Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 10

You may ask: what am I getting at with these preparatory remarks, why have I gone into so much detail about a young girl's cheekbones, eyebrows, ear lobes, hands, and feet? I agree with you perfectly, I too am opposed to this kind of description. Oskar knows perfectly well that he has succeeded at best in distorting Maria's image in your mind, perhaps for good. For this reason I will add one sentence that should make everything clear: If we disregard all the anonymous nurses, Maria was Oskar's first love. I became aware of this state of affairs one day when, as seldom happened, I listened to my drumming. I could not help noticing the insistent new note of pa.s.sion which Oskar, despite all his precautions, was communicating to his drum. Maria took this drumming in good part. But I was none too pleased when she set her harmonica to her lips, a.s.sumed an unprepossessing frown, and felt called upon to accompany me. Often, though, while darning stockings or filling sugar bags, her quiet eyes would gaze earnestly and attentively at me and my drumsticks and, before resuming her work, she would run her hand slowly and sleepily over my short-cropped hair.

Oskar, who ordinarly could not bear the slightest contact, however affectionately meant, accepted Maria's hand and became so enslaved to this caress that he would often, quite consciously, spend hours drumming the rhythms that brought it on, until at last Maria's hand obeyed and brought him well-being.

After a while Maria began to put me to bed at night. She undressed me, washed me, helped me into my pajamas, advised me to empty my bladder one last time before going to sleep, prayed with me, although she was a Protestant, an Our Father, three Hail Mary's and from time to time a JesusfortheeIlivejesusfortheeIdie, and finally tucked me in with a friendly, drowsy-making face.

Pleasant as were the last minutes before putting out the light -- gradually I exchanged Our Father and JesusfortheeIlive for the tenderly allusive Starofthesealgreetthee and MaryIlovethee -- these daily preparations for bed embarra.s.sed me. They almost shattered my self-control, reducing Oskar -- who had always prided himself on his mastery over his features -- to the telltale blushes of starry-eyed maidens and tormented young men. Oskar must own that every time Maria undressed me, put me in the zinc tub, scrubbed the dust of a drummer's day off me with washcloth, brush, and soap, every time it was brought home to me that I, almost sixteen, was standing or sitting mother-naked in the presence of a girl somewhat older than myself, I blushed long and loud.

But Maria did not seem to notice my change of color. Could she have thought that washcloth and brush brought such a flush to my cheeks? Or was Maria modest and tactful enough to see through my daily evenglow and yet to overlook it?

I am still subject to this sudden flush, impossible to hide, that may last as much as five minutes or longer. Like my grandfather, Koljaiczek the firebug, who turned flaming red whenever the word "match" was dropped in his hearing, the blood rushes to my head whenever anyone, even a total stranger, speaks in my presence of small children being tubbed and scrubbed before they go to bed at night. Oskar stands there like an Indian; those around me call me eccentric if not vicious; for what can it mean to them that little children should be soaped, scrubbed, and visited with a washcloth in their most secret places?

Maria, on the other hand, was a child of nature: she did the most daring things in my presence without embarra.s.sment. Before scrubbing the living room or bedroom floor, she would hoist her skirt to mid-thigh and take off her stockings, a gift from Matzerath, for fear of soiling them. One Sat.u.r.day after the shop had closed -- Matzerath had business at the local Party headquarters -- Maria shed her skirt and blouse, stood beside me in a pitiful but clean petticoat, and began to remove some spots from her skirt and artificial silk blouse with gasoline.

What could it have been that gave Maria, whenever she removed her outer garments and as soon as the smell of gasoline had worn off, a pleasantly and naively bewitching smell of vanilla? Did she rub herself with some such extract? Was there a cheap perfume with this sort of smell? Or was this scent as specific to her as, for example, ammonia to Mrs. Kater or rancid b.u.t.ter to my grandmother's skirts? Oskar, who liked to get to the bottom of things, investigated the vanilla: Maria did not anoint herself. Maria just smelled that way. Yes, I am still convinced that she was not even aware of the scent that clung to her; for on Sunday, when, after roast veal with mashed potatoes and cauliflower in brown b.u.t.ter, a vanilla pudding trembled on the table because I was tapping my foot on the table leg, Maria, who was wild about other varieties of pudding, ate but little and with evident distaste, while Oskar to this day is in love with this simplest and perhaps most commonplace of all puddings.

In July, 1940, shortly after the special communiques announcing the rapid success of the French campaign, the Baltic bathing season opened. While Maria's brother Fritz, now a corporal, was sending the first picture postcards from Paris, Matzerath and Maria decided that Oskar must go to the beach, that the sea air would surely be good for his health. It was decided that Maria should take me at midday -- the shop was closed from one to three -- to the beach at Brosen, and if she stayed out until four, Matzerath said, it didn't matter; he liked to stand behind the counter from time to time and show himself to the customers.

A blue bathing suit with an anchor sewn on it was purchased for Oskar. Maria already had a green one with red tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs that her sister Guste had given her as a confirmation present. Into a beach bag from Mama's days were stuffed a white woolen bathrobe of the same vintage and, quite superfluously, a pail and shovel and a set of sand molds. Maria carried the bag, while I carried my drum.

Oskar was apprehensive of the streetcar ride past the cemetery at Saspe. Was it not to be feared that the sight of this silent, yet so eloquent spot would put a crimp in his enthusiasm about bathing, which was no more than moderate to begin with? What, Oskar asked himself, will the ghost of Jan Bronski do when his a.s.sa.s.sin, dressed for summer, goes jingling past his grave in a streetcar?

