by Günter Grass
Describe him? Lud looked like a man buffeting a strong wind. Bent grimly forward when entering a closed room, such as his studio full of pupils. Prominent forehead and cheekbones, but all finely modeled. Hair light-colored and soft. Eyes red, bceause the wind was always contrary. Delicate mouth and nostrils. As chaste as his pencil sketches.
I miss Lud. How I miss Lud! And even when we quarreled … Even when with our fists … Lud and I—a strenuous friendship …
As during my friendship with Ludek, when Awa and Ewa swapped us back and forth. And when Ludger took me with him on the migration, his horse kicked me. The prelate Ludewig tolerated my little three-breasted Madonnas. I don’t know if Dorothea sat for Skriever the woodcarver; some of my daughters were by him. Before executing me, Ladewik praised my sturdy neck. When the plague snatched me away from this vale of tears, Colonel Ludström, in the name of the Swedish crown (and with the help of Agnes the kitchenmaid) carefully sorted my papers. With Ludrichkait I drank away my money (and my soul). I’m not sure Sophie thanked the Bavarian captain with only a kiss. When the strike fund was robbed, I’d have been glad to go fifty-fifty with Ludwig Skröver. It’s only about Frankie the old wagoner that I choose to say nothing. And when I went to Berlin with Lud …
That leaves only Jan. Yes, Jan Ludkowski, with whom I was friends, who like me had a way with words, Jan, who belonged to Maria, is dead as Lud. Jan was different. So was Lud. With Jan you could talk over bread, cheese, nuts, and wine. With Lud, too. We sang until late into the night and were desperate. We clung fast to our dream. Men are like that; they can stay friends. Ilsebill can’t understand it.
Late
Ilsebill’s out.
I am not here.
Actually I’d been expecting Agnes.
Whatever else is going on—the clatter of plates—
belongs to Amanda: her daily dishwashing.
Lena has been here.
Maybe we just forgot
to appoint an exact time.
I met Sophie while the bells
of all the churches were ringing for vespers.
We kissed like at the movies.
Cold stand the leftovers, chicken and so on.
A sentence, begun, hangs fire.
Even the strangest things don’t smell new any more.
In the wardrobe a dress is missing, the one with big flowers,
intended for feast days with Dorothea,
who always went in rags.
As long as there was music,
we, together, could hear the same thing differently.
Or love, a snapshot: Billy and I
aboard the white steamship, which was named Margarete
and sent up black smoke between the beach resorts.
Of course I’m behindhand.
But Maria wouldn’t wait.
Now the Flounder tells her what time it is.
Why she vomited
I’m related to Maria. Her father is my mother’s cousin. As early as Amanda Woyke’s day, there were Kuczorras in Kokoschken, Ramkau, and Zuckau. And one of her grandchildren, Lovise Pipka (Sophie’s cousin), married a Kutschorra, who came from Viereck (today Firoga). So Maria’s descent can be traced back to Lena Stubbe, whose maiden name was Pipka, and to Amanda Woyke, while the fact that my maternal grandmother was by birth a Kuczorra (though her mother started life as a Bach) indicates that (like Maria) I, too, am related to Amanda and Lena. Since there are several Kurbiellas or Korbiellas in Maria’s maternal line, since my mother had an uncle Korbiella (who emigrated to America), and since poor Sibylle Miehlau remembered a great-aunt Korbiella (the sister of her maternal grandmother) who seems to have sold darning cotton, buttons, and Güterman’s sewing silk in Karthaus, I could easily conjure up a kinship with Agnes, the diet-fare cook, especially as there is reason to believe that Agnes’s mother, who like her father was killed by the Swedes on the Hela Peninsula, was by birth a Woyke or a Gnoyke. (It also seems worth mentioning that Katharina, the younger daughter of the abbess Rusch, married a butcher by the name of Kurbjuhn, and that the mother of Dorothea Swarze, commonly known as Dorothea of Montau, was by birth a Woikat.)
