The Tin Drum (33 page)

While useless and abstract speculations of this sort hampered my discretionary actions outside the half-open door to the mailroom, machine-gun fire could be heard for the first time in the courtyard. As I had predicted, the Home Guard was launching its initial attack from Police Headquarters on Schneidemühlengasse. Soon thereafter we were
all knocked off our feet: the Home Guard had managed to blow in the door to the parcels area at the head of the loading ramp. A moment later they were in the parcel room, then in the parcel-post reception area, and the door to the corridor leading to the main hall stood open.

The men who had carried the wounded man upstairs and bedded him down in the mail basket that sheltered my drum rushed out; others followed. From the noise I gathered that they were fighting in the corridor on the ground floor, then in the parcel-post reception area. The Home Guard was forced to withdraw.

Hesitantly at first, then with more confidence, Oskar entered the dead-letter room. The wounded man's face was grayish yellow; he was baring his teeth and working his eyeballs behind his closed lids. He spat thread-trailing blood. But since his head was hanging over the edge of the mail basket, there was little danger that he would soil the letters. Oskar had to stand on tiptoe to reach inside the basket. The man's bottom bore down heavily on the exact spot where his drum was buried. Finally Oskar managed, gingerly at first, taking care not to hurt the wounded man or the letters, then pulling harder, in the end yanking and tearing them to pieces, to drag several dozen envelopes from under the groaning man.

Today let me say that I had just felt the rim of my drum when men came storming up the stairs and down the corridor. They were coming back, had driven the Home Guard from the parcel room, were at least momentarily the victors; I heard them laughing.

Hidden behind one of the mail baskets, I waited near the door till they were at the wounded man's side. At first shouting and gesticulating, then cursing softly, they bandaged him.

Two antitank shells struck home, level with the main hall—another two, then silence. The salvos of the battleships in the Free Port, across from the Westerplatte, rolled in the distance, grumbling on good-naturedly at a steady pace—you got used to it.

Unnoticed by the men with the wounded clerk, I slipped out of the dead-letter room, left my drum in the lurch, and resumed my search for Jan, my presumptive father and uncle, and for Kobyella the janitor.

On the second floor was the official residence of Postmaster General Naczelnik, who seemed to have sent his family off to Bromberg or War
saw just in time. After searching through a few storerooms on the courtyard side, I found Jan and Kobyella in the nursery of Naczelnik's flat.

A bright, pleasant room with cheery wallpaper, which had unfortunately been wounded here and there by stray bullets. In more peaceful times one could have stood at the double windows enjoying the view onto Heveliusplatz. A rocking horse, as yet unwounded, a variety of balls, a medieval castle full of toppled tin soldiers, on foot and on horseback, an open cardboard box full of railroad tracks and miniature boxcars, several dolls looking more or less the worse for wear, dollhouses in which disorder reigned—in short, a plethora of toys revealed that Postmaster General Naczelnik must have been the father of two thoroughly spoiled children, a boy and a girl. How fortunate that the brats had been evacuated to Warsaw, that I was spared an encounter with a pair of siblings of the sort I already knew from the Bronskis. A gentle schadenfreude ran through me as I imagined how painful it must have been for the postmaster general's little rascal to bid farewell to his childhood paradise full of tin soldiers. Perhaps he stuck a few uhlans in his pocket to reinforce the Polish cavalry later on at the battle for Modlin Fortress.

Oskar is talking too much about tin soldiers and still can't squeeze his way past a confession: on the top shelf of a rack for toys, picture books, and parlor games stood a row of toy musical instruments. A honey-yellow trumpet stood soundlessly beside a glockenspiel that was participating in the hostilities, that is, it chimed every time a shell struck. On the outer right a brightly painted accordion dangled crookedly. The parents had even been crazy enough to give their offspring a real little violin with four real strings. Next to the violin, displaying its white, undamaged circle, held in place by a few building blocks so it wouldn't roll off, stood—you won't believe it—a red and white lacquered tin drum.

I didn't even try to pull the drum down from the rack on my own. Oskar was well aware of his limited reach, and in cases where his gnome-like stature resulted in helplessness, took the liberty of soliciting favors from grownups.

