Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Günter Grass

Dedication

Title Page

Introduction

BOOK ONE

The Wide Skirt

Under the Raft

Moth and Light Bulb

The Photo Album

Glass, Glass, Little Glass

The Schedule

Rasputin and the ABCs

Long-Distance Song Effects from the Stockturm

The Grandstand

Shop Windows

No Miracle

Good Friday Fare

Tapering towards the Foot

Herbert Truczinski’s Back

Niobe

Faith Hope Love

BOOK TWO

Scrap Metal

The Polish Post Office

House of Cards

He Lies in Saspe

Maria

Fizz Powder

Special Communiqués

Carrying My Helplessness to Frau Greff

Seventy-five Kilos

Bebra’s Theatre at the Front

Inspecting Concrete — or Mystical Barbaric Bored

The Imitation of Christ

The Dusters

The Christmas Play

The Ant Trail

Should I or Shouldn’t I

Disinfectant

Growth in a Boxcar

BOOK THREE

Flintstones and Gravestones

Fortuna North

Madonna 49

The Hedgehog

In the Wardrobe

Klepp

On the Coco Rug

The Onion Cellar

On the Atlantic Wall or Bunkers Can’t Cast Off Concrete

The Ring Finger

The Last Tram or Adoration of a Canning Jar

Thirty

Translator’s Afterword

Glossary

Copyright

About the Book

On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany.

About the Author

Günter Grass, born in Danzig in 1927, is Germany’s most celebrated contemporary writer. He is a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

Also by Günter Grass

Cat and Mouse

Dog Years

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

Four Plays

Speak Out!

Local Anaesthetic

From the Diary of a Snail

Inmarypraise

In the Egg and Other Poems

The Flounder

Meeting at Telgte

Headbirths

Drawings and Words 1954–1977

On Writing and Politics 1967–1983

Etchings and Words 1972–1982

The Rat

Show Your Tongue

Two States – One Nation?

The Call of the Toad

My Century

Too Far Afield

Crabwalk

Peeling the Onion

FOR ANNA GRASS

Introduction

IN THE SUMMER of 1959, I completed my first novel, The Tin Drum, in Paris. I had just corrected proofs and created an image for the dust jacket when a letter arrived from the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff in New York. Wolff, who had left Germany in the thirties, asked me to meet him at a hotel in Zurich. He strode up to me in the hotel lobby, a tall gentleman, with his wife and colleague Helen Wolff beside him.

‘I’m thinking of publishing your book in America,’ he said. ‘Do you think the American reader will understand it?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘The setting is provincial, not even Danzig itself, but a suburb. The novel is filled with German dialect. And it concentrates solely on the provinces —’ ‘Say no more,’ he broke in. ‘All great literature is rooted in the provincial. I’ll bring it out in America.’

The American Tin Drum appeared in 1962 with Pantheon Books of New York, a firm founded by Wolff.

Later on, I was often urged to give some account of the origins of my first novel, but I didn’t feel ready to sift through the circumstances and influences with a prying eye. I was almost frightened I might discover my own tricks.

Up to then I had written poetry and plays, as well as libretti for the ballet (my first wife Anna was a dancer). In 1956 Anna and I left Berlin and moved to Paris with the vague idea of writing a novel circulating in my mind. I took pleasure in art, enjoyed the varieties of form, and felt the urge to create an alternative reality on paper — in short, I had all the tools needed to undertake any artistic project, regardless of its nature. If things had gone solely according to my own desires and instinct for play, I would have tested myself against purely aesthetic norms and found my role in the scurrilous. But I couldn’t. There were obstacles. The gestation of German history had brought forth piles of rubble and dead bodies, a mass of material that, once I began to clear it away, only increased from book to book.

With the first sentence, ‘Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution …,’ the barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention, and an obsession with detail all flowed freely, chapter after chapter arose, history offered local examples, I took on a rapidly proliferating family, and contended with Oskar Matzerath and those around him over the simultaneity of events and the absurd constraints of chronology, over Oskar’s right to speak in the first or third person, over his true transgressions and his feigned guilt.

The Tin Drum struck a distinctly new tone in post-war German literature, one that was greeted with enthusiasm by many critics and with annoyance by others. The poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger offered this review in 1959:

The Tin Drum knows no taboos. … Again and again the narrative enters the forbidden sphere where disgust and sexuality, death and blasphemy meet.

What differentiates Grass in this respect both from any form of pornography, and from the so-called ‘stark realism’ of the American school, what legitimises these blunt forays, indeed elevates them to acts of artistic brilliance, is the total objectivity with which he presents them. Unlike Henry Miller, Grass does not seek out taboos; he simply doesn’t notice them. It would be unfair to accuse him of deliberate provocation. He neither avoids scandal nor invites it; but that is precisely what will give rise to scandal: Grass doesn’t have a guilty conscience, he takes what we find shocking for granted.

This passage shows the wide variety of responses my work evoked in the late fifties. As a result, from the very start of my career as a novelist, I was considered controversial.

