The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  The most violent eruption I can recall at The Onion Cellar was, if not a turning point, at least a decisive moment in Oskar's life. Schmuh's wife, the vivacious Billy, seldom visited the Cellar, and when she did, she came with friends Schmuh had no desire to see. One evening she turned up with Woode, the music critic, and Wackerlei, a pipe-smoking architect. Both were regular customers at The Onion Cellar, burdened with thoroughly boring sorrows: Woode wept for religious reasons—he longed to convert, or had already converted, or was converting for the second time—and the pipe-smoking Wackerlei bewailed a professorship he'd turned down in the twenties for the sake of a flashy Danish woman who'd run off instead with some South American and bore him six children, all of which grieved Wackerlei so deeply that his pipe kept going out. It was the slightly malicious Woode who persuaded Schmuh's wife to cut up an onion. She did so, burst into tears, and started spilling the beans, laid poor Schmuh bare, told stories about him Oskar has the tact to spare you, at which point several strong men were required to keep Schmuh from flinging himself upon his wife; after all, kitchen knives were lying all around on the tables. The enraged man was forcibly restrained long enough for an indiscreet Billy to disappear with her friends Woode and Wackerlei.

  Schmuh was both agitated and stunned. I could see it in his flighty hands, which kept rearranging his shawl. He disappeared behind the curtain several times to lash out at the washroom attendant, returned in the end with a full basket, and announced to the guests in a strained and overly cheerful voice that he, Schmuh, was in a generous mood, this round was on the house, and started handing out onions.

  Even Klepp, who thought most human situations, no matter how painful and embarrassing, a good joke, appeared pensive, or at least tense, and held his flute at the ready. After all, we knew how dangerous it was to allow this sensitive and refined company a chance to release their inhibitions through tears twice in rapid succession.

  Schmuh, who saw that we had taken up our instruments, forbade us to play. The knives on the tables set to work. The first oh-so-beautiful rosewood skins were cast carelessly aside. Glassy onion flesh with pale green stripes went under the knife. Strangely enough, the ladies weren't the first to weep. Gentlemen in the prime of life—the owner of a large mill, the proprietor of a hotel with his lightly rouged friend, a nobleman representing his firm, a whole table of clothes manufacturers in town for a board meeting, and a bald actor we nicknamed the Gnasher, because he gnashed his teeth when he cried—were all in tears before the ladies joined in. But these ladies and gentlemen did not dissolve in the tears of relief that the first onions called forth; instead they fell prey to convulsive fits of weeping: the Gnasher gnashed so fiercely he would have moved any audience to tearful gnashing, the mill owner kept pounding his carefully groomed gray head on the table, the hotel owner blended his crying jag with that of his graceful friend; Schmuh, standing by the stairs, let his shawl dangle, eyed the unleashed company with a pinched mouth, but not without pleasure. And then an older woman tore off her blouse before the eyes of her son-in-law. Suddenly the hotel owner's friend, whose slightly exotic appearance had already attracted attention, stood on a table, his naturally brown body bare from the waist up, moved on to the next, and launched into some sort of Oriental dance, signaling the advent of an orgy that was lively enough to begin with, but was so lacking in imagination, so downright silly, that it's not worth describing in detail.

  Schmuh was not the only one disappointed; Oskar too lifted his eyebrows in bored disgust. A few silly striptease acts, gentlemen wearing ladies' underwear, amazons donning ties and suspenders, a couple or two who vanished beneath the tables; only the Gnasher distinguished himself by chewing up a bra and apparently swallowing part of it.

  It was probably the terrible din, all the ouhhhs and uahhhs signifying little or nothing, that caused a disappointed Schmuh to give up his place beside the stairs, perhaps fearing the police. He bent down to us where we were sitting under the hen-house ladder, poked Klepp, then me, and hissed, "Music! Play something, for God's sake. Put an end to this."

  But it turned out that Klepp, who was easily pleased, was having a good time. He was shaking so hard with laughter he couldn't lift his flute. Scholle, who looked on Klepp as his master, followed his lead in everything, including laughter. So that left only Oskar—but Schmuh could count on me. I pulled my tin drum out from under the bench, nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and began to drum.

