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Epub ISBN: 9781473545199
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Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Text copyright © Steidl Verlag, Goettingen, Germany 2015
Graphics copyright © Steidl Verlag and Günter & Ute Grass-Stiftung 2015
English translation copyright © Breon Mitchell 2016
First published by Harvill Secker in 2016
First published with the title Vonne Endlichkait in Germany by Steidl Verlag in 2015
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
For Sarah Winter
When the pipe smoker’s heart, lung, and kidneys sent him to the workshop for yet another stay, hooked him up to an intravenous drip, a wretched fellow, and forced him to swallow a growing pile of pills—round, oblong, brightly colored—all whispering warnings on their side effects; when grumpy old age kept asking peevishly “How much longer?” and “What’s the point?” and neither lines of ink nor strings of words flowed from his hand; when the world with its wars and collateral damage slipped away, and he sought only sleep, a sleep torn to rags, and estranged from himself he began to lick his wounds in self-pity; when the last fountain had run dry, I was revived, as if mouth-to-mouth resuscitation were still in use, by the moist kiss of a part-time muse on call, and images and words came crowding in; paper, pencil, brush lay close at hand, autumnal Nature made its frail offering, watercolors began to flow; I delighted in scribbling and, fearing a relapse, began eagerly to live again.
To feel myself. Light as a feather free as a bird, though long since fit to be shot down. Unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Awaken the dead. Wear my pal Baldanders’ rags for a change. Lose my way on a single-minded quest. Seek refuge among ink-lined shadows. Say: Now!
It seemed as if I could change skins, grasp the thread, cut the knot, as if this rediscovered happiness had a name I could say again.
With red chalk, lead, graphite,
with goose quill and ink pen,
with sharp pencils, full brush,
and charcoal from Siberia’s woods,
with watercolors damp on damp,
then back to black and white—
to scales of layered grays,
bring forth the shadows’ silver gleam;
and since from death-like sleep
the muse’s kiss first startled me,
forcing me stark-bare naked
into brightness,
I’ve looked on each new leaf in turn,
obsessed by yellow,
mustard-dazed,
enflamed by red,
faded by fall,
hoping green would wake again,
seeking the way out, wafting gently,
like a feather falling from the blue.
Again and again the dream where I milk a midsize squid. It’s easy underwater, like making love to a daring mermaid strayed from her flock.
You swim up from behind, quite innocently, stay patient, and when the moment is right, attach the pump to the muscular opening of the gland and activate it by pressing a small button. Soon, half forced, half willingly, the squid expels what’s normally released as a dark cloud to befog a nearby enemy.
That happened a lot at first, when I was in too great a hurry to harvest the inky brew. Time would go by and still nothing. I would run out of breath. Surface, then try again. Milking squids, like pleasuring mermaids, takes practice.
Since then black milk stands stored in canning jars, a borrowed metaphor. A soupy extract used for pen and brittle brush drawings alike. Washed they reveal streaks of a slimy substance.
The drawings retain the smell long after, at first fresh, then increasingly pungent; especially on days of high humidity, the squid-ink ink recalls its origin.
that rises from the bottom left,
then forms steps, hesitates,
ventures back, tumbles downhill,
catches itself, staggers but remains intact,
curves now into an arch, spins in place,
marking time, sets off again,
starts to head outside,
almost losing its way,
sets off yet again,
still sharp enough to find its way out,
surveying in its course the hilly landscape
of a face—female—
colonizes it with vegetation,
leaves blank a few bare islands,
doubles back on itself, evasive, creeps
beyond hearing into the shell of an ear
and nests there; a line
that has no goal,
its only meaning its own breath,
a breath that never tires,
so long as ink keeps flowing.
Swoon, an old-fashioned word: in ages past, when tiny flasks of smelling-salts were held beneath the noses of powdered ladies to revive them, swooning was socially acceptable. It offered a ready excuse for failing to take action against some power or other. But now it has ruffled up its feathers to cover us all.
While bankrupts are sheltered by emergency loans or hope to hibernate through winter in failing banks, and the entire world argues that things will turn around, perhaps even head upward, if not now then soon, and while the responsible parties postpone action from congress to congress as if time were no object, the rest of us are willing to be linked totally and forever by the Internet.
Available around the clock. Never beyond reach. Trapped by a mouse click. Data registered back to our baby powder. Nothing omitted. Daily visits to the thrift store, to the movies, to the toilet—immortalized. The long, drawn-out course of our love life stored on a chip the size of a fingernail. Nowhere to hide. Always in sight. Watched over in our sleep. Never again alone.
