The Tin Drum (56 page)

Several harshly glaring flashlights, not set on red. Störtebeker rose, crossed himself, stepped toward the flashlights, handed his velour hat to the still kneeling Pinchcoal, and advanced in his raincoat toward a bloated shadow with no flashlight, toward Father Wiehnke, pulled something skinny that flailed about from the shadow into the light, Luzie Rennwand, and slapped away at the girl's pinched triangular face under the beret till a blow from a policeman sent him flying into the pews.

"Man, Jeschke," I heard one of the cops cry from my perch on the Virgin, "that's the chief's son!"

Oskar, with a sense of modest satisfaction at having had the son of a police chief as an able lieutenant, let himself be taken into custody without a struggle, playing the role of a whimpering three-year-old misled by teenagers: Father Wiehnke picked me up in his arms.

The police were the only ones shouting. The boys were led away. Father Wiehnke, feeling faint and sinking onto the nearest pew, had to put me down on the flagstones. I stood by our equipment and discovered, behind the chisels and hammers, the basket full of sausage sandwiches that Thumper had prepared before we started on our mission.

I grabbed the basket and went up to Luzie, who was shivering in her thin coat, and offered her the sandwiches. She picked me up, held me in her right arm, hung the basket with the sausage sandwiches over her left, a sandwich moved rapidly from her fingers to her teeth, and I watched her burning, beaten face with its crowded features: the eyes restless behind two black slits, the skin as if hammered, a chewing triangle, doll, Black Cook, devouring sausage and skin, growing skinnier as she fed, more ravenous, more triangular, more doll-like—a look that left its mark upon me. Who will remove that triangular mark from my brow, and from my mind? How long will it chew away inside me, chewing sausage, skin, and men, and smiling as only that triangle and ladies in tapestries taming unicorns can smile?

As Störtebeker was led away between two officers and turned his blood-smeared face to Luzie and Oskar, I looked right past him, no longer recognized him, and surrounded by four or five cops, was car
ried along behind my former Duster gang in the arms of the sandwich-eating Luzie.

What stayed behind? Father Wiehnke stayed behind with our two flashlights, still set on red, surrounded by hastily cast-off choir robes and priest's garments. Chalice and monstrance remained on the altar steps. A sawed-off John and a sawed-off Jesus remained with the Virgin once meant to serve as a counterweight to the tapestry with lady and unicorn in our Puttkamer cellar.

Oskar, however, was carried away toward a trial that I still call the second trial of Jesus, a trial that ended with my acquittal, and hence that of Jesus.

Imagine, if you please, a swimming pool tiled in azure blue, and in that pool, feeling suntanned and athletic, people swimming. At the edge of the pool men and women recline outside the bathing cabins. Some music from a loudspeaker perhaps, playing softly. Healthy boredom, an easygoing, casual eroticism that tautens swimsuits. The tiles are smooth, but no one slips. A few signs with rules; but these too are unnecessary, for those who swim have come for just an hour or two and break the rules elsewhere. Now and then someone dives from the three-meter board but does not merit the attention of those swimming or tempt those lying at poolside to look up from their magazines. Suddenly a breeze. No, not a breeze. A young man, slowly, resolutely climbing the ladder of the ten-meter tower, rung by rung. The magazines with commentaries from Europe and abroad droop, eyes rise with him, bodies at rest now stretch, a young woman shades her eyes, someone loses his train of thought, a word remains unspoken, a minor flirtation, barely begun, comes to a sudden end in midsentence—for now he stands on the platform, well built, virile, takes a little hop, leans against the gently curving tubular steel railing, gazes down as if bored, casts off from the rail with an elegant thrust of the hips, ventures out upon the diving board towering high above, which dips at each step, looks down, his gaze tapering to an azure, startlingly small pool below in which red, yellow, green, white, red, yellow, green, white, red, yellow bathing caps constantly rearrange themselves. His friends must be sitting there, Doris and Erika Schüler, Jutta Daniels with her boyfriend, who's not at all right for her. They wave, Jutta waves too. Careful not to lose his balance, he waves back. They call out. What do they want? Do it, they call
out, dive, cries Jutta. But he wasn't planning on that at all, just wanted to see what it looked like from up there and then climb back, slowly, rung by rung. And now they're shouting to him, so that everyone can hear, shouting loudly: Jump! Go on! Jump!

