The Tin Drum (82 page)

I had not misread Maria. She gave up Stenzel, set up a first-class delicatessen on Friedrichstraße with my financial backing, and just last week—as Maria reported yesterday with joy, and not without gratitude—opened a branch in Oberkassel, only three years after starting the first one.

Was I on the way back from my seventh or my eighth tour? July was at its hottest. I hailed a taxi at the train station and went straight to the office building. As had happened at the station, a crowd of annoying autograph hunters stood outside the high-rise—retirees and grandmas who should have been taking care of their grandchildren. I immediately sent up word to the boss I was there, found the double door open and the carpet flowing toward the steel desk; but it wasn't the Master behind the desk, no wheelchair awaited me, but the smile of Dr. Dösch.

Bebra was dead. In fact the Master had been gone for several weeks. At Bebra's wish, I had not been informed that his condition was serious. Nothing, not even his death, was to interrupt my tour. At the reading of the will that soon followed, I inherited a small fortune and the portrait of Roswitha, yet also suffered a substantial financial loss, since I can
celed without notice two tours to which I was firmly committed, one to southern Germany and one to Switzerland, and was sued for breach of contract.

Those few thousand marks aside, I was hit hard by Bebra's death and was slow to recover. I locked my tin drum away and refused to stir from my room. To make matters worse, my friend Klepp chose that moment to get married, made a redheaded cigarette girl his wife, just because he'd once given her his photo. Shortly before the wedding, to which I was not invited, he gave up his room, moved to Stockum, and Oskar remained Zeidler's sole lodger.

My relationship with the Hedgehog had altered somewhat. Now that almost every newspaper carried my name in banner headlines he treated me with respect, and in return for a small consideration, even gave me the key to Sister Dorothea's empty room; later I rented the room myself so no one else could have it.

A path was thus provided for my sorrow. I opened the doors to both rooms, wandered from the tub in my room across the coco runner in the hall to Dorothea's chamber, gazed into the empty wardrobe, faced the taunting washstand mirror, despaired beside the heavy bed stripped bare, escaped into the corridor, fled from the coco fibers to my room and couldn't even bear it there.

Expecting to find customers among the lonely perhaps, an enterprising businessman from East Prussia who'd lost an estate in Masuren opened a shop near Jülicher Straße with a simple, straightforward name: Dogs for Rent.

There I rented Lux, a black Rottweiler, powerful, gleaming, and slightly overweight. I went walking with him so I wouldn't have to pace back and forth between my bathtub and Sister Dorothea's empty wardrobe in Zeidler's flat.

Lux would often lead me to the Rhine. There he barked at the ships. Lux would often lead me to Rath, in Grafenberg Forest. There he barked at the lovers. Toward the end of July of fifty-one, Lux led me to Gerresheim, a suburb of Düsseldorf, which, with its few factories and a large glassworks, was doing its best to deny its rural origins. Just beyond Gerresheim were allotment gardens, and among them pastures had fenced themselves in, and fields of grain were billowing, rye I think it was.

Have I already said it was hot the day the dog Lux led me to Gerresheim, and beyond Gerresheim to the allotment gardens and fields of grain? Not till we'd left the last houses of the suburb behind did I let Lux off the line. Even so he stayed at my heel, a loyal dog, an extremely loyal dog, since as a dog-rental dog he had to be loyal to many masters.

In other words, Lux obeyed me, positively dogged my steps. I found this dogged obedience overdone, wished he would run ahead, kicked him so he would; but he strayed with a bad conscience, kept turning his smooth black neck, kept his doggedly devoted dog eyes on me.

"Beat it, Lux!" I ordered. "Scram!"

Lux obeyed several times, but so briefly that I was delighted when he stayed away for slightly longer, disappeared into the grain, which was rye here, swaying in the wind, wait, not swaying in the wind—the wind had dropped and it was sultry.

Lux must be chasing a rabbit, I thought. Or perhaps he simply wants to be alone, to be his doggy self, just as Oskar would like to be a man awhile, without a dog.

