by Günter Grass
But my poor mama was long since dead. So why was Jan Bronski sweating? After noticing that almost every time we came to a tram stop he thought of getting off and then, recalling my presence just as he was about to descend, sat back down only because of me and my drum, I realized he was sweating over the Polish Post Office, which as a civil ser vant he was required to defend. He'd already fled it once, but then he found me and my scrap-metal drum on the corner of Ringstraße and Heeresanger, decided to return to his civil duty, and dragged me along, though I was neither a civil servant nor fit to defend a post office, and now he sat sweating and smoking. Why didn't he get off again? I certainly would not have stopped him. He was still in the prime of life, not yet forty-five. Blue were his eyes, brown his hair, well manicured his trembling hands, and had he not perspired so pitifully it would have been eau de cologne and not cold sweat that Oskar smelled as he sat beside his presumptive father.
At Holzmarkt we got off and walked down Altstädtischer Graben. A windless late-summer evening. As always toward eight o'clock, the bells of the Altstadt bronzed the sky. Chimes sent pigeons up in clouds: "Be true and upright to the grave." It was beautiful and made you want to cry. But all about was laughter. Women with sunburned children, terrycloth bathrobes, brightly colored beach balls and toy sailboats, descended from trams bearing freshly bathed multitudes from the seaside resorts of Glettkau and Heubude. Drowsy girls licked raspberry ice cream with lithe tongues. A fifteen-year-old dropped her cone, bent to retrieve it, then hesitated, abandoned the melting delicacy to the pavement and the soles of future passersby; soon she would be one of the grownups and no longer lick ice cream in the street.
We turned left into Schneidemühlengasse. Heveliusplatz, to which the little lane led, was blocked off by the SS Home Guard standing about in groups: youngsters, also older family men with armbands and police carbines. It would have been easy to make a detour around the blockade and reach the post office by way of Rähm. Jan Bronski went straight up to the Home Guard. His intention was clear: he wanted to be stopped before the eyes of his superiors, who were surely keeping watch on Heveliusplatz from the post office, and sent back, so that, a thwarted hero cutting a reasonably honorable figure, he could return home on the same Number Five tram that had brought him here.
The Home Guard let us through, probably never dreaming that this well-dressed gentleman with a three-year-old boy by the hand meant to enter the post office. They politely advised us to be careful and didn't yell stop till we'd passed through the iron gate and stood outside the main entrance. Jan turned around uncertainly. Then the heavy door opened slightly and we were pulled in: we stood in the pleasantly cool half-light of the main hall of the Polish Post Office.
Jan Bronski received a less than cordial greeting from his colleagues. They mistrusted him, had probably already given up on him, and stated openly their clear suspicion that he, Postal Clerk Bronski, meant to run away. Jan had a hard time fending off their accusations. They didn't even listen to him, just shoved him into a line of men who had taken on the task of passing sandbags from the cellar to the bank of windows in the main hall. These sandbags and similar nonsense were being stacked in front of the windows, while heavy pieces of furniture such as filing cabinets were being shoved near the main door so the entrance could be quickly barricaded across its entire width if necessary.
Someone asked who I was, but had no time to wait for Jan's answer. The men were nervous, calling out loudly, then whispering more cautiously than necessary. My drum and its predicament seemed forgotten. Kobyella the janitor, on whom I had pinned my hopes, who was supposed to restore the pile of scrap metal at my tummy to respectability, was nowhere in sight, and was probably working away on the first or second floor of the post office at the same feverish pitch as the mailmen and window clerks in the main hall, piling up overstuffed sandbags that were supposedly bulletproof. Jan Bronski was embarrassed by Oskar's presence. So I slipped away the moment a man the others called Dr. Michon started giving Jan instructions. After a brief search, and carefully dodging this Herr Michon, who was wearing a Polish steel helmet and was obviously the postmaster, I found the stairs to the first floor and there, almost at the end of the hallway, a medium-sized, window-less room where no one was carrying crates of ammunition or piling up sandbags.
