by Günter Grass
No, don’t look. Step across. Stop your ears with lead. Practice glassy-eyed indifference. Leave pity in your suitcase with your shirts and socks, or stick a bank note in your guidebook at the place where it says “Calcutta.” Or look. Stop. Listen. Feel moved and ashamed. Show your red tongue, because pity is small change and quickly dispensed.
Now in Kalighat, where the ragged bundles that are picked up off the street at night are (for once) given ample helpings of rice at Mother Theresa’s home for the dying. Next door (at last) the temple of the goddess Kali. A priest explains, and Vasco pays him five rupees. In the sacrificial area blood covered with flies recalls the goats that were sacrificed this morning. Young women scratch little good-luck symbols in the blood-drenched clay. Close by there’s a tree for mothers who wish for children, lots of children, another child, more children, more and more children, a child (or two or three) year in, year out. The mothers hang wishing stones on the tree. The tree is full of wishing stones, all signifying children, more children. Wherever Vasco looks, flowery madness and Catholic-type Hindu kitsch. The black Kali is hidden behind the crush of the faithful.
Vasco stands to one side. He wants to know why she sticks out her red tongue. The priest explains that after Kali had killed all the demons (and other counterrevolutionaries) she couldn’t stop killing and only came to her senses after setting her foot on the chest of her recumbent male aspect, Shiva. Then Kali was ashamed, and for shame she stuck out her tongue. Sticking out the tongue has been regarded as a sign of being ashamed ever since. Nowhere has Vasco seen a minister, governor, Brahman, or lisping poet stick out his tongue. He has seen the pale tongues of cows grazing gently in garbage. He has seen how undernourishment turns children blond. He has seen mothers dipping their whining babies’ pacifiers in brackish sugar water. He has seen flies on everything under the sun. He has seen life before death.
Vasco takes refuge in the newspaper. Side by side with a story about the strike of the food truckers he reads the latest about the table-tennis matches. The members of the Swedish team have the runs. After a short stroll around town they flee back to their hotel in horror. Now they talk of leaving ahead of time. And Vasco writes his Ilsebill, now in her third month of pregnancy, horrified half sentences on a postcard showing a glossy picture of the black Kali: “This place defies understanding. Reason won’t get you anywhere. The lepers are worse than I thought. I’ve met a nun who believes with all her might and is always cheerful. The heat is something. Leaving tomorrow. Flying to the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama landed …”
Send a postcard with regards from Calcutta. See Calcutta and go on living. Meet your Damascus in Calcutta. As alive as Calcutta. Chop off your cock in Calcutta (in the temple of Kali, where young goats are sacrificed and a tree is hung with wishing stones that cry out for children, more and more children). In Calcutta, encoffined in mosquito netting, dream of Calcutta. Get lost in Calcutta. On an uninhabited island write a book about Calcutta. At a party call Calcutta an example (of something). Rethink the Frankfurt/Mannheim area as Calcutta. Misbehaved children, women like Ilsebill who are never satisfied, and men who live for schedules—curse them, wish them all in Calcutta. Recommend Calcutta to a young couple as a good place to visit on their honeymoon. Write a poem called “Calcutta” and stop taking planes to far-off places. Get a composer to set all the projects for cleaning up Calcutta to music and have the resulting oratorio (sung by a Bach society) open in Calcutta. Develop a new dialectic from Calcutta’s contradictions. Transfer the UN to Calcutta.
When Vasco da Gama, hardly able to remember his first landing, returned reborn to Calcutta, he decided to level the city with ten thousand bulldozers and rebuild it by computer. Thereupon the computer vomited up three thousand sixteen-story bustees, another vast slum, only deep-frozen and much lonelier, beyond hope of disaster and totally isolated, since all noise had been absorbed. And then Calcutta died, though the living standard had been raised just above the destitution level. Very little was lacking, only the things that matter. People who multiply as a form of self-assertion. All the same, says Vasco to himself, infant mortality has dropped. Or perhaps if all the existing statistical charts and tables were pulped, a new study could be financed on the proceeds. Let’s not waste another word on Calcutta. Delete Calcutta from all guidebooks. In Calcutta, Vasco gained four and a half pounds.