  With no plan in mind, I made myself understood on tin. I forgot all the standard nightclub routines. No jazz for Oskar either. I didn't like being taken for a maniacal drummer by the crowd anyway. Though I considered myself a decent percussionist, I was no purebred jazz musician. I love jazz, just as I love Viennese waltzes. I could have played either, but didn't feel I had to. When Schmuh asked me to step in with my drum, I didn't play what I could play, but what was in my heart. Oskar pressed his drumsticks into the hands of a three-year-old Oskar. I drummed up and down former paths, showed the world as a three-year-old sees it, and the first thing I did was harness that postwar crowd incapable of a true orgy to a cord, that is, I led them down Posadowskiweg into Auntie Kauer's kindergarten, had them standing with their mouths hanging open, holding one another by the hand, turning their toes inward, waiting for me, their Pied Piper. And so I left my post beneath the hen-house ladder, took the lead, began by drumming up a sample of "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man," then, when childish glee from all corners indicated its success, sent them into a paroxysm of terror with "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming!" I feared her now and then as a child, but in recent days she scares me more and more, and now I sent her raging through The Onion Cellar, monstrous, coal-black, vast, and accomplished something Schmuh could only manage with onions: the gentlemen and ladies shed big, round, children's tears, were scared to death, begged me for mercy, so that to comfort them, and help them back into their clothes, their underwear, their silk and satin, I drummed "Green, green, green are all my clothes," and "Red, red, red are all my clothes," and "Blue, blue, blue..." and "Yellow..." too, through every shade and color till all stood decently clad once more, then lined the kindergarten up to leave, led them through The Onion Cellar as though it were Jäschkentaler Weg, climbed up the Erbs berg, past the creepy Gutenberg Memorial, and on to Johanniswiese, as though real daisies bloomed there, which they, those ladies and gentlemen, were free to pick in childish joy. And then I gave them all permission, all those present, including Schmuh, to leave a little souvenir of that playful kindergarten afternoon, to do their business, told them on my drum—we neared the deep, dark Devil's Gorge, gathered beechnuts on the way—go right ahead now, children: and they did their little children's business, all wet themselves, gentlemen and ladies, Schmuh the host, my friends Klepp and Scholle, even the washroom attendant in the back, went peepee peepee in their pants, crouched and listened to themselves as they did so. Once this music faded—Oskar merely tapped lightly along with that children's orchestra—I banged the drum loudly and ushered in a boundless joy. With a rollicking:

  Glass, glass, little glass,

  Sugar and no beer,

  Mother Holle runs upstairs

  And sheds a tiny tear...

  I led the cheering, giggling, childishly babbling company first to the cloakroom, where a bewildered bearded student handed out coats to Schmuh's childish guests, then drummed the ladies and gentlemen up the concrete steps with the popular little song "If Washerwomen You Would See," past the doorman in sheepskin, and out. Beneath a night sky studded with fairy-tale stars, slightly cool, but seemingly made to order for the occasion, in the spring of nineteen-fifty, I dismissed the gentlemen and ladies, who carried on for some time with their childish nonsense in the Altstadt and did not return home till the police finally helped them recall their age, social position, and telephone numbers.

  As for me, I returned to The Onion Cellar, a giggling Oskar caressing his drum, to find Schmuh still clapping his hands, standing knock-kneed in wet trousers by t
he hen-house ladder, and seemingly as happy in Auntie Kauer's kindergarten as he had been on the Rhine meadows, when a grown-up Schmuh went shooting sparrows.

  On the Atlantic Wall or Bunkers Can't Cast Off Concrete

  I'd only meant to help Schmuh, the host of The Onion Cellar. But he couldn't forgive me for the tin drum solo that transformed his high-rolling guests into babbling, blithely merry children who still wet their pants and therefore cried—cried without onions.

  Oskar tries to understand. How could he help but fear my competition when customers kept pushing aside his traditional crying onions and calling for Oskar, for Oskar's drum, for me, who could conjure up on tin the childhood of any guest, no matter how advanced in years?

  Schmuh, who up till then had restricted himself to firing washroom attendants on the spot, now fired our band and hired a strolling fiddler who, if you squinted a little, might have been taken for a gypsy.

