The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  Since several more carpets that weren't tapestries hung on the walls or slouched in corners rolled up, Oskar assumed the Hedgehog had traded in rugs prior to the currency reform and was stuck with them afterward.

  The only picture was a framed and glazed portrait of Prince Bismarck hanging between two small rugs of an Oriental cast on the window wall. The Hedgehog sat in a leather armchair, beneath the Chancellor, with whom he shared a certain family resemblance. As he took the change-of-residence form from my hand and studied both sides of the preprinted document carefully, critically, and impatiently, his wife's whispered query if anything was wrong threw him into a rage that made him look even more like the Iron Chancellor. The armchair spewed him forth. He stood on four carpets, held the form to one side, filled him self and his waistcoat with air, reached the first and second carpet with a single bound, and showered his wife, who had bent over her sewing again, with a sentence that ran somewhat as follows: Youshutyour-mouthwhenyourenotaskedandkeepitclosedilldothetalkinghereandnobodyelsesee! Notanotherword!

  Since Frau Zeidler restrained herself nicely, didn't say another word and stuck to her sewing, the problem the Hedgehog faced as he stood impotently kicking the carpets was how to allow his rage to reverberate and fade in a credible manner. He took one stride to the display case, rattled it open, reached in cautiously with outspread fingers, grasped eight liqueur glasses, withdrew his overloaded hands from the case, leaving all within intact, tiptoed—like a host planning to divert himself and seven guests with an exercise in dexterity—toward the green-tiled slow-combustion stove, and flung the fragile freight—casting all caution now to the wind—against the cold cast-iron door of the stove.

  Amazingly enough, throughout this scene, which required a certain accuracy, the Hedgehog managed to keep his bespectacled eye on his wife, who had arisen and was trying to thread a needle by the right-hand window. An instant after he had shattered the glasses, she brought this delicate task, which required a steady hand, to a successful conclusion. Frau Zeidler returned to her still warm chair and sat down in such a way that her dress scooted up again, clearly revealing three fingers' breadth of her pink slip. Bent forward, with a critical yet submissive eye, the Hedgehog had followed his wife's trip to the window, the needle threading, and her return. She was scarcely seated again when he reached behind the stove, pulled out a dustpan and whiskbroom, swept up the shards, and shook the sweepings onto a newspaper that was already half-covered with shattered liqueur glasses and would be hard-pressed to hold a third outburst of glass-breaking wrath.

  If the reader now asserts that Oskar recognized in this glass-smashing Hedgehog a version of the Oskar who sangshattered glass over the years, I can't say you're entirely wrong; I too once loved to transform my rage into shards of glass—but no one ever saw me reach for a dustpan and brush.

  Once Zeidler had cleared away the traces of his wrath he returned to his armchair. Once more Oskar handed him the registration form, which the Hedgehog had dropped when he reached into the display cabinet with both hands.

  Zeidler signed the form and gave me to understand that he ran an orderly house, where would we be otherwise, after all, he'd been a salesman for fifteen years, sold hair clippers in fact, did I know what hair clippers were?

  Oskar knew what hair clippers were, and made a few explanatory motions in the air from which Zeidler could infer that I was au courant with regard to hair clippers. His neatly clipped crew cut showed he represented his product well. After explaining his work schedule to me—one week on the road, two days at home—he lost all interest in Oskar, just rocked hedgehoggishly in the creaking light brown leather, glared through his glasses, and kept repeating apropos of nothing: jajajajajaja—it was time for me to go.

  Oskar took his leave of Frau Zeidler first. She had a cold, boneless, but dry hand. The Hedgehog gestured from his chair, waving me toward the door, where Oskar's luggage stood. My hands were already full when his voice sounded: "What have you got there hanging on your suitcase?"

  "My tin drum."

  "You plan on drumming here?"

  "Not necessarily. I used to play it a lot."

  "That's fine with me. I'm never home anyway."

  "It is unlikely I shall ever drum again."

  "And why are you still so small, huh?"

  "An unfortunate fall stunted my growth."

  "Just don't give me any trouble with fits and all."

