The Call of the Toad Read online

  The third-floor apartment was situated at the end of the street, which like all other east-west streets in Right City ends at the Mottlau, from which it is separated by a gate. The slender tower of the Town Hall and the blunt tower of St. Mary’s could be seen from the living-room window, though the upper third of both was cut off by the gables of the house across the street. The son’s room, now Piątkowska’s workroom, looked out over Schnellstrasse to the south. On that side, all that remained of a suburb originally known as Poggenpfuhl (Frog Pond) was the Church of St. Peter. The widow showed the widower the bedroom, which also had a southern exposure, and the adjoining bathroom. In the kitchen, next to the living room, Alexandra Piątkowska said, “You see, sir, I live in luxury, compared with average.”

  Why, damn it, did I go along? What makes me run after him? And what business have I in cemeteries and on Hundegasse? Why am I involved in his speculations in the first place? Perhaps because the widow …

  In his notes, immediately after describing the three-room apartment, Reschke thought back on the way her eyes had affected him: “Under the cemetery trees the pale blue of her eyes changed to bright blue, their brightness enhanced by the black of her too heavily made-up eyelashes. Like a tangle of spears, they fenced the upper and lower lids. And then a network of laugh wrinkles …” Only then did he quote his remarks to her on living conditions in the West. “I, too, since the death of my wife—it was cancer—and the departure of my three daughters—have been living in a rather spacious three-room studio-type apartment, in an unattractive new building, it is true, with a mediocre view. An industrial landscape, relieved, to be sure, by quite a few green spaces …”

  Here the long-drawn-out, tragic-sounding chimes from the Rathaus tower invaded the kitchen, interrupting Reschke’s comparison of Western and Eastern living conditions. They will often be interrupted just as emphatically. After the last peel the widow commented, “A bit loud. But you get used to it.”

  From his diary I know that for chopping parsley she tied on a kitchen apron. She cleaned the four thick-bellied, broad-brimmed, humpbacked mushrooms, whose stems were neither wooden nor wormeaten. Little waste. Apart from the mossy lining of the hats, negligible traces of slug damage. He then insisted on helping her peel potatoes. Easy for him, he said, as he had done it since the death of his wife.

  The smell of the mushrooms invaded the kitchen and prompted them both to search for appropriate descriptive terms. I cannot tell from Reschke’s book whether he or she first ventured the words “aphrodisiac smell.” The boletus mushrooms reminded him of his childhood, when he and his maternal grandmother went looking for chanterelles in the mixed forest around Saskoschin. “Such memories stay with one longer than any of the mushroom dishes served in Italian restaurants, most recently in Bologna, when my wife and I …”

  She regretted that she had never been to Italy, but long stays in West Germany and Belgium had made up for it. “Polish restorers bring hard currency. Good for export, like fattened Polish geese. I worked in Trier, Cologne, and Antwerp …”

  “She sometimes uses the kitchen as a workshop,” he writes, and points to a shelf crowded with bottles, cans, and utensils. The mushrooms had drowned the originally strong smell of varnish as well as “Alexandra’s perfume.”

  After putting the potatoes in a pot to boil, the widow melted butter in a frying pan and cut the mushrooms into quarter-inch slices which she brought to a sizzle over a medium flame. The widower learned to pronounce masto, the Polish word for butter. Now she was smoking again, over the stove; that bothered him. He thought it worth noting that not only he in peeling potatoes but she in cleaning mushrooms had resorted to their glasses. At home, she wore hers on a plaited silk string around her neck. I see him opening an elegant, old-fashioned case, grasping the frame, opening it, breathing on the lenses, rubbing them, putting the glasses on, taking them off, folding them, putting them back into the case, and closing it. Her frame—“beautiful present I made myself in Antwerp”—is trimmed with rhinestones, which is supposed to look fetching. His round, horn-rimmed lenses give him a scholarly look. Now they both take off their glasses. Later, when he anticipates the turn of the millennium with his leaps in time, he writes: “Walking with a cane, almost blind …”

