The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  You have to admit that's a hell of a situation, no matter how close the diving board is to heaven. The Dusters and I found ourselves in a similar situation, though it wasn't the season for swimming, in January of forty-five. We had ventured high above, were now jostling about on the diving board, while below us, forming a solemn horseshoe around an empty pool, sat judges, associates, witnesses, and bailiffs.

  Then Störtebeker stepped out onto the springy board with no railing.

  "Jump!" the judges shouted.

  But Störtebeker didn't jump.

  Then the slim figure of a young girl in a short Berchtesgaden jacket and a gray pleated skirt rose from the benches of the witness stand. She raised a pale but not blurred face—which I still maintain formed a triangle—like a blinking target; and Luzie Rennwand did not shout but whispered instead, "Jump, Störtebeker, jump!"

  Then Störtebeker jumped, and Luzie sat back down on the wooden witness bench, pulling the sleeves of her knitted Berchtesgaden jacket over her fists.

  Moorskiff limped onto the diving board. The judges urged him to jump. But Moorskiff didn't feel like it, examined his fingernails with an embarrassed smile, waited till Luzie freed her sleeves, lowered her fists from the wool, and showed him her triangle of a face, black-framed, with slits for eyes. Then he jumped, plunging toward the triangular target, yet never reached it.

  Pinchcoal and PuttPutt, who had it in for each other even as they ascended, came to blows on the diving board. PuttPutt got a dusting and Pinchcoal didn't let go of him even when he jumped.

  Thumper, who had long, silky lashes, closed his unfathomably sad doe eyes before he jumped.

  The Air Force auxiliaries had to remove their uniforms before they jumped.

  Nor could the Rennwand brothers jump from the diving board into heaven as choirboys; Luzie, their little sister, sitting in the witness stand, dressed in threadbare wartime wool and encouraging this jumping game, would never have stood for it.

  Countering history, Belisarius and Narses jumped first, then Totila and Teja.

  Bluebeard jumped, Lionheart jumped, the foot soldiers of the Dusters, Nosey, Bushman, Tanker, Piper, Hotsauce, Yatagan, and Cooper, jumped.

  When Stuchel, a high school student so cross-eyed it was confusing to look at him, only loosely involved with the Dusters, and that almost by accident, had jumped, only Jesus remained on the diving board and, as Oskar Matzerath, was urged in chorus by the judges to jump, an invitation Jesus declined. And when a stern Luzie rose from the witness stand with her scrawny Mozart pigtail between her shoulder blades, spread her knitted sleeves, and without moving her pinched mouth, whispered, "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump!" I understood the seductive nature of the ten-meter diving board, little gray kittens tumbled about in the hollows of my knees, hedgehogs mated beneath the soles of my feet, fledgling swallows took wing in my armpits, and the whole world lay at my feet, not just Europe. There were Americans and Japanese, dancing a torch dance on the island of Luzon. There were slant-eyes and round-eyes, losing buttons on their uniforms. But at the same moment a tailor in Stockholm was sewing buttons on a pinstriped evening suit. There was Mountbatten, feeding the elephants of Burma with shells of every caliber. But at the same moment a widow in Lima was teaching her parrot to say "caramba." There were two powerful aircraft carriers, decked out like Gothic cathedrals, heading for each other in the Pacific, sending up their planes and then sinking each other. But the planes had nowhere to land, hung in the air like helpless, allegorical angels, roaring, burning up their fuel. But that didn't disturb a tram conductor in Haparanda, just home from work. He broke eggs into a pan, two for him and two for his fiancée, whose arrival he awaited with a smile, planning everything in advance. Of course as expected the armies of Konev and Zhukov were on the move again; as it rained in Ireland, they broke through on the Vistula, took Warsaw too late and Königsberg too early, and still couldn't keep a woman in Panama with five children and only one husband from burning the milk on her gas stove. And thus did the threads of current events, still hungry in front, coil about and create a story already being woven into History behind. And I saw too that activities like thumb-twiddling, brow-wrinkling, head-nodding, hand-shaking, baby-making, coin-faking, light-dousing, tooth-brushing, man-killing, and diaper-changing were being engaged in all over the world, if not always with equal skill. I was bewildered by so many purposeful actions. And so I turned my thoughts back to the trial being staged in my honor at the foot of the diving board. "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump," whispered Luzie Rennwand, the precocious witness. She sat on Satan's lap, which emphasized her virginity. He tempted her desire by handing her a sausage sandwich. She took a bite, yet retained her chastity. "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump!" she chewed, and offered me her triangle, still intact.

