by Günter Grass
Pressing against one of the anchor buttons on my sailor coat, Leo’s glove opened so fast that I could hear his finger joints crack. And there, on the stiff, shiny leather that protected the inside of his hand, lay the cartridge case.
When Leo closed his fist again, I was prepared to follow him. That little scrap of metal had spoken to me directly. We walked side by side down Brösener-Weg; this time no shopwindow, no advertising pillar detained us. We crossed Magdeburger-Strasse, left behind us the last two tall, boxlike buildings on Brösener-Weg, topped at night by warning lights for planes that were taking off or about to land, skirted the fence of the airfield for a time, but then moved over to the asphalt road, where the going was less wet, and followed the rails of the Number 5 streetcar line in the direction of Brösen.
We said not a word, but Leo still held the cartridge case in his glove. The weather was miserably cold and wet, but when I wavered and thought of going back, he opened his fist, made the little piece of metal hop up and down on his palm, and so lured me on, a hundred paces, then another hundred paces, and even resorted to music when, shortly before the city reservation in Saspe, I seriously decided to turn back. He turned on his heel, held the cartridge case with the open end up, pressed the hole like the mouthpiece of a flute against his protruding, slavering lower lip, and projected a new note, now shrill, now muffled as though by the fog, into the mounting whish of the rain. Oskar shivered. It wasn’t just the music that made him shiver; the wretched weather, which seemed made to order for the occasion, had more than a little to do with it. So intense was my misery that I hardly bothered to hide my shivering.
What lured me to Brösen? Leo, the pied piper, of course, piping on his cartridge case. But there was more to it than that. From the roadstead and from Neufahrwasser, from behind the November fog, the sirens of the steamships and the hungry howling of a torpedo boat entering or leaving the harbor carried over to us past Schottland, Schellmühl, and Reichskolonie. In short, it was child’s play for Leo, supported by foghorns, sirens, and a whistling cartridge case, to draw a frozen Oskar after him.
Not far from the wire fence which turns off in the direction of Pelonken and divides the airfield from the new drill ground, Leo Schugger stopped and stood for a time, his head cocked on one side, his saliva flowing over the cartridge case, observing my trembling little body. He sucked in the cartridge case, held it with his lower lip, then, following a sudden inspiration, flailed wildly with his arms, removed his long-tailed morning coat, and threw the heavy cloth, smelling of moist earth, over my head and shoulders.
We started off again. I don’t know whether Oskar was any less cold. Sometimes Leo leapt five steps ahead and then stopped; as he stood there in his rumpled but terrifying white shirt, he seemed to have stepped directly out of a medieval dungeon, perhaps the Stockturm, to illustrate a disquisition on What the Lunatics Will Wear. Whenever Leo turned his eyes on Oskar staggering along in the long coat, he burst out laughing and flapped his wings like a raven. I must indeed have looked like a grotesque bird, a raven or crow, especially with those coat-tails dragging over the asphalt highway like a train or a huge mop and leaving a broad majestic track, which filled Oskar with pride whenever he looked back, and foreshadowed, if it did not symbolize, the tragic fate, not yet fully implemented, that slumbered within him.
Even before leaving Max-Halbe-Platz, I had suspected that Leo had no intention of taking me to Brösen or Neufahrwasser. From the very start it was perfectly clear that our destination could only be the cemetery in Saspe, near which a modern rifle range had been laid out for the Security Police.
From September to April the cars serving the seaside resorts ran only every thirty-five minutes. As we were leaving the suburb of Langfuhr, a car without trailer approached from the direction of Brösen and passed us by. A moment later the car that had been waiting on the Magdeburger-Strasse siding came up behind us and passed by. It was not until we had almost reached the cemetery, near which there was a second siding, that another car moved up clanking and tinkling behind us, and soon its companion piece, which we had long seen waiting in the mist up ahead, its yellow light shining wet in the fog, started up and passed us by.
