The Tin Drum (52 page)

Its portal faced the railway embankment. Between the embankment and the open door we came to a stop. A late August afternoon, the air humming. Behind us, on the ballast between the rails, Ukrainian women in white kerchiefs were hacking and shoveling. We stood and peered into the shadowy, cool-breathing belly of the church: far to the back, deftly seductive, a severely inflamed eye—the Eternal Light. Behind us on the embankment the women stopped shoveling and hacking. A horn tooted, a train was approaching, it arrived, it was there, was still there, not gone yet, then it was gone, and the horn tooted, Ukrainians shoveled. Maria wavered, perhaps unsure which foot to put for
ward, placed the burden of responsibility on me, by birth and baptism closer to the only true Church; for the first time in years, since those two weeks filled with fizz powder and love, Maria resigned herself to Oskar's guidance.

Then we left the embankment and its sounds, August and its August hum. Rather mournfully, gently tapping my drum with the tips of my fingers beneath my smock, as outwardly a look of indifference settled on my face, I recalled masses, pontifical offices, vesper services, and Saturday confessions at my poor mama's side, who shortly before her death was rendered pious by her all too intense involvement with Jan Bron-ski, and sought relief in confession Saturday after Saturday, strengthened herself each Sunday with the sacrament, and thus relieved and strengthened would meet Jan on Tischlergasse the following Thursday. Who was the priest back then? It was Father Wiehnke, and he was still pastor at the Church of the Sacred Heart, delivered sermons that were pleasantly soft and unintelligible, sang the Credo so faintly and plaintively that even I might have been overcome by something resembling faith back then if it hadn't been for that left side-altar with the Virgin, the boy Jesus, and the boy Baptist.

And yet it was that altar that impelled me to pull Maria from the sunshine into the portal, then across the flagstones into the nave.

Oskar took his time, sat quietly beside Maria on the oak pew, growing calmer, cooler. Years had passed, and yet it seemed to me that the same people still awaited Father Wiehnke's ear, leafing methodically through the Mirror of Confession. We sat somewhat off to the side, but nearer the central aisle. I wanted to leave the choice up to Maria and make it easier for her. She wasn't so near the confession box as to be confused by it, leaving her free to convert in a quiet, unofficial way; yet she could see how people behaved prior to confession and, while watching, reach her own decision about making her way into the box to the Father's ear to discuss the details of her conversion to the only true Church. I felt sorry for her, small and with still unpracticed hands, kneeling amid incense, dust, plaster, sinuous angels, refracted light, and convulsed saints, before, beneath, and amid all that sweet, sorrow-laden Catholicism, crossing herself backward the first time. Oskar tapped Maria, demonstrated how it should be done, showed the eager pupil where behind her forehead, where deep in her breast, where
exactly in the joints of her shoulder Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dwell, and how the hands must be folded to finish it off with Amen. Maria did so, brought her hands to rest in Amen, and with her Amen began to pray.

At first Oskar tried to pray too, for a few of the dead, but as he supplicated the Lord on behalf of his Roswitha, trying to negotiate eternal peace for her and admission to the joys of heaven, he so lost himself in earthly details that eternal peace and heavenly joys wound up in a Paris hotel. I took refuge in the Preface, where there is nothing much to pin you down; for all eternity, I said,
sursum corda, dignum et justum
— it is just and right, left it at that, and began watching Maria from the side.

Catholic prayer was becoming to her. She was pretty as a picture in her devotions. Prayer lengthens the eyelashes, arches the brows, inflames the cheeks, renders the brow somber, the neck supple, makes the nostrils quiver. Maria's face, blossoming in sorrow, nearly seduced me into an attempted caress. But one must never disturb those in prayer, one must neither seduce nor be seduced by them, however pleasant and conducive to prayer it may be for those praying to know someone thinks they're worth watching.

So I slid from the polished church bench and quietly folded my hands on the drum that bulged beneath my smock. Oskar fled from Maria, crossed the flagstones with his drum, passed the stations of the cross in the left nave, not pausing at Saint Anthony—pray for us — having lost neither a purse nor a house key, to our left Saint Adalbert of Prague, slain by the Prussians of old, never resting, hopping from stone to stone — a chessboard spread before us — till a carpet announced the steps to the left side-altar.

I can assure you that nothing in the Neo-Gothic brick Church of the Sacred Heart, and consequently nothing in the left side-altar either, had changed. The naked-pink boy Jesus still sat on the left thigh of the Virgin, whom I will not call the Virgin Mary, lest you confuse her with my own Mary, my Maria busy converting. Still pressed against the right knee of the Virgin was the boy Baptist, scantily clad in his chocolate-colored shaggy pelt. She herself pointed at Jesus as before with her right finger while looking at John.

