The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  The room's two windows, like those in Zeidler's bed-sitting room, looked out on Jülicher Straße, or, more precisely, out into the leafy gray-green garb of the chestnut tree outside the building. The only picture gracing the room hung between the two windows, fastened with thumbtacks, a color photo, probably taken from some magazine, of Elizabeth of England. Beneath the picture, hanging from a hook, was a set of bagpipes, its Scottish plaid barely discernible beneath a layer of soot. As I gazed at the color photo, thinking less of Elizabeth and her Philip than of Sister Dorothea, standing, perhaps in despair, between Oskar and Dr. Werner, Klepp explained to me that he was a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the English royal family, and had even taken bagpipe lessons from the pipers of a Scottish regiment in the British Army of Occupation, since Elizabeth commanded the regiment; he, Klepp, had seen her in the weekly newsreel, in Scottish kilts, plaid from top to toe, reviewing the regiment.

  Strangely enough, the Catholic in me rose up at this point. I said I doubted that Elizabeth understood the first thing about bagpipes, and added a few comments about the disgraceful end of the Catholic Mary Stuart; in short, Oskar let Klepp know that he considered Elizabeth tone-deaf.

  Actually I had expected an angry outburst from the Royalist. Instead he gave a superior smile and asked me why he should give any weight to what such a little man—that's what the fat fellow called me—had to say about music.

  Oskar stared steadily at Klepp for some time. He had spoken to me without knowing that he spoke to something deep within me. A shiver ran through my head to my hump. It was as if all my old, battered, worn-out tin drums were celebrating Judgment Day on their own. A thousand drums I had thrown on the scrap heap and the one drum that lay buried in the cemetery at Saspe rose up, rose renewed, were resurrected whole and intact, sounded forth, filled me with their resonance, boosted me from the edge of the bed, pulled me, as I begged Klepp to excuse me for a moment, from the room, drew me past Sister Dorothea's frosted-glass door—the half-covered rectangle of the letter still lay on the hall floor—whipped me along toward my room and the drum Raskolnikov had given me while painting Madonna 49; and I seized the drum, held it and both drumsticks in my hands, turned or was turned, left the room, sprang past that cursed chamber, entered Klepp's spaghetti kitchen like a man who has survived long wanderings, and without further ado, seated myself on the edge of the bed, adjusted my red and white lacquered tin, dallied in the air with the drumsticks, still a little embarrassed no doubt and looking past an astonished Klepp, then let one stick fall, as if at random, on the tin, and ah, the tin replied to Oskar, who quickly followed with the second stick; and I began to drum, told it all in order, in the beginning was the beginning: the moth between the light bulbs drummed out the hour of my birth; I drummed the cellar stairs with their sixteen steps and my fall down those steps during the celebration of my legendary third birthday; I drummed the schedule at the Pestalozzi School from top to bottom, climbed the Stockturm with the drum, sat with it beneath political grandstands, drummed eels and gulls, and carpet beating on Good Friday, sat drumming on my poor mama's coffin that tapered toward its foot, then used the scar-studded back of Herbert Truczinski as a score, and noticed, as I drummed up the defense of the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, as if from a great distance, a movement at the head of the bed on which I sat, saw with half an eye a Klepp now sitting up, pull from beneath his pillow a ludicrous wooden lute, place it to his lips, and bring forth tones so sweet, so unnatural, so attuned to my drumming, that I could lead him through Saspe Cemetery to Crazy Leo, that I could, once Crazy Leo was done with his dance, let the fizz powder of my first love foam up before him, for him, and with him; I even led him into the jungles of Frau Lina Greff, let the seventy-five-kilo counterweight drum machine of the greengrocer Greff whir and run down to silence, had Klepp join Bebra's Theater at the Front, let Jesus speak on my drum, drummed Störtebeker and all the dusters off the diving board—while Luzie sat below—but I let ants and Russians take over my drum, though I didn't lead Klepp back to Saspe Cemetery, where I threw my drum into Matzerath's grave, but instead took up my never-ending theme: Kashubian potato fields in October rains, there sits my grandmother in her four skirts; and Oskar's heart almost turned to stone when I heard October rain drizzling from Klepp's lute, as, be neath the rain and her four skirts, Klepp's lute found my grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, the arsonist, and both demonstrated and celebrated my poor mama's hour of conception.