  I didn't jump, nor will I ever jump or dive from a diving tower. That wasn't Oskar's final trial. They've attempted to persuade me to jump many times, even quite recently. At the ring-finger trial—which I prefer to call the third trial of Jesus—just as at the Dusters' trial, there were plenty of spectators at the edge of the empty, azure-tiled pool. They sat on witness benches, intending to live through and beyond my trial.

  But I turned around, stifled the fledgling swallows in my armpits, squashed the hedgehogs celebrating their marriage beneath my soles, starved the gray kittens from the hollows of my knees—and stepped stiffly to the rail, scorned the exhilaration of the jump, swung onto the ladder, descended, confirming with every rung that one could not only climb diving towers, but leave them without diving.

  Maria and Matzerath waited for me below. Father Wiehnke blessed me unasked. Gretchen Scheffler had brought me a little winter coat and some cake. Little Kurt had grown and refused to recognize me as his father or half brother. My grandmother Koljaiczek held her brother Vinzent by the arm. He knew the world and mumbled incoherently.

  As we left the courthouse, an official in civilian clothes came up to Matzerath, handed him a document, and said, "You really should think this over, Herr Matzerath. You've got to get that child off the streets. You see how easy it is for certain elements to misuse such a poor helpless creature."

  Maria wept and draped my drum around me, which Father Wiehnke had taken charge of during the trial. We walked to the tram stop at Central Station. Matzerath carried me the last part of the way. I looked back over his shoulder, searching for a triangular face in the crowd, wanted to know if she would climb to the diving board too, if she would jump after Störtebeker and Moorskiff, or if, like me, she would avail herself of the second possibility, and descend the ladder.

  To this very day I have not cured myself of the habit of keeping a lookout on streets and squares for a skinny teenage girl, neither pretty nor ugly, who devours men like a shark. Even in my bed at the mental institution I'm frightened whenever Bruno announces an unknown visitor. My fear is this: Luzie Rennwand has come back as a scary Black Cook to urge you to jump one last time.

  For ten days Matzerath pondered whether or not to sign the letter and send it back to the Ministry of Health. When, on the eleventh day, he sent it off signed, the city already lay under artillery siege, and it was questionable whether the post office would have a chance to send it on. The tanks leading the way for Marshal Rokossovski's army pressed forward to Elbing. The second army, under Weiß, took up positions on the heights surrounding Danzig. Life in the cellar began.

  As we all know, our cellar was under the shop. It could be reached through the door in the hall across from the toilet, by descending eighteen steps, past the cellars of Heilandt and Kater, and before Schlager's. Old man Heilandt was still there. But Frau Kater, as well as Laubschad the clockmaker, the Eykes, and the Schlagers, had all departed with a few bundles. They were later said to have boarded a former Strength through Joy ship, along with Gretchen and Alexander Scheffler, and taken off in the direction of Stettin or Lübeck, or into the skies, having hit a mine; in any case, over half of the flats and cellars were empty.

  Our cellar had the advantage of
a second entrance, as we also know, through a trapdoor behind the counter in the shop. So no one could see what Matzerath took to the cellar or brought up from it. Nor would anyone have tolerated the provisions Matzerath managed to store there during the war. The dry, warm room was filled with such foodstuffs as dried beans, noodles, sugar, synthetic honey, wheat flour, and margarine. Boxes of Ryvita rested on boxes of Palmin. Tin cans of Leipzig Mixed Vegetables were stacked beside cans of yellow plums, baby peas, and prunes on shelves Matzerath the handyman had built himself and pegged to the walls. Midway through the war, at Greff's suggestion, he had wedged a few beams between the ceiling and the concrete floor of the cellar, so that the storeroom was as safe as a regulation air-raid shelter. Matzerath had wanted to knock these beams down again at various times, since Danzig had not suffered any serious bombardments other than nuisance raids. But when Greff the air-raid warden was no longer there to raise the issue, Maria asked Matzerath to leave the props in place. She demanded security for little Kurt and sometimes even for me.

  During the first air raids at the end of January, old man Heilandt and Matzerath joined forces to carry the chair along with Mother Truczinski down to the cellar. Thereafter, either at her request or to avoid the effort, they left her by the window in her flat. After the big air raid on the inner city, Maria and Matzerath found the old lady with her jaw hanging down and squinting so oddly you'd think a small, sticky fly had flown into her eye.

  So the door to the bedroom was lifted off its hinges. Old man Heilandt fetched his tools and a few crate boards from his workshop. Smoking Derby cigarettes that Matzerath had given him, he started taking measurements. Oskar helped him with his work. The others disappeared into the cellar because the artillery had started firing again from the heights.

