The Tin Drum (65 page)

I started work as a stonecutter's trainee at the end of May. In early October Korneff developed two new boils and we had to set up a travertine slab for Hermann Webknecht and Else Webknecht née Freytag in South Cemetery. Up till then, the stonecutter, who still didn't trust my strength, refused to take me along to the cemetery. An almost deaf but hardworking man from the firm of Julius Wöbel usually helped him set up stones. In return Korneff stepped in for Wöbel, who employed eight men, whenever he was shorthanded. I kept offering to help out at the cemetery, but in vain; cemeteries still attracted me, even though no decisions were in the offing at the time. Fortunately by early October the busy season had set in for Wöbel and he couldn't spare any men before the first frost; Korneff was forced to turn to me.

The two of us tilted the travertine slab behind the three-wheeler, then placed it on hard wooden rollers, rolled it onto the truck bed, shoved the pedestal beside it, protected the corners with empty paper sacks, loaded on the tools, cement, sand, gravel, and rollers and crates for offloading, I fastened the tailgate, Korneff was already at the wheel starting the engine, then stuck his head and boil-infested neck out the side window and yelled, "Come on, boy, get moving. Grab your lunch box and hop in!"

A slow drive around and past City Hospital. Outside the main entrance white clouds of nurses. Among them a nurse I know, Sister Gertrud. I wave, she waves back. My luck's back, I think, or I've never lost it, ought to ask her out sometime, even if I can't see her anymore, since we've turned toward the Rhine, ask her out to something, heading for Kappes-Hamm, maybe see a movie or Gründgens at the theater, there it is now, that yellow brick building, ask her out, doesn't have to be a play, smoke rising from the crematorium above the half-bare trees, how would you feel about a little change of scenery, Sister Gertrud? Another cemetery, other gravestone firms: a lap of honor for Sister Gertrud before the main entrance: Beutz & Kranich, Pottgiesser's Natural Stone, Böhm's Mortuary Art, Gockeln's Cemetery Landscaping and Gardening; questions at the gate, it's not that easy to get into a graveyard, staff
with cemetery caps: travertine for a double plot, Number Seventy-nine, Section Eight, Webknecht, Hermann, hand raised to cemetery cap, lunch pails left to warm at the crematorium; and standing outside the mortuary Crazy Leo.

I said to Korneff, "Isn't that Crazy Leo, the fellow with the white gloves?"

Korneff, reaching back and feeling his boils: "That's not Crazy Leo, it's Weird Willem, he lives here!"

How could I rest content with this information? After all, I'd been in Danzig before, and now I was in Düsseldorf, but I was still called Oskar: "There was a fellow back home who hung around cemeteries and looked just like him, and his name was Crazy Leo, and early on, when he was just plain Leo, he was a student at the seminary."

Korneff, his left hand on his boils and turning the three-wheeler toward the crematorium with his right: "You might be right about that. There's a bunch of them look like that used to be in the seminary living in graveyards now, using other names. That there's Weird Willem!"

We drove past Weird Willem. He waved a white glove at us and I felt at home in South Cemetery.

October, graveyard paths, the world losing its teeth and hair, that is, yellow leaves ceaselessly drifting down from above. Silence, sparrows, strolling visitors, the three-wheeler's engine heads for Section Eight, still a long way off. Old women here and there with watering cans and grandchildren, sun on black Swedish granite, obelisks, columns with symbolic cracks or actual war damage, a tarnished green angel behind a yew tree or something yewlike. A woman shading her eyes with a marble hand, dazzled by her own marble. Christ in stone sandals blessing the elms, another Christ in Section Four blessing a birch. Lovely daydreams on the path between Sections Four and Five: the sea, for instance. And this sea, among other things, casts a corpse on the shore. Violin music from the pier at Zoppot and the bashful beginnings of a fireworks display in support of those blinded in war. I bend down, a three-year-old Oskar, over the flotsam, hoping it may be Maria, or Sister Guste perhaps, whom I ought to ask out some time. But it is fair Luzie, pale Luzie, as the fireworks rushing toward their climax reveal and confirm. And as always when she's up to no good, she's wearing her knitted Berchtesgaden jacket. Wet is the wool I strip from her body. And wet
the little jacket she wears beneath her knitted jacket. Yet another Berchtesgaden jacket blooms before me. And toward the very end, when the fireworks have died down at last and only the violins remain, I find beneath the wool upon the wool within the wool, wrapped in a League of German Girls singlet, her heart, Luzie's heart, a cold, tiny gravestone, on which stands written:
Here lies Oskar—Here lies Oskar—Here lies Oskar .
.
.

