The Call of the Toad Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Günter Grass

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum comes a satire of European politics and a love story.

  About the Author

  Günter Grass was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

  ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS

  The Tin Drum

  Cat and Mouse

  Dog Years

  The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

  Four Plays

  Speak Out!

  Local Anaesthetic

  Max: A Play

  From the Diary of a Snail

  Inmarypraise

  In the Egg and Other Poems

  The Flounder

  The 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?

  My Century

  For Helen Wolff

  The Call of the Toad

  Günter Grass

  Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

  1

  CHANCE PUT THE widower next to the widow. Or maybe chance had nothing to do with it, for the story began on All Souls’. Be that as it may, the widow was already there when the widower tripped, stumbled, but did not fall.

  He stood beside her. Shoe size ten beside shoe size eight. Widow and widower met facing the wares of a peasant woman: mushrooms heaped in a basket or spread out on newsprint, and three buckets filled with cut flowers. The woman was sitting to one side of the covered market in the midst of other truck farmers and the produce of their small plots: celery, rutabaga the size of a child’s head, leeks and beets.

  His diary confirms “All Souls’” and makes no mystery of the shoe sizes. What made him stumble was the edge of the curbstone. But the word chance does not occur in his diary. “It may have been fate that brought us together that day on the stroke of ten o’clock …” His attempt to give body to the third person, the silent intermediary, remains vague, as does his bumbling attempt to pin down the color of her head scarf: “Not exactly umber, more earth-brown than peat-black …” He has better luck with the brickwork of the monastery wall: “Infested with scab …” I have to imagine the rest.

  Only a few varieties of cut flowers were left in the buckets: dahlias, asters, chrysanthemums. The basket was full of chestnuts. Four or five boletus mushrooms with slight slug damage were lined up on the title page of an ancient issue of the local paper Glos Wybrzeza. Also a bunch of parsley and a roll of wrapping paper. The cut flowers looked bedraggled: leftovers.

  “No wonder,” writes the widower, “that this and other stands in St. Dominic’s Market seemed so poorly supplied. Flowers are much in demand on All Souls’. Even on All Saints’, the day before, the demand often exceeds the supply …”

  Though dahlias and chrysanthemums are showier, the widow decided in favor of asters. The widower was hesitant: Even if “the surprisingly late mushrooms” and chestnuts may have lured him to this particular stand, “I’m certain that after a moment’s dismay—or could it have been the ringing of the bells?—I gave in to a special sort of seduction—no, call it magnetism …”

  When from the three or four buckets the widow took a first, a second, then hesitantly a third aster, exchanged this last for another, and pulled out a fourth, which also had to be put back and replaced, the widower began to take asters from buckets and, no less picky-and-choosy than the widow, to exchange them; he chose rust-red asters just as she had chosen rust-red asters, though white and pale-violet ones were still available. The color harmony went to his head: “What gentle consonance. Like her, I am especially fond of the rust-red, how quietly they smolder …” Be that as it may, they both concentrated on rust-red asters until there were no more left in the buckets.

  Neither widow nor widower had enough for a bouquet. She was ready to shove her meager selection back into one of the buckets when the so-called plot set in: The widower handed the widow his rust-red spoils. He held them out, she took them. A wordless surrender. Never to be reversed. Inextinguishably burning asters. That made for a bond between them.

  Stroke of ten: that was St. Catherine’s. What I know about the place where they met is a combination of somewhat blurred but also ultradistinct knowledge about the locality through the widower’s assiduous research, the product of which he has confided to his notes in dribs and drabs, for instance the fact that the octagonal seven-story-high fortress tower constitutes the north-west corner of the great town wall. It was nicknamed “Kiek in de Köck” (Peek in the Kitchen) after a smaller tower, which had been so called because it was next door to the Dominican monastery and offered an unobstructed view of the pots and pans in the monastery kitchen, which toward the end of the nineteenth century had fallen into such disrepair that trees and shrubs took root in its roofless interior (for which reason it was known for a time as “the flowerpot”) and was torn down along with the rest of the monastery. Beginning in 1895, a covered market in the neo-Gothic style was built on the site. Named St. Dominic’s Market, it survived the First and Second World wars and under its broad vaulted roof it still offers sometimes abundant, more often scant wares in six rows of stands: darning wool and smoked fish, American cigarettes and Polish mustard pickles, poppy-seed cake and pork that is much too fat, plastic toys from Hong Kong, cigarette lighters from all over the world, caraway seed and poppy seed in little bags, cheese spread and Perlon stockings.

  Of the Dominican monastery nothing remains but the gloomy Church of St. Nikolai, its interior splendor resting entirely on black and gold: an afterglow of past atrocities. But the memory of the black-robed monastic order lives on only in the name of the market, as it does in that of a summer holiday named St. Dominic’s Day, which since the late Middle Ages has survived all manner of political change and today attracts natives and tourists with street musicians, sausage stands, and all kinds of baubles and trumpery.

