The Tin Drum (48 page)

What we offered wasn't world-class, of course, but it entertained the audience, made them forget the front and their furlough, released a wave of laughter that seemed endless; for as the blockbusters rained down upon us, shaking and burying the beer cellar and everything in it, dousing both lights and emergency lights, when everything lay scattered about, laughter still rose through the dark, stifling coffin, "Bebra!" they cried, "We want Bebra!" and good old indestructible Bebra answered the call, played the clown in the dark, drew salvos of laughter
from the buried mob, and when they cried for Raguna and Oskarnello he blared out, "Signora Raguna is verrry tired, my dear tin soldiers. And little Oskarnello has to take a little nap too for the grrreater glory of the Gerrrman Reich and final victory!"

Raguna, however, lay with me and was frightened. Oskar, though not frightened, lay with Raguna. Her fear and my courage brought our hands together. I explored her fear, she explored my courage. Toward the end I became slightly frightened, but she gained courage. And when I had banished her fear the first time and given her courage, my manly courage arose a second time. While my courage was eighteen glorious years old, she fell prey again, standing in I know not what year of her life, recumbent for I know not how many times, to the well-practiced fear that gave me courage. For like her face, her body, sparingly measured but complete in every way, had nothing in common with a Time that leaves its traces. Timelessly courageous and timelessly fearful, Roswitha gave herself to me. And no one will ever learn if, during a major air raid on the capital, that midget who lost her fear beneath my courage before the air-raid wardens dug us out of a collapsed Thomaskeller was nineteen or ninety-nine years old; and Oskar finds it easy to be discreet, since he himself has no idea if this first embrace that truly matched his own bodily proportions was granted by a courageous old woman or a young girl made willing by fear.

For three weeks we performed every night within the venerable casemates of the Roman garrison city of Metz. We put on the same show for two weeks in Nancy. Châlons-sur-Marne received us hospitably for a week. A few French phrases were already tripping off Oskar's tongue. In Rheims one could admire ruins from the First World War. The stony menagerie of the world-famous cathedral, disgusted by humanity, spat water unceasingly onto the cobblestones: that is, it rained daily in Rheims, and nightly too. In exchange, we had a sunny, mild September in Paris. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday by strolling along the
quais
with Roswitha on my arm. Though I knew the city from Airman First Class Fritz Truczinski's postcards, Paris didn't disappoint me in the least. As Roswitha and I stood arm in arm at the foot of the Eiffel Tower—I was three foot one, she was three foot three—we looked up and realized for the first time how special we were, sensing our true stature. We kissed on the street, which in Paris doesn't mean much.

Oh, the glorious associations with art and history! As I paid a visit to the Dôme des Invalides, still with Roswitha on my arm, and meditated on the great emperor, who though great was not all that tall, and therefore dear to both our hearts, I spoke Napoleon's words. Just as he had proclaimed at the tomb of the second Friedrich, who was no giant himself, "If he were still alive, we would not be standing here!" I whispered tenderly into my Roswitha's ear, "If the Corsican were still alive, we would not be standing here, would not be kissing beneath the bridges, on the
quais, sur le trottoir de Paris."

As part of a long program, we appeared in the Salle Pleyel and at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. Oskar quickly accustomed himself to big-city
stages, refined his repertoire, and adapted to the jaded tastes of the army of occupation: I no longer sangshattered ordinary German beer bottles, no, I reduced to shards with my song the most exquisite, gracefully curved, paper-thin blown vases and fruit bowls from French castles. My act was structured on a cultural-historical point of view, began with glasses from the reign of Louis XIV, then crushed Louis XV glassware to glassdust. Vehemently, with revolutionary fervor, I ravaged the goblets of poor Louis XVI and his heedless and headless Antoinette, then a little Louis Philippe, and for a finale took issue with the vitreous fantasies of French art nouveau.

