by Günter Grass
I, Oskar, left Sister Dorothea's chamber, cutting off the current to the forty-watt light bulb that had watched me throughout my visit.
Klepp
There I stood in the corridor, with a wad of pale blond hair in my wallet, trying for a second to feel the wad through the leather, through the lining of my jacket, vest, shirt, and undershirt. But I was too weary, and in that strangely morose way, too satisfied, to see anything more in the trophy I had stolen from her chamber than loose hair of the sort picked up by combs.
Only then did Oskar admit to himself that he'd sought quite different treasures. What I'd wanted to prove during my stay in Sister Dorothea's chamber was that this Dr. Werner must surely be in evidence there, if only through one of the envelopes I knew about. I found nothing. No envelope, let alone a page from a letter. Oskar admits that he pulled the crime novels down one by one from the hat compartment, opened them, looked for dedications and bookmarks, and also for a photo, for Oskar knew most of the doctors at St. Mary's Hospital by sight, though not by name—but there was no picture of Dr. Werner.
He seemed unfamiliar with Sister Dorothea's room, and if he'd ever seen it, he hadn't managed to leave any traces. So Oskar had every reason to be pleased. Wasn't I way ahead of Dr. Werner in that regard? And didn't the lack of any trace of the doctor prove that the relationship between doctor and nurse was confined to the hospital and thus purely professional, or if not professional, then at least unilateral in nature?
But Oskar's jealousy clamored for a motive. Though the slightest vestige of Dr. Werner would have been a blow to me, it would have provided an equally strong satisfaction with which the minor, short-lived outcome of my sojourn in the wardrobe could hardly compare.
I no longer recall how I made it back to my room, but I do remem ber hearing a forced cough meant to attract my attention coming from behind the door at the other end of the hall, where a certain Herr Münzer lived. What was this Herr Münzer to me? Didn't I have my hands full with the Hedgehog's female lodger? Why add Münzer to my burdens—who knew what the name might conceal? So Oskar ignored the cough's demand, or, more accurately: I didn't understand its import, didn't realize till I was in my room that this Herr Münzer, whom I neither knew nor cared about, had tried to lure me, Oskar, to his room by coughing.
Granted: for a long time I regretted not having reacted to the cough, for my room seemed so terribly cramped and yet so vast that a conversation with the coughing Herr Münzer, no matter how tedious and forced, would have come as a relief. But unable to summon up courage, belatedly, to establish contact with the gentleman at the other end of the hallway, perhaps by producing a cough of my own in the hall, I surrendered passively to the unyielding rectangle of the kitchen chair in my room, grew restless, as always when I sit on chairs, picked up a medical reference book from my bed, dropped the expensive tome, purchased with my hard-earned modeling money, leaving it crumpled and creased, picked up Raskolnikov's gift, my tin drum, from the table, held it, but could not ply the tin with my sticks, nor could Oskar find the tears that might have fallen on the round white lacquer and granted a relief without rhythm.
Here one might begin a tract on lost innocence, comparing the drumming, eternally three-year-old Oskar to the humpbacked, voiceless, tearless, and drumless Oskar. But that would not accord with the facts: Oskar lost his innocence on several occasions while still drumming, recovered it or let it grow back; for innocence flourishes like a weed—just think of all those innocent grandmothers who were all once wicked, spiteful infants—no, it wasn't the little game of innocence and innocence lost that made Oskar jump up from his kitchen chair; it was love for Sister Dorothea that commanded me to replace the drum un-drummed, made me leave the room, corridor, and Zeidler's flat to head for the Art Academy, though Professor Kuchen was not expecting me till later that afternoon.
When Oskar impetuously fled his room, stepped into the hall, and opened the outer door to the flat noisily and with a good deal of fuss, I listened for a moment in the direction of Herr Münzer's room. He didn't cough, and so, ashamed, offended, content and craving, tired of life and hungering for it, smiling here and there, in other places nearly in tears, I left the flat and then the house on Jülicher Straße.
