by Günter Grass
But once her decision—“I’m different and that’s that”—was more or less definite, she let me in now and then. We got along much better than before. (You have to expect these contradictions.) Our daughter even got to visit the monkeys and seals with us once a month at the zoo: we looked (in photos) like real parents, a little family.
It wasn’t until the summer of 1960—Sibylle had made a big thing of her thirtieth birthday—that I was definitely through. Maxie had come into the picture and refused to be satisfied with half the cake. (“You can go on being friends. But that’s all.”) At first I had thought or hoped that Maxie would be just another chick like the others. It’s just an act, I thought. And Billy will gobble up this spindly-legged kid the same as she’d been gobbling up men, rare or well done. And for quite some time Billy did think she was wearing the pants. But meanwhile she was filling out and softening up; she’d gone crazy about keeping house, with a built-in kitchen and a dishwasher and fancy furniture from Knoll’s. Her standard sentence (preceding a long speech about cookery) was “If I only had the cook book my great-grand-mother wrote before the Nazis killed her in the concentration camp.”
Oh well, she’d always liked to cook, and there was no change, either during her vamp phase or when she went different. (Her Rhenish sauerbraten, her Hungarian goulash, her saltimbocca, her coq au vin …)
Anyway, it wasn’t long before Maxie had the say. Maxie decided when and with whom they’d take vacations on Elba, Formentera, or this year on Gotland. Maxie decided which Godard film, what Beckett or lonesco absolutely couldn’t be missed. Maxie had the wall-to-wall carpeting ripped up. Maxie said, “The television set goes here.” Maxie slept around. Maxie ran up debts, and Billy paid. And Maxie had said, “On Father’s Day you’ll kindly stay home.”
What a scene. It took a two-hour crying jag, six broken champagne glasses, and a handkerchief chewed to pieces to bend Maxie’s will. So when Siggie interceded with “And who’ll do the cooking? Frankie, I suppose?,” Maxie had said, “OK, let her come, just this once. But no scenes, see? None of your fuss and bother and bickering and wishing this and wishing that. I won’t stand for it. I simply won’t stand for it.”
And when, all over Berlin, Father’s Day began with a mass exodus, a painstaking search for suitable spots, and the ritual of fire making, Billy tried her level best not to behave like an offended crybaby or a moody femme. Taking care of the fire helped. And Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie were so Father’s Day crazed and busy with themselves that Billy’s state of cozy-warm inner conflict probably escaped them.
There was plenty to do. Like all the ten thousand, no, hundred thousand men on the lake shores, between the trees, outside refreshment stands, at scrubbed tables, Siggie (sprawled out), Frankie (standing), and Maxie (walking restlessly back and forth) were guzzling beer. The fifth and sixth bottles had already been sloshed down. When the pressure became overwhelming, the boyish Maxie did something terrific; instead of relieving her bladder in the usual squatting position, she unbuttoned the fly of her jeans, spread her legs, took out a pink pecker with a deftness suggesting long practice, brought it into a horizontal position, and began, in time-honored male manner, to urinate against a pale mottled pine tree.
Evidently the appliance, made from some synthetic material, was efficiently fastened over the piss hole by a rubber suction cup, for Maxie pissed at length with deceptive verisimilitude (seen from a distance, of course) against the tree trunk. In so doing she looked past the tree and across the lake at the hordes of male Father’s Day celebrants on the far shore. (If it had been winter, Maxie could easily have pissed a big M into the snow.)
Laughter and amazement. Frankie wanted a chance at the marvelous thing; she wanted to touch it, fasten it onto herself with the suction cup, and give it a try. “Boy oh boy! Where’d you get it? Denmark? Only nineteen marks eighty? I gotta have it. I gotta!”
Frankie stood like a man, her masculine gaze lost in hazy, faraway prairies. No more penis envy. Never again that humiliating female squat. Like thousands and thousands of men facing thousands and thousands of other pine trees, Frankie pissed erect, sending a gently slanting stream against upstanding Prussian trees. Yes sirree!
When it was Siggie’s turn, she held a bottle of Schultheiss to her lips up top while pissing down below—like a real man. Her Hell’s Angel cap pushed back over the nape of her neck. “Father’s Day! Father’s Day!” she roared, and the stags of the neighboring male groups, among them fraternity students in full regalia, responded with rutting cries.
