The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  We didn't say a word, but Leo still held the empty shell in his glove. When I hesitated and started to turn back because of the cold and the rain, he opened his fist, made the little piece of metal hop up and down in his palm, lured me on a hundred paces, then another hundred smaller paces, and when, just before we reached the Saspe grounds, I made a serious decision to retreat, he even resorted to music. He turned on his heel, held the shell with its open end upward, pressed the hole like the mouthpiece of a flute against his protruding lower lip, and sent a raspy tone, now shrill, now muffled as though by fog, into the ever more intensely falling rain. Oskar was freezing: it wasn't just the music on the empty shell that made him shiver, the lousy weather, arriving as if on cue to fit the mood, played its part too, so that I didn't even try to hide my miserable state.

  What lured me to Brösen? Well, yes, Leo the Pied Piper, piping on his empty shell. But other things piped to me too. Beyond November's laundry-room fog, from the roadstead and Neufahrwasser, the sirens of the steamships and the hungry howl of a torpedo boat running in or out reached us over Schottland, Schellmühl, and Reichskolonie, so that with foghorns, sirens, and a whistling shell, it was child's play for Leo to draw a freezing Oskar after him.

  Not far from where the wire fence curved off toward Pelonken, sepa rating the airfield from the new drill ground with its encircling trenches, Crazy Leo paused, his head cocked to one side, slobbering over the empty shell, and observed for a time my shivering, trembling body. He sucked at the shell, held it with his lower lip, and following a sudden inspiration, flailed his arms about, pulled off his long-tailed frock coat and threw the heavy cloth, smelling of damp earth, over my head and shoulders.

  We set off again. I don't know if Oskar was any less cold. Now and then Leo would leap forward five paces, pause, and strike a figure in his rumpled yet shockingly white shirt that might have sprung mysteriously from some medieval dungeon—the Stockturm, say—with the harshly bright shirt that style demands of the insane. Whenever Leo turned to see Oskar tottering along in his frock coat, he would burst out laughing and flap his wings like a croaking raven. Indeed I must have looked like some strange bird, if not a raven, then a crow, since my coattails dragged behind me like a train, mopping up the asphalt street, leaving behind a broad, majestic track that made Oskar proud each time he glanced back over his shoulder, and foreshadowed, perhaps even symbolized, a tragic fate that slept within him and was gradually to awaken.

  Even before leaving Max-Halbe-Platz, I suspected that Leo had no intention of taking me to Brösen or Neufahrwasser. From the very start the only possible goal of this march was Saspe Cemetery and the training trenches, near which a modern rifle range had been set up for the police.

  From the end of September through the end of April, the trams to the seaside resorts ran only every thirty-five minutes. As we were leaving the suburb of Langfuhr, a single-car tram approached. A few moments later the tram that had been waiting for it on the siding at Magdeburger Straße overtook us. We had almost reached Saspe Cemetery, where a second siding had been installed, when another tram jangled past, then the moist, yellow headlight of a tram we'd seen waiting ahead in the mist came toward us.

  The flat, morose face of the tram driver was still sharp in Oskar's mind as Crazy Leo led him off the asphalt street through loose sand hinting at the sand dunes on the beach. A wall that enclosed the cemetery formed a square. A small gate on the south side, ornately rusted and only pretending to be locked, permitted us to enter. Unfortunately Leo left me no time to inspect more closely the slanted gravestones, heading for a fall or already flat on their faces, carved mostly from black Swedish granite or diorite, rough-hewn on their backs and sides, their fronts polished smooth. Five or six stunted beach pines, which had taken various detours as they grew, filled in as decorative trees for the cemetery. When Mama was alive and gazing out from the streetcar she always preferred this little rundown spot to any other final resting place. Now she lay in Brentau. The soil was richer there; elms and maples grew.

  Before I could find my footing in all that romantic decay, Leo led me out of the cemetery through a small, gateless portal in the northern wall. Just beyond the wall we found ourselves on sandy level ground. Broom, pines, and rosehip shrubs drifted off toward the coast with striking clarity through a misty brew. Looking back at the cemetery, I saw at once that a portion of the northern wall had been freshly whitewashed.

