The Tin Drum (39 page)

The Number Nine rolled to a stop. The conductor called out Saspe. I stared fixedly past Maria toward Brôsen, where the oncoming tram grew slowly larger as it crept toward us. Don't let your eyes wander. What was there to see anyway? Twisted beach pines, ornate rusted iron, a jumble of loose gravestones whose inscriptions only beach thistles and wild oats could read. Better to look out the open window and upward: there
they were, droning overhead, the fat Ju 52s, as only tri-engine planes or very fat flies could drone in a cloudless July sky.

We set off, jingling and jangling, and the other tram blocked our view. Just past the trailing car my head turned of its own accord: I caught the whole rundown cemetery, including a portion of the north wall with a noticeably white patch that lay in shadow, but was still extremely embarrassing...

And then we were past it, we approached Brösen, and I looked at Maria again. She filled out a light, flowery summer dress. About her softly glowing neck, on her well-padded collarbone, lay a necklace of antique red wooden cherries, all the same size and looking ready to burst. Was it my imagination, or did I actually smell it? Oskar leaned forward slightly—Maria was taking her vanilla scent along with her to the Baltic—took a deep breath of the fragrance, and instantly vanquished the moldering Jan Bronski. The defense of the Polish Post Office had receded into history before the flesh had even fallen from the defenders' bones. Oskar, the survivor, had totally different smells in his nostrils from those of his once so elegant and now crumbling presumptive father.

In Brösen Maria bought a pound of cherries, took me by the hand—she knew that Oskar allowed her alone to do this—and led us through the stand of beach pines to the bathhouse. In spite of my nearly sixteen years—the bath attendant had no eye for that—I was allowed into the women's side. Water: eighteen degrees centigrade; air: twenty-six; wind: east—continued fair, stood on the black slate next to a poster for the Lifesavers' Association showing various techniques for artificial respiration accompanied by clumsy, old-fashioned drawings. All of the drowned were wearing striped bathing suits, the lifesavers wore mustaches, straw hats floated on treacherously dangerous waters.

The barefoot bath attendant led the way. She wore a cord around her body like a penitent, and from the cord hung a mighty key that unlocked all the cabins. Boardwalks. The railings of the walks. A rough coconut-fiber runner outside all the cabins. We were given cabin 53. The wood of the cabin was warm, dry, of a natural bluish white color I'd call blind. Beside the cabin window, a mirror that no longer took itself seriously.

Oskar had to undress first. I did this with my face to the wall, ac
cepting help only reluctantly. Then Maria turned me around with her practical firm grip, held out my new bathing suit, and forced me ruthlessly into the tight-fitting wool. No sooner had she buttoned my shoulder straps than she lifted me up onto the wooden bench against the back wall of the cabin, put the drum and drumsticks down on my lap, and began to undress with rapid, energetic movements.

At first I drummed a little and counted the knotholes in the floorboards. Then I stopped drumming and counting. I still don't know why Maria was whistling to herself with comically pursed lips as she stepped from her shoes, two high notes, two low notes as she stripped off her socks, whistled like a beer-truck driver, removed her flowered dress, whistled as she hung her slip over the dress, let her bra fall, still straining to whistle but without finding a tune as she pulled her underpants, which were actually gym shorts, down to her knees, let them fall to her ankles, stepped from her rolled-up shorts, and kicked them off into a corner with her left foot.

Maria frightened Oskar with her hairy triangle. Of course he knew from his poor mama that women weren't bald down there, but to him Maria wasn't a woman in the sense in which his mama had shown herself to be a woman with Matzerath or Jan Bronski.

And I recognized her at once. Rage, shame, indignation, disappointment, and a half-comic, half-painful incipient stiffening of the little watering can under my bathing suit made me forget both drum and drumsticks in favor of a newly grown stick.

Oskar jumped up and flung himself at Maria. She caught him with her hair. His face was now overgrown. It grew between his lips. Maria laughed and tried to push him away. But I was drawing more and more of her in, tracking down that vanilla scent. Maria was still laughing. She even let me reach her vanilla, it seemed to amuse her, for she didn't stop laughing. Only when my legs slipped and I hurt her—for I didn't let go of her hair, or it wouldn't let go of me—only when the vanilla brought tears to my eyes, only when I tasted mushrooms or something else sharp and pungent, but no longer vanilla, only when this earthy smell that Maria concealed behind the vanilla nailed the moldering Jan Bronski to my brow and infected me for all time with the taste of the transient nature of all things—only then did I let go of her.

