The Tin Drum (76 page)

To those now enjoying my discomfort who think that Sister Dorothea lung me down on the coco runner with a curse and a clout, Oskar reports, sadly but with a certain satisfaction, that Sister Dorothea removed her hands and arms slowly, one might almost say reluctantly and thoughtfully, from my hump, in what seemed like an infinitely sad
caress. And when soon thereafter the sound of her weeping and sobbing arose, it too lacked all violence. I hardly noticed it when she wriggled out from under me and the mat, let me slip to the floor, and slipped away herself, her steps absorbed by the rug on the floor. I heard a door open and close, a key turned, and all at once the six frosted-glass panes of Sister Dorothea's chamber glowed with inner light and reality.

Oskar lay there and covered himself with the mat, which still retained some warmth from that satanic game. My gaze was held by the glowing rectangles. Now and then a shadow crossed the frosted glass. Now she's going to the wardrobe, I told myself, now she's going to the washstand. Oskar tried a canine, cringing approach. Taking my mat with me, I crept along the runner to her door, scratched at the wood, pulled myself up partway, sent a seeking, imploring hand wandering across the two lower panes; but Sister Dorothea didn't open up, moved tirelessly between the wardrobe and the washstand with its mirror. I knew it and would not admit it: Sister Dorothea was packing her things, fleeing, seeing from me. Even the feeble hope that she would show me her electrically illumined face as she left her chamber was to be buried. First, things went dark behind the frosted glass, then I heard the key, the door opening, shoes on the coco runner—I reached for her, struck a suitcase, a stockinged leg; then she kicked me in the chest with one of those sturdy hiking shoes I'd seen in her wardrobe, throwing me onto the runner, and as Oskar pulled himself back together and pleaded, "Sister Dorothea," the door to the flat slammed shut: a woman had left me.

Now you and all those who understand my grief will say: Go to bed, Oskar. What business do you have in the corridor after this shameful episode? It's four o'clock in the morning. You're lying naked on a coco runner, barely covered by a fiber mat. You've scraped your hands and knees raw. Your heart bleeds, your member aches, your disgrace cries out to high heaven. You've awakened Herr Zeidler. He's awakened his wife. They're going to get up, open the door of their bed-sitter, and see you. Go to bed, Oskar, it will soon strike five.

I gave myself that exact advice back then lying on the runner. But I just lay there and shivered. I tried to call back Sister Dorothea's body. I felt nothing but coconut fibers, even had a few caught in my teeth. Then a strip of light fell on Oskar: the door to Zeidler's bed-sitter fell open a crack. Zeidler's hedgehog head, above it a head full of metal curlers,
Frau Zeidler. They stared, he coughed, she giggled, he called out, I didn't reply, she giggled again, he shut her up, she asked me what was wrong, he said it wouldn't do, she said this was a decent house, he threatened to evict me, but still I lay silent, for my cup was not yet full. The Zeidlers opened their door, and he switched on the light in the hall. They came toward me, giving me little tiny nasty looks, and this time he wasn't going to vent his anger on liqueur glasses, he stood over me, and Oskar awaited the Hedgehog's rage—but Zeidler could not vent his rage, for just then a commotion came from the stairwell, a shaky key sought the door to the flat, found it at last, and Klepp entered, bringing with him someone equally drunk: Scholle, the long-sought guitarist.

The two of them calmed Zeidler and his wife down, bent over Oskar, asked no questions, picked me up, carried me and the satanic scrap of coco runner back to my room.

Klepp rubbed me warm. The guitarist brought me my clothes. Together they dressed me and dried my tears. Sobs. Morning arrived outside the window. Sparrows. Klepp hung my drum around me and brought out his little wooden flute. Sobs. The guitarist shouldered his guitar. Sparrows. Friends surrounded me, took me between them, led a sobbing but unresisting Oskar out of the flat, out of the house, onto Jülicher Straße and to the sparrows, led him forth from the influence of coconut fibers, led me down dawning streets, through the Hofgarten to the Planetarium and the banks of the river Rhine, wending its way grayly toward Holland, bearing barges on which washing fluttered.

From six till nine on that misty September morning the flautist Klepp, the guitarist Scholle, and the percussionist Oskar sat on the right bank of the river Rhine making music, getting in a groove, drinking from the same bottle, squinting off toward the poplars on the other bank, regaling barges on their way upriver, having taken on coal in Duisburg, with the hot and happy, sad and slow music of the Mississippi, and tried to think of a name for their newly formed jazz band.

