Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 17

Old man Heilandt had found work as a shoemaker. He was busy resoling the boots the Russians had worn out during their rapid advance and was unwilling at first to make us a coffin. But after Mr. Fajngold had drawn him into a business deal -- Derby cigarettes from our shop for an electric motor from his shed -- he set his boots aside and took up other tools and the last of his boards.

At that time -- until we were evicted and Mr. Fajngold turned the cellar over to us -- we were living in Mother Truczinski's flat, which had been stripped bare by neighbors and Polish immigrants. Old man Heilandt removed the door between the kitchen and living room from its hinges, for the door between the living room and bedroom had been used for Mother Truczinski's coffin. Down below, in the court, he was smoking Derby cigarettes and throwing the box together. We remained upstairs. I took the one chair that was left in the flat and pushed open the broken window. It grieved me to see that the old fellow was taking no pains at all with his work and turning out a plain rectangular box without the tapering characteristic of self-respecting coffins.

Oskar didn't see Matzerath again, for when the box was lifted onto the widow Greff's handcart, the Vitello Margarine slats had already been nailed down, although in his lifetime Matzerath, far from eating margarine, had despised it even for cooking.

Maria asked Mr. Fajngold to come with us; she was afraid of the Russian soldiers in the streets. Fajngold, who was squatting on the counter, spooning artificial honey out of a cardboard cup, expressed misgivings at first; he was afraid Luba might object, but then apparently his wife gave him permission to go, for he slipped off the counter, giving me the honey. I pa.s.sed it on to Kurt, who made short shrift of it, while Maria helped Mr. Fajngold into a long black coat with grey rabbit fur. Before he closed the shop, bidding his wife to open for no one, he put on a top hat, considerably too small for him, which Matzerath had worn at various weddings and funerals.

Old man Heilandt refused to pull the cart as far as the City Cemetery. He hadn't the time, he said, he still had boots to mend. At Max-Halbe-Platz, the ruins of which were still smoldering, he turned left into Brosener-Weg and I guessed he was heading for Saspe. The Russians sat outside the houses in the thin February sun, sorting out wrist.w.a.tches and pocket watches, polis.h.i.+ng silver spoons with sand, experimenting to see how bra.s.sieres worked out as ear m.u.f.fs, and doing stunt bicycle-riding over an obstacle course fas.h.i.+oned of oil paintings, grandfather clocks, bathtubs, radios, and clothes trees. Enthusiastically applauded for their skill, they did figure eights, twists, and spirals, all the while dodging the baby carriages, chandeliers, and such like that were being thrown out of the windows. As we pa.s.sed, they broke off their sport for a few seconds. A few soldiers with negligees over their uniforms helped us to push and tried to make pa.s.ses at Maria, but were called to order by Mr. Fajngold, who spoke Russian and had an official pa.s.s. A soldier in a lady's hat gave us a birdcage containing a live lovebird on a perch. Kurt, who was hopping along beside the cart, tried to pull out its feathers. Afraid to decline the gift, Maria lifted the cage out of Kurt's reach and handed it up to me on the cart. Oskar, who was in no mood for lovebirds, put the cage down on Matzerath's enlarged margarine crate. I was sitting in the rear end of the cart, dangling my legs and looking into the folds of Mr. Fajngold's face, which bore a look of thoughtful gloom, suggesting a mind at work on a complicated problem that refused to come out.

I beat my drum a little, something sprightly, in an effort to dispel Mr. Fajngold's somber thoughts. But his expression remained unchanged, his eyes were somewhere else, maybe in far-away Galicia; one thing they did not see was my drum. Oskar gave up, and after that there was no sound but Maria's weeping and the rumbling of the wheels.

What a mild winter, I thought when we had left the last houses of Langfuhr behind us; I also took some notice of the lovebird, which was puffing out its feathers in consideration of the afternoon sun hovering over the airfield.

The airfield was guarded, the road to Brosen closed. An officer spoke with Mr. Fajngold, who during the interview held his top hat between his fingers, letting his thin, reddish-blond hair blow in the wind. After tapping for a moment on Matzerath's crate as though to determine its contents and tickling the lovebird with his forefinger, the officer let us pa.s.s, but a.s.signed two young fellows, who couldn't have been more than sixteen, with caps that were too little and tommy guns that were too big, to escort us, perhaps for our protection or perhaps to keep an eye on us.

Old man Heilandt pulled, without ever once turning around. He had a trick of lighting his cigarette with one hand, without slowing down. Planes darted about overhead. The engines were so clearly audible because of the season, late February or early March. Only in the vicinity of the sun were there a few clouds which gradually took on color. The bombers were heading for Hela or returning from Hela Peninsula, where what was left of the Second Army was still holding out.

The weather and the droning of the planes made me sad. There is nothing so tedious, nothing that makes for such a feeling of surfeit and disgust, as a cloudless March sky full of airplane motors crescendo and decrescendo. To make matters worse, the two Russian puppies kept trying, quite unsuccessfully, to march in step.

Perhaps some of the boards of the hastily a.s.sembled coffin had been jolted loose, first on the cobblestones, then on battered asphalt; we were heading into the wind and, as we have seen, I was sitting in back; in any case, it smelled of dead Matzerath, and Oskar was glad when we reached Saspe Cemetery.

We couldn't take the cart as far as the iron gate, for the road was blocked shortly before the cemetery by the charred wreckage of a T-34. Other tanks, obliged to detour around it on their way to Neufahrwa.s.ser, had left their tracks in the sand to the left of the highway and flattened a part of the cemetery wall. Mr. Fajngold asked old man Heilandt to take the rear. They carried the coffin, which sagged slightly in the middle, along the tracks of the tank treads, traversed with some difficulty the stone pile into which the cemetery wall had been transformed, and finally, with their last strength, took a few steps among the tumble-down tombstones. Old man Heilandt tugged avidly at his cigarette and blew out smoke over the coffin. I carried the cage with the lovebird. Maria dragged two shovels behind her. Little Kurt carried or rather brandished a pickax, attacking the grey granite tombstones at the risk of his life, until Maria took it away from him and helped the men to dig.

