The Tin Drum (80 page)

The retired lieutenant immediately began inspecting Dora Seven, starting with the outside, which Lankes allowed him to do. He filled out charts, pestered the countryside and oncoming tide with his telescope. He caressed the gun slits of Dora Six, right next to us, so tenderly you
would have thought he was pleasuring his wife. When he wanted to inspect the interior of Dora Seven, our vacation cottage, Lankes resisted: "Man, Herzog, what is it you want? Fiddling around here with concrete. That was news once, but it's all passé now."

Passé is a pet term with Lankes. He tends to divide the world into contemporary and passé. But for the retired lieutenant nothing was passé, things still didn't add up, they'd all have to answer to history many times over in the coming years, and he was going to inspect the interior of Dora Seven now: "I hope I've made myself clear, Lankes."

Herzog had already cast his shadow across our table and fish. He started to go past us and into the pillbox, above the entrance of which concrete ornaments still bore witness to the artistic hand of Corporal Lankes.

Herzog didn't make it past our table. Without dropping his fork, Lankes's fist shot up and laid out retired Lieutenant Herzog on the sand. Shaking his head, deploring the disruption of our fish fest, Lankes rose, bunched the lieutenant's linen shirt at his chest, dragged him off to one side, tracing a smooth, straight track in the sand, and tossed him down the dune, where we could no longer see him but still had to listen to him. Herzog gathered up his surveying instruments, which Lankes had flung after him, and withdrew cursing, conjuring up all the ghosts of history that Lankes had called passé.

"He's not all that far off, is Herzog, even if he is a nutter. If we hadn't been so drunk when it all started back then, who knows what might have happened to those Canadians."

I could only nod in agreement, for just the day before, at low tide, I'd found among the seashells and empty prawn husks a telltale button from a Canadian uniform. Oskar stowed the button away in his wallet, as pleased as if he'd found a rare Etruscan coin.

Lieutenant Herzog's visit, brief though it was, had stirred up memories: "Do you remember, Lankes, when our frontline troupe was inspecting your concrete and we had breakfast on top of the pillbox, there was a slight breeze, just like today; and all at once six or seven nuns appeared, searching for prawns among the Rommel asparagus, and you were ordered to clear the beach, Lankes, and did, with a deadly round of machine-gun fire."

Lankes remembered, sucked on fish bones, even knew their names,
Sister Scholastika, Sister Agneta, named them in turn, described the novice as a rosy face framed in black, portrayed her so clearly that the image of my secular hospital nurse, Sister Dorothea, which I carry with me always, was not so much submerged as partially obscured; and was even further obscured when, a few minutes after his description—but not so surprisingly as to constitute a miracle—a young nun, pink and framed in black, could hardly be missed billowing across the dunes from the direction of Cabourg.

She was warding off the sun with a black umbrella of the kind elderly gentlemen carry. Above her eyes arched an intensely green celluloid shade resembling the visors worn by busy Hollywood filmmakers. They were calling for her in the dunes. There seemed to be more nuns out there. "Sister Agneta!" they called. "Sister Agneta, where are you?"

And Sister Agneta, the young thing who could be seen above our clearly delineated codfish skeleton, replied, "Here, Sister Scholastika. There's no wind at all here."

Lankes grinned and nodded complacently with his wolf's head, as if he had ordered up this Catholic parade, as if nothing could surprise him.

The young nun spotted us and stood to the left of the pillbox. Her rosy face, with two circular nostrils, said between slightly protruding but otherwise perfect teeth, "Oh."

Lankes turned his head and neck without moving his upper body: "Well, Sister, taking a little stroll?"

How quickly the answer came: "We visit the seashore once a year. But for me it's the first time. The ocean's so big."

There was no denying it. To this very day, that description of the ocean seems to me the only one that truly hits the mark.

Lankes played host, poked about in my portion of fish and offered her some: "Try a little fish, Sister? It's still warm." His free and easy French astonished me, and Oskar tried the foreign language too: "You don't have to worry, Sister. It's Friday."

But even this allusion to the no doubt rigid rules of her order could not convince the young woman so cleverly hidden beneath her habit to partake of our repast.

"Do you live here?" curiosity impelled her to ask. She found our bunker charming, if slightly odd. At this point, unfortunately, the Mother
Superior and five other nuns with black umbrellas and green reporter's visors entered the picture over the crest of the dune. Agneta dashed off and, as far as I could gather from the flurry of words clipped short by the east wind, was given a good scolding and taken back into their circle.

Lankes was dreaming. He held his fork upside down in his mouth and stared at the billowing group on the dune: "Those aren't nuns, they're sailing ships."

