Peeling the Onion Read online

  It should therefore have been clear that my mother could not afford to give me a weekly allowance. But after endless laments on my part – everyone else in my class jangled a more or less ample supply of pocket money – she pushed over to me a well-worn ledger containing rows and rows of the debts of customers who paid on credit – ‘on tick’, as she put it. I open it up.

  I see a neatly penned list of names, addresses, and amounts of money owed, occasionally going down but more often going up, accurate to the last penny. It is the record of a businesswoman with every reason to worry about her business, as well as a mirror of the general economic situation at a time of growing unemployment.

  ‘The sales reps will be coming on Monday morning and they’ll want to see cash,’ she always told me. All the same she never made either me, or later, my sister feel that the school fees she had to fork out every month put us under any special obligation to her. She never said, Look at the sacrifice I’m making for you. Show your appreciation.

  She, who had little patience with cautious child-raising methods that took long-term consequences into account – when an argument between my sister and me got a bit too loud, she would say, ‘Just a second’ to her customer, run out of the shop to wherever we were, and instead of asking ‘Who started it?’ would simply slap both of us without a word, return immediately to the shop, and serve the customer as cordially as you please – she, who was so gentle and warm-hearted, so easily moved to tears, who called everything she thought beautiful ‘genuinely romantic’, she, the most concerned of all mothers, pushed the ledger over to me and offered to give me in cash – in guldens and pfennigs – five per cent of the debts I collected if I was willing to make time – in the afternoon or whenever I was free from the (in her eyes) idiotic Jungvolk meetings – to visit the defaulting debtors, and armed with nothing but a saucy tongue (which I was not lacking!) and a notebook full of neat figures urge them most compellingly if not to settle their debts outright at least to pay them off in instalments. She gave me just one specific piece of advice: ‘Friday is payday. Friday evening is the best time to collect.’

  And so at the age of ten or eleven I became a resourceful and, when all was said and done, successful debt collector. I was not to be bought off by an apple or cheap sweets. I came up with words capable of melting hardened debtors’ hearts. Even the most pious, the most unctuous excuses sailed past my ears. I was not deterred by threats. I would stick my foot in the door when I felt it was about to be slammed. I was particularly aggressive on Fridays, making reference to pay packets, but not even Sundays were sacred for me. And on holidays, great and small, I was at it all day long.

  I soon recovered such significant amounts that my mother felt impelled, now for ethical reasons, to reduce her son’s extravagant percentage from five to three. I accepted the cut begrudgingly. Her response: ‘You were getting too big for your britches.’

  In the end I was better off financially than many of my classmates, even those who lived in high-roofed Uphagenweg or Steffensweg private houses with colonnaded doorways and balconies and terraces and servants’ entrances and whose fathers were doctors and lawyers and grain merchants and even factory and shipowners. My earnings piled up in an empty tobacco tin hidden in my window niche. I spent it on a supply of sketching pads and on books, including several volumes of Brehm’s Lives of Animals. The film addict in me could now afford to visit the most out-of-the-way Old Town film palaces, even the Roxi in the Oliva Castle Gardens, return tram ticket included. He missed not one offering there.

  During those Free State days a Fox Movietone newsreel ran before every documentary and feature film. I enjoyed watching Charlie Chaplin eat his shoe, laces and all, in The Gold Rush; I laughed at Laurel and Hardy; I was fascinated by Harry Piel. As for Shirley Temple, I found her silly and only moderately cute. Fortunately I also had the funds to see Buster Keaton, whose funny scenes made me sad and sad scenes made me laugh.

  Was it in February, for her birthday, or was it for Mother’s Day? In any case, I wanted to give my mother something special, something from abroad, some time before the beginning of the Second World War. I remember standing in front of the shop windows, contemplating the possibilities, luxuriating in the agony of choice, vacillating between an oval crystal bowl in Sternfeld’s department store and an electric iron.

  In the end I decided on the beautifully designed Siemens appliance, whose exorbitant price the mother sternly extracted from her son, though she avoided revealing it to the rest of the family as if it were one of the seven deadly sins. No, not even the father, who knew he had reason to be proud of his competent son, was told the source of my sudden fortune. After each use, the iron disappeared into the sideboard.

  I REAPED ANOTHER reward from my career as a debt collector, though I did not cash in on it till decades later and then it came in the form of prose.

  I would go up and down stairs in apartment buildings where smells varied from floor to floor: on one the smell of simmering cabbage would be overwhelmed by the stink of laundry soaking; on the next a cat smell or a nappy smell would force its way through. Behind each door lurked a special rankness: a sour must or the reek of burning hair, because the mistress of the house had just been styling her locks with the curling iron. There was the odour of elderly ladies – mothballs and Uralt Lavender cologne – and the schnapps breath of the retired widower.

  I learned by smelling, hearing, seeing, and by experiencing: the poverty and anxieties of large working-class families, the arrogance and fury of civil servants who cursed in stilted High German and refused to pay their bills as a matter of principle, the need of lonely women for a kitchen-table chat, the ominous silence and fierce quarrels among neighbours.

