Chapter 3 fat skirt

Confession: I am a resident of a nursing home①.My orderly was watching me, he watched me almost all the time; because there was a peephole in the door, my orderly eyes were those brown ones, and it was impossible for him to see through my blue eyes. -------- ①The protagonist of this book, the self-reporter Oskar Matzerath, was "forcibly sent" to a sanatorium (euphemistic name for a lunatic asylum) for observation because he was accused of being a suspect in a murder case.The footnotes in this book are all translation notes. Therefore, my orderly could not be my enemy at all.I've grown to like him.As soon as this peeper stepped into my room, I related the events of my life to him.That way, despite the peephole, he could still get to know me.It seems that the logical pragmatist Quinn is the main representative.See "Logical Pragmatism". , the good man appreciates the stories I tell, for whenever I tell him something made up, he shows me his latest made-up image as a token of his gratitude.Whether he is an artist can not be discussed for the time being.However, if an exhibition is held with his creations, the press will give good reviews and attract some buyers.Using ordinary dressing thread, which he gathered in the rooms of the patients he nursed after visiting hours, he wove them into layers of cartilaginous ghosts, which he then dipped in plaster to make them Rigid, then inserted with pins, secured to a wooden base.

He often changes his mind and wants to create colorful works.I dissuaded him, pointing to my white-painted metal bed, and asking him to imagine what the most complete bed would look like if it were painted in colour.As soon as he heard this, he stretched out the hands of the orderly over his head and clapped violently in horror, trying to show various expressions of fear at the same time on his too rigid face, and gave up his coloring plan. So my hospital bed with a white-painted metal frame was a norm.For me, it's even more than that: my bed is my ultimate destination.It is my consolation, and it may become my religion, if the sanitarium administration will allow me to make some changes and have the bed rail raised so that no one can get too close to me.

Weekly visiting days interrupt the silence I've woven between the white-painted metal bed rails.When that day came, they all came, those who wanted to save me.They entertain themselves by loving me, wanting to value, respect and know themselves through me.How blindly they are relative, abstract and concrete, particular and general and other important philosophical categories and their relations.Mention, how neurotic, and how uneducated.They scratched my white-painted bed rail with their fingernails, and scribbled long, unseemly little figures on the white paint with ballpoint pens and pencils.My lawyer hangs his nylon cap on the bedpost at my left heel every time he barges into the ward with a "hello."During his visits—and a lot to do with being a lawyer—he robbed me of my mental balance and joy with this rape.

The people who came to visit me put their gifts on the small white table covered with wax cloth under the watercolor painting of anemones, told me the rescue plan they were implementing or had planned, and persuaded me, persuaded them to work tirelessly. The rescued person highly believed in their fraternity.After that, they rediscovered the joy of their own existence and left me.As soon as they were gone, my orderly came to open the windows for air, and at the same time to collect the twine for binding presents.After changing the air he often still finds time to sit on the edge of my bed and untie the knots of the cord and tidy up and let the silence spread until I call the silence Bruno and Bruno the silence.

Bruno Münsterberg (I am giving the name of my orderly now, not playing with words), native Sauerland, unmarried, childless.He bought me 500 sheets of typing paper, and the money was put on my account.I didn't have enough paper, so I asked Bruno to go to the small stationery store that also sold children's toys to buy me unlined paper and provide me with the necessary space to exercise my memory.Ah, if only my memory were correct!I never entrust this to anyone who comes to visit me, whether it is a lawyer or Klepp.Kindness made my friends worry about me and set rules for me, and kindness certainly forbade them from doing such dangerous things as bringing me blank paper so that I could record what was secreted in my head. incoherent syllables.

"Hey, Bruno!" I said to him, "Can you buy me five hundred sheets of clean paper?" Bruno looked up at the ceiling for an analogy, and pointed his index finger in the same direction. Home.He thought that the object of philosophy could only be experience and inferences from experience, and replied: "You mean a blank sheet of paper, Mr. Oscar." I insisted on using the word "clean" and asked Bruno to say the same in the shop.In the evening he came back with a pack of papers and wanted me to think he looked like a thoughtful Bruno.He raised his head several times, stared at the ceiling for a long time, and from there drew all the inspiration he needed, before uttering these few words: "You suggested to me the right word. I ask the saleswoman to be innocent." The paper, before she gave it to me, she flushed with embarrassment."