The Number 9 car stopped. The conductor announced Saspe. I looked fixedly past Maria in the direction of Brosen, whence the other car crept toward us, growing gradually larger. Mustn't let my eyes wander. What, after all, was there to look at? Scrub pines, rusty ironwork, a maze of tumble-down tombstones with inscriptions that only the thistles and wild oats could read. Under such circ.u.mstances, it was better to look out the open window and up into the sky: there they hummed, the fat Ju-52's, as only trimotored planes or enormous flies can hum in a cloudless July sky.

We moved up with a great clanging of bells and the other car cut off our view. The moment we pa.s.sed the trailer, my head turned of its own accord and I was treated to the whole tumbledown cemetery and also a bit of the north wall; the white patch lay in the shadow, but it was still painfully white. . .

Then the cemetery was gone, we approached Brosen, and once again I looked at Maria. She had on a light summer dress with a flower pattern. On her round neck with its faintly radiant skin, over her well-upholstered collarbone, she wore a necklace of red wooden cherries, all the same size and simulating bursting ripeness. Was it my imagination or did I really smell it? Maria seemed to be taking her vanilla scent along with her to the Baltic. Oskar leaned slightly forward, took a long whiff of it, and in an instant vanquished the moldering Jan Bronski. The defense of the Polish Post Office had receded into history even before the flesh had fallen from the defenders' bones. Oskar, the survivor, had very different smells in his nostrils than that of his presumptive father, once so elegant a figure, now dust.

In Brosen Maria bought a pound of cherries, took me by the hand -- well she knew that only she was permitted to do so -- and led me through the pine woods to the bathing establishment. Though I was nearly sixteen -- the attendant had no eye for such things -- I was allowed into the ladies' section. Water: 65, said the blackboard, air: 80; wind: east; forecast: fair. Beside the blackboard hung a poster, dealing with artificial respiration. The victims all had on striped bathing suits, the rescuers wore mustaches, straw hats floated upon treacherous, turbulent waters.

The barefooted girl attendant went ahead. Around her waist, like a penitent, she wore a cord from which hung the enormous key that opened the cabins. Plank walks. Railings. Alongside the cabins a hard runner of coconut fiber. We had cabin Number 53. The wood of the cabin was warm, dry, and of a natural bluish-white hue that I should call blind. Beside the window hung a mirror that had ceased to take itself seriously.

First Oskar had to undress. This I did with my face to the wall and it was only reluctantly that I let Maria help me. Then Maria turned me round in her st.u.r.dy, matter-of-fact way, held out my new bathing suit, and forced me ruthlessly into the tight-fitting wool. No sooner had I b.u.t.toned the shoulder straps than she lifted me up on the wooden bench against the back wall of the cabin, put my drum and sticks on my lap, and began, with quick energetic movements, to undress.

First I drummed a little and counted the knotholes in the floorboards. Then I stopped counting and drumming. It was quite beyond me why Maria, with oddly pursed lips, should whistle while removing her shoes, two high notes, two low notes, and while stripping off her socks. Whistling like the driver of a brewery truck, she took off the flowery dress, whistling she hung up her petticoat over her dress, dropped her bra.s.siere, and still without finding a tune, whistled frantically while pulling her panties, which were really gym shorts, down to her knees, letting them slip to the floor, climbing out of the rolled-up pants legs, and kicking the shorts into the corner with one foot.

Maria frightened Oskar with her hairy triangle. Of course he knew from his poor mama that women are not bald down there, but for him Maria was not a woman in the sense in which his mama had shown herself to be a woman in her dealings with Matzerath or Jan Bronski.

And I recognized her at once. Rage, shame, indignation, disappointment, and a nascent half-comical, half-painful stiffening of my watering can under my bathing suit made me forget drum and drumsticks for the sake of the new stick I had developed.

Oskar jumped up and flung himself on Maria. She caught him with her hair. He buried his face in it. It grew between his lips. Maria laughed and tried to pull him away. I drew more and more of her into me, looking for the source of the vanilla smell. Maria was still laughing. She even left me to her vanilla, it seemed to amuse her, for she didn't stop laughing. Only when my feet slipped and I hurt her -- for I didn't let go the hair or perhaps it was the hair that didn't let me go -- only when the vanilla brought tears to my eyes, only when I began to taste mushrooms or some acrid spice, in any case, something that was not vanilla, only when this earthy smell that Maria concealed behind the vanilla brought me back to the smell of the earth where Jan Bronski lay moldering and contaminated me for all time with the taste of perishability -- only then did I let go.

Oskar slipped on the blind-colored boards of the bathhouse cabin and was still crying when Maria, who was laughing once more, picked him up, caressed him, and pressed him to the necklace of wooden cherries which was all she had on.

Shaking her head, she picked her hairs from between my lips and said in a tone of surprise: "What a little rascal you are! You start up and you don't know what's what and then you cry."

Fizz Powder

Does that mean anything to you? Formerly, you could buy it at any time of year in little flat packages. In our shop my mama sold woodruff fizz powder in a nauseatingly green little bag. Another sack that had the color of not-quite-ripe oranges claimed to have an orange flavor. There was also a raspberry flavor, and another variety which, if you poured fresh water over it, hissed, bubbled, and acted excited, and if you drank it before it quieted down, tasted very remotely like lemon, and had a lemon color in the gla.s.s, only more so: an artificial yellow masquerading as poison.

What else was on the package except for the flavor? Natural Product, it said. Patented. Protect Against Moisture, and, under a dotted line, Tear Here.

Where else could you buy this fizz powder? Not only in my mama's shop was it for sale, but in all grocery stores, except for Kaiser's and the cooperatives. In the stores and at all refreshment stands a package cost three pfennigs.

Maria and I got ours free of charge. Only when we couldn't wait to get home were we obliged to stop at a grocery store or refreshment stand and pay three pfennigs or even six, because we could never get enough of it and often asked for two packages.