  When we were tossed out, however, several of Schmuh's best customers threatened to boycott The Onion Cellar, and within a few weeks he was forced to accept a compromise: Three times a week the strolling fiddler fiddled. Three times a week we performed, having demanded and received a raise: our salary was now twenty marks a night, and increasingly generous tips poured in too—Oskar opened a savings account and looked forward to the interest.

  All too soon my little savings book became a friend indeed in time of need, for Death came and carried off Ferdinand Schmuh, along with our work and wages.

  As I've said before, Schmuh shot sparrows. Sometimes he took us along in his Mercedes and let us watch. Despite occasional quarrels over my drum, which also drew in Klepp and Scholle, who always stuck by me, relationships between Schmuh and the band remained friendly until, as I say, Death came.

  We piled in. Schmuh's wife sat at the wheel as always. Klepp beside her. Schmuh between Oskar and Scholle. The rifle Schmuh held on his knees, stroking it from time to time. We stopped just short of Kaiserswerth. A backdrop of trees on both sides of the Rhine. Schmuh's wife stayed in the car and unfolded a newspaper. Klepp had bought some raisins and was eating them at a more or less steady pace. Scholle, who'd studied something or other before taking up the guitar, managed to recite a few poems about the Rhine River from memory. The river was showing its poetical side as well, bearing not only the usual tow barges, but autumnal leaves rocking their way toward Duisburg, even if the calendar claimed it was still summer; and if Schmuh's rifle hadn't spoken up now and then, that afternoon below Kaiserswerth might well have been called peaceful.

  By the time Klepp had finished his raisins and wiped his fingers on the grass, Schmuh was finished too. To the eleven cold balls of feather lying on the newspaper he added a twelfth, still kicking, as he put it. The sharpshooter was already packing up his plunder—for some inexplicable reason, Schmuh always took what he shot home—when a sparrow settled on a nearby tree root that had washed onto the bank, and did it so openly, this gray, fine specimen of a sparrow, that Schmuh couldn't resist; he who never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon shot a thirteenth—which Schmuh should not have done.

  After he'd laid the thirteenth beside the other twelve, we walked back and found Schmuh's wife sleeping in the black Mercedes. First Schmuh got in front. Then Scholle and Klepp climbed in the back. I was to get in next, but I didn't, said I felt like a little stroll, that I would take the tram, not to worry about me, and so they headed off toward Düsseldorf without Oskar, who had wisely declined to get in.

  I followed them slowly. I didn't have far to go. There was a detour around some roadwork. The detour led past a gravel pit. And in the gravel pit, over twenty feet below, lay the black Mercedes with its wheels in the air.

  Some workmen in the gravel pit had pulled the three injured occupants and Schmuh's body from the car. The ambulance was already on its way. I clambered down into the pit, my shoes soon full of gravel, and gave what little help I could to the injured; in spite of their pain they tried to ask questions, but I didn't tell them Schmuh was dead. Stiff and startled he stared at the sky, which was mostly cloudy. The newspaper with its afternoon's plunder had been thrown from the car. I counted twelve sparrows, couldn't find the thirteenth, and was still looking for it when the ambulance was funneled down into the gravel pit.

  Schmuh's wife, Klepp, and Scholle had suffered minor injuries: bruises, a few broken ribs. Later, when I went to see Klepp in the hospital and asked what caused the accident, he told me an amazing story: as they were driving past the gravel pit, slowly because of the poor condition of the detour, scores or even hundreds of sparrows rose in clouds from the hedges, bushes, and fruit trees, cast a shadow across the Mercedes, banged against the windshield, frightened Schmuh's wife, and by sheer sparrow power caused the wreck and Schmuh's death.

  Whatever you may think of Klepp's story, Oskar remains skeptical, since he counted no more sparrows when Schmuh was buried in South Cemetery than he had in previous years among the gravestones as a stonecutter and letterman. Be that as it may, as I followed along with the train of mourners behind the coffin in a borrowed top hat, I saw the stonecutter Korneff with an assistant I didn't know, setting up a diorite slab for a double plot in Section Nine. As the coffin with Schmuh was carried past the stonecutter on its way to the newly opened Section Ten, Korneff doffed his cap in accordance with cemetery rules, failed to recognize me, perhaps because of the top hat, but did rub the back of his neck, indicating ripening or overripe boils.

