The Tin Drum (51 page)

So I wasn't sent to a home. But from then on an official letter arrived every two weeks asking Matzerath for a simple signature; Matzerath refused to sign, but his face grew lined with care.

Oskar's getting ahead of himself, and must smooth Matzerath's face again, for the evening I arrived his face beamed; he was far less worried than Maria and asked fewer questions, just enjoyed my happy homecoming, behaved like a true father, and said, as I was taken up to a somewhat bewildered Mother Truczinski at bedtime, "Won't little Kurt be happy to have a little brother again. And just think, tomorrow is Kurt's third birthday."

On his birthday table my son Kurt found, in addition to the cake with three candles, a wine-red sweater knitted by Gretchen Scheffler to which he paid no attention. There was a nasty yellow rubber ball he sat on, then rode all about and finally punctured with a kitchen knife. Then
he sucked from the rubber wound that sickeningly sweet fluid that gathers in all inflated balls. Scarcely had the ball been given its permanent dent than little Kurt began to unrig the sailboat and transform it into a shipwreck. A humming top and its whip lay untouched, but frighteningly close at hand.

Oskar, who had planned for his son's birthday far in advance, who had rushed eastward amid the ultimate fury of historical events, determined not to miss the third birthday of his son and heir, stood to one side, looked upon his son's destructive efforts, admired the boy's resolution, compared his own physical dimensions with those of his son, and was forced to admit with some concern: Little Kurt has outgrown you while you were away, the three feet you've managed to hold yourself down to for almost seventeen years, ever since your third birthday, this little boy has clearly topped by an inch; it's time to turn him into a tindrummer and call an energetic "Halt!" to this precipitous growth.

From my theatrical gear, which I had stowed behind the roof tiles in the attic along with my large one-volume course of study, I fetched a shiny brand-new tin drum, resolved to offer my son the same opportunity—since none of the grownups would—that my poor mama, keeping her promise, had offered me on my third birthday.

Matzerath had once hoped that I would take over the grocery store, and since I'd let him down, I had good reason to believe that Matzerath now saw little Kurt as the future grocer. If I say that had to be prevented at all costs, please don't regard Oskar as an outright enemy of retail trade. I would have felt exactly the same way had either one of us been asked to take over a factory or inherit a kingdom with all its colonies. Oskar wanted no hand-me-downs, and he hoped his son would reject them too; I wanted him—and therein lay my logical error—to be a drummer eternally three years old, as if taking over a drum weren't just as revolting for a hopeful young man as taking over a grocery store.

Oskar sees that today. But back then he was consumed by one desire: to set a drumming son beside a drumming father, to drum as a duo looking up at the grownups from below, to establish a drumming dynasty capable of perpetuating itself, passing on his work from generation to generation on red and white lacquered tin.

What a life lay before us! Drumming away beside each other, but also in different rooms, side by side, but he at times on Labesweg, I on
Luisenstraße, he in the cellar, I in the attic, little Kurt in the kitchen, Oskar in the toilet, father and son, here and there, and now and then in tandem, and should the fortunate occasion have arisen, we could both have slipped under the skirts of my grandmother and his great-grandmother Anna Koljaiczek to live and drum and breathe in the smell of slightly rancid butter. Crouching by her portal, I would have said to little Kurt, "Take a look inside, my son. That's where we come from. And if you're very, very good, we may be allowed to return there for a brief hour or so and visit those who await us."

And there beneath the skirts, little Kurt would have bent low, risked a peep, and politely asked me, his father, to explain things.

"That beautiful woman," Oskar would have whispered, "sitting in the middle, playing with her beautiful hands, with an oval face so lovely it brings tears to your eyes, that's my poor mama, your dear grandmother, who died from eating eel soup or from her own overly tender heart."

"Go on, Papa, go on!" little Kurt would have clamored. "Who's the man with the mustache?"

Then, with an air of mystery, I would have lowered my voice: "That's your great-grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek. Note his flickering arsonist's eyes, the divine Polish eccentricity and the practical Kashubian cunning crowning the bridge of his nose. Observe as well the webs between his toes. In nineteen-thirteen, as the
Columbus
was being launched from the slips, he wound up under a raft of logs, then swam and swam, all the way to America, where he became a millionaire. But sometimes he takes to the water again, swims back, and dives in here, where he first found refuge as an arsonist and contributed his part toward my mama."

