by Günter Grass
Then, with a quick transition from one brand of pathos to another, he bent slightly forward and assumed the wily countenance of a purveyor of false consolation: “America! Take heart, Oskar. You have an aim, a mission in life. You’ll be acquitted, released. Where should you go if not to America, the land where people find whatever they have lost, even missing grandfathers.”
Sardonic and offensive as Vittlar’s answer was, it gave me more certainty than my friend Klepp’s ill-humored refusal to decide between life and death, or the reply of Bruno, my keeper, who thought my grandfather’s death had been beautiful only because it had been immediately followed by the launching of the Columbus. God bless Vittlar’s America, preserver of grandfathers, goal and ideal by which to rehabilitate myself when, weary of Europe, I decide to lay down my drum and pen: “Go on writing, Oskar. Do it for your grandfather, the rich but weary Koljaiczek, the lumber king of Buffalo, U.S.A., the lonely tycoon playing with matches in his skyscraper.”
When Klepp and Vittlar had finally taken their leave, Bruno drove their disturbing aroma out of the room with a thorough airing. I went back to my drum, but I no longer drummed up the logs of death-concealing rafts; no, I beat out the rapid, erratic rhythm which commanded everybody’s movements for quite some time after August, 1914. This makes it impossible for me to touch more than briefly on the life, up to the hour of my birth, of the little group of mourners my grandfather left behind him in Europe.
When Koljaiczek disappeared under the raft, my grandmother, her daughter Agnes, Vincent Bronski, and his seven-year-old son Jan were standing among the raftsmen’s relatives on the sawmill dock, looking on in anguish. A little to one side stood Gregor Koljaiczek, Joseph’s elder brother, who had been summoned to the city for questioning. Gregor had always had the same answer ready for the police: “I hardly know my brother. All I’m really sure of is that he was called Joseph. Last time I saw him, he couldn’t have been more than ten or maybe twelve years old. He shined my shoes and went out for beer when mother and I wanted beer.”
Though it turned out that my great-grandmother actually did drink beer, Gregor Koljaiczek’s answer was no help to the police. But the elder Koljaiczek’s existence was a big help to my grandmother Anna. Gregor, who had spent most of his life in Stettin, Berlin, and lastly in Schneidemühl, stayed on in Danzig, found work at the gunpowder factory, and after a year’s time, when all the complications, such as her marriage with the false Wranka, had been cleared up and laid at rest, married my grandmother, who was determined to stick by the Koljaiczeks and would never have married Gregor, or not so soon at least, if he had not been a Koljaiczek.
His work in the gunpowder factory kept Gregor out of the peacetime and soon the wartime army. The three of them lived together in the same one-and-a-half-room apartment that had sheltered the incendiary for so many years. But it soon became evident that one Koljaiczek need not necessarily resemble another, for after the first year of marriage my grandmother was obliged to rent the basement shop in Troyl, which happened to be available, and to make what money she could selling miscellaneous items from pins to cabbages, because though Gregor made piles of money at the powder works, he drank it all up; what he brought home wasn’t enough for the barest necessities. Unlike Joseph my grandfather, who merely took an occasional nip of brandy, Gregor was a real drinker, a quality he had probably inherited from my great-grandmother. He didn’t drink because he was sad. And even when he seemed cheerful, a rare occurrence, for he was given to melancholia, he didn’t drink because he was happy. He drank because he was a thorough man, who liked to get to the bottom of things, of bottles as well as everything else. As long as he lived, no one ever saw Gregor Koljaiczek leave so much as a drop in the bottom of his glass.
My mother, then a plump little girl of fifteen, made herself useful around the house and helped in the store; she pasted food stamps in the ledger, waited on customers on Saturdays, and wrote awkward but imaginative missives to those who bought on credit, admonishing them to pay up. It’s a pity that I possess none of these letters. How splendid if at this point I could quote some of my mother’s girlish cries of distress—remember, she was half an orphan, for Gregor Koljaiczek was far from giving full value as a stepfather. Quite the contrary, it was only with great difficulty that my grandmother and her daughter were able to conceal their cashbox, which consisted of a tin plate covered by another tin plate and contained more copper than silver, from the sad and thirsty gaze of the gunpowder-maker. Only when Gregor Koljaiczek died of influenza in 1917 did the profits of the shop increase a little. But not much; what was there to sell in 1917?