But when Billy left the fire and her growing bed of coals and said, “Me, too. Let me try it!” she got nothing but fatherly words. “You’re going too far, child. Enough is enough. We can’t just go on wishing all the time. Our little butterball promised to behave. How about something to eat?” Frankie bellowed, “I’m hungry!” And Maxie began to sing: “One two three! We are hungaree… .”
This left Billy, my poor insulted and so tragically imprinted Sibylle, no choice but to smooth out the accumulated coals with the poker, set the four-legged grate over them, dispose four enormous steaks previously rubbed with ground pepper, thyme, and oil, and six halved sheep kidneys into which she had pressed quartered cloves of garlic, close together on the grate, till they hissed, sizzled, and discharged their fragrance, which mingled with the resinous Grunewald air and the musty smell of the lake.
Billy was as busy as Cleaver the Cook in the Swedish camp, as busy as if she’d been called upon to tend twelve spitted oxen at once. “Cooking over an open fire is man’s business. You can’t tell me different. It’s a primordial instinct. Nature wanted it that way.”
After turning the steaks and halved kidneys, Billy thrust the strips of green pepper between the pieces of meat, which, though shrunken, retained their juice. Only the fluid from the kidneys was dripping into the fire. When Maxie, supported by Frankie, gave a repeat performance of the hunger song—“One two three!”—Billy shouted, “Just a minute, you pigs. It’s almost ready.”
Four women eating. But if you saw them chewing their oversized bites, their teeth not nibblingly concealed but brazenly bared, you’d have said it was four men eating.
“Hm,” said Frankie, chewing. “That was before the Battle of Wittstock. A bouncing lass; she was wearing women’s clothes when we caught her, but there was a young boy underneath. We’d have to put him to the question. But already the bloody battle was …”
“They couldn’t keep watch over me in the confusion,” said Maxie, chewing, “so in the first alarm I escaped up a tree. And there I read line after line of a book I’d swiped from the provost. And that book told me in pictures and in words exactly what was happening on the battlefield.”
“That’s how it is with reality,” said the chewing Siggie from between terrifying incisors. “Whatever is, has already been written. And us sitting here chewing steak, that, too, has happened before; it happened right after the battle, after we’d driven the imperial troops across the Dosse and into the swamps. Am I right, Billy?”
“Right,” said Billy, chewing. “That’s when I was the cook in the Scottish Lesley regiment. And we didn’t have steaks; we had spitted oxen. And when the slashing and gouging were over, our Maxie, whom we’d caught somewhere in women’s clothes, climbed down from the tree with her book in which everything had been written beforehand, and we gave the kid a chunk of beef because he was so skinny, but he was lively and talked in phrases plucked from the lips of the people—a little scamp from the baggage train, a simple fool, as it says in the book. Always putting on an act. Gets ideas while standing on his head. Why, the kid has ears like funnels.”
I’ve told you how it was. Maxie drove me out. That skinny kid, inappropriately christened with the gentle name of Susanne. The skinny kid whom nothing, no pork cracklings, no boiled beef, no roast goose, no greasy, hot mutton could fatten. Nothing could upholster her collarbone, cushion her spinal column. Now that Maxie was moving away from ecstatic interpretive dancing and c
oncentrating on classical ballet drill, we called her body emaciated and her soul bulimic.
That’s why Sibylle drove me, who had the gall to be a man, out of our shared apartment. No, it was Maxie who drove me out, took my place, took my desk and my well-worn chair. As for my bed—the bars of which had been affixed as though for all time to the frame of Sibylle’s bed—she sawed it off, snip-snap, with a metal saw.
I was present. Ostentatiously amputated. Severed from board and bed. My bed was thrust aside, reviled, cursed, and spat upon. Pillow, feather bed, sheets, bolster, springs, and mattress were handed, along with a tip, to the garbage man: “Throw the bastard out! What do we need him for? Anything he can do I can do with my little finger.”
Only then did Maxie send for some metal workers, who from the skeleton of my orphaned bed fashioned a long, round bar, the ends of which were bent into handles and sunk in the masonry. The remains of my bed had become Maxie’s ballet barre, Converted to an ascetic function. Divested of all memory of Sibylle as we lay (when times were good) in our double bed and were one flesh. Nothing left but severe discipline. Classical beauty. Sweat-raising exercise. Maxie wanted to go on the stage and do solo or at least group dancing. Susanne Maxen, known as Maxie, was thought to be talented.
