The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  How good that the wardrobe existed with its heavy woolens that barely breathed, allowing me to gather nearly all my thoughts, to bundle them together and present them to an ideal figure who was rich enough to receive this gift with measured and scarcely noticeable joy.

  As always, when I concentrated and made proper use of my powers, I transported myself to the office of Dr. Hollatz on Brunshüferweg and enjoyed the one part of my weekly Wednesday visits I cared about. Thus my thoughts centered less on the doctor with his increasingly detailed examinations and more on his assistant, Sister Inge. She was allowed to undress and dress me, she alone was permitted to measure me, weigh me, test me; in short, all the experiments Dr. Hollatz conducted upon me were carried out by Sister Inge, correctly but somewhat sullenly, and reported, not without a touch of mockery, as total failures, which Hollatz termed partial successes. I seldom looked Sister Inge in the eye. My gaze and my sometimes racing drummer's heart found repose on the clean, starched white of her nurse's uniform, on the weightless edifice she wore as a cap, on a smooth pin decorated with a red cross. How pleasant it was to follow the constantly renewing folds of her uniform. Did she have a body beneath that fabric? Her aging face and her well-cared-for yet rawboned hands indicated that Sister Inge was indeed a woman. Of course the sort of smells that would have revealed a physical state similar to my mama's when Jan, or even Matzerath, unveiled her before my eyes, those Sister Inge did not breed. She smelled of soap and soporific medications. How often I was overcome by sleep as she auscultated my small and supposedly ailing body: a shallow sleep, born from the folds of white fabric, a carbolic-cloaked sleep, a dreamless sleep; unless in the distance her pin expanded into who knew what: a sea of banners, an alpine glow, a splash of poppy field, ready to revolt, who knew against whom: against red Indians, cherries, nosebleeds, against cockscombs, red blood cells, coalescing to a red that filled my vision and gave back ground to a passion that I found, both then and now, quite understandable, but could not name, because the small word red says nothing, and nosebleeds do nothing, and banners fade, and if in spite of all I still say red, red won't have me, turns its coat: back to black, the Cook is coming, scares me yellow, makes me blue, blue won't do, blue's untrue, turns me green, green grows the grass above my grave, green turns me white: calls me black, black scares me yellow, yellow makes me blue, blue won't turn green, green blooms me red, red was Sister Inge's pin, the red cross she wore, to be precise, upon the washable collar of her nurse's uniform; but things seldom stopped with this most monochromatic of all images, nor did they in the wardrobe.

  A highly colorful din, pushing its way in from the living room, pounded at my wardrobe doors, awakening me just as I was falling into a doze devoted to Sister Inge. Sober and thick-tongued I sat holding my drum on my knees among winter coats of all styles, smelled Matzerath's Party uniform, felt his military belt, leather shoulder straps with hooks, beside me, but found no remnant of the folds of the nurse's white uniform: wool dangled, worsted hung, cord creased flannel, and above me four years' fashion in hats, at my feet large shoes, little shoes, polished puttees, heels with and without taps, a strip of light falling in from outside that outlined everything; Oskar was sorry he'd left a gap between the mirrored doors.

  What could those people in the living room have to offer me? Perhaps Matzerath had caught the two of them on the sofa, though that was highly unlikely, for Jan always maintained a certain degree of caution, and not just when he was playing skat. Probably—and this proved to be the case—Matzerath had placed the slaughtered, cleaned, washed, cooked, spiced, and sampled eels in the large terrine and set it on the living room table as a ready-to-serve eel soup with boiled potatoes, and then, because no one would join him, had dared to start singing the praises of his dish, listing all its ingredients and reciting the recipe like a prayer. Mama shouted. She shouted in Kashubian. Which Matzerath could neither stand nor understand, yet still he had to listen, and no doubt got the drift of it; she had to be talking about eels, and as always when Mama started shouting, it was about my fall down the cellar steps. Matzerath replied in kind. They knew their parts well. Jan raised objections. Without him there would have been no show. Finally Act Two: The piano lid banged open, without a score, by heart, feet on both pedals, up, down, and sideways resounded the Huntsmen's Chorus from the Freischütz: What thing on earth resembles ... And right in the midst of the Halali the piano lid bangs, feet off the pedals, the piano stool tips over, and Mama's on her way, already in the bedroom, takes a last glance at herself in the mirror of the wardrobe door, and throws herself, I saw it through the gap, across the marriage bed beneath the blue canopy, weeping and wringing her hands with as many fingers as the penitent, gold-framed Mary Magdalene in the color print at the head of the matrimonial fortress.

