by Günter Grass
Before me la Spollenhauer’s litany, behind me the howling of the mob. Putting a good face on a sorry and ludicrous business, I beat out the syllables, with moderation I should say, and so it continued until la Spollenhauer, goaded by some inner demon, leapt up in palpable fury, but not over the Tartars behind me; no, it was I who sent the red blotches to her cheeks; Oskar’s poor little drum was her stumbling block, her bone of contention; it was I she chose to rebuke.
“Oskar, you will now listen to me: Thursday, geography?” Ignoring the word Thursday, I drummed four beats for geography, four beats for arithmetic, and two for writing; to religion I devoted not four, but, in accordance with sound theological principles, three triune and only-saving drumbeats.
But la Spollenhauer had no ear for subtleties. To her all drumming was equally repugnant. Once again she bared her ten truncated fingernails and once again they tried to seize my drum.
But before she had so much as touched it, I unleashed my glass-demolishing scream, which removed the upper panes from the three oversized windows. The middle windows succumbed to a second cry. Unobstructed, the mild spring air poured into the classroom. With a third shriek I annihilated the lower window-panes, but this I admit was quite superfluous, pure exuberance as it were, for la Spollenhauer had already drawn in her claws at the discomfiture of the upper and middle panes. Instead of assaulting the last remaining windowpanes out of pure and, from an artistic standpoint, questionable malice, Oskar would have done more wisely to keep an eye on la Spollenhauer as she beat a disorderly retreat.
Lord only knows where she found that cane. In any case it was suddenly at hand, vibrant in the classroom air now mingled with springtime air. Through this atmospheric mixture she whished it, endowing it with resiliency, with hunger and thirst for bursting skin, for the whistling wind, for all the rustling curtains that a whishing cane can impersonate. And down it came on my desk so hard that a violet streak sprang from my inkwell. Then, when I wouldn’t hold out my hand to be whipped, she struck my drum. She struck my darling. She, la Spollenhauer, struck my instrument. What ground had she to strike? And if she was bent on hitting something, why my drum? What about the yokels behind me? Did it have to be my drum? By what right did she, who knew nothing, nothing whatsoever, about the drummer’s art, assault and batter my drum? What was that glint in her eye? That beast ready to strike? What zoo had it escaped from, what did it lust for, what prey was it after? The very same beast invaded Oskar; rising from unknown depths, it rose up through the soles of his shoes, through the soles of his feet, rose and rose, investing his vocal cords and driving him to emit a rutting cry that would have sufficed to unglass a whole Gothic cathedral resplendent with the refracted light of a hundred windows.
In other words, I composed a double cry which literally pulverized both lenses of la Spollenhauer’s spectacles. Slightly bleeding at the eyebrows, squinting through the empty frames, she groped her way backward, and finally began to blubber repulsively, with a lack of self-control quite unbefitting an educator, while the rabble behind me fell into a terrified silence, some sitting there with chattering teeth, others vanishing beneath their desks. A few of them slid from desk to desk in the direction of the mothers. The mothers for their part, perceiving the extent of the damage, looked round for the culprit and were about to pounce on my mother. They would surely have torn her to pieces had I not gathered up my drum and rushed to her assistance.
Past the purblind Miss Spollenhauer, I made my way to my mama, who was menaced by the Furies, seized her by the hand, and drew her out of the drafty headquarters of Class I-A. Resounding corridors, stone stairs for giant children. Crusts of bread in gushing granite fountains. In the open gymnasium boys were trembling beneath the horizontal bar. Mama was still holding her little card. Outside the portals of the Pestalozzi School, I took it from her and transformed a schedule into a speechless wad of paper.
However, Oskar allowed the photographer, who was waiting for the new pupils and their mothers between the doorposts, to take a picture of him and of his cornucopia, which for all the tumult had not been lost. The sun came out, classrooms buzzed overhead. The photographer placed Oskar against a blackboard on which was written: My First School Day.
Rasputin and the Alphabet
I have just been telling my friend Klepp and Bruno my keeper, who listened with only half an ear, about Oskar’s first experience with a school schedule. On the blackboard (I said) which provided the photographer with the traditional background for postcard-size pictures of six-year-old boys with knapsacks and cornucopias, these words were inscribed: My First School Day.
