by Günter Grass
Not till Jan Bronski found and married his Hedwig, a Kashubian girl from the city, but one who still owned some farmland in Ramkau, did relations between Jan and my mama improve. At a dance in the Café Woyke, where they ran into each other by accident, she is said to have introduced Jan to Matzerath. The two gentlemen, so different by nature yet so similar in their feelings for Mama, took a fancy to each other, though Matzerath bluntly declared in his Rhenish way that Jan's transfer to the Polish Post Office was a harebrained idea. Jan danced with Mama, Matzerath with the big-boned, lanky Hedwig, whose inscrutable bovine gaze always made those around her think she was pregnant. They continued to dance with, around, and into each other all evening, always thinking as they danced of the next dance to come, a step ahead in the two-step, swept away by the English waltz, till they found their self- confidence at last in the Charleston, and settled into a sensual flow bordering on the religious during the slow-moving foxtrot.
When Alfred Matzerath married my mama in nineteen twenty-three, a year when you could paper your bedroom with zeroes for the price of a box of matches, Jan was one witness and a grocer named Mühlen the other. I can't tell you much about Mühlen. He rates a mention only because, just as the Rentenmark was being introduced, he sold Mama and Matzerath a struggling grocery store in the suburb of Langfuhr that had been nearly ruined by selling on credit. Within a relatively short time, Mama, who had acquired skills for dealing with every sort of deadbeat in the basement shop on Troyl and was blessed with cleverness, a ready wit, and a natural head for business, had lifted the fortunes of the failing business so substantially that Matzerath was forced to give up his job as a salesman in the paper industry, which was glutted in any case, in order to help out in the shop.
The two complemented each other perfectly. Mama's skills with customers were matched by the Rhinelander's rapport with agents and his deals on the wholesale market. Moreover, Matzerath's love for the cook's apron, for kitchen work including cleaning up, was a great relief to Mama, who stuck to quick meals.
The flat, which adjoined the store, was cramped and poorly laid out, but compared with living conditions on Troyl, which I've only heard stories about, it was sufficiently middle-class that Mama, at least during the early years of her marriage, must have felt comfortable on Labesweg.
In addition to a long, slightly crooked hall, stacked for the most part with boxes of Persil, there was a spacious kitchen, though it too was half-filled with goods such as canned food, sacks of flour, and packets of oatmeal. The central feature of the ground-floor flat was a living room that looked out through two windows onto the street and a front garden area adorned in summer with Baltic seashells. The wallpaper held a good deal of wine red, while the couch verged on purple. Standing black-legged on a blue carpet, a dining room leaf table with rounded corners, four black leather chairs, and a little round smoking table that was constantly shifted about. Black and gold, an upright clock, flanked by the windows. Black, pressed against the purple couch, the piano, first rented, then slowly paid for over time, with revolving stool atop a pale yellow longhair pelt. Opposite it the buffet. The black buffet with its sliding, cut-glass doors, bordered by black egg-and-dart bars, with heavy black fruit carved on the lower doors enclosing the china and linen, with black claw feet, black carved headboard—and between the crystal bowl with artificial fruit and the green loving cup won in a lottery, a gap, which thanks to my mama's business acumen was later filled by a light brown radio.
The bedroom was done in yellow and looked out on the inner courtyard of the four-story building. You'll have to take my word for it that the canopy above the broad matrimonial fortress was light blue, cast light blue light on a framed and glazed repentant Mary Magdalene above the bed, lying flesh-colored in a grotto, sighing toward the top right edge of the picture and wringing so many fingers at her breast that you had to re-count them constantly, thinking there must be more than ten. Across from the marriage bed a white-enameled wardrobe with mirror doors, to the left a little dressing table, to the right a marble-topped chest of drawers, and hanging from the ceiling, not shaded with fabric as in the living room, but on two brass arms beneath pale pink porcelain globes that left the bulbs visible, the bedroom lamp spreading its light.
Today I drummed away a long morning putting questions to my drum, wanting to know if the light bulbs in our bedroom were forty or sixty watts. It's not the first time I've asked my drum and myself this burning question. It often takes hours to find my way back to those bulbs. For must not the thousands of lights I've brought to life or put to sleep by switching them on or off when entering or leaving countless flats first be forgotten if I'm to make my way, by the plainest and simplest of drumming, through a forest of standard bulbs back to those lights in our bedroom on Labesweg?
Mama's confinement took place at home. When the contractions started she was still standing in the shop filling blue pound and half-pound bags with sugar. It was too late to take her to the women's clinic; an elderly midwife, who took up her bag only occasionally now, had to be summoned from nearby Hertastraße. In the bedroom she helped Mama and me break free from each other.
I first saw the light of this world in the form of two sixty-watt bulbs. As a result, the biblical text "Let there be light and there was light" still strikes me today as the perfect slogan for Osram light bulbs. With the exception of the obligatory perineal tear, my birth went smoothly. Effortlessly I freed myself from the head-first position favored by mothers, embryos, and midwives alike.