And Billy, too (my Sibylle), thought herself destined, if not to play other roles, then at least to portray herself. Often after meals, and so likewise when Father’s Day was being celebrated all around them, and the steaks, still red within and salted only before serving, as well as the juicy sheep kidneys, had been done away with—there was unbuttered black bread with the meat and sheep’s-milk cheese afterward—Billy said, “My whole life is a movie.”
For which reason the Grunewald Father’s Day, which Billy and Frankie, Siggie and Maxie celebrated to the grue-some end in the midst of a hundred thousand men, forming on the lake shore a group among other groups, must now be viewed from varying perspectives: prone in the trampled grass, from the branches of climbable Grunewald pine trees, from bushes, from the unruffled lake. And let there also be cameramen with the other ninety thousand and more men in Spandau, Britz, and Tegel Forest, at beer tables and around other lakes, and keep at it, keep at it. Everywhere camou-flaged microphones, lest any talk be lost. Now! Now! During the noonday break …
After replete belching a few words are said. (We’ll keep them in reserve and cut them in later on.) By the Griebnitzsee, a bank clerk in his mid-forties announces over a schnitzel that isn’t there any more, “But life is like that.” At a gathering of the Harmonia Choral Society under beech trees in Britz, a pensioned schoolteacher says to his fellow members after jellied pig’s knuckle with cabbage and puree of peas, “Song is the only pleasure left.” Immediately after the third Bockwurst on the banks of the Teltow Canal, a foreman bricklayer sums up the situation: “Now the world is OK again.” And one of the black-leather boys who are keeping their motorcycles ready to take off—his name is Herby—says (after the bags of French fries have been emptied), “A day like this with no fucking is a total loss.” While, almost simultaneously, Billy contributes her significant sentence: “My whole life is a movie.”
After that, bemused by the buzzing midday stillness, they pursue their own thoughts. The hour of Pan. A few high-pitched gnats. Hats and caps put aside. Billy, Frankie, Siggie, Maxie lie, each by herself—Billy on a camel’s-hair blanket—smoking, chewing blades of grass, with Maxie trying, as thousands are trying in Spandau and Tegel, to wear out a piece of chewing gum. The thoughts the four of them are pursuing this midday are thoughts of the kind that lead, in a classical Western, to conflict between heroes.
Maybe Siggie, maybe Frankie, anyway, one against many. Maybe Billy, maybe Maxie: back to back they shoot their way out of the trap. Quadriune thoughts unite the four of them—the victorious four. They caress the loneliness that goes with superiority. They despise the crowd. Their indolent, self-assured gait. For in thoughts they’re always quicker on the draw. They cross the dusty square. Their eyes narrow; the saloon empties at their approach. All four at the bar. That thirsty ride. Weighted down with the saddles of dead horses. The way they shoot the heels off the corrupt sheriff’s boots. The way they shoot, period. In any position. Even funny ones. The way Siggie (after a long ride through the alkali desert) sits in the bathtub with soapsuds up to her neck, yet through the towel takes care of the lurking enemy bang bang.
And always there’s a milk-faced boy who makes trouble, who’s in the way, who stands dreamy-dopey in the field of fire and whom Billy has to rescue, though the Smith Brothers (Frankie and Siggie) have already tightened the noose around the trembling kid’s (Maxie’s) neck. But in thoughts and films that never tear, the rescued kid always turns into the scrawny, stubborn, and comically angular girl in pants. This comes out in thought and fact when the gunshot wound has to be cauterized, or the arrowhead extracted: small breasts under the gooseflesh. Our Maxie’s name is Susanne. But Billy staunchly forgoes a fuck in the bushes. The leave-taking is gruffly affectionate, no more, a good-natured smack on the boy-in-girl’s taut ass: “So long, Susie. Take care of yourself.”
Then more loneliness in the saddle or walking beside the rickety nag through desert and prairie. Vultures describing smaller and smaller circles. Skeletons all about. Plagued by horseflies or gnats. Gold, money, thinks Frankie. Revenge, thinks Siggie. Only Billy yearns to go straight, not to have to kill kill kill any more, to raise cattle in the wide, billowing pasture land and back home in Kentucky—“You come, too, Maxie!”—and break in horses.