The ‘shocking’ parts of The Tin Drum may have led translators and publishers in other countries to omit or shorten passages they believed their own readers might find disgusting or blasphemous. And some no doubt thought that by pruning this very long novel, written by a brazen young author who was still unknown, they could only improve it. I thought highly of the late Ralph Manheim, and his translations of several of my works into English were marvellous, but both literary historians and translators indicated repeatedly that his translation of The Tin Drum needed revision. I heard the same thing about the early translations of The Tin Drum into other languages.

Thus, in the early summer of 2005, ten translators, including Breon Mitchell, joined me in Gdańsk with one set goal in mind: to create new versions of my first novel in their own languages. To prepare myself for their questions, I reread The Tin Drum for the first time since I’d written it, hesitantly at first, then with some pleasure, surprised at what the young author of fifty years ago had managed to put down on paper.

For eight days the translators from various lands questioned the author; for eight days the author talked with them, responded to their queries. During breaks I would take them to this or that spot mentioned in the rapidly shifting narrative of the novel.

How much more relaxed the reader’s attitude towards The Tin Drum is today, even in Catholic countries like Poland, was evident one Sunday when the author and his translators visited the Church of the Sacred Heart in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr, where I was born and raised. In my autobiographical memoir Peeling the Onion, I recounted the story:

And there, in this neo-Gothic scene of a youthful crime, a young priest with a cryptic smile, a man who bore not the faintest resemblance to Father Wiehnke, asked me to sign a Polish copy of the book in question, and the author, to the astonishment of his translators and editor, did not hesitate to place his name below the title. For it was not I who broke off the Christ Child’s little watering can that day at the Altar of Our Lady. It was someone with a different will. Someone who had never renounced evil. Someone who did not wish to grow …

Lübeck, January 2009

BOOK
ONE

The Wide Skirt

GRANTED: I’M AN inmate in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can’t see through blue-eyed types like me.

So my keeper can’t possibly be my enemy. I’ve grown fond of this man peeping through the door, and the moment he enters my room I tell him incidents from my life so he can get to know me in spite of the peephole between us. The good fellow seems to appreciate my stories, for the moment I’ve finished some tall tale he expresses his gratitude by showing me one of his latest knotworks. Whether he’s an artist remains to be seen. But an exhibition of his works would be well received by the press, and would entice a few buyers too. He gathers ordinary pieces of string from his patients’ rooms after visiting hours, disentangles them, knots them into multilayered, cartilaginous spectres, dips them in plaster, lets them harden, and impales them on knitting needles mounted on little wooden pedestals.

He often plays with the notion of colouring his creations. I advise him not to, point towards my white metal bed and ask him to imagine this most perfect of all beds painted in multiple hues. Horrified, he claps his keeper’s hands to his head, struggles to arrange his somewhat inflexible features into an expression of manifold shock, and drops his polychrome plans.

My white-enamelled metal hospital bed thus sets a standard. To me it is more; my bed is a goal I’ve finally reached, it is my consolation, and could easily become my faith if the administration would allow me to make a few changes: I’d like to have the bed rails raised even higher to keep anyone from coming too close.

Once a week Visitors Day disrupts the silence I’ve woven between my white metal bars. It signals the arrival of those who wish to save me, who find pleasure in loving me, who seek to value, respect, and know themselves through me. How blind, nervous, and ill-mannered they are. Scratching away at my white bed rails with their nail scissors, scribbling obscene, elongated stick figures on the enamel with ballpoint pens and blue pencils. My lawyer, having blasted the room with his hello, routinely claps his nylon hat over the left-hand bedpost at the foot of my bed. This act of violence robs me of my inner balance and good cheer for as long as his visit lasts — and lawyers always have plenty to say.

Once my visitors have placed their gifts on the little white oilcloth-covered table that stands beneath a watercolour of anemones, once they’ve laid out some future plan to save me, or one already under way, once they’ve managed to convince me, by their tireless attempts to rescue me, of the high quality of their brotherly love, they find renewed joy in their own existence and depart. Then my keeper arrives to air out the room and gather up the string from the gift wrappings. Often after airing he finds time, sitting by my bed and disentangling the string, to spread a silence so prolonged that in the end I call the silence Bruno, and Bruno silence.

Bruno Münsterberg — I’m talking about my keeper now, I’m done playing with words — bought five hundred sheets of writing paper on my behalf. Should this supply prove insufficient, Bruno, who is unmarried, childless, and hails from the Sauerland, will revisit the little stationery shop, which also sells toys, and provide me with whatever additional unlined space I need for my recollections, which I hope will be accurate. I could never have requested this favour of my visitors, my lawyer, or Klepp, say. The solicitous love prescribed for me would surely have prevented my friends from anything so dangerous as bringing me blank paper and allowing my incessantly syllable-excreting mind free use of it.

When I said to Bruno, ‘Oh, Bruno, would you buy me a ream of virgin paper?’ he looked up at the ceiling, sent his finger pointing in that same direction to underline the comparison, and replied, ‘You mean white paper, Herr Oskar.’

I stuck with the word virgin and told Bruno to ask for it that way at the shop. When he returned later that afternoon with the package, he seemed a Bruno lost in thought. He stared long and hard a few times at the ceiling, that source of all his bright ideas, and then announced, ‘That word you recommended was right. I asked for virgin paper and the salesgirl blushed bright red before she gave me what I wanted.’

