Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 14

ROSWITHA: Reborn!

BEBRA: The eyes soar aloft.

ROSWITHA: Aloft!

BEBRA: Over the sea. the endless sea. . . I say. Corporal, I see something black down there on the beach. Whatever it is, there's five of them.

KITTY: So do I. With five umbrellas.

FELIX: Six.

KITTY: Five! One, two, three, four, five!

LANKES: It's the nuns from Lisieux. They've been evacuated and s.h.i.+pped over here with their kindergarten.

KITTY: I don't see any children. Just five umbrellas.

LANKES: They leave the children at Bavent. Sometimes they come down here at low tide to pick up the crabs and sh.e.l.lfish that get stuck in the Rommel asparagus.

KITTY: Poor things!

ROSWITHA: Shouldn't we offer them some corned beef and cookies?

OSCAR: I suggest raisin bread with plum jam. It's Friday; nuns aren't allowed to eat corned beef on Friday.

KITTY: They're running now. They seem to be gliding on their umbrellas.

LANKES: They always do that when they've finished picking. Then they begin to play. Especially Agheta, the novice, she's just a kid that doesn't know which way is up. Maybe you could spare another cigarette? Thank you, sir. And the one back there, the fat one that isn't running is Scholastica, the mother superior. She doesn't like them to play on the beach, she thinks it might be against the rule of their order.

(Nuns with umbrellas are seen running in the background. Roswitha puts on the gramophone: "Sleigh Bells in St. Petersburg." The nuns dance and shout.) AGNETA: Yoohoo, Sister Scholastica!

SCHOLASTICA: Agneta, Sister Agneta!

AGNETA: Yoohoo, Sister Scholastica!

SCHOLASTICA: Come back now, child! Sister Agneta!

AGNETA: I can't. It carries me away.

SCHOLASTICA: Then you must pray, sister, for a conversion.

AGNETA: A sorrowful one?

SCHOLASTICA: A merciful one.

AGNETA: A joyful one?

SCHOLASTICA: Just pray, Sister Agneta!

AGNETA: I'm praying to beat the band. But I'm still being carried away.

SCHOLASTICA (her voice dying away in the distance): Agneta, Sister Agneta.

AGNETA: Yoohoo, Sister Scholastica!

(The nuns disappear, but from time to time their umbrellas appear in the background. The phonograph record runs down. Beside the pillbox entrance the telephone rings. Lankes jumps down and picks up the receiver, the others go on eating.) ROSWITHA: Telephones, telephones, wherever you go. Between the sea and the sky, telephones.

LANKES: Dora Seven speaking. Corporal Lankes.

HERZOG (comes in slowly from the right, holding a telephone and dragging the wire after him. He stops repeatedly and talks into the phone): Are you asleep, Lankes? There's something moving in front of Dora Seven. I'm sure of it.

LANKES: It's the nuns, sir.

HERZOG: What are nuns doing down there? And suppose they're not nuns.

LANKES: But they are nuns. I can see them plain as day.

HERZOG: Never hear of camouflage? Never hear of the fifth column? The English have been at it for centuries. They come in with their Bibles and before you know what they're up to, boom!

LANKES: They're picking up crabs, sir. . .

HERZOG: I want that beach cleared immediately. Is that clear?

LANKES: Yes, sir, but they're just picking up crabs.

HERZOG: Lankes, I want you to get your a.s.s behind your MG!

LANKES: But suppose they're just looking for crabs, 'cause it's low tide and the children in their kindergarten. . .

HERZOG: That's an official order, Lankes.

LANKES: Yes, sir.

(Lankes disappears into the pillbox. Herzog goes out right with the telephone.) OSKAR: Roswitha, stop your ears, there's going to be shooting like in the newsreels.

KITTY: Oh, how awful! I'm going to knot myself still tighter.

BEBRA: I myself am almost inclined to think that we shall soon hear some noise.

FELIX: Let's put on another record. That will help some.

