Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Günter Grass
Title Page
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Copyright
The Tin Drum
Cat and Mouse
Dog Years
Selected Poems
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising
Four Plays
Speak Out!
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Epub ISBN: 9781473545298
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VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © 1969 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag GmbH, Neuwied and Berlin
English translation copyright © 1970 by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., and Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
Originally published in Germany under the title Örtlich Betäubt
Günter Grass has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by England in 1970
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781784703073
His assistant pressed the palm of her hand against my forehead: no demon of hell, only the reconstructible impression of my lower ground-down and unground-down teeth lay on the glass top of the accessory table and, because it was full of contradictions, looked witty.
“Tell me, Doc, what do you think of the Soviet system?”
“What we need is worldwide and socially integrated Sickcare.—Don’t forget to rinse.”
“But in what system is your international Sickcare to …?”
“It is to replace all existing systems and …”
“But isn’t your Sickcare, which I relate to my own project for a pedagogical province expanded to worldwide proportions, itself a system?”
“My worldwide Sickcare has nothing to do with any ideology; it is the base and superstructure of our human society.”
“But my pedagogical province, in which there are only students and no teachers …”
“It will adapt itself without difficulty to the new therapy.
“But Sickcare is only for sick people….”
“Kindly rinse in between.—All people are sick, have been sick, get sick, and die.”
“But what’s the good of all that if no system educates man to surpass himself?”
“Why do we need systems that prevent a man from finding the way to his sickness? All systems take health as their aim and standard.”
“But if we want to eliminate human failings …”
“We eliminate man.—But now shall we …”
“I don’t want to rinse any more.”
“Think of your aluminum shells.”
“But how can we change the world without a system?”
“Once we abolish systems, we shall have changed it.”
“Who’s going to abolish them?”
“The sick. To make room at last for the great all-embracing world Sickcare, which will not govern us but care for us, which will not try to change us but will help us, which, as Seneca has already said, will give us leisure for our infirmities….”
“The world as hospital …”
“In which there will be no more healthy people and no obligation to be healthy.”
“And what’s to become of my pedagogic principle?”
“Just as you want to do away with the distinction between teachers and students, so we shall abolish the distinction between doctor and patient, definitively and—systematically.”
“Systematically.”
“But now we shall put the aluminum shells back on.”
“Put the aluminum shells back on.”
“Your tongue must be used to the foreign bodies by now.”
“Bodies by now.”
(A furry dumpling. Couldn’t his Sickcare serve me an apple?) But even tender sage-fed lamb would have been rubber to my cataleptic palate. I, so sensitive to foretaste, taste, and aftertaste, couldn’t even taste the plaster. (“Oh, Doc. To demonstrate a crisp apple, to bite, to be young again, curious and with clamoring palate …”)
Instead, I saw a TV cook flaming veal kidneys. Relevant chitchat about recipes—“I hope none of us is prejudiced against innards!”—mingled with remarks on the protective function of my aluminum shells: “And don’t forget. Neither hot nor cold. And especially no fruit, because the acid …”
Eye to eye with my absent palate the TV cook cut into the kidney. He tasted one morsel and then another, and if my dentist hadn’t concluded the session and eliminated the cook by pressing a button, veal kidney would have become repugnant to me for all time.—Doubly relieved, I attempted a closing remark: “Anyway Krings started fighting one battle after another in the sandbox. His daughter became his natural enemy….”
Then I gave up (for the present) and took refuge in the pain which is the right of every patient: “It aches, Doc. Well anyway, I feel something….”
My dentist (who is still my friend) donated Arantil: “This will take care of you.—But before I let you go, suppose we consult the dental color chart and select a suitable tint for the porcelain of your bridges. I believe this yellowish-white with a suggestion of warm gray will do the trick. How does it strike you?”
Since his assistant (who couldn’t help but know me) nodded approval of his choice, I agreed: “Fine, we’ll take that one.”
My dentist dismissed me with the (solicitous) words: “And close your mouth tight when you go out.”
I bowed to reality: “Yes, yes. It’s still snowing.”
A light beer, waiter, a light beer!—and an idea not soluble in water, an idea to which blue light gives right of way, a brand-new idea that will cut a clear path through the tooth-geared smog, so that we all—waiter, my beer!—all of us who flirt with the past and stir up dregs may return home over the military highway, through the Red Sea piled up—waiter, my beer—to the left and right …
“Because, Doc, what and how much can we learn from history? All right, I admit it: I was disobedient, I ignored transmitted experience; because it was snowing outside and because I was making footprints in the snow, I drank a cold beer on the way home and had to take two more Arantil tablets with lukewarm water…. We learn nothing. There’s no progress, at the most footprints in the snow….”