Fearing a long conversation about salesgirls in stationery shops, I regretted having emphasised the paper’s innocence by calling it virgin, and said nothing, waited till Bruno had left the room. Only then did I open the package with the five hundred sheets of paper.

I lifted the resilient stack for a moment and tested its weight. Then I counted off ten sheets and stored the rest in my bedside table. I found the fountain pen by my photo album in the drawer: it’s full, it won’t fail for lack of ink; how shall I begin?

You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backwards and forwards to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all reference to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you’ve finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists. I’ve also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.

I’ll begin long before me, for no one should describe his life who lacks the patience to commemorate at least half of his grandparents’ existence before detailing his own. To all of you forced to live confusing lives beyond the confines of my mental institution, to all you friends and weekly visitors who have no inkling of my store of paper, I introduce Oskar’s maternal grandmother.

My grandmother Anna Bronski sat in her skirts late one October afternoon at the edge of a potato field. You could have seen how expertly my grandmother raked the limp potato tops into tidy piles that morning, ate a hunk of bread at noon smeared with dripping and sweetened with syrup, dug through the field one last time, and sat at last in her skirts between two nearly full baskets. Before the upturned and inwardly tilted soles of her boots, flaring up asthmatically from time to time and sending a flat layer of troubled smoke across the slightly tilted crust of the soil, smouldered a potato-top fire. The year was eighteen ninety-nine, she sat in the heart of Kashubia, near Bissau, nearer still to the brickworks, this side of Ramkau she sat, beyond Viereck, facing the road to Brentau, between Dirschau and Karthaus, with her back towards the black forest of Goldkrug she sat, shoving potatoes under the hot ashes with the charred tip of a hazel stick.

If I’ve singled out my grandmother’s skirt for special mention, making it clear, I hope, that she was sitting in her skirts — even calling the chapter ‘The Wide Skirt’ — it’s because I know how much I owe to that article of clothing. My grandmother didn’t wear just one skirt, she wore four, one atop the other. Nor did she wear one top skirt and three underskirts; she wore four so-called top skirts, each skirt wore another, but she wore all four, according to a system of daily rotation. The skirt on top the day before descended one layer on the next, her second skirt became the third. The skirt that yesterday was third now nestled right against her skin. Yesterday’s inmost skirt now clearly showed its pattern, which was none at all: my grandmother Anna Bronski’s skirts all preferred the same standard potato colour. It must have suited her.

Aside from their colour my grandmother’s skirts were distinguished by a lavish expanse of material. They formed broad arcs, billowed when the wind rose, fell slack when it had had enough, rattled as it passed, and all four flew out ahead of her when the wind was in her stern. When she sat down, my grandmother gathered her skirts about her.

In addition to the four skirts that permanently billowed, drooped, draped, or stood stiff and empty by her bed, my grandmother possessed a fifth. This skirt differed in no way from the four other potato-coloured ones. And this fifth skirt was not always the same fifth skirt. Like its brothers — for skirts are masculine by nature — it too was subject to rotation, was one of the four skirts she wore, and like them, when its time had come each fifth Friday, it descended into the washtub, hung Saturday on the clothesline at the kitchen window, and lay when dry on the ironing board.

When, after one of these housecleaning-baking-washing-and-ironing Saturdays, having milked and fed the cow, my grandmother climbed into the tub, tendered something to the suds, let the tub water sink once more, then sat in her grandly flowered towel on the edge of the bed, there were four skirts and the freshly washed one lying spread out before her on the floor. She propped up the lower lid of her right eye with her right forefinger, consulted no one, not even her brother Vinzent, and thus reached a speedy conclusion. Barefoot she stood and pushed aside with her toe the skirt whose potato sheen had lost the most lustre. The clean one then took its place.

The following Sunday, to the greater glory of Jesus, about whom she had firm ideas, she would consecrate the new order of skirts by attending church in Ramkau. Where did my grandmother wear the freshly laundered skirt? Not only a clean woman but also somewhat vain, she wore the best one on top, and if the weather was good, in bright sunshine.

Now it was a Monday afternoon and my grandmother was sitting by the potato fire. Her Sunday skirt had moved one closer to her Monday, while the one skin-warmed on Sunday flowed atop her hips that Monday Monday dull. She whistled, with no particular tune in mind, and scraped the first baked potato from the ashes with her hazel stick. She shoved the spud far enough from the smouldering mound of tops for the breeze to caress and cool it. A sharpened stick then speared the split, charred, and crusty tuber and held it to her mouth, which no longer whistled but instead, through cracked and wind-dried lips, blew ashes and earth from the skin.

As she blew, my grandmother closed her eyes. When she thought she had blown long enough, she opened her eyes, one after the other, bit down with her peep-through but otherwise perfect front teeth, quickly released them, held the still too hot potato half, mealy and steaming, in her open mouth, and inhaling smoke and October air, stared with rounded eyes over her flaring nostrils across the field to the nearby horizon with its grid of telegraph poles and the top third of the brickworks chimney.

