The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Mention must be made of the travel plans not only of Reschke and Piątkowska but also of Chatterjee—in three different directions—the Bengali traveling in accordance with a carefully prepared itinerary and our couple in haste, as if to make the fullest use of the days remaining before the next meeting of the board of directors. Reschke’s destination was Lübeck, Piątkowska’s was Wilno, though her departure was delayed for several days by visa trouble. Chatterjee visited a string of big cities. They all traveled as light as possible. Reschke took the car, Piątkowska the train, and Chatterjee—what would you expect?—a plane.

  Though the intentions of the couple were unrelated to the itinerary of the rickshaw manufacturer, all three travelers had one thing in common: each pursued an idea, either to save it or to give it wings. The purpose of S. Ch. Chatterjee’s European tour was to open or expand branches; Piątkowska’s to make a last try at establishing a Polish cemetery in Wilno; and Reschke’s to put a stop to the reburial program.

  The businessman was accompanied by two of his six cousins. He proposed with his visionary concept of traffic to help all those immobilized by motorized metal, smothered by exhaust fumes, and deafened by noise; he guaranteed immediate delivery of brand-new bicycle rickshaws, though in limited numbers to begin with. Piątkowska had fortified herself with a financial guarantee backed by a third of the capital of the Cemetery Association. Only Reschke was empty-handed when he protested in Lübeck against what he called “this inhuman reburial business.”

  Considering the traffic situation in the western and southern European urban centers, Chatterjee’s success was assured: political leaders jumped at his idea and—in Amsterdam and Copenhagen immediately, in Paris and Rome after some hesitation, in London with reservations, and in Athens only after receiving certain favors—granted him concessions for inner-city rickshaw routes.

  In Lithuania the opposition of the minorities—a few White Russians and Ukrainians, numerous Russians and Poles, who all felt that the independence given to the majority at the last plebiscite offered them, the minority, too little security—did not make for a climate favorable to Alexandra’s wish. Tempted as they were by the financial offer, the Lithuanians were unwilling to guarantee a cemetery for Polish citizens of any extraction whatever. Their answer: “First the Kremlin dictatorship must go.”

  In Lübeck the ladies and gentlemen of the League, among them Frau Dettlaff, listened to Reschke’s worries and complaints, but said there was nothing they could do, since the professed willingness of so many compatriots to move the bones of their family members to the Gdańsk Cemetery of Reconciliation could not be negated by any resolution. The matter was settled, and that was that.

  If I now say that I’m glad to see Reschke coming back empty-handed—I thought all along that his idea stank—I still feel sorry for Alexandra; she said nothing about her Lithuanian defeat and even kept her “Russophobia” valve screwed tight. Of the three, only Chatterjee, at the next “tomb of Klawitter” meeting, could announce progress, which Reschke called breathtaking. The professor, who as a rule foresaw calamity in everything, believed in the Bengali blindly. An image rises up before my eyes; a spanking new bicycle rickshaw with a toad as passenger, rolling in the direction of the future …

  I don’t know how Alexander and Alexandra comforted each other. Their love was of a long-suffering kind. Frequent embraces and affectionate words may have helped. In the diary I read: “At first she seemed to be sealed up. Not even tears came out. Later her repeated cry of ‘Damn politics. Messes up everything’ may have relieved her a little. But yesterday she frightened me. She reached for the bottle—as a rule she never takes more than an occasional sip from a liqueur glass—poured tumbler after tumbler of Wódka Wyborowa into herself, and her curses snowballed into such verbal monstrosities that I refuse to quote. Lithuanians, Russians, and Poles all had their turn. To be fair, I cursed the Germans, though without recourse to the vodka bottle. I could only agree with Alexandra’s supranational appraisal: ‘Learned nothing from past, make double-trouble mistakes.’ Right now, for all Wróbel’s urgings, we’ve lost interest in visiting other potential cemeteries. I’m almost afraid that Jerzy in his excessive zeal is creating more openings for reburials; the Cemetery of Reconciliation by itself would hardly be equal to such a flood of mortal remains.”

