The Tin Drum (40 page)

Maria wanted my spit. From the very beginning it was clear that only my spit would do. She kept her demanding gaze trained on me, and I blamed this cruel intransigence on those earlobes, attached, not hanging free. So Oskar swallowed, thought of things that normally made his mouth water, and yet—perhaps it was the sea air, perhaps the salt air, perhaps the salty sea air—my saliva glands failed me, I had to rise, driven by Maria's look, and set out on my way. It was a matter of taking over fifty strides across the hot sand, looking neither left nor right, climbing the even hotter steps to the bathhouse attendant's cabin, turning on the water faucet, angling my head under its open spout, taking a drink, swilling it around, and swallowing, so that Oskar could replenish his spittle.

When I had conquered the stretch between the bathing attendant's cabin and our white towel, as endless and ringed with ghastly sights as that path was, I found Maria lying on her stomach. She had nestled her head in her crossed arms. Her braids lay languid on her round back.

I poked her, for now Oskar had spittle. Maria didn't stir. I poked her again. Not interested. Cautiously I opened her left hand. She didn't resist: the hand was empty, as though it had never seen woodruff. I
straightened the fingers of her right hand: pink was her palm, its lines moist, hot, and empty.

Had Maria used her own spittle after all? Couldn't she wait? Or had she blown the fizz powder away, stifled that feeling before she felt it, rubbed her hand on the beach towel until Maria's familiar little paw resurfaced, with its slightly superstitious Mound of the Moon, its fat Mercury, and its tightly padded Belt of Venus?

We went home right after that, and Oskar will never know if Maria foamed the fizz powder a second time that same day or if it was a few days later that a mixture of fizz powder and my spittle first became, through repetition, a vice we both fell prey to.

It happened by chance, or perhaps chance responding to our wishes, that on the very evening of the beach visit just described—we were eating blueberry soup followed by potato pancakes—Matzerath informed Maria and me, ever so circumspectly, that he had joined a little skat club at his local Party gathering, and that he would be meeting with his new skat brothers, all cell leaders, two evenings a week at Springer's restaurant, and that Selke, the new local group leader, would sit in now and then, which in itself meant he had to go and, unfortunately, leave us by ourselves. Probably the best thing to do would be to billet Oskar at Mother Truczinski's on skat evenings.

Mother Truczinski agreed, since this solution pleased her far more than the one Matzerath had suggested the day before without Maria's knowledge, which was that rather than my staying overnight at Mother Truczinski's, Maria would spend the night with us twice a week and sleep on our sofa.

Up till then Maria had been sleeping in the broad bed where my friend Herbert had formerly lodged his scarred back. That heavy piece of furniture stood in a small back room. Mother Truczinski's bed was in the living room. Guste Truczinski, who still worked as a waitress at the Hotel Eden's snack bar and also lived there, came home occasionally on her days off but seldom spent the night, and when she did she slept on the sofa. But if Fritz Truczinski came home from the front bearing gifts from distant lands, whether on leave or on duty, he slept in Herbert's bed, while Maria slept in Mother Truczinski's bed and the old woman camped on the sofa.

This order of things was disrupted by my demands. At first I was
to bed down on the sofa. I rejected this notion briefly but firmly. Then Mother Truczinski offered to relinquish her old woman's bed and put up with the sofa. Here Maria raised an objection, couldn't bear to see her old mother's nightly rest disturbed by such discomfort, and without wasting words, declared herself prepared to share Herbert's former waiter's bed with me: "Little Oskar and me can fit into one bed. He's just a half-pint anyways."

So, starting the following week, Maria carried my bedclothes twice weekly from our ground-floor flat up two stories and prepared the night's lodging for me and my drum on the left side of her bed. On Matzerath's first skat night nothing at all happened. Herbert's bed seemed huge to me. I lay down first, Maria came in later. She had washed in the kitchen and entered the bedroom in a ridiculously long and old-fashioned starched nightgown. Oskar had expected her to be naked and hairy, and was disappointed at first, but happy even so, since the gown from great-granny's drawer was reminiscent of the white folds of nurse uniforms, and built pleasant bridges to them.

Standing before the chest of drawers, Maria undid her braids, whistling all the while. Whenever Maria dressed or undressed, did or undid her braids, she whistled. Even when she was combing her hair she never tired of squeezing those two notes through her pursed lips, though she never found a tune.

