by Günter Grass
On the Atlantic Wall or Concrete Eternal
I had only been trying to help him. But Schmuh, owner and guiding spirit of the Onion Cellar, could not forgive me for my drum solo which had transformed his well-paying guests into babbling, riotously merry children who wet their pants and cried because they had wet their pants, all without benefit of onions.
Oskar tries to understand him. Could he help fearing my competition when his guests began to push aside the traditional onions and cry out for Oskar, for Oskar’s drum, for me who on my drum could conjure up the childhood of every one of them, however old and feeble?
Up until then, Schmuh had contented himself with dismissing his washroom attendants without notice. Now it was the whole Rhine River Three that he fired. In our place he took on an ambulatory fiddler who, if you closed an eye or two, might have been taken for a gypsy.
But when, as a result of our dismissal, several of the guests, the most faithful at that, threatened to leave the Onion Celhr for good, Schmuh had to accept a compromise. Three times a week the fiddler fiddled. Three times a week we performed, having demanded and obtained a raise: twenty DM a night. There were good tips too; Oskar started a savings account and rejoiced as the interest accrued.
Only too soon my savings account was to become a friend in need and indeed, for then came Death and carried away our Ferdinand Schmuh, our job, and our earnings.
I have already said that Schmuh shot sparrows. Sometimes he took us along in his Mercedes and let us look on. Despite occasional quarrels about my drum, which involved Klepp and Scholle, because they took my part, relations between Schmuh and his musicians remained friendly until, as I have intimated, death came between us.
We piled in. As usual, Schmuh’s wife was at the wheel. Klepp beside her. Between Oskar and Scholle sat Schmuh, holding his rifle over his knees and caressing it from time to time. We stopped just before Kaiserswerth. On both banks of the Rhine lines of trees: the stage was set. Schmuh’s wife stayed in the car and unfolded a newspaper. Klepp had bought some raisins which he munched with noteworthy regularity. Scholle, who had been a student of something or other before taking up the guitar in earnest, managed to conjure up from his memory a number of poems about the river Rhine, which had indeed put its poetic foot forward and, apart from the usual barges, was giving us quite a display of swaying autumnal foliage in the direction of Duisburg, though according to the calendar it was still summer. If Schmuh’s rifle had not spoken up from time to time, that afternoon below Kaiserswerth might well have been termed peaceful or even serene.
By the time Klepp had finished his raisins and wiped his fingers on the grass, Schmuh too had finished. Beside the eleven cold balls of feathers on the newspaper, he laid a twelfth—still quivering, as he remarked. The marksman was already packing up his “bag”—for some unfathomable reason Schmuh always took his victims home with him—when a sparrow settled on a tree root that the river had washed ashore not far from us. The sparrow was so cocky about it, so grey, such a model specimen of a sparrow, that Schmuh couldn’t resist; he who never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon shot a thirteenth—he shouldn’t have.
After he had laid the thirteenth beside the twelve, we went back to the black Mercedes and found Madame Schmuh asleep. Scholle and Klepp got into the back seat. I was about to join them but didn’t; I felt like a little walk, I said, I’d take the streetcar, no need to bother about me. And so they drove off without Oskar, who had been very wise not to ride with them.
I followed slowly. I didn’t have far to go. There was a detour round a stretch of road that was under repair. The detour passed by a gravel pit. And in this gravel pit, some twenty feet below the surface of the road, lay the black Mercedes with its wheels in the air.
Some workmen from the gravel pit had removed the three injured persons and Schmuh’s body from the car. The ambulance was on its way. I climbed down into the pit—my shoes were soon full of gravel—and busied myself a little with the injured; in spite of the pain they were in, they asked me questions, but I didn’t tell them Schmuh was dead. Stiff and startled, he stared up at the sky, which was mostly cloudy. The newspaper containing his afternoon’s bag had been flung out of the car. I counted twelve sparrows but couldn’t find the thirteenth; I was still looking for it when they eased the ambulance down into the gravel pit.
Schmuh’s wife, Klepp, and Scholle had nothing very serious the matter with them: bruises, a few broken ribs. When I went to see Klepp in the hospital and asked him what had caused the accident, he told me an amazing story: As they were driving past the gravel pit, slowly because of the poor condition of the road, hundreds maybe thousands of sparrows had swarmed out of the hedges, bushes, and fruit trees, casting a great shadow over the Mercedes, crashing against the windshield, and frightening Mrs. Schmuh. By sheer sparrow power, they had brought about the accident and Schmuh’s death.
