The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  And those who were not yet dancing on the Maiwiese grabbed the last available ladies before it was too late. But Löbsack had to dance with his hump, because anything wearing a skirt nearby was already occupied, and the ladies from the Women's Association who might have come to his aid were shifting about, far, far away from the lonely Löbsack, on the hard wooden rows of the grandstand. Nevertheless—as his hump advised him—he still danced, tried to put a good face on this awful Jimmy music, and save what could still be saved.

  But there was nothing left to save. The Volk danced off across the Maiwiese, leaving it thoroughly trampled but green and deserted. The Volk disappeared with Jimmy the Tiger into the spacious grounds of nearby Steffenspark. There the jungle Jimmy promised was offered, tigers prowled on velvet paws, a substitute forest primeval for the Volk who had just been thronging the Maiwiese. Law and order had gone to the dogs. But whoever loved culture could still hear, on the broad, well-kept promenades of Hindenburgallee, first planted in the eighteenth century, cut down in eighteen ought-seven while under siege by Napoleon's troops and planted again in Napoleon's honor in eighteen-ten, in other words on historic ground, all those still dancing on Hindenburgallee could still hear my music, for the microphone above me had not been turned off, and I could be heard as far as Oliva Gate, nor did I let up till I and the fine young boys at the base of the grandstand had managed, with the help of Jimmy's unchained tiger, to clear the Maiwiese of everything but the daisies.

  Even when I gave my drum a well-earned rest, the drummer boys kept right on. It was some time before my musical influence wore off.

  A word or two about the aftermath: Oskar couldn't come out from under the grandstand immediately, since SA and SS officers were banging away at planks with their boots for over an hour, snagging tears in brown and black cloth, apparently looking for something within the framework—a Socialist, perhaps, or a team of Communist saboteurs. Without enumerating all Oskar's dodges and feints we can simply state: they didn't find Oskar, because they were no match for him.

  Things finally grew quiet in the wooden labyrinth, which was about the size of the whale in which Jonah sat in oily lethargy. But Oskar was no prophet, he was feeling hungry. There was no Lord to say, "Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it." Nor did the Lord have to grow a gourd for me that a worm would then destroy at the Lord's command. I didn't bewail that biblical gourd, nor Nineveh, even one called Danzig. I had affairs of my own to attend to, tucked my non-biblical drum under my sweater, and without hitting my head or scratching myself on a nail, emerged from the bowels of a grandstand that, meant for meetings and rallies of all sorts, had the proportions of a prophet-swallowing whale merely by chance.

  Who paid any attention to the little three-year-old boy, whistling as he trudged along the edge of the Maiwiese in the direction of the Sporthalle? Beyond the tennis courts my boys from the grandstand were marching with lansquenet drums, with shallow drums, fifes, and trumpets. Punitive exercises I noted, and was only moderately sorry for those at the beck and call of their leader's fife. Off to the side from his assembled staff, Löbsack was pacing up and down with his lonely hump. Turning on his heel at each end of his course, he had succeeded in completely eradicating the grass and the daisies.

  When Oskar reached home, lunch was already on the table: meat-loaf with boiled potatoes, red cabbage, and chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce for dessert. Matzerath didn't say a word. Mama's thoughts were elsewhere. But that afternoon there was a family fight over jealousy and the Polish Post Office. Toward evening a refreshing thunderstorm that included a cloudburst and a lovely drum solo of hail gave a lengthy performance. Oskar's exhausted drum could rest and listen.

  Shop Windows

  For a long time, till November of thirty-eight to be exact, crouching under grandstands with my drum, with greater or lesser success I broke up rallies, reduced speakers to stutters, and turned marches and hymns into waltzes and foxtrots.

  Today, as a private patient in a mental institution, when all that's past history, still being eagerly forged but from cold iron, I've achieved a proper distance from my drumming under grandstands. It would never occur to me to see myself as a member of the Resistance on the basis of six or seven disrupted rallies, three or four assemblies and parade marches drummed off stride. The term is quite fashionable these days. You hear of the spirit of Resistance, of Resistance circles. There's even talk of internal resistance, what's now called Inner Emigration. To say nothing of those honorable men so well versed in the scriptures who were fined by a growling air-raid warden for having failed to black out their bedroom windows and now call themselves Resistance fighters, men of the Resistance.

  Let's take another look under Oskar's grandstands. Didn't Oskar show others a thing or two with his drum? Did he not, as his teacher Bebra advised, take control of events and cause the Volk standing in front of the grandstand to break out in dance? Did he not make hash of the plans of Löbsack, District Head of Indoctrination, a man of ready wit and a smooth customer if there ever was one? Did he not, on a hotpot Sunday in August of thirty-five, and on a few later occasions, break up rallies in brown with flourishes on a tin drum that, though red and white, was not Polish?

  You have to admit I did all that. But does that make me, lying here in a mental institution, a Resistance fighter? My answer must be no, and so I ask that you, who aren't inmates in a mental institution, regard me too as merely a somewhat eccentric fellow who, for private and also aesthetic reasons of his own, taking the warnings of his teacher Bebra to heart, turned down the color and cut of the uniforms, the beat and blast of the standard grandstand music, and drummed up a few protests on a simple child's toy.