Within my four walls my dentist was still present. He strung pearls, the triumphs of dental medicine, into a chain. He countered my ironic interruption—“When did the first toothpaste appear on the market? Before or after the toothbrush?”—with critical objections to chlorophyll: “All right, it’s refreshing. But does it prevent cavities?”
When he reviewed the development from the low-speed drill to the high-speed Airmatic—“And Siemens is coming up with five hundred thousand r.p.m. at the next dental equipment fair. Compared to that, my machine is a lazy old fossil”—when he held out the prospect of ultrasonic scaling and ultimate victory over caries, I admitted: “Maybe things are going ahead in your field, but history—despite the infallibly logical development of its weapons systems—can teach us nothing. It’s all as absurd as sweepstakes numbers. Accelerated immobility. Wherever you look, unsettled accounts, face-lifted defeats, and childish attempts to win lost battles in retrospect. When, for instance, I think of the former Field Marshal General Krings and how consistently his daughter …”
Even behind my desk, surrounded by private bric-a-brac—fetishes that were supposed to protect me—he smacked several spoonfuls of pink plaster into my mouth the moment I said “Linde.” (And right now he’s asking me not to swallow and to breathe through my nose as long as the plaster is setting in my oral cavity….)
Something is flowing evenly: Father Rhine. Carrying ships in both directions. And the two of us in wide-billowing spring coats strolling back and forth on the Rhine Promenade. (Having it out again under the close-clipped plane trees on the ramparts amid the Mary-thank-you notices.)
“What did you say? Say it again. I want to hear that again.”
Two profiles whose substructure has found a bench. (Sitting and having it out.) Heads rigid. Only the hair gives an illusion of movement. Plus freighters passing through the picture from left to right and right to left.
“Don’t make such a fuss. All right, if that’s what you want to hear: You do it better. Satisfied?”
Now the ships count. Four coming upstream from Holland. Three have found their way through the Binger Loch and are floating downstream. That much at least is correct. And the season: March. Gray-brown drips the tender springtime. (Leuterdorf still across the river.)
“What do you think, Doc, should I organize a trip to Bonn for my junior class? Visit Parliament? Interviews with leading political figures. And then on to Andernach …”
(Now the two of them are silent upstream and down.)
The traffic in both directions was stronger than my objections: Long-drawn-out perseverance with laundry fluttering on the stem and slowly hardening plaster over ground-down tooth stumps in which the nerves were silent. What I was really going to say—Schlottau wanted to get even with Krings because Krings had broken him from staff sergeant to private in Kurland—floated out of the picture with the barges. I’ve always been easily distracted. (Fade in any old thing: Irmgard Seifert feeding ornamental fish.) Long before there was a fiancée … (Difficulties in procuring school equipment.) Before I went to work for Dyckerhoff-Lengerich … (Heckling from my student Veronica Lewand: “That’s subjectivism!”) As a student in Aachen I earned my living delivering ration cards upstairs and down. My territory was Venloer Strasse….
Once there was a student who delivered ration cards for a fee. He was engulfed by a nine-family apartment house that had remained standing between vacant lots. On his left the student of engineering clutches his oilcloth briefcase with the bread, meat, fat, and sugar-and-flour stamps, with a list to be checked off, and a few books on statics; on his right the bell responded to his thumb. “Won’t you come in a moment?”
In a widow’s apartment the freshman lost some of his timidity and the habit of straying from the subject. From those days, however, he retained—for now and then his vision was clear—the picture of a smiling, carefree sergeant in a standing frame on the bedside table in among the bric-a-brac.
The widow’s name was, no, not Lowith, that was the party across the hall, who, when the student’s right thumb pressed the bell, said: “Come right in, young man, my sister has gone to the rationing office for extra coupons, but I can probably.” Soon—and better from week to week—the student learned to take the curlers out of her hair, which was on the red side.
