The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  Across the way, the greatest Sunday painter of them all was daily adding a little more sap green, fresh from the tube, to the trees of Wersten Cemetery. I have always been attracted to cemeteries. They are well kept, straightforward, logical, manly, full of life. You can summon up courage and reach decisions in cemeteries, life takes on clear contours—and I'm not referring to burial plots—in cemeteries, and, if you will, a meaning.

  A street called Bittweg ran along the northern wall of the cemetery. Seven gravestone manufacturers competed there. Large firms like C. Schnoog or Julius Wöbel. Between them the smaller artisans, with names like R. Haydenreich, J. Bois, Kühn & Müller, and P. Korneff. A jumble of sheds and workshops, large signs, freshly painted or barely legible, on the roofs with inscriptions under the firm's name like Gravestones—Monuments and Borders—Natural and Artificial Stone—Mortuary Art. Above Korneff's shop I could barely make out: P. Korneff Stonecutter and Gravestone Sculptor.

  Between the workshop and the wire fence enclosing the yard stood staggered lines of tombstones for single to four-person graves, so-called family plots, set on single or double pedestals. Just beyond the fence, patiently bearing the lozenge-patterned shadow of the wire on sunny days, were shell-limestone cushions meant for modest budgets, polished diorite slabs with unpolished palm branches, and standard thirty-two-inch children's gravestones of slightly smoky Silesian marble with running fluted borders and sunken reliefs on the top third, mostly showing broken roses. Next came a row of standard meter-high stones, taken from the Main-sandstone facades of bombed-out banks and department stores and celebrating here their resurrection, if that can be said of gravestone. In the midst of this display stood the showpiece: a monument of bluish white Tyrolean marble set on three pedestals and consisting of two side pieces and a richly carved center slab. On this central slab rose in sublime relief what is known in the trade as a corpus. This was a corpus with its head and knees to the left, with a crown of thorns and three nails, beardless, hands open, and a wound in its side bleeding in stylized fashion, five drops I think it was.

  Though there were more than enough monuments on Bittweg with a corpus turned to the left—prior to the spring season there would often be ten or more of them spreading their arms—I was particularly taken with Korneff's Jesus Christ, because, well, because he bore the closest resemblance to my gymnast above the main altar in the Church of the Sacred Heart, flexing his muscles, expanding his chest. I spent hours at that fence. I let a stick purr along the finely meshed wire net, wishing for this and that, thinking all sorts of thoughts or none at all. For a long time Korneff remained in hiding. A stovepipe emerged from one of the workshop windows, flexed its elbows a few times, and finally jutted high above the flat roof. Thick yellow smoke from cheap coal barely rose, fell back on the roofing pasteboard, trickled down the windows, along the gutters, and lost itself among the unworked stones and slabs of brittle Lahn marble. Outside the sliding door of the workshop a three-wheeled truck waited under several tarps, as if camouflaged against low-flying planes. Sounds from the workshop—wood striking iron, iron chipping stone—betrayed the stonemason at work.

  In May the tarps were off the three-wheeler, the sliding door stood open. Gray on gray I saw stones tilted against a bench inside the shop, the gallows of a polisher, shelves with plaster models, and, finally, Korneff. He walked with a stoop, his knees permanently bent. His head he held stiffly thrust forward. Pink adhesive tape blackened with grime crossed the back of his neck. Korneff stepped out with a rake and raked, since spring had come, between the gravestones standing on display. He did so thoroughly, leaving alternating tracks in the gravel and picking off a few of last year's leaves that still clung to the monuments. Right by the fence, while the rake was being carefully guided between shell-limestone cushions and diorite slabs, his voice surprised me: "Well, son, don't they want you at home no more?"

  "I really like your gravestones," I said flatteringly.

  "Don't say that aloud or you may wind up under one."

  Now he made an effort to turn his neck for the first time, and his sidewise glance took me in, or rather my hump: "What've they done to you? Don't that make it hard to sleep?"

  I let him have his laugh, then explained that a hump doesn't necessarily get in the way, that I was more than a match for it, that there were girls and even grown women who seemed attracted to a hump, who adapted to the special position and potentialities of a hunchbacked man, women who, to put it plainly, found a hump fun.

  Korneff leaned his chin on the rake handle and pondered this: "You might be right there, I've heard tell of it."

