The Tin Drum d-1

by Günter Grass

  Neither Matzerath nor Mother Truczinski saw me wander away from them and the condolences. Assuming the manner of a little boy who has to go, Oskar slipped back past the grave-digger and his assistant. Then, without regard for the ivy, he ran to the elms, catching up with Sigismund Markus before the exit.

  “If it ain’t little Oskar,” said Markus with surprise. “Say, what are they doing to Markus? What did Markus ever do to them they should treat him so?”

  I didn’t know what Markus had done. I took him by his hand, it was clammy with sweat, and led him through the open wrought-iron gate, and there in the gateway the two of us, the keeper of my drums and I, the drummer, possibly his drummer, ran into Leo Schugger, who like us believed in paradise.

  Markus knew Leo, everyone in town knew him. I had heard of him, I knew that one sunny day while he was still at the seminary, the world, the sacraments, the religions, heaven and earth, life and death had been so shaken up in his mind that forever after his vision of the world, though mad, had been radiant and perfect.

  Leo Schugger’s occupation was to turn up after funerals—and no one could pass away without his getting wind of it—wearing a shiny black suit several sizes too big for him and white gloves, and wait for the mourners. Markus and I were both aware that it was in his professional capacity that he was standing there at the gate of Brenntau Cemetery, waiting with slavering mouth, compassionate gloves, and watery blue eyes for the mourners to come out.

  It was bright and sunny, mid-May. Plenty of birds in the hedges and trees. Cackling hens, symbolizing immortality with and through their eggs. Buzzing in the air. Fresh coat of green, no dust. Bearing a tired topper in his left gloved hand, Leo Schugger, moving with the lightness of a dancer, for grace had touched him, stepped up to Markus and myself, advancing five mildewed gloved fingers. Standing aslant as if to brace himself against the wind, though there was none, he tilted his head and blubbered, spinning threads of saliva. Hesitantly at first, then with resolution, Markus inserted his bare hand in the animated glove. “What a beautiful day!” Leo blubbered. “She has already arrived where everything is so cheap. Did you see the Lord? Habemus ad Dominun. He just passed by in a hurry. Amen.”

  We said amen. Markus agreed about the beautiful day and even said yes he had seen the Lord.

  Behind us we heard the mourners buzzing closer. Markus let his hand fall from Leo’s glove, found time to give him a tip, gave me a Markus kind of look, and rushed away toward the taxi that was waiting for him outside the Brenntau post office.

  I was still looking after the cloud of dust that obscured the receding Markus when Mother Truczinski took my hand. They came in groups and grouplets. Leo Schugger had sympathies for all; he called attention to the fine day, asked everyone if he had seen the Lord, and as usual received tips of varying magnitude. Matzerath and Jan Bronski paid the pallbearers, the gravedigger, the sexton, and Father Wiehnke, who with a sigh of embarrassment let Leo Schugger kiss his hand and then proceeded, with his kissed hand, to toss wisps of benediction after the slowly dispersing funeral company.

  Meanwhile we—my grandmother, her brother Vincent, the Bronskis with their children, Greff without wife, and Gretchen Scheffler—took our seats in two common farm wagons. We were driven past Goldkrug through the woods across the nearby Polish border to the funeral supper at Bissau Quarry.

  Vincent Bronski’s farm lay in a hollow. There were poplars in front of it that were supposed to divert the lightning. The barn door was removed from its hinges, laid on saw horses, and covered with tablecloths. More people came from the vicinity. It was some time before the meal was ready. It was served in the barn doorway. Gretchen Scheffler held me on her lap. First there was something fatty, then something sweet, then more fat. There was potato schnaps, beer, a roast goose and a roast pig, cake with sausage, sweet and sour squash, fruit pudding with sour cream. Toward evening a slight breeze came blowing through the open barn, there was a scurrying of mice and of Bronski children, who, in league with the neighborhood urchins, took possession of the barnyard.

  Oil lamps were brought out, and skat cards. The potato schnaps stayed where it was. There was also homemade egg liqueur that made for good cheer. Greff did not drink but he sang songs. The Kashubians sang too, and Matzerath had first deal. Jan was the second hand and the foreman from the brickworks the third. Only then did it strike me that my poor mama was missing. They played until well into the night, but none of the men succeeded in winning a heart hand. After Jan Bronski for no apparent reason had lost a heart hand without four, I heard him say to Matzerath in an undertone: “Agnes would surely have won that hand.”

