The Tin Drum (60 page)

When Crazy Leo approached Oskar, whom old man Heilandt had laid on the handcart, his face dissolved, and the wind billowed his clothing. A dance seized hold of his legs. "The Lord, the Lord!" he cried, and shook the budgie in its cage. "Look at the Lord, how He is growing, look at Him grow!"

He was tossed into the air along with the cage, and he ran, flew, danced, staggered, fell, fled with the screeching bird, himself a bird, taking wing at last, fluttering across the field toward the sewage farms. And you could hear him cry through the voices of both tommy guns, "He's growing, he's growing!" and screaming still as the two Russian boys were busy reloading, "He's growing!" And even as the tommy guns fired again, as Oskar plunged down stepless stairs into a growing, all-embracing faint, I could still hear the bird, the voice, the raven—Leo proclaiming: "He's growing, he's growing, he's growing..."

Last night I was beset by hasty dreams. They were like friends on Visitors Day. Each dream held the door for the next and departed, having told me what dreams find worth telling: inane stories filled with repetitions, monologues you can't help listening to because they're declaimed so insistently, with the gestures of incompetent actors. When I tried to tell the stories to Bruno at breakfast, I couldn't rid myself of them because I had forgotten them all; Oskar has no talent for dreaming.

While Bruno cleared away breakfast, I asked, as if in passing, "My dear Bruno, how tall am I actually?"

Bruno placed the little dish of jam on top of my coffee cup and said in a worried voice, "But Herr Matzerath, you haven't touched your jam."

I'm all too familiar with this reproach. It's always trotted out after breakfast. Every morning Bruno brings me a dab of strawberry jam that I cover immediately by folding my newspaper into a tent over it. I can't stand the sight or taste of jam, and so I dismiss Bruno's reproach calmly and firmly: "You know how I feel about jam, Bruno—just tell me how tall I am."

Bruno has the eyes of an extinct octopod. The moment he's required to think, he trains his prehistoric gaze at the ceiling and speaks toward it for the most part, so that this morning too he said to the ceiling, "But it's strawberry jam!" Only after a long pause—for my silence kept the question of Oskar's height in play—when Bruno's gaze had found its way back from the ceiling and was clinging to the bars of my bed, did I hear that I measured one meter and twenty-one centimeters, or just under four foot tall.

"Won't you please measure me again, dear Bruno, just to be sure?"

Without batting an eyelash, Bruno pulled out a folding rule from his hip pocket, threw back my covers with almost brutal force, pulled my tangled nightclothes down over my nakedness, unfolded the stark-yellow rule, broken off at one meter seventy-eight, held it up to me, adjusted it by hand and carefully, but with his gaze in the Saurian age, and finally, as if reading out the result, let the rule come to rest on me: "Still one meter and twenty-one centimeters."

Why does he have to make so much noise folding his rule and clearing away breakfast? Doesn't he like my height?

When Bruno left the room with the breakfast tray, with the yolk-yellow folding rule next to the revolting, natural-colored strawberry jam, he glued his eye to the peephole in the door from the corridor for one last look—his gaze made me feel as old as the hills, until he finally left me alone with my four foot height.

So Oskar's that tall! Almost too tall for a dwarf, a gnome, or a midget. What was the altitude of my Roswitha, La Raguna's summit? What height did Master Bebra, descended from Prince Eugen, choose to maintain? Nowadays I could even look down on Kitty and Felix. Whereas all those I mentioned once looked down in friendly envy on Oskar, who until his twenty-first year had measured a mere ninety-four centimeters, or three foot one.

It wasn't till that stone hit me on the back of the head at Matzerath's burial in Saspe Cemetery that I began to grow.

Oskar says stone. So it seems I've decided to expand my report on events at the cemetery.

After I had discovered, by a little game, that "Should I or shouldn't I?" no longer existed for me, but only "I should, I must, I will!"—I un-slung my drum, tossed it and the sticks into Matzerath's grave, decided to grow, suffered an immediate roaring in my ears, and was only then hit on the back of the head by a stone about the size of a walnut, which my son Kurt had flung with all his four-and-a-half-year-old might. Though not surprised by the blow—I'd sensed that my son had something in mind for me—I still plunged into Matzerath's grave right behind my drum. Old man Heilandt pulled me from the pit matter-of-factly with an old man's dry grip but left my drum and drumsticks below, and, once my nosebleed was evident, laid the back of my neck against the iron of the pickax. The nosebleed soon abated, as we know, but my growth pro
gressed, albeit at such a slow pace that only Crazy Leo, fluttering and light as a bird, noticed and proclaimed it with a loud screech.

