The Tin Drum (15 page)

I was headed for the Stadt-Theater, whose columned portal could be seen on the right, separated from the arsenal only by a narrow, dark lane. But since, as I expected, I found the Stadt-Theater closed at that hour—the box office for the evening performance wouldn't open till seven—I drummed off indecisively to the left, already weighing a retreat, till Oskar stood between the Stockturm and Langgasser Gate. I didn't dare pass through the gate down Langgasse and left onto Große Wollwebergasse, for Mama and Jan would be sitting there, and if they weren't yet there they might be just finishing up on Tischlergasse, or perhaps already on their way to their refreshing Mochas on the little marble table.

I don't know how I managed to cross the avenue on Kohlenmarkt, with the streetcars jangling in and out through the gate, screeching round the curve toward Kohlenmarkt, Holzmarkt, and Central Station. Perhaps some grownup—it may even have been a policeman—took me by the hand and guided me safely through the perils of the traffic.

I stood before the buttressed brick of the Stockturm, which rose steeply toward the sky, and only by chance, stirred by encroaching boredom, lodged my drumsticks between the brickwork and the ironclad frame of the tower door. From the moment I directed my gaze upward along the brick it proved hard to follow the line of the facade, for pigeons were busy taking off from niches and windows in the tower, coming to rest for brief pigeon-measured moments on waterspouts and in alcoves, then plunging down the wall, dragging my gaze along.

This pigeon business irritated me. My gaze deserved better; I withdrew it and, to dispel my irritation, used both my drumsticks in earnest as a lever: the door yielded, and before he had even pushed it fully open, Oskar was inside the tower, climbing the spiral staircase, leading with his right leg, pulling the left one after, reached the first barred dungeons, spiraled still higher, leaving behind the torture chambers with their carefully polished and instructively labeled instruments, cast a glance through a narrow barred window as he continued to climb—now leading with his left leg, pulling his right after—estimated how high he was, noted the thickness of the masonry, startled pigeons into flight, met the same pigeons one turn of the stairs higher, led with his right leg again, pulling his left after, and as Oskar, continuing to switch legs, finally reached the top, he would gladly have kept on climbing, though both his right and left legs felt heavy. But the stairs had tired too soon. He grasped the absurdity and futility of building towers.

I don't know how high the Stockturm was—and still is, for it survived the war. Nor do I have any desire to ask my keeper Bruno for a reference work on East German brick Gothic. I guess it must have been a good hundred fifty feet to the very top of the tower.

As the spiral staircase tired too soon, I had to stop at a gallery that circled the tower's dome. I sat down, thrust my legs between the little columns of the balustrade, leaned forward, and peering past a column I had wrapped my right arm around, gazed down at the Kohlenmarkt, while with my left I made sure of my drum, which had shared the entire journey.

I have no intention of boring you with a bird's-eye view of Danzig, with that panorama of bell towers, still suffused, they say, with the breath of the Middle Ages, portrayed in a thousand good engravings. Nor will I go on about the pigeons, even if it's true ten times over that pigeons, which some people call doves, are good literary material. Pigeons and doves do next to nothing for me, though gulls are somewhat more interesting. The phrase dove of peace is simply a paradox. I would sooner entrust a peace message to a hawk or even a vulture than to a dove, the most belligerent tenant under the sun. To make a long story short: there were pigeons on the Stockturm. But there are pigeons on any self-respecting tower that wants to keep up appearances with the help of its conservators.

My gaze had turned toward something totally different: the Stadt-Theater, which I'd found closed upon leaving the Arsenal Arcade. The box with its dome bore a fiendishly close resemblance to a senselessly enlarged, neoclassical coffee grinder, though it lacked the handle on the rounded top of its dome which, in that temple devoted to culture and the muses filled to the brim each evening, would have allowed it to grind to grisly scrap a five-act play with its entire assemblage of tragedians, stage sets, prompters, props, and curtains. This building, from whose column-flanked lobby windows a sagging afternoon sun, steadily applying more red, refused to depart, annoyed me.