Three questions
How,
where horror should cast us in lead,
can I laugh,
even at breakfast laugh?
How,
where garbage and only garbage grows,
am I to speak of Ilsebill because she is beautiful,
and speak of beauty?
How,
where the hand in the photo
remains forever riceless,
shall I write about the cook
and how she stuffs fattened geese?
The sated are going on a hunger strike.
O beautiful garbage!
It’s enough to make you die laughing.
I’m trying to find a word for shame.
Too much
Between the holidays
as soon as it’s late and quiet enough,
I read Orwell’s utopian novel, 1984,
which I read for the first time in 1949
in a very different frame of mind.
To one side, next to the nutcracker and the package of tobacco,
lies a book of statistics,
the figures that maximize-minimize
the world’s population—according to how it will be fed
or not fed up to the year 2000.
In pauses,
when I reach for my tobacco
or crack a hazelnut,
I am overtaken by difficulties
which in comparison with Big Brother
and the world-wide protein shortage
are slight
but refuse to stop snickering in private.
Now I am reading about interrogation methods in the near future.
Now I am trying to remember figures,
present infant-mortality
patterns in southern Asia.
Now I’m unraveling on the edges,
because, before the holidays, ebbed quarrels
were tied up in little packages: Ilsebill’s wishes …
The ash tray is half full of nutshells.
Too much of everything.
Something has to be deleted: India
or Oligarchic Collectivism
or the family Christmas.
Esau says
Commuted to lentils.
Drown in a sea of lentils.
On my lentil-stuffed cushion.
Hope springs like lentils.
And what the prophets have always wanted is
a miraculous multiplication of lentils.
And when he arose on the third day
his hunger for lentils was great.
Beginning at breakfast.
Thickened till the spoon stands erect.
With marjoram-seasoned shoulder of mutton.
Or remembered lentils: once when King Stephen Batory
returned to camp from the hunt
Mother Margarete Rusch boiled up a (tough, year-old) pheasant
with lentils to make him a Polish-style soup.
With a bagful I walked without fear.
Since me, birthrights have been available.
Paid off, I live by lentil law.
My little brother has a tough time of it.
The last meal
First built in 1346 as a bastion to the High Gate and subsequently enlarged as the need for prison cells, torture chambers, and business premises increased, the Stockturm, whose dungeon keeps were reputed to be dry, was rebuilt in 1509, when city architects Hetzel and Enkinger added two stories and capped the tower. Thereafter it stood empty and unused until King Sigismund of Poland, responding in April 1526 to the call of Mayor Eberhard Ferber, occupied the city, posted
Counter Reformation statutes in the seven principal churches, and haled all the leaders of the uprising against the patrician council, except for the fugitive preacher Hegge, before a court of aldermen, which sentenced the six ringleaders to death by beheading, including the blacksmith Peter Rusch, whose daughter had recently been appointed abbess of Saint Bridget’s—an imposing woman of controversial reputation who flattered the taste of all parties with her conventual cookery, took her cut on every transaction, and even in times of general ruin (war, plague, and famine) made a profit.
And because Mother Rusch was not without influence, she was able to obtain, if not her father’s pardon, at least the right to cook one last meal for him. Highly placed persons accepted her invitation. Mayor Ferber, deposed and banished to his starosty in Dirschau by the rebellious guilds but now restored to office, and Abbot Jeschke of the Oliva Monastery repaired to the Stockturm in fur-trimmed brabant, quite willing to join blacksmith Rusch in spooning up his favorite dish. Executioner Ladewig was also invited, and came. The cooking abbess had put her full kettle on the hearth the night before in the kitchen of the executioner (and knacker), and the smell penetrated to every last dungeon of the now fully occupied Stockturm.
Who will join me in a dish of tripe? It soothes, appeases the anger of the outraged, stills the fear of death, and reminds us of tripe eaten in former days, when there was always a half-filled pot of it on the stove. A chunk of the fat paunch and the limp, honeycombed walls of the second stomach—four pounds for three fifty. It’s the widespread distaste for innards that makes beef heart and pork kidneys, calf’s lung and tripe cheap.