Afraid to talk endlessly about the salesgirls in the stationery shop, regretting that I should not call the paper innocent, I kept silent and waited until Bruno left the ward before opening the package of five hundred typewritten sheets. I held this pliable paper in my hand, and it didn't take me long to weigh it.I took out ten pages and kept the rest in the bedside table. I found a pen next to the photo album in the drawer. The pen was fully filled. The work is a fluid structure waiting for the reader to fill in the meaning, not realistic. There is no shortage of ink, so where do I start?

A story can be told from the middle, forward or backward, boldly creating suspense, or it can be a little fashionable, completely ignoring time and space, and then announce it at the end, or have someone announce it. At the last moment, time and space The issue has been resolved.It is also possible to start out by claiming that it is impossible to write a novel these days, and then, for example, add a hoarse shouter behind yourself as the last author who might write a novel.I have also heard it said that to make a good impression, to make a modest impression, you can cut to the chase and say: there are no longer heroes in novels, because there are no more individual persons, because individuality has been lost. , because man is lonely, everyone is equally lonely, and has no right to claim individual loneliness, so a nameless, heroless, lonely group is formed.That might be the case, and there might be something believable about it being right.But as far as me, Oscar, and my orderly Bruno are concerned, I daresay we are both heroes, very different heroes.He is behind the peephole, I am in front of it; if he opens the door, we two, friendship and solitude, still do not form a nameless, heroless crowd.I will start from a long time before my own birth; for a man who is impatient and does not want to recall either of his grandparents before he has written down the date of his existence is not worthy of writing an autobiography.So, to all of you who have to live a chaotic life outside of the nursing home where I live, and to all of you who visit me once a week and have no idea that I stockpile paper, let me introduce my Oscar. grandmother.

My grandmother, Anna Bronski, was sitting at the edge of a potato field one evening in October, wearing some of her dresses.If it is in the morning, you can see how my grandmother neatly puts the withered potato seedlings into piles.At noon she ate lard bread with sugar sauce, then dug the ground one last time, and finally sat in her skirts between two baskets almost full of potatoes.The soles of her boots formed a right angle with the ground, and the toes almost touched each other. A pile of potato stalks was smoldering in front of the soles, which occasionally burst into flames like asthma. The sloping crust parallels, drifting away uneasily.It was 1899.She sits in the heart of the Kashube region, not far from Bissau, closer to the brick kilns between Ramkau and Fierek, facing the road to Brentau between Dilsau and Carterhaus, Back towards Goldkruger's Black Forest.She sat poking potatoes under the hot ashes with the end of a charred hazel stick.

-------- ①The Kashube area, the area inhabited by Germanized West Slavs, formerly northwest of West Prussia and northeastern Pomerania.Until 1945, about 150,000 people spoke Kashube.The language is a dialect between Polish and West Pomeranian. I specifically mentioned my grandmother's dresses above, saying she was sitting there in a few dresses, and I hope that made that clear enough.I've even titled this chapter "Fat Dresses," because I know how grateful I am for such clothes.My grandmother didn't just wear one dress, she wore four.You don't think she wears one skirt and three petticoats; she wears four skirts, one inside the other, and they are turned inside out once a day in a certain order.What was worn on the outermost layer yesterday became the second layer today, and what was on the second layer yesterday reached the third layer today.Yesterday's third layer is worn next to the body today.The one that stuck to the skin yesterday can let others see its style today, or in other words, see that it has no style at all.My grandmother Anna Bronski's dresses were all potato-colored.This color must suit her best.

