The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  Time and again Reschke points out that gilding can be done only with tightly closed doors and windows. He, a mere observer, who at the most reads or exchanges whispers with friend Wróbel, is forbidden to make any sweeping gesture; pages, finished, must be turned cautiously, as cautiously as she picks up the gold leaf and tamps it in place. Everything happens in slow motion. She never laughs while gilding. Sometimes classical music may supply the background to this kitchen idyll.

  He omits nothing: her agate polishing stone, the various brushes with which the sizing is applied in eight successive layers, the chopped calfskin from which Alexandra, at the kitchen stove, prepares the glue, into which cinchona bark is later stirred. The art historian knows and doesn’t mind telling us that the gilder’s trade has been true to itself for four thousand years. “Already the Egyptians, by beating gold blow by blow, obtained hair-thin gold leaves, twenty-five of which, supported on paper and bound together, to this day make a booklet of gold leaf …”

  Alexandra has been working with the last supplies from Dresden. “Is gold still from People-Owned Gold-Beating Works,” she says.

  The air-still kitchen, in which a kneeling late-Gothic angel acquired more and more gold, became the center of existence for those two, who had ceased to be anything more than honorary chairmen of the Cemetery Association. They seldom went out except to visit the sickbed of Erna Brakup, “who is sinking into memories that are becoming more and more childlike …”

  A lot of coffee was consumed in the course of gilding. He called the angel “an anonymous, probably South German if not Bohemian work.” She said, “Is typical Cracow school.” The humidity in the kitchen had to be repeatedly measured and maintained at an even level.

  Little was said while gilding was in progress. Either he put on long-playing records, or they listened to a radio station that broadcast classical music from morning to night. Over it, the chimes from the Rathaus tower, striking the hour: “We will never let go the land from where our people came …”

  The kneeling angel carved of linden wood was blowing a trumpet and could thus be associated with the Last Judgment. “Originally there were many of them, probably a full choir, every one of them gilded, with a blast of their trumpets waking the dead, opening tombs and charnel houses, and so fulfilling what I recently read on a memorial slab in the central nave of Holy Trinity: ‘After pain and misery, in this tomb at rest I lie, until the day when I arise, summoned to eternal peace.’ And it was Alexandra’s angel who did the summoning …”

  She had taken over the carved figure from another workshop. Intersections, plugs in the linden wood, sprayed and smoothed traces of woodworm bore witness to long handling. This angel kneeling on his left knee must have looked pathetic in his patched condition: a veteran of changing times. Even after the complicated application of eight glue-bound layers of gesso, much of his potential beauty was gone, though the gildress had not covered any of the subtleties of the late-Gothic drapery.

  But as the kneeling angel acquired more and more gold, with both wings glistering golden, and as Alexandra applied the alloy of white gold and red gold in the mastic layer to the sizing and finally polished with the agate stone the layer of gold from the bell of the trumpet to the tips of his toes, the figure conceived by an anonymous hand was restored to life in all its beauty. The once morose expression of the blowing, long-haired angel, concealing more likely a young man than a maiden under the drapery, took on, as Reschke says, “the austere charm of early Riemenschneider angels …”

  And yet, from an artistic point of view, he did not hold the resuscitated work in very high esteem: “Combined with other figurations, the angel might have been part of an altar, presumably with the Resurrection as the central motif. Amazing how the ruined piece has revived in Alexandra’s hands. Time and again—just now, for instance, while polishing the upper parts—she promises herself and me: ‘You’ll see. Will be like new born.’”

  Meanwhile spring had come. When Alexandra Piątkowska’s kitchen was entirely inhabited by the gilded and highly polished angel of Resurrection, the town clerk Jerzy Wróbel brought the news of Erna Brakup’s death.

