The Call of the Toad Read online

  Reschke, too, moved a stool closer, until there was only one seat between them. Physical proof of the cosmopolitan’s figures was not in sight. But since the widower had spent the whole day and part of the night in conversation with the widow, preoccupied by the dead and their last wishes, he may have been appalled by this image but was pleased, at the same time, to meet someone who had so many living people behind him. I imagine Reschke in the confines of the tiny bar, overwhelmed by the futuristic sight of space-devouring multitudes.

  Reschke now introduced himself, not forgetting to mention his professional activity or the endless diversity of Baroque emblems. As his models, he mentioned such great names as Cassirer and Panofsky, and said that when he had studied in London, the Warburg Institute proved invaluable for his research. He then tried to make a show of wit: commenting on the most recent political changes, he called the possible reunification of all the Germans “a German one-pot meal.” At the same time, he admitted that the concentration of eighty million of his hard-working compatriots in the very center of Europe worried him a little. “That may not sound like much compared to your impressive figures. Nevertheless, the mind boggles.”

  Mr. Chatterjee, who like Reschke was drinking Export beer, was soon able to dispel his new friend’s anxieties. “As long as the old European order prevails, there will indeed be problems. But it won’t last. As the ancient Greeks knew, all is flux. We shall come. We will have to come, because it’s getting a little cramped over there. Everybody pushes everybody else; the end will be one great push that will be impossible to stop. Several hundred thousand are already on their way. Not all of them will make it. But still others are packing their bags. Regard me, if you please, as a forerunner or billeting officer of the future world society, in which the egocentric worries of your compatriots will be lost. Even the Poles, who just want to be Poles, always Poles and never anything else, will learn that next to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa there is room for another black divinity, because of course we will bring our beloved and feared Mother Kali with us—she has already taken up residence in London.”

  Raising his beer glass, Reschke agreed. “I take a similar view.” Indeed, his highest hopes were not confirmed by this proof of what he called “Asia’s silent invasion.” “Nothing,” he cried, “is more to be desired than the symbiosis of Kali and Mary, than a double altar consecrated to both.”

  Although in his scholarly pursuits the professor had specialized in memorial slabs, he had a general idea of Hindu theology, and even knew the goddess Kali under the names of Durga and Parvati. It was not just to be polite that he said he had seen this or something of the sort coming. He hoped that the international amalgamation process would ultimately lead to an exchange of cultures. A future world culture would not be too different from the world society envisioned by Mr. Chatterjee.

  At first, Reschke’s incorrigible English and the Bengali version of the once dominant colonial language were too incompatible. It was only when the girl behind the bar, described by Reschke as pretty, asked the two gentlemen in her Polish-accented school English whether they wanted more German beer, and when Chatterjee answered in Polish and then asked, in a startling German, if he could buy the professor another beer, that a full-voiced, gargling, percussive, moist-lipped, palatal Europe, interpolated with warring sibilants, made itself heard.

  The three of them laughed. Even when she laughed, the pretty barmaid was pretty. Chatterjee’s small-boned hand fusing with his beer glass. Reschke’s slightly oblique dolichocephalic skull. He had forgotten his beret at the widow’s. The girl behind the bar, her name Yvonne, claimed to be a medical student, able to work here only twice a week. Chatterjee praised Export beer. Reschke identified the Ruhr as its source, then asked the barmaid to put two more bottles on his tab. The medical student let them treat her to a scotch. Uninvited, and half a dozen barstools away, I might have ordered a vodka.

  They talked rather randomly about the weather, the dollar exchange rate, the permanent crisis of the shipbuilding industry. Their main topic had been exhausted; there was nothing more to be squeezed out of Asia. Even when he spoke, Chatterjee’s unevenly veiled eyes remained expressionless. “Sadly absent,” writes Reschke. Yet no silence set in. It seems they even recited poems: the Bengali quoted Kipling; the professor remembered some lines by Poe.

