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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

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

The Call of the Toad

Günter Grass

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

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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.

About the Book

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

For Helen Wolff

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.

As 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.

I let the widower carry the heirloom and must admit that as he shuffles along slightly stooped beside the widow, not only his beret but the string bag as well is most becoming to him, as though he and not she had inherited it, as though the Japanese camera had been only borrowed and from now on he would carry his specialized literature, his thick tomes on Baroque iconology, in a crocheted or knotted string bag, on his way, for instance, to Ruhr University.

Though I fail to remember a classmate by his name, he seems an old acquaintance with his ingrained eccentricities and first signs of geriatric ailments. And the widow, too, as beside him she makes her way slowly cemeteryward, takes shape by virtue of sheer willpower. She’ll teach him to stop shuffling.

A long but enjoyable walk, for the widow subdivided it by explaining everything in short, concise sentences and letting out an occasional burst of her bellbird laughter. By the time they had made their way from St. Catherine’s and the Big Mill, where the Radaune canal carries very little water—“Stinks,” she said, “but what doesn’t around here!”—and came in sight of the highrise Hotel Hevelius, she knew: “I bet gentleman from West has view of city from so high.”

The widower opened up as they approached the library, and was still talking as they passed the former St. Peter’s High School—both Prussian neo-Gothic structures spared by the war. He admitted that he had been precocious and a bookworm, referred to the barn still being operated as a school as “my old Alma M.,” a term he explained most elaborately. And they had passed the Church of St. James before he finished explaining what books in the reading room of the municipal library had infected and at the same time inoculated him. “You can’t imagine how I devoured books, every single volume of the Knackfuss monographs on artists …”

And then outside the gate of the Lenin Shipyard—just before it was renamed—the square with the three towering crosses spread out before them, where three anchors hung crucified.

“That was Solidarność,” the widow said, and added a sentence designed to mitigate the brusqueness of her obituary. “But we Poles can still build monuments. Everywhere martyrs and statues of martyrs.” Then she fell silent, without laughter before or after.

In this sentence the widower thought he detected “a bitterness bordering on despair.” All she had left were gestures. Then she extracted an aster from the bouquet, added it to the flowers heaped up in front of the memorial wall, and at the widower’s request translated, line for line, the poem by Czesław Miłosz inscribed on the monument: a stern poem in praise of futility. Thereupon she associated herself and her family with the poet and his family—all refugees driven from the East to an uncertain West. “We had to leave Wilno, like you all had to leave here.”

Still on the square, but already moving, she lit a cigarette.

To abbreviate their walk to the cemetery: Smoking, the widow led the widower out of the city across a bridge, which since the demolition of the fortifications and the construction of the main railroad station arches over all the railroad tracks leading westward from Danzig or Gdańsk or eastward to Gdańsk or Danzig. Since German and Polish spellings are used interchangeably in the widower’s notes, I shall follow his irresolute nomenclature and say not Brama Oliwska but: The widow led him out of the city to the Olivaer Tor streetcar stop; then, via the left fork of the highway to Kartuzy, up the gently sloping Hagelsberg to the service station for tourists intent on lead-free gasoline, across from which there is an old cemetery shaded by beeches and lindens, which formerly belonged to the parishes of Corpus Christi, further up to those of St. Joseph and St. Bridget, and on the western edge to various “non-sectarian” religious congregations. Overcrowded for years, it now seemed abandoned. No open gate provided access. They walked along a fence overgrown with shrubbery. Across from the adjacent military cemetery was a Red Army war memorial, on whose lawn some teenagers were playing soccer. The widow knew a hole in the fence.

Once inside—under trees and among overgrown single and double graves—the widower proffered a formal introduction: “Please allow me to introduce myself, as I should have done long ago: My name is Alexander Reschke.”

The widow’s laughter took time, and must have struck him as out of place, especially here among tombs. Nevertheless, still laughing, she followed suit: “Alexandra Piątkowska.”