Let me say at once: I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is complete at birth and thereafter simply confirmed. As impervious to influence as I had been as an embryo, listening only to myself, gazing at my own reflection in the amniotic fluid, so closely and critically did I now eavesdrop upon my parents' first spontaneous remarks beneath the light bulbs. My ear was wide awake. Although it could be described as small, bent, gummed up, and of course dainty, it nonetheless caught and preserved each of those watchwords that, offered as my first impressions, were henceforth so important to me. Still more: what my ear took in, my tiniest of brains immediately evaluated, and I decided, after devoting sufficient thought to all I had heard, to do certain things and most certainly not to do others.
"It's a boy," this Herr Matzerath said, who presumed he was my father. "He'll take over the business someday. At last we know why we've been working our fingers to the bone."
Mama was thinking less about the business and more about equipping her son: "Well, I knew it would be a boy, even if I sometimes said it would be a little lass."
Thus prematurely acquainted with feminine logic, I heard the following: "When little Oskar is three years old, we'll give him a tin drum."
Weighing maternal and paternal promises against each other carefully and at some length, Oskar observed and listened to a moth that had flown into the room. Medium-sized and hairy, it wooed the two sixty-watt light bulbs, casting shadows out of all proportion to its wing-span, enveloping, filling, enlarging the room and its contents with flickering motion. What stayed with me, however, was less this light-and-shadow play than the sound produced by the moth and the light bulb: the moth chattered away as though in haste to unburden itself of its knowledge, as though it had no time for further cozy chats with fonts of light, as though this dialogue of moth and bulb were now its last confession, and once the absolution dispensed by light bulbs was granted, there'd be no further chance for sin or ecstasy.
Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I've heard rabbits, foxes, and dormice drum. Frogs can drum up a storm. They say wood peckers drum worms from their casings. And men beat on timpani, cymbals, kettles, and drums. We have eardrums and brake drums, we drum up excuses, drum into our heads, drum out of the corps. Drummer boys do that, to the beat of a drum. Composers pen concerti for strings and percussion. I might mention Tattoos, both minor and major, and Oskar's attempts up to now: all that is nothing compared with the orgy of drumming staged by that moth with tw
o simple sixty-watt bulbs on the day of my birth. Perhaps there are Negroes in darkest Africa, and those in America who have not yet forgotten Africa, who with their innate sense of rhythm might manage, in imitation of my moth, or of African moths—which as everyone knows are larger and more splendid than those of Eastern Europe—to drum in a similar fashion: with discipline, yet freed of all restraint; I hold to my East European standards, cling to that medium-sized, powdery-brown moth of the hour of my birth, declare him Oskar's master.
It was in the first days of September. The sun was in the sign of Virgo. A late-summer storm pushed its way through the night from afar, shifting chests and cupboards about. Mercury made me critical, Uranus ingenious, Venus made me believe in modest happiness, Mars in my ambition. Libra was rising in the house of the ascendant, which made me sensitive and prone to exaggeration. Neptune entered the tenth house, the house of midlife, and anchored me between miracle and deception. It was Saturn, in the third house in opposition to Jupiter, that cast doubt on my origins. But who sent the moth, and allowed him and a late-summer thunderstorm, banging and blustering like a high school principal, to stimulate my longing for the tin drum my mother had promised me, and to steadily increase over time both my aptitude and my desire for it?
Outwardly screaming and impersonating a reddish blue baby, I reached a decision: I would reject my father's suggestion and everything else to do with the grocery store point-blank, but when the proper time came, that is, on the occasion of my third birthday, I would give favorable consideration to my mother's wish.
In addition to all this speculation about my future, I realized the following: Mama and this father Matzerath had no ear at all for my protests and decisions, and would neither understand nor in the end respect them. Lonely and misunderstood, Oskar lay beneath the light bulbs, concluded that things would go on that way for sixty or seventy years until a final short circuit cut off all fonts of light, and so lost his enthusiasm before this life beneath light bulbs even began; and only the prospect of a tin drum back then kept me from expressing more forcefully my desire to return to my embryonic head-first position.
Besides, the midwife had already cut my umbilical cord; there was nothing more to be done.
The Photo Album
I am guarding a treasure. Through all the bad years of nothing but days to get through, I guarded it, hid it away, pulled it out again; during the trip in the boxcar I clutched it to my breast, a thing of value, and when I slept, Oskar slept on his treasure, his photo album.
What would I do without this open family grave that shows all things so clearly? It has a hundred and twenty pages. On each page, four or six or sometimes only two photos are carefully arranged, mounted in patterns that are sometimes symmetrical, sometimes less so, but always based on right angles. It's bound in leather, and the older it gets, the more leathery it smells. There were times when it was exposed to the wind and weather. The photos loosened, and I was obliged by their helpless state to seek some quiet opportunity when paste could restore those nearly lost images to their ancestral spot.
What else in this world, what novel has the epic scope of a photo album? May the good Lord in Heaven, that diligent amateur who photographs us from on high each Sunday and pastes us in his album, terribly foreshortened and more or less properly exposed, guide me safely through this my album, prevent me from any stops of unseemly length along the way, no matter how pleasurable, and refrain from nourishing Oskar's love of the labyrinthine; for I'm eager to follow up these photos with the originals.