The flat morose face of the motorman was still sharp in Oskar’s mind when Leo Schugger led him off the asphalt road, through loose sand not very different from that of the dunes by the beach. The cemetery was square with a wall running round it. We went in on the south side, through a little gate that was covered with ornamental rust and only supposed to be locked. Most of the tombstones were of black Swedish granite or diorite, rough hewn on the back and sides and polished in front. Some leaned perilously, others had already toppled. Unfortunately Leo left me no time to look at them more closely. The place was poor in trees; five or six gnarled and moth-eaten scrub pines, that was all. Mama in her lifetime had admired this tumble-down graveyard; as she often said, it was her favorite among last resting places. And now she lay in Brenntau. There the soil was richer, elms and maples grew.
By way of an open gate that had lost its grating, Leo led me out of the cemetery through the northern wall, before I could attune my thoughts to its romantic decay. Close behind the wall the soil was flat and sandy. Amid the steaming fog, broom, scrub pine, and dog rose stretched out toward the coast. When I looked back toward the cemetery, it struck me at once that a piece of the northern wall had been freshly whitewashed.
Close to this stretch of wall, which gave the impression of being new, as painfully white as Leo’s rumpled shirt, Leo became very active. He took great long strides which he appeared to count; at all events, he counted aloud and, as Oskar believes to this day, in Latin. Whatever this litany was, he chanted it as he had no doubt learned to do at the seminary. Leo marked a spot some ten yards from the wall and also set down a piece of wood not far from the whitewashed portion, where, it seemed pretty obvious, the wall had been mended. All this he did with his left hand, for in his right hand he held the cartridge case. Finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he bent down near the piece of wood and there deposited the hollow metallic cylinder, slightly tapered at the front end, which had lodged a lead kernel until someone with a curved forefinger had exerted just enough pressure to evict the lead projectile and start it on its death-dealing change of habitat.
We stood and stood. The spittle flowed from Leo Schugger’s mouth and hung down in threads. Wringing his gloves, he chanted for a time in Latin, but stopped after a while as there was no one present who knew the responses. From time to time he turned about and cast a peevish, impatient look over the wall toward the highway, especially when the streetcars, empty for the most part, stopped at the switch and clanged their bells as they passed one another by and moved off in opposite directions. Leo must have been waiting for mourners. But neither on foot nor by car did anyone arrive to whom he could extend a glove in condolence.
Once some planes roared over us, preparing to land. We did not look up, we submitted to the noise without bothering to ascertain that three planes of the Ju-52 type, with blinking lights on their wing tips, were preparing to land.
Shortly after the motors had left us—the stillness was as painful as the wall facing us was white—Leo Schugger reached into his shirt and pulled something out. A moment later he was standing beside me. Tearing his crow costume from Oskar’s shoulders, he darted off coastward, into the broom, dog rose, and scrub pine, and in departing dropped something with a calculated gesture suggesting that it was meant to be found.
Only when Leo had vanished for good—for a time he could be seen moving about in the foreground like a spook, until at last he was swallowed up by low-lying pools of milky mist—only when I was all alone with the rain, did I reach out for the object that lay in the sand: it was a skat card, the seven of spades.
A few days after this meeting at Saspe Cemetery, Oskar met his grandmother Anna Koljaiczek at the weekly market in Langfuhr. Now that there was no more borderline at Bissau, she was able once again to bring her eg
gs, butter, cabbages, and winter apples to market. The people bought plentifully, they had begun to lay in stocks, for food rationing was in the offing. Just as Oskar caught sight of his grandmother sitting behind her wares, he felt the skat card on his bare skin, beneath his coat, sweater, and undershirt. At first, while riding back from Saspe to Max-Halbe Platz, after a streetcar conductor had invited me to come along free of charge, I had meant to tear up that seven of spades. But Oskar did not tear it up. He gave it to his grandmother. She seemed to take fright behind her cabbages when she saw him. Maybe it passed through her mind that Oskar’s presence could bode no good. But then she motioned the three-year-old urchin, half-hiding behind some baskets of fish, to come over. Oskar took his time; first he examined a live codfish nearly a yard long, lying in a bed of moist seaweed, then watched some crabs crawling about in a basket; finally, himself adopting the gait of a crab, he approached his grandmother’s stand with the back of his sailor coat and, turning to show her his gold anchor buttons, jostled one of the sawhorses under her display and started the apples rolling.