  Then I slipped off Gretchen Scheffler’s lap and found my grandmother and her brother Vincent outside. They were sitting on a wagon shaft. Vincent was muttering to the stars in Polish. My grandmother couldn’t cry any more but she let me crawl under her skirts.

  Who will take me under her skirts today? Who will shelter me from the daylight and the lamplight? Who will give me the smell of melted yellow, slightly rancid butter that my grandmother used to stock for me beneath her skirts and feed me to make me put on weight?

  I fell asleep beneath her four skirts, close to my poor mama’s beginnings and as still as she, though not so short of air as she in her box tapered at the foot end.

  Herbert Truczinski’s Back

  Nothing, so they say, can take the place of a mother. Soon after her funeral I began to miss my poor mama. There were no more Thursday visits to Sigismund Markus’ shop, no one led me to Sister Inge’s white uniforms, and most of all the Saturdays made me painfully aware of Mama’s death: Mama didn’t go to confession any more.

  And so there was no more old city for me, no more Dr. Hollatz’ office, and no more Church of the Sacred Heart. I had lost interest in demonstrations. And how was I to lure passers-by to shop-windows when even the tempter’s trade had lost its charm for Oskar? There was no more Mama to take me to the Christmas play at the Stadt-Theater or to the Krone or Busch circus. Conscientious but morose, I went about my studies, strode dismally through the rectilinear suburban streets to the Kleinhammer-Weg, visited Gretchen Scheffler, who told me about Strength through Joy trips to the land of the midnight sun, while I went right on comparing Goethe with Rasputin or, when I had enough of the cyclic and endless alternation of dark and radiant, took refuge in historical studies. My old standard works, A Struggle for Rome, Keyser’s History of the City of Danzig, and Köhler’s Naval Calendar, gave me an encyclopedic half-knowledge. To this day I am capable of giving you exact figures about the building, launching, armor, firepower, and crew strength of all the ships that took part in the battle of the Skagerrak, that sank or were damaged on that occasion.

  I was almost fourteen, I loved solitude and took many walks. My drum went with me but I was sparing in my use of it, because with Mama’s departure a punctual delivery of tin drums became problematic.

  Was it in the autumn of ‘37 or the spring of ‘38? In any case, I was making my way up the Hindenburg-Allee toward the city, I was not far from the Café of the Four Seasons, the leaves were falling or the buds were bursting, in any event something was going on in nature, when whom should I meet but my friend and master Bebra, who was descended in a straight line from Prince Eugene and consequently from Louis XIV.

  We had not seen each other for three or four years and nevertheless we recognized one another at twenty paces’ distance. He was not alone, on his arm hung a dainty southern beauty, perhaps an inch shorter than Bebra and three fingers’ breadths taller than I, whom he introduced as Roswitha Raguna, the most celebrated somnambulist in all Italy.

  Bebra asked me to join them in a cup of coffee at the Four Seasons. We sat in the aquarium and the coffee-time biddies hissed: “Look at the midgets, Lisbeth, did you see them! They must be in Krone’s circus. Let’s try to go.”

  Bebra smiled at me, showing a thousand barely visible little wrinkles.

  The waiter who brought us the coffee was very tall. As Signora R
oswitha ordered a piece of pastry, he stood there beside her, like a tower in evening clothes.

  Bebra examined me: “Our glass-killer doesn’t seem happy. What’s wrong, my friend? Is the glass unwilling or has the voice grown weak?”

  Young and impulsive as I was, Oskar wanted to give a sample of his art that was still in its prime. I looked round in search of material and was already concentrating on the great glass facade of the aquarium with its ornamental fish and aquatic plants. But before I could begin to sing, Bebra said: “No, no, my friend. We believe you. Let us have no destruction, no floods, no expiring fishes.”

  Shamefacedly I apologized, particularly to Signora Roswitha, who had produced a miniature fan and was excitedly stirring up wind.