"But what about that handsome man who's been hiding behind the lady who is my grandmother, but is sitting beside her now, caressing her hands? His eyes are as blue as yours, Papa!"

Then, wicked and traitorous son that I am, I would have gathered all my courage to answer my dear child: "Those are the dreamy blue eyes of the Bronskis looking at you, Kurt. It's true your own eyes are gray. You got them from your mother. Yet like Jan, who is kissing my poor mama's hand, and like his father Vinzent, you are a Bronski, a dreamer through and through, yet with a Kashubian practicality. One day we'll return there, return to the source that spreads the slightly rancid smell of butter. Rejoice!"

According to my theories at the time, it was only inside my grandmother Koljaiczek, or, as I put it in jest, in the grandmotherly butter tub, that true family life was possible. Today, when God the Father, his only begotten Son, and, most important of all, the Holy Spirit himself are such a short hop away that I could jump right over them—for in addition to all my other callings, I am reluctantly committed to the Imitation of Christ—and though nothing is farther from me now than the entrance to my grandmother, I still picture the most beautiful of family scenes in the circle of my forebears.

I envision them mostly on rainy days: My grandmother sends out invitations and we all meet inside her. Jan Bronski arrives with flowers, carnations perhaps, stuck in the bullet holes in his Polish Post Office defender's breast. Maria, who has received an invitation at my behest, approaches my mama shyly and, trying to curry favor, shows her the account books Mama set up and Maria has carried on flawlessly, at which Mama releases her Kashubian laugh, draws my beloved to her, kisses her cheek, and says with a wink, "Dear little Maria, who cares? After all, we both wed a Matzerath and nursed a Bronski!"

I must sternly forbid myself any further thoughts along these lines, any speculation for example about a son sired by Jan, carried to term by my mama inside Grandmother Koljaiczek, and finally born in the butter tub. For this would surely have drawn further consequences. Thus my half brother Stephan Bronski, who after all belonged in this circle, might have hit on the Bronskian idea of casting first an eye, and soon much more, at my Maria. My imaginative powers prefer to focus on an innocent family gathering. Renouncing a third and fourth drummer, I rest content with Oskar and little Kurt, narrate for those present something on my drum about that Eiffel Tower which replaced my grandmother in foreign climes, and am pleased if the guests, including our hostess Anna Koljaiczek, enjoy our drumming and slap one another's knees in time to the rhythm.

Enticing as it is to unfold the world and its relationships inside one's own grandmother, to be multilayered within restricted levels, Oskar must now—since, like Matzerath, he is a merely presumptive father—limit himself to recounting the events of the twelfth of June, nineteen forty-four, little Kurt's third birthday.

To repeat: the boy had received a sweater, a ball, a sailboat, and a
whip and humming top, to which I was about to add a red and white lacquered tin drum. He'd barely finished unrigging the sailboat when Oskar approached, holding his tin gift hidden behind his back, with his own battered drum dangling at his tummy. We stood only a step apart: Oskar, the toddler; Kurt, the inch-taller toddler. He had a furious, pinched look on his face—still bent on destroying the sailboat—and at the very moment I drew forth the drum and held it up, he broke off the final mast of the
Pamir,
for that was the windjammer's name.

Kurt dropped the wreck, accepted the drum, held it, turned it about, and his face grew calmer, though it was still tense. Now it was time to hand him the drumsticks. Unfortunately he misunderstood my dual gesture, felt threatened, knocked the sticks from my hands with the edge of his drum, reached behind him as I bent for the sticks, and as I offered them to him a second time, struck me with his birthday gift: struck me, not the top grooved for the whip, tried to make me, his father, hum and spin like a top, whipped me, thought just you wait little brother; thus did Cain whip Abel till Abel spun, still wobbling at first, then with ever increasing speed and precision, and found his way darkly through a low, grumbling humming to a higher song, sang the song of the humming top. Higher and higher Cain enticed me with his whip, my voice chalky, a tenor pouring forth his morning prayer, I sang as silver-chased angels might sing, or the Vienna Boys' Choir, or well-drilled castrati—as Abel may have sung before he fell, as I now fell, collapsing beneath the whip of the boy child Kurt.