  At first the widow wanted to set the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. “We eat here, yes? Kitchen always cozy.” Then decided on the living room after all. Furniture dating from the sixties, some of it rustic. A couch and two easy chairs. The bookcase overloaded and slightly crooked. On the walls framed reproductions of Old Flemish masters, but also a spooky Ensor: Christ’s entry into Brussels. On the bulletin board an assortment of photos: the Porta Nigra, Antwerp City Hall, the guildhalls. Among crime novels and Polish postwar literature, a few cumbersome nautical tomes. The tablecloth is of Kashubian linen with an embroidered tulip pattern. The photographs on the glassed-in dish cupboard show the widow’s husband in the uniform of the merchant marine; the widow and her husband on the Sopot pier; mother and son at the door of the Oliwa Castle Church, the mother, as Reschke writes, laughing and “starry-eyed,” the son morose and aloof; the officer in the administration of the merchant marine looking bored.

  “You see,” says Piątkowska while serving the steaming dishes, “my husband big. Almost two heads taller.”

  For almost too long the widower was lost in contemplation of the photographs on Sopot Pier. “Now come and eat; otherwise gets cold.”

  They sat facing each other. A bottle of Bulgarian red wine was drained. As a finishing touch the widow had stirred cream into the mushrooms, added a dash of pepper, and topped the floury and crumbling boiled potatoes with chopped parsley. Refilling their glasses, Reschke spilled a little. The spot of red wine provoked laughter. Salt was sprinkled on it. Again the electronic chimes from the Town Hall; tragic heroic. “In famous words by Maria Konopnicka,” said the widow. “We will never let go the land from where our people come …”

  No mushrooms were left over. And not until the coffee, served in demitasses and gritty the way Poles like it, were smoker and nonsmoker caught up again in their cemetery conversation.

  It started with school stories. Wilno weighed heavily. “Lyceum I was not allowed to attend.” They took away my two girlfriends. And Papa lost sugar factory …”

  It was then that Reschke added another twist of fate, a rather banal coincidence I would call it: he confessed that he and his parents and his brothers had lived diagonally across the street, on Hundegasse, in that plain gabled house without a front terrace, or rather in the original of that house. His father had been a postal official in the period between the wars and had had his desk in the Central Post Office only a block away. “Incidentally, the vault of my paternal grandparents, located in the central aisle of the United Cemeteries, had already been reserved for my parents …”

  “The same with Mama and Papa,” the widow cried. “They know always where their last resting place in Wilno cemetery will be …”

  That was when it clicked, when the coin fell. Painlessly a thought was born. Widow and widower together composed an idea whose simple melody was to prove extremely catching, so great was its universal human appeal, in Polish as well as in German.

  It must have been a long conversation over several brewings of coffee and several invasions of the Town Hall chimes, which shortly before the stroke of nine kindled this idea, declared it to be their own, and finally expanded it into a thing that would reconcile the nations. She was capable of enthusiasm, he more inclined to skepticism. Begging her to be patient, he took “The Century of Expulsions” as his theme and spoke of all those who had been driven out and forcibly resettled, all those who had fled, all the Armenians and Crimean Tatars, Jews and Palestinians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, Estonians and Latvians, Poles and finally Germans who had fled west with bag and baggage. “Many died on the way. Typhus, hunger, the cold. And the numberless dead. Millions. No one knows where their bodies are. Buried by the roadside. Individual graves and mass
graves. Sometimes only ashes. Death factories. Genocide, the still unfathomable crime. Therefore today, on All Souls’ Day, we should …”

  Then Reschke spoke of man’s need to be laid to rest in the place where his home was before flight, expulsion, or forced resettlement; where he had assumed his home to be, where he sought and found it, where it had always been, since his birth. He said: “What we call home means more to us than such concepts as fatherland or nation, and that is why so many of us—not all, to be sure, but more and more as we grow older—long to be buried in our home soil. A natural longing which for the most part remains cruelly unfulfilled, as only too often circumstances stand in the way of its fulfillment. We should, however, call it a natural right, and it should at long last be included in the catalog of human rights. No, I am not referring to the right to a homeland demanded by our refugees’ associations. Our true home has been lost to us forever, a consequence of our own crimes—but the right of the dead to return is something that could and should be urged.”