What to do? In a powerless swoon I abstain, reject what’s on offer. No cell phone among my glasses, tobacco, and pipe. No pointers allowed on how to surf, to Google, to Twitter. No Facebook counts my friends and enemies. When no one is looking I use a goose quill. Murmured soliloquies at most, on cow pats, Cartesian devils, and the ants’ notion of progress; and yet a power has seized me by the collar too, a power that goes under various names, but remains nameless.
No signal gives advance warning. It feeds on overqualified stupidity. What once was an omnipresence with religious trimmings now presents itself as soberly rational and proof of a civil society.
No! It renders all things transparent, dispenses with memory. Removes responsiblity. Erases doubt. Simulates freedom. Declared incompetent, we find ourselves flopping in the net.
As a child,
what scared me stiff when I was stiff
was the motto “God sees everything,”
in Sütterlin script on every wall.
But now that God is dead
an unmanned drone circles high overhead
keeping an eye on me,
a lidless eye that never sleeps
And notes all things, unable to forget.
And so I turn childish,
stammer scraps of prayers,
beg for mercy and forgiveness
as my lips once begged at bedtime
for remission after every act of sin.
In confessionals I hear myself whisper:
Ah, dear drone,
make me pious, that I may come
into your heavenly home.
How simple must we become to see in all its diversity what autumn now sheds, first fruit, then foliage. Piles of leaves. A single leaf. Drying it twists and turns, spreads, rolls its edges, stiffens in ecstasy. Each brittle fissure, each panicle, clearly traced. Sharp edges cast soft shadows. Forgetful green blushes into red, merges with rotting apples, pears, worm-eaten plums. And leaves keep falling, though there is no wind.
They fall dizzily, not knowing where they’re headed, hesitate, find their way to their own kind, or stray to others, till tree and bush, stripped bare alike, await the first frost. Now only still lifes remain. I bend over, learn to read. No leaf without its inscription. Eichendorff left a poem on chestnut leaves, one I could recite as a schoolboy. And heart-shaped leaves bear traces of Trakl, leading letter by letter to solemn gardens where he, the stranger, saw Sebastian in a dream.
Mysteries are cheap these days. No more embarrassing questions. When the maple disrobed, love started stammering. There’s a clearance sale on metaphors. Openings of novels, final lines, a manifesto cries out in vain. Prayers of a babbling child. Summary conclusions. Broken off in midsentence. Letters that remain unfinished. Curses and canticles of hate. Long-sought rhymes stamped in birch leaves. A plot scurries off: a pile of fallen poplar leaves leads to a crime story whose ending is still unclear. And over all wafts the decaying breath of fall.
Write long letters to dead friends,
and short plaintive ones to a love
who slipped from life too soon.
Plain letters, in simple script,
vague at times, perhaps,
but intense, to the point,
penetrating time itself,
as if no time has passed.
And report too on the dwindling Now,
on the rush and weariness,
a word-drunk eyewitness account,
on the stockmarket, the general falling sickness,
on what’s become, what will become, of the children,
and how many grandchildren I’ve been given,
on what new words are now in fashion,
and which old veterans are now long gone.
Ah, how I miss them, my departed friends,
and my love, whose name
I’ve kept fresh in a secret drawer,
repeating it endlessly
till the morning wind
blankets my doorstep with autumn leaves
covered in writing, many-colored.
And I see snails
laboring along the postal route,
they come from far away,
on the road for years;
and I see myself each evening,
patiently deciphering their slimy trail,
reading what my dear dead friend,
what my beloved, wrote.
What am I talking about? With whom? Who says do or don’t? Footsteps from one standing desk to another. Things begin but don’t want to end. What’s ended only seems so. Threadbare words. Try keeping quiet.
Who’s that coughing, spitting out the lungs’ debris? At times an angel drifts through the slightly-open door, whispering politely, kindly, trying to palm off assurances on me. About everything and nothing.
Now quiet is decreed—by whom? Only my own sounds linger. Something hard falls from the table, the scissors this time. Yesterday it was my eraser, bouncing three times after it hit. And tomorrow?
A slim book, wedged firmly between broad-backed volumes, lures me with poems of rustling autumn leaves. And before that a visitor came, but left no trace. That tickling on my left ear is one of the last flies at the window. Or am I the one who can’t keep still?
