The Tin Drum d-1

by Günter Grass

  In a territory six blocks long and four blocks wide, Kurt was the only dealer in flints. He had a “source”; he never told anybody who or what it was, though he never stopped talking about it. Even before going to sleep at night, he would say, instead of his prayers: “I’ve got a source.”

  As his father, I claimed that I was entitled to know my son’s source. He didn’t even trouble to inject a note of mystery into his voice when he said “I’ve got a source.” If his tone conveyed anything at all, it was pride and self-assurance. “Where did you get those flints?” I roared at him. “You will tell me this minute.”

  Maria’s standing remark in that period, whenever I tried to get at the source, was: “Leave the kid alone. In the first place, it’s none of your business; in the second place, if anybody’s going to ask questions, it’s me; in the third place, don’t take on like you was his father. A few months ago, you couldn’t even say boo.”

  When I went on too long about Kurt’s source, Maria would smack her hand down on the honey pail and, indignant to the elbow, launch into a diatribe against me and also Guste, who sometimes supported Oskar in his effort to penetrate the source: “A fine lot you are. Trying to ruin the kid’s business. Biting the hand that feeds you. When I think of the ten calories Oskar gets for sick relief that he gobbles up in two days, it makes me good and sick, in fact, it makes me laugh.”

  Oskar can’t deny it: I had a monstrous appetite in those days: it was thanks to Kurt and his source, which brought in more than the honey, that Oskar was able to regain his strength after the meager hospital fare.

  Oskar was reduced to shamefaced silence; taking the ample pocket money with which little Kurt deigned to provide him, he would leave the flat in Bilk and stay away as much as he could, to avoid having his nose rubbed in his shame.

  Today there are plenty of well-heeled critics of the economic miracle who proclaim nostalgically—and the less they remember about the situation in those days the more nostalgic they become—“ Ah, those were the days, before the currency reform! Then people were still alive! Their empty stomachs didn’t prevent them from waiting in line for theater tickets. And the wonderful parties we used to improvise with two pretzels and a bottle of potato schnaps, so much more fun than the fancy doings today, with all their caviar and champagne.”

  This is what you might call the romanticism of lost opportunities. I could lament with the best of them if I chose, for in the days when Kurt’s “source” was gushing, I developed a sudden interest in adult education and imbibed a certain amount of culture almost free of charge. I took courses at night school, became a steady visitor at the British Center, also known as “Die Brücke”, discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants alike, and shared the guilt feelings of all those who said to themselves: “Let’s do our stint now; when things begin to look up we’ll have it over with and our consciences will be all right.”

  Be that as it may, it is to night school that I owe what education I possess; I am the first to own that it doesn’t amount to much, though there is something rather grandiose about the gaps in it. I began to read avidly, no longer satisfied, now that I had grown, with an oversimplified world evenly divided between Goethe and Rasputin or with the information that could be culled from the 1904-1916 issues of Köhler’s Naval Calendar. I was always reading, though I don’t remember what. I read in the toilet. I read while waiting in line for theater tickets, surrounded by young girls with Mozart pigtails, also reading. I read while Kurt sold his flints and while I myself was packaging synthetic honey. And when the current was shut off, I read by the light of tallow candles also obtained from Kurt’s “source”.

  I am ashamed to say that what I read in those days did not become a part of me, but went in one eye and out the other. I have retained a few turns of phrase, an aphorism or two, and that is about all. And the theater? A few names of actors: Hoppe, Peter Esser, Flickenschildt and her special way of pronouncing the letter r. I recall some drama students in experimental theaters, who tried to improve on Flickenschildt’s r’s; I remember Gründgens as Tasso, he wore the regulation black, but had discarded the laurel wreath called for in Goethe’s text, alleging that the greenery burned his hair. And Gründgens again, still in black, as Hamlet. And la Flickenschildt claiming that Hamlet is fat. Yorick’s skull made quite an impression on me because of the impressive remarks it drew from Gründgens. Draussen vor der Tür played in unheated theaters to spellbound audiences; to me Beckmann as the man with the broken glasses was Köster, Guste’s husband, who would change everything on his return home and stop up my son Kurt’s source forever.