When a bit of sun began to tint the morning mist, and the craving for a leisurely breakfast crept into our music, Oskar, having put his drum between himself and the preceding night, arose, took money from his coat pocket, which meant it was time to eat, and announced to his friends the name of their newborn band: "The Rhine River Three," we called ourselves, and headed off for breakfast.

We loved the Rhine meadows, and the tavern owner Ferdinand Schmuh loved the same stretch of the Rhine's right bank between Düsseldorf and Kaiserswerth. We generally rehearsed our music just above Stockum. Schmuh took his rile to hunt sparrows among the hedges and bushes of the sloping riverbank. That was his hobby, his way of relaxing. When business got on Schmuh's nerves, he put his wife behind the wheel of their Mercedes and they drove along the river, parked the car just above Stockum, then, slightly flat-footed, his rifle angled downward, he set off across the meadows, dragging along his wife, who would have preferred to stay in the car, deposited her on a comfortable rock on the riverbank, and disappeared among the hedges. We played our ragtime, he banged away in the bushes. While we made music, Schmuh shot sparrows.

At the first crack from the bushes, Scholle, who, like Klepp, knew every tavern owner in town, would announce:

"Schmuh's shooting sparrows."

Since Schmuh has passed away, I may just as well add my obituary here: Schmuh was a good shot, and perhaps a good man as well; for when Schmuh shot sparrows, though he kept shells in his left coat pocket, he kept his right coat pocket stuffed with birdseed, which, after hunting and not before—Schmuh never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon—he scattered among the sparrows with generous sweeps of his hand.

On a cool November morning in the year forty-nine, when Schmuh was still among the living—we'd been rehearsing on the bank of the Rhine for several weeks by then—he addressed us in an overly loud and
far from gentle voice: "How am I supposed to hunt here when you're playing music and scaring away the birds?"

"Oh," Klepp apologized, and held his flute as though presenting arms, "you're the gentleman with the fine musical ear who's been blasting away in the hedges in perfect time with our tunes, allow me to pay my respects, Herr Schmuh!"

Schmuh was flattered that Klepp knew his name, but asked him how that happened. Klepp, with a show of indignation: Why, everyone knows Schmuh's name. You heard it on the streets: there goes Schmuh, here comes Schmuh, did you see Schmuh just now, where's Schmuh today, Schmuh's shooting sparrows.

Transformed by Klepp into a figure of public note, Schmuh offered us cigarettes, asked our names, wanted to hear a little something from our repertoire, was offered "Tiger Rag," then waved his wife over, who'd been sitting on a rock in her fur coat, contemplating the waters of the Rhine. She arrived in fur and we had to play another tune, obliged her with "High Society," and after we'd finished she said in fur, "Why, Ferdy, that's just what you're looking for at The Cellar." He seemed to share her opinion, to think he'd found just what he'd been looking for, but he skimmed a few flat stones across the waters of the Rhine first, thinking things over, perhaps running through a few numbers before making his offer: play at The Onion Cellar evenings from nine till two in the morning, at ten marks apiece per night, or say twelve—Klepp said seventeen so Schmuh could say fifteen—Schmuh made it fourteen marks fifty, and we called it a deal.

Seen from the street, The Onion Cellar looked like many of the newer nightclubs that differed from older taverns by being more expensive. The higher prices were justified by the extravagant décor of the bars, usually called artists' clubs, and by their names: the subdued refinement of "The Ravioli Room," the shadowy existentialism of "Taboo," the heady spice of "Paprika," and of course "The Onion Cellar."

The words
The Onion Cellar
and a crude but striking likeness of an onion were painted with deliberate clumsiness on an enamel sign that hung in the old German manner from an ornate wrought-iron gallows in front. Bull's-eye panes of beer-bottle green glazed the only window. Outside the iron door, which was painted with red lead and had no doubt shielded an air-raid shelter during the years of adversity, stood a door
man in a rustic sheepskin. Not just anyone was allowed in The Onion Cellar. On Fridays in particular, when paychecks turned to beer, some of the locals, for whom The Onion Cellar would have been too expensive in the first place, had to be turned away. Behind the red lead door, those allowed in faced five concrete steps, descended them, came to a landing three feet square—a poster from a Picasso exhibition rendered even this small landing striking and original—then descended another set of steps, four this time, and found themselves opposite the cloakroom.
Please pay when you leave!
a little cardboard sign stated, and the young man behind the cloakroom counter—usually a bearded apostle from the Art Academy—never took money in advance, for The Onion Cellar was expensive, but it was also a serious and respectable establishment.

