Herbert worked for Starbusch. Starbusch was the owner of the Sweden Bar, which was situated across the street from the Protestant Seamen’s Church; the customers, as the name might lead one to surmise, were mostly Scandinavians. But there were also Russians, Poles from the Free Port, longshoremen from Holm, and sailors from the German warships that happened to be in the harbor. It was not without its perils to be a waiter in this very international spot. Only the experience he had amassed at the Ohra “Race Track”—the third-class dance hall where Herbert had worked before going to Neufahrwasser—enabled him to dominate the linguistic volcano of the Sweden Bar with his suburban Plattdeutsch interspersed with crumbs of English and Polish. Even so, he would come home in an ambulance once or twice a month, involuntarily but free of charge.
Then Herbert would have to lie in bed for a few days, face down and breathing hard, for he weighed well over two hundred pounds. On these days Mother Truczinski complained steadily while taking care of him with equal perseverance. After changing his bandages, she would extract a knitting needle from her bun and tap it on the glass of a picture that hung across from Herbert’s bed. It was a retouched photograph of a man with a mustache and a solemn steadfast look, who closely resembled some of the mustachioed individuals on the first pages of my own photograph album.
This gentleman, however, at whom Mother Truczinski pointed her knitting needle, was no member of my family, it was Herbert’s, Guste’s, Fritz’, and Maria’s father.
“One of these days you’re going to end up like your father,” she would chide the moaning, groaning Herbert. But she never stated clearly how and where this man in the black lacquer frame had gone looking for and met his end.
“What happened this time?” inquired the grey-haired mouse over her folded arms.
“Same as usual. Swedes and Norwegians.” The bed groaned as Herbert shifted his position.
“Same as usual, he says. Don’t make out like it was always them. Last time it was those fellows from the training ship, what’s it called, well, speak up, that’s it, the Schlageter, that’s just what I’ve been saying, and you try to tell me it’s the Swedes and Norskes.”
Herbert’s ear—I couldn’t see his face—turned red to the brim: “God-damn Heinies, always shooting their yap and throwing their weight around.”
“Leave them be. What business is it of yours? They always look respectable when I see them in town on their time off. You been lecturing them about Lenin again, or starting up on the Spanish Civil War?”
Herbert suspended his answers and Mother Truczinski shuffled off to her imitation coffee in the kitchen.
As soon as Herbert’s back was healed, I was allowed to look at it. He would be sitting in the kitchen chair with his braces hanging down over his blue-clad thighs, and slowly, as though hindered by grave thoughts, he would strip off his woolen shirt.
His back was round, always in motion. Muscles kept moving up and down. A rosy landscape strewn with freckles. The spinal column was embedded in fat. On either side of it a luxuriant growth of hair descended from below the shoulder blades to disappear beneath the woolen underdrawers that Herbert wore even in the summer. From his neck muscles down to the edge of the underdrawers Herbert’s back was covered with thick scars which interrupted the vegetation, effaced the freckles. Multicolored, ranging from blue-black to greenish-white, they formed creases and itched when the weather changed. These scars I was permitted to touch.
What, I should like to know, have I, who lie here in bed, looking out of the window, I who for months have been gazing at and through the outbuildings of this mental hospital and the Oberrath Forest behind them, what to this day have I been privileged to touch that felt as hard, as sensitive, and as disconcerting as the scars on Herbert Truczinski’s back? In the same class I should put the secret parts of a few women and young girls, my own pecker, the plaster watering can of the boy Jesus, and the ring finger which scarcely two years ago that dog found in a rye field and brought to me, which a year ago I was still allowed to keep, in a preserving jar to be sure where I couldn’t get at it, yet so distinct and complete that to this day I can still feel and count each one of its joints with the help of my drumsticks. Whenever I wanted to recall Herbert Truczinski’s back, I would sit drumming with that preserved finger in front of me, helping my memory with my drum. Whenever I wished—which was not very often—to reconstitute a woman’s body, Oskar, not sufficiently convinced by a woman’s scarlike parts, would invent Herbert Truczinski’s scars. But I might just as well put it the other way around and say that my first contact with those welts on my friend’s broad back gave promise even then of acquaintance with, and temporary possession of, those short-lived indurations characteristic of women ready for love. Similarly the symbols on Herbert’s back gave early promise of the ring finger, and before Herbert’s scars made promises, it was my drumsticks, from my third birthday on, which promised scars, reproductive organs, and finally the ring finger. But I must go back still farther: when I was still an embryo, before Oskar was even called Oskar, my umbilical cord, as I sat playing with it, promised me successively drumsticks, Herbert’s scars, the occasionally erupting craters of young and not so young women, and finally the ring finger, and at the same time in a parallel development beginning with the boy Jesus’ watering can, it promised me my own sex which I always and invariably carry about with me—capricious monument to my own inadequacy and limited possibilities.
Today I have gone back to my drumsticks. As for scars, tender parts, my own equipment which seldom raises its head in pride nowadays, I remember them only indirectly, by way of my drum. I shall have to be thirty before I succeed in celebrating my third birthday again. You’ve guessed it no doubt: Oskar’s aim is to get back to the umbilical cord; that is the sole purpose behind this whole vast verbal effort and my only reason for dwelling on Herbert Truczinski’s scars.
Before I go on describing and interpreting my friend’s back, an introductory remark is in order: except for a bite in the left shin inflicted by a prostitute from Ohra, there were no scars on the front of his powerful body, magnificent target that it was. It was only from behind that they could get at him. His back alone bore the marks of Finnish and Polish knives, of the snickersnees of the longshoremen from the Speicherinsel, and the sailor’s knives of the cadets from the training ships.
When Herbert had had his lunch—three times a week there were potato pancakes, which no one could make so thin, so greaseless, and yet so crisp as Mother Truczinski—when Herbert had pushed his plate aside, I handed him the Neueste Nachrichten. He let down his braces, peeled off his shirt, and as he read let me question his back. During these question periods Mother Truczinski usually remained with us at table: she unraveled the wool from old stockings, made approving or disapproving remarks, and never failed to put in a word or two about the—it is safe to assume—horrible death of the man who hung, photographed and retouched, behind glass on the wall across from Herbert’s bed.
I began my questioning by touching one of the scars with my finger. Or sometimes I would touch it with one of my drumsticks.
“Press it again, boy. I don’t know which one. It seems to be asleep.” And I would press it again, a little harder.
“Oh, that one! That was a Ukrainian. He was having a row with a character from Gdingen. First they were sitting at the same table like brothers. And then the character from Gdingen says: Russki. The Ukrainian wasn’t going to take that lying down; if there was one thing he didn’t want to be, it was a Russki. He’d been floating logs down the Vistula and various other rivers before that, and he had a pile of dough in his shoe. He’d already spent half his shoeful buying rounds of drinks when the character from Gdingen called him a Russki, and I had to separate the two of them, soft and gentle the way I always do. Well, Herbert has his hands full. At this point the Ukrainian calls me a Water Polack, and the Polack, who spends his time hauling up muck on a dredger, calls me something that sounds like Nazi. Well, my boy, you know Herbert Truczinski: a minute later the guy from the dredger, pasty-faced guy, looks like a stoker, is lying doubled-up by the coatroom. I’m just beginning to tell the Ukrainian what the difference is between a Water Polack and a citizen of Danzig when he gives it to me from behind—and that’s the scar.”