Oskar slid down onto the blind-colored boards of the bathhouse cabin and was still crying as Maria, who was laughing again, lifted him up into her arms, caressed him, and pressed him to her necklace of wooden cherries, the only thing she was still wearing.

Shaking her head, she picked her hairs from my lips and said in surprise, "You are such a little rascal! Head for it but don't know what it is, and then you cry."

Do you know what that is? It came in little flat packets and you could buy it all year round. In our shop my mama sold a vomit-green packet of woodruff-flavored fizz powder. A packet that borrowed its color from half-ripened oranges styled itself fizz powder with orange flavor. You could get raspberry too, and another one that hissed, bubbled, and acted excited when you added clear tap water, and if you drank it before it settled down, it tasted very faintly and remotely of lemon, was lemon-colored in the glass, but even more so: an artificial yellow masquerading as poison.

What else was shown on the little packet besides its flavor? All-Natural Product, it said—Patented—Keep Dry—and below a dotted line: Tear Here.

Where else could you buy fizz powder? It wasn't sold just in my mama's shop, every grocery store in town—except for Kaisers-Kaffee and the Konsum cooperatives—stocked the little powder. A packet cost three pfennigs there and at any refreshment stand.

Maria and I got our fizz powder free. But when we couldn't wait till we got home, we would wind up paying three pfennigs at some grocery store or refreshment stand, or even six, since we could never get enough of it and sometimes asked for two packets.

Who started with the fizz powder? That old lovers' quarrel. I say Maria started it. Maria never claimed Oskar did. She left the question open, found such interrogations painful, and if pressed might well have said, "The fizz powder started it."

Of course everyone will say Maria was right. Oskar alone could not accept the verdict. I could never admit to myself that a little three
pfennig packet of fizz powder had managed to seduce Oskar. I was sixteen years old and set great store by declaring myself to blame, or possibly Maria, but certainly not fizz powder you had to keep dry.

It began a few days after my birthday. According to the calendar, the bathing season was drawing to a close. The weather, however, would hear nothing of September. After a rainy August, summer was showing its mettle; its belated accomplishments could be read on the board nailed up beside the Lifesavers' Association poster in the bathing attendant's cabin—air: twenty-nine degrees centigrade; water: twenty; wind: southeast; mostly fair.

While Fritz Truczinski was writing postcards as an airman second class in the Luftwaffe from Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Brussels—the fellow was always traveling on official business—Maria and I managed to acquire a bit of a tan. In July we had our regular little spot by the sun shield in the family area. Since Maria was never safe there from the awkward horseplay of senior boys from the Conradinum in their red gym shorts and the boring, long-winded declarations of love of a student from the Petri School, we abandoned the family area in mid-August and found a quieter spot near the water in the women's area, where fat ladies, short of breath and wheezing like the short-lived waves of the Baltic, ventured into the water up to the varicose veins at the back of their knees, where little urchins, naked and badly behaved, struggled against fate: that is, saw how high they could pile sand towers before they collapsed.

The women's area: when women are by themselves and think they're unobserved, a young man of the kind that Oskar knew how to keep hidden back then should keep his eyes closed rather than become an unwilling witness to unabashed womanhood.

We lay in the sand. Maria in her green bathing suit trimmed in red, I having adjusted to my blue. The sand slept, the sea slept, the shells were crushed and not listening. Amber, which allegedly keeps you awake, was off somewhere else, the wind, from the southeast as the weather-board said, fell slowly asleep, the broad expanse of sky, which had surely overexerted itself, could not stop yawning; Maria and I were somewhat tired ourselves, we'd already been in the water, had eaten after, not before, going in. Now our still-moist cherry pits lay on the beach beside last year's dried-white, weightless ones.

At the sight of so much transience, Oskar let the sand with its year-old, thousand-year-old, and still-oh-so-young cherry pits trickle onto his drum as if through an hourglass, and tried to enter into the role of Death playing with bones. Beneath Maria's warm, sleepy flesh I pictured parts of her surely wide-awake skeleton, relished the gap between ulna and radius, played counting games up and down her spine, poked through both holes in her hipbones, and amused myself with the base of her sternum.

Despite all the fun I was having as Death with a beach-sand hourglass, Maria stirred. She reached blindly into the beach bag, relying solely on touch, and looked for something while I poured the rest of the sand with the last of the cherry pits onto the drum, which was already half-covered. When Maria didn't find what she was looking for, probably her harmonica, she turned the bag inside out; a moment later something lay on the beach towel, but it wasn't her harmonica—it was a packet of woodruff fizz powder.