As soon as Maria put down the comb, the whistling stopped. She turned, shook her hair out, and arranged things on her chest of drawers with a few deft movements, which put her in high spirits: she threw a kiss to her mustached father, photographed and retouched in a black ebony frame, then leapt into bed with exaggerated energy, bounced up and down a few times, grabbed the eiderdown on her last bounce, and disappeared up to her chin under the mound, didn't touch me at all as I lay under my own quilt, reached out from under the eiderdown with a round arm from which the sleeve of her gown slid back, felt over her head for the cord to click off the light, found it, clicked it, and only when it was dark, said to me much too loudly, "Good night!"

Maria was soon breathing evenly. I don't think she was pretending, she probably did fall asleep quickly, for the hours of good solid work she put in each day led of necessity to similarly good solid hours of sleep.

For some time Oskar was beset by absorbing images that kept him
awake. In spite of the thick darkness that reigned between the walls and the blackout paper over the window, blond nurses bent over Herbert's scarred back, Crazy Leo's white rumpled shirt turned quite naturally into a seagull that flew away, then smashed in flight against a cemetery wall, which instantly took on a freshly whitewashed look, and so on, and so on. Not until the steadily intensifying, sleepy-making smell of vanilla made the pre-slumber film first flicker, then break, did Oskar's breathing fall into the calm rhythm that Maria's had long since achieved.

Three days later Maria presented an equally demure image of maidenly modesty going to bed. She arrived in her nightgown, whistled as she undid her braids, kept whistling as she combed out her hair, put the comb away, stopped whistling, arranged things on top of the chest of drawers, threw a kiss, made her exaggerated leap into bed, bounced, reached for the eiderdown, and caught sight—I was contemplating her back—caught sight of a little packet—I was admiring her long, lovely hair—discovered something green on the eiderdown—I closed my eyes, waiting for her to grow used to the sight of the fizz powder—then the springs cried out beneath a Maria flopping back down, there was a click, and when I opened my eyes at the click, Oskar confirmed what he already knew: Maria had turned out the light, her breath in the dark was uneven, she had not grown used to the sight of the fizz powder; but the question remained whether the darkness she'd summoned might not have granted the fizz powder an even more intense existence, brought woodruff to full bloom, and ordained a mixture of bubbling carbonate for the night.

I almost think the darkness was on Oskar's side. For after a few minutes—if one can speak of minutes in a pitch-black room—I could make out movements at the head of the bed; Maria was fishing for the cord, the cord bit, and an instant later I was again admiring the long, lovely hair cascading down Maria's sitting nightgown. How steady and yellow shone the light bulb behind its pleated lampshade! The eiderdown still rose plump, turned up, and untouched at the foot of the bed. The little packet atop the mound hadn't dared budge in the darkness. Maria's granny nightshirt rustled, a sleeve of the gown lifted along with its plump little hand, and Oskar gathered spit in his mouth.

Over the following weeks the two of us emptied over a dozen little packets of fizz powder, mostly woodruff flavored, and then when the
woodruff ran out, lemon and raspberry, always following the same routine, using my spittle to make it bubble and provoking a feeling that Maria grew to appreciate more and more. I became skilled in gathering saliva, used tricks to make my mouth water quickly and copiously, and was soon able, with the contents of a single packet of fizz powder, to bestow the sensation Maria longed for three times in rapid succession.

Maria was pleased with Oskar, hugged him sometimes, even kissed him two or three times after a fizz-powder pleasuring, somewhere on his face; then Oskar would hear her giggle briefly in the darkness and quickly fall asleep.

I was finding it increasingly difficult to fall asleep. I was a sixteen-year-old with a lively imagination and a sleep-depriving urge to endow my love for Maria with even more amazing possibilities than those slumbering in the fizz powder, which, awakened by my spittle, invariably aroused the same sensation.

Oskar's meditations were not confined to the period after the light clicked off. During the day I brooded behind my drum, leafed through my well-thumbed Rasputin excerpts, recalled earlier educational orgies between Gretchen Scheffler and my poor mama, consulted Goethe, whose
Elective Affinities
I had excerpted as I had Rasputin, took on the faith healer's animal drive, tempered it with the noble poet's world-embracing feel for nature, gave Maria first the traits of the Tsarina, then the Grand Duchess Anastasia, chose ladies from Rasputin's retinue of eccentric nobles, but soon, repelled by so much animal passion, saw Maria take on the celestial transparency of an Ottilie, or as Charlotte, masking a disciplined, fully mastered passion. Oskar saw himself by turns as Rasputin, then as his murderer, often as the Captain, more rarely as Charlotte's vacillating husband, and once—I have to admit—as a genius with the well-known features of Goethe, hovering over a sleeping Maria.