  There between St. Dominic’s Market and the Church of St. Nikolai, diagonally across from Peek in the Kitchen, widower and widow met at a time when the name “Kantor” on a hand-written sign identified the street floor of what was the former fortress tower as an exchange office. Teeming with customers spilling out through the wide open door; a blackboard at the entrance, brought up to date every hour, bore witness to the deplorable situation by indicating the steadily increasing number of zlotys obtainable for one American dollar.

  The conversation began with “May I?” Wishing to pay not only for his own asters but for the whole now unified bouquet, and somewhat bewildered by the look of a currency so rich in zeroes, he drew banknotes from his wallet. The widow said with an accent, “You may nothing.”

  Her use of the foreign language may have lent additional sharpness to her negative reply, and if her next remark—“Is now pretty bouquet, yes?”—hadn’t opened the door to conversation, the chance encounter between widower and widow might have begged comparison with the diminishing rate of the zloty.

  He writes that
while the widow was still paying, a conversation had started up about mushrooms, especially the late, belated boletus. The summer that had seemed endless and the mild autumn were cited as reasons. “But when I said something about global warming, she just laughed.”

  On a sunny to partly cloudy November day the two of them stood face to face. It seemed as though nothing could separate them from the flowers and the mushrooms. He had fallen for her, she for him. The widow laughed frequently. Her accented sentences were preceded and followed by laughter that seemed groundless, just a little prelude and postlude. The widower liked this almost-shrill laugh, for it says in his papers: “Like a bellbird, sometimes frightening, I have to admit, but I enjoy the sound of her laughter and never ask what seems to amuse her. Maybe she’s laughing at me. But even that, even for her to think me laughable, gives me pleasure.”

  So they stood there. Or rather: they stand there a while and another little while, posing for me, to give me a chance to get used to them. If she was fashionably dressed—he thought her “too modishly done up,” his tweed jacket and corduroy trousers gave him the look of shabby elegance that went with his camera case—a traveler for educational purposes, the better type of tourist. “If you won’t accept the flowers, suppose we go back to the subject of the conversation we had just started, namely, mushrooms; will you permit me to select this one and perhaps this one, and make you a present of them? They look inviting.”

  She would. And she watched carefully to make sure that he wouldn’t peel off too many bills for the marketwoman. “Here is all so crazy expensive,” she cried. “But cheap perhaps for a gentleman with deutschmarks.”

  I wonder if he succeeded by mental arithmetic in interpreting the multidigital figures on the zloty bills, and whether he seriously, without fear of her laughter, thought of mentioning the reference to Chernobyl and global warming in his diary. It is certain that before buying the mushrooms he photographed them with a camera identified in his diary as a Japanese make. Because his snapshot is taken from above at a sharp angle, so sharp that it takes in the tips of the squatting marketwoman’s shoes, this photo bears witness to the astonishing size of the boletus mushrooms. The stems of the two younger ones are wider than their high-arching hats; the wide brims of the older ones, now curled inward, now rolled outward, shade their fleshy, convoluted bodies. Lying together, the four of them turn their tall wide hats toward one another, but are so placed by the photographer that there is little overlap. Thus they form a still life. The widower may have made a remark to that effect. Or was it she who said, “Pretty, like still life”? In any case, the widow reached into her shoulder bag and found a string bag for the mushrooms, which the marketwoman wrapped in newspaper, throwing in a small bunch of parsley.

  He wanted to carry the string bag. She held on tight. He said please. She said no, “Pay then carry is too much.” A slight battle, a tussle, taking care, however, not to harm the contents of the string bag, kept the two of them in place, as if they were unwilling to leave the spot where they had met. Back and forth they pulled the string bag. Nor was he allowed to carry the asters. A well-rehearsed battle—they might have known each other for years. They might have done a duet in any opera; to whose music I can already guess.

  They didn’t lack an audience. The marketwoman looked on in silence, and there were witnesses all around: the octagonal fortress tower, with its latest subtenant, the overcrowded exchange bureau, and next to it the broad-beamed covered market that seemed bloated with mist, and the gloomy Dominican Church of St. Nikolai. And the peasant women in the adjoining stands, and finally the potential customers, all making up an impoverished crowd, driven only by their day-to-day needs, their scant funds diminishing in value by the hour, while widow and widower looked upon each other as money in the bank and showed no desire to separate.

  “Now I go to different place.”

  “May I come with you, please?”

  “Well, it’s far.”

  “It would be a pleasure, really …”

  “But it’s cemetery where I go.”

  “I’ll try not to bother you.”

  “All right, come.”

  She carried the bunch of asters. He carried the string bag. He gaunt and stooped. She with short percussive steps. He inclined to stumble, dragging his feet a little, a good head taller than she. She with pale blue eyes, he far-sighted. Her hair tinted Titian-red. His mustache salt-and-pepper. She took the scent of her aggressive perfume with her, he the mild counterpoint of his after-shave lotion.

