The Tin Drum (16 page)

The play was
Tom Thumb,
a fairy tale that gripped me from the first scene and appealed to me for obvious reasons. It was done very cleverly, you never saw Tom Thumb, just heard his voice and saw the grownups
chasing after the play's invisible but very active eponymous hero. There he was, ensconced in the horse's ear, there he was, being sold at a high price to two rascals by his father, there he was, strolling about on the brim of one rascal's hat, speaking down from above; later he creeps into a mouse hole, then into a snail's shell, joins a band of thieves, sleeps in the hay, winds up with the hay in a cow's stomach. But the cow is slaughtered because it speaks with Tom Thumb's voice. The cow's stomach is thrown on a dunghill with the little fellow trapped inside and gobbled up by a wolf. Tom Thumb, however, lures the wolf to the storeroom of his father's house with a few clever remarks, then raises a din just as the wolf gets going. It ended like the fairy tale: the father kills the big bad wolf, the mother cuts open the glutton's stomach with a pair of scissors, and out pops Tom Thumb, or at least you hear his voice cry, "Oh, Father, I was in a mouse hole, and a cow's stomach, and a wolf's belly; now I'm going to stay home with you."

The end moved me, and as I blinked up at Mama, I noticed she was hiding her nose in her handkerchief; like me, she had completely identified with the action on the stage. Mama was easily moved, and in the weeks that followed, especially during what remained of the Christmas holidays, she repeatedly hugged me and kissed me, calling Oskar, laughingly, wistfully, Tom Thumb. Or: my little Tom Thumb. Or: my poor, poor Tom Thumb.

It wasn't till the summer of thirty-three that I had another chance to attend the theater. Owing to a misunderstanding on my part, the affair went badly, but it had a lasting influence on me. Even now it sounds and surges within me, for it took place at the Zoppot Opera-in-the-Woods, where summer after summer, under the night sky, the music of Wagner poured forth to Nature.

Mama was the only one who cared at all for opera. Even operettas were too much for Matzerath. Jan followed Mama's lead, gushed over arias, yet despite his musical appearance he was tone-deaf to fine music. He made up for this by knowing the Formella brothers, former schoolmates at the middle school in Karthaus, who lived in Zoppot and were in charge of lighting the pier and fountain outside the spa and casino, as well as running the lights for festival performances at the Opera-in-the-Woods.

The way to Zoppot led through Oliva. A morning in Castle Park.
Goldfish, swans. Mama and Jan Bronski in the famous Whispering Grotto. Then more goldfish and swans, working hand in glove with a photographer. Matzerath let me ride on his shoulders while the picture was taken. I propped my drum on top of his head, which elicited general laughter, both then and later, when the photo had been pasted in the album. Farewell to goldfish, swans, and the Whispering Grotto. It wasn't Sunday just in Castle Park, it was Sunday everywhere: outside the iron gate, in the streetcar to Glettkau, and at the Glettkau spa, where we had lunch while the Baltic, as if it had nothing else to do, kept on inviting us to bathe. As the beach promenade took us toward Zoppot, Sunday came out to meet us, and Matzerath had to pay admission for the lot of us.

We bathed on South Beach because it was supposedly less crowded than North Beach. The men changed on the men's side, Mama took me into a booth on the women's side; I was expected to go on the family beach naked, while she, already lushly overflowing her banks, poured her flesh into a straw-yellow bathing suit. To avoid exposing myself to all eyes on the family beach all too plainly, I held my drum before my private parts, then lay on my stomach in the sand, rejecting the inviting Baltic waters, hiding my shame in the sand instead, playing the ostrich. Matzerath and Jan Bronski looked so ridiculous and almost pitiful with their incipient paunches that I was glad when, late that afternoon, we returned to the bathing cabins, applied cream to our sunburns, and, Nivea-soothed, slipped back into our Sunday clothes.

Coffee and cake at The Starfish. Mama wanted a third helping of the five-story cake. Matzerath was against it, Jan in favor and against, Mama ordered, gave Matzerath a bite, fed Jan, satisfied both her men, then crammed the sugary sweet wedge spoonful by little spoonful into her mouth.