  But before the earth covers her, I must backtrack. Through April, or more precisely starting with (and in expectation of) April 8, all Poland was gripped by travel fever: from that date on, Poles were at last allowed to cross their western border without a visa, and to travel through Germany to France, Holland, and Italy, as long as they had enough zlotys to convert into a visible quantity of Western currency. Wishes wanted to be fulfilled, Polish troubles, for a few weeks or days, to be forgotten. But no sooner was the border crossed than hate shouted itself hoarse. Violence, set loose, struck, slogans from the vocabulary and the scenes of German-Polish history picture books were repeated in all their ugliness, and all the fine phrases of the recent past were made worthless. One had to fear. Not welcomed, the Poles recovered from their travel fever, so it was not at all surprising that many who might have liked to be traveling westward turned up instead at Erna Brakup’s funeral.

  The ceremony was held in the chapel to one side of the Matarnia Cemetery. Jerzy Wróbel had had to promise her that: she didn’t want to lie in the Cemetery of Reconciliation but in Matern, as it was formerly called. Young and old, they came in black. They didn’t all fit into the chapel. In photos I see them clustering outside the door.

  Frau Brakup lay in an open pinewood coffin. The service was slow, loud, and Catholic. She lay in her black woolen Sunday dress. Everybody sang enthusiastically and mournfully. No, she was not wearing her fur boots but laced bootees, and she had to leave her felt hat at home. How thinly her hair covered her shriveled little head. Two priests, one from Brzeźno, the other from Matarnia, celebrated the Requiem Mass. Someone—friend Wróbel perhaps—had removed from her hat the brooch, in the center of which glowed a bleeding-heart-red semiprecious stone, and fastened it to her high-necked dress just under her chin. The priests and servers in white and violet. Tulips and candles around the coffin. In her knotted fingers Erna Brakup held a rosary and the picture of a saint whom Reschke thinks he recognizes as the Black Madonna.

  From him I know that during the Requiem Mass confessions were made and the host received. Since many unburdened themselves, the Mass went on for more than an hour. Reschke was neither a Catholic nor anything else, but suddenly Piątkowska, who had often told him how godlessly she had practiced her gilding trade, though endowing two dozen altars with new radiance, moved away from him in the pew, stood up, and waited in a long line outside one of the confessionals in which the priests were lending their ears. She disappeared into the confessional after the priest tapped the signal, reappeared in a state of deep introspection, stood in the center nave with all those who also had their confession behind them, waited humbly for the last sinners, then knelt among others in black at the communion rail, rested her head on it, pushed back her hat, received the host, returned with downcast eyes to the pew, went down on both knees, moved her lips, and taught her Alexander that in Poland a life of unbelief does not rule out Catholic reactions. He writes: “Without my asking her or urging her in any way, Alexandra said to me with a laugh on the way home: ‘Now I can be godless again until next time.’”

  All in all, Erna Brakup’s funeral must have been a cheerful affair. The old woman’s smile in her coffin with its brilliant white trimmings—a smile that I have on one of the photos and which in the words of the photographer is more a mocking grin than a smile of deliverance—spread to the mourners. Many of the old German inhabitants had come. They all had Erna Brakup stories to tell. When the mourners crowded around the coffin to take their leave, each and every one caressing her knotted fingers, Reschke heard a farewell mumbling untouched by sadness: “You’re better off now,” “You won’t have to suffer no more,” but also, “Thanks for everything, Erna,” “Good luck,” “See you soon, Erna.”

  The burial itself went quickly. Clayey soil up there. Seen from the cemetery hill, the Rembiechowo Airport wa
s right next to the village. The airport building and freight depot could only be guessed at. No plane took off or landed during the burial.

  As the closed coffin was carried out of the chapel and church banners with the likenesses of saints unfurled, as the funeral procession—priests and servers in the lead, Wróbel right behind the coffin—formed into a black swarm and started on its way. S. Ch. Chatterjee pulled up at the cemetery gate in a taxi to add his wreath and ribbon to the funeral procession. He, too, was dressed in black, which made him seem no less foreign than usual.

  Almost all those buried in Matarnia are Kashubians. Erna Brakup, née Formella, who lived to be ninety, found her place between Stefan Szulc and Rozalia Szwabe. Her ninetieth birthday had been celebrated on Hundegasse in January, when there was snow on the ground. A photo shows Wróbel and Brakup dancing.