  After questioning each other about their ages, the gentlemen asked Yvonne to guess. The forty-two years of the Bengali-British businessman, born when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned, turned out to be more surprising than the sixty-two of my former classmate, who like me came into the world when the tower of St. Mary’s, found to be in need of repair, was encased in scaffolding up to its blunt top. Mr. Chatterjee’s sparse hair contrasted with the vigorous if graying mane of the soon-to-retire professor; but when he gestured, gently pleading or suddenly forceful, making use of all ten fingers as he related episodes of a circular Oriental legend, the businessman grew younger. By comparison, the professor had few gestures, all equally dismal, such as the speechless raising or lowering of the hands in the way of aging men; that, at least, is how I rhyme the two of them.

  They stopped at the third bottle of Export. When Chatterjee maintained that he went in for sports in order to keep fit, Yvonne found this laughable. Apparently her acquaintance with the Bengali went beyond serving him beer. Her laughter, which kept reinfecting itself, did not improve her looks. When she called him a bicycle champion with, as Reschke noted, an insulting snap of her fingers, Chatterjee took it lying down, but paid at once, barely waiting for Reschke.

  It was shortly after midnight when the two gentlemen parted outside the small half-timbered house. “We’ll meet again,” cried the small-boned Bengali with the British passport as, recharged with energy, he disappeared into the night along the bank of the Radaune. Reschke had only a short way to go, past the hotel’s parking lot.

  The Bulgarian red wine, the small glass of honey liqueur, and three bottles of Dortmund Export were not enough to make the widower quite ready for bed; at any rate, he was sufficiently awake to give a pedantic account of himself in his diary. He recalled every conversation of that day, omitting not a single variation in mood. A slight headache was important, as well as the likelihood of heartburn, for which he had tablets, drops, and lozenges in his suitcase: Reschke’s traveling pharmacy.

  I’m not going to make him take his glasses out of their case again, open them, breathe on the lenses and wipe them. He wrote fluently. Whenever he felt that he was growing longwinded, for example, in singing the praises of the mushroom dish while taking account of its possible aftereffects, he summed up his misgivings like an experienced taker of minutes. “Once again acted against my better judgment.” He even reduced Mr. Chatterjee’s prophesied Völkerwanderung—the inexorable waves of immigration, which could have justified a more dramatic flow of images—to the essential: “That Bengali who pretends to be British painted a graphic picture of the Asian overflow. When he referred to the Indian subcontinent at least, there was no contradicting him. Is disaster threatening, or is our old Europe heading for a radical, much needed rejuvenation cure?”

  Interestingly enough, in his diary Reschke always started with what he had experienced most recently. Enthusiasm turned a mere barroom acquaintance into a “crowning encounter,” and his tendency to exaggerate led him to call Chatterjee, who had introduced himself as a businessman interested in transportation, a “transportation expert” and “amiable to boot.”

  Only then did he write about tripping near the buckets of flowers, about the rust-red asters, the predestined widow. Frau Piątkowska soon became Alexandra. He described her as vital, inclined to sarcasm, interested in politics, though also embittered, not without obstinacy, but worldly wise and warm-hearted. “I have the impression that Alexandra uses her charm to atone for a contrariness that may sometimes strike one as childish. An amusing duel, in which I enjoy participating. She makes a point of being ‘modern,’ which shows in her rather lou
d makeup. Several times she said I was old-fashioned, ‘of the old school,’ but evidently takes pleasure in my admittedly exaggerated good manners.”

  After a long digression on the poverty inherent in the Polish street scene, the devaluation of the zloty, the rate of inflation and the disproportion between wages and prices, and after deploring the thriving black market, the children begging outside his hotel, the condition of the sidewalks, the unreliable street lighting, and the increase in crime “since the collapse of the Communist state,” and after deploring the increased power of the Catholic clergy, forgetting neither the stench of sulfur nor the cloud of exhaust fumes over the city, he turned his attention again to Alexandra Piątkowska. He called her irresistible. He used expressions such as “a good looker,” “small but oh.” The apartment on Hundegasse was “all in all a cozy little place.” “With her I feel alive again.” It is only after an elaborate description of the cemetery on Hagelsberg that he comes to the point, which is the Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Association proposed by the widow. He calls it “our no sooner conceived than born” idea, evaluates the Lithuanian component as “sensible and desirable,” though “hard to put into effect.”