How fortunate that the soil here is sandy and not frozen, I said to myself, while looking for Jan Bronski's place behind the northern wall. It must be here, I thought, or maybe there. I couldn't be sure, for the changing seasons had turned the telltale fresh whitewash a crumbling grey like all the walls in Saspe.

I came back through the hind gate, looked up at the stunted pines: So now they're burying Matzerath, I thought, for fear of thinking something irrelevant. And I found at least partial meaning in the circ.u.mstance that the two skat brothers, Bronski and Matzerath, should lie here in the same sandy ground, even if my poor mama was not here to keep them company.

Funerals always make you think of other funerals.

The sandy soil put up a fight, it probably wanted more experienced gravediggers. Maria paused, leaned panting on her pick, and began to cry again when she saw Kurt throwing stones at the lovebird in its cage. Kurt missed, his stones overshot the mark; Maria wept loudly and in all sincerity, because she had lost Matzerath, because she had seen something in Matzerath which in my opinion wasn't there, but which, as far as she was concerned, was to remain henceforth real and lovable. Mr. Fajngold said a few comforting words, which gave him a chance to rest, for the digging was too much for him. Old man Heilandt wielded his shovel with the regularity of a seeker after gold, tossed the earth behind him, and blew out puffs of smoke, also at measured intervals. The two Russian puppies sat on the cemetery wall a few steps away from us, chatting into the wind. Overhead, airplanes and a sun growing steadily riper.

They may have dug about three feet. Oskar stood idle and perplexed amid the old granite, amid the stunted pines, between Matzerath's widow and a Kurt throwing stones at a lovebird.

Should I or shouldn't I? You are going on twenty-one, Oskar. Should you or shouldn't you? You are an orphan. Actually you should, it's high time. When your poor mama died, you were left half an orphan. That was when you should have made up your mind. Then they laid Jan, your presumptive father, under the crust of the earth. That made you a presumptive full orphan. You stood here on this sand named Saspe, holding a slightly oxidized cartridge case. It was raining and a Ju-52 was getting ready to land. Wasn't this "Should I or shouldn't I?" audible even then, if not in the sound of the rain, then in the roaring of the landing transport plane? You said to yourself: it's the rain, it's the sound of airplanes engines; uninspired interpretations of this sort can be read into any text you please. You wanted everything to be perfectly plain and not just presumptive.

Should I or shouldn't I? Now they are digging a hole for Matzerath, your second presumptive father. As far as you know, you have no more presumptive fathers. Why, then, do you keep juggling with two bottle-green bottles; should I or shouldn't I? Who else is there to question? These stunted pines, themselves so questionable?

I found a slender cast-iron cross with crumbling ornaments and encrusted letters adding up to Mathilde Kunkel -- or Runkel. In the sand -- should I or shouldn't I? -- between thistles and wild oats -- should I? -- I found -- or shouldn't I? -- three or four rusty metal wreaths the size of dinner plates -- should I? -- which once upon a time -- or shouldn't I? -- were no doubt supposed to look like oak leaves or laurel -- or should I after all? -- weighed them in my hand, took aim -- should I? -- the top end of the ironwork cross -- or shouldn't I? -- had a diameter of -- should I? -- maybe an inch and a half -- or shouldn't I? -- I ordered myself to stand six feet away -- should I? -- tossed -- or shouldn't I? -- and missed -- should I try again? -- the cross was too much on a slant -- should I? -- Mathilde Kunkel or was it Runkel -- should I Runkel, should I Kunkel? -- that was the sixth throw and I had allowed myself seven, six times I shouldn't and now seven --should, the wreath was on the cross -- should -- wreathed Mathilde - -should -- laurel for Miss Kunkel -- should I? I asked young Mrs. Runkel -- yes, said Mathilde; she had died young, at twenty-seven, and born in '68. As for me, I was going on twenty-one when I made it on the seventh throw, when my problem -- should I or shouldn't I? -- was simplified, transformed into a demonstrated, wreathed, aimed, and triumphant "I should".

As Oskar, with his new "I should" on his tongue and in his heart, made his way back to the gravediggers, the lovebird let out a squeak and shed several yellow-blue feathers, for one of Kurt's stones had struck home. I wondered what question may have impelled my son to keep throwing stones at a lovebird until at last a hit gave him his answer.

They had moved the crate to the edge of the pit, which was about four feet deep. Old man Heilandt was in a hurry, but had to wait while Maria completed her Catholic prayers, while Mr. Fajngold stood there with his silk hat over his chest and his eyes in Galicia. Kurt, too, came closer. After his bull's-eye he had probably arrived at a decision; he approached the grave for reasons of his own but just as resolutely as Oskar.

The uncertainty was killing me. After all, it was my son who had decided for or against something. Had he decided at last to recognize and love me as his only true father? Had he, now that it was too late, decided to take up the drum? Or was his decision: death to my presumptive father Oskar, who killed my presumptive father Matzerath with a Party pin for no other reason than because he was sick of fathers? Perhaps he, too, could express only by homicide the childlike affection that would seem to be desirable between fathers and sons.

While old man Heilandt flung rather than lowered the crate containing Matzerath, the Party pin in Matzerath's windpipe and the magazineful of Russian tommy-gun ammunition in Matzerath's belly, into the grave, Oskar owned to himself that he had killed Matzerath deliberately, because in all likelihood Matzerath was not just his presumptive father, but his real father; and also because he was sick of dragging a father around with him all his life.

And so it was not true that the pin had been open when I picked up the badge from the concrete floor. The pin had been opened within my closed hand. It was a jagged, pointed lozenge that I had pa.s.sed on to Matzerath, intending that they find the insignia on him, that he put the Party in his mouth and choke on it -- on the Party, on me, his son; for this situation couldn't go on forever.

