The Tin Drum (7 page)

What would I do without this open family grave that shows all things so clearly? It has a hundred and twenty pages. On each page, four or six or sometimes only two photos are carefully arranged, mounted in patterns that are sometimes symmetrical, sometimes less so, but always based on right angles. It's bound in leather, and the older it gets, the more leathery it smells. There were times when it was exposed to the wind and weather. The photos loosened, and I was obliged by their helpless state to seek some quiet opportunity when paste could restore those nearly lost images to their ancestral spot.

What else in this world, what novel has the epic scope of a photo album? May the good Lord in Heaven, that diligent amateur who photographs us from on high each Sunday and pastes us in his album, terribly foreshortened and more or less properly exposed, guide me safely through this my album, prevent me from any stops of unseemly length along the way, no matter how pleasurable, and refrain from nourishing Oskar's love of the labyrinthine; for I'm eager to follow up these photos with the originals.

A few incidental remarks: all sorts of uniforms here, dresses and hairstyles change, Mama gets fatter, Jan grows slacker, here are some people I don't even know, wonder who took that shot, things are starting to go downhill, and now the turn-of-the-century art photo degenerates into today's commercial photo. Take, for example, this monu
ment to my grandfather Koljaiczek and this passport photo of my friend Klepp. Simply place Grandfather's sepia portrait side by side with that glossy passport photo of Klepp, just crying out for a rubber stamp, and it's easy to see where advances in photography have brought us. And all the paraphernalia these instant photos require. But I have more to answer for than Klepp, since, as the owner of the album, it was up to me to maintain standards. If hell's in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era. Quick, a little pathos: O man amid candid cameras, snapshots, passport photos! O man in the glare of flashbulbs, O man standing erect beside the Leaning Tower of Pisa, O photomat man, whose right ear must be exposed to be passport-worthy. And—hold the pathos: perhaps even this hell will be bearable, because the worst pictures are never taken, but only dreamed of, or if taken, never developed.

Klepp and I had pictures both taken and developed during our early days on Jülicher Straße, having made friends while eating spaghetti. I was busy with travel plans back then. That is, I was feeling so depressed that I wanted to take a trip, and planned to apply for a passport. But since I lacked the cash to finance a proper trip, one that included Rome, Naples, or at least Paris, I was just as glad I couldn't afford it, for nothing's more depressing than traveling in a state of depression. We both had enough money for the movies, however, so Klepp and I visited cinema halls where, in keeping with Klepp's tastes, Wild West films were playing or, matching my needs, films in which Maria Schell wept as the nurse, with Borsche as head surgeon having just finished a most difficult operation, playing Beethoven sonatas by the open balcony door, the very image of responsibility. We found it a great affliction that the programs lasted only two hours. We would have liked to see some of them a second time. Often we got up at the end of a film and went to the box office to buy another ticket for the same show. But the moment we left the hall and saw the longer or shorter lines at the box-office window we lost courage. We were too ashamed to face the total strangers who stared at us with such insolence, let alone the cashier, and did not dare extend the line.

After nearly every film we saw those days, we would go to the photography shop near Graf-Adolf-Platz to have our passport photos taken.
They knew us well there and smiled to themselves as we entered, but still asked us most politely to take a seat, for we were customers and respected as such. As soon as the booth was free, a young woman, of whom I recall nothing except that she was nice, pushed us one after the other into the booth, deftly positioned and adjusted first me, then Klepp, and told us to stare at a certain spot until a flash of light synchronized with a bell announced that we were now on the plate six times in succession.

Barely photographed and still slightly stiff around the corners of our mouths, we were pressed into comfortable wicker chairs by the young woman, who asked us nicely, just being nice and also nicely dressed, to be patient for five minutes. We were happy to wait. After all, now we had something to look forward to: we were eager to see how our passport photos had turned out. After just seven minutes the nondescript but still nice young woman handed us two little paper envelopes and we paid.

The triumph in Klepp's slightly protuberant eyes. As soon as we had the envelopes, we also had an excuse to enter the nearest beer hall, for no one likes to look at his passport pictures on the open, dusty street, standing amid all the bustle, blocking the flow of traffic. Just as we were loyal to the photography shop, we always went to the same tavern on Friedrichstraße. Ordering beer, blood sausage with onions, and black bread, we spread out the slightly damp pictures before our order came, using the entire top of the round wooden table, and immersed ourselves, as our beer and blood sausage promptly arrived, in our own strained features.