  Then he told me about his days in the Eifel, when he worked in the basalt quarries and had something going with a woman who had a wooden leg, the let one I believe, which could be unbuckled, to which he compared my hump, though there was no unbuckling what he called my "box." The stonecutter recalled the whole story from start to finish in long-winded detail. I waited patiently till he was through and the woman had buckled her leg back on, then asked if I could see his workshop.

  Korneff opened the sheet-metal gate in the wire fence, pointed his rake toward the open sliding door by way of invitation, and I crunched across the gravel till the smell of sulfur, lime, and moisture engulfed me.

  Heavy pear-shaped wooden mallets, flattened on top, with frayed hollows from the same constantly repeated blow, rested on roughly hewn slabs formed by four of those blows. Points for boasting mallets, points with billet heads, freshly reforged cold chisels still blue from tempering, long, springy etching chisels and bull chisels for marble, compact broad-track bush chisels on a slab of Blaubank, polishing paste drying on four-cornered wooden sawhorses, and, on wooden rollers, ready to roll out, standing on end, matte and fully polished, a travertine slab, oily, yellow, cheesy, porous, for a double plot.

  "This here's a bush hammer, that's a spoon chisel, that's a groove cutter, and this"—Korneff lifted a board a hand's breadth wide and three paces long, examined its edge closely—"this here's a marking level. I uses it to whack the tyros on the head if they don't do what I say."

  My question was not merely polite: "So you take on apprentices?"

  Korneff launched into complaints: "I got work enough for five. But you can't get none. They're all in the black market these days, the bunglers!" Like me, the stonecutter opposed the sort of shady dealing that hindered many a promising young man from learning a useful trade. While Korneff demonstrated the polishing qualities of various coarse to fine grinding stones on a Solnhof slab, I was playing with a little idea. Pumice stones, the chocolate-brown shellac stone for prepolishing, tripoli to tripol a dull surface shiny, and still there, but gleaming more brightly now, my little idea. Korneff showed me lettering samples, told me of lettering in relief and lettering in blind, of gilding, and that using gold isn't as crazy as you might think: with one good, old-fashioned thaler you could gild an entire horse and rider, and my thoughts flew off to Kaiser Wilhelm on the Heumarkt in Danzig, eternally riding off along Sandgrube, whose statue the Polish authorities in charge of monuments might now decide to gild, but in spite of horse and rider covered in gold leaf I did not abandon my little idea, which seemed to gleam even more richly now, played with it, formulating it as Korneff explained the tripod pointing machine for sculptural work, rapped on plaster models of the crucified Christ, facing left or facing right, with his knuckle: "So you might take on an apprentice?" My little idea was off and running. "I gather you're looking for an apprentice, am I right?" Korneff rubbed the tape covering the boils on the back of his neck. "I mean, would you take on someone like me as an apprentice?" The question was badly put, and I corrected myself at once: "Please don't underestimate my strength, sir. My legs are a little weak, but that's all. I've got a strong grip!" Inspired by my own resolution and going for broke, I bared my left upper arm, offered my small but rawhide-tough muscle for him to feel, and when he didn't, grabbed a boasting chisel off the shell limestone, made the six-sided metal tool bounce up and dow
n convincingly on my small, tennis-ball-sized mound, and interrupted my demonstration only when Korneff turned on the grinder, started running a blue-gray grinding disk over the travertine pedestal for the double slab, and finally, his eyes glued on the grinder, roared out over the noise: "Best sleep on it, boy. This here's no bed of roses. Then, if you still feel like it, I'll take you on as a trainee."

  Taking the stonecutter's advice, I slept on my little idea for a week, while by day I weighed little Kurt's flintstones against the gravestones on Bittweg, listened to Maria's reproaches: "You're just living off us, Oskar. Get started in something: tea, cocoa, powdered milk maybe," but I started in nothing, basked in the approval of Guste, who held up the absent Köster as a model and praised me for keeping out of the black market, but was deeply hurt by my son Kurt, who, inventing columns of numbers and committing them to paper, ignored me in the same way I had seen fit to ignore Matzerath over the years.