The little room which had remained empty since the powder-maker’s death, because my mama was afraid of ghosts and refused to move into it, was occupied later on by Jan Bronski, my mother’s cousin, then aged about twenty, who, having graduated from the high school in Karthaus and served a period of apprenticeship at the post office in the district capital, had left Bissau and his father Vincent to pursue his career at the main post office in Danzig. In addition to his suitcase, Jan brought with him a large stamp collection that he had been working on since he was a little boy. So you see, he had more than a professional interest in the post office; he had, indeed, a kind of private solicitude for that branch of the administration. He was a sickly young man who walked with a slight stoop, but he had a pretty oval face with perhaps a little too much sweetness about it, and a pair of blue eyes that made it possible for my mama, who was then seventeen, to fall in love with him. Three times Jan had been called to the colors, but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition, a circumstance which threw ample light on Jan Bronski’s constitution in those days, when every male who could stand halfway erect was being snipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change of posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal.
Their flirtation ought reasonably to have begun as they were looking at stamps together, as their two youthful heads leaned over the perforations and watermarks. Actually it began or, rather, erupted only when Jan was called up for service a fourth time. My mother, who had errands in town, accompanied him to district headquarters and waited for him outside the sentry box occupied by a militiaman. The two of them were both convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content. It is possible that my mother counted the buttons on the sentry’s uniform several times with varying results. I can easily imagine that the buttons on all uniforms are so constituted that the last to be counted always means Verdun, the Hartmannsweilerkopf, or some little river, perhaps the Somme or the Marne.
When, barely an hour later, the four-times-summoned young man emerged from the portal of the district headquarters, stumbled down the steps, and, falling on the neck of Agnes, my mama, whispered the saying that was so popular in those days:
“They can’t have my front, they can’t have my rear. They’ve turned me down for another year “—my mother for the first time held Jan Bronski in her arms, and I doubt whether there was ever more happiness in their embrace.
The details of this wartime love are not known to me. Jan sold part of his stamp collection to meet the exigencies of my mama, who had a lively appreciation of everything that was pretty, becoming to her, and expensive, and is said to have kept a diary which has unfortunately been lost. Evidently my grandmother tolerated the relations between the young people—which seem to have been more than cousinly—for Jan Bronski stayed on in the tiny flat in Troyl until shortly after the war. He moved out only when the existence of a Mr. Matzerath became undeniable and undenied. My mother must have met this Mr. Matzerath in the summer of 1918, when she was working as an auxiliary nurse in the Silberhammer Hospital near Oliva. Alfred Matzerath, a native of the Rhineland, lay there wounded—the bullet had passed clear through his thigh—and soon with his merry Rhenish ways became the favorite of all the nurses, Sister Agnes not excluded. When he was able to get up, h
e hobbled about the corridor on the arm of one of the nurses and helped Sister Agnes in the kitchen, because her little nurse’s bonnet went so well with her little round face and also because he, an impassioned cook, had a knack for metamorphosing feelings into soup.
When his wound had healed, Alfred Matzerath stayed in Danzig and immediately found work as representative of the Rhenish stationery firm where he had worked before the war. The war had spent itself. Peace treaties that would give ground for more wars were being boggled into shape: the region round the mouth of the Vistula—delimited roughly by a line running from Vogelsang on the Nehrung along the Nogat to Pieckel, down the Vistula to Czattkau, cutting across at right angles as far as Schönfliess, looping round the forest of Saskoschin to Lake Ottomin, leaving Mattern, Ramkau, and my grandmother’s Bissau to one side, and returning to the Baltic at Klein-Katz—was proclaimed a free state under League of Nations control. In the city itself Poland was given a free port, the Westerplatte including the munitions depot, the railroad administration, and a post office of its own on the Heveliusplatz.
The postage stamps of the Free City were resplendent with red and gold Hanseatic heraldry, while the Poles sent out their mail marked with scenes from the lives of Casimir and Batory, all in macabre violet.
