The Tin Drum d-1

by Günter Grass

  Oskar has been going on too much about tin soldiers; the truth is that there’s a confession he has to make and he may as well get on with it. In this nursery there was a kind of bookcase full of toys, picture books, and games; the top shelf was taken up with miniature musical instruments. A honey-yellow trumpet lay silent beside a set of chimes which followed the hostilities with enthusiasm, that is to say, whenever a shell struck, they went bim-bim. A brightly painted accordion hung down on one side. The parents had been insane enough to give their offspring a real little fiddle with four real strings. And next to the fiddle, showing its white, undamaged roundness, propped on some building blocks to keep it from rolling off the shelf, stood—you’ll never believe it!—a toy drum encased in red and white lacquer.

  I made no attempt to pull the drum down from the rack by my own resources. Oskar was quite conscious of his limited reach and was not beyond asking grownups for favors in cases where his gnomelike stature resulted in helplessness.

  Jan Bronski and Kobyella lay behind a rampart of sandbags filling the lower third of the windows that started at the floor. Jan had the left-hand window. Kobyella’s place was on the right. I realized at once that the janitor was not likely to find the time to recover my drum from its hiding place beneath the wounded, blood-spitting post-office defender who was surely crushing it, and repair it. Kobyella was very busy; at regular intervals he fired his rifle through an embrasure in the sandbag rampart at an antitank gun that had been set up on the other side of the Hevelius-Platz, not far from Schneidermuhlen-Gasse and the Radaune Bridge.

  Jan lay huddled up, hiding his head and trembling. I recognized him only by his fashionable dark-grey suit, though by now it was pretty well covered with plaster and sand. The lace of his right, likewise grey shoe had come open. I bent down and tied it into a bow. As I drew the bow tight, Jan quivered, raised his disconcertingly blue eyes above his sleeve, and gave me an unconscionably blue, watery stare. Although, as Oskar quickly determined, he was not wounded, he was weeping silently. He was afraid. I ignored his whimpering, pointed to young Naczalnik’s drum, and asked Jan with transparent gestures to step over to the bookcase, with the utmost caution of course and taking advantage of the dead comer of the nursery, and hand me down the drum. My uncle did not understand me. My presumptive father did not see what I was driving at. My mama’s lover was busy with his fear, so full of it that my pleading gestures had no other effect than to add to his fear. Oskar would have liked to scream at him, but was afraid of distracting Kobyella, who seemed to have ears only for his rifle.

  And so I lay down beside Jan on the sandbags and pressed close to him, in the hope of communicating a part of my accustomed equanimity to my unfortunate uncle and presumptive father. In a short while he seemed rather calmer. By breathing with exaggerated regularity, I persuaded his pulse to become approximately regular. But when, far too soon I must admit, I tried once more to call Jan’s attention to Naczalnik Junior’s drum by turning his head slowly and gently but firmly in the direction of the bookcase, he still failed to see what I wanted. Terror invaded him by way of his feet, surged up through him and filled him entirely; then it flowed back down again, but was unable to escape, perhaps because of the inner soles he always wore, and rebounded invading his stomach, his spleen, his liver, rising to his head and expanding so mightily that his blue eyes stood out from their sockets and the whites disclosed a network of blood vessels which Oskar had never before had occasion to observe in his uncle’s eyes.

  It cost me time and effort to drive my uncle’s eyeballs back into place, to make his heart behave a little. But all my esthetic efforts were frustrated when the Home Guards began to fire that field howitzer of theirs and, with an accuracy bearing witness to the high quality of their training, flattened out the iron fence in front of the building by demolishing, one by one, the brick posts to which it was anchored. There must have been from fifteen to twenty of those posts and Jan suffered heart and soul at the demise of each one, as though it were no mere pedestals that were being pounded into dust but with them imaginary statues of imaginary gods, well known to my uncle and necessary to his very existence.

