The Tin Drum (31 page)

Since these forbidden games usually started after midnight and had to break off by three in the morning so Scheffler could get back to his bakery, it was only on rare occasions that I managed to slip from my little bed in my nightshirt, avoiding any sound, and reach the shaded corner under the table unseen and drumless.

As you will already have noted, I always indulged in the easiest of all observations under tables: I made comparisons. How things had changed since my poor mama died. No more Jan Bronski, cautious above, yet losing hand after hand, bold below, seeking conquests between my mama's thighs with his shoeless sock. There was no erotic play under the skat table in those years, and certainly no love. Six trouser legs displaying a variety of fishbone patterns covered six more or less hairy men's legs—naked or in long underwear according to preference,
making a sixfold effort to avoid even the most casual contact—which extended and diversified above into torsos, heads, and arms deeply engaged in a game that should have been forbidden on political grounds, but which in every case, whether the game was won or lost, provided both justification and triumph: Poland has lost a grand hand; the Free City of Danzig has just won a sure-fire diamond single for the Greater German Reich.

The day could be foreseen on which these war games would come to an end—as all games must one day end—and on an expanded scale, in response to some so-called national emergency, turn into hard facts.

Early in the summer of thirty-nine it became clear that in the course of his weekly Party meetings Matzerath had found less compromising skat partners than Polish postal clerks and former scoutmasters. Jan Bronski was forced to recall what camp he was in, and stuck with the post office staff, the lame janitor Kobyella for instance, who, since his service in Marszałek Piłsudski's legendary legion, stood an inch or two short on one leg. In spite of his limp, Kobyella was an excellent janitor and thus also a skilled craftsman, who, I hoped, might eventually be kind enough to fix my ailing drum. So it was that every afternoon about six, even in the most oppressive August heat, simply because I could only reach Kobyella through him, I would stand near the Polish settlement waiting for Jan, who normally quit right on time and headed home. He didn't arrive. Without actually asking myself, what is your presumptive father doing after closing time?, I waited, as I often did, till seven or seven-thirty. But he didn't arrive. I could have gone to Aunt Hedwig. Jan might be ill, running a fever, or nursing a broken leg in a plaster cast. Oskar stayed where he was and made do with staring now and then at the window and curtains of the postal clerk's flat. A strange shyness kept Oskar from visiting his aunt, whose warm, motherly, bovine eyes saddened him. Nor did he particularly like the children the Bronski marriage had produced, who were his presumptive half brother and half sister. They treated him like a doll. They wanted to play with him, use him as a toy. Why did fifteen-year-old Stephan, who was almost the same age as Oskar, think he had the right to act like a father, always lecturing and talking down to him? And ten-year-old Marga with her pigtails and a face in which the moon was always rising fat and full: did she think Oskar was a spineless doll she could dress, comb, brush,
pat into place, and instruct for hours on end? Of course they both saw me as an abnormal, pitiful midget and themselves as healthy, highly promising children who were indeed the darlings of my grandmother Koljaiczek, who, given the way I acted, found it hard to see in me a darling. I had no real interest in fairy tales and picture books. What I wanted from my grandmother, what I picture even today in broad and pleasurable brushstrokes, was quite clear-cut and thus rarely achieved: the moment Oskar saw her he wished, in eager emulation of his grandfather Koljaiczek, to dive beneath her and, if possible, never draw another breath outside her sheltered lee.

The tricks I tried to get under my grandmother's skirts! I can't say she disliked having Oskar sitting there. But she hesitated, refused me for the most part, might well have offered refuge to anyone halfway resembling Koljaiczek, but I, who had neither the build nor the ready matchstick of the arsonist, had to invent Trojan horses to enter the fortress.

Oskar sees himself as a real three-year-old playing with a rubber ball, notices that Oskar has accidentally allowed the ball to roll under her skirts, then follows the spherical pretext before his grandmother can see through the ruse and give the ball back. When grownups were around, my grandmother wouldn't tolerate me under her skirts for long. The grownups made fun of her, reminding her with a few often risqué phrases of her bridal day in the autumnal potato fields, till my grandmother, who was not naturally pale in any case, would blush loud and long, which didn't look bad on a sixty-year-old with nearly white hair.