After all, we Kashubians are all related by way of a country lane or two. There was only the Goldkrug Forest near Bissau, the raspberry bushes outside of Zuckau, the road to Karthaus, the Vistula River, the rivulet Radaune, and four, five centuries between us: the time before and after the potato, history that passed over us. Maria knew nothing of all that.
She’s blond. Before she learned to be a salesgirl at the cooperative store, her curls fell as they pleased. Then her girl friend went to hairdressing school. Except for one of my uncle’s brothers, who moved to the West in ’45, the Kuczorras live either in Gdynia or in Wrzeszcz, a suburb of Danzig that used to be called Langfuhr. They live with Maria’s two younger sisters in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Ulica Lelewela, which used to be called Labesweg. (They still own a one-and-a-half-acre plot of potato and garden land in Kokoschken.)
In 1958, when I obtained a visa for the first time and went back with out-of-focus memories, Maria was nine years old and laughed when she saw me in my Western clothes. And so she remained: blond, giggly, wild about dancing, quick at mental arithmetic, an efficient salesgirl, rather boisterous in the company of boys, never knowing more than what was going on at the moment. I was the uncle from the West, who turned up every few years, brought records (the Beatles), and could speak neither Polish nor Kashubian, and concerning whom she formed a picture both lovely and mistaken.
But I also formed a picture of Maria. (That’s what comes of forgetting your language.) What happened then was worse than anything I had imagined. I should have made up a different story for Maria. A happy story with a little sorrow around the edges and a nice wedding present. But the times were against it. Maria did not remain a salesgirl at the cooperative. A job became available elsewhere. She was bent on getting ahead. Yet Maria wasn’t cut out to be a cook. (She could have sold costume jewelry at a souvenir shop on Frauengasse, and worn it; it would have gone well with her hair.)
Pomorshian currency. The small change of the coast. Long beaches. Rich. The dowry of wandering dunes. What the Baltic Sea paid back. The Phoenicians came sailing first from Sidon, then from Carthage by way of Cornwall, where they bartered purple cloth for tin, fist-sized ingots of which they traded to us for seed (barley and spelt). And when Mestwina was beheaded, the amber of her necklace scattered far into the back country. And when Maria gave me a piece of amber as big as a walnut, I recognized it, the old story began all over again, I saw Maria in a new light, a different Maria became possible.
At that time she was still learning at the cooperative. She had found the amber while digging potatoes in the bit of land they had left in Kokoschken. A fine piece: from a crusty yellow edge of shell, the transparent drop shapes itself into a dark globe enveloping a fly.
You shouldn’t have given me that amber. Now I’m going to tell the whole story. How you became more real in a different way. How you stopped laughing. How you turned to stone.
Starting in the summer of 1969, Maria Kuczorra, who had first been a salesgirl at the cooperative store and then a cashier, worked as a cook at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. There she made a hundred and twelve zlotys more than at the cooperative. Since she had no cooking experience, she only helped out at the kettles, but because of her knowledge of prices and quality she was charged with making wholesale purchases and inventorying the canned goods.
Her efficiency and cheerful disposition made for quick success. In her dealings with the bureaucracy, her experience at the cooperative helped her to obtain special authorizations. It was she, for instance, who acquired the big freezer. (And through black-market connections, she also traded spare tractor parts for fresh vegetables.) The menu at the shipyard canteen became more varied. But when Maria began to do some of her purchasing via the free port, and bananas and oranges suddenly made their appearance in the canteen, she found herself at
odds with her friend Jan, a basically timid young man, despite his bold ideas, who worked in the publicity department of the shipyard, writing prospectuses for the export trade, and had helped Maria to obtain her job at the canteen.