Something was moving between the telegraph poles. My grandmother closed her mouth, sucked in her lips, narrowed her eyes, and munched on the potato. Something was moving between the telegraph poles. Something was leaping. Three men were leaping between the poles, three made for the chimney, then round in front, when one of them doubled back, took a new running start, seemed short and stout, made it over the chimney, over the brickworks, the other two, more tall and thin, made it over the brickworks too, if only just, between the poles again, but short and stout doubled back, and short and stout was in a greater hurry than tall and thin, the other leapers, who had to head back towards the chimney because the other man was already tumbling over it, while the two, still hot on his heels, made a running start and were suddenly gone, had lost heart it seemed, and the short one too fell in midleap from the chimney and disappeared below the horizon.

And there they stayed, it was intermission, or they were changing costumes, or coating bricks and getting paid for it.

When my grandmother tried to take advantage of the intermission to spear a second potato, she missed it. For the one who seemed short and stout now climbed, in the same costume, over the horizon as if it were a picket fence, as if he’d left the two leapers who were chasing him behind the fence, among the bricks, or on the pike to Brentau, yet was still in a great hurry, trying to outrace the telegraph poles, taking long, slow leaps across the field, mud leaping from his soles as he leapt from the mud, but no matter how far he leapt, he merely crept, he crawled across the muddy earth. At times he seemed stuck to the ground, then hung suspended in air so long that short and stout he still had time to wipe his brow in midleap before planting his leg again in the freshly ploughed field that furrowed towards the sunken lane by her five-acre field of potatoes.

And he made it to the sunken lane, had barely vanished short and stout into the sunken lane, when tall and thin the other two, who may have toured the brickworks meanwhile, climbed likewise over the horizon and stomped their way tall and thin but by no means slim across the field, so that my grandmother failed once more to spear her potato; because that’s a sight you don’t see every day, three grown men, albeit grown in quite different ways, hopping among telegraph poles, practically breaking off the brickworks chimney, then, at intervals, first short and stout, then thin and tall, but all three struggling hard, ever more mud clinging to their freshly polished boots, leaping through the field that Vinzent had ploughed just two days before, and disappearing into the sunken lane.

Now all three were gone, and my grandmother dared spear a nearly cold potato. Hastily she blew earth and ashes from the skin, put the whole thing in her mouth at once, thinking, if she was thinking, that they must be from the brickworks, and was still chewing with a circular motion when one of them leapt out of the sunken lane, glanced about wildly over his black moustache, took two final leaps to the fire, stood on this, that, and the other side of the fire all at once, fled here, was scared there, didn’t know where to head, couldn’t go back, since tall and thin were coming up the sunken lane behind him, clapped his hands, slapped his knees, his eyes popping from his head, sweat leaping from his brow. And panting, moustache trembling, he ventured nearer, crept right up to the soles of her boots; crept right up to my grandmother, looked at my grandmother like some short, stout animal, at which she heaved a great sigh, stopped chewing her potato, tilted apart the soles of her boots, abandoned all thought of brickworks, bricks, brick makers and brick coaters, and instead lifted her skirt, no, lifted all four of them, all up at once, so that this man who was not from the brickworks could crawl short but stout beneath them, and then he was gone with his moustache, gone with his animal look, came neither from Ramkau nor Viereck, was under her skirts with his fear, his knee-slapping ended, not stout or short, yet still taking up space, panting and trembling and hands on knees now forgotten: all was as still as on the first day of Creation or the last, a slight breeze gossiped in the potato fire, the telegraph poles counted themselves in silence, the brickworks chimney stood firm, and she, my grandmother, she smoothed her top skirt over the second skirt, smooth and proper, scarcely felt him under the fourth skirt, had not yet caught on with her third to something new and amazing against her skin. And because it was amazing, though on top all was calm, and both second and third had yet to catch on, she scraped two or three potatoes from the ashes, took four raw ones from the basket by her right elbow, shoved the raw spuds into the hot ashes one by one, covered them with more ashes, and poked about until the thick smoke billowed up once more — what else could she have done?

My grandmother’s skirts had barely settled down, the thick flow of smoke from the potato fire, which had lost its way during all the desperate knee-slapping, place-changing, and poking about, had barely returned to creep yellow windward across the field to the south-west, when the tall and thin pair chasing the short but stout fellow now living under her skirts spurted forth from the lane and turned out to be tall and thin and wearing the official uniform of the rural constabulary.

They almost shot past my grandmother. Didn’t one of them even leap over the fire? But suddenly they had heels, and brains in their heels, dug them in, turned, stomped back, stood booted and uniformed in the thick smoke, withdrew coughing in their uniforms, pulling smoke along, and were still coughing as they addressed my grandmother, wanting to know if she’d seen Koljaiczek, she must have seen him, she was sitting by the lane and he, Koljaiczek, had escaped along the lane.

