The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  On August 7, Reschke’s latest gift from Bochum, a chrome-plated shower set with adjustable spray, was inaugurated far from any crisis. Alexandra’s sixtieth birthday started out wet and happy. Reschke writes: “What a capacity for enjoyment! ‘Is luxury,’ she cried out and absolutely insisted on our standing together under our new acquisition, like children …”

  Then the couple stood in front of Alexandra’s place of work, the astronomical clock. It looked all finished. Not without pride she pointed, among the signs of the zodiac and other symbolic figures, to the Lion, which, like the Crab and the Archer, the Bull and the Virgin, did not glitter with new gilding but shimmered in a matte earth tone. “That’s my sign. Leo means I’m frivolous and game for adventure. The Lion wants to dominate, yes, but is always generous, likes to take long journey and celebrate cheerfully with friends …”

  It was an intimate birthday dinner. One of her colleagues at work and Jerzy Wróbel joined them on Hundegasse. Smoked eel was served, then fillet of perch. They talked about everything under the sun, including crises near and far. Before dinner the couple had mingled with tourists and locals; as usual at the beginning of August, St. Dominic’s Market spread into all the streets. Evidence of the couple’s private stroll is provided by a cut-out silhouette showing the two of them in profile, side by side, Alexandra slightly overlapping Alexander. Her small nose, his big nose. Her full mouth, his receding lower lip. Her chin arching double over her short neck, his high, steep forehead contradicted by his inadequate chin. The back of his head, a curve balanced by the outline of her bosom. A Biedermeier pair, in keeping with Reschke’s second birthday present, a volume illustrated with numerous silhouettes.

  In my documents there are no references to travel. After so much life already lived, the two began to discover each other. Yet I don’t believe they were given to confessions or revelations. Neither widow nor widower had reason to complain about dead husband or dead wife; photographs of normally happy days were preseved in the apartment on Hundegasse and the apartment in Bochum—some framed, some collected in albums. There was no need to pry into the past, for their few off-the-beaten-path adventures left only vague or misfiled memories. True, he at the age of fourteen and a half was a troop leader in the Hitler Youth and she at seventeen was an enthusiastic member of the Communist Youth organization, but both excused these aberrations as congenital defects of their generation; there were no abysses to be sounded. Even if he, in moments of self-doubt, thought he would always have to combat the Hitler Youth in himself, and even if she wished she had left the Party sooner, in ’68 or two years before, “When militia fired on workers here …”

  After the end of August they seldom attended the burials. They left that to Wróbel and to Erna Brakup, who never missed a burial or a funeral feast at the Hevelius. The Cemetery of Reconciliation was now running smoothly. Piątkowska was putting the finishing touches to the astronomical clock: the sun between Cancer and Gemini and the moon between Libra and Scorpio demanded gold. Reschke concentrated on organizational tasks.

  The computer in Bochum was hooked up with the computer on Hundegasse, feeding as well as questioning each other, and there were seldom breakdowns or glitches when it came to supplying the Cemetery of Reconciliation with raw material. The Polish as well as the German press had calmed down. Other news had priority, such as the constant increase in manpower and equipment being poured into the Gulf, the latest developments in Lithuania, and the oppressive tension between the perpetually gloomy Polish prime minister and the labor leader in Gdańsk, who like many small men felt called upon to do big things. Nevertheless, the bank balance of the Cemetery Association showed that world crises did not impede the reconciliation between the German and Polish dead.

  Despite considerable expenses—maintenance and incidentals—the bank balance shot up to unexpected heights. Prudently invested, 16 million deutschmarks yielded so much monthly interest that shipping and maintenance costs—the rest was covered by the health insurance and burial funds—hardly made a dent in the capital. Not to mention the bequest account, used to defray the burial costs of needy persons; they and the German minority in Gdańsk could always count on a final resting place in the Cemetery of Reconciliation; the GPCA worked for the commonweal.

