The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  Lankes left the pillbox first. The typical painter's gesture: he wiped his hands on the legs of his trousers, lounged about in the sun, bummed a cigarette off me, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and fell upon the cold cod. "That whets your appetite," he said suggestively, and set to pillaging the tail piece that was mine.

  "She must be unhappy now," I said accusingly to Lankes, savoring the word unhappy.

  "How so? She's got nothing to be unhappy about."

  It was inconceivable to Lankes that his notion of human relations might make anyone unhappy.

  "What's she doing now?" I asked, though I really had another question in mind.

  "She's sewing," Lankes explained with his fork. "Ripped her habit a bit and now she's mending it."

  The seamstress left the bunker. She immediately opened her umbrella, babbling gaily, yet I thought I detected a note of strain: "The view from your bunker really is nice. You can see the whole beach and the ocean."

  She paused before the ruins of our fish. "May I?"

  We both nodded.

  "Sea air whets your appetite," I said by way of encouragement, upon which she nodded, dug into our fish with reddened, chapped hands recalling her hard work in the nunnery, raised the fish to her mouth, and ate gravely, with pensive concentration, as if she were rechewing something along with it, something she'd had before the fish.

  I glanced under her coif. She'd left her green reporter's visor in the pillbox. Small, uniform beads of sweat lined her smooth forehead, Madonna-like within its stiff white border. Lankes asked for another cigarette, though he still hadn't smoked the first one. I tossed him the whole pack. While he stowed three away in his shirt pocket and stuck a fourth between his lips, Sister Agneta turned, threw away her umbrella, and ran—only now did I see that she was barefoot—up the dune and disappeared toward the surf.

  "Let her run," Lankes said in an oracular tone. "Either she'll come back or she won't."

  I couldn't sit still for long watching the painter's cigarette. I climbed up on the pillbox and scanned the beach, the waves of the incoming tide closer now.

  "Well?" Lankes wanted to know.

  "She's undressing." That was all he could get out of me. "Probably wants to go swimming, to cool off."

  That struck me as dangerous, given the tide, and so soon after eating. She was already in up to her knees, went in deeper and deeper, her back rounded. The water, which couldn't be all that warm with August drawing to a close, didn't seem to bother her: she swam, swam well, practiced different strokes, and dived into the oncoming waves.

  "Let her swim, and come on down off the bunker."

  I looked behind me and saw Lankes stretched out, puffing away. The bare bones of the cod glistened white in the sun, dominating the table.

  As I jumped down from the pillbox, Lankes opened his artist's eyes and said, "What a painting that would make: Tidal Nuns. Or Nuns at High Tide."

  "You monster!" I shouted. "What if she drowns?"

  Lankes closed his eyes: "Then we'll call it Drowning Nuns."

  "And if she comes back and throws herself at your feet?"

  With open eyes the painter delivered his verdict: "Then I'll call her and the painting Fallen Nun."

  With him it was always either/or, heads or tails, drowned or fallen. He bummed my cigarettes, tossed the lieutenant off the dune, ate my fish, showed the inside of a bunker to a child who'd given herself to Christ, sketched scenes in the air with his big, knobby foot as she swam out to sea, chose formats and titles: Tidal Nuns. Nuns at High Tide. Drowning Nuns. Fallen Nuns. Twenty-five Thousand Nuns. Seascape format: Nuns off Trafalgar. Portrait format: Nuns Conquer Lord Nelson. Nuns in a Headwind. Nuns in Fair Wind. Nuns Tacking into the Wind. Black, lots of black, dead white, and cold-storage blue: The Invasion, or Mystical, Barbaric, Bored—that old concrete title from his war days. And when we returned to the Rhineland, Lankes painted every one of them, in seascape format, in portrait format, a whole series of nuns, found a dealer who was crazy about nuns, exhibited forty-three nun paintings, sold seventeen to collectors, industrialists, art museums, and an American, spawned critics who compared him, Lankes himself, to Picasso, and by all this success, persuaded me, Oskar, to dig out the business card from Dr. Dösch, the concert agent, for Lankes's art was not alone in crying out for bread, my art did too: the time had come, by means of my drum, to transmute the prewar and wartime experience of Oskar, the three-year-old drummer, into the pure, ringing gold of the postwar period.