My grandmother hadn’t seen any Koljaiczek, because she didn’t know any Koljaiczek. Was he from the brickworks, she asked, because the only ones she knew were from the brickworks. But this Koljaiczek the uniforms described had nothing to do with bricks, he was more on the short and stout side. My grandmother thought back, recalled having seen someone like that run past, and pointed, with reference to where he was heading, with a steaming potato spitted on a sharpened stick in the direction of Bissau, which, to judge by the potato, must lie between the sixth and seventh telegraph poles, counting to the right from the chimney of the brickworks. But my grandmother had no idea if the man running was Koljaiczek, blamed her lack of knowledge on the fire at the soles of her boots; it gave her enough to do, it was burning poorly, she didn’t have time to worry about people running past or standing in the smoke, in general she didn’t worry about people she didn’t know, the only ones she knew were from Bissau, Ramkau, Viereck, and the brickworks — and that was plenty for her.

Having said this, my grandmother heaved a gentle sigh, but loud enough that the uniforms asked why she was sighing. She nodded towards the fire to indicate that she was sighing because the little fire was burning poorly, and because of all the people standing right in the smoke, then she bit off half the potato with her widely spaced front teeth, lost herself entirely in chewing, and rolled her eyeballs up and to the left.

The men in the uniform of the rural constabulary could draw no encouragement from the distant gaze of my grandmother, nor were they sure if they should head off beyond the telegraph poles towards Bissau, so in the meantime they poked around with their bayonets in the nearby piles of potato tops not yet burning. Moved by a sudden inspiration, they simultaneously overturned both nearly full potato baskets at my grandmother’s elbows, and couldn’t understand why only potatoes rolled out of the woven baskets at their boots, and not Koljaiczek. Suspiciously they crept around the potato pile, as if Koljaiczek might somehow have had time to pile into it, gave it several well-aimed jabs, and were sorry when no one screamed. Their suspicions were aroused by every bush, however scraggly, every mouse hole, a colony of molehills, and time and again by my grandmother, who sat there as if rooted, emitting sighs, rolling her eyes behind her lids so that the whites showed, reciting the Kashubian names of all the saints — all of which expressed and emphasised the sorrows of a poorly burning little fire and two overturned potato baskets.

The uniforms stayed a good half-hour. They stood at varying distances from the fire, took bearings on the brickworks chimney, intending to occupy Bissau as well, postponed the attack, and held their reddish blue hands over the fire till my grandmother, without ever interrupting her sighs, gave each of them a split potato on a stick. But in the midst of their chewing, the uniforms remembered their uniforms, leapt a stone’s throw into the field along the broom at the edge of the lane, and startled a hare that did not, however, turn out to be Koljaiczek. Back at the fire they recovered their mealy, hotly aromatic spuds, and pacified as well as somewhat war-weary, decided to gather up the raw spuds and return them to the baskets they had overturned earlier in the line of duty.

Only when evening began to squeeze a fine, slanting rain and an inky twilight from the October sky did they attack, briefly and listlessly, a distant, darkening boulder, but once that was taken care of they decided to call it a day. A bit more foot-stamping and hands held out in blessing over the rain-spattered little fire, its thick smoke spreading, more coughing in the green smoke, eyes tearing up in the yellow smoke, then a coughing, teary-eyed stomping towards Bissau. If Koljaiczek wasn’t here, then Koljaiczek must be in Bissau. The rural constabulary never sees more than two possibilities.

The smoke from the slowly dying fire enveloped my grandmother like a fifth skirt, so roomy that she too, in her four skirts, with her sighs and names of saints, like Koljaiczek, found herself beneath a skirt. Only when nothing remained of the uniforms but wavering dots slowly drowning in dusk between the telegraph poles did my grandmother rise as laboriously as if she had struck root and was now interrupting that incipient growth, pulling forth tendrils and earth.

Suddenly finding himself lying short and stout in the rain without a hood, Koljaiczek grew cold. Quickly he buttoned the trousers that fear and an overwhelming need for refuge had bidden him open under her skirts. He fiddled quickly with the buttons, fearing an all too rapid cooling of his rod, for the weather carried the threat of autumnal chills.

It was my grandmother who found four more hot potatoes under the ashes. She gave three to Koljaiczek, kept one for herself, then asked before taking a bite if he came from the brickworks, though she must have known that Koljaiczek had nothing to do with the bricks. And paying no heed to his answer, she loaded the lighter basket onto him, bent beneath the heavier one herself, kept one hand free for the garden rake and hoe, and with basket, potatoes, rake, and hoe, billowed away in her four skirts towards Bissau-Abbau.

Bissau-Abbau was not Bissau proper. It lay more in the direction of Ramkau. Leaving the brickworks to their left, they headed for the black forest, where Goldkrug lay, and beyond it Brentau. But in a hollow before the forest lay Bissau-Abbau. And following my grandmother towards it short and stout came Joseph Koljaiczek, who could no longer free himself from her skirts.

Under the Raft

IT’S NOT SO easy, lying here in the scrubbed metal bed of a mental institution, within range of a glazed peephole armed with Bruno’s eye, to retrace the swaths of smoke rising from Kashubian potato fires and the fine diagonal strokes of an October rain. If I didn’t have my drum, which, when handled properly and patiently, recalls all the little details I need to get the essentials down on paper, and if I didn’t have the institute’s permission to let my drum speak three or four hours each day, I would be a poor fellow with no known grandparents.