  “My mama has died,” I tried to explain. “She shouldn’t have done that. I can’t forgive her. People are always saying: a mother sees everything, a mother forgives everything. That’s nonsense for Mother’s Day. To her I was never anything but a gnome. She would have got rid of the gnome if she had been able to. But she couldn’t get rid of me, because children, even gnomes, are marked in your papers and you can’t just do away with them. Also because I was her gnome and because to do away with me would have been to destroy a part of herself. It’s either I or the gnome, she said to herself, and finally she put an end to herself; she began to eat nothing but fish and not even fresh fish, she sent away her lovers and now that she’s lying in Brenntau, they all say, the lovers say it and our customers say so too: The gnome drummed her into her grave. Because of Oskar she didn’t want to live any more; he killed her.”

  I was exaggerating quite a bit, I wanted to impress Signora Roswitha. Most people blamed Matzerath and especially Jan Bronski for Mama’s death. Bebra saw through me.

  “You are exaggerating, my good friend. Out of sheer jealousy you are angry with your dead mama. You feel humiliated because it wasn’t you but those wearisome lovers that sent her to her grave. You are vain and wicked—as a genius should be.”

  Then with a sigh and a sidelong glance at Signora Roswitha: “it is not easy for people our size to get through life. To remain human without external growth, what a task, what a vocation!”

  Roswitha Raguna, the Neapolitan somnambulist with the smooth yet wrinkled skin, she whose age I estimated at eighteen summers but an instant later revered as an old lady of eighty or ninety, Signora Roswitha stroked Mr. Bebra’s fashionable English tailor-made suit, projected her cherry-black Mediterranean eyes in my direction, and spoke with a dark voice, bearing promise of fruit, a voice that moved me and turned me to ice: “Carissimo, Oskarnello! How well I understand your grief. Andiamo, come with us: Milano, Parigi, Toledo, Guatemala!”

  My head reeled. I grasped la Raguna’s girlish age-old hand. The Mediterranean beat against my coast, olive trees whispered in my ear: “Roswitha will be your mama, Roswitha will understand. Roswitha, the great somnambulist, who sees through everyone, who knows everyone’s innermost soul, only not her own, mamma mia, only not her own, Dio!”

  Oddly enough, la Raguna had no sooner begun to see through me, to X-ray my soul with her somnambulist gaze, than she suddenly withdrew her hand. Had my hungry fourteen-year-old heart filled her with horror? Had it dawned on her that to me Roswitha, whether maiden or hag, meant Roswitha? She whispered in Neapolitan, trembled, crossed herself over and over again as though there were no end to the horrors she found within me, and disappeared without a word behind her fan.

  I demanded an explanation, I asked Mr. Bebra to say something. But even Bebra, despite his direct descent from Prince Eugene, had lost his countenance. He began to stammer and this is what I was finally able to make out: “Your genius, my young friend, the divine, but also no doubt the diabolical elements in your genius have rather confused my good Roswitha, and I too must own that you have in you a certain immoderation, a certain explosiveness, which to me is alien though not entirely incomprehensible. But regardless of your character,” said Bebra, bracing himself, “come with us, join Bebra’s troupe of magicians. With a little self-discipline you should be able to find a public even under the present political conditions.”

  I understand at once. Bebra, who had advised me to be always on the rostrum and never in front of it, had himself been reduced to a pedestrian role even though he was still in the circus. And indeed he was not at all disappointed when I politely and regretfully declined his offer. Signora Roswitha heaved an audible sigh of relief behind her fan and once again showed me her Mediterranean eyes.

  We went on chatting for a while. I asked the waiter to bring us an empty water glass and sang a heart-shaped opening in it. Underneath the cutout my voice engraved an inscription ornate with loops and flourishes: “Oskar for Roswitha.” I gave her the glass and she was pleased. Bebra paid, leaving a large tip, and then we arose.

  They accompanied me as far as the Sports Palace. I pointed a drumstick at the naked rostrum at the far end of the Maiwiese and—now I remember, it was in the spring of ‘38—told my master Bebra of my career as a drummer beneath rostrums.

  Bebra had an embarrassed smile, la Raguna’s face was severe. The Signora drifted a few steps away from us, and Bebra, in leave-taking, whispered in my ear: “I have failed, my friend. How can I be your teacher now? Politics, politics, how filthy it is!”