  We played for several hours. After multiple variations on the flight of my grandfather across the timber rafts, we brought the concert to a close, slightly exhausted but happy, with a hymnlike intimation of a possible miraculous rescue of the vanished arsonist.

  With the final note still half in his flute, Klepp sprang forth from his form-furrowed bed. Cadaverous smells clung to him. He threw open the windows, stuffed newspaper in the chimney hole, tore the color photo of Elizabeth of England to shreds, declared an end to the Royalist Era, let water gush from the tap into the sink, and washed himself: he washed himself, Klepp did, he washed everything away boldly, this was no mere washing, it was a purification, he was washing himself clean; and as the purified man turned from the water and stood before me, fat, dripping, naked, nearly bursting, his unsightly member hanging at an angle, and lifted me, lifted me up in his outstretched arms—for Oskar was and still is a lightweight—as the laughter erupted from him, poured forth and dashed against the ceiling, I realized that Oskar's drum was not alone in being resurrected, that Klepp too had risen from the dead—and so we congratulated each other, kissed each other on the cheek.

  That same day—we went out toward evening, drank beer, ate blood sausage with onions—Klepp suggested we form a jazz band. I asked for time to think it over, but Oskar had already made up his mind, not only to give up carving inscriptions for Korneff the stonecutter, but to stop modeling with Ulla the Muse and become the percussionist in a jazz band.

  On the Coco Rug

  So Oskar supplied his friend with reasons for getting out of bed. Though Klepp sprang joyfully from the musty bedclothes, even let water touch him, and became the sort of man who says Let's go! and I'll take on the world!, I would claim today, when Oskar's the one keeping to his bed, that Klepp is taking his revenge, wants to spoil my bed for me at the mental institution the way I spoiled his for him in the spaghetti kitchen.

  Once a week I have to put up with his visits and listen to his upbeat jazz tirades, his musico-Communist manifestos, for no sooner had I deprived him of his bed and his bagpiping Elizabeth than this bedkeeper who styled himself a true Royalist and devotee of the English monarchy became a dues-paying member of the German Communist Party, an illegal hobby he pursues to this day by drinking beer, devouring blood sausage, and holding forth about the benefits of collectives like a fulltime jazz band or a Soviet kolkhoz to the harmless little men who stand at bars and study the labels on bottles.

  These days there aren't many possibilities left for a dreamer who's been startled awake. Once alienated from his form-furrowed bed, Klepp could become a Communist comrade—illegally, which further increased its appeal. Jazz was the second religion open to him. Third, as a baptized Protestant, he could convert to Catholicism.

  You have to hand it to Klepp: he kept all religious avenues open. Caution, his heavy, glistening flesh, and a humor that feeds on applause inspired in him a recipe that, with a peasant's practical wit, combined the teachings of Marx and the mythos of jazz. If one day he runs into a left-wing priest catering to the working class who also owns a collection of Dixieland records, a jazz-ruminating Marxist will start receiving the sacraments on Sundays from then on, mingling the body odor described above with the effluvia of a Neo-Gothic cathedral.

  May my bed, from which this fellow tries to lure me by promises warm with life, protect me from that fate. He submits petition after petition to the court, works hand in hand with my lawyer, demands a retrial: he wants to see Oskar acquitted, to see Oskar free—get our Oskar out of th
at place—and all simply because Klepp begrudges me my bed.

  Nonetheless I'm not sorry that while lodging with Zeidler I transformed a recumbent friend into a standing, stomping-about, and sometimes even walking friend. Apart from the strenuous hours I devoted to Sister Dorothea, deep in thought, I now had a carefree private life. "Hey, Klepp!" I would clap him on the shoulder. "Let's start a jazz band." And he would fondle my hump, which he loved almost as much as his own belly. "Oskar and I are starting a jazz band," Klepp announced to the world. "All we need is a decent guitarist who can handle the banjo too."

  A second melodic instrument is indeed needed with a drum and flute. A plucked bass would not have been bad, even in purely visual terms, but bass players were always hard to come by, even in those days, so we undertook an eager search for the missing guitarist. We frequented the movie houses, had our photographs taken twice a week as you may remember, and played all sorts of silly tricks with our passport photos over beer, blood sausage, and onions. Klepp met Red Ilse back then, thoughtlessly gave her his photo, and for that reason alone had to marry her—but we couldn't find a guitarist.

