Chapter 27 seventy-five kilograms

Vyatsma and Bryansk; then came the muddy period.In mid-October 1941, Oscar also began digging hard in the mud.The reader will perhaps forgive me for comparing Army Group Center's results in the mud with those I achieved in Mrs. Lena Greve's impassable, equally muddy area.Not far from Moscow, tanks and trucks got stuck in the mud, and I got stuck in the mud; there, the wheels were still turning, turning up the mud, and I wasn't going to let it go - I was in Gray Mrs. Husband succeeded in whipping up foam in the muddy ground.This was true, but even so, there was no question of occupying land, not far from Moscow, or in the bedroom of Greve's apartment.

-------- ①In October 1941, Nazi Germany marched into Moscow, encircling and annihilating two Soviet troops in these two places. ② On October 6, 1941, snow began to fall in the Soviet Union and the roads were muddy.It is a metaphor here that the Nazi German offensive was blocked. I still don't want to let go of this comparison: just as future strategists will learn their lessons from a botched mud operation, so I draw my own from the struggle with such a natural phenomenon as Mrs. Greve. conclusion.We should not underestimate the variety of operations on the home front in World War II.Oscar was seventeen years old at the time. Although he had messed around in his youth, he was trained to be a masculine man in Lena Greve's practice area where he could not see the whole picture clearly and was lurking in danger.I now give up the analogy with military operations, and instead use the concept of artists to measure Oscar's progress.So I said: Maria persuaded me to use small forms in the vanilla mist of childish allure, familiarized me with lyric forms such as soda powder and mushroom picking, so, in Mrs. Greve's acidic, more In the cloud of hierarchy, I learned to breathe that wide, epic breath that makes it possible today to compare the victories at the front with those in bed.music!Starting from listening to Maria's childish and sentimental yet so sweet harmonica playing, I stepped up to the podium, because Lena Greve provided me with an orchestra with a large and comprehensive organization. Only found in Bavaria or Salzburg.In the band, I learned how to blow, play, play, pluck, and pull, whether it is continuo or counterpoint, whether it is twelve-tone system or traditional harmony, I have mastered all of them, as well as the introduction and lines of the scherzo. the tempo of the board, my passions were both dry and smooth; Oscar let Mrs. like an artist.

It was only twenty short steps from our Colony Warehouse to Greve's Greengrocer.The vegetable shop is diagonally opposite, and its position is much better than that of Alexander Scheffler, a baker on Little Hammer Road.The reason I studied female anatomy a little better than I did my masters Goethe and Rasputin probably stemmed from the more favorable position of the greengrocer.This sharp difference in upbringing, which still persists, may perhaps be explained, and even excused, by the difference between my two governesses.Lena Greve did not want to teach me at all, but humbly and passively offered her wealth to me as material for observation and experimentation.In contrast, Gretchen Scheffler takes her educational mission too seriously.She wanted to see my grades, to hear me read aloud, to gaze at my beautifully written drummer's fingers, to befriend my lovely grammar, while she herself profited from this friendship.Oscar, however, would not let her see any obvious signs that he himself had achieved something.At this point, Gretchen Scheffler lost her patience.Not long after my poor mom died, and after seven years of teaching, she turned to her knitting again.Since the baker couple still had no children, she still gave me the sweaters, stockings, and mittens she knitted as usual, but only occasionally, mainly on big holidays.I no longer talk about Goethe and Rasputin with her, only the fragments of the works of these two masters I have kept, now here, now there, mostly in this apartment in the clothes-drying attic.Thanks to these fragments, Oskar did not completely waste this part of his studies; I was self-taught and formed my own opinions.

But Lena Greve, frail and sickly, was lingering on the side of the bed, and she could neither avoid me nor forsake me.Although her illness is chronic, it is not so serious that death will take away my female teacher Lina in advance.However, there are no permanent things on this planet, so when Oscar thought his studies had been completed, he abandoned this woman who lingered on the bedside. Gentlemen will say: In what a narrow world this young man was brought up!It was between a colonial goods store, a bakery, and a greengrocer that he had outfitted himself for a manly life.Although I have to admit that Oscar collected his first impressions of such importance in the environment of a rather stale and filthy petty bourgeoisie, there is still a third teacher after all.All that is left to this male teacher to do is to open the door to the world for Oscar, to make Oscar what he is today, to be a person, and for want of a better name I have to give him such a name that does not adequately describe it. Trait Title: Cosmopolitan.

