The Tin Drum d-1

by Günter Grass

  I don’t like to think about those collection Sundays. It was on one of them that I made a futile attempt to possess myself of a new drum. Matzerath, who had spent the morning collecting outside the Art Cinema in Hauptstrasse and Sternfeld’s Department Store, came home at noon and warmed up some meatballs for our lunch. After the meal—I can still remember that it was very tasty—the weary collector lay down on the couch for a nap. No sooner did his breathing suggest sleep than I took the half-full collection box from the piano and disappeared into the store. Huddled under the counter, I turned my attention to this most preposterous of all tin cans. Not that I intended to filch so much as a penny. My absurd idea was to try the thing out as a drum. But however I beat, however I manipulated the sticks it gave but one answer: Winter Aid, please contribute. Let no one be cold or hungry. Winter Aid, please contribute.

  After half an hour I gave up; I took five pfennigs from the cash drawer, contributed them to the Winter Aid, and returned the collection box thus enriched to the piano, so that Matzerath might find it and kill the rest of his Sunday shaking it for the cold and hungry.

  This unsuccessful attempt cured me forever. Never again did I seriously attempt to use a tin can, an overturned bucket, or the bottom of a washbasin for a drum. If I nevertheless did so from time to time, I try my best to forget these inglorious episodes, and give them as little space as possible on this paper. A tin can is simply not a drum, a bucket is a bucket, and a washbasin is good for washing yourself or your socks. There was no more substitute then than there is now; a tin drum adorned with red flames on a white field speaks for itself and no one can speak for it.

  Oskar was alone, betrayed and sold down the river. How was he to preserve his three-year-old countenance if he lacked what was most necessary to his well-being, his drum? All the deceptions I had been practicing for years: my occasional bed-wetting, my childlike babbling of evening prayers, my fear of Santa Claus, whose real name was Greff, my indefatigable asking of droll, typically three-year-old questions such as: Why have cars got wheels?—all this nonsense that grownups expected of me I now had to provide without my drum. I was soon tempted to give up. In my despair I began to look for the man who was not my father but had very probably begotten me. Not far from the Polish settlement on Ringstrasse, Oskar waited for Jan Bronski.

  My poor mama’s death had put an end to the relations, sometimes verging on friendship, between Matzerath and my uncle, who had meanwhile been promoted to the position of postal secretary. There was no sudden break, but despite the memories they shared, they had gradually moved apart as the political crisis deepened. The disintegration of my mama’s slender soul and ample body brought with it the disintegration of the friendship between these two men, both of whom had mirrored themselves in her soul and fed on her body. Deprived of this nourishment and convex mirror, they found no substitute but their meetings with men who were dedicated to opposing political ideas though they smoked the same tobacco. But neither a Polish Post Office nor meetings with unit leaders in shirtsleeves can take the place of a beautiful, tender-hearted woman. Despite the need for caution—Matzerath had to think of his customers and the Party and Jan had the postal administration to consider—my two presumptive fathers met several times between my poor mama’s death and the end of Sigismund Markus.

  Two or three times a month, toward midnight, we would hear Jan’s knuckles tapping on our living room window. Matzerath would push the curtain aside and open the window a crack; both of them would be thoroughly embarrassed until one or the other found the saving word and suggested a game of midnight skat. They would summon Greff from his vegetable store or, if he was disinclined, which he often was on Jan’s account, because as a former scout leader—he had meanwhile disbanded his troop—he had to be careful and besides he was a poor player and didn’t care much about skat in the first place, they usually called in Alexander Scheffler, the baker, as third. Scheffler himself was none too enthusiastic about sitting at the same table with Jan, but a certain affection for my poor mama, which had transferred itself like a kind of legacy to Matzerath, and a firm conviction that retailers should stick together, induced the short-legged baker to hurry over from Kleinhammer-Weg in response to Matzerath’s call, to take his place at our living room table, to shuffle the cards with his pale, worm-eaten, floury fingers and distribute them like rolls to the hungry multitude.

  Since these forbidden games did not as a rule begin until midnight, to break off at three in the morning when Scheffler was needed in the bakery, it was only on rare occasions that I managed to rise from my bed unseen, unheard, and drumless, and slip into the shady corner beneath the table.