  The Ring Finger

  "So," said Zeidler, "you clearly don't plan to work anymore." It riled him that Klepp and Oskar sat in either Klepp's or Oskar's room doing next to nothing. I'd paid the October rent on both rooms with what was left of the advance Dr. Dösch gave me after Schmuh's funeral at South Cemetery, but the prospects for November, financial and otherwise, looked bleak.

  And yet we had plenty of offers. We could have played in various dance halls and nightclubs. But Oskar didn't want to play jazz. Klepp and I were at odds with each other. He said my new drum style had nothing to do with jazz. I didn't dispute that. Then he called me a traitor to everything jazz stood for.

  It wasn't till early November, when Klepp found a new percussionist—and a good one too, Bobby from The Unicorn—and got a gig in the Altstadt, that we could speak like friends again, even if Klepp was starting to sound like a Communist at the time, all talk and not much thought.

  The only door left open to me was Dr. Dösch's concert agency. I couldn't go back to Maria, nor did I wish to, since her lover Stenzel was getting a divorce so he could turn my Maria into a Maria Stenzel. From time to time I lettered a gravestone at Korneff's on Bittweg, dropped in at the Academy to be blackened and abstracted by eager apostles of art, and, with no ulterior motive, paid several visits to Ulla the Muse, who had been obliged to break off her engagement with Lankes shortly after our trip to the Atlantic Wall because Lankes now painted nothing but high-priced pictures of nuns, and didn't even bother to beat her anymore.

  Dr. Dösch's business card lay with silent insistence on the table by my bathtub. One day, having torn it up and thrown it away, since I wanted nothing to do with Dr. Dösch, I discovered to my horror that I could reel off the agent's phone number and address by heart like a poem. I spent three days doing this, kept awake by the number, and so on the fourth day I went to a phone booth, dialed the number, Dösch answered, acted as if he'd been expecting my call at any moment, and asked me to come to the agency that very afternoon so he could introduce me to his boss, who was expecting me.

  The West Concert Agency was located on the eighth floor of a new high-rise office building. Before entering the lift, I wondered if the agency's name might not conceal some annoying political agenda. If there was a West Concert Agency then there was sure to be an East Concert Agency in some matching high-rise. The name was cleverly chosen, for I immediately preferred the West, and as I left the lift on the eighth floor I had the good feeling that I was on my way to the right agency. Wall-to-wall carpet, plenty of brass, indirect lighting, totally soundproof, door-to-door harmony, long-legged, crisply rustling secretaries carrying the aroma of their bosses' cigars past me; I almost turned and ran from the West Concert Agency.

  Dr. Dösch welcomed me with open arms. Oskar was glad it didn't turn into a hug. A green sweater girl's typewriter fell silent as I entered, then caught up with what it had missed on account of my entrance. Dösch let his boss know I'd arrived. Oskar sat down on the left front sixth of an armchair upholstered in English red. Then a double door opened, the typewriter held its breath, I was sucked from my chair, the doors closed behind me, carpet flowed through a bright room, bearing me along with it, till a piece of steel furniture told me: Oskar is now standing in front of the boss's desk, wondering how much it weighs. I lifted my blue eyes, sought the boss beyond the infinite, bare oak surface, and in a wheelchair that could be cranked up like a dentist's chair and swiveled, paralyzed and living now only through his eyes and fingertips, found my frien
d and master Bebra.

  He still had that voice, though. It spoke from Bebra: "So we meet again, Herr Matzerath. Did I not say years ago, when you still preferred to face the world as a three-year-old, that our kind can never lose one another? But I see to my regret that you've altered your proportions in a major and senseless way to your own disadvantage. Didn't you measure barely three foot one back then?"

  I nodded, on the verge of tears. On the wall, behind the steady hum of the master's electric wheelchair, hung the only picture in the room, a life-size, half-length portrait of my Roswitha, the great Raguna, in a Baroque frame. Without following my gaze, but well aware of its goal, Bebra spoke, hardly moving his mouth: "Oh yes, our dear Roswitha. Would she have liked the new Oskar? I doubt it. She had a thing for a different Oskar, a three-year-old, chubby-cheeked Oskar, madly in love. She worshiped him, as she admitted to me in what was more an announcement than a confession. But one day he didn't want to bring her coffee, so she got it herself and paid for it with her life. That is not, to the best of my knowledge, the only murder committed by our chubby-cheeked Oskar. Didn't he drum his poor mama into the grave?"