  I presume that Professor Reschke uttered these and other thoughts about death and about man’s last resting place while striding back and forth in Piątkowska’s living room as though addressing a large auditorium. He went on for quite a while before coming to the point, and then cast doubt on the daring statements that had just been made.

  That was not her way. Alexandra Piątkowska wanted everything to be clear and simple. “What you mean could, should? Fancy conditionals. I learned all that. It has to be: must, will. Will do this immediately. Will say out loud where politics must stop and human rights must begin, when man is dead with no money only last wish in pocket, as Mama and Papa said as long as they lived, because they were foreigners still, even if Mama sometimes cried out on excursions to Kashubian hills: ‘As beautiful here as at home!’”

  When the widow was excited—and all that coffee and especially the professor’s long, involved sentences must have stirred her up considerably—she dropped articles and stumbled over her word order more than usual. The report that Reschke saddled me with demands that I quote her verbatim. Now that I’m in it, it’s too late to retreat. Moreover, the covering letter contains allusions that compromise me. He claims, for instance, that I won his admiration and that of the other students by swallowing a live toad. All right, I’ll swallow another, as demanded.

  Reschke must have asked Piątkowska, most likely in the market and at the latest in the cemetery, how she came to know German so well—complimenting her of course. It isn’t until later that his diary supplies her precise answer … “‘Mother no. Father spoke German.’ In Poznań, along with art history she majored in Germanic studies. Her husband, who spoke English fluently as well as German, must have been after her like a drill sergeant. ‘Every mistake he corrected, that’s the way he was.’ Witold, their son, benefited by this. ‘Only,’ said Alexandra, ‘he talks too complicated, much too complicated.’ She couldn’t be accused of that. True enough. No one who listened to her could fail to recognise that my gildress, exported in exchange for hard currency, had benefited by a number of stays abroad. She says ‘Three months Cologne, four months Trier. Every time something stick.’ She even sang some Cologne carnival songs recently when we drove to the Island to do taping.”

  That was later, when her idea had acquired its own momentum. But after the first spirited beginning, when she came to the rights of the dead, Piątkowska soon ran short of words. Sentences and nouns liberated from articles made their way through Polish interjections and exclamations: “Last resting place must sanctity have … Finally reconciliation will be … I learned German word: Friedhofsordnung … Niemiecki porzadek! Fine. Dobrze. We make German-Polish cemetery ordnung … only, we must learn to avoid Polish ordnung and stick to German ordnung.”

  I assume a second bottle of Bulgarian red wine from the widow’s kitchen cupboard. In any case, Reschke’s diary assures us of repeated laughter on Piątkowska’s part. He was beginning to count her laugh-wrinkles. “That wreath of rays!” She must have had plenty to laugh about. True, no sooner had the idea taken wing, than they spoke of nothing but funeral establishments, efficient burials, the transportation of dead bodies, and the difficulties to be expected in connection with the shipment of coffins and urns, but Alexandra thought all that, the name of their shared idea included, worth a burst of before or after laughter, her bellbird laughter. His proposal was: The Polish-German Cemetery Association. She, “because Germans are rich and must be first always,” thought her counterproposal, The German-Polish Cemetery Association, much better.

  Finally, because Wilno had to be taken into consideration, they agreed to give the middle position to the richest and the first: The Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Association, later called PGLCA, was founded November 2, 1989, or announced if not actually founded. Lacking were such indispensables as additional founding members, a draft contract with statutes and bylaws, a board of directors, capitalization, and a bank account.

  Apparently there was no more red wine or any vodka in the house, but there seems to have been some honey liqueur at the bottom of a bottle—as though put aside for the occasion—just enough for two little glasses. With that they drank to the new organization. He claims that he tried to kiss her hand in the Polish manner. She didn’t laugh. Finally, the widower took his leave after the widow dismissed him—“Now we on it sleep”—and for the first time addressed him by name. “Won’t we, Aleksander?” “Yes, Alexandra,” he said in the doorway. “We will, we will sleep on it.”