Apart from this color, my grandmother's dresses were characterized by a generous size and an excessive waste of material.They are round and pier, and when the wind comes, they roll like waves, when the wind blows, they fall to one side, when the wind passes, they crackle, and when the wind blows from behind, the four skirts flutter in front of my grandmother.When she sat down, the four skirts gathered around her. In addition to these four skirts, which were often puffy, drooping, wrinkled, or stiff and hanging empty by the head of her bed, my grandmother had a fifth skirt.This one was indistinguishable from the other four potato-coloured dresses.This fifth dress is not always fifth.Like its brethren (for skirt is a masculine noun), it is subject to the need for rotation, and like them, if it gets its turn, which is on Friday the fifth day, it is thrown into the wash-tub , was hung on a linen line in front of the kitchen window to dry clothes on Saturday night, and after drying, was placed on the ironing board. Every Saturday, my grandmother cleaned the house, baked bread, washed, ironed, milked and fed the cows.Once the chores were done, she soaked from head to toe in the bath tub, lifted herself up a little from the soapy water, and let the tub return to its original level.She wrapped herself in a towel that looked like a large blooming flower, and sat on the edge of the bed. On the floor in front of her were four worn skirts and a freshly washed skirt.She propped the lower lid of her right eye with the index finger of her right hand and asked no one—including her brother Vinzent—for advice, so she made up her mind quickly.She stood up on her bare feet and kicked aside the soft sheen of the potato color with her toes.The freshly laundered dress filled the vacancy. On Sunday morning, after she adjusted the order of her skirts, she set off for Ram Kao to go to church and worship the Lord Jesus whom she had fixed in her mind.On which layer do you wear your newly washed skirt?Not only was my grandmother a clean woman, but she was also a bit vain, and she wore her best clothes on a layer where others could see them, exposed to the sun in fine weather. It was a Monday afternoon, and my grandmother was sitting by a smoldering mound of potato seedlings.The outermost dress on Sunday was switched to the second layer on Monday, and the one that warmed her skin on Sunday floated on the outermost layer of her hips in Monday's overcast sky.She whistled, with no tune in her mind, and with a hazel stick scraped the ripe potatoes of the first gate out of the ashes.She pulled it away from the burning pile of potato vines and let the wind cool it.She inserted a sharp branch into the charred and split tuber and held it to her mouth.Instead of whistling, she breathed out from between her wind-parched lips, touting the ashes and dirt on the potato skins. She closed her eyes and blew on the dust.When she thought she had blown enough, she opened one eye first, then the other, and took a bite with her incisors, which were wide apart and otherwise flawless, and then removed the leftover potato, The bitten half of a mealy, still too hot potato remained steaming in the open mouth.Her nostrils were bulging, inhaling the smoke and the October air, her eyes wide open along the fields, fixed on the horizon divided by the full third of the poles and the tops of the chimneys of the brick kilns. Something moved between the poles.My grandmother closed her mouth, pursed her lips, squinted her eyes, and chewed the potatoes.Something is moving between the poles.Something is beating there.Three men jumped between the poles, three men jumped towards the chimney, and then circled in front of the chimney; The other two, tall and slender, followed closely behind him through the kiln and returned to the middle of the electric poles; Haste; the two were obliged to jump again toward the chimney, for the shorter and wider one had already jumped across; he was already a thumb's width from both of them when they began; suddenly they disappeared, He seemed to have lost his interest; and the short one, in the middle of jumping down the chimney, disappeared behind the horizon. They were out of sight now, and it might have been an intermission, or a costume change, or they had gone to break bricks and get paid. My grandmother was about to use the interval to fork a second potato, but missed one.For the man who looked short and broad, still in his original costume, climbed up to the horizon.It seemed to be a wooden fence, and he seemed to have left the two jumping people behind him behind the fence, among the bricks, or on the road to Brentau.Still, he was in a hurry, trying to jump faster than the pole.He jumps across the field in slow-motion big leaps; he dances in the mud, and the clods are thrown from the soles of his shoes; even though he jumps far, it still seems to be crawling in the mud.At times he seemed stuck in the mud, then stayed motionless in the air, wiping the sweat off his brow during a low but long jump, and then his legs stuck to the freshly plowed patch. in the field.The field was next to the five morgan potato field and extended to the field lane. -------- ①Morgan, the old German land area unit, equivalent to 2,500 to 3,400 square