The Grinder says nothing. His grinding is plain enough. It means: Amsel should not spread his little fingers. Amsel shouldn’t take anything away. The skull is not to be removed. Don’t disturb it. Don’t touch it. Place of skulls. Golgotha. Barrow. Gnashing of teeth.
But Amsel, who is always at a loss for meaningful props and accessories, who is always short on what he needs most, is again preparing to dispatch his hand skullward and again—for it isn’t every day that you find a skull—outspread fingers can be discerned amid the shimmering dust of the flashlight beam. At this point the stick which thus far had struck nothing but rats descends on him, once maybe twice. And the acoustics of the shaft amplify a word uttered between blow and blow: “Sheeny!” Walter Matern calls his friend “Sheeny!” and strikes. Amsel falls sideways beside the skeleton. Dust rises and takes its time about settling. Amsel picks himself up. Who can cry such fat, convulsively rolling tears? But even as the tears roll from both his eyes and turn to beads of dust on the floor of the shaft, Amsel manages to say with a grin somewhere between good-natured and mocking: “Walter is a very silly boy.” Imitating the teacher’s voice, he several times repeats this sentence from his first-year English book; for always, even when tears are flowing, he has to imitate somebody, himself if need be: “Walter is a very silly boy.” And then in the idiom of the Island: “This here is my head. Didn’t I find it? I just wanna try it out. Then I’ll bring it back.”
But the Grinder is in no mood to be spoken to. The sight of the haphazardly disposed bones makes his face shrink toward the inside corners of his eyebrows. He folds his arms, leans on his stick, freezes in contemplation. Whenever he sees anything dead: a drowned cat, rats he has slain with his own hand, gulls slit open with a throw of his knife, when he sees a bloated fish rolled in the sand by the lapping of the waves, or when he sees a skeleton which Amsel wants to deprive of its skull, his teeth start in from left to right. His bullish young face twists into a grimace. His gaze, ordinarily dull to stupid, becomes piercing, darkens, gives an intimation of directionless hatred: theatrical ambiance in the passages, dungeons, and shafts beneath the Gothic Church of the Trinity. Twice the Grinder pounds his own forehead with his fist, bends down, reaches out, raises the skull to himself and his thoughts, and contemplates it while Eduard Amsel squats down to one side.
Who is squatting there, obliged to relieve himself? Who is standing there, holding a stranger’s skull far out in front of him? Who looks behind him with curiosity, examining his excrement? Who stares at a smooth skull, trying to recognize himself? Who has no worms, but did once from salad? Who holds the light skull and sees worms that will one day be his? Who, who? Two human beings, pensive and troubled. Each has his reasons. They are friends. Walter Matern puts the skull back down where he found it. Amsel is scratching again in the dirt with his shoe, looking and looking. Walter Matern declaims high-sounding words into the void: “Let’s be going now. This is the kingdom of the dead. Maybe that’s Jan Bobrowski or Materna that our family conies from.” Amsel has no ear for words of conjecture. He is unable to believe that Bobrowski the great robber, or Materna, robber, incendiary, and ancestor, ever gave flesh to this skeleton. He picks up something metallic, scratches at it, spits on it, rubs it off, and exhibits a metal button, which he confidently identifies as the button of one of Napoleon’s dragoons. He dates the button from the second siege and puts it in his pocket. The Grinder does not protest, he has scarcely been listening, he is still with the robber Bobrowski or his ancestor Materna. The cooling feces drive the friends through the hole in the wall. Walter Matern goes first. Amsel squeezes through the hole backwards, his flashlight turned upon the death’s- head.
TWENTY-FIFTH MORNING SHIFT
Change of shifts at Brauxel & Co.: The friends had to hurry on the way back. The train in Niederstadt station never waited more than ten minutes.
Change of shifts at Brauxel & Co.: Today we are celebrating the two-hundred-fiftieth birthday of Frederick the Great; it might be a good idea for Brauxel to fill one of the stalls with relics from Frederick’s times: a kingdom of Prussia below ground!
Change of shifts at Brauxel & Co.: In the locker room of the gymnasium in the Sankt Johann High School Walter Matern fitted the rectangular lid back into the floorboards. They beat the dust from each other’s clothes.