Who started up with the fizz powder? The old old quarrel between lovers. I say Maria started it. Maria never claimed that Oskar started it. She left the question open and the most she would say, if pressed, was: "The fizz powder started it."

Of course everyone will agree with Maria. Only Oskar could not accept this verdict. Never would I have admitted that Oskar was seduced by a little package of fizz powder at three pfennigs. I was sixteen, I wanted to blame myself or Maria if need be, but certainly not a powder demanding to be protected against moisture.

It began a few days after my birthday. According to the calendar, the bathing season was drawing to an end. But the weather would hear nothing of September. After a rainy August, the summer showed its mettle; its belated accomplishment could be read on the bulletin board beside the artificial-respiration poster: air: 84; water: 68; wind: southwest; forecast: generally fair.

While Fritz Truczinski, a corporal in the air corps, sent postcards from Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Brussels -- the fellow was always traveling on official buisness -- Maria and I acquired quite a tan. In July we had occupied a place on the family beach. But here Maria had been exposed to the inept horseplay of some boys from the Conradinum and to interminable declarations of love emanating from a student at the Petri School; in mid-August we moved to the beach reserved for ladies, where we found a quiet spot near the water. Buxom ladies panted and puffed as they submerged their varicose veins up to their knees, and naked, misbehaved urchins waged war on fate; that is, they piled up sand into crude castles that kept toppling down.

The ladies' beach: when women are by themselves and think themselves un.o.bserved, a young man -- and Oskar was well aware of being a young man beneath the surface -- will do well to close his eyes rather than become a witness, however involuntary, to uninhibited womanhood.

We lay in the sand, Maria in her green bathing suit bordered with red, I in my blue one. The sand slept, the sea slept, the sh.e.l.ls had been crushed and did not listen. Amber, which allegedly keeps you awake, was elsewhere; the wind, which according to the bulletin board came from the southwest, fell gradually asleep; the whole wide sky, which had surely been overexerting itself, did nothing but yawn; Maria and I were also somewhat tired. We had already bathed and we had eaten after, not before, bathing. Our cherries, reduced to moist pits, lay in the sand beside bleached cherry pits from the previous year.

At the sight of so much transience, Oskar took to picking up handfuls of sand mingled with fresh young cherry pits and others that were one or a thousand years old, and sifting it over his drum; so he impersonated an hourgla.s.s and at the same time tried to think himself into the role of death by playing with bones. Under Maria's warm, sleepy flesh I imagined parts of her surely wide-awake skeleton; I relished the view between radius and ulna, played counting games up and down her spine, reached in through her iliac fossae and played with her sternum.

Despite all the fun I was having playing the part of death with my hourgla.s.s and my skeleton, Maria moved. Blindly, trusting wholly to her fingers, she reached into the beach bag and looked for something, while I dropped what was left of my sand and cherry pits on the drum, which was almost half-buried. When she failed to find what she was looking for, probably her harmonica, Maria turned the bag inside out: a moment later, something lay on the beach towel; but it was not a harmonica; it was a package of woodruff fizz powder.

Maria affected surprise. Or maybe she really was surprised. As for me, my surprise was real: over and over I asked myself, as I still ask myself: how did this package of fizz powder, this miserable cheap stuff, bought only by the children of dock workers and the unemployed, because they had no money for real pop, how did this unsalable article get into our beach bag?

While Oskar pondered, Maria grew thirsty. And breaking off my meditations, I too, quite against my will, had to confess to an irresistible thirst. We had no cup, and besides it was at least thirty-five paces to the drinking water if Maria went and nearly fifty if I did. To borrow a cup from the attendant and use the tap by the bathhouse, it was necessary to pa.s.s over burning sand between mountains of flesh s.h.i.+ning with Nivea oil, some lying on their backs, others on their bellies.

We both dreaded the errand and left the package lying on the towel. Finally I picked it up, before Maria showed any sign of picking it up. But Oskar only put it back on the towel in order that Maria might reach out for it. Maria did not reach out. So I reached out and gave it to Maria. Maria gave it back to Oskar. I thanked her and made her a present of it. But she wanted no presents from Oskar. I had to put it back on the towel. There it lay a long while without stirring.

Oskar wishes to make it clear that it was Maria who after an oppressive pause picked up the package again. But that was not all: she tore off a strip of paper exactly on the dotted line where it said to Tear Here. Then she held out the opened package -- to me. This time Oskar declined with thanks. Maria managed to be vexed. She resolutely laid the open package down on the towel. What was there for me to do but to pick the package up before sand should get into it, and offer it to Maria.

Oskar wishes to make it clear that it was Maria who made one finger disappear into the opening of the package, who coaxed the finger out again, and held it up vertically for inspection: something bluish-white, fizz powder, was discernible on the fingertip. She offered me the finger. I took it of course. Although it made my nose p.r.i.c.kle, my face succeeded in registering pleasure. It was Maria who held out a hollow hand. Oskar could hardly have helped pouring some fizz powder into the pink bowl. What she would do with the little pile of powder, she did not know. This mound in the cup of her hand was something too new, too strange. At this point I leaned forward, summoning up all my spit, and directed it at the powder; I repeated the operation and leaned back only when I was out of saliva.

In Maria's hand a hissing and bubbling set in. The woodruff erupted like a volcano, seethed like the greenish fury of some exotic nation. Something was going on that Maria had never seen and probably never felt, for her hand quivered, trembled, and tried to fly away, for woodruff was biting her, woodruff penetrated her skin, woodruff excited her, gave her a feeling, a feeling, a feeling. . .

