The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  The women's area: when women are by themselves and think they're unobserved, a young man of the kind that Oskar knew how to keep hidden back then should keep his eyes closed rather than become an unwilling witness to unabashed womanhood.

  We lay in the sand. Maria in her green bathing suit trimmed in red, I having adjusted to my blue. The sand slept, the sea slept, the shells were crushed and not listening. Amber, which allegedly keeps you awake, was off somewhere else, the wind, from the southeast as the weather-board said, fell slowly asleep, the broad expanse of sky, which had surely overexerted itself, could not stop yawning; Maria and I were somewhat tired ourselves, we'd already been in the water, had eaten after, not before, going in. Now our still-moist cherry pits lay on the beach beside last year's dried-white, weightless ones.

  At the sight of so much transience, Oskar let the sand with its year-old, thousand-year-old, and still-oh-so-young cherry pits trickle onto his drum as if through an hourglass, and tried to enter into the role of Death playing with bones. Beneath Maria's warm, sleepy flesh I pictured parts of her surely wide-awake skeleton, relished the gap between ulna and radius, played counting games up and down her spine, poked through both holes in her hipbones, and amused myself with the base of her sternum.

  Despite all the fun I was having as Death with a beach-sand hourglass, Maria stirred. She reached blindly into the beach bag, relying solely on touch, and looked for something while I poured the rest of the sand with the last of the cherry pits onto the drum, which was already half-covered. When Maria didn't find what she was looking for, probably her harmonica, she turned the bag inside out; a moment later something lay on the beach towel, but it wasn't her harmonica—it was a packet of woodruff fizz powder.

  Maria acted surprised. And perhaps she really was. I was certainly surprised and kept asking myself, still ask myself today: How did fizz powder, this cheap stuff bought only by children of temporary dock-workers and the unemployed, because they had no money for regular soft drinks, how did this slow-selling article get into our beach bag?

  While Oskar was still mulling this over, Maria grew thirsty. Even I, interrupting my thoughts, had to admit against my will to an urgent thirst. We had no cup, and drinking water was at least thirty-five strides away if Maria went for it, and nearly fifty if I did. Borrowing a cup from the bathhouse attendant and turning on the faucet by the cabin meant making your way between mounds of flesh gleaming with Nivea oil lying on their backs or bellies, and enduring the burning sand.

  We both dreaded the trip, so we left the packet lying there on the beach towel. Finally I picked it up before Maria showed any signs of doing so. But Oskar put it back on the towel so Maria could take it. But Maria didn't take it. So I took it and gave it to Maria. Maria gave it back to Oskar. I thanked her and made a present of it to her. But she wasn't accepting any presents from Oskar. I had to put it back on the towel. It lay there a long time without stirring.

  Oskar wishes to make clear that it was Maria who, after an awkward pause, picked up the packet. Not only that: she tore off a strip of paper right on the dotted line where it said Tear Here. Then she held the open packet out to me. This time I was the one who declined with thanks. Maria managed to feel hurt. She replaced the open packet firmly and resolutely on the towel. What was I to do except pick it up myself before any sand got into it, and offer it to Maria.

  Oskar wishes to make clear that it was Maria who made one finger disappear into the opening of the packet, who coaxed it out again and held it up vertically for inspection: something bluish white appeared on the tip of her finger, fizz powder. Of course I took it. Though it made my nose prickle, my face managed to mirror pleasure at the taste. It was Maria who cupped her hand. And Oskar couldn't avoid sprinkling a little fizz powder into that pink bowl. She didn't know what to do with the little heap. The mound in her palm was too new to her, too amazing. Then I leaned forward, gathered all my saliva, added it to the fizz powder, did it again, and didn't lean back till I had no more spittle left.

  In Maria's hand a hissing and foaming set in. The woodruff erupted like a volcano. The greenish rage of who knew what native tribe was boiling over. Something was going on that Maria had neither seen nor probably ever felt before; her hand twitched, trembled, tried to fly away, for woodruff nipped at her, woodruff penetrated her skin, woodruff excited her, gave her a feeling, a feeling, a feeling...

  The green grew greener, but Maria grew red, brought her hand to her mouth, licked her palm with her long tongue, again and again, and so frantically it seemed to Oskar that her tongue, instead of stilling the woodruff feeling that stirred her so, was intensifying it to the limit, perhaps even past the limit, normally set for any feeling.

