The evening went well. I danced "Hey Ba Ba Re Bop," "In the Mood," and "Shoeshine Boy," made small talk in between, and entertained two easily pleased young women who told me they both worked at the longdistance telephone exchange on Graf-Adolf-Platz, and said even more girls from the exchange came to Wedig's on Saturdays and Sundays. At any rate they came every weekend, unless they had to work, and I promised I would come often too, because Helma and Hannelore were so nice, and because girls who worked long distance—and here I made a little play on words they both caught at once—also knew how to work up close.
It was a long time before I dropped by the hospital again. And when I resumed my occasional visits, Sister Gertrud had been transferred to the women's ward. I no longer saw her, except once, briefly, waving in the distance. I became a regular and welcome guest at the Löwenburg. The girls exploited me a good deal, but not excessively. Through them I came to know several members of the British Army of Occupation, picked up dozens of English words and phrases, and even became close friends with a couple of the band members at the Löwenburg, but as for drumming I held back, never sat down at the drums, and instead rested content with the modest joy of tapping out letters in stone at Korneff's workshop.
During the hard winter of forty-seven to forty-eight I remained in contact with the girls from the telephone exchange, and was warmed from time to time, at no great cost, by the silent, sedentary Hannelore, though we always maintained a certain distance and restricted ourselves to noncommittal manual labor.
In winter the stonecutter rests and restores. Tools are resharpened, the surfaces of a few old slabs are pounded flat for inscriptions, missing corners are ground into chamfers and fluted. Korneff and I replenished the gravestone display, which had thinned out during the fall season, and cast a few synthetic slabs from a mixture of shell limestone, sand, and cement. I also tried my hand at some of the easier sculptural elements with the pointing machine—reliefs of the heads of angels, Christ's head with a crown of thorns, the dove of the Holy Spirit. When it snowed I shoveled snow, and when it didn't snow I thawed the water line to the grinder.
Toward the end of February forty-eight, shortly after Ash Wednesday—I'd lost weight during Carnival and may have been looking a bit wan and intellectual, for some of the girls at the Löwenburg took to calling me Doctor—the first farmers from the left bank of the Rhine arrived to inspect our stock of gravestones. Korneff was away. He was taking his annual rheumatism cure, working at a blast furnace in Duisburg, and when he returned fourteen days later, dried out and sans boils, I had already managed to sell three stones, one of them for a triple plot, at a good price. Korneff sold off another two slabs of Kirchheim shell limestone, and in mid-March we began installing them. One of Silesian marble went to Grevenbroich; the two Kirchheim meter-high stones are in a village graveyard near Neuss; the red Main sandstone with my angel heads may still be admired today at the cemetery in Stomml. At the end of March we loaded up the diorite slab for the triple plot with Christ's thorn-crowned head and drove off slowly, because the three-wheeler was overloaded, toward Kappes-Hamm and the bridge crossing the Rhine at Neuss. From Neuss by way of Grevenbroich to Rommerskirchen, then right on the road to Bergheim Erft, leaving Rheydt and Niederaußem behind us, we delivered the block and its base with out breaking an axle to the cemetery in Oberaußem, which lay on a hill that sloped gently toward the village.