This entry in Reschke’s diary made it clear that fate had a hand in it. What difference does it make that his former classmate, whose only function here is that of a reporter, finds this consonance too much in harmony, suitable at best for an operetta on the well-known model, all right for fairy-tale characters but not for this pair thrown together by chance. But it’s got to be Alexander and Alexandra; after all it’s their story.

The intimacy of the names, however, must also have alarmed both the widower and the widow, as I have been calling them up to now, though they couldn’t have known that they were meeting in a widowed state. Determined to be independent, Alexandra Piątkowska walked into the cemetery, disappeared among tombstones, reappeared, disappeared, reappeared. Alexander Reschke also kept his distance. Avoiding the rustling autumn leaves, he shuffled along moss-covered paths, his beret now gone, now seen again. As though loitering, he hesitated before one tombstone, then another: plenty of diabase and highly polished granite, little sandstone, marble, or shell limestone.

All the stones bore Polish names and indicated dates of death beginning in the late fifties, all, that is, except the numerous children’s graves lined up in a field to one side and dated 1946, the plague year. Wooden crosses and headstones. The silence under the cemetery trees was not lessened by the soccer-playing children, or even by the sounds of the service station. I read: “Here I have again grasped the meaning of the words ‘quiet as a tomb.’”

Nevertheless, Alexander Reschke was looking for something. On the edge of the cemetery he found two crooked tombstones and then two more, overgrown with weeds, and he had a hard time deciphering what was on them. Death dates from the early twenties to the mid-forties, and inscriptions above the names—“Here Rests in God,” “Death Is the Gateway to Life,” or “Here Lie Our Dear Mommy and Granny”—evoked the distant past of this burial ground. Reschke notes: “These stones, too, are made of the usual material, diabase and black Swedish granite.”

For a while, I leave him with the remaining tombstones. Long enough for Pani Piątkowska to deposit the bunch of asters in a vase on her parents’ grave. This double grave, I copy, is bordered by box trees, and less neglected than the neighboring graves. Her father died in ’58, her mother in ’54. They were both under seventy. I take note of All Souls’ activity in all areas of the cemetery. Here and there hurricane lamps on tombstones indicate that visitors have come and gone.

But widow and widower paid no attention to them.

“I was with Mama and Papa. My husband is in Sopot Forest Cemetery.” Alexandra Piątkowska said this as she joined Alexander Reschke, whom the other tombstones had distracted from the present time; the voice behind and to one side of him may have startled him; in any case it brought him back.

The pair again. Because she had made it known that she was a widow, he should have talked about the death of his wife and also about the early, too early, deaths of his parents. Instead, he provided her with his professional status, identified himself as a professor of art history lecturing in the Ruhr, and for completeness’ sake brought in the title of his doctoral dissertation submitted and accepted many years before—Memorial Slabs and Epitaphs in the Churches of Danzig—and only then, abruptly, dated the death of his wife: “Edith died five years ago.”

The widow said nothing. Then she came closer, and another step closer, to the crooked tombstones that the widower had found worthy of notice. Suddenly, and too loudly for a cemetery, she exploded: “Disgraceful Poland! Everything with German on it they cleaned out. Here and other places, in Sopot Forest Cemetery too. For dead no peace. Wiped out everything. After the war and later. Worse even than Russians. They call it politics. Plain criminals, I say.”

As far as I can make out from Reschke’s notes, he tried to soothe the widow by putting the blame on the invasion of Poland, the consequences of the war, and the exaggerated nationalism on all sides, roughly in that order. Yes, he said, the desecration of a cemetery borders on barbarism. He, too, he had to admit, was saddened by these forgotten tombstones. One should expect human beings to deal more humanly with the dead. After all, the grave, and its artistic execution, is the last authentic expression of a person. One has to consider, however, that most of the memorial tombs of German patrician families in the main city churches had been protected from vandalism. Yes, yes, he understood the persistence of her anger. It was only natural that people should want to know that the graves of their closest relatives were in good condition. On his first postwar visit to Gdańsk—“That was in the spring of ’58, when I was working on my dissertation”—he had wanted to visit the graves of his paternal grandparents in the United Cemeteries. Yes indeed, it was awful; the place seemed to have been laid waste out of sheer malice. “A terrible sight! Believe me, Frau Piątkowska, I understand your indignation. Nothing was left for me but grief, which, it is true, can also be viewed in the context of facts that are a matter of historical record. After all, such barbarity was first perpetrated by us. Not to mention all our other unspeakable crimes …”