  In those days you could get the better of people on and in front of a grandstand with a paltry tin drum, and I grant that I developed my stage trick, as I had my long-distance, glass-slaying song, to the point of perfection. I didn't just drum down rallies in brown. Oskar sat under the grandstands of Reds and Blacks, of Boy Scouts and the spinach shirts of the PX, of Jehovah's Witnesses and the Kyffhäuser Bund, of vegetarians and the Polish Youth Fresh Air Movement. Whatever they had to sing, to blow, to pray, to proclaim: my drum knew better.

  Thus my task was destruction. And what I failed to bring low with my drum I slew with my voice. In addition to my forays in broad daylight against grandstand symmetry, I initiated nighttime actions: in the winter of thirty-six/thirty-seven I played the seducer. My first lessons in seducing my fellow men came from my grandmother Koljaiczek, who opened a stand at the weekly market that harsh winter in Langfuhr, where she squatted behind a market table in her four skirts and offered goods for the holidays, crying plaintively, "Get your fresh eggs, butter gold and creamy, geese, not too fat, not too thin!" Tuesday was market day. She came from Viereck on the narrow-gauge railway, removed the felt slippers she wore for the train ride when she drew near Langfuhr, stepped into her shapeless galoshes, linked her arms under both baskets, and looked for a stand on Bahnhofstraße with a sign that said: Anna Koljaiczek, Bissau. How cheap eggs were back then. A mandel, which was a baker's dozen plus two, cost a mere gulden, and Kashubian butter was cheaper than margarine. My grandmother squatted between two fishmongers who called out, "Fresh flounder!" and "Pomuchel cod here!" The frost turned the butter to stone, kept the eggs fresh, honed fish scales to extra-thin razorblades, and provided a one-eyed man named Schwerdtfeger with a job and cash heating bricks over an open wood-charcoal ire, which he then wrapped in newspaper and rented out to the market women.

  My grandmother had Schwerdtfeger shove a hot brick under her four skirts every hour on the dot. Schwerdtfeger did this with an iron slide. He pushed a steaming packet under her scarcely raised skirts, dumped it, lifted the other one, then Schwerdtfeger's iron slide would reappear from beneath my grandmother's skirts with a nearly cold brick.

  How I envied those bricks wrapped in newspaper, storing and bestowing their heat. To this day I wish I could lie like a toasty warm brick consta
ntly being exchanged for myself under my grandmother's skirts. And just what, you may ask, is Oskar looking for under his grandmother's skirts? Does he wish to imitate his grandfather Koljaiczek and take liberties with the old woman? Does he seek oblivion, a home, the ultimate Nirvana?

  Oskar replies: I was looking for Africa under her skirts, Naples perhaps, which everyone knows you must see before dying. Where all rivers converged, where all waters divided, where special winds blew, yet calm could descend, where the rains pounded down and yet you were dry, where ships made fast or weighed anchor at last, where the good Lord, who always liked warmth, sat by Oskar, where the devil dusted his spyglass, where angels played blindman's buff; it was always summer under my grandmother's skirts, as the Christmas tree glowed, as I hunted for Easter eggs or marked every All Saints' Day. Nowhere could I live more at peace with the calendar than under my grandmother's skirts.

  But she would never let me stay there at the weekly market, and only rarely otherwise. I squatted beside her on the small crate, the warmth of her arm around me in place of her skirts, watched as the bricks came and went, and learned from my grandmother the trick of tempting people. She would throw Vinzent Bronski's old coin purse, with a cord attached, onto the hard-packed snow of the sidewalk, which was so darkened and dirtied by the sand spreaders that only my grandmother and I could see the string.

  Housewives came and went, not buying anything, even though her wares were so cheap, wanting produce for free or with a little something thrown in; then a lady would bend down for Vinzent's castoff purse, and just as her fingers touched the leather, my grandmother would reel in the line along with the slightly embarrassed customer, draw the well-dressed fish to the crate on which she sat, and say good-naturedly, "Well, ma'am, how about a little butter, gold and creamy, or a mandel of eggs for a gulden?"

  That's how Anna Koljaiczek sold her produce. Meanwhile I grasped the magic of temptation, but not the temptation that lured fourteen-year-old boys into the basement with Susi Kater to play doctor. That didn't tempt me, I stayed well away from that, once the brats in our building, using me as their patient, with Axel Mischke and Nuchi Eyke as serum donors and Susi Kater as the doctor, forced me to swallow doses that were not as grainy as the brick soup but left an aftertaste of rotten fish. The temptation I offered was almost ethereal, and I kept a proper distance from those I tempted.

  Long after darkness had fallen, one or two hours after the shop had closed, I slipped away from Mama and Matzerath. Into the winter night I went, and took up my position. On silent, nearly deserted streets, from the recesses of doorways sheltered from the wind, I observed the shop windows across the way: delicatessens, haberdasheries, all those shops with their shoes, clocks, and jewelry on display, all those easily portable, desirable items. Not every display was illuminated. I even preferred shops that kept their displays in semidarkness, at some distance from streetlamps, for light attracts all people, even the most ordinary, while only the chosen will linger in semidarkness.