We always had other pictures with us too, taken after previous visits to the movies. So there was a basis for comparison: and where there's a basis for comparison, you're allowed a second, third, and fourth glass of beer to liven things up a bit or, as they say in the Rhineland, create a little ambiance.

That's not to say that someone who's depressed can render his own depression less tangible by means of a passport photo, for true depression is intangible by its very nature; at least mine, and Klepp's as well, had no tangible basis, and demonstrated in its almost cheery intangibility a staying power that nothing seemed capable of dispersing. If there was any chance of confronting our depression then, it could only
be through those photos; for in these series of snapshots, not always sharply focused to be sure, we found ourselves passive and neutralized, which was what mattered. We could treat ourselves however we wished; drink beer as we did so, torture our blood sausages, create a little ambiance, and play. We bent and folded those little pictures, cut them up with the scissors we always carried for just this purpose. We pieced old and new likenesses together, gave ourselves one eye or three, ears for noses, let our right ears speak or stay silent, browbeat our chins. Nor did we keep our montages separate; Klepp borrowed details from me, I took traits from him: we were creating new, and we hoped happier, creatures. Now and then we gave a photo away.

We—I'm speaking only of Klepp and me, leaving aside all those artificially assembled figures—got into the habit of giving the waiter, whom we called Rudi, a photo on each visit, and that beer hall saw us at least once a week. Rudi, the sort of fellow worthy of twelve children and guardianship of eight more, was familiar with our compulsion, and though he already had dozens of pictures of us in profile and even more
en face,
he always assumed a sympathetic expression and said thank you when, after lengthy consultation and a stringent selection process, we handed him the photo.

Oskar never gave a photo to the waitress at the counter or to the foxy young redhead with the cigarette tray, for women shouldn't be given photos—they always mistreat them. Klepp, however, who, for all his portliness, could never stop showing off for the ladies, was communicative to the point of folly, and was ready to bare his chest and heart to any of them, must have given a photo to the cigarette girl one day without my knowledge, for he got engaged to the saucy green slip of a thing, and even married her, because he wanted his photo back.

I've got ahead of myself and devoted too many words to the final pages of my album. Those stupid snapshots aren't worth it, except to make clear by way of comparison how grand and unrivaled—yes, even artistic—the portrait of my grandfather Koljaiczek on the first page of the album appears to me to this day.

Short and stout he stands beside a small, elaborately carved table. Unfortunately he had himself photographed as Wranka the volunteer fireman, not as the arsonist. So he's missing his mustache. But the tautly stretched fireman's uniform with its medal for bravery and the
fireman's helmet transforming the table into an altar almost compensate for the arsonist's whiskers. How gravely he gazes out, how deeply aware of all that turn-of-the-century suffering. That look, proud though tragic, seems to have been both beloved and common during the Second Reich, for Gregor Koljaiczek, the drunken gunpowder maker, who appears relatively sober in his pictures, sports it too. More mystic in tone, having been taken in Częstochowa, is the image captured of Vinzent Bronski, who holds a votive candle. A youthful portrait of the slender Jan Bronski bears witness to a consciously melancholy manliness, captured by means of early photography.

The women of that period were seldom as successful at finding a look that matched their demeanor. Even my grandmother Anna, who, God knows, was a real person, sits primly behind a silly, pasted-on smile in pictures taken prior to the outbreak of the First World War, offering no hint of the breadth of her four cascading skirts and the refuge they offered.

Even during the war years women were still smiling at the photographer as he danced about under his black cloth, snapsnapping away. I have another photo, double postcard size on stiff cardboard, showing twenty-three nurses in the Silberhammer Military Hospital, Mama among them as an auxiliary nurse, timid, clustering around the staff doctor, who offers a point of support. The hospital ladies seem slightly more relaxed in a posed shot at a costume ball in which convalescent warriors also appear. Mama ventures a wink, pursing her lips for a kiss that in spite of her angel wings and tinseled hair seems to say: Even angels have a sex. Matzerath, kneeling before her, has chosen a costume he would all too happily wear in daily life: he appears as a cook in a starched chef's hat, brandishing a spoon. In uniform, on the other hand, decked out with the Iron Cross Second Class, he too, like the Koljaiczeks and Bronskis, gazes out with a knowingly tragic look, and is superior to all the women in the photos.