You are free to think what you please of Klepp’s story; Oskar is skeptical, especially when he considers that when Schmuh was buried in the South Cemetery, he, Oskar, was able to count no more sparrows than years before when he had come here to set up tombstones. Be that as it may, as I, in a borrowed top hat, was following the coffin with the mourners, I caught a glimpse of Korneff in Section Nine, setting up a diorite slab for a two-place grave, with an assistant unknown to me. As the coffin with Schmuh in it was carried past the stonecutter on its way to the newly laid-out Section Ten, Korneff doffed his cap in accordance with cemetery regulations; perhaps because of the top hat, he failed to recognize me, but he rubbed his neck in token of ripening or over-ripe boils.
Funerals! I have been obliged to take you to so many cemeteries. Somewhere, I went so far as to say that funerals remind one of other funerals. Very well, I will refrain from speaking at length of Schmuh’s funeral or of Oskar’s retrospective musings at the time. Suffice it to say that Schmuh had a normal, decent burial and that nothing unusual happened. All I really have to tell you is that when they had finished burying Schmuh—the widow was in the hospital, or perhaps a little more decorum would have been maintained—I was approached by a gentleman who introduced himself as Dr. Dösch.
Dr. Dösch ran a concert bureau but the concert bureau did not belong to him. He had been a frequent guest, he told me, at the Onion Cellar. I had never noticed him, but he had been there when I transformed Schmuh’s customers into a band of babbling, happy children. Dösch himself, in fact, as he told me in confidence, had returned to childhood bliss under the influence of my drum, and he was dead set on making a big thing out of me and my “ terrific stunt”, as he called it. He had been authorized to offer me a contract, a terrific contract; why wouldn’t I sign it on the spot? Outside the crematorium, where Leo Schugger, who in Düsseldorf bore the name of Willem Slobber, was waiting in his white gloves for the mourners, Dr. Dösch pulled out a paper which, in return for enormous sums of money, committed the undersigned, hereinafter referred to as “Oskar, the drummer”, to give solo performances in large theaters, to appear all by myself on the stage before audiences numbering two to three thousand. Dösch was inconsolable when I said I could not sign right away. As my reason, I gave Schmuh’s death; Schmuh, I said, had been very close to me, I just couldn’t go to work for someone else before he was cold in his grave, I’d have to think the matter over, maybe I’d take a little trip somewhere; I’d look up Dr. Dösch the moment I got back and then perhaps I would sign this paper that he called a contract.
However, though I signed no contract at the cemetery, Oskar’s financial situation impelled him to accept an advance which Dr. Dösch handed me discreetly, hidden away in an envelope with his visiting card, outside the cemetery where he had parked his car.
And I did take the trip, I even found a traveling companion. Actually I should have liked Klepp to go with me. But Klepp was in the hospital, Klepp couldn’t even laugh, for he had four broken ribs. I should have liked to take Maria. But the summer holidays were still on, little Kurt would have to come with us.
And besides, she was still tied up with Stenzel, her boss, who had got Kurt to call him Papa Stenzel.
In the end I set out with Lankes. You remember him no doubt as Corporal Lankes and as the Muse Ulla’s sometime fiancé. When, with my advance and my savings book in my pocket, I repaired to Lankes’ studio in Sittarder-Strasse, I was hoping to find Ulla, my former partner; I thought I would ask the Muse to come along on my trip.
Ulla was there. Right in the doorway she told me: We’re engaged. Been engaged for two weeks. It hadn’t worked with Hänschen Krages, she had been obliged to break it off. Did I know Hänschen Krages?
No, said Oskar, to his infinite regret he hadn’t known Ulla’s former fiancé. Then Oskar made his generous offer but before Ulla could accept, Lankes, emerging from the studio, elected himself Oskar’s travel companion and boxed the long-legged Muse on the ear because she didn’t want to stay home and had burst into tears in her disappointment.
