The Tin Drum (61 page)

But my fever waned, and April arrived. Then my fever rose again, the carousel spun round once more, and Herr Fajngold sprinkled Lysol on the living and the dead. Then my fever waned again, and April drew to a close. By early May my neck grew shorter and my chest grew larger, pressing upward till I could rub Oskar's chin against my collarbone without lowering my head. Then more fever and Lysol. And I heard Maria whispering words that floated in Lysol: "If only he don't grow crooked. If only he don't wind up with a hump. If only he don't get water on the brain!"

Herr Fajngold consoled Maria, however, recalling stories of people he'd known who managed to make something of themselves in spite of a hump and water on the brain. He told of a certain Roman Frydrych who had emigrated to Argentina with his hump and opened a sewing-machine business that later expanded into a large concern and made a real name for itself.

The story of Frydrych the successful hunchback did little to console Maria, but it catapulted its narrator, Herr Fajngold, into such a state of enthusiasm that he decided to give our grocery store a facelift. In mid-May, shortly after the war ended, new merchandise showed up in the shop. The first sewing machines appeared, along with spare parts, while groceries remained for some time and helped ease the transition. Idyllic times. Almost no one ever paid in cash. Things were traded and re-traded, and synthetic honey, rolled oats, the remaining packets of Dr. Oetker's Baking Powder, sugar, flour, and margarine were transformed into bicycles, the bicycles and spare parts into electric motors, these into work tools, the tools into furs, and the furs, as if by magic, Herr Fajn-gold transformed into sewing machines. Little Kurt made himself use
ful at this trade-and-retrade game, brought in customers, helped make deals, adjusted to the new line much more quickly than Maria. It was almost like the old days with Matzerath. Maria stood behind the counter, served those of the old customers who were still around, and tried to decipher the wishes of the newly arrived customers with her painfully limited Polish. Little Kurt was a gifted linguist. Little Kurt was all over the place. Herr Fajngold could count on little Kurt. Though not quite five, little Kurt became an expert, picking out high-quality Singer and Pfaff sewing machines with ease from a hundred poor to mediocre models being offered on the black market on Bahnhofstraße; and Herr Fajngold valued little Kurt's knowledge. When, toward the end of May, my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek came on foot from Bissau to Langfuhr by way of Brentau to visit us, and plopped herself down on the sofa breathing heavily, Herr Fajngold praised little Kurt to the skies and extolled Maria too. When he told my grandmother the story of my illness in lengthy detail, pointing out again and again the efficacy of his disinfectants, he found words of praise for Oskar too, because I'd been so calm and well-behaved, and never once cried throughout the whole ordeal.

My grandmother wanted kerosene, because Bissau had no electricity. Fajngold told her about his experience with kerosene in the camp at Treblinka, and about his multifarious duties as camp disinfector, had Maria fill two liter bottles with kerosene, added a package of synthetic honey and a broad assortment of disinfectants, and listened, nodding absently, as my grandmother reported on all the things that had burned to the ground in Bissau and Bissau-Abbau in the course of the fighting. She also described the damage in Viereck, which was now called Firoga again. And Bissau was once more Bysewo, as before the war. As for Ehlers, who was once Party leader of the Local Farm Association in Ramkau and very able, who had married her brother's son's wife Hedwig, whose Jan had stayed at the post office, the farmhands had hanged him outside his office. And almost hanged Hedwig too, because she'd switched as a wife from a Polish hero to the Party leader of the Local Farm Association, and Stephan had been a lieutenant and Marga had been in the League of German Girls.

"Well," said my grandmother, "they couldn't hurt Stephan no more, cause he was killed up in the Arctic. They wanted to take Marga away
and stick her in a camp. But Vinzent started jawing and talking like he never did before. So now Hedwig is with Marga, helping in the fields. All that talking near wore Vinzent out, and he might not last much longer. As for Granny, her heart's bad and everything else, her head too, where some oaf whacked her because he thought he ought."

Thus the lamentations of Anna Koljaiczek; stroking my growing head and holding her own, she delivered a few meditative insights: "That's Kashubes for you, little Oskar. Always getting hit on the head. But you are going where things are better now, and leaving old Granny behind. Because Kashubes don't move around a lot, they always stay put, and hold their heads still for others to whack, because we ain't really Polish and we ain't really German, and Kashubes ain't good enough for Germans or Pollacks. They want everything cut and dried."

My grandmother laughed loudly, stowed the kerosene bottles, the package of synthetic honey, and the disinfectants under her four skirts, which, in spite of the extreme violence of military, political, and world-historical events, had lost none of their potato color.

