The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  And there beneath the skirts, little Kurt would have bent low, risked a peep, and politely asked me, his father, to explain things.

  "That beautiful woman," Oskar would have whispered, "sitting in the middle, playing with her beautiful hands, with an oval face so lovely it brings tears to your eyes, that's my poor mama, your dear grandmother, who died from eating eel soup or from her own overly tender heart."

  "Go on, Papa, go on!" little Kurt would have clamored. "Who's the man with the mustache?"

  Then, with an air of mystery, I would have lowered my voice: "That's your great-grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek. Note his flickering arsonist's eyes, the divine Polish eccentricity and the practical Kashubian cunning crowning the bridge of his nose. Observe as well the webs between his toes. In nineteen-thirteen, as the Columbus was being launched from the slips, he wound up under a raft of logs, then swam and swam, all the way to America, where he became a millionaire. But sometimes he takes to the water again, swims back, and dives in here, where he first found refuge as an arsonist and contributed his part toward my mama."

  "But what about that handsome man who's been hiding behind the lady who is my grandmother, but is sitting beside her now, caressing her hands? His eyes are as blue as yours, Papa!"

  Then, wicked and traitorous son that I am, I would have gathered all my courage to answer my dear child: "Those are the dreamy blue eyes of the Bronskis looking at you, Kurt. It's true your own eyes are gray. You got them from your mother. Yet like Jan, who is kissing my poor mama's hand, and like his father Vinzent, you are a Bronski, a dreamer through and through, yet with a Kashubian practicality. One day we'll return there, return to the source that spreads the slightly rancid smell of butter. Rejoice!"

  According to my theories at the time, it was only inside my grandmother Koljaiczek, or, as I put it in jest, in the grandmotherly butter tub, that true family life was possible. Today, when God the Father, his only begotten Son, and, most important of all, the Holy Spirit himself are such a short hop away that I could jump right over them—for in addition to all my other callings, I am reluctantly committed to the Imitation of Christ—and though nothing is farther from me now than the entrance to my grandmother, I still picture the most beautiful of family scenes in the circle of my forebears.

  I envision them mostly on rainy days: My grandmother sends out invitations and we all meet inside her. Jan Bronski arrives with flowers, carnations perhaps, stuck in the bullet holes in his Polish Post Office defender's breast. Maria, who has received an invitation at my behest, approaches my mama shyly and, trying to curry favor, shows her the account books Mama set up and Maria has carried on flawlessly, at which Mama releases her Kashubian laugh, draws my beloved to her, kisses her cheek, and says with a wink, "Dear little Maria, who cares? After all, we both wed a Matzerath and nursed a Bronski!"

  I must sternly forbid myself any further thoughts along these lines, any speculation for example about a son sired by Jan, carried to term by my mama inside Grandmother Koljaiczek, and finally born in the butter tub. For this would surely have drawn further consequences. Thus my half brother Stephan Bronski, who after all belonged in this circle, might have hit on the Bronskian idea of casting first an eye, and soon much more, at my Maria. My imaginative powers prefer to focus on an innocent family gathering. Renouncing a third and fourth drummer, I rest content with Oskar and little Kurt, narrate for those present something on my drum about that Eiffel Tower which replaced my grandmother in foreign climes, and am pleased if the guests, including our hostess Anna Koljaiczek, enjoy our drumming and slap one another's knees in time to the rhythm.

  Enticing as it is to unfold the world and its relationships inside one's own grandmother, to be multilayered within restricted levels, Oskar must now—since, like Matzerath, he is a merely presumptive father—limit himself to recounting the events of the twelfth of June, nineteen forty-four, little Kurt's third birthday.

  To repeat: the boy had received a sweater, a ball, a sailboat, and a whip and humming top, to which I was about to add a red and white lacquered tin drum. He'd barely finished unrigging the sailboat when Oskar approached, holding his tin gift hidden behind his back, with his own battered drum dangling at his tummy. We stood only a step apart: Oskar, the toddler; Kurt, the inch-taller toddler. He had a furious, pinched look on his face—still bent on destroying the sailboat—and at the very moment I drew forth the drum and held it up, he broke off the final mast of the Pamir, for that was the windjammer's name.