  He meant to do the job quickly and construct a simple, untapered box. But Oskar preferred the traditional form of the coffin, refused to relent, and held the boards so firmly in place beneath the saw that Heilandt finally decided to taper it toward the foot after all, giving it the shape every human corpse has the right to demand.

  The coffin ended up fine. Lina Greff washed Mother Truczinski, took a freshly laundered nightgown from the wardrobe, trimmed her fingernails, arranged her bun, and gave it the support it needed with three knitting needles; in short, she made sure that in death as in life, Mother Truczinski looked like a gray mouse who liked to drink barley coffee and eat potato pancakes.

  But since the mouse had stiffened in her chair during the air raid and couldn't fit in the coffin with her knees drawn up, old man Heilandt waited until Maria had left the room for a few minutes with little Kurt in her arms, then broke both legs so the coffin could be nailed shut.

  Unfortunately we had no black paint but only yellow. So Mother Truczinski was carried out of her flat and down the stairs in unpainted boards, which, however, tapered toward the foot. Oskar carried his drum behind and examined the coffin lid, which read Vitello-Margarine—Vitello-Margarine—Vitello-Margarine—three times in succession, evenly spaced, in posthumous confirmation of Mother Truczinski's taste. During her lifetime she had preferred good old Vitello Margarine made from pure vegetable oil to the finest butter, because margarine is wholesome and nutritious, stays fresh, and lifts the spirits.

  Old man Heilandt loaded the coffin onto a flatbed cart from Greff's vegetable shop and pulled it down Luisenstraße, Marienstraße, along Anton-Möller-Weg — where two houses were on fire — toward the Women's Clinic. Little Kurt stayed in our cellar with the widow Greff. Maria and Matzerath pushed, Oscar sat on the cart, would have liked to climb up on the coffin, but wasn't allowed to. The streets were clogged with refugees from East Prussia and the Delta. It was almost impossible to get through the railway underpass by the Sporthalle. Matzerath suggested digging a grave on the school grounds at the Conradinum. Maria was against it. Old man Heilandt, who was Mother Truczinski's age, waved it off. I was opposed to the school grounds too. We had to forgo the city cemetery, though, since from the Sporthalle on, Hindenburgallee was closed to all but military traffic. So we couldn't bury the mouse next to her son Herbert, but did find a place for her beyond the Maiwiese in Steffenspark, which lay across from the city cemetery.

  The ground was frozen. While Matzerath and old man Heilandt took turns plying the pickax and Maria tried to dig up some ivy from around the stone benches, Oskar slipped off to be on his own and was soon among the tree trunks on Hindenburgallee. What traffic! The tanks retreating from the heights and the Delta were towing one another off. From the trees — lindens, if I remember rightly — dangled Volkssturm men and soldiers. Cardboard signs on their uniform jackets were fairly legible and indicated that the men hanging from the trees, or lindens, were traitors. I stared into the strained faces of several hanged men, made a few general comparisons, then specific ones with the hanged greengrocer Greff. I also saw clusters of youngsters strung up in uniforms too large for them, kept thinking I saw Störtebeker — though all hanged youngsters look alike — and said to myself: So now they've hanged Störtebeker — I wondered if they've strung up Luzie Rennwand?

  This thought gave Oskar wings. He searched the trees left and right for a skinny dangling girl, ventured between the tanks to the other side of the avenue, but found only doughboys, elderly Volkssturmers, and youngsters who looked like Störtebeker. Disappointed, I searched along the avenue up to the half-demolished Café Vierjahreszeiten, returned only reluctantly, and when I stood once more at Mother Truczinski's grave, strewing ivy and foliage over the mound with Maria, I still retained the clear and detailed image of a dangling Luzie.

  We didn't return the widow Greff's cart to the vegetable shop. Matzerath and old man Heilandt took it apart but stowed the pieces by the shop counter, and the grocer said as he stuck three packets of Derby cigarettes in the old man's pockets, "We may need the cart again. At least it's fairly safe here."

  Old man Heilandt said nothing, but helped himself to several packages of noodles and two bags of sugar from the nearly empty shelves. Then he shuffled out of the shop in the same felt slippers he'd worn at the burial and all the way there and back, leaving it to Matzerath to clear his meager remaining stock from the shelves and carry it to the cellar.

