The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  About the first station, Bremen, Reschke writes: “Alexandra must have been hurt when Witold refused to discuss the Cemetery of Reconciliation with us—even in the most general terms. Still, his comment ‘It’s your pigeon’ shows how well he has mastered colloquial German. When I asked him how he was getting on with his studies in philosophy, he said: ‘We’re taking Bloch apart. All that utopian shit. It’s dead!’ That was the tone of our dinner in what I admit was the provocatively posh restaurant of our hotel. He made it plain that he’d have preferred a hamburger joint. Over the soup he started scolding his mother in Polish. As far as he was concerned, I wasn’t there. He jumped up. He sat down. Some of the diners turned around. Alexandra, who at first had put up some resistance, grew more and more quiet. When Witold left even before the dessert, she cried, but would not tell me what Witold had said to wound her. Smiling again, all she said was, ‘So he finally got a girlfriend.’ His Christmas present for the gildress, a badger’s-hair brush, undoubtedly expensive, lay beside his mother’s plate, in a plastic bag.”

  About their stay in Göttingen Reschke writes: “Only Sophia’s children behaved naturally. Shy at first, then affectionate, even to Alexandra. My youngest daughter wouldn’t talk—or let anyone else talk—about anything but her part-time job as a social worker. She complained about everything: the job, her cases, her colleagues, the pay. When I asked if I could show her some photographs of the Cemetery of Reconciliation, which I had taken for my archives, she shook her head. ‘Christmas and all this holiday stuff is depressing enough.’ Her husband, a bookdealer, complained about the ‘hordes of Easties’ and with a strained smile joked about their eagerness to buy books on labor law and how to succeed in business. His only comment about the cemetery was: ‘Looks really inviting.’ This with a grin. A cynic who used to be on the far left but now only cracks jokes, for instance about the Peace Movement and the protests against the Gulf War. Since both husband and wife had recently became fanatical non-smokers, Alexandra had to go out on the balcony whenever she was in the mood to light up. He gave me a paperback about potency in old age. Brilliantly witty of him! Sophia gave me a pair of slippers, which she called comfies, hideous things. Only the children gave us pleasure.”

  About the courtesy call in Wiesbaden, I read: “What on earth has become of Dorothea? She gave up her profession: pediatrician. Candy all over the house. She has visibly put on weight, become morose and withdrawn. Only her ailments make her talkative: shortness of breath, itching skin, and so forth. Not a single word to Alexandra. Her husband, who has advanced to department head at the Ministry of the Environment, showed interest in our idea and sympathy for the difficulty (God knows) of carrying it out, but said with characteristic condescension: ‘You could have bought that a lot cheaper from the Poles. There’s no profit in leasing. Now that their border has been formally recognized, you could have asked for outright ownership, at least of the cemetery land. Anyway, all that once belonged to us.’ Alexandra kept her mouth shut. I said: ‘You forget that we and our dead are guests in their country.’ After that the conversation turned to Hessian garbage disposal sites, increasingly petty party squabbles, and the impending Landtag elections. I was given a picture book that I already own, The Church of St. Mary, and Alexandra got potholders from a Third World shop. The two of us said nothing.”

  Finally, the last station of this calvary, which my classmate lined up as systematically as his memorial slabs. One can only admire Piątkowska’s willingness to hold her peace all the way to Limburg an der Lahn, to bear with his three daughters and their husbands. She should have called the whole thing off back in Göttingen. Even Reschke said: “My dearest! What have I got you into? Their coldness. Their callousness. We actually planned to spend New Year’s Eve with Margarethe and her Fred. That was their wish too. But when my eldest daughter, unsolicited, told us what she thought of our idea, it was too much for Alexandra. Gret, as I used to call her, flicked through the photos and smacked her lips. ‘You sure found an untapped market,’ she cried. And: ‘What’s in it for you?’ And: ‘Certainly a shrewd idea.’ That Fred, who thinks he’s an actor and has let my stupid Gret support him for years, put in his two cents’ worth: ‘Exactly. You have to have an eye for it. Where there’s cream to be skimmed. My advice to you is to allow reburials. That’ll keep you supplied until at least anno 2000.’ I should have slapped him. Alexandra says that would be too much honor for him. We left immediately, without taking our presents—for Alexandra candy, for me a fairly attractive eyeglass case—art nouveau. In conclusion, and with the door already open, Margarethe, a dedicated high-school teacher, stooped to vulgarity: ‘You can’t stand criticism, can you? Taking it as an insult, the idea! Go bury yourselves in your cemetery, for all I care. Cemetery of Reconciliation. Ridiculous. Robbing the dead, that’s what I call it!’”

