The Tin Drum (34 page)

One of the armored scout cars—I think it was the "Ostmark"—was just rolling toward the post office again from Rittergasse, when my uncle Jan, who'd been totally lifeless for some time, shoved his right leg up to the loophole and lifted it in hopes that the scout car might spot it and take a shot at it, or that some stray bullet would take pity on him and graze his calf or heel, providing the wound that lets a soldier retreat with an exaggerated limp.

This leg posture must have been hard for Jan Bronski to hold for very long. He was forced to abandon it from time to time. Not until he rolled onto his back did he find sufficient strength, propping his leg up with both hands at the knee, to offer calf and heel more steadily, and with more hope of success, to aimed or errant bullets.

No matter how deeply I sympathized with Jan, both then and today, I could well understand Kobyella's rage when he saw his superior, Postal Clerk Jan Bronski, in such a miserable and desperate posture. With one leap the janitor was on his feet, with the second beside us, over us, had grabbed hold, seized Jan's jacket and with the jacket Jan, raised the bundle up, smashed it down, grabbed it again, banged it down, hauled off with his left, held back with his right, hauled off with his right, then dropped his left, caught hold of his right with his left in flight, made one great fist of left and right, drew back for the one great blow that would lay my uncle Jan Bronski low, lay Oskar's presumptive father low—when something whirred, as angel wings may whir to honor God, something sang, as radios sing through the ether, but did not strike Jan Bronski, struck Kobyella instead, a shell had delivered a colossal joke and bricks now laughed themselves to chips, shards to dust, plaster to flour, wood found its ax, the whole droll nursery hopped on one leg, Käthe Kruse dolls split their sides, the rocking horse bolted and longed for a rider to throw, faulty structures arose from Märklin block boxes, Polish uhlans
occupied all four corners of the room—and finally the toy rack toppled: the glockenspiel rang Easter in, the accordion cried out, the trumpet may have blown something or other, all sounded their keynotes at once, like an orchestra tuning up; screaming, splitting, neighing, ringing, smashing, bursting, gnashing, screeching, chirping on high yet unearthing our deepest foundations below. But finding myself, as befits a three-year-old, in the guardian-angel corner of the nursery right under the window when the shell struck, the drum, the drum made of tin fell to me—no holes at all and scarcely a crack, Oskar's new tin drum.

When I looked up from my newly won prize, which had rolled to my feet in the blink of an eye, I saw I'd have to help Jan Bronski. He was having trouble shifting the janitor's heavy body off him. At first I thought Jan had been hit too, for he was whimpering very realistically. When we finally managed to roll Kobyella, whose moans were equally realistic, to one side, Jan's bodily injuries proved negligible—splintered glass had scratched his right cheek and the back of one hand. A quick comparison allowed me to note that my presumptive father's blood was paler than the janitor's, whose trousers were stained at the thighs with a dark sap.

It was of course no longer clear who had ripped and twisted Jan's elegant gray jacket. Was it Kobyella or the shell? It hung in tatters from his shoulders, the lining had been loosened, the buttons freed, the seams split, and the pockets turned inside out.

I hope you'll excuse my poor Jan Bronski for scraping together everything that had been shaken from his pockets by that rough storm before dragging Kobyella out of the nursery with my help. He recovered his comb, the photos of his loved ones, including a half-length portrait of my poor mama; his coin purse hadn't even come open. The only difficulty he had, and one that was not without its dangers, since the protective sandbags had been partly swept away, was gathering up the skat cards scattered all over the room; he wanted all thirty-two of them, and was desperately unhappy when he couldn't find the thirty-second; when Oskar found it, found it between two devastated dollhouses, and handed it to him, he smiled, even though it was the lowly seven of spades.

After we'd dragged Kobyella from the nursery and finally got him into the corridor, the janitor found the strength to utter a few words that Jan Bronski managed to make out. "Is everything still there?" he asked
with concern. Jan reached into the man's trousers, between his old man's legs, found a handful, and nodded to Kobyella.

We were all happy: Kobyella had kept his pride, Jan Bronski had found all thirty-two skat cards, including the seven of spades, and Oskar had a new drum that banged against his knee at every step while Jan and a man Jan called Viktor carried the janitor, weakened by loss of blood, down one floor and into the dead-letter room.