  Funerals! I've been obliged to take you to so many cemeteries already, and as I've said elsewhere, funerals always make you think of other funerals—so I won't report on Schmuh's funeral and Oskar's retrospective musings at the time—Schmuh's descent into the earth went smoothly, and nothing special happened—but I will tell you that after the funeral—the mood was fairly informal, since the widow was still in the hospital—a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as Dr. Dösch.

  Dr. Dösch ran a concert agency. But he didn't own the agency. Dr. Dösch also identified himself as a former customer at The Onion Cellar. I'd never noticed him there. Nevertheless he'd been present when I turned Schmuh's guests into babbling, joyful children. Dösch himself, he told me in confidence, had reverted to a state of childhood bliss under the influence of my tin drum, and now wanted to feature me and what he called my "cool trick" in a major production. He was fully authorized to offer me a fantastic contract; all I had to do was sign. He pulled it out in front of the crematorium, where Crazy Leo, who was called Weird Willem in Düsseldorf, was waiting in white gloves for the mourners; in return for huge sums of money, I would have to appear alone onstage in theaters seating two to three thousand people and offer solo performances as "Oskar the Drummer." Dösch was inconsolable when I said I couldn't sign right then and there. I offered Schmuh's death as an excuse, I'd been so close to Schmuh, I just couldn't go to work for someone else before I'd even left the cemetery, I needed time to think things over, perhaps take a little trip, and after that I'd look him up, Herr Dr. Dösch, and perhaps then I'd sign the piece of paper he called a work contract.

  Though I signed no contract at the cemetery, in the lot outside, where Dösch had parked his car, Oskar found himself compelled by his uncertain financial situation to accept and pocket an advance that Dr. Dösch handed me discreetly, tucked away in an envelope with his business card.

  And I did take that trip, and even found a traveling companion. Actually I would have preferred to travel with Klepp. But Klepp was in the hospital and didn't dare laugh because he'd broken four ribs. And I would gladly have gone with Maria. The summer holidays had not yet ended, we could have taken little Kurt along. But she was still tied up with Stenzel, her boss, who had little Kurt calling him Papa Stenzel.

  So I wound up traveling with Lankes, the painter. You've met Lankes before as Corporal Lankes, and as the sometime fiancé of Ulla the Muse. When, with my advance and my savings book in my pocket, I looked up Lankes at his studio on Sittarder Straße, I was hoping to find Ulla, my
former colleague; I intended to ask her to join me on the trip.

  I found her with the painter. We've been engaged for two weeks, she told me in the doorway. Things hadn't worked out with Hänschen Krages, she'd had to break off their engagement; did I know Hänschen Krages?

  Oskar was sorry to say he didn't know Ulla's former fiancé, extended his generous offer, then had to watch as Lankes stepped up and, before Ulla could say yes, elected himself Oskar's traveling companion and boxed the Muse, the long-legged Muse, on the ear because she didn't want to stay home and had burst into tears.

  Why didn't Oskar defend himself? Why, if he wanted to travel with the Muse, did he not take her side? As attractive as the thought of a trip with the extremely slender, downy blond Ulla was, I still feared becoming too intimate with a Muse. You have to keep the Muses at a distance, I told myself, otherwise the Muse's kiss will start to taste like everyday fare. Better to travel with Lankes, who slaps his Muse when she tries to kiss him.

  No lengthy discussions were required about our destination. Normandy was the only choice. We wanted to visit the bunkers between Caen and Cabourg. Because that's where we'd met during the war. The only difficulty was getting visas. But Oskar doesn't waste words on visa stories.

  Lankes is a stingy man. The lavishness with which he flings cheap or scrounged paint on poorly primed canvas is matched only by his tight-fistedness when it comes to paper money or hard cash. He never buys cigarettes, but he's always smoking. To show how systematic his stinginess is, consider the following: the moment someone gives him a cigarette, he takes a ten-pfennig piece from his left trouser pocket, lifts the coin briefly, and slips it into his right trouser pocket, where it joins a greater or lesser number of small coins, depending on the time of day. He smokes constantly and once told me, when he was in a good mood, "I make about two marks a day smoking!"