The Tin Drum (14 page)

Fräulein Dr. Hornstetter, who drops by my room almost daily long enough to smoke one cigarette, who's supposed to be treating me but leaves the room less nervous each time I've treated her, who's so shy that the only close relationship she has is to her cigarette, steadfastly maintains that I was too isolated as a child, that I didn't play enough with other children.

Now, as far as other children are concerned, she may not be entirely wrong. Gretchen Schemer's pedagogical venture occupied so much of my time, and I was torn so often between Goethe and Rasputin, that with the best will in the world I found no time for ring-around-the-rosy and counting games. But every time I shunned books, as scholars sometimes do, cursed them as verbal graveyards, and tried to make contact with the common folk, I ran up against the kids in our building and felt fortunate, after a few brushes with those little cannibals, to return to my reading in one piece.

Oskar could either leave his parents' flat through the shop, in which case he would be standing on Labesweg, or he could close the door to the flat behind him and stand in the stairwell, from which he could reach the street to the left, or climb four flights of stairs to the attic where Meyn played his trumpet, or, lastly, go out into the courtyard. The street was cobblestone. On the packed sand of the courtyard rabbits multiplied and carpets were beaten. The attic offered, aside from occasional duets with the drunken Herr Meyn, a view, a vista, and that lovely but deceptive feeling of freedom all tower climbers seek, which makes dreamers of all who dwell in garrets.

While the courtyard was fraught with perils for Oskar, the attic offered him security, till Axel Mischke and his gang drove him from there as well. The courtyard ran the full length of the building but measured only seven paces in depth, and was separated from three other courtyards by a tarred wooden fence sprouting barbed wire from its top. The attic offered a good overview of this labyrinth: the buildings on Labesweg, the two cross streets Hertastraße and Luisenstraße, and Marienstraße in the far distance formed an extensive quadrangle of courtyards that included a cough-drop factory and several small repair shops. Trees and bushes emerged here and there from the courtyards and advertised the season. Otherwise the courtyards indeed differed in size, but as far as rabbits and carpet beatings were concerned they all came from the same litter. While there were rabbits throughout the year, carpets were, according to house rules, beaten only on Tuesdays and Fridays. On such days the size of the courtyard complex was confirmed. Looking down from the attic, Oskar could see and hear it: over one hundred carpets, runners, and bedside rugs were rubbed with sauerkraut, brushed, beaten, and finally forced to show their patterns. One hundred women carried carpet corpses from the houses, lifting their naked round arms as they did so, their hair and hairdos protected by short knotted kerchiefs, threw the carpets over the racks, grabbed the plaited carpet beaters, and blasted the narrow courtyards with a barrage of dry blows.

Oskar hated this single-minded hymn to cleanliness. He battled the din with his drum, yet had to admit, even in the attic, which provided a certain distance, that he was powerless against the housewives. A hundred carpet-beating women could storm the heavens, could blunt the wingtips of young swallows, could bring down with a few blows the little temple Oskar had drummed up in the April air.

On days when no carpets were being beaten, the children of our building did gymnastics on the wooden carpet racks. I was rarely in the courtyard. Only old Herr Heilandt's shed offered me a degree of security, for the old man didn't allow anyone but me in his junk room and gave the children scarcely a peek at the disintegrating sewing machines, the incomplete bicycles, the vises and pulley blocks, the crooked nails pounded straight and kept in cigar boxes. That was his major occupa
tion: when he wasn't pulling nails from crate boards, he was at the anvil straightening nails he had pulled out the previous day. Aside from the fact that he never gave up on a nail, he was the man who helped on moving day, who slaughtered rabbits for holidays, and who spat tobacco juice all over the courtyard, stairs, and attic.

One day when the children, as children do, were making soup next to his shed, Nuchi Eyke asked old man Heilandt to spit in the soup three times. The old man did so, bringing it up from his depths, then disappeared into his shanty and started pounding nails again, while Axel Mischke added a further ingredient, some pulverized brick. Oskar regarded this culinary experiment with curiosity but stood off to one side. Axel Mischke and Harry Schlager had erected a sort of tent out of blankets and rags so no grownups could peek into the soup. As the brick gruel came to a boil, little Hans Kollin emptied his pockets and contributed two live frogs he'd caught at Aktien Pond to the soup. Susi Kater, the only girl in the tent, puckered her mouth in disappointment and bitterness as the frogs sank silently into the soup, unheralded and unsung, without the slightest attempt at a last jump. Nuchi Eyke was the first to unbutton his trousers and, undeterred by Susi's presence, pee into the hotpot. Axel, Harry, and little Hans Kollin followed suit. When Little Cheese tried to show the ten-year-olds what he could do, nothing came forth. Now all eyes turned to Susi, and Axel Mischke handed her a Persil-blue enamel cook pot with a battered rim. Oskar was ready to leave by now. But he waited till Susi, who apparently had no panties on, squatted down, wrapped her arms around her knees, shoved the pot under her, gazed blankly into space, then wrinkled her nose as the pot announced with a metallic tinkle that she too had a little something to spare for the soup.

I ran away at the time. I shouldn't have run, I should have walked calmly. But because I ran, everyone who'd been fishing around in the pot with their eyes till then looked up at me. I heard Susi Kater's voice behind me saying, "He's going to rat on us, look at him run!"; her voice was still stabbing at me as I stumbled up four flights of stairs and finally caught my breath in the attic.

I was seven and a half. Susi may have been nine. Little Cheese was barely eight. Axel, Nuchi, little Hans, and Harry were ten or eleven. Then there was Maria Truczinski. She was a little older than me but
never played in the courtyard; instead she played with dolls in Mother Truczinski's kitchen, or with her grown-up sister Guste, who helped out at the Protestant kindergarten.

Small wonder that to this day I can't stand to hear the sound of women urinating in chamber pots. Just when Oskar had soothed his ears by stirring his drum, felt safely removed in the attic from the soup that bubbled below, the whole contingent arrived, barefoot or in laced shoes, everyone who'd done their bit for the soup, and Nuchi had the soup with him. They surrounded Oskar, with Little Cheese bringing up the rear. They poked each other, whispering "Do it!" till Axel grabbed Oskar from behind, pinned his arms, and Susi, laughing, baring her moist, even teeth, her tongue between them, said why not? She took the spoon from Nuchi, wiped the tin to silver on her thigh, dipped the little spoon in the steaming pot, stirred around in it slowly, enjoying its mushy resistance to the full like any good housewife, blew on the spoon to cool it, and finally fed it to Oskar: she fed it to me, I've never eaten anything like it again, that taste will stay with me forever.

Not until the mob, so overly concerned with my physical well-being, had left because Nuchi had vomited into the pot, did I too crawl into a corner of the drying loft where only a few bedsheets were hanging at the time, and disgorge several spoonfuls of reddish brew, but could discover no vestiges of frog in what I threw up. I climbed up on a box under an open dormer window, gazed out at distant courtyards, grinding brick residue between my teeth, felt the urge to act, checked the distant windows of the houses on Marienstraße, glass gleaming, screamed, sang long-distance toward them, with no visible result, yet was so convinced long-distance song would work that henceforth my courtyard and all other courtyards grew too small for me, and hungering for distant climes, distant places, distant views, I seized each opportunity, alone or holding Mama's hand, that led me far from Labesweg, far from our neighborhood, and delivered me from the persecution of all those soup chefs in our small courtyard.

Every Thursday Mama went shopping in the city. She usually took me along. She always took me along when we needed to buy a new drum from Sigismund Markus in the Arsenal Arcade at Kohlenmarkt. In that period, from roughly the age of seven to ten, I wrecked a drum in two weeks flat. From ten to fourteen I would pound through the tin
in less than a week. Later on I could reduce a drum to scrap metal in a single day, or, if I was in a more harmonious mood, drum firmly yet sensitively for three or four months at a time with no visible damage to my drum, apart from a few cracks in the lacquer.

But we're speaking now of the time I would leave our courtyard with its carpet racks, old man Heilandt pounding nails, the kids making new soups, and go with my mama once every two weeks to the shop of Sigismund Markus, where I was permitted to select a new instrument from his stock of tin drums. Sometimes Mama would take me along even though my drum was in a relatively sound condition, and I enjoyed those afternoons in the colorful Altstadt, which always had a museum-like quality, with bells ringing from this or that church tower.