  "The state of my health has improved steadily over the past few years. Just look how nimble I am." Then Oskar performed a few flips and semi-acrobatic exercises he'd learned back when he was with the Theater at the Front, reducing Frau Zeidler to giggles and leaving the Hedgehog still slapping his thighs as I entered the hall and carted my luggage and drum past the nurse's frosted door, the toilet, the kitchen, and into my room.

  That was early May. From that day forward, I was tempted, possessed, overwhelmed by the mystery of the hospital nurse: nurses made me ill, perhaps incurably so, for even today, when all that is behind me, I still contradict my keeper Bruno, who flatly maintains that only men can be proper nurses, the patient's addiction to female nurses being simply one more symptom of the disease; while the male nurse conscientiously cares for the patient and sometimes cures him, the female nurse follows the feminine path: she seduces the patient toward recovery or toward death, which she imbues with a tinge of eroticism that renders it palatable.

  Thus says my keeper Bruno, whose view I am reluctant to support. Whoever needs to have his life reconfirmed by hospital nurses every other year or so, as I do, maintains his gratitude, and is not so quick to allow a grumpy if likable keeper filled with professional envy to alienate him from his Sisters.

  It began with my fall down the cellar steps on the occasion of my third birthday. I think she was called Sister Lotte and came from Praust. Sister Inge was with me for several years at Dr. Hollatz's. After the defense of the Polish Post Office I fell into the hands of several nurses at once. I recall only one of them by name: Sister Erni or Berni. Nameless nurses in Lüneberg, at the university clinic in Hanover. Then the sisters of City Hospital in Düsseldorf, first and foremost Sister Gertrud. But then she came along, and I didn't even have to visit a hospital. While in perfect health, Oskar succumbed to a nurse who, like him, lived as a lodger in Zeidler's flat. From that day on my world was filled with nurses. When I left for work early each morning to carve inscriptions for Korneff, my tram stop was at St. Mary's Hospital. Nurses came and went outside the brick gateway and in the flower-laden forecourt of the hospital. Sisters with their strenuous work before or behind them. Then the tram arrived. I often found myself sitting in the same rear car with several of the exhausted or at least weary nurses with worn faces, or standing on the car's platform with them. At first I inhaled their scent reluctantly, then soon sought it out, stationing myself near or even among their uniforms.

  Then Bittweg. I worked outside in good weather, carving letters among the gravestones on display, saw them passing by, arm in arm, two by two or four by four, on their break, chatting, forcing Oskar to look up from his diorite, to neglect his work, for every upward look cost me twenty pfennigs.

  Movie posters: there had always been plenty of films in Germany about nurses. Maria Schell lured me into the movie houses. She wore a nurse's uniform, laughed, cried, nursed selflessly, smiling and still in her nurse's cap, played somber music, then in a fit of despair nearly tore her nightgown, renounced her love after her attempted suicide—Borsche played the doctor—stayed true to her profession, retained her cap and Red Cross pin. While the upper and lower levels of Oskar's brain laughed and wove a steady stream of smutty remarks into the film, Oskar's eyes wept tears, I wandered half-blind through a desert of anonymous good Samaritans in white, seeking Sister Dorothea, of whom I knew only this: she had rented the room behind a frosted-glass door at Zeidler's.

  Sometimes I heard her steps when she returned from the night shift. Heard her around nine in the evening too, when her day shift was over an
d she went to her room. Oskar didn't always remain seated in his chair when he heard the nurse in the hall. Often he would play with the door handle. For who could resist? Who doesn't look up when something passes by that might be passing by for him? Who can stay seated when every neighboring sound seems to serve the sole purpose of sending a calmly seated person springing to his feet?

  Still worse is the silence. We know this from the ship's figurehead, who after all was wooden, silent, and passive. There lay the first museum guard in his blood. They said: Niobe killed him. The director looked for a new guard, since the museum could not be closed. When the second guard was dead, they cried: Niobe killed him. The museum director had difficulty finding a third guard—or was it the eleventh he sought by now?—it hardly matters. One day this long-sought guard lay dead as well. Niobe, they cried, Niobe of the green paint, Niobe gazing from amber eyes. Niobe, wooden, nude, who neither flinches, freezes, sweats, nor breathes, untouched even by woodworms since she'd been sprayed against them, her historical value retained. A witch was burned because of her, the man who carved her lost his gifted hand to the ax, ships sank, but she floated on. Niobe, wooden and fireproof, killed others yet did not lose her value. She silenced with her silence the head of his class, students, an elderly priest, a whole chorus of museum guards. My friend Herbert Truczinski mounted her and sprang a fatal leak; yet Niobe stayed dry and her silence deepened.

