The Call of the Toad

by Günter Grass

  In two of the diary entries the distant past and the recent past correspond. Reschke deals playfully with the light on Erna Brakup’s veranda: “Just a moment ago, when I cast a glance at the endlessly praying then lamentingly-Catholically singing mourners, the three saucers filled with pink hard candy were what mattered to me, while the colored light filtered by the veranda glass mattered not at all; but now if I conjure up the scene, the predominantly yellow-green panes of glass transform the table and the people around it into an aquarium. Their praying and singing are soundless. Their mourning takes place underwater. They are all lamenting members of an underwater community at once near and far away …”

  In another passage, the “many too many greedy swans in the shallow Baltic brew” are transformed for him after years of distance into a single greedy swan, “which then tried with its begging to upstage my proposal of marriage. How fortunate that Alexandra still remembers if not the swan at least my admittedly old-fashioned, stiff, and stilted proposal: ‘Shall we, my dearest, become man and wife before the law as well?’ I still remember her answer: ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”

  Having completed all the formalities, they were married May 30. In mid-May the couple for honorary reasons had to attend a meeting of the Board one more time. Frau Johanna Dettlaff and Marian Marczak reported on a meeting of the executive partners of all the cemetery associations that had mushroomed throughout western and northern Poland. It was reported that long-term leases had been successfully obtained everywhere. Soon there would be an even hundred cemeteries of reconciliation, and the turnover was increasing accordingly. At this meeting on the executive level, the question of establishing a central administration in Warsaw could not be avoided. Marczak stated that Cracow and Poznań as well as Gdańsk had been considered, but that after a heated quarrel the capital had won out. “That just happens to be a Polish tradition, which we Germans must respect,” said Frau Dettlaff.

  Consistory councilor Karau and Father Bieroński called the idea of a central administration “lunacy” and “absurdly bureaucratic.” One excited, the other angry, they asked to be relieved of their positions and for others to be appointed to their seats on the Board.

  Apart from the resignations, which were regretted, “the expanding area of the idea of reconciliation” provoked applause, especially as the “Spend the twilight of your life in the homeland in a retirement home” campaign, the “Reburial (or second burial) program,” and the Bungagolf project were being emulated on all sides.

  As a member of the board of directors, the Düsseldorf planning chief reported on the most recent achievements. A piece of lakeshore land suitable both for golf and bungalow colonies had been located in Kashubia, not far from Kartuzy. On signing the contract, the Cemetery Association had agreed to a lease of only sixty years, but with option to buy. Similar developments were reported from Olsztyn, where the first Bungagolf project was being planned in the Masurian lake region. From Elbląg came news that the so-called Vistula Slope was to be opened. Interest was also reported from Lower Silesia and the Pomeranian coast.

  Reschke quotes Timmstedt: “In the long run nothing is more persuasive than profit … At long last the Poles are learning to figure in terms of European union, that is, to think … Land ownership is ceasing to be of primary importance. Of this and much more we can assure our honorary chairmen, who kindly consented to attend today, and to whom the German-Polish Cemetery Association owes such a large debt of gratitude.”

  Other urgent matters were taken up. The mass arrival of the bereaved, that permanent invasion of mourners, entailed risks: more and more often the conspicuously pregnant wives of the generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren refused to be discouraged by the long trip. Before and after burials there were sudden confinements and premature births. Giving her report, Frau Johanna Dettlaff had this to say: “Gratifying as it is that Germans are again being born in our old homeland, we ought not to place an additional strain on the already overburdened hospital facilities of our Polish friends.”

  It was immediately resolved that a maternity clinic with delivery room be installed in a wing of the spacious retirement home on Pelonker Weg. “The medical equipment,” said Frau Dettlaff, “must of course be up to Western standards, and I’m sure that Poland has plenty of doctors and midwives sufficiently qualified to bring our New Danzigers into the world.”

  Samples of four-language street signs and inscriptions for monuments were then displayed. Sketches which had the names and dates of historical events inscribed in parallel columns and identical type sizes were rejected. The German members of the Board felt that the Polish inscription at the top ought to be appreciably larger than the inscriptions in other languages. So much courtesy led to an exchange of compliments. Even the honorary chairmen participated cheerfully in this skirmish.