A few incidental remarks: all sorts of uniforms here, dresses and hairstyles change, Mama gets fatter, Jan grows slacker, here are some people I don't even know, wonder who took that shot, things are starting to go downhill, and now the turn-of-the-century art photo degenerates into today's commercial photo. Take, for example, this monu ment to my grandfather Koljaiczek and this passport photo of my friend Klepp. Simply place Grandfather's sepia portrait side by side with that glossy passport photo of Klepp, just crying out for a rubber stamp, and it's easy to see where advances in photography have brought us. And all the paraphernalia these instant photos require. But I have more to answer for than Klepp, since, as the owner of the album, it was up to me to maintain standards. If hell's in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era. Quick, a little pathos: O man amid candid cameras, snapshots, passport photos! O man in the glare of flashbulbs, O man standing erect beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, O photomat man, whose right ear must be exposed to be passport-worthy. And—hold the pathos: perhaps even this hell will be bearable, because the worst pictures are never taken, but only dreamed of, or if taken, never developed.
Klepp and I had pictures both taken and developed during our early days on Jülicher Straße, having made friends while eating spaghetti. I was busy with travel plans back then. That is, I was feeling so depressed that I wanted to take a trip, and planned to apply for a passport. But since I lacked the cash to finance a proper trip, one that included Rome, Naples, or at least Paris, I was just as glad I couldn't afford it, for nothing's more depressing than traveling in a state of depression. We both had enough money for the movies, however, so Klepp and I visited cinema halls where, in keeping with Klepp's tastes, Wild West films were playing or, matching my needs, films in which Maria Schell wept as the nurse, with Borsche as head surgeon having just finished a most difficult operation, playing Beethoven sonatas by the open balcony door, the very image of responsibility. We found it a great affliction that the programs lasted only two hours. We would have liked to see some of them a second time. Often we got up at the end of a film and went to the box office to buy another ticket for the same show. But the moment we left the hall and saw the longer or shorter lines at the box-office window we lost courage. We were too ashamed to face the total strangers who stared at us with such insolence, let alone the cashier, and did not dare extend the line.
After nearly every film we saw those days, we would go to the photography shop near Graf-Adolf-Platz to have our passport photos taken. They knew us well there and smiled to themselves as we entered, but still asked us most politely to take a seat, for we were customers and respected as such. As soon as the booth was free, a young woman, of whom I recall nothing except that she was nice, pushed us one after the other into the booth, deftly positioned and adjusted first me, then Klepp, and told us to stare at a certain spot until a flash of light synchronized with a bell announced that we were now on the plate six times in succession.
Barely photographed and still slightly stiff around the corners of our mouths, we were pressed into comfortable wicker chairs by the young woman, who asked us nicely, just being nice and also nicely dressed, to be patient for five minutes. We were happy to wait. After all, now we had something to look forward to: we were eager to see how our passport photos had turned out. After just seven minutes the nondescript but still nice young woman handed us two little paper envelopes and we paid.
The triumph in Klepp's slightly protuberant eyes. As soon as we had the envelopes, we also had an excuse to enter the nearest beer hall, for no one likes to look at his passport pictures on the open, dusty street, standing amid all the bustle, blocking the flow of traffic. Just as we were loyal to the photography shop, we always went to the same tavern on Friedrichstraße. Ordering beer, blood sausage with onions, and black bread, we spread out the slightly damp pictures before our order came, using the entire top of the round wooden table, and immersed ourselves, as our beer and blood sausage promptly arrived, in our own strained features.
We always had other pictures with us too, taken after previous visits to the movies. So there was a basis for comparison: and where there's a basis for comparison, you're allowed a second, third, and fourth glass of beer to liven things up a bit or, as they say in the Rhineland, create a little ambiance.
That's not to say that someone who's depressed can render his own depression less tangible by
means of a passport photo, for true depression is intangible by its very nature; at least mine, and Klepp's as well, had no tangible basis, and demonstrated in its almost cheery intangibility a staying power that nothing seemed capable of dispersing. If there was any chance of confronting our depression then, it could only be through those photos; for in these series of snapshots, not always sharply focused to be sure, we found ourselves passive and neutralized, which was what mattered. We could treat ourselves however we wished; drink beer as we did so, torture our blood sausages, create a little ambiance, and play. We bent and folded those little pictures, cut them up with the scissors we always carried for just this purpose. We pieced old and new likenesses together, gave ourselves one eye or three, ears for noses, let our right ears speak or stay silent, browbeat our chins. Nor did we keep our montages separate; Klepp borrowed details from me, I took traits from him: we were creating new, and we hoped happier, creatures. Now and then we gave a photo away.
We—I'm speaking only of Klepp and me, leaving aside all those artificially assembled figures—got into the habit of giving the waiter, whom we called Rudi, a photo on each visit, and that beer hall saw us at least once a week. Rudi, the sort of fellow worthy of twelve children and guardianship of eight more, was familiar with our compulsion, and though he already had dozens of pictures of us in profile and even more en face, he always assumed a sympathetic expression and said thank you when, after lengthy consultation and a stringent selection process, we handed him the photo.