Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 19

I said it was worth trying. Her reaction was: "What's the use?" Her idea was to have her sleep out. I made my invitation more definite, and when she still couldn't make up her mind, concluded mysteriously with the words: "A little gumption, Sister Gertrude. We're only young once. I know someone who's got plenty of cake stamps." I ill.u.s.trated this last remark with a light, stylized tap on my breast pocket and offered her another piece of candy. Strange to say, I was rather terrified when this strapping Westphalian la.s.s, who was not my type at all, said as though to the medicine chest: "All right, if you feel like it. Let's say six o'clock, but not here, how about Cornelius-Platz?"

As though I would ever have expected Sister Gertrude to meet me or anyone else in or near the hospital entrance! At six o'clock I was waiting for her under the Cornelius-Platz clock, which was still feeling the effects of the war and did not tell time. She was punctual, as I could tell by the not very expensive pocket watch I had bought some weeks before. I hardly recognized her; if I had seen her a little sooner, on her descent for instance from the streetcar some fifty paces away, before she could notice me, I should have slipped quietly away; for Sister Gertrude did not come as Sister Gertrude in white with a Red Cross pin, she came in miserably cut civilian dress as Miss Gertrude Wilms from Hamm or Dortmund or one of those towns between Dortmund and Hamm.

She didn't notice my dismay, but told me she had nearly been late because, just to be mean, the head nurse had given her something to do just before five.

"Well, Miss Gertrude, may I offer a few suggestions? Let's first relax a while in a pastry shop and after that whatever you say: we could go to the movies, it's too late to get theater tickets, or how about a little dance?"

"Oh, yes, let's go dancing," she cried with enthusiasm. It was too late when she realized, but then with ill-concealed distress, that despite my finery I was hardly cut out to be her dancing partner.

With a certain malice -- why hadn't she come in the nurse's uniform I was so fond of? -- I confirmed the arrangements; she, for lack of imagination, soon forgot her fright, and joined me in consuming -- I one piece, she three -- some cake that must have had cement in it. After I had paid with money and cake stamps, we boarded the Gerresheim car, for if Korneff were to be believed, there was a dance hall below Grafenberg.

We did the last bit of the way slowly on foot, for the car stopped before the uphill stretch. A September evening by the book. Gertrude's wooden sandals, obtainable without coupons, clattered like the mill on the floss. The sound made me feel gay. The people coming downhill turned around to look at us. Miss Gertrude was embarra.s.sed. I was used to it and took no notice. After all it was my cake stamps that had fed her three slices of cement cake at Kurten's Pastry Shop.

The dance hall was called Wedig's and subt.i.tled The Lions' Den. There was t.i.ttering before we left the ticket window, and heads turned as we entered. Sister Gertrude was ill at ease in her civilian clothing and would have fallen over a folding chair if a waiter and I hadn't held her up. The waiter showed us a table near the dance floor, and I ordered two iced drinks, adding in an undertone audible only to the waiter: "But toss in a couple of shots, if you please."

The Lions' Den consisted chiefly of a large room that must once have been a riding academy. The rafters and bomb-scarred ceiling had been decorated with streamers and garlands from last year's carnival. Muted colored lights swung in circles, casting reflections on the resolutely slicked hair of the young black marketeers, some of them fas.h.i.+onably dressed, and the taffeta blouses of the girls, who all seemed to know each other.

When the drinks were served, I bought ten American cigarettes from the waiter, offered Sister Gertrude one and gave another to the waiter, who stored it behind his ear. After giving my companion a light, I produced Oskar's amber cigarette holder and smoked half a Camel. The tables around us quieted down. Sister Gertrude dared to look up. When I crushed out my enormous Camel b.u.t.t in the ash tray and left it there, Sister Gertrude picked it up with a practiced hand and tucked it away in the side pocket of her oilskin handbag.

"For my fiance in Dortmund," she said. "He smokes like mad."

I was glad I wasn't her fiance and glad too that the music had started up.