The green grew greener, but Maria grew red, raised her hand to her mouth, and licked her palm with a long tongue. This she did several times, so frantically that Oskar was very close to supposing that her tongue, far from appeasing the woodruff feeling that so stirred her, raised it to the limit, perhaps beyond the limit, that is appointed to all feeling.

Then the feeling died down. Maria giggled, looked around to make sure there had been no witnesses, and when she saw that the sea cows breathing in bathing suits were motionless, indifferent, and Nivea-brown, she lay down on the towel; against the white background, her blushes died slowly away.

Perhaps the seaside air of that noonday hour might still have sent Oskar off to sleep, if Maria, after only a few minutes, had not sat up again and reached out once more for the package, which was still half-full. I do not know whether she struggled with herself before pouring the rest of the powder into her palm, which was no longer a stranger to the effect of woodruff. For about as long as a man takes to clean his gla.s.ses, she held the package on the left and the bowl on the right, motionless and antagonistic. Not that she directed her gaze toward the package or the hollow hand, or looked back and forth between half-full and empty; no, Maria looked between package and hand with a stern scowl. But her sternness was soon to prove weaker than the half-full package. The package approached the hollow hand, the hand came to meet the package, the gaze lost its sternness sprinkled with melancholy, became curious, and then frankly avid. With painstakingly feigned indifference, she piled up the rest of the woodruff fizz powder in her well-upholstered palm, which was dry in spite of the heat, dropped package and indifference, propped up the filled hand on the now empty one, rested her grey eyes on the powder for a time, then looked at me, gave me a grey look, her grey eyes were demanding something of me. It was my saliva she wanted, why didn't she take some of her own, Oskar had hardly any left, she certainly had much more, saliva doesn't replenish itself so quickly, she should kindly take her own, it was just as good, if not better, in any case she surely had more than I, because I couldn't make it so quickly and also because she was bigger than Oskar.

Maria wanted my saliva. From the start it was perfectly plain that only my spit could be considered. She did not avert those demanding eyes from me, and I blamed this cruel obstinacy of hers on those ear lobes which, instead of hanging free, grew straight into her lower jaws. Oskar swallowed; he thought of things which ordinarily made his mouth water, but -- it was the fault of the sea air, the salt air, the salty sea air no doubt -- my salivary glands were on strike. Goaded by Maria's eyes, I had to get up and start on my way. My labor was to take more than fifty steps through the burning sand, looking neither to left nor right, to climb the still more burning steps to the bathhouse, to turn on the tap, to twist my head and hold my mouth under it, to drink, to rinse, to swallow in order that Oskar might be replenished.

When I had completed the journey, so endless and bordered by such terrible sights, from the bathhouse to our white towel, I found Maria lying on her belly, her head nestling in her arms. Her braids lay lazy on her round back.

I poked her, for Oskar now had saliva. Maria didn't budge. I poked her again. Nothing doing. Cautiously I opened her left hand. She did not resist: the hand was empty, as though it had never seen any woodruff. I straightened the fingers of her right hand: pink was her palm, with moist lines, hot and empty.

Had Maria resorted to her own saliva? Had she been unable to wait? Or had she blown away the fizz powder, stifling that feeling before feeling it; had she rubbed her hand clean on the towel until Maria's familiar little paw reappeared, with its slightly superst.i.tious mound of the moon, its fat Mercury, and its solidly padded girdle of Venus?

Shortly after that we went home, and Oskar will never know whether Maria made the fizz powder fizz for the second time that same day or whether it was not until a few days later that the mixture of fizz powder with my spittle became, through repet.i.tion, a vice for herself and for me.

Chance, or if you will a chance pliant to our wishes, brought it about that on the evening of the bathing day just described -- we were eating blueberry soup followed by potato pancakes -- Matzerath informed Maria and me, ever so circ.u.mspectly, that he had joined a little skat club made up of members of the local Party group, that he would meet his new skat partners, who were all unit leaders, two evenings a week at Springer's restaurant, that Sellke, the new local group leader, would attend from time to time, and that that in itself obliged him to be present, which unfortunately meant leaving us alone. The best arrangement, he thought, would be for Oskar to sleep at Mother Truczinski's on skat nights.

Mother Truczinski was agreed, all the more so as this solution appealed to her far more than the proposal which Matzerath, without consulting Maria, had made her the day before, to wit, that instead of my spending the night at Mother Truczinski's, Maria should sleep on our sofa two nights a week.

Up until then Maria had slept in the broad bed where my friend Herbert had formerly laid his scarred back. This extraordinarily heavy piece of furniture stood in the small rear room. Mother Truczinski had her bed in the living room. Guste Truczinski, who still waited on table at the snack bar in the Hotel Eden, lived at the hotel; she occasionally came home on her day off, but rarely spent the night, and when she did, it was on the couch. When Fritz Truczinski, laden with presents, came home on furlough from distant lands, he slept in Herbert's bed, Maria took Mother Truczinski's bed, while the old woman camped on the couch.

This order of things was disturbed by my demands. Originally I was expected to sleep on the couch. This plan I rejected out of hand. Then Mother Truczinski offered to cede me her bed and take the couch for herself. Here Maria objected, her mother needed her sleep, her mother must not be made uncomfortable. Very simply and directly Maria expressed her willingness to share Herbert's former bed with me. "I'll be all right in the same bed with Oskar," she said. "He's only an eighth of a portion." And so, twice weekly, beginning a few days later, Maria carried my bedclothes from our ground-floor apartment to the Truczinski dwelling on the second floor and prepared a night lodging for me and my drum on the left side of her bed. On Matzerath's first skat night nothing at all happened. Herbert's bed seemed frightfully big to me. I lay down first, Maria came in later. She had washed herself in the kitchen and entered the bedroom in an old-fas.h.i.+oned, absurdly long and absurdly starched nightgown. Oskar had expected her to be naked and hairy and was disappointed at first, but soon he was perfectly happy, because the heirloom nightgown made pleasant bridges, reminding him of trained nurses and their white draperies.