  I nodded, was able to weep, thank God, and kept my eyes trained on Roswitha. Meanwhile Bebra was readying his next blow: "And what about that postal clerk Jan Bronski, whom Oskar used to call his presumptive father? He turned him over to the hangmen. They shot him in the chest. Perhaps, Herr Oskar Matzerath, since you dare appear in this new form, you can tell me what happened to our three-year-old Oskar's second presumptive father, Matzerath the grocer?"

  I confessed to that murder too, admitted I'd rid myself of Matzerath, described how I'd made him choke to death, no longer hid behind a Russian machine gun but said instead, "It was I, Master Bebra. I caused it, and I caused the other one too, I caused that death, even there I am not innocent—have mercy on me!"

  Bebra laughed. I don't know what he laughed with. His wheelchair trembled, winds ruffled through his white gnome's hair and across the hundred thousand wrinkles that formed his face.

  Once more I begged fervently for mercy, lent my voice a sweetness I knew was effective, covered my face with hands I knew were beautiful and equally effective: "Mercy, dear Master Bebra, have mercy!"

  Then, having cast himself in the role of judge and playing it to the hilt, he pressed a little button on a small ivory switchboard he held between his hands and knees.

  The carpet behind me brought the green sweater girl. She held a file, spread it out on the oaken surface that stood roughly level with my collarbone on a pluck of steel tubing, so that I couldn't see what the sweater girl was spreading out. She handed me an ink pen: I was to purchase Bebra's mercy with my signature.

  Nevertheless I ventured a question toward the wheelchair. I found it difficult to place my signature blindly on the spot indicated by a lacquered fingernail.

  "It's a work contract," Bebra said. "You have to sign it in full. Write 'Oskar Matzerath,' so we know who we're dealing with."

  As soon as I'd signed, the humming of the motor increased fivefold, I tore my eyes from the ink pen just in time to see a quickly rolling wheelchair, growing smaller as it departed, lower itself, cross the parquet floor, and disappear through a side door.

  Now, some may think that the contract in duplicate I signed twice purchased my soul, or required some terrible misdeed of Oskar. Nothing of the kind. As I studied the contract in the outer office with the help of Dr. Dösch, I understood quickly and effortlessly that Oskar's task consisted of performing solo on his tin drum before an audience, that I was to drum as I did when I was three and as I did again in Schmuh's Onion Cellar. The concert agency agreed to organize my tour, and to beat the drum of publicity prior to Oskar's appearance with his own drum.

  While the advertising campaign was under way, I lived on a second generous advance from the West Concert Agency. Now and then I visited the office building, talked to journalists, let myself be photographed, lost my way at times in that box which looked, smelled, and felt the same everywhere, like some highly indecent object with an infinitely expandable condom stretched over it, sealing it off. Dr. Dösch and the sweater girl treated me with consideration, but I saw no more of Master Bebra.

  Actually I could have afforded better lodgings even prior to my first tour. I stayed at Zeidler's, however, because of Klepp, trying to make up with my friend, who didn't like my relationship with the agency, but I refused to give in, no longer accompanied him to the Altstadt, drank no more beer, ate no more fresh blood sausage with onion, but dined instead in the finest railway-station restaurants to prepare myself for future railroad journeys.

  Oskar doesn't have space here to describe his successes in detail. A week before the tour began, the first scandalously effective posters ap peared, setting the stage for my success, proclaiming my forthcoming appearance like that of a magician, a faith healer, a messiah. My first visitations were to cities in the Ruhr area. The halls in which I appeared seated from fifteen hundred to two thousand people. I sat alone onstage before a black velvet backdrop. A spotlight targeted me. A dinner jacket clothed me. Though I drummed, there were no young jazz lovers among my fans. My listeners, my fans, were mature adults over the age of forty-five. To be precise, I would say approximately one-fourth of my audience consisted of forty-five- to fifty-five-year-olds. Those were my younger fans. Another quarter were fifty-five to sixty years old. The oldest men and women made up the larger and more appreciative half of my listeners. I spoke to those advanced in years and they responded, no longer sat silently as I let the three-year-old's drum speak, but rejoiced, not in the language of the aged, of course, but with the childish babbling and prattling of a three-year-old, with "Rashu, Rashu, Rashu!" the moment Oskar drummed up something from the amazing life of the amazing Rasputin. I had even more success with certain themes than I did with Rasputin, who was too demanding for most listeners, themes with no particular plot, which merely described situations, to which I gave titles like Baby's First Teeth—That Awful Whooping Cough—Those Itchy Wool Socks—Dream of Fire and You'll Wet the Bed.