  When immediately after the burial Reschke greeted Chatterjee, the Bengali is reported to have said with a sad, evasive smile: “She was one of my best customers. Our friend especially liked to be driven to her favorite cemetery. Why is she buried here? Wasn’t she German enough?”

  Lately I have noticed episodes of confusion invading my classmate’s papers more and more. Leaps in time are frequent. The handwriting remains unchanged, but the order of events changes in mid-sentence. Suddenly something that has just happened is set far back in the past. He introduces Chatterjee driving up to the cemetery in a taxi, then sees him removed in time; this he does with the backward look of an old man who is no longer Reschke but goes by the name of Reszkowski, as he did before the Germanizing of family names became common practice, and who years after the turn of the millennium dimly remembers Erna Brakup’s funeral and Chatterjee’s visit to the cemetery: “… but whenever I try to recollect that day and to my dismay realize that at that time I still felt obliged to abide by my father’s decision of 1939 and cling to my Germanized name, my old friend Chatterjee appears to me, the first man to experiment with the now universally used rickshaw system …”

  And Reschke as Reszkowski describes the present in retrospect, as follows: “Oh, how full of calamity the world looked then! Hunger and wars, countless dead, streams of refugees on their way, soon at the door … On every wall Mene tekel … Who at that time would have dared hope that life would ever be worth living again? Who would have dared believe that the city and surrounding countryside would ever again enjoy economic prosperity? True, everything in the meantime has fallen into Bengali hands, but they are not oppressive hands. Even Alexandra finds this commendable. Soon large-scale attempts will be made to take advantage of the altered climate: rice will be planted on the Island and soy beans grown in Kashubia. The new situation goes against the grain of the New Germans, whereas the old Poles seem to find Asian dominance acceptable, all the more so since Hinduism is not necessarily contrary to Catholic practice …”

  I’m beginning to believe in his prognostications: “Not long ago a new altar was consecrated in Holy Trinity Church. Tuned to the same key, the Black Madonna of Wilno in her halo and Calcutta’s mother goddess, black Kali with her red tongue, call to worship. Now even Alexandra has found her faith, and by her side I am becoming devout …”

  7

  FROM THE COUCH Alexander and Alexandra saw what the world had to offer. He looked on in bedroom slippers, she with cigarette holder, as tidal waves, raging fires, and fleeing Kurds provided, for the moment, food for newscasts in which image followed image in quick succession, each one blotting out everything previously seen from the couch. That was how the couple watched the Gulf War, whose dead no one wanted to count.

  A small table laden with snacks went with the couch and the armchairs. When volcanic eruptions on Luzon Island buried under mud and ashes the burning oil wells, fleeing Kurds, victory proclamations, and rough estimates of the dead, the consequences of these now devalued events nevertheless were fertilized by the images that followed. Having noted all this in his calligraphic script, Reschke got up from the couch and, nibbling a pretzel, came to the conclusion: Nothing ever ends.

  Against this belief, I enter a report from the autumn of 1944 into my record. We were escaping from the city of Danzig before it went up in flames. Discharged from the Reich Labor Battalion, we were put into uniform in army staging areas; he was trained as a radio operator, I as an armored infantryman, and we were both thrown into the final combat west of the Oder. And it was chance—hear this, Reschke—pure chance, nothing to do with higher dispensation, that we came through, that we survived, unharmed but for a few bruises, and got away to the West; while Alexandra’s brother, age seventeen like us, was shot as a partisan the year before, and Reschke’s brothers had been dead since the summer of ’43—Maximilian, a tank driver, burned alive near Kursk, Eugen torn apart by a land mine near Tobruk; they ended, we did not.