Standing at the washstand, Maria undid her braids and whistled. Maria always whistled while dressing or undressing, doing or undoing her braids. Even while combing her hair, she never wearied of squeezing out those two notes between her pursed lips, without ever arriving at a tune.

The moment Maria put her comb aside, the whistling stopped. She turned, shook her hair once again, put the washstand in order with a few quick strokes. Order made her frolicsome: she threw a kiss at her photographed, retouched, and mustachioed father in the ebony frame, then with exaggerated gusto jumped into bed and bounced a few times. At the last bounce she pulled up the eiderdown and vanished beneath the mountain as far as her chin. I was lying under my own quilt and she didn't touch me at all; she stretched out a well-rounded arm from under the eiderdown, groped about overhead for the light cord, found it, and switched out the light. Only when it was dark did she say, in much too loud a voice: "Good night!"

Maria was soon breathing evenly. I do not think she was pretending; it is quite likely that she did drop right off to sleep, for the quant.i.ties of work she did each day certainly called for corresponding quant.i.ties of sleep.

For quite some time, absorbing and sleep-dispelling images pa.s.sed before Oskar's eyes. For all the dense darkness between the far walls and the blacked-out windows, blonde nurses bent over to examine Herbert's scarred back, from Leo Schugger's white rumpled s.h.i.+rt arose -- what else would you expect? -- a sea gull, which flew until it dashed itself to pieces against a cemetery wall, which instantly took on a freshly whitewashed look. And so on. Only when the steadily mounting, drowsy-making smell of vanilla made the film flicker before his eyes did Oskar begin to breathe as peacefully as Maria had been doing for heaven knows how long.

Three days later I was treated to the same demure tableau of maidenly going-to-bed. She entered in her nightgown, whistled while undoing her braids, whistled while combing her hair, put the comb down, stopped whistling, put the washstand in order, threw the photo a kiss, made her wild leap, took hold of the eiderdown, and caught sight -- I was contemplating her back -- caught sight of a little package -- I was admiring her lovely long hair -- discovered something green on the quilt -- I closed my eyes, resolved to wait until she had grown used to the sight of the fizz powder. The bedsprings screamed beneath the weight of a Maria flopping down backward, I heard the sound of a switch, and when I opened my eyes because of the sound, Oskar was able to confirm what he already knew; Maria had put out the light and was breathing irregularly in the darkness; she had been unable to accustom herself to the sight of the fizz powder. However, it seemed not unlikely that the darkness by her ordained had only given the fizz powder an intensified existence, bringing woodruff to bloom and mingling soda bubbles with the night.

I am almost inclined to think that the darkness was on Oskar's side. For after a few minutes -- if one can speak of minutes in a pitch-dark room -- I became aware of stirrings at the head end of the bed; Maria was fis.h.i.+ng for the light cord, the cord bit, and an instant later I was once more admiring the lovely long hair falling over Maria's sitting nightgown. How steady and yellow shone the light bulb behind the pleated lampshade cover! The eiderdown still bulged untouched on the foot end of the bed. The package on top of the mountain hadn't dared to budge in the darkness. Maria's ancestral nightgown rustled, a sleeve rose up with the little hand belonging to it, and Oskar gathered saliva in his mouth.

In the course of the weeks that followed, the two of us emptied over a dozen little packages of fizz powder, mostly with woodruff flavoring, then, when the woodruff ran out, lemon or raspberry, according to the very same ritual, making it fizz with my saliva, and so provoking a sensation which Maria came to value more and more. I developed a certain skill in the gathering of saliva, devised tricks that sent the water running quickly and abundantly to my mouth, and was soon able, with the contents of one package, to give Maria the desired sensation three times in quick succession.

Maria was pleased with Oskar; sometimes, after her orgy of fizz powder, she pressed him close and kissed him two or three times, somewhere in the face. Then she would giggle for a moment in the darkness and quickly fall asleep.

It became harder and harder for me to get to sleep. I was sixteen years old; I had an active mind and a sleep-discouraging need to a.s.sociate my love for Maria with other, still more amazing possibilities than those which lay dormant in the fizz powder and, awakened by my saliva, invariably provoked the same sensation.

Oskar's meditations were not limited to the time after lights out. All day long I pondered behind my drum, leafed through my tattered excerpts from Rasputin, remembered earlier educational orgies between Gretchen Scheffler and my poor mama, consulted Goethe, whose Elective Affinities I possessed in excerpts similar to those from Rasputin; from the faith healer I took his elemental drive, tempered it with the great poet's world-encompa.s.sing feeling for nature; sometimes I gave Maria the look of the Tsarina or the features of the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Anastasia, selected ladies from among Rasputin's following of eccentric n.o.bles; but soon, repelled by this excess of animal pa.s.sion, I found Maria in the celestial transparency of an Ottilie or the chaste, controlled pa.s.sion of a Charlotte. Oskar saw himself by turns as Rasputin in person, as his murderer, often as a captain, more rarely as Charlotte's vacillating husband, and once -- I have to own -- as a genius with the well-known features of Goethe, hovering over a sleeping Maria.

Strange to say, I expected more inspiration from literature than from real, naked life. Jan Bronski, whom I had often enough seen kneading my mother's flesh, was able to teach me next to nothing. Although I knew that this tangle, consisting by turns of Mama and Jan or Matzerath and Mama, this knot which sighed, exerted itself, moaned with fatigue, and at last fell stickily apart, meant love, Oskar was still unwilling to believe that love was love; love itself made him cast about for some other love, and yet time and time again he came back to tangled love, which he hated until the day when in love he practiced it; then he was obliged to defend it in his own eyes as the only possible love.

