The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  I tried to get Matzerath to take me to the Krone circus, but Matzerath could not be moved, he was devoting himself entirely to mourning my poor mama, whom he had never possessed entirely. But who had possessed Mama entirely? Not even Jan Bronski, if anyone me, Oskar, for Oskar suffered most from her absence, which upset his daily life, even called it into question. Mama had cheated me. I could expect nothing from my fathers. Master Bebra had found his own master in Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda. Gretchen Schemer was spending all her time in Winter Aid work. Let no one go hungry, let no one be cold, that was the watchword. I turned to my drum and perfected my loneliness on its once white tin, now drummed thin. In the evenings Matzerath and I sat across from each other. He leafed through his cookbooks, I lamented on my instrument. Sometimes Matzerath wept and hid his head in the cookbooks. Jan Bronski's visits to the house were more and more infrequent. In light of the political situation, both men agreed caution was called for, you never knew which way the rabbit might jump or the wind might blow. Skat games with various third partners grew increasingly infrequent, and when they did take place it was late at night, in our living room, under the hanging lamp; all mention of politics was avoided. My grandmother Anna no longer seemed to find her way from Bissau to our place on Labesweg. She held a grudge against Matzerath, perhaps against me too; after all, I'd heard her say, "My Agnes died because she couldn't stand the drumming no more."

  Even if I did cause my poor mama's death, I clung all the more tightly to my despised drum, for it didn't die as a mother does, you could buy a new one, have it repaired by old man Heilandt or Laubschad the clockmaker, it understood me, always gave the right answer, it stuck with me, and I stuck with it.

  If the apartment grew too cramped for me back then, the streets too short or too long for my fourteen years, if by day there was no chance to play tempter at shop windows, and the temptation not strong enough when evening came to stand as a plausible tempter in darkened doorways, I would stomp up the four flights of stairs, beating out the time, counting one hundred sixteen steps, pause on each landing, and breathe in the smells that seeped through the five apartment doors on every floor, since the smells, like me, found the two-room flats too cramped.

  At first I had occasional luck with Meyn, the trumpeter. Drunk, lying among the bedsheets hung out to dry in the attic, he could still blow his trumpet with amazing musical feeling and bring joy to my drum. In May of thirty-eight he gave up Machandel and told everyone, "I'm starting a new life!" He joined the Mounted SA to play in the band. In boots and leather-seated breeches, cold sober, I saw him taking the steps five at a time from then on. He kept his four cats, one of them named Bismarck, because, as you might expect, the Machandel gained the upper hand now and then and brought out his musical side.

  I seldom knocked at the door of Laubschad the clockmaker, a silent man among a hundred noisy clocks. I couldn't stand the excessive wear and tear of time more than once a month.

  Old man Heilandt still had his shed in the courtyard of the apartment house. He still hammered crooked nails straight. And there were rabbits, and rabbits from those rabbits, as in the old days. But the brats in the courtyard had changed. Now they wore uniforms and black ties, and were no longer brewing brick-dust soup. What grew there, towering above me, I scarcely knew by name. It was a new generation, while my generation had finished school and were now apprentices: Nuchi Eyke was at a barber's, Axel Mischke wanted to be a welder at Schichau, Susi Kater was training as a salesgirl in Sternfeld's department store and had a steady boyfriend. How things can change in three or four years. The old carpet rack was still there and the house rules still read, Tuesdays and Fridays—carpet beating, but the blows resounded only occasionally on those two weekdays, and with a hint of embarrassment: since Hitler had come to power there were more and more households with vacuum cleaners; the carpet racks grew lonely and served only the sparrows.

  All that was left to me were the stairwell and the attic. Beneath the roof tiles I studied my trusty reading material, in the stairwell I knocked at the first door on the left on the second floor whenever I felt the need for human company. Mother Truczinski always answered. Ever since taking my hand at Brentau Cemetery and leading me to my poor mama's grave, she opened up whenever Oskar signaled on the door with his drumsticks.

  "Don't drum so loud, little Oskar. Herbert's still sleeping, he had a rough night again and they had to bring him back in the car." Then she pulled me into the flat, poured me some barley coffee and milk, and added a stick of brown rock candy on a string to dip in it and lick. I drank, sucked away on the candy, and gave my drum a rest.