  2

  IT IS POSSIBLE that just once, to show off or because that’s what the bored rabble wanted to see and I am good-natured, I actually did swallow a toad. In a country boarding school or some such place. Frogs I can remember, I swallowed them on request in playing fields or beside the Striessbach, vomited them up, and let them hop away. Sometimes three or four at a time. But he claims to have seen me swallow a full-grown toad, a red-bellied toad, without gagging, swallow it a hundred percent with no returns.

  That was a hit, Reschke writes. The loony with his loony idea claims to remember me better than I care to be remembered; he claims that I distributed condoms—known as merry widows—in class. Just as I’m ready to go somewhere entirely different, taking with me what words I have left, he drags me back into the old school fug. “Do you remember, just after Stalingrad, old Dr. Korngiebel suddenly turning up without his Party badge …” It’s possible that early in ’43 I met one of his cousins several times—name of Hildchen, he’s sure of that—outside the main entrance to St. Dominic’s Market. Always after school: Hildchen and me. But here I’m trying to tell you about Alexander and Alexandra. She has just dismissed him after two glasses of honey liqueur at the door of her apartment …

  And now he’s standing on the terrace, alone with himself. Since in my schooldays I ran myself ragged in the routes that Reschke claims to have covered, for which reason the city faithfully rebuilt from the ruins remains a city where I can find my way in my sleep, and since his detour via Beutlergasse to St. Mary’s could have been my detour, I follow him to the Orbis-Hotel Hevelius, adapt to his shuffling gait, make myself his night shadow and echo.

  Alexander Reschke avoided going by the covered market. The loneliness and the stagnant smell might have spoiled his exultant mood. He proceeded carefully. I hear him humming: something between Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the Holberg Suite. He rounded the huge late-Gothic building in a clockwise arc, stopped, hesitated when the Frauengasse opened its front terraces before him, was tempted to drop into a bar, probably the Actors’ Club, whose wide-open door announced that it was doing business, for another little drink, resisted the temptation, kept faith with his exultant mood and headed for his hotel.

  But once at the Hevelius, he did not feel like going to his room on the fourteenth floor. He walked around the lobby but kept away from the hotel bar. Once again he passed the unconcerned porter and went out into the night with its smell of sulfur. Finally making up his mind, though not without the
usual misgivings, he shuffled purposefully in the direction of a bar, a small, scrupulously restored half-timbered little house which was quaintly set in the bushes along the bank of the Radaune, behind the dauntingly tall hotel.

  The widowed professor had often stopped here on earlier visits to the city—which despite its poverty was still exceedingly rich in towers—in the days when his studies still amused him and when several religious edifices, such as St. Peter’s, the church most recently reclaimed from the rubble, promised the discovery of new memorial slabs.

  “No, Alexandra,” he said, after a whiff of the Radaune, “it always stank, at least it did in my school-days.” Business was slow, and there was room at the bar. Alexander Reschke later made a note of his “strong though undefined sense that this special day was not yet over. There was more on the program, another scene in the play, which might be pleasant or disturbing. In any case, I felt a curiosity mingled with foreboding. My prescience, my special gift of seeing in retrospect things to come, had been aroused.”

  Nevertheless, his barroom acquaintance struck him at first as “merely odd.” Reschke was addressed across three empty barstools by a gentleman on his left, dressed like a Southeast Asian diplomat, whose strangely gargling English suggested a Pakistani or Indian with a university education. The dainty but obviously energetic man in the blue-gray Nehru jacket introduced himself as the holder of a British passport, born in Pakistan, who after his flight from that country had grown up in Bombay, but one branch of his far-flung family was at present located in Dacca and another branch in Calcutta; he therefore regarded himself as more or less a Bengali, even though he had studied economics and nineteenth-century English literature in Cambridge and had acquired his first business experience in London, chiefly in the field of transportation. He moved one stool closer and said—I quote freely from Reschke’s translation: “Please look upon me as a person with nine hundred and fifty million human beings, soon a round billion, behind him.”