Laundry baskets on wheels, filled with brightly stamped letters, stood crowded together on the wood floor. The room was low, the wallpaper ocher. There was a faint smell of rubber. A light bulb burned unprotected. Oskar was too tired to look for the switch. In the far distance the bells of St. Mary's, St. Catherine's, St. John's, St. Bridget's, St. Barbara's, Trinity, and Corpus Christi rang out their reminders: It's nine o'clock, Oskar, you must go to bed. And so I lay down in one of the mail baskets, bedded my drum, which was as exhausted as I was, by my side, and fell asleep.
The Polish Post Office
I slept in a laundry basket full of letters headed for Łódz, Lublin, Lwów, Torun, Krakow, and Czc:stochowa, coming from Lodz, Lublin, Lemberg, Thorn, Krakau, and Tschenstochau. But I dreamed neither of the Matka Boska Częstochowska nor of the Black Madonna, nibbled in dreams neither on Marszałek Piłsudski's heart preserved in Cracow nor on the gingerbread that has made the city of Thorn so famous. I didn't even dream of my still unrepaired drum. Lying dreamless on letters in a laundry basket on wheels, Oskar heard none of the whispers, murmurs, and small talk, none of those indiscretions they say can be heard when letters lie in a heap. To me those letters breathed not a word, I was expecting no mail, no one could see in me a recipient or even a sender. Imperiously I slept with retracted antennae on a mountain of mail that, brimming with news, might well have stood for the world.
So of course I wasn't awakened by the letter that a certain Pan Lech Milewczyk from Warsaw wrote to his niece in Danzig-Schidlitz, a letter alarming enough to awaken a millennial tortoise; I was awakened either by machine-gun fire close at hand or by the distant salvos from the twin turrets of the battleships in the Free Port.
It's so easily written: machine guns, twin turrets. Might it not have been a cloudburst, a hailstorm, the deployment of a late-summer thunderstorm like the one that accompanied my birth? I was too sleepy, such speculations were beyond me, and so, the sounds still fresh in my ear, like all sleepyheads I simply and aptly called a spade a spade: Now they are shooting!
Scarcely having climbed from the laundry basket, unsteady on his sandals, Oskar turned his attention to the well-being of his delicate drum. With both hands he dug into the basket that had sheltered his slumbers, scooped out a hole in the loosely piled yet interlocked letters, but was not brutal—he neither tore nor bent nor defaced them; no, I cautiously separated the jumbled mail, treated each letter, even the postcards, stamped Poczta Polska in violet for the most part, with care, made sure no envelope came open; for even in the face of inescapable, world-shaking events, the privacy of the post must always be maintained.
As the machine-gun fire increased, so the crater in that laundry basket full of letters deepened. Finally I let well enough alone, bedded my terminally ill drum down in the freshly dug site, and covered it not in three but in ten or twenty layers of overlapping envelopes, fitting them with care, as masons do bricks when they wish to build a solid wall.
No sooner had I completed these precautionary measures, with which I hoped to shield my drum from shrapnel and bullets, than the first antitank shell exploded against the post office facade facing Heveliusplatz, at about the level of the main hall.
The Polish Post Office, a massive brick building, could easily absorb a number of such hits with no fear that the Home Guard would make short work of things and quickly open a breach wide enough for the frontal assault they had practiced so often.
I left my safe, windowless mailroom, enclosed by three offices and the first-floor corridor, to go looking for Jan Bronski. While I was keeping an eye out for my presumptive father Jan, I was of course seeking, perhaps even more eagerly, the disabled janitor Kobyella. After all, I had
given up my supper the evening before, taken the tram into the city to Heveliusplatz, and entered the post office, to which I was otherwise totally indifferent, solely in order to get my drum repaired. If I did not find the janitor in time, that is, before the all-out attack that was sure to come, a painstaking reinforcement of my rickety drum would be out of the question.
So Oskar looked for Jan with Kobyella in mind. He traversed the long, tiled corridor repeatedly, his arms folded across his chest, a solitary marcher. He could indeed differentiate the scattered rifle shots coming from the post office from the wasted barrage of the Home Guard, but the thrifty postal sharpshooters must have exchanged their rubber stamps for alternate means of leaving their mark, and stayed in their offices. In the corridor no squad of men stood by or lay in readiness to launch a possible counterattack. Oskar patrolled the hall alone, unarmed and drumless, exposed to the history-making introitus of Aurora at a far too early hour, adorned in lead instead of gold.