  Mother Truczinski had a small round head, covered so transparently with thin ash-gray hair that her pink scalp showed through. The sparse strands all strove toward the farthest point at the back of her head where they formed a bun, which in spite of its modest size—it was smaller than a billiard ball—could be seen from all sides, no matter which direction she turned. Knitting needles held the bun together. Each morning Mother Truczinski rubbed her round cheeks with red paper from chicory packages till they seemed pasted on her face when she laughed. She glanced about like a mouse. Her four children were named Herbert, Guste, Fritz, and Maria.

  Maria was my age, had just finished grade school, and lived as an apprentice housekeeper with a family of civil servants in Schidlitz. Fritz, who worked in the railroad-car factory, was seldom seen. He had two or three young women he danced with at The Racetrack in Ohra, who took turns making his bed. He kept rabbits, Vienna Blues, in the apartment-house courtyard, but Mother Truczinski had to feed them, since Fritz had his hands full with his girlfriends. Guste, a calm young woman around thirty, was a waitress at the Eden Hotel by the railroad station. Still unmarried, she lived on the top floor of the Eden, along with the rest of the staff of that first-class hotel. Herbert, the oldest and the only one living with his mother—if one leaves aside an occasional overnight visit from Fritz the mechanic—worked as a waiter in the waterfront suburb of Neufahrwasser. He's the one I want to tell you about. After the death of my poor mama, for a brief but happy period Herbert Truczinski was the goal toward which I strove: to this day I call him my friend.

  Herbert worked as a waiter for Starbusch. That was the name of the host and owner of the Swedish Bar. It lay opposite the Protestant Seaman's Church, and the customers—as can be easily guessed from its name—were mostly Scandinavians. But a few Russians came too, Poles from the Free Port, dockers from Holm, and sailors from German warships that had dropped in for a visit. Being a waiter in this truly European bar was not without its dangers. Only the experience he'd gained at The Racetrack in Ohra—Herbert had worked as a waiter in the third class dance bar before going to Fahrwasser—enabled him to rise commandingly above the bubbling confusion of tongues he encountered in the Swedish Bar with his suburban Plattdeutsch, interspersed with scraps of English and Polish. Even so, once or twice a month an ambulance would bring him home, against his will but free of charge.

  Then Herbert would have to lie face down, breathing heavily, for he weighed well over two hundred pounds, and burden his bed for a few days. Mother Truczinski kept up a steady stream of complaints on such occasions while caring for him untiringly, removing a knitting needle from her bun each time she changed his bandages and tapping it on the glass of a picture opposite his bed, the retouched photograph of a solemnly staring man with a mustache who closely resembled some of the mustaches inhabiting the opening pages of my photo album.

  The gentleman indicated by Mother Truczinski's knitting needle was not, however, a member of my family, it was the father of Herbert, Guste, Fritz, and Maria.

  "You'll end up just like your father," she needled into the ear of the heavily breathing, groaning Herbert. Yet she never said clearly how and where the man in the black lacquered frame had met, or perhaps sought, his end.

  "Who was it this time?" the gray-haired mouse asked above her folded arms.

  "Swedes and Norskis, same as always." Herbert
shifted his weight, and the bed creaked loudly.

  "Same as always, same as always. Don't act like they're the only ones. Last time it was some lads from that there training ship, what's its name, come on, yes, from the Schlageter, just like I said, and you talk about Swedes and Norskis!"

  Herbert's ear—I couldn't see his face—turned red all the way past its rim: "Damn Heinis, always shooting their mouths off and throwing their weight around!"

  "Let them, those guys. What do you care? When they're on leave in town they always look decent enough. You told them your ideas about Lenin, didn't you, or started spouting off about the Spanish Civil War?"

  Herbert made no further response, and Mother Truczinski shuffled back to the kitchen and her barley coffee.

  The moment Herbert's back was healed, I was allowed to look at it. He would sit on a kitchen chair, let his suspenders fall across his blue-clad thighs, and slowly, as if grave thoughts were giving him pause, strip off his woolen shirt.