I paid no attention to my surroundings. Neither the allotment gardens nor Gerresheim nor the city lying flatly in the haze beyond attracted my eye. I sat down on an empty, rusted cable reel, which I will now call a cable drum, for Oskar had barely taken a rusty seat before he was drumming his knuckles on the cable drum. It was hot out. My suit weighed down on me, it was too heavy for summer. Lux was gone, and stayed gone. The cable drum didn't replace my tin drum, but even so: I slowly drifted back, and when things didn't seem to be going anywhere, when the images of the past few years with all those hospitals kept coming back, I picked up two dry sticks, and told myself: Hang on a moment, Oskar, let's see what you are and where you came from. And there they were, shining, those two sixty-watt bulbs of the hour of my birth. The moth chattered between them, a distant storm shoved heavy furniture about, I heard Matzerath speak, then Mama. He pledged me the store, Mama promised a toy, I'd have a tin drum when I turned three, and so Oskar tried to make those three years pass as rapidly as possible: I ate, drank, spit up, gained weight, let them weigh me, diaper me, bathe me, brush me, powder me, vaccinate me, admire me, call me by name, smiled when asked, chortled on command, went to sleep on time, woke up on time, and showed in sleep the special face that
grownups call angelic. I had diarrhea several times, caught a number of colds, had whooping cough, clung to it awhile, and did not let go till I had grasped its difficult rhythm, kept it forever in my wrists; for, as you know, "Whooping Cough" was part of my repertoire, and when Oskar drummed the whooping cough before an audience of two thousand, two thousand little old ladies and men hacked and coughed.

Lux whined before me, rubbed against my knees. This dog from the dog rental my loneliness made me rent. There he stood four-legged, wagged his tail, was a dog, had a doggy look, and held something in his slavering muzzle: a stick, a stone, whatever a dog might find of value.

Those all-important early years slipped slowly from me. The pain in my gums heralding my first milk teeth receded, I leaned back wearily, a grown-up hunchback, neatly but somewhat too warmly dressed, with a wristwatch, an identification card, and a bundle of banknotes in my wallet. I placed a cigarette between my lips, held a match to it, and left it to the tobacco to dissolve the clear-cut taste of childhood left in my mouth.

And Lux? Lux rubbed against me. I pushed him away, blew cigarette smoke at him. He didn't like that, but held his ground and rubbed against me. His gaze licked at me. I searched the nearby wires between the telegraph poles for swallows, hoping to use them as a remedy for pushy dogs. But there were no swallows and Lux refused to be driven off. His muzzle found its way between my trouser legs, hit the spot so unerringly it seemed the East Prussian rental agent must have trained him to do it.

I struck him twice with the heel of my shoe. He retreated, stood there trembling, four-legged, yet still offered me his muzzle, holding its stick or stone so steadfastly he might have been holding not a stick or a stone but the wallet I felt in my jacket or the watch I felt ticking on my wrist.

What was he holding? What was so important, so worthy of display?

I reached between his warm jaws, soon held it in my hand, saw what I held, yet still acted as if I were searching for the word that might describe what Lux had found and brought from the field of rye.

There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and more accurately when they are detached, alienated from the
whole. It was a finger. A woman's finger. A ring finger. A woman's ring finger. A tastefully ringed woman's finger. Between the metacarpal and the first finger joint, approximately three-quarters of an inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be hacked off. A clean and clear cross-section preserved the sinews of the tendon.

It was a lovely, agile finger. I immediately identified the gemstone of the ring—correctly, as it later turned out—as an aquamarine, held by six golden claws. The ring itself proved so thin in one spot, worn to the point of fragility, that I judged it to be an heirloom. Though a line of dirt, or rather soil, showed beneath the fingernail, as if the finger had been forced to scratch or dig into the earth, from its shape the nail appeared well manicured. Beyond that the finger, once removed from the warm living muzzle of the dog, felt cold, and its yellowish pallor matched the cold.

For months Oskar had been carrying a triangular silk handkerchief peeking out of his left front breast pocket. He pulled forth this piece of silk, spread it out, bedded the ring finger down in it, noting that the inner surface of the finger showed lines extending to the third joint that bore witness to hard work, energy, and tenacity.

After wrapping the finger in the handkerchief, I rose from the cable drum, patted Lux on the neck, set out with handkerchief and finger in handkerchief in my right hand toward Gerresheim, headed home with various plans for my find, made it as far as a nearby garden fence—when Vittlar, who was lying in the fork of an apple tree and had been watching me and my retriever, addressed me.