No, reddish-blonde was the daughter on the second floor, whom the student had to help with her homework until she was successfully promoted. Across the hall the daughter flunked because the student wasn’t allowed to help her. He had to debate with the mother until the son intervened in the discussion with a “Just wait until Father comes home from the prison camp …”
But even as a student I enjoyed arguments, especially as Frau Podzum always had real coffee and other little delicacies such as pork fat with cracklings and apples in it, of which the student without Frau Podzum’s noticing—or did she wisely overlook it?—little by little carried off several pounds to the third floor of the house.
There a girl student lodger, whom pork fat didn’t agree with, got pimples from my booty. She was squeamish in other respects as well, blushed at nothings, and kept a diary which the student had no qualms about reading and diagnosed as “a scream” until she burst into tears.
Heide Schmittchen, across the hall to the right, was something else again. She owned a typewriter and let the student use it whenever he pleased. Though she was only a few years his senior, there was something motherly about her, perhaps because she was childless and her husband (whom to this day I can see leaving every time I see myself coming in) took no interest in such things.
The fourth floor, on the other hand—as one could already hear on the third—abounded with children and smelled of Brussels sprouts. There two women in different phases of exhaustion and wrappers with different patterns said: “Come right in, young man.” And the student learned and learned: to say yes, to say no, to temporize, to look away, to think of something else. The time passed under a wall clock and beside a grandfather clock, which had both survived the war. Where were the fried potatoes better? Where was there a parakeet? (On the left, I maintain, on the left where the grandfather clock was, because on the right nothing appears on the screen but the wall clock and the severe bespectacled face of a woman in her middle forties.) The student must have wasted a good deal of time at Frau Szymanski’s, in the first place because the parakeet started out in good health (now I see him sick, huddling ruffled and woebegone on his perch) and when after a long illness he was back in his cage again, chipper and in excellent feather, Frau Szymanski wanted, in the second place, the student to stay and live with her; but he had ration cards to deliver on the top floor left. To whom? What did it smell like? And the wallpaper?
(“You’ll admit, Doc, I had opportunities that lent themselves to exploitation.”) Soundlessly the door opens on the screen. Wearily a hand with three overloaded rings beckons the student into the hole. How adroitly he had learned to hesitate. He sniffs at the hand. He takes off the third ring: his fee. The hand is entitled to crawl down his neck. Now it is entitled to fondle his curly, always rather tangled hair. Now it unbuttons him. Now it pours something. Now it tears up paper. Now it slaps the student’s face with the two remaining rings. Now she masturbates with one ring. And he takes off the second ring: his fee. Now she pours something again. Now comes sleep. Time passes. Now she puts water on for coffee. Now she cries before the mirror and shows a cracked face. Again time passes. Now she fiddles with the radio button. Now she lays down the last ring, now she signs (and I check off: sugar, flour, bread, meat, and fat stamps). Now she opens the door and pushes the student out: he is a grownup now and knows differences and nuances. He knows everything in advance and feels his weariness afterward. He can compare and is no longer a novice. Someone has graduated. Leaving the attic, the student goes downstairs from floor to floor and leaves the house. (I recapitulated, for I was beginning to forget characteristic features, such as curtain patterns and flaws in the plaster.)
“No longer a student, no, Doc, the graduate mechanical engineer Eberhard Starusch is amazed to see how many new buildings have shot up in Venloer Strasse which only a minute ago was half destroyed by bombing. On both sides of his apartment house the gaps have been filled (or as you say, bridged over). The shop windows are bursting with goods shortly before clearance sales. The Consumer Society has set in. (And, now that you want to break the plaster out of my face again and for evermore, my oilcloth briefcase that I carried on my left when this fairy tale began is made out of new pigskin and swollen with my accepted thesis on dust control in cement plants; for while I supplied my nine-family apartment house with ration cards and the plaster was taking time to set, I worked hard, passed all my examinations, and grew to manhood, even if my fiancée did say later: “You’re still wearing short pants.”)
“What do you think? Wouldn’t that be a good subject?” My student Scherbaum is asked to imagine that he’s a student in 1947 and has to deliver ration cards in an apartment house in Neukölln.
(When I left my apartment house in 1951, Scherbaum was just cutting his milk teeth.) Or I take two more Arantil tablets and call up Irmgard Seifert; but before I chew over old letters with her, I slip away to Kretz, Plaidt, and Kruft, I roam through the Nette Valley with Linde, climb (still in love) the Korrelsberg with her, crawl further back (there is always something before) and read my paper on trass at the cement producers’ congress in Düsseldorf, go to work again for Dyckerhoff-Lengerich, skip Aachen (the apartment house), and, as long as Arantil helps (and Irmgard Seifert doesn’t call up with her lamentations), sedulously pursue my crabwalk: When I was eighteen in a heavily chlorinated American camp near Bad Aibling in the Allgäu, a close-cropped prisoner of war who, with his nine hundred and fifty calories a day and full set of teeth (Oh, Doc, you should have seen my teeth!), had left behind him all fear of clearing mines without covering fire and was conscientiously attending classes.