A few days later I carried out a long-cherished plan, the continued rejection of which had proved an excellent method for planning it in detail. That day I had the whole morning free. Oskar and Ulla weren't due to pose for the imaginative Raskolnikov till three that afternoon, when, as the returning Ulysses, I was to surprise Penelope with the gift of a hump. I'd sought in vain to dissuade the artist from this notion. In those days he was successfully exploiting Greek gods and demigods. Ulla felt at home in the world of mythology, and so I gave in, let myself be portrayed as Vulcan, as Pluto with Proserpina, and, in the end, that afternoon, as a hunchbacked Ulysses. But it's the morning I want to describe. So Oskar won't reveal what Ulla looked like as Penelope and simply say: silence reigned in Zeidler's flat. The Hedgehog had taken his hair clippers on a business trip, Sister Dorothea was on the day shift, having left the house at six, and Frau Zeidler was still in bed when, shortly after eight, the mail arrived.
I went through it at once, found nothing for me—Maria's letter had come just two days before—but discovered at first glance an envelope posted from the city that bore the unmistakable handwriting of Dr. Werner.
First I put the letter back with the others for Herr Münzer and the Zeidlers, went to my room, and waited until Frau Zeidler entered the hall, gave her lodger Herr Münzer his letter, returned to her kitchen, then her bedroom, and in less than ten minutes left the flat and the house, for her office job at Mannesmann started at nine.
Oskar waited just to be sure, donned his clothes with unhurried deliberation, cleaned his fingernails with apparent calm, and only then resolved to act. I went to the kitchen, set an aluminum kettle half-filled with water on the largest burner of the three-burner gas stove, set the flame on high to begin with, turned the dial to the lowest setting as soon as it started to steam, then, carefully collecting my thoughts and focusing them as closely as possible on the action at hand, reached Sister Dorothea's door in two strides, took the letter that Frau Zeidler had shoved halfway under the frosted-glass door, went back to the kitchen, and cautiously held the back of the envelope over the rising steam till it could be opened without damage. Naturally Oskar had turned off the gas before venturing to hold Dr. Werner's letter over the kettle.
I didn't read the doctor's tidings in the kitchen, but lying on my bed. At first I was disappointed, for neither the salutation nor the standard formula that closed the letter shed any light on the doctor/nurse relationship.
"Dear Fräulein Dorothea!" it said—and: "Sincerely yours, Erich Werner."
Nor did I find a single truly tender word in the letter. Werner was sorry he hadn't spoken to Sister Dorothea the day before, though he had seen her outside the door to the men's ward for the privately insured. For reasons that remained unclear to Dr. Werner, she had turned away when she had come upon the doctor conversing with Sister Beate—Sister Dorothea's friend. Dr. Werner simply sought some explanation, since his conversation with Sister Beate had been of a purely professional nature. As Sister Dorothea no doubt knew, he had always taken pains, both in the past and at present, to maintain a proper distance from the somewhat impetuous Beate. This was no easy matter, as she, Dorothea, knowing Beate, must surely realize, for Sister Beate often declared her feelings quite openly, feelings that he, Dr. Werner, had certainly never reciprocated. The last sentence of the letter ran: "Please believe that I would be happy to speak with you at any time about this matter." In spite of the formality, coldness, and even arrogance of these lines, I did not find it difficult, in the end, to see through Dr. Werner's epistolary style and recognize the missive for what it was: a passionate love letter.
Mechanically I restored the letter to its envelope, and with no thought at all for hygiene, moistened the flap, which Werner may well have wet with
his tongue, with Oskar's tongue in turn, then burst out laughing, and slapped my head front and back, still laughing, till I finally managed, in mid-slap, to divert my right hand from my brow to the latch on the door to my room, to open the door, to step into the hall, and carefully push the letter from the good Dr. Werner halfway under the door that sealed off the well-known room of Sister Dorothea with gray paint and frosted glass.
I was still squatting on my heels, with one or possibly two fingers on the letter, when I heard Herr Münzer's voice from the other end of the corridor. He spoke slowly and clearly, as though giving dictation, and I understood every word: "My dear sir, would you be so kind as to bring me some water?"