Of course the words could only be read by the mothers who, much more excited than their children, were standing behind the photographer. The boys, who were in front of the blackboard, would at best be able to decipher the inscription a year later, either at Easter time when the next first grade would turn up at school or on their own old photographs. Then and only then would they be privileged to read that these lovely pictures had been taken on the occasion of their first school day.
This testimonial to a new stage in life was recorded in Sütterlin script that crept across the blackboard with malignant angularity. However, the loops were not right, too soft and rounded. The fact is that Sütterlin script is especially indicated for succinct, striking statements, slogans for instance. And there are also certain documents which, though I admit I have never seen them, I can only visualize in Sütterlin script. I have in mind vaccination certificates, sport scrolls, and handwritten death sentences. Even then, I knew what to make of the Sütterlin script though I couldn’t read it: the double loop of the Sütterlin M, with which the inscription began, smelled of hemp in my nostrils, an insidious reminder of the hangman. Even so, I would have been glad to read it letter for letter and not just dimly guess at what is said. Let no one suppose that I drummed in revolutionary protest and shattered glass so highhandedly at my first meeting with Miss Spollenhauer because I had already mastered my ABC’s. Oh, no, I was only too well aware that this intuition of mine about Sütterlin script was not enough, that I lacked the most elementary school learning. It was just unfortunate that Miss Spollenhauer’s methods of inculcating knowledge did not appeal to Oskar.
Accordingly, when I left the Pestalozzi School, I was far from deciding that my first school day should be my last, that I had had my fill of pencils and books, not to mention teacher’s dirty looks. Nothing of the sort. Even while the photographer was capturing my likeness for all eternity, I thought: There you are in front of a blackboard, under an inscription that is probably important and possibly portentous. You can judge the inscription by the character of the writing and call forth associations such as solitary confinement, protective custody, inspector, and hang-them-all-by-one-rope, but you can’t read the words. And yet, with all your ignorance that cries out to the overcast heavens, you will never again set foot in this schedule-school. Where, oh where, Oskar, are you going to learn your big and little alphabet?
Actually a little alphabet would have been plenty for me, but I had figured out that there must be a big as well as a little one, among other things from the crushing and undeniable fact of the existence of big people, who called themselves grownups.
In the next few months, neither Matzerath nor Mama worried about my education. They had tried to send me to school, and as far as they were concerned, this one attempt, so humiliating for Mama, was quite sufficient. They behaved just like Uncle Jan Bronski, sighed as they looked down on me, and dug up old stories such as the incident on my third birthday: “The trap door! You left it open, didn’t you? You were in the kitchen and before that you’d been down in the cellar, hadn’t you? You brought up a can of mixed fruit for dessert, didn’t you? You left the cellar door open, didn’t you?”
Everything Mama held up to Matzerath was true, and yet, as we know, it was not. But he took the blame and sometimes even wept, for he was a sensitive soul at times. Then Mama and Jan Bronski had to comfort him, and they s
poke of me, Oskar, as a cross they had to bear, a cruel and no doubt irrevocable fate, a trial that had been visited on them, it was impossible to see why.
Obviously no help was to be expected from such sorely tried cross-bearers and victims of fate. Nor could Aunt Hedwig, who often took me to Steffens-Park to play in the sand pile with her two-year-old Marga, have possibly served as my preceptor. She was good-natured enough, but as dull-witted as the day is long. I also had to abandon any ideas about Dr. Hollatz’ Sister Inge, who was neither dull-witted nor good-natured, for she was no common door-opener but a real and indispensable doctor’s assistant and consequently had no time for me.
Several times a day I tramped up and down the steps of the four-story apartment house—there were more than a hundred of them—drumming in quest of counsel at every landing. I sniffed to see what each of the nineteen tenants was having for dinner, but I did not knock at any of the doors, for I recognized my future preceptor neither in old man Heilandt nor in Laubschad the watchmaker, and definitely not in the corpulent Mrs. Kater nor, much as I liked her, in Mother Truczinski.