  We were having lunch. Guste had switched off the bell so the customers wouldn't catch us eating scrambled eggs and bacon. Maria said, "See, Oskar, we can only afford this because we don't sit around twiddling our thumbs." Little Kurt heaved a sigh. Flintstones had fallen to eighteen. Guste ate heartily in silence. I did the same, liked what I ate, but though I liked it, I was still unhappy, perhaps it was the powdered eggs, and biting down on something gristly in the bacon, I suddenly felt such an intense craving for joy that it radiated right to the rims of my ears, I longed for joy against all better judgment, beyond the power of cynicism to outweigh, I longed for boundless joy and rose while others, satisfied with powdered eggs, still ate, approached the cupboard as if it held that joy, rummaged through my drawer and found, not joy, but there beneath the photo album, beneath my tome, two packs of Herr Fajngold's disinfectant, pulled from one not joy, no, but my poor mama's thoroughly disinfected ruby necklace, which Jan Bronski, one winter night that smelled of snow, had taken from the window of a shop through which, not long before, Oskar, still happy then and slaying glass with song, had sung a circular hole. And with that necklace I left the flat, saw the necklace as the first step toward, made my way toward, rode off toward the railway station, thinking, If all goes well ... then bartered long and hard, confident that ... but the one-armed man and the Saxon everyone called the Assessor, who knew the price of things but not their value, had no idea what happiness they laid before me when, in return for my poor mama's necklace, they handed me a genuine leather briefcase and fifteen cartons of Yankee cigarettes, Lucky Strikes.

  That afternoon I was back in Bilk with the family. I unloaded fifteen cartons of Lucky Strikes, a fortune, in packs of twenty, savored their astonishment, thrust the mountain of packaged blond tobacco at them, and said, That's for you, now leave me alone, they're worth that much I should hope, and I want a lunchbox from now on too, with my lunch in it, which I plan to take to work in this briefcase each day. I wish you joy with your honey and flintstones, I said without scorn or censure, I shall practice another art, henceforth my joy will be written, or, to put it more professionally, engraved, on gravestones.

  Korneff took me on as his trainee for a hundred Reichsmarks a month. That was practically nothing, but it paid off in the end. After only a week it was clear my strength was not up to heavy stone work. I was supposed to rough-cut a slab of Belgian granite fresh from the quarry for a four-plot grave, but in less than an hour I could barely lit the point, and the hand in which I held the boasting mallet was totally numb. I had to leave the rough pointing to Korneff while I, showing real skill, took on fine pointing, notching, checking surfaces with dual marking levels, drawing lines for the four blows, and hatching the dolomite borders blow by blow. An upright squared block, above it, forming a T, the board on which I sat, guiding the point with my right hand, and in my left, over Korneff's objections, who wanted to make a right-hander of me, in my left, banging away, clanging away, with the wooden pears, the billets, with iron mallets, the bush hammer, with sixty-four bush-hammer teeth biting and softening the stone at the same time: here I found joy, though it was not my drum, found joy, though it was but a substitute, for joy too may be a substitute, may only come by way of substitution, joy always ersatz joy, laid down as sediment: marble joy, sandstone joy, sandstone from the Elbe, sandstone from the Main, sandstone always mine, sandstone beyond time, joy from Kirchheim, joy from Grenzheim. Hard joy: Blaubank. Cloudy, brittle joy: alabaster. Widia steel strikes joyfully on diorite. Dolomite: green joy. Gentle joy: tufa. Motley joy from the Lahn. Porous joy: basalt. Cooled joy from the Eifel. Joy erupted like a volcano and fell as a layer of dust, as grit between my teeth.

  But my greatest talent and joy was engraving letters. I even surpassed Korneff, handled the ornamental features of the sculpture work: acanthus leaves, broken roses for children's stones, palm branches, Christian symbols like PX or INRI, fluting, astragals, eggs and darts, chamfers and double chamfers. Oskar blessed gravestones of all prices with all manner of ornament. And when, over an eight-hour period, repeatedly clouding the polished slab of diorite with my breath, I provided an inscription such as Here rests in God my dear Husband—new line — Our dear Father, Brother, and Uncle — new line—Joseph Esser—new line — b. 3.4.1885 d. 22.6.1946—new line — Death is the Gateway to Life — then, reading over this text, I felt a sort of ersatz joy, that is, was pleasantly happy, and repeatedly thanked Joseph Esser, dead at the age of sixty-one, and the small green clouds of diorite raised by my lettering point as I bestowed particular attention on the five O's in Esser's epitaph; and so I did well with the letter O, for which Oskar felt a special affection, producing it with a fine regularity and endlessness, though it was always somewhat too large.