(He puts on the gramophone: The Platters singing "The Great Pretender". The rat-tat-tat of the machine gun punctuates the slow mournful music. Roswitha holds her ears. Felix stands on his head. In the background five nuns with umbrellas are seen flying heavenward. The record sticks in its groove and repeats. Felix returns to his feet. Kitty unties herself. Roswitha begins to clear the table and repack her basket. Oskar and Bebra help her. They leave the roof of the pillbox. Lankes appears in the entrance.) LANKES: Captain, sir, if you could spare another cigarette. . .

BEBRA (his frightened troupe huddle behind him): You smoke too much, Corporal.

BEBRA'S TROUPE: He smokes too much.

LANKES: That's on account of the concrete, sir.

BEBRA: And suppose some day there's no more concrete?

BEBRA'S TROUPE: No more concrete.

LANKES: Concrete is immortal, sir. Just us and our cigarettes. . .

BEBRA: I know, I know, we vanish like a puff of smoke.

BEBRA'S TROUPE: (slowly going out): Smoke!

BEBRA: But in a thousand years they will still be coming to see the concrete.

BEBRA'S TROUPE: In a thousand years!

BEBRA: They'll find puppy bones.

BEBRA'S TROUPE: Puppy bones.

BEBRA: And your Oblique Formations in the concrete.

BEBRA'S TROUPE: Barbaric, mystical, bored!

(Lankes is left alone, smoking)

Though Oskar hardly opened his mouth in the course of that breakfast on the concrete, the mere fact that such words should be spoken on the eve of the invasion has impelled me to record them. Moreover, we haven't seen the last of Corporal Lankes, the master of "concrete" art; we shall meet him again when the time comes to speak of the postwar period and the present apotheosis of bourgeois comfort.

On the beach promenade, our armored personnel carrier was still waiting for us. With long strides Lieutenant Herzog returned to his proteges and breathlessly apologized to Bebra for the little incident, adding, however, that the beach was off limits for civilians and "Off limits is off limits." He helped the ladies into the vehicle, gave the driver some instructions, and back we rode to Bavent. We had to hurry, there was no time for lunch, for at two o'clock we had a show at the charming little Norman chateau nestling among the poplars at the edge of the village.

We had barely half an hour in which to test the lighting; then Oskar raised the curtain with a drum flourish. We were playing to an audience of enlisted men. We laid it on thick and the laughter was hearty and frequent. I sang at a gla.s.s chamber pot containing a pair of hot dogs with mustard. Bebra, in white grease paint, wept clown's tears over the broken pot, salvaged the sausages from the shards, and devoured them to the joy of the field-grey ma.s.s. Felix and Kitty had taken to appearing in leather shorts and Tyrolian hats, which lent their act a special cachet. Roswitha wore a close-fitting silvery gown and long pale-green gloves; her tiny feet were encased in gold-embroidered sandals. Her half-closed bluish eyelids and drowsy Mediterranean voice produced their usual effect of eerie magic. Oskar -- or have I mentioned it before? -- required no special costume. I wore my good old sailor hat with S.M.S. Seydlitz on the band, my navy-blue s.h.i.+rt, and my jacket with the golden anchor b.u.t.tons. As the camera eye descended, it registered the bottoms of my knee-pants, rolled stockings, and a very dilapidated pair of boots. From my neck hung my red and white lacquered drum, serene in the knowledge that there were five more like it in my luggage.

That night we repeated the same show for officers and for the Blitz Girls from the Cabourg message center. Roswitha was a trifle nervous. She made no mistakes, but in the middle of her number she put on a pair of sungla.s.ses with blue rims and abruptly changed her tone. Here revelations became more direct; for instance, she informed an anemic-looking Blitz Girl, whose embarra.s.sment made her snippish, that she was having an affair with her commanding officer. This, it seemed to me, was in poor taste, but there were plenty of laughs, for there was an officer sitting beside the Blitz Girl, and there was good reason to suppose. . .