  Then he kissed me on the forehead as he had done years before when I met him among the circus trailers. Lady Roswitha held out her hand like porcelain, and I bent over it politely, almost too expertly for a fourteen-year-old.

  “We shall meet again, my son,” said Mr. Bebra. “Whatever the times may be, people like us don’t lose each other.”

  “Forgive your fathers,” the Signora admonished me. “Accustom yourself to your own existence that your heart may find peace and Satan be discomfited!”

  It seemed to me as though the Signora had baptized me a second time, again in vain. Satan, depart—but Satan would not depart. I looked after them sadly and with an empty heart, waved at them as they entered a taxi and completely vanished inside it—for the Ford was made for grownups, it looked empty as though cruising for customers as it drove off with my friends.

  I tried to persuade Matzerath to take me to the Krone circus, but Matzerath was not to be moved; he gave himself entirely to his grief for my poor mama, whom he had never possessed entirely. But who had? Not even Jan Bronski; if anyone, myself, for it was Oskar who suffered most from her absence, which upset, and threatened the very existence of, his daily life. Mama had let me down. There was nothing to be expected of my fathers. Bebra my master had found his master in Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Gretchen Scheffler was entirely taken up with her Winter Relief work. Let no one go hungry, let no one suffer cold. I had only my drum to turn to, I beat out my loneliness on its once white surface, now drummed thin. In the evening Matzerath and I sat facing one another. He leafed through his cookbooks, I lamented on my drum. Sometimes Matzerath wept and hid his head in the cookbooks. Jan Bronski’s visits became more and more infrequent. In view of the political situation, both men thought they had better be careful, there was no way of knowing which way the wind would blow. The skat games with changing thirds became fewer and farther between; when there was a game, it was late at night under the hanging lamp in our living room, and all political discussion was avoided. My grandmother Anna seemed to have forgotten the way from Bissau to our place in Labesweg. She had it in for Matzerath and maybe for me too; once I had heard her say: “My Agnes died because she couldn’t stand the drumming any more.”

  Despite any guilt I may have felt for my poor mama’s death, I clung all the more desperately to my despised drum; for it did not die as a mother dies, you could buy a new one, or you could have it repaired by old man Heilandt or Laubschad the watchmaker, it understood me, it always gave the right answer, it stuck to me as I stuck to it.

  In those days the apartment became too small for me, the streets too long or too short for my fourteen years; in the daytime there was no occasion to play the tempter
outside of shop-windows and the temptation to tempt was not urgent enough to make me lurk in dark doorways at night. I was reduced to tramping up and down the four staircases of our apartment house in time to my drum; I counted a hundred and sixteen steps, stopped at every landing, breathed in the smells, which, because they too felt cramped in those two-room flats, seeped through the five doors on each landing.

  At first I had occasional luck with Meyn the trumpeter. I found him lying dead-drunk among the bed sheets hung out in the attic to dry, and sometimes he would blow his trumpet with such musical feeling that it was a real joy for my drum. In May, ‘38 he gave up gin and told everyone he met: “I am starting a new life.” He became a member of the band corps of the Mounted SA. Stone sober, in boots and breeches with a leather seat, he would take the steps five at a time. He still kept his four cats, one of whom was named Bismarck, because, as might have been expected, the gin gained the upper hand now and then and gave him a hankering for music.

  I seldom knocked at the door of Laubschad the watchmaker, a silent man amid a hundred clocks. That seemed like wasting time on too grand a scale and I couldn’t face it more than once a month.

  Old man Heilandt still had his shop in the court. He still hammered crooked nails straight. There were still rabbits about and the offspring of rabbits as in the old days. But the children had changed. Now they wore uniforms and black ties and they no longer made soup out of brick flour. They were already twice my size and were barely known to me by name. That was the new generation; my generation had school behind them and were learning a trade: Nuchi Eyke was an apprentice barber. Axel Mischke was preparing to be a welder at the Schichau shipyards, Susi was learning to be a salesgirl at Sternfeld’s department store and was already going steady. How everything can change in three, four years! The carpet rack was still there and the house regulations still permitted carpet-beating on Tuesdays and Fridays, but by now there was little pounding to be heard and the occasional explosions carried an overtone of embarrassment: since Hitler’s coming to power the vacuum cleaner was taking over; the carpet racks were abandoned to the sparrows.