  Even though modeling at the Art Academy had familiarized me to some extent with Düsseldorfs Altstadt, with its bull's-eye windowpanes, its mustard and cheese, its beery atmosphere and Lower Rhenish coziness, I first came to know it well at Klepp's side. We looked for guitarists all around St. Lambert's Church, in all the taverns, and in particular on Ratinger Straße at The Unicorn, because Bobby, who led the dance band there, let us join in on flute and tin drum at times and praised my playing, though Bobby himself was an excellent percussionist, unfortunately missing a finger on his right hand.

  Though we didn't find a guitarist at The Unicorn, I picked up a few routines, and with my own experience in the Theater at the Front, I would soon have passed for a fair percussionist had not Sister Dorothea made me miss my cue now and then.

  Half my thoughts were always with her. I could have endured that if the other half had remained totally focused from one note to the next in the vicinity of my tin drum. Instead a thought would start out with my drum and wind up at Sister Dorothea's Red Cross pin. Klepp, who managed to bridge my lapses brilliantly on his flute, was worried each time he saw Oscar half-submerged in thought. "Are you hungry, shall I order some sausage?"

  Klepp sensed a wolfish hunger lurking behind each of the world's sorrows, and thought that any sorrow could be cured by a helping of blood sausage. Oskar ate great quantities of fresh blood sausage with onion rings and washed them down with beer back then, just so his friend Klepp would think his sorrow was named hunger and not Sister Dorothea.

  We generally left Zeidler's flat on Jülicher Straße early in the morning and had breakfast in the Altstadt. I only went to the Academy when we needed money for the cinema. Ulla the Muse was engaged to Lankes for the third or fourth time, and thus unavailable, since Lankes was receiving his first major industrial commissions. But Oskar didn't like to pose without the Muse—they were totally distorting him again, painting him in the blackest of colors, and so I devoted myself entirely to my friend Klepp; for I found no peace at the flat with Maria or with little Kurt. Her boss and married lover Stenzel was installed there every evening.

  One day in the early fall of forty-nine, as Klepp and I stepped out of our rooms and met in the hall near the frosted-glass door to leave the flat with our instruments, Zeidler called out to us from the door of his bed-sitter, which he had opened a crack.

  He shoved a narrow but bulky roll of carpet toward us and asked us to help him install it. It was a coco runner. The runner was eight meters twenty long, or about twenty-seven feet. Since the corridor in Zeidler's flat was only twenty-four feet six inches long, Klepp and I had to cut seventy-five centimeters, or about thirty inches, off the runner. We did this sitting down, for cutting through the coco fibers proved hard work. When we were finished, the runner was short by about an inch. Since the runner matched the width of the corridor, Zeidler, who supposedly had trouble bending over, asked us to nail it to the floorboards. It was Oskar's idea to stretch the runner as it was being nailed. In this way we managed to wrangle the missing inch from it, leaving only a small gap. We used broad, flat-headed nails, because small-headed ones would not have held the coarsely woven coco runner. Neither Oskar nor Klepp hit his thumb. Of course we did bend a few nails. But that was due to the quality of the nails, which came from Zeidler's stock and pre-dated the currency reform. After we had fastened the runner halfway down the hall, we crossed our hammers and looked up, not insistently but expectantly, at the Hedgehog, who was supervising our work. He disappeared into his bed-sitter, returned with three liqueur glasses from his liqueur-glass store and a bottle of Doppelkorn. We drank to the runner's durability, then pointed out, again not insistently but expectantly, that coco fibers made a man thirsty. Perhaps the Hedgehog's liqueur glasses were happy that they held several more rounds of Doppelkorn before a familiar temper tantrum from the Hedgehog reduced them to shards. When Klepp accidentally knocked over an empty liqueur glass on the coco runner, the little glass neither broke nor made a sound. We all praised the runner. When Frau Zeidler, who was watching our work from the door of the bed-sitter, joined us in praising the runner for protecting falling liqueur glasses from harm, the Hedgehog flew into a rage. He stamped on the still unfastened portion of the runner, seized the three empty liqueur glasses, disappeared thus burdened into the Zeidlers' bed-sitter, the glass doors of the display case rattled—he was grabbing more glasses, since three weren't enough for him—and soon thereafter Oskar heard a familiar tune: in his mind's eye he saw Zeidler's slow-combustion stove, eight shattered glasses lay at its foot, and Zeidler was bending over for the dustpan and brush, sweeping up the shards Zeidler had produced as the Hedgehog. Frau Zeidler, however, remained standing in the doorway while all the scraping and tinkletinkle went on behind her. She took a considerable interest in our work, for we had picked up our hammers again following the Hedgehog's angry outburst. He didn't return, but he'd left the bottle of Doppelkorn with us. At first we felt awkward as we took turns tipping the bottle to our mouths in Frau Zeidler's presence. But she gave us a friendly nod, though it couldn't induce us to pass her the bottle for a nip. Nevertheless we worked neatly, hammering nail after nail into the runner. As Oskar nailed down the runner outside the nurse's chamber, the frosted-glass panes rattled at each blow of the hammer. That caused him pangs of anguish, and for an anguished moment he let the hammer drop. As soon as he was past Sister Dorothea's frosted-glass door, however, both he and his hammer felt better. As all good things must come to an end, so too the nailing down of the runner. The nails ran from one end to the other with their broad heads, stood up to their necks in the floorboards and held their heads just barely above the flowing, swirling, whirlpool-forming coco fibers. Pleased with ourselves, we strode up and down the corridor, enjoyed the full length of the carpet, praised our own work, pointed out that it was no mean task to lay down a coco runner and nail it fast on an empty stomach, and at last induced Frau Zeidler to venture out upon the brand-new, virgin coco runner, make her way along it to the kitchen, pour us coffee, and fry us eggs. We ate in my room, Frau Zeidler toddled off, since she was due at the Mannesmann office, we left the door open, and chewing and pleasantly weary, contemplated our work, the coco runner flowing toward us.