Why didn’t Oskar defend himself? Why, if he wanted the Muse as his traveling companion, didn’t he take the Muse’s part? Much as I was attracted by the prospect of a journey with Ulla by my side, Ulla so slender, Ulla so fuzzy and blond, I feared too close an intimacy with a Muse. Better keep the Muses at a distance, I said to myself, or the kiss of the Muses will get to be a domestic habit. It will be wiser to travel with Lankes, who gives his Muse a good licking when she tries to kiss him.
There was little discussion about our destination. Normandy, of course, where else? We would visit the fortifications between Caen and Cabourg. For that is where we had met during the war. The only difficulty was getting visas. But Oskar isn’t one to waste words on visas.
Lankes is a stingy man. The lavishness with which he flings paint—cheap stuff to be sure, and scrounged as often as not—on poorly prepared canvas is equalled only by his tight-fistedness with money, coins as well as paper. A constant smoker, he has never been known to buy a cigarette. Moreover his stinginess is systematic: whenever someone gives him a cigarette, he takes a ten-pfennig piece out of his left pants pocket, raises his cap in a brief gesture of recognition, and drops the coin into his right pants pocket where it takes its place among other coins—how many depends on the time of day. As I have said, he is always smoking, and one day when he was in a good humor, he confided in me: “Every day I make about two marks, just by smoking.”
Last year Lankes bought a bombed-out lot in Wersten. He paid for it with the cigarettes of his friends and acquaintances.
This was the Lankes with whom Oskar went to Normandy. We took the train—an express. Lankes would rather have hitchhiked. But since he was my guest and I was paying, he had to give in. We rode past poplars, behind which there were meadows bounded by hedgerows. Brown and white cows gave the countryside the look of an advertisement for milk chocolate, though of course for advertising purposes one would have had to block out the war damage. The villages, including the village of Bavent where I had lost my Roswitha, were still in pretty bad shape.
From Cabourg we walked along the beach toward the mouth of the Orne. It wasn’t raining. As we approached Le Home, Lankes said: “We’re home again, my boy. Give me a butt.” Before he had finished transferring his coin from pocket to pocket, he stretched out his wolf’s head toward one of the numerous unharmed pillboxes in the dunes. With one long arm he toted his knapsack, his traveling easel, and his dozen frames; with the other, he pulled me toward the concrete. Oskar’s luggage consisted of a suitcase and his drum.
On the third day of our stay on the Atlantic Coast—we had meanwhile cleared the drifted sand out of Dora Seven, removed the distasteful traces of lovers who had found a haven there, and furnished the place with a crate and our sleeping bags—Lankes came up from the beach with a good-sized codfish. Some fishermen had given it to him in return for a picture he had done of their boat.
In view of the fact that we still called the pillbox Dora Seven, it is hardly surprising that Oskar’s thoughts, as he cleaned the fish, turned to Sister Dorothea. The liver and milt spurted over both my hands. While scaling, I faced the sun, which gave Lankes a chance to dash off a water color. We sat behind the pillbox, sheltered from the wind. The August sun beat down on the concrete dome. I larded the fish with garlic. The cavity once occupied by the milt, liver, and entrails, I stuffed with onions, cheese, and thyme; but I didn’t throw away the milt and liver; I lodged both delicacies between the fish’s jaws, which I wedged open with a lemon. Lankes reconnoitred. He disappeared into Dora Four, Dora Three, and so on down the line. Soon he returned with boards and some large cartons. The cartons he kept to paint on; the wood was for the fire.
There was no difficulty in keeping up the fire; the beach was covered with pieces of dry, feather-light driftwood, casting a variety of shadows. Over the hot coals I laid part of an iron balcony grating which Lankes had torn off a deserted beach villa. I rubbed the fish with olive oil and set it down on the hot grate, which I had also smeared with oil. I squeezed lemon juice over the crackling codfish and let it broil slowly—one should never be in a hurry about cooking fish.