  Kurt dropped the wreck, accepted the drum, held it, turned it about, and his face grew calmer, though it was still tense. Now it was time to hand him the drumsticks. Unfortunately he misunderstood my dual gesture, felt threatened, knocked the sticks from my hands with the edge of his drum, reached behind him as I bent for the sticks, and as I offered them to him a second time, struck me with his birthday gift: struck me, not the top grooved for the whip, tried to make me, his father, hum and spin like a top, whipped me, thought just you wait little brother; thus did Cain whip Abel till Abel spun, still wobbling at first, then with ever increasing speed and precision, and found his way darkly through a low, grumbling humming to a higher song, sang the song of the humming top. Higher and higher Cain enticed me with his whip, my voice chalky, a tenor pouring forth his morning prayer, I sang as silver-chased angels might sing, or the Vienna Boys' Choir, or well-drilled castrati—as Abel may have sung before he fell, as I now fell, collapsing beneath the whip of the boy child Kurt.

  When he saw me lying there in misery, my hum dying away, he cracked his whip in the air several more times, as if his arm hadn't had enough. He also kept a mistrustful eye on me during his thorough examination of the drum. First the red and white lacquer was banged against the corner of a chair, then my gift fell to the floor and little Kurt sought and found the massive hull of the former sailboat. With this he beat the drum. He didn't play the drum, he beat it to pieces. His hand did not attempt the simplest rhythm. He just pounded away steadily with an expression of frantic concentration on an instrument that had never expected such a drummer, that was made to withstand playful rolls of lightweight drumsticks but not blows with a bulky wreck used as a battering ram. The drum buckled, tried to escape by breaking away from its frame, tried to turn invisible by shedding its red and white lacquer and letting its gray-blue tin beg for mercy. But the son showed no mercy to his father's birthday gift. And when his father tried to mediate again, making his way across the carpet, in spite of all his aches and pains, to where his son sat on the wooden floor, the whip intervened once more. And the weary top, knowing that mistress well, gave up spinning and humming, just as the drum gave up once and for all on finding a sensitive drummer, strong but not brutal, who would playfully ply his drumsticks.

  When Maria walked in, the drum was ready for the scrapheap. She picked me up, kissed my swollen eyes and my torn ear, licked my blood and the welts on my hands.

  Oh, if only Maria had not kissed the maltreated, backward, deplorably abnormal child! If only she had recognized the beaten father and in every wound the lover. What a consolation, what a true, secret husband I could have been for her during the dark months ahead.

  The first blow—which had little direct impact on Maria—fell on my half brother Stephan Bronski, serving on the Arctic Front and recently promoted to lieutenant, who was still going by his stepfather's name Ehlers, and found his career as an officer suddenly placed on permanent hold. While Stephan's father Jan, shot during the defense of the Polish Post Office, bore a skat card under his shirt at the cemetery in Saspe, the lieutenant's jacket was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class, the Infantry Badge, and the so-called Cold Storage Medal.

  Toward the end of June Mother Truczinski suffered a slight stroke when the mailman delivered bad news. Airman First Class Fritz Truczinski had fallen for three things simultaneously: his Führer, his Volk, and his Fatherland. This had happened in the Center Sector, and Fritz's wallet with snapshots of pretty young women, most of them laughin
g, from Heidelberg, Brest, Paris, Bad Kreuznach, and Saloniki, his Iron Cross First and Second Class, a medal for some wound or other, his bronze bar for close combat, and two loose antitank patches, along with a few letters, had been sent by a certain Captain Kanauer directly from the Center Sector to Labesweg, Langfuhr.

  Matzerath helped as best he could, and Mother Truczinski soon improved, though she never really recovered. She sat stuck in her chair by the window, asked me or Matzerath, who brought something up for her two or three times a day, just where this "Center Sector" was, if it was far away, and if you could get there by train on a Sunday.

  Much as he would have liked to, Matzerath couldn't tell her. So, based on the geography lessons I'd learned from special communiqués and military broadcasts, it was left to me to spend long afternoons with Mother Truczinski, who sat motionless except for her wobbling head, drumming out various versions of the Center Sector's now rapidly shifting location.

  Maria, on the other hand, who was deeply attached to the dashing Fritz, turned religious. At first, all through July, she tried to make do with the religion she'd been raised in, going to Pastor Hecht at the Church of Christ on Sundays, accompanied at times by Matzerath, though she preferred to go alone.