She took her time. She pounded the pieces and brushed them inside and out, as though some beggar’s sweaty rags had found their way to her washboard. She removed the wrinkled skin, but she spared the belly fat, for tripe fat has a special quality—instead of hardening into tallow, it dissolves like soap.
When a last meal was prepared for blacksmith Rusch and his guests, seven quarts of water seasoned with salt, caraway seed, cloves, ginger root, bay leaf, and coarsely pounded peppercorns were set over an open fire. The limp pieces, cut into finger-long strips, were added until the pot was full, and when the water came to a boil the scum was skimmed off. Then the daughter covered her father’s favorite dish and let it boil for four hours. At the end she added garlic, freshly grated nutmeg, and more pepper.
The time it takes. Those are the best hours. When the tough has to be made tender, but can’t be hurried. How often Mother Rusch and I, while the billowing tripe kept the kitchen stable-warm, sat at the table pushing checkers over the board, discovering the sea route to India, or catching flies on the smooth-polished table top, and telling each other about the tripe of olden times, when we were Pomorshian and still heathen. And about older than olden times, when elk cows were the only source of meat.
Later on, after the daughter had cooked her father’s last dish of tripe, she cooked for rich coopers at guild banquets, for Hanseatic merchants who cared about nothing but Öresund tolls, for fat abbots and King Stephen Batory, who wanted his tripe sour and Polish. Still later Amanda Woyke, in her farm kitchen, cooked up tripe with turnips and potatoes into a soup that she seasoned with lovage. And still later Lena Stubbe taught the patrons of the Danzig-Ohra soup kitchen to enjoy proletarian cabbage soups made with (cut-rate) tripe. And to this very day Maria Kuczorra, canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, makes a thick soup once a week out of kaldauny (tripe).
When you are feeling cold inside—try the walls of the cow’s second stomach. When you are sad, cast out by all nature, sad unto death, try tripe, which cheers us and gives meaning to life. Or in the company of witty friends, godless enough to sit in the seat of the scornful, spoon up caraway-seasoned tripe out of deep dishes. Or cooked with tomatoes, Andalusian-style with chickpeas, or à la Portugaise with kidney beans and bacon. Or if love needs an appetizer, precook tripe in white wine, then steam it with diced celery root. On cold, dry days, when the east wind is banging at the windowpanes and driving your Ilsebill up the wall, tripe thickened with sour cream and served with potatoes in their jackets will help. Or if we must part, briefly or forever, like the time I was a prisoner in the Stockturm and my daughter served me a last meal of peppered tripe.
Because the execution was to take place next day in the Long Market, in the presence of the king of Poland, of the seated and standing councils, of the aldermen and various prelates and abbots, the abbess of Saint Bridget’s had invited the guests to her father’s dungeon for an early evening meal. Torches on the walls provided light. A basin of coals under the barred window hole kept the pot of tripe warm. Margarete Rusch tasted for seasoning, and after that she didn’t touch another mouthful. She said grace, appending a prayer for the condemned blacksmith, then served her father and his guests. But while the men were spooning up their tripe out of earthenware bowls, and while she was pouring black beer into mugs, she spoke. She spoke and her words passed over the autocratic head of the patrician, over the sleek, round head of the abbot, over the bald pate of the executioner, and over her father’s head, which he had lowered into his bowl. She spoke without paragraphs or punctuation of any kind.
Margarete Rusch was known for that. When the soup was too hot, while the men were gnawing at goose drumsticks, before fish was served on Friday (mackerel bedded on leeks), but also over tables eaten bare, the abbess spoke to all those she cooked for, with a broad accent that brooked no interruption. She could reel off several stories (or instructive disquisitions) at once without dropping a thread. From sheep raising on the Island, from the sewage sludge in the Mottlau, she would ramble on to Councilor Angermünde’s daughters, but without failing to bring in price increases that the Danes had clapped on Scania herring, to get the latest joke about Preacher Hegge off her chest, to mention the continued interest of the Brigittine nuns in certain Old City real estate; yet with it all she found breath to spin out her favorite topic—larded with pious invocations of all the archangels from Ariel to Zedekiel—namely, the necessity of establishing a pepper depot in Lisbon (with a warehouse on the Malabar Coast of India), spinning out every detail of the commercial law involved.