"Don't fall asleep, boy!" Korneff interrupted my lovely reveries, laved by the sea, illuminated by fireworks. We turned left, and Section Eight, a new section with no trees and few gravestones, lay flat and hungry before us. Above the monotony of the other graves, all still too fresh to be tended, the most recent five rose clearly: moldering mounds of brown wreaths with faded, rain-soaked ribbons.

We quickly found Number Seventy-nine at the top of the fourth row, right by Section Seven, which boasted a few young, fast-growing trees, and was stocked with meter-high stones, mostly of Silesian marble, lined up with some regularity. We pulled up behind Seventy-nine, unloaded the tools, cement, gravel, sand, the pedestal and the travertine slab, with its slightly oily sheen. The three-wheeler sprang up as we rolled the load from the truck bed onto the crate with boards for tilting. Korneff pulled out the temporary wooden cross, with a crossbar bearing the names H. Webknecht and E. Webknecht, from the head of the grave, had me hand him the post-hole digger, and started digging two holes five feet three inches deep, one meter sixty by cemetery regulations, for the concrete posts, while I fetched water from Section Seven, then mixed the concrete, so it was ready by the time, having dug five feet, he said he was finished, and I could begin tamping in both holes while Korneff sat panting on the travertine slab and reached back to feel his boils. "Coming to a head. I can always feel when they're about to bust." I kept on tamping, my mind nearly blank. Coming from Section Seven, a Protestant funeral procession crawled across Section Eight to Section Nine. As they passed us, three rows away, Korneff slid off the travertine slab, and in compliance with cemetery regulations, we pulled off our caps for them, from the pastor through the next of kin. A solitary figure walked behind the coffin, a small, lopsided woman in black. Those who followed were all much taller and sturdier.

"God almighty, Katie bar the door!" Korneff groaned beside me. "I got a feeling they're going to bust before we get that slab up!"

Meanwhile the funeral procession arrived at Section Nine, rearranged itself, and gave birth to the rising and falling voice of the pastor. We could have placed the pedestal on the base, since the concrete was starting to set. But Korneff lay belly down across the travertine slab, shoved his cap between his forehead and the stone, and jerked back his jacket and collar, laying his neck bare, while details from the life of the dearly departed in Section Nine were announced to us in Section Eight. Not only did I have to clamber up on the travertine slab, I squatted on Korneff's lower back and took in the whole bag of tricks: there were two side by side. A straggler with an enormous wreath hurried toward Section Nine and the sermon that was slowly drawing to a close. After removing the tape with a single jerk, I wiped off the Ichthyol salve with a beech leaf and examined both indurations, tar-brown shading into yellow, and of approximately equal size. "Let us pray" drifted over from Section Nine. I took that as a sign, turned my head away, pressed and pulled at the beech leaves under my thumbs. "Our Father..." Korneff ground his teeth: "Pull, don't squeeze." I pulled. "...be Thy name." Korneff managed to join in the prayer: "...Thy kingdom come." Then I squeezed anyway, since pulling didn't work. "Will be done, on, as it is in." It was a miracle there was no explosion. And again: "Give us this day." Now Korneff had found his place in the text: "Trespasses and ... not into temptation..." There was more than I expected. "Kingdom, the power, and the glory." Squeezed out the last colorful remnants. "Forever and ever, amen." While I pulled again, Korneff: "Amen," and squeezed again: "Amen," while over in Section Nine they turned to their condolences, Korneff groaned another: "Amen," lying flat on the travertine slab heaved a sigh of relief: "Amen," and "Got any concrete left for the base?" I had, and he: "Amen."

I dumped the final shovelfuls as a binder between the two posts. Then Korneff slid off the polished, lettered surface and had Oskar show him the autumnal beech leaves with the similarly colored contents of his boils. We straightened our caps, took hold of the stone, and set the monument for Hermann Webknecht and Else Webknecht née Freytag in place as the funeral in Section Nine dispersed into thin air.

Only people who left something of value behind on earth could afford gravestones back then. It didn't have to be a diamond or a yard-long string of pearls. Five sacks of potatoes would get you a full-fledged meter-high slab of shell limestone from Grenzheim. We took in enough cloth for two three-piece suits in exchange for a double-plot Belgian granite monument on a triple pedestal. The tailor's widow, who had the cloth and an apprentice, offered to make the suits for us if we would throw in a dolomite border.