  A little later, Reschke writes: “I don’t know where Alexandra gets the strength to keep calm, even to be cheerful, after all that. When at last we were back, toasting to the New Year at home, she asked me to put on some good music. While I was looking for something suitable, she lit the two candles on the fir branches and said: ‘I understand your daughters. Witold, too. It’s different generation. They were never chased out, never had to flee in cold. They got everything and know nothing.’”

  I can only conjecture what music he put on. Something classical. In his diary music occurs only as background. He never mentions composers, not even Chopin. Otherwise he writes only that the weather was mild during the holidays, much too mild. “Again no white Christmas …”

  When at the end of the first week in January our couple came back to the three-room apartment on Hundegasse, the weather turned cold after all. Snow fell and lay on the ground, more and more snow, powdery snow on snow. Reschke wrote: “It would seem as though nature wanted to apologize for the long time without snow. Caps on all the decorative gables. How I missed the sound of running feet on crunchy snow, making tracks in the snow. Alexandra’s high heels will have to take a rest …”

  This entry in the diary accounts for the purchase of fur-lined, “sinfully expensive bootees” for her, and some sturdy footwear that he treated himself to. Thus shod, they were on the move, on the ramparts at Leegen Gate for instance or with Wróbel at the old Salvator Cemetery overlooking the Radaune, where one could imagine under tons of snow a good four acres of cleared cemetery land; or I see the two of them by themselves, because Wróbel is detained by his work, tramping down the left side of Grosse Allee toward the Cemetery of Reconciliation. This couple that I have been saddled with: she as round as a tub under her fur cap, he in his baggy black coat, bent as if fighting the wind, though there isn’t any wind in this frosty weather. Since he too is wearing a fur cap, I can’t help wondering: Was it bought in response to the weather, or did Alexandra unearth a mothballed article from the years of her previous marriage? Photos bear out assumptions: our couple let themselves be photographed on their way to, and later in, the Cemetery of Reconciliation, several times in color.

  The burials had to be halted. The deeply frozen ground made digging impossible. With the thermometer at seventeen below, not even urns could be properly buried. Reschke writes: “We were glad to find ourselves alone between rows of graves. Mound after mound. Amazing how quickly the first rows have lined up. By spring, the upper right-hand quarter of the cemetery will be full. I believe the lower quarter, the urnfield, will also be fully occupied. Though all the plots were landscaped individually to suit the taste of the families, the snow has made them all alike. The simple crosses, which for the time being make known the names and dates of the dead, are confirmed in their uniformity: everything is covered by a thick layer of white, the freshly planted box borders and all the fir branches that cover the graves in winter. The snow caps on the urns made Alexandra laugh. For the first time I hear her laughing across the snow. How cheerful she is again. ‘Your pots are funny looking. Nothing like that in Polish cemetery, where everything Catholic.’ Later, we weren’t
alone anymore. Heavily bundled, Erna Brakup came waddling along in her felt boots, and talked and talked …”

  I’m grateful to him for taking down her word-flow immediately after their visit to the cemetery, and not trying to convert her babble into standard German. “Hey, did the lady and gentleman see on television as how they’re making war on the Arabs in the desert?”