  Leo busied himself before the seemingly new wall, its harsh brightness matching his rumpled shirt. He strained to take long strides, seemed to be counting them, counted aloud in what Oskar believes to this day was Latin. And chanted a text too, one he might have learned in the seminary. Approximately thirty feet from the wall Leo marked a point, then placed a wooden stick near the whitewashed section, which I imagine had also been repaired, all this with his let hand, for in his right he held the empty shell, and finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he removed the wooden stick and replaced it with that hollow metallic cylinder, somewhat narrowed at the tip, which had housed a lead kernel till someone tightened his index finger, sought the pressure point, and smoothly, without jerking, issued the lead's eviction notice and ordered its death-dealing relocation.

  We stood and stood. Crazy Leo drooled threads of spittle. Wringing his gloves, he chanted a few more Latin phrases, then fell silent, as there was no one present who knew the responses. Then Leo turned round, peered over the wall toward Brösener Landstraße with peevish impatience, and kept turning his head that way every time the trams, empty for the most part, pulled onto the siding and jangled past each other, then distanced themselves again. Leo was probably waiting for mourners. But no one arrived on foot or by tram to whom he could offer his glove in sympathy.

  Some planes roared overhead, coming in for a landing. We didn't look up, submitted to the noise of the engines, had no desire to satisfy ourselves that three Ju 52s with blinking lights on their wingtips were coming in to land.

  Shortly after the engines left us—the stillness was as painful as the wall we faced was white—Crazy Leo reached into his shirt, pulled something out, stepped up beside me, tore his crow's coat from Oskar's shoulders, leapt off toward the broom, rosehips, and beach pines, heading for the coast, and in bounding away, with a calculating gesture suggesting it was meant to be found, let something drop.

  Only when Leo had disappeared for good—he roamed about in the foreground like a ghost till milky tendrils of fog clinging to the ground swallowed him up—only when I found myself totally alone in the rain, did I pick up the small rectangle of cardboard stuck 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 longer any border or customs at Bissau, she could take her eggs, butter, even green kale and winter apples to market. People were busy buying all they could, for food would soon be rationed and they had to lay in stores. The very moment Oskar saw his grandmother squatting behind her wares, he felt the skat card against his bare skin, beneath his coat, sweater, and undershirt. At first, having hopped on the tram free of charge at the conductor's urging, I'd meant to tear up the seven of spades on the way back from Saspe to Max-Halbe-Platz.

  Oskar didn't tear up the card. He gave it to his grandmother. She was startled behind her green kale when she saw him. She may have thought that Oskar's presence could bode no good. Nevertheless, she waved the three-year-old, who was half hiding behind some baskets of fish, over to her. Oskar took his time, looked over a live cod nearly a yard long lying on damp seaweed, then watched some pocket crabs from Lake Ottominer still hard at work practicing their crabwalk in a basket; then Oskar tried this method of locomotion himself, approaching his grandmother's stand with the back of his sailor's jacket, and didn't show her his golden anchor buttons till he bumped against one of the wooden trestles under her display and set the apples rolling.

  Schwerdtfeger came wi
th his hot bricks wrapped in newspaper, shoved them under my grandmother's skirts, drew out the cold bricks with a slide as he always did, made a mark on the slate tablet dangling from him, moved on to the next stand, and my grandmother handed me a shiny apple.

  What could Oskar give her when she gave him an apple? He handed her the skat card and then the empty shell, for he hadn't wished to leave it lying in Saspe either. Anna Koljaiczek stared uncomprehendingly at those two quite disparate objects for some time. Then Oskar's mouth approached her gristly old woman's ear beneath her scarf, and casting all caution to the wind, I whispered, thinking of Jan's small but fleshy pink ear with the long, nicely shaped lobes: "He lies in Saspe," Oskar whispered, and dashed off, upsetting a shoulder basket of green kale.

  Maria

  While history, blaring special communiqués at the top of its lungs, drove, swam, and flew like a well-oiled machine through Europe's streets, waterways, and skies, conquering them all, my own affairs, which were limited to wearing out lacquered tin drums, slowed, sputtered, and finally came to a halt. While others were flinging high-priced metal lavishly about, I was running out of tin again. It's true Oskar had managed to rescue a new, nearly unscathed instrument from the Polish Post Office and thus provide some justification for the latter's defense, but given the fact that it took me a mere eight weeks to transform a drum into scrap metal when I was at my best, how much could Herr Naczelnik junior's tin drum mean to me?

