The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Vielbrand seized on these details, on everything Reschke said about skeletons and charnel houses, and bent them, stripped of their baroque gruesomeness, to his purpose. Obviously, any reburial program involved the problem of space. The large number of applications demanded consolidation. Common graves seemed to him a possible solution, and he proposed repositories large enough to accommodate fifty reburials. The names and dates of the reburied could be arranged in alphabetical order on a simple plaque. In accordance with the esteemed Professor Reschke’s suggestion, some of these inscriptions might be cut in stone. There would even be room for traditional symbols, such as the above-mentioned key. Every problem contains its solution. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  But the will was not there just yet. Reschke objected to the misapplication of his knowledge and called the above-mentioned channel house an obsolete model. Consistory councilor Karau confessed that he was “torn.” Frau Johanna Dettlaff said: “Frankly, I am uncomfortable with the macabre aspect of the program under consideration.” Bieroński and Wróbel stuck to their no. Unable to make up his mind, Marczak said: “Later perhaps …” After Reschke’s presentation, Alexandra Piątkowska was able to put an end to the discussion by referring to the double grave of her parents on Hagelsberg and categorically refusing reburial, even were it to become possible in Wilno. “Anyone already in ground should stay there.”

  So for the time being nothing came of it. Marczak tabled the motion. Under “miscellaneous,” the last item on the agenda, certain public reactions were mentioned. It was noted with satisfaction that a debate in the Sejm had ended favorably for the Cemetery Association. A former Communist deputy had attacked the German-Polish reconciliation movement as “cryptorevanchism.” His denunciation culminated in the cry: “An army of German corpses is intent on conquering our western provinces.” Marczak reported that several deputies rejected this denunciation, or, in his words, “unmasked it as a Stalinist horror story.” When the meeting was over, he invited the whole board of directors for a drink at the hotel bar.

  The conference room on the top or seventeenth floor of the Hevelius may be pictured as two guest rooms joined together. Its only distinction was the view of all the towers in the Old and Right cities. Thanks to Marczak’s charm, the tone of the assembled Board seldom rose to the level of an exchange of verbal blows, although it must be admitted that a debate in three languages, Polish, German, and occasional English, often provided plenty of incendiary material. The polyglot chairman, that always carefully groomed quadragenarian whose forehead, heightened by loss of hair, shone as though polished, managed to take the sting out of arguments that threatened to grow violent; with gestures comparable to those of an orchestra conductor he moderated here, pacified there, sometimes in French. He curtailed Wróbel’s longwindedness by tossing in questions, hurried Karau’s sermons along to the amen by injecting Bible quotations. He softened Frau Dettlaff’s repeated insistence that smoking not be allowed, by suggesting smoker’s breaks for Piątkowska’s benefit. Without irony he summoned Erna Brakup back from an occasional nap to the business at hand. He managed to reduce Vielbrand’s motions to a minimum, and even aroused the interest of a bored Stefan Bieroński with an encouraging gesture when Reschke took the opportunity to get back to the original idea of the Cemetery of Reconciliation. Marczak had them under control, even during the session that left the reburial question undecided. Bieroński listened and Brakup woke up when Reschke added a variant to his standard Century of Expulsions theme by provoking the opposition of both Vielbrand and Karau with the assertion: “Reburial is but another form of expulsion.” Vielbrand threatened to walk out. Brakup babbled away, though no tape was running. And Piątkowska smoked, though no break had been announced. But Marczak disarmed them all with his helpless smile.

  Later in the hotel bar, the atmosphere was relaxed, almost cheerful. I picture Brakup on a barstool.

  Just a week after this meeting, Reschke had another talk with Chatterjee, this time not in the small half-timbered house on the bank of the Radaune but conspiratorially in a rundown graveyard behind the Church of Corpus Christi. Here, either forgotten or deliberately spared, the Klawitter family tomb was their place of rendezvous.