  The shipyard, on the other hand, benefited from Chatterjee’s travels. Rickshaw production took over even more hangars. Threatened with collapse, all the big cities of Europe—and later the medium and small ones—had to ban car traffic. The melodious three-note bicycle bell developed in Chatterjee’s workshops brought to the citizens of numerous towns a concert which, Reschke writes, “on my recommendation echoes the call of the toads. Gradually this sad and beautiful sound has replaced the aggressive honking of horns, at least in the inner cities.”

  All of which made for more jobs and revived the languishing shipyard, whose world renown was once based on the idea of Solidarność. Chatterjee decided to name a rickshaw model Solidarność, after the now historical working class movement, and it soon achieved striking success on the international market. The Solidarność Bicycle Rickshaw went into mass production and, passing beyond the borders of Europe, was on its way to meeting the needs of Africa, Asia, and South America. This model too rang with the sadly beautiful toad call.

  But before that could happen, Chatterjee had to bring over more Bengali cousins, Marwaris included. There were now a good dozen of them, and with them they brought business sense as well as energy. Poles provided the labor force. According to my classmate’s notes, which from now on are often prescient, when the thriving plant, still affectionately known as the Shipyard, was in need of a catchy new name, the president of Poland proposed his own. Reschke writes: “The entire work force of the rickshaw plant rejected that offer.” And so it came about—“since Chatterjee knew his place”—that before the turn of the millennium, the Schichau then Lenin Shipyard was named after the legendary Bengali national hero Subhas Chandra Bose, in my opinion a more dubious than exemplary individual. But that’s another story …

  It remains for me to report that the reburial program was already in operation before the next meeting of the board of directors. The ever helpful, courteous, obliging, zealous, all too zealous Jerzy Wróbel had come up with suitable land. The large park beyond Grosse Allee offered ample room. On either side of the Soviet tank which stands there as a memorial (for how much longer?) and where in Reschke’s and my schooldays the Café Four Seasons was popular, Wróbel paced off the section available for lease to the Cemetery Association. This area, just behind the Steffenspark, had formerly been St. Mary’s Cemetery, nine acres under linden, ash, birch, and maple trees, and even a few isolated weeping willows had survived. The tombstones, as Wróbel found out, had been removed in the late forties and shipped from the nearby freight station to Warsaw for other use.

  Behind the railroad tracks and working-class dwellings from Imperial and Schichau times, behind the shipyard with its cranes and dry docks, lay the United Cemeteries of St. John, St. Bartholomew, Sts. Peter and Paul, plus the Mennonite Cemetery, occupying an area of some twenty acres. Then came a field covered by barracks: the former Maiwiese, also known as the Small Drillground—in my day used for big parades past grandstands, shouts of Siegheil, march music, commands, and speeches by gauleiters.

  And here, a little to the side of Grosse Allee, right behind the still-standing staff annex of the Café Four Seasons, the first shipments of mortal remains, in small, simple wooden boxes, were buried in groups of one hundred in two common graves. Neither Reschke in his black worsted nor Piątkowska in her broad-rimmed hat attended, but many family members were there. Since the speeches made over the pits were short and moderate, the Polish authorities took no umbrage at the German-speaking throng, especially as the crowd quickly dispersed after the reburials and drifted off to the usual tourist pursuits.

  Faced with the fait accompli, our couple could only acquiesce in the reb
urials, though under protest. I have in my possession, over her hen-scratched and his neat signature, their expression of shared impotence on paper: “Disgrace has befallen us! While until now people of their own free will and in their lifetime decided to make their last resting place in the homeland, from now on the dead will be disposed of unconsulted. Greed and sacrilege have the upper hand. More and more German demands are on the agenda. This must be nipped in the bud.”

  Alexander, of course, had more to do with the wording of this protest than Alexandra, but it was she who insisted on including this sentence: “If all is not put in minutes, right away I resign.” No other statements of dissent are recorded. Bieroński and Wróbel kept silent. A single line, however, announces the resignation of Erna Brakup.

  She didn’t do it silently. She was said to have banged the conference table repeatedly with her fist. And when she spoke, no one could pretend not to hear her. “Disgusting. I saw them lining up those crates; margarine crates, that’s what they used to look like. Always neat as a pin. Poshondek! or as the Germans say, there must be order. Well, I don’t want to be German no more, I’d rather be a Polack, being I’m a Catholic anyway. All that for boodle. Not for me. Ain’t going to sell myself for money. And I’m resigning from the Board this minute. Phooey!”