  Now all that is behind me; today I know that a postwar binge is only a binge and therefore followed by a hangover, and one symptom of this hangover is that the deeds and misdeeds which only yesterday were fresh and alive and real, are reduced to history and explained as such. Today I am able once more to appreciate the instruction Gretchen Scheffler meted out to me amid her travel souvenirs and her knitting: not too much Rasputin, Goethe in moderation, Keyser’s History of the City of Danzig, the armament of a battleship that has long been lying on the bottom of the sea, the speed (in knots) of all the Japanese torpedo boats that took part in the battle of Tsushima, not to mention Belisarius and Narses, Totila and Teja, as represented in Felix Dahn’s A Struggle lor Rome.

  In the spring of ‘47 I abandoned night school, the British Center, and Pastor Niemöller, and took my leave, from the second balcony, of Gustaf Gründgens, who still figured on the program as Hamlet.

  Two years had not passed since at Matzerath’s grave I had resolved to grow, and already I had lost interest in grown-up life. I dreamed of my lost three-year-old dimensions. I wanted to be three feet tall again, smaller than my friend Bebra, smaller than the dear departed Roswitha. Oskar missed his drum. I took long walks which often ended up at the City Hospital. In any event I was expected to call once a month on Professor Irdell, who regarded Oskar as an interesting case. At regular intervals Oskar visited the nurses he had known during his illness, and even when they had no time for him, their hurrying white uniforms, betokening recovery or death, gave him a feeling bordering on happiness.

  The nurses liked me, they played childish, but not malicious, games with my hump, gave me good things to eat, and told me interminable, pleasantly soporific stories about the complexities of hospital life. I listened, gave advice, and was able even to arbitrate some of their little disputes, for I enjoyed the sympathy of the head nurse. On these days Oskar was the only man among twenty or more young or not so young girls camouflaged beneath nurse’s uniforms—and in some strange way he was an object of desire.

  As Bruno has already said, Oskar has lovely, expressive hands, fine wavy hair, and those winning, ever so blue, Bronski eyes. Possibly the attractiveness of my hands, eyes, and hair was accentuated by my hump and the shocking proximity of my chin to my narrow, vaulted chest. It was not infrequent, in any case, that as I was sitting in the nurses’ room, they would take hold of my hands, play with my fingers, fondle my hair, and say to one another in leaving: “When you look into his eyes, you forget all the rest.”

  Thus I was superior to my hump and I might well have attempted a conquest in the hospital if I had still had my drum, if I had been able to count on my reliable drummer’s potency of former years. As it was, I felt unsure of myself and my physical reactions and I would leave the hospital after these affectionate hors d’oeuvres, fearing to reach out for the main course. I would take the air, go for a walk in the garden or around the wire fence which, with its close-meshed regularity, gave me a peace of mind that I expressed by whistling. I would watch the streetcars headed for Wersten and Benrath or stroll along the park promenade beside the bicycle path, smiling in pleasant boredom at the efforts of nature, which was playing spring and, following the program to a T, making buds burst open almost audibly.

  Across the way, our Sunday painter who art in heaven, was each day adding a little more green fresh from the tube to the
trees of Wersten Cemetery. Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours—I am not referring to the borders of the graves—and if you will, a meaning.

  Along the northern wall of the cemetery ran a street called Bittweg, occupied by no less than six manufacturers of tombstones. There were two large establishments: C. Schnoog and Julius Wöbel. The rest were small artisans: R. Haydenreich, J. Bois, Kühn & Müller, and P. Korneff. Sheds and workshops with large signs hanging from the roofs, some freshly painted, others barely legible, indicating the name of the firm and the nature of its wares: Tombstones—Mortuary Monuments and Borders—Natural and Artificial Stone—Mortuary Art. Korneff’s sign, in such disrepair that I had to spell it out, said: P. Korneff, Stonecutter and Mortuary Sculptor.

  Between the workshop and the wire fence enclosing the yard stood neat rows of monuments on simple and double pedestals; they were of different sizes, calculated to adorn anything from a solitary one-man grave to a family vault with room for four. Just behind the fence, reflecting its diamond-shaped pattern in sunny weather, an assortment of tombstones: shell-lime cushions for modest pocketbooks, polished diorite slabs with unpolished palms, standard thirty-inch children’s tombstones of slightly cloudy Silesian marble, surrounded by fluting and adorned toward the top with sunken reliefs, most of which represented broken roses. Next came a row of plain, red sandstone slabs taken from the façades of bombed-out banks and department stores. At the center the prize piece was displayed: a monument of bluish-white Tyrolian marble with three pedestals, two side-pieces, and a large richly carved slab featuring what is known in the trade as a corpus. This corpus was beardless; his distinguishing features were: head and knees turned leftward, a crown of thorns, three nails, open hands, and stylized bleeding from the wound in his flank, five drops, I seem to recall.