Maria took the fizz powder lying on her back. As soon as it bubbled up, her legs began to quiver and thrash and her nightgown, sometimes after the very first sensation, slipped up as far as her thighs. At the second fizz, the nightgown usually managed to climb past her belly and to bunch below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. One night after I had been filling her left hand for weeks, I quite spontaneously -- for there was no chance to consult Goethe or Rasputin first -- spilled the rest of a package of raspberry powder into the hollow of her navel, and spat on it before she could protest. Once the crater began to seethe, Maria lost track of all the arguments needed to bolster up a protest: for the seething, foaming navel had many advantages over the palm of the hand. It was the same fizz powder, my spit remained my spit, and indeed the sensation was no different, but more intense, much more intense. The sensation rose to such a pitch that Maria could hardly bear it. She leaned forward, as though to quench with her tongue the bubbling raspberries in her navel as she had quenched the woodruff in the hollow of her hand, but her tongue was not long enough; her bellyb.u.t.ton was farther away than Africa or Tierra del Fuego. I, however, was close to Maria's bellyb.u.t.ton; looking for raspberries, I sank my tongue into it and found more and more of them; I wandered far afield, came to places where there was no forester to demand a permit to pick berries; I felt under obligation to cull every last berry, there was nothing but raspberries in my eyes, my mind, my heart, my ears, all I could smell in the world was raspberries, and so intent was I upon raspberries that Oskar said to himself only in pa.s.sing: Maria is pleased with your a.s.siduity. That's why she has turned off the light. That's why she surrenders so trustingly to sleep and allows you to go on picking; for Maria was rich in raspberries.

And when I found no more, I found, as though by chance, mushrooms in other spots. And because they lay hidden deep down beneath the moss, my tongue gave up and I grew an eleventh finger, for my ten fingers proved inadequate for the purpose. And so Oskar acquired a third drumstick -- he was old enough for that. And instead of drumming on tin, I drummed on moss. I no longer knew if it was I who drummed or if it was Maria or if it was my moss or her moss. Do the moss and the eleventh finger belong to someone else and only the mushrooms to me? Did the little gentleman down there have a mind and a will of his own? Who was doing all this: Oskar, he, or I?

And Maria, who was sleeping upstairs and wide awake downstairs, who smelled upstairs of innocent vanilla and under the moss of pungent mushrooms, who wanted fizz powder, but not this little gentleman whom I didn't want either, who had declared his independence, who did just what he was minded to, who did things I hadn't taught him, who stood up when I lay down, who had other dreams than I, who could neither read nor write and nevertheless signed for me, who goes his own way to this very day, who broke with me on the very day I first took notice of him, who is my enemy with whom I am constrained, time and time again, to ally myself, who betrays me and leaves me in the lurch, whom I should like to auction off, whom I am ashamed of, who is sick of me, whom I wash, who befouls me, who sees nothing and flairs everything, who is so much a stranger to me that I should like to call him Sir, who has a very different memory from Oskar: for today when Maria comes into my room and Bruno discreetly slips off into the corridor, he no longer recognizes Maria, he can't, he won't, he sprawls most phlegmatically while Oskar's leaping heart makes my mouth stammer: "Listen to me, Maria, tender suggestions. I might buy a compa.s.s and trace a circle around us; with the same compa.s.s, I might measure the angle of inclination of your neck while you are reading, sewing, or as now, tinkering with the b.u.t.tons of my portable radio. Let the radio be, tender suggestions: I might have my eyes vaccinated and find tears again. At the nearest butcher shop Oskar would put his heart through the meat grinder if you would do the same with your soul. We might buy a stuffed animal to have something quiet between us. If I had the worms and you the patience, we might go fis.h.i.+ng and be happier. Or the fizz powder of those days? Do you remember? You call me woodruff, I fizz up, you want still more, I give you the rest -- Maria, fizz powder, tender suggestions.

"Why do you keep playing with those radio k.n.o.bs, all you care about nowadays is the radio, as though you were taken with a mad pa.s.sion for special communiques."

Special Communiques

It is hard to experiment on the white disk of my drum. I ought to have known that. My drum always wants the same wood. It wants to be questioned with drumsticks and to beat out striking answers or, with an easy, conversational roll, leave questions and answers open. So you see, my drum is neither a frying pan which, artificially heated, cooks raw meat to a crisp, nor a dance floor for couples who do not know whether they belong together. Consequently, even in the loneliest hours, Oskar has never strewn fizz powder on his drum, mixed his saliva with it, and put on a show that he has not seen for years and that I miss exceedingly. It is true that Oskar couldn't help trying an experiment with said powder, but he proceeded more directly and left the drum out of it; and in so doing, I exposed myself, for without my drum I am always exposed and helpless.

It was hard to procure the fizz powder. I sent Bruno to every grocery store in Grafenberg, I sent him to Gerresheim by streetcar. I asked him to try in town, but even at refreshment stands of the sort you find at the end of streetcar lines, Bruno could find no fizz powder. Young salesgirls had never heard of it, older shopkeepers remembered loquaciously; thoughtfully -- as Bruno reported -- they rubbed their foreheads and said: "What is it you want? Fizz powder? That was a long time ago. Under Wilhelm they sold it, and under Adolf just in the beginning. Those were the good old days. But if you'd like a bottle of soda or a c.o.ke?"