  “On a gray pedestal, a black granite block rubbed to a high gloss. The spacious tomb is surrounded by a rusty iron railing. The name of the last Klawitter, president of the Chamber of Commerce, is chiseled at the bottom. Of course I owe this discovery to Wróbel. And Chatterjee listened attentively when I told him about Johann Wilhelm, the founder of the first Danzig shipyard …”

  My former classmate entrusted this secret meeting to his diary as a matter of great importance. Yet it can’t have lasted more than half an hour. “He was waiting, leaning against the railing. This vital, often exhaustingly vital man with his life-affirming energy and spontaneity, to whom our preoccupation with the dead is bound to be utterly alien, fascinates me more and more. He calls burial a total waste of space. We could be friends, if only I could manage not to regard him as a threat. Sensible as I find his solution to the traffic problem, and willing as I am, though a motorist, to do without cars and support his bicycle rickshaw as a way to save our cities, I cannot accept his view of the present war and its global effects. No! His conclusions horrify me. Chatterjee believes that the Gulf War is needed to make the pauperization especially of Asia and Africa intolerably evident. The crushing demonstration of military might, he believes, simply highlights the impotence of Western thinking. No one can halt what has now been set in motion. The die is cast. He even tried, by quoting Nietzsche, to make the new era and the transvaluation of all values palatable to me. ‘Already we are on the way. Only a few hundred thousand to begin with, poor in luggage but rich in ideas. Just as you came to us, to teach us double-entry bookkeeping, we are coming to you, bringing you something in return.’ That led him to his rickshaw principle, the success of which indeed speaks for itself. After a sudden leap and a vault over the railing, which must have been at least waist-high, he spoke well of my seed-money investments and promised, with a glance at the tombstone of the shipyard founder, to revive the founder’s spirit of enterprise. After another vault, he tossed figures about with playful earnestness, vaulted over the railing again, this time without using his hands, and swore by Klawitter to turn the shipyard into a gold mine. Theatricals, of course, but this much is true: Chatterjee’s rickshaw production is running full tilt in three shipyard hangars. First he means to satisfy the domestic market, then nibble at other countries. With all this planning activity, my business friend has put on a little weight. Unfortunately, he can no longer find time to pull a rickshaw in his own employ; his personal fitness suffers, and that’s why he resorts to jumping exercises. Again he vaulted inside the railing, and again back to me, and confided that he had arranged for additional help by procuring visas for six of his numerous cousins—four from Calcutta, two from Dacca—and, in return for small favors, obtained residence permits for them. Three of the expected kinsmen are supposed to be Marwaris, hence especially capable.”

  All this was heard by the forgotten and spared tombstone of the founder of the Klawitter Shipyard, whose expensive railing the Bengali was using as gymnastic equipment; over and over again he practiced the side vault from a standing position. All around him scrub-wood, rusting scrap iron, the remains of a wooden shed, and, farther on, community gardens. Even before Schichau, Klawitter had been active. His first steamship. Only later, much later, came Lenin, who built no ship and nothing but ideas.

  And once again hup! and hup! After the twelfth vault—Reschke was counting too—Chatterjee pointed to the polished granite and tapped the first chiseled name and the dates 1801 to 1863: “I’d like to have that man as a partner!” And Reschke, poor Reschke, who wouldn’t have dared attempt any vaults but wanted to be a partner in the place of Klawitter, offered further financing from his hidden reserves. Figures and bank connections were mentioned. With the six-foot tombstone behind them, Chatterjee’s rick
shaw production and the Cemetery Association, the moving and the immovable, the quick and the dead, once again concluded a deal which, to quote Chatterjee, was based “on reciprocity.”

  When Reschke asked how business was doing in the winter, he learned that even in the hard January frost a good many Poles had responded to the attraction of the low rickshaw prices, among them the vice president of the National Bank. “Mister Marczak is a loyal passenger and always willing to help,” said the Bengali after a last leap over the cast-iron railing.

  Erna Brakup too enjoyed riding in rickshaws. If the Board was in session, she had herself cycled to the hotel entrance. Her arrival drew a crowd. She was the one, actually, who gave Chatterjee the idea that the rickshaw could be used for small deliveries. Soon an inner-city service for letters and parcels was introduced.