For the most part these visits passed with pleasing regularity. A few purchases at Leiser, Sternfeld, or Machwitz, then the visit to Markus, who made a habit of addressing Mama with a carefully selected assortment of the most flattering compliments. There was no doubt that he was courting her, but so far as I know he never gave in to any greater overture than silently kissing Mama's warmly grasped hand and declaring it worth its weight in gold—except for the time he fell to his knees, which I'll tell about later.

Mama, who had inherited her full, firm, stately figure from Grandmother Koljaiczek, as well as a charming vanity coupled with good nature, submitted to the attentions of Sigismund Markus all the more willingly because of the dirt-cheap assortment of sewing silk and ladies' stockings, purchased in bulk but nonetheless flawless, that he practically gave to her. To say nothing of the tin drum he passed over the counter to me every two weeks at a ridiculously low price.

On every visit, at precisely four-thirty in the afternoon, Mama would ask Sigismund if she could leave me, Oskar, at the shop in his care, since she had important and pressing errands to attend to. Smiling oddly, Markus would bow and promise in flowery phrases to protect me like the apple of his eye while she took care of her important errands. A very gentle, by no means offensive mockery, which gave his sentences a peculiar intonation, made Mama blush on occasion and suspect that Markus knew what was what.

But I too knew the sort of errands Mama called important, to which she attended all too eagerly. For a time I was allowed to accompany her
to a cheap boarding house on Tischlergasse, where she disappeared into a stairwell, returning three-quarters of an hour later, while I was left to wait with the landlady, who was usually slurping a bottle of Mampe, with a soft drink before me, silently served, always awful, till Mama came back, apparently unchanged, greeted the landlady, who didn't glance up from her half and half, and took me by the hand, forgetting that the temperature of her hand would give her away. Hot hand in hand we then visited the Café Weitzke on Wollwebergasse. Mama would order a strong Mocha coffee for herself, a lemon ice cream for Oskar, and wait till, right on time and as if by chance, Jan Bronski happened by, joined us at the table, and had his own Mocha placed on the cool, calming marble top.

They spoke quite openly in front of me, and their conversation confirmed what I'd known for some time: Mama and Uncle Jan met almost every Thursday to do it with each other for three-quarters of an hour in a room Jan rented at the boarding house on Tischlergasse. It was probably Jan who objected to these visits of mine to Tischlergasse and the Café Weitzke. He was quite prudish at times, more so than Mama, who saw no problem with my witnessing the conclusion to their hour of love, of whose legitimacy, it appears, she always remained convinced.

So at Jan's request I spent almost every Thursday afternoon from four-thirty till nearly six at Sigismund Markus's, where I could inspect and use his assortment of tin drums, even play several at once—where else could Oskar have done that?—while gazing into the hangdog face of Markus. Though I had no idea where his thoughts came from, I had a pretty good idea where they were headed: they hung around Tischlergasse, scratched at the numbered doors of rooms, or crouched like poor Lazarus beneath a marble table at the Café Weitzke, waiting for what? For crumbs?

Mama and Jan Bronski left no crumbs. They ate it all themselves. They had that ravenous hunger that's never satisfied, that swallows its own tail. They were so busy they would have sensed the thoughts of Markus beneath the table as merely the insistent caress of a draft.

On one of those afternoons—it must have been in September, for Mama left Markus's shop in a rust-brown autumn suit—when I saw that Markus was deeply immersed, completely buried, and no doubt thoroughly lost in thought behind the counter, something impelled me to carry my newly acquired drum into the Arsenal Arcade, a darkly cool
tunnel lined on both sides by the windows of the choicest establishments, such as jewelry shops, delicatessens, and bookstores. But the displayed wares, no doubt reasonably priced but clearly beyond my means, could not hold me; instead that same force impelled me out of the tunnel and into the Kohlenmarkt. At its very center I stood in the dusty light before the arsenal, its basalt-gray facade studded with cannonballs of all sizes from all sorts of former sieges, iron bumps intended to remind each passerby of the city's history. The cannonballs failed to move me, for I knew they had not lodged there on their own, but that a mason who lived in the city, employed and paid by the Building Surveyor's Office in conjunction with the Office of Historical Preservation, embedded munitions from past centuries in the facades of various churches and town halls, including the front and rear walls of the arsenal.