  It is only by some such thought that I can account for the scream with which Jan registered each hit of the howitzer, a scream so shrill and piercing that, had it been consciously shaped and aimed, it would, like my own glass-killing creations, have had the virtue of a glass-cutting diamond. There was fervor in Jan’s screaming but no plan or system; all it accomplished was at long last to attract Kobyella’s attention; slowly the bony, crippled janitor crept toward us, raised his cadaverous, eyelashless bird’s head, and surveyed our distress society out of watery grey eyeballs. He shook Jan. Jan whimpered. He opened Jan’s shirt and passed his hand quickly over Jan’s body, looking for a wound—I could hardly keep from laughing. Failing to detect the slightest scratch, he turned him over on his back, seized him by the jaw, and shook it till the joints cracked, looked him grimly in the eye, swore at him in Polish, spraying his face with saliva in the process, and finally tossed him the rifle which Jan, though provided with his own private embrasure, had thus far left untouched; in fact it was still on safety. The stock struck his kneecap with a dull thud. The brief pain, his first physical pain after so much mental torment, seemed to do him good, for he seized the rifle, took fright when he felt the coldness of the metal parts in his fingers and a moment later in his blood, but then, encouraged by Kobyella, alternately cursing and coaxing, crept to his post.

  For all the effeminate lushness of his imagination, my presumptive father took so realistic a view of war that it was hard, in fact impossible, for him to be brave. Instead of surveying his field of vision through his embrasure and picking out a worth-while target, he tilted his rifle so that it pointed upward, over the roofs of the houses on the Hevelius-Platz; quickly and blindly he emptied his magazine and, again empty-handed, crawled back behind the sandbags. The sheepish look with which he implored the janitor’s forgiveness made me think of a schoolboy trying to confess that he has not done his homework. Kobyella gnashed his teeth in rage; when he had had enough of that, he burst out laughing as though he never would stop. Then with terrifying suddenness, his laughter broke off, and he gave Bronski, who as postal secretary was supposed to be his superior officer, a furious kick in the shins. His ungainly foot was drawn back for a kick in the ribs, but just then a burst of machine-gun fire shattered what was left of the upper windowpanes and scored the ceiling. The orthopedic shoe fell back into place; he threw himself behind his rifle and began to fire with morose haste, as though to make up for the time he had wasted on Jan. At all events, he accounted for a fraction, however infinitesimal, of the ammunition consumed during the Second World War.

  Had the janitor failed to notice me? He was ordinarily a gruff kind of man; like many war invalids, he had a way of keeping you at a respectful distance. Why, I wondered, did he tolerate my presence in this drafty room? Could Kobyella have thought: it’s a nursery after all, so why shouldn’t Oskar stay here and play during lulls in the battle?

  I don’t know how long we lay flat, I between Jan and the left-hand wall of the room, both of us behind the sandbags, Kobyella behind his rifle, shooting for two. It must have been about ten o’clock when the shooting died down. It grew so still that I could hear the buzzing of flies; I heard voices and shouts of command from the Hevelius-Platz, and occasionally turned an ear to the dull drone of the naval guns in the harbor. A fair to cloudy day in September, the sun spread a coating of old gold, the air was thin, sensitive, and yet hard of hearing. My fifteenth birthday was coming up in the next few days. And as every year in September, I wished for a drum, nothing less than a drum; renouncing all the treasures of the world, my mind was set unswervingly on a tin drum, lacquered red and white.

  Jan didn’t stir. Kobyella’s breathing was so even that Oskar began to think he was asleep, that he was taking advantage of the brief lull in the battle to take a little nap, for do not all men, even heroes, ne
ed a refreshing little nap now and then? I alone was wide awake and, with all the uncompromising concentration of my years, intent on that drum. It should not be supposed that I remembered young Naczalnik’s drum in this moment, as the silence gathered and the buzzing of a fly tuckered out from the summer heat died away. Oh, no. Even during the battle, even amid the tumult, Oskar hadn’t taken his eyes off that drum. But it was only now that I saw the golden opportunity which every fiber of my being commanded me to seize.

  Slowly Oskar arose, moved slowly, steering clear of the broken glass, but unswerving in purpose and direction, toward the bookcase with the toys; he was already figuring how, by putting the box of building blocks on one of the little nursery chairs, he would build a stand high and solid enough to make him the possessor of a brand-new drum, when Kobyella’s voice and immediately thereafter his horny hand held me back. Desperately I pointed at the drum. It was so near. Kobyella pulled me back. With both arms I reached out for the drum. The janitor was weakening; he was just about to reach up and hand me happiness when a burst of machine-gun fire invaded the nursery and several antitank shells exploded in front of the entrance; Kobyella flung me in the corner beside Jan Bronski and resumed his position behind his rifle. I was still looking up at the drum when he started on his second magazine.

