The Tin Drum (12 page)

The devil knows where she conjured up that cane. At any rate it was suddenly there, vibrating in the classroom air now mingled with spring breezes, and through this airy mixture she made it whistle, rendered it flexible, hungry, thirsty, crazed for bursting skin, for
Sssst,
for all those curtains canes can imitate, bent on satisfying both herself and the cane. And she banged it down so hard on my desk that the ink in my inkwell took a violet leap. And when I wouldn't hold my hand out to be hit, she struck my drum. She struck my tin. She, that Spollenhauerite, struck my tin drum. What was she hitting it for? If she wanted to hit something, fine, but why did it have to be my drum? Weren't there enough crude louts behind me? Did it have to be my drum? Did she, who knew nothing of drumming, have to attack my drum? What was that glint in her eye? What animal longed to strike? Escaped from what zoo, seeking what prey, lusting for what? Something seized Oskar, welled up in him, rose from unknown depths through the soles of his shoes, through the soles of his feet, forced its way upward, took command of his vocal cords, and made him release a scream of passion sufficient to deglaze an entire Gothic cathedral with all its glorious windows capturing and refracting light.

In other words, I fashioned a double scream that literally pulverized both lenses of Spollenhauer's glasses. With slightly bleeding eyebrows, peering now through empty frames, she groped her way backward,
then finally started to blubber in a manner far too ugly and hysterical for a schoolteacher, while the pack behind me fell into a terrified silence, some disappearing under their desks, some sitting fast with chattering teeth. Others scooted from desk to desk toward their mothers. The mothers, however, having assessed the damage and sought out the guilty party, were about to fall upon my mama, and would no doubt have done so, had I not grabbed my drum and shoved myself away from my bench.

Passing the half-blind Spollenhauer, I made my way to my mama, who was being menaced by the Furies, took her by the hand, and pulled her from the drafty room of class I-A. Echoing corridors. Stone stairs for giant children. Breadcrumbs in bubbling granite basins. In the open gymnasium boys trembled beneath the horizontal bar. Mama was still clutching her sheet of paper. Outside the portals of the Pestalozzi School I took it from her and converted the schedule into a meaningless paper ball.

But Oskar did allow the photographer, who was waiting between the columns at the entrance for the first graders with their paper cones and mothers, to take a picture of him with his own school cone, which, in spite of all the confusion, he had not lost. The sun came out, classrooms buzzed above us. The photographer posed Oskar before a blackboard on which was written:
My First Day at School.

Relating the story of Oskar's first encounter with a schedule to my friend Klepp and my keeper Bruno, who listened with only half an ear, I said just now that the blackboard the photographer used as a traditional background for his postcard-sized pictures of six-year-old boys with knapsacks and school cones bore the following inscription:
My First Day at School.

Of course this little phrase could only be read by the mothers, who were standing behind the photographer and acting more excited than the boys. It was at least a year before the boys in front of the blackboard could decipher the inscription, either next Easter when the new class entered or in their own earlier photos, and realize that those pretty pictures had been taken on the occasion of their first day at school.

Sütterlin script crawled across the blackboard with spiky malevolence, its curves falsely padded, chalking the inscription that marked the beginning of a new stage in life. And in fact the Sütterlin script is well suited for items of marked importance, for succinctly striking statements, for slogans of the day. And there are certain documents that, though I admit I've never seen them, I nonetheless envision in Sütterlin script. I have in mind immunization certificates, sports records, and handwritten death sentences. Even back then, when I could see through the Sütterlin script but couldn't read it, the double loop of the Sütterlin
M
with which the inscription began, malicious and smelling of hemp, reminded me of the scaffold. Nevertheless I would have preferred to read it letter for letter and not just divine its sense darkly. Let no one suppose that I spent my encounter with Fräulein Spollenhauer highhandedly singshattering glass and playing my drum in rebellious pro
test because I had already mastered my ABCs. Oh no, I knew only too well that simply seeing through Sütterlin script was not enough, that I lacked the most elementary schoolboy knowledge. Unfortunately the methods by which Fräulein Spollenhauer wished to educate him did not appeal to Oskar.