  I collected it all in my internal savings account: fathers sober and fathers drunk, beating their children, mothers screaming at the top of their lungs, close-mouthed or stuttering children, whooping cough, permanent cough, sighs, curses, tears of all sizes, dog-and-canary love, people hatred, the prodigal son who has not yet returned, tales of the proletariat and tales of the petite bourgeoisie, the former in Low German larded with Polish expletives, the latter in clipped bureaucratese and shortened to arm’s length, some generated by infidelity, and others – about the strength of the spirit and the frailty of the flesh – that I did not recognize as stories until later.

  That and much more – not only the blows I was dealt as I made my rounds – got stowed away in me, a stockpile for times when the professional storyteller was short of material, at a loss for words. All I had to do then was let time run backwards, sniff the smells, sort the stenches, trudge up and down the stairs, ring the doorbells or knock on the doors, mostly on Friday evenings.

  It may even be that this early contact with Free State currency, pfennigs as well as guldens, and then, starting in 1939, with the Reichsmark and its much-coveted silver five-mark coins – that is, my early initiation into the financial world – made it easy for me to trade unscrupulously in black-market commodities like flints and razor blades after the war, and then later on as an author negotiate doggedly with hard-of-hearing publishers. So I have ample reason to be grateful to my mother for my early lessons in the businesslike handling of money even if they were based on debt collecting. And when my sons Franz and Raoul coerced me into drawing them a verbal self-portrait in the early seventies while I was working on From the Diary of a Snail, I came up with the lapidary ‘I was very well badly brought up’. Among other things, I was referring to my career as a debt collector.

  I have forgotten to mention the bouts of tonsillitis that even after my childhood ended not only kept me out of school for days but also interfered with my money-mad professional life. The convalescent boy was fed egg yolk mixed with sugar by his mother at his bedside.

  ENCAPSULATIONS

  ONE WORD EVOKES the other: Schulden, Schuld, debts, guilt. Two words so close and so deeply rooted in the soil of the German language. But while debts can be mitigated by instalment payments, lon
g-term as they may be (witness my mother’s clientele), guilt – whether proven, presumed, or concealed – remains, ticking on and on, and holds its place, even on journeys to nowhere. It says its piece, fears no repetition, is mercifully forgotten for a time, hibernates in dreams. It remains as sediment – not a stain to be removed or a spill to be wiped away. Penitent, it learns early to seek refuge in the shell of an ear, to think of itself as beyond the statute of limitations, as long since forgiven, as smaller than small, next to nothing, yet there it is, as the onion sheds skin after skin, permanently inscribed on the youngest skins, now in capital letters, now in a subordinate clause or footnote, now clear and legible, now in barely decipherable hieroglyphics. The brief inscription meant for me reads: I kept silent.

  But because so many kept silent, the temptation is great to discount one’s own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly, in the third person: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent … and what’s more, silent within, where there is plenty of room for hide and seek.

  AS SOON AS I summon up the boy I was at the age of thirteen, subject him to the third degree, and feel tempted to judge him as I would a stranger to whose needs I am indifferent, to condemn him, I see a kid of average height in shorts and kneesocks constantly grimacing, running to his mother, and crying, ‘I was just a child, just a kid …’

  I try to calm him down and ask him to help me peel the onion, but he rejects all entreaties and refuses to let himself be exploited as my early self-portrait. He denies me the right to – as he puts it – do him in and ‘from your high horse’ to boot.

  Now he is narrowing his eyes to observation slits, pressing his lips together, screwing his mouth into an uneasy grimace while hunching over his books; then he’s gone, nowhere to be found.

  I observe him reading. It’s the only thing he can do for any length of time. He habitually stops up his ears with his index fingers to shut out his sister’s gleeful noise. Here she comes, warbling away. He’d better watch out, because she likes to close his book on him. Or she may want him to play with her. That’s all she thinks about, play; she never stops. The only time he likes her is when she keeps her distance.

  Books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds. But he also makes faces when he’s not reading, when he’s just standing in the living room, looking so absent that his mother calls over to him, ‘Where are you, anyway? What’s going on up there in your head?’

  Where was I when I was only pretending to be there? What far-off spaces was the grimacing youngster inhabiting without leaving the living room or classroom? In what direction was he spooling his thread? As a rule, I was moving backwards in time, ravenously hungry for the bloody entrails of history and mad about the Pitch-Dark Ages or the Baroque interim of a war lasting thirty years.

  And so the boy who answers to my name liked to see the passing days as a series of appearances in ever-changing costumes. I always wanted to be someone else and somewhere else, the Soonother whom I met a few years later, immersed in a cheap edition of Simplicissimus, a strange, yet attractive figure, who at the end of the eponymous hero’s adventures, helps him to slip out of a musketeer’s baggy breeches into a hermit’s shaggy habit.

  Even though the present, with the Führer’s speeches, the blitzkriegs, submarine heroes, ace pilots, and suchlike military details, was a subject I knew backwards and forwards, and my knowledge of geography was expanding to include the mountains of Montenegro, the Greek archipelagos, and – starting in the summer of ’41, as the front shifted eastwards – Smolensk, Kiev, and Lake Ladoga, I was simultaneously on the march with the Crusaders as they entered Jerusalem, I was a squire to the Emperor Barbarossa, fought fiercely as a knight of the order against the Prussians, was excommunicated by the Pope, joined Conradin’s retinue, and went down, intrepid, with the last of the Hohenstaufens.

  Blind to the injustices that were becoming daily occurrences in the city’s environs – between the Vistula and the Haff, only two villages away from the Nickelswald country house used by the Conradinum for school excursions, the Stutthof concentration camp was growing and growing – I was incensed by the crimes of sanctimonious clerics, the tortures of the Inquisition. On the one hand I thrilled to the description of pincers, red-hot pokers, and thumbscrews, on the other hand I saw myself avenging the deaths of witches and heretics. I reserved my ire for Gregory IX & Co. Polish peasants and their families were being turned out of their farms in the West Prussian hinterland; meanwhile I was a vassal of Frederick II, who settled his loyal Saracens in Apulia and spoke Arabic to his falcons.

  In retrospect I see that the grimacing gymnasium student had managed to transfer his book-learned sense of justice entirely to the Middle Ages. Perhaps that is why in my first attempt at writing a sustained piece I used a setting far from the sieges of the summer of ’41 and the deportation of the remaining Danzig Jews from the Mausegasse ghetto to Theresienstadt. I could scarcely have chosen a more remote backdrop for my plot than the mid-thirteenth century.

  It all began with Hilf mit! (Lend a Hand), a children’s newspaper, which had sponsored a contest with prizes for narrative prose submitted by youthful readers. Thus did the grimacing youth, or my I, by now well-established though forever ducking behind fiction’s bushes, maculate a till-then-immaculate notebook with no, not a meagre short story, but a full-fledged novel right off the bat. And off my own bat: the novel bore the title The Kashubians – that I remember clearly. They were, after all, my relatives.

  During my childhood we often crossed the Free State border in the direction of Kokoschken and Zuckau to visit Great-Aunt Anna, who lived with her large family in cramped quarters under a low roof. Cheesecake, brawn, gherkins pickled with mustard seeds, mushrooms, honey, prunes, and chicken trimmings (stomach, heart, liver), morsels sweet and morsels sour, and schnapps, potato schnapps – she would lay it all out on the table at once, and we would all laugh and cry at once.

  In the winter, Uncle Joseph, Great-Aunt Anna’s eldest son, would come for us with his horse and sleigh. What fun it was. We would cross the border at Goldkrug. Even though Uncle Joseph greeted the customs officers in German and Polish, he would get an earful from each uniform. That was less fun. Just before the war broke out, the story goes, he took a Polish flag and a flag with a swastika out of the wardrobe and said, ‘When war starts in, I climb tree and look who comes first. Then I raise flag – this one or that …’

  Even later, when times had changed, we would go on seeing the mother and sisters and brothers of the late Uncle Franz, though only in secret, after the shop was closed. Trade in kind was useful in that war economy: they gave us soup chickens and farm eggs; we gave them raisins, baking powder, yarn, and paraffin. Next to the herring barrel there was a paraffin tank the size of a man. Its smell has survived its time. As has the picture of Great-Aunt Anna pulling a plucked goose she had brought to trade out from under her skirts and tossing it onto our counter with, ‘One of them ten-pounders …’

  I was familiar with Kashubian speakers’ linguistic peculiarities in German: whenever she abandoned grumblings in her ancient Slav tongue for expressions of woe in Low German, she would also abandon all articles, definite and indefinite, and say nein twice instead of once just to be certain. Her slow-motion speech was like clotted milk mixed with sugar and topped with grated pumpernickel crumbs.

  The Kashubians, what remained of them, had lived from time immemorial in the hilly hinterland of the city of Danzig and depending on who was in power were considered either not Polish or not German enough. When the Germans took over government of the Free State, many Kashubians were classified by decree as Ethnic Group Three. This was done under pressure from the authorities, that the Kashubians might prove themselves worthy of being made fully fledged Germans, Reichsdeutsche, the young women eligible for the Labour Service, the young men, like Uncle Jan, who was now called Hannes, for the military.

  Here were issues that
cried out for airing. That is why I placed the action of my entry into literature, a tale of mayhem and manslaughter, during the interregnum of the thirteenth century – ‘a terrible time with no emperor’. I had the urge to flee reality for as rough-and-tumble a historical period as possible. Nor did the life and customs of an ancient Slav culture have a chance. No, my literary debut was more about the medieval German Vehmic court and its injustices after the downfall of the Hohenstaufens, which made for amply violent narrative material.

  Not a word of that novel remains: I haven’t the slightest memory of its episodes, other than that they dripped with blood because they dealt with bloodlust; not one character’s name – knight or peasant or beggar – has stayed with me; nothing, no cleric’s pronouncement of guilt, no witch’s cry has stuck. Yet streams of gore must have flowed, a dozen or more stakes been erected and victims set afire with torches, because by the end of the first chapter all the heroes were dead: beheaded, garrotted, impaled, burnt to a cinder, or drawn and quartered. Not only that: there was nobody left to avenge them.