The Tin Drum (46 page)

The trapdoor to the cellar, which was located, just as in our shop, behind the counter, stood open. Nothing supported the plank cover, which Frau Greff must have flung open in her screaming haste, though she hadn't hooked it to the latch on the counter. Oskar could have given it a little push and tipped it over, closing off the cellar.

Motionless, I stood halfway behind those planks, breathing in their smell of dust and decay, and stared at the brightly lit square framing part of the stairs and a portion of the concrete cellar floor. Into the rectangle, from the upper right, protruded a section of a stepped platform, presumably a new acquisition of Greff's, for I'd never seen it before on my occasional visits to the cellar. But Oskar would never have peered into the cellar so long and intently at a mere platform had not two filled wool socks in black-laced shoes, oddly foreshortened, entered the upper right-hand corner of the picture. Even though I couldn't inspect the soles, I recognized them immediately as Greff's hiking shoes. That can't be Greff, I thought to myself, standing there in the cellar ready for
a hike, because the shoes aren't standing there, they're dangling above the platform; unless the tips of the shoes, sharply angled downward, have managed to touch the boards, if only barely. So for a second I pictured Greff standing there on tiptoe, for this comic but strenuous exercise would be just like him, gymnast that he was, and nature lover.

To convince myself of the accuracy of my hypothesis, and to have a good laugh at the greengrocer's expense if it proved to be true, I climbed cautiously down the steep stairs, drumming, as I recall, something to create and dispel fear: "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Only when Oskar stood firmly on the concrete floor did he allow his gaze to wander indirectly over bundles of empty onion sacks and stacks of equally empty fruit crates until, gliding across timberwork he'd never seen before, it approached the spot where Greff's hiking shoes must be hanging or standing on tiptoe.

Of course I knew that Greff was hanging. The shoes were hanging, thus the coarsely knit dark green socks were hanging too. Bare male knees above the edges of the socks, hairy thighs to the edges of the knee pants; then a prickling, stabbing sensation rose slowly from my private parts, followed my buttocks along my numbing back, ascended my spinal column, settled in the back of my neck, struck me hot and cold, bounded down between my legs, shriveled my already tiny sack, leapt right over my now bent back and lodged itself once more behind my head, contracting there—to this day Oskar still gags, still feels that stab whenever anyone mentions hanging, even hanging out the laundry, in his presence; it was not just Greff's hiking shoes, wool socks, knees, and knee pants that were hanging there; the whole of Greff was hanging by the neck, and the strained expression on his face above the cord was not entirely free of theatrics.

The contracting, stabbing sensation faded surprisingly quickly. The sight of Greff returned to normal, for the posture of a hanging man looks as normal and natural as a man walking on his hands or standing on his head, or a man making a true spectacle of himself by mounting a four-legged horse for a ride.

And then there was the setting. Only now did Oskar grasp the lengths to which Greff had gone. The frame, the setting in which Greff hung, was most carefully chosen, studied almost to the point of extravagance.
The greengrocer had aimed at a form of death appropriate to him, one that was carefully balanced. He who in his lifetime had had difficulties and unpleasant exchanges by post with the Bureau of Weights and Standards, whose weights and scales had been confiscated on more than one occasion, who had been fined for weighing fruit and vegetables inaccurately, had balanced his weight to the gram with potatoes.

The dully gleaming cord, which had no doubt been soaped, was led by pulleys over two beams, which he had fashioned for his final day into a scaffold whose sole purpose was to serve as his final scaffold. Since the wood was of the highest quality, I gathered that the greengrocer had spared no expense. Given the scarcity of building materials in wartime, it must have been difficult to procure those planks and beams. Greff had obviously done some bartering, getting wood in exchange for fruit. Thus the scaffolding was not lacking in even superfluous and merely decorative braces. The three-part stepped podium—one corner of which Oskar had seen from the shop—lifted the whole edifice onto an almost sublime plane.

As with the drum machine, which may have served the home mechanic as a model, Greff and his counterweight hung within the scaffolding. In striking contrast to the four whitewashed corner posts, a small, delicate green ladder stood between him and the produce, which also dangled in the air. The potato baskets had been attached to the main cord by means of an ingenious knot of the sort boy scouts are skilled at. Since the interior of the scaffold was illuminated by four light bulbs, which, though painted white, still shone brightly, Oskar was able, without stepping onto the platform and desecrating it, to read the inscription on a little cardboard sign wired to the Boy Scout knot above the potato baskets:
seventy-five kilos (less one hundred grams).