But when my grandmother Anna was alone—which happened rarely, and I saw her less and less often after my poor mama's death, and scarcely at all once she was obliged to give up her booth at the weekly market in Langfuhr—she put up with having me under her potato-colored skirts more readily, more willingly, and for longer periods of time. I didn't even need my silly trick with that even sillier rubber ball to gain admittance. Scooting across the floorboards with my drum, doubling up one leg and pushing off with the other against the furniture, I shoved myself toward the grandmotherly mountain, and having reached its foot, lifted the fourfold garment with my drumsticks, moved quickly underneath, let the curtain fall fourfold, rested quietly for a moment, and, breathing in with all my pores, surrendered myself totally to the pungent smell of rancid butter, which, unaffected by the seasons,
always reigned beneath those four skirts. Only then did Oskar begin to drum. He knew what his grandmother liked to hear, and so I drummed the sounds of October rain, similar to what she must have heard beside the potato-top fire as Koljaiczek ducked in beneath her with the smell of a hotly pursued arsonist. I let a fine, slanting rain fall on the drum till sighs and saints' names sounded above me, and now it's up to you to recognize those sighs and saints' names, last heard in ninety-nine, as my grandmother sat in the rain and Koljaiczek in the dry.

As I waited for Jan Bronski across from the Polish settlement in August of thirty-nine, I often thought of my grandmother. She might have been visiting Aunt Hedwig. Tempting as the thought of sitting beneath her skirts and breathing in the smell of rancid butter was, I still didn't climb the two flights of stairs or ring at the door with the nameplate:
Jan Bronski.
After all, what did Oskar have to offer his grandmother? His drum was battered, his drum had nothing to say, his drum had forgotten what rain sounds like as it falls fine and slanting on a potato field in October. And since his grandmother could only be swayed by a background of autumnal rainfall he stayed outside on Ringstraße, gazing at the streetcars as they approached and receded, jangling their way up and down Heeresanger, all serving the Number Five line.

Was I still waiting for Jan? Hadn't I already given up, wasn't I still standing at my station simply because I could think of no acceptable way to give up? A long wait can be educational. But it can also tempt one to imagine an encounter in such detail that it destroys any chance for a real surprise. Jan surprised me nonetheless. Motivated by the desire to spot him first while he was still unprepared, so I could drum at him on the remnant of my drum, I stood tensely at my station with my sticks at the ready. Without going into long explanations, I planned to make my hopeless situation clear by a loud hue and cry from my drum: five more streetcars, I told myself, three more, this last one, imagined my worst fears in vivid detail, that the Bronskis had been transferred to Modlin or Warsaw at Jan's request, saw him as head postal clerk in Bromberg or Thorn, waited, breaking all my previous oaths, for one last streetcar, and was already turning for home when Oskar was grabbed from behind, a grownup covered his eyes.

I felt soft, pleasingly dry male hands, smelling of expensive soap; I felt Jan Bronski.

As he released me, turned me toward him with a loud laugh, it was too late to demonstrate my desperation on my drum. So I stowed both drumsticks behind the linen suspenders of my knee-length trousers, which, since no one was looking after me at the time, were dirty and frayed at the pockets. My hands now free, I lifted high the drum hanging from a wretched string, high in accusation, high above eye level, high the way his highness Wiehnke lifts high the host at Mass, and could have added, This is My flesh and blood, but said not a word, just lifted high the flayed metal, sought no fundamental transubstantiation or miracle, asked nothing more than that my drum be repaired.

Jan immediately broke off his improper laughter, in which I'd detected nervousness. He saw my drum, which he could hardly miss, looked away from the crumpled tin, sought my blank eyes, still seemingly those of a true three-year-old, saw nothing in them at first but the same empty blue iris twice over, with highlights, reflections, all those things they claim make eyes expressive, then, having realized that my look was in no way different from that of any shiny puddle in the street, gathered all his goodwill, all his tangible memories, and forced himself to rediscover in my eyes those of my mama, admittedly gray but of a similar cast, which, after all, had reflected back everything from goodwill to passion for him over several years. But he may also have been bewildered by some semblance of himself, which still doesn't mean that Jan was my father, or, more precisely, my begetter. For his eyes, Mama's, and my own were all distinguished by the same naively shrewd, radiantly imprudent beauty found in almost all the Bronski faces, including Stephan's, to a lesser degree Marga Bronski's, but above all in those of my grandmother and her brother Vinzent. But for all my black lashes and blue eyes there was no denying a shot of Koljaiczek arsonist blood in me—just think of my glass-slaying song—while it would have been difficult to ascribe any Rhenish Matzerath traits to me at all.