So one evening after work, Korneff and I boarded the Number Ten and headed toward Stockum, where we looked up the widow Lennert and had our measurements taken. Absurd as it sounds, Oskar was wearing an antitank gunner's uniform in those days, one Maria had altered for him, and even though the buttons on the jacket had been moved, given my unusual build, it proved impossible to button.

The apprentice, whom the widow Lennert called Anton, hand-tailored a suit for me from dark blue material with a pinstripe: single-breasted, lined in ash gray, the shoulders well padded but creating no false sense of size, my hump not concealed but handsomely emphasized, cuffs for the trousers but not too wide; Master Bebra remained my well-dressed ideal. Thus no loops for a belt, but buttons for suspenders instead, the vest shiny in back and matte in front, lined in antique rose. The whole thing took five fittings.

While the tailor's apprentice was still bent over Korneff's double-breasted suit and my single-breasted suit, a shoe salesman tried to get a meter-high stone for his wife, who had been killed in an air raid in forty-three. At first the man tried to palm off redeemable coupons on
us, but we wanted to see real merchandise. For Silesian marble with a synthetic stone border plus installation Korneff obtained a pair of low, dark brown shoes and a pair of carpet slippers with leather soles. I received a pair of black shoes with laces, which, though old-fashioned, were wonderfully soft. European size thirty-five; they offered my weak ankles firm and elegant support.

I laid a bundle of Reichsmarks on the synthetic-honey scales for Maria, who handled the shirts: "Could you get me two white dress shirts, one with pinstripes, and a light gray tie and a chestnut-colored one? The rest is for little Kurt and for you, dear Maria, who never think of yourself but only of others."

In a burst of generosity, I also gave Guste an umbrella with a genuine bone handle and a deck of nearly new Altenburger skat cards, since she enjoyed laying them out but was reluctant to borrow a deck from the neighbors every time she wanted to find out when Köster was coming home.

Maria rushed off to carry out her commission, bought a raincoat for herself with the considerable remaining cash, and a school satchel of imitation leather for little Kurt, which, ugly as it was, would have to do for the time being. To my shirts and ties she added three pairs of gray socks, which I'd forgotten to ask for.

When Korneff and I picked up our suits, we stood in some embarrassment before the mirror in the tailor's workshop, yet quite impressed with each other. Korneff scarcely dared turn his neck, furrowed with the scars of his boils. He leaned forward, his arms dangling from his drooping shoulders, and tried to straighten his crooked legs. As for me, when I folded my arms across my chest, thereby enlarging the horizontal mass of my upper body, placed my weight on my feeble right leg and angled my left nonchalantly, my new clothes gave me a daemonic, intellectual look. Smiling at Korneff and enjoying his astonishment, I approached the mirror, stood so close to the surface dominated by my reversed image that I could have kissed it, but instead simply breathed on it and said, as if in passing, "Hey there, Oskar. You still need a tie pin."

When, on Sunday afternoon a week later, I entered City Hospital to visit my nurses and present my new, vain self in tiptop form, showing all my best sides, I was the proud owner of a silver tie pin, set with a pearl.

The dear girls were speechless when they saw me sitting in the nurses' ward. This was late in the summer of forty-seven. I folded the arms of my suit across my chest in my accustomed manner and played with my leather gloves. I had been a stonecutter's trainee and master of fluted grooves for over a year now. I placed one trouser leg over the other, being careful to maintain the crease. Our good Guste cared for my suit as though it had been tailor-made for Köster, who was going to make some changes when he returned. Sister Helmtrud asked to feel the cloth. In the spring of forty-seven I bought little Kurt a mouse-gray loden coat for his seventh birthday, which we celebrated with homemade eggnog and Madeira cake—recipe: add freely! I offered the nurses, Sister Gertrud now among them, some candy that, in addition to twenty pounds of brown sugar, we'd been given for a slab of diorite. It seemed to me little Kurt was enjoying school a bit too much. The young lady teacher, not yet worn down, and certainly no Spollenhauer, praised him, said he was bright but a trifle solemn. How gay nurses can be when you bring them sweets. When I was alone with Sister Gertrud for a moment in the nurses' ward, I inquired about her free Sundays.