meters. He managed to reach the narrow path, the short and wide one hadn't disappeared there, and the other two tall and slender ones also climbed to the horizon.They may have been to the brick kiln just now, but now they are walking over in the muddy ground.They are tall and slender, but not skinny.My grandmother watched, and again missed the potato; as such things were not common, three adults, though of different stature, jumped around the telegraph pole, nearly breaking the chimney of the brick kiln, and then separated some distance from each other, First came the short and wide one, followed by the two tall and slender ones. All three bounced in the muddy ground with the same strenuous effort but with the same tenacity.In this way they jumped over the field that Vinzent had plowed two days ago and disappeared down the narrow road. Now that all three of them are gone, my grandmother can go back to the cold potato again.She hastily blew off the ash and dirt from the skin and stuffed the potato whole into her mouth, thinking - if she was thinking anything - that they might be from a brick kiln, chewing, making circular motions with her mouth .At this time, a man jumped out from the narrow path, the eyes on the black mustache looked around frantically, jumped to the side of the fire, and stood in front of the fire, behind the fire, and beside the fire at the same time, cursing , trembling and desperate, it was impossible to retreat, because the two tall and slender ones were chasing after them on the narrow road.He slapped himself, slapped his knees, the eyes on his head seemed to pop out, and the sweat was beading on his forehead.He boldly crawled closer, panting, with trembling mustaches, and crawled up to the soles of his boots; he crawled up to my grandmother, like a squat little animal, looking at my grandmother, she had to sigh, I can no longer chew the potatoes in my mouth, my toes are raised, and the soles of my boots form an oblique angle with the ground.She stopped thinking about brick kilns, brick piles, brick-burners, adobe-beaters, and lifted up her skirts, no, four skirts, all at the same time, so that this short, wide man who wasn't on a brick kiln could slip Go down to the bottom and get in together with his black mustache.He no longer looked like a small animal, neither from Ramkau nor from Phil Eck.He crawled under his skirts in terror, stopped beating his knees, was neither short nor broad, and nevertheless found a place to stay, and he forgot about panting, trembling, and knee-beating hands: and now there was silence, Like the first day of creation, but also like the end of the world, the breeze whispered in the fire, the telephone poles silently called the number, and the chimney of the brick kiln stood at attention.She, my maternal grandmother, smoothed out the outermost skirt and sensibly covered the second, and she could hardly feel him under the fourth, nor let the third know that something was making her skin Feel novel.Yes, it was a novelty, but the top skirt was sensibly smoothed out, and the second and third skirts were left in the dark.She picked two or three potatoes out of the hot ashes, took four raw ones from the basket at her right elbow, and poked them one by one into the hot ashes, covering them with more ashes, poking them. until the smoke came out—what else could she have done? My grandmother had just smoothed her skirts, and the smoke from the smoldering pile of potato vines, which had just been disoriented by desperately slapping knees, changing places and poking around, now formed a yellow puff along the wind direction, sticking to the ground. Float southwest.The two tall, slender ones, who were chasing after the short, broad one who was now hiding under the skirt, came ghost-like down the narrow path.They were tall and slender, and because of their occupations, they wore the uniforms of the rural security police. They almost ran close to my grandmother.Didn't one of them even jump over the fire?But they suddenly remembered that they had heels, so they stopped their bodies with the heels, turned their faces, put on their leather boots, stood in the thick smoke with their uniforms on, coughed repeatedly, and pulled out their uniforms from the smoke. Even thick smoke came out of his body.They were still coughing and talking to my grandmother, asking her if she had seen that Koljacek, and saying she must have, because she was sitting here, on the edge of the path, and he, Koljacek escaped from the narrow passage. My grandmother said she never met Koljacek because she didn't know Koljacek as a person.She wanted to know if he was from the brick kiln, because she only knew people from the brick kiln.The two uniformed men described Koljacek to her as not working with bricks, but as a short, broad fellow.My grandmother recalled that she saw such a person running past and pointing at a point in the direction of Bissau with a pointed branch holding steaming potatoes. Between the sixth and seventh poles to the right of the chimney.My grandmother said that she didn't know if it was Koljacek who was running, and pointed to the fire in front of her boots to ask them to forgive her, saying that she couldn't explain because the fire had tormented her ;The fire is neither dead nor