So much for this addendum, which is basically superfluous; for my growth began before the stone was thrown and I fell into Matzerath's grave. As far as Maria and Herr Fajngold were concerned, however, from its onset there was only one reason for my growth, which they termed an illness: the stone on the back of the head, my fall into the grave. Maria spanked little Kurt right there at the cemetery. I felt sorry for Kurt, for he may well have meant to help with his stone, to speed up my growth. Perhaps he wanted a real grownup father at last, or at least a substitute for Matzerath; for he has never acknowledged or honored the father in me.

In the course of my growth, which went on for nearly a year, there were plenty of male and female doctors who confirmed that the stone and my unfortunate fall were to blame, who stated and entered into my medical records: Oskar Matzerath is deformed because a stone hit him in the back of the head—and so on and so forth.

At this point let us recall my third birthday. What did the grownups say about the actual start of my story? At the age of three Oscar Matzerath fell down the cellar steps onto the concrete floor. His growth was cut short by this fall, and so on and so forth....

One recognizes in these explanations mankind's reasonable desire to provide a rational basis for every miracle. Oskar has to confess that he too examines miracles from all angles before casting them aside as totally implausible fantasies.

Returning from Saspe Cemetery, we found new lodgers in Mother Truczinski's flat. A Polish family of eight populated the kitchen and both rooms. They were nice people and offered to take us in till we found something else, but Herr Fajngold, who objected to such mass overcrowding, suggested we move back into his bedroom and said he would make do temporarily with the living room. Maria opposed that in turn. She found it improper, in her newly widowed state, to share such close quarters with an unattached gentleman. Fajngold, who was unaware at the time that he no longer had a wife named Luba and a family, and constantly sensed his energetic wife looking over his shoulder, could see Maria's point. Both propriety and his wife Luba spoke against that plan, but he could still turn the cellar over to us. He even helped us rearrange
the storeroom, but wouldn't let me move into the cellar with the others. Because I was ill, so miserably ill, a temporary cot was set up for me in the living room beside my poor mama's piano.

It was hard to find a doctor. Most of the doctors had left the city along with the troops, since the West Prussian Insurance Fund had already been transferred westward in January, and many doctors had trouble conceiving of people as true patients anymore. After a long search, Herr Fajngold managed to scare up a female doctor from Elbing who was amputating limbs at the Helene Lange School, where wounded soldiers from the Wehrmacht and the Red Army lay side by side. She promised to come around, and four days later she did, sat down by my sickbed, smoked three or four cigarettes in a row as she examined me, and fell asleep while still on the fourth.

Herr Fajngold was afraid to wake her. Maria poked her timidly. But the doctor didn't stir till the cigarette burned down and singed her left forefinger. She immediately stood up, stamped out the butt on the carpet, said tersely and irritably, "Sorry. Haven't slept in three weeks. Trying to get kids trucked in from East Prussia on the ferry at Kásemark. No go. Troops only. Four thousand kids. Blown to bits." Then she patted my growing kid's cheek as tersely as she'd told of the kids blown to bits, stuck a new cigarette in her mouth, rolled up her left sleeve, pulled an ampoule from her case, and said to Maria as she gave herself a pickup shot in the arm, "Can't say what's wrong with the boy. Got to get him to a clinic. But not here. Be sure you get away, and head west. His knee, wrist, and shoulder joints are swollen. His head is bound to start swelling too. Make cold compresses. I'll leave you a few pills in case he can't sleep."

I liked this terse doctor who didn't know what was wrong with me and said so. Over the coming weeks Maria and Herr Fajngold made numerous cold compresses, which helped, but couldn't keep the joints of my knees, wrists, and shoulders from continuing to swell painfully, along with my head. My expanding head scared Maria and Herr Fajn-gold the most. The pills they gave me ran out all too quickly. Herr Fajn-gold started charting the curve of my fever with a ruler and pencil, but wound up experimenting as he did so, recording my temperature in a boldly executed graph, measuring it five times daily with a thermometer he obtained on the black market in exchange for synthetic honey,
a graph which then appeared on Herr Fajngold's tables as a shockingly jagged mountain chain—I thought of the Alps, the snowy peaks of the Andes—while in reality my temperature wasn't half that adventurous: in the morning it was usually thirty-eight-point-one centigrade, or one hundred point five, by the evening it would rise to thirty-nine; the highest point it reached during the period of my growth was thirty-nine point four, or one hundred two point seven. I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; it was like riding a carousel I wanted to get off but couldn't. I was sitting with a lot of little children in fire engines, scooped-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, round and round and round, wanting to get off but unable to. All the little children were crying, wanted out of the fire engines and scooped-out swans as much as I did, wanted off the cats, dogs, stags, and pigs, wanted to end the carousel ride but couldn't. The Good Lord stood beside the carousel owner and kept treating us to yet another ride. And we prayed: "Oh, Our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change and like watching us ride the carousel, that you enjoy proving to us that the world is round and round. Please put your purse away, cry stop, halt,
fertig,
shop's closed, everybody off,
basta, stoi
—we poor little kids are dizzy, they've trucked four thousand of us to Käsemark on the Vistula, but we can't cross, because your carousel, your carousel..."