  Still, he develops the concept further: “The Wilno project will have to be financed. We must find means to counter all the reservations that may be raised in Vilnius. After all, we stand together or not at all. The Poles as well as the Germans must recognize the right of the dead to repatriation. It is a human right that knows no frontiers.”

  Resounding words. All that smug self-righteousness in the service of the dead stank in my nostrils. I took his fountain pen and wrote in the margin, “Look here, Reschke, this idea stinks.” All the same, I stayed with it. Something the widow had said caught my fancy. “No room for politics in cemetery.” You could only agree with that. Her certainty intrigued me. Now I was curious whether they would succeed or fail.

  Something else spurred me on; the fact that they were both widowed spoke in their favor. If their story had been larded with the usual adultery, if one of those ridiculously hyped-up affairs had taken up space in Reschke’s papers, if there had been talk of ingeniously deceiving a wife or routinely cuckolding a husband, believe me, Reschke, I would not have been able to oblige you. But with both of them widowed for years, set free by the death of a spouse and again solely responsible for their affairs, unencumbered by children, who have grown up and left home, they are accessible to me. I can follow them.

  Toward the end of his entries under “All Souls’,” the widow’s string bag again became important to him. He returned to that heirloom in repeated flights of fancy: How glad he was to carry Alexandra’s loaded bag. How that outmoded household article touched him. How many sentiments, ardent some of them, could find room in it. Here is one: “I feel as if I had walked into her net.”

  Counting the knotted or crocheted meshes of all the string bags the widow had inherited from her mother, the widower probably fell asleep in the end; or was it the nine hundred and fifty million people behind Mr. Chatterjee that he had begun to count from left to right? As for Alexandra Piątkowska, we may assume that she lay awake working out the cost of the Cemetery Association by mental arithmetic. After computing the initial capital—“half million deutschmarks, about”—she probably drifted off into dream calculations with even more zeroes.

  Outside a wide window stand six pillars whose concrete cores are covered with ceramic. On the kitchen side, additional pillars covered with antiqued red brick. Otherwise, smooth wood paneling. In the background, an embossed relief.

  Shortly before nine A.M. Reschke found a free table in the hotel restaurant and ordered tea, which he preferred to the gritty Polish coffee, and ham and cottage cheese. A frilly-white waitress approached hesitantly, as if overcoming some inner resistance. No sooner had he ordered than a man sat down at his table, a fellow countryman, as it soon turned out. The newcomer had not, like most of the predominantly middle-aged men and women at neighboring tables, come with a package tour, but was traveling for a private health insurance company, with headquarters in Hamburg. They struck up a conversation.

  This gentleman, who remains nameless in Reschke’s diary, was trying, with the help of the magic formula “joint venture,” to establish business connections. He was looking for attractively situated vacation homes, offering a share of the capital as well as prospective buyers. His company, he informed Reschke, was proposing a time-share program for curative or recreational purposes in Eastern Europe, especially in the former German provinces. There was no lack of demand. As owners of a number of medium-sized homes, the state-controlled trade unions at least showed an interest. “What would you expect? They’re in hot water up to their necks.”

  But Reschke’s table companion complained of Polish unwillingness to cooperate. He realized that the question of ownership might be a sore point at the moment, but felt sure that even allowing for a certain amount of distrust, which was understandable, there had to be the possibility of long-term leases with an option to buy. “Otherwise,” he said, “it won’t be long before the whole place is dead. They should finally get that through their heads. On the one hand they say they want capitalism and on the other hand they behave like innocent maidens. These Poles still think they can get something for nothing.”