  This was far from being the only mortuary monument in Bittweg showing a corpus turned leftward—sometimes there were as many as ten of them getting ready for the spring season. But Korneff’s Jesus Christ had made a particular impression on me, because, well, because he showed a marked resemblance to my Athlete on the Cross, flexing his muscles and expanding his chest over the main altar of the Church of the Sacred Heart. I spent hours by that fence, scraping a stick along the close wire meshes, thinking of everything and nothing and toying perhaps with a wish or two. For a long while Korneff remained in hiding. A stovepipe full of knees and elbows emerged from one of the windows of the shop and jutted over the flat roof. You couldn’t get very good coal in those days. Yellow smoke arose in fitful puffs and fell back on the roofing paper. More smoke seeped from the windows, slid down the drainpipe, and lost itself amid tombstones in various stages of completion. Outside the sliding door of the workshop stood a three-wheeled truck under several tarpaulins, as though camouflaged against attack from low-flying planes. Sounds from the shop—wood striking iron, iron chipping stone—bore witness to the stonecutter at work.

  In May the canvas was gone from over the three-wheeler, the sliding door stood open. I could see inside the workshop grey on grey, stones on the cutting bench, a polishing machine that looked like a gallows, shelves full of plaster models, and at last Korneff. He walked with a stoop and permanently bent knees, his head thrust rigidly forward. The back of his neck was crisscrossed with grimy, once pink adhesive tape. He stepped out of the shop with a rake and, assuming no doubt that spring had come, began to clean up the grounds. He raked carefully between the tombstones, leaving tracks in the gravel, occasionally stopping to remove dead leaves from one of the monuments. As he was raking between the shell-lime cushions and diorite slabs near the fence, I was suddenly surprised by his voice: “What’s the matter, boy; don’t they want you at home no more?”

  “I’m very fond of your tombstones,” I said.

  “Mustn’t say that out loud,” he replied. “Bad luck. Talk like that and they’ll be putting one on top of you.”

  Only then did he move his stiff neck, catching me, or rather my hump, in a sidelong glance: “Say, what they done to you? Don’t it get in your way for sleeping?”

  I let him have his laugh. Then I explained that a hump was not necessarily a drawback, that it didn’t get me down, that, believe it or not, some women and even young girls had a special weakness for humps and were only too glad to adapt themselves to the special proportions and possibilities of a hunchback.

  Leaning his chin on his rake handle, Korneff pondered: “Maybe so. I’ve heard tell of it.”

  He went on to tell me about his days in the basalt quarries when he had had a woman with a wooden leg that could be unbuckled. This, to his way of thinking, was something like my hump, even if my gas meter, as he insisted on calling it, was not removable. The stonecutter’s memory was long, broad, and thorough. I waited patiently for him to finish, for his woman to buckle her leg on again. Then I asked if I could visit his shop.

  Korneff opened the gate in the fence and pointed his rake in invitation at the open sliding door. Gravel crunched beneath my feet and a moment later I was engulfed in the smell of sulphur, lime, and dampness.

  Heavy, pear-shaped wooden mallets with fibrous hollows showing frequent repetition of the same expert blow, rested on roughly hewn slabs of stone. Stippling irons for the embossing mallet, stippling tools with round heads, freshly reforged and still blue from tempering; long, springy etching-chisels and bull chisels for marble, polishing paste drying on four-cornered sawing trestles, and, on wooden rollers, ready to move, an up-ended, polished travertine slab, fatty, yellow, cheesy, porous for a double grave.

  “That’s a bush hammer, that’s a spoon chisel, that’s a groove cutter, and that,” Korneff lifted a board a hand’s breadth wide and three feet long and examined the edge closely, “that’s a straight edge; I use it to whack the apprentices with if they don’t keep moving.”

  My question was not one of pure politeness: “You employ apprentices then?”