  Protestant services were not enough for Maria. One weekday—was it a Thursday or a Friday?—before closing time, turning the shop over to Matzerath, she took me, the Catholic, by the hand, we headed toward Neuer Markt, then turned on Elsenstraße, again on Marienstraße, passed Wohlgemuth's butcher shop, reached Kleinhammerpark—Oskar was already thinking, we're headed for Langfuhr Station, we're going to take a little trip, to Bissau perhaps in Kashubia—when we swung to the left, waited superstitiously at the underpass for a freight train to go by, entered the underpass, which was dripping nastily, and went through, not straight ahead to the Film-Palast, but left along the railway embankment. I thought: Either she's dragging me to Dr. Hollatz's office on Brunshöferweg or she's heading for the Church of the Sacred Heart to convert.

  Its portal faced the railway embankment. Between the embankment and the open door we came to a stop. A late August afternoon, the air humming. Behind us, on the ballast between the rails, Ukrainian women in white kerchiefs were hacking and shoveling. We stood and peered into the shadowy, cool-breathing belly of the church: far to the back, deftly seductive, a severely inflamed eye—the Eternal Light. Behind us on the embankment the women stopped shoveling and hacking. A horn tooted, a train was approaching, it arrived, it was there, was still there, not gone yet, then it was gone, and the horn tooted, Ukrainians shoveled. Maria wavered, perhaps unsure which foot to put for ward, placed the burden of responsibility on me, by birth and baptism closer to the only true Church; for the first time in years, since those two weeks filled with fizz powder and love, Maria resigned herself to Oskar's guidance.

  Then we left the embankment and its sounds, August and its August hum. Rather mournfully, gently tapping my drum with the tips of my fingers beneath my smock, as outwardly a look of indifference settled on my face, I recalled masses, pontifical offices, vesper services, and Saturday confessions at my poor mama's side, who shortly before her death was rendered pious by her all too intense involvement with Jan Bron-ski, and sought relief in confession Saturday after Saturday, strengthened herself each Sunday with the sacrament, and thus relieved and strengthened would meet Jan on Tischlergasse the following Thursday. Who was the priest back then? It was Father Wiehnke, and he was still pastor at the Church of the Sacred Heart, delivered sermons that were pleasantly soft and unintelligible, sang the Credo so faintly and plaintively that even I might have been overcome by something resembling faith back then if it hadn't been for that left side-altar with the Virgin, the boy Jesus, and the boy Baptist.

  And yet it was that altar that impelled me to pull Maria from the sunshine into the portal, then across the flagstones into the nave.

  Oskar took his time, sat quietly beside Maria on the oak pew, growing calmer, cooler. Years had passed, and yet it seemed to me that the same people still awaited Father Wiehnke's ear, leafing methodically through the Mirror of Confession. We sat somewhat off to the side, but nearer the central aisle. I wanted to leave the choice up to Maria and make it easier for her. She wasn't so near the confession box as to be confused by it, leaving her free to convert in a quiet, unofficial way; yet she could see how people behaved prior to confession and, while watching, reach her own decision about making her way into the box to the Father's ear to discuss the details of her conversion to the only true Church. I felt sorry for her, small and with still unpracticed hands, kneeling amid incense, dust, plaster, sinuous angels, refracted light, and convulsed saints, before, beneath, and amid all that sweet, sorrow-laden Catholicism, crossing herself backward the first time. Oskar tapped Maria, demonstrated how it should be done, showed the eager pupil where behind her forehead, where deep in her breast, where exactly in the joints of her shoulder Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dwell, and how the hands must be folded to finish it off with Amen. Maria did so, brought her hands to rest in Amen, and with her Amen began to pray.

  At first Oskar tried to pray too, for a few of the dead, but as he supplicated the Lord on behalf of his Roswitha, trying to negotiate eternal peace for her and admission to the joys of heaven, he so lost himself in earthly details that eternal peace and heavenly joys wound up in a Paris hotel. I took refuge in the Preface, where there is nothing much to pin you down; for all eternity, I said, sursum corda, dignum et justum — it is just and right, left it at that, and began watching Maria from the side.