  There lay Oskar, and Jan Bronski, my sweet blue-eyed uncle, didn’t even lift up his nose when the clubfoot with the bird’s head and the watery lashless eyes caught me, hard before my goal, and thrust me into the corner behind the sandbags.

  Fat, bluish-white, eyeless maggots wriggled and multiplied, looking for a worthwhile corpse. What was Poland to me? Or the Poles for that matter? Didn’t they have their cavalry? Let them ride. They were always kissing ladies’ hands and never till it was too late did they notice that what they were kissing was not a lady’s languid fingers but the unrouged muzzle of a field howitzer. And the daughter of the Krupps proceeded to vent her feelings. She smacked her lips, gave a corny yet convincing imitation of battle noises, the kind you hear in newsreels. She peppered the front door of the post office, burst into the main hall, and tried to take a bite out of the staircase, so that no one would be able to move up or down. Then came her retinue: machine guns and two trim little armored reconnaissance cars with their names painted on them. And what pretty names: Ostmark and Sudetenland. What fun they were having! Back and forth they drove, rat-tat-tatting from behind their armor and looking things over: two young ladies intent on culture and so eager to visit the castle, but the castle was still closed. Spoiled young things they were, just couldn’t wait to get in. Bursting with impatience, they cast penetrating, lead-grey glances, all of the same caliber, into every visible room in the castle, making things hot, cold, and uncomfortable for the castellans.

  One of the reconnaissance cars—I think it was theOstmark— was just rolling back toward us from Rittergasse when Jan, my uncle, who for some time now had seemed totally inanimate, moved his right leg toward the embrasure he was supposed to be shooting through and raised it high in the air, hoping no doubt that somebody would see it and take a shot at it, or that a stray bullet would take pity on him and graze his calf or heel, inflicting the blessed injury that permits a soldier to limp—and what a limp!—off the battlefield.

  A difficult position to hold for very long. From time to time Jan was obliged to relax. But then he changed his position. By lying on his back and propping up his leg with both hands, he was able to expose his calf and heel for a very considerable period and vastly improve their prospects of being hit by an aimed or errant bullet.

  Great as my sympathy for Jan was and still is, I could easily understand the temper it put Kobyella in to see Postal Secretary Bronski, his superior, in this desperate, not to say ludicrous posture. The janitor leapt to his feet and with a second leap was standing over us. He seized Jan’s jacket and Jan with it, lifted the bundle and dashed it down, up down, up down; dropping it for good, he hauled off with his left, hauled off with his right; then, still not satisfied, his two hands met in mid-air and clenched into one great fist that was going to crush my presumptive father when—there came a whirring as of angels’ wings, a singing as of the ether singing over the radio. It didn’t hit Bronski, no, it hit Kobyella, Lord, what a sense of humor that projectile had: bricks laughed themselves into splinters and splinters into dust, plaster turned to flour, wood found its ax, the whole silly nursery hopped on one foot, Käthe Kruse dolls burst open, the rocking horse ran away—how happy it would have been to have a rider to throw off!—Polish Uhlans occupied all four corners of the room at once, and at last, the toy rack toppled over: the chimes rang in Easter, the accordion screamed, the trumpet blew something or other, the whole orchestra sounded the keynote at once, as though tuning up: screaming, bursting, whinnying, ringing, scraping, chirping, high and shrill but digging down into cavernous foundations. I myself, as befits a three-year-old child, was in the safest spot, directly under the window, as the shell struck, and into my lap, as it were, fell the drum. No holes at all and hardly a crack in the lacquer. Oskar’s new drum.

  When I looked up from my new possession, I saw that I would have to help my uncle, who was unable by his own resources to get out from under the heavy janitor. At first I supposed that Jan too had been hit, for he was whimpering very realistically. Finally, when we had rolled Kobyella, who was groaning just as realistically, to one side, Jan’s injuries proved to be negligible. His right cheek and the back of one hand had been scratched by broken glass, and that was all. A quick comparison showed me that my presumptive father’s blood was lighter in color than the janitor’s, which was seeping, dark and sticky, through the tops of his trouser legs.