Jan Bronski opted for Poland and transferred to the Polish Post Office. The gesture seemed spontaneous and was generally interpreted as a reaction to my mother’s infidelity. In 1920, when Marszalek Pilsudski defeated the Red Army at Warsaw, a miracle which Vincent Bronski and others like him attributed to the Virgin Mary and the military experts either to General Sikorski or to General Weygand—in that eminently Polish year, my mother became engaged to Matzerath, a citizen of the German Reich. I am inclined to believe that my grandmother Anna was hardly more pleased about it than Jan. Leaving the cellar shop in Troyl, which had meanwhile become rather prosperous, to her daughter, she moved to her brother Vincent’s place at Bissau, which was Polish territory, took over the management of the farm with its beet and potato fields as in the pre-Koljaiczek era, left her increasingly grace-ridden brother to his dialogues with the Virgin Queen of Poland, and went back to sitting in four skirts beside autumnal potato-top fires, blinking at the horizon, which was still sectioned by telegraph poles.
Not until Jan Bronski had found and married his Hedwig, a Kashubian girl who lived in the city but still owned some fields in Ramkau, did relations between him and my mother improve. The story is that the two couples ran into each other at a dance at the Café Woyke, and that she introduced Jan and Matzerath. The two men, so different by nature despite the similarity of their feeling for Mama, took a shine to one another, although Matzerath in loud, unvarnished Rhenish qualified Jan’s transfer to the Polish Post Office as sheer damn-foolishness. Jan danced with Mama, Matzerath danced with the big, rawboned Hedwig, whose inscrutable bovine gaze tended to make people think she was pregnant. After that they danced with, around, and into one another all evening, thinking always of the next dance, a little ahead of themselves in the polka, somewhat behind hand in the English waltz, but at last achieving self-confidence in the Charleston and in the slow foxtrot sensuality bordering on religion.
In 1923, when you could paper a bedroom with zeros for the price of a matchbox, Alfred Matzerath married my mamma. Jan was one witness, the other was a grocer by the name of Mühlen. There isn’t much I can tell you about Mühlen. He is worth mentioning only because, just as the Rentenmark was coming in, he sold Mama and Matzerath a languishing grocery store ruined by credit, in the suburb of Langfuhr. In a short time Mama, who in the basement shop in Troyl had learned how to deal with every variety of nonpaying customer and who in addition was favored with native business sense and ready repartee, managed to put the business back on its feet. Matzerath was soon obliged to give up his job—besides, the paper market was glutted—in order to help in the store.
The two of them complemented each other wonderfully. My mother’s prowess behind the counter was equalled by Matzerath’s ability to deal with salesmen and wholesalers. But what made their association really perfect was Matzerath’s love of kitchen work, which even included cleaning up—all a great blessing for Mama, who was no great shakes as a cook.
The flat adjoining the store was cramped and badly constructed, but compared with the place in Troyl, which is known to me only from hearsay, it had a definite middle-class character. At least in the early years of her marriage, Mama must have felt quite comfortable.
There was a long, rather ramshackle hallway that usually had cartons of soap flakes piled up in it, and a spacious kitchen, though it too was more than half-full of merchandise: canned goods, sacks of flour, packages of rolled oats. The living room had two windows overlooking the street and a little patch of greenery decorated with sea shells in summer. The wallpaper had a good deal of wine-red in it and the couch was upholstered in an approximation of purple. An extensible table rounded at the corners, four black leather-covered chairs, a little round smoking table, which was always being moved about, stood black-legged on a blue carpet. An upright clock rose black and golden between the windows. Black against the purple couch squatted the piano, first rented then purchased in installments; and under the revolving stool lay the pelt of some yellowish-white long-haired animal. Across from the piano stood the sideboard, black with cut-glass sliding panels, enchased in black eggs-and-anchors. The lower doors enclosing the china and linen were heavily ornamented with black carvings of fruit; the legs were black claws; on the black carved top-piece there was an empty space between the crystal bowl of artificial fruit and the green loving cup won in a lottery; later on, thanks to my mama’s business acumen, the gap was to be filled with a light-brown radio.