The five-piece band played "Don't Fence Me In." Males in crepe soles dashed across the dance floor without colliding and appropriated young ladies who as they arose gave their bags to girl friends for safekeeping.

A few of the couples danced with a smoothness born of long practice. Quant.i.ties of gum were being ruminated; now and then a group of young black marketeers would stop dancing for a few measures to confer in Rhenish leavened with American slang while their partners, held vaguely by the arm, bobbed and joggled impatiently. Small objects exchanged hands: a true black marketeer never takes time off.

We sat the first dance out and the next foxtrot as well. Oskar took an occasional look at the men's feet. When the band struck up "Rosamund," he asked a bewildered Sister Gertrude to dance.

Remembering Jan Bronski's ch.o.r.eographic arts, I, who was almost two heads shorter than Sister Gertrude, decided to try a schieber; I was well aware of the grotesque note we struck and determined to accentuate it. With resignation she let herself be led. I held her firmly by the rear end, thirty percent wool content; cheek to blouse, I pushed her, every pound of her, backward and followed in her footsteps. Sweeping away obstacles with our unbending side arms, we crossed the dance floor from corner to corner. It went better than I had dared to hope. I risked a variation or two. My cheek still clinging to her blouse, my hand still supported by her hips, I danced around her without relinquis.h.i.+ng the cla.s.sical posture of the schieber, whose purpose it is to suggest that she is about to fall backward and that he is about to fall on top of her, though because they are such good dancers, they never actually fall.

Soon we had an audience. I heard cries such as: "Didn't I tell you it was Jimmy? Hey, take a look at Jimmy. h.e.l.lo, Jimmy. Come on. Jimmy. Let's go, Jimmy."

Unfortunately, I couldn't see Sister Gertrude's face and could only hope that she was taking the applause in her stride as a well-meant homage. A nurse, after all, should be used to embarra.s.sing flattery.

When we sat down, those around us were still clapping. The five-piece band did a flourish and another and another; the percussion man outdid himself. There were cries of "Jimmy!" And "Say, did you see those two?" At this point Sister Gertrude arose, mumbled something about going to the ladies' room, took her handbag containing the cigarette b.u.t.t for her fiance in Dortmund, and blus.h.i.+ng scarlet, shoved her way, colliding with everything in her path, between chairs and tables, toward the ladies' room, which happened to be near the exit.

She never came back. Before leaving, she had drained her drink at one long gulp, a gesture that apparently means goodbye; Sister Gertrude had walked out on me.

And Oskar? An American cigarette in his amber holder, he ordered a straight schnaps from the waiter who was discreetly removing Sister Gertrude's empty gla.s.s. He was determined to smile at all costs. His smile may have been a bit sorrowful, but it was still a smile; folding his arms and crossing his legs, he waggled one delicate black shoe, size five, and savored the superiority of the forsaken.

The young habitues of the Lions' Den were very nice; it was a swing number, and they winked at me from the dance floor as they swung by. "h.e.l.lo," cried the boys and "Take it easy" the girls. With a wave of my cigarette holder I thanked the repositories of true humanity and smirked indulgently as the percussion man gave a sumptuous roll and did a solo number on the drums, cymbals, and triangle, which reminded me of my good old rostrum days. The next dance, he then announced, would be ladies' invitation.

A hot number, "Jimmy the Tiger," meant for me no doubt, though no one at the Lions' Den could have known about my career as a disrupter of ma.s.s meetings. A fidgety little thing with a henna mop came over to me and, pausing a moment in her gum chewing, whispered in my ear with a voice husky from smoking: "Jimmy the Tiger." I was the partner of her choice. Conjuring up jungle menaces, we danced Jimmy; the Tiger walked -- for about ten minutes -- on velvet paws. Again a flourish, applause and another flourish, because my hump was well dressed and I was nimble on my legs and cut a pretty good figure as Jimmy the Tiger. I asked my admirer to my table, and Helma -- that was her name -- asked if her girl friend Hannelore could come too. Hannelore was silent, sedentary, and hard-drinking. Helma, on the other hand, was addicted to American cigarettes, and I had to ask the waiter for some more.

