by Günter Grass
That sounds very familiar. It wasn’t only with you that the old man was determined to ride the roller coaster; it was with Paulchen, Lena, and me, too, during one of our summers on Møn, when all of us—though without Taddel—made our annual day trip to Copenhagen. We went to Tivoli, which was packed, and there were fantastic rides. But none of us wanted to go on the roller coaster.
He was the only one who did.
I suppose he was disappointed in us.
I’m telling you, he was bound and determined to ride that roller coaster, which was super-modern, with all kinds of loops and a really steep descent. It looked quite dangerous. The Ferris wheel or some other ride that was more sedate would’ve been okay. Even the flying swings, which he managed to talk Camilla into taking, but none of us wanted to get on the roller coaster, not even Paulchen, who usually did everything to please him. And when I let him persuade me after all, he took all of us for one ride on that roller coaster. When I got off, I had to go into the bushes behind a booth and throw up. A good thing Mariechen wasn’t there with her box. She’d certainly have had a field day with me puking.
Still, it’s a shame we had to go to Tivoli without her. She always had to stay behind with our dog Paula—my dog, actually.
Back in the village, whenever a ship was launched from the shipyard, old Marie would be up on the dike, waiting in a standing or crouching position for the exact moment of the launch.
Usually Paula followed us. Mariechen had a habit of slipping her some egg yolk at breakfast, which annoyed Camilla no end.
I was allowed to carry the pouch with the rolls of film. You’re my little assistant, Paulchen, she’d say.
Those boats built in our shipyard were coasters, small freighters intended to ply the coastal waters.
Every launch was a festive occasion. A big crowd would gather. Ordinary folks from Wewelsfleth, but also politicians and such. The mayor—Sachse was his name—stood on the platform, of course. Lots of speeches. Even when it rained. Usually a woman in a hat would smash a bottle of champagne against the bow. And the fife-and-drum corps from the town had plenty to do. But Mariechen never took any interest in that. She was completely fixated on the ship as it slowly, then faster and faster, slid into the Stör, creating a huge wave, but then came to rest quietly in the water just before it reached the other bank, which was overgrown with reeds. She stayed focused on the ship, standing with her camera at waist height or crouching, whether it was rainy or sunny, shooting two, maybe three rolls. Always focused on the ship. And I was allowed to help her change the film. Making snapshots, she called it. Afterwards she would go straight to her darkroom, right behind the dike.
That’s why it was called the House Behind the Dike.
Father bought it after he finished the short book that followed the long one. That’s what usually happened when a book sold well.
I don’t know, really, we all don’t know how he pulled that off: one best-seller after another, no matter what the niggling critics had to say.
Mariechen explained, Money matters to your father only because it keeps him from being dependent on anyone. For himself he hardly needs anything—tobacco, lentils, paper, a new pair of trousers now and then …
And when he bought the house behind the dike, he told me, Otherwise the shipyard will buy it, tear it down, and put up a concrete and sheet-metal storage building.
He’d heard that from the mayor, who was concerned about preserving the beauty of his village.
Father had to move fast to outbid the shipyard. It’s worth saving, he said. Two hundred years old at least. It would be such a shame.
But his real reason for buying the house behind the dike was probably that the big house was getting too rowdy for him. Too much running up and down stairs. Our friends were always coming and going. I’m sure that explains why the old man moved his studio into the house behind the dike, with his standing desk, clay bin, modelling stands, and all his gear.
In the morning he’d go there to work, come back for afternoon coffee, then disappear again.
That was his routine when he had the caged rat as a pet.
He wanted to be alone with his rat.
Even Camilla seldom visited him there.
That’s not true. The rat didn’t come along till later, much later.
But he always needed time alone, everywhere, even when he lived in the clinker house.
Maybe he’d long wished for a rat he could be alone with.