Old man Heilandt began to shovel. Little Kurt helped him clumsily but with alacrity. I had never loved Matzerath. Occasionally I liked him. He took care of me, but more as a cook than as a father. He was a good cook. If today I sometimes miss Matzerath, it is his Konigsberg dumplings, his pork kidneys in vinegar sauce, his carp with horseradish and cream, his green eel soup, his Ka.s.sler Rippchen with sauerkraut, and all his unforgettable Sunday roasts, which I can still feel on my tongue and between my teeth. They forgot to put a cooking spoon in the coffin of this man who transformed feelings into soups. They also forgot to put a deck of skat cards in his coffin. He was a better cook than skat player. Still, he played better than Jan Bronski and almost as well as my poor mama. Such was his endowment, such was his tragedy. I have never been able to forgive him for taking Maria away from me, although he treated her well, never beat her, and usually gave in when she picked a fight. He hadn't turned me over to the Ministry of Public Health, and had signed the letter only after the mails had stopped running. When I came into the world under the light bulbs, he chose the shop as my career. To avoid standing behind a counter, Oskar had spent more than seventeen years standing behind a hundred or so toy drums, lacquered red and white. Now Matzerath lay flat and could stand no more. Smoking Matzerath's Derby cigarettes, old man Heilandt shoveled him in. Oskar should have taken over the shop. Meanwhile Mr. Fajngold had taken over the shop with his large, invisible family. But I inherited the rest: Maria, Kurt, and the responsibility for them both.

Maria was still crying authentically and praying Catholically. Mr. Fajngold was sojourning in Galicia or solving some knotty reckoning. Kurt was weakening but still shoveling. The Russian puppies sat chatting on the cemetery wall. With morose regularity old man Heilandt shoveled the sand of Saspe over the margarine-crate coffin. Oskar could still read three letters of the word Vitello. At this point he unslung the drum from his neck, no longer saying "Should I or shouldn't I?" but instead: "It must be," and threw the drum where the sand was deep enough to m.u.f.fle the sound. I tossed in the sticks too. They stuck in the sand. That was my drum from the Duster days, the last of those Bebra had given me. What would the Master have thought of my decision? Jesus had beaten that drum, as had a Russian with large, open pores and built like a bank safe. There wasn't much life left in it. But when a shovelful of sand struck its surface, it sounded. At the second shovelful, it still had something to say. At the third it was silent, only showing a little white lacquer until that too was covered over. The sand piled up on my drum, the sand mounted and grew -- and I too began to grow; the first symptom being a violent nosebleed.

Kurt was the first to notice the blood. "He's bleeding, he's bleeding," he shouted, calling Mr. Fajngold back from Galicia, calling Maria from her prayers, and even making the two young Russians, who had been sitting on the wall the whole while, chatting in the direction of Brosen, look up in momentary fright.

Old man Heilandt left his shovel in the sand, took the pickax, and rested my neck against the blue-black iron. The cool metal produced the desired effect. The bleeding began to subside. Old man Heilandt returned to his shoveling. There was still a little sand left beside the grave when the bleeding stopped entirely, but the growth continued, as I could tell by the rumbling and cracking and grinding inside me.

When old man Heilandt had finished shoveling, he took a dilapidated wooden cross with no inscription on it from a nearby tomb and thrust it into the fresh mound, approximately between Matzerath's head and my buried drum. "That does it! " said the old man and picked up Oskar, who was unable to walk, in his arms. Carrying me, he led the others, including the Russian puppies with the tommy guns, out of the cemetery, across the crushed wall, along the tank tracks to the handcart on the highway. I looked back over my shoulder toward the cemetery. Maria was carrying the cage with the lovebird, Mr. Fajngold was carrying the tools, Kurt was carrying nothing, the two Russians with the caps that were too small were carrying the tommy guns that were too big for them, and the scrub pines were bent beneath so much carrying.

From the sand to the asphalt highway, still blocked by the burned-out tank. On the tank sat Leo Schugger. High overhead planes coming from Hela, headed for Hela. Leo Schugger was careful not to blacken his gloves on the charred T-34. Surrounded by puffy little clouds, the sun descended on Tower Mountain near Zoppot. Leo Schugger slid off the tank and stood very straight.

The sight of Leo Schugger handed old man Heilandt a laugh. "D'you ever see the like of it? The world comes to an end, but they can't get Leo Schugger down." In high good humor, he gave the black tailcoat a slap on the back and explained to Mr. Fajngold: "This is our Leo Schugger. He wants to give us sympathy and shake hands with us."

He spoke the truth. Leo Schugger made his gloves flutter and, slavering as usual, expressed his sympathies to all present. "Did you see the Lord?" he asked. "Did you see the Lord?" No one had seen Him. Maria, I don't know why, gave Leo the cage with the lovebird.

When it was the turn of Oskar, whom old man Heilandt had stowed on the handcart, Leo Schugger's face seemed to decompose itself, the winds inflated his garments, and a dance seized hold of his legs. "The Lord, the Lord!" he cried, shaking the lovebird in its cage. "See the Lord! He's growing, he's growing!" Then he was tossed into the air with the cage, and he ran, flew, danced, staggered, and fled with the screeching bird, himself a bird. Taking flight at last, he fluttered across the fields in the direction of the sewage land and was heard shouting through the voices of the tommy guns: "He's growing, he's growing!" He was still screaming when the two young Russians reloaded. "He's growing!" And even when the tommy guns rang out again, even after Oskar had fallen down a stepless staircase into an expanding, all-engulfing faint, I could hear the bird, the voice, the raven, I could hear Leo proclaiming to all the world: "He's growing, he's growing, he's growing. . ."

Disinfectant

Last night I was beset by hasty dreams. They were like friends on visiting days. One dream after another; one by one they came and went after telling me what dreams find worth telling; preposterous stories full of repet.i.tions, monologues which could not be ignored, because they were declaimed in a voice that demanded attention and with the gestures of incompetent actors. When I tried to tell Bruno the stories at breakfast, I couldn't get rid of them, because I had forgotten everything; Oskar has no talent for dreaming.

While Bruno cleared away the breakfast, I asked him as though in pa.s.sing: "My dear Bruno, how tall am I exactly?"

Bruno set the little dish of jam on my coffee cup and said in tones of concern: "Why, Mr. Matzerath, you haven't touched your jam."

How well I know those words of reproach. I hear them every day after breakfast. Every morning Bruno brings me this dab of strawberry jam just to make me build a newspaper roof over it. I can't even bear to look at jam, much less eat it. Accordingly I dismissed Bruno's reproach with quiet firmness: "You know how I feel about jam, Bruno. Just tell me how tall I am."