As she was about to leave, Herr Fajngold asked her to wait a moment, since he wanted to introduce his wife Luba and the rest of his family to her, and when Frau Luba failed to appear, Anna Koljaiczek said, "Well, let her be then. I'm always calling out, Agnes, that's my daughter, come help your old ma wring out the wash, and she don't come, just like your Luba. And Vinzent, that's my brother, goes out sick or not in the dark at night and wakes up the neighbors, crying out for his son Jan that was at the post office and got killed."

She was standing in the door, pulling on her scarf, when I called out from my bed, "Babka, Babka!" which means Grandma, Grandma. And she turned, lifted her skirts slightly, as if she wanted to let me in under them, take me with her, when she probably recalled the kerosene bottles, the synthetic honey, and the disinfectants already occupying that space—and left, left without me, left without Oskar.

At the beginning of June the first convoys headed west. Maria said nothing, but I could see she too was taking leave of the furniture, the shop, the flat, taking leave of the graves on both sides of Hindenburgallee and the mound in Saspe Cemetery.

Sometimes in the evening, before she went down to the cellar with little Kurt, she would sit beside my cot at my poor mama's piano, hold
ing the harmonica in her left hand and trying to accompany her little tune with one finger of her right hand.

The music made Herr Fajngold sad, he asked Maria to stop, yet the moment she lowered the harmonica and started to close the piano, he would ask her to play a little more.

Then he proposed to her. Oskar had seen this coming. Herr Fajn-gold called his wife Luba less and less often, and one summer evening full of buzzing flies, when he was certain she was gone, he proposed to Maria. He would take care of her and both children, Oskar the sick one too. He offered her the flat and a partnership in the business.

Maria was twenty-two then. Her early beauty, which had seemed pieced together almost by chance, had firmed up, perhaps even hardened. The last few months of the war and its aftermath had deprived her of the permanents Matzerath always paid for. Though she no longer wore braids, as she had in my day, her hair hung down to her shoulders, lending her the aura of a somewhat serious, perhaps even embittered young woman—and this young woman said no, rejected Herr Fajngold's proposal. Maria stood on the carpet that was once ours, holding little Kurt in her left arm, gestured with her right thumb toward the tile stove, and Herr Fajngold and Oskar heard her say, "Can't do it. Things are all washed up here. We're going to my sister Guste in the Rhineland. She married a headwaiter in the hotel business there. His name's Köster and he'll take us in for now, all three of us."

The very next day she filled out the applications. Three days later we had our papers. Herr Fajngold no longer spoke, closed the store, sat in the dark shop on the counter near the scales while Maria packed, and didn't even feel like spooning out synthetic honey. Only when Maria came to say goodbye did he slide down from his perch, fetch his bicycle with its cart, and offer to accompany us to the station.

Oskar and the baggage—each person was allowed fifty pounds—were loaded into the two-wheeled cart, which ran on rubber tires. Herr Fajn-gold pushed the bicycle. Maria held little Kurt's hand and looked back one last time from the corner as we turned left onto Elsenstraße. I couldn't turn toward Labesweg, since it hurt me to twist my neck. Oskar's head thus remained at rest between his shoulders. Only with my eyes, which had retained their mobility, did I take leave of Marienstraße, Strießbach, Kleinhammerpark, the underpass to Bahnhofstraße, still
dripping nastily, my undamaged Church of the Sacred Heart and the Langfuhr suburban railway station, which was now called Wrzeszcz, a name that almost defied pronunciation.

We had to wait. When the train finally rolled in, it was a freight train. There were hordes of people, and far too many children. Our baggage was inspected and weighed. Soldiers threw a bale of straw into each boxcar. No music played. But at least it wasn't raining. Clear to partly cloudy it was, with a breeze from the east.

We climbed into the fourth-to-last car. Herr Fajngold stood below us on the tracks with his thin, reddish hair blowing in the wind, and when the locomotive announced its arrival with a jolt, he stepped closer, handed Maria three packages of margarine and two of synthetic honey, and as orders in Polish, cries, and weeping signaled our departure, added a package of disinfectants to our provisions—Lysol is more important than life—and we were off, leaving Herr Fajngold behind, who, as is proper and fitting when a train departs, grew smaller and smaller with his reddish hair blowing in the wind, then was merely something waving, then nothing at all.