  For a long time I heard nothing but Mama's whimpering, the soft creaking of the bed, and faint murmurs from the living room. Jan was calming Matzerath down. Matzerath asked Jan to calm Mama down. The murmuring thinned out, Jan entered the bedroom. Act Three: He stood by the bed, observing Mama and the repentant Mary Magdalene in turn, sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, stroked Mama, who was lying on her stomach, on the back and buttocks, spoke to her soothingly in Kashubian, and finally—since words no longer helped—slid his hand under her dress, until she ceased whimpering and Jan could remove his gaze from the many-fingered Magdalene. You should have seen how Jan stood up when his work was finished, dabbed at his fingers with his handkerchief, then spoke aloud to Mama, no longer in Kashubian, emphasizing every word so that Matzerath could hear him from the living room or kitchen: "Come on now, Agnes, let's just forget the whole thing. Alfred took the eels and dumped them in the toilet long ago. Let's have a good game of skat, quarter-penny for all I care, and when we've all forgotten this and made up, Alfred will fix us mushrooms with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes."

  Mama said nothing, rolled from the bed, smoothed out the yellow quilt, shook her hair into place before the wardrobe's mirrored doors, and followed Jan from the bedroom. I took my eye from the observation slit, and the next thing I heard was the shuffling of cards. Subdued, cautious laughter, Matzerath cut, Jan dealt, and they started to bid. I think Jan must have outbid Matzerath. He passed at twenty-three. Whereupon Mama bid Jan up to thirty-six, then he too had to back down, and Mama played a grand, which she just barely lost. Jan won the following diamond simple hands down, while Mama just managed to bring home the third round, a heart hand without two.

  Certain that this family game of skat, interrupted briefly for scrambled eggs, mushrooms, and fried potatoes, would stretch well into the night, I barely listened to the following rounds but instead tried to find my way back to Sister Inge and her white, soporific uniform. But my stay in Dr. Hollatz's office was to remain a gloomy experience. Not only did green, blue, yellow, and black constantly interrupt the redness of the Red Cross pin, the events of that morning pressed in as well: whenever the door to the consultation room and to Sister Inge opened, what was offered was not the pure and delicate sight of the nurse's uniform, but instead the docker on the harbor jetty at Neufahrwasser with the sea marker pulling eels from a dripping, wriggling horse's head, and what posed as white, what I tried to connect with Sister Inge, were seagull wings, which, for a moment, covered the carcass and the eels inside it deceptively, till the wound opened once more, yet did not bleed red blood, but black was the horse, bottle-green the sea, some rust appeared, brought by the Finn that loaded lumber, and the gulls—let's have no more talk of doves—clouded the victim and dipped in their wingtips and threw the eel to my own Sister Inge, who caught it, celebrated it, and turned into a gull, took its form, not that of a dove, yet still Holy Spirit, and in the form that's called a gull, sank down as cloud on flesh and celebrated Pentecost.

  Abandoning the effort, I abandoned the wardrobe as well, pushed open the mirrored doors angrily, climbed forth from the cupboard, found myself unchanged in front of the mirrors but relieved that Frau Kater was no longer beating h
er carpets. Good Friday had ended for Oskar, but only when Easter was over would his Passion begin.

  Tapering toward the Foot

  And for Mama too it was only after that Good Friday with the eel-wriggling horse head, after Easter Sunday with Grandmother and Uncle Vinzent in rural Bissau along with the Bronskis, that an ordeal set in which even the smiling May weather could not assuage.

  It's not true that Matzerath made Mama start eating fish again. Just two weeks after Easter, entirely on her own and driven by some mysterious urge, she started devouring fish in such quantities and with so little thought for her figure that Matzerath said, "Stop eating all that fish—you act like someone's making you!"