At that hour, some one hundred fifty feet above the Kohlenmarkt, above streetcars and clerks heading home from work, high above Markus's sweet-smelling junk shop, above the cool marble tables at the Café Weitzke, above two cups of Mocha, towering above Mama and Jan Bronski, above our building, our courtyard, all other courtyards, above bent and straightened nails, leaving the neighborhood children and their brick soup far below, I, who up till then had screamed only when forced by circumstances, now screamed without cause or compulsion. Until I climbed the Stockturm, I'd only sent my piercing tones into glass, the interior of a light bulb, or a bottle of flat beer when someone tried to take away my drum; now on the tower I screamed down, though my drum was not threatened in any way.

No one was trying to take Oskar's drum away, and yet he screamed. No pigeon had sullied his drum with his droppings, to be repaid with a scream. There was verdigris on copper plates nearby but no glass, yet Oskar screamed. The pigeons had blank reddish eyes, but no glass eye eyed him, yet he screamed. What was he screaming at, what distant horizon lured him? Was it a focused attempt to demonstrate what he'd tried at random in the attic above the courtyard after enjoying his brick soup? What glass did Oskar have in mind? With what glass—and it had to be glass—did Oskar plan to experiment?

It was the Stadt-Theater, the dramatic coffee grinder, whose setting-sun windowpanes attracted my newfangled tones, first tested in our attic and bordering now, I might say, on mannerism. After a few minutes of screams of various calibers, which however produced no results, an almost soundless tone took effect, and Oskar could report with joy and telltale pride that two midlevel panes in the left window of the lobby
had been forced to surrender the evening sun and now registered as two black quadrangles in need of immediate reglazing.

This success required further confirmation. Like a modern painter who, having at last found the style he's been seeking for years, bestows upon a stunned world a whole series of equally wonderful, equally bold, equally worthy, similarly formatted finger exercises in the same mode, I proceeded to put on a show.

Within a mere quarter-hour I managed to deglaze all the windows in the lobby and a portion of the doors. What appeared from above to be an excited crowd gathered in front of the theater. There are always curious bystanders. I was not particularly impressed by my admirers. Of course they forced Oskar to work with even greater rigor, even greater formal skill. I was just setting out on an even bolder experiment to lay bare the inner essence of all things, namely to project a special scream through the open lobby, through a keyhole in a lobby door, into the still darkened interior of the theater and strike the pride of all season-ticket holders, the theater's chandelier, with all its polished, reflecting, refracting, faceted claptrappery, when I spotted a rust-brown suit in the crowd outside the theater. Mama had found her way back from the Café Weitzke, had enjoyed her Mocha, had left Jan Bronski.

Admittedly, Oskar still sent a scream toward the fancy chandelier. It appeared to have had no effect, however, for the following day the newspapers reported only the mysteriously shattered panes in the lobby windows and doors. For weeks afterward semi-scientific and even scientific investigations appeared in the feature sections of the daily press, spreading one column after another of the most fantastic nonsense. The
Neueste Nachrichten
referred to cosmic rays. Staff members at the local observatory, highly qualified academics, spoke of sunspots.

I made my way down the spiral stairs of the Stockturm as quickly as my little legs would carry me and arrived somewhat breathlessly among the crowd in front of the theater portal. Mama's rust-brown autumn suit no longer stood out, she must have been inside Markus's shop, perhaps reporting the damage my voice had caused. And Markus, who accepted my so-called retarded condition, as well as my diamond voice, as the most natural thing in the world, would be wagging the tip of his tongue, so Oskar thought, and rubbing his yellow-white hands.

From the door of the shop I saw something that made me forget all
my long-distance singshattering triumphs. Sigismund Markus knelt before my mama, and all the stuffed toys, bears, monkeys, dogs, even dolls with click-open eyes, fire engines, rocking horses, all the puppets hanging round guarding his shop, seemed about to kneel down with him. He, however, held Mama's two hands covered by his own, their backs showing lightly downed brownish spots, and he was crying.

Mama looked equally solemn and concerned by the situation. "Please, Markus," she said, "please, not here in the shop."

But Markus couldn't stop, and his words had an unforgettable cadence, pleading and overwrought at the same time: "Drop this Bronski business, with him and the Polish Post Office, it's bad I tell you. Don't bet on the Poles, if you got to bet on someone, bet on the Germans, they're going to be on top, sooner or later; they're partway there already, on their way up, and you're still betting on Bronski, Frau Agnes. Bet on Matzerath if you want, him you've got already. Or bet on Markus if you'd like, please, come with Markus, newly baptized and all. Let's go to London, Frau Agnes, I got people there and funds if you come, but if you won't come with Markus, if you despise him, then you despise him. But he's begging you, from his heart he's begging, please don't bet on this meshuge Bronski who sticks with the Polish Post Office when it's clear the Poles are finished once the Germans come."

