by Günter Grass
Nearly all these communications, as Oskar soon found out, were quite rapid and unrevealing. Nevertheless, they threw some light on Sister Dorothea’s past; she had worked at the Vinzent-Hospital in Cologne, at a private clinic in Aachen, and in Hildesheim, where her mother was still living. It could be inferred either that she was from Lower Saxony or that like Oskar she was a refugee from the East and had settled there after the war. I also found out that Sister Dorothea was working nearby, at the Marien-Hospital, that she had a close friend by the name of Beata, for the postcards were full of references to, and regards for, this Sister Beata.
The existence of a girl friend gave me wild ideas. I composed letters to Beata, in one I asked her to intercede for me, in the next I said nothing about Dorothea, my idea being to approach Beata first and switch to Dorothea later on. I drafted five or six letters and even addressed one or two; several times I started for the mailbox, but none was ever sent.
Yet perhaps, in my madness, I would actually have mailed one of these pleas to Sister Beata had I not—one Monday it was, the day Maria started up with Mr. Stenzel, her boss, an occurrence that left me surprisingly cold—found on the floor, below the letter slot, the missive which transformed my passion from love to jealous love.
The name and address printed on the envelope told me that the letter had been written by a Dr. Erich Werner at the Marien-Hospital. On Tuesday a second letter came. Thursday brought a third. What shall I say of my state of mind on that Thursday? Oskar tottered back to his room, fell on one of the kitchen chairs which helped to turn my bathroom into a place of residence, and drew Maria’s weekly letter from his pajama pocket—in spite of her love affair Maria continued to write punctually, neatly, and exhaustively. Oskar even tore open the envelope and gazed at the letter with sightless eyes; he heard Mrs. Zeidler in the hall, calling Mr. Münzer, who did not answer. But Münzer must have been in, for Mrs. Zeidler opened his room door, handed in the mail, and kept on talking to him.
Mrs. Zeidler was still talking but I could no longer hear her. I surrendered myself to the madness of the wallpaper, the vertical, horizontal, diagonal madness, the curved madness, reproduced a thousandfold; I saw myself as Matzerath, eating the alarmingly nutritious bread of cuckolds; and no shame or scruple deterred me from representing my Jan Bronski as a seducer in Satanic make-up, clad by turns in the traditional overcoat with velvet collar, in Dr. Hollatz’ white smock, and in the equally white smock of Dr. Werner, in every case seducing, corrupting, desecrating, insulting, scourging, and torturing, in short, doing everything a seducer has to do if he is to be plausible.
Today I can smile when I recall the idea which then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine. I would graduate in no time. I would become a doctor, at the Marien-Hospital, of course. I would expose Dr. Werner, demonstrate his incompetence, nay more, prove that his criminal negligence had been responsible for the death of a patient in the course of a larynx operation. It would turn out that this Mr. Werner had never attended medical school. He had picked up a smattering of medicine while working as an orderly in a field hospital during the war. Off to jail with the charlatan. And Oskar, despite his youth, becomes head physician. A new Professor Sauerbruch, with Sister Dorothea at his side, followed by a white-clad retinue, strides down resounding corridors, visits his patients, decides at the last minute to operate. How fortunate that this film was never made!
In the Clothes Cupboard
It should not be supposed that Oskar’s whole life was taken up with nurses. After all, I had my professional occupations. I had to give up cutting inscriptions, the summer semester at the Academy had begun. Once again Ulla and I received good money for sitting still while art students, employing methods old or new, subjected us to their vision or blindness. There were many who destroyed our objective existence, rejected and negated us, covering paper and canvas with lines, rectangles, spirals, producing wallpaper designs which had everything in them but Oskar and Ulla, or mystery and tension if you will, and giving these absurdities high-sounding titles such as: “Plaited Upward,” “Hymn above Time”, “Red in New Spaces”.
This manner was particularly favored by the younger students who had not yet learned to draw. We fared better at the hands of my old friends from the studios of Kuchen and Maruhn, not to mention the prize students Ziege and Raskolnikov.