You have to admit that's a hell of a situation, no matter how close the diving board is to heaven. The Dusters and I found ourselves in a similar situation, though it wasn't the season for swimming, in January of forty-five. We had ventured high above, were now jostling about on the diving board, while below us, forming a solemn horseshoe around an empty pool, sat judges, associates, witnesses, and bailiffs.

Then Störtebeker stepped out onto the springy board with no railing.

"Jump!" the judges shouted.

But Störtebeker didn't jump.

Then the slim figure of a young girl in a short Berchtesgaden jacket and a gray pleated skirt rose from the benches of the witness stand. She raised a pale but not blurred face—which I still maintain formed a triangle—like a blinking target; and Luzie Rennwand did not shout but whispered instead, "Jump, Störtebeker, jump!"

Then Störtebeker jumped, and Luzie sat back down on the wooden witness bench, pulling the sleeves of her knitted Berchtesgaden jacket over her fists.

Moorskiff limped onto the diving board. The judges urged him to jump. But Moorskiff didn't feel like it, examined his fingernails with an embarrassed smile, waited till Luzie freed her sleeves, lowered her fists from the wool, and showed him her triangle of a face, black-framed, with slits for eyes. Then he jumped, plunging toward the triangular target, yet never reached it.

Pinchcoal and PuttPutt, who had it in for each other even as they ascended, came to blows on the diving board. PuttPutt got a dusting and Pinchcoal didn't let go of him even when he jumped.

Thumper, who had long, silky lashes, closed his unfathomably sad doe eyes before he jumped.

The Air Force auxiliaries had to remove their uniforms before they jumped.

Nor could the Rennwand brothers jump from the diving board into heaven as choirboys; Luzie, their little sister, sitting in the witness stand,
dressed in threadbare wartime wool and encouraging this jumping game, would never have stood for it.

Countering history, Belisarius and Narses jumped first, then Totila and Teja.

Bluebeard jumped, Lionheart jumped, the foot soldiers of the Dusters, Nosey, Bushman, Tanker, Piper, Hotsauce, Yatagan, and Cooper, jumped.

When Stuchel, a high school student so cross-eyed it was confusing to look at him, only loosely involved with the Dusters, and that almost by accident, had jumped, only Jesus remained on the diving board and, as Oskar Matzerath, was urged in chorus by the judges to jump, an invitation Jesus declined. And when a stern Luzie rose from the witness stand with her scrawny Mozart pigtail between her shoulder blades, spread her knitted sleeves, and without moving her pinched mouth, whispered, "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump!" I understood the seductive nature of the ten-meter diving board, little gray kittens tumbled about in the hollows of my knees, hedgehogs mated beneath the soles of my feet, fledgling swallows took wing in my armpits, and the whole world lay at my feet, not just Europe. There were Americans and Japanese, dancing a torch dance on the island of Luzon. There were slant-eyes and round-eyes, losing buttons on their uniforms. But at the same moment a tailor in Stockholm was sewing buttons on a pinstriped evening suit. There was Mountbatten, feeding the elephants of Burma with shells of every caliber. But at the same moment a widow in Lima was teaching her parrot to say "caramba." There were two powerful aircraft carriers, decked out like Gothic cathedrals, heading for each other in the Pacific, sending up their planes and then sinking each other. But the planes had nowhere to land, hung in the air like helpless, allegorical angels, roaring, burning up their fuel. But that didn't disturb a tram conductor in Haparanda, just home from work. He broke eggs into a pan, two for him and two for his fiancée, whose arrival he awaited with a smile, planning everything in advance. Of course as expected the armies of Konev and Zhukov were on the move again; as it rained in Ireland, they broke through on the Vistula, took Warsaw too late and Königsberg too early, and still couldn't keep a woman in Panama with five children and only one husband from burning the milk on her gas stove. And thus did the threads of current events, still hungry in front, coil about and
create a story already being woven into History behind. And I saw too that activities like thumb-twiddling, brow-wrinkling, head-nodding, hand-shaking, baby-making, coin-faking, light-dousing, tooth-brushing, man-killing, and diaper-changing were being engaged in all over the world, if not always with equal skill. I was bewildered by so many purposeful actions. And so I turned my thoughts back to the trial being staged in my honor at the foot of the diving board. "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump," whispered Luzie Rennwand, the precocious witness. She sat on Satan's lap, which emphasized her virginity. He tempted her desire by handing her a sausage sandwich. She took a bite, yet retained her chastity. "Jump, sweet Jesus, jump!" she chewed, and offered me her triangle, still intact.