  Then the feeling ebbed. Maria giggled, looked around to make sure there were no witnesses to the woodruff, and seeing only listless Nivea-brown sea cows in bathing suits, she sank to the beach towel; her blush of shame gradually faded against its ever so white surface.

  The seaside air that noonday hour might even have lulled Oskar to sleep had not Maria straightened up a brief half-hour later and dared to reach again for the fizz powder packet, which was still half-full. I don't know if she struggled with herself before pouring the rest of the powder into that hollow hand which was no longer a stranger to the effects of woodruff. For about as long as it takes a man to polish his glasses, she held the packet in her right hand, and opposite it, its mo tionless counterpart, the little pink bowl of her left hand. Not that she directed her gaze at the packet or her hollow hand, or let it wander back and forth between half-full and empty; Maria stared straight between the two, darkly and sternly. But it was soon evident how much weaker that stern look was than the half-full packet. The packet approached the hollow hand, the hand drew near the packet, her gaze lost its sternness sprinkled with melancholy, took on an aroused curiosity, and then was simply aroused. With painstakingly feigned indifference, Maria heaped the rest of the woodruff fizz powder in the well-padded palm of her hand, which was dry in spite of the heat, dropped the packet and her indifference, propped up her full hand with the one now free, let her gray eyes linger for a time on the powder, then looked at me, gazed at me grayly, her gray eyes demanding something of me, she wanted my spit, why didn't she use her own, Oskar had hardly any left, she surely had much more, spittle doesn't renew itself that quickly, she should use her own please, it was just as good, if not better, and anyway she surely had more than I did, I couldn't come up with more that fast, and she was bigger than Oskar.

  Maria wanted my spit. From the very beginning it was clear that only my spit would do. She kept her demanding gaze trained on me, and I blamed this cruel intransigence on those earlobes, attached, not hanging free. So Oskar swallowed, thought of things that normally made his mouth water, and yet—perhaps it was the sea air, perhaps the salt air, perhaps the salty sea air—my saliva glands failed me, I had to rise, driven by Maria's look, and set out on my way. It was a matter of taking over fifty strides across the hot sand, looking neither left nor right, climbing the even hotter steps to the bathhouse attendant's cabin, turning on the water faucet, angling my head under its open spout, taking a drink, swilling it around, and swallowing, so that Oskar could replenish his spittle.

  When I had conquered the stretch between the bathing attendant's cabin and our white towel, as endless and ringed with ghastly sights as that path was, I found Maria lying on her stomach. She had nestled her head in her crossed arms. Her braids lay languid on her round back.

  I poked her, for now Oskar had spittle. Maria didn't stir. I poked her again. Not interested. Cautiously I opened her left hand. She didn't resist: the hand was empty, as though it had never seen woodruff. I straightened the fingers of her right hand: pink was her palm, its lines moist, hot, and empty.

  Had Maria used her own spittle after all? Couldn't she wait? Or had she blown the fizz powder away, stifled that feeling before she felt it, rubbed her hand on the beach towel until Maria's familiar little paw resurfaced, with its sli
ghtly superstitious Mound of the Moon, its fat Mercury, and its tightly padded Belt of Venus?

  We went home right after that, and Oskar will never know if Maria foamed the fizz powder a second time that same day or if it was a few days later that a mixture of fizz powder and my spittle first became, through repetition, a vice we both fell prey to.

  It happened by chance, or perhaps chance responding to our wishes, that on the very evening of the beach visit just described—we were eating blueberry soup followed by potato pancakes—Matzerath informed Maria and me, ever so circumspectly, that he had joined a little skat club at his local Party gathering, and that he would be meeting with his new skat brothers, all cell leaders, two evenings a week at Springer's restaurant, and that Selke, the new local group leader, would sit in now and then, which in itself meant he had to go and, unfortunately, leave us by ourselves. Probably the best thing to do would be to billet Oskar at Mother Truczinski's on skat evenings.

  Mother Truczinski agreed, since this solution pleased her far more than the one Matzerath had suggested the day before without Maria's knowledge, which was that rather than my staying overnight at Mother Truczinski's, Maria would spend the night with us twice a week and sleep on our sofa.