I straightened up, said to myself, The man must be sick, but knew as I did so that the man behind the door wasn't sick, that Oskar was simply saying this to himself as an excuse to bring him water, since a simple, unmotivated call could never have lured me to the room of a total stranger.
At first I was going to bring him the lukewarm water in the aluminum kettle that had helped me open the doctor's letter. But then I poured that water into the sink, ran fresh water into the kettle, and carried kettle and water to the door behind which must dwell the voice of Herr Münzer that had cried out for me and for water, or perhaps for water alone.
Oskar knocked, entered, and ran point-blank into Klepp's characteristic odor. If I call his effluvium acrid, I omit its equally strong sweetness. The air surrounding Klepp had nothing in common with the vinegary air of the nurse's chamber, for example. To call it sweet and sour would be equally false. This Herr Münzer, or Klepp as I call him today, this corpulent, lazy yet not immobile, readily perspiring, superstitious, unwashed yet not derelict flautist and jazz clarinetist, had and still has, though something was always preventing him from dying, the smell of a corpse about him, a corpse that can't stop smoking, sucking on peppermints, and exuding a haze of garlic. So smelled he then, and so he smells and breathes today, descending upon me on Visitors Day, bearing both lust for life and transience in his scent, forcing Bruno to throw open the windows and doors to air things out the moment his elaborate farewells, filled with promises to return, have ended.
Today Oskar is bedridden. Back then, in Zeidler's flat, I found Klepp in the remnants of a bed. He was cheerfully rotting away, remaining within reach of an old-fashioned, extremely baroque-looking alcohol stove, a good dozen packages of spaghetti, cans of olive oil, tubes of tomato paste, moist clumps of salt on newspaper, and a case of bottled beer that turned out to be lukewarm. He would urinate into the empty beer bottles while lying down, and, as he told me in confidence an hour or so later, seal the greenish containers, which held just about as much as he did and were for the most part full, and set them aside, clearly separated from those that were still literally beer bottles, to prevent any chance that while tending his bed he would get thirsty and grab the wrong one. Although the room had running water—with a little initiative he could have urinated in the sink—he was too lazy, or, more accurately, too hindered from getting up because of the way he lived, to leave the bed he had shaped to his body with such effort and fetch fresh water in his spaghetti pot.
Since Klepp as Herr Münzer was always careful to cook his pasta in the same water, and guarded the multiply drained-off and increasingly viscous brew like the apple of his eye, he often managed, with the help of his store of empty beer bottles, to maintain the horizontal position suited to his bed for upward of four days at a time. The critical stage came when the spaghetti brew had boiled down to an oversalted, glutinous sludge. Of course at that point Klepp could have gone hungry; but in those days he lacked the necessary ideological presuppositions for such an act, and his asceticism seemed limited from the very start to periods of four to five days, for otherwise a larger spaghetti pot and a water container of sufficient size to match his store of pasta, or Frau Zeidler, who brought him his mail, might have made him still more independent of his surroundings.
On the day Oskar violated the privacy of the mail, Klepp had been lying independently in bed for five days: he could have pasted posters on pillars with his spaghetti sludge. Then he heard my irresolute steps in the corridor toward Sister Dorothea and her letters. Having learned that Oskar does not react to forced coughs meant to attract attention, on the day I read Dr. Werner's coolly passionate letter he tried his voice: "My dear sir, would you be so kind as to bring me some water?"
And I took the kettle, poured out the lukewarm water, turned on the faucet, let it run till the little kettle was half-full, added a little more, and brought him fresh water, was the dear sir he assumed I was, introduced myself as Matzerath, stonecutter and letterman.
He, equally polite, raised his upper body a few degrees, introduced himself as Egon Münzer, jazz musician, but asked me to call him Klepp, since Münzer had been his father's name. I understood his wish all too well; after all, I myself preferred Koljaiczek or simply Oskar, used Matzerath out of sheer humility, and only rarely called myself Oskar Bronski. So I found it easy enough to address this portly, recumbent young man—I guessed he was thirty, but he proved to be younger—as just plain Klepp. He called me Oskar, since Koljaiczek was too much work.