Bruno's eyes took on the expression of an extinct octopod. He always casts this prehistoric gaze up at the ceiling whenever he has to think, and if he has anything to say, it is also the ceiling he addresses. This morning, then, he said to the ceiling: "But it's strawberry jam." Only when after a considerable pause -- for by my silence I sustained my question about Oskar's size -- Bruno's gaze came down from the ceiling and twined itself round the bars of my bed, was I privileged to hear that I measured four feet one.

"Wouldn't you kindly measure me again, Bruno, just to be sure?"

Without batting an eyelash, Bruno drew a folding rule from his back pants pocket, threw back my covers with a gesture that was almost brutal, pulled down my nightgown, which had bunched up, unfolded the ferociously yellow ruler which had broken off at five feet eleven, placed it alongside me, s.h.i.+fted its position, checked. His hands worked efficiently, but his eyes were still dwelling in the age of dinosaurs. At length the ruler came to rest and he declared, as though reading off his findings: "Still four feet one."

Why did he have to make so much noise folding up his ruler and removing my breakfast tray? Were my measurements not to his liking?

After leaving the room with the breakfast tray, with the egg-yellow ruler beside the revoltingly natural-colored strawberry jam, Bruno cast a last glance back through the peephole in the door -- a glance that made me feel as old as the hills. Then at length he left me alone with my four feet and my one inch.

So Oskar is really so tall! Almost too big for a dwarf, a gnome, a midget? What was the alt.i.tude of la Raguna's, my Roswitha's, summit? At what height did Master Bebra, who was descended from Prince Eugene, succeed in keeping himself? Today I could look down even on Kitty and Felix. Whereas all those I have just mentioned once looked down with friendly envy upon Oskar, who, until the twenty-first year of his life, had measured a spare three feet.

It was only when that stone hit me at Matzerath's funeral in Saspe Cemetery that I began to grow.

Stone, Oskar has said. I had better fill in my record of the events at the cemetery.

After I had found out, thanks to my little game of quoits, that for me there could be no more "Should I or shouldn't I?" but only an " I should, I must, I will!" I unslung my drum, cast it complete with drumsticks into Matzerath's grave, and made up my mind to grow. At once I felt a buzzing, louder and louder, in my ears. Just then I was struck in the back of the head by a stone about the size of a walnut, which my son Kurt had thrown with all his four-year-old might. Though the blow came as no surprise to me -- I had suspected that my son was cooking up something against me -- I nevertheless made a dash for my drum in Matzerath's grave. Old man Heilandt pulled me out of the hole with his dry, old man's grip, but left drum and drumsticks where they were. Then when my nose began to bleed, he laid me down with my neck against the iron of the pickax. The nosebleed, as we know, soon subsided, but I continued to grow, though so slowly that only Leo Schugger noticed, whereupon he proclaimed my growth to the world with loud cries and birdlike fluttering.

So much for my addendum, which is actually superfluous; for I had started to grow even before I was. .h.i.t by the stone and flung myself into Matzerath's grave. But from the very first Maria and Mr. Fajngold saw but one reason for my growth, or sickness as they called it, namely, the stone that had hit me in the head, my leap into the grave. Even before we had left the cemetery, Maria gave Kurt a sound spanking. I was sorry for Kurt. For after all he may have thrown that stone at me to help me, to accelerate my growth. Perhaps he wanted at last to have a real grown-up father, or maybe just a subst.i.tute for Matzerath; for to tell the truth, he has never acknowledged or honored the father in me.

In the course of my growth, which went on for nearly a year, there were plenty of doctors of both s.e.xes who confirmed the theory that the stone and my headlong leap into the grave were responsible, who said and wrote in my case history: Oskar Matzerath is a deformed Oskar because a stone hit him in the back of the head, etc. etc.

Here it seems relevant to recall my third birthday. What had the grownups said about the beginning of my biography proper? This is what they had said: At the age of three, Oskar Matzerath fell from the cellar stairs to the concrete floor. This fall put an end to his growth, etc. etc.

In these explanations we find man's understandable desire to find physical justification for all alleged miracles. Oskar must admit that he too examines all alleged miracles with the utmost care before discarding them as irresponsible hok.u.m.

On our return from Saspe Cemetery, we found new tenants in Mother Truczinski's flat. They were nice enough people and offered to take us in until we had found something else, but Mr. Fajngold refused to countenance such overcrowding and said we could have the bedroom of the ground-floor flat, he could manage for the present with the living room. To this arrangement Maria objected, feeling that it would not be right in her recently widowed state to live at such close quarters with a gentleman alone. At the time Fajngold was unaware of being a gentleman alone, but Luba's energetic presence made it easier in a way for him to appreciate Maria's arguments. For Luba's sake as well, they would make a different arrangement, he would turn the cellar over to us. He even helped us to rearrange the storeroom, but he would not let me move into the cellar, for I was sick, a poor sick child, and so a bed was set up for me in the living room, beside my poor mama's piano.

It was hard to find a doctor. Most of the doctors had left with the troops, because in January the medical insurance fund had been evacuated westward and patients had become exceedingly rare. After a long search, Mr. Fajngold managed to scare up a lady doctor from Elbing, who was amputating at the Helene Lange School, where wounded from the Wehrmacht and the Red Army lay side by side. She promised to look in, and four days later she actually did. She sat down by my sickbed, smoked three or four cigarettes in a row while examining me, and on the last cigarette fell asleep.

Mr. Fajngold was afraid to wake her up. Maria gave her a timid poke. But the lady doctor didn't wake up until her cigarette burned down and singed her finger. She stood up and stamped out the b.u.t.t on the carpet. She spoke tersely in a tone of nervous irritation: "You'll have to excuse me. Haven't closed an eye in three weeks. I was in Kasemark with a trainload of children from East Prussia. Couldn't get the kids on the ferry. Only took troops. Four thousand kids. All blown to pieces." There was the same terseness in the way she stroked my cheek. Thrusting a fresh cigarette into her face, she rolled up her left sleeve and took an ampoule out of her briefcase. While giving herself a shot in the arm, she said to Maria: "I can't tell you what's the matter with the boy. Ought to be in a hospital, but not here. You've got to get away. To the West. The joints of his wrists, knees, and shoulders are swollen. It's bound to attack his brain in the end. Make him cold compresses. I'm leaving you a few pills in case the pain prevents him from sleeping."

