Return of the Natives : THE CALL OF THE TOAD <i> By Gunter Grass</i> , <i> Translated by Ralph Manheim</i> , <i> (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $19.95; 256 pp.) </i>

A wit was once asked how he expected to spend eternity in Heaven. He replied: “With English books and German music.” “And how,” he was asked, “would you spend eternity in hell?” “With the reverse, of course.”

An overstatement, surely, but it’s nice to think that in the latter eventuality he’d find Gunter Grass’s new novel on the Stygian shelf. Compared to some of Grass’ major efforts--”The Tin Drum,” for instance, or “Dog Years”--”The Call of the Toad” is short; it only seems if one needs an eternity to get through it.

“Toad” offers little plot and less dialogue, but there is a situation that can be described. On November 2, 1989, just days before the Berlin Wall begins to fall, a widow and a widower meet at a flower stall in Gdansk. She is Polish; he, German. They share a name: she is Alexandra, a restorer of art, “a gildress of ornate emblems”; he is Alexander, a professor of art history who wrote his dissertation on “Memorial Slabs and Epitaphs in the Churches of Danzig.” Danzig is what Gdansk was called when the Germans occupied the city. Like Grass himself, Alexander was born in Danzig; like millions of Germans, he found himself dislocated after the war. Alexandra, too, is uprooted: she was born in Vilnius when the Poles occupied Lithuania.

Brooding on “the Century of Expulsions” and the yearning of refugees to be buried in whatever part of the world they think of as home, the pair concoct a plan: a Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Association. The corpses of ethnic Germans born in Danzig would return to Gdansk for burial; those of Lithuanian Poles would return to Vilnius. “The Poles as well as the Germans must recognize the right of the dead to repatriation,” says Alexander. “It is a human right that knows no frontiers.” “No room for politics in the cemetery,” Alexandra replies. If Alexander’s conversation customarily sounds as if it had been plucked from the final revision of a United Nations report, Grass makes Alexandra speak in a Pole’s erratic German--which must be rendered into spikey English by Grass’ perdurable translator, Ralph Mannheim.

From its outset, this enterprise is intended to be “a thing that would reconcile the nations,” It becomes instantly successful: “burial-ready persons” line up to pay DM 1000 in advance; the original cemetery in Gdansk is expanded and then scores more are bought. A board of directors is formed (improbably, the pair whose idea it was do not have voting rights) to develop ancillary projects: there must be hotels to house the mourners; retirement homes (or “death-houses” with golf courses to accommodate refugees awaiting interment in their homeland; and, as a “space-saving venture,” mass graves. The propriety of repatriating the previously buried becomes a delicate issue, for the rich dead will be reburied; the poor dead, not.

Does all this sound like heavy weather? You bet. For the benefit of readers whose perceptive faculties may have been swept away by a tide of good German lager, Grass obliges one of his directors to explain that the Cemetery Association has become “the new German land grabbers.” “What was lost in the war is being retaken by economic power.” Yet there is hope: a light in the East, so to speak. One of Alexander’s friends is a Bengali refugee with an equally innovative (and profitable) idea: using bicycle rickshaws to relieve congested inner-city traffic. Grass appears to view the prospect of hordes of Asians flooding into Europe with equanimity--at least they’ll be environmentally sound.

When the critics in Valhalla assemble to recite the many virtues of German literature, “humor” is not a word that falls from every lip. Indeed, the wittiest writers in German tend to be of other nationalities: Kafka, Durrenmatt. Yet here is Grass, who has worried honorably over Germany’s condition in this century, attempting humor; I’d like to say something good about his book, but he makes it difficult. The novel’s premise--that today’s Germany is still a problem for itself and other countries--is unexceptionable. The metaphor he chooses to express his premise--that the emotional ties which bind refugees to their homeland and overcome national divisiveness--ought to be compelling, but it isn’t. The metaphor is about feeling-- and there’s no feeling in this story, just a lot of geographical detail.

In fact, there’s very little story, and that little is screened from the reader by a cumbersome device: one of Alexander’s classmates pastes the narrative together from journals, tapes and photos. This narrator is often as irritated by the protagonists as we are.

Is it possible that this book, in the original German, has some charm? I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that if “Toad” were not by Grass, it would not have been published here. It’s not likely to find an audience here; like local wines, some European novels don’t travel well.