  Korneff told me his troubles: “ I could keep five boys busy. But you can’t get none. All the young pantywaists wants to learn nowadays is how to turn a crooked penny on the black market.” Like me, the stonecutter was opposed to the dark machinations that prevented so many a young hopeful from learning a useful trade. While Korneff was showing me carborundum stones ranging from coarse to fine and their effect on a Solnhof slab, I was playing with a little idea. Pumice stones, chocolate-brown sandstone for rough polishing, tripoli for high polish, and there was my little idea popping up again, but it had taken on a higher, shinier polish. Korneff showed me models of lettering, spoke of raised and sunken inscriptions, and told me about gilding; that it wasn’t nearly so expensive as generally supposed, that you could gild a horse and rider with one genuine old taler. This made me think of the equestrian monument of Kaiser Wilhelm on the Heumarkt in Danzig, which the Polish authorities would maybe decide to gild, but neither horse nor rider could make me give up my little idea, which seemed to become shinier and shinier. I continued to toy with it, and went so far as to formulate it while Korneff was explaining the workings of a three-legged stippling machine for sculpture and tapping his knuckles on some plaster models of Christ crucified: “So you’re thinking of taking on an apprentice?” This was my first formulation. My little idea gained ground. What I actually said was: “I gather you’re looking for an apprentice, or am I mistaken?” Korneff rubbed the adhesive tape covering the boils on his neck. “I mean, would you consider taking me on as an apprentice, other things being equal?” I had put it awkwardly and corrected myself at once: “Don’t underestimate my strength, my dear Mr. Korneff. It’s just my legs that are underdeveloped. There’s plenty of strength in my arms.” Delighted with my resolution and determined to go the whole hog, I bared my left arm and asked Korneff to feel my muscle, which was small but tough. When he made no move to feel it, I picked up an embossing chisel that was lying on so
me shell lime and made the metal bob up and down on my biceps. I continued my demonstration until Korneff turned on the polishing machine; a carborundum disk raced screeching over the travertine pedestal of a slab for a double grave. After a while Korneff, his eyes glued to the machine, shouted above the noise: “Sleep on it, boy. It’s hard work. Come back and see me when you’ve thought it over. I’ll take you on if you still feel like it.”

  Following Korneff’s instructions, I slept a whole week on my little idea; I weighed and compared: on the one hand Kurt’s firestones, on the other, Korneff’s tombstones. Maria was always finding fault: “You’re a drain on our budget, Oskar. Why don’t you start something? Tea or cocoa maybe, or powdered milk.” I started nothing; instead, I basked in the approval of Guste, who held up the absent Köster as the example to follow and praised me for my negative attitude toward the black market. What really troubled me was my son Kurt, who sat there writing columns of imaginary figures and overlooking me just as I had managed for years to overlook Matzerath.

  We were having our lunch. Guste had disconnected the bell so our customers wouldn’t find us eating scrambled eggs with bacon. Maria said: “You see, Oskar, we have nice things to eat. Why? Because we don’t sit with our hands folded.” Kurt heaved a sigh. Flints had dropped to eighteen. Guste ate heartily and in silence. I too. I savored the eggs, but even while savoring, I felt miserable, perhaps because powdered eggs are not really so very appetizing, and suddenly, while biting into some gristle, experienced a yearning for happiness so intense that it made my cheeks tingle. Against all my better judgment, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness. I wanted to be boundlessly happy. While the others were still eating, content with scrambled egg-powder, I left the table and went to the cupboard, as though it contained happiness. Rummaging through my compartment, I found, not happiness, but behind the photograph album, two packages of Mr. Fajngold’s disinfectant. From one package I took—no, not happiness, but the thoroughly disinfected ruby necklace which had belonged to my mother, which Jan Bronski years ago, on a winter’s night that smelled of more snow to come, had removed from a shopwindow with a circular hole cut out a short while before by Oskar, who in those days was still happy and able to cut glass with his voice. And with that necklace I left the flat. The necklace, I felt, would be my start, my jumping-off place. I took the car to the Central Station, thinking if all goes well… and throughout the lengthy negotiations, the same thoughts were with me. But the one-armed man and the Saxon, whom the other called the Assessor, were aware only of my article’s material value, they failed to suspect what pathways of happiness they laid out before me when in return for my poor mama’s necklace they gave me a real leather briefcase and twelve cartons of “Ami” cigarettes. Lucky Strikes.