The host received each guest in person with the most mobile of eyebrows and gestures, as if initiating the newcomer into some sacred rite. The host, as we know, was Ferdinand Schmuh, who shot sparrows now and then and had a keen understanding of the society that had sprung up in Düsseldorf—and in other cities as well, if more slowly—after the currency reform.

The Onion Cellar itself—and here the serious and authentic nature of this successful nightclub was clearly in evidence—was an actual cellar, and even slightly damp. It could be compared to a long tube, chilly under foot and measuring about fourteen by sixty, heated by two round cast-iron stoves, also authentic. The Cellar was not, to be sure, a true cellar. The ceiling had been removed to open things up into the former ground-floor flat above. The single window of The Onion Cellar was thus not an actual cellar window, but the former window of the ground-floor flat, which undermined the authenticity of the successful nightclub to a certain extent. But since the window had been glazed with bull's-eye panes, rendering it opaque, and since a gallery had been constructed in the expanded upper area of the cellar, reached by a highly original set of steep steps like a hen-house ladder, The Onion Cellar might well be termed a serious nightclub, even if the cellar wasn't really a cellar—and why should it have been?

Oskar has forgotten to tell you that the hen-house ladder to the gallery wasn't a true hen-house ladder either, but more a sort of inclined gangway, since there were two highly original clotheslines to grasp to the left and right of the dangerously steep ladder; it swayed slightly,
making you think of an ocean voyage, and added to the price of The Onion Cellar.

Carbide lamps of the kind miners carry lighted The Onion Cellar, spread a smell of carbide—which also raised the price—and transported The Onion Cellar's paying guests to the gallery of a mine, a potash mine, say, three thousand feet below the surface of the earth; cutters stripped to the waist hack away at the rock, strike a vein, the scraper hauls salt, the winches whine, fill the carts; far to the rear, where the tunnel turns toward Friedrichhall Two, a light sways, here comes the head foreman, calls out, "Hey, boys!" and swings a carbide lamp that looks just like those hanging on the unplastered, thinly whitewashed walls of The Onion Cellar, emitting light, smelling, raising prices, and creating a highly original atmosphere.

The uncomfortable seating consisted of ordinary crates covered with onion sacks, but the gleaming wooden tables, neatly polished, lured the guests from the mine to the sort of peaceful farmhouse parlors you sometimes see in films.

And there you have it. What about the bar? No bar. Waiter, a menu please? No menu, no waiter. No one but us, The Rhine River Three. Klepp, Scholle, and Oskar sat beneath the hen-house ladder, which was in fact a gangway, came at nine, unpacked our instruments, and started playing around ten. But since it's only a quarter past nine now, we can talk about us later. For the moment we need to keep our eye on Schmuh, who keeps an eye on sparrows.

As soon as The Onion Cellar was filled with guests—half-full counted as full—Schmuh, the host, would don his shawl. The shawl, a cobalt-blue silk, was printed with a special pattern, and is mentioned because donning the shawl had a particular meaning. The pattern could be called Golden-Yellow Onions. Only when Schmuh wrapped his shawl about him could one truly say that The Onion Cellar had opened.

The customers: businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, actors, journalists, film people, well-known athletes, high-ranking officials from provincial and municipal government, in short, all those who call themselves intellectuals nowadays, sat on burlap-covered crates and talked with their spouses, girlfriends, secretaries, arts-and-crafters, and male mistresses too, their conversations subdued, slightly hesitant, almost forced, as long as Schmuh had not yet donned his shawl of golden-yellow
onions. They've tried to start up conversations but failed, tried their best but talked around their true problems, tried to air things, get things off their chests, talk freely and openly, spill their guts, speak straight from the heart, tried to stop thinking and just let go, face the bloody truth, stand there naked and human—but they can't. Here and there hints of a botched career, a broken marriage. That gentleman with the massive head, the intelligent face, and soft, almost delicate hands seems to be having problems with his son, who doesn't approve of his father's past. The two women in mink, shown off to advantage by the carbide lamps, claim they've lost their faith: in what, remains an open question. We still know nothing of the past of the gentleman with the massive head, nor what problems he faces with his son because of that past; it's like—forgive Oskar for this comparison—trying to lay an egg: you push and push...