The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  The letters exchanged by our couple at Advent, at Christmas time, and at the end of the year give a rough idea of the direction of their efforts. Piątkowska reports that the Catholic Church, in the person of the Bishop of Oliwa, has not only shown interest but has characterized “our idea” as “pleasing to God” despite anticipated difficulties. “Important,” she writes, “because in Poland Church here always is and government sometimes is and sometimes not.” True, she met with a good deal of headshaking amazement among her Polish-Lithuanian compatriots, but also with some support. “Many want to finish in Wilno cemetery. And some burst in tears because thought is so beautiful.”

  Reschke writes about his first contacts with refugee organizations. “These people are not as reactionary as certain articles in their church bulletins would lead one to think.” Some local groups with headquarters in the cities of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein reacted positively; other reactions were not without suspicion. One letter expressed vital interest in “a return to the homeland, if only for the dead.” The idea of the cemetery association was surprisingly well received. Conversations with dignitaries of the Lutheran variety—“No interview with the Catholic clergy has as yet taken place”—met with initial success. “A consistory councilor from Elbing, who wished to take an active part, told me that the mere mention of such a cemetery in his birthplace cheered him immeasurably. You see, dear Alexandra, our idea, though devoted to death, contains a life-affirming element, which gives hope to many; just as the medieval Dance of Death motif gives not only a macabre but also a cheerful relevance to death as an egalitarian principle. Consider if you will the Lübeck Dance of Death, unfortunately destroyed by the war, and that of Master Bernt Notke, preserved in Reval: this endless round dance of the walks of life, from patrician to tradesman, king to beggar. They all dance into the pit, as they do today, and today, dearest, is a time of great change whose outcome is unknown. I see waves of barbaric power approaching us directly and by devious ways; some may be salutary. Yet I cannot share the present exuberance of mood without reservation—it is almost certain to swing to bitterness. Although the end of the Wall is a source of satisfaction, I fear the worst. Yes, I vacillate, I feel hot and cold, I’m glad there has been no bloodshed here as in Romania, but I do not exclude the possibility of a special kind of brutality, because in Germany, there is always …”

  Thus the correspondence between Alexander and Alexandra was increasingly burdened by the events of the day. In one of his December letters—four in number—Reschke reports at length on “further initial successes, likely to advance our cemetery idea,” but then: “I see signs of a unity which, though longed for, is beginning to look alarming …”

  Piątkowska opposes this view with confidence, as if all Polish fears for the future have evaporated with the decline in the value of the zloty. “I don’t understand you, Aleksander. As Pole, I can only congratulate with whole heart your people. Anyone who wants Polish nation undivided must also want German nation one. Or do you want to build two cemeteries in Gdańsk with Rest in Peace East and Rest in Peace West?” But then it occurs to her that the border between the two antagonistic nations must be made secure: “Otherwise unity will be dangerous, as often was for whole world.”

  One might suppose that this assault of historic reality would detract from their barely kindled love, the unmannerly intrusion of politics, the “hoofbeat of the mounted Weltgeist” outgalloping the dreams of men, the ubiquitous banners and slogans. Didn’t the increasingly amplified shouts of “We are one people” drown out the lovers’ whispers, their gentle vows of “We are one flesh”?

  The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig traveled around the world. When New Year’s Eve was celebrated on and under the Brandenburg Gate, the slums of India and Brazil joined in the celebration, and the worldwide family of nations looked on in amazement. In Bochum and Gdańsk, Alexander and Alexandra saw what the TV brought into their living rooms. At such a moment, who could turn off the TV and gaze instead at a photograph showing mushrooms, or hold up a walnut-size piece of amber to the light?