The moment I lifted high the drum and let my eyes take effect, Jan himself, who gladly avoided such questions, would, if asked directly, have had to confess: his mother Agnes is looking at me. Or perhaps I'm looking at myself. His mother and I had far too much in common. Then again my uncle Koljaiczek might be looking at me, who's in America or at the bottom of the sea. Matzerath's the only one who's not looking at me, and that's just as well.

Jan took the drum from me, turned it about, tapped it. He, an impractical fellow who couldn't even sharpen a pencil properly, assumed the air of a man who knew something about repairing tin drums, obviously reached some decision, which he seldom did, took me by the hand—which surprised me, for I wasn't in all that big a hurry—crossed the Ringstraße with me, reached the streetcar island at Heeresanger still holding my hand, and as the Number Five tram arrived, pulled me with him into the trailer car where smoking was permitted.

As Oskar suspected, we were heading into the city, to Heveliusplatz, to the Polish Post Office and the janitor Kobyella, who had the tools and the skill Oskar's drum had been craving for weeks.

This tram ride might have turned into a peaceful pleasure jaunt had not the Number Five lead car and trailer jangled its way toward the city, filled from Max-Halbe-Platz on with tired yet noisy bathers from the seaside resort at Brösen, on the eve of the first of September nineteen thirty-nine. What a late-summer evening would have awaited us, drinking a soft drink through a straw in the Cafe Weitzke after delivering the drum, had not the battleships
Schlesien
and
Schleswig-Holstein
dropped anchor in the harbor mouth opposite Westerplatte and presented their steel hulls, revolving dual turrets, and casemate guns to the red brick wall with the ammunition depot lying beyond. How lovely it would have been to ring at the porter's lodge of the Polish Post Office and entrust an innocent toy drum to the janitor Kobyella for repair, had not the interior of the post office been fitted out for months with armored plates and transformed into a fortress garrison manned by previously innocent postal staff, officials, and mailmen, trained on weekends at Gdingen and Oxhöft.

We were approaching Oliva Gate. Jan Bronski was sweating, staring into the dusty foliage of the trees on Hindenburgallee and smoking more of his gold-tipped cigarettes than his natural thriftiness allowed. Oskar had never seen his presumptive father sweat so, except for the two or three times he had watched him on the sofa with his mama.

But my poor mama was long since dead. So why was Jan Bronski sweating? After noticing that almost every time we came to a tram stop he thought of getting off and then, recalling my presence just as he was about to descend, sat back down only because of me and my drum, I realized he was sweating over the Polish Post Office, which as a civil ser
vant he was required to defend. He'd already fled it once, but then he found me and my scrap-metal drum on the corner of Ringstraße and Heeresanger, decided to return to his civil duty, and dragged me along, though I was neither a civil servant nor fit to defend a post office, and now he sat sweating and smoking. Why didn't he get off again? I certainly would not have stopped him. He was still in the prime of life, not yet forty-five. Blue were his eyes, brown his hair, well manicured his trembling hands, and had he not perspired so pitifully it would have been eau de cologne and not cold sweat that Oskar smelled as he sat beside his presumptive father.

At Holzmarkt we got off and walked down Altstädtischer Graben. A windless late-summer evening. As always toward eight o'clock, the bells of the Altstadt bronzed the sky. Chimes sent pigeons up in clouds: "Be true and upright to the grave." It was beautiful and made you want to cry. But all about was laughter. Women with sunburned children, terrycloth bathrobes, brightly colored beach balls and toy sailboats, descended from trams bearing freshly bathed multitudes from the seaside resorts of Glettkau and Heubude. Drowsy girls licked raspberry ice cream with lithe tongues. A fifteen-year-old dropped her cone, bent to retrieve it, then hesitated, abandoned the melting delicacy to the pavement and the soles of future passersby; soon she would be one of the grownups and no longer lick ice cream in the street.