  That was her greeting. It was through her that the outbreak of the Gulf War was first recorded in Reschke’s diary. “That’s the way it’s always been. When the gentlemen up top don’t know what to do, they make war. First I thought they’d show us fireworks like at the end of Dominik. But then I saw they were hell-bent on smashing all the Arabs. And I said to myself: What for? An Arab’s a human, ain’t he? Even if he’s maybe done wrong. Who in the world hasn’t done wrong? I ask you, Herr Professor. Will there never be mercy?”

  I don’t know whether he or she explained the significance of the Gulf War to the old relic. In the diary his approach to the war is circumspect. “Once again,” he writes, “Brakup knew what was going on. Amazing, the interest she takes in current events …” But that doesn’t tell us what he thinks of the new weapons systems glorified on television. I read only that, as usual, he is of two minds: on the one hand he justifies the slaughter and on the other calls it barbarous. While the ultimatum was still in force, he was definitely furious with the Germans for supplying arms to Iraq, but his fury lost itself in generalities after he referred to chemical warfare agents as “German poison.” “It is as though human beings were deliberately trying to wipe each other out, until nothing is left …”

  He took a picture of Brakup in the snow, and the old woman seems to have photographed the pair amid snow-covered grave mounds, white-capped urns, and sugar-sprinkled cemetery lindens. All the photos in my possession speak of January frost, winter sun, and blue shadows on the snow. We already know how the couple look in snow, but Brakup is new. She has wrapped her scarf several times around her small, already shrunken skull so tightly that the muffled ball reveals only narrow-set eyes, the reddened hook of a nose, a sunken mouth. It was this photographed mouth that said across the silence of the cemetery: “And when they stop the war, it’ll be the same as it was here in Danzig. Everything smashed, and so many bodies that nobody could count them …”

  A photo that Piątkowska must have taken seems strange and unsuitable for Reschke’s documentation. I see him and Brakup in the center of the cemetery traffic circle, both in violent motion. Slightly blurred, they are throwing snowballs at each other. Firmly planted in felt boots of the kind worn in wartime, Brakup throws and hits—sending up a shower of snow—while Alexander Reschke winds up for a throw, his fur cap slipped to one side. “Snowball fight,” he wrote on the back.

  The frost held until mid-February. The cemetery was as good as dead. But this slack time was taken up with activities: senior citizens moved into the first of the former trade-union houses. In other houses renovation work was under way. In the large villas and manors on Pelonker Weg, progress was slower. In passing Reschke notes that he and Piątkowska saw nothing wrong with the additional leases—in any case the executive partners had no voting power on the Board.

  Advertised in glossy pamphlets under the slogan “Spend the twilight of your life in the homeland,” the housing project was a huge success. Applications poured in. Waiting lists had to be made. Leases were signed for eight more buildings, some of them hotels on the brink of bankruptcy, of course with an option to buy. Vielbrand invested a good deal of time in the new project, confident that his own medium-sized business, which specialized in floor heating, would have a part to play.

  For a time Reschke and Piątkowska were swept along in these activities. Impressed by the cheerful vigor of many of the old people—over six hundred of them moved without any problems into the first five homes—the two approved the decision of the Board after the fact. He released more of his “hidden reserves” when a plan had to be drawn up for a geriatric clinic that met Western standards. After the brief rejuvenation that came with the joy of arrival, the infirmities of old age reclaimed their usual rights. If anything, the change of scene so ardently longed-for made the old people’s health more delicate. The clinic was therefore indispensable, especially as there was no relying on the Polish hospitals, which at best could be used only during the transitional period. In any case, the mortality rate in the retirement homes was on the rise. By the end of February, as even Vielbrand had to admit, the situation was critical.

  Reschke, whose early misgivings were confirmed by this increase in the mortality rate, nevertheless denied the accusation made in a West German magazine that “a profitable business feeding on the homesickness of old people had produced sad flophouses fit only to die in and which ought to be condemned.” In his reply, the executive partner pointed to the advanced or, as he put it, “Biblical” age of the dying. The thirty-eight deaths since the opening of the retirement homes included seven between the ages of ninety and one hundred, while not one was under seventy. “Furthermore, it is safe to say that in every case a long cherished wish had been fulfilled. This wish, expressed in many letters, can be reduced to a few words: We want to die in our homeland.”