  Soon after my release from the city hospital, lamenting the loss of my nurses, I released a mighty drumroll and started to drum mightily. That rainy afternoon in Saspe Cemetery had not stilled my handiwork; on the contrary, Oskar redoubled his efforts and devoted all his energy to the task of destroying the last witness of his shameful conduct with the Home Guard, his drum.

  But it held firm, responded, struck back accusingly each time I struck it. Strangely enough, in the midst of all these slugfests, which were intended solely to eradicate a certain limited segment of my past, I kept thinking of Viktor Weluhn, the postal money-order clerk, though he was surely too nearsighted to bear witness against me. But had he not escaped in spite of being nearsighted? Could it be that nearsighted people see more than we do, that Weluhn, whom I usually call poor Viktor, scanned my gestures like those of a black and white silhouette, recognized my Judas act, and carried Oskar's secret shame with him on his flight into the wider world?

  It wasn't till mid-December that the accusations of the lacquered, red-flamed conscience round my neck began to lose their persuasive power: the lacquer showed hairline cracks and started to peel. The tin began to yield, grow thin, and split before turning transparent. As always when something is suffering and struggling toward its end, the eyewitness wishes to shorten its sufferings, to end things more rapidly. Oskar speeded up during the final weeks of Advent, worked so hard the neighbors and Matzerath held their heads in their hands, was determined to settle his accounts by Christmas Eve; for on Christmas Eve I hoped to receive a new, guiltless drum.

  I made it. On the eve of the twenty-fourth of December I rid my body and my soul of a crumpled, flapping, rusty something, reminiscent of a wrecked car, and with that I hoped the defense of the Polish Post Office had also been crushed once and for all.

  Never has any human being—if you are prepared to accept me as one—experienced a more disappointing Christmas than Oskar, who found beneath the Christmas tree a whole range of presents set out for him save one—a tin drum.

  There was a set of building blocks I never even opened. A rocking swan, meant as a very special present, was supposed to turn me into Lohengrin. Just to annoy me, no doubt, they had the nerve to place three or four picture books on the gift table. The only items that appeared useful were a pair of gloves, some laced boots, and a red sweater Gretchen Scheffler had knitted. Dismayed, Oskar let his gaze glide from the building blocks to the swan, stared at the picture-book teddy bears meant to be cute, holding all sorts of musical instruments in their paws. One of these adorable, mendacious beasts even held a drum, looked as if he knew how to drum, as if he were about to launch into a drum solo, as if he were drumming away; and I had a swan but no drum, probably more than a thousand building blocks but not a single drum, had mittens for all those bitter-cold winter nights but nothing round, smooth, ice-cold, lacquered, and tinny in my mittened fists to carry into the winter night so the frost could finally hear something truly white.

  Oskar thought to himself: Matzerath has hidden the drum. Or Gretchen Scheffler, who's come with her baker husband to polish off our Christmas goose, is sitting on it. They want to share my pleasure in the swan, the building blocks, and the picture books before they pull out the real treasure. I gave in, leafed like a fool through the picture books, mounted the swan, and rocked back and forth in utter disgust for at least half an hour. Then in spite of the overheated apartment I let them try the sweater on me, slipped into the boots with Gretchen Schemer's help—meanwhile the Greffs had arrived too, since the goose would serve six—and after wolfing down the goose, stuffed with dried fruit, masterfully prepared by Matzerath, during dessert—plums and pears—desperately clutching a picture book Greff had added to my other four, after soup, goose, red cabbage, boiled potatoes, plums and pears, breathed on by a hot tile stove, we all sang—and Oskar sang too—a Christmas carol and another verse, Rejoice, and Ochristmastreeochristmastreehow-lovelyarethy-ringbellsgotingalingaling-everyyearatchristmas and felt it was about time—they were already ringing the bells outside—I wanted my drum—the drunken brass band that Meyn the musician had once belonged to blew so loud the icicles at the window ledges ... but I wanted, and they weren't giving, weren't bringing out, Oskar "Yes!" the others "No!"—and then I screamed, I hadn't screamed in a long time, I filed my voice to a sharp, glass-cutting instrument once more, after its long rest, and didn't slay vases, or beer glasses, or light bulbs, sliced open no showcase window, blinded no spectacles—instead my vocal resentment was directed at all those resplendent glass balls, bells, silvery shining bubbles, and treetop baubles spreading good cheer on the Ochristmastree: ringadinging and tingalingalinging, the Christmas tree ornaments were shattered to dust. Quite superfluously, several dustpans' worth of pine needles detached themselves at the same time. But the candles went on burning, silent and holy, and Oskar still didn't get his drum.