So I had by no means decided, having left the Pestalozzi School, that my first day at school would be my last. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks. Nothing of the sort. At the very moment that the photographer was recording my image for posterity, I thought to myself: You're standing here in front of a blackboard beneath a no doubt meaningful, possibly ominous, inscription. It's true you're able to judge the inscription by the script and sense its associations, such as solitary confinement, protective custody, supervisory custody, and one-rope-fits-all, but you can't decipher the inscription. Meanwhile, in spite of your ignorance, which cries out to the partly cloudy heavens, you intend never to enter this schedule-school again. So just where, oh Oskar, do you plan to learn your big and little ABCs?

Though the little ABCs would no doubt have been enough for me, I had deduced the existence of both big and little ABCs from, among other things, the manifest existence of big people who couldn't be wished away and called themselves grownups. They never tired of offering a justification for big and little ABCs, pointing out that there were also big and little books, big and little leagues, and even state visits coded as big or little railroad stations, based on the number of arriving dignitaries and decorated diplomats for whom the red carpet had to be rolled out.

Neither Matzerath nor Mama worried about my education over the next few months. That one attempt to enroll me, so stressful and embarrassing for Mama, had been enough for them. Like Uncle Jan Bronski, they now sighed when they gazed down at me, and dredged up old stories like the one about my third birthday: "The trapdoor was open! You left it open, didn't you? You were in the kitchen, and the cellar before that, right? You brought up a can of mixed fruit for dessert, right? You left the trapdoor to the cellar open, didn't you?"

Every reproach Mama heaped on Matzerath was true, as we well know, and yet the whole was false. But he accepted all the blame and sometimes even wept, softhearted as he was. Then Mama and Jan Bronski would have to comfort him, and spoke of me, Oskar, as a cross
they had to bear, a fate they could not flee, a trial they faced but knew not why.

No help was to be expected from these cross bearers, struck down by fate and plagued by trials. Aunt Hedwig Bronski, who frequently took me to Steffenspark to play in the sandbox with her two-year-old Marga, was likewise ruled out as my teacher: she was good-natured enough but dumb as the sky was blue. I was also forced to abandon the thought of Dr. Hollatz's Sister Inge, who was neither sky-blue nor good-natured, for she was no mere office girl but an extremely bright and irreplaceable assistant, and so had no time for me.

I conquered the hundred-plus steps of our four-story building several times a day, trying to drum up advice on every floor, smelled what nineteen lodgers were having for lunch, but knocked at no door, since I couldn't see old Heilandt, or the clockmaker Laubschad, and certainly not fat Frau Kater, or, much as I liked her, Mother Truczinski, as my future schoolteacher.

Under the eaves lived a musician and trumpeter named Meyn. Herr Meyn kept four cats and was permanently drunk. He played dance music at Zingler's Heights, and on Christmas Eve he and five fellow drunks would stamp through the snowy streets battling the harsh frost with carols. I met him one day in the attic: he lay on his back in black trousers and his white Sunday shirt, rolling an empty bottle of Machandel gin with his bare feet and playing the trumpet beautifully. Without lowering his trumpet, just shifting his eyes slightly to where I was standing behind him, he stole a glance at me and accepted me as his percussionist. He valued my instrument as highly as he did his own. Our duet drove his four cats out onto the roof and set the roof tiles gently vibrating.

When we finished our music and lowered our instruments, I pulled an old issue of the
Neueste Nachrichten
newspaper from under my sweater, smoothed out the pages, crouched beside Meyn the trumpeter, held out my reading matter, and asked him to teach me the big and little ABCs.

But Herr Meyer had fallen straight from his trumpet into a deep sleep. For him there were only three containers that counted: his bottle of Machandel gin, his trumpet, and sleep. It's true that for some time after that—to be precise, till he entered the SA cavalry and gave up gin—
we played unrehearsed duets in the attic for the stove, roof tiles, pigeons, and cats, but he was just never any use as a teacher.

I tried Greff the greengrocer. Without my drum, for Greff didn't like hearing it, I paid several visits to his basement shop across the way. The preconditions for a thorough course of study seemed present: scattered all about the two-room apartment, in the shop itself, behind and on 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,
artists' monographs, stacks of sports magazines, and picture books filled with half-naked boys, most of whom, for some inexplicable reason, were leaping at a ball in sand dunes on the beach, displaying their oiled and gleaming muscles.