  These favorable bank balances apart, it must be said that a third of the capital and interest was reserved for the as yet inactive Lithuanian component; but the Lithuanians’ demand for national independence left no room for the wishes of their minorities. No space was allotted to the Special Cemetery for dead Poles who had once lived in Wilno; not yet in any case. The Lithuanian people first had to have a state of their own. Later, perhaps, when they got rid of the Russians, a deal could be made on a strictly hard currency basis, but right now …

  In my classmate’s diary I read: “Alexandra suffers from this attitude of total rejection. To do something at least, she has lately been sending Polish schoolbooks across the border through her organization, the Society of the Friends of Wilno and Grodno. We both think that’s not much. But she does not allow her sorrow to cast a shadow on our enduring summer happiness …”

  It was then that those photographs were taken, which Reschke interpreted in a much too dramatic way. The subject presented itself on a weekend early in September. Since the location is not indicated on the back of the photographs, I can only conjecture. It is certain, however, that the couple took the ferry across the Vistula estuary from Schiewenhort to Nickelswalde: a snapshot shows Piątkowska in a light-blue blouse, standing at the rail of the car-ferry. So they must have been on the highway alongside the narrow-gauge railroad tracks, in the direction of Stutthof and Frische Nehrung. A leafy tunnel skirting the forest by the shore. My assumption is based on an entry in the diary. “On the drive through the lowlands one notices how the industrial zone to the east of the city eats its way like a cancer into the flatland bounded only by the Vistula dike. ‘Began already in Gierek time,’ cried Alexandra. Sulfur smell all over …”

  In all four photographs the asphalt surface of a highway shimmers. The outline of a flattened toad is clearly stamped into the surface. It’s not one and the same toad. Four toads, I am certain, were run over, and not once but several times. Perhaps they were going somewhere in a group, or possibly in pairs. It is also possible that they were a mile away from one another when run over, that it is only the photographs that bring them together. I assume that more than four toads tried to cross the road, here and there or else all in one place. Some were lucky, others were not. Just flattened, turned into low reliefs, but still recognizable as toads. One of those typical roads lined on either side with lindens and chestnut trees, forming a deep-green tunnel in the summer, was a trap for the toads.

  All four digits of the front legs, all four digits plus the webs of the hind legs, and even the rudimentary fifth digits both in front and back can be read from the photographs. Flat heads and bulging eyes pressed into bodies. Yet a row of warts can be clearly made out on the back. Desiccated, the body has shrunk into folds. In two of the pictures, the intestines have oozed out and dried on the sides.

  From what I know of toads, which admittedly is not much, these must be common or earth toads. But Reschke wrote on the back of the photographs: “This was a singing toad”—“This toad will sing no more”—“Flattened toad”—“Another flattened toad. Not a good omen.”

  Maybe he’s right. Since red-bellied toads and yellow-bellied toads are smaller than common toads, and he reckons the length of the flat bodies one at five centimeters, two at five and a half, and one at six, they must have been anouras and not common toads, which sometimes grow to a length of fifteen centimeters. Since they were squashed on the Island, they were undoubtedly low country toads. If Reschke had carefully detached one of these reliefs from the asphalt, turned it, and photographed the burst underside, I might now be able to speak with confidence of red-bellied toads. But he was content to look at them from above. So sure was the professor.

  I assume t
hat they drove no farther toward Stutthof and the memorial to the concentration camp by that name. Most likely Alexandra wanted to go back. Though she went in for godless talk—on a different occasion she said, “Actually I’m still Communist, even if I’m out of Party”—she clung to her superstitions.

  No minutes were taken of their meetings. Neither expense accounts nor photographs tell us anything about the frequent sessions. Only Reschke’s diary reveals what was kept secret even from Piątkowska: from early September on, he had many conversations with Chatterjee, “because”—as he explains these secret meetings—“this widely traveled, ambitious Bengali always gives rise to hopes, rather ambiguous hopes. From everything that weighs so heavily on us he squeezes a positive essence. For instance, it pleases him to think that rising oil prices are making gasoline more and more expensive, most notably in poor countries like Poland, for which reason more and more customers flock to his rickshaw business. It’s true. Day after day, I see his inflation-oriented calculations borne out. Not only in the Old City are the streets dotted with nimble rickshaws, drawn now by unembarrassed young Poles; they can also be seen running up and down Grunwaldzka, doing a thriving business in Sopot and Oliwa, and no longer exclusively used by tourists. Shipyard engineers, city officials, prelates, and even officers of the militia let themselves be driven to work at attractive prices or home again after office hours. Chatterjee comments: ‘We are not only environment-friendly, we are also autonomous. Independent of the oil wells that will soon be the target of furious battles, we guarantee a fair price. But things will get even better because they are getting worse. You know what I always say: ‘The future belongs to the rickshaw!’—I didn’t contradict him. How could I?”