The bedroom ran to yellow and looked out on the court of the four-story apartment house. Please believe me when I tell you that the canopy over the citadel of wedlock was sky-blue and that under its bluish light a framed, repentant, and flesh-colored Mary Magdalene lay in a grotto, sighing up at the upper right-hand edge of the picture and wringing so many fingers that you couldn’t help counting them for fear there would be more than ten. Opposite the bed stood a white-enameled wardrobe with mirror doors, to the left of it a dressing table, to the right a marble-covered chest of drawers; the light fixture hung on brass arms from the ceiling, not covered with satin as in the living room, but shaded by pale-pink porcelain globes beneath which the bulbs protruded.
I have just drummed away a long morning, asking my drum all sorts of questions. I wished to know, for instance, whether the light bulbs in our bedroom were forty or sixty watts. The question is of the utmost importance to me, and this is not the first time I have asked it of myself and my drum. Sometimes it takes me hours to find my way back to those light bulbs. For I have to extricate myself from a forest of light bulbs, by good solid drumming without ornamental flourishes I have to make myself forget the thousands of lighting mechanisms it has been my lot to kindle or quench by turning a switch upon entering or leaving innumerable dwellings, before I can get back to the illumination of our bedroom in Labesweg.
Mama’s confinement took place at home. When her labor pains set in, she was still in the store, putting sugar into blue pound and half-pound bags. It was too late to move her to the hospital; an elderly midwife who had just about given up practicing had to be summoned from nearby Hertastrasse. In the bedroom she helped me and Mama to get away from each other.
Well, then, it was in the form of two sixty-watt bulbs that I first saw the light of this world. That is why the words of the Bible, “Let there be light and there was light,” still strike me as an excellent publicity slogan for Osram light bulbs. My birth ran off smoothly except for the usual rupture of the perineum. I had no difficulty in freeing myself from the upside-down position so favored by mothers, embryos, and midwives.
I may as well come right out with it: I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth and after that merely needs a certain amount of fil
ling in. The moment I was born I took a very critical attitude toward the first utterances to slip from my parents beneath the light bulbs. My ears were keenly alert. It seems pretty well established that they were small, bent over, gummed up, and in any case cute, yet they caught the words that were my first impressions and as such have preserved their importance for me. And what my ear took in my tiny brain evaluated. After meditating at some length on what I had heard, I decided to do certain things and on no account to do certain others.
“ It’s a boy,” said Mr. Matzerath, who presumed himself to be my father. “He will take over the store when he grows up. At last we know why we’ve been working our fingers to the bone.” Mama thought less about the store than about outfitting her son: “ Oh, well, I knew it would be a boy even if I did say once in a while that it was going to be a girl.”
Thus at an early age I made the acquaintance of feminine logic. The next words were: “When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum.”
Carefully weighing and comparing these promises, maternal and paternal, I observed and listened to a moth that had flown into the room. Medium-sized and hairy, it darted between the two sixty-watt bulbs, casting shadows out of all proportion to its wing spread, which filled the room and everything in it with quivering motion. What impressed me most, however, was not the play of light and shade but the sound produced by the dialogue between moth and bulb: the moth chattered away as if in haste to unburden itself of its knowledge, as though it had no time for future colloquies with sources of light, as though this dialogue were its last confession; and as though, after the kind of absolution that light bulbs confer, there would be no further occasion for sin or folly.
Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I have heard rabbits, foxes and dormice drumming. Frogs can drum up a storm. Woodpeckers are said to drum worms out of their hiding places. And men beat on basins, tin pans, bass drums, and kettledrums. We speak of drumfire, drumhead courts; we drum up, drum out, drum into. There are drummer boys and drum majors. There are composers who write concerti for strings and percussion. I might even mention Oskar’s own efforts on the drum; but all this is nothing beside the orgy of drumming carried on by that moth in the hour of my birth, with no other instrument than two ordinary sixty-watt bulbs. Perhaps there are Negroes in darkest Africa and others in America who have not yet forgotten Africa who, with their well-known gift of rhythm, might succeed, in imitation of African moths—which are known to be larger and more beautiful than those of Eastern Europe—in drumming with such disciplined passion; I can only go by my Eastern European standards and praise that medium-sized powdery-brown moth of the hour of my birth; that moth was Oskar’s master.