I feel the pain to this day. It flung my head to the pillows just now. It brings out the joints of my ankles and knees, turns me into a grinder—by which I mean that Oskar must grind his teeth to keep from hearing the grinding of his bones in their sockets. I observe my ten fingers and have to admit that they're swollen. A final try on my drum shows that Oskar's fingers are not only swollen, they're not up to the job right now; they just can't hold the drumsticks.

Nor will my fountain pen submit to my guidance. I'll have to ask Bruno for cold compresses. Then, with hands, feet, and knees wrapped and cool, and a cloth on my brow, I'll give my keeper Bruno paper and pencil, for I don't like to lend out my fountain pen. Will Bruno be willing and able to listen properly? And will his retelling do justice to that trip in a boxcar which began on twelve June of forty-five? Bruno sits at the little table beneath the picture of anemones. Now he turns his head, shows me that side called the face, and stares past me right and left with the eyes of a mythical beast. He's slanted the pencil across his thin, sour lips, trying to look like a man waiting. But even assuming he's actually waiting for me to speak, for the signal to start recreating my narrative—his thoughts are circling about his own knotworks. He'll be tying string, while it remains Oskar's task to disentangle my tangled prehistory in a wealth of words. Now Bruno writes:

I, Bruno Münsterberg, from Altena in the Sauerland, unmarried and childless, am a keeper in the private wing of the local mental institution. Herr Matzerath, who has been here for over a year, is my patient. I have other patients I can't speak of here. Herr Matzerath is my most harmless patient. He never gets so upset that I have to call in other keepers.
He writes and drums a little too much. To spare his overstrained fingers, he's asked me to write for him today and not create my knotted figures. Nevertheless I've stuck some string in my pockets and while he's telling his story I'll start on the lower limbs of a figure I plan to call "Eastern Refugee," in line with Herr Matzerath's story. It won't be the first figure I've based on my patient's stories. So far I've knotted his grandmother, whom I call "Potato in Four Skirts": strung together his grandfather, the raftsman, titled rather daringly "Columbus"; his poor mama as "The Beautiful Fish Eater"; I knotted his two fathers, Matzerath and Jan Bronski, as a pair called "Two Skat-Playing Card Thumpers"; I cast the scar-studded back of his friend Herbert Truczinski in string, and titled the raised relief "Rough Road Ahead"; and knot by knot, I built such buildings as the Polish Post Office, the Stockturm, the Stadt-Theater, the Arsenal Arcade, the Maritime Museum, Greff's vegetable cellar, the Pestalozzi School, the Brósen Bathhouse, the Church of the Sacred Heart, the Café Vierjahreszeiten, the Baltic Chocolate Factory, several bunkers on the Atlantic Wall, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Stettin Station in Berlin, Rheims Cathedral, and, last but not least, the building in which Herr Matzerath first saw the light of day; the gates and gravestones of the cemeteries at Saspe and Brentau offered their decorative ornaments to my string, I set the Vistula and the Seine flowing in wave after wave of string, sent the rolling Baltic and the cresting Atlantic dashing against coasts of string, turned Kashubian potato fields and Norman pasture-lands to string, and populated the resulting landscape—which I called simply "Europe"—with groups like: Defenders of the Post Office. Grocery Store Owners. People in the Grandstands. People in Front of the Grandstands. Schoolboys with Paper Cones. Museum Guards Dying Out. Young Hooligans Preparing for Christmas. Polish Cavalry at Sunset. Ants Making History. Theater at the Front Performs for NCOs and Soldiers. Standing Men Disinfecting Men Lying Motionless at Camp Treblinka. And now I'm starting on Eastern Refugee, which will probably develop into a group of Eastern Refugees.

On the twelfth of June in forty-five, around eleven in the morning, Herr Matzerath pulled out of Danzig, which at that time was already called Gdańsk. He was accompanied by the widow Maria Matzerath, whom my patient refers to as his former mistress, and Kurt Matzerath, my patient's alleged son. He says there were another thirty-two people
in the boxcar, including four Franciscan nuns in their habits, and a young woman in a scarf, whom Herr Matzerath claimed to have recognized as a certain Fräulein Luzie Rennwand. Upon further questioning on my part, however, my patient admits that the young woman's name was Regina Raeck, but continues to speak of a nameless triangular fox face he repeatedly refers to by name as Luzie; which does not stop me from entering the young woman's name here as Fräulein Regina. Regina Raeck was traveling with her parents, her grandparents, and a sick uncle who bore a bad case of stomach cancer westward along with his family, was a big talker, and announced the moment the train pulled out that he was a former Social Democrat.