  My former classmate appears to have met the Bengali often in the place of their first encounter, the half-timbered little house where they drank Dortmund Export beer together. Their bar conversations: I hear Reschke, whose pessimism has been confirmed by the flattened toads foreshadowing woe, and who foresees dire punishment for every ecological sin, from the Brazilian rain forest to the soft coal mines in Lusatia; and I hear Chatterjee saving the car-clogged cities, Rome and Paris, with his special lanes reserved for rickshaws. The one thing that troubles him is the long wait for Dutch bicycle rickshaws and the constant chicanery of the customs officials.

  And I find a statement of what this Bengali with a British passport has quite consistently been up to. “He has bought into the former Lenin Shipyard, as the new liberal laws permit him to do. He plans to make his own rickshaws in two medium-sized hangars left empty because of the shipbuilding crisis. A license from a Rotterdam firm is already in his pocket. He has more than the Polish demand in mind. His aim is export. Already, Chatterjee tells me, he has twenty-eight first-rate Polish shipyard workers under contract and is having them retrained by two Dutch instructors. With the help of their specialized knowledge he intends to develop the assembly line that has always been his aim. The wheels will soon be turning …”

  Between two bottles of Dortmund Export, the professor in Reschke has pointed out to the Bengali that the city of Gdańsk, during the centuries when it was still called Dantzik, maintained commercial relations with Holland and Flanders, which supplied it with artists and craftsmen. Thus the architect Anthony van Obbergen, hailing from Mecheln near Antwerp, was commissioned by the city magistrate to build the Old City Rathaus, the Big Arsenal on Wollwebergasse, as well as the rectories next to St. Catherine’s in the late Renaissance style. And Chatterjee may have remembered that there were Dutch trading posts on the River Hooghly before Calcutta was grabbed by the British, and that around 1870 a Franciscan missionary of Dutch descent invented the rickshaw in Japan, the term deriving from the Japanese “jin riki shaw,” which means “vehicle propelled by hand power.” If Chatterjee is to be believed, the Chinese brought the rickshaw to Calcutta twenty years later.

  This is mere conjecture, but it is certain that the two men soon arrived at an understanding and that in the course of one of their barroom conversations a first financial agreement between the businessman and the executive partner was committed to writing; the thirty-percent participation of the German-Polish Cemetery Association in S. Ch. Chatterjee’s Bicycle Rickshaw Company, however, did not come to light until a meeting of the board of directors much later. In any case, Reschke was bold and far-sighted enough to invest in this promising venture. The balance sheet of the Cemetery Association made the transaction possible.

  No actual figures are mentioned in the diary. No withdrawals document Reschke’s high-handed risk-taking. His diary refers only to “far-reaching discussions.” “This Mr. Chatterjee has a way of dispelling my dark forebodings; or he colors them in such a way that before you know it they are rosy-red clouds. If only I could convince Alexandra of the humanity of his idea. If only I could bring them closer together and make her see him as a human being just like us. I, in any case, have a vision of how our work, dedicated as it is to people who have crumbled into dust, can be coordinated with his project. While our obligation is to the dead, he is aiming at the survival of the living. While we are thinking about the end, he has a beginning in mind. If high-sounding words still have meaning, it is in the field of our common endeavor. The return of the dead, as enacted each day in our Cemetery of Reconciliation, and the bicycle rickshaw, a vehicle especially favored by our younger mourners—all this, I am not ashamed to say, is living proof of the old adage: ‘Die and be born again.’”