  As you have doubtless noticed by now, I had always, under tables, been given to the easiest kind of meditation: I made comparisons. How things had changed since my poor mama’s death. No longer did Jan Bronski, cautious up top and yet losing game after game, but intrepid below, send out his shoeless sock on expeditions between my mother’s thighs. Sex, not to say love, had vanished from the skat table. Six trouser legs in various fishbone patterns draped six masculine legs, some bare and more or less hairy at the ankles, others affecting long underwear. Down below, all six made every effort to avoid the slightest contact, however fortuitous, while up above their extensions—trunks, heads, arms—busied themselves with a game which should have been forbidden on political grounds, for every hand lost or won admitted of such baleful or triumphant reflections as: Poland has lost a grand hand, or, the Free City of Danzig has taken a diamond single for the German Reich.

  It was not hard to foresee a day when these war games would come to an end, transformed, as is the way with war games, into hard realities.

  Early in the summer of ‘39 it became clear that Matzerath, in the course of his weekly Party conferences, had found skat partners less compromising than Polish postal officials and former scout leaders. Jan Bronski remembered—he was forced to remember—the camp to which fate had assigned him; he began to stick to his post-office friends, such as Kobyella, the crippled janitor who, since his service in Marszalek Pilsudski’s legendary legion, had one leg an inch or more shorter than the other. Despite his limp, Kobyella was an excellent janitor, hence a skillful repair man who might, it seemed to me, be kind enough to make my sick drum well again. The path to Kobyella led through Jan Bronski. That was the only reason why I took to waiting for Jan near the Polish settlement toward six in the evening. Even in the most stifling August heat I waited, but Jan, who normally started punctually for home at closing time, did not appear. Without explicitly asking myself what does your presumptive father do after work? I often waited until seven or half-past. And still he did not come. I could have gone to Aunt Hedwig’s. Possibly Jan was sick; maybe he had fever or he had broken a leg and had it in plaster. Oskar stayed right where he was and contented himself with staring from time to time at the windows and curtains of the postal secretary’s flat. Oskar felt a strange reluctance about visiting his Aunt Hedwig, whose motherly cow’s eyes made him sad. Besides, he was not especially fond of the Bronski children, his presumptive half brother and sister. They treated him like a doll. They wanted to play with him, to use him for a toy. What right had Stephan, who was just fifteen, scarcely older than himself, to treat him with the condescension of a father or schoolmaster? And ten-year-old Marga with those braids and that face that rose like a fat full moon, what gave her the right to look upon Oskar as a dummy to be dressed, combed, brushed, adjusted, and lectured at by the hour? To both of them I was nothing but a freak, a pathetic midget, while they were normal and full of promise. They were also my grandma Koljaiczek’s favorites, but then I have to own that I made things pretty hard for her. I showed little interest in fairy tales and picture books. What I expected of my grandmother, what even today I dream of in the most pleasurable detail, was very clear and simple, and for that reason hard to obtain: the moment he saw her, Oskar wanted to emulate his grandfather Koljaiczek, to take refuge beneath her skirts and, if possible, never again
draw a breath outside of their sheltering stillness.

  What lengths I went to to gain admittance to that tent! I don’t believe that she actually disliked to have Oskar sitting there. But she hesitated and usually refused me; I think she would gladly have granted refuge to anyone who halfway resembled Koljaiczek; it was only I who, having neither his build nor his ready hand with matches, was constrained to think up stratagems.

  I can see Oskar playing with a rubber ball like a real three-year-old; by pure chance the ball rolls under her skirts and Oskar, in pursuit of the spherical pretext, slips in before his grandmother can see through his ruse and give back the ball.

  When the grownups were present, my grandmother never tolerated me under her skirts for very long. The grownups would make fun of her, reminding her, often in rather crude terms, of her betrothal in the autumnal potato fields, until my grandmother, who was not pale by nature, would blush loud and long, which was not unbecoming to her with her hair which by then—she was past sixty—was almost white.