But Frankie jumps out of the film to the shore of the Grunewaldsee, where Father’s Day lies dozing, and shoots from the hip with both index fingers: Bang! Bang! “You curs! You wuthless curs!”
But Westerns aren’t the whole story. Billy, my Sibylle, whose life is a movie, stars in other pictures as well. Under the name of Bill, she has gone to sea and hauled codfish to Iceland. A hard life.
And in war films, Billy has taken an active part in several campaigns. In the Thirty Years’ War she claims, if not as cook in a Scottish regiment, then as a colonel under the Swedish general Banér (immediately after the Battle of Wittstock), to have reconquered Silesia, driven out the Catholics, and as Chancellor Oxenstierna’s courier gone to Danzig, where she met the poet (and double agent) Opitz, for whom a kitchenmaid cooked diet fare and whose last years she sweetened.
Or in love films: Sibylle Miehlau has at all times been irresistible as a man. She claims to have taken the place of sweet Jesus in the bed of the High Gothic Dorothea of Montau on the first night of the journey to Aachen, when the pilgrims stopped at the Jug in Putzig. A wandering student he was at the time, and they did it over and over and then some. Naturally Maxie has to play the part of the frail Dorothea in ecstasy.
And Billy also has the starring role in a picture called Father’s Day, which begins with a hundred thousand men going to the woods and shows how on foot, in carriages, and in cars they go looking for places, make fires, drink beer, piss against trees, cook, chew pieces of meat, rest after lunch, and pursue thoughts that are all filmed.
Suddenly a breeze. The Prussian pines were clearing their throats. Under the ashes of the campfire the coals were beginning to look hopeful. The lake ruffled its forehead. Seven, eleven crows flew up into the air—messengers from the black-leather angels on the far shore. Pine trees stirred elsewhere, by the Schlachtensee, by the Griebnitzsee. The oaks in Spandau Forest and in the mixed forest of Tegel remembered keenly. Smells moved from place to place. Paper napkins bloomed at lakeside cafés. And near the village of Lübars, where the German Democratic Republic marks its border with barbed wire, the breeze—which came from that direction—knew only one Germany. As though the sweet Lord had decided to suspend the noonday peace of this Ascension Day, which in Berlin and elsewhere is celebrated as Father’s Day, with a “We-e-ell” more sighed than spoken.
And Billy, Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie were also shaken out of their thoughts and exciting adventure films. They jumped to
their feet. Maxie was wearing sandals. Frankie sported paratroopers’ boots. Siggie and Billy were wearing plain though sturdy shoes. All four flexed their knees. They shook off tatters of thoughts and prairie dust. They cracked their joints. They hopped about like sparring partners or sprinters before the start.
And on the far shore, as on the shores of faraway lakes, male limbs were picked up, shaken, stretched: Let’s see what we can still do. Give the old Adam a chance. We can’t just laze in bed all the time, letting sweet dreams melt in our mouths. Hell no! Gotta get back into action. What price the world?
“Hey, Siggie, what’s wrong with you today? Hey, Maxie, do something! Put on a show! And what about Frankie? Can this be our good old Frankie? The wagoner and hellhound. The man with the iron claw. Let’s go, boys. You, too, Billy. Didn’t Billy promise to pull out the stopper? Hell, this is Father’s Day, Father’s Day!”
And then on all sides the great, the unprecedented male competition began. What made it really worth seeing was that the contestants were amateurs, but professional class. The rules? It’s simple: everyone shows what he can do. That’s how it’s always been, as you can see recorded in Old Man Homer and Old Man Moses, in the Nibelungenlied or The Struggle for Rome. Not just the young people; Grandpa can join in, too, grabbing hold of a café chair by the bottom of one leg and lifting it high into the beech leaves.
Lots of people can chew up beer glasses and swallow them. Anybody who’s been in the army can volunteer to do a hundred knee bends while holding a jerrycan of gasoline (only half full) out in front of him. Walking on hands still earns gasps of amazement. And what else?
Wherever men have gathered in dispersed order: Bavarian finger wrestling, all-German tug-of-war, East Asian free-style wrestling. All demonstrate strength, courage, and dexterity. And that’s the mark of a man: dead serious about his merry games.