  Their love remained unharmed. In her Christmas and New Year’s letter, Piątkowska, usually all common sense, recalls the skinny body on top of, under, and beside her. Her love is still palpably with her when she writes of her pleasure in fingering and counting her “dear Aleksander’s ribs.” “You have body of boy!” She counts the sparse hair on his chest as profit. In one letter Piątkowska uses an expression that the exported gildress must have picked up in Trier or Cologne: “You fucked me good and I hope it is more and often …”

  Reschke on the other hand refrains from bodily allusions, adumbrating their love with the help of sublime concepts, as though to put it on a pedestal. Even the momentous political events of the day he harnesses to that frail vehicle. At the start of the New Year he writes: “And what happened there on New Year’s Eve, on and under that classical structure, long sealed, now at last open, what happened on the stroke of twelve, when a bloody decade bristling with weapons to its very end passed away, what suddenly broke free, and what then irrevocably began with the new decade, which I saw coming with fear and hope, set off a bellowing—for the people in Berlin and elsewhere seem to have gone wild—which was reduced by a large-circulation newspaper, that harangued this people day after day, to a single word in bold type: Madness! Yes, Alexandra, the new decade was rung in with this word. When people meet on the street, they greet one another with, ‘Isn’t it madness?’ Yes, it’s madness. Whatever happens, madness must have a hand in it. If something inexplicable happens, madness explains it. Madness is the lid that fits every pot. And it may well have been madness, my dearest, I’m referring to the sublime madness that lends wings to love, that brought us together outside that flower stall, that led us to the cemetery, tempted us with that fragrant mushroom dish, brought us together again, and fitted us together in that narrow bed. But to this madness, to our madness and its melody, I say yes and again yes …”

  From this point, roughly since the middle of January, much becomes obscure. If I see them at all, it is as silhouettes. True, not a single letter is missing from my mountain of documents. But amusing as this correspondence may be to an outsider, alternating between billing and cooing and mortuary matters, it seldom goes into anything of substance. To keep their story flowing, I have to grasp at dependent clauses and milk single words dry.

  I shall try to explain this deficiency. Reschke and Piątkowska carried on a large part of their correspondence by telephone. Next to nothing is known of these conversations, though the letters and his diary give an idea of the difficulties encountered in telephoning between East and West. These quarters of the compass are not at all neutral; they divide good and evil, are imprinted like watermarks on their writing paper. While she bemoans the poverty of the East, the rising prices, the soup kitchens—in Poland at present the needy can get soup by presenting a kuroniówka, named after Jacek Kuroń, the minister of social affairs—he complains about Western oversupply and the unyielding hardness of West German currency, which he refers to, borrowing Alexandra’s language, as “the German mark.” And if she calls it disgraceful that she stayed in the Communist Party as long as she did, yet holds Communism responsible for all subsequent disasters—she even blames Communist iconoclasm for the persistence of Catholic dogma—he believes capitalism is responsible for all failings, including his own. After buying a computer for tax reasons—“Such things are deductible here”—he sees himself succumbing, compulsively as it were, to the principle of capitalist accumulation. “And to think that the university has a superabundance of data-storing devices …”

  How dismissive he sounds, and yet this computer which, as he himself admits, he “hardly knows how to operate,” will help him bring their idea to life. A so-called PC, probably an Apple. Here again I lack details, because he omits the technical information which I, stubbornly at work without a computer, cannot pull out of my hat.

  Be that as it may, his “useful acq
uisition,” as he soon calls his nameless contraption, begins to spit out elaborate extrapolations based on statistics as well as input coming to him from an increasing number of local homeland associations. For the first time he speaks, without a trace of irony, of “burial-ready persons,” basing his calculations on the assumption that 30,000 people will be willing to advance as much as DM 1000, and in addition make further contributions as well as eventually sign over payments from health and life insurance policies, so that, given the availability of an authorized cemetery, a capitalization of some 28 million would be assured. True, a third of that sum would have to be set aside for the cemetery in Wilno and deposited in an escrow account, since it seems certain that Lithuania will want the return of burial-ready Poles to be paid for in hard currency. “Yes, dear Alexandra, that’s how it is. Only with the help of the deutschmark can we provide our idea with concrete form …”

  The majority of the former inhabitants of Danzig and environs, which until 1939 formed a Free State and was then incorporated into the Reich, had found reasonable accommodation if not a home in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lower Saxony. Another 15,000 burial-ready persons could be expected as soon as Reschke fed figures for the East and South German settlement areas into his computer. My former classmate did not exclude the possibility of further increase after reunification, “although in that case the most that could be hoped for is a deposit of 500 deutschmarks. After all, East Germany is groaning under inherited burdens similar to those of Poland, even though it is true that recovery here should be quicker than in Poland. You, after all, have a big brother who knows the answer to everything.”