I liked this terse lady doctor, who didn't know what was wrong with me and admitted as much. In the few weeks that followed, Maria and Mr. Fajngold made me several hundred cold compresses which soothed me, but didn't prevent my knee, wrist, and shoulder joints, and my head as well, from swelling and aching. What horrified Maria and Mr. Fajngold the most was my swelling head. She gave me the pills, but they were soon gone. He began to plot fever curves, took to experimenting with pencil and ruler, constructed bold fantastic shapes round my temperature, which he took five times a day with a thermometer obtained on the black market in exchange for synthetic honey. My fever chart looked like a mountain range with terrifying chasms -- I thought of the Alps, the snowy peaks of the Andes. In reality, there was nothing so fantastic about my temperature: in the morning I usually had a hundred and five-tenths; by evening it had risen to something over a hundred and two and the most I ever had during my period of growth was a hundred and two point seven. I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; I was riding a merry-go-round, I wanted to get off but I couldn't. I was one of many little children sitting in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, riding round and round. I wanted to get off but I wasn't allowed to. All the little children were crying, like me they wanted to get out of the fire engines and hollowed-out swans, down from the backs of the cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, they didn't want to ride on the merry-go-round any more, but they weren't allowed to get off. The Heavenly Father was standing beside the merry-go-round and every time it stopped, he paid for another turn. And we prayed: "Oh, our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change, we know you like to treat us to rides on the merry-go-round, we know you like to prove to us that this world is round. Please put your pocket-book away, say stop, finished, fertig, basta, stoi, closing time -- we poor little children are dizzy, they've brought us, four thousand of us, to Kasemark on the Vistula, but we can't get across, because your merry-go-round, your merry-go-round. . ."

But G.o.d our Father, the merry-go-round owner, smiled in his most benevolent manner and another coin came sailing out of his purse to make the merry-go-round keep on turning, carrying four thousand children with Oskar in their midst, in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, round and round in a ring, and every time my stag -- I'm still quite sure it was a stag -- carried us past our Father in heaven, the merry-go-round owner, he had a different face: He was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer's teeth; and then he was Goethe, the poet prince, holding a beautifully embroidered purse, and the coins he took out of it were all stamped with his father-in-heaven profile; and then again Rasputin, tipsy, and again Herr von Goethe, sober. A bit of madness with Rasputin and a bit of rationality with Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe. The tumultuous ma.s.ses round Rasputin, calendar mottoes with Goethe . . . until at length the merry-go-round slowed down -- not because my fever subsided, but because a soothing presence bent down over my fever, because Mr. Fajngold bent over me and stopped the merry-go-round. He stopped the fire engines, the swan, and the stag, devaluated Rasputin's coins, sent Goethe back to the Mothers, sent four thousand dizzy little children floating off to Kasemerk, across the Vistula, to the kingdom of heaven -- and picked Oskar up from his sickbed, and lifted him up on a cloud of Lysol, that is to say, he disinfected me.

It started on account of the lice and then became a habit. He first discovered the lice on little Kurt, then on me, Maria, and himself. The lice had probably been left behind by the Kalmuck who had taken Matzerath from Maria. How Mr. Fajngold yelled when he discovered them. He summoned his wife and children; the whole lot of them, he suspected, were infested with vermin.

Then, having bartered rolled oats and synthetic honey for different kinds of disinfectant, he took to disinfecting himself, his whole family, Maria, and myself every single day. He rubbed us, sprayed us, and powdered us. And while he sprayed, powdered, and rubbed, my fever blazed, his tongue wagged, and I learned about the whole carloads of carbolic acid, lime, and Lysol that he had sprayed, strewn, and sprinkled when he was disinfector in Treblinka Concentration Camp. Every day at 2 p.m., in his official capacity as Disinfector Mariusz Fajngold, he had sprinkled Lysol on the camp streets, over the barracks, the shower rooms, the cremating furnaces, the bundles of clothing, over those who were waiting to shower, over those who lay rec.u.mbent after their showers, over all that came out of the ovens and all who were about to go in. He listed the names, for he knew them all. He told me about Bilauer, who one hot day in August had advised the disinfector to sprinkle the camp streets with kerosene instead of Lysol. Mr. Fajngold had taken his advice. And Bilauer had the match. Old Zev Kurland of the ZOB had administered the oath to the lot of them. And Engineer Galewski had broken into the weapons room. Bilauer had shot Hauptsturmfuhrer Kutner. Sztulbach and Warynski got Zisenis by the throat; the others tackled the guards from Trawniki Camp. Some were electrocuted cutting the high-tension fence. SS Sergeant Schopke, who had always made little jokes while taking his protege's to the showers, stood by the camp gate shooting. But it didn't help him, they were all on top of him at once: Adek Kave, Motel Levit, and Henoch Lerer; Hersz Rotblat and Letek Zegel were there too, and Tosias Baran with his Deborah, And Lolek Begelmann shouted: "What about Fajngold? Got to get him out of here before the planes come." Mr. Fajngold was waiting for Luba, his wife. But even then she had stopped coming when he called her. So they seized him left and right, Jakub Gelernter on the left side, Mordechaj Szwarcbard on the right. And in front of him ran little Dr. Atlas, who, in the camp at Treblinka and later in the woods round Vilna, had recommended a thorough sprinkling with Lysol and maintained that Lysol is more important than life. This Mr. Fajngold could corroborate, for he had sprinkled the dead, not one corpse but many, why bother with figures; he had sprinkled dead men and dead women with Lysol and that was that. And he knew names, so many that it became tedious, that to me who was also swimming in Lysol the question of the life and death of a hundred thousand names became less important than the question of whether life and, if not life, then death, had been disinfected adequately and on time with Mr. Fajngold's disinfectants.