A fine evening. I danced "Hey Bob A Re Bop," "In the Mood," "Shoes.h.i.+ne Boy," chatted between dances, and entertained the two young ladies, who were not very exacting and told me that they worked in the telephone exchange on Graf-Adolf-Platz and that lots of girls from the exchange came to Wedig's every Sat.u.r.day and Sunday night. They themselves came regularly when they weren't on duty, and I too promised to come often, because Helma and Hannelore were so nice, and because telephone operators seemed so easy to get along with when there was no telephone -- a little joke that they were good enough to laugh at.

It was a long while before I went back to the City Hospital. When I resumed my occasional visits, Sister Gertrude had been transferred to gynecology. I never saw her again except to wave to from a distance. I became a welcome habitue at the Lions' Den. The girls exploited me but not immoderately. Through them I made the acquaintance of several members of the British Army of Occupation and picked up a few dozen words of English, I made friends with a couple of the musicians, but controlled myself, that is, I kept away from the drums and contented myself with the modest happiness of cutting inscriptions at Korneff's.

During the hard winter of 1947 to 1948, I kept up my contact with the telephone girls. At no great expense, I obtained a certain amount of warmth from the silent, sedentary Hannelore, though we never went beyond the noncommittal manual stage.

In the winter the stonecutter took care of his equipment. The tools had to be reforged, a few leftover blocks were trimmed and made ready for their inscriptions. Korneff and I replenished our stores, which had been thinned out during the autumn season, and made a few artificial stones from sh.e.l.l-lime waste. I also tried my hand at some simple sculpture with the stippling machine, did reliefs representing angels' heads, heads of Christ with crowns of thorns, and doves of the Holy Ghost. When snow fell, I shoveled it away, and when there was none, thawed out the water pipe leading to the polis.h.i.+ng machine.

At the end of February, '48, soon after Ash Wednesday -- I had lost weight during carnival and may have been looking rather ethereal, for some of the girls at the Lions' Den took to calling me Doctor -- the first peasants from the left bank of the Rhine came over to look at our offerings. Korneff was absent on his annual rheumatism cure, tending a blast furnace in Duisburg. When he came back two weeks later, parched and boilless, I had already sold three stones, one of them for a tomb for three, on favorable terms. Korneff sold two slabs of Kirchheim sh.e.l.l lime; and early in March we began to set them up. One slab of Silesian marble went to Grevenbroich; the two Kirchheim stones are in a village cemetery near Neuss; the red sandstone with my angels' heads can still be admired in the cemetery at Stomml. At the end of March we loaded the diorite slab with the thorn-crowned Christ and drove slowly, because the three-wheeler was overloaded, in the direction of Kappes-Hamm, meaning to cross the Rhine at Neuss. From Neuss via Grevenbroich to Rommerskirchen, then left on the road to Bergheim Erft. Leaving Rheydt and Niederaussem behind us, we reached Oberaussem without breaking an axle. The cemetery was situated on a hill sloping gently toward the village.

Ah, the view! At our feet the Erftland soft coal country. The eight chimneys of the Fortuna Works, steaming heavenward. The new Fortuna North power plant, hissing as though about to explode. The mountains of slag surmounted by telpher lines. Every three minutes a train empty or full of c.o.ke, no larger than a toy, moving to or from the power plant; a larger toy, a toy for giants, was the high-tension line that swept across one corner of the cemetery on its way, three abreast, buzzing with high tension, to Cologne. Other lines hurried horizonward in other directions, to Belgium and Holland: hub of the world. We set up the diorite slab for the Flies family -- electricity is generated by. . . The gravedigger with his helper, who subst.i.tuted for Leo Schugger on this occasion, pa.s.sed by with their implements. We were standing in a field of tension. Three rows away, they started to dig up a grave preparatory to moving its occupant -- war reparations flowing over high-tension wires -- the wind carried the smells typical of a premature exhumation -- not so bad, it was only March. Amid the c.o.ke piles the green fields of spring. The bows of the gravedigger's gla.s.ses were mended with string, he was arguing in an undertone with his Leo Schugger, until for exactly one minute the Fortuna siren gave a gasp, leaving us breathless, not to mention the woman whose remains were being moved, only the high-tension lines got on with their work. The siren tipped, fell overboard, and drowned -- while from the slate-grey slate roofs of the village rose coils of smoke betokening the lunch hour, followed by the church bells: pray and work, industry and religion, boon companions. Change of s.h.i.+fts at Fortuna. We unwrapped our smoked pork sandwiches, but exhumation suffers no delay and the high-tension current continued without interruption on its way to the victor powers, to light the lamps of Holland, while here the juice was constantly being shut off -- but the dead woman saw the light.