Even so, I often went to the house behind the dike, because Mariechen had her darkroom back in the lean-to, and Camilla had furnished a cosy apartment for her in the old house. And sometimes, if I’d washed my hands, I’d be allowed to enter her holy of holies, as she called her darkroom. Every time it was so exciting. I got to see what she did there with the rolls of film she’d shot with her Agfa box from the top of the dike when yet another coaster was launched, and believe me, there was no trickery, no cheating. She used perfectly normal developer. And because Mariechen witnessed every launch, afterwards you could see where the coasters were heading, once they were fitted out and seaworthy: to Rotterdam or around Jutland, even in rough seas. And with one coaster—I don’t recall its name—her Agfa knew in advance that it would capsize by the island of Gotland and sink. There were eight or more photos in which you could see the containers on deck begin to slip, until the ship started to list, and finally it capsized with all the remaining containers, after two of them had already slid overboard, capsized to starboard, remained afloat for a while, keel upwards, then suddenly went under, gone, leaving only a few pieces of clothing and oil drums floating on the surface … You don’t believe me? It was true, though. The Wilster paper’s headline read Total Loss. Camilla read the article out loud to us—the account of what I’d already seen in the darkroom in the stack of photos, the disaster the Agfa had foreseen at the launch. Later, two bodies washed ashore in Sweden … Dear God! Dear God! she exclaimed as the developing photos revealed what awaited that ship in the future. Don’t you dare breathe a word about it in the village, she whispered, or they’ll think I’m a witch. It’s not that long ago that they burned folks like me. Kindling was always in plentiful supply. Always. Prayers did no good. It could happen in a flash. Then, after a pause, she remarked, Not much has changed since then.
That’s what I always got to hear when she took historical snapshots, as she called them, for father: Hardly anything’s changed since then, except the fashions.
And that’s how it looked when she snapped a whole series for him in the main room of the Parish Overseer’s Residence, when no one else was there, so you could see all the green and yellow tiles. And afterwards—right, Paulchen?—she hung up the prints in her kitchen, straight from the darkroom. In the middle of the big room was a long table, and around it sat a bunch of bearded old geezers, a good dozen of them, wearing these weird outfits.
All smoking long clay pipes.
And at the head of the table sat father, dressed as the parish overseer, in a puffy shirt and a wig with long, curly locks.
I’d be curious to know how she created virtual scenes like that without any of the equipment we have nowadays, because by itself that simple old box …
That’s how she did it, Jasper, just with the Agfa. When Marie photographed the series of gravestones with baroque carvings in front of the church, the pictures showed Taddel’s father as the pastor, in a huge white ruff and a black robe, following a coffin. Remember? The three of us with Camilla, looking for all the world like a grieving widow, trotting along behind him …
We had on black knee breeches, and our hairdos would have made you die laughing.
That scene seemed more like a costume drama than uncanny.
But you could only guess who was in that coffin.
Even the box didn’t know that.
Maybe his rat, who bit the dust once he’d finished the rat book.
He kept that rat for a long time in old Marie’s refrigerator.
Lay in the fr
eezer, stiff as a board. No doubt he planned to thaw her out some day so the box …
Now you two are lying the way only my papa usually does.
But that’s how it was.
I could tell you a whole bunch of things, totally crazy things, because I was almost always there when she developed her snapshots. Some of them were hilarious. She even made the shipyard historic, because just as our house in the village was still known as the Junge House, the shipyard was once named after Junge, too. He was the owner. Not till much later was it renamed the Peter Shipyard. Any number of whaling cutters were launched from the Junge Shipyard. They sailed with their crews, who came from our village, all the way up to Greenland and back. And it was such a cutter, returning from a long voyage and sailing up the Stör at high tide, that Marie had in her viewfinder from the dike, don’t ask me how. And in the prints she produced, you, Taddel, could unmistakably be seen on board. I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. You were a cabin boy, wearing a cap with a bobble. Man, you must have been scared on the high seas, especially when it was stormy and the waves were rough. You looked completely done in. Like a dishrag. Pitiful. The captain on the cutter was your father, of course. Who else!
So? That doesn’t surprise me. When I was little I was convinced he had a harpoon, because when he went off campaigning I thought he was going whale hunting, and when he …
It’s weird that in another series of historical photos your father appears as someone else—the shipbuilder Junge.
Well, that’s not so strange, because he shows up in all his own books, sometimes as the main character, sometimes in a minor role, in one costume or another, as if the book was always about him.
Yes, in one photo that Marie enlarged, though otherwise she never did that, you could see him seated as Master Junge in the big tiled room in the Parish Overseer’s Residence. On the table in front of him stood a model of his famous whaling cutter. It looked like one of the models in the maritime museum in Altona. He had a long black beard and a tasselled cap on his head.
And his pipe, no doubt.
Maybe so. But we three were clustered around him, this time as apprentices from the shipyard. And behind us you could make out all the wall tiles, which supposedly came from Holland.