After the war people wore a different look. The men appear slightly demobilized, and now it's the women who know how to pose for photos, who have reason to gaze out gravely, who, even when smiling, make no effort to conceal an undertone of the sorrows they've suffered. It was quite becoming, that melancholy air of women in the twenties. Did they not manage, sitting, standing, and half reclining, with the crescents of
their little black spit curls pasted to their temples, to fashion a harmonious blend of Madonna and harlot?

The picture of my twenty-three-year-old mama—it must have been taken shortly before she became pregnant—shows a young woman who bows her round, smoothly shaped head slightly forward on her firm, fleshy neck, yet looks directly at the viewer, belying the merely physical with the aforementioned melancholy smile and a pair of eyes that, more gray than blue, seem accustomed to regarding the souls of her fellow beings, as well as her own, as solid objects—a coffee cup, say, or a cigarette holder. Of course the simple word soulful would not suffice here, were I to place it as an adjective before my mama's gaze.

No more interesting, but easier to assess and therefore more revealing, are the group photos of that period. It's amazing how much more beautiful and bridal the wedding dresses were when they were signing the Treaty of Rapallo. Matzerath still wears a stiff collar in his wedding picture. He looks handsome, elegant, almost intellectual. His right foot is thrust forward, looking like some movie actor of his day, Harry Liedtke, say. Dresses were short back then. The bridal dress of my mama the bride, a white skirt with a thousand pleats that barely reaches past her knees, shows off her shapely legs and dainty dancer's feet in white strap shoes. The entire wedding party crowds into other prints. Amid the urbanely dressed guests striking various attitudes, my grandmother Anna and her blessed brother Vinzent are always conspicuous for their stern provinciality and guileless insecurity. Jan Bronski, who like my mama comes from the same potato field as his aunt Anna and his heavenly-Virgin-addicted father, manages to hide his rural Kashubian origins behind the festive elegance of a Polish postal clerk. No matter how small and endangered he stands among the robust occupiers of space, his unusual eyes and the almost feminine regularity of his features become the focal point of every photo, even when he's standing off to one side.

For some time now I've been looking at a group photo taken not long after the marriage. The matte brown rectangle compels me to reach for my drum, to try to conjure with drumsticks on lacquered tin the tristar constellation visible on the print.

The photograph must have been taken at the corner of Magdeburgerstraße and Heeresanger near the Polish student hostel, in the Bronskis'
apartment, for a balcony typical only of those pasted onto the fronts of flats in the Polish quarter serves as a background, sunlit and half-overgrown with pole beans. Mama is seated, Matzerath and Jan Bronski are standing. But how she sits, and how they stand! For a time I was silly enough to try to plot the constellation formed by this triumvirate—for Mama gave the full value of a man—with a school compass Bruno had to buy for me, and a ruler and triangle. The angle of inclination of the neck, a triangle of unequal sides, led to divergent parallels, to forced congruencies, to circles of the compass that closed significantly outside the triangle, that is, in the greenery of the pole beans, and produced a central point, because I was seeking a point, believed in the point, was addicted to the point, longed for a reference point, a departure point, perhaps even a viewpoint.

Nothing resulted from this dilettantish series of measurements but tiny yet annoying holes that I dug into the most important areas of this precious photograph with the point of my compass. What was so special about this print? What made me seek, and, if you will, actually find, mathematical and, ridiculous as it seems, even cosmic references in this rectangle? Three people: a seated woman, two standing men. Her dark hair marcelled, Matzerath's curly blond, Jan's chestnut brown, combed back close to his head. All three are smiling: Matzerath more than Jan Bronski, both showing their upper teeth, the smile of the two together five times broader than Mama's, of which you see only a hint at the corners of her mouth, and nothing at all in her eyes. Matzerath rests his left hand on Mama's right shoulder; Jan is content to place his right hand lightly on the back of the chair. She, with her knees to the right, facing forward from the waist up, holding a notebook in her lap that I long took for one of Bronski's stamp albums, later for a fashion magazine, and finally for a cigarette-card collection of famous film stars. Mama's hands seem poised to turn the pages the moment the plate is exposed and the picture taken. All three appear happy, commending one another for their mutual immunity to surprises of the sort that arise only if one partner in the Triple Alliance resorts to secret drawers or keeps things concealed from the start. Since they form a set, the only reason they need the fourth person, namely Jan's wife, Hedwig Bronski
née
Lemke, who may have already been pregnant at the time with the future Stephan, is to point the camera at the three of them and the happiness
the three display, so that, at least photographically, their tripartite happiness can be captured and held fast.