Jan Bronski and Kobyella lay behind sandbags that blocked the lower third of the tall windows. Jan had taken the left window. Kobyella was on the right. I realized immediately that the janitor would have no time
to retrieve and repair my drum, which lay beneath the wounded man who was spitting blood, and was undoubtedly being crushed flat, for Kobyella was fully occupied: he was firing his rifle at regular intervals through a gap in the sandbag wall across Heveliusplatz toward the corner of Schneidemühlengasse, where an antitank gun had taken up position just short of Radaune Bridge.

Jan lay cowering, hiding his head and trembling. I recognized him only by his elegant dark gray suit, now dusted with chalk and sand. The lace of his right shoe, gray as well, had come undone. I bent down and tied it in a bow for him. As I pulled the knot tight, Jan twitched, raised his far too blue eyes above his left sleeve and turned an incredibly blue and watery gaze upon me. Though not wounded, as Oskar ascertained with a quick inspection, he was weeping silently. Jan Bronski was frightened. I ignored his blubbering, pointed toward the tin drum of Naczelnik's evacuated son, and with crystal-clear gestures asked Jan to make his way, as carefully as possible, taking advantage of the dead corner of the nursery, to the rack and hand the drum down to me. My uncle didn't understand. My presumptive father didn't see what I was driving at. My poor mama's lover was so busy with his fear, so filled with it, that my pleading gestures had no effect but to increase that fear. Oskar wanted to scream at him but was worried he might be discovered by Kobyella, who seemed to be listening only to his rifle.

So I lay down with Jan behind the sandbags, pressed myself against him, trying to transfer some portion of my customary sang-froid to my unhappy uncle and presumptive father. Soon he seemed somewhat calmer.

My steady breathing helped to restore a degree of regularity to his pulse. When I then drew Jan's attention once again to Naczelnik junior's tin drum, all too soon of course, by trying to turn his head, slowly and gently but still insistently, in the direction of the wooden rack loaded with toys, Jan still didn't understand. Fear invaded him from head to toe, surged back from toe to head, encountered such strong resistance below, perhaps because of the inner soles, that it tried to vent itself, but was flung back, fleeing past stomach, spleen, and liver, occupying his poor head so that his blue eyes bulged and the whites disclosed intricate little veins that Oskar had never before had the opportunity to observe in the eyes of his presumptive father.

It cost me time and effort to drive my uncle's eyeballs back in place, to make his heart behave itself. All my diligence in the service of aesthetics was in vain, however, when the Home Guard employed their midrange field howitzers for the first time, and firing directly at the iron fence in front of the post office, sighting through a scope, laid it flat with admirable precision, revealing a high level of training, blasting away at the knees of one brick pillar after another until they were forced to kneel once and for all, dragging the iron fence with them. My poor uncle Jan felt the collapse of each of the fifteen to twenty pillars with heart and soul, and was so passionately stricken one would have thought those weren't just pedestals being reduced to dust, but that along with those pedestals, standing upon them, imaginary statues of gods were being cast down, gods my uncle knew intimately and without whom he could not live.

This alone can explain why each time a howitzer hit, Jan responded with a shrill scream that, had it only been shaped and aimed more consciously, would, like my glass-slaying scream, have had the glass-cutting virtue of a diamond. Jan screamed fervently but to no purpose, merely causing Kobyella to throw his bony, disabled janitor's body over toward us, lift his lean, lashless bird's head, and scan our mutual-aid society with watery gray pupils. He shook Jan. Jan whimpered. He unbuttoned his shirt, checked Jan's body hastily for wounds—I almost had to laugh—then, having failed to find the slightest scratch, turned him on his back, seized Jan's chin, jerked it around so hard that it cracked, forced Jan's blue Bronski eyes to endure the watery gray flare of Kobyella's predatory gaze, cursed him in Polish, spraying saliva in his face as he did so, then finally tossed him the rifle that Jan had so far left untouched at his own loophole; the safety hadn't even been released. The rifle butt struck Jan's left kneecap dully. The brief pain, the first physical pain he'd felt after so much mental torment, seemed to do him good, for he seized the rifle, took fright as he felt the cold gunmetal in his fingers and soon thereafter in his blood, but then, urged on by a cursing, coaxing Kobyella, crawled to his post.