Greff was having all kinds of trouble with the shop at the time. Inspectors from the Bureau of Weights and Standards were less than pleased when they tested his weights and scales. The word fraud surfaced. Greff had to pay a fine and buy new weights. Beset by cares, only his books, youth meetings, and weekend hikes with the Boy Scouts could cheer him up.

He was filling out price tags and barely noticed me when I entered the shop; seizing the opportunity offered by this price-tagging operation, I grabbed three or four white paper tags and a red pencil, and using the finished tags as models, made a great show of imitating his Süt-terlin script.

Oskar was no doubt too little for him, not wide-eyed and pale enough. So I laid the red pencil aside, chose a tome full of naked youths I thought would leap out at Greff, and held photos of bending or stretching boys I assumed meant something to him at an angle so Greff could see them.

Since as long as there were no customers in the shop demanding red beets the greengrocer kept penciling away with exaggerated precision on his price tags, I was forced to either clap the book covers loudly or flip noisily through the pages to make him emerge from his price tags and pay attention to me, the illiterate boy.

Simply put, Greff didn't understand me. When Scouts were in the shop—and there were always two or three of his lieutenants around in
the afternoon—he didn't notice Oskar at all. If Greff was alone, however, nervous, strict, and annoyed by disturbances, he was quite capable of springing up and issuing orders: "Put that book down, Oskar. There's nothing in it for you. You're too dumb and too little for that. You're going to ruin it. Cost me more than six gulden. If you want to play there's plenty of potatoes and cabbages!"

He took the trashy old book away from me, leafed through it with no change of expression, and left me standing among Savoy cabbages, red cabbages, white cabbages, among sugar beets and spuds, alone and growing lonely; for Oskar didn't have his drum.

True, there was still Frau Greff, and after being brushed off by the greengrocer I would usually make my way to the couple's bedroom. Back then, Frau Lina Greff would lie in bed for weeks at a time, playing the invalid, smelling of a decaying nightgown, taking just about anything in hand except a book that might have taught me something.

In the days that followed, nursing a slight envy, Oskar eyed the school knapsacks of boys his own age, from the sides of which sponges and little rags for wiping the slates fluttered self-importantly. Nevertheless he can't recall ever having thoughts like: You brought this on yourself, Oskar. You should have put on your school game face. You shouldn't have ruined things permanently with Spollenhauer. Those urchins are getting ahead of you. They have their big or little ABCs down pat, while you still haven't learned how to hold the
Neueste Nachrichten
properly.

A slight envy, I've just said, it was no more. It took only a sniff to get a noseful of school once and for all. Have you ever gotten a whiff of those poorly rinsed, half-eaten sponges and little rags for yellow-framed flaking slates, which, in knapsacks of the cheapest leather, retain the sweat of all that penmanship, the vapor of big and little multiplication tables, the sweat of squeaking, halting, slipping, spit-moistened slate pencils? Now and then, when pupils on their way home from school laid their knapsacks down somewhere near me to play soccer or dodge-ball, I would bend down to those little cloudlike sponges drying in the sun and imagine that if Satan existed, such would be the sour stench of his armpits.

So the school of slates was hardly to my taste. But Oskar can scarcely maintain that Gretchen Schemer, who took his education in hand soon thereafter, was precisely the answer.

Everything about the furnishings of the Schemers' flat over the bakery on Kleinhammerweg offended me. Those ornamental coverlets, those cushions embroidered with coats of arms, the Käthe Kruse dolls lurking in the corners of the sofa, those stuffed animals underfoot everywhere, all that china crying out for a bull, the souvenirs wherever you looked, all the pieces she'd started, knitted, crocheted, embroidered, woven, plaited, tatted, and trimmed in tiny mouse teeth. I could think of only one explanation for this sweetly dainty, charmingly cozy, stiflingly tiny household, overheated in winter and poisoned with flowers in summer: Gretchen Schemer was childless, longed for little ones to ensnare in her knitting—ah, was Herr Scheffler to blame, or was she?—hungered so for a baby, would so happily have crocheted, beaded, trimmed, and covered a little one with cross-stitch kisses.