At any rate my drum says: On that October afternoon in eighteen ninety-nine, while Ohm Krüger was brushing his bushy anti-British eyebrows in South Africa, nearer home, between Dirschau and Karthaus, by the Bissau brickworks, beneath four skirts of a single colour, beneath smoke, shock, sighs, and saints’ names sorrowfully invoked, beneath the slanting rain, beneath the smoke-filled eyes and hapless questioning of two rural constables, short but stout Joseph Koljaiczek begot my mother Agnes.

Anna Bronski, my grandmother, changed her name under cover of that very night’s darkness, transformed herself, with the help of a priest who was generous with the sacraments, into Anna Koljaiczek, and followed Joseph, if not into Egypt, at least to the provincial capital on the Mottlau, where Joseph found work as a raftsman and temporary respite from the rural police.

Just to heighten the suspense somewhat, I won’t name that city at the mouth of the Mottlau just yet, though as my mother’s birthplace it would certainly deserve mention at this point. At the end of July nineteen hundred — they were deciding to double the construction plans for the imperial navy — Mama first saw the light of day, under the sign of Leo. Self-confidence and imagination, generosity and vanity. The first house, also known as domus vitae, in the sign of the ascendant: the easily influenced Pisces. The constellation of the sun in opposition to Neptune, seventh house or domus matrimonii uxoris, would bring confusion. Venus in opposition to Saturn, called the sour planet, known to induce ailments of the spleen and liver, dominant in Capricorn and celebrating its destruction in Leo, to which Neptune offers eels and receives the mole in return, which loves belladonna, onions, and beets, which coughs lava and sours wine; he lived with Venus in the eighth house, the house of death, which spoke of accidents, while conception in the potato field gave promise of a most hazardous happiness under the protection of Mercury in the house of relatives.

Here I must insert my mama’s protest, for she always denied having been conceived in the potato field. Her father — this much she admitted — had tried it there, but his situation and Anna Bronski’s position were not sufficiently well chosen to provide Koljaiczek with the preconditions for conception.

‘It must have happened that night, while we were on the run, or in Uncle Vinzent’s box cart, or later on the island of Troyl, when we found a room and safe haven with the raftsmen.’

With such words did my mama date the founding of her existence, and my grandmother, who surely must have known, would nod patiently and announce to the world, ‘That’s right, child, maybe it was in the cart or on Troyl, but not in the field, because it was windy and raining like the dickens.’

Vinzent was my grandmother’s brother. Spurred on by the death of his young wife, he made a pilgrimage to Częstochowa, where the Matka Boska Częstochowska charged him to recognise her as the future Queen of Poland. From then on he spent all his time rummaging through strange books, where he found the Virgin Mother’s claim to the Polish throne confirmed in every line, and let his sister handle the farmhouse and his few acres. Jan, his four-year-old son, a frail child always on the verge of tears, tended the geese, collected brightly coloured cards and, steered by fate from an early age, stamps.

Into that farmhouse dedicated to the divine Queen of Poland my grandmother brought her potato baskets and Koljaiczek, whereupon Vinzent, seeing what had happened, ran to Ramkau and drummed up a priest to come armed with the sacraments and join Anna and Joseph in marriage. No sooner had His Reverence, groggy with sleep, yawned his drawn-out blessing and, supplied with a good side of bacon, turned his consecrated back than Vinzent hitched the horse to the cart, bundled the newlyweds into the back, bedded them down on straw and empty sacks, set a shivering and weakly weeping Jan beside him on the box, and gave his horse to understand that he was to head hard and straight into the night: the honeymooners were in a hurry.

The night was dark, but almost spent, when the wagon reached the timber port of the provincial capital. Fellow raftsmen, friends of Koljaiczek, took in the fugitive couple. Vinzent turned and headed his horse towards Bissau again: a cow, the goat, a sow with her piglets, eight geese, and the farmyard dog were waiting to be fed and his son Jan to be put to bed, for he was running a slight fever.

Joseph Koljaiczek remained in hiding for three weeks, trained his hair to take a new parting, shaved off his moustache, provided himself with unblemished papers, and found work as a raftsman named Joseph Wranka. But why did Koljaiczek find it necessary to appear before timber merchants and sawmills with Wranka’s papers in his pocket, a man who, unbeknownst to the local authorities, had been shoved off a raft in a scuffle above Modlin and then drowned in the Bug River? Because, having given up rafting for a time, Koljaiczek worked in a sawmill near Schwetz and got into a row with the mill boss over a fence Koljaiczek had painted a provocative red and white. No fence sitter himself when it came to politics, the mill boss ripped two slats from the fence, one white and one red, and smashed them to Polish kindling across Koljaiczek’s Kashubian back, grounds enough for the battered man, on the following no doubt starry night, to set the newly constructed, whitewashed sawmill ablaze in red, to the greater glory of an indeed partitioned but therefore even more firmly united Poland.