For all the tender lushness of his imagination, my presumptive father had such a detailed and realistic concept of war that he found it difficult, even impossible, to be brave. Without surveying the field of fire or selecting a worthwhile target through his loophole, holding his rifle
at an angle and at arm's length, he fired away blindly across the rooftops of the buildings on Heveliusplatz, quickly emptied his magazine, then crawled back empty-handed to hide behind the sandbags. The sheepish look Jan gave the janitor from his hiding place, imploring his forgiveness, seemed that of a sulky and embarrassed schoolboy admitting he hadn't done his homework. Kobyella worked his lower jaw several times, laughed loudly and seemingly uncontrollably, then broke off with frightening abruptness, kicked Jan Bronski, a postal clerk who was after all his superior, three or four times in the shins, drew back his bulky laced shoe to deliver a blow to Jan's ribs, but then, as machine-gun fire ticked off the remaining upper panes of the nursery one by one and roughed up the ceiling, lowered his orthopedic shoe, threw himself behind his rifle, and as if trying to make up for the time he'd wasted on Jan, started firing grouchily and hastily, shot after shot—all of which added to the ammunition consumed during the Second World War.

Hadn't the janitor noticed me? He, who was otherwise so severe and unapproachable, who demanded the sort of respectful distance only disabled war veterans can, allowed me to remain in this drafty den, where the air was so rich in iron. Did Kobyella say to himself: It's a nursery after all, so why shouldn't Oskar stay here and play during lulls in the battle?

I don't know how long we lay that way: I between Jan and the left wall of the room, both of us behind the sandbags, Kobyella behind his rifle, shooting for two. Around ten o'clock the firing died down. Things got so quiet I could hear flies buzzing, caught voices and commands coming from Heveliusplatz, and now and again lent an ear to the dull drone of the battleships at work in the harbor. A clear to partly cloudy September day, the sun coating everything in antique gold, paper-thin, sensitive, yet still hard of hearing. My fifteenth birthday was coming up in a few days. And as I did every year in September, I wanted a tin drum, nothing less than a tin drum; renouncing all the treasures of this world, my mind was set only and forever on a tin drum, lacquered red and white.

Jan didn't stir. Kobyella wheezed so evenly that Oskar assumed he was asleep, taking advantage of the short break in the action for a little nap, for don't all men, even heroes, need a refreshing little nap now and
then? I alone was wide awake and focused on that drum with all the stubbornness of youth. It was hardly as if Naczelnik junior's tin drum had come to mind again just now, amid the growing stillness and dying buzz of a fly wearied by summer. Throughout the fighting, with the roar of battle about him, Oskar had never let it out of his sight. Now, however, an opportunity presented itself which my every thought urged me not to waste.

Oskar got up slowly and, avoiding the shattered glass, moved quietly but single-mindedly toward the wooden rack with the toys, mentally constructing a pedestal of boxes on a nursery chair, tall and stable enough to make him the owner of a brand-new tin drum, when Kobyella's voice and then the janitor's horny hand caught up with me. I pointed to the drum in despair. Kobyella pulled me back. I stretched both arms out toward the drum. The disabled man was already weakening, was about to stretch forth his hand and grant me happiness, when machine-gun fire entered the nursery and antitank shells exploded at the main entrance; Kobyella flung me into the corner with Jan Bronski, flung himself behind his gun, and loaded for a second time while my eyes remained fixed on the tin drum.

There lay Oskar, and Jan Bronski, my sweet blue-eyed uncle, didn't even lift his nose when the bird-head with the clubfoot and the watery eyes with no lashes brushed me aside just short of my goal and shoved me into the corner behind the sandbags. But Oskar didn't cry. Rage bred within me. Fat, bluish white, eyeless maggots multiplied, searching for a worthwhile corpse: What did Poland mean to me? Or the Poles, for that matter? They had their own cavalry. Let them mount up. They kissed the ladies' hands and always realized too late that those weren't the languid fingers of a lady but the unrouged muzzle of a field howitzer. By then she'd already vented her feelings, that virgin from the house of Krupp. She smacked her lips in a poor yet convincing imitation of the sounds of battle heard in weekly newsreels, peppered the main entrance of the post office with inedible exploding bonbons, tried to open a breach, opened a breach through the ruptured main hall and nibbled away at the staircase so no one could go up or down anymore. And her retinue behind the machine guns and in the elegant armored scout cars painted with pretty names like "Ostmark" and "Sudetenland"
just couldn't get enough, rolled back and forth outside the post office, clattering, armored, scouting: two studious and cultured young ladies who wished to visit the castle, but the castle was still closed. Then the spoiled young beauties grew impatient, couldn't wait to get in, began casting lead-gray, penetrating glances, all of the same caliber, toward every chamber of the castle they could see into, making things hot, cold, and uncomfortable for the castle stewards.