As the most observant of you readers have already discovered, I am speaking of my teacher and master Bebra, the direct descendant of the Prince Eugene, descendant of the royal family of Louis XIV, the dwarf and musical buffoon Bebra.When I talked about Bebra, I naturally thought of the woman beside him, the great sleepwalker Rosweta Laguna, the beauty beyond time, who took my Maria in Matzerath In those dark years of my life, I had to think of her often.How old is she, lady?I asked secretly.Is she a twenty (if not nineteen) blooming maiden?Could she be that charming ninety-nine-year-old woman who would, in the next hundred years, embody the petite figure of eternal youth without aging?

If I remember correctly, I chanced upon these two persons who were so closely related to me not long after my poor mother died.We drank much at the Four Seasons Cafe together, then broke up and went our separate ways.There were small but not insignificant differences of opinion between us; Bebra was closely related to the Reich Propaganda Department, and I could easily hear from his hints that he was in and out of the private houses of Goebbels and Herr Goering, he He also tried his best to explain his cheating behavior to me and justify it.He tells how influential the medieval court jester was.He showed me a reproduction of a painting by a Spanish painter, showing some Philip or Carlos and his court.Among these stereotyped crowds, one could make out a few clowns, dressed in crumpled, angular, colorful costumes, of the same stature as Bebra and me—Oscar.Precisely because I love these paintings—today I can claim to be an enthusiastic admirer of the gifted painter Diego Velázquez—I don't want Bebra to convince me so easily.He then stopped comparing the buffoon at the court of Fatality IV of Spain with his position next to Joseph Goebbels, the upstart in the Rhineland.He spoke of hard times, of weaklings who had to retreat for a while, of rebellion rising up in covert forms.He said that little word at the time—"inner exile", and because of this, Oscar and Bebra parted ways.

-------- ① Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), a master of the Seville School of Painting in Spain, his works include group portraits (such as Philip III and IV) in addition to religious content. This is not to say that I was angry with the master at the time.In the following years, I have been looking for Bebra's name on the posters of vaudeville and circus posted on the advertising pillars. I have seen his name and Mrs. Laguna's name next to each other twice, but I did nothing to enable me to see these two friends again. I was counting on a chance encounter, but it didn't happen.If Bebra and I had gone the same way in the autumn of 1942 instead of 1943, Oscar would never have been Lena Grave's student but Beb Master La's apprentice.In this way, I crossed the Rue de la Besse day after day, and most of the time I stepped into the vegetable shop in the first hour of the morning. Out of courtesy, I always stood beside the owner Greve for half an hour first.The businessman turned into an eccentric builder, and I watched him make his ones without making a sound.Weird whining and creaking machinery, and I poked a customer when he came in, because Greff paid little attention to the world around him then.What's going on here?What had made this formerly cheerful and joking gardener and friend of youth so silent, what had made him so withdrawn, a queer, an old man with little grooming Woolen cloth?

-------- ①According to the previous article, it should be the autumn of 1941. No young man ever came to his door again.No one who grew up here knew him.His followers in Boy Scout days were torn apart by the war and sent to all fronts.They sent field letters, and then only field postcards.One day, Greve received indirect news that his favorite Horst Donat, first a boy scout, then a captain of the youth regiment, and finally a second lieutenant, had died on the banks of the Donets. From that day on, Greve grew old, paid little attention to his appearance, and devoted himself to making machinery.It turned out that one saw more tinkling and whining machines in his greengrocer than potatoes and cabbage bulbs.The general lack of food is naturally also a reason; people rarely supply vegetables to the vegetable store, even if the supply is irregular, and Greff is not as well-connected as Matzerath, who runs a big market and pulls various connections. To be a competent buyer.