  I started work as a stonecutter's trainee at the end of May. In early October Korneff developed two new boils and we had to set up a travertine slab for Hermann Webknecht and Else Webknecht née Freytag in South Cemetery. Up till then, the stonecutter, who still didn't trust my strength, refused to take me along to the cemetery. An almost deaf but hardworking man from the firm of Julius Wöbel usually helped him set up stones. In return Korneff stepped in for Wöbel, who employed eight men, whenever he was shorthanded. I kept offering to help out at the cemetery, but in vain; cemeteries still attracted me, even though no decisions were in the offing at the time. Fortunately by early October the busy season had set in for Wöbel and he couldn't spare any men before the first frost; Korneff was forced to turn to me.

  The two of us tilted the travertine slab behind the three-wheeler, then placed it on hard wooden rollers, rolled it onto the truck bed, shoved the pedestal beside it, protected the corners with empty paper sacks, loaded on the tools, cement, sand, gravel, and rollers and crates for offloading, I fastened the tailgate, Korneff was already at the wheel starting the engine, then stuck his head and boil-infested neck out the side window and yelled, "Come on, boy, get moving. Grab your lunch box and hop in!"

  A slow drive around and past City Hospital. Outside the main entrance white clouds of nurses. Among them a nurse I know, Sister Gertrud. I wave, she waves back. My luck's back, I think, or I've never lost it, ought to ask her out sometime, even if I can't see her anymore, since we've turned toward the Rhine, ask her out to something, heading for Kappes-Hamm, maybe see a movie or Gründgens at the theater, there it is now, that yellow brick building, ask her out, doesn't have to be a play, smoke rising from the crematorium above the half-bare trees, how would you feel about a little change of scenery, Sister Gertrud? Another cemetery, other gravestone firms: a lap of honor for Sister Gertrud before the main entrance: Beutz & Kranich, Pottgiesser's Natural Stone, Böhm's Mortuary Art, Gockeln's Cemetery Landscaping and Gardening; questions at the gate, it's not that easy to get into a graveyard, staff with cemetery caps: travertine for a double plot, Number Seventy-nine, Section Eight, Webknecht, Hermann, hand raised to cemetery cap, lunch pails left to warm at the crematorium; and standing outside the mortuary Crazy Leo.

  I said to Korneff, "Isn't that Crazy Leo, the fellow with the white glov
es?"

  Korneff, reaching back and feeling his boils: "That's not Crazy Leo, it's Weird Willem, he lives here!"

  How could I rest content with this information? After all, I'd been in Danzig before, and now I was in Düsseldorf, but I was still called Oskar: "There was a fellow back home who hung around cemeteries and looked just like him, and his name was Crazy Leo, and early on, when he was just plain Leo, he was a student at the seminary."

  Korneff, his left hand on his boils and turning the three-wheeler toward the crematorium with his right: "You might be right about that. There's a bunch of them look like that used to be in the seminary living in graveyards now, using other names. That there's Weird Willem!"

  We drove past Weird Willem. He waved a white glove at us and I felt at home in South Cemetery.

  October, graveyard paths, the world losing its teeth and hair, that is, yellow leaves ceaselessly drifting down from above. Silence, sparrows, strolling visitors, the three-wheeler's engine heads for Section Eight, still a long way off. Old women here and there with watering cans and grandchildren, sun on black Swedish granite, obelisks, columns with symbolic cracks or actual war damage, a tarnished green angel behind a yew tree or something yewlike. A woman shading her eyes with a marble hand, dazzled by her own marble. Christ in stone sandals blessing the elms, another Christ in Section Four blessing a birch. Lovely daydreams on the path between Sections Four and Five: the sea, for instance. And this sea, among other things, casts a corpse on the shore. Violin music from the pier at Zoppot and the bashful beginnings of a fireworks display in support of those blinded in war. I bend down, a three-year-old Oskar, over the flotsam, hoping it may be Maria, or Sister Guste perhaps, whom I ought to ask out some time. But it is fair Luzie, pale Luzie, as the fireworks rushing toward their climax reveal and confirm. And as always when she's up to no good, she's wearing her knitted Berchtesgaden jacket. Wet is the wool I strip from her body. And wet the little jacket she wears beneath her knitted jacket. Yet another Berchtesgaden jacket blooms before me. And toward the very end, when the fireworks have died down at last and only the violins remain, I find beneath the wool upon the wool within the wool, wrapped in a League of German Girls singlet, her heart, Luzie's heart, a cold, tiny gravestone, on which stands written: Here lies Oskar—Here lies Oskar—Here lies Oskar . ..