My keeper drank several bottles of soda pop or c.o.ke at my expense without obtaining what I wanted, and nevertheless Oskar got his fizz powder in the end: yesterday Bruno brought me a little white package without a label; the laboratory technician of our mental hospital, a certain Miss Klein, had sympathetically agreed to open her drawers, phials, and reference works, to take a few grams of this and a few grams of that, and finally, after several attempts, had mixed up a fizz powder which, as Bruno reported, could fizz, p.r.i.c.kle, turn green, and taste very discreetly of woodruff.

And today was visiting day. Maria came. But first came Klepp. We laughed together for three-quarters of an hour about something worth forgetting. I was considerate of Klepp and spared his Leninist feelings, avoided bringing up current events, and said nothing of the special announcement of Stalin's death, which had come to me over my little portable radio -- given to me by Maria a few weeks ago. But Klepp seemed to know, for a crepe was sewn incompetently to the sleeve of his brown checked overcoat. Then Klepp arose and Vittlar came in. The two friends seem to have quarreled again, for Vittlar greeted Klepp with a laugh and made horns at him. "Stalin's death surprised me as I was shaving this morning;" he said sententiously and helped Klepp into his coat. His broad face coated with unctuous piety, Klepp lifted up the black cloth on his sleeve: "That's why I am in mourning," he sighed and, giving an imitation of Armstrong's trumpet, intoned the first funereal measures of New Orleans Function: trrah trahdaha traah dada dadada -- then he slipped through the door.

But Vittlar stayed; he didn't want to sit down, but hopped about in front of the mirror and for a few minutes we exchanged understanding smiles that had no reference to Stalin.

I don't know whether I meant to confide in Vittlar or to drive him away. I motioned him to come close, to incline an ear, and whispered in his great-lobed spoon: "Fizz powder! Does that mean anything to you, Gottfried?" A horrified leap bore Vittlar away from my cage-bed; he thrust out his forefinger and in tones of theatrical pa.s.sion that came easy to him, declaimed: "Wilt thou seduce me with fizz powder, O Satan? Dost thou not know I am an angel?"

And like an angel, Vittlar, not without a last look at the mirror over the washbasin, fluttered away. The young folks outside the mental hospital are really an odd and affected lot.

And then Maria arrived. She has a new tailor-made spring suit and a stylish mouse-grey hat with a discreet, sophisticated straw-colored tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. Even in my room she does not remove this objet d'art. She gave me a cursory greeting, held out her cheek to be kissed, and at once turned on the portable radio which was, to be sure, a present from her to me, but seems to have been intended for her own use, for it is the function of that execrable plastic box to replace a part of our conversation on visiting days. "Did you hear the news this morning? Isn't it exciting? Or didn't you?" "Yes, Maria," I replied patiently. "They haven't kept Stalin's death secret from me, but please turn off the radio."

Maria obeyed without a word, sat down, still in her hat, and we spoke as usual about little Kurt.

"Just imagine, Oskar, the little rascal don't want to wear long stockings no more, when it's only March and more cold weather coming, they said so on the radio." I ignored the weather report but sided with Kurt about the long stockings. "The boy is twelve, Maria, he's ashamed to go to school in wool stockings, his friends make fun of him."

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, his health comes first; he wears the stockings until Easter."

This date was stated so unequivocally that I tried another tack. "Then you should buy him ski pants, because those long woolen stockings are really ugly. Just think back to when you were his age. In our court in Labesweg. Shorty always had to wear stockings until Easter, you remember what they did to him? Nuchi Eyke, who was killed in Crete, Axel Mischke, who got his in Holland just before the war was over, and Harry Schlager, what did they do to Shorty? They smeared those long woolen stockings of his with tar so they stuck to his skin, and Shorty had to be taken to the hospital."

"That wasn't the fault of the stockings, Susi Kater was to blame," cried Maria furiously. Although Susi had joined the Blitz Girls at the very beginning of the war and was rumored to have married in Bavaria later on, Maria bore Susi, who was several years her senior, a lasting grudge such as women and only women can carry with them from childhood to a ripe old age. Even so, my allusion to Shorty's tar-daubed stockings produced a certain effect. Maria promised to buy Kurt ski pants. We were able to go on to something else. There was good news about Kurt. The school princ.i.p.al had spoken well of him at the parents' and teachers' meeting. "Just imagine. He's second in his cla.s.s. And he helps me in the shop, I can't tell you what a help he is to me."

I nodded approval and listened as she described the latest purchases for the delicatessen store. I encouraged Maria to open a branch in Oberka.s.sel. The times were favorable, I said, the wave of prosperity would continue -- I had just picked that up on the radio. And then I decided it was time to ring for Bruno. He came in and handed me the little white package containing the fizz powder.

Oskar had worked out his plan. Without explanation I asked Maria for her left hand. She started to give me her right hand, but then corrected herself. Shaking her head and laughing, she offered me the back of her left hand, probably expecting me to kiss it. She showed no surprise until I turned the hand around and poured the powder from the package into a pile between mound of the Moon and mound of Venus. But even then she did not protest. She took fright only when Oskar bent down over her hand and spat copiously on the mound of fizz powder.

"Hey, what is this?" she cried with indignation, moved her hand as far from her as possible, and stared in horror at the frothing green foam. Maria blushed from her forehead down. I was beginning to hope, when three quick steps carried her to the washbasin. She let water, disgusting water, first cold, then hot, flow over the fizz powder. Then she washed her hands with my soap.

"Oskar, you're really impossible. What do you expect Mr. Munsterberg to think of us?" She turned to Bruno, who during my experiment had taken up a position at the foot end of the bed, as though pleading with him to overlook my insane behavior. To spare Maria any further embarra.s.sment, I sent the keeper out of the room, and as soon as he had closed the door behind him, called her back to my bedside: "Don't you remember? Please remember. Fizz powder! Three pfennigs a package. Think back! Woodruff, raspberry, how beautifully it foamed and bubbled, and the sensation, Maria, the way it made you feel."