For we Germans have a way of organizing even the most monotonous camp life profitably. (Some of my colleagues go so far as to call me an expert at drafting smoothly functioning school schedules.)
The prisoners doubled up in order that a school barracks might offer room and opportunity to supplant ordinary hunger with the hunger for knowledge: Language courses for beginners and advanced students. Double-entry bookkeeping. German cathedrals. With Sven Hedin through Tibet. The late Rilke—the early Schiller. A short course in anatomy. (And you too would have found a larger audience for your lectures on caries in the camp at Bad Aibling than today at the Tempelhof People’s University.) At the same time the do-it-yourself movement started up. How can we make, if not bazookas, at least vacuum cleaners out of tin cans? The first mobiles (cut from American sheet metal) moved in the hot air over our drum stoves. Quartermaster sergeants gave lectures introducing us to philosophy. (You’re right, Doc, especially in captivity Seneca can provide consolation.) And every Wednesday and Saturday a former hotel chef—now esteemed by all as a TV chef—gave a beginner’s course in cookery.
Brühsam claimed to have learned his trade with Sacher in Vienna. Brühsam came from Transylvania. His lessons began; “In my homeland, in beautiful Transylvania, the kitchen-loving housewife takes …”
The curriculum was determined by shortages and absences: Brühsam cooked with imaginary ingredients. He evoked brisket of beef, veal kidneys, and roast pork. Word and gesture preserved the juices in a shoulder of lamb. His pheasant on wine cabbage and his carp in beer sauce: reflections of reflections. (I learned to imagine.)
While wide-eyed and spiritualized, our features sharp-cut from undernourishment, we sat in the school barracks listening to Brühsam, our copybooks—an American gift—filled with recipes that made us put on weight ten years later.
“In my homeland,” said Brühsam, “in beautiful Transylvania, when the kitchen-loving housewife goes to market, she draws a sharp distinction between free-range geese and force-fed geese.”
There followed an edifying digression about the natural freedom of the Polish and Hungarian free-range geese and the sad lot of the force-fed geese in Pomerania: “In beautiful Transylvania, which was my home, the kitchen-loving housewife chose a free-range goose.”
Then Brühsam demonstrated how first the breast, then the rump must be tested with thumb-and-ring-finger grip. “One must be able to feel the glands in spite of all the fat in which they are embedded.”
(Surely you will understand that your assistant’s three-finger grip, which commands me to keep silent, reminds me of Brühsam’s rump-testing grip; or to reverse the image as in a mirror, that while instructed by Brühsam I locate the glands of an imaginary goose, your assistant’s fingers block my oral cavity.)
“On returning home,” said Brühsam, “one must remove the goose’s innards to make room for the stuffing.”
And with our pencil stumps—one pencil for three men, everything was shared—we noted: “Whatever stuffing the kitchen-loving housewife may select, no goose can be said to be stuffed without artemisia, without three sprigs of rustling, aromatic artemisia.”
And addressing us who were glad to find a bit of dandelion between the barracks to make a little extra soup with, addressing us humble pot scrapers, Brühsam listed stuffings. We learned and noted: “Apple stuffing, chestnut stuffing …” And someone who was fifteen pounds underweight said: “What are chestnuts?”
That’s how Brühsam the TV chef ought to exuberate today on the First Program: “Glazed chestnuts. Candied chestnuts. Chestnut puree. Never red cabbage without chestnuts. In beautiful Transylvania that was my home, there were chestnut vendors with charcoal stoves who … In the winter, on the frosty market places when the chestnuts … Chestnut stories: When my uncle Ignazius Balthasar Brühsam moved with his chestnuts to Hermannstadt, which is in Transylvania and was my home … And so in November, on St. Martin’s Day, our free-range goose demands, no, cries out for chestnuts which, honey-glazed together with cinnamon-powdered apple wedges, rustling artemisia—never a goose without artemisia—and the raisin-stuffed goose heart, fill our free-range goose, whether Hungarian or Polish, to bursting and give the breast meat that little something which top heat and bottom heat, for all the golden-brown crispness they confer, can never give the delicious goose skin: that note of mild chestnut sweetness….”