After the show the regimental staff officers, who were billeted in the chateau, gave a party. Bebra, Kitty, and Felix stayed on, but Raguna and Oskar slipped quietly away and went to bed. It had been a trying day. We dropped off quickly and slept until 5 a.m. when the invasion woke us up.

What shall I tell you about the invasion? Canadians landed in our sector, not far from the mouth of the Orne. Bavent had to be evacuated. Our luggage was already stowed in the truck. We were pulling out with the regimental staff. A motorized field kitchen had stopped in the court of the chateau. Roswitha asked me to get her a cup of coffee. Rather nervous and afraid of missing the truck. I refused. I was even a little rude to her. Thereupon she herself ran over to the field kitchen in her high-heeled shoes, and reached the steaming hot coffee exactly at the same time as a sh.e.l.l from a naval gun.

O Roswitha, I know not how old you were, I know only that you measured three foot three, that the Mediterranean spoke from your lips, that you smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg, and that you could see into the hearts of men; but you couldn't see into your own heart, or else you would have stayed with me instead of running after that coffee, which was much too hot.

In Lisieux Bebra managed to w.a.n.gle marching orders for Berlin. We waited for him outside the Kommandantur, and it was only when he joined us that he mentioned Roswitha's death for the first time: "We dwarfs and fools have no business dancing on concrete made for giants. If only we had stayed under the rostrums where no one suspected our presence!"

In Berlin I parted from Bebra. "What," he said with a smile as thin as a spiderweb, "will you do in all those air-raid shelters without your Roswitha?" Then he kissed me on the forehead. He made me a present of the five remaining drums and sent Kitty and Felix to Danzig with official travel orders to keep me company. So it was that armed with six drums and my "book", I returned on June 11, 1944, the day before my son's third birthday, to my native city, which was still intact and medieval and which still resounded with bells of every size ringing out the hour from belfries high and low.

The Imitation of Christ

Ah, yes, homecoming! At four minutes after twenty hundred, the furlough train pulled into Danzig station. Felix and Kitty accompanied me as far as Max-Halbe-Platz. Kitty burst into tears as they were saying goodbye. Then -- it was almost twenty-one hundred -- they went on to Propaganda Troop headquarters in Hochstriess, while Oskar toted his luggage down Labesweg.

Homecoming indeed! Nowadays every young man who forges a little check, joins the Foreign Legion, and spins a few yarns when he gets home a few years later, tends to be regarded as a modern Ulysses. Maybe on his way home our young man gets into the wrong train which takes him to Oberhausen instead of Frankfurt, and has some sort of experience on the way -- why not? -- and the moment he reaches home, he begins to bandy mythological names about: Circe, Penelope, Telemachus.

Oskar was no Ulysses, if only because on his return home he found everything unchanged. Far from being beset by lecherous suitors, his beloved Maria, who, had he been Ulysses, would have had to play the role of Penelope, still had her Matzerath, in whose favor she had decided long before Oskar's departure. And I do hope the more cla.s.sical-minded among my readers will not, because of her somnambulism, mistake my poor Roswitha for Circe, the enchantress who turned men into beasts. Lastly, my son Kurt didn't raise a ringer for his returning father; accordingly, he was no Telemachus, even if he did fail to recognize me.

If comparison there must be -- and I can see that homecomers must put up with a comparison or two -- I prefer to be looked upon as the Prodigal Son; for Matzerath opened the door and welcomed me like a true, not a presumptive, father. In fact, he managed to be so happy over Oskar's return, to the point of shedding real, speechless tears, that from that day on I ceased to call myself exclusively Oskar Bronski and called myself Oskar Matzerath as well.

Maria's reception of me was less emotional but not unfriendly. She was sitting at the table, pasting up food stamps for the Board of Trade, having previously piled up a few birthday presents for little Kurt. Practical as she was, she thought first of my physical well-being, undressed me, bathed me as in times gone by, overlooked my blushes, and set me down in my pajamas at the table, Matzerath having meanwhile served up a dish of fried eggs and browned potatoes. I drank milk with my food, and as I ate and drank, the questions began: "Where have you been? We looked all over like mad; we even had to go to the police and swear we hadn't done you in. Well, here you are and thank the Lord for that. But plenty of trouble you made us and there's going to be more, because now we've got to report you back again. I only hope they won't put you in an inst.i.tution. That's what you deserve. Running away without a word."