The greengrocer was a wretched place to look at, but one should have been pleased that Greff had filled the space with meaningless noisy machinery, quaint as it was decorative.I rather like what emerges from the increasingly confused mind of Greff, an amateur craftsman.Today, as soon as I look at what my caretaker Bruno has woven out of baled rope, I think back to Greve's displays.Bruno is delighted today to see my half-joking, half-serious interest in his hand-knitted baubles, when, whenever Greve found this or that musical contraption aroused in me, He was also dreamily happy when he was having fun.For many years Greve had ignored me, but then, when I left his shop-turned-workshop after half an hour to visit his wife, Lena Greve, he Showed a disappointed look.

I probably spend two to two and a half hours with this lingering bedside woman, but how many of these things can I tell you?As soon as Oscar entered the room, she waved from the bed: "Oh, it's you, little Oscar. Come closer, do you want to get under the duvet? It's freezing in the room! Greff didn't heat the room. ’ So I crawled under her duvet and left my drum and the two active sticks by the bed, letting only the worn-out, fibrous third stick go with me. Visit Lena.Don't think I took off my clothes before I climbed into Lena's bed.I went to bed in wool and velvet, and leather shoes, which, after a considerable time, I emerged from under the tangled duvet, despite the laborious work of keeping warm. , and barely crumpled.