We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was. Was he of the opinion that all men must die, Oskar asked. The death of all men he thought certain too, but was by no means sure that all men must be born, spoke of his own birth as a mistake, and once again Oskar felt a kinship with him. We both believed in heaven—but when he said heaven he gave a nasty little laugh and scratched himself under the bedclothes: one could assume Herr Klepp was planning indecent acts in the here and now that he would carry out in heaven. When we came to politics, he waxed almost passionate, named over three hundred German noble houses he would immediately grant title, crown, and power; the Duchy of Hanover he ceded to the British Empire. When I asked about the fate of the former Free City of Danzig he was sorry to say he didn't know the place, but had no problem naming a count from the Bergisches Land, who, as he said, descended in a more or less direct line from Jan Wellem, as prince of the little city he was sorry to say he'd never heard of. Finally—we were engaged in defining the concept of Truth, and making good progress—I skillfully interpolated a few questions into the conversation from which I learned that Herr Klepp had been paying rent to Zeidler as a lodger for three years now. We expressed our regrets at not having met sooner. I blamed the Hedgehog for failing to provide me with sufficient information about this man who was tending his bed, just as it had not occurred to him to convey more about the nurse than the paltry comment: A nurse lives behind this frosted-glass door.
Oskar didn't want to start right in burdening Herr Münzer or Klepp with his troubles. So instead of seeking information about the nurse, I expressed my concern for him: "Apropos of health," I threw in, "aren't you well?"
Klepp again raised his upper body a few degrees, then, realizing he would never make it to a right angle, sank back again and informed me that in fact he was lying in bed in order to find out whether his health was good, middling, or poor. He hoped within a few weeks to discover that it was middling.
Then what I'd feared might happen did, something I'd hoped to avoid by an extended and wide-ranging conversation. "My dear sir, do join me in a plate of spaghetti." So we ate spaghetti cooked in the fresh water I'd brought. I wanted to ask him for the sticky pot, so that I could take it to the sink and give it a thorough washing, but didn't dare. Turning on his side, Klepp cooked our meal in silence with the sure motions of a somnambulist. He drained the water carefully into a large tin can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his upper body, reached under the bed and pulled out a greasy plate crusted with tomato paste, seemed to hesitate a moment, then fished around under the bed again and brought to light a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, tossed the wad back under the bed, breathed on the smeared platt
er as if to remove a final speck of dust, then, with an almost noble gesture, handed me the most loathsome plate I'd ever seen, and invited Oskar to help himself.
After you, I said, hoping he would go first. Having provided me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he heaped a huge portion of the spaghetti onto my plate with a soup spoon and fork, then, with elegant motions, squeezed a long worm of tomato paste in decorative patterns onto it, added a generous portion of oil from the can, did the same for himself, sprinkled pepper over both plates, stirred up his share, and with a glance urged me to do the same. "Ah, dear sir, forgive me for not having grated parmesan in the house. Even so, bon appétit!"
To this day Oskar doesn't know how he summoned up the courage to ply fork and spoon. Amazingly, it tasted good. In fact Klepp's spaghetti set a culinary standard against which, from that day on, I measured every menu set before me.
During the meal I had time to appraise the bedkeeper's room discreetly. The main attraction was a round hole for a stovepipe just below the ceiling, breathing darkly from the wall. It was windy outside. Apparently it was the gusts of wind that puffed occasional clouds of soot through the hole into Klepp's room. The clouds settled evenly on the furnishings, conducting a burial rite. Since those furnishings consisted only of the bed in the middle of the room and a few of Zeidler's rolled-up rugs covered with wrapping paper, it was safe to say that nothing in the room was blackened more thoroughly than the once-white bedsheet, the pillow beneath Klepp's head, and a hand towel the bed keeper spread over his face whenever a gust of wind ushered a cloud of soot into the room.