Change of shifts at Brauxel & Co.: What will the great conjunction of February 4-5 bring us? In the sign of Aquarius Uranus will enter into opposition, but not exactly, while Neptune completes the square. Two critical aspects, more than critical!—Shall we, will Brauxel, come through the Great Conjunction unscathed? Will it be possible to carry this book, dealing with Walter Matern, the dog Senta, the Vistula, Eduard Amsel, and his scarecrows, to a conclusion? Despite the critical aspects Brauxel, the present writer, wishes to avoid an apocalyptic tone and record the following events with equanimity, even though there is every reason to expect an auto-da-fé of the lesser apocalypse.
Change of shifts at Brauxel & Co.: After Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel had beaten the medieval dust from one another, they started out: down Katergasse, up the Lastadie. They follow Ankerschmiedgasse. Behind the Postal Savings Bank lies the new boathouse of the school oarsmen’s association: boats are being put up on chocks. They wait for the open Cow’s Bridge to close and crossing it spit several times into the Mottlau. Cries of gulls. Horse-drawn vehicles over wooden planks. Beer barrels are rolled. A drunken long shoreman is supporting himself on a sober longshoreman, he has designs on a salt herring, skin, bones, and… “You want to bet? You want to bet?” Across the Speicherinsel: Erich Karkutsch, flour, seed, dried peas, and beans; Fischer & Nickel—conveyor belts, asbestos goods; across the railroad tracks, shreds of cabbage, flocks of kapok. They stop outside the establishment of Eugen Flakowski, saddlers’ and upholsterers’ supplies: bales of seaweed, hemp, jute, horsehair, reels of awning string, porcelain rings and tassels, notions, notions! Through the puddles of horse piss in Münchengasse, across the New Mottlau. Up Mattenbuden. Then climb into the trailer of the Heubude streetcar, but only ride as far as Langgart Gate, and arrive at the station on time for the narrow-gauge train, which smells of butter and whey, which rings fast as it slowly rounds the bend, and which goes to the Island. Eduard Amsel is still holding Napoleon’s dragoon’s button hot in his pocket.
The friends—and they remain inseparable blood brothers in spite of the death’s-head and the word “Sheeny”—spoke no more of the skeleton under the Church of the Trinity. Only once, on Milchkannengasse, between Deutschendorff’s sporting goods store and a branch of the Valtinat dairy chain, outside a window displaying stuffed squirrels, martens, and owls, displaying mountain cocks and a stuffed eagle with out spread wings and a lamb in its claws, outside a window with shelves in the form of a grandstand that stopped just before the plate-glass pane, in the presence of rat traps, fox traps, packages of insect powder, little bags of moth flakes, in the presence of gnat bane, roaches’ nemesis, and rough-on-rats, in the presence of exterminator’s equipment, bird food, dog biscuit, empty fish bowls, tins full of dehydrated flies and waterbugs, in the presence of frogs, salamanders, and snakes in jars and alcohol, of incredible butterflies under glass, of beetles with antlers, hairy spiders, and the usual sea horses, in the presence of the human skeleton—to the right beside the shelf—in the presence of the chimpanzee’s skeleton—to the left beside the grandstand—, and the skeleton of a running cat at the feet of the smaller chimpanzee, in the presence of the uppermost shelf of the grandstand, upon which stood instructively the skulls of man, woman, aged person, child, premature infant, and abortions, outside this world-embracing shop window—inside the store you could buy puppies or have kittens drowned by an officially licensed hand—, outside glass polished twice weekly, Walter Matern abruptly suggested to his friend that with the rest of the money in the leather pouch they might buy one or another of these skulls and use it in the construction of a scarecrow. Amsel made a negative gesture and said tersely, not with the
terseness of one who is offended but with a lofty kind of terseness, that though the topic of death’s-heads was not exactly dead or superseded, it was not urgent enough to justify a purchase with their last remaining funds; if they were going to buy anything, they could buy goose, duck, and chicken feathers of inferior quality cheap and by the pound from the peasants and poultry farmers of the Island; he, Amsel, was planning something paradoxical: he was going to create a scarecrow in the form of a giant bird—the shop window on Milchkannengasse full of stuffed zoological items had inspired him, especially the eagle above the lamb.
Sacred ludicrous moment of inspiration: angel taps on forehead. Muses with frayed rosebud mouths. Planets in Aquarius. A brick falls. The egg has two yolks. The ash tray is running over. Dripping from the roof: celluloid. Short circuit. Hatboxes. What turns the corner: a patent-leather shoe. What enters without knocking: La Barbarina, the Snow Queen, snow men. What lends itself to being stuffed: God, eels, and birds. What is extracted from mines: coal, iron, pot ash, scarecrows, the past.