Not long after I left Lena's bed, I visited the greengrocer, still reeking of his wife.After doing this a few times, Greve established a rule, which I am also very willing to follow.While I was still in Mrs. Greve's bed, doing my last exercises, the greengrocer came into the bedroom, brought a basin full of hot water, set it on a little stool, and left Towels and soap.Without glancing at the bed, he left the bedroom without a word. Most likely, Oscar quickly broke away from the warm nest provided for him, walked to the bathtub, and gave himself and the old drum stick that had played a big role on the bed a thorough cleaning.I can understand Greff's intolerance of his wife's stench, even if it was thrown at him after a hand.In this way, I was welcomed by this amateur producer just after taking a shower.He started all his machines for me and made me listen to their various noises.To this day I am still baffled by the fact that Oskar and Greve, in spite of this belated intimacy, were never able to form a friendship.Greve was a stranger to me as usual, and though he had attracted my attention, I had never aroused my sympathy for him. In September 1942, I had just passed my eighteenth birthday without song or music, and on the radio the Sixth Army had taken Stalingrad.Shortly thereafter, Greff built a drum machine.At either end of a wooden rack he hung two plates, filled with potatoes, of equal weight.Then he removed a potato from the left plate, and the balance tipped up, opening a stop and setting the drum machine mounted on the wooden stand into motion: Cracks, rattles, rattles, cymbals strike, gongs strike, all these sounds make up a short, sonorous, discordantly pathetic finale.I love this machine.I repeatedly asked Greve to activate it to do the show for me.However, Oscar believes that the greengrocer, who loves cooking, had an idea and invented and built this machine for Oscar.It was not long before it became quite clear to me that my guess was wrong.Greve may have taken his cue from me, but the machine was built for him, because the machine's finale was also his finale. It was a clean October morning, as clean as it could be only when the north-easterly wind swept away the rubbish in front of the house.I left Madame Truczynski's place on time and came out into the street when Matzerath was pulling the shutters in front of the shop.I stood beside him just as he rattled the green-painted screen, and there was a cloud of colonial wares that had been stored in the store the night before, and then I ushered in the horses. Rat's morning kiss.Before Maria appeared, I crossed the rue Labes and cast a long shadow towards the stone pavement to the west, because to my right, in the east, over the Max Halbe square, the sun raised itself Pulled up high, it used the trick that Baron Munchausen used when he grabbed his braids and pulled himself out of the swamp. -------- ①The protagonist in the German folk fairy tale "The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen" (1786). Anyone who knew Greve the greengrocer as I did would have been at once surprised to see his shop windows shuttered and doors locked at such a time.Although Greve has become an increasingly eccentric Greve in recent years, he has always been open for business on time.He might be ill, Oskar thought, but then dismissed the idea.Greve took a full-body bath in the ice hole dug in the Baltic Sea last winter. Although he no longer went there as regularly as in previous years, how could this nature-loving person, despite showing some signs of aging, be able to recover overnight? What about falling ill?Mrs. Greve was relentless in exercising her bed privileges; and I knew that Greve despised soft beds, preferring a camp bed or a hard bed.There was no way any disease could have bound the greengrocer to his bed. I came to the vegetable store with the doors and windows locked, looked back at our store, and saw Matzerath in the store, and then I quickly beat a few bars on my tin drum, hoping that Mrs Greve's sensitive ear.It didn't take much noise for the second window on the right of the door to open.Mrs. Greve, in her pajamas, with her hair curled up and a pillow on her breast, showed her face above the icy window sill. "Come in, little Oscar! What are you waiting for, it's cold outside!" I took up a drum stick and tapped on the tin planking in front of the window to explain why. "Albrecht!" she yelled, "Albrecht, where are you? What's the matter?" She continued calling to her husband, walking away from the window.The door opened, and I heard her walking in the shop, and then she shouted and opened again.She shouted in the cellar, but I couldn't see, and I don't know why she shouted, because the cellar window was also sealed; through this window, potatoes were poured in during the stocking days, and the stockings increased more and more during the war years. less and less.I stuck an eye to the seam of the tarred planks in front of the window opening, and I saw the electric light in the cellar.I could see something white lying across the top of the cellar stairs, probably Mrs Greve's pillow. She must have left the pillow on the stairs, for she was no longer in the cellar.She yelled again in the shop, and then ran to the bedroom to yell.She took off the receiver, yelled, found the number, then yelled into the phone; but Oskar couldn't understand what it was all about.He just heard the word "accident" by accident, and the address, No. 24 Labes Road.She growled and repeated several times, then hung up the receiver.Immediately afterwards, she was wearing pajamas, without a pillow, but her head was still full of curly hair clips, and her shouts filled the window frame, and she cast her whole double body that I was familiar with on the ice flowers in the window box. , covering the pink tumor with both hands, shouting so loudly upstairs that the street became narrow.Oskar thought Mrs. Greve was breaking glass and singing too, but not a single glass was broken.The windows were flung open, the neighbors appeared, the women shouted to ask what was the matter, and the men burst out from adjacent door openings: the watchmaker Raubshard, with both arms only half in the sleeves of his coat, the old Hyland, Herr Reisberg, the tailor Libyshewski, Herr Esch, and even Probst, not the barber but the one from the