Greff was hanging in a scoutmaster's uniform. On the last day of his life he had returned to the uniform of his prewar years. It was too tight for him now. He had not managed to fasten the two top buttons or the belt, a jarring note in his otherwise neat appearance. Greff had crossed two fingers on his left hand according to Boy Scout custom. Before hanging himself, he had tied his scout hat to his right wrist. The neckerchief he'd been forced to forgo. Since, as with his knee pants, he hadn't managed to fasten the buttons at his collar, curly black chest hair sprang through the opening.

A few asters lay on the steps of the platform, and also, looking out of place, some stalks of parsley. He had probably run out of flowers as he was strewing them about, since he'd used most of the asters, as well as a few roses, to wreathe four small photos hanging on the four main posts of the scaffolding. On the left front post, behind glass, Sir Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. On the left rear, unframed, the saintly Saint George. On the right rear, without glass, the head of Michelangelo's
David.
Framed and glazed on the right front post, the photo of an expressively handsome lad of around sixteen. An early photo of his favorite, Horst Donath, who fell as a lieutenant on the Donets.

Perhaps I should also mention the four scraps of paper on the platform steps among the asters and parsley. They lay in a way that made it easy to piece them together. Oskar did so and deciphered a court summons stamped several times by the vice squad.

The rest may be summed up briefly: The insistent cry of the ambulance awakened me from my meditations on the death of a greengrocer. A moment later they stumbled down the stairs, mounted the platform, and laid hands on the dangling Greff. No sooner had they lifted the grocer, however, than the counterbalancing potato baskets came crashing down, setting in motion a now freed mechanism, similar to the drum machine, which Greff had cleverly encased in plywood above the scaffolding. While the potatoes rattled across the platform and onto the concrete floor, a banging on tin, wood, bronze, and glass sounded from above, a frenzied orchestra of drums, hammering out Albrecht Greff's grand finale.

Today Oskar faces the difficult task of reproducing on his drum an echo of that avalanche of potatoes—a windfall, by the way, for a few of the medics—and the organized din of Greff's drum machine. No doubt because my drum had a decisive influence on the shape and design of Greff's death, I sometimes manage to translate Greff's death into a well-rounded composition for percussion on Oskar's drum, and when friends or my keeper Bruno ask me what I call it, I tell them: Seventy-five Kilos.

In mid-June of forty-two, my son Kurt turned one year old. Oskar, his father, took it in stride, thought to himself: Just two short years to go. In October of forty-two the greengrocer Greff hanged himself on a gallows of such formal perfection that I, Oskar, have henceforth considered suicide one of the sublime forms of death. In January of forty-three there was a good deal of talk about the city of Stalingrad. Since Matzerath referred to this city in the same tone he'd used earlier for Pearl Harbor, To-bruk, and Dunkirk, I paid no more attention to it than any other place I knew from special communiqués; for war reports and special communiqués had become a sort of geography lesson for Oskar. How else could I have learned where rivers like the Kuban, the Mius, and the Don flowed, who could have explained the location of the Aleutian islands Attu, Kiska, and Adak better than the detailed radio reports on events in the Far East? Thus, though I learned in January of forty-three that the city of Stalingrad is situated on the Volga, I wasn't as worried about the Sixth Army as I was about Maria, who was suffering from a slight case of the flu at the time.

While Maria's flu faded, the radio continued its geography lesson: Oskar can still find the little towns of Rzev and Demyansk on any map of Soviet Russia with his eyes closed. Maria had barely recovered when my son Kurt came down with whooping cough. While I tried to remember the most difficult names of a few hotly contested oases in Tunisia, little Kurt's whooping cough and the Africa Corps both came to an end.

O the merry month of May: Maria, Matzerath, and Gretchen Scheffler were making preparations for little Kurt's second birthday. Oskar
attached a greater significance to the upcoming celebration too, for after the twelfth of June in forty-three, only one short year remained. Had I been present on little Kurt's second birthday, I could have whispered in my son's ear, "Just wait, soon you too will be drumming." And it came to pass in those days that on the twelfth of June in forty-three, Oskar was no longer in Danzig-Langfuhr but in the ancient Roman village of Metz. Indeed, he had been away for so long that he had a hard time getting back to the familiar environs of his still undamaged native city by the twelfth of June in forty-four to help celebrate little Kurt's third birthday.

What business took me away? I won't beat around the bush: outside the Pestalozzi School, which had been converted into barracks for the Luftwaffe, I met my master Bebra. But Bebra alone could not have talked me into a trip. On Bebra's arm hung La Raguna, Signora Roswitha, the great somnambulist.

Oskar was coming from Kleinhammerweg. He'd paid a visit to Gretchen Scheffler, leafed through the
Struggle for Rome,
discovered that even back then, in the time of Belisarius, things were constantly in flux, with victories or defeats at various cities and river crossings being celebrated or bemoaned with a fine geographical sweep.