(Ah, Doc, if we’d only had your aspirator in those hollow-cheeked times!) Brühsam wouldn’t let us out of his clutches, he refined the torture: “And now for the forcemeat stuffing. The kitchen-loving housewife in my homeland takes ten ounces of ground pork, weighs two onions, three apples, the innards of the goose except for the precious liver—sprinkles artemisia over these ingredients, stirs in three soft rolls previously soaked in warm milk, adds grated lemon peel and a mashed medium-sized clove of garlic, and breaks two eggs over the mixture, salts moderately, mixes thoroughly, and, to give the stuffing body, binds with three level tablespoons of wheat flour. Then she stuffs the goose, stuffs the goose …”
(Thus began the re-education of a misled youth.) We learned and learned. From ruins and hardship rose undernourished pedagogues, proclaiming: “We must learn to live again, learn to live right. For instance, one doesn’t stuff a goose with oranges. We must choose between the classical apple stuffing, the meridional chestnut stuffing, and the forcemeat stuffing. But in hard times when the supply of geese is large, but of pigs small, and when the foreign chestnut is unavailable on the domestic market, a potato stuffing”—so spoke the former hotel chef and later TV chef Albert Brühsam—“offers an excellent substitute for the apple, chestnut, or forcemeat stuffing, especially since potato stuffing, with grated nutmeg to enhance its flavor and artemisia—never a goose without artemisia!—to lend that certain something, becomes a great delicacy.”
In the autumn of fifty-five my fiancée and I—it was our last trip together—went to Posen for the autumn fair, where I took the opportunity to convince a few Polish engineers in the employ of the cement industry that centrifugal dust removers were a paying proposition. After the fair we went to Ramkau near Karthaus southwest of Danzig to visit my Aunt Hedwig, who, after long-winded conversations about agriculture in Kashubia and after a nice little family reunion had developed, spoke to me of the advantages of Polish free-range geese with potato stuffing in terms very similar to those employed ten years before by Brühsam; except that my aunt was not too familiar with nutmeg; she seasoned with caraway seed.
My fiancée dreaded the tiring trip, the arrangements for which involved considerable bureaucratic obstacles, but she grumblingly consented when I pointed out: “If I adapt myself to your family, which is rather strenuous, you’ll have to admit, it won’t hurt you to show a little good will.” And so we visited my simple and rurally hospitable relatives. (And since they were the last remnants of my family, it was not without emotion that I embarked on the journey. We also went to Neufahrwasser, the waterfront suburb of Danzig; you remember, Doc, the place where, across from the Island, I once lowered my milk tooth into the still sludgy harbor sludge.)
“Well, my boy, you’ve certainly grown!” said my aunt, who was actually my grandaunt, sister of my maternal grandmother, née Kurbjuhn. She had married a smallholder by the name of Rippka, whereas her sister, my grandmother, had moved into the city and married a sawmill foreman by the name of Behnke; my mother, you see, grew up in town and married a Starusch, whose family had been residents of the city for three generations but who, like the Kurbjuhns, originated in Kashubia: early in the nineteenth century the Storoszes were still living near Dirschau.
“Now tell me what you do for a living?” said my grandaunt and took my fiancée into her field of vision.
(Over absurd resistance on the part not only of the Polish but also of the West German authorities, I managed, immediately after our return, to ship ten bags of cement to Ramkau. That was Linde’s idea.)
My fiancée promised Aunt Hedwig the cement needed to rebuild the barn which had been shot up during the war and still showed it, but my aunt was not to be deprived of her lamentations: “All we’ve got is a little rye, a cow, a calf, sour apples if you want some, spuds of course, some chickens, and a few free-range geese….”
But these last were not for us. Ancient chickens out of preserving jars were put on the table; it seemed to Grandaunt Hedwig that canned fowl was more high-class than freshly slaughtered birds whose cackling had been heard shortly before the ax fell behind the tool shed. Perhaps it was out of consideration for my fiancée, because later on in the vegetable garden amid cabbages she said to me: “My, what a fine lady you’ve nuzzled up to.”