O holy buttercream, O clear to partly cloudy Sunday afternoon, dusted with powdered sugar! Polish nobles sat behind blue sunglasses and intense lemonades they didn't touch. The ladies played with violet fingernails and sent the insect-powder fragrance of the fur capes they'd rented for the season wafting toward us on the sea breeze. Matzerath thought they were silly. Mama would have loved to rent a fur cape like that, if only for a single afternoon. Jan claimed that the boredom of the Polish nobility had reached such heights that in spite of rising debts
they no longer spoke French, but out of pure snobbishness, only the most ordinary Polish.

We couldn't just go on sitting in The Starfish staring at the blue sunglasses and violet fingernails of the Polish nobility. My mama full of cake needed some exercise. The spa park welcomed us, I had to ride on a donkey and pose for yet another photo. Goldfish, swans—the things Nature thinks of—then more goldfish and swans, enjoying the fresh water.

Between trimmed yews, which, however, did not whisper as people always claim, we met the Formella brothers, the same Formellas who served as lighting technicians for the Casino, and for the Opera-in-the-Woods. First the younger Formella had to deliver himself of all the jokes he'd heard on the job as a lighting technician. The elder Formella brother knew these jokes by heart and still managed to laugh infectiously at all the right places out of brotherly love, showing one gold tooth more than his younger brother, who only had three. We headed toward Springer's for a little Machandel. Mama said she preferred Kurfürsten. Then, still pulling jokes from his stockpile, the free-spending younger Formella invited us to dinner at The Parrot. There we met Tuschel, and this Tuschel owned half of Zoppot, a share of the Opera-in-the-Woods, and five movie theaters. He was also the Formella brothers' boss, and was pleased, as we were pleased, to meet us, to meet him. Tuschel never tired of twisting a ring on his finger, which could not, however, have been a magic ring or wishing ring, for nothing at all happened except that Tuschel in turn started telling jokes, and in fact the same jokes we'd just heard from Formella, though more long-windedly because he had fewer gold teeth. Nevertheless the whole table laughed, because Tuschel was telling them. I alone remained solemn and tried to kill his punch lines by maintaining a straight face. Ah, how the salvos of laughter, even if false, spread coziness, like the bull's-eye panes on the glass partition of our little corner booth. Tuschel was visibly grateful, kept telling jokes, ordered Goldwasser liqueur, and suddenly, drifting happily in laughter and Goldwasser, twisted his ring a different way, and something actually happened. Tuschel invited us all to the Opera-in-the-Woods, since he owned a small share of the company; unfortunately he himself couldn't, a previous engagement etc., but he hoped we could still make use of his seats, the box was padded, the little fellow could sleep if he was tired;
and he jotted down a few words in Tuschel's hand with a silver mechanical pencil on Tuschel's calling card that he said would open all doors—and so it did.

What happened can be told in a few words: a mild summer evening, the Opera-in-the-Woods sold out and full of foreigners. The mosquitoes had arrived early. But not until the last mosquito, trying as always to be fashionably late, had announced its arrival with a bloodthirsty buzz, did it well and truly start. It was a performance of
The Flying Dutchman.
A ship, looking bent more on poaching than on high-seas piracy, emerged from the woods that gave the opera company its name. Sailors sang to the trees. I fell asleep on Tuschel's padded cushions, and when I awoke, the sailors were still singing or had started up again, Helmsman keep watch ... but Oskar went back to sleep again, glad to see, as he was drifting off, that his mama was thoroughly taken with the Dutchman, floating on the waves, and breathing deeply in true Wagnerian spirit. She hadn't noticed that Matzerath and her Jan were sawing logs of various sizes, their hands shielding their faces, nor that Wagner kept slipping through my fingers too, till Oskar finally awoke for good because a woman was standing all alone in the middle of the woods screaming. She had yellow hair, and was screaming because one of the lighting technicians, probably the younger Formella, was blinding her with a spotlight, harassing her. "No!" she cried out, "Woe is me!" and "Who hath made me suffer so?" But the Formella tormenting her didn't switch off his spotlight, and the screams of the solitary woman, whom Mama later referred to as the soloist, modulated into a whimper that now and then rose as silvery foam to wilt the leaves on the trees of Zoppot Woods before their time but could not find and destroy Formella's spotlight. Her voice, though gifted, failed her. Oskar was forced to intervene, seek out the ill-bred source of light, and with one long-distance scream, undercutting the soft urgency of the mosquitoes, kill the spotlight.

