The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  Oskar had never seen her like that. Red spots appeared on her face, and her gray eyes grew darker and darker. She called Matzerath a limp-dick, whereupon he picked up his trousers, pulled them on, and buttoned them up. He could buzz off, Maria yelled at him, go back to his group leaders, they were a bunch of quick-squirts too. Matzerath grabbed his jacket, then the door handle, and assured her he would be making some changes, he was fed up with women; if she was so hot, she should get her hooks in some foreign worker, the Frenchy who brought the beer, he could surely do it better. To him, Matzerath, love was something more than just swinishness, he was going to play some skat now, at least there he knew what to expect.

  And then I was alone with Maria in the living room. She had stopped crying and was thoughtfully pulling on her panties, whistling only sparingly. She spent a long time smoothing out her dress, which had suffered on the sofa. Then she turned on the radio, tried to listen as the water levels on the Vistula and the Nogat were reported, and then, after the gauge reading for the lower Mottlau had been announced, as a waltz was first promised and could then be heard, she suddenly and unexpectedly pulled off her panties again, went into the kitchen, plunked down a kettle, turned on the tap; I heard the gas puff and gathered that Maria had decided on a sitz bath.

  To dispel this rather embarrassing image, Oskar concentrated on the strains of the waltz. If I recall correctly, I even drummed a few bars of Strauß and enjoyed it. Then the radio station interrupted the waltz for a special communiqué. Oskar bet on news from the Atlantic and was not mistaken. Several U-boats had managed to sink seven or eight ships of so-and-so-many thousand tons to the west of Ireland. Other subs had managed to send a nearly equal number of registered tons to the bottom of the Atlantic. One submarine in particular had distinguished itself, under the command of Lieutenant-Captain Schepke, or perhaps Lieutenant-Captain Kretschmer—anyway, one or the other, or some third famous lieutenant-captain—had sunk the most tonnage, and into the bargain, or over and above it, a British destroyer of the XY class.

  While I played variations on "Sailing against England," which followed the special communiqué, and almost turned it into a waltz on my drum, Maria came into the living room with a Turkish towel over her arm. In an undertone she asked Oskar, "Do you hear that, little Oskar, another special communiqué! If they keep on like that..."

  Without revealing to Oskar what would happen if they managed to keep on like that, she sat down in the chair on which Matzerath usually hung his jacket. Maria twisted the wet towel into a sausage and whistled along with "Sailing against England," rather loudly and even correctly. She repeated the final chorus a second time when those on the radio had already stopped, then switched off the box on the sideboard the moment strains of the immortal waltz set in again. She left the sausaged towel on the table, sat down, and placed her little paws on her thighs.

  Then things grew very quiet in our living room, only the grandfather clock spoke more and more loudly, and Maria seemed to be wondering if it might not be best to turn the radio back on. But she made another decision. She pressed her head against the sausaged towel on the tabletop, let her arms dangle past her knees toward the carpet, and wept silently and steadily.

  Oskar wondered if Maria was ashamed because I'd caught her in such an embarrassing position. I decided to cheer her up, slipped out of the living room and found in the dark shop, next to packages of pudding and sheets of gelatin, a little packet that in the twilight of the corridor turned out to be a packet of woodruff-flavored fizz powder. Oskar was pleased by his find, for at the time I thought Maria preferred woodruff to any other flavor.

  As I entered the living room, Maria's right cheek still rested on the towel twisted into a sausage. And her arms still dangled helplessly between her thighs. Oskar approached from the left and was disappointed to find her eyes closed and tearless. I waited patiently till she lifted her lids with their slightly sticky lashes, then held the little packet out to her, but she didn't notice the woodruff, seemed to stare right through the little packet and Oskar too.

  She's probably been blinded by her tears, I thought, excusing her, and decided, after a brief internal deliberation, on a more direct approach. Under the table climbed Oskar, crouched at Maria's pigeon-toed feet, took her left hand, which was almost touching the carpet with its fingertips, turned it till I could see the palm, tore open the packet with my teeth, poured half the contents of the paper package into the bowl thus listlessly relinquished to me, added my spittle, and had just enough time to see it start to fizz before Maria gave me a painful kick in the chest that hurled Oskar to the carpet directly under the living room table.