Schwerdtfeger came over with his hot bricks wrapped in newspaper, shoved them under my grandmother’s skirts, removed the cold bricks with his rake as he had done ever since I could remember, made a mark on the slate that hung from his neck, and proceeded to the next stand while my grandmother handed me a shining apple.
What could Oskar give her if she gave him an apple? He gave her first the skat card and then the cartridge case, for he hadn’t abandoned that in Saspe either. For quite some time Anna Koljaiczek stared uncomprehending at these two so disparate objects. Then Oskar’s mouth approached her aged cartilaginous ear beneath her kerchief and, throwing caution to the winds, I whispered, thinking of Jan’s pink, small, but fleshy ear with the long, well-shaped lobes. “He’s lying in Saspe,” Oskar whispered and ran off, upsetting a basket of cabbages.
Maria
While history, blaring special communiqués at the top of its lungs, sped like a well-greased amphibious vehicle over the roads and waterways of Europe and through the air as well, conquering everything in its path, my own affairs, which were restricted to the belaboring of lacquered toy drums, were in a bad way. While the history-makers were throwing expensive metal out the window with both hands, I, once more, was running out of drums. Yes, yes, Oskar had managed to save a new instrument with scarcely a scratch on it from the Polish Post Office, so lending some significance to the defense of said post office, but what could Naczalnik Junior’s drum mean to me, Oskar, who in my least troubled days had taken barely eight weeks to transform a drum into scrap metal?
Distressed over the loss of my nurses, I began to drum furiously soon after my discharge from the City Hospital. That rainy afternoon in Saspe Cemetery did nothing to diminish my drumming; on the contrary, Oskar redoubled his efforts to destroy the last witness to his shameful conduct with the Home Guards, namely, that drum.
But the drum withstood my assaults; as often as I struck it, it struck back accusingly. The strange part of it is that during this pounding, whose sole purpose was to eradicate a very definite segment of my past, Victor Weluhn, the carrier of funds, kept turning up in my mind, although, nearsighted as he was, his testimony against me couldn’t have amounted to much. But hadn’t he managed to escape despite his nearsightedness? Could it be that the nearsighted see more than others, that Weluhn, whom I usually speak of as poor Victor, had read my gestures like the movements of a black silhouette, that he had seen through my betrayal and that now, on his flight, he would carry Oskar’s secret, Oskar’s shame, all over the world with him?
It was not until the middle of December that the accusations of the serrated red and white conscience round my neck began to carry less conviction: the lacquer cracked and peeled; the tin grew thin and fragile. Condemned to look on at this death agony, I was eager, as one always is in such cases, to shorten the sufferings of the moribund, to hasten the end. During the last weeks of Advent, Oskar worked so hard that Matzerath and the neighbors held their heads, for he was determined to settle his accounts by Christmas Eve; I felt confident that for Christmas I should receive a new and guiltless drum.
I made it. On the twenty-fourth of December I was able to rid my body and soul of a rusty, dissipated, shapeless something suggestive of a wrecked motor car; by discarding it, I hoped, I should be putting the defense of the Polish Post Office behind me forever.
Never has any human being—if you are willing to accept me as one—known a more disappointing Christmas than Oskar, who found everything imaginable under the Christmas tree, save only a drum.
There was a set of blocks that I never opened. A rocking swan, viewed by the grownups as the most sensational of presents, was supposed to turn me into Lohengrin. Just to annoy me, no doubt, they had had the nerve to put three or four picture books on the gift table. The only presents that struck me as in some sense serviceable were a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and a red sweater knitted by Gretchen Scheffler. In consternation Oskar looked from the building blocks to the swan, and stared at a picture in one of the picture books, showing an assortment of teddy bears which were not only too cute for words but, to make matters worse, held all manner of musical instruments in their paws. One of these cute hypocritical beasts even had a drum; he looked as if he knew how to drum, as if he were just about to strike up a drum solo; while as for me, I had a swan but no drum, probably more than a thousand building blocks but not one single drum; I had mittens for bitter-cold winter nights, but between my gloved fists no round, smooth-lacquered, metallic, and ice-cold object that I might carry out into the winter nights, to warm their icy heart.