  Matzerath simply lacked judgment. I don't know if he was trying to raise me properly or if he just didn't think of providing me with an ample supply of drums in a timely fashion. Things were headed for disaster, and it was only because it was impossible to hide the mounting disorder in our grocery shop at the very moment of my impending disaster that help arrived—as one always thinks it will when times are hard—and saved both me and the shop.

  Since Oskar possessed neither the necessary height nor the inclination to stand behind the store counter selling Ryvita, margarine, and synthetic honey, Matzerath, whom I'll resume calling my father for the sake of simplicity, hired Maria Truczinski, my poor friend Herbert's youngest sister, to work in the store.

  Maria wasn't just named for a saint, she was one. Not only did she manage, within a few weeks, to restore the good reputation of our shop, she also showed, along with her friendly but firm approach to business, to which Matzerath gladly submitted, some true understanding for my situation.

  Even before taking her place behind the counter, Maria had offered me an old washbasin on several occasions as a substitute for the scrapheap I held at my tummy as I stamped accusingly up and down the hundred-plus steps of the stairwell. But Oskar would accept no substitute. He steadfastly refused to drum on an overturned washbasin. No sooner had Maria gained a firm foothold in the business, however, than she managed, in spite of Matzerath, to accommodate my wishes. Of course Oskar could not be persuaded to enter a toy store at her side. The interiors of those brightly colored, overstocked shops would surely have evoked painful comparisons with Sigismund Markus's devastated shop. Maria, gentle and compliant, let me wait outside, or went shopping on her o
wn, brought me a new drum every four or five weeks as needed, and during the final years of the war, when even tin drums were rare and rationed, offered the shopkeepers sugar or an ounce of real coffee and received my drum under the table, as so-called UT goods. All this she did without sighing, shaking her head, or glancing heavenward, but with the same serious, attentive, and matter-of-fact air she assumed when she dressed me in freshly laundered, properly mended trousers, socks, and smocks. Though relations between Maria and me have remained in constant flux over the intervening years, and are unsettled to this day, the way in which she hands me my drum remains unchanged, though the price of tin drums has risen substantially since nineteen-forty.

  Today, Maria subscribes to a fashion magazine. She looks more elegant from one Visitors Day to the next. And back then?

  Was Maria beautiful? She had a round, freshly washed face, gazed out coolly but not coldly from slightly protruding gray eyes with short but thick lashes beneath strong, dark eyebrows that merged above the bridge of her nose. Clearly defined cheekbones—with skin that grew taut, turned bluish, and chapped painfully in cold weather—lent a calming regularity to her features, barely interrupted by a diminutive nose that was by no means unattractive or comical in any way, but rather, in spite of its delicacy, nicely shaped. Her forehead was small and round, and even early on marked by thoughtful vertical creases above the brows that merged over her nose. Rounded too was the slightly curly brown hair at her temples, which still has the sheen of wet tree trunks today, drawn back tightly, like Mother Truczinski's, to span a small, round skull that barely revealed its back. When Maria donned her long white smock and took her place behind our shop counter, she still wore braids behind her flushed, robustly healthy ears, whose earlobes unfortunately were not free but attached, growing straight into the flesh of her lower jaws, without any ugly creases to be sure, but still degenerate enough to draw conclusions about Maria's character. Later, Matzerath talked the young girl into a permanent wave and her ears remained hidden. These days Maria lets her attached earlobes show beneath a short, stylish hairdo, but hides this blemish by means of large and slightly tasteless clip-ons.