Viktor Weluhn helped us move the janitor, who, though steadily losing blood, grew heavier and heavier. Viktor, who was very nearsighted, still had his glasses at the time and didn't stumble on the stone steps. Strange as it sounds for someone as nearsighted as Viktor, he delivered money for the post office. Today, whenever Viktor's name comes up, I call him poor Viktor. Just as my mama became my poor mama after a family outing to the harbor jetty, Viktor, who delivered money orders, became poor Viktor when he lost his glasses—though other factors came into play as well.

"Have you ever run into poor Viktor again?" I always ask my friend Vittlar on Visitors Day. But since that streetcar ride from Flingern to Gerresheim—I'll speak of that later on—Viktor Weluhn has been lost to us. We can only hope that the bloodhounds who are after him are having an equally difficult time, that he's found his glasses or at least a suitable substitute and is now delivering money orders as before, if not for the Polish Post Office, then for the Federal Republic, nearsighted but bespectacled, blessing people with colored banknotes and hard coins.

"Isn't it awful?" panted Jan, who had grabbed Kobyella on his left.

"And what if the English and the French don't come?" said Viktor with concern, bearing the janitorial load on the right.

"They'll come all right. I heard Rydz-Śmigły just yesterday on the radio saying we have their pledge: if it kicks off, the whole of France will rise as one man." Jan had difficulty maintaining his conviction to the end of the sentence, for though the sight of his own blood on the back of his scratched hand did not in itself call the Polish-French treaty into question, it did raise the possibility that he might bleed to death before
the whole of France rose up as one man and, true to their pledge, overran the Siegfried Line.

"I'm sure they're on their way right now. And the English fleet must be plowing through the Baltic this very minute!" Viktor Weluhn, who loved strong, ringing phrases, paused on the stairs with the wounded body of the janitor draped over his right shoulder, threw one hand in the air on the left as if he were on stage, and let all five fingers speak: "Come, you proud and mighty Britons!"

While the two men slowly bore Kobyella toward the emergency aid station, earnestly deliberating Polish-French-English relations, Oskar mentally leafed through Gretchen Schemer's books for relevant passages. Keyser's
History of the City of Danzig:
"During the Franco-German War of eighteen-seventy, on the afternoon of the twenty-first of August, four French warships entered Danzig harbor, crossed the roads, and trained their guns on the harbor and the city; the following night, however, the propeller-driven corvette
Nymphe
under Lieutenant-Commander Weickmann forced the formation, which had anchored in the small inner bay at Putzig, to withdraw."

Shortly before we arrived at the dead-letter room on the first floor, I reached a troubling conclusion, which was later to be confirmed: while the Polish Post Office and the whole plain of Poland was under assault, the English home fleet lay more or less comfortably sheltered in some firth in northern Scotland; the grand army of France was still dawdling over lunch, confident that a few scouting patrols in the general vicinity of the Maginot Line had fulfilled the Franco-Polish mutual-defense treaty.

Outside the mailroom-cum-emergency-aid station we were intercepted by Dr. Michon, still wearing his steel helmet, the silk handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, and a delegate from Warsaw, a man by the name of Konrad. Jan Bronski's fear was immediately activated across a broad spectrum, simulating the most serious of wounds. While Viktor Weluhn, who was not wounded, and equipped with his glasses should make a good marksman, was sent down to the main hall, we were given permission to enter the windowless room, dimly lit by tallow candles since the Municipal Power Plant of Danzig was no longer prepared to provide current to the Polish Post Office.

Dr. Michon, who had his doubts about Jan's wounds but no high
opinion of Jan's military prowess in defense of the post office either, ordered his postal clerk to watch over the wounded men in a sort of quasi-medical capacity, and—he patted me briefly, and with what I sensed was a touch of despair—urged him to keep an eye on me too, lest the child wander into the action.

The field howitzer scored a hit on the main hall below. We were tossed about like dice. Michon the steel helmet, Konrad the Warsaw delegate, and Weluhn the money-order man raced to their battle stations. Jan and I found ourselves with seven or eight wounded men inside the sealed-off room where the sounds of combat were muffled. The candles hardly flickered when the howitzer got down to business outside. It was quiet in spite of the moaning around us, or perhaps because of it. With awkward haste Jan wrapped strips of torn sheets around Kobyella's thighs, then started to tend to himself; but my uncle's cheek and the back of his hand had stopped bleeding. The cuts maintained a crusty silence, but they must have been painful enough to feed Jan's fear, which found no outlet in the stuffy, low-ceilinged room. Nervously he searched through his pockets and found the full deck. Then, till the final collapse of our defenses, we played skat.