But the dear Lord Our Father, the carousel owner, smiled as the good book says, let another coin hop from his purse, and four thousand little children, with Oskar among them, were whirled about in fire engines and scooped-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, and each time my stag—I still think I was on a stag—carried me past Our Father the carousel owner, he had a different face: there was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer's teeth; there was Goethe, prince of poets, plucking coins from his finely embroidered purse, each one stamped with the profile of Our Father, then Rasputin drunk, then Herr von Goethe sober. A little craziness with Rasputin, then for reason's sake a little Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe. The masses in revolt with Rasputin, calendar mottoes from Goethe ... and finally someone bent down—not because the fever abated, but because some soothing presence always bends down in a fever—Herr Fajngold bent down and stopped the carousel. He turned off the fire engine, swan, and stag, cashed in Rasputin's
coins, sent Goethe down to the Mothers, sent four thousand dizzy little children floating off from Käsemark across the Vistula into the kingdom of heaven—and lifted Oskar from his sickbed, then sat him on a cloud of Lysol; that is to say, he disinfected me.

It began because of the lice, then it became a habit. He first discovered lice on little Kurt, then on me, Maria, and himself. The lice were probably left behind by the Kalmuck who took Matzerath from Maria. The cries Herr Fajngold let out when he discovered the lice! He summoned his wife and children, suspected that the whole family was infested with vermin, traded synthetic honey and rolled oats for a wide variety of disinfectants, and began to administer a daily dose of disinfectants to himself, his whole family, little Kurt, Maria, and me, as well as my cot. He rubbed, sprayed, and powdered us. And while he sprayed, powdered, and rubbed, my fever blossomed, his words flowed, and I learned of whole boxcars filled with carbolic acid, chlorine, and Lysol, which he had sprayed, strewn, and sprinkled when he was still disinfector at Treblinka, where every afternoon at two, as Disinfector Mariusz Fajngold, he sprinkled a daily dose of Lysol over the streets of the camp, the barracks, the shower rooms, the cremation ovens, the bundled clothes, over those who were waiting, having not yet showered, over those lying still, having already showered, over all that emerged from the ovens, over all yet to enter the ovens. And he listed the names, for he knew every one: he told me of Bilauer, who on one of the hottest days in August told him to sprinkle the camp streets of Treblinka with kerosene rather than Lysol. Herr Fajngold did so. And Bilauer had the match. And old Zev Kurland from the ŻOB administered oaths to the lot of them. And the engineer Galewski broke into the arsenal. And Bilauer shot Hauptsturmführer Kutner. And Sztulbach and Warynski took care of Zisenis. And the others handled the Trawniki men. And still others cut open the fence and died. But Unterscharführer Schöpke, who always made little jokes while taking a group to the showers, stood at the camp gate firing. But it was no use, they all fell on him at once: Adek Kave, Motel Levit, and Henoch Lerer; Hersz Rotblat and Letek Zagiel were there too, and Tosias Baran with his Debora. And Lolek Begelmann cried out, "Get Fajngold too, before the planes arrive." Herr Fajngold was still waiting for his wife Luba. But even then she no longer came when he called. So they seized him left and right. On the left Jakub
Gelernter and on the right Mordechaj Szwarcbard. And running before him little Dr. Atlas, who had advised sprinkling Lysol liberally at Treblinka and later in the woods near Vilna, who maintained: Lysol is more important than life! And Herr Fajngold could confirm this, for he had sprinkled the dead with Lysol, not just one corpse, no, but the dead, why bother with numbers, the dead. And named names for so long it grew tedious, since for me, floating in Lysol, the question of the life and death of a hundred thousand names was less important than the question of whether life, and if not life, then death, had been disinfected in time and thoroughly enough with Herr Fajngold's disinfectants.