Gradually my fever left me and it was April. Then the fever went up again, the merry-go-round spun, and Mr. Fajngold sprinkled Lysol on the living and the dead. Then the fever was down again and April was at an end. Early in May, my neck grew shorter and my chest grew broader and higher, so that I could rub Oskar's collarbone with my chin without lowering my head. Again there was fever and Lysol. And I heard Maria whispering words that floated in Lysol: "If only he don't grow crooked! If only he don't get a hump! If only he don't get water on the brain!"

Mr. Fajngold comforted Maria, telling her about people he had known who in spite of humps and dropsy had made a success of life. There was a certain Roman Frydrych, for instance, who had gone to the Argentine with his hump and started a sewing-machine business which got to be big-time and very well known. The story of Frydrych the successful hunchback failed to comfort Maria but filled the narrator, Mr. Fajngold, with such enthusiasm that he resolved to give our grocery store a new face. In the middle of May, shortly after the war ended, new merchandise made its appearance. He began to sell sewing machines and spare parts for sewing machines, but to facilitate the transition, he still carried groceries for a while. What blissful times. Hardly anything was paid for in cash. Everything was done by barter. Synthetic honey, oat flakes, sugar, flour, margarine, and the last little bags of Dr. Oetker's Baking Powder were transformed into bicycles; the bicycles and bicycle spare parts into electric motors, and these into tools; the tools became furs, and as though by magic Mr. Fajngold turned the furs into sewing machines. Little Kurt made himself useful at this game of swap and swap again; he brought in customers, negotiated deals, and caught on much more quickly than Maria to the new line. It was almost as in Matzerath's days. Maria stood behind the counter, waiting on those of the old customers who were still in town, and trying hard, with her painful Polish, to find out what the new customers wanted. Kurt was a born linguist. Kurt was all over the place. Mr. Fajngold could rely on him. Though not quite five, he became an expert on sewing machines. Amid the hundred-odd middling to miserable models displayed on the black market in Bahnhofstra.s.se he detected the first-cla.s.s Singers and Pfaffs at a glance, and Mr. Fajngold valued his knowledge.

At the end of May my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek came to see us and flung herself panting on the sofa. She had walked all the way from Bissau by way of Brenntau. Mr. Fajngold was full of praise for little Kurt and had plenty of good things to say about Maria as well. He told my grandmother the story of my illness at great length, coming back over and over again to the utility of his disinfectant. For Oskar, too, he had words of praise: I had been so quiet and well behaved and during the whole of my illness hadn't cried once.

My grandmother wanted kerosene because there was no light in Bissau. Mr Fajngold told her about his experience with kerosene in the camp at Treblinka and about his multifarious duties as camp disinfector. He told Maria to fill two quart bottles with kerosene, added a package of synthetic honey and a whole a.s.sortment of disinfectants, and listened, nodding absently, as my grandmother listed all the many things that had burned down in Bissau and Bissau Quarry during the fighting. She also described the damage in Viereck, which had been renamed Firoga as in times gone by. And Bissau had again been given its pre-war name of Bysew. As for Ehlers, who had been local peasant leader in Ramkau and very competent, who had married her brother's son's wife, Hedwig, widow of Jan who had lost his life at the post office, the farm laborers had hanged him outside his office. They had came very close to hanging Hedwig for marrying Ehlers when she was the widow of a Polish hero, and also because Stephan had been a lieutenant and Marga had belonged to the League of German Girls.

"Well," said my grandmother, "they couldn't hurt Stephan no more, because he was killed up there in the Arctic. They wanted to take Marga away and put her in a camp. But then Vincent opened his mouth and spoke like he never spoke in all his life. And now Hedwig and Marga are both with us, helping in the fields. But Vincent was knocked out from talking so much and I think maybe he won't last long. As for old Grandma, I've had my share of trouble too; pains all over, in the heart and in the head where some numbskull hit me 'cause he thought it was the right thing to do."

Such were the lamentations of Anna Koljaiczek; holding her head and stroking mine as it grew, she thought things over and came up with the following wisdom: "Yes, Oskar, that's how it is with the Kashubes. They always get hit on the head. You'll be going away where things are better, only Grandma will be left. The Kashubes are no good at moving. Their business is to stay where they are and hold out their heads for everybody else to hit, because we're not real Poles and we're not real Germans, and if you're a Kashube, you're not good enough for the Germans or the Polacks. They want everything full measure."

My grandmother gave a loud laugh, hid the bottle of kerosene, the synthetic honey, and the disinfectant under her four skirts, which despite the most violent military, political, and historical upheavals had never lost their potato color.

She was about to go, but Mr. Fajngold asked her to wait a few moments, he wanted her to meet his wife Luba and the rest of his family. When Luba failed to appear, my grandmother said: "Never mind. I'm always calling people, too: Agnes, I say, Agnes, my daughter, come and help your old mother wring out the wash. And she don't come no more than your Luba. And Vincent, my brother, in the black of night he stands outside the door though he's a sick man and shouldn't and wakes up the neighbors hollering for his son Jan that was in the post office and got killed."

She was already in the doorway, putting on her kerchief, when I called from my bed: "Babka, Babka," which means Grandma, Grandma. She turned around and lifted her skirt a little as though to let me in and take me with her. But then she probably remembered that the haven and refuge was already occupied by kerosene bottles, honey, and disinfectant, and went off without me, without Oskar.

At the beginning of June the first convoys left for the West. Maria said nothing, but I could see that she was taking leave of the furniture, the shop, the house, the tombs on both sides of Hindenburg-Allee, and the mound in Saspe Cemetery.

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

The music made Mr. Fajngold unhappy; he asked Maria to stop, and then, when she had taken the harmonica out of her mouth and was going to close the piano, he would ask her to play a little more.

Then he proposed to her. Oskar had seen it coming. Mr. Fajngold called his Luba less and less often, and one summer evening full of humming and buzzing, when he was sure she was gone, he proposed to Maria. He promised to take care of her and both children, Oskar, the sick one, too. He offered her the flat and a partners.h.i.+p in the business.