While Korneff dug the five-foot holes for the foundation, she was brought up into the fresh air. She hadn't been lying very long down in the darkness, only since the fall, and already she had made progress, keeping pace with the improvements that were everywhere under way. Those who were dismantling industrial plants in the Ruhr and Rhineland had progressed like anything; during the winter that I had frittered away at the Lions' Den, this woman had made serious progress and now, as we were laying on concrete and putting the pedestal in place, it was piece by piece that she had to be persuaded to let herself be dug up. But that's what the zinc casket was for, to prevent anything, even the most negligible part of her, from getting lost. Just as when free coal was distributed at Fortuna, children ran behind the overloaded trucks and picked up the chunks that fell out, because Cardinal Frings had proclaimed from the pulpit: Verily I say unto you, it is not a sin to filch coal. But for this woman there was no longer any need to keep up a fire. I don't think she was cold in the proverbially chilly March air, she had quite a good deal of skin left; to be sure it had sprung leaks and runners; but these were compensated for by vestiges of cloth and hair, the latter still permanently waved, hence the term. The coffin fittings were also worth moving and there were even bits of wood that wanted to go along to the other cemetery, where there would be no peasants or miners from Fortuna, for this next last resting place was in the city where there was always something doing, nineteen movie houses operating all at once. For as the grave-digger told us, she wasn't from around here, she had been evacuated: "She was from Cologne, and now they're taking her to Mulheim on the other side of the Rhine." He would have said more if the siren hadn't gone off again for another minute. Taking advantage of the siren, I approached the grave; tacking against the siren, I wanted to witness this exhumation, and I took something with me which turned out, when I reached the zinc casket, to be my spade, which I put into action, not in order to help but because I happened to have it with me. On the blade I picked up something that had fallen on the ground. This spade had formerly been the property of the Reich Labor Service. And what I picked up on the Reich Labor Service spade was or had been the middle finger and, as I am still convinced, the ring finger of the evacuated woman; they had not fallen off but had been chopped off by the gravedigger, an unfeeling sort. But it seemed to me that they had been beautiful and adroit. Similarly the woman's head, which had already been placed in the casket, had preserved a certain regularity through the winter of '47 to '48, which was a severe one as you surely remember, and it was reasonably possible to speak of beauty, though on the decline. Moreover, this woman's head and fingers were closer to me, more human, than the beauty of Fortuna North. It seems safe to say that I enjoyed the industrial landscape as I had enjoyed Gustaf Grundgens at the theater -- a surface beauty which I have always distrusted, though a.s.suredly there was art in it, whereas the effect produced by this evacuee was only too natural. Granted that the high-tension lines, like Goethe, gave me a cosmic feeling, but the woman's fingers touched my heart. They still touched my heart when I began to think of her as a man, because it was more compatible with my thing about making decisions and with the fancy that transformed me into Yorick and the woman -- half of her still in the earth, half in the zinc casket -- into Hamlet. And I, Yorick, Act V, the fool, "I knew him, Horatio," Scene I, I who on all the stages of this world -- "Alas, poor Yorick!" -- lend Hamlet my skull so that some Grundgens or Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of Hamlet may ponder over it: "Where be your gibes now? your gambols?" I held Grundgens' Hamlet fingers on the blade of the Labor Service shovel, stood on the solid ground of the Rhenish soft coal fields, amid the graves of miners, peasants, and their families, and looked down on the slate roofs of the village of Oberaussem. The village cemetery became for me the center of the world, while Fortuna North stood there as the redoubtable demiG.o.d, my antagonist. The fields were the fields of Denmark; the Erft was my Belt, whatever rot lay round about was rotten in the state of Denmark -- and I was Yorick. Charged with high tension, crackling, the high-tension angels, in lines of three, sang as they made their way to the horizon, to Cologne with its fabulous Gothic monster, heavenly hosts over the beet fields. But the earth yielded up coal and the corpse, not of Yorick but of Hamlet. As to the others, who had no parts in the play, they lay buried for good -- "The rest is silence" -- weighed down with tombstones just as we were weighing down the Flies family with this ponderous diorite slab. But for me, Oskar Matzerath Bronski Yorick, a new era was dawning, and scarcely aware of it, I took another quick look at Hamlet's worn-out fingers on the blade of my shovel -- "He is fat and scant of breath" -- I looked on as Grundgens, Act III, Scene I, labored his dilemma about being or not being, rejected this absurd formulation, and put the question more concretely: "My son and my son's lighter flints, my presumptive earthly and heavenly father, my grandmother's four skirts, the beauty, immortalized in photographs, of my poor mama, the maze of scars on Herbert Truczinski's back, the blood-absorbing mail baskets at the Polish Post Office, America -- but what is America compared to Streetcar Number 9 that went to Brosen? I considered Maria's scent of vanilla, still perceptible now and then, and my hallucination of Lucy Rennwand's triangular face; I asked Mr. Fajngold, that disinfector unto death, to search for the Party pin that had disappeared in Matzerath's windpipe. And at last, turning to Korneff, or more to the pylons of the power line, I said -- my decision was made, but before coming out with it, I felt the need of a theatrical question that would cast doubt on Hamlet but legitimize me, Yorick, as a citizen -- turning, then, to Korneff, who had called me because it was time to join our slab to the pedestal, I, stirred by the desire to become an honest citizen, said, slightly imitating Grundgens, although he could scarcely have played Yorick, said across the shovel blade: "To marry or not to marry, that is the question."