When he saw me lying there in misery, my hum dying away, he cracked his whip in the air several more times, as if his arm hadn't had enough. He also kept a mistrustful eye on me during his thorough examination of the drum. First the red and white lacquer was banged against the corner of a chair, then my gift fell to the floor and little Kurt sought and found the massive hull of the former sailboat. With this he beat the drum. He didn't play the drum, he beat it to pieces. His hand did not attempt the simplest rhythm. He just pounded away steadily with an expression of frantic concentration on an instrument that had never expected such a drummer, that was made to withstand playful rolls of lightweight drumsticks but not blows with a bulky wreck used as a battering ram. The drum buckled, tried to escape by breaking away from
its frame, tried to turn invisible by shedding its red and white lacquer and letting its gray-blue tin beg for mercy. But the son showed no mercy to his father's birthday gift. And when his father tried to mediate again, making his way across the carpet, in spite of all his aches and pains, to where his son sat on the wooden floor, the whip intervened once more. And the weary top, knowing that mistress well, gave up spinning and humming, just as the drum gave up once and for all on finding a sensitive drummer, strong but not brutal, who would playfully ply his drumsticks.

When Maria walked in, the drum was ready for the scrapheap. She picked me up, kissed my swollen eyes and my torn ear, licked my blood and the welts on my hands.

Oh, if only Maria had not kissed the maltreated, backward, deplorably abnormal child! If only she had recognized the beaten father and in every wound the lover. What a consolation, what a true, secret husband I could have been for her during the dark months ahead.

The first blow—which had little direct impact on Maria—fell on my half brother Stephan Bronski, serving on the Arctic Front and recently promoted to lieutenant, who was still going by his stepfather's name Ehlers, and found his career as an officer suddenly placed on permanent hold. While Stephan's father Jan, shot during the defense of the Polish Post Office, bore a skat card under his shirt at the cemetery in Saspe, the lieutenant's jacket was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class, the Infantry Badge, and the so-called Cold Storage Medal.

Toward the end of June Mother Truczinski suffered a slight stroke when the mailman delivered bad news. Airman First Class Fritz Truczinski had fallen for three things simultaneously: his Führer, his Volk, and his Fatherland. This had happened in the Center Sector, and Fritz's wallet with snapshots of pretty young women, most of them laughing, from Heidelberg, Brest, Paris, Bad Kreuznach, and Saloniki, his Iron Cross First and Second Class, a medal for some wound or other, his bronze bar for close combat, and two loose antitank patches, along with a few letters, had been sent by a certain Captain Kanauer directly from the Center Sector to Labesweg, Langfuhr.

Matzerath helped as best he could, and Mother Truczinski soon improved, though she never really recovered. She sat stuck in her chair by
the window, asked me or Matzerath, who brought something up for her two or three times a day, just where this "Center Sector" was, if it was far away, and if you could get there by train on a Sunday.

Much as he would have liked to, Matzerath couldn't tell her. So, based on the geography lessons I'd learned from special communiqués and military broadcasts, it was left to me to spend long afternoons with Mother Truczinski, who sat motionless except for her wobbling head, drumming out various versions of the Center Sector's now rapidly shifting location.

Maria, on the other hand, who was deeply attached to the dashing Fritz, turned religious. At first, all through July, she tried to make do with the religion she'd been raised in, going to Pastor Hecht at the Church of Christ on Sundays, accompanied at times by Matzerath, though she preferred to go alone.

Protestant services were not enough for Maria. One weekday—was it a Thursday or a Friday?—before closing time, turning the shop over to Matzerath, she took me, the Catholic, by the hand, we headed toward Neuer Markt, then turned on Elsenstraße, again on Marienstraße, passed Wohlgemuth's butcher shop, reached Kleinhammerpark—Oskar was already thinking, we're headed for Langfuhr Station, we're going to take a little trip, to Bissau perhaps in Kashubia—when we swung to the left, waited superstitiously at the underpass for a freight train to go by, entered the underpass, which was dripping nastily, and went through, not straight ahead to the Film-Palast, but left along the railway embankment. I thought: Either she's dragging me to Dr. Hollatz's office on Brunshöferweg or she's heading for the Church of the Sacred Heart to convert.