  When, in the early morning around six, the nurse left her room, the hall, and the Hedgehog's flat, things grew very still, though she made no noise when she was there. Unable to stand the silence, Oskar had to make his bed creak a time or two, move a chair, or roll an apple against the bathtub. Around eight there was a rustling. This was the mailman, dropping letters and postcards through the slot onto the hall floor. Aside from Oskar, Frau Zeidler too listened for this sound. Her job as a secretary at Mannesmann didn't start until nine, so she let me go first, and it was Oskar who reacted to the rustling. I moved quietly, though I knew she could hear me, left my door open so I wouldn't have to turn on the light, scooped up all the mail, checked for the weekly letter Maria sent me reporting in detail on herself, the child, and her sister Guste, stuck it in my pajama pocket if it had come, then quickly looked through the rest of the mail. Everything addressed to the Zeidlers or a certain Herr Münzer, who lived at the other end of the hall, I let slide back onto the floor, since I was crouching rather than standing; as for the nurse's mail, Oskar turned it about, smelled it, felt it, and, last but not least, checked the return address.

  Sister Dorothea seldom received any mail, though she got more than I did. Her full name was Dorothea Köngetter, but I just called her Sister Dorothea, and occasionally forgot her last name, which was superfluous anyway, since she was a nurse. She got mail from her mother in Hildesheim. Letters and postcards arrived from hospitals scattered throughout West Germany. These were from nurses she'd gone through training with. Now she was struggling, somewhat haltingly, to keep up with them by postcard, and was receiving these replies, which, as Oskar hastily noted, seemed rather silly and trite.

  I did learn a few things about Sister Dorothea from these postcards, however, most of which showed pictures of hospitals covered with ivy: she had spent some time at St. Vincent's Hospital in Cologne, at a private clinic in Aachen, and had worked in Hildesheim too. That's where her mother was writing from. So she either came from Lower Saxony or was a refugee from the East like Oskar, and had settled there after the war. I also learned that Sister Dorothea was working nearby, at St. Mary's Hospital, and was evidently close friends with a certain Sister Beate, for several postcards referred to this friendship, and bore greetings for Beate.

  She disconcerted me, this girlfriend. Her existence gave Oskar all sorts of ideas. I composed letters to Beate, requested her intercession in one, then suppressed all mention of Dorothea in the next, planning to approach Beate first and then switch to her friend later on. I drafted five or six letters, even stuck one or two in envelopes, was on my way to the mailbox, and yet sent none.

  But perhaps, in my madness, I might still have sent such a missive to Sister Beate one day, had I not, on a certain Monday—Maria had just begun her affair with her boss, Stenzel, which, strangely enough, left me completely cold—found that letter in the hall which transformed my passion, lacking nothing in love, into jealousy.

  The preprinted return address told me that a certain Dr. Erich Werner—St. Mary's Hospital—had written a letter to Sister Dorothea. On Tuesday a second letter arrived. Thursday brought a third. What was that Thursday like? Oskar returned to his room, fell onto one of the kitchen chairs that served as furniture, pulled Maria's weekly letter from his pajama pocket—in spite of her new lover Maria continued to write punctually, neatly, and clearly, omitting nothing—even opened the envelope, read without reading, heard Frau Zeidler in the hall, then her voice calling for Herr Münzer, who failed to answer, though he must have been home, for she opened his door, handed the mail to him, and kept right on talking.

