The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  That must have been the signal to start, for charcoal ground sixteen-fold behind easels, cried out as it softened, turned to dust as it sketched my expression—that is, my hump—and turned it black, blackened it thoroughly, got it all wrong; for every one of Professor Kuchen's students tried to capture my expression with a blackness so thick they couldn't help exaggerating it, kept overestimating the size of my hump, reached for larger and larger sketchpads and still couldn't get my hump down on paper.

  Then Professor Kuchen gave the sixteen charcoal crushers the sage advice not to start with the outline of my all too expressive hump—which seemed to exceed all known formats—but to begin instead on the upper fifth of the pad, as far left as possible, by blackening in my head.

  My beautiful hair gleams dark brown. They turned me into a scraggly-haired gypsy. Not one of the sixteen artists noticed Oskar's blue eyes. When, during one of the breaks—for every model gets to rest fifteen minutes after posing for forty-five—I inspected the upper left fifth of the sixteen pads, I was struck at each easel by the social indictment in my careworn face, but slightly taken aback to find the brilliance of my blue eyes missing: where there should have been a clear, winning sparkle, strokes of blackest charcoal rolled, narrowed, crumbled, and glared at me.

  Keeping in mind artistic freedom, I said to myself: These young sons of the Muses and devoted daughters of Art have recognized the Rasputin in you, but will they ever discover and awaken the slumbering Goethe within, will they ever capture him on paper, not as expression but with the delicate, measured touch of a silver point? Neither the sixteen students, gifted though they might have been, nor Professor Kuchen, with his supposedly unique charcoal stroke, succeeded in passing on to posterity an acceptable portrait of Oskar. But I was well paid, treated with respect, posed for six hours a day on the turntable, with my face first toward the constantly clogged sink, then with my nose to the gray, sky-blue, slightly cloudy studio windows, then toward a folding screen, dispensing expression at one mark eighty pfennigs an hour.

  After a few weeks the students managed to produce several nice little sketches. They'd toned down their dark expressionism and no longer exaggerated my hump so wildly, even got me on paper now and then from head to toe, and from the jacket buttons on my chest to the hindmost reaches of the cloth marking the back of my hump. On several pads there was even room for a background. In spite of the currency reform, these young people still felt the war's influence, constructed ruins behind me with accusing black holes where windows had been, portrayed me as a forlorn, undernourished refugee among blasted tree stumps, even interned me in a camp, wove a ferociously barbed barbed-wire fence behind me in painstaking black charcoal, erected watch-towers in that same looming background, forced me to hold an empty tin bowl while prison windows behind and above me lent their graphic appeal—Oskar was shown in prisoner's garb—all in the name of artistic expression.

  But since it was as a black-haired gypsy-Oskar that I was made to witness all this misery, through coal-black eyes instead of my own blue ones, knowing full well that barbed wire couldn't be drawn, holding still even so as a model, I was nonetheless pleased when the sculptors, who as everyone knows must make do without backgrounds reflecting the times, asked me to pose for them, and in the nude.

  This time it was not a student but the master in person who spoke to me. Professor Maruhn was a friend of Professor Kuchen, my charcoal master. One day, as I was posing motionless in Kuchen's private studio, a gloomy loft filled with framed strokes of charcoal, allowing the mas ter, whose beard you could almost hear rustling in the wind, to record me on paper with his unique stroke, Professor Maruhn dropped by, a sturdy, thickset fifty-year-old in a white modeling smock, who, had not a dusty beret borne witness to his artistic calling, might have been taken for a surgeon.

  Maruhn, an admirer of classical form, as I could see at a glance, regarded me with hostility, given my proportions. He jeered at his friend: weren't the gypsy models enough, the ones he'd been blackening in charcoal up to now, the ones who'd earned him the nickname Gypsycakes in artistic circles? Was he going to try his hand at freaks now, did he plan to follow up the commercial success of his gypsy period with an even more lucrative and successful gnomic period?

