno has written, I, Oskar, now take up my pen.
Bruno has just measured me with his rule. He held it up to me, then left the room proclaiming the result aloud. He even dropped the knotwork he was secretly fashioning as I was telling my story. I assume he's calling Fräulein Dr. Hornstetter.
Yet before the doctor comes and confirms Bruno's measurements, Oskar can tell you himself: Over the course of the three days in which I told my keeper the story of my growth, I gained—dare we call it a gain?—a good two centimeters in height, or almost an inch.
As of today, then, Oskar is almost four foot one. He will now relate how he fared after the war, when he was released from City Hospital in Düsseldorf as a deformed yet otherwise relatively healthy young man who could speak easily, write slowly, and read fluently, to begin—as one always assumes upon being released from a hospital—a new and now grownup life.
BOOK THREE
Flintstones and Gravestones
Fat, sleepy, good-natured: there was no need for Guste Truczinski to change when she became Guste Köster, especially since Köster had only been able to work on her during their two-week engagement, shortly before he was shipped off to the Arctic Front, and for a few nights later on, spent mostly in air-raid shelter beds, when he was home on leave and they'd married. Though there was no word on Köster's whereabouts following the army's surrender in Courland, Guste, when asked about her husband, would reply with assurance and a jerk of her thumb toward the kitchen door, "Ivan's got him locked up over there. There'll be some changes round here once he's back."
The changes in store for the Bilk apartment upon Köster's return involved Maria as well as little Kurt. Having been released from the hospital, after taking my leave of the nurses and promising to visit whenever I got the chance, I boarded the tram toward Bilk, the sisters, and my son Kurt, where I found, on the second floor of an apartment house burned out from the third floor to the roof, a black-market headquarters run by Maria and my son, six years old and counting on his fingers.
Maria, still true to Matzerath even on the black market, was dealing in synthetic honey. She poured from unlabeled pails, slapped the stuff on the kitchen scales, and put me to work—barely arrived and still getting used to the cramped conditions—making up quarter-pound cartons.
Little Kurt sat behind a Persil crate as if it were a counter, looked up, it's true, at his homecoming father, but trained his always somewhat wintry gray eyes on some item of interest that could evidently be seen directly through me. He held a sheet of paper before him on which he was arranging imaginary columns of numbers, and after a scant six weeks of schooling in overcrowded and poorly h
eated classrooms, had the look of a brooder and a go-getter.
Guste Köster was drinking coffee. Real coffee, Oskar noted when she pushed a cup over to me. While I dealt with the honey, she regarded my hump with curiosity and no small sympathy for her sister Maria. It was all she could do to stay seated and not stroke my hump, for all women think stroking a hump brings good luck, and good luck in Guste's case meant the return of Köster, who would change everything. She held back, stroked her coffee cup instead, but with no luck, and let out a loud sigh I was to hear daily over the coming months: "You can bet your life on it, when Köster gets home there'll be some changes round here, quick as a wink!"
Guste condemned black-market activities, but was happy enough to drink the real coffee provided by synthetic honey. When customers came she left the living room and shuffled off into the kitchen, where she banged about loudly in protest.
There were plenty of customers. The bell would start ringing at just past nine, right after breakfast: short—long—short. Late in the evening, around ten o'clock, often over the objections of little Kurt, who had to miss half the business day because of school, Guste would switch off the bell.
"Any synthetic honey?" people asked. Maria nodded gently and replied, "Quarter or half pound?" But there were some who didn't want honey. They would ask, "Any flintstones?" Upon which little Kurt, whose school alternated between mornings and afternoons, would emerge from his columns of numbers, reach for the little cloth sack under his sweater, and call out figures into the living room air with a brightly demanding little boy's voice: "Would you like three, or four? Better take five. They'll be up to twenty-four soon. They were eighteen last week, this morning I had to ask twenty, and if you'd come two hours ago, right after school, I could have said twenty-one"
Little Kurt was the only dealer in flintstones in a four-by-six street area. He had a source, one he never revealed but mentioned constantly, even before he went to bed, saying in place of a nightly prayer, "I've got a source!"
As a father, I was determined to assert my right to know my son's source. So when he announced, self-confidently and without the slightest air of mystery, "I have a source!" my question quickly followed: "Where do you get those flints? Tell me right now where you get them!"
Maria's standard response in the months I was trying to learn his source was: "Leave the boy alone, Oskar. First of all it's none of your business, second I'll do the asking if need be, and third don't be acting like you're his father. A few months ago you couldn't even say boo!"
When I wouldn't stop, and pursued little Kurt's source too stubbornly, Maria would slap her hand down on a pail of honey and get so riled up she'd attack both me and Guste, who occasionally backed me up in my search for a source: "A fine lot you are! Trying to ruin the boy's business. Biting the hand that feeds you. When I think of the dab of extra calories Oskar gets on sick relief, then wolfs down in two days, it makes me sick, but I have to laugh!"
Oskar has to admit: I was blessed with a good appetite, and it was thanks to little Kurt's source, which brought in more than the honey did, that Oskar regained his strength after the meager fare at the hospital.
So the father was reduced to shamefaced silence, and with a decent allowance provided by little Kurt's childish benevolence, absented himself from the apartment in Bilk as often as possible, so as not to confront his disgrace.