  Reschke, who for a day now had been entertaining similar plans, wanted to know if by and large the prospects were good for such joint-venture deals. “That is essentially a political question. The time has come for us to recognize their Oder-Neisse boundary. With no ifs, ands, or buts. Forget about the handful of professional refugees left. Then everything will be possible here. After all, now that everything is going to the dogs in the GDR, the Poles are panicking. They need us. Who else can be expected to lend them a helping hand? The French? See what I mean? Take it from me: in three or four years we’ll rule the roost here in Poland. They can’t ignore the D-mark. And if the Poles don’t want us, we’ll go to the Czechs and Hungarians. They’re more open …”

  As he stood up, the venture capitalist, a man in his late forties who had ordered too much and had hardly touched his soft-boiled eggs, said: “But this area would be best, even if the Baltic isn’t what it used to be. I’ve looked at a few trade union homes. On the Frische Nehrung on the Hela peninsula. Those pine woods. Or the so-called Kashubian Switzerland. All excellent health resort terrain and more familiar than foreign places. Full of memories for those of our people who had to leave here once upon a time. And there are plenty of those. My own family, for instance. They came from Marienwerder. I can still distinctly remember the flight, though I was very little at the time …”

  Reschke left the hotel. The weather continued to be unusually warm for early November. It cost him an effort to give something to the begging children. He bought six exorbitantly priced picture postcards from a boy who was leading his little sister by the hand. Undecided whether to spend his last day in Gdańsk paying another visit to St. Mary’s or aimlessly strolling, he hesitated too long at the hotel entrance; for no sooner had he decided in favor of the memorial slabs at St. Mary’s than he was addressed by name in the special English of his midnight barroom acquaintance, the Bengali with the British passport.

  This is what I read in Alexander Reschke’s notes: “At some distance from the row of waiting taxis Mr. Chatterjee stood beside a bicycle rickshaw. With what self-assurance he held the handlebars. In a jogging suit, he stood beside the rickshaw which, though not one of those notorious vehicles powered by coolies on foot, nevertheless seemed out of place, at least at first. He beckoned me to approach and admire his rickshaw—yes, it belonged to him. Spotlessly clean. A folding red-and-white striped top for the protection of his passengers in inclement weather. The frame dark blue, without a rust spot or any sign of peeling paint. Chatterjee explained: Sometimes he parked in front of this hotel, sometimes in front of another. Pure chance that we hadn’t met sooner. No, the rickshaw was not imported from Dacca or Calcutta; this Dutch-produced v
ehicle was designed to meet European requirements. The Sparta trademark was a guarantee of quality. Sophisticated gears. He owned six others, all brand-new. But only two were in operation in the city at the moment. Yes, he had a license for the inner city and part of the pedestrian zone and recently even for Allee Grunwaldzka in both directions. There had been difficulties at first, but he found ways of ingratiating himself with the local authorities. Oh yes, it’s the same all over the world. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find pedalers, or rickshawwallas as they call them in Calcutta, although, as you see, the taxi drivers are almost all unemployed. The Poles’ exaggerated pride keeps them from engaging their labor force in his transportation business. Which is expanding. In fact, he has ordered six more vehicles from Holland. ‘Because,’ cried Mr. Chatterjee, ‘the future belongs to the bicycle rickshaw. Not only in impoverished Poland. All over Europe.’”

  Reschke saw at once that the Bengali’s business was big business and therefore worth entering in his diary. Moreover, as he looked through his notes, he saw a parallel between his breakfast companion’s projected vacation homes, the environment-friendly bicycle rickshaw business, and the cemetery association. He writes: “All three projects have one thing in common: they serve human beings, older human beings in particular. They are, as it were, senior-citizen-friendly.”

  Mr. Chatterjee, spurred on by Reschke’s questions, held forth on the impending collapse of the automobile traffic in all the urban centers of Europe and on the advantages of the highly maneuverable, virtually noiseless, and, it goes without saying, exhaust-free bicycle rickshaw for short-to-medium distances in cities, then spoke more generally on the revitalization of Europe by new blood from Asia, and finally, if only ironically, he invoked the capitalist concept of untapped markets. And reality adapted itself to his vision: powered by the one Pole who had thus far gone into rickshaw cycling, a vehicle of the same model pulled up in front of the hotel, bringing a smiling old man back from his morning tour of the city; whereupon two smartly dressed ladies—both about Reschke’s age—engaged Mr. Chatterjee’s services and giggled like little girls while fitting themselves into the narrow seat.