  Playing with the computer must have amused Reschke. Words like network, monitor, and mouse slipped into his letters. ROM was explained to Alexandra as Read Only Memory, RAM as Random Access Memory. Since their idea struck like a bombshell, a flood of programs poured through the mail, and he loaded them all on to his hard disk. He soon filled dozens of floppy disks. Not that his PC replaced his distant loved one in his affections. Nevertheless, he speaks fondly of his new acquisition: “… and as my buzzing companion, who stutters knowledgeably and yet so discreetly, recently whispered, we can start our cemetery association with a capitalization that promises to be far larger than my first extrapolations led me to believe …”

  I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such easy familiarity with software. At first Reschke felt obliged to justify his acquisition as required for his academic work. Passages from secondary sources, flowery jumbles of Baroque iconography struck him as worth storing, but in the end it was only the Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Association and its plans that the professor entrusted to the memory of the “capitalist monster.”

  Having gone through numerous issues over several years of the monthly Our Danzig in the university library, he fed his PC—I see him in bedroom slippers sitting at his Apple—with information gathered from the back pages of that organ of local patriotism. There he found death notices and messages of congratulation on round-numbered birthdays, silver, golden, and diamond wedding anniversaries, and “well-deserved retirements.” Photos of class reunions with captions told him how many surviving, now very senior schoolboys might still want to travel. There were also class photos from various elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools, listing the boys and girls squatting in front, then sitting, then standing, then in the last row elevated. Their side-parts and pigtails, their cabbage bows and Schiller collars, their knee stockings and striped socks, their grins and timid smiles, and so much pinched gravity, flanked by the school principal and the class teacher—conveniently pre-assorted sources of information for Reschke, because these and other sources told him something about the longevity of former refugees. My classmate hesitates between categories and says “resettled” when he means “driven out,” or he blurs the issue by classifying our aging compatriots as “resettled refugees.”

  As proof of this above-average life expectancy, he sent Piątkowska photocopies of birthday and anniversary notices as well as death notices, showing that a Herr Augustin Habernoll had celebrated not only his ninety-fifth birthday but the seventy-fifth anniversary of his career as an organist, or that Frau Frieda Knippel had reached her eighty-sixth birthday in the best of health, or that Herr Otto Maschke, age ninety-one, had “quietly passed away after a long illness.”

  Alexandra read: “Is not the longevity of resettled refugees trying to tell us that people are waiting impatiently, no, longing, for the Cemetery Association to be founded? Nay more. I believe that the dread prospect, increasing with each year, of having to lie in foreign soil, mingled with the hope of one day finding their last resting place in a native churchyard, has prolonged the twilight of my countrymen’s lives. The waiting bench is steadily growing longer. It is as though the old and the very old were crying out to us: ‘Hurry! Don’t make us wait any longer!’ How fortunate that these jubilarians along with their former addresses are communicated to my otherwise obscure homeland paper, whose editors still believe that the course of history can be reversed, e.g.: ‘Formerly of Danzig, Am Brausenden Wasser 3B, present residence 2300 Kiel 1, Lornsenstrasse 57.’ I have stored over a thousand addresses. Most local refugee organizations answer my circular, expressing interest. They provide me with raw data. And I am grateful that nearly all of them distribute my questionnaire. Seventy-two percent of the replies indicate burial-readiness in the context of our Cemetery Association. Fifty-one percent of these wish to make the full deposit as soon as possible, while only thirty-five percent prefer to pay in installments; the remaining fourteen percent are undecided. Several times I have checked these figures, and every time I am amazed to see what wonders computer technology, which I long believed to be soulless, can accomplish. Soon we will set up one of these magic boxes on Hundegasse. I feel sure that my Alexandra will learn to use it more easily than I did.”

