The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  From this first visit to Bochum there are photos of the two of them alone and with others. Reschke took Piątkowska to the university and introduced her to some of his colleagues and invited her to speak at his praxis-oriented seminar. “Alexandra’s improvised talk about gilding as a trade and her comments on the necessity of rebuilding the old cities destroyed by the war were well received by my students, which is no surprise. She used her charm to make them forget the forgery underlying all reconstruction …”

  They were constantly on the move, and not always for pleasure. In the presence of an important official from Bonn a preliminary contract was signed and notarized, which made it possible to open an escrow account in the Deutsche Bank. The atmosphere was unbureaucratic but serious. Since the Bonn Ministry for All-German Questions had already recognized the still-to-be-created Cemetery Association as a worthy cause, funds were set aside as seed money, for which a special account was opened. In Reschke’s financial report the figure given is DM 20,000. Mention is made of widely distributed membership application forms, offering the option of paying the full fee up front or in installments. Should the Cemetery Association not be fully funded by the end of the year, reimbursement was guaranteed.

  A photo shows the two of them standing outside the door of a house, beside which a notary has his office hours inscribed on a brass plate as if for all time. Piątkowska in a tailored suit, burgundy, bought in Essen and often mentioned in the diary. He in his usual beret. Both without string bags. An attaché case dangling on his right.

  On March 21 Alexandra left. The first deposits in the escrow account had just been made. The computer had predicted correctly: only a third of the subscribers opted to pay in installments. On March 31 the balance stood at DM 317,400. Not a bad start. The idea was paying off. There would soon be an even million.

  One may wonder why widower and widow did not meet again sooner, at Christmas, for instance. Had it been a question of her taking too long to get a visa, he could easily have made the trip by car or by plane. Or they could have met elsewhere, on so-called neutral ground, in Prague, say. No impromptu meeting is mentioned in his diary. Much as they longed for each other in their letters and found sparkling words for their desire, they didn’t want to rush things. In his best handwriting, we read: “At our age, experience counsels caution.”

  From her hen-scratchings I make out: “Our love is not little and won’t run away.”

  He in December: “We have waited years for each other; what do a few months matter?”

  “Do you know,” writes the gildress, “when I sit in scaffolding with astronomical big clock in front of me, the time just slips away.”

  He wants to be like the gnat in the walnut-size chunk of amber. “… enclosed in you …”

  “And I in my Aleksander …”

  “Ah yes, Alexandra, each in each …”

  “But longing is great …”

  “No, dearest, we mustn’t. Not yet.”

  Besides, both had family obligations. She had her son Witold with her over Christmas—“He was very sweet and I spoiled him like child”; he spent the holidays with his youngest daughter and for three days surrendered himself to the mercies of his grandchildren. “The two boys,” however, “were not as exhausting as their parents with their passion for long-drawn-out conflict.”

  I don’t know whether they had sworn in Gdańsk, perhaps over breakfast at the Hevelius, not to see each other until their idea had learned to fly on its own, but obviously they decided that when in doubt they would give precedence to the Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Association. In one of his April letters I read: “Duty is duty and schnapps is schnapps.” So they let the Easter holidays go by and did not arrange to meet until mid-May. By that time, they assumed, everything would be in place for incorporation.

  He traveled by car. Three other persons flew from Hamburg: Frau Johanna Dettlaff, 65, wife of a retired manager of a district savings bank in Lübeck; Herr Gerhard Vielbrand, 57, a mid-rank industrialist from Braunschweig; and Dr. Heinz Karau, a consistory councilor of the North-Elbian Lutheran Church. These three persons had agreed that once the incorporation went through, they would occupy the three German seats on the board of directors. A legal adviser, whose name was not recorded, arrived at the same time.

  Piątkowska reserved rooms for them, and a conference room on the seventeenth floor of the centrally located Hevelius. I have in my possession copies of itemized bills for expenses paid out of the account opened with the seed money from the All-German Ministry. Out of this account twice fourteen lunches were paid for. The dinner that concluded the conference after two days of meetings—“The atmosphere was relaxed, speeches were made,” according to Reschke—must have been paid for by the województwo or the Polish National Bank. I find no documentary evidence.