Maria was twenty-two. The beauty of her younger days, which seemed to have been pieced together by chance, had taken on firmer, perhaps harder contours. The last few months before and after the end of the war had uncurled the permanents Matzerath had paid for. She no longer wore pigtails as in my day; now her hair hung long over her shoulders, giving her the look of a rather solemn, perhaps somewhat soured young girl -- and this young girl said no, rejected Mr. Fajngold's proposal. Maria stood on the carpet that had once been ours with Kurt to one side of her and pointed her thumb at the tile stove. Mr Fajngold and Oskar heard her say: "It can't be done. Here the whole place is washed up and finished. We're going to the Rhineland where my sister Guste is. She's married to a headwaiter. His name is Koster and he'll take us in temporarily, all three of us."

Next day she filled out the application and three days later we had our papers. After that Mr. Fajngold was silent. He closed the shop. While Maria was packing, he sat in the dark shop on the counter, beside the scale; he hadn't even the heart to spoon out honey. But when Maria came to say goodbye, he slid off the counter, got out the bicycle and trailer, and said he would take us to the station.

Oskar and the baggage -- we were allowed fifty pounds each -- were loaded on the two-wheeled rubber-tired trailer. Mr. Fajngold pushed the bicycle. Maria held Kurt by the hand and took a last look back as we turned left into Elsenstra.s.se. I couldn't look back at Labesweg because it hurt me to twist my neck. Oskar's head remained motionless on his shoulders, and it was only with my eyes, which had preserved their mobility, that I took leave of Marienstra.s.se, Striessbach, Kleinhammer-Park, the underpa.s.s, which still oozed as disgustingly as ever, Bahnhofstra.s.se, my undestroyed Church of the Sacred Heart, and the Langfuhr station -- Langfuhr was now called Wrzeszcz, but who can p.r.o.nounce that?

We had to wait. When a train finally rolled in, it was a freight. There were hordes of people and far too many children. The baggage was inspected and weighed. Soldiers threw a bale of straw into each car. There was no music, but at least it wasn't raining. The weather was partly cloudy with an easterly wind.

We found a place in the fourth car from the end. Mr. Fajngold stood below us on the tracks, his thin, reddish hair blowing in the wind. When the locomotive revealed its arrival with a jolt, he stepped closer, handed Maria three packages of margarine and two of synthetic honey, and when orders in Polish, screaming and wailing, announced that the train was pulling out, he added a package of disinfectant to our provisions -- Lysol is more important than life. Then we began to move, leaving Mr. Fajngold behind. He stood there with his reddish hair blowing in the wind, becoming smaller and smaller, as is fitting and proper when trains leave, until nothing was left of him but a waving arm, and soon he had ceased to exist altogether.

Growth in a Freight Car

Those aches and pains are still with me. They have thrown me back on my pillows. I have taken to grinding my teeth to keep from hearing the grinding in my bones and joints. I look at my ten fingers and have to admit that they are swollen. A last attempt to beat my drum has proved to me that Oskar's fingers are not only somewhat swollen but temporarily no good for drumming; they just can't hold the drumsticks.

My fountain pen also refuses my guidance. I shall have to ask Bruno for cold compresses. Then, when my hands, feet, and knees are all wrapped and cool, when Bruno has put a cool cloth on my forehead too, I shall give him paper and pencil; for I don't like lending him my fountain pen. Will Bruno be willing and able to listen properly? Will his record do justice to that journey in a freight car, begun on June 12, 1945? Bruno is sitting at the table under the picture of the anemones. Now he turns his head, showing me the side of it that calls itself face, while with the eyes of a mythical animal he looks past me, one eye to the left, the other to the right of me. He lays the pencil slantwise over his thin, puckered lips. That is his way of impersonating someone who is waiting. But even admitting that he is really waiting for me to speak, waiting for the signal to begin taking down my story, his thoughts are busy with his knotted fantasies. He will knot strings together, whereas Oskar's task will be to disentangle my knotted history with the help of many words. Now Bruno writes:

I, Bruno Munsterberg, of Altena in Sauerland, unmarried and childless, am a male nurse in the private pavilion of the local mental hospital. Mr. Matzerath, who has been here for over a year, is my patient. I have other patients, of whom I cannot speak here. Mr. Matzerath is my most harmless patient. He never gets so wild that I have to call in other nurses. Today, in order to rest his overstrained fingers, he has asked me to write for him and to stop making my knotted figures. However, I have put a supply of string in my pocket and as he tells his story, I shall start on the lower limbs of a figure which, in accordance with Mr. Matzerath's story, I shall call "Refugee from the East." This will not be the first figure I have derived from my patient's stories. So far, I have done his grandmother, whom I call "Potato in Four Skirts," and his grandfather, the raftsman, whose string image I have called, rather pretentiously perhaps, "Columbus"; my strings have turned his poor mama into "The Beautiful Fish Eater," and his two fathers, Matzerath and Jan Bronski, have become "The Two Skat Players." I have also rendered the scarry back of his friend Herbert Truczinski; this piece is ent.i.tled "Rough Going." In addition, I have drawn inspiration from such sites and edifices as the Polish Post Office, the Stockturm, the Stadt-Theater, a.r.s.enal Pa.s.sage, the Maritime Museum, the cellar of Greff's vegetable store, Pestalozzi School, the Brosen bathing establishment, the Church of the Sacred Heart, the Four Seasons Cafe, the Baltic Chocolate Factory, the pillboxes of the Atlantic Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Stettin Station in Berlin, Reims Cathedral, and neither last nor least the apartment house where Mr. Matzerath first saw the light of this world. The fences and tombstones of the cemeteries of Saspe and Brenntau suggested ornaments; with knot upon knot, I have made the Vistula and the Seine flow and set the waves of the Baltic and Atlantic das.h.i.+ng against coasts of pure disembodied string. I have shaped pieces of string into Kashubian potato fields and Norman pastures, and peopled the resulting landscape, which I call Europe for short, with such figures as post office defenders, grocers, people on rostrums, people at the foot of the rostrums, schoolboys with cornucopias, expiring museum attendants, juvenile delinquents preparing for Christmas, Polish cavalrymen at sunset, ants that make history. Theater at the Front, standing men, disinfecting rec.u.mbent figures in Treblinka Camp. I have just begun "Refugee from the East," which will probably develop into a group of refugees from the East.