  When activity in the Cemetery of Reconciliation resumed with the early spring weather, Brakup could often be seen riding up Grosse Allee to the old brick building beside the gate. She never missed a burial. To all the mourners she expressed her condolences, which boiled down to one sentence: “Let’s wish them eternal peace.” She is reported to have said to Chatterjee, who pedaled her at reduced rates: “We’re both a minority here. That’s why we should back each other up. I mean against the Polacks and the Germans from over there. They want to put us through the wringer.” And then she made Reschke, who was less than eager, translate her babbling into English. “Especially the part about backing each other up.” The parcel service which she suggested became so popular that Chatterjee had special rickshaws built in his assembly plant, and honored his advisor with a book of free tickets.

  There were always spectators at the cemetery entrance when Brakup drove up. From there she went to the brick house where the gravediggers and gardeners kept their tools and where the permanent guards were stationed, and picked up her watering can and her little shovel that also served as a hoe.

  I have a photo showing Brakup sitting in a bicycle rickshaw with a raised top, although the photo indicates fine sunny weather. She sits as though in a shell, wearing her pot-shaped felt hat and the same old wartime felt boots. Her fingers are braided in her lap. She is not smiling.

  Since the driver is not a Pakistani but flaxen-haired, he could be a Pole, and if not a Pole then a Kashubian. Unfortunately, few photos document Chatterjee’s rickshaw enterprise. This photo appears as authentic as those black-and-white snapshots in my possession that prove that in German-occupied Warsaw, when all sorts of things were prohibited and no Pole was allowed to drive a car, whether a taxi or privately owned, there existed a legal bicycle rickshaw business operated by Poles for Poles, engaged in the transportation of persons as well as goods. The wheels and crates attached to them look shabby, the drivers morose, and the passengers worried. In another picture, the “driver” pushes an overloaded crate. The writer Kazimierz Brandys has this historical vehicle rolling through his novel Rondo. The rickshaw also occurs in some of Szczypiorski’s works.

  The color photo of Erna Brakup, however, shows a spanking new wheel that was made in the shipyard hangar. To the right of the bicycle seat a pea-green inscription on a ground of white enamel avoids the national language and attempts, through English, to be universally intelligible: CHATTERJEE’S RICKSHAW SERVICE. The raised top is striped in the national colors: white and red, white and red. The driver’s dress has a hint of uniform but is actually a sports outfit: bicycle racer’s cap, collarless tunic, trousers not unlike antediluvian knickerbockers. A stripe across the chest of the tunic displays the logo of the firm and the number of the vehicle, which is 97.

  Like the Warsaw passengers in those black-and-white wartime photos, Erna faces the camera impassively, as if welded into the rickshaw. Reschke must have taken this snapshot, because on the back of it is written: “Thus majestically does the spokeswoman of the German minority in Gdańsk ride to the Cemetery of Reconciliation.”

  The photo was taken at the end of March. At that time the currency, which had been briefly stable, began again to show an inflationary trend; prices were rising, production falling, and wages stagnating. The new president of the Republic, of whom Piątkowska said, “Now electrician wants to be King of Poland,” had got himself a prime minister who lacked the mournful countenance of his predecessor but saw everything, countrywide, in a much more mournful light. Only churches were being built, ungainly churches everywhere.

  Reschke writes: “The joint-venture businesses that put on such a show of optimism are already failing. Just as a year ago the Americans refused to take over the rundown Lenin Shipyard, now the Norwegians hesitate to buy into the deficit-ridden Paris Commune Shipyard in nearby Gdynia. At best we see pseudodeals between foreign firms that have post-office box addresses and native factory managers, each taking a cut. This no doubt is why Chatterjee’s enterprise, though of medium size, is commanding more and more respect …”

  And that is why the photo of Erna Brakup riding in a rickshaw suggests more to me than any photo can prove. The Bengali with a British passport had taken root in Poland. There his six cousins, among them three Marwaris, found fertile soil for their activities and established branches in Warsaw, Łódź, Wrocław, and Poznań. Reschke had done widely to put the Cemetery Association’s money—never mind how much—into rickshaw production. Even now it might not be unreasonable to ask whether the former Lenin Shipyard, previously the Schichau Shipyard—and in the beginning there was Klawitter—should not be named, if not after the Bengali’s black goddess Kali then after the Bengali national hero Subhas Chandra Bose.