After this crisis at the cemetery facing Fortuna North, I gave up dancing at Wedig's Lions' Den, broke off all connections with the girls at the telephone exchange, whose foremost quality had been their ability to provide connections.

In May I took Maria to the movies. After the show we went to a restaurant and ate relatively well. We had a heart to heart talk. Maria was dreadfully worried because Kurt's source was drying up, because the honey business was falling off, because I, weakling, so she put it, that I was, had been supporting the whole family for several months. I comforted Maria, told her that Oskar was glad to be doing what he could, that Oskar liked nothing better than to bear a heavy responsibility, complimented her on her looks, and finally came out with a proposal.

She asked for time to think it over. For weeks the only answer to my Yorick's question was silence and evasion; in the end it was answered by the currency reform.

Maria gave me innumerable reasons. She caressed my sleeve, called me "dear Oskar," said I was too good for this world, begged me to understand and always be her friend, wished me the best of everything for my future as a stonecutter and otherwise, but when asked more explicitly and urgently, declined to marry me.

And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.

Madonna 49

The currency reform came too soon, it made a fool of me, compelling me in turn to reform Oskar's currency. I was obliged to capitalize, or at least to make a living from, my hump.

Yet I might have been a good citizen. The period following the currency reform, which -- it has now become perfectly clear -- contained all the seeds of the middle-cla.s.s paradise we are living in today, might have brought out the bourgeois Oskar. As a husband and family man I should have partic.i.p.ated in the reconstruction of Germany, I should now be the owner of a medium-sized stonecutting business, giving thirty workers their livelihood and providing office buildings and insurance palaces with the sh.e.l.l-lime and travertine facades that have become so popular: I should be a businessman, a family man, a respected member of society. But Maria turned me down.