Naturally a lot of pictures were taken. Especially the children of Uncle Josef, a cousin of my mother’s, had to stand repeatedly in front of the shot-up barn, because Linde wanted them to. And toward evening we took the bus to Karthaus to visit my aunt’s Great-Uncle Clemens, a brother of my late maternal grandmother, and his Lenchen, née Storosz: doubly related. What a reunion! “Well, my boy! And what a pity your poor mother had to die like that! She collected your milk teeth, she was just crazy about them. Everything lost. I lost everything too, except my accordion and the piano; Alfons, our Jan’s youngest, plays it. Maybe he’ll play for us later….”
Before the family music there was more canned chicken and potato schnapps which, because my fiancée was such a fine lady, had been rendered loathsome with peppermint. (And yet the Kashubians are a people of ancient culture, they are older than the Poles and related to the Serbs. Kashubian, an Old Slavic language, is gradually dying out. Aunt Hedwig and Uncle Clemens with his Lenchen still spoke it, but Alfons, a phlegmatic young man in his late twenties, mastered neither the old language nor the Kashubian variant of the West-Prussian dialect, and only put in an occasional and grudging word or two in Polish. Nevertheless, students of Old Slavic would find it worth their while to compose a Kashubian grammar, because to date there is none. Copernicus—Kubnik or Kopnik—was neither of German nor of Polish, but of Kashubian origin.)
Because dinner had gone off rather quietly—Linde’s High German was a wet blanket and my relapses into the dialect of the Danzig suburbs lacked assurance—my Great-Uncle Clemens, from whom, via the distaff side, I inherited my knack for pedagogical encouragement: “Look here, my boy, what’s the use of being miserable? We got to be happy and learn how to live. And we got to sing too, till the cups rattle in the cupboard.”
And we did just that in family style: my Grandaunt Hedwig, her daughter Selma—my mother’s cousin—her husband Siegesmund, consumptive (he had a slight cough) and unfit for work, Great-Uncle Clemens with his Lenchen and their grown son—my half-cousin—Alfons, who didn’t want to play the piano because he had a boil on his rear end, but had to: “Wake up, boy. Don’t be bashful. Bang those keys”—gathered into their midst, the one as a relative, the other as almost an in-law, my fiancée and myself. Accompanied by Great-Uncle on the accordion and Alfons, seated half-assed at the piano, we sang for about two hours, mostly “Forest glade, forest glade! Oh, how lonely and afraid …” and drank potato brandy drowned in peppermint.
(In every sip of this Kashubian beverage the chemical extract of peppermint clashed with varying outcome with the musty smell and taste of a potato cellar; just as you started on the taste of cloying sweet liqueur, the crude spirits crashed through, and when your palate tried to accustom itself to the peasant rotgut, the extract reminded you of the wonders of chemistry. But over the conflict of taste lay, reconciling and reuniting, the forest-glade song.)
“My boy,” said my grandaunt as she was filling the glasses, “do you think the Führer’s still living?” (This sense of intimacy with past history is forbidden to us who endeavor to take a cool, scientific view; and when recently I was so thoughtless as to quote my Aunt Hedwig in class, my students held my grandaunt to be deficient in political consciousness, as though I should have answered her with Hegel.) “Of course not, Auntie,” I ventured to say. And my fiancée, whose arms had been attached by Uncle Clemens’ Lenchen and by Siegesmund the consumptive railroad worker—we formed a swaying chain as we sang Forest Glade—nodded in confirmation: Linde and I were of one opinion.
“There you have it!” my grandaunt pounded the table. “He talked and talked—and look what happened!” (Even Scherbaum could not side-step this logic: “She’s okay, your aunt….”) And once again we, my family and Linde, sang “Forest glade, forest glade! Oh, how lonely and afraid …” to the dregs.
At the end we were joined by an authentic family doctor, who had been called in by my ma’s Cousin Selma to write out, very very legibly, a list of the medicines my family needed: a tonic for Aunt. Something for Siegesmund the railroad worker’s lungs. Something for Uncle Clemens’ trembling. (Though he didn’t tremble at all when he played the accordion.) And for all of them except the railroad worker something to combat obesity.
Aside, the doctor said to me: “They only want all those things because they come from the West. It won’t do any good. They should eat less and sing more Forest Glade. You ought to come here some November when they start in on the geese….”
My grandaunt took the doctor at his word. “That’s it, my boy. Come again soon with your fine fiancée. At St. Martin’s you’ll eat yourself sick. A Kashubian free-range goose. You saw them in the meadow today. And do you remember how we stuff them?”