  Up till then Maria had been sleeping in the broad bed where my friend Herbert had formerly lodged his scarred back. That heavy piece of furniture stood in a small back room. Mother Truczinski's bed was in the living room. Guste Truczinski, who still worked as a waitress at the Hotel Eden's snack bar and also lived there, came home occasionally on her days off but seldom spent the night, and when she did she slept on the sofa. But if Fritz Truczinski came home from the front bearing gifts from distant lands, whether on leave or on duty, he slept in Herbert's bed, while Maria slept in Mother Truczinski's bed and the old woman camped on the sofa.

  This order of things was disrupted by my demands. At first I was to bed down on the sofa. I rejected this notion briefly but firmly. Then Mother Truczinski offered to relinquish her old woman's bed and put up with the sofa. Here Maria raised an objection, couldn't bear to see her old mother's nightly rest disturbed by such discomfort, and without wasting words, declared herself prepared to share Herbert's former waiter's bed with me: "Little Oskar and me can fit into one bed. He's just a half-pint anyways."

  So, starting the following week, Maria carried my bedclothes twice weekly from our ground-floor flat up two stories and prepared the night's lodging for me and my drum on the left side of her bed. On Matzerath's first skat night nothing at all happened. Herbert's bed seemed huge to me. I lay down first, Maria came in later. She had washed in the kitchen and entered the bedroom in a ridiculously long and old-fashioned starched nightgown. Oskar had expected her to be naked and hairy, and was disappointed at first, but happy even so, since the gown from great-granny's drawer was reminiscent of the white folds of nurse uniforms, and built pleasant bridges to them.

  Standing before the chest of drawers, Maria undid her braids, whistling all the while. Whenever Maria dressed or undressed, did or undid her braids, she whistled. Even when she was combing her hair she never tired of squeezing those two notes through her pursed lips, though she never found a tune.

  As soon as Maria put down the comb, the whistling stopped. She turned, shook her hair out, and arranged things on her chest of drawers with a few deft movements, which put her in high spirits: she threw a kiss to her mustached father, photographed and retouched in a black ebony frame, then leapt into bed with exaggerated energy, bounced up and down a few times, grabbed the eiderdown on her last bounce, and disappeared up to her chin under the mound, didn't touch me at all as I lay under my own quilt, reached out from under the eiderdown with a round arm from which the sleeve of her gown slid back, felt over her head for the cord to click off the light, found it, clicked it, and only when it was dark, said to me much too loudly, "Good night!"

  Maria was soon breathing evenly. I don't think she was pretending, she probably did fall asleep quickly, for the hours of good solid work she put in each day led of necessity to similarly good solid hours of sleep.

  For some time Oskar was beset by absorbing images that kept him awake. In spite of the thick darkness that reigned between the walls and the blackout paper over the window, blond nurses bent over Herbert's scarred back, Crazy Leo's white rumpled shirt turned quite naturally into a seagull that flew away, then smashed in flight against a cemetery wall, which instantly took on a freshly whitewashed look, and so on, and so on. Not until the steadily intensifying, sleepy-making smell of vanilla made the pre-slumber film first flicker, then break, did Oskar's breathing fall into the calm rhythm that Maria's had long since achieved.

  Three days later Maria presented an equally demure image of maidenly modesty going to bed. She arrived in her nightgown, whistled as she undid her braids, kept whistling as she combed out her hair, put the comb away, stopped whistling, arranged things on top of the chest of drawers, threw a kiss, made her exaggerated leap into bed, bounced, reached for the eiderdown, and caught sight—I was contemplating her back—caught sight of a little packet—I was admiring her long, lovely hair—discovered something green on the eiderdown—I closed my eyes, waiting for her to grow used to the sight of the fizz powder—then the springs cried out beneath a Maria flopping back down, there was a click, and when I opened my eyes at the click, Oskar confirmed what he already knew: Maria had turned out the light, her breath in the dark was uneven, she had not grown used to the sight of the fizz powder; but the question remained whether the darkness she'd summoned might not have granted the fizz powder an even more intense existence, brought woodruff to full bloom, and ordained a mixture of bubbling carbonate for the night.