Jan had studied shipbuilding, but his passion was early Pomorshian history. At night he wrote poetry. He had published in the Baltic Almanac an article on the love poetry of Wiclaw of Rugen. Along with some favorable criticism, his epic cycle on Prince Mestwin’s daughter Damroka, first abbess of Zuckau Convent, had, because of its numerous erotic metaphors, provoked a protest on the part of the Kashubian Cultural Association. Holding to the controversial thesis that the general who defeated and destroyed the Kashubian prince Swantopolk was Fortinbras, prince of Norway, who in the last scene of Hamlet claims to have just come from victories in Poland, Jan was projecting a sequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy. But he never had time. By day he wrote publicity for the Polish shipbuilding industry, which was translated into English, Swedish, and German and thought to be effective; in the evening Maria would be waiting for him to take her dancing or to the movies.
He had met her at the cooperative. They quarreled from the start. He had brought back a can of putrid peas and held it under the nose of cashier Kuczorra. When they met in the evening in the now public gardens of Oliva Monastery, Jan told Maria that with her corkscrew curls she reminded him of the Kashubian princess Damroka, a sister of his hero Swantopolk and cousin to Wiclaw of Rugen. This Damroka (Jan explained) had founded the Zuckau Convent on the banks of the Radaune because of the wild raspberries that grew there. And he quoted from his long poem. Jan’s historical comparisons appealed to Maria. She let him call her Damroka. They were soon in love.
But what about me? I’m not Jan. I’m Maria’s second cousin. But she calls me Uncle. She gave me a piece of amber, that’s all. With an insect enclosure. I’m the enclosure. In case of doubt, I, late-enamored and kept in reserve. Beside me: I. Outside me: I. Foisted on me like a hoax, the obedient but grumbling I. Always escaping, fleeing the times, devious. Where a slat in history’s fence is missing. Listen to me, Maria. It was when Mestwina wore a necklace of amber pierced by me. Sambor, Mestwin, Swantopolk, and Princess Damroka are descended from her daughters and daughters’ daughters. No, it was I who caught the talking Flounder. I in the guildhall when the guilds rebelled. I in the Stockturm, spooning up my last tripe. And when the plague greeted me in passing. And when the potato triumphed over millet. The great cook who stirs all things stirred me at cross-purposes with time. How she (to this day) clarifies me with the skimmer, how fairly she dishes me out. How tender I am to her taste, once marinated. Lovage and caraway seed, marjoram and dill. Seasoned am I. I, Maria, am Jan, as per your recipe.
And when Maria Kuczorra had been purchasing fresh vegetables, canned goods, and (illegally, to be sure) bananas and oranges for the Lenin Shipyard canteen for a year, when asked by her boy friend, whom she still loved and who (evenings in the dark movie house, whispering in her ear while dancing) called her Damroka, when, finally, because Jan so desired, she stopped taking her curly hair to the hairdresser’s, when autumn came and the newspapers were full of treaties ready to be signed, when in Warsaw Gomulka and Brandt affixed their names for Poland and Germany, so—as people said—making history, when winter came and preparations for Christmas got under way, Maria, seeing there was too much talk about the priority of national tasks, said it was time to buy provisions in a hurry. The newspapers were stuffed with sublimities about the great historical hour. Not a word about consumer goods. That was a bad sign. “They’re going to raise the prices,” said Maria to Jan.
Which is just what happened. By decree. Sugar, flour, meat, butter, and fish. On December 11. And they’d been planning to marry on the fourth Sunday of Advent.
There were good economic arguments for it. Everything can’t be subsidized. Even a Communist government can’t afford it. If the market doesn’t regulate prices, government regulation comes too late. But when prices get out of hand, so do other things, and sometimes the whole shebang.
When the prices of staple goods were raised between thirty and fifty percent on Friday—they had thought it was clever to take account of the weekend—Jan said it was a historical fact that on several occasions the rise in the price of Scania herring and the importation of cheap beer from Wismar had united the quarreling guilds and incited them to rebel against the patricians. Then he speculated at length on the drop in the price of pepper during the Reformation and the simultaneous meat shortage in Central Europe, due to a falling off in the marketing of cattle.