Under the eaves dwelt Meyn the trumpet player. Mr. Meyn kept four cats and was always drunk. He played dance music at “Zinglers Höhe” and on Christmas Eve he and five fellow sots plodded through the snow-clad streets battling the frost with carols. One day I saw him in his attic: clad in black trousers and a white evening shirt, he lay on his back, rolling an empty gin bottle about with his unshod feet and playing the trumpet just wonderfully. He did not remove his instrument from his lips, but merely squinted vaguely round at me for a moment. He acknowledged me as his drummer accompanist. His instrument was no more precious to him than mine to me. Our duet drove his four cats out on the roof and set up a slight vibration in the gutter tiles.
When the music was finished and we lowered our instruments, I drew an old copy of the Neueste Nachrichten from under my sweater, smoothed out the paper, sat down beside the trumpeter, held out my reading matter, and asked him to instruct me in the big and little alphabets.
But Mr. Meyn had fallen directly from his trumpeting into a deep sleep. His spirit recognized only three repositories: his bottle of gin, his trumpet, and his slumber. It is true that for quite some time after that—to be exact, until he joined the band of the Mounted SA and temporarily gave up gin—we would quite frequently play unrehearsed duets in the attic for the benefit of the roof tiles, the chimneys, the pigeons, and the cats; but I could never get anything out of him as a teacher.
I tried Greff the greengrocer. Without my drum, for Greff didn’t appreciate it, I paid several visits to the basement shop across the way. The wherewithal for thorough and many-sided study seemed to be at hand. In every corner of the two-room flat, all over the shop, under and behind the counter, even in the relatively dry potato cellar, lay books, adventure stories, song books, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, the works of Walter Flex, Wiechert’s Simple Life, Daphnis and Chloe, monographs about artists, piles of sport magazines and illustrated volumes full of half-naked youths, most of whom, for some unfathomable reason, were chasing after a ball amid sand dunes, exhibiting oiled and glistening muscles.
Even then Greff was having a good deal of trouble in the shop. The inspectors from the Bureau of Weights and Measures had not been quite satisfied with his weights. There was talk of fraud. Greff had to pay a fine and buy new weights. He was bowed down with cares; his books and scout meetings and weekend excursions were his only cheer.
He was making out price tabs when I came in and hardly noticed me. Taking advantage of his occupation, I picked up three or four white squares of cardboard and a red pencil and, in the hope of attracting his attention, made a great show of zeal copying his handiwork in my own version of Sütterlin script.
But Oskar was clearly too little for him, not pale and wide-eyed enough. I dropped the red pencil, picked out a book full of the nudities that so appealed to Greff, and pretended to be very busy, inspecting photographs of boys bending and boys stretching and twisting them about so he could see them.
But when there were no customers in the shop asking for beets or cabbages, the greengrocer had eyes only for his price tabs. I tried to arouse his interest in my unlettered presence by clapping book covers or making the pages crackle as I turned them.
To put it very simply: Greff did not understand me. When scouts were in the shop—and in the afternoon there were always two or three of his lieutenants around him—Greff didn’t notice Oskar at all. And when Greff was alone, he was quite capable of jumping up in nervous irritation and dealing out commands: “Oskar, will you leave that book alone. You can’t make head or tail of it anyway. You’re too dumb and you’re too little. You’ll ruin it. That book costs more than six gulden. If you want to play, there’s plenty of potatoes and cabbages.”
He took his nasty old book away and leafed expressionlessly through the pages, leaving me standing amid potatoes and several representatives of the cabbage family, white cabbage, red cabbage, savoy cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, wretchedly lonely, for I had left my drum at home.
There was still Mrs. Greff, and after her husband’s brush-off, I usually made my way to the matrimonial bedroom. Even then Mrs. Lina Greff would lie in bed for whole weeks, vaguely ailing; she smelled of decaying nightgown and though her hands were very active, one thing she never touched was a book that might have taught me anything.
It was not without a suspicion of envy that Oskar, in the weeks that followed, looked upon his contemporaries and their school-bags from which dangled importantly the little sponges or cloths used for wiping off slates. Even so, he cannot remember having harbored such thoughts as: you’ve made your own bed, Oskar, you should have put a good face on the school routine; you shouldn’t have made an everlasting enemy of la Spollenhauer. Those yokels are getting ahead of you. They have mastered the big or at least the little alphabet, whereas you don’t even know how to hold the Neueste Nachrichten properly.