  But when my grandmother Anna was alone—as she seldom was, and I saw her more and more rarely after my poor mama’s death, and scarcely ever since she had been obliged to give up her stall at the weekly market in Langfuhr—she was more willing to let me take shelter beneath her potato-colored skirts and let me stay longer. I didn’t even need the silly trick with the rubber ball. Sliding across the floor with my drum, doubling up one leg and bracing the other against the furniture, I made my way toward the grandmotherly mountain; arrived at the foot, I would raise the fourfold veils with my drumsticks and, once underneath, let them fall, all four at once. For a moment I remained perfectly still, breathing in with my whole soul the acrid smell of slightly rancid butter, which, unaffected by the changing of the seasons, pervaded this chosen habitat. Only then did Oskar begin to drum. Knowing what his grandmother liked to hear, I called forth sounds of October rain, similar to what she must have heard by the smouldering potato plants, when Koljaiczek, smelling like a hotly pursued firebug, came to her for shelter. I would make a fine slanting rain fall on the drum, until above me I could hear sighs and saints’ names, and it is up to you to recognize the sighs and saints’ names that were uttered in ‘99 when my grandmother sat in the rain and Koljaiczek sat dry in the tent.

  As I waited for Jan Bronski outside the Polish settlement in August, ‘39, I often thought of my grandmother. Possibly she was visiting with Aunt Hedwig. But alluring as the thought may have been to sit beneath her skirts, breathing in the smell of rancid butter, I did not climb the two flights of stairs, I did not ring the bell under the name, plate marked “Jan Bronski”. What had Oskar to offer his grandmother? His drum was broken, it made no music, it had forgotten the sound of the rain, the fine rain that falls aslant on a fire of potato plants. And since these autumnal sound effects were his only way of appealing to his grandmother, he stayed out on Ringstrasse, gazing at the Number 5 cars as they approached or receded, clanging their bells in their course along the Heeresanger.

  Was I still waiting for Jan? Had I not already given up? If I was still standing on the same spot, was it not simply that I had not yet thought up an acceptable way of leaving? Long waiting can be quite educational. But a long wait can also make one conjure up the awaited encounter in such detail as to destroy all possibility of a happy surprise. Nevertheless Jan surprised me. Resolved to take him unawares, to serenade him with the remains of my drum, I stood there tense, with my sticks at the ready. If only the groans and outcries of my drum could make my desperate situation clear to him, there would be no need of any long-winded explanations. Five more streetcars, I said to myself, three more, just this one; giving shape to my anxieties, I imagined that the Bronskis, at Jan’s request, had been transferred to Modlin or Warsaw; I saw him as postmaster in Bromberg or Thorn. Then, in disregard of all my promises to myself, I waited for one more streetcar, and had already turned to start for home when Oskar was seized from behind. A grownup had put his hands over Oskar’s eyes.

  I felt soft hands that smelled of expensive soap, pleasantly dry, men’s hands; I felt Jan Bronski.

  When he let me loose and spun me round toward him with an overloud laugh, it was too late to demonstrate my disastrous situation on the drum. Consequently I inserted both drumsticks under the linen suspenders of my filthy knickers, filthy and frayed around the pockets because in those days there was no one to take care of me. That left my hands free to lift up my drum, to raise it high in accusation, as Father Wiehnke raised the host during Mass, I too might have said: this is my body and blood, but I said not a word; I just held up the battered metal. I desired no fundamental or miraculous transubstantiation; all I wanted for my drum was a repair job, nothing more.

  Jan’s laughter was plainly hysterical. He must have felt it to be out of place for he stopped it at once. He saw my drum, he couldn’t very well help it, but soon turned away from it to seek my bright, three-year-old eyes, which at that time still had a look of candor. At first he saw nothing but two expressionless blue irises full of glints and reflections, everything in short that eyes are said to be full of, and then, forced to admit that the reflections in my eyes were no better or worse than those that can be seen in any first-class puddle, summoned up all his good will, concentrated his memory, and forced himself to find in my orbits my mama’s grey, but similarly shaped eyes which for quite a few years had reflected sentiments ranging from benevolence to passion for his benefit. Perhaps he was disconcerted to find a shadow of himself, though this would not necessarily mean that Jan was my father or, more accurately, my begetter. For his eyes, Mama’s, and my own were distinguished by the same naively shrewd, sparkling, inept beauty as those of nearly all the Bronskis, of Stephan, of Marga, though in lesser degree, but above all of my grandmother and her brother Vincent. Yet despite my blue eyes and black lashes, there was no overlooking a dash of incendiary Koljaiczek blood in me—how else account for my delight in shattering glass with song?—whereas it would have been hard to discern any Rhenish, Matzerath traits in me.