  But it was not considered amusing when Alexandra Piątkowska suggested that in view of the latest development in the city’s economy a fifth line might be called for, in Bengali. “It may come to that!” cried Vielbrand. “In Poland never!” Marczak assured them. Only Timmstedt took a relaxed view. “Why not? In a free society anything is possible.”

  In Reschke’s diary Alexandra’s question and Timmstedt’s openmindedness are followed by a reference to the distant future. “These good people, Marczak in the lead, are in for a surprise: after briefly bearing the name of its founder, Burgomaster Daniel Gralath (whose escutcheon, incidentally, shows a lion shouldering two silver crutches), Grunwaldzka, once Grosse Allee then Hindenburgallee then Stalinallee, will finally bear the name of my Bengali business associate, to whom the whole world is indebted for the advancement of innercity rickshaw traffic …”

  In the very next sentence, to be sure, which was written at a distance in time, as has now become frequent for Reschke, he corrects himself: “Because of Chatterjee’s modesty and under pressure from the influential Bengali minority, Grunwaldzka has been named Rabindranath-Tagore-Allee. Nothing unusual, when Alexandra and I think how many streets, squares, cities, stadiums, and shipyards have in our lifetime discarded and renewed their names, after every about-face of history, as though there will never be an end to naming and renaming.”

  It should not be assumed that the meeting recorded here took place on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Hevelius. The city magistrate had allotted the Cemetery Association a room in the nearby Old City Rathaus, with a heavy oak conference table and a dozen antique Danzig oak chairs, a perfect seventeenth-century setting.

  There are photos of the meeting at the long table. Partners Dettlaff and Marczak preside executively at the head of the table, while at the foot of the table, by the door, sit our couple, the still-honorary chairmen. The Board members have taken their places on either side, but the German and Polish contingents no longer sit stiffly facing each other; a mixed seating arrangement has developed. As chairman, Vielbrand sits between the two new members; to his left, the young directress of the tourist agency, her hair demurely parted in Madonna style. I recognize Vielbrand by the rimless glasses and brush-cut hair often mentioned by Reschke. I can say with assurance that the tall seated gentleman, whose silvery wavy hair looks like a wig adapted to the period furniture, is consistory councilor Karau shortly after his resignation. The man pointedly bored and lolling in his chair has to be—you could tell even without his clerical garb—Father Bieroński, likewise resigned. As for the remaining members, I can’t tell by their looks whether they are of the Polish or the German nation; relatively young, they show little personality but radiate abundant good nature, combined with an easygoing determination to achieve, which will benefit the treasury of the Cemetery Association. That fellow over there, youthful and vigorous, may be Torsten Timmstedt, attempting with the help of models no larger than matchboxes to familiarize the Board with the new coffin culture.

  Through a magnifying glass I make out coffins egg-shaped, ziggurat-shaped, pyramid-shaped, and denatured-to-violin-case shaped, which Timmstedt as part of his customer servic
e will carry in stock along with the traditional model which is tapered at the foot. With their postmodern inspiration they are intended to liberate the funeral business from unbending routine. Even Snow White’s glass coffin is in the offing. Reschke has this to say on the subject: “Quite defensible, this artistic reworking of the classical coffin form, which has come to seem decadent and pretentious … But I had no difficulty approving Timmstedt’s suggestion that coffins made of tropical woods such as teak, mahogany, and Brazilian rosewood should be prohibited …”

  And the still vigorous lady and the casually elegant vice president, what did they have to say about the latest “earth furniture”? It is only the seating arrangement, the window behind them, that gives these two the appearance of a pair, whereas the honorary chairmen, though not yet married, strike one as a couple even photographed from behind high chairs and more surmised than seen.