What a view! At our feet the soft-coal district of Erftland. The eight chimneys of the Fortuna Works, steaming heavenward. The new Fortuna North power plant, hissing as though about to explode. Midrange mountains of slag, topped by cable cars and tipping wagons. Every three minutes an electric train, full of coke or empty. Coming from the power plant or headed toward it, small and toylike; next, leaping over the left corner of the cemetery, a toy for giants: high-voltage wires in triple ranks, buzzing with high tension, racing off toward Cologne. Other lines in rank rushing toward the horizon, toward Belgium and Holland: hub of the world—we set up the diorite slab for the Flies family—electricity is generated when ... The gravedigger and his helper, who substituted for Crazy Leo on this occasion, arrived with tools, we stood in a field of electric tension, the gravedigger began unearthing a grave three rows down from us to relocate its occupant—war reparations rushed on their way—the breeze brought us the typical smells of a premature exhumation—not too disgusting, it was still March. Slag heaps of coke on the March fields. The gravedigger wore a pair of glasses held together with string and argued in an undertone with his Crazy Leo till the siren at Fortuna expelled its breath for one long minute, we were out of breath too, not to mention the woman being moved, only the high-tension lines kept right on working as the siren tipped, toppled overboard, and drowned—while smoke curled up in noonday fashion from the slate-gray slate roofs of the village and church bells chimed in: Pray now, work now—industry and religion hand in hand. Change of shift at Fortuna, bacon sandwiches for us, but no rest for those moving the woman or for the high-voltage current rushing restlessly through to the victorious powers, lighting up Holland, while here the current was still constantly being cut off—and yet the dead woman was brought to the light.
While Korneff dug the five-foot holes for the base, she came up for fresh air, had not been down in the dark that long, just since last fall, yet still she'd made progress, kept pace with improvements under way on all sides; and just as progress had been made dismantling the industrial Rhineland and Ruhr, so too had this woman, in the course of the winter—which I'd frittered away at the Löwenburg—made serious prog ress, taking herself so gravely to task beneath the frozen crust of the soft-coal district that now, while we poured concrete and set the pedestal, she could be persuaded to move her remains only piecemeal. But that's what the zinc casket was for, so not even the tiniest piece would be lost—just as children ran along behind the overloaded trucks when coal was distributed in Fortuna, collecting the fallen chunks, because Cardinal Frings had decreed from the pulpit: Truly I say unto you, pilfering coal is no sin. But no fire was needed to warm her now. I don't think she was cold in the proverbially chill March air, she still had plenty of skin, though leaky and filled with runs, compensated for by patches of clothing and scraps of hair in a permanent wave—hence the name—and the coffin fittings were worth relocating too, even small splinters of wood wanted to go along to the next cemetery, where there would be no farmers or miners from Fortuna, no, the big city was where she wanted to go, where there was always something happening, and nineteen movie houses playing at once, for she was an evacuee, the gravedigger told us, and not from here: "The girl came from Cologne, and now she's headed for Müllheim, across the Rhine," he said, and would have said more, had not the siren sounded another minute's worth of siren, and taking advantage of the siren, I drew near the remains, making my way stealthily beneath the siren's cover, wanting to witness the transfer, taking something along that later, by the zinc coffin, proved to be my spade, which I now put into action, not meaning to help but simply because I had it with me, lifting something on the blade of the spade that had fallen off to the side: a spade that had once belonged to the Reich Labor Service. And what I picked up on the RLS spade was the middle finger and—I still believe today—the ring finger that had once belonged or still belonged to the evacuated woman, and had not dropped off, but had been hacked off instead by the motorized digger, which had no feeling. They seemed to me, however, to have once been lovely and agile, just as the woman's head, already in the zinc casket, had preserved a certain regularity throughout the postwar winter of forty-seven/ forty-eight, well-known for its severity, so that here too one could speak of loveliness, though lapsed. Moreover the woman's head and fingers struck me as much more intimate and human than the beauty of the Fortuna power plant. True, I may have enjoyed the pathos of the industrial landscape, just as I had once enjoyed Gustaf Gründgens in the the ater, but I still remained skeptical of such staged beauty, artful though it was, while the evacuated woman was only too natural. Grant