Nor did I find a single soul in the offices on the courtyard side. Very careless, I thought. The building should have been secured on the Schneidemühlengasse side as well. The police headquarters located there, separated from the post office courtyard and the parcel ramp by a bare wooden fence, offered a picture-perfect opportunity for an attack. I went through the offices, the registered parcel room, the money-order room, the payroll department, the telegraph office: there they lay. Behind armored plates and sandbags, behind overturned office furniture they lay, firing hesitantly, almost sparingly.
In most of the rooms a few windowpanes had already been introduced to the Home Guard's machine guns. I undertook a quick survey of the damage, making comparisons with the windows that had collapsed under the impact of my diamond voice in calm, deep-breathing times of peace. Well now, if I were asked to do my bit in defense of the Polish Post Office, if, say, that little wiry Dr. Michon were to approach me in his military rather than his postal capacity, to enlist me in the defense and service of Poland, my voice would not be found wanting: for Poland and Poland's economy, which grows wild but always bears fruit, I would gladly have smashed the panes of all the buildings across the way on Heveliusplatz, the glazing of all the buildings on Rähm, the glassy row along Schneidemühlengasse, including the police station, and, with greater long-distance effect than ever, the brightly polished windowpanes of Altstädtischer Graben and Rittergasse, reducing them all within minutes to black, drafty holes. That would have spread confusion among the Home Guard and the onlooking burghers. It would have replaced several high-caliber machine guns, it would have instilled a belief in miracle weapons right from the start of the war, but it would not have saved the Polish Post Office.
Oskar was not sent into action. This Dr. Michon with a Polish steel helmet on his postmaster's head did not enlist me, but instead, as I rushed down the stairs to the main hall and got tangled in his legs, gave me a painful box on the ear, then, cursing loudly in Polish, returned to his defensive duties. I could only submit to this blow. The men, and Dr. Michon too, who bore the burden of responsibility, were agitated and frightened; they had to be forgiven.
The clock in the main hall told me it was twenty past four. At twenty-one past four I inferred that the initial hostilities had not damaged its works. It was running, and I didn't know whether to interpret this indifference on the part of Time as a good or bad omen.
In any case I stayed in the main hall for the time being, looked for Jan and Kobyella, kept out of Dr. Michon's way, found neither my uncle nor the janitor, noted the damaged glass in the hall, the cracks and ugly gaps in the plaster by the main entrance, and was privileged to witness the first two wounded men being carried in. One of them, an older gentleman with gray hair still neatly parted, spoke in a steady, agitated stream while they bandaged his upper right arm, which had been grazed by a bullet. No sooner had this slight wound been swathed in white than he was ready to jump up, grab his rifle, and throw himself once more behind the apparently not so bulletproof sandbags. Fortunately a slight dizziness brought on by substantial blood loss forced him back to the floor and prescribed the rest without which an elderly gentleman who's just been wounded is unlikely to recover his strength. Moreover, the energetic little fifty-year-old wearing a steel helmet, but from whose civilian breast pocket the triangle of a silk handkerchief peeked forth, this gentleman with the noble gestures of a knight in government service, this same Dr. Michon who had interrogated Jan Bronski so sternly the evening before, ordered the older wounded gentleman in the name of Poland to keep still and rest.
The second wounded man lay breathing heavily on a straw mattress and showed no further interest in sandbags. At regular intervals he screamed loudly and without shame, for he'd been shot in the gut.
Oskar was just about to inspect the row of men behind the sandbags again in hopes of finding those he sought, when two shells struck home almost simultaneously above and beside the main entrance, rattling the hall. The cabinets that had been shoved against the door burst open and released bundles of bound files that, having lost all decent control, fluttered loosely to the floor and touched and covered slips of paper whose acquaintance they had no right to make under any proper bookkeeping system. Needless to say, the rest of the window glass shattered, and larger and smaller patches of plaster fell from the walls and the ceil ing. Yet another wounded man was lugged through clouds of chalk and plaster into the center of the room, but then, at the command of Dr. Michon's steel helmet, hauled up the stairs to the first floor.