  Though she continued to talk, I no longer heard Frau Zeidler's voice. I surrendered myself to the wallpaper's madness, its vertical, horizontal, diagonal madness, its curving, thousandfold madness, saw myself as Matzerath, shared with him the suspiciously wholesome daily bread of the betrayed, costumed with ease my own Jan Bronski as a cheaply and poorly drawn seducer in satanic makeup, appearing first in the traditional overcoat with velvet collar, then in the hospital smock of Dr. Hollatz, quickly followed by that of the surgeon, Dr. Werner, all to seduce, to corrupt, to ravish, to desecrate, to whip, to torture—to do everything a seducer must do to retain his credibility.

  Today I can smile when I recall the thought that then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine and graduate as quickly as possible. I would become a doctor, at St. Mary's Hospital of course. I would drive Dr. Werner out, expose him, reveal his incompetence, even accuse him of manslaughter for botching a larynx operation. It would transpire that Herr Werner never went to medical school. He'd served in a field hospital during the war and picked up a thing or two: away with the charlatan! And Oskar becomes head surgeon, so young and yet such a responsible position. A new Sauerbruch strides through echoing corridors with Sister Dorothea, his surgical assistant, at his side, surrounded by a retinue clad in white, visiting patients, making a last-minute decision to operate. How fortunate that film was never made.

  In the Wardrobe

  Now, no one should believe that Oskar thought only about nurses. After all, I had my professional life. Summer semester had begun at the Art Academy and I had to give up the part-time work I'd had chiseling letters over the holidays, for now Oskar sat still for good wages, challenging old styles to prove themselves, while new styles tested themselves on me and Ulla the Muse; the latter destroyed our substance, denied us, negated us, covering canvas and sketchpads with lines, squares, and spirals, stuff learned by heart, fit at best for wallpaper, and endowed those commercial patterns, which contained everything but Oskar and Ulla and thus lacked all mystery and tension, with pretentious titles that reeked of the marketplace: Woven Upward. Song above Time. Red in New Spaces.

  This latter style was favored mostly by new students who still couldn't draw very well. My old friends working with Professors Kuchen and Maruhn, top-flight students like the Goat and Raskolnikov, were too rich in charcoal and color to sing a song in praise of poverty with pale curlicues and anemic lines.

  But Ulla the Muse, who, when she descended to earth, revealed a distinct taste for arts and crafts, warmed to the new wallpaper designs so thoroughly that she quickly forgot Lankes, the painter who had abandoned her, and turned to the decorative patterns in various sizes of a somewhat older artist named Meitel, which she found pretty, cheerful, funny, fantastic, awesome, and even chic. That she was soon engaged to the artist, who had a special fondness for forms suggesting sugary-sweet Easter eggs, meant little; she was constantly getting engaged, and at this very moment—as she told me the other
day when she came by with sweets for Bruno and me — she's about to enter into what she always refers to as a serious relationship.

  When the semester began, Ulla wished to limit the vision she offered as Muse solely to those heading in this new direction, which she failed to see was such a sadly blind alley. Meitel, her Easter-egg painter, had put that flea in her ear and as an engagement present had provided her with a vocabulary she tried out on me in our conversations about art. She spoke of relationships, of constellations, accents, perspectives, irrigative structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted solely of bananas and tomato juice, now spoke of proto-cells, of color atoms, which not only reached their natural positions through dynamic flat trajectories within their force fields, but could even be said to ... That's more or less what Ulla came out with during our breaks, or now and then over a cup of coffee on Ratinger Straße. Even when her engagement to the dynamic Easter-egg painter was a thing of the past and, after the briefest of episodes with a lesbian, she'd taken up with one of Kuchen's students and been drawn back into the world of solid objects, she still retained this vocabulary, which put such a strain on her little face that two sharp and somewhat fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.

  Here I must admit that it was not solely Raskolnikov's idea to paint Ulla as a nurse beside Oskar. After Madonna 49 he portrayed us as The Rape of Europa — I was the bull. And immediately following the somewhat controversial Rape came The Fool Heals the Nurse.

  It was a little suggestion on my part that inflamed Raskolnikov's imagination. Brooding darkly and furtively in his redheaded way, cleaning his brushes, staring fixedly at Ulla, he began speaking of guilt and atonement, so I suggested he picture me as Guilt, Ulla as Atonement; my guilt was obvious and Atonement could be dressed as a nurse.