  His back was round, mobile. Muscles wandered tirelessly. A rosy landscape strewn with freckles. Below the shoulder blades fox-red hair grew rankly on either side of a spine embedded in fat. Downward it curled till it disappeared into the long underwear Herbert wore even in summer. Upward, covering his back from the top of his underwear to the muscles of his neck, interrupting the growth of hair, obliterating the freckles, puckering the skin into folds, ranging in color from blue-black to greenish white, itching at each change in the weather, ran thick, puffy scars. These scars I was allowed to touch.

  What have I, lying here in bed, looking out the window, observing the outbuildings of the mental institution and the Oberrath Forest beyond for months on end without ever really seeing them, what to this very day have I been allowed to touch that was as hard, as sensitive, and as disconcerting as the scars on Herbert Truczinski's back? To wit: the parts of a few young girls and women, my own member, the plaster watering can of the boy Jesus, and that ring finger the dog brought me from the rye field barely two years ago, which a year ago I was still allowed to keep, in a glass jar to be sure where it couldn't be touched, yet so clear and complete that even now I can feel each joint of the finger and count them off by just taking my drumsticks in hand. Whenever I wished to recall the scars on Herbert Truczinski's back, I sat down and drummed with that canning jar and finger before me, drumming up memories. Whenever I traced a woman's body, which happened rarely enough, and Oskar was not sufficiently convinced by the scarlike parts of the woman, I would conjure up Herbert Truczinski's scars. But I could just as easily say: the first touch of those welts on the broad back of my friend already promised knowledge and even temporary possession of those transient indurations characteristic of women ready for love. The signs on Herbert's back likewise promised me at that early date the ring finger, and before Herbert's scars made their promises, it was the drumsticks that, from my third birthday on, promised me scars, reproductive organs, and finally the ring finger. Yet I must reach even further back: even as a fetus, before Oskar was even called Oskar, the game with my umbilical cord promised me in succession drumsticks, Herbert's scars, the occa sionally erupting craters of younger and older women, finally the ring finger, and time and again, from the watering can of the boy Jesus on, my own sex, which I resolutely carry with me as a moody monument to my impotence and limited possibilities.

  Today I return to my drumsticks. In any case it is only by way of the detour my drum provides that I recall scars, soft parts, and my own only occasionally functioning equipment. I will have to turn thirty to celebrate my third birthday a second time. I'm sure you've guessed by now: Oskar's goal is a return to the umbilical cord; that's the sole purpose of all this effort, why I've lingered over Herbert Truczinski's scars.

  Before I go on to describe and interpret my friend's scars in greater detail, one preliminary remark: except for a bite wound on his left shin that a prostitute from Ohra left behind, there were no scars on the front of his powerful body, though it offered a target so large as to be nearly indefensible. They could only attack him from behind. They could only get at him from behind, his back alone was marked by Finnish and Polish knives, by the frog stickers of dockers from Speicherinsel, by the sailor's knives of cadets from the training ship.

  When Herbert had finished his lunch—three times a week they had potato pancakes, which no one could bake so thin, so greaseless yet crispy, as Mother Truczinski—when Herbert shoved his plate aside, I handed him the Neueste Nachrichten. He dropped his suspenders, peeled off his shirt, and let me question his back while he read. Mother Truczinski usually sat with us at the table during these question sessions, unraveling old wool socks, offering remarks of approval or disapproval, and not omitting an occasional reference to the—one presumes—horrible death of her husband, who, photographed and retouched, hung behind glass on the wall across from Herbert's bed.

  The questioning began when I would tap on a scar with my finger. At times I tapped with one of my drumsticks.

  "Press on it again, boy. I don't know which one it is. It seems to be asleep today." Then I would press again, a little harder.