  In any event, hope moved into Poland with Chatterjee.

  If I am to believe Reschke, as I must, the German-Polish Cemetery Association enjoyed comparable esteem, which, however, as sad experience shows, kept being cast into doubt; the GPCA was respected, whereas Chatterjee was idolized as a benefactor. Yet Reschke sees himself as equal in stature to the Bengali. More and more often he refers to him as “my associate and partner in the business of the future.” I would not have thought Alex, as we called him at school and later as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, capable of so much foresight, allowing, however, for the fact that he prospered at a time propitious to his idea, when everything was in flux, when the world was out of joint and all certainty gone. He could at least be certain of his Alexandra.

  They were no longer a widower and a widow, but a pair. I see them personifying convincingly their idea: at the Rathaus reception, as guests at the Bishop’s palace in Oliwa, in seats of honor at the Baltic Opera House, on the podium at debates about “Courage for Reconciliation,” or within the milling crowd at Chatterjee’s inauguration of his fourth assembly-line hangar at the shipyard premises with free beer and bratwurst. Whatever the program, our couple was present. Side by side and if necessary back to back, since war was in the cards for the next meeting, scheduled to take place in early April.

  Since little reliance could be placed on Jerzy Wróbel, who always had his nose in the past, or on Stefan Bieroński, who was interested only in collections for the arch in his parish church, and since they could expect support solely from Erna Brakup, provided all the talk didn’t put her to sleep, the session took a turn it shouldn’t have taken. The “reburial program” was presented in a motion formulated by Vielbrand. Brisk, businesslike, armed with a brush haircut and rimless glasses, he made himself heard like a general on the eve of battle.

  Because the middle-class industrialist took only what he wanted from the professor’s recent lecture and adopted the frequently mentioned Baroque charnel houses as a model for his plan, the reburial of mortal remains sounded practicable and not at all offensive. Communal graves of moderate size were proposed, and memorial tablets instead of tombstones. “This space-saving venture,” he said, “demands to be handled with the utmost dignity.”

  Thus was Vielbrand’s mill powered by the professor’s passion for research. Bieroński was carried off by sweet boredom. Wróbel was tracking down clues to the past. Brakup was fast asleep under her hat.
And Reschke confesses: “He beat me with my own words. I had foolishly supplied him with arguments for his loathsome reburial scheme. That always correct advocate of naked interests reduced me to silence. Even Alexandra’s protest, expressed in both languages—’Reburial will take place over my dead body’—for all the effect it had, might have been spoken out the window. But no, her protest was not entirely wasted. Erna Brakup woke up, and she, with her choice of words, did have an effect. The priest in Karau thought he heard speaking in tongues. Bieroński and Wróbel sat up. Frau Dettlaff was shocked and Vielbrand petrified …”

  With her hat on and standing in her everlasting felt boots, Brakup spoke: “If reburial goes on here, ladies and gentlemen, pretty soon there won’t be no room for real dead people. And who’s going to dig out all the Germans that croaked at the end of the war and right after the war? The devil only knows where the refugees gave up and lay down. And who’s going to pay for all that? Nothing doing. There’s no justice in it. You only get reburied if you’re rich and German. And the Poles make money out of it. But if you’re a German and a poor devil you and your bones can stay where they put them in the bad times when there was no justice. Nothing doing. Count me out. If that’s how it is, you can bury me somewhere else. For all I care, in the Arabian desert, where they had a war a while back. But, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you this: First I’ll resign from the Board!”

  Apart from the objections of the executive couple, the only dissenting voice was that of Erna Brakup. Wróbel and Bieroński abstained. With the three German votes plus Marczak, the motion would have carried, if Brakup’s threat to resign hadn’t forced a postponement. The next meeting was to take place in two weeks. Vielbrand was in a hurry. He had acted without consulting the executive couple, and spoke of some 37,000 reburial applications with basic fees raised to 2,000 deutschmarks. The vice president of the Polish National Bank, Gdańsk branch, had no difficulty in adding up the numbers.