  In spite of the pain I was back on my feet in an instant and out from under the table. Maria was standing too. We stood across from each other breathing hard. Maria grabbed the Turkish towel, wiped her left hand clean, slung the towel at my feet, and called me a dirty pig, a nasty dwarf, a crazy midget that should be thrown in the nuthouse. Then she grabbed me, slapped the back of my head, reviled my poor mama for having brought a brat like me into the world, and just as I was about to aim a scream at all the glass in the living room and in the whole world, she stuffed my mouth with that Turkish towel, which was tougher than tough beef when you clamped down on it.

  Not until Oskar managed to turn red and blue did she release me. Now I could easily have screamshattered all the glasses and window-panes, including the crystal covering the dial of the grandfather clock again. But I didn't scream; instead I allowed a hate to possess me that's so deep-seated I still feel it today every time Maria walks in the room, feel it like that towel between my teeth.

  Capricious as Maria could be, she let up on me, laughed good-naturedly, turned the radio on with a flick of the dial, came toward me, whistling along with the waltz, to stroke my hair the way I always liked and make up.

  Oskar let her get right up close and then struck her an uppercut with both fists right where she'd admitted Matzerath. And when she caught my fists before I could hit her a second time, I bit down hard on that same accursed spot and fell to the sofa with her, still biting Maria hard, heard the radio break for another special communiqué, but Oskar had no wish to hear it; and so he can't tell you who sank what and how many, for a violent fit of tears loosened my jaws and I lay motionless on Maria, who was crying in pain, while Oskar was crying with hate, and with a love that turned to leaden helplessness and yet could never die.

  Carrying My Helplessness to Frau Greff

  I didn't like Greff. Greff didn't like me. Later on, when Greff built the drum machine for me, I still didn't like him. Even today, when Oskar barely has the strength for such sustained antipathies, I don't much care for Greff, even if he no longer exists.

  Greff was a greengrocer. But don't fool yourself. He didn't believe in potatoes or Savoy cabbages, but still he knew a great deal about growing vegetables and liked to think of himself as a gardener, a friend of Nature, a vegetarian. But precisely because Greff didn't eat meat, he was no true greengrocer. He found it impossible to talk about vegetables as mere vegetables. "Consider, please, this extraordinary potato," I would often hear him tell his customers, "this swelling, bursting fruity pulp, constantly creating new forms, yet so chaste. I love a potato, for it speaks to me." Of course no true greengrocer would ever embarrass his customers with talk like that. Even in the best potato years, my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek, who grew old amid potato fields, never uttered more than some brief remark such as "Them spuds are a bit bigger than last year." Yet Anna Koljaiczek and her brother Vinzent Bronski were far more dependent on the potato harvest than the greengrocer Greff, who could always make up for a bad potato year with a good one in plums.

  Everything about Greff was overdone. Did he have to wear a green apron in the shop? What presumption to smile at his customers, point sagely at his spinach-green bib, and call it "God's green garden-apron." Nor could he give up scouting. True, he'd been forced to disband his troop in thirty-eight—the little rogues were fitted out in brown
shirts and dashing black winter uniforms instead—but his former scouts came by regularly, in civilian clothes or their new uniforms, to see their former scoutmaster, and as he plucked a guitar against the garden-apron God had loaned him, sang morning songs, evening songs, hiking songs, soldier's songs, harvest songs, church songs, and folk songs native and foreign. Since Greff had joined the National Socialist Motor Corps just in time and, from forty-one on, called himself both a greengrocer and an air-raid warden, and since he could count on the support of two of his former scouts who had risen in the Hitler Youth, one to squad leader and the other to platoon leader, the evenings of song in Greff's potato cellar could be considered more or less approved by the Hitler Youth District Bureau. Greff had also been asked by Löbsack, the District Director of Training, to set up song evenings for training sessions at the school in Jenkau. Early in nineteen-forty, Greff and a schoolteacher were commissioned to compile a young people's songbook entitled Sing Along! for the district of Danzig-West Prussia. The book turned out well. The greengrocer received a letter from Berlin, signed by the Reich Youth Leader, and was invited to attend a gathering of song leaders in Berlin.