"Sailing ships are white," I pointed out.

"Those are black sailing ships." It was hard to argue with Lankes. "The one out on the left is the flagship.
Agneta
s a speedy corvette. Good sailing weather: column formation, jib to stern post, mizzenmast, mainmast and foremast, all sails set, heading toward the horizon, toward England. Just think: the Tommies wake up tomorrow morning, look out the window, and what do they see?—twenty-five thousand nuns, flags flying from the mast tops, and here comes the first broadside..."

"A new religious war," I helped him. The flagship should be named the
Mary Stuart
or the
De Valera,
or better still, the
Don Juan.
A new, more mobile armada avenges Trafalgar. "Death to all Puritans" is the watchword, and this time the English don't have a Nelson on hand. Let the invasion begin: England's no longer an island.

The conversation was getting a little too political for Lankes. "Now they're steaming away, the nuns," he reported.

"Sailing away," I corrected him.

Sailing or steaming, they billowed off toward Cabourg. They held umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun. But one lagged a little behind, bent down between steps, picking up and discarding. The rest of the fleet—to stick with the metaphor—made their way slowly on, tacking into the wind, toward the burned-out shell of the former beach hotel.

"She didn't get her anchor up, or her rudder's damaged." Lankes was sticking with sea lingo. "Isn't that the speedy corvette
Agneta?"

Corvette or frigate, it was the novice Agneta coming toward us, gathering and discarding seashells.

"What's that you're gathering, Sister?" Lankes could see very well what it was.

"Seashells." She pronounced the word very clearly and bent down.

"Are you allowed to do that? Those are earthly goods, after all"

I supported the novice Agneta: "You're wrong, Lankes. There's nothing earthly about seashells."

"Then they're stranded goods, goods in any case, and nuns aren't allowed to have them. For them it's poverty, poverty, and more poverty. Right, Sister?"

Sister Agneta smiled with protruding teeth: "I just take a few. They're for the kindergarten. The little ones love to play with them, and they've never been to the seashore."

Agneta stood at the entrance to the pillbox and cast a nun's glance inside.

"How do you like our little home?" I said, cozying up to her. Lankes was more direct: "Take a tour of our villa. Costs nothing to look, Sister."

She scraped the tips of her shoes below the sturdy stuff of her habit, stirring up sand that the wind lifted and sprinkled over our fish. Somewhat more uncertain now, with eyes distinctly light brown, she examined us and the table between us. "Surely I shouldn't," she replied, asking to be contradicted.

"Oh come now, Sister!" the painter said, sweeping all objections aside, and rising. "It's got a great view, the bunker. You can see the whole beach through the gun slits."

She still hesitated, her shoes now surely full of sand. Lankes extended his hand into the pillbox entrance. His concrete ornaments cast strong, ornamental shadows. "It's clean inside." Perhaps it was the artist's gesture of invitation that brought the nun into the bunker. "Just for a moment, then," came the decisive word. She whished into the pillbox ahead of Lankes. He wiped his hands on his trousers—a typical painter's gesture—and warned me before disappearing: "Don't eat my fish!"

But Oskar had had his fill of fish. I withdrew from the table, remained at the mercy of the sandy wind and the blustering noise of the tide and the sea, that swaggering old strongman. With my foot I dragged my drum closer and began drumming, tried to drum my way out of this concrete landscape, this pillbox world, this vegetable called Rommel asparagus.

First, and with scant success, I tried love: Once upon a time I too had loved a Sister. Not a nun, to be sure, but a nurse. She lived in Zeidler's
flat, behind a door of frosted glass. She was beautiful, and yet I never saw her. A coco runner came between us. It was too dark in Zeidler's hall. And so I felt the coco fibers much more clearly than Sister Dorothea's body.

When this theme ended all too quickly on the coco runner, I tried to convert my early love for Maria to rhythm and plant it like rapidly growing ivy in front of the pillbox. But once again Sister Dorothea stood in the way of my love for Maria: the smell of carbolic acid drifted in from the sea, gulls beckoned in nurses' uniforms, the sun seemed to glow like a Red Cross pin.

Oskar was actually glad when his drumming was interrupted. The Mother Superior, Sister Scholastika, had returned with her five nuns. They looked tired, held their umbrellas at a forlorn slant: "Have you seen a young nun, our young novice? The child is so young. It's the first time the child has seen the ocean. She must have lost her way. Where are you, Sister Agneta?"