  6

  RESCHKE AND ME, me and Reschke. “Both of us antiaircraft auxiliaries,” he writes, “in the eighty-eight millimeter Brösen-Glettkau flak battery …” In those days Erna Brakup was living in Brösen. She was one of the barely six hundred Germans left in Gdańsk and environs. Possibly there were only five hundred who believed they were Germans; later, there were more and more. When hundreds of thousands tied up their bundles and headed west, the five or six hundred, either by accident or because of unshakable roots, had stayed on in whatever houses remained standing, in the midst of smoking ruins or in suburban slums, where no one disputed their right to a corner in a cellar or attic.

  At the end of the war Erna Brakup was a widow of forty; her three children had died of typhus in the plague year 1946. She quickly picked up some makeshift Polish and entrenched herself in her hut in the fishermen’s and resort village now called Brzeźno. To the right and left of her hut and on both sides of the streetcar line to Nowy Port, boxlike buildings were being put up. As long as the ramshackle casino was still standing, she gave the waitress a hand; later she found work in the cooperative. From the mid-sixties on she eked out her meager pension by running errands, standing in line outside the butcher shop, and performing similar services. She spoke only with her fellow Germans or when tourists came and asked the way to the pier or the bathing establishment, expressing herself in an increasingly odd variant of her mother tongue.

  After the changes in Eastern Europe, when the government, with some hesitation, finally authorized the Germans still living in Poland to form associations, Erna Brakup joined and became a far from inactive member. On Jaschkentalerweg she wangled a meeting room for the three hundred-odd members who, having grown old and useless, were bewildered by this sudden turn of events. Now they were even allowed to sing their favorite German songs: O forest glade … By the well at the village gate … or, in mid-winter, Now comes the merry month of May … So it came about that Erna Brakup was given a seat and a vote on the board of directors of the German-Polish Cemetery Association. Her pension was now supplemented by hard-earned attendance pay, for it was she who secured a resolution guaranteeing long-established residents, in return for a nominal fee payable in zlotys, a place in the Cemetery of Reconciliation. She also supplied them with song books, illustrated magazines, mail order catalogues, and other glossy publications, by prying small sums loose from the bequest account. When the Board was in session, her voice was not to be ignored.

  “Often,” writes Reschke, “the Board members exchange glances when Erna Brakup takes the floor.” Frau Johanna Dettlaff, as though her refugee’s luggage—her Danziger’s Hanseatic arrogance—had doubled in Lübeck, “seems to react with irritation and disgust to Brakup’s ‘diminished Germanness.’” About Vielbrand Reschke writes: “This businessman with his passion for brevity tried at first to curb Brakup’s logorrhea. Her angry response: ‘Who’s talking here, you or me?’” And consistory council Karau saw her as a character.

  Nor could Erna Brakup be seen or heard with equanimity on the other side of the conference table. Her presence was a reminder to the Poles of an injustice that could not as usual be blamed on the Russians. Marczak and Bieroński sat in embarrassed silence when she blurted out: “It was horrible here after the war.”

  Only Jerzy Wróbel had no compunction about taking his thirst for knowledge to Erna Brakup, sometimes bringing a bunch of flowers like a lover. To him her babbling was spring water. Intent on details, he learned what Brösen had looked like before it was ruined by new buildings on every side; learned which fishermen, and at what prices, marketed the catch from their trawls; and what pieces of music resounded from the bandstand at the afternoon concerts in the casino garden. For Brakup knew who lived in the remaining fishermen’s huts and behind the crumbling façades of the middle-class houses near the streetcar stop, how much freshly caught flounder used to cost, and the names of the lifeguards. She told him about the ice floes in the Baltic—“Such winters ain’t no more”—and whistled or sang for Wróbel a medley from the Zarevich and Frau Luna.