It was then that Oskar remembered his hump and fell a victim to art. Before Korneff, whose existence as a maker of tombstones was also threatened by the currency reform, could dismiss me, I walked out. I took to standing on streetcorners when I wasn't twiddling my thumbs in Guste Koster's kitchen-living room; I gradually wore out my tailor-made suit and began to neglect my appearance. There were no fights with Maria, but for fear of fights I would leave the flat in Bilk in the early forenoon. First I went to see the swans in Graf-Adolf-Platz, then I s.h.i.+fted to the swans in the Hofgarten. Small, thoughtful, but not embittered, I would sit on a park bench across the street from the Munic.i.p.al Employment Agency and the Academy of Art, which are neighbors in Dusseldorf.

It is amazing how long a man can sit on a park bench; he sits till he turns to wood and feels the need of communicating with other wooden figures: old men who come only in good weather, old women gradually reverting to garrulous girlhood, children shouting as they play tag, lovers who will have to part soon, but not yet, not yet. The swans are black, the weather hot, cold, or medium according to the season. Much paper is dropped; the sc.r.a.ps flutter about or lie on the walks until a man in a cap, paid by the city, spears them on a pointed stick.

Oskar was careful in sitting to blouse the knees of his trousers evenly. Of course I noticed the two emaciated young men and the girl in gla.s.ses before the girl -- she had on a leather overcoat with an ex-Wehrmacht belt -- addressed me. The idea seemed to have originated with her companions, who despite their sinister underworldly look were afraid to approach me, the hunchback, for they sensed my hidden greatness. It was the girl who summoned up the courage. She stood before me on firm, widely s.p.a.ced columns until I asked her to sit down. There was a mist blowing up from the Rhine and her gla.s.ses were clouded over; she talked and talked, until I asked her to wipe her gla.s.ses and state her business intelligibly. Then she beckoned to her sinister companions. I had no need to question them; they introduced themselves at once as painters in search of a model. I was just what they were looking for, they said with an enthusiasm that was almost frightening. When I rubbed my thumb against my index and middle finger, they told me the Academy paid one mark eighty an hour, or two marks for posing in the nude, but that, said the stout girl, didn't seem very likely.

Why did Oskar say yes? Was it the lure of art? Or of lucre? No need to choose. It was both. I arose, leaving the park bench and the joys and sorrows of park bench existence behind me forever, and followed my new friends -- the stout girl marching with determination, the two young men, stooped as though carrying their genius on their backs -- past the Employment Agency to the partially demolished Academy of Art.

Professor Kuchen -- black beard, coal-black eyes, black soft hat, black fingernails -- agreed that I would be an excellent model.

For a time he walked around me, darting coal-black looks, breathing black dust from his nostrils. Throttling an invisible enemy with his black fingers, he declared: "Art is accusation, expression, pa.s.sion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper."

Professor Kuchen led me to a studio, lifted me up with his own hands on a revolving platform, and spun it about, not in order to make me dizzy, but to display Oskar's proportions from all sides. Sixteen easels gathered round. The coal-breathing professor gave his disciples a short briefing: What he wanted was expression, always expression, pitch-black, desperate expression. I, Oskar, he maintained, was the shattered image of man, an accusation, a challenge, timeless yet expressing the madness of our century. In conclusion he thundered over the easels: "I don't want you to sketch this cripple, this freak of nature, I want you to slaughter him, crucify him, to nail him to your paper with charcoal!"

This was the signal to begin. Sixteen sticks of charcoal rasped behind sixteen easels; charcoal came to grips with my expression, that is, my hump, blackened it, and put it on paper. Professor Kuchen's students took so black a view of my expression that inevitably they exaggerated the dimensions of my hump; it refused to fit on the paper though they took larger and larger sheets.

Professor Kuchen gave the sixteen charcoal-crushers a piece of good advice: not to begin with the outlines of my hump -- which was allegedly so pregnant with expression that no format could contain it -- but first to black in my head on the upper fifth of the paper, as far to the left as possible.

My beautiful hair is a glossy chestnut-brown. They made me a scraggly-haired gypsy. Not a one of them ever noticed that