The two of them were made for such conversation. He was a master of the lofty tone; she had the gift of righteous indignation. Under towering beeches and lindens, which had survived all manner of political vicissitude, widow and widower agreed that politics was a curse and had to stop somewhere, and that it was most certainly out of place in cemeteries. “Yes,” she cried, “dead enemy no longer enemy.”

They called each other Herr Reschke and Frau Piątkowska. Relaxed after their exchange of views, they suddenly noticed that all around them other celebrants of All Souls’ Day were paying their respects to their dead with flowers and hurricane lamps. And only then did the widow make the remark that the widower noted verbatim in his diary: “Naturally Mama and Papa prefer to lie in Wilno cemetery than here, where everything strange was and is.”

Was it these words that sparked it off? Or did ravished tombstones continue to weigh on their cemetery conversation? My former classmate and now doctor of philosophy Alexander Reschke, that past master of elevated discourse, has indeed conveyed to me a whole anthology of somber images—“The autumnal trees provided a wordless commentary in the abode of transience …” or: “Thus the spreading ivy has survived the violent depredation of the cemetery and in its own way remained victorious if not immortal …”—but only after a critical observation (Did she absolutely have to smoke in a cemetery?) does he confess: “Why do I hesitate to tell Alexandra of my parents’ boundless if seldom expressed hope of being allowed to rest in their native soil, though neither of them had any hope of returning in their lifetime? Like Alexandra’s parents, they had to accept their foreign surroundings.”

The two of them lingered. Their cemetery talk went on and on. Finally they found a cast-iron bench which had managed to survive along with the ivy. They sat in the shelter of yew trees. According to Reschke’s entries, the teenagers had tired of their soccer game on the lawn in front of the Soviet military cemetery; only the large service station continued to intrude into their world. And smoking, still smoking, as though memory were stimulated by puffing at cigarettes, Alexandra, as she is called in his papers from this point on, talked about her childhood and youth in Wilno, as Vilnius or Wilna is called in Polish. “Pilsudski took it from Lithuania and gave to Poland. Was white and gold from Baroque. And all over beautiful city was woods, everywhere woods.” Then after amusing tales of school, with girlfriends in them, two of them Jewish, and country vacations devoted to rounding up potato bugs, she broke off, and said, “But the war was terrible in Wilno. I still see in street dead people lying.”

Again, service station sounds. No birds in the cemetery trees. The smoker, the nonsmoker. The two of them on the cast-iron bench. And then suddenly, because suddenness was her way, and because she wanted to add one more similarity to those of their first names and their widowhood, she surprised him with a declaration about her profession: “I went to same faculty as gentleman. But only six semesters of art history and professorship no chance. But plenty practical experience to make up for it.”

Reschke learned that Piątkowska had worked as a restorer for a good thirty years and that her specialty was gilding. “All kinds. Matte gilding and bright gilding with gold leaf and ducat gold. Not just Baroque angels, also burnish gilding on marble stucco. Also good at carved rococo altars. All kinds of altars. Three dozen altars I gilded. In Dominican church and all over. We get material from Dresden, gold leaf from People-Owned Gold-Beating Works …”

So the iconographer and the gildress of ornate emblems talked shop under cemetery trees that were steadily losing their leaves. He spoke of St. Mary’s thirty-eight epitaphs listed by Curicke; she described her gilding work on an epitaph dating from 1588, which had been given up for lost some years ago. He held forth on Dutch mannerism; she decided that the half horse on a red field and the three lilies on blue in the arms of Jakobus Schadius were well worth gilding. He praised the anatomy of the skeletons rising from tombs in the relief; she reminded him of the golden initials on black in the lower broad oval. He lured her downstairs into crypts; she led him from altar to altar in the Church of St. Nikolai.