On June 12, 1945, at approximately 11 a.m., Mr. Matzerath pulled out of Danzig, which at the time was already called Gdansk. He was accompanied by the widow Maria Matzerath, whom my patient refers to as his former mistress, and by Kurt Matzerath, my patient's alleged son. In addition, he tells me, there were thirty-two other persons in the freight car, including four Franciscan nuns, dressed as such, and a young girl with a kerchief on her head, whom Mr. Oskar Matzerath claims to have recognized as one Lucy Rennwand. In response to repeated questions, my patient admits that this young lady's real name was Regina Raeck, but he continues to speak of a nameless triangular fox face and call it by name, namely Lucy. All this to the contrary notwithstanding, the young lady's real name, as I here beg leave to state, was Miss Regina Raeck. She was traveling with her parents, her grandparents, and a sick uncle who for his part was accompanied by, in addition to his family, an acute cancer of the stomach. The sick uncle was a big talker and lost no time in identifying himself as a former Social Democrat.

As far as my patient can remember, the trip was uneventful as far as Gdynia, which for four and a half years had borne the name of Gotenhafen. Two women from Oliva, several children, and an elderly gentleman from Langfuhr cried until the train had pa.s.sed Zoppot, while the nuns resorted to prayer.

In Gdynia the convoy stopped for five hours. Two women with six children were shown into the car. The Social Democrat, as my patient tells me, protested on the ground that he was sick and was ent.i.tled, as a prewar Social Democrat, to special treatment. But when he refused to sit down and hold his tongue, the Polish officer in charge of the convoy slapped him in the face and gave him to understand in very fluent German that he, the Polish officer, didn't know what "Social Democrat" meant. During the war he had paid forced visits to various parts of Germany, and never had the word Social Democrat been dropped in his hearing. The Social Democrat with the stomach cancer never did get a chance to explain the aims, nature, and history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany to the Polish officer, for the Polish officer left the car, closed the doors, and bolted them from outside.

I have forgotten to write that everyone was sitting or lying on straw. When the train started to move late that afternoon, some of the women screamed: "We're going back to Danzig." But they were mistaken. It was just some sort of switching maneuver, and soon they were on their way westward, headed for Stolp. The trip to Stolp, my informant tells me, took four days; the train was constantly stopped in the open fields by former partisans and young Polish gangsters. The youngsters opened the sliding doors, letting in a little fresh air, and each time removed part of the travelers' baggage along with the carbon dioxide. Whenever the young bandits occupied Mr. Matzerath's car, the four nuns rose to their feet and held up their crucifixes. The four crucifixes made a profound impression on the young fellows, who never failed to cross themselves before tossing the travelers' suitcases and knapsacks out on the roadbed.

When the Social Democrat held out a paper in which the Polish authorities in Danzig or Gdansk attested that he had been a dues-paying member of the Social Democratic Party from '31 to '37, the boys did not cross themselves, but knocked the paper out of his fingers and took his two suitcases and his wife's knapsack; the fine winter coat with the large checks, on which the Social Democrat had been lying, was also carried out into the fresh Pomeranian air.

Even so, Mr. Matzerath says the boys had seemed well disciplined and in general made a favorable impression on him. This he attributes to the influence of their leader, who despite his tender years, just sixteen of them, had cut quite a figure and reminded Mr. Matzerath, to his pleasure and sorrow, of Stortebeker, commander of the Dusters.

When this young man who so resembled Stortebeker was pulling the knapsack out of Mrs. Maria Matzerath's hands, Mr. Matzerath reached in at the last moment and removed the family photograph alb.u.m, which was fortunately lying on top. The young bandit was on the point of getting angry. But when my patient opened the alb.u.m and showed him a picture of his grandmother Koljaiczek, the boy dropped Maria's knapsack, thinking no doubt of his own grandmother. Raising two fingers to his pointed Polish cap in salute, he said "Do widzenia, good-by," in the general direction of the Matzerath family, and taking someone else's suitcase instead of the Matzerath knapsack, left the car with his men.

Apart from a small amount of underwear, this knapsack, which remained in the family's possession thanks to the family photograph alb.u.m, contained the books, bankbooks, and tax vouchers of the Matzerath grocery enterprise and a ruby necklace, once the property of Mr. Matzerath's mother, which my patient had hidden in a package of disinfectant; the educational tome, consisting half of excerpts from Rasputin and half of selections from Goethe, also accompanied Mr. Matzerath on his journey westward.

My patient tells me that in the course of the trip he often perused the photo alb.u.m and occasionally consulted the educational tome and that despite the violent pains in his joints he derived a good many happy though pensive hours from both volumes.

He has also asked me expressly to say that all the shaking and jolting, the switches and intersections, the constant vibration of the front axle on which he was lying, promoted his growth. He ceased to broaden and began to grow lengthwise. His joints, which were swollen but not inflamed, were given an opportunity to relax. Even his ears, nose, and s.e.x organ, I am told, grew perceptibly, aided by the pounding of the rails. As long as the train was in motion, Mr. Matzerath seems to have felt no pain. Only when the train stopped for partisans or juvenile delinquents did he, so he tells me, suffer the shooting, pulling pains which he soothed as best he could with the photograph alb.u.m.

He tells me that apart from the Polish Stortebeker several other youthful bandits and a middle-aged partisan took an interest in the family photos. The hardened warrior went so far as to sit down, light a cigarette, and leaf thoughtfully through the alb.u.m, omitting not a single rectangle. He began with the likeness of grandfather Koljaiczek, followed the richly imaged rise of the family, and continued on to the snapshots of Mrs. Maria Matzerath with her one-, two-, three-, four-year-old son Kurt. My patient even saw him smile at some of the family idylls. The partisan took umbrage only at the unmistakable Party insignia on the lapels of the late Mr. Matzerath senior and of Mr. Ehlers, formerly a local peasant leader in Ramkau, who had married the widow of Jan Bronski, the post office defender. My patient tells me that he scratched out the offending insignia with his penknife before the eyes, and to the satisfaction, of his critic.

Mr. Matzerath has just seen fit to inform me that this partisan, unlike so many of them, was an authentic partisan. For -- to quote the rest of my patient's lecture -- there is no such thing as a part-time partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and overthrow governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr. Matzerath contended -- and his thesis struck me as perfectly plausible -- that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just created.