  These pleased the old people. They were right there with Oskar. They suffered as they cut their milk teeth. Two thousand old people hacked long and hard from an outbreak of whooping cough I instigated. How they scratched at the long wool socks I pulled onto them. Many an old lady, many an old gentleman, wet their pants and their padded seats when I set the children dreaming of roaring fires. I don't recall whether it was in Wuppertal or Bochum, no, it was in Recklinghausen: I was playing to old miners, the company had paid for the performance, and I thought these old comrades, having spent years handling black coal, could handle a little black fright. So Oskar drummed up "The Old Black Cook" and watched fifteen hundred comrades who had suffered through firedamp, collapsing tunnels, strikes, and unemployment send up a fearsome howl when she arrived, a howl—and that's why I mention the story—that shattered several thickly curtained windowpanes in the hall. And so by this detour I rediscovered my glass-slaying voice, but used it sparingly, not wanting to ruin our business.

  For my tour was indeed good business. When I came back and settled accounts with Dr. Dösch, it turned out my tin drum was a gold mine.

  Though I hadn't asked after Master Bebra—I had long since given up all hope of seeing him again—Dr. Dösch announced that Bebra was expecting me.

  My second encounter with the Master went somewhat differently from the first. Oskar was not left standing before the steel desk, but found instead a motorized, swivel wheelchair made to his measurements placed opposite the Master's chair. We sat for a long time in silence, listening to press notices and reports on Oskar's percussive arts which Dr. Dösch had recorded and now played for us. Bebra seemed satisfied. I found all the talk in the newspapers a little embarrassing. A cult was being built up around me, attributing healing powers to me and my drum. They were said to cure memory loss; the term "Oskarism" made its first appearance, and soon became a catch phrase.

  Afterward the sweater gi
rl brought me tea. She laid two pills on the Master's tongue. We chatted. He was no longer my accuser. It was like the early years when we sat in the Café Vierjahreszeiten, except the Signora was missing, our Roswitha. When I couldn't help noticing that Master Bebra had fallen asleep during my somewhat long-winded tales of Oskar's past, I spent another quarter-hour playing with my electric wheelchair, sent it humming across the parquet floor, swiveled it left and right, made it grow and shrink, and found it difficult to part from this everyday item of furniture, which, with its infinite possibilities, offered an innocent vice.

  My second tour took place at Advent. I adjusted my program accordingly and heard my praises sung in both Catholic and Protestant newspapers. And I did indeed manage to turn ancient, hard-boiled sinners into little children singing Advent hymns in touchingly quavery voices. "Jesus I live for thee, Jesus I die for thee," sang twenty-five hundred people one would not have believed capable of such eager, childlike faith at their advanced age.

  My third tour, which took place during Carnival, was equally appropriate. No so-called Children's Carnival could have been more amusing and carefree than the atmosphere at my performances, which trans formed every trembling grandma, every shaky grandpa, into naively comic gangland molls and rat-a-tat-tatting gangsters.

  After Carnival I signed a contract with a record company. I recorded in soundproof studios, was put off at first by the overly sterile atmosphere, then had huge photos of old people like those in nursing homes and on park benches placed on the studio walls and drummed as effectively as I did at performances in the human warmth of concert halls.

  The records sold like hotcakes, and Oskar grew rich. Did I give up my miserable former bathroom in Zeidler's flat as a result? I did not. Why not? Because of my friend Klepp, and the empty room behind the frosted-glass door in which Sister Dorothea had once lived and breathed. What did Oskar do with all that money? He made Maria, his Maria, a proposition.