So Koljaiczek was an arsonist, and this several times over, for in the days that followed, sawmills and woodlots all over West Prussia provided tinder for the flare-up of bicoloured nationalist feelings. As always when the future of Poland was at stake, the Virgin Mary appeared in the crowd at these conflagrations, and there were eyewitnesses — a few might still be alive today — who claimed to have seen the Mother of God, adorned with the crown of Poland, atop the collapsing roofs of several sawmills. The crowd that always gathers at such great conflagrations is said to have burst out in the Hymn to Bogurodzica, Mother of God — Koljaiczek’s fires, we have every reason to believe, were affairs of great solemnity: solemn oaths were sworn.

While Koljaiczek was pursued as an arsonist, the raftsman Joseph Wranka — with an unblemished past and no parents, a harmless, even slow-witted fellow no one was looking for and hardly anyone even knew — had divided his chewing tobacco into daily rations till the Bug swallowed him up, leaving behind his jacket with three days’ worth of chewing tobacco and his papers. Since Wranka, having drowned, could no longer show up, and no embarrassing questions were raised about him, Koljaiczek, who was about the same size and had the same round head as the drowned man, crept first into his jacket, then into his skin, complete with official papers and free of any prior conviction, gave up his pipe, took to chewing tobacco, even adopted Wranka’s most characteristic trait, his speech impediment, and in the years that followed played the part of an honest and thrifty raftsman with a slight stutter who conveyed entire forests down the Niemen, the Bobr, the Bug, and the Vistula. To which must be added that he even rose to Private First Class in the Crown Prince’s Leib-Hussars under Mackensen, for Wranka had not yet done his service, while Koljaiczek, who was four years older than the drowned man, had left a checkered record behind in the artillery at Thorn.

Even as they steal, murder, and set fires, the most dangerous of thieves, murderers, and arsonists are on the lookout for a more respectable trade. By effort or luck, some get that chance: Koljaiczek in the guise of Wranka made a good husband, and was so thoroughly cured of the fiery vice that the mere sight of a match made him tremble. A box of matches lying openly and smugly on the kitchen table was never safe from him, even though he might well have invented them. He cast temptation out of the window. My grandmother had a hard time getting a hot lunch on the table by noon. The family often sat in darkness for lack of a match to light the oil lamp.

Yet Wranka was no tyrant. On Sunday he took his Anna Wranka to church in the lower city and allowed her, his legally wedded wife, to wear four skirts one atop the other, as she had in the potato field. In winter, when the rivers were frozen over and times were lean for the raftsmen, he sat like a good fellow on Troyl, where only raftsmen, stevedores, and dockers lived, and watched over his daughter Agnes, who seemed to take after her father, for when she wasn’t crawling under the bed, she was hiding in the wardrobe, and when there were visitors she sat under the table with her rag dolls.

Thus little Agnes tried to stay hidden, seeking in her hiding place the same security, though not the same pleasure, that Joseph found under Anna’s skirts. Koljaiczek the arsonist had been burned badly enough to understand his daughter’s need for shelter. So when it became necessary to build a rabbit hutch on the balcony-like porch of their one-and-a-half-room flat, he added a small addition just her size. In such housing my mother sat as a child, played with dolls, and kept growing. It’s said that later, when she was already at school, she threw her dolls away and, playing with glass beads and coloured feathers, revealed her first taste for fragile beauty.

Since I’m burning to announce the beginning of my own existence, perhaps I may be permitted to leave the Wrankas’ family raft drifting peacefully along without further comment till nineteen-thirteen, when the Columbus was launched at Schichau’s; that’s when the police, who never forget, picked up the trail of the false Wranka.

It all began in August of nineteen-thirteen, when, as he did towards the end of each summer, Koljaiczek helped man the great raft that floated down from Kiev by way of the Pripet, through the canal, along the Bug as far as Modlin, and from there on down to the Vistula. Twelve raftsmen in all, they steamed upriver on the tugboat Radaune, operated by the sawmill, from Westlich Neufähr along the Dead Vistula as far as Einlage, then up the Vistula past Käsemark, Letzkau, Czattkau, Dirschau, and Pieckel, and tied up that evening at Thorn. There the new sawmill manager came on board, sent to oversee the purchase of timber in Kiev. When the Radaune cast off at four that morning he was said to be on board. Koljaiczek saw him for the first time at breakfast in the galley. They sat opposite each other, chewing, and slurping barley coffee. Koljaiczek recognised him at once. The stout, prematurely bald man had vodka brought for the empty coffee cups. Still chewing, and while the vodka was being poured at the end of the table, he introduced himself: ‘Just so you know, I’m the new boss, Dückerhoff, and I run a tight ship.’

At his bidding the raftsmen reeled off their names in turn as they sat, then drained their cups with bobbing Adam’s apples. Koljaiczek gulped his down first, then said ‘Wranka’ and looked Dückerhoff straight in the eye. The latter nodded just as he’d done before, repeated the name Wranka just as he had repeated those of the other men. Yet it seemed to Koljaiczek that Dückerhoff had spoken the name of the drowned raftsman with special emphasis, not pointedly but with a thoughtful air.