Maria acted surprised. And perhaps she really was. I was certainly surprised and kept asking myself, still ask myself today: How did fizz powder, this cheap stuff bought only by children of temporary dock-workers and the unemployed, because they had no money for regular soft drinks, how did this slow-selling article get into our beach bag?

While Oskar was still mulling this over, Maria grew thirsty. Even I, interrupting my thoughts, had to admit against my will to an urgent thirst. We had no cup, and drinking water was at least thirty-five strides away if Maria went for it, and nearly fifty if I did. Borrowing a cup from the bathhouse attendant and turning on the faucet by the cabin meant making your way between mounds of flesh gleaming with Nivea oil lying on their backs or bellies, and enduring the burning sand.

We both dreaded the trip, so we left the packet lying there on the beach towel. Finally I picked it up before Maria showed any signs of doing so. But Oskar put it back on the towel so Maria could take it. But Maria didn't take it. So I took it and gave it to Maria. Maria gave it back to Oskar. I thanked her and made a present of it to her. But she wasn't accepting any presents from Oskar. I had to put it back on the towel. It lay there a long time without stirring.

Oskar wishes to make clear that it was Maria who, after an awkward pause, picked up the packet. Not only that: she tore off a strip of paper
right on the dotted line where it said
Tear Here.
Then she held the open packet out to me. This time I was the one who declined with thanks. Maria managed to feel hurt. She replaced the open packet firmly and resolutely on the towel. What was I to do except pick it up myself before any sand got into it, and offer it to Maria.

Oskar wishes to make clear that it was Maria who made one finger disappear into the opening of the packet, who coaxed it out again and held it up vertically for inspection: something bluish white appeared on the tip of her finger, fizz powder. Of course I took it. Though it made my nose prickle, my face managed to mirror pleasure at the taste. It was Maria who cupped her hand. And Oskar couldn't avoid sprinkling a little fizz powder into that pink bowl. She didn't know what to do with the little heap. The mound in her palm was too new to her, too amazing. Then I leaned forward, gathered all my saliva, added it to the fizz powder, did it again, and didn't lean back till I had no more spittle left.

In Maria's hand a hissing and foaming set in. The woodruff erupted like a volcano. The greenish rage of who knew what native tribe was boiling over. Something was going on that Maria had neither seen nor probably ever felt before; her hand twitched, trembled, tried to fly away, for woodruff nipped at her, woodruff penetrated her skin, woodruff excited her, gave her a feeling, a feeling, a feeling...

The green grew greener, but Maria grew red, brought her hand to her mouth, licked her palm with her long tongue, again and again, and so frantically it seemed to Oskar that her tongue, instead of stilling the woodruff feeling that stirred her so, was intensifying it to the limit, perhaps even past the limit, normally set for any feeling.

Then the feeling ebbed. Maria giggled, looked around to make sure there were no witnesses to the woodruff, and seeing only listless Nivea-brown sea cows in bathing suits, she sank to the beach towel; her blush of shame gradually faded against its ever so white surface.

The seaside air that noonday hour might even have lulled Oskar to sleep had not Maria straightened up a brief half-hour later and dared to reach again for the fizz powder packet, which was still half-full. I don't know if she struggled with herself before pouring the rest of the powder into that hollow hand which was no longer a stranger to the effects of woodruff. For about as long as it takes a man to polish his glasses, she held the packet in her right hand, and opposite it, its mo
tionless counterpart, the little pink bowl of her left hand. Not that she directed her gaze at the packet or her hollow hand, or let it wander back and forth between half-full and empty; Maria stared straight between the two, darkly and sternly. But it was soon evident how much weaker that stern look was than the half-full packet. The packet approached the hollow hand, the hand drew near the packet, her gaze lost its sternness sprinkled with melancholy, took on an aroused curiosity, and then was simply aroused. With painstakingly feigned indifference, Maria heaped the rest of the woodruff fizz powder in the well-padded palm of her hand, which was dry in spite of the heat, dropped the packet and her indifference, propped up her full hand with the one now free, let her gray eyes linger for a time on the powder, then looked at me, gazed at me grayly, her gray eyes demanding something of me, she wanted my spit, why didn't she use her own, Oskar had hardly any left, she surely had much more, spittle doesn't renew itself that quickly, she should use her own please, it was just as good, if not better, and anyway she surely had more than I did, I couldn't come up with more that fast, and she was bigger than Oskar.