If the field-gray masses in the stalls and balconies could not follow my historical presentation and applauded the shards simply as ordinary shards, there were also occasional staff officers and journalists from the Reich who admired my historical sense as well as the shards. A scholarly type in uniform offered a few flattering remarks on my artistic skills when we were introduced to him following a gala performance for garrison headquarters. Oskar was particularly grateful to the correspondent of a leading newspaper of the Reich in the city on the Seine who identified himself as an expert on France and discreetly drew my attention to a few small errors, not to say stylistic inconsistencies, in my program.

We spent the entire winter in Paris. They lodged us in first-class hotels, and I won't hide the fact that throughout the whole of that long winter, Roswitha repeatedly tested and confirmed at my side the advantages of the French bed. Was Oskar happy in Paris? Had Oskar forgotten his loved ones back home, Maria, Matzerath, Gretchen and Alexander Scheffler, had Oskar forgotten his son Kurt and his grandmother Anna Koljaiczek?

Though I had not forgotten them, I didn't miss them either. I sent no postcards home, gave no sign of life, but offered them instead a chance to live for a year without me; for I'd already decided when I left that I would return, and of course I wanted to see how they would fare in my absence. On the street, and during performances too, I sometimes searched among the soldiers for familiar faces. Perhaps, Oskar speculated, Fritz Truczinski or Axel Mischke had been transferred to Paris from the Eastern Front, and once or twice he thought he recognized Maria's dashing brother in a horde of infantrymen; but it wasn't him: field-gray can be misleading.

The only thing that made me homesick was the Eiffel Tower. Not that I climbed it and let the vista awaken in me an urge to head for home. Oskar had climbed the tower so often on postcards and in his mind that an actual physical ascent could only have resulted in a disappointed descent. At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, but without Roswitha, standing or even squatting alone beneath the boldly curved base of the iron structure, that vault, through which I could indeed see, but which still covered me, became the sheltering hood of my grandmother Anna: when I sat beneath the Eiffel Tower, I sat beneath her four skirts, the Champ de Mars was transformed into a Kashubian potato field, a Paris October rain slanted down tirelessly between Bissau and Ramkau; on such days it seemed the whole of Paris, including the metro, smelled of slightly rancid butter, and I turned silent, meditative, while Roswitha treated me with kindness, aware of my sorrow, for she was a sensitive soul.

In April of forty-four—amid reports that our lines were being successfully shortened on all fronts—we had to pack up our theatrical gear, leave Paris, and regale the Atlantic Wall with Bebra's Theater at the Front. We began the tour in Le Havre. Bebra seemed taciturn, distracted. Although he never gave a bad performance, and kept the laughers on his side as always, his age-old Narses face would turn to stone the moment the final curtain fell. At first I saw him as a jealous man, and worse yet, one ready to capitulate to the vigor of my youth. Roswitha cleared things up for me in whispers, knew nothing for sure, just rumors about officers visiting Bebra behind closed doors after his performances. It looked as if the master was emerging from his inner emigration, as if he was planning some direct action, as if the blood of his ancestor Prince Eugen was stirring within him. His plans had taken him so far from us, had led him into a realm of such broad and far-reaching import, that Oskar's narrow and purely personal relationship with his former Roswitha might at most have lured a weary smile to his wrinkled face. When—in Trouville it was, we were lodged at the spa hotel—he surprised us intertwined on the carpet of the dressing room we all shared, he waved off our attempt to pull apart and spoke into his makeup mirror: "Enjoy each other, my children, kiss while you can, for it's concrete tomorrow, then concrete grit between your lips, and an end to joy in kissing."

That was in June of forty-four. In the meantime we'd slogged all along the Atlantic Wall, from the Bay of Biscay to Holland, but remained for the most part in the hinterlands, saw little of the legendary pillboxes, and it wasn't till Trouville that we performed right on the coast. We were offered a chance to inspect the Atlantic Wall. Bebra accepted. A final performance in Trouville. We moved that night to the little village of Bavent, just short of Caen, four kilometers from the sand dunes. We were billeted with farmers. Broad meadows, hedgerows, apple trees. Calvados, the apple brandy, was distilled there. We drank some and slept well. A brisk breeze came through the window, a frog pond croaked till morning. Some frogs can really drum. I heard them in my sleep and told myself: You have to go home, Oskar, your son Kurt will soon be three, you have to give him his drum, you promised! When, thus admonished, Oskar the tormented father would awake from hour to hour, he felt beside him to make sure his Roswitha was still there, breathed in her smell: Raguna smelled faintly of cinnamon, crushed cloves, and nutmeg; she smelled like the cake spices that heralded Christmas, retained her fragrance even in summer.