  The photos don’t tell us much more. Uncomfortable and hard-edged as they may be, the sumptuously carved backs of the highly polished, solemnly dark-brown chairs create an illusion of Baroque solidity: the astronomer and master brewer Johann Hevelius, who once belonged to the Old City council and lived in nearby Pfefferstadt, might well take his place belatedly among the representatives of the German-Polish Cemetery Association to report on the phases of the moon or the cost of burying his recently deceased wife Catharina née Rebeschke …

  My material is running out, but there’s still a pile of notes at my elbow, full of leads that have not been followed. According to one note, Reschke intended to have a talk with Timmstedt about the new coffin culture, also to suggest the founding of a new necropolis near the formerly East Prussian city of Rastenburg, and furthermore to mount an exhibition designed to establish a historical bridge connecting “Etruscan sarcophagi, tombs, and ossuaries with the latest artistic creations …” Nothing came of it. Unless Timmstedt promoted exhibitions of this kind at a later date.

  In another handsomely penned note, Alexandra is advised to collect documentation about her membership in the United Workers’ Party, in order to have answers ready should she stand accused. There is no such documentation in my possession. Only this much is certain: she joined as a youthful believer and dropped out, disillusioned, at the age of fifty. At the World Youth Festival in Bucharest, she had praised Stalin, in a brief speech, as the liberator of Poland. Later came doubt, vacillation, playing the game, shame, silence, playing dead. “I was card-file corpse, as Germans say, long before 1968 when the anti-Semitic schweinerei started in Warsaw …”

  In Reschke’s diary this is accompanied with his sympathy: “She accuses herself, lists sins of omission, but insists that up to her official withdrawal—‘I couldn’t take martial law’—like a good Communist she kept hoping against hope. What consolation could I offer her? My own stupid stubbornness? The unshakable credulity of a Hitler Youth? We’ll just have to live with it. We are still living with it. And then, to top it all, our idea failed …”

  The following weekend they took a trip to Kashubia. True, Wróbel was at the wheel, but they were not riding in his Polski Fiat. Written on a slip of paper: “At last to the country in a new car.”

  It couldn’t have been the weather that tempted them. If everything had come too early the year before, much too early—the rape, the toads—this spring everything came late, much too late. The fruit blossoms had suffered from night frost. Not only the farmers were complaining, the over-all mood was in keeping with the wet, cold May. Report followed report, each filled with disaster, and because nothing was right at home, the politicians took refuge in the vast perspectives of the European idea. Unified, the Germans were more disunited than ever, and free Poland surrendered to the tyrannical decrees of the Church. No sign of spontaneous revival. Even in the middle of May, no rape blossoms in sight.

  When the three of them drove out into the country, the weather must have been changeable; now and then, the sun broke through. They drove to the Radaune Lakes, not far from Chmielno. Alexandra had prepared a picnic; this time no pickled Polish mushrooms or hard-boiled eggs. Forked out of cans were Greenland crabmeat and Norwegian smoked salmon; cheese from France, sliced mortadella and salami, Danish beer and Spanish olives. For everything was available now, even a fruit called kiwi from New Zealand, though expensive, too expensive.

  The picnic was not to be. Before and after too brief a burst of sunshine, showers poured water on their late lunch. Nevertheless, they stopped. As they walked down from the road to the low-lying lakeshore, it turned out that Alexandra was once again wearing unsuitable shoes. Along the reed-lined shore they found a small bay known to campers, as was clear from the charred, rain-wet remains of a campfire and a semicircle of stones of the kind often found at the edge of fields. “Some are as large as the boulders with simple inscriptions used in the Cemetery of Reconciliation, most recently over the common graves.”

  A dozen Boy Scouts may have rolled these boulders up to the campfire. Now the three used them as seats. Piątkowska lit a cigarette once, though there were no mosquitoes to give her an excuse. The picnic basket stayed in the car. All three sat silent on their boulders. Voices came from far over the lake, harsh, as though quarreling, then again silence. Wróbel skipped a few stones across the water, and sat down when no one wanted to join him. Again harsh voices in the distance. Then from across the road where they had left the new car, cows bellowing hoarsely, as they do just before slaughter. Silence again, all the more as there were no larks in the sky above the lake.