I listed what I had learned in the Bad Aibling prison camp from the former hotel chef and present TV chef. “There’s apple stuffing, there’s the fine chestnut stuffing, and there’s the forcemeat stuffing. And every stuffing calls for artemisia. Never a goose without artemisia.”
My Grandaunt Hedwig was pleased: “Artemisia is right. But we stuff our goose with raw potatoes and we pour off the juice. You’re in for a big treat when you come for Christmas with your fiancée….”
But Linde had had enough. The canned chicken backed up on her. She got pimples, heartburn, and stomach cramps on the trip back. (I even thought she was going to pass on, not an unusual thought for me.) She didn’t feel better till we got to Berlin. It was almost over between us anyway. Because in spring 1956 she paid me off: “Do you want the money in installments or all at once?”
I decided in favor of a lump sum. Financially we were quits. And today I freely admit: I learned the art of stuffing geese from Master Brühsam. In a nine-family apartment house I became a man: knew everything in advance and felt my weariness afterward. Great-Uncle Clemens gave me my final polish and savoir-vivre as I was leaving: “We got to learn to be peaceful again and to live!” But it was my fiancée who financed the pedagogue in me.
(All the same I hesitated a long while to take money and let things come to a break.) When we were having it out on Mayener Feld at the edge of an abandoned basalt pit (because immediately after our trip to Poland Linde had resumed her so-called espionage activities with Schlottau), I said: “If you don’t break with him I’ll kill you.”
Linde didn’t laugh, she expressed concern. “You oughtn’t to say those things so lightly, Hardy. Of course they won’t kill me, but the word ‘kill’ might settle down in your little head and produce episodes that would produce episodes….”
“Ah, how we overflow. Ah, how we are beset. Ah, how superabundance smothers us….”
Housecleaning on TV. Bulldozers, first at play in an open field. Then they set themselves in motion, attack gadgets and cosmetics, crush upholstered groups and camping equipment, sweep second cars, home film projectors, and built-in kitchens into great heaps, undermine the foundations of high-piled boxes of Zymo (washes whiter), topple the children’s bar and then the freezer, out of which—along with vegetables fish fruits—fall quickly thawing consumers: my fiancée, presumably dead, old Krings in uniform, reluctantly Linde’s aunt, Schlottau with hand on penis, also my students colleagues relatives scramble with four five nine women over commodities and gadgets (with Polish free-range geese in between), roll and are rolled…. Furiously clatters the empty clothes drier. Rhythmically clap the students.
And the bulldozers push this excrescent superfluity from the background through the middle ground close up to the screen; bursting through curved glass, they empty it all into the room; the dentist’s office is full up. I take flight, forcing my way through tumbled rubbish, through a serried group of people who want to talk with me—“What’s up, Scherbaum?”—Where to? To the television screen that has been suddenly healed by faith: there my dentist is waiting with his assistant and bids me be seated; today two porcelain bridges are to be put in place, an acoustically rewarding procedure, interrupted only by rinsing sounds, while the dialogue between dentist and patient, to be edited a bit at some later date, begins to arise in austere Platonic balloons: the dentist advocates moderation, confidence in the continuous evolutionary process, while the patient (a schoolteacher egged on by chanting students) demands radical changes and a revolutionary approach.
For instance, he wants bulldozers to clear all the crap away, the accessories and spare parts, the duplications (second car, second TV set) and easy-payment plans—“Pay as you go! Pay as you go!”—the chromium and the advertising budgets, and remove it all from the consumer’s field of vision to make room (as his student Vero Lewand wrote on the class blackboard) for new foundations on which to build a pacified existence.
But the dentist is equally well read: he traces every abuse of power back to Hegel, whom he refutes elaborately, largely on the strength of the peaceful evolutionary progress of dental medicine. “Too many mutually contradictory doctrines of salvation and too little practical advantage …” he says, and recommends that all government be replaced by his worldwide Sickcare.
Here the teacher discovers common ground: “Basically we are in agreement, especially as we both are conscious of an obligation to humanism, humanitas. …”
But the dentist wants the patient to withdraw his incitements to violence: “At the very most I’ll tolerate the radical abolition of chlorophyll toothpastes with their unwarranted claim to provide effective protection against caries.”