coal shop, also came with his son.Matzerath, wearing white work clothes, came like a gust of wind, while Maria, who was holding little Kurt, stood in the doorway of the colonial merchandise store. I easily disappeared among these panicked adults, avoiding Matzerath who was looking for me.Matzerath and watchmaker Raubshard were the first to want to take action.They tried to climb the window into the house.But Mrs. Greve wouldn't let anyone climb it, let alone enter the house.As she clawed, hit, and bit, she still found time to cry out, louder and louder, and some of the words were even audible.We have to wait for the accident emergency team to come. She has already called, and there is no need for others to call. She knows what to do when something like this happens.All should go and tend their own shops.Things are bad enough here.Curiosity, nothing more than curiosity, this time seeing clearly where one's friends are when an unfortunate accident comes.She must have spotted me in the crowd under the window as she sang her dirge, for she was calling me, and after pushing the men down, she stretched out her bare arms towards me.Someone—Oscar still believes today that it was the watchmaker Raubshard—lifted me up and, against Matzerath's objections, sent me into the window, just before the icy window box, When Matzerath was about to grab me too, Lena Greff hugged me and pressed me against her warm pajamas.At this point she stopped shouting and just whimpered in a falsetto, sucking in gulps of air between the whimpers. Just now, Mrs. Greve's outcry had prompted impulsive and impertinent actions in the neighbors.Now her thin falsetto sobs had the same effect of turning the crowd under the frost into a silent and embarrassed crowd.They hardly dared to look at her crying face, and they transferred all their hopes, curiosity and concerns to the ambulance that was expected to arrive.Mrs. Greve's sobbing made Oskar uncomfortable too.I managed to slide down a little so I wasn't so close to her mournful voice.I let go of my arms around her neck, and sat on the flower box on the window sill with half of my buttocks.Oskar felt someone staring at him because Maria was standing in the shop doorway with the baby in her arms.And just like that, I gave up where I was sitting again, realizing the embarrassment of my situation.At the same time, I was thinking only of Maria, the neighbors were nothing to me.I propped myself away from the bank of Mrs. Greve, and I felt it vibrate too much, and reminded me of the bed. Lena Greve didn't notice me slipping away, maybe she didn't have the strength to hold the little body anymore.For a long time, this body had worked hard to provide her with a substitute.Lena probably also had a premonition that Oscar would slip away from her forever.She had a premonition that with her shouts a cacophony of voice descended into the world, which on the one hand became a high wall and a sound barrier between the woman at the side of the bed and the drummer, and on the other hand broke down the existing gap between Maria and me. high wall. I'm standing in Mr. and Mrs. Greve's bedroom.My drum hangs at an angle and is not very stable.Oscar is familiar with this room, he can recite the length and width of this pale green wallpaper.The washtub, filled with gray soapy water from the previous day, was still on the bench.All objects have their place, but I feel that broken, seated, and lying cups are the same as broken furniture, at least they have been repaired, as if all of them are standing on four feet or four legs. The wall-standing furniture needs Lena Greve's yelps followed by falsetto whimpers, which get a new, eerily cold sheen. The door to the shop was open.Oscar didn't want to go into the room that smelled of dry earth and onions, but he couldn't help himself.Daylight filtered through the cracks in the window shutters, dividing the room into strips with dusty bands of light.Most of Greve's noise and music machinery was in semi-darkness, and the light only illuminated certain details, a small bell, plywood braces and the lower part of the drum machine, and allowed me to see the Potato.The flap door behind the counter that covered the entrance to the shop was open, just like in our shop.The plank door was unsupported by anything, and Mrs Greve may have opened it hastily when she cried out, but she did not fasten the ring on the side of the counter with the hook on the door.Oscar only needs to touch it lightly, and the portcullis will fall down and seal the cellar door. I stood motionless behind the dusty and musty-smelling plank, gazing at the lighted square that framed part of the staircase and a concrete floor in the cellar.Part of a small platform that forms the steps projects into the box from the upper right corner.This little platform must have been a recent addition by Greve, for I had been in the cellar occasionally before, but had never seen it.Oskar would never have cast his eyes so obsessively into the cellar for such a long time to look at a small platform, but he did so because of the two filled woolen socks and two lace-up black leather shoes, which were strangely shortened.Although I couldn't see the soles, I recognized Greve's hiking shoes right away.This can't be Greve, I thought to myself, how could he be standing in the cellar like this, getting ready for the excursion?Because the shoe is not bottom-down, but floats freely above the small platform; the straight-down toe barely touches the wooden board of the small platform, barely touching, but still touching.For a second I pictured Greif standing on the tip of his shoe because I believed he, the gymnast and nature lover, was capable of such ludicrously strenuous exercises of. To reassure me of the validity of my supposition, and to give the greengrocer a good laugh if it were the case, I climbed cautiously up the steep stairs, descending them step by step.If I remember correctly, I was still knocking on this fear-creating and fear-dispelling tool: "Black Cook, are you there? Yes!" When Oscar stood firmly on the concrete floor, he let his gaze pass through the winding road, passing over a bunch of empty onion sacks, and then sliding past the piles of empty fruit boxes, passing by a place he had never seen before. The cross-beam frame is close to where Greve's hiking shoes hang or