The resulting short circuit, blackout, flying sparks, and forest fire, which provoked a panic, though they finally got it under control, were consequences I hadn't counted on, for I lost more among the crowd than just Mama and her two rudely awakened men; my drum also vanished in the confusion.

This third encounter of mine with the theater gave Mama, who began, after that evening at the Opera-in-the-Woods, to domesticate Wag
ner in simplified arrangements on our piano, the idea of introducing me to the world of the circus in the spring of thirty-four.

Oskar has no intention of going on here about silvery ladies on the trapeze, tigers from Busch's circus, or trained seals. No one fell from the top of the circus tent. Nothing was bitten off any animal tamer. And the seals did what they'd been trained to do: they juggled balls and were tossed live herring by way of reward. I am indebted to the circus for providing entertaining children's matinees and my highly significant encounter with Bebra the musical clown, who played "Jimmy the Tiger" on bottles and directed a troupe of midgets.

We met in the menagerie. Mama and her two men were allowing themselves to be insulted at the monkey cage. Hedwig Bronski, who for once was part of the group, was showing her children the ponies. After a lion had yawned at me, I was foolish enough to get involved with an owl. I tried to stare the bird down, but it stared me down instead; and Oskar slunk away stunned, with burning ears, wounded to the core, and slipped off among the blue and white wagons, because, except for a few tethered dwarf goats, there were no animals there.

He walked past me in suspenders and slippers, carrying a pail of water. Glances crossed but fleetingly. Yet we knew each other at once. He set the pail down, tilted his great head to one side, came up to me, and I guessed that he was about four inches taller than me.

"Look at this!" came an envious growl. "These days three-year-olds don't want to grow anymore." Since I said nothing, he came at me again: "Bebra's my name, direct descendant of Prince Eugen, whose father was Louis the Fourteenth and not any old Savoyard, as they claim." I still said nothing, so he took a new run at it: "I stopped growing on my tenth birthday. A little late, but even so!"

Since he spoke so openly, I too introduced myself, but without concocting some family tree, just said I was Oskar. "Tell me, my dear Oskar, you could be fourteen now, even fifteen or sixteen. It's not possible; nine and a half, you say?"

Now I was supposed to guess his age, and made it deliberately low.

"You flatter me, my young friend. Thirty-five, that was once upon a time. In August I celebrate my fifty-third, I could be your grandfather!"

Oskar said a few nice things to him about his acrobatic clown act, praised his musical talents, and, seized by a touch of ambition, per
formed a little trick for him. Three light bulbs illuminating the circus grounds were taken in by it, and Herr Bebra called out bravo, bravissimo, and wanted to hire Oskar on the spot.

I still occasionally regret that I declined. I talked myself out of it, saying, "You know, Herr Bebra, I prefer to be part of the audience, to allow my little art to bloom in secret, far from all applause, but I would be the last person to fail to applaud your performances." Herr Bebra raised his crumpled forefinger and admonished me: "My dear Oskar, take it from an experienced colleague. The likes of us should never be part of the audience. We have to be on the stage, in the arena. We have to perform and direct the action, otherwise our kind will be manipulated by those who do. And they'll all too happily pull a fast one on us."

His eyes turning ancient, and almost crawling into my ear, he whispered, "They're coming! They will take over the festival grounds. They will stage torchlight parades. They will build grandstands, they will fill grandstands, they will preach our destruction from grandstands. Watch closely, my young friend, what happens on those grandstands. Always try to be sitting on the grandstands, and never standing in front of them."

Then, since my name was being called, Herr Bebra reached for his pail. "They're looking for you, my young friend. We'll see each other again. We're too little to lose each other. Bebra always says: Little people like us can squeeze into even the most crowded grandstands. And if not on the grandstand, then under the grandstand, but never in front. So says Bebra, direct descendant of Prince Eugen."

Mama, who stepped from behind a circus wagon calling for Oskar, was just in time to see Bebra kiss me on the forehead, then pick up his pail of water, and rowing with his shoulders, steer his way toward another wagon.

"Just imagine," Mama later reported indignantly to Matzerath and the Bronskis, "he was with the midgets. A dwarf kissed him on the forehead. I hope that doesn't mean anything."

Bebra's kiss on my forehead was to mean a great deal indeed to me. The political events of the following years proved him right: the era of torchlight parades and grandstand assemblies began.