Oskar thought to himself: Matzerath has hidden the drum. Or Gretchen Scheffler, who has come with her baker to polish off our Christmas goose, is sitting on it. They are determined to enjoy my enjoyment of the swan, the building blocks, the picture books, before disgorging the real treasure. I gave in; I leafed like mad through the picture books, swung myself upon the swan’s back and, fighting back my mounting repugnance, rocked for at least half an hour. Despite the overheated apartment I let them try on the sweater; aided by Gretchen Scheffler, I slipped into the shoes. Meanwhile the Greffs had arrived, the goose had been planned for six, and after the goose, stuffed with dried fruit and masterfully prepared by Matzerath, had been consumed, during the dessert, consisting of stewed plums and pears, desperately holding a picture book which Greff had added to my four other picture books; after soup, goose, red cabbage, boiled potatoes, plums, and pears, under the hot breath of a tile stove which had hot breath to spare, we all sang, Oskar too, a Christmas carol and an extra verse. Rejoice, and Ochristmastree, ochristmastree, greenarethybellstingalingtingelingyearafteryear, and I was good and sick of the whole business; outside the bells had already started in, and I wanted my drum; the alcoholic brass band, to which Meyn the musician had formerly belonged, blew so the icicles outside the window… but I wanted my drum, and they wouldn’t give it to me, they wouldn’t cough it up. Oskar: “Yes!” The others: “No!” Whereupon I screamed, it was a long time since I had screamed, after a long rest period I filed my voice once again into a sharp, glass-cutting instrument; I killed no vases, no beer glasses nor light bulbs, I opened up no showcase nor deprived any spectacles of their power of vision—no, my vocal rancor was directed against all the balls, bells, light refracting silvery soap bubbles that graced the Ochristmastree: with a tinkle tinkle and a klingaling, the tree decorations were shattered into dust. Quite superfluously several dustpans full of fir needles detached themselves at the same time. But the candles went on burning, silent and holy, and with it all Oskar got no drum.
Matzerath had no perception. I don’t know whether he was trying to wean me away from my instrument or whether it simply didn’t occur to him to keep me supplied, amply and punctually, with drums. I was threatened with disaster. And it was only the coincidence that just then the mounting disorder in our shop could no longer be overlooked which brought help, before it was too la
te, both to me and the shop.
Since Oskar was neither big enough nor in any way inclined to stand behind a counter selling crackers, margarine, and synthetic honey, Matzerath, whom for the sake of simplicity I shall once more call my father, took on Maria Truczinski, my poor friend Herbert’s youngest sister, to work in the store.
She wasn’t just called Maria; she was one. It was not only that she managed, in only a few weeks, to restore the reputation of our shop; quite apart from her firm though friendly business management, to which Matzerath willingly submitted, she showed a definite understanding for my situation.
Even before Maria took her place behind the counter, she had several times offered me an old washbasin as a substitute for the lump of scrap metal with which I had taken to stamping accusingly up and down the more than hundred steps of our stairway. But Oskar wanted no substitute. Steadfastly he refused to drum on the bottom of a washbasin. But no sooner had Maria gained a firm foothold in the shop than she succeeded, Matzerath to the contrary notwithstanding, in fulfilling my desires. It must be admitted that Oskar could not be moved to enter a toystore with her. The inside of one of those emporiums bursting with multicolored wares would surely have inspired painful comparisons with Sigismund Markus’ devastated shop. The soul of kindness, Maria would let me wait outside while she attended to the purchases alone; every four or five weeks, according to my needs, she would bring me a new drum. And during the last years of the war, when even toy drums had grown rare and come to be rationed, she resorted to barter, offering the storekeepers sugar or a sixteenth of a pound of real coffee and receiving my drum under the counter in return. All this she did without sighing, shaking her head, or glancing heavenward, but seriously and attentively and as matter-of-factly as though dressing me in freshly washed, properly mended pants, stockings, and school smocks. Though, in the years that followed, the relations between Maria and me were in constant flux and have not been fully stabilized to this day, the way in which she hands me a drum has remained unchanged, though the prices are a good deal higher than in 1940.