  Professor Kuchen transformed his friend's mockery into raging, pitch-black strokes of charcoal: it was the blackest portrait he ever made of Oskar, totally black in fact, except for a few highlights on my cheekbones, nose, forehead, and hands, which Kuchen always spread wide with expressive power, overly large and swollen with gout, in the middle ground of his charcoal orgies. In this drawing, however, much admired at later exhibitions, my eyes are blue, by which I mean they are lighter in tone, not scowling darkly. Oskar attributes this to the influence of the sculptor Maruhn, who was not, after all, a fanatic of charcoal expression, but a classicist alert to the Goethean clarity of my gaze. It can only have been Oskar's eyes that led this lover of classical harmony to see in me a fit model for his own sculpture.

  Maruhn's studio was bright with dust, nearly empty, and contained not a single finished work. Nevertheless, frameworks of projected sculptures stood everywhere, so perfectly conceived that even without modeling clay, the wire, iron, and curves of bare lead tubing proclaimed a future perfect harmony.

  I posed nude for the sculptor five hours a day and received two marks an hour. He chalked a point on the turntable to show me where my right leg was to take root from then on as the engaged leg. A vertical line rising straight up from the instep of the engaged leg must meet the base of my neck precisely between my collarbones. My left leg was the free leg. But the term is misleading. Even though I was to keep it slightly bent and relaxed to one side, I was not to move it, and certainly not freely. The free leg too was rooted to a chalk outline on the turntable.

  During the weeks I posed for the sculptor Maruhn he could find no set position for my arms comparable to the fixed position of my legs. He had me dangle my left arm and angle my right over my head, cross my arms over my chest, clasp them under my hump, stand with arms akimbo; there were a thousand possibilities, and the sculptor tried them all, on me and on the iron framework with the flexible lead-tubing limbs.

  When, after a month's strenuous search for the right pose, he finally decided to begin modeling me in clay, either with my hands clasped behind my head, or as a torso with no arms at all, he was so worn out with constructing and reconstructing the framework, that though he reached for the clay in the clay box, and even made a start, he then dumped the dumb, formless mass back into the box, crouched before the frame, and stared at me and my frame, his fingers trembling in despair: the framework was too perfect.

  Sighing in resignation, feigning a headache, but bearing no ill will toward Oskar, he gave up and placed the humpbacked framework with its engaged leg and its free leg, with its raised, tubular arms, with its wire fingers clasped at the back of its iron neck, in the corner with all the other prematurely finished skeletons; gently, not mockingly, but conscious instead of their own uselessness, the wooden strips—also known as butterflies—intended to bear the weight of the clay, swayed in the spacious framework of my hump.

  After that we drank tea and chatted for an hour or so, which the sculptor counted as an hour of posing. He recalled the early days, when as an uninhibited young Michelangelo he slapped clay on frameworks by the ton and actually completed sculptures, most of which were destroyed in the war. I told him about Oskar's work as a stonecutter and engraver of inscriptions. We talked shop for a while; then he took me to his students so they could recognize the sculptor's model in Oskar and shape frameworks based upon me.

  If long hair is any indication of gender, six of Professor Maruhn's ten students could be designated as female. Four were ugly and gifted. Two were pretty and talkative—real girls. Posing in the nude never bothered me. Yes, Oskar even enjoyed the astonishment of the two pretty, talkative sculptresses as they examined me for the first time on the turntable and ascertained, to their dismay, that Osk
ar, despite his hump, de spite his parsimonious size, carried a male member with him which, should the need arise, could match that of any so-called normal man.

  Maruhn's students differed from the master in their approach. After only two days they had constructed their skeletons, seemed totally inspired, slapped the clay on the hastily and inexpertly mounted lead tubes in a rush of inspiration, but must have added too few wooden butterflies to the frame of my hump: for no sooner had the weight of the damp modeling clay been applied to the skeleton, giving Oskar a wild, rugged look, than ten freshly modeled Oskars began to sag, my head fell between my feet, the clay slumped down from the tubing, my hump drooped to the hollows of my knees, and I came to appreciate Maruhn, the master, whose frames were so perfect that he had no need to conceal them beneath cheap clay.