The Radaune pounded along against the muddy tide that knew but one direction, deftly avoiding sandbanks with the aid of constantly changing pilots. To right and left, beyond the dykes, the same flat landscape with occasional hills, already harvested. Hedges, sunken lanes, a hollow basin with broom, a level plain between the scattered farms, just made for cavalry attacks, for a division of uhlans to wheel in from the left onto the sand table, for hedge-vaulting hussars, for the dreams of young cavalry officers, for battles long past and battles yet to come, for an oil painting: tartars leaning forward, dragoons rearing up, Brethren of the Sword falling, grandmasters staining their noble robes, not a button missing from their cuirasses, save for one, struck down by the Duke of Mazowsze, and horses, no circus has horses so white, nervous, covered with tassels, sinews rendered with precision, nostrils flaring, crimson, snorting small clouds impaled by lowered lances decked with pennants, and parting the heavens, the sunset’s red glow, the sabres, and there, in the background — for every painting has a background — clinging tightly to the horizon, with smoke rising peacefully, a small village between the hind legs of the black stallion, crouching cottages, moss-covered, thatched, and inside the cottages, held in readiness, the pretty tanks, dreaming of days to come when they too would be allowed to enter the picture, to come out onto the plain beyond the Vistula’s dykes, like slender colts among the heavy cavalry.

At Włocławek, Dückerhoff tapped Koljaiczek on the jacket: ‘Say, Wranka, didn’t you work at the mill in Schwetz a few years back? The one that burned down afterwards?’ Koljaiczek shook his head slowly, as if he had difficulty turning it, and his eyes were so sad and tired that Dückerhoff, exposed to that look, kept any further questions to himself.

When Koljaiczek, as all raftsmen used to do, leaned over the railing at Modlin and spat three times into the Bug as the Radaune entered the Vistula, Dückerhoff was standing beside him with a cigar and asked for a light. That little word, like the word match, got under Koljaiczek’s skin. ‘You don’t have to blush when I ask for a light, man. You’re not some little girl, are you?’

Modlin was far behind them before Koljaiczek’s blush faded, which was not a blush of shame but the lingering glow of sawmills he’d set on fire.

From Modlin to Kiev — up the Bug, through the canal linking the Bug and the Pripet, till the Radaune, following the Pripet, made its way to the Dnieper — nothing passed between Koljaiczek-Wranka and Dückerhoff that could be recorded as an exchange. It’s of course possible that things happened on the tug, among the raftsmen, between the raftsmen and the stokers, between the stokers, the helmsman, and the captain, between the captain and the constantly changing pilots, as one assumes, perhaps rightly, they always do among men. I could imagine disputes between the Kashubian raftsmen and the helmsman, who came from Stettin, perhaps even the beginnings of a mutiny: a meeting in the galley, lots drawn, passwords given out, frog stickers sharpened.

But enough of that. There were no political disputes, no knife fights between Germans and Poles, nor a true mutiny born of social injustice to add local colour. The Radaune chugged along eating her coal like a good girl, got hung up on a sandbank once — just beyond Ploch, I think it was — but freed herself under her own power. A brief but bitter exchange between Captain Barbusch from Neufahrwasser and the Ukrainian pilot, that was about it — and the log had little more to add.

But had I wanted or needed to keep a log of Koljaiczek’s thoughts, or perhaps even a journal of Dückerhoff’s inner life as a master miller, there would have been plenty of incidents and adventures to describe: suspicions aroused, suspicions confirmed, distrust, and distrust quickly quelled. They were both afraid. Dückerhoff more than Koljaiczek: for now they were in Russia. Dückerhoff could have gone overboard, as poor Wranka once had, or — by now we are in Kiev — in lumberyards so vast and confusing that a man can lose his guardian angel in the wooden labyrinth and wind up under a pile of suddenly shifting logs that can no longer be held back — or instead be saved. Saved by Koljaiczek, first to fish the mill master from the Pripet or the Bug, or, in that Kiev lumberyard bereft of guardian angels, yank Dückerhoff back in the nick of time from an avalanche of logs. How touching it would be if I could now report that a half-drowned or nearly crushed Dückerhoff, still breathing heavily, the lingering trace of death in his eyes, whispered in the ear of the ostensible Wranka, ‘Thanks, Koljaiczek, thanks, old man!’ and then, after the obligatory pause, ‘We’re quits now — the slate’s clean.’

And with gruff bonhomie, smiling awkwardly into each other’s manly eyes, blinking back what might have been a tear, they exchange a shy but calloused handshake.

We know this scene from magnificently filmed movies, when directors decide to turn two finely portrayed rival brothers into steadfast comrades, who now make their way together through thick and thin to face a thousand adventures.

Koljaiczek, however, found neither the opportunity to drown Dückerhoff nor to snatch him from the claws of death-dealing logs. Ever attentive and alert to his firm’s advantage, Dückerhoff bought lumber in Kiev, oversaw the assembly of the nine rafts, distributed, as was customary, a large sum of Russian pocket money for the trip downriver, then boarded the train that took him by way of Modlin, Deutsch-Eylau, Marienburg, and Dirschau back to his firm, whose sawmill lay in the timber port between the shipyards of Klawitter and Schichau.

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