  Now we seldom emerged from our hole. The Russians were said to be in Zigankenberg and Pietzgendorf and on the outskirts of Schidlitz. In any case they must have occupied the heights, for they were firing straight down on the city. Rechtstadt, Altstadt, Pfefferstadt, Vorstadt, Jungstadt, Neustadt, and Niederstadt, built up over the past seven hundred years, burned to the ground in three days. But it wasn't the first time Danzig had been put to the torch. Pomerelians, Brandenburgers, Teutonic Knights, Poles, Swedes and Swedes again, French, Prussians and Russians, Saxons too, making history, had found the city worthy of burning every few decades—and now it was the Russians, Poles, Germans, and English who were baking the Gothic bricks for the hundredth time, without improving the baker's art. Häkergasse, Langgasse, Breitgasse, Große and Kleine Wollwebergasse, were burning, Tobiasgasse, Hundegasse, Altstädtischer Graben, Outer Graben, the ramparts burned, as did Lange Brücke. Crane Gate was made of wood and burned beautifully. On Tailor Lane the fire had itself measured for several flashy pairs of trousers. St. Mary's Church burned from the inside out, its lancet windows lit with a festive glow. Those bells that had not yet been evacuated from St. Catherine's, St. John's, Saints Brigitte, Barbara, Elisabeth, Peter, and Paul, from Trinity and Corpus Christi, melted in their tower frames, dripping without song or sound. In the Great Mill they were grinding red wheat. Butchers Lane smelled of burned Sunday roast. At the Stadt-Theater Dreams of Arson, a one-act play of ambiguous import, was given its world premiere. The town fathers in Rechtstadt decided to raise the firemen's wages retroactively after the fire. Holy Spirit Lane blazed in the name of the Holy Spirit. The Franciscan monastery blazed joyfully in the name of St. Francis, who loved fire and sang hymns to it. The Lane of Our Lady glowed for Father and Son alike. Needless to say, the Hay Market, Coal
Market, and Lumber Market burned to the ground. In Bakers Lane the buns never made it out of the oven. In Milk Churn Lane the milk boiled over. Only the West Prussian Fire Insurance building, for purely symbolic reasons, refused to burn down.

  Oskar never had much interest in fires. So I would have stayed in the cellar when Matzerath bounded up the steps to watch Danzig burn from the attic windows, had I not been thoughtless enough to store my few, highly flammable possessions in that same attic. It was a matter of saving the last of the drums from my Theater at the Front stockpile and my Goethe and Rasputin. I also kept a paper-thin, delicately painted fan between the pages of my book, one that my Roswitha, La Raguna, had wielded gracefully in her lifetime. Maria remained in the cellar. But little Kurt wanted to come up to the roof with Matzerath and me and watch the fire. Though my son's uncontrolled enthusiasm annoyed me, Oskar told himself the boy must get that from his great-grandfather, my grandfather Koljaiczek, the arsonist. Maria kept little Kurt below while I went up with Matzerath, gathered my things, glanced out the attic window, and was amazed to see the scintillating burst of vitality our venerable old city had managed to summon up.

  When shells began landing nearby, we left the attic. Matzerath wanted to go up again later, but Maria wouldn't let him. He caved in, and wept as he gave a detailed account of the fire to the widow Greff, who had remained below. He went back to the flat again and turned on the radio, but there was no longer any signal. You couldn't even hear the crackle of the flames at the burning station, let alone a special communiqué.

  Matzerath stood in the middle of the cellar, as hesitant as a child who isn't sure if he should go on believing in Santa Claus, tugged at his suspenders, expressed doubt for the first time about the final victory, and on the widow Greff's advice, removed his Party pin from his lapel, then didn't know what to do with it, since the cellar had a concrete floor, Lina Greff wouldn't take it, and Maria said he should bury it among the winter potatoes, but the potatoes didn't seem safe enough to Matzerath and he didn't dare go back upstairs, for they were bound to arrive soon, if they weren't already there, he'd seen them fighting in Brentau and Oliva from the attic, and he kept wishing he'd left the little bonbon up there in the air-defense sand, because if they found him holding it down here—then he dropped it on the concrete, was about to stamp on it, a man of action, but little Kurt and I both pounced on it, I got to it first and held tight as little Kurt started hitting the way he always did when he wanted something, but I wouldn't give my son the Party pin for fear of endangering him, because you didn't fool around with the Russians. Oskar remembered that from reading Rasputin, and I wondered, as little Kurt flailed away at me and Maria tried to separate us, whether it would be White Russians or Great Russians, Cossacks or Georgians, Kalmucks or Crimean Tartars, Ruthenians or Ukrainians, or maybe even Kirghizes, who would find the Party pin on little Kurt if Oskar relented beneath the blows of his son.