  She started out with sardines in oil for breakfast, then, two hours later, if there were no customers in the store, she would raid a plywood box of Bohnsack sprats, demand fried flounder or cod in mustard sauce for lunch, and be reaching for the can opener again by afternoon: jellied eel, rollmops, pickled herring—and if Matzerath refused to fry or boil fish for supper she didn't say a word, raised no complaint, just rose quietly from the table and returned from the shop with a chunk of smoked eel, at which we would all lose our appetite, for she would scrape every smidgen of fat from both sides of the eel's skin with a knife, and in general ate nothing but fish with a knife from then on. She had to vomit several times a day. Matzerath was worried sick: "Are you pregnant, or what?"

  "Rubbish," Mama would say, if she said anything, and one Sunday, when boiled eel with parsley and new potatoes swimming in May butter arrived at the dinner table, Grandmother Koljaiczek banged her hand between the plates and cried out, "Agnes, what's going on? Why are you eating fish when it don't agree with you, are you off your rocker?" and Mama just shook her head, shoved the potatoes aside, pulled the eel through the May butter, and chewed away steadily as if she had a job to do. Jan Bronski said nothing. Once when I surprised the two of them on the sofa, holding hands as usual with their clothes in the normal disarray, I was struck by Jan's tear-stained eyes and Mama's general apathy, which, however, was quickly transformed into its opposite. She jumped up, clutched me, lifted me and squeezed me, revealing a void that nothing, not even those vast quantities of fried, boiled, pickled, and smoked fish, could ever fill.

  A few days later I saw her in the kitchen as she not only gobbled up those damned sardines as usual but poured the leftover oil from several old tins she'd saved into a small saucepan, heated the mess up over the gas flame, and drank it down, while, standing at the kitchen door, I almost dropped my drum.

  That same evening Mama had to be taken to the city hospital. Matzerath cried and carried on before the ambulance arrived: "Why don't you want the child? Who cares whose it is? Or is it still that damn horse's head? If only we'd never gone there. Forget all that, Agnes. I didn't do it on purpose."

  The ambulance arrived, Mama was carried out. Children and grownups gathered on the sidewalk; the ambulance drove off with her, and soon it was apparent that Mama had forgotten neither the jetty nor the horse's head, that she carried the memory of that horse—whether it was named Fritz or Hans—with her. Her organs recalled that Good Friday outing with painful clarity and, for fear of repeating it, allowed my mother, who was at one with her organs, to die.

  Dr. Hollatz spoke of jaundice and fish poisoning. At the hospital they discovered that Mama was three months pregnant and gave her a private room, and for four days she showed those of us allowed to visit her a face devastated by pain and nausea, a nausea through which she sometimes smiled at me.

  Even though she tried to please her visitors, just as I take pains to seem happy when my friends arrive on Visitors Day, she still couldn't prevent the occasional bouts of retching that repeatedly racked her slowly succumbing body, though it could come up with nothing more by the fourth day of that difficult death than the last gasp we all must expel to gain our death certificate.

  We all sighed with relief when nothing remained in my mama to set off the retching that so disfigured her beauty. The moment she had been washed and lay there in her shroud, she showed once more her familiar, round, naive yet clever face. The head nurse closed Mama's eyes, since Matzerath and Jan were blinded by their tears.

  I could not weep, because the others, the men and Grandmother, Hedwig Bronski, and fourteen-year-old Stephan, were all weeping. Besides, my mama's death had come as no great surprise to me. To Oskar, who accompanied her on Thursdays into the Altstadt and to the Church of the Sacred Heart on Saturdays, it seemed as if she'd been seeking a chance for years to dissolve her triangular relationship in such a way that Matzerath, whom she may have hated, would bear the guilt for her death, while Jan Bronski, her Jan, could keep working at the Polish Post Office thinking: She died for me, she didn't want to stand in my way, she sacrificed herself.