  Greff was a practical man. Not only did he know all the verses of all the songs, he could also pitch a tent, kindle and extinguish campfires without setting the woods ablaze, and find his way easily with a compass; he was on a first-name basis with every star in the sky, rattled off jokes and told tall tales, knew all the legends of the land of the Vistula, gave home lectures on "Danzig and the Hanseatic League," and could list all the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Knights along with their dates; nor did he stop at that: he could also tell you all sorts of things about the Germanic mission in the territories of the Order, and only on rare occasions did he weave an obvious Boy Scout maxim into his lectures.

  Greff loved young people. He loved boys more than girls. In fact he didn't love girls at all, he only loved boys. Often he loved boys more than he could express in song. It may well be that his wife, Frau Greff, a slovenly woman with a bra that was always greasy and holes in her underwear, forced him to seek a purer measure of love among those wiry, squeaky-clean boys. But one might also lay bare another root of the tree on whose branches Frau Greff's dirty underwear bloomed throughout the year. I think Frau Greff turned slovenly because the greengrocer and air-raid warden had no appreciation for her carefree and somewhat dimwitted voluptuousness.

  Greff loved the taut, the muscular, the hardened. When he said Nature, he meant asceticism. When he said asceticism, he meant a particular type of physical culture. Greff knew his body well. He cared for it meticulously, exposed it to heat and, in particularly inventive ways, to cold. While Oskar sangshattered glass at both near and long distances, thawing frost-flowers from windows now and then, melting icicles and sending them tinkling down, the greengrocer was a man who attacked ice directly with hand tools.

  Greff chopped holes in the ice. In December, January, February he chopped holes in the ice with an ax. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he would bring his bicycle up from the cellar, wrap the ice ax in an onion sack, ride through Saspe to Brösen, follow the snow-covered beach promenade from there toward Glettkau, dismount between Brösen and Glettkau, and, as the sky gradually brightened, push his bicycle with the ax in the onion sack across the icy beach and then several hundred feet out onto the frozen Baltic. Coastal fog held sway over the entire scene. No one could have seen from the beach how Greff laid down his bicycle, unwrapped the ax from the onion sack, stood for a while in devout silence, listening to the foghorns of the icebound freighters on the roads, then dropped his jacket, did a few exercises, and finally began to chop away, strongly and steadily, hacking a round hole in the Baltic Sea.

  Greff needed a good three-quarters of an hour for his hole. Don't ask me how I know. Oskar knew just about everything back then. So I knew how long Greff took for his hole in the ice too. He was sweating, and his sweat sprang salty from his high-domed forehead into the snow. He chopped efficiently, drove the traced circle all the way round to its beginning, then, gloveless, lifted the round plug of ice, which was about ten inches thick, out of the broad expanse of ice, which presumably stretched clear to Hela, or even Sweden. Water stood in the hole, ancient and gray, studded with ice grits. It steamed a little but was no hot spring. The hole attracted fish. That is, they say holes in the ice attract fish. Greff could have caught lampreys or a twenty-pound cod. But he wasn't fishing, instead he was taking off his clothes, stripping naked; for whenever Greff took off his clothes, he stripped naked.