  "Oh, that one. That was a Ukrainian. He got into a scrap with a guy from Gdingen. At first they were sitting at the same table like brothers. Then the guy from Gdingen calls the other one a Russki. The Ukrainian wasn't going to take that lying down, no way was he a Russki, anything but. He'd floated logs down the Vistula and a few rivers before that, and now he had a wad of money in his boot, with half a bootful already laid out buying rounds from Starbusch, when the guy from Gdingen says Russki, and I have to jump right in and push them apart, gently, the way I always do. So Herbert has his hands full, when the Ukrainian up and calls me a Water Polack, and the Polack, who spends his day hauling up muck on a dredger, adds something that sounds like Nazi. Well, Oskar, you know Herbert Truczinski: the one from the dredger, a pasty-faced guy, looks like a stoker, is soon lying in a heap by the cloakroom. And I'm just about to explain to the Ukrainian the difference between a Water Polack and a fine Danzig lad when he sticks me from behind—and that's the scar."

  Whenever Herbert said "and that's the scar," he would turn a page of the newspaper to emphasize his words and take a gulp of his barley coffee before I was allowed to press the next scar, once or sometimes twice.

  "Oh, that one! It don't amount to much. Two years or so ago it was, a whole fleet of torpedo boats from Pillau tied up here, swaggered about playing sailor boy in blue and the Danzig girls went crazy. How a skinny rag like that ever got into the navy is a mystery to me. And he was from Dresden, Oskar, can you believe it, from Dresden! You got no idea how odd that sounds, a sailor from Dresden."

  Herbert's thoughts now lingered about in the beautiful city of Dresden on the Elbe, and to lure them back to their home in Neufahrwasser, I tapped again on that scar he thought didn't amount to much.

  "Yeh, like I was saying. A signalman on the torpedo boat he was. Talked high and mighty, starts ribbing a quiet Scotsman with a tub in dry dock. Starts in with Chamberlain, umbrellas, and the like. I advise him gently, the way I always do, to stow that sort of talk, since the Scot can't cop a word anyway and was just drawing pictures on the tabletop with schnapps. And when I say, Drop it, boy, this ain't your home, this here's the League of Nations, the torpedo fritz calls me 'German booty,' in Saxon you understand—and I whack him a time or two, which quiets him down. A half-hour later, when I'm bending down to fish out a gulden that'd rolled under the table and can't see nothing, since it's dark under there, the Saxon hauls out his pik-pik and piks me quick!"

  Herbert turned the page of the Neueste Nachrichten and laughed, then added, "And that's the scar," pushed the newspaper over to a grum bling Mother Truczinski, and prepared to rise. Quickly, before Herbert could head for the toilet—I could tell from his face where he was headed—while he was still pressing his hands on the edge of the table to rise, I tapped on a blackish violet stitched scar as broad as a skat card is tall.

  "Herbert's got to go to the c
an, son. I'll tell you when I'm back." But I tapped again, stamped my feet, played the three-year-old; that always helped.

  "All right, then. Just to keep you quiet. But I'm making it short." Herbert sat down again. "It was Christmas nineteen-thirty. Nothing going on at the harbor. Dockers hanging out on street corners seeing how far they could spit. After midnight mass—we'd just finished mixing the punch—the Swedes and the Finns come pouring out of the Seaman's Church across the way, all neatly combed and polished in their blues. I've already got a feeling they're up to no good, stand there in the doorway watching those real pious faces, thinking why are they fiddling around with their anchor buttons? And all of a sudden they're at it: long are the knives and short is the night. Well, Finns and Swedes have always had a thing about each other. But why Herbert Truczinski gets mixed up with them, the devil only knows. When something's up, the monkey bites him and Herbert's got to join in. I was out the door with Starbusch calling after me, 'Watch yourself, Herbert.' But Herbert's on a mission to save the pastor, a small young fella, fresh from the seminary at Malmo, who'd never spent a Christmas with Finns and Swedes in one church before, he's going to take him under his wing, get him home safe and sound, so I've barely got ahold of the churchman's sleeve when there's a nice clean blade in my back and I think 'Happy New Year,' though it's only Christmas Eve. When I come to, I'm lying on the bar at our place, with my beautiful blood filling the beer glasses free of charge, and Starbusch comes with his Red Cross kit and wants to give me so-called first aid"

  "What'd you want to stick your nose in for?" Mother Truczinski said angrily, and pulled a knitting needle from her bun. "You don't never go to church. Never ever!"