ed, the high-voltage wires, like Goethe, gave me a cosmic feeling, but the woman's fingers touched my heart, even if I imagined the evacuee as a man because that was more compatible with my penchant for making decisions, and fit the comparison that transformed me into Yorick, and the woman—half in the grave, half in the zinc casket—into Hamlet the man, if you wish to call Hamlet a man. And I, Yorick, Act Five, the fool, "I knew him, Horatio," Scene One, on all the stages of the world—"Alas, poor Yorick!"—loaning my skull to Hamlet, so some Gründgens or Sir Laurence Olivier can ponder over it as Hamlet: "Where be your gibes now? your gambols?"—I held Gründgens' Hamlet fingers on the blade of my Labor Service spade, stood on the firm soil of the Lower Rhenish soft-coal district, between the graves of miners, farmers, and their families, gazed down upon the slate roofs of the village of Oberaußem, and transformed that village cemetery into the center of the world, the Fortuna North power plant into my daunting, demigod antagonist, the fields into the fields of Denmark, the Erft my Belt, what rotted here was something rotten in the state of Denmark—and I was Yorick; strung taut, filled, crackling, and singing above me, not actual angels, yet high-voltage angels singing away in triple ranks toward the horizon, toward Cologne with its central train station by that fabulous Gothic monster, sending current to the Catholic welfare center, heavenly hosts hurrying over the turnip fields, and the earth brought forth coal and the corpse, not of Yorick but of Hamlet. But those who had no part in the play remained below—"Which have solicited. The rest is silence"—weighed down with gravestones, as we weighed down the Flies family in their triple plot beneath a ponderous diorite slab. But for me, Oskar Matzerath Bronski Yorick, a new age was dawning, and scarcely aware of that new age, I took another quick glance, before it had passed, at the ravaged fingers of Hamlet on my spade—"He is fat and scant of breath"—heard Gründgens ask, Act Three, Scene One, to be or not to be, rejected this foolish formulation, and paired things far more concretely: my son and my son's flintstones, my presumptive earthly and heavenly fathers, my grandmother's four skirts, my poor mama's immortal beauty in photos, the labyrinth of scars on Herbert Truczinski's back, the blood-blotting mail baskets of the Polish Post Office, America—ah, what is America compared to the Number Nine streetcar to Brösen?—sent the still occasionally sharp scent of Maria's vanilla drifting into the triangular face of Luzie Rennwand offering madness, asked Herr Fajngold, still disinfecting death, to find the missing Party pin in Matzerath's windpipe, and said to Korneff, or perhaps to the high-tension pylons above, said—since I was slowly reaching a decision, yet still felt the need, before that decision, to ask a suitably theatrical question, one that would cast doubt on Hamlet and make of me, Yorick, a true citizen—said to Korneff when he called me over, since it was time to mount the diorite slab on the pedestal, said softly, wishing to be a solid citizen at last, said—with just a touch of Gründgens, though he could hardly have played Yorick—said over the blade of the spade: "To wed or not to wed, that is the question."
After this turning point in the cemetery facing Fortuna North, I gave up Wedig's Löwenburg dance hall and broke off all connections with the girls from the telephone exchange, whose primary merit had been the quick and satisfying connections they offered.
In May I took Maria to the movies. After the show we went to a restaurant, dined fairly well, and I talked with Maria, who was worried sick because little Kurt's flintstone source was drying up, because the synthetic-honey business was slowing down, and because I'd been supporting the whole family for months with—as she put it—my limited strengths. I comforted Maria, told her Oskar did so gladly, that he liked nothing better than having to bear a great responsibility, complimented her on her appearance, and finally proposed to her.
She asked for time to think it over. My Yorick question was ignored or avoided for weeks, till it was answered at last by the currency reform.
Maria offered all sorts of reasons, stroking my sleeve as she did so, called me "dear Oskar," told me I was too good for this world, hoped I would understand and that this wouldn't damage our friendship, wished me all the best for my future as a stonecutter and in general, but, when pressed again and even more urgently, declined to marry me.
And so Yorick did not become a solid citizen, but a Hamlet instead, a fool.
Madonna 49
The currency reform arrived too soon, made a fool of me, compelled me to reform Oskar's currency in turn; from then on, even if I couldn't convert it into capital, I found myself forced to make a living from my hump.