  Oskar has no wish to send wintry shivers up and down your spine. Let me be brief: During the winter months the greengrocer Greff bathed twice weekly in the Baltic. On Wednesdays he bathed alone at the crack of dawn. He left around six, was there around six-thirty, hacked out the hole by seven-fifteen, flung off his clothes with quick, exaggerated movements, rubbed himself down with snow, jumped in the hole, began to shout, and at times could be heard singing: "Wild geese are flying through the night" or "Oh, how we love the storm...," he sang, bathed, shouted for two or at most three minutes, then with a single leap he stood terrifyingly distinct on the surface of the ice: a mass of steaming, crab-red flesh racing around the hole, still shouting, still glowing, then back in his clothes at last and onto the bike. Shortly before eight Greff was at Labesweg again and opened his shop right on time.

  Greff took a second ice bath on Sundays, in the company of several boys. Oskar makes no claim to have ever seen this, nor did he. But word got around. Meyn the musician told stories about the greengrocer, trumpeted them through the whole neighborhood, and one of those trumpet-tales ran like this: Each Sunday during the roughest winter months, Greff would bathe in the company of several boys. But even Meyn didn't claim that the greengrocer forced the boys to jump into the ice hole naked, as he did. He was satisfied if they frolicked around on the ice, sinewy and tough, half-naked or nearly naked youths, and rubbed each other down with snow. Indeed, the boys in the snow gave Greff so much pleasure that before or after bathing he often frolicked with them, helped rub down one or two, and let the whole horde rub him down; and Meyn the musician claims that in spite of the coastal fog, he saw from the Glettkau beach promenade an appallingly naked, singing, shouting Greff pull two of his naked pupils to him, lift them up, and naked bearing the naked, tear off across the thick Baltic ice like a shouting, runaway troika.

  As you might imagine, Greff was no fisherman's son, though there were lots of fishermen in Brôsen and Neufahrwasser named Greff. Greff the greengrocer hailed from Tiegenhof, but Lina Greff, née Bartsch, met her husband in Praust. He was helping an enterprising young vicar there run the Catholic journeymen's club, and Lina was drawn to the parish house each Saturday by same vicar. A photo she must have given me, for it's still pasted today in my photo album, shows the twenty-year-old Lina as strong, plump, merry, good-natured, flighty, dumb. Her father ran a good-sized fruit and vegetable farm in Sankt Albrecht. She was twenty-two and, as she always swore later, totally inexperienced when she followed the vicar's advice and married Greff, then opened the vegetable shop in Langfuhr with her father's money. Since they got a large part of their produce—almost all their fruit, for example—at low cost from their father's farm, the business practically ran itself, and Greff could do little damage.

  In fact if it hadn't been for the greengrocer's childish tendency to tinker with things, the shop could easily have turned into a gold mine, for it was favorably located in a suburb swarming with children and far removed from competitors. But when an inspector from the Bureau of Weights and Standards appeared for the third or fourth time to examine the scales, then confiscated the weights, locked the scales, and imposed assorted fines on Greff, a number of regular customers turned elsewhere, bought at the weekly market, and passed the word: the produce at Greff's is always high quality, and the prices aren't bad, but something fishy is going on; the people from Weights and Standards were there again.

  Yet I'm sure Greff wasn't try
ing to cheat anyone. What happened was that the large potato scales were weighing to Greff's disadvantage after the greengrocer had made a few adjustments. So shortly before the war he built a set of chimes into the scales that would play a little tune depending on the weight of the potatoes. With twenty pounds of potatoes the customer was regaled, as a sort of bonus, with "On the sunny shores of the Saale," fifty pounds of potatoes got you "Always true and honest be," a hundred pounds of winter potatoes lured from the chimes the naively bewitching tones of the little song "Annchen von Tharau."

  Though I could see how the Bureau of Weights and Standards might not like such musical pleasantries, Oskar himself was in tune with the greengrocer's flights of fancy. Lina Greff too indulged her husband's eccentricities, for the Greffs' marriage was founded precisely on the mutual indulgence of such eccentricities. In this sense the Greffs' marriage was a good one. The greengrocer didn't beat his wife, never cheated on her with other women, was neither a drunkard nor a glutton; instead he was a cheerful, respectably dressed man who was well liked for his affability and helpful nature, not only by young boys but also by those of his customers who bought his music along with his potatoes.