In the morning an armored personnel car pulled up in front of the farmyard. We all stood shivering slightly at the gate. It was early, cool, we chatted into the breeze coming off the sea, climbed in: Bebra, Raguna, Felix and Kitty, Oskar, and a Lieutenant Herzog, who was taking us to his battery west of Cabourg.

When I say Normandy is green, I pass over in silence the brown-and-white-spotted cows engaged in their ruminant profession on both sides of the country road that ran straight as a string through the slightly misty meadows wet with dew, cattle that greeted our armored car with such indifference that the armor plates would have turned bright red with shame had they not previously received a coat of camouflage. Poplars, hedgerows, creeping underbrush, the first of the hulking, empty beach hotels, their shutters banging; we turned onto the promenade, climbed out, and followed behind the lieutenant, who showed Captain Bebra a slightly overbearing but still properly military respect, plodding through the dunes into a wind filled with sand and the sound of the surf.

It was no gentle Baltic, bottle-green and sobbing like a maiden, that awaited me. The Atlantic was testing his age-old maneuver: storming forward at high tide, retreating at low.

Then there it was, our concrete pillbox. We could admire it and pet it: it held still. "Achtung!" someone cried out inside, and flew forth at full stretch from the pillbox, which was shaped like a flattened turtle, lay between two sand dunes, was called "Dora Seven," and gazed out on high and low tides with its gun embrasures, observation slits, and small-caliber hardware. It was a man named Corporal Lankes, reporting to Lieutenant Herzog and to our Captain Bebra.

LANKES
,
saluting:
Dora Seven, sir, one corporal, four men. Nothing special to report!

HERZOG
: Very good! At ease, Corporal Lankes. You hear that, Captain, nothing special to report. It's been like that for years.

BEBRA
: But even so, high and low tides. The performances of Nature.

HERZOG
: That's just what keeps our men busy. That's why we keep building one pillbox after another. We're already sitting in each other's line of fire. Soon we'll have to blow up a few pillboxes just to clear room for new concrete.

BEBRA
knocks on the concrete; his troupe does likewise:
And you have faith in concrete, Lieutenant?

HERZOG
: That's hardly the right word. We haven't much faith in anything anymore. Right, Lankes?

LANKES
: Yes, sir, not anymore!

BEBRA
: But they keep on mixing and pouring.

LANKES
: Just between you and me: We're getting valuable experience here. I never knew how to build anything, spent some time as a student, then the war broke out. I'm hoping to use my knowledge working with cement when it's over. Everything's going to have to be rebuilt back home. Just take a look at that concrete, take a close look.
Bebra and his troupe with their noses right on it.
You see that? Seashells. We've got everything right at our doorstep. Just have to gather and mix it. Stones, seashells, sand, cement ... What more can I say, Captain, you're an artist and an actor, you know how it is. Lankes! Tell the captain what we put in the concrete.

LANKES
: Yes, sir! Tell the captain what we put in the concrete. We put puppies in. There's a puppy buried in the foundation of every pillbox.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: A puppy?

LANKES
: Soon there won't be another puppy between Caen and Le Havre.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: No more puppies.

LANKES
: That's how hard we've been working.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: That's how hard.

LANKES
: We'll have to start using kittens soon.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: Meow!

LANKES
: But cats aren't as good as puppies. So we're hoping there's some action here soon.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: The gala performance!
They applaud.

LANKES
: We've rehearsed long enough. And if we run out of puppies ...

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: Oh!

LANKES
:...we can't build any more pillboxes. Cats are bad luck.

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: Meow, meow!

LANKES
: But if you'd like to know in a nutshell, sir, why we use puppies ...

BEBRA'S TROUPE
: Puppies!