This scarecrow comes into being soon thereafter. It is Amsel’s last for many a year. For under the no doubt ironically intended title “The Great Cuckoo Bird”—suggested, as a note informs us, not by Amsel but by Kriwe the ferry man—this creation, handed down both in a preliminary sketch and in a color study, is the last recorded in the diary which is today still relatively safe in Brauxel’s safe.
Rags—as the diary tells us in its own words—have first to be coated with pitch or tar. Rags coated with tar or pitch have to be studded on the outside with large and small feathers and on the inside as well if enough of them are available. But in an unnatural, not a natural, way.
And indeed, when the completed Great Cuckoo Bird, tarred, feathered, and superman-high, was set out on the dike to the amazement of all who approached, its feathers stood unnaturally on end. It looked altogether spooky. The most hardened fisherwomen fled, convinced that looking at the monster could induce goiter, swivel eye, or miscarriage. The men stood their ground stiff and stolid, but let their pipes grow cold. Johann Lickfett said: “Friend, I wouldn’t want that thing for a present.”
It was hard to find a purchaser. And yet for all the tar and feathers the price was not high. In the forenoon it stood alone on the Nickelswalde dike, silhouetted against the sky. Only when the commuting schoolchildren returned from the city did a few come strolling out as though by chance, but stopped at a safe distance, appraised it, expressed opinions, and were disinclined to buy. Not a gull in the cloudless sky. The mice in the dike looked for other lodgings. The Vistula was unable to make a loop or it would have. Everywhere cockchafers, not in Nickelswalde. When with a laugh that was much too loud Herr Olschewski, the schoolteacher who was by nature rather high-strung, expressed interest, more for the fun of it than to protect his sixty square feet of front garden—the Great Cuckoo Bird had to be unloaded far below the price originally set. It was moved in Olschewski’s rack wagon.
For two weeks the monster stood in the front garden, casting its shadow upon the teacher’s flat-roofed, whitewashed cottage. No bird dared to let out a peep. The sea wind ruffled tarry feathers. Cats grew hysterical and shunned the village. Schoolchildren made detours, dreamt wet at night, and woke up screaming, with white fingertips. In Schiewenhorst Hedwig Lau came down with a bad case of tonsillitis, complicated by sudden nosebleeds. While old man Folchert was chopping wood, a chip flew into his eye, which for a long time refused to heal. When Grandma Matern passed out in the middle of the poultry yard, there were many who blamed the Great Cuckoo Bird; however, both hens and rooster had been carrying straw around in their beaks for the last month: which has always been a presage of death. Everyone in the miller’s house, beginning with poor Lorchen, had heard the woodworm, the deathwatch. Grandma Matern took note of all these omens and sent for the sacraments. Once they had been administered, she lay down and died in the midst of straw-toting chickens. In her coffin she looked surprisingly peaceful. Gloved in white, she was holding a lavender-scented lace handkerchief between her crookedly folded hands. It smelled just right. Unfortunately they forgot to take out her hairpins before the coffin was closed and relegated to Catholically consecrated earth. This omission was no doubt responsible for the shooting headaches that assailed Frau Matern née Stange immediately after the funeral and from then on left her no peace.
When the body was laid out in the overhang room, when the villagers all stiff and starched stood crowded together in the kitchen and on the stairs leading to the overhang room, while they muttered their “Now she’s gone!,” their “Now she don’t need to scold no more,” and their “Now her troubles are over, now she’s earned eternal rest” over the body, Kriwe the ferryman asked leave to touch the dead woman’s right index finger to one of his few teeth, which had been aching and suppurating for several days. Standing between window and armchair, the miller, an unfamiliar figure in black with out sack or mealworm, struck by no changing light, for the new mill was not yet running, nodded slowly: gently Grand mother Matern’s right glove was removed, and Kriwe conveyed his bad tooth to the tip of her crooked index finger: sacred ludicrous moment of miraculous healing: angel taps, lays on hands, strokes against the grain, and crosses fingers. Toad’s blood, crow’s eyes, mare’s milk. In each of the Twelve Nights thrice over left shoulder, seven times eastward. Hair pins. Pubic hair. Neck fuzz. Exhume, scatter to the winds, drink of the corpse’s bath water, pour it across the threshold alone at night before cockcrow on St. Matthew’s Day. Poison made from cockles. Fat of a newborn babe. Sweat of the dead. Sheets of the dead. Fingers of the dead: for the truth of the matter is that the suppuration at the base of Kriwe’s tooth was said to have subsided after contact with the deceased Grandmother Matern’s crooked index finger and, in strict accordance with the superstitious belief that a dead person’s finger cures toothache, the pain was also said to have eased and gone away.