The teacher hesitates, swallows, is unwilling to retract. (Grinning, my junior class looked on.) Promiscuously he quotes Marxengels and even old Seneca who in condemning superfluity was of the same opinion as Marcuse…. (I went so far as to give the late Nietzsche the floor: “Ultimately, with the transvaluation of all values …”)
But the dentist insists on my abjuring violence and threatens, if no retraction is forthcoming, to treat my lower jaw without anaesthesia. No more tender sickcare. The instruments of torture are displayed. A dentist’s threat: “In other words, my friend, if you continue to advocate violence, I shall remove your aluminum shells without local anaesthesia, and install your bridges, both of them …”
At this the liberal, and only inauthentically radical, schoolteacher (my junior class booed me down) capitulates and asks the dentist, not to take his suggestion of housecleaning bulldozers literally, but rather to take a symbolic view of these essentially useful (“vital” was my actual word) vehicles: “Naturally I’m not an iconoclast, I’m not in favor of a totally destructive anarchism….”
“Then you retract?”
“I retract.”
(Immediately after my capitulation the dentist’s office rid itself automatically of all the consumer goods and superfluous figures the freezer had vomited.) Muttering, my junior class withdraws. My fiancée takes her leave with a cutting remark: “And they let that creep teach!” (The Polish, artemisia-stuffed free-range geese have to clear out of the office.) It’s properly rectangular again, sixteen by twenty-three and ten feet high. All the dental equipment is standing or lying in its place: the patient in the reclining chair is permitted, between the dentist and his assistant, to leave the television screen upon which, no sooner evacuated, consumer goods, upholstered groups, driers, camping equipment, and also—between advertising spots for mortgage companies and detergents—publicity is being made for deep freezers in which lies, covered over by fruit, veal kidneys, and ready-to-eat dishes, the schoolteacher’s former fiancée, sending up balloons: “You super-yellowbelly …”
Now, as the dentist is poised to administer the first injection lower left but the television screen dwells on the deep freezer and its provocatively repetitious contents, the patient in the dentist’s chair attempts once again to clean house. “Bulldozers …,” he says, “…. several thousand bulldozers ought to clear all that truck away, remove it from our field of vision.”
But the violent word has lost its effectiveness. The freezer, to be sure, is pushed out of the picture by a telegenic spirit hand, but no bulldozers enter from left to right, playfully animating the background, then occupying the middle ground and undertaking the radical transformation of our environment. The screen has nothing to offer. (My junior class also refuses to appear.) Milky flickering. The nihilating Nothing. “Do you see anything?” asks the dentist as he weighs the syringe in his hand.
“I see nothing,” the patient answers.
“In that case let’s pretend this time that you haven’t been so thoughtless as to advocate violence again. Of course you’ve spoiled the current program completely. We’ll have to go without the evening news. To make up for it I’ll switch to room monitor. Better than nothing.”
The great consensus: framed by assistant and dentist the patient in his Ritter chair sees the assistant shape her hand into the left-handed three-finger grip and, beside the television screen as on it, help the patient to lock his jaw: her middle finger holds his tongue down, her ring finger blocks his upper jaw, and her index finger presses a cotton roll against his gums. Beside the screen and on it the dentist administers the first injection in the lower jaw.
The sound reproduction is excellent: both office and screen speak at normal listening volume: “We start with a mandibular block, anaesthetizing the nerve at its point of entrance.”
(I saw what trouble he was having inserting the needle.)
“Your gums, as you can imagine, have been pretty badly bruised by our previous injections.”
A camera—there’s got to be a camera somewhere!—brings the patient’s gums into close-up: the three-finger grip and the searching needle take up the entire picture. Now he has found a spot that has not yet been punctured: premonition catches up with actuality. The releasing pinprick strikes me (has struck me) in the picture and in reality: Myohmy …
“And do you remember what happens now?”
The secret camera abandons the detail transfigured into a mythological landscape and once again shows the patient in the Ritter chair between dentist and assistant.
“Now comes the local anaesthetic….”
“Correct. Then we know what to expect….”
“Look here, Doc, the rest of the injections are nothing new. We could get along without your sound, I mean not just on the TV….”
“If I catch your meaning, you want to get on with your war games….”
“My fiancée, Sieglinde Krings …”
“Wouldn’t it be better if you gave your Krings a recalcitrant son….”
“No advice, please, Doc….”
“Suit yourself….”
“I won’t say bulldozer any more and you won’t ever again try to talk Krings into a son.”
“Agreed in the presence of a witness….”
(Though, as the picture shows, without handshake.)