stand on the toe. Of course I knew Greve was hanging.The shoes dangled, and so did the coarsely woven dark green socks.Naked man's knee above the top of the stockings, hairy thighs to the hem of the shorts; at this moment, a prickly, itchy sensation slowly spread from my genitals, then to the buttocks, and then to the numb back , climbed up the spine, and then to the back of the neck, making me hot and cold.From there, the feeling went all the way down between my legs, drying up my small round stick, and then it jumped over my already curved back to the nape of my neck again, where it gradually shrunk—today, As long as someone said the word hanging in front of Oscar, or even hung up the laundry, he would feel this prickly and itchy feeling.It wasn't just Greve's hiking shoes, wool socks, knees and shorts that hung there, Greve's whole body was suspended by the neck, a grinning face on a rope, still not out of his onstage airs. -------- ① In German, "suspension" and "hanging" are the same word. The prickly, itchy sensation disappeared astonishingly quickly.I think Greve's posture is back to normal; because the body posture of a hanging person is basically the same as a person walking on his hands, a person standing on his head, a person who wants to ride a horse and jumps onto a four-legged horse. The appearance of a man is as normal and natural as a horse in a truly unfortunate pose. -------- ① means that when taking these postures, the toes are all facing down or up. Plus there's the scenery.Only then did Oscar understand the energy that Greve had spent in the past.The frames and sets in which Greve hangs are chosen, almost extravagant.The greengrocer had been looking for a form of death that suited him, he had found a way of dying that balanced both ends.He, during his life, had had trouble with Bureau of Weights and Measures officials many times, there had been unpleasant correspondence between them, and they had repeatedly confiscated his scales and weights.He, once paid a fine for inaccurately weighing fruit and vegetables.This time, he used the potato to balance his body, keeping it within a gram. A dull, perhaps soaped, rope, guided by pulleys, passed over two beams that Greve had set up on a brace for his doom.This brace has only one purpose, and that is as his doom brace.He wasted good wood, and I deduced from this that the greengrocer did not think of economy.It must have been very difficult to get beams and planks in those war years when building materials were scarce.Before this, Greve must have done barter, he traded fruit for wood.Therefore, there is no shortage of purely superfluous corner braces that are only for decoration on this bracket.The small three-stage platform forming the steps—Oscar had just seen a corner of it in the shop above—raised the whole beam structure to an almost majestic level.The drum machine appears to have been used as a model by the amateur builder.As in the case of that machine, Greff and his counter-weights hung on the inside of the stand.Between him and the equally swaying potatoes stood a neat little green ladder, in stark contrast to four whitewashed corner beams.He tied several potato baskets to the main rope with an artful noose tied like a Boy Scout.Four white-painted but still powerful bulbs illuminate the interior of the stand.So, without having to climb up and defile that stately little platform, Oscar can read from a little piece of cardboard above the potato basket wired to a Boy Scout noose: Seventy-five kilos (less than a hundred gram). Greif hangs there in his Boy Scout uniform.At his own end he reverted to the uniform of the antebellum days.The uniform was already narrow on him.He couldn't tie the top two buttons and the belt, or else his clothes, which were neat, now had a nasty odour.Greve folded the fingers of his left hand in Boy Scout fashion.The Hanged Man tied his Boy Scout hat around his right wrist before hanging himself.He couldn't button the collar of his shirt, nor could he button the top button of his knee-length shorts, so his curly black chest hair poked through the gap. On the steps of the little terrace were a few plants of purple flowers interspersed inappropriately with coriander stalks.Perhaps he had already scattered the flowers, for he had used more than half the purples and a few roses to decorate the four little portraits hanging from the four main beams of the trestle.On the left front hangs a statue of Sir Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, with a glass frame.Saint George, unframed, at rear left.At the rear right is the head of David painted by Michelangelo, without glass.On the front right column, a framed and glassed photograph of an expressive, handsome boy of about sixteen smiling.This is a former photograph of Greff's favorite Horst Donnat, who later became a second lieutenant and was killed in Donets. Perhaps I should also mention a piece of paper that was scattered in four among the asters and parsley on the small terrace step.The pieces are thrown there, but they fit together effortlessly.Oscar did so, recognizing it as a summons from a court that had repeatedly stamped the disciplinary police department. What I still have to report is that the siren of the ambulance awakened me who was investigating the cause of the death of a greengrocer.Immediately after, they stumbled down the stairs, onto the small landing, and reached for the hanging Greve.However, as soon as they lifted the businessman a little, the potato baskets used as counterweights fell and overturned.Like the drum machine, the mechanism on the plywood-covered stand that Greve had ingeniously started to operate when the stopper was opened.Below, potatoes thumping onto the little platform, and from the little platform onto the concrete floor; Greif's grand finale. To this day, one of Oscar's most difficult tasks is to make the noise of an avalanche of falling potatoes - which, by the way, made a fortune for a few first responders - the organic din of Greve's drum machine. There was an echo on his tin drum.Perhaps because my drums had a decisive influence on the image of Grave's death, I sometimes managed to play an embellished arrangement of Grave's death on Oscar's tin drum.My friends and caregiver Bruno asked about the title of the drum piece, so I named it: Seventy-Five Kilograms.