Strangely enough, I received more inspiration from literature than from actual, naked life. Jan Bronski, for example, whom I'd seen tilling the flesh of my poor mama often enough, taught me next to nothing. Though I knew that this tangle consisting by turns of Mama and Jan or Matzerath and Mama—sighing, straining, then moaning in exhaustion, falling apart, trailing sticky threads—meant love, Oskar still couldn't believe that love was love, and moved by love sought other loves, yet al
ways returned to that same tangle-love, hated that love till he'd practiced that love himself and was forced to defend it in his own eyes as the only true and possible love.

Maria took the fizz powder lying down. Since her legs generally started twitching and fidgeting the moment the powder started to fizz, her nightgown often rode high up her thighs after the first sensation. By the second fizzing the gown had usually managed to climb over her belly and roll up under her breasts. Spontaneously, without having had a chance to consult Goethe or Rasputin beforehand, after weeks of filling her left hand, I shook the rest of the raspberry fizz-powder packet into her hollow bellybutton and let my spittle flow onto it before she could protest, and as the crater started to seethe, Maria lost track of any arguments she might have used in protest, for the seething, bubbling bellybutton had obvious advantages over her hollow hand. It was still the same fizz powder, my spittle was still my spittle, and the feeling had not changed, it was simply more intense, much more intense. The sensation reached such a pitch that Maria could barely stand it. She bent over and tried to switch off the fizzing raspberry in her little bellybutton pot with her tongue, just as she used to slay the woodruff in her hollow hand when it had done its duty, but her tongue wasn't long enough; her bellybutton was farther away than Africa or Tierra del Fuego. But Maria's bellybutton was right beside me, and I sank my tongue into it, went looking for raspberries and found more and more, grew so lost in picking them that I wandered toward regions where no wardens checked licenses to pick berries, felt duty-bound to pluck each and every raspberry, had eyes, mind, heart, ears, and nose only for raspberries, was so intent on raspberries that Oskar merely noted in passing: Maria is pleased by your berry-picking zeal. That's why she's clicked off the light. That's why she's fallen asleep so trustingly and lets you keep on looking; for Maria was rich in raspberries.

And when I found no more, I found, as if by chance, mushrooms in other places. And since they grew more deeply hidden under moss, my tongue failed, and I grew an eleventh finger, since my ten fingers failed too. And so Oskar acquired a third drumstick—he was old enough for it. And I drummed not on tin but on moss. And I no longer knew: am I drumming? Is it Maria? Is that my moss or her moss? Do the moss and eleventh finger belong to someone else, and only the mushrooms to me?
Did the gentleman down there have a mind and a will of his own? Who was doing the begetting: Oskar, he, or I?

And Maria, asleep above and awake below, guileless vanilla and pungent mushrooms under moss, who longed for fizz powder but not for the little gentleman who raised his own head, who declared independence, who did what he felt like doing, whom I didn't want either, who proposed things I never suggested, who rose up when I lay down, whose dreams were not my dreams, who could neither read nor write yet signed for me, who goes his own way to this very day, who left me the first time I noticed him, a foe I must repeatedly join forces with, who betrays me and leaves me in the lurch, whom I'd gladly betray in turn, who makes me ashamed, who's fed up with me, whom I wash, who befouls me, who sees nothing and sniffs out everything, who's such a stranger I hardly know him, whose memory is not Oskar's memory: for when Maria enters my room today and Bruno slips discreetly into the hall, he no longer recognizes her, neither can nor will, lolls about phlegmatically, while Oskar's surging heart makes me stammer out, "Listen to me, Maria, just tender suggestions: I could buy a compass and trace a circle about us, could use that compass to measure the angle of inclination of your neck as you read, sew, or, as now, turn the dial on my portable radio. Leave the radio alone, just tender suggestions: I could inoculate my eyes and shed tears again. Oskar will put his heart through the next butcher's meat grinder if you'll do the same with your soul. We could buy a stuffed animal to have some quiet between us. If I decided on worms and you on patience, we could go fishing and be happier. Or the fizz powder back then, do you remember? You call me Woodruff, I bubble up, you want more, I give you the rest—Maria, fizz powder, just tender suggestions.