Just as Mama, confused by so many possibilities and impossibilities, was about to burst into tears, Markus saw me in the shop door and, releasing one of Mama's hands, gestured toward me with five eloquent fingers: "Please, we'll take him with us to London. Like a prince he'll live, a prince!"

Now Mama looked at me too, and started to smile. Perhaps she was thinking of the paneless lobby windows of the Stadt-Theater, or felt good about the prospect of metropolitan London. But to my surprise she shook her head and said lightly, as if declining an offer to dance, "Thank you, Markus, but I can't, I really can't—on account of Bronski."

Taking my uncle's name as a cue, Markus rose at once, jackknifed a bow, and replied, "Forgive Markus, please, that's what he thought, that it wouldn't work on account of him."

As we left the shop in the Arsenal Arcade, Markus locked it from the outside, though it wasn't yet closing time, and walked with us to the stop for the Number Five line. Passersby and a few policemen were
still standing outside the Stadt-Theater. I wasn't afraid, however, and scarcely recalled my triumphs over glass. Markus bent down to me, whispering more to himself than to us, "The things he can do, that Oskar. Beats his drum and raises a ruckus at the theater."

He calmed Mama's growing anxiety over the broken glass with soothing gestures, and as the tram arrived and we stepped into the second car, he implored her again softly, fearing he might be overheard, "Well, stick with Matzerath then, please, him you have, and don't bet on no more Poles."

When Oskar, lying or sitting on his metal bed today, drumming in either case, revisits the Arsenal Arcade, the words scribbled on the walls of the Stockturm's dungeons, the Stockturm itself with its oiled instruments of torture, the three lobby windows of the Stadt-Theater behind its columns, then returns to Arsenal Arcade and Sigismund Markus's shop to trace the details of that September day, he must, at the same time, seek the land of the Poles. How does he seek it? He seeks it with his drumsticks. Does he seek the land of the Poles with his soul as well? He seeks it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ.

And I seek the land of the Poles that is lost, that is not yet lost. Some say nearly lost, already lost, lost once more. Here in Germany they seek Poland with credits, with Leicas, with compasses, with radar, with divining rods and delegations, with humanism, with leaders of the opposition and clubs of exiles mothballing regional costumes. While they search for the land of the Poles with the soul in this land—some with Chopin, some with revenge in their hearts—while they dismiss plans one through four for partitioning the land of the Poles and sit down to work on a fifth, while they fly with Air France to Warsaw and place a wreath in remorse where the ghetto once stood, while they seek the land of the Poles with rockets someday, I search on my drum for the land of the Poles and drum: lost, not yet lost, lost once more, lost to whom, lost too soon, lost by now, Poland's lost, all is lost, Poland is not yet lost.

In singshattering the lobby windows of our Stadt-Theater, I sought and found my first contact with the dramatic arts. Though she was deeply engaged with the toy merchant Markus, Mama must have noticed my direct tie to the theater that afternoon, for when the Christmas holidays came, she bought four theater tickets, for herself, for Stephan and Marga Bronski, and for Oskar, and took the three of us to the Christmas play on the last Sunday of Advent. We sat in the front row of the second balcony on the side. The fancy chandelier hanging over the orchestra section was doing its best. So I was glad I hadn't shattered it from atop the Stockturm with my song.

Even back then there were far too many children. More children than mothers sat in the balcony, while the ratio of mother to child in the orchestra, where the more prosperous and procreatively cautious sat, was fairly well balanced. Why can't children sit still? Marga Bronski, who was sitting between me and the relatively well-behaved Stephan, slipped off the folding seat, tried to climb back up, soon found it more fun to do gymnastics on the balcony rail, got caught in the folding mechanism of her seat, and began to scream, but no more loudly or lengthily than the screamers around us, because Mama stuffed her silly little mouth with candy. Sucking away and prematurely exhausted by all the struggles with her seat, Stephan's little sister fell asleep soon after the performance began and had to be awakened at the end of each act to clap her hands, which she did with great enthusiasm.