In her earthly existence the Muse Ulla revealed a marked taste for applied art. Lankes had left her but in her enthusiasm for the new wallpaper designs she soon forgot him and convinced herself that the decorative abstractions of a middle-aged painter named Meitel were sweet, amusing, cute, fantastic, terrific, and even chic. Meitel had a special fondness for forms suggesting sugary-syrupy Easter eggs, but that is hardly worth mentioning; since then she has found many other occasions to become engaged and at the present moment—as she informed me when she came to see me the day before yesterday, with candy for me and Bruno—is on the point of entering upon a serious and lasting relationship, as she has always put it.
At the beginning of the semester, Ulla wanted to pose only for the “new trends”—a flea that Meiter, her Easter egg painter, had put in her ear; his engagement present to her had been a vocabulary which she tried out in conversations with me. She spoke of relationships, constellations, accents, perspectives, granular structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted exclusively of bananas and tomato juice, spoke of proto-cells, color atoms which in their dynamic flat trajectories found their natural positions in their fields of forces, but did not stop there; no, they went on and on … This was the tone of her conversation with me during our rest periods or when we went out for an occasional cup of coffee in Ratinger-Strasse. Even when her engagement to the dynamic painter of Easter eggs had ceased to be, even when after a brief episode with a Lesbian she took up with one of Kuchen’s students and returned to the objective world, she retained this vocabulary which so strained her little face that two sharp, rather fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.
Here I must admit that it was not entirely Raskolnikov’s idea to dress the Muse Ulla as a nurse and paint her with Oskar. After the “Madonna 49” he put us into “The Abduction of Europa”—I was the bull. And immediately after the rather controversial “Abduction” came “Fool Heals Nurse”.
It was a little word of mine that fired Raskolnikov’s imagination. Somber, red-haired, and crafty, he cleaned his brushes and brooded; staring fixedly at Ulla, he began to speak of guilt and atonement. At this I advised him to picture me as guilt, Ulla as atonement; my guilt, I said, was patent; as for Atonement, why not dress her as a nurse?
If this excellent picture later bore another, misleadingly different title, it was Raskolnikov’s doing. I myself should have called it “Temptation”, because my right, painted hand was gripping and turning a doorknob, opening the door to a room where The Nurse is standing. Or it might have been called “The Doorknob”, for if I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word “doorknob”, because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us, because the doorknob on the frosted-glass door of Sister Dorothea’s room was to me temptation itself whenever I knew that Hedgehog Zeidler was on the road. Sister Dorothea at the hospital, and Mrs. Zeidler in the office at Mannesmann’s.
Oskar would emerge from his room with the drainless bathtub, cross the hallway, approach the nurse’s room, and grip the doorknob.
Until about the middle of June—and I made the experiment almost every day—the door had resisted my temptation. I was beginning to think that Sister Dorothea’s work had just made her too orderly in her ways, that I might as well give up hope of her ever neglecting to lock it. And that is why, when one day the door opened under my pressure, my dull-witted, mechanical reaction was to close it again.
For several minutes Oskar stood there in a very tight skin, a prey to so many thoughts of the most divergent origins that his heart had diff
iculty in imposing any sort of arrangement upon them.
It was only after I had transferred my thoughts to another context—Maria and her lover, I thought; Maria has a lover, lover gives her a coffee pot, lover and Maria go to the Apollo on Saturday night, Maria addresses lover as Mr. So-and-So during working hours, he is her boss, owner of the store where she works—only after I had thus considered Maria and her lover from various angles, that I managed to create a little order in my poor brain… and opened the frosted-glass door.
I had already figured out that the room must be windowless, for never had the upper, dimly transparent part of the door revealed the slightest trace of daylight. Reaching to the right, exactly as in my own room, I found the switch. The forty-watt bulb was quite sufficient for this cubbyhole which hardly deserved to be called a room. I was rather distressed to find myself face to face with my bust in the mirror. Though his reverse image had nothing to tell him, Oskar did not move away; he was too fascinated by the objects on the dressing table in front of the mirror.