When the coffin had been carried out of the house and was swaying first past Folchert’s farm, then past the teacher’s cottage, one of the pallbearers stumbled, because the Great Cuckoo Bird was still standing hideous and gruesome in the teacher’s garden. Stumbling means something. Stumbling is an omen. The pallbearer’s stumbling was the last straw: the peasants and fishermen of several villages submitted a petition to Herr Olschewski and threatened to send an even more strongly worded one to the school board.
The following Monday, when Amsel and Walter Matern came home from school, Herr Olschewski was waiting for them at the Schiewenhorst ferry landing. He was standing beneath a straw hat. He was standing in knickers, a sports jacket with large checks, and canvas shoes. While the train was being run onto the ferry, the schoolteacher, seconded by Kriwe the ferryman, remonstrated with the two boys. This just couldn’t go on, he declared, a number of parents had complained and were planning to write the school board, they had already got wind of it in Tiegenhof, people were superstitious, of course that had something to do with it, even the unfortunate death of Grandmother Matern—a fine woman!—was being attributed—all this in our enlightened twentieth century, but no one, especially here in the villages of the Vistula delta, could swim against the stream, realities were realities: beautiful as the scarecrow was, it was more than village people, especially here on the Island, could stomach.
Literally, Herr Olschewski spoke as follows to Eduard Amsel, his former pupil: “My boy, you’re going to high school now, you’ve taken quite a step out into the wide world. From now on, the village will be too small for you. Let us hope that your zeal, your artistic nature, that gift of God as they say, will find new fields to conquer out there, in the world. But here let well enough alone. You know I’m saying this for your own good.”
The following day was marked by mildly apocalyptic doings: Amsel broke up shop in Folchert’s barn. In other words, Matern opened the padlock and an amazing number of volunteer helpers carried the milliner’s—as Amsel was called in the villages—building materials into the open: four scarecrows in pr
ocess of construction, bundles of roofing laths and flower stakes. Kapok was shredded. Mattresses vomited seaweed. Horsehair exploded from sofa cushions. The helmet, the beautiful full-bottomed wig from Krampitz, the shako, the poke bonnets, the plumed hats, the butterfly bonnets, the felt-straw-velours hats, the sombrero and the Wellington hat donated by the Tiedes of Gross-Zünder, everything that can shelter a human crown passed from head to head, from the twilight of the barn to honey-yellow sunshine: “Milliner milliner!” Amsel’s chest, which would have driven a hundred order-loving barracks orderlies out of their minds, poured forth ruffles, sequins, rhinestone beads, braid, clouds of lace, upholstery cord, and carnation-scented silk pompons. Everybody got into the act, pitched in to help the milliner, put things on, took them off, and threw them on the pile: jumpers and jackets, breeches and the frog-green litewka. A traveling agent for a dairy concern had given Amsel the zouave’s jacket and a plum-blue vest. Hey, the corset, the corset! Two wrapped themselves in the Blücher overcoat. Brides dancing furiously in bridal dresses fragrant with lavender. Sack races in leggings. Pea-green screamed the shift. Muff equals ball. Young mice in the cape. Jagged holes. Shirts without collars. Roman collars and mustache holders, cloth violets, wax tulips, paper roses, shooting match medals, dogtags and pansies, beauty spots, tinsel. “Milliner milliner!” Whom the shoe fitted and whom it did not fit slipped or struggled into galoshes, top boots, knee boots, laced boots, strode in pointed shoes through tobacco-brown curtains, leapt shoeless but in gaiters through the curtains of a countess, princess, or even queen. Prussian, West Prussian, and Free City wares fell on the pile: What a shindig in the nettles behind Folchert’s barn: “Milliner milliner!” And uppermost on the pyre, whence moths were still escaping, stood, supported by beanpoles, the public scandal, the bugaboo, Baal tarred and feathered, the Great Cuckoo Bird.