Never amid tombstones was there so much talk about gold grounds, polished gold, hand gilding, and the tools and accessories of the trade. According to Reschke, who went back as far as the tombs of the pharaohs, gold should have been named the color of the dead: gold on black. This transfiguration, the shimmering between red gold and green gold. “The golden luster of death!” cried Reschke, showing off for all he was worth.

It was not until Piątkowska started talking about the work which some years ago had familiarized her with every detail of the organ screen in the Church of St. John (evacuated and therefore saved during the war), that her laughter won the upper hand. “More of that we need. You buy with deutschmarks a brand-new organ for Marii Panny Church. We restore old screen with gold leaf that doesn’t cost much.”

They fell silent. Or rather, I assume silence between them. But this demonstration of how Germans and Poles could collaborate on organs and organ screens rekindled enthusiasm. “That is how it must be!” said the professor. And in his diary noted: “Why can’t it be the same in other fields?”

Two or three more cigarettes may have been sacrificed to the cemetery mood. Perhaps her idea first took form and then went up in cigarette smoke. However, it was in the air, demanding to be seized.

Reschke writes that Alexandra then led him, no, invited him to the grave of her parents: “I am pleased if you come to grave of Mama and Papa.”

As they stood facing the two hurricane lamps on either side of the vase with the rust-red asters on the broad granite tomb, which bore, incidentally, a freshly gilded inscription—it was the widow who gave the plot direction. As though maternal advice had reached her from the tomb, she pointed at the crocheted heirloom that the professor was still holding, released a short burst of laughter, and said, “Now I make us mushrooms, with parsley chopped fine.”

Through the hole in the cemetery fence they crossed into the early afternoon of the present day. Now the widow was carrying the string bag. The widower, obliged to give in, once again ventured no allusion to Chernobyl and its consequences.

They took the streetcar, rode past Central Station to High Gate, now called Brama Wyżynna. Alexandra Piątkowska lived on ul. Ogarna, which runs to the right and parallels Langgasse, and which once was Hundegasse, or Dog Street. This street, destroyed by fire like the rest of the city toward the end of the war, with only the tatters of house fronts left, was rebuilt with admirable fidelity during the fifties and, like all the main and side streets of the resurrected city, is in need of thorough restoration: molding crumbling on all sides, blistering plaster peeling. Sulfurous fumes blown from the harbor had disfigured all the pedimental figures hewn in stone, aged them before their time. Scaffolding had been placed against a few façades that seemed especially decrepit. I read: “There will never be an end to this much-admired, expensively maintained illusion.”

Since housing in the historic areas of the Old City and Right City was at all times in demand and not allotted without political considerations, Piątkowska’s membership in the Polish United Workers’ Party through the early eighties, and to an even greater degree the fact that she had been decorated for her work as restorer, must have helped. She had been living there since the mid-seventies. Before that she, her son, and her husband, until her husband’s early retirement—he had been with the merchant marine—occupied two rooms in a housing development between Sopot and Adlershorst (eyrie), now Orlowo, a long trip to her place of work in the inner city. Understandably, she put in a complaint with the Party. As a member of long standing—since 1953—she believed, especially in view of her participation in the forthcoming International Youth Games in Bucharest, that she was entitled to lodgings closer to her work. At that time the workshops of the Restorers and Gilders were in Green Gate, a Renaissance structure at the east end of Long Street and Long Market and fronting the River Mottlau.

A few years after the move to Hundegasse her husband died of leukemia. And when, in the late eighties, the president proclaimed martial law and Witold, her late-born only son, went to the West to study in Bremen, the widow was alone but not unhappy in the once cramped, now spacious apartment.

Unlike any other building on Hundegasse, the semi-detached house at ul. Ogarna 78/79 had a front terrace, with steps leading down to the street. During the period of martial law, the government press agency Polska Agencja Interpress had moved into the ground floor, with an entrance of its own, and was now trying to obtain recognition as a private organization. On the street side the spacious terrace had reliefs in sandstone—rococo ornaments and cupids at play. Reschke deplored their condition: “One would like to see these cheerful records of bourgeois culture protected against erosion and moss.”

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