  Much remains unclear: Why did Reschke and Piątkowska wish to be considered only executive partners without voting rights? What was the legal basis of those meetings? I do not possess a copy of the contract of incorporation. But this much is certain. With the exception of the site occupied by the Students’ Clinic, the entire area of the former United Cemeteries, in other words, the Park Akademicki, a tract of land amounting to twenty-five acres, was leased for sixty years, with option to buy, to the Association, hereinafter referred to in brief as the German-Polish Cemetery Association. In compliance with the size of the units required by the German Cemetery Regulations, it was specified that the area, fully occupied, would comprise 20,000 plots, including smaller plots for urns. However calculated, the lease amounted to DM 484,000 per annum, payable November 2. The total rent for the duration of the contract came to DM 6 million and was to be paid within two years. All additional expenses were the responsibility of the Association.

  I assume that the two of them put their November date into the contract, though making no reference to the private significance of All Souls’. It goes without saying that burial expenses and grave maintenance in the now-German cemetery, to be known officially as the Cemetery of Reconciliation, were to be borne by the beneficiaries. The ground rules, worked out by Reschke, were accepted. After revision by the legal advisors—paragraphs concerning the length of interment periods and the right to be buried anonymously—Alexandra Piątkowska and Aleksander Reschke signed the contract as executive partners. The Lithuanian part of the concept, the “Polish cemetery in Wilno,” with its financial structure based on the deutschmark, was reserved for a separate clause—a compromise which Piątkowska had to accept.

  He writes: “We met in a shabbily furnished conference room, but the view from the seventeenth floor of the resurrected city with all its towers made the scope of the enterprise clear to those present. Toward the end of the meeting, the atmosphere became festive. I don’t know who ordered, or paid for, the champagne.”

  The board of directors consisted of the shareholders Dettlaff, Vielbrand, and Karau, and, on the Polish side, of the shareholders Marian Marczak, Stefan Bieroński, Jerzy Wróbel, and Erna Brakup. Erna Brakup, it was thought, would make up for the preponderance of Poles—four to three—because she was of German descent. As Reschke writes, “This was a friendly gesture on the part of the Poles, all the more so as Erna Brakup is no ordinary woman. Well into her eighties, she blabbers nonstop …”

  The following day, the incorporation was announced to the press. My former classmate, who called his idea-become-contract “the work of a century,” was nettled when anyone failed to agree with him. He shooed away like flies the criticisms of the press—the journalists had not been allowed to ask questions until the contract was signed. “We’ll just have to get used to these troublemakers.” In the end, however, he found the press conference satisfactory. “The questions were pointless more than malicious. When the editor-in-chief of a student newspaper observed that the Western border of Poland had not yet been recognized, I was able to refer to the clause in the contract—voted with no opposition and only one abstention—which stipulates that in the event of nonrecogn
ition the contract becomes null and void.”

  Reschke speaks of Marian Marczak as helpful in dealing with the press. In his capacity as vice president of the National Bank, Marczak insisted “firmly but gently” that in the interests of Poland accommodation to the laws of the marketplace could not stop halfway, unless the intention was to restore the principle of Communist penury in all its glory … “I like this Pan Marczak, though I don’t fully agree with his economic liberalism …”

  Piątkowska’s remarks about the distant goal of a cemetery to be leased in Wilno were applauded. Since reconciliation between Lithuania and Poland was in order, that cemetery too could be called a cemetery of reconciliation. I believe that she made this statement first in her language and then in her German. “We have all enough suffered!”

  And yet Reschke saw fit to deplore her violent (his word was “rude”) anti-Russian outburst, which true enough did not occur during the press conference but immediately after. “It grieves me to hear Alexandra speak that way. Understandable as the Russophobia of many Poles may be, our idea does not permit blanket judgments. For my sake at least she should dispense with them …”

  Otherwise nothing clouded our couple’s month of May. Alexander Reschke made little use of his single room at the Hevelius. The three-room apartment on Hundegasse was always open to him. Alexandra was delighted with his present from the West, a laptop computer. She was soon able to use it.