  Alexandra kept out of it. No stretch of Reschke’s imagination could lead her to Chatterjee. Not only did she refuse to ride in the melodiously tinkling rickshaw, she excoriated its promoter, who was simply beyond her; he was uncanny, he had a foreign smell. She wouldn’t trust him by day or by night. “His eyes,” she cried out, “are always half closed.” At an early date, even before the first burials, Reschke recorded her opinion: “Is phony Englisher. We’ll defeat him same as we Poles at gates of Vienna defeated Turks …”

  With regard to Chatterjee’s origins, Alexandra’s mistrust was not unfounded. In one of their barroom conversations the “rickshaw man”—Piątkowska’s disparaging name for Subhas Chandra Chatterjee—admitted that he was of Bengali origin only on his father’s side. Not without embarrassment he explained that his mother belonged to the merchant caste of the Marwaris, that the Marwaris came from Rajastan in the north and had immigrated into Bengal, where they soon cornered the real estate market, acquired numerous jute mills in Calcutta, and had not made themselves exactly popular. But that was what the Marwaris were like: good businessmen. And he, Chatterjee, took entirely after his mother, while his father was a lover of poetry, possessed by dreams of power, which accounts for the first names he gave his son. But he, Chatterjee, had no desire to emulate the megalomania of the legendary Subhas Chandra Bose, who had failed so abysmally as the leader of India; his mother’s child, he staked his future on the business ethics of the Marwaris. “Please believe me, Mr. Reschke, if we want a future, we must finance it.”

  Not a word of this was said on Hundegasse, where Reschke had settled in with his bedroom slippers. I’m certain that Alexandra smelled his secret. But since the barroom excursions were an exception and the couple seldom went out in the evening, it is safe to say that they were homebodies. Only for a few minutes did they allow the TV to fill their living room with crises. They cooked for each other—here too in harmony—from Italian recipes. He learned a few Polish words. They took turns playing with the minicomputer. When in the kitchen she sized richly carved picture frames and applied fresh gilding leaf by leaf with the help of the gilding cushion, Reschke looked on. And when he waxed emblematic and explained to her the ambiguities of Baroque tombstones, Piątkowska hung on his every word. Sometimes they listened to tapes together, to what was left of their weekends on the Island or by the reed-lined Kashubian lakes, in a chorus or solo: ominous toad calls.

  5

  IN PHOTOS I see them hand in hand or arm in arm. This stance, which went with their weekend
outfits, their “partner look,” was interrupted by Reschke’s trip to Bochum. Apart from diary entries and copies of receipts, there are letters which speak only incidentally of love. Busily he writes about “indispensable transactions” and the “necessity of reorganizing the accounts.” Between references to the rise in the price of the stock of certain insurance companies, he informs her that it would be advisable “to build up hidden reserves here and there.” “The high interest rate and the present political climate,” he writes, “make advantageous investments possible.” But this sentence he did not entrust to any letter. He wrote it in his diary, in his meticulous handwriting, for no other purpose than to let me know that he knew how to handle money.

  Alexander Reschke could always handle money; during the war, for instance, when he organized the then compulsory potato bug operation and renamed it “the campaign against the American Colorado beetle.” After submitting a report in crisp military style to the District Farmers’ Leader, he succeeded in having the reward for a full-to-the-brim liter bottle of beetles raised by ten pfennigs to approximately one reichsmark; he then put the money into a “hidden reserve,” with the result that our troop—I personally was involved in this “Colorado beetle campaign”—was able to afford a few extras such as crumb cake, lollipops, and malt beer at the end-of-summer celebration in the barn of the Kelpin farm.

  It was along the lines of these early exercises that the professor of art history now took to operating with the capital of the German-Polish Cemetery Association. Unbeknownst to the board of directors, he demonstrated sure instinct, split accounts, unloaded before it was too late, made profits, and sub rosa laid the investment foundation of the GPCA so that it became a highly diversified, in other words inscrutable, financial structure. Only his office in Bochum had the full picture, although, Reschke writes, “the place is no longer fit to live in. Denkwitz has had to take on a typist and someone to help her with the bookkeeping, which has become very complicated.”