The voice alone: that arrogant, affected nasal whine. He lay in the fork of the apple tree and said, "That's quite a dog you've got there, sir!"

I, at a loss: "What are you doing in that apple tree?" He preened on the forked branches, stretched his long upper body languidly: "They're just cooking apples, you've nothing to fear."

Time to put him in his place: "Who cares if they're cooking apples? What do I have to fear?"

"Well," he hissed, darting his tongue, "you might think I'm the snake, straight from Paradise, there were cooking apples even then."

I, angrily: "Allegorical rubbish!"

He, slyly: "So you think only fancy fruit's worth sinning for?"

I was ready to leave. The last thing I wanted to do right then was discuss the fruits in paradise. Then he took a more direct approach, jumped down nimbly from the apple tree, stood tall, willowy, and wily at the fence: "What's that your dog found in the rye?"

I don't know why I said, "A stone."

"And you stuck the stone in your pocket?" This was degenerating into an interrogation.

"I like to keep stones in my pocket."

"What I saw the dog bring back looked more like a stick."

"I'm sticking with stone, stick or stone."

"So it was a stick?"

"Whatever: stick or stone, cooking apples or fancy fruit..."

"A flexible stick?"

"The dog wants to go home, I'm off"

"A flesh-colored stick?"

"You just tend to your apples. Come on, Lux."

"A flesh-colored, flexible stick with a ring on it?"

"What is it you want? I'm just a man out for a stroll with a borrowed
dog."

"Well, you see, I'd like to borrow something too. Could I just put that pretty ring on my little finger for a moment or two, the one that gleamed on the stick and turned it into a ring finger? Vittlar's my name. Gottfried von Vittlar. I'm the last of our line."

That's how I met Vittlar, made friends with him that very day, still call him my friend, and said to him not long ago, when he came to visit, "I'm so glad, dear Gottfried, that it was you who turned me in to the police and not just any stranger."

If angels exist, they surely look like Vittlar: tall, willowy, vibrant, collapsible, more likely to hug the most barren of all lampposts than a gentle maiden who might ensnare him.

You don't notice Vittlar at first. Presenting a certain side, depending on his surroundings, he can turn himself into a length of string, a scarecrow, a coat rack, the recumbent fork of a tree. That's why I didn't notice him when I was sitting on the cable drum and he lay in the apple tree. Even the dog didn't bark; for dogs neither smell nor see nor bark at angels.

"Be a good fellow, my dear Gottfried," I said to him the other day, "and send me a copy of the statement you made to the court two years or so ago that led to my trial."

Here's the copy, in his own words, of his testimony in court:

On the day in question I, Gottfried von Vittlar, was lying in the fork of an apple tree in my mother's garden that bears enough cooking apples to fill our seven canning jars with applesauce each year. I was lying in the fork of the tree, lying on my side that is, with my left hip lodged in the lowest point of the fork, which was slightly mossy. My feet were pointing toward the glassworks at Gerresheim. I was looking—let's see now—I was looking straight ahead, waiting for something to happen within my field of vision.

The accused, who is today my friend, entered my field of vision. A dog accompanied him, circled about him, behaved like a dog, and, as the accused later told me, was named Lux, a Rottweiler rented from a dog-rental agency near St. Roch's Church.

The accused sat down on the empty cable drum that's been lying in front of my mother Alice von Vittlar's allotment garden since the end of the war. As the Court knows, the physique of the accused can only be described as small, and also hunchbacked. I was struck by that. But the behavior of that small, well-dressed gentleman seemed to me even stranger. He drummed on the rusty cable drum with two dry sticks. Bearing in mind that the accused is a drummer by profession, and, as has since been established, practices his trade whenever and wherever he can, and that a cable drum—which is not called a drum for nothing—could easily entice anyone, even a layperson, to drum, I can only state that on a sultry summer day, the accused Oskar Matzerath took a seat on the cable drum fronting Frau Alice von Vittlar's allotment garden and, with two dry willow sticks of unequal length, intoned rhythmically arranged sounds.

I further testify that the dog Lux disappeared for a considerable time into a field of rye ripe for harvest. If asked how long he was gone, I couldn't give an answer, since the moment I lie down in the fork of our apple tree I lose all sense of time, long or short. If I say notwithstanding that the dog disappeared for a considerable time, it means that I missed the dog, because I liked him, with his black coat and floppy ears.