  Her reaction upon the arrival of the new piece of furniture: “Yes, German gentleman has to tell Polish people always how to make everything all right …”

  That was toward the end of February, when the East German state was threatening to drain in a westerly direction and Reschke was feeding the daily emigration figures into his PC, whereupon it spat out the information that this depopulation gave reason to fear an Anschluss of the vacated territories in the near future. I read: “More and more the events of the day make me fear that our idea will suffer under the burden of German incompatibility …”

  By return mail a reply that is meant to comfort him arrives. Piątkowska compares the permanently worried face of her prime minister with the West German chancellor’s standard expression: “Why you complain, Aleksander? If poor Poland has knight of mournful countenance, you have only blubbery Sancho Panza always grinning …”

  Now I want to unload my rage. What are their letters to me! Why should I join in his computer games? What is it about the couple’s story that continues to intrigue me? Isn’t their love getting banal, and isn’t their business with the dead contrived? How many more toads do I have to swallow?

  Neat and spidery, their February letters justify my bad mood. Piątkowska writes that her son, who is studying in Bremen, has dismissed his mother’s and her lover’s plans for the Cemetery Association as a “typical product of petty bourgeois wishful thinking.” “Witold says our idea is false consciousness because he has to tease me always, he is Trotskyite because I was too long in Party, and he won’t have girlfriend like I want him to have.” Reschke then complains about the “injudicious egoism” of two of his daughters, one of whom accuses him of an “anachronistic homeland cult” and the other of “revanchist necrophilia.” “The youngest keeps out of it; obviously our idea means nothing to her.”

  He further deplores the bureaucratic pettiness at the university, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the weather, the neonationalist attitudes of his colleagues; she, on the other hand, reports uncomplainingly on her work, now in St. Mary’s. “There stands a
stronomical big clock, made, as you know, by Hans Düringer, but legend says he smashed it all, because council of patricians put out both his eyes and blinded him to stop him making wonderful clocks in other places. And now I get to fix it …”

  The gildress’s task was to restore the traces of the original gilding, specifically in the numerals of the ecclesiastical feast days. Piątkowska wrote this letter in December, whose feast days are: St. Barbara, St. Nicholas, the Immaculate Conception, and St. Lucy. The Golden Number, the lunar cycle running from 1 to 19, the twelve golden numerals for the hours on the outer circle of the clock, and the few traces of gold in the signs of the zodiac on the inner circle still had to be restored. “Especially Leo has most gold left over from first gilding. I am looking forward to Leo because my birthday comes when Leo dominant …”

  Our professional pair. I’m getting curious about them again. Luckily, they were not entirely obsessed with their idea. While Piątkowska was gilding time that had stopped, Professor Reschke was inventing exercises for his students. “The charming gift from your hand,” he writes, “has inspired me to channel my anger with the university and its intrigues into useful activity—that is, to give a seminar on the objects created for buying and selling. Everything that appears in works of art can be categorized in this way: baskets, panniers, bags, sacks, nets, carryalls, knapsacks, which are again in fashion among the counterculture people, as are, sorry to say, those wretched plastic bags. As you might expect, the Dutch Little Masters have a great deal to offer. Money pouches, visibly displayed and often magnificently executed, can be seen in woodcuts since the late-Gothic period. And contemporary art, down to Beuys, positively celebrates these objects; no felt slipper is safe from it. Incidentally, any number of these useful articles figure in the etchings and drawings of our mutual friend Chodowiecki—I’m sure you recall our little quarrel—I am thinking in particular of the drawings he did on his journey from Berlin to Danzig and during his stay there, for example, the charming sketch of a maid with a wicker basket. My students are crazy about these drawings. And they were ecstatic when, with your permission, I hope, I brought your dear gift to my seminar. What interests me in all this is the visual quality and the possibility of building bridges between art and everyday life. No wonder that two of my female students and a little later a young man started crocheting a string bag with a zigzag pattern. They use your bag, which I am now glad to call mine, as a model …”