Yet even after years of absence, Oskar was less interested in the Virgin's maternal pride than in the build of the two boys. Jesus was about
the size of my son Kurt on his third birthday, and thus almost an inch taller than Oskar. John, who according to the evidence was older than the Nazarene, was my height. Both, however, had the same precocious expression, which as a permanent three-year-old I too bore. Nothing had changed. They had stared out with that same precocity when I used to visit the Church of the Sacred Heart at my poor mama's side all those years ago.

Over and up the carpeted steps, but without the Introitus. I examined each fold of drapery, slowly traced the painted plaster of both little nudists with my drumstick, more sensitive than all my fingers combined, omitting nothing: thighs, belly, arms, counted the rolls of fat, the dimples—that was Oskar's exact build, my healthy flesh, my strong, slightly plump knees, my short but muscular drummer's arms. And he held them the same way, the rascal. He sat on the thigh of the Virgin and lifted his arms and fists as though about to drum, as though Jesus and not Oskar was the drummer, as though he was just waiting for my drum, as if this time he had every intention of pounding out something rhythmically pleasing on it for the Virgin, John, and me.

I did what I'd done years before, removed the drum from my tummy and put Jesus to the test. Cautiously, careful not to damage the painted plaster, I pushed Oskar's red and white drum onto his rosy thighs, but this time for my own satisfaction, not in the stupid expectation of some miracle but to witness sculptural impotence, for even though he sat there with upraised fists, even though he was my size and had my own sturdy build, even though he could easily provide a plaster copy of the three-year-old I had sustained with such effort and the greatest of privations—he still couldn't drum, could only pretend, thinking no doubt: if I had one I could; now you've got one, I said, and you can't, and doubled over with laughter. I stuck both sticks into his ten sausage fingers—now drum, sweetest Jesus, painted plaster drumming on tin, Oskar backs down the three steps, from carpet to flagstones, come on, drum, Jesus boy, Oskar steps farther back. Maintains his distance and laughs himself silly, for Jesus just sits there, can't drum though he wants to. Boredom starts gnawing at me as if I were a rind of bacon—and then he struck, and all at once he was drumming!

While all remained motionless: he crossed over nicely, first with his right, then his left, then with both sticks, his drumroll not half-bad, he
took it seriously, loved to change tempo, was as good when the rhythm was simple as he was when he made it complex, and yet he avoided all gimmicks, just stuck to his drum, his style not even religious or that of some warmed-over trooper, but simply and purely musical, nor did he scorn popular hits, playing, among others, one that was on everyone's lips back then, "Everything Passes," and of course "Lili Marleen," then slowly, a little jerkily perhaps, he turned his curly head with the blue Bronski eyes toward me, smiled somewhat arrogantly, and delivered a potpourri of Oskar's favorites: it began with "Glass, Glass, Little Glass," skimmed through "The Schedule," the rascal played Rasputin off against Goethe just as I did, climbed the Stockturm with me, crawled under the grandstand with me, caught eels off the harbor jetty, strode at my side behind my poor mama's coffin, tapering toward the foot, and, what stunned me most, appeared again and again beneath the four skirts of my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek.

Oskar stepped nearer. Something drew him forward. He wanted to stand on the carpet, not the flagstones. One altar step passed him on to the next. So I climbed up, though I would rather have seen him climb down. "Jesus"—I scraped together the remnants of a voice—"that wasn't our bargain. Give me back my drum right now. You have your cross, that's all you need!" Though he didn't break off abruptly, he ended his playing, crossed the sticks on the drum with exaggerated care, and without a word of objection handed me what Oskar had so thoughtlessly loaned him.

I was ready to run like ten devils down the steps with no thanks and away from Catholicism when a pleasant but imperious voice touched my shoulder: "Dost thou love me, Oskar?" Without turning I responded, "Not that I know of." And he in the same voice, without raising it in the least: "Dost thou love me, Oskar?" Crossly I replied, "Sorry, no, not at all!" Then he needled me a third time: "Oskar, dost thou love me?" Now Jesus saw my face: "I hate you, little fellow, you and your bag of tricks!"

Strangely enough, my hostility lifted him to vocal triumph. He raised his forefinger like a lady schoolteacher and gave me an assignment: "Thou art Oskar, the rock, and upon this rock I will build my church. Follow thou me!"

You can imagine my indignation. Rage turned my skin to soup
chicken flesh. I broke off one of his plaster toes, but he no longer moved. "Say that again," Oskar hissed, "and I'll scratch the paint right off you!"