I crossed Fröbel Meadow, which in the course of the last few years had been turned into a construction camp for the Todt Organization, with my thoughts on Taginae—where Narses defeated Totila in the year five fifty-two—yet it wasn't the victory that caused my thoughts to linger on Narses, the great Armenian, it was the general's figure I liked: misshapen and humpbacked, Narses was small, a dwarf, a gnome, a midget was Narses. Perhaps only a child's head taller than Oskar, I reflected, and standing outside the Pestalozzi School I examined by way of comparison the rows of ribbons on a few Luftwaffe officers who had shot up too quickly, told myself that Narses surely never wore ribbons, had no need of them, when there in the main entrance to the school stood the great general himself with a lady hanging on his arm—why shouldn't Narses have a lady on his arm? And then they approached, dwarfed by Luftwaffe giants, and yet they were central figures, wrapped in the aura of history, old as the hills among these newly minted airforce heroes—what does a whole barracks full of Totilas and Tejas, of tree-tall Ostrogoths, mean in the face of a single Armenian dwarf called
Narses—and Narses drew nearer Oskar step by tiny step, waved to Oskar, and the lady on his arm waved too: Bebra and Signora Roswitha Raguna greeted me — the Luftwaffe stepped aside respectfully—I placed my lips near Bebra's ear, whispered, "Dear master, I took you for the great general Narses, whom I hold in much higher esteem than that muscle man Belisarius."

Bebra modestly waved this aside. But my comparison pleased Raguna. How prettily her lips moved as she spoke: "Come now, Bebra, is he so mistaken, our young
amico?
Does not the blood of Prince Eugen flow in your veins?
E Lodovico quattordicesimo?
Is he not your ancestor?"

Bebra took my arm and led me aside, for the airmen kept staring at us in admiration, which was becoming annoying. Finally, after a lieutenant and a moment later two airmen first class came to attention and saluted Bebra — the master was wearing a captain's stripes on his uniform, and a band on his sleeve with the inscription
Propaganda Corps
— after the beribboned airmen asked for and received autographs from Raguna, Bebra beckoned for his official car, we climbed in, and put up with the enthusiastic applause of the Luftwaffe as we pulled away.

We drove along Pestalozzistraße, Magdeburger Straße, Heeresanger. Bebra sat beside the driver. We'd barely reached Magdeburger Straße when Raguna used my drum as an opening. "Are you still faithful to your drum, my dear friend?" she whispered in those Mediterranean tones I had not heard for so long. "And how faithful have you been otherwise?" Oskar didn't reply, spared her his tiresome stories about women, but smilingly permitted the great somnambulist to caress first his drum, then his hands, which were clutching the drum rather convulsively, to caress them with an increasingly southern warmth.

As we turned onto Heeresanger and followed the rails of the Number Five line, I even responded, that is, I caressed her left hand with my left while she fondled my right with her right. Soon we'd left Max-Halbe-Platz behind. It was too late for Oskar to get out; then I saw Bebra's shrewd, light brown, age-old eyes in the rearview mirror, watching our mutual caresses. Wishing to spare my friend and master, I tried to withdraw my hands, but Raguna held them fast. Bebra smiled into the rearview mirror, then looked away and started up a conversation with the driver, while on her part Roswitha, warmly caressing and pressing my hands, opened a conversation in Mediterranean tones that
flowed directly and sweetly into Oskar's ear alone, took a brief practical turn, then became even sweeter, tones in which all my misgivings and attempted escape bogged down. We were at Reichskolonie, heading toward the Women's Clinic, when Raguna confessed to Oskar that she'd never stopped thinking of him all these years, that she still had the glass from the Café Vierjahreszeiten that I'd singscribed a dedication into back then, that Bebra was a splendid friend and excellent colleague, but marriage was out of the question; Bebra has to live alone, Raguna replied when I broke in, she allowed him total freedom, and though he was quite jealous by nature, over the course of the years he had come to see that Raguna could not be tied down either, and anyway, as director of the Theater at the Front, the dear man would hardly have time to perform any possible conjugal duties, but the theater itself was first-rate, with a show that could have played at the Wintergarten or La Scala in peacetime, wouldn't I, Oskar, with all my God-given talent, like to try it for a year, I was certainly old enough, she could arrange it, but I, Oskar, probably had other obligations, no?—then so much the better, they were leaving today, they'd had their last matinee in the military district of Danzig-West Prussia, now they were heading for Lothringen, then on to France, the Eastern Front was out of the question for the time being, that was safely behind them, I, Oskar, could count myself lucky that the East was passé, they were headed for Paris now, yes of course to Paris, had I, Oskar, ever been to Paris? Well then,
amico,
if Raguna can't seduce your hard drummer's heart, let Paris do so,
andiamo!