There were blue-black spots in the white enamel of the washbasin. The table top in which the washbasin was sunk almost to the rim also had blemishes. The left corner was missing and the missing piece lay on the table top under the mirror, showing the mirror its veins. Traces of peeling glue on the broken edge bore witness to a bungled attempt to repair the damage. My stonecutter’s fingers itched. I thought of Korneff’s homemade marble cement, which transformed even the most dilapidated marble into enduring slabs fit to adorn the façades of large butcher stores.
Once these familiar thoughts had diverted me from my cruelly distorted image in the mirror, I was able to give the smell that had struck me the moment I came in a name.
It was vinegar. Later, and again only a few weeks ago, I justified that acrid smell by the assumption that Sister Dorothea must have washed her hair the day before and had put vinegar in the rinse water. However, there was no vinegar bottle on the dressing table. Nor did I detect vinegar in any of the containers otherwise labeled; moreover, I have often said to myself, would Sister Dorothea be likely to heat water in the Zeidler kitchen, for which she would have required Zeidler’s permission, and go through the bother of washing her hair in her room, when the hospital is full of the best showers and bathrooms? Yet possibly the head nurse or the hospital management had forbidden the nurses to use certain sanitary installations in the hospital; perhaps Sister Dorothea actually was obliged to wash her hair in this enamel bowl, in front of this deceitful mirror.
Though there was no vinegar bottle on the table, there were plenty of other bottles and jars on the clammy marble. A package of cotton and a half-empty package of sanitary napkins discouraged Oskar from investigating the contents of the little jars. But I am still of the opinion that they contained nothing but routine cosmetics or harmless medicinal ointments.
Sister Dorothea had left her comb in her brush. It cost me a struggle to pull it out and take a good look at it. How fortunate that I did so, for in that instant Oskar made his important discovery; the nurse’s hair was blonde, perhaps ashblonde, but one cannot be too suspicious of conclusions drawn from the dead hair that comes out in a comb. Suffice it to say that Sister Dorothea had blonde hair.
In addition, the alarmingly abundant contents of the comb told me that Sister Dorothea suffered from falling hair, an ailment that must have distressed her. It’s the fault of her nurse’s caps, I said to myself; but I did not condemn them, for how can a hospital be run properly without nurses’ caps?
Distasteful as the vinegar smell was to Oskar, the only sentiment aroused in me by the thought that Sister Dorothea was losing her hair was love, seasoned with solicitude and compassion. It is characteristic of the state I was in that I thought of several hair lotions I had heard recommended and resolved to supply Sister Dorothea with one or more of them at the first opportunity. Dreaming of our first meeting, which would take place beneath a warm summer sky, amid fields of waving grain, I plucked the homeless hairs from the comb and arranged them in a bundle, which I secured by tying a knot in it. I blew off some of the dust and dandruff and carefully secreted my treasure in a compartment of my wallet from which I had quickly removed its previous contents.
Having stowed my wallet in my jacket, I picked up the comb, which I had laid down on the table top for want of hands. I held it up to the naked light bulb, making it transparent, examined the two rows of prongs, coarse and fine, and noted that two of the finer prongs were missing. I could not resist the temptation to run the nail of my left forefinger over the tips of the coarse prongs, and while thus playing Oskar was gladdened by the glitter of a few hairs which, to avert suspicion, I had intentionally neglected to remove.
At length I dropped the comb back into the brush and left the dressing table, which, it seemed to me, was giving me an unbalanced picture. On my way to Sister Dorothea’s bed I bumped into a chair on which hung a brassiere—much washed, I noted, and faded at the edges.
Oskar had nothing but his fists with which to fill the two concavities. They were inadequate. Too hard, too nervous, they were alien and unhappy in these bowls which in my ignorance of their contents I should gladly have lapped up with a teaspoon day after day; I might have experienced a little nausea now and then, for too much of any fare will unsettle the stomach, but after nausea sweetness, such sweetness as to make nausea desirable, the seal of true love.