  I almost think the darkness was on Oskar's side. For after a few minutes—if one can speak of minutes in a pitch-black room—I could make out movements at the head of the bed; Maria was fishing for the cord, the cord bit, and an instant later I was again admiring the long, lovely hair cascading down Maria's sitting nightgown. How steady and yellow shone the light bulb behind its pleated lampshade! The eiderdown still rose plump, turned up, and untouched at the foot of the bed. The little packet atop the mound hadn't dared budge in the darkness. Maria's granny nightshirt rustled, a sleeve of the gown lifted along with its plump little hand, and Oskar gathered spit in his mouth.

  Over the following weeks the two of us emptied over a dozen little packets of fizz powder, mostly woodruff flavored, and then when the woodruff ran out, lemon and raspberry, always following the same routine, using my spittle to make it bubble and provoking a feeling that Maria grew to appreciate more and more. I became skilled in gathering saliva, used tricks to make my mouth water quickly and copiously, and was soon able, with the contents of a single packet of fizz powder, to bestow the sensation Maria longed for three times in rapid succession.

  Maria was pleased with Oskar, hugged him sometimes, even kissed him two or three times after a fizz-powder pleasuring, somewhere on his face; then Oskar would hear her giggle briefly in the darkness and quickly fall asleep.

  I was finding it increasingly difficult to fall asleep. I was a sixteen-year-old with a lively imagination and a sleep-depriving urge to endow my love for Maria with even more amazing possibilities than those slumbering in the fizz powder, which, awakened by my spittle, invariably aroused the same sensation.

  Oskar's meditations were not confined to the period after the light clicked off. During the day I brooded behind my drum, leafed through my well-thumbed Rasputin excerpts, recalled earlier educational orgies between Gretchen Scheffler and my poor mama, consulted Goethe, whose Elective Affinities I had excerpted as I had Rasputin, took on the faith healer's animal drive, tempered it with the noble poet's world-embracing feel for nature, gave Maria first the traits of the Tsarina, then the Grand Duchess Anastasia, chose ladies from Rasputin's retinue of eccentric nobles, but soon, repelled by so much animal passion, saw Maria take on the celestial transparency of an Ottilie, or as Charlotte, masking a disciplined, fully mastered pa
ssion. Oskar saw himself by turns as Rasputin, then as his murderer, often as the Captain, more rarely as Charlotte's vacillating husband, and once—I have to admit—as a genius with the well-known features of Goethe, hovering over a sleeping Maria.

  Strangely enough, I received more inspiration from literature than from actual, naked life. Jan Bronski, for example, whom I'd seen tilling the flesh of my poor mama often enough, taught me next to nothing. Though I knew that this tangle consisting by turns of Mama and Jan or Matzerath and Mama—sighing, straining, then moaning in exhaustion, falling apart, trailing sticky threads—meant love, Oskar still couldn't believe that love was love, and moved by love sought other loves, yet al ways returned to that same tangle-love, hated that love till he'd practiced that love himself and was forced to defend it in his own eyes as the only true and possible love.

  Maria took the fizz powder lying down. Since her legs generally started twitching and fidgeting the moment the powder started to fizz, her nightgown often rode high up her thighs after the first sensation. By the second fizzing the gown had usually managed to climb over her belly and roll up under her breasts. Spontaneously, without having had a chance to consult Goethe or Rasputin beforehand, after weeks of filling her left hand, I shook the rest of the raspberry fizz-powder packet into her hollow bellybutton and let my spittle flow onto it before she could protest, and as the crater started to seethe, Maria lost track of any arguments she might have used in protest, for the seething, bubbling bellybutton had obvious advantages over her hollow hand. It was still the same fizz powder, my spittle was still my spittle, and the feeling had not changed, it was simply more intense, much more intense. The sensation reached such a pitch that Maria could barely stand it. She bent over and tried to switch off the fizzing raspberry in her little bellybutton pot with her tongue, just as she used to slay the woodruff in her hollow hand when it had done its duty, but her tongue wasn't long enough; her bellybutton was farther away than Africa or Tierra del Fuego. But Maria's bellybutton was right beside me, and I sank my tongue into it, went looking for raspberries and found more and more, grew so lost in picking them that I wandered toward regions where no wardens checked licenses to pick berries, felt duty-bound to pluck each and every raspberry, had eyes, mind, heart, ears, and nose only for raspberries, was so intent on raspberries that Oskar merely noted in passing: Maria is pleased by your berry-picking zeal. That's why she's clicked off the light. That's why she's fallen asleep so trustingly and lets you keep on looking; for Maria was rich in raspberries.