  I wondered whether it was Kobyella or the explosion that had ripped and twisted Jan’s pretty grey jacket. It hung down in tatters from his shoulders, the lining had come loose, the buttons had fled, the seams had split, and the pockets had been turned inside out.

  Don’t be too hard on my poor Jan Bronski, who insisted on scraping his belongings together before dragging Kobyella out of the nursery with my help. He found his comb, the photographs of his loved ones—including one of my poor mama; his purse hadn’t even come open. He had a hard and not undangerous time of it, for the bulwark of sandbags had been partly swept away, collecting the skat cards that had been scattered all over the room; he wanted all thirty-two of them, and he was downright unhappy when he couldn’t find the thirty-second. When Oskar found it between two devastated doll’s houses, and handed it to him, Jan smiled, even though it was the seven of spades.

  We dragged Kobyella out of the nursery. When we finally had him in the corridor, the janitor found the strength to utter a few words that Jan Bronski was able to make out: “Is it all there?” he asked. Jan reached into Kobyella’s trousers, between his old man’s legs, found a handful and nodded.

  We were all happy: Kobyella had kept his pride, Jan Bronski had found all his skat cards including the seven of spades, and Oskar had a new drum which beat against his knee at every step while Jan and a man whom Jan called Victor carried the janitor, weak from loss of blood, downstairs to the storeroom for undeliverable mail.

  The Card House

  Though losing more and more blood, the janitor was becoming steadily heavier. Victor Weluhn helped us to carry him. Victor was very nearsighted, but at the time he still had his glasses and was able to negotiate the stone steps without stumbling. Victor’s occupation, strange as it may seem for one so nearsighted, was delivering funds sent by money order. Nowadays, as often as Victor’s name comes up, I refer to him as poor Victor. Just as my mama became my poor mama as a result of a family excursion to the harbor breakwater, Victor, who carried money for the post office, was transformed into poor Victor by the loss of his glasses, though other considerations played a part.

  “Have you ever run into poor Victor?” I ask my friend Vittlar on visiting days. But since that streetcar ride from Flingem to Gerresheim—I shall speak of it later on—Victor Weluhn has been
lost to us. It can only be hoped that his persecutors have also been unable to locate him, that he has found his glasses or another suitable pair, and if it isn’t too much to ask, that he is carrying money again, if not for the Polish Post Office—that cannot be—then for the Post Office of the Federal Republic, and that, nearsighted but bespectacled, he is once more delivering happiness in the form of multicolored banknotes and hard coins.

  “Isn’t it awful,” said Jan, supporting Kobyella on one side and panting under the weight.

  “And the Lord knows how it will end,” said Victor, who was holding up the other side, “if the English and the French don’t come.”

  “Oh, they’ll come all right. Only yesterday Rydz-Smigly said on the radio: ‘We have their pledge,’ he said. ‘If it comes to war, all France will rise as one man.’ “ Jan had difficulty in maintaining his assurance until the end of the sentence, for though the sight of his own blood on the back of his hand cast no doubt on the Franco-Polish treaty of mutual defense, it did lead him to fear that he might bleed to death before all France should rise as one man and, faithful to its pledge, overrun the Siegfried Line.

  “They must be on their way right now. And this very minute the British fleet must be plowing through the Baltic.” Victor Weluhn loved strong, resounding locutions. He paused on the stairs, his right hand was immobilized by the wounded janitor, but he flung its left counterpart aloft to welcome the saviors with all five fingers: “Come, proud Britons!”

  While the two of them, slowly, earnestly weighing the relations between Poland and her Western allies, conveyed Kobyella to the emergency hospital, Oskar’s thoughts leafed through Gretchen Scheffler’s books, looking for relevant passages. Keyser’s History of the City of Danzig: “During the war of 1870 between Germany and France, on the afternoon of August 21, 1870, four French warships entered Danzig Bay, cruised in the roadstead and were already directing their guns at the harbor and city. The following night, however, the screw corvette Nymph, commanded by Corvette Captain Weickhmann, obliged the formation to withdraw.”