  The ugly but gifted sculptresses even shed tears when the clay Oskar parted from the frame Oskar. The pretty but talkative sculptresses laughed as the flesh slid rapidly, almost symbolically, from my bones. Yet when the novice sculptors finally managed, after several weeks, to finish a few passable sculptures, first in clay, then in shiny plaster for the end-of-term exhibition, I had a chance to make several new comparisons between the ugly, gifted girls and the pretty but talkative ones. The ugly but not entirely artless maidens reproduced my head, limbs, and hump with some care, yet were strangely shy about my sexual organs, either neglecting or stylizing them in some silly fashion, while the sweet, wide-eyed maidens with their lovely though hardly agile fingers wasted little time on the articulated proportions of my body, but instead devoted their entire energy to reproducing my imposing genitals to a hair. Lest we forget the four young men who were sculpting away, I can report that they abstracted me, clapped me into a quadrangle with flat grooved boards, and, with dry male rationality, let the very thing the ugly maidens neglected and the sweet young maidens allowed to bloom as fleshy nature, jut out into the room as an elongated, quadrangular log above a pair of matching cubes, like the sex-crazed organ of a buildingblock king.

  Was it my blue eyes or the sun-bowl reflectors the sculptors set up around me, the nude Oskar: in any case, the young artists who visited the lovely sculptresses discovered a picturesque charm in either the blue of my eyes or my irradiated skin, glowing lobster-red, and carried me off from the sculpture and graphics studios on the ground floor to the upper stories, where they then mixed the paints on their palettes to match my colors.

  At first the painters were so taken with my blue eyes that their brushes rendered me entirely blue. Oskar's healthy flesh, his wavy brown hair, his fresh, flushed lips shriveled, moldered in macabre shades of blue; at best, here and there, accelerating the decay, a moribund green, a nauseous yellow, crept in between patches of blue flesh.

  Oskar did not take on other colors until, in the course of a weeklong celebration of Carnival in the cellars of the Academy, he discovered Ulla and brought her to the artists to serve as their Muse.

  Was it Shrove Monday? Yes, it was on Shrove Monday that I decided to join the festivities, to put on a costume and mix in with the crowd as a costumed Oskar.

  When Maria saw me standing at the mirror, she said, "Stay home, Oskar. They'll just trample you." But then she helped me with my outfit, cut scraps of cloth that her sister Guste sewed with garrulous needle into a jester's costume. I'd been thinking at first of something in the style of Velázquez. And I would have gladly appeared as General Narses, or possibly Prince Eugen. When I stood at last before the full-length mirror, which the war had endowed with a diagonal crack that slightly canted the surface, and saw the entire brightly colored, baggy, slashed outfit hung with bells, which moved my son Kurt to laughter and a ht of coughing, I said softly to myself, not entirely pleased: Now you're Yorick the fool, Oskar. But where is the king you'll play the fool to?

  In the tram on the way to Ratinger Tor, near the Academy, I noticed that the other passengers, all those cowboys and Spanish señoritas trying to forget their offices and shop counters, weren't laughing at me but were frightened instead. Everyone edged away, and so I was accorded the pleasure of a seat in the otherwise jammed tram. Outside the Academy, policemen were swinging their hard rubber truncheons, which were by no means merely cosmetic. "The Tumble of the Muses"—as the young artists had christened their ball—was packed, but the crowd still tried to push their way into the building, resulting in a confrontation with the police that was somewhat bloody but in any case colorful.

  Oskar jingled the little bell hanging on his left sleeve, the crowd parted, and a policeman, professionally attuned to recognize my true stature, saluted down at me, asked if he could be of help, and, swinging his truncheon, escorted me into the cellar festivities—where things were cooking but not yet done.

  Now no one should imagine that an artists' ball is a ball where artists have a ball. Most of the students at the Academy stand behind cleverly decorated but somewhat wobbly counters with serious, strained expressions on their painted faces, trying to earn a little extra money by selling beer, champagne, Vienna sausages, and clumsily poured schnapps. Those having a ball are everyday citizens who throw their money around once a year and try to live it up like artists.