  I wasn't interested in those who merely glanced in brightly lit shop windows as they passed, more concerned with price tags than with merchandise, or those who used the windowpane's reflection to make sure their hats were on straight. The customers I lay in wait for in the crisp, dry, windless cold, behind flurries of large snowflakes, amid silent, thick snowfall, or beneath a frosty waxing moon, were those customers who stopped before shop windows as if in answer to a call, scanned the shelves briefly, and quickly brought their gaze to rest on a single item.

  My pursuit was that of the hunter. It required patience, sang-froid, a clear view, and a steady eye. Only when all these preconditions obtained did it fall to my voice, spilling no blood and causing no pain, to bag my prey, to lure it on—but toward what?

  Toward theft: for with my most silent of screams I cut a circular section from the shop window at the lowest level of the display opposite the desired object, and with a last lift of my voice pushed the glass disk into the interior of the display case, so that a quickly muffled tinkle, which was not however the tinkle of breaking glass, was heard—not by me, for Oskar stood too far away; but that young woman with a rabbit-fur collar on her brown winter coat, surely reversed at least once by now, she heard the glass disk and gave a start that made her rabbit fur quiver, started off through the snow, but paused, perhaps because it was snowing, and when it's snowing, if it's snowing hard enough, all things are permitted. Yet she looked around, suspicious of the snowflakes, looked around as if there might be something else beyond the snowflakes, kept looking around as her right hand glided out of a muff covered in that same rabbit fur. And looked around no more, but reached through the circular opening, first pushing aside the glass disk that had fallen on top of what she wanted, pulled first the right and then the left black pump through the hole, without scratching the heels, without cutting her hand on the sharp edges. Left and right the shoes disappeared in her coat pockets. For a moment that lasted five snowflakes long, Oskar saw a pretty but empty profile, had time to think, that's a mannequin from Sternfeld's department store, walking about by some miracle, then she dissolved into the falling snow, only to reappear beneath the next street-lamp, then, beyond its circle of light, be it as young newlywed or emancipated mannequin, she vanished.

  Having completed my work—and waiting, lurking without the comfort of my drum, then singing toward icy glass and thawing it out was hard work—there remained nothing to do but, like the thief, with no spoils it's true, but with a similarly inflamed and deeply chilled heart, to head home.

  I did not always manage, as I did in the mannequin case described above, to employ the art of seduction with such clear success. One of my ambitions was to transform a pair of lovers into a pair of thieves. Either both were unwilling, or he grabbed and she pulled his hand back; or she was bold enough, and he fell to his knees and begged till she complied and henceforth despised him. And once I seduced what seemed to be a very young pair of lovers in the falling snow outside a perfume shop. He was playing the hero and stole a bottle of cologne. She wailed and claimed she was giving up perfume. He wanted her fragrant, however, and had his way as far as the next streetlamp. But there, demonstratively and blatantly, as if the young thing wanted to annoy me, she kissed him, standing on tiptoe, till he retraced his steps and returned the cologne to the shop window.

  I had similar experiences on occasion with elderly gentlemen, from whom I expected more than their brisk pace through the winter night promised. They stood before a cigar-shop display with rapt attention, their thoughts in Havana, in Brazil, or on the Bissago Islands, but when my voice produced its custom-made incision and the disk fell at last onto a box of Black Wisdom, a pocketknife snapped closed in these gentlemen. They turned around, rowed their way across the street with their canes, and hurried past me and my doorway without spotting me, while their disturbed old faces, which looked as if the devil had given them a good shaking, brought a smile to Oskar's lips—a smile that bore a trace of concern, for the gentlemen, mostly cigar smokers advanced in years, had broken out in a cold sweat, and thus ran the risk, particularly with a change in the weather, of catching cold.

  Insurance companies had to pay substantial claims that winter to many of the shops in our suburb, most of which were insured against theft. Though I never allowed things to progress to the point of grand larceny, and intentionally kept the excised panes of glass small enough that only one or two items could be removed from a display at a time, the number of what were termed burglaries still increased so greatly that the criminal-investigation units never had a quiet moment, yet were still criticized by the press for doing a poor job. From November of thirty-six till March of thirty-seven, when Colonel Koc formed a National Front government in Warsaw, a total of sixty-four attempted and twenty-eight successful burglaries of the same type were reported. Of course the police were able to recover part of the loot from elderly women, counter jockeys, maids, and retired schoolteachers, none of whom were truly enthusiastic thieves, or else
the amateur window-weasel would decide, after losing a night's sleep over the object of his desire, to go to the police the next day and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. It'll never happen again. A hole just appeared in the window, and when I'd nearly recovered from the shock and the broken window was three streets behind me, I found an expensive pair of men's leather gloves, probably cost a fortune, illegally lodged in the left pocket of my overcoat."