Maria said, “Maybe you have to expect such things under capitalism, but they shouldn’t happen in a Communist state. Why, we learned that in school. And if the union doesn’t do anything, we’ll take action without the union. And if the men have no spunk, the women will just have to wake them up.” No, she was in no mood for the movies. He, Jan, should go and organize. She, Maria, would go and see the women at the cooperative and talk things over. She knew them. They knew all about prices, too. They’d smelled a rat long ago. And you could count on them.
And because all the women had steamed up their men (as Maria had steamed up Jan)—“And don’t show your face in my kitchen until the prices are back down again!”—the harbor and shipyard workers of the Baltic coast, of Gdańsk and Gdynia, of Szczecin and Elblag went on strike the following day. The railroad workers and others, even the girls in the Baltic Chocolate Factory, joined in. Since the local trade-union leadership held aloof, strike committees formed spontaneously, and workers’ councils were elected. They demanded not only the rescinding of the price increases but also worker management of the factories—the old, deep-rooted, foolish, beautiful, indestructible dream of self-determination.
At the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, new supplies were brought in before the police could start checking. It was done at night. Next morning workers and house-wives came in from the suburbs, from Ohra and Troyl, Langfuhr and Neufahrwasser, maybe fifty thousand strong. They marched past the Central Station and assembled outside the Communist Party headquarters. There, since there wasn’t much to make speeches about, they sang the Internationale a number of times. What discussion there was centered on Jan (who had been swept away from Maria in the crush), for Jan was overflowing with historical comparisons that he couldn’t keep to himself. As usual, he began with the early Pomorshians, Sambor, Mestwin, Swantopolk, and Damroka of the beautiful hair. At that point the shipyard workers were still listening, but when Jan got long-winded, lost himself in the labyrinth of medieval guild regulations, and compared the demands of the trades for seats and voices in the seated and standing councils with present demands for worker management of the factories, the workers turned a deaf ear.
Then the crowd sang the Internationale again. Only Maria, who had been pushed to one side, saw her Jan agitating—historically aware, without listeners, imprisoned in a balloon. She held her head slightly tilted, her lips moving slightly, on the verge of a smile.
They’ve all tilted their heads that way, just a bit frightened, but at the same time amused at so much talk and virile enthusiasm. Thus, but already poised for mockery, Abbess Margarete Rusch watched, and listened to, Preacher Hegge when on the Hagelsberg he conjured up eternal damnation and all the devils from Ashmodai to Zaroe. Thus alarmed, but with a smile bordering on melancholy, the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella looked over the poet Opitz’s shoulder as, wordless, but inwardly rich in figures, he sat over blank paper. It was with just such an expression that Wigga, the Iron Age wurzel mother, received me when, sore of foot, I came limping home from the migration. And Lena Stubbe looked at me with similarly tilted head on Fridays, when I’d whopped her again with my razor strop and as on every such occasion looked for the rope and failed to find the nail. Dorothea smiled and tilted her head differently, scornfully, when I started talking guild business or counting up small change. Sophie, on the other hand, was full of tender concern as she tied up a package of gingerbread int
o which she had baked stimulating fly agaric, finely ground, for her Fritz, who was under fortress arrest. And my Mestwina smiled in the same way when she saw Bishop Adalbert spooning up her fish soup. And after giving me (the stupid lummox) my extra feeding, Awa tilted her head, grave with ever-loving care, yet smiling in the certainty that there would never be enough, that hunger springs eternal and there would always be grounds for care.
Maria tilted her head when she saw her Jan wedged in the crowd but agitating unheard. For she said to herself: In a minute he’ll feel cold, all alone with his talk. In a minute he’ll look for me, to unload on. Because when I’m not with him, it’s only fear that makes him talk. In a minute I’ll say: Jan, you’re right. We must take a historic view of this. It never stops. Not even under Communism. It’s always the bottom against the top. In those days the bosses were called patricians. They made Scania herring expensive. They raised the price of pepper, though there was plenty of it. They kept saying: The Danes are to blame. They’ve raised the Öresund tolls. Everything is going up. That’s the way it is. You’ve got to accept it. The party says so. And the party is right, always right. And the party says it’s too soon for freedom.