I didn't jump, nor will I ever jump or dive from a diving tower. That wasn't Oskar's final trial. They've attempted to persuade me to jump many times, even quite recently. At the ring-finger trial—which I prefer to call the third trial of Jesus—just as at the Dusters' trial, there were plenty of spectators at the edge of the empty, azure-tiled pool. They sat on witness benches, intending to live through and beyond my trial.

But I turned around, stifled the fledgling swallows in my armpits, squashed the hedgehogs celebrating their marriage beneath my soles, starved the gray kittens from the hollows of my knees—and stepped stiffly to the rail, scorned the exhilaration of the jump, swung onto the ladder, descended, confirming with every rung that one could not only climb diving towers, but leave them without diving.

Maria and Matzerath waited for me below. Father Wiehnke blessed me unasked. Gretchen Scheffler had brought me a little winter coat and some cake. Little Kurt had grown and refused to recognize me as his father or half brother. My grandmother Koljaiczek held her brother Vinzent by the arm. He knew the world and mumbled incoherently.

As we left the courthouse, an official in civilian clothes came up to Matzerath, handed him a document, and said, "You really should think this over, Herr Matzerath. You've got to get that child off the streets. You see how easy it is for certain elements to misuse such a poor helpless creature."

Maria wept and draped my drum around me, which Father Wiehnke had taken charge of during the trial. We walked to the tram stop at Central Station. Matzerath carried me the last part of the way. I looked back
over his shoulder, searching for a triangular face in the crowd, wanted to know if she would climb to the diving board too, if she would jump after Störtebeker and Moorskiff, or if, like me, she would avail herself of the second possibility, and descend the ladder.

To this very day I have not cured myself of the habit of keeping a lookout on streets and squares for a skinny teenage girl, neither pretty nor ugly, who devours men like a shark. Even in my bed at the mental institution I'm frightened whenever Bruno announces an unknown visitor. My fear is this: Luzie Rennwand has come back as a scary Black Cook to urge you to jump one last time.

For ten days Matzerath pondered whether or not to sign the letter and send it back to the Ministry of Health. When, on the eleventh day, he sent it off signed, the city already lay under artillery siege, and it was questionable whether the post office would have a chance to send it on. The tanks leading the way for Marshal Rokossovski's army pressed forward to Elbing. The second army, under Weiß, took up positions on the heights surrounding Danzig. Life in the cellar began.

As we all know, our cellar was under the shop. It could be reached through the door in the hall across from the toilet, by descending eighteen steps, past the cellars of Heilandt and Kater, and before Schlager's. Old man Heilandt was still there. But Frau Kater, as well as Laubschad the clockmaker, the Eykes, and the Schlagers, had all departed with a few bundles. They were later said to have boarded a former Strength through Joy ship, along with Gretchen and Alexander Scheffler, and taken off in the direction of Stettin or Lübeck, or into the skies, having hit a mine; in any case, over half of the flats and cellars were empty.

Our cellar had the advantage of a second entrance, as we also know, through a trapdoor behind the counter in the shop. So no one could see what Matzerath took to the cellar or brought up from it. Nor would anyone have tolerated the provisions Matzerath managed to store there during the war. The dry, warm room was filled with such foodstuffs as dried beans, noodles, sugar, synthetic honey, wheat flour, and margarine. Boxes of Ryvita rested on boxes of Palmin. Tin cans of Leipzig Mixed Vegetables were stacked beside cans of yellow plums, baby peas, and prunes on shelves Matzerath the handyman had built himself and pegged to the walls. Midway through the war, at Greff's suggestion, he had wedged a few beams between the ceiling and the concrete floor of
the cellar, so that the storeroom was as safe as a regulation air-raid shelter. Matzerath had wanted to knock these beams down again at various times, since Danzig had not suffered any serious bombardments other than nuisance raids. But when Greff the air-raid warden was no longer there to raise the issue, Maria asked Matzerath to leave the props in place. She demanded security for little Kurt and sometimes even for me.

During the first air raids at the end of January, old man Heilandt and Matzerath joined forces to carry the chair along with Mother Truczinski down to the cellar. Thereafter, either at her request or to avoid the effort, they left her by the window in her flat. After the big air raid on the inner city, Maria and Matzerath found the old lady with her jaw hanging down and squinting so oddly you'd think a small, sticky fly had flown into her eye.