  After I'd spent an hour or so on stairways, in nooks and crannies, and under tables, startling couples on the point of wringing a thrill from their discomfort, I made friends with two Chinese girls who must have had some Greek blood flowing in their veins, for they were practitioners of a love praised centuries ago in song on the island of Lesbos. Though they went at each other all fingers and thumbs, they left my vital zones in peace, put on a show I found amusing at times, drank warm champagne with me, and, with my permission and apparent success, tested the resistance of my hump, which thrust out solidly at its extremity—once again confirming my theory that a hump brings good luck to women.

  Nevertheless, the longer I was with these women, the sadder I got. Thoughts plagued me, the political situation worried me, I traced the blockade of Berlin in champagne on the tabletop, sketched in the airlift, despaired of the reunification of Germany while contemplating those two Chinese girls, who could never unite, and did something very unlike me: Oskar, as Yorick, pondered the meaning of life.

  When the ladies could think of nothing more worth watching—they subsided in tears, leaving telltale traces on their painted Chinese faces—I arose, slashed, baggy, jingling my bells, two-thirds of me wanting to head home and one-third still hoping for some further Carnival encounter, and saw—no, he spoke to me—Corporal Lankes.

  Do you remember? We met him on the Atlantic Wall during the summer of forty-four. He was guarding concrete and smoking my master Bebra's cigarettes.

  I was trying to squeeze my way up the stairs, thickly populated with necking couples, and was just lighting up, when someone tapped me on the shoulder and a corporal from the last war said, "Say, friend, got a cigarette?"

  Small wonder that I recognized him at once, given this familiar request and his field-gray costume. Yet I would never have tried to renew our acquaintance had not the corporal and concrete artist held the Muse in person on his field-gray knee.

  Let me speak with the corporal first and describe the Muse later. I not only gave him a cigarette but held out my lighter for him, and said, as the first puff of smoke rose, "Do you remember, Corporal Lankes? Bebra's Theater at the Front? Mystical, barbaric, bored?"

  The painter stopped in shock at my words; he managed to hold on to his cigarette, but the Muse slipped from his knee. I caught the totally drunk, long-legged child and handed her back to him. As the two of us, Oskar and Lankes, swapped old memories, cursed Lieutenant Herzog, whom Lankes called a nut, recalled my master, Bebra, and the nuns who'd been looking for prawns in the Rommel asparagus, I gazed in amazement at the Muse. She'd come as an angel, in a hat of molded cardboard of the sort used for egg cartons, yet in spite of her advanced state of inebriation and the melancholy droop of her wings, she still radiated the slightly artsy-craftsy charm of a heavenly being.

  "This he
re's Ulla," Lankes, the painter, explained. "She studied dressmaking, but now she wants to do something in art, and I can't see that, because she can make some money with dresses, but she'll make nothing in art."

  Oskar, who made good money in art, offered to introduce Ulla the dressmaker to the painters of the Art Academy as a model and Muse. Lankes was so delighted by my proposal that he helped himself to three cigarettes from my pack, inviting me in return to come see his studio, if, he quickly added, I didn't mind paying for the taxi.

  Off we rode, leaving Carnival behind, I paid for the taxi, and Lankes, whose studio was on Sittarder Straße, made us coffee over an alcohol stove, which revived the Muse. After throwing up with the help of my right forefinger, she seemed almost sober.

  Only then did I note the light blue eyes from which she stared in constant amazement, and hear her voice, which was slightly squeaky and tinny but not without a certain touching charm. When Lankes explained my proposal to her, ordering more than suggesting that she pose at the Art Academy, she refused at first, saying she didn't want to be a muse or a model for the Art Academy, but only for Lankes. But, as gifted artists sometimes do, matter-of-factly and without saying a word, he slapped her a few times with his big hand, asked her again, and chuckled contentedly, good-natured once more, as, sobbing and weeping like an angel, she declared her willingness to become a well-paid model for the painters at the Art Academy, and possibly their Muse as well.

  You have to visualize Ulla as roughly five foot ten, extremely slender, lovely and fragile, reminiscent of both Botticelli and Cranach. We posed together in the nude. Her long, smooth flesh is about the color of spring-lobster meat, covered with soft, childlike down. The hair on her head is somewhat fine, but long and straw-blond. Her pubic hair curls red-dishly, covering only a small triangle. Ulla shaves her armpits weekly.