We had made a table by laying a big piece of tarboard over some empty buckets. We had our own forks and tin plates. To divert Lankes—he was circling round the fish like a hungry sea gull—I went to the pillbox and brought out my drum. Bedding it in the sand, I drummed into the wind, variations on the sounds of the surf and the rising tide: Bebra’s Theater at the Front had come to inspect the concrete. From Kashubia to Normandy. Felix and Kitty, the two acrobats, tied themselves into knots on top of the pillbox and, just as Oskar was drumming against the wind, recited against the wind a poem the refrain of which, in the very midst of the war, announced the coming of an era of cozy comfort: “… The thought of comfort’s like a drug: The trend is toward the bourgeois-smug,” declaimed Kitty with her Saxon accent; and Bebra, my wise Bebra, captain of the Propaganda Company, nodded; and Roswitha, my Raguna from the Mediterranean, took up the picnic basket and set the table on the concrete, on top of Dora Seven; and Corporal Lankes, too, ate our white bread, drank our chocolate, and smoked Captain Bebra’s cigarettes…
“Man!” Lankes called me back from the past. “Man, Oskar! If I could only paint like you drum; give me a butt.”
I stepped drumming, gave my traveling companion a cigarette, examined the fish, and saw that it was good: the eyes were white, serene, and liquid. Slowly I squeezed a last lemon, omitting not the slightest patch of the skin, which had cracked in places but was otherwise a beautiful brown.
“I’m hungry,” said Lankes. He showed his long yellow fangs and, apelike, beat his breast with both fists through his checkered shirt.
“Head or tail?” I asked, setting the fish down on a sheet of waxed paper, which we had spread over the larboard in lieu of a tablecloth.
“What’s your advice?” Lankes pinched out his cigarette and put away the butt.
“As a friend, I’d say: Take the tail. As a cook, I can only recommend the head. On the other hand, if my mama, who was a big fish-eater, were here now, she’d say: Mr. Lankes, take the tail, then you know what you’ve got. On the third hand, the doctor used to advise my father…”
“I’m not interested in doctors,” said Lankes distrustfully.
“Dr. Hollatz advised my father always to eat the head of the codfish.”
“Then I’ll take the tail. I see you’re trying to sell me a bill of goods.” Lankes was still suspicious.
“So much the better for Oskar. The head is what I prefer.”
“Well, if you’re so crazy about it, I’ll take the head.”
“You’re having a tough time, aren’t you, Lankes,” I said. “All right, the head is yours, I’ll take the tail.” This, I hoped, would be the end of our dialogue.
“Heh, heh!” said Lankes. “I guess I put one over on you.”
Oskar admitted that Lankes had put one over on him. Well I knew that his portion wouldn’t taste right unless it were seasoned with the asurance that he had put one over on me. A shrewd art
icle, a lucky bastard, I called him—then we fell to.
He took the head piece, I squeezed what was left of the lemon juice over the white, crumbling flesh of the tail piece, whence, as I picked it up, two or three butter-soft wedges of garlic detached themselves.
Sucking at his bones, Lankes peered over at me and the tail piece: “Give me a taste of your tail.” I nodded, he took his taste, and was undecided until Oskar took a taste of his head piece and assured him once again that he, Lankes, had as usual got the better deal.
We drank red Bordeaux with the fish. I felt sorry about that, I should have preferred to see white wine in our coffee cups. Lankes swept my regrets aside; when he was a corporal in Dora Seven, he remembered, they had never drunk anything but red wine. They had still been drinking red wine when the invasion started: “Boy, oh boy, were we liquored up! Kowalski, Scherbach, and little Leuthold didn’t even notice anything was wrong. And now they’re all in the same cemetery, the other side of Cabourg. Over by Arromanches, it was Tommies, here in our sector, Canadians, millions of them. Before we could get our suspenders up, there they were, saying, ‘How are you?’ “
A little later, waving his fork and spitting out bones: “Say, who do you think I ran into in Cabourg today? Herzog, Lieutenant Herzog, the nut, you met him on your tour of inspection. You remember him, don’t you?”
Of course Oskar remembered Lieutenant Herzog. Lankes went on to tell me over the fish that Herzog returned to Cabourg year in, year out, with maps and surveying instruments, because the thought of these fortifications gave him no sleep. He was planning to drop in at Dora Seven and do a bit of measuring.
We were still on the fish—little by little the contours of the backbone were emerging—when Lieutenant Herzog turned up. Khaki knee breeches, plump calves, tennis shoes; a growth of grey-brown hair emerged from the open neck of his linen shirt. Naturally we kept our seats. Lankes introduced me as Oskar, his peacetime friend and wartime buddy, and addressed Herzog as Reserve Lieutenant Herzog.