Thirty-two cards were shuffled, cut, dealt, and played. Since all the mail baskets were already occupied by casualties, we propped Kobyella against a basket, and then, when he kept sliding down, bound him to it with another wounded man's suspenders, sat him up at attention, and forbade him to drop his cards, for we needed Kobyella. How could we have done without a third for skat? Those men in the mail baskets could hardly tell black from red and had lost all interest in games. In fact Kobyella didn't feel much like skat either. All he wanted was to lie down. Just leave it to chance, let things slide, that's what he wanted. To witness the final demolition work with his janitorial hands idle for once, as he closed his lashless lids. But we weren't about to put up with such fatalism, we bound him fast, forced him to play third, while Oskar played second—and no one was surprised at all that the toddler could play skat.

When I lent my voice to grownup speech for the first time and said "Eighteen!" Jan did, it's true, emerge from behind his cards and give me a brief and incredibly blue look, then nodded, to which I responded, "Twenty?" Jan didn't miss a beat: "Keep going." "Two!" I said, "And three?
Twenty-four?" Jan gave up: "Pass." And Kobyella? He'd nearly collapsed in spite of the suspenders. But we hoisted him back up and waited for the noise of a shell that had struck somewhere far from our card room to die away so Jan could hiss into the sudden stillness, "Twenty-four, Kobyella! Didn't you hear the boy's bid?"

I don't know from where or what depths the janitor surfaced. It looked as if he was raising his eyelids with a winch. At last his watery gaze strayed over the ten cards that Jan had discreetly pressed into his hand, taking care not to peek at them.

"Pass," said Kobyella. That is, we read it from his lips, which were too dry for speech.

I played a club single. Jan, who was playing contra, had to shout at the janitor and give him a sharp, good-natured poke in the ribs during the early tricks to get him to pull himself together and follow suit; first I drew all the trumps from the two of them, sacrificed my king of clubs, which Jan took with the jack of spades, but since I was void in diamonds I trumped Jan's ace of diamonds, regained the lead, and captured his ten with the jack of hearts—Kobyella discarded the nine of diamonds and there I sat with a run of hearts that was good: one-hand-two-contra-three-schneider-four-times-clubs-is-forty-eight-makes-twelve-pfennigs. It wasn't till the next hand—I risked a more than risky grand without two—when Kobyella, who had both jacks but stopped bidding at thirty-three, took my jack of diamonds with the jack of clubs, that the game began to liven up. The janitor, emboldened, it seemed, by having taken a trick, came back with the ace of diamonds, I had to follow suit, Jan snapped down the ten, Kobyella raked in the cards, pulled out his king, I should have trumped but didn't, discarded the eight of clubs instead, Jan threw on whatever points he could, even led a ten of spades, I trumped in, and damned if Kobyella didn't top it with his jack of spades, which I'd forgotten or thought Jan had, but it was Kobyella who overtrumped me and guffawed, came back with a spade, of course, I had to discard something, Jan threw on what points he could, and they finally led a heart to me, but it was far too late: I'd counted fifty-two in all the back and forth: without-two-one-hand-three-times-grand-minus-sixty-one-hundred-twenty-makes-thirty-pfennigs. Jan loaned me two gulden in change and I paid up, but in spite of having won the hand, Kobyella collapsed a second time, didn't take his money, and even the
first antitank shell to strike the staircase, which landed just then, didn't mean a thing to the janitor, though it was his staircase, which he'd never tired of cleaning and polishing over the years.

Fear overcame Jan again, however, as the door to our mailroom rattled and the flames of the tallow candles had no idea what was happening to them or which way to head. Even when relative calm returned to the staircase and the next antitank shell exploded some distance away, against the facade, Jan Bronski shuffled as if he'd gone crazy and misdealt twice, but I let it pass. As long as they were firing outside, Jan was unreceptive to any comment, he was overwrought, failed to follow suit, even forgot to discard the skat, and constantly kept one of his small, well-formed, sensuously fleshy ears trained outside while we waited impatiently for him to play. Though Jan's attention to the game was rapidly losing focus, Kobyella, when he wasn't about to collapse and needed a poke in the ribs, was always in it. His play wasn't nearly as bad as the state he was in. He never collapsed till he'd won a hand or spoiled a grand for Jan or me. Winning or losing no longer mattered to him. He was playing for the game itself. And while we counted and re-counted the score, Kobyella the janitor hung there at an angle in his borrowed suspenders, giving no sign of life but the terrifying spasms of his Adam's apple.