A suspicion of envy, I have said, and that is all it was. A little smell test is all that was needed to disgust me with school for all time. Have you ever taken a sniff of those inadequately washed, worm-eaten sponges appended to pealing, yellow-rimmed slates, those sponges which somehow manage to store up all the effluvia of writing and ‘rithmetic, all the sweat of squeaking, halting, slipping slate pencils moistened with saliva? Now and then, when children on their way home from school laid down their bags to play football or Völkerball, I would bend down over those sponges steaming in the sun, and the thought came to me that if Satan existed, such would be the acrid stench of his armpits.
Certainly I had no yearning for the school of slates and sponges. But, on the other hand, it would be an exaggeration to say that Gretchen Scheffler, who soon took his education in hand, was the precise answer to Oskar’s dreams.
Everything about the Scheffler dwelling behind the bakery in Kleinhammer-Weg set my teeth on edge. Those ornamental coverlets, those cushions embroidered with coats-of-arms, those Käthe Kruse dolls lurking in sofa corners, those plush animals wheresoever one turned, that china crying out for a bull, those ubiquitous travel souvenirs, those beginnings of knitting, crocheting, and embroidery, of plaiting, knotting, and lacework. The place was too sweet for words, so cunning and cozy, stiflingly tiny, overheated in winter and poisoned with flowers in summer. I can think of only one explanation: Gretchen Scheffler was childless; oh, if she had had some little creature to knit for, who can say whether she or Scheffler was to blame, oh, how happy she would have been with a little sugarplum baby, something she could love to pieces and swathe in crocheted blankets and cover with lace and ribbons and little kisses in cross-stitch.
This is where I went to learn my big and little alphabets. I made a heroic effort to spare the china and the souvenirs. I left my glass-destroying voice at home and bore it meekly when Gretchen expressed the opinion that I had drummed enough for now and, baring her equine gold teeth in a smile, removed my drum from my knees and laid it among the te
ddy bears.
I made friends with two of the Käthe Kruse dolls, clutched the little dears to my bosom, and manipulated the lashes of their permanently startled eyes as though I were madly in love with them. My purpose in this display of affection for dolls, which seemed sincere just because it was so completely false, was to knit a snare round Gretchen’s knitted, knit two purl two, heart.
My plan was not bad. It took only two visits before Gretchen opened her heart; that is, she unraveled it as one unravels a stocking, disclosing a long crinkly thread worn thin in places. She opened all her cupboards, chests, and boxes and spread out all her beaded rubbish, enough baby jackets, baby pants, and bibs to clothe a set of quintuplets, held them up against me, tried them on, and took them off again.
Then she showed me the marksman’s medals won by Scheffler at the veterans’ club and photographs to go with them, some of which were identical with ours. Then she went back to the baby clothes and at long last, while searching for heaven knows what cute little object, she unearthed some books. That was what Oskar had been building up to. He fully expected her to find books under the baby things; he had heard her talk about books with Mama; he knew how feverishly the two of them, while still engaged and after their early and almost simultaneous marriages, had exchanged books and borrowed books from the lending library by the Film-Palast, in the hope of imparting wider horizons and greater luster to their grocery store and bakery marriages.
Gretchen had little enough to offer me. Like Mama, who had given up reading in favor of Jan Bronski, she who no longer read, now that she spent all her time knitting, had evidently given away the sumptuous volumes of the book club, to which both had belonged for years, to people who still read because they did not knit and had no Jan Bronski.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. What I found there can only be described as miscellaneous; most of it came, no doubt, from the book chest of Gretchen’s brother Theo, who had met a seaman’s death on the Dogger-Bank. Seven or eight volumes of Köhler’s Naval Calendar, full of ships that had long since sunk, the Service Ranks of the Imperial Navy, Paul Beneke, the Naval Hero— these could scarcely have been the nourishment for which Gretchen’s heart had yearned. It seemed equally certain that Erich Keyser’s History of the City of Danzig and A Struggle for Rome, which a man by the name of Felix Dahn seems to have fought with the help of Totila and Teja, Belisarius and Narses, had arrived at their present state of dilapidation beneath the hands of the seafaring brother. To Gretchen’s own collection I attributed a book by Gustav Freytag about Debit and Credit, something by Goethe about Elective Affinities, and a copiously illustrated thick volume entitled: Rasputin and Women.