Regardless of whom she cooked for, her table talk was thrown in—a subliminal mumbling with subplots as intricate as the politics of her time. She spoke as if to herself, but loud enough for the bishop of Leslau, who was dipping his bread into Margarete’s hasenpfeffer, or for Councilors Angermünde and Feldstadt, who were shoveling in her beef hock with millet, to detect the purpose behind her chatter, although it was never certain whether Mother Rusch favored the patrician council or the lower trades, whether she was agitating for the Hanseatic League and against the Polish crown, and whether or not she was outwardly Catholic but contaminated through and through with Lutheranism. And yet her table speeches captured all ears with their ambiguities. They put this one in the right, injected that one with doubt, supplied tactical pointers, and in the long run brought benefit only to the Abbey of Saint Bridget, which obtained profitable fishing rights (Lake Ottomin), indentured leases (the Scharpau, the sheep farms of Schiedlitz and Praust), and property in the Old City (on the Rähm, in Peppertown), and an episcopal letter safeguarding the abbey against Dominican snooping.
And so, when the abbess Margarete Rusch served up the last dish of tripe to her father and his guests, her tongue wagged as usual. That was her way. Always, along with her cookery, she apportioned her subtly balanced interests.
At first the men at the table sat silent. The only sound was the jangling of Peter Rusch’s irons, for the blacksmith ate in fetters. And outside the barred window hole, the tower pigeons clamored. Guzzling and gulping. The executioner’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
Yet it was not at all certain that the king of Poland had intended so harsh a sentence. Jeschke and Ferber had worked on the judge and on the aldermen. Ferber, who spoke first, admitted as much; law and order, he said, must be manifested visibly. True, the abbot conceded, the blacksmith mi
ght have been spared (and merely blinded) if Hegge, that minion of Luther, had not escaped. He had a pretty good idea, said the wealthy Ferber, bending over his tripe in his fur-trimmed broadcloth, who had helped Hegge escape from the blocked-off city. That, said the abbot, all the while plying his spoon, was known to all, though no one could prove it. Executioner Ladewig gave assurance that the scrawny neck of the escaped Dominican would have been far more welcome to him in the morning than that of a blacksmith. When Peter Rusch lifted his head out of the bowl and said, more in resignation than in protest, that he, too, was not unaware who had helped Preacher Hegge, spiritual head of the burghers’ uprising, to escape from the beadles of the patrician order, Ferber said harshly, while holding out his bowl to the abbess to refill, “Then you also know whom you can thank for your death sentence.” “Yes, indeed,” said Jeschke. “Things have come to a pretty pass when a father can expect no mercy from his child. That’s what happens when the pulpit is opened up to heresy.” Here he threw in a bit of information, namely, that Hegge had apparently escaped to Greifswald and was going right on with his preaching.
Then Mother Rusch laughed so resoundingly, with every ounce of her flesh, that the walls expanded, and, pouring black beer, said casually: Yes, yes, she supposed all these insinuations were aimed at her. And maybe there was some truth in them. For one night in April, after it had pleased His Polish Majesty to occupy the city, she had seen a man in woman’s skirts clinging to the town wall, in a place where it’s low, not far from Jacob’s Gate. Trying to climb over it, but he didn’t have the strength. His misery had cried out for help, and she had helped. She had reached under his skirts, and when all her pushing and puffing had gone for nothing, had bitten off his left or right testicle. After that he had literally flown over the wall. Maybe the man had been Peter Hegge. But how could one be sure? Because, in her fright, she, Margarete Rusch, had swallowed this left or right ball. To tell the truth, she had been feeling pregnant ever since—this was the third month. But by whom? That was the question. If he was so inclined, Ferber could go to Greifswald, taking Jeschke with him, and they could reach between the still-eloquent Hegge’s legs. Then they’d know more.