Maria did not remember. She was taken with an insane fear of me, she hid her left hand, tried frantically to find another topic of conversation, told me once again about Kurt's good work in school, about Stalin's death, the new icebox at Matzerath's delicatessen, the projected new branch in Oberka.s.sel. I, however, remained faithful to the fizz powder, fizz powder, I said, she stood up, fizz powder, I begged, she said a hasty good-by, plucked at her hat, undecided whether to go or stay, and turned on the radio, which began to squeak. But I shouted above it: "Fizz powder, Maria, remember! "

Then she stood in the doorway, wept, shook her head, and left me alone with the squeaking, whistling radio, closing the door as cautiously as though she were leaving me on my deathbed.

And so Maria can't remember the fizz powder. Yet for me, as long as I may breathe and drum, that fizz powder will never cease to fizz and foam; for it was my spittle which in the late summer of 1940 aroused woodruff and raspberry, which awakened feelings, which sent my flesh out questing, which made me a collector of morels, chanterelles, and other edible mushrooms unknown to me, which made me a father, yes indeed, young as I was, a father, from spittle to father, kindler of feelings, gathering and begetting, a father; for by early November, there was no room for doubt, Maria was pregnant, Maria was in her second month and I, Oskar, was the father.

Of that I am convinced to this day, for the business with Matzerath happened much later; two weeks, no, ten days after I had impregnated the sleeping Maria in the bed of her brother Herbert, rich in scars, in plain sight of the postcards sent by her younger brother, the corporal, and then in the dark, between walls and blackout paper, I found Maria, not sleeping this time but actively gasping for air on our sofa; under Matzerath she lay, and on top of her lay Matzerath.

Oskar, who had been meditating in the attic, came in from the hallway with his drum and entered the living room. The two of them didn't notice me. Their heads were turned toward the tile stove. They hadn't even undressed properly. Matzerath's under-drawers were hanging down to his knees. His trousers were piled up on the carpet. Maria's dress and petticoat had rolled up over her bra.s.siere to her armpits. Her panties were dangling round one foot which hung from the sofa on a repulsively twisted leg. Her other leg lay bent back, as though unconcerned, over the head rest. Between her legs Matzerath. With his right hand he turned her head aside, the other hand guided him on his way. Through Matzerath's parted fingers Maria stared at the carpet and seemed to follow the pattern under the table. He had sunk his teeth into a cus.h.i.+on with a velvet cover and only let the velvet go when they talked together. For from time to time they talked, though without interrupting their labours. Only when the clock struck three quarters did the two of them pause till the last stroke, and then, resuming his efforts, he said: "It's a quarter of." Then he wanted to know if she liked it the way he was doing it. She said yes several times and asked him to be careful. He promised. She commanded, no, entreated him to be particularly careful. Then he inquired if it was time. And she said yes, very soon. Then she must have had a cramp in her foot that was hanging down off the sofa, for she kicked it up in the air, but her panties still hung from it. Then he bit into the velvet cus.h.i.+on again and she screamed: go away, and he wanted to go away, but he couldn't, because Oskar was on top of them before he could go away, because I had plunked down my drum on the small of his back and was pounding it with the sticks, because I couldn't stand listening any more to their go away go away, because my drum was louder than their go away, because I wouldn't allow him to go away as Jan Bronski had always gone away from my mother; for Mama had always said go away to Jan and go away to Matzerath, go away, go away. And then they fell apart. But I couldn't bear to see it. After all, I hadn't gone away. That's why I am the father and not this Matzerath who to the last supposed himself to be my father. But my father was Jan Bronski. Jan Bronski got there ahead of Matzerath and didn't go away; he stayed right where he was and deposited everything he had; from Jan Bronski I inherited this quality of getting there ahead of Matzerath and staying put; what emerged was my son, not his son. He never had any son at all. He was no real father. Even if he had married my poor mama ten times over, even if he did marry Maria because she was pregnant. That, he thought, is certainly what the people in the neighborhood think. Of course they thought Matzerath had knocked up Maria and that's why he's marrying her though she's only seventeen and he's going on forty-five. But she's a mighty good worker for her age and as for little Oskar, he can be very glad to have such a stepmother, for Maria doesn't treat the poor child like a stepmother but like a real mother, even if little Oskar isn't quite right in the head and actually belongs in the nuthouse in Silberhammer or Tapiau.

On Gretchen Scheffler's advice, Matzerath decided to marry my sweetheart. If we think of this presumptive father of mine as my father, it follows inevitably that my father married my future wife, called my son Kurt his son Kurt, and expected me to acknowledge his grandson as my half-brother, to accept the presence of my darling vanilla-scented Maria as a stepmother and to tolerate her presence in his bed, which stank of fish roe. But if, more in conformance to the truth, I say: this Matzerath is not even your presumptive father, he is a total stranger to you, deserving neither to be liked nor disliked, who is a good cook, who with his good cooking has thus far been a father of sorts to you, because your poor mother handed him down to you, who now in the eyes of all has purloined the best of women away from you, who compels you to witness his marriage and five months later a baptism, to play the role of guest at two family functions where you should properly have been the host, for you should have taken Maria to the City Hall, you should have picked the child's G.o.dfather and G.o.dmother. When I considered the miscasting of this tragedy, I had to despair of the theater, for Oskar, the real lead, had been cast in the role of an extra, that might just as well have been dropped.

Before I give my son the name of Kurt, before I name him as he should never have been named -- for I would have named the boy after his great-grandfather Vincent Bronski -- before I resign myself to Kurt, Oskar feels obliged to tell you how in the course of Maria's pregnancy he defended himself against the expected event.