  Directors Dettlaff, Vielbrand, and Karau departed after the Board had voted a constitution and bylaws and elected the vice president of the National Bank chairman. Despite certain organizational problems that remained to be worked out, there was time for our couple to make excursions to Kashubia and to the Island as far as Tiegenhof. They took the car. But when my former classmate wanted to hire a bicycle rickshaw for the short ride to the newly leased burial ground, a quarrel erupted, which might have marred their happiness.

  According to the diary, Reschke gave in. And Mr. Chatterjee, whose firm by then was operating more than thirty rickshaws in the Gdańsk area, offered the prospect of a future ride.

  Actually, the short quarrel between Alexander and Alexandra was brought on not by the rickshaw question alone. If Chatterjee’s sprightly employees had consisted entirely of Pakistanis and Bengalis, or even of Russians, Piątkowska would have risked the little exotic adventure. But because Poles, and by now exclusively Poles, were keeping the three dozen rickshaws on the road, the widow’s “no” was motivated by national pride and for that reason riled the widower. “I should live,” cried Alexandra, “to see Polish men doing coolie work.”

  4

  MY FORMER CLASSMATE has written down a good many names for me: Marian Marczak, a tailor-made vice president, Stefan Bieroński, priest in jeans, Jerzy Wróbel, town clerk, who in his everlasting windbreaker is said to be a fact-finding bloodhound, and Erna Brakup in her cloche hat and galoshes, who is now coming to life for me.

  Herren Karau and Vielbrand and Frau Johanna Dettlaff—who, according to Reschke, distinguished herself during the negotiations by her ladylike smile and rapid-fire mental arithmetic—have left town, but will return whenever Marczak summons the board of directors. Surrounded by people eager to vote, to meddle, and to supervise, Alexander and Alexandra were allowed only a little time together; so little time left.

  Piątkowska began filling in the traces of gold on the outermost rim of the astronomical clock. Reschke continued discussions with the Polish members of the Board, most often with Marczak, who promised liberal terms from his bank, which was located in the old building on High Gate, where the coffered ceiling supported by granite columns created the illusion of permanence. With its ornamentation entirely in ceramic tile—the outer fields in green, white, and ocher, the center field in shades of brown, ocher, and white—the building had offered a secure home to varying currencies, and to that home Reschke now had access.

  His computer had to be fed now and then with the hard work that had accumulated in Bochum. From the Interpress Bureau on Hundegasse, he was able to make long-distance calls and, at a later date, send faxes. Someone, probably Wróbel, advised caution—someone might be listening in, old habits die hard—but Reschke was unperturbed: “We have nothing to hide.” Day after day his diary reports ever new activities, and yet the couple find time for two weekend excursions: a car trip across the Vistula to the Island and a drive to a lake.

  At the beginning of May, earlier than usual, the rape was in bloom. “Too early,” he writes. “A magnificent sight it is, as if yellow were celebrating yellow, but I still suspect that this spring, foreshadowed in February by violent storms, is fooling us all. Alexandra may laugh at me and call this monochrome floral splendor a gift from God that one should not complain about; I still say that sooner or later we’ll get the bill for our commissions and omissions. I see the time, perhaps around the turn of the millennium, when, as Chatterjee says, the bicycle rickshaw will have driven the motorcar from the cities. Strict laws are in force. Much of what we can’t do without today will be obsolete luxuries. But our idea, which now has a definite address, will not be affected by the great change, because it serves the dead, not the living. Nevertheless, in landscaping the cemetery, whose reconciliatory name we owe to consistory councilor Karau, a man of God who speaks in metaphors, preference should be given to plants that can withstand the future warming of the earth’s surface. I must admit I don’t know much about this. I will study and learn. Which plants withstand dry weather, even periods of drought. While crossing Tuchler Heath, reputed to be sandy and barren, my attention was drawn to those round juniper bushes; they immediately struck me as hardy, just the thing for our cemetery grounds …”