I thought of Dr. Werner and took my fists out of the brassiere. But then Dr. Werner vanished and I was able to approach Sister Dorothea’s bed. So this was her bed! How often Oskar had tried to visualize it, and now it was the same hideous wooden structure, painted brown, that served as a setting for my own repose and occasional insomnia. What I should have wished for her was a white-enameled metal bed with brass knobs, a light, immaterial frame, and not this cumbersome and loveless object. Immobile, I with heavy head, devoid of passion, incapable even of jealousy, I stood for a time gazing at this altar of sleep—the comforter, it seemed to me, must be granite. Then I turned away from the loathsome sight. Never could Oskar have visualized Sister Dorothea and her slumbers in this repulsive tomb.
I started back toward the dressing table, planning perhaps to open the presumed ointment jars. On my way, the clothes cupboard commanded me to note its dimensions, to qualify its paint as black-brown, to follow the contours of its molding, and at last to open it; for where is the cupboard that does not demand to be opened?
There was no lock, the doors were held together by a bent nail; I turned it to a vertical position and at once, with no help from me, the doors swung apart with a sigh, offering me so wide a vista that I had to step backward to take it all in. Oskar didn’t want to lose himself in details as he had at the dressing table; nor did he wish, as in the case of the bed, to let prejudice pass judgment; no, he was determined to give himself to that cupboard, which opened out its arms to him, with the freshness of the first day of Creation.
Nevertheless Oskar, the incorrigible esthete, could not refrain entirely from criticism: some barbarian had hurriedly sawed off the legs, tearing splinters out of the wood, and set the disfigured cupboard down flat on the floor.
The inside was in the best of order. On the right there were three deep shelves piled with undergarments and blouses; white, pink, and a light blue which Oskar felt certain would not discolor. Two red and green oilcloth bags hung inside the right-hand door, one containing stockings with runs, the other stockings Sister Dorothea had mended. These stockings, it seemed to me, were equal in quality to those that Maria’s employer and boy friend had given her, but of closer weave and more durable. To the left hung starched, gleaming white nurse’s uniforms. In the hat compartment on top, in beauty and simplicity, sat the fragile nurse’s caps, fearing the touch of any unpracticed hand. I cast only a brief glance at the civilian clothes to the left of the undergarments. The cheap, haphazard assortment confirmed my secret hope: Sister Dorothea was not deeply interested in this department of her clothing. And the same impression was
conveyed by the three or four pot-shaped hats with imitation flowers, which, tossed negligently in a heap beside the caps, suggested nothing so much as an unsuccessful cake. The hat compartment also contained ten or a dozen books with colored backs, leaning on a shoe box filled with wool left over from knitting.
Oskar had to step closer and tilt his head in order to read the titles. It was with an indulgent smile that my head resumed a vertical position: so our good Sister Dorothea read crime novels. But I have said enough about the civilian section of the cupboard. Lured closer by the books, I did not retreat; quite on the contrary, I stuck my head in the cupboard and ceased to resist my mounting desire to belong to it, to become a part of the clothes cupboard where Sister Dorothea kept a not inappreciable part of her visible presence.
I didn’t even have to move the sensible low-heeled shoes that stood on the cupboard floor, meticulously polished and waiting to go out. As though to invite me in, the contents of the cupboard were so arranged that Oskar was able, without crushing a single garment, to take shelter in the middle of it. Full of anticipation, I crawled in and squatted on my heels.
At first, however, my mind was not at rest. Oskar felt himself observed by the furniture and the light bulb. Wishing to make my sojourn in the cupboard more intimate, I tried to pull the doors shut. It was none too easy, the catch was worn out, the doors refused to close properly. Light still entered, but not enough to disturb me. The smell became more concentrated. An old-fashioned, clean smell, no longer of vinegar, but of some mild moth deterrent; a good smell.