  In the name of the board of directors, Vielbrand thanked Reschke for his letter of clarification. And in Reschke’s diary I find remarks casting a more favorable light on the industrialist: “Spoke with him recently in private. Was surprised to learn how much importance he attaches to the economic recovery of Poland. Touching, how excited he gets. Gerhard Vielbrand’s standard remark—‘What Poland needs is a healthy middle class’—provokes violent nods of agreement not only in Marczak and Father Bieroński; Wróbel nods too, and so does Alexandra; they all nod, and sometimes I nod too.”

  Yet strife was on the horizon. At the early March meeting the atmosphere was already tense. Balancing, in his usual way, expense against benefit, and as usual ending up with a profit, Vielbrand outlined a proposal which aroused interest only in the vice president of the National Bank. Space, he said, should now be designated for the reburial of bodies and bones. Marczak immediately agreed and set December 1, 1970—when the first German-Polish pact was drafted in Warsaw—as the cutoff date. Only those resettlers who died after that would be eligible to be returned for reburial. In conclusion Vielbrand stated: “I believe we can handle well over thirty-thousand as a start. Economies of scale. It goes without saying that I shall make reburial possible for my parents, who died in the mid- and late seventies. I trust our Polish friends realize that we are acting in full awareness of the enormous cost. Anything that furthers the reconciliation of our peoples is worth paying for.”

  Sums in hard currency, yet with many zeros, were named. It was made clear that for reburial the basic fee would have to be drastically increased. Still, despite the vice president’s interest, the Polish faction held back. Stefan Bieroński, as a priest, said a flat no. Jerzy Wróbel, though obviously upset, gently commented on the “inhuman dimension” of the idea. Piątkowska seems to have laughed out loud and asked Vielbrand if he thought his proposal would improve the health of the Polish middle class. Angry, heated words passed up and down the conference table. In all likelihood, the proposal introduced by Vielbrand as Operation Reburial and paraphrased by Marczak as “cemetery diversification,” would have been voted down, buried under the rubble of asphyxiating talk, if the professor in Reschke had not won out over his better judgment.

  Carried away, he treated the assembled board of directors to a lecture described in his diary as a “succinct excursus.” Tediously, he brought out his knowledge of church burial customs. Elaborately, he expatiated on the dates chiseled into memorial slabs marking the expiration of interment contracts, then on the transfer of the bones from reopened graves to the charnel house of the parish church, whose small inner chambers did not allow for permanent use, so that the only solution was the installation of crypts filled with skulls and bones, which were, according to Reschke, “the most striking
symbols of death.”

  I am certain that he embellished this lecture, which ruined everything, with the finds to which Jerzy Wróbel had called his attention in mid-February, after the frost let up, in the interior of the ruined Church of St. John.

  They had entered, Wróbel in the lead, first through the hoarding and then through the side door of the right nave, which had been only loosely boarded up. Reschke’s thrill of horror: “What a sight! There in the dim, broken light amid scaffolding and beams, amid cracked memorial slabs and pulverized Gothic arches, the witnesses of our mortality: bones upon bones, heaped-up fragments of skulls, pelvises, collarbones. I saw knucklebones and vertebrae, as though the war had only just brought them to light when the city crumbled in the firestorm caused by bombs and shells … I can see it in my mind’s eye, though I left the city when it was still intact … In the central nave a worthy hand has started cleaning up, collecting bones in crates. One crate is marked, as Jerzy translates, GLASS, HANDLE WITH CARE! Where to put them next? They can’t be left there among cigarette butts and beer bottles. Since we can’t afford a charnel house, a special pit should be dug and covered over. Perhaps by the tower … And then in the rubble, to the right of the demolished main altar, I found pieces of memorial slabs partially sunk into the crypts, among them one dedicated to two sea captains—St. John’s was the church of mariners, sailmakers, and fishermen—and a limestone plaque on which two hands in bas relief hold a key beneath illegible names. Here, too, bones and skulls …”