I would have made a good citizen. The period following the currency reform, which—as we see today—included all the necessary preconditions for the current blossoming of bourgeois comfort, would have brought out the bourgeois in Oskar. As a married man, a solid citizen, I could have taken part in the reconstruction of Germany, would have had a good-sized stonecutting business by now, providing a livelihood for thirty journeymen, handymen, and apprentices, would have been the man adorning all those newly constructed office high-rises and insurance palaces with their ever popular shell-limestone and travertine facades: a businessman, a solid citizen, a family man—but Maria turned me down.
Then Oskar recalled his hump and fell prey to art. Korneff's existence as a stonecutter was also threatened by the currency reform, so before he could fire me, I fired myself, stood about on street corners, when I wasn't twiddling my thumbs in Guste Kösters kitchen-living room, gradually wore out my elegantly tailored suit, began to neglect my appearance, and while I didn't fight with Maria, I feared I might, and so would often leave the apartment in Bilk well before noon, drop by the swans on Graf-Adolf-Platz, then visit the ones in the Hofgarten, and sit small, pensive, but not embittered in the park, diagonally across from the Employment Agency and the Art Academy, which are next-door neighbors in Düsseldorf.
You sit and sit on a park bench like that till you turn wooden yourself and feel the need to talk. Old men brought out by good weather, elderly women who slowly revert to garrulous girlhood, the changing seasons, black swans, children who chase one another screaming, and pairs of lovers you'd like to watch until, as one could predict, they have to part. Now and then someone drops a piece of paper. It flutters a while, tosses and turns till it's stabbed with a sharp-tipped pole by a man in a cap who's paid by the city.
Oskar knew how to sit and flare his trouser legs evenly with his knees. Of course I had noticed the two lean young men and the fat girl in glasses well before the girl, who was wearing a leather jacket with an ex-Wehrmacht belt, spoke to me. The idea apparently originated with the young men, who were dressed in anarchistic black. No matter how dangerous they looked, they hesitated to speak point-blank and directly to a humpbacked man in whom they sensed a hidden greatness. They talked the fat, leather-clad girl into it. She came, stood straddle-legged on solid pillars, stuttering, till I invited her to sit down. She sat, her glasses clouded by the mist, nearly a fog, drifting in from the Rhine, talked and talked till I asked her to stop, wipe her glasses, and state her request in a manner I could understand. With that she called over the somber youths, who introduced themselves, without being prompted, as artists: painters, draftsmen, and sculptors seeking a model. They concluded by telling me, not without some passion, that they thought I would make a good model, and when I made a rapid rubbing motion with my thumb and forefinger, they quickly detailed the potential earnings of an academic model: the Art Academy paid one mark eighty an hour, and for posing in the nude—but there was probably no question of that, the stout girl said—two German marks.
Why did Oskar say yes? Was it the lure of art? Was it the lure of cash? Art and cash both lured me, made Oskar say yes. So I stood up, left the park bench and the possibilities of a park bench existence behind me forever, followed the resolutely marching girl in glasses and the two youths, who walked with a stoop as though carrying their genius on their backs, past the Employment Agency to Eiskellerbergstraße and into the partially demolished building of the Art Academy.
Pr
ofessor Kuchen—black beard, coal-black eyes, bold black slouch hat, black rims beneath his fingernails—he reminded me of the black sideboard from my childhood—saw in me the same splendid model his students had seen in the man on the park bench.
For a time he walked around me, his coal-black eyes circling, snorted black dust from his nostrils, and then spoke, throttling an invisible enemy with his black nails: "Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper."
I posed as a model for this crushing art. Professor Kuchen led me to his students' studio, lifted me with his own hands onto a revolving pedestal, turned it about, not to dizzy me, but to display Oskar's proportions from all sides. Sixteen easels drew closer to Oskar's form. Yet another brief lecture from the charcoal-dust-snorting professor: he asked for expression, seemed in love with the word, demanded expression, pitch-black and desperate, saw in Oskar the shattered image of humanity, an accusation, a challenge, a timeless expression of the madness of our century, and ended by thundering across the easels: "Don't draw this cripple—slaughter him, crucify him, nail him to the paper with charcoal!"