Maria was right. There was plenty of bother. A man came from the Ministry of Public Health and spoke to Matzerath in private, but Matzerath shouted so loud you could hear him all over the house; "It's out of the question. I promised my wife on her deathbed. I'm his father, not the Board of Health."

So I was not sent to an inst.i.tution. But every two weeks an official letter came, asking Matzerath for a little signature; Matzerath refused to sign, but his forehead was creased with care.

Oskar has been getting ahead of himself; now he must smooth the creases out of Matzerath's brow, for on the night of my arrival he beamed; he was much less worried than Maria, also asked fewer questions, and was happy just to have me home. All in all, he behaved like a true father. "Won't Kurt be glad to have a little brother again!" he said as they were putting me to bed in the flat of the rather bewildered Mother Truczinski. "And just imagine, tomorrow is Kurt's third birthday."

On his birthday table my son Kurt found a cake with three candles, a crimson sweater knitted by Gretchen Scheffler, to which he paid no attention at all, and various other articles. There was a ghastly yellow ball, which he sat on, rode about on, and finally punctured with a potato knife. From the wound in the rubber he sucked the sickly sweet fluid that gathers inside all air-filled b.a.l.l.s, and when he had enough of that began to dismantle and wreck the sailboat. The whistling top and the whip that went with it lay untouched, but frighteningly close at hand.

Oskar, who had long been thinking of this birthday, who had hastened eastward amid one of history's wildest frenzies, determined not to miss the third birthday of his son and heir -- Oskar stood aside viewing the little fellow's destructive efforts, admiring his resolution, comparing his own dimensions with those of his son. I had to face the facts. While you were gone, I said to myself in some alarm, Kurt has grown by more than a head. He is already a good inch taller than the three feet you've kept yourself down to ever since your third birthday nearly seventeen years ago; it is time to make a drummer of him and call a halt to that immoderate growth.

I had stored away my drums along with my one-volume library behind the roof tiles in the attic. I picked out a gleaming, brand-new instrument, resolved -- since the grownups weren't doing anything about it -- to offer my son the same opportunity as my poor mother, faithful to her promise, had offered me on my third birthday.

In my own infancy Matzerath had chosen me as his successor in the shop. Now that I had failed him, there was every reason to suppose that he had transferred his designs to Kurt. This, I said to myself, must be prevented at all costs. But I should not like you to see in Oskar a sworn enemy of the retail trade. If my son had been offered the owners.h.i.+p of a factory, or even of a kingdom complete with colonies, I should have felt exactly the same. Oskar had wanted no hand-me-downs for himself and he wanted none for his son. What Oskar wanted -- and here was the flaw in my logic -- was to make Kurt a permanently three-year-old drummer, as though it were not just as nauseating for a young hopeful to take over a tin drum as to step into a ready-made grocery store.

This is Oskar's present opinion. But at the time he was consumed by one desire: to see a drummer son beside a drummer father, two diminutive drummers looking on at the doings of the grown-up world; to establish a dynasty of drummers, capable of perpetuating itself and of handing down my work, drummed on tin encased in red and white lacquer, from generation to generation.

What a life lay ahead of us! How we might have drummed. Side by side, but also in different rooms, side by side, but also he in Labesweg and I in Luisenstra.s.se, he in the cellar, I in the attic, Kurt in the kitchen, Oskar in the toilet, father and son, hither and yon but occasionally together; and when we had the chance, the two of us might have slipped under the skirts of Anna Koljaiczek, my grandmother and his great-grandmother, to live and drum and breathe in the smell of slightly rancid b.u.t.ter. Squatting by her portal, I should have said to Kurt: "Look inside, my son. That's where we come from. And if you're a good little boy, we shall be allowed to go back for an hour or more and visit those who are waiting."