Oskar followed the men bearing the postal clerk, who groaned at every step; no one called him back, asked where he was going, or felt it necessary, as Michon had a short time before, to box his ear with a rough manly hand. Of course he was careful not to run between the grownup post-office-defender legs.
When I reached the first floor behind the men trudging up the stairs, my suspicions were confirmed: they were taking the wounded man to the windowless and therefore safe mailroom I'd reserved for myself. And since there were no mattresses, they decided that the mail baskets, though rather too short, would provide soft padding for the wounded. I was already regretting having lodged my drum in one of those rolling laundry baskets full of undeliverable mail. Wouldn't the blood of these roughly opened and perforated mailmen and postal clerks seep through ten or twenty layers of paper and color my drum a hue it knew only as lacquer? What did my drum have in common with the blood of Poland! Let them dye their files and blotting paper with that sap! Let them dump the blue from their inkwells and refill them with red! Let them color half of every handkerchief and starched white shirt a good Polish red! After all, Poland was at stake, not my drum. If they insisted that Poland, if lost, be lost in red and white, must my drum, rendered suspect by its fresh coat, be lost as well?
Slowly the thought took root in me: this isn't about Poland, it's about my warped drum. Jan had lured me to the post office to give the clerks, for whom Poland was an insufficient rallying cry, a rousing battle standard. At night, while I slept in the rolling mail basket yet neither rolled nor dreamed, the clerks standing guard had whispered it like a password: A dying toy drum has sought refuge with us. We are Poles, we must protect it, especially since England and France are bound by treaty to defend us.
While useless and abstract speculations of this sort hampered my discretionary actions outside the half-open door to the mailroom, machine-gun fire could be heard for the first time in the courtyard. As I had predicted, the Home Guard was launching its initial attack from Police Headquarters on Schneidemühlengasse. Soon thereafter we were all knocked off our feet: the Home Guard had managed to blow in the door to the parcels area at the head of the loading ramp. A moment later they were in the parcel room, then in the parcel-post reception area, and the door to the corridor leading to the main hall stood open.
The men who had carried the wounded man upstairs and bedded him down in the mail basket that sheltered my drum rushed out; others followed. From the noise I gathered that they were fighting in the corrid
or on the ground floor, then in the parcel-post reception area. The Home Guard was forced to withdraw.
Hesitantly at first, then with more confidence, Oskar entered the dead-letter room. The wounded man's face was grayish yellow; he was baring his teeth and working his eyeballs behind his closed lids. He spat thread-trailing blood. But since his head was hanging over the edge of the mail basket, there was little danger that he would soil the letters. Oskar had to stand on tiptoe to reach inside the basket. The man's bottom bore down heavily on the exact spot where his drum was buried. Finally Oskar managed, gingerly at first, taking care not to hurt the wounded man or the letters, then pulling harder, in the end yanking and tearing them to pieces, to drag several dozen envelopes from under the groaning man.
Today let me say that I had just felt the rim of my drum when men came storming up the stairs and down the corridor. They were coming back, had driven the Home Guard from the parcel room, were at least momentarily the victors; I heard them laughing.
Hidden behind one of the mail baskets, I waited near the door till they were at the wounded man's side. At first shouting and gesticulating, then cursing softly, they bandaged him.
Two antitank shells struck home, level with the main hall—another two, then silence. The salvos of the battleships in the Free Port, across from the Westerplatte, rolled in the distance, grumbling on good-naturedly at a steady pace—you got used to it.
Unnoticed by the men with the wounded clerk, I slipped out of the dead-letter room, left my drum in the lurch, and resumed my search for Jan, my presumptive father and uncle, and for Kobyella the janitor.
On the second floor was the official residence of Postmaster General Naczelnik, who seemed to have sent his family off to Bromberg or War saw just in time. After searching through a few storerooms on the courtyard side, I found Jan and Kobyella in the nursery of Naczelnik's flat.