  Why so many words about a cheap rug, which at most might have had some barter value prior to the currency reform? Oskar anticipates this legitimate question and answers it in advance: upon this coco runner, in the course of the following night, I first met Sister Dorothea.

  I came home late, toward midnight, full of beer and blood sausage. I'd left Klepp behind in the Altstadt. He was looking for the guitarist. I found the keyhole of the Zeidler flat, found the coco runner in the hall, found my way past the dark frosted glass to my room, found my way to my bed, after first finding my way out of my clothes, but found I couldn't find my pajamas—they were in the laundry at Maria's—found the thirty-
inch-long piece of coco runner we'd cut from the overly long carpet, placed it beside the bed as a bedside rug, found my way into bed, but found no sleep.

  There's no point in telling you everything that went through Oskar's mind, consciously or unconsciously, because he couldn't fall asleep. Today I think I know why I couldn't sleep. Before climbing into bed I'd stood barefoot on my new bedside rug, the remnant from the runner. The coco fibers pressed against my bare feet, penetrated my skin, and entered my blood: long after I had gone to bed, I was still standing on coco fibers and thus could not drift off; for nothing is more stimulating, sleep-dispersing, and thought-provoking than standing barefoot on a coco fiber mat.

  Long after midnight, till almost three in the morning, Oskar was still standing and lying sleepless on the mat and the bed, at one and the same time, when he heard a door and then another door in the corridor. That must be Klepp, I thought, coming home without a guitarist but stuffed with blood sausage, yet I knew it wasn't Klepp opening first one door and then the other. And I had a further thought: if you're lying in bed for no reason anyway, feeling those coco fibers pricking the soles of your feet, you might as well get up and actually stand on the mat by your bed instead of just imagining it. Oskar did just that. This had consequences. I had barely set foot on the mat when the thirty-inch-long remnant reminded me via my soles of its source, the twenty-four-foot-five-inch coco runner in the corridor. Whether it was because I felt sorry for the cut-off remnant, or because I'd heard the doors in the corridor and assumed, without believing it, that Klepp had returned, Oskar bent down, and, having failed to find his pajamas when he went to bed, took one corner of the bedside rug in each hand, spread his legs till he was no longer standing on the fibers but on the floorboards, pulled the mat high between his legs, held its thirty inches in front of his bare body, which measured four feet, thus covering his nakedness decently, but exposing himself to the sensation of the coco fibers from his collarbone to his knees. This sensation was further intensified as Oskar, shielded by his fibrous garment, passed from his dark room into the dark corridor and thus onto the coco runner.