  Reschke described the landscape for me, as though wishing to paint it in watercolor: the loosely planted mixed forest on the left, the fields descending to the lake, a flat-roofed wooden barn on a hill in the foreground, more forest, then more fields with clumps of trees in their midst. Not a boat, not a sail is mentioned, only two ducks swimming in opposite directions. “Rarely does a breeze ruffle the lake.”

  And then, after having neatly brushed everything in, including the old brown barn, he bestows on the lake a reflection that I can only reproduce in his words: “Though apart from the solitary barn the undulating country above the lake is bare of buildings, unvaried except for the alternation of field and forest, I read a different picture reflected in the smooth surface: the shore ringed not by shingle-brown but by the brick-red roofs of a bungalow colony, which hugs the hill in terraces that carefully conform to the contours of the land yet take possession; small parcels of forest and stands of trees yield to the will of the architect who drew the plans and the builder who carried them out, eliminating any obstruction to the box-on-box compactness of this colony, in which I see the mirror image of a settlement I know from the blueprints. This complex, crowned at the top by a clubhouse (though from my perspective at the bottom), this vast expanse spreading between and across gentle hills, adapted and greened for the game of golf, may strike you as in good taste and even well executed, since from my upside-down point of view this development shows concern for the landscape; and yet the longer I look, the more this reflection in the water fills me with a sorrow that grows, though by now gusts of wind have ruffled the surface of the lake and disturbed the picture. We must go now, Alexandra.”

  I don’t know whether Reschke shared his view of the future—or rather vision—with Piątkowska and Wróbel; if he did, I doubt that they would have been able to see the image in the mirror which foreshadowed the Bungagolf builders’ box-on-box activity. He alone could see it. You alone, Reschke, showed foresight. He alone was ahead of the times. But in resigning from their honorary chairmanship of the German-Polish Cemetery Association, Alexander and Alexandra resigned together.

  They explained their resignation in writing. In addition, Reschke claims to have sent the Board a tape, in which both spoke, he at length, she in brief. This was done the next day, such was their hurry after they had made their decision.

  At the time of their resignation, the Cemetery Association, whose board of directors met in the Old City Rathaus, already had offices of its own near the shipyard,
occupying a floor of a highrise built under Gierek. One floor up, the rent was paid by the firm of Chatterjee & Co. Since an audit of all the accounts had shown how profitably Reschke had invested the diversified capital of the Cemetery Association, though unbeknownst to the Board—only Marczak knew but kept it to himself—and how he had put it, as it accrued, into the new assembly plants, thus linking rickshaw production with the interests of the Cemetery Association, it seemed only appropriate that the administrations of the expanding Association and of the firm aiming at the export market should have their offices one above the other in the same building.

  There Reschke delivered the tape and also Alexandra’s PC. In his explanation—and on the tape—he pointed out that this computer, linked with his home computer in Bochum, had served faithfully in realizing the idea of reconciliation. He even quipped: “It goes without saying that we are delivering our hard disk absolutely virus-free.”

  The taping was done at night. A first attempt, unsuccessful, was made on the lakeshore. “The weather was too unsettled. Not even suitable for a picnic. This spring everything comes too late. That, no doubt, is why no toads were heard …”

  The second nocturnal attempt succeeded, thanks to some manipulation. “The toad song that we recorded last year among osier willows on the flat Island in the spring, a spring that started early, too early, proved helpful. At that time we recorded over a long period of time the melodious though profoundly melancholy calls of a few courting lowland toads, which we now took as the background for our spoken text or, rather, our valedictory message. We used the pauses between call and call, allowing nature to add emphasis to our admonitions.”

  I have copies of the written text only, but since Reschke’s junk includes last year’s toad calls, I can imagine the effect of this device on the assembled board of directors. The younger members probably reacted with no more than amused headshaking. Vielbrand, I am sure, tapped his forehead, and Frau Dettlaff may have called under her breath for a psychiatrist. Undoubtedly Marczak, with his taste for theatrics, enjoyed this offering. As for Timmstedt, I’m willing to believe that he regarded the whole thing as a successful collage.