  Catholic prayer was becoming to her. She was pretty as a picture in her devotions. Prayer lengthens the eyelashes, arches the brows, inflames the cheeks, renders the brow somber, the neck supple, makes the nostrils quiver. Maria's face, blossoming in sorrow, nearly seduced me into an attempted caress. But one must never disturb those in prayer, one must neither seduce nor be seduced by them, however pleasant and conducive to prayer it may be for those praying to know someone thinks they're worth watching.

  So I slid from the polished church bench and quietly folded my hands on the drum that bulged beneath my smock. Oskar fled from Maria, crossed the flagstones with his drum, passed the stations of the cross in the left nave, not pausing at Saint Anthony—pray for us — having lost neither a purse nor a house key, to our left Saint Adalbert of Prague, slain by the Prussians of old, never resting, hopping from stone to stone — a chessboard spread before us — till a carpet announced the steps to the left side-altar.

  I can assure you that nothing in the Neo-Gothic brick Church of the Sacred Heart, and consequently nothing in the left side-altar either, had changed. The naked-pink boy Jesus still sat on the left thigh of the Virgin, whom I will not call the Virgin Mary, lest you confuse her with my own Mary, my Maria busy converting. Still pressed against the right knee of the Virgin was the boy Baptist, scantily clad in his chocolate-colored shaggy pelt. She herself pointed at Jesus as before with her right finger while looking at John.

  Yet even after years of absence, Oskar was less interested in the Virgin's maternal pride than in the build of the two boys. Jesus was about the size of my son Kurt on his third birthday, and thus almost an inch taller than Oskar. John, who according to the evidence was older than the Nazarene, was my height. Both, however, had the same precocious expression, which as a permanent three-year-old I too bore. Nothing had changed. They had stared out with that same precocity when I used to visit the Church of the Sacred Heart at my poor mama's side all those years ago.

  Over and up the carpeted steps, but without the Introitus. I examined each fold of drapery, slowly traced the painted plaster of both little nudists with my drumstick, more sensitive than all my fingers combined, omitting nothing: thighs, belly, arms, counted the rolls of fat, the dimples—that was Oskar's exact build, my healthy flesh, my strong, slightly plump knees, my short but muscular drummer's arms. And he held them the same way, the rascal. He sat on the thigh of the Virgin and lifted his arms and fists
as though about to drum, as though Jesus and not Oskar was the drummer, as though he was just waiting for my drum, as if this time he had every intention of pounding out something rhythmically pleasing on it for the Virgin, John, and me.

  I did what I'd done years before, removed the drum from my tummy and put Jesus to the test. Cautiously, careful not to damage the painted plaster, I pushed Oskar's red and white drum onto his rosy thighs, but this time for my own satisfaction, not in the stupid expectation of some miracle but to witness sculptural impotence, for even though he sat there with upraised fists, even though he was my size and had my own sturdy build, even though he could easily provide a plaster copy of the three-year-old I had sustained with such effort and the greatest of privations—he still couldn't drum, could only pretend, thinking no doubt: if I had one I could; now you've got one, I said, and you can't, and doubled over with laughter. I stuck both sticks into his ten sausage fingers—now drum, sweetest Jesus, painted plaster drumming on tin, Oskar backs down the three steps, from carpet to flagstones, come on, drum, Jesus boy, Oskar steps farther back. Maintains his distance and laughs himself silly, for Jesus just sits there, can't drum though he wants to. Boredom starts gnawing at me as if I were a rind of bacon—and then he struck, and all at once he was drumming!

  While all remained motionless: he crossed over nicely, first with his right, then his left, then with both sticks, his drumroll not half-bad, he took it seriously, loved to change tempo, was as good when the rhythm was simple as he was when he made it complex, and yet he avoided all gimmicks, just stuck to his drum, his style not even religious or that of some warmed-over trooper, but simply and purely musical, nor did he scorn popular hits, playing, among others, one that was on everyone's lips back then, "Everything Passes," and of course "Lili Marleen," then slowly, a little jerkily perhaps, he turned his curly head with the blue Bronski eyes toward me, smiled somewhat arrogantly, and delivered a potpourri of Oskar's favorites: it began with "Glass, Glass, Little Glass," skimmed through "The Schedule," the rascal played Rasputin off against Goethe just as I did, climbed the Stockturm with me, crawled under the grandstand with me, caught eels off the harbor jetty, strode at my side behind my poor mama's coffin, tapering toward the foot, and, what stunned me most, appeared again and again beneath the four skirts of my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek.