The Tin Drum (68 page)

After a few weeks the students managed to produce several nice little sketches. They'd toned down their dark expressionism and no longer exaggerated my hump so wildly, even got me on paper now and then from head to toe, and from the jacket buttons on my chest to the hindmost reaches of the cloth marking the back of my hump. On several pads there was even room for a background. In spite of the currency reform, these young people still felt the war's influence, constructed ruins behind me with accusing black holes where windows had been, portrayed me as a forlorn, undernourished refugee among blasted tree stumps, even interned me in a camp, wove a ferociously barbed barbed-wire fence behind me in painstaking black charcoal, erected watch-towers in that same looming background, forced me to hold an empty tin bowl while prison windows behind and above me lent their graphic appeal—Oskar was shown in prisoner's garb—all in the name of artistic expression.

But since it was as a black-haired gypsy-Oskar that I was made to witness all this misery, through coal-black eyes instead of my own blue ones, knowing full well that barbed wire couldn't be drawn, holding still even so as a model, I was nonetheless pleased when the sculptors, who as everyone knows must make do without backgrounds reflecting the times, asked me to pose for them, and in the nude.

This time it was not a student but the master in person who spoke to me. Professor Maruhn was a friend of Professor Kuchen, my charcoal master. One day, as I was posing motionless in Kuchen's private studio, a gloomy loft filled with framed strokes of charcoal, allowing the mas
ter, whose beard you could almost hear rustling in the wind, to record me on paper with his unique stroke, Professor Maruhn dropped by, a sturdy, thickset fifty-year-old in a white modeling smock, who, had not a dusty beret borne witness to his artistic calling, might have been taken for a surgeon.

Maruhn, an admirer of classical form, as I could see at a glance, regarded me with hostility, given my proportions. He jeered at his friend: weren't the gypsy models enough, the ones he'd been blackening in charcoal up to now, the ones who'd earned him the nickname Gypsycakes in artistic circles? Was he going to try his hand at freaks now, did he plan to follow up the commercial success of his gypsy period with an even more lucrative and successful gnomic period?

Professor Kuchen transformed his friend's mockery into raging, pitch-black strokes of charcoal: it was the blackest portrait he ever made of Oskar, totally black in fact, except for a few highlights on my cheekbones, nose, forehead, and hands, which Kuchen always spread wide with expressive power, overly large and swollen with gout, in the middle ground of his charcoal orgies. In this drawing, however, much admired at later exhibitions, my eyes are blue, by which I mean they are lighter in tone, not scowling darkly. Oskar attributes this to the influence of the sculptor Maruhn, who was not, after all, a fanatic of charcoal expression, but a classicist alert to the Goethean clarity of my gaze. It can only have been Oskar's eyes that led this lover of classical harmony to see in me a fit model for his own sculpture.

Maruhn's studio was bright with dust, nearly empty, and contained not a single finished work. Nevertheless, frameworks of projected sculptures stood everywhere, so perfectly conceived that even without modeling clay, the wire, iron, and curves of bare lead tubing proclaimed a future perfect harmony.

I posed nude for the sculptor five hours a day and received two marks an hour. He chalked a point on the turntable to show me where my right leg was to take root from then on as the engaged leg. A vertical line rising straight up from the instep of the engaged leg must meet the base of my neck precisely between my collarbones. My left leg was the free leg. But the term is misleading. Even though I was to keep it slightly bent and relaxed to one side, I was not to move it, and certainly not freely. The free leg too was rooted to a chalk outline on the turntable.

During the weeks I posed for the sculptor Maruhn he could find no set position for my arms comparable to the fixed position of my legs. He had me dangle my left arm and angle my right over my head, cross my arms over my chest, clasp them under my hump, stand with arms akimbo; there were a thousand possibilities, and the sculptor tried them all, on me and on the iron framework with the flexible lead-tubing limbs.

When, after a month's strenuous search for the right pose, he finally decided to begin modeling me in clay, either with my hands clasped behind my head, or as a torso with no arms at all, he was so worn out with constructing and reconstructing the framework, that though he reached for the clay in the clay box, and even made a start, he then dumped the dumb, formless mass back into the box, crouched before the frame, and stared at me and my frame, his fingers trembling in despair: the framework was too perfect.

Sighing in resignation, feigning a headache, but bearing no ill will toward Oskar, he gave up and placed the humpbacked framework with its engaged leg and its free leg, with its raised, tubular arms, with its wire fingers clasped at the back of its iron neck, in the corner with all the other prematurely finished skeletons; gently, not mockingly, but conscious instead of their own uselessness, the wooden strips—also known as butterflies—intended to bear the weight of the clay, swayed in the spacious framework of my hump.

After that we drank tea and chatted for an hour or so, which the sculptor counted as an hour of posing. He recalled the early days, when as an uninhibited young Michelangelo he slapped clay on frameworks by the ton and actually completed sculptures, most of which were destroyed in the war. I told him about Oskar's work as a stonecutter and engraver of inscriptions. We talked shop for a while; then he took me to his students so they could recognize the sculptor's model in Oskar and shape frameworks based upon me.

If long hair is any indication of gender, six of Professor Maruhn's ten students could be designated as female. Four were ugly and gifted. Two were pretty and talkative—real girls. Posing in the nude never bothered me. Yes, Oskar even enjoyed the astonishment of the two pretty, talkative sculptresses as they examined me for the first time on the turntable and ascertained, to their dismay, that Oskar, despite his hump, de
spite his parsimonious size, carried a male member with him which, should the need arise, could match that of any so-called normal man.

Maruhn's students differed from the master in their approach. After only two days they had constructed their skeletons, seemed totally inspired, slapped the clay on the hastily and inexpertly mounted lead tubes in a rush of inspiration, but must have added too few wooden butterflies to the frame of my hump: for no sooner had the weight of the damp modeling clay been applied to the skeleton, giving Oskar a wild, rugged look, than ten freshly modeled Oskars began to sag, my head fell between my feet, the clay slumped down from the tubing, my hump drooped to the hollows of my knees, and I came to appreciate Maruhn, the master, whose frames were so perfect that he had no need to conceal them beneath cheap clay.

The ugly but gifted sculptresses even shed tears when the clay Oskar parted from the frame Oskar. The pretty but talkative sculptresses laughed as the flesh slid rapidly, almost symbolically, from my bones. Yet when the novice sculptors finally managed, after several weeks, to finish a few passable sculptures, first in clay, then in shiny plaster for the end-of-term exhibition, I had a chance to make several new comparisons between the ugly, gifted girls and the pretty but talkative ones. The ugly but not entirely artless maidens reproduced my head, limbs, and hump with some care, yet were strangely shy about my sexual organs, either neglecting or stylizing them in some silly fashion, while the sweet, wide-eyed maidens with their lovely though hardly agile fingers wasted little time on the articulated proportions of my body, but instead devoted their entire energy to reproducing my imposing genitals to a hair. Lest we forget the four young men who were sculpting away, I can report that they abstracted me, clapped me into a quadrangle with flat grooved boards, and, with dry male rationality, let the very thing the ugly maidens neglected and the sweet young maidens allowed to bloom as fleshy nature, jut out into the room as an elongated, quadrangular log above a pair of matching cubes, like the sex-crazed organ of a buildingblock king.

Was it my blue eyes or the sun-bowl reflectors the sculptors set up around me, the nude Oskar: in any case, the young artists who visited the lovely sculptresses discovered a picturesque charm in either the blue of my eyes or my irradiated skin, glowing lobster-red, and carried
me off from the sculpture and graphics studios on the ground floor to the upper stories, where they then mixed the paints on their palettes to match my colors.

At first the painters were so taken with my blue eyes that their brushes rendered me entirely blue. Oskar's healthy flesh, his wavy brown hair, his fresh, flushed lips shriveled, moldered in macabre shades of blue; at best, here and there, accelerating the decay, a moribund green, a nauseous yellow, crept in between patches of blue flesh.

Oskar did not take on other colors until, in the course of a weeklong celebration of Carnival in the cellars of the Academy, he discovered Ulla and brought her to the artists to serve as their Muse.

Was it Shrove Monday? Yes, it was on Shrove Monday that I decided to join the festivities, to put on a costume and mix in with the crowd as a costumed Oskar.

When Maria saw me standing at the mirror, she said, "Stay home, Oskar. They'll just trample you." But then she helped me with my outfit, cut scraps of cloth that her sister Guste sewed with garrulous needle into a jester's costume. I'd been thinking at first of something in the style of Velázquez. And I would have gladly appeared as General Narses, or possibly Prince Eugen. When I stood at last before the full-length mirror, which the war had endowed with a diagonal crack that slightly canted the surface, and saw the entire brightly colored, baggy, slashed outfit hung with bells, which moved my son Kurt to laughter and a ht of coughing, I said softly to myself, not entirely pleased: Now you're Yorick the fool, Oskar. But where is the king you'll play the fool to?

In the tram on the way to Ratinger Tor, near the Academy, I noticed that the other passengers, all those cowboys and Spanish señoritas trying to forget their offices and shop counters, weren't laughing at me but were frightened instead. Everyone edged away, and so I was accorded the pleasure of a seat in the otherwise jammed tram. Outside the Academy, policemen were swinging their hard rubber truncheons, which were by no means merely cosmetic. "The Tumble of the Muses"—as the young artists had christened their ball—was packed, but the crowd still tried to push their way into the building, resulting in a confrontation with the police that was somewhat bloody but in any case colorful.

Oskar jingled the little bell hanging on his left sleeve, the crowd parted, and a policeman, professionally attuned to recognize my true
stature, saluted down at me, asked if he could be of help, and, swinging his truncheon, escorted me into the cellar festivities—where things were cooking but not yet done.

Now no one should imagine that an artists' ball is a ball where artists have a ball. Most of the students at the Academy stand behind cleverly decorated but somewhat wobbly counters with serious, strained expressions on their painted faces, trying to earn a little extra money by selling beer, champagne, Vienna sausages, and clumsily poured schnapps. Those having a ball are everyday citizens who throw their money around once a year and try to live it up like artists.

After I'd spent an hour or so on stairways, in nooks and crannies, and under tables, startling couples on the point of wringing a thrill from their discomfort, I made friends with two Chinese girls who must have had some Greek blood flowing in their veins, for they were practitioners of a love praised centuries ago in song on the island of Lesbos. Though they went at each other all fingers and thumbs, they left my vital zones in peace, put on a show I found amusing at times, drank warm champagne with me, and, with my permission and apparent success, tested the resistance of my hump, which thrust out solidly at its extremity—once again confirming my theory that a hump brings good luck to women.

Nevertheless, the longer I was with these women, the sadder I got. Thoughts plagued me, the political situation worried me, I traced the blockade of Berlin in champagne on the tabletop, sketched in the airlift, despaired of the reunification of Germany while contemplating those two Chinese girls, who could never unite, and did something very unlike me: Oskar, as Yorick, pondered the meaning of life.

When the ladies could think of nothing more worth watching—they subsided in tears, leaving telltale traces on their painted Chinese faces—I arose, slashed, baggy, jingling my bells, two-thirds of me wanting to head home and one-third still hoping for some further Carnival encounter, and saw—no, he spoke to me—Corporal Lankes.

Do you remember? We met him on the Atlantic Wall during the summer of forty-four. He was guarding concrete and smoking my master Bebra's cigarettes.

I was trying to squeeze my way up the stairs, thickly populated with necking couples, and was just lighting up, when someone tapped me on
the shoulder and a corporal from the last war said, "Say, friend, got a cigarette?"

Small wonder that I recognized him at once, given this familiar request and his field-gray costume. Yet I would never have tried to renew our acquaintance had not the corporal and concrete artist held the Muse in person on his field-gray knee.

Let me speak with the corporal first and describe the Muse later. I not only gave him a cigarette but held out my lighter for him, and said, as the first puff of smoke rose, "Do you remember, Corporal Lankes? Bebra's Theater at the Front? Mystical, barbaric, bored?"

The painter stopped in shock at my words; he managed to hold on to his cigarette, but the Muse slipped from his knee. I caught the totally drunk, long-legged child and handed her back to him. As the two of us, Oskar and Lankes, swapped old memories, cursed Lieutenant Herzog, whom Lankes called a nut, recalled my master, Bebra, and the nuns who'd been looking for prawns in the Rommel asparagus, I gazed in amazement at the Muse. She'd come as an angel, in a hat of molded cardboard of the sort used for egg cartons, yet in spite of her advanced state of inebriation and the melancholy droop of her wings, she still radiated the slightly artsy-craftsy charm of a heavenly being.