Right, from Delft, blue and white, which you couldn’t tell in the black-and-white photos. At the time, Paulchen, you wouldn’t have known that in the olden days the cutter captains received their pay in Delft tiles. And they in turn paid for their new cutters in part with tiles. They served as a sort of currency. I read that in a book on whaling. And I assume that’s how all those tiles ended up in our house.
They’re still there on the walls.
Some have windmills and girls herding geese.
There are also some that portray stories from the Bible.
Camilla explained them to us, remember, because she knew all the Bible stories.
And old Marie had to shoot every single biblical tile for my father, so he wouldn’t run out of material.
One of the tiles had the Wedding at Cana. Another had Jacob wrestling with the angel. And other stories, too: Cain and Abel, and the burning bush. And of course the Flood, because the old man urgently needed horror stories like that for his rat book, in which …
It’s amazing, brother, what the three of them experienced in the village while I was off on my farm with nothing but cows for company morning and night …
Or me in Cologne in vocational school …
Well, for me what went on in that godforsaken place wasn’t okay at all; I found it dreary.
But apparently Taddel and Paulchen adapted very well to village life. At least that was my impression the few times I visited when my master gave me the weekend off.
We went to village festivals.
Wilster had a church fair.
And a disco, where I later …
You should have been there, Nana, because among the rides were old-fashioned flying swings.
Right, why didn’t you come to visit?
Because …
You could have taken ten rides with your papa …
Because I …
And Mariechen would certainly have snapped the two of you with her box …
It wasn’t possible, because …
You could have held hands …
Well, because Camilla …
Or your papa …
Stop it! Enough!
But I was happy living with my mother, though at times I secretly wished for something impossible. I like to hear all of you describe the miracles Mariechen, or old Marie, as Taddel calls her, could work with her photo box: those snapshots in which things from the past came back to life.
How about that, big brother? She was doing that when we two were small. When Taddel was a baby, and long before Lara got Joggi.
You weren’t even dreamed of yet, Lena and Nana.
No god-awful mess, or who did what with whom first.
Old Marie photographed our clinker house inside and out with her Agfa Special so father could see who’d lived there before and painted under the eaves, where he now had his studio. It was someone who became famous later, and for a particular picture. He was a marine painter, did so-called seascapes. Three-masters under full sail, but also ocean steamships. Later, mostly battleships, armoured cruisers and such, when the First World War got under way and our fleet and the British navy were sinking each other’s vessels in the North Sea. He painted the Dogger Bank and the Battle of the Skagerrak Strait, in which lots of people perished. He did one painting of a naval battle off the Falklands. Those islands are far away, down by Argentina. You could see the wreckage of a German cruiser, the Leipzig. In the background English vessels were in flames. And in the foreground a sailor was teetering amid the swells on a piece of a keel or a plank from the cruiser. With one hand or both he was holding up a flag. It looked like the flags the right-wing baldies wave when they want to get on TV. The title was The Last Man.
And this very painting Mariechen’s Agfa Special re-called …
Sure. Because her box was hindsighted.
I remember her snapping a picture through father’s big window while looking over her shoulder.
She contorted herself that way sometimes when she stood on the dike, with the box facing forward while she looked back, as if the past were there and in front only air. Totally weird.
At any rate, the prints she gave our father later showed that painting on the easel, still unfinished. In front of it stood the painter, holding his palette and brushes. Behind him you could see the big window in father’s studio. And believe it or not, next to him, in a uniform with lots of glitter and a handlebar moustache …
And when we asked Marie, Who in the world is that? she said, That’s old Wilhelm, the Kaiser back then.
When I checked with father, he said, What Marie’s telling you is true. The Kaiser used to visit this house. You can read all about it in the Friedenau chronicle. Up in the attic Wilhelm II visited the marine painter Hans Bohrdt. And out in front of the house a single policeman in a spiked helmet stood guard.
She brought that policeman back to life with her special lens. You could see him snap to attention when His Majesty deigned to leave our house.
Much later—during the next world war, that is—when the painter’s other studio out in Dahlem burned down, he’s supposed to have become very depressed. He died soon after, poor and forgotten, in an old-age home.
But the old Kaiser’s supposed to have given the painter advice: You should put a crown of foam over here, on this wave, or something like that. So the painter—what was his name again? right—made some changes to improve his painting. You could see the difference when you compared them.
That’s the kind of detail the box could remember.
Maybe what made the box special was not only that it fulfilled wishes but also that it could save the past like a computer, before any such thing as hard drives or diskettes.