All sorts of well-placed critics of the German Economic Miracle are waxing nostalgic these days, and the less they remember what things were really like back then, the more enthusiastic they are: "Ah, those were the days, before the currency reform! There was always something happening. People's stomachs were empty, but they still lined up for theater tickets. And those spur-of-the-moment parties with potato schnapps were just marvelous, so much more fun than parties today, with all that champagne and Dujardin."
So speak the romantics of lost opportunities. I could easily sound the same lament, in fact, for in the years when little Kurt's flintstone source was still bubbling, I educated myself at almost no cost in the company of thousands determined to learn, to make up for the education they'd missed, took courses in night school, was a regular visitor at the British Center, called Die Brücke, or The Bridge, discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants, shared that guilt with all who thought: Let's get it over with now, be done with it, and later, when things get better, there'll be no need to feel guilty.
At any rate, I am indebted to night school for what education I received, which was indeed modest, though generous in its gaps. I read a great deal in those days. The readings that, prior to my growth, led me to simply divide the world evenly between Rasputin and Goethe, and the knowledge I gained from Köhler's Naval Calendar from ought-four to sixteen, no longer sufficed. Not that I remember what I read. I read on the toilet. I read while standing in line for hours for theater tickets, squeezed between young women with Mozart pigtails who were also reading. I read while little Kurt sold flintstones, read while I packed synthetic honey. And when the power was interrupted, I read by the light of tallow candles; thanks to little Kurt's source, we had a few.
I'm ashamed to say that what I read in those years did not stick with me but passed through me instead. A few phrases, some blurbs, remain. And the theater? Names of actors: Hoppe, Peter Esser, Flickenschildt with her special way of pronouncing r's, drama students trying to improve on Flickenschildt's r on studio stages, Gründgens all in black as Tasso, removing the laurel wreath called for by Goethe because the greenery supposedly seared his locks, and the same Gründgens all in black as Hamlet. And Flickenschildt claiming Hamlet was fat. And Yorick's skull made an impression on me because of some very impressive things Gründgens had to say about it. Draußen vor der Tür played before a shaken audience in an unheated theater, and I imagined Beckmann, the Man Outside with his broken glasses, as Guste's husband, Köster, coming home to make some changes and stop up the source of my son Kurt's flintstones forever.
Today, with all that behind me, and knowing that a postwar binge is just a binge, and that the hair of the dog that barks up the wrong tree, reducing to history that which but yesterday was fresh and bloody deed or misdeed, offers no cure at all for the hangover, today I praise the lessons I received from Gretchen Scheffler amid Strength through Joy souvenirs and her own knitting: not too much Rasputin, Goethe in moderation, key phrases from Keyser's History of the City of Danzig, the armaments of a battleship long since sunk, the speed in knots of all the Japanese tor pedo boats that took part in the Battle of Tsushima, as well as Belisarius and Narses, Totila and Teja, Felix Dahn's Struggle for Rome.
In the spring of forty-seven I gave up night school, the British Centre, and Pastor Niemöller, and took my leave, from the second balcony, of Gustaf Gründgens, who was still on the program as Hamlet.
Not two years had passed since I'd stood beside Matzerath's grave and resolved to grow, and already I'd lost interest in grownup life. I longed for the lost proportions of a three-year-old. I had an unshakable desire to be three foot one again, smaller than my friend Bebra, than the dearly departed Roswitha. Oskar missed his drum. He took long walks that ended near City Hospital. Since he had to see Professor Irdell once a month anyway, who referred to him as an interesting case, he paid repeated visits to the nurses he knew, and even when they had no time for him, just being around all that white cloth in a hurry, promising recovery or death, made him feel good, almost happy.
The nurses liked me, played childish but not malicious games with my hump, gave me good things to eat, and let me in on their endless, convoluted, pleasantly soporific stories about the hospital. I listened, gave advice, even served as a go-between in smaller disputes, since I enjoyed the sympathy of the head nurse. Among twenty to thirty young women camouflaged in nurse's uniforms, I was the only male, and in some strange way an object of desire.
As Bruno has already said, Oskar has beautiful, expressive hands, fine wavy hair, and—amply blue—those ever so winning Bronski eyes. Perhaps my hump a
nd the narrow, vaulted chest that starts just under my chin accentuated the beauty of my hands, eyes, and pleasing head of hair, at any rate often enough when I was sitting in the nurses' ward they would take my hands in theirs, play with my fingers, and fondle my hair, then say to one another as they left, "When you look into his eyes, you could just forget all the rest."
So I could rise above my hump and would certainly have resolved to make a conquest or two at the hospital had I still been in command of my drum back then, and sure of my well-tested potency as a drummer. Shamefaced, uncertain, not trusting the contingent impulses of my body, I would depart the hospital after such tender foreplay, having avoided any frontal assault, and unburden myself, wandering through the garden or along the wire fence surrounding the hospital grounds, which, with its finely meshed geometric pattern, awakened in me a mood of serenity that set me whistling. I watched the trams heading for Wersten or Benrath, strolled in pleasant boredom along the walks near the bicycle paths, and smiled at Nature's efforts to play Spring and make buds burst like tiny firecrackers right on time.