  Like Jerzy Wróbel, Alexandra Piątkowska took an interest in the forgotten past of her city, whose history, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, the gildress knew from the carvings on the high altars and the creases in the garments of the ecstatic saints; but as to what stores there used to be in Langfuhr, now Wrzeszcz, or what films with Harry Piel, Zarah Leander, or Hans Albers were shown and exactly when in the two local movie houses, she learned from Brakup. To her Alexander she said: “It was like hole before. Now I know where was Sternfeld’s Department Store and how cheap you could buy there pretty things.” But only Jerzy Wróbel profited from the Brakup source, profited for the Cemetery Association.

  It must have been mid-March when their friend invited the couple for a mad ride from one former cemetery to another in his “Polski Fiat,” as Reschke calls it. They accepted without enthusiasm; since the start of the reburial program, they had both lost interest in their idea.

  Wróbel drove them to Ohra, a working-class suburb whose only cemetery, now a park, would hardly have suited the Association because of its location on either side of a railroad line. Next they drove to Schidlitz, where just a few fragments of tombstones recall the Cemetery of St. Barbara, which has also been turned into a park. The main avenue and four crossroads, on a slope bordered by lindens, chestnut trees, a single maple, and a clump of birches, are enclosed in what remains of a fence, its gaps filled with a pile of railroad ties.

  In upper Schidlitz they climbed through rugged country: “The lower third of St. Joseph’s Cemetery, which was not leveled until the mid-seventies, is criss-crossed by a tangle of pipes which with frequent loops carry steam from a central heating plant to a new housing development.”

  They approached the Bischofsberg from behind, Wróbel in the lead. They stumbled—Alexandra in city shoes that were much too delicate—over several discused cemeteries choked with weeds. Here the all-explaining Wróbel kept unearthing toppled, cracked, or still intact tombstones. No sooner spelled out, names such as Auguste Wiegandt and Emma Czapp née Rodler gave way to other names. On golden-brown speckled granite, a message chiseled for no one: Paul Stellmacher, whose life had lasted from 1884 to 1941.

  Only then did Jerzy Wróbel lead them to where—not far from the Stolzenberg housing development on the farthermost hump of Bischofsberg, called Chelm by the Poles—a neglected park on its way to becoming a forest rises steeply to the tragic remnant of an old Jewish cemetery, from which the city below can be more guessed at than seen.

  I climbed with Reschke. Still on the rise, a slab of granite misused as a stepping stone bears the name Silberstein. Large tombstones toppled backward, th
eir Hebrew and German inscriptions covered with moss, lie buried in weeds, only Wróbel knows where. I agree with Reschke that these stones were overturned “in our time.” Wróbel does not contradict us.

  Old stones that speak: Abraham Rollgerber was born in 1766. Alexander Deutschland lived from 1799 to 1870. To hear more, you’d have to scratch the moss out of the grooves. Reschke calls it a disgrace, Piątkowska a double disgrace. I know that beginning in 1937 the Danzig Jewish community was forced to sell this cemetery and others to the Free State in order to help finance the emigration of its members to Palestine. Reschke and I were ten or eleven at the time. We could have asked childlike questions, could have found out at an early age … A quiet countryside to those who don’t listen. Just a few toppled stones are left. There are always stones of which people say, If only they could speak.

  I can imagine how the couple felt when they were back in the Polski Fiat—“We hardly spoke”—and they were wordless fellow travelers as Wróbel drove past the Salvator Cemetery and the Mennonite church, which today is used for prayer and baptism by the, Pentecostal community, to what used to be St. Mary’s Cemetery, next to the Schiesstange prison complex, which is still a prison. Alexandra said: “In December 1970 when strike was, they lock up workers here.”

  She didn’t want to see any more cemeteries. Her shoes were not right for walking through any more cemeteries. All this had made her tired and sad. “I have to sit a little and rest my head.”

  So they repaired not to the Klawitter tomb but to the nearby Church of Corpus Christi, which in the late fourteenth century had become a hospital church; formerly Roman Catholic, since the end of the war it was open to serve Poland’s Old-Catholic minority. “In one of the old hospital buildings Wróbel found the priest, who welcomed us, and, as we walked between the pews, acquainted us with his estrangement from the Pope: as a Christian, he refused to bow to His Holiness’s infallibility. A bright, almost cozy church, All the floor slabs, which in the mid-eighties had been moved from the nave to the left wing of the sanctuary, were well cared for. Alexandra sat down in one of the pews.”