There was nothing I could do but send the little billowing squad, this time with the wind at their backs, off toward the mouth of the Orne, Arromanches, and Port Winston, where the English once wrested their artificial harbor from the sea. There wouldn't have been room for all of them in the bunker anyway. I'd been tempted, just for a moment, to let them pay Lankes a surprise visit, but then friendship, disgust, and malice combined to make me lift my thumb toward the mouth of the Orne. The nuns obeyed my thumb, turned into six steadily shrinking, wavering black dots on the crest of the dune; and their plaintive "Sister Agneta, Sister Agneta!" turned increasingly windswept, till it was buried at last in the sand.

Lankes left the pillbox first. The typical painter's gesture: he wiped his hands on the legs of his trousers, lounged about in the sun, bummed a cigarette off me, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and fell upon the cold cod. "That whets your appetite," he said suggestively, and set to pillaging the tail piece that was mine.

"She must be unhappy now," I said accusingly to Lankes, savoring the word unhappy.

"How so? She's got nothing to be unhappy about."

It was inconceivable to Lankes that his notion of human relations might make anyone unhappy.

"What's she doing now?" I asked, though I really had another question in mind.

"She's sewing," Lankes explained with his fork. "Ripped her habit a bit and now she's mending it."

The seamstress left the bunker. She immediately opened her umbrella, babbling gaily, yet I thought I detected a note of strain: "The view from your bunker really is nice. You can see the whole beach and the ocean."

She paused before the ruins of our fish. "May I?"

We both nodded.

"Sea air whets your appetite," I said by way of encouragement, upon which she nodded, dug into our fish with reddened, chapped hands recalling her hard work in the nunnery, raised the fish to her mouth, and ate gravely, with pensive concentration, as if she were rechewing something along with it, something she'd had before the fish.

I glanced under her coif. She'd left her green reporter's visor in the pillbox. Small, uniform beads of sweat lined her smooth forehead, Madonna-like within its stiff white border. Lankes asked for another cigarette, though he still hadn't smoked the first one. I tossed him the whole pack. While he stowed three away in his shirt pocket and stuck a fourth between his lips, Sister Agneta turned, threw away her umbrella, and ran—only now did I see that she was barefoot—up the dune and disappeared toward the surf.

"Let her run," Lankes said in an oracular tone. "Either she'll come back or she won't."

I couldn't sit still for long watching the painter's cigarette. I climbed up on the pillbox and scanned the beach, the waves of the incoming tide closer now.

"Well?" Lankes wanted to know.

"She's undressing." That was all he could get out of me. "Probably wants to go swimming, to cool off."

That struck me as dangerous, given the tide, and so soon after eating. She was already in up to her knees, went in deeper and deeper, her back rounded. The water, which couldn't be all that warm with August drawing to a close, didn't seem to bother her: she swam, swam well, practiced different strokes, and dived into the oncoming waves.

"Let her swim, and come on down off the bunker."

I looked behind me and saw Lankes stretched out, puffing away. The bare bones of the cod glistened white in the sun, dominating the table.

As I jumped down from the pillbox, Lankes opened his artist's eyes and said, "What a painting that would make:
Tidal Nuns.
Or
Nuns at High Tide."

"You monster!" I shouted. "What if she drowns?"

Lankes closed his eyes: "Then we'll call it
Drowning Nuns."

"And if she comes back and throws herself at your feet?"

With open eyes the painter delivered his verdict: "Then I'll call her and the painting
Fallen Nun."

With him it was always either/or, heads or tails, drowned or fallen. He bummed my cigarettes, tossed the lieutenant off the dune, ate my fish, showed the inside of a bunker to a child who'd given herself to Christ, sketched scenes in the air with his big, knobby foot as she swam out to sea, chose formats and titles: Tidal Nuns. Nuns at High Tide. Drowning Nuns. Fallen Nuns. Twenty-five Thousand Nuns. Seascape format: Nuns off Trafalgar. Portrait format: Nuns Conquer Lord Nelson. Nuns in a Headwind. Nuns in Fair Wind. Nuns Tacking into the Wind. Black, lots of black, dead white, and cold-storage blue: The Invasion, or Mystical, Barbaric, Bored—that old concrete title from his war days. And when we returned to the Rhineland, Lankes painted every one of them, in seascape format, in portrait format, a whole series of nuns, found a dealer who was crazy about nuns, exhibited forty-three nun paintings, sold seventeen to collectors, industrialists, art museums, and an American, spawned critics who compared him, Lankes himself, to Picasso, and by all this success, persuaded me, Oskar, to dig out the business card from Dr. Dösch, the concert agent, for Lankes's art was not alone in crying out for bread, my art did too: the time had come, by means of my drum, to transmute the prewar and wartime experience of Oskar, the three-year-old drummer, into the pure, ringing gold of the postwar period.