alive, so she can't care about other people's business; whether it's people running past here or standing in the thick smoke, she never cares about anyone she doesn't know. Don't ask; she only knows Bissau's, Ramkau's, Phil Eck's and Brick Kilns, and that's enough for her. After my grandmother had said this, she sighed a few times, loud enough that the two men in uniform asked her why she sighed.She nodded towards the fire, meaning that she sighed because the little fire was neither yin nor yang, but also more or less because several people stayed in the thick smoke.After finishing speaking, she bit off half of a potato with her widely spaced front teeth, chewing intently, her two eyeballs turned to the upper left corner. The two men in rural security police uniforms couldn't tell anything from my grandmother's absent-minded eyes, and they couldn't decide whether to look for them in Bissau behind the telegraph poles, so they stabbed them with the bayonet hanging by their side. Heap of potato seedlings.Suddenly, they had an idea, and they kicked over the two baskets almost full of potatoes at my grandmother's elbow at the same time. After thinking about it for a long time, they couldn't understand why there were only potatoes in the basket rolling towards their boots, but there was no Cole. Jacek.Suspicious, they tiptoed around the pile of potatoes, as if in such a short time Koljacek could hide in the pile of potatoes; The howls of the people in the middle.They suspected every dead bush, every mouse-hole, a certain mole nest, and always my grandmother.She sat there as if rooted, sighing again and again, her pupils turned under her eyelids, only the whites of her eyes were visible.She was chanting the Kashu names of all the saints one by one—her voice was getting louder and louder because of the strangeness of the fire, because of the two baskets of potatoes being kicked to the ground. The two men in uniform stayed for half an hour, sometimes away from the fire, sometimes close to it, visually checking the position of the chimney of the brick kiln, wanting to occupy Bissau, but delaying the attack, and stretching their blue-red hands to the fire Up until my grandmother gave them each a potato with a splinter and a cracked skin, but she didn't stop sighing.The two men in uniform chewed halfway, then remembered that they were on official business, so they jumped out in the field, along the gorse bushes beside the narrow road, a stone's throw away, startling a hare, but it didn't cry. Koljacek.They found that there were steaming pink and white potatoes by the fire again, and being exhausted from the pursuit, they made up their minds and kindly carried the raw potatoes back into the two baskets; Kicking over, it is because of official business, so I have to do it. Evening squeezed the October sky into a slanting drizzle and an ink-like twilight.At this time, they were still attacking a dark boundary stone in the distance quickly and listlessly. After killing this enemy, they felt that the tossing was enough.They also kicked their legs, stretched their hands like blessings over the small fire that was wet with drizzle, and smoked long and wide, coughed again in the green smoke, smoked tears in the yellow smoke, Then, coughing and weeping, he lifted his boots and walked in the direction of Bissau.If Koljacek was not here, he must be in Bissau.The Rural Security Police will always know only two possibilities. The smoke from the slowly dying fire covered my grandmother like a fifth equally fat skirt, throwing her, her four skirts, her sighs, the calling of the saint's name, the same Like Erjacek, under the smoke skirt.When the two uniformed figures were reduced to rickety dots and slowly disappeared into the twilight between the telephone poles, my grandmother struggled to her feet, as if she had taken root and was now putting The fledgling plant is pulled out along with the soil and fibers. Koljacek felt cold.He suddenly lost his cover and lay short and wide in the rain.He hastened to button up the trousers he had unbuttoned when he was under his skirt, frightened and in desperate need of refuge, wherever there was a place to lie down.He fastened the button with nimble fingers, fearing that his piston would catch cold, because in this autumn weather, there was a great danger of catching a cold. My grandmother also found four cooked potatoes in the hot ashes.Three were given to Koljacek and one was kept for himself.Before she opened her mouth to eat the potatoes, she asked him if he was from the brick kiln, although she knew that Koljacek was from somewhere else, but he was not from the brick kiln.Before he could answer, she asked him to help carry the lighter basket, and stooped to lift the heavier one, taking her rake and hoe with one hand free.So, with her basket, potatoes, rake, and hoe, and with her four skirts billowed like sails, she set off for the Bissau quarry. The quarry is not in Bissau, but closer to Ramcao.They left the brick kiln on the left, and walked towards the Black Forest, where Goldkruger was, and beyond that was Brentau.The quarry is in a pit in front of the Black Forest.Short and broad Joseph Koljacek followed my grandmother there, and he could no longer be separated from the four skirts.