  Though both Mama and Jan were coldly calculating when it came to finding a safe love nest, they showed an equal talent for romance: one might see them as Romeo and Juliet, or those two royal children kept apart because the water was too deep. While Mama, who had taken the last sacraments just in time, lay cold and unmoved by the priest's prayers, I found time and leisure to observe the hospital nurses, who were mostly Protestant. They folded their hands differently from Catholics, more self-confidently I might say, recited the Lord's Prayer with words that varied from the original Catholic text, and didn't cross themselves the same way Grandmother Koljaiczek, the Bronskis, and I did. My father Matzerath—I call him that now and then, even if his role remains presumptive—he, the Protestant, differed from other Protestants in prayer by not holding his hands anchored at his chest, but instead switched his fingers from one religion to the other by clenching them at the level of his private parts, and was obviously ashamed to be seen praying. My grandmother, kneeling beside her brother Vinzent at the deathbed, prayed loudly and effusively in Kashubian, while Vinzent merely moved his lips, presumably in Polish, though his widened eyes brimmed with spirituality. I would have liked to play my drum. After all, I had my poor mama to thank for all those red and white drums. As a counterweight to Matzerath's desires, she had laid the maternal promise of a tin drum in my cradle, and now and then, particularly when she was slimmer and didn't have to exercise, Mama's beauty had served as a score for my drumming. Finally, no longer able to contain myself, I shaped the ideal vision of her gray-eyed beauty on my drum at Mama's deathbed, and was amazed that it was Matzerath who took my side and softened the immediate protest of the head nurse, whispering, "Let him be, Sister, they were so close."

  Mama could be very cheerful. Mama could be very timid. Mama forgot things quickly. Mama nonetheless had a good memory. Mama threw me out with the bathwater yet sat in the tub with me. Mama was sometimes lost, but I always found her. When I sangshattered glass, Mama sold lots of putty. She sometimes put her foot in it when she could have put her foot down elsewhere. Even when Mama buttoned up, she stayed an open book to me. Mama feared drafts but generated storms. She lived on what she charged but hated paying taxes. I was the flip side of her top card. When Mama played a heart hand, she always won. When Mama died, the red flames on my drum turned pale; but the white lacquer grew whiter, so dazzling that, blinded, even Oskar had to shut his eyes.

  My poor mama was not buried at Saspe Cemetery, as she had sometimes wished, but in the small, peaceful cemetery in Brentau. Her stepfather, the gunpowder miller Gregor Koljaiczek, who died of influenza in nineteen-seventeen, lay there too. There was a large crowd of mourners, as might be expected at the funeral of a popular grocer; the faces of her steady customers appeared, of course, but also salesmen from various wholesale houses and even a few competitors, like the grocer Weinreich and Frau Probst from the store over on Hertastraße. The chapel of Brentau Cemetery couldn't hold the crowd. It smelled of flowers and black clothing in mothballs. In the open coffin my poor mama's face was yellow and worn. During the interminable ceremony I couldn't shake the feeling: Her head is going to bob up, she'll have to vomit again, something inside her still wants out—not just t
he three-month-old fetus who, like me, doesn't know which father to thank, who wants to come out and ask for a drum as Oskar did, and not just the fetus, there's still fish in there, not sardines, and I don't mean flounder, I mean a small chunk of eel, a few greenish white tendrils of eel meat, eel from the naval battle at Skagerrak, eel from the harbor jetty at Neufahrwasser, Good Friday eel, eel that sprang from the head of the horse, perhaps even eel from Joseph Koljaiczek her father, who slipped under a raft and fell prey to the eels, eel of thine eel, for eel thou art, and to eel returnest...

  But she did not retch. She kept it down, took it with her, was going to bury the eel beneath the earth, so there might at last be peace.

  When the men lifted the coffin lid and started to cover my poor mama's nauseated yet resolute face, Anna Koljaiczek held the men back and, trampling the flowers beside the coffin, threw herself across her daughter and wept, tearing at the expensive white shroud and wailing in Kashubian.

  There were many who later said she cursed my presumptive father Matzerath and called him her daughter's murderer. There was also talk of my fall down the cellar steps. She took the tale over from Mama and never allowed Matzerath to forget his supposed guilt for my supposed accident. Again and again she accused him, even though Matzerath, in spite of his politics, showed an almost grudging reverence for her, and kept her stocked throughout the war years with sugar and synthetic honey, with coffee and kerosene.