  They merged into the crowd outside the market. Now the widower’s beret was gone. Shortly before the stroke of eleven from the top of St. Catherine’s. And what about me? I have to follow the two of them.

  When did he first collect reasons for sending bundles of his junk to my address? Couldn’t he have sent them to some archive? Or if not an archive, why not some obliging journalist? What made the fool take me for an obliging fool?

  This pile of letters, these canceled bills and dated photos. His scrapbook, now resembling a diary and now a time capsule stuffed with newspaper clippings and audio tapes—wouldn’t it have been better to store all that with an archivist than with me? He should have known how easily I tell stories. Why did he nevertheless choose to bury me under his junk? And what made me run after him, no, after the two of them?

  All because half a century ago, according to him, he and I sat ass by ass on the same school bench. He records: “The row of benches on the window side.” I don’t remember having him next to me. At St. Peter’s High School. It’s impossible. But I was in and out of that school in less than two years. I was always having to change schools. Different flavors of schoolboy sweat. Playgrounds with different kinds of bushes. I really don’t know who doodled stick figures next to me where or when.

  When I opened the package, his covering letter was on top. “I’m sure you’ll be able to do something with this, precisely because it all borders on the incredible.” The familiarity of his tone—did he think we were still in school? “I know you were no shining light in other subjects, but your essays soon made it clear …” I should have sent his junk back to him, but where to? “Actually you could have made up the whole story, but we did live through it, we did share an experience of more than ten years.”

  He dated his letter ahead: June 19, 1999. And toward the end, while otherwise expressing himself clearly, he writes about worldwide preparations to celebrate the millennium: “What useless expense! To think that a century dedicated to wars of annihilation, mass expulsions, and countless deaths by violence, is drawing to an end. But now, with the dawn of a new era, life will again …”

  And so on. Enough of that. Only this much is true: They met on November 2, All Souls’ Day, in sunny weather, a few days before the Wall came down. A cheap novel might have begun like this: The world, or at least a part of this immutable world, suddenly changed, no ceremony, in a total free-for-all. Everywhere monuments were overturned. My former classmate noted these often simultaneous acts of heroism in his diary, but he treated them as mere statements of fact. Reluctantly he made room, in parentheses, for events that demanded to be termed historic but irritated him because, as he wrote, “they distract attention from the essential, the idea, our great nation-reconciling idea …”

  With this I am already in his, in her, story. Already I am talking as if I had been there, talking about his tweed jacket and her string bag; I put a beret on him because berets stand out—as do his corduroy trousers and her stiletto-heeled shoes—in the photographs in my possession, both black and white and color. Like their shoe sizes, her perfume as well as his after-shave he considered worth noting. The string bag is not an invention. Later, he describes lovingly, almost obsessively, every mesh of this useful object as if wishing to make it the basis of a cult. But the early introduction of the crocheted heirloom—the widow had inherited it from her mother—appearing with the purchase of the mushrooms, is my contribution, as is the anticipated beret.

  A
s an art historian and a professor to boot, he could not have done otherwise: Just as he had made memorial slabs and tombstones, sarcophagi and epitaphs, ossuaries and crypts legible by rubbing, and had identified motheaten funeral banners—which traditionally furnish brick Gothic churches in the Baltic area—by their heraldry and rendered them eloquent by condensed histories of once eminent patrician families, so did he make the widow’s string bags (there wasn’t just this one, there were half a dozen) witnesses of a past culture superseded by ugly oilcloth carry-alls and radically devalued by plastic bags.

  “Four of the string bags are crocheted,” he writes, “two knotted by hand as fishnets used to be. Of the crocheted ones, one is solid moss-green …”

  And just as, in his doctoral dissertation, he had interpreted the three thistles and five roses in the bushlike coat-of-arms of seventeenth-century theologian Aegidius Strauch—taken from the bas-relief of a tombstone in the Church of the Holy Trinity, whose priest Strauch had been—and related them to the vicissitudes of an embattled life (Strauch had spent years in prison), so he quibbled and fussed over the widow’s inherited string bags. Learning that she always carried two of her six in her calfskin shoulder bag, he attributed this precaution to the shortages prevailing in all East Bloc countries: “Suddenly there’s cauliflower or cucumbers to be had somewhere, or a peddler produces bananas from the trunk of his Polski Fiat. That’s when a string bag comes in handy, for plastic bags are still a rarity in the East.”

  He then goes on, for two pages, to deplore the demise of handmade products and the triumph of the Western synthetic bag as a further symptom of human self-abasement. It is only toward the end of his plaint that he remembers his affection for the widow’s string bags, which he finds loaded with significance. And when mushrooms were being bought, I anticipated the presence of one of these string bags, to wit, the solid-color crocheted one.