And bending low, little Kurt would have peeped in. And ever so politely he would have asked me, his father, for explanations.

And Oskar would have whispered: "The lovely lady sitting there in the middle, playing with her lovely hands, the lovely lady whose sweet oval face brings the tears to my eyes, and yours no doubt as well, is my poor mama, your good grandmother, who died of eating eel soup, or maybe because her heart was too tender."

"Tell me more, Papa, tell me more," little Kurt would have clamored. "Who is the man with the mustache?"

With an air of mystery, I should have lowered my voice: "That's Joseph Koljaiczek, your great-grandfather. Take a good look at those flas.h.i.+ng incendiary eyes, at his divine Polish wildness and the practical Kashubian shrewdness of his brow. Observe, if you please, the webs between his toes. In the year 1913, when the Columbus ran down the ways, he was hiding under a timber raft. After that he had to swim a long way; he swam and swam till he came to America and became a millionaire. But sometimes he takes to the water, swims back, and dives in here, where the fugitive firebug first found shelter and contributed his part toward my mama."

" But what about the handsome gentleman who has been hiding behind the lady who is my grandmother, who is sitting down now beside her and stroking her hands with his hands? His eyes are just as blue as yours, Papa."

Then I, unnatural son and traitor that I was, should have summoned up all my courage to answer my dear child: "Those are the dreamy blue eyes of the Bronskis that are looking at you, my boy. Your eyes, it is true, are grey. They come to you from your mother. And yet, just like this Jan who is kissing my poor mama's hands, or his father Vincent, for that matter, you too are a Bronski, a dreamer through and through, yet with a practical Kashubian side. One day we will go back there, one day we shall follow the source whence flows that smell of slightly rancid b.u.t.ter. It's something to look forward to."

In those days it seemed to me that true family life was possible only in the interior of my grandmother Koljaiczek, in the grandmotherly b.u.t.ter tub, as I liked to call it. Today many things have changed. With a snap of my fingers I can equal if not surpa.s.s G.o.d the Father, the only begotten Son, and most important of all, the Holy Ghost. The imitation of Christ has become an occupation with me, that I practice with the same distaste as all my other occupations. And yet, though nothing is farther away from me today than the entrance to my grandmother, it is among my forebears that I picture the most beautiful family scenes.

These fantasies come to me mostly on rainy days: my grandmother sends out invitations and we all meet inside her. Jan Bronski comes with flowers, carnations mostly, in the bullet holes perforating his Polish Post Office defender's breast. Timidly Maria, who at my behest has also received an invitation, approaches my mama; currying favor, she shows her the account books impeccably set up by my mama and impeccably carried on by Maria, and Mama, with her most Kashubian laugh, draws my darling to her, kisses her on the cheek, and says with a twinkle: "Why, child, there's nothing to be ashamed of. Haven't the both of us married a Matzerath and nursed a Bronski?"

I must sternly forbid myself any further reflections along these lines, speculations for example about a son begotten by Jan, deposited by my mama inside Grandma Koljaiczek, and finally born in the b.u.t.ter tub. Such notions would inevitably lead too far. Might it not occur to my half brother Stephan Bronski, who is after all one of us, to cast first a glance, and thereafter heaven knows what else, at my Maria? My imagination prefers to limit itself to an innocent family gathering. Renouncing a third and fourth drummer, I content myself with Oskar and Little Kurt. For the benefit of those present, I drum something or other about that Eiffel Tower which replaced my grandmother for me in a strange land, quite satisfied if the guests and Anna Koljaiczek, our hostess, enjoy our drumming and clap each other on the knees in obedience to the rhythm.

Delightful as it may be to see the world and its relations.h.i.+ps unfolding inside my own grandmother, to be profound in a limited area, Oskar must now -- since like Matzerath he is only a presumptive father -- turn back to the events of June 12, 1944, to Kurt's third birthday.