  These death reports were mixed in with a conversation that must now be recorded. Before Erna Brakup was buried with knotted fingers in the cemetery at Matarnia, the couple visited the fisherman’s cottage for the last time. As soon as Wróbel brought word of the old woman’s death to the kitchen and workshop, they, as on previous visits, took the streetcar to Brzeźno, past Saspe Cemetery, a route I’ve traveled over and over again in other stories. But neither the streetcar nor the farewell visit to the old woman, who had just been laid out, requires a leap in time; what does is a walk along the faintly rippling Baltic toward Jelitkowo, which in Reschke’s diary drags on forever, since he returns to it repeatedly, first as an immediate event, then at a distance of seven years.

  Key words tell me that in Erna Brakup’s cottage the bedroom-living room as well as the veranda were jammed: no way to get through, not enough chairs. People crowding around the deathbed. Candles, flowers, the smell, and so forth. He writes. “On the veranda neighbors had gathered around a table, joined by Wróbel when a chair became free. I noticed three saucers half filled, then less than half filled, with hard candy, which those singing or praying sucked to keep in good voice. The perpetual rosary allowed endless prayer, which was interrupted from time to time by lamentation in song. Wróbel helped himself to hard candy. I stood to one side. Our beloved Erna looked rather odd without her felt hat; she seemed to smile, but Alexandra thought, as I did, that her expression was more likely one of mockery. ‘Because we’re still honorary chairmen, though honor is gone, she’s laughing at us a bit.’”

  Without transition, the couple are next at the beach. Wróbel stayed with the hard candy, the supply of which was replenished as needed. They had probably walked across the dunes, past the old grade school. Reschke describes the Baltic as dull, gray, motionless, says nothing about the weather, mentions only briefly the fact that bathing has been prohibited on all the Bay beaches, and then goes on to the far too many swans on the water’s edge, which he reviles as “the contaminated beneficiaries of the contaminated sea.” “What an onslaught! Two swans may be beautiful, but a greedy, sated, yet still greedy horde of swans …”

  I see the couple in changing perspective. As through a telescope held correctly, then held backward. Sometimes I’m in the lead, then I’m at their heels. I overtake them, see them come closer, grow larger, grow smaller: an unequal pair in motion. When shortly before Jelitkowo they turned around, they were still flanked by swans—talking to each other, she past him, he over her head.

  This is how Reschke records their conversation: Erna Brakup’s death, he says, laid bare the death of their brothers. Links between the Gulf War dead and the early loss of their brothers became evident. We felt we were in their company. “Because, I say, nothing, not even life, ends. Alexandra’s brother who was shot and my burned, tattered brothers live on. Though buried somewhere and nowhere, they are still in us, unwilling to end, wanting rather to be lived, lived by us …”

  After that, without announcing a leap in time, he has only pleasant things to report: “Who would have dared hope that these polluted waters would again be teeming with fish and again invite bathers in weather that continues mild? When Erna Brakup lay on
her deathbed, who would ever have thought that summer tourism would revive? The Baltic Sea seemed dead forever. At that time, I too foresaw a dismal future, and my beloved Alexandra made fun of my tendency to read dire omens on walls, however solid: “Somebody who always sees Mene tekel on wall will live long and see that Mene tekel was wrong …”

  Typical of Reschke that he shortened the time interval of his backward glance whenever he remembered his proposal of marriage uttered near Brösen. Immediately after the entry, “This afternoon, as we were walking on the filthy beach, I proposed to Alexandra,” he sees himself happily married for seven years. “Time has not impaired our love. Though less frequently, we still embrace as we did that first time … When my proposal elicited her spontaneous yes, Alexandra must have known that we would grow old together happily, taking turns caring for each other, because of the accident and its consequences …” Then again he stirs up the sludge of memories … “Yet we had been rather depressed until shortly before our marriage. The thought of death as something to be shared lay in easy reach, and there were plenty of reasons for it. We tormented ourselves over that disgraceful honorary chairmanship. And then the weather. I remember, spring just refused to come. And then the trouble with the car, all that wretched, hateful suspicion. Small wonder that one day, soon after I proposed, we threw in the sponge, and by God not silently. Ah, the relief and the emptiness afterward. Gone was the vision. Now we were without an idea …”