  But it was not just the too-early-blooming rape that fed his forebodings. My classmate, who even during the weekly two-hour art class would scribble terrifyingly prophetic pictures on his Pelikan pad—in the middle of 1943 he did a sketch of our until then untouched city beneath a hail of bombs, all its towers in flames—was now finding a wider field for his talent. On the flat Island and along the shores of the Kashubian lakes, in the drainage ditches of the low-lying country and in the reeds along the shore, everywhere toads clamored, and Reschke identified them by their mating call, as red-bellied toads, the so-called fire toads. He writes: “They’re still here. And in the higher lakes and ponds there are even yellow-bellied toads.”

  When Piątkowska, proud of her vocabulary, exclaimed, “Regular frog concert all over,” the art history professor was prepared for more than a zoological lecture on spadefoot toads, common toads, midwife toads, frogs of all sizes, natterjacks, and horned toads: “Do you hear how the red-bellied call stands out against the others? It sounds as if a glass bell was struck. Over and over again. That plaintive double note after a short strike. That everlasting lament ‘Oh, woe to you!’ No wonder the call of the toad, even more than the screech of the barn owl, has given rise to superstitions. In many German fairy tales—in Polish fairy tales too, I’m sure—the call of the toad foreshadows disaster. We find it in Burger’s ballads, we find it in Voss and Brentano. In the old days the toad was believed to be wise. It was only later, as the times grew steadily worse, that toads became the harbingers of calamity.”

  No one could have been on more intimate terms with the subject than Reschke. In the rushes along the lakeshore near Kartuzy, and on the road from Neuteich to Tiegenhof where they stopped the car to photograph the rows of osier willows on the bank of the Tiege, or along the drainage ditches, with toads providing the accompaniment, the professor recited from the romantic poets, and his last quotation, from Achim von Arnim—“And the frogs and the toads sang on and on, celebrating the fires of St. John …”—brought him back to the too-early spring. If Arnim had the toads celebrating the fires of St. John, he was undoubtedly referring to the time of the summer solstice; but what was heard here in mid-May was the ominously premature call of the natterjack, or Bufo calamita. “Believe me, Alexandra, just as the rape is flowering too early, so are the r
ed-bellied toad and the yellow-bellied toad calling too early. They are trying to tell us something …”

  After this disquisition on their meeting with premature nature, Reschke’s diary tells us that Piątkowska laughed at first, then scolded—“Why can’t you just say rape is pretty! You big toad yourself”—then went on puffing cigarette after cigarette, growing increasingly taciturn, and in the end stopped talking altogether. “I’ve never known Alexandra so silent.” The only request she had left was: “Here is little spooky. Let’s go back to town.”

  The diary does not say whether she uttered this request on the shore of a lake or among osier willows. But on a tape Reschke’s voice tells where he went with his recorder and sensitive microphone to capture the distinctly glass-bell-like calls of the toad. In Kashubia, near Chmielno, I hear Alexandra’s voice over those ringing bells. “Mosquitoes eating me alive.” And: “Now is enough nature sounds, Aleksander. It gets soon dark.”

  “Right away. Just a few more minutes, to compare the intervals …”

  “Bites all over …”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “I know. All must be perfect.”

  Thanks to audio technology, his identification on the tape of time and place, her complaints, and the song of the toads all blend into a beautiful trio. From this I have learned that red-bellied toads call at longer intervals than yellow-bellied toads; that my classmate’s voice is soft and warm, rumbling in a register between bass and baritone, but always as if he had a slight cold; and that she trumpets her words challengingly in harmony with the singing of the toads.

  With the same technology Reschke captured the prolixity of a woman who, as a Polish citizen of German descent, belonged to the board of directors of the German-Polish Cemetery Association. Erna Brakup was also the speaker for the Ethnic German Minority of Gdańsk, which until then had been reduced to speechlessness; minorities had not been allowed.