Not another word came, nothing came but the old man who now and forever is shuffling through churches. He bowed to the left side-altar, took no notice of me, shuffled onward, and had already reached Adalbert of Prague when I too stumbled down the steps from carpet to flagstones and, without looking back, made my way across the chessboard pattern to Maria, who just then made the Catholic cross correctly in accordance with my instructions.

I took her by the hand, led her to the holy-water font, and when she had almost reached the portal, had her cross herself once more toward the high altar from the rear of the church but did not join in, pulling her instead, just as she was about to kneel, out into the sun.

It was early evening. The women laborers from the east had disappeared from the embankment. In their place a freight train was being shunted just outside the local station at Langfuhr. Clusters of gnats hung in the air. Bells rang down from above. The sounds of shunting cars absorbed their ringing. The gnats still hung in clusters. Maria's face was tear-stained. Oskar wanted to scream. What should I do about Jesus? I felt like loading my voice. What did I have to do with his cross? But I knew that my voice was no match for his church windows. Let him keep building his temple on people named Petrus, or Petri, or East Prussian Petrikeit. "Watch out, Oskar, don't break those church windows!" Satan whispered inside me. "He'll ruin your voice if you do." And so I cast one solitary glance upward, took the measure of one of those Neo-Gothic windows, and then tore myself away, didn't sing, didn't follow Him but instead trotted along beside Maria to the underpass on Bahnhofstraße, through the dripping tunnel, up the hill to Kleinhammerpark, right onto Marienstraße, past Wohlgemuth's butcher shop, left onto Elsenstraße, across Strießbach to Neuer Markt, where they were building a water tank for air-raid defense. Labesweg seemed endless, and then, at last, we were there: Oskar left Maria, climbed over ninety steps to the attic. Bedsheets were hanging there, and behind the sheets a mound of air-defense sand, and behind sand and buckets, behind bundles of newspapers and stacks of roof tiles, my book and my store of drums from the Theater at the Front days. And, in a shoebox, a few burned-out
but still bulbous light bulbs. Oskar took the first of these, sangshattered it, took the second, reduced it to glassdust, sliced off the plumper half of the third quite neatly, sangscribed the calligraphic letters
JESUS
on the fourth, then pulverized both bulb and script, and was about to repeat the exercise when he saw he was out of light bulbs. Exhausted, I sank down on the air-defense sand: Oskar still had his voice. Jesus may have had a follower. But as for me, the Dusters would be my first disciples.

Oskar was not cut out to follow in Christ's footsteps, if only because gathering disciples presented me with insuperable difficulties, but the call reached my ear by various circuitous routes and turned me into his follower, though I did not believe in my predecessor. Yet true to the rule, He who doubts believes, and the unbeliever believes longest, I did not manage to bury the small miracle offered to me in private inside the Church of the Sacred Heart beneath my doubts, but tried instead to persuade Jesus to repeat his performance.

Oskar returned to the brick church several times without Maria. I could always slip away from Mother Truczinski, who was after all stuck in her chair and couldn't get at me. What did Jesus have to offer me? Why did I remain half the night in the left nave of the church and let the sexton lock me in? Why did Oskar stand at the left side-altar till his ears turned brittle and his limbs grew stiff? For in spite of my crushing humility and my equally crushing blasphemies, I never got to hear my drum or the voice of Jesus again.

Miserere!
Never in all my life have I heard my teeth rattle as noisily as they did in those midnight hours on the flagstones of the Church of the Sacred Heart. What jester could ever have found a better rattle than Oskar? I imitated an entire frontline sector of freewheeling machine guns, had a whole insurance office full of secretaries and typewriters lodged between my upper and lower jaws. Back and forth it resounded, drawing echoes of applause. Columns shivered, vaulted grottos got goose-flesh, then my cough hopped one-legged across the flagstone chessboard, down the way of the cross in reverse, up the central nave, hoisted itself to the choir, coughed sixtyfold—a Bach society that didn't sing but
had been trained to cough instead—and just when I was hoping that Oskar's cough had crawled into the organ pipes and wouldn't be heard from again till the Sunday chorale—a cough came from the sacristy, then from the chancel, and finally died down, still coughing, behind the high altar, behind the gymnast on the cross—where it quickly coughed up its soul. It is finished, coughed my cough; but nothing was finished. The boy Jesus held my drumsticks stiffly and impudently, immune to the cold, held my drum on rosy plaster and would not drum, would not confirm me as his follower. Oskar wished he had it in writing, that command to follow Christ.