  At that moment, when I lifted my drum and put my eyes to work, Jan himself, who preferred to sidestep such questions, would, if asked directly, have had to confess: it is his mother Agnes who is looking at me. Or perhaps I am looking at myself. His mother and I had far too much in common. But then again it might be my uncle Koljaiczek, who is in America or on the bottom of the sea. In any case it is not Matzerath who is looking at me, and that is just as well.

  Jan took my drum, turned it about, tapped it. He, the impractical butterfingers, who couldn’t even sharpen a pencil properly, assumed the air of a man who knows something about repairing tin drums. Visibly making a decision, which was rare with him, he took me by the hand, quite to my surprise because I had never expected things to move that quickly, and led me across Ringstrasse to the Heeresanger streetcar stop. When the car came, he pulled me after him into the trailer where smoking was permitted.

  As Oskar suspected, we were going into the city, to the Hevelius-Platz, to the Polish Post Office, to see Janitor Kobyella, who possessed the tools and the skill that Oskar’s drum was so sorely in need of.

  That streetcar ride in the jingling, jangling Number 5 might have been a quiet pleasure jaunt if it had not taken place on the day before September 1, 1939. At Max-Halbe-Platz, the car filled up with weary but vociferous bathers from the beach at Brösen. What a pleasant summer evening would have awaited us, drinking soda pop through a straw at the Café Weitzke after depositing the drum, if the battleships Schleswig and Schleswig-Holstein had not been riding at anchor in the harbor mouth across from the Westerplatte, displaying their grim steel flanks, their double revolving turrets, and casemate guns. How lovely it would have been to ring at the porter’s lodge of the Polish Post Office and leave an innocent child’s drum for Janitor Kobyella to repair, if only the post office had not, in the course of the last few months, been fitted out with armor plate and turned into a fortress garrisoned by the hitherto peace-loving post-office person
nel, officials, clerks, and mail carriers, who had been devoting their weekends to military training at Gdingen and Oxhoft.

  We were approaching Oliva Gate. Jan Bronski was sweating profusely, staring at the dusty green trees of Hindenburg-Allee and smoking more of his gold-tipped cigarettes than his economical nature would ordinarily have permitted. Oskar had never seen his presumptive father sweat so, except for two or three times when he had watched him on the sofa with his mama.

  But my poor mama had long been dead. Why was Jan Bronski sweating? When I saw how he prepared to leave the car at every approaching stop but each time remembered my presence at the last moment, when I realized that if he resumed his seat it was because of me and my drum, I knew why he was sweating. It was because Jan, as an official, was expected to help defend the Polish Post Office. He had already made his getaway, but then he had run into me and my scrap metal on the corner of Ringstrasse and the Heeresanger, and resolved to follow the call of duty. Pulling me, who was neither an official nor fit to defend a post office, after him, he had boarded the car and here he sat smoking and sweating. Why didn’t he get out? I certainly would not have stopped him. He was still in the prime of life, not yet forty-five, blue of eye and brown of hair. His trembling hands were well manicured, and if he hadn’t been perspiring so pitifully, the smell that came to Oskar’s nostrils as he sat beside his presumptive father would have been cologne and not cold sweat.

  At the Holzmarkt we got out and walked down the Altstädtischer Graben. It was a still summer night. The bells pealed heavenward as they always did toward eight o’clock, sending up clouds of pigeons. “Be True and Upright to the Grave”, sang the chimes. It was beautiful and made you want to cry. But all about us there was laughter. Women with sunburned children, terry-cloth beach robes, bright-colored balls and sailboats alit from the streetcars bearing their freshly bathed multitudes from the beaches of Glettkau and Heubude. Girls still drowsy from the sun nibbled raspberry ice. A fifteen-year-old dropped her ice cream cone and was about to pick it up, but then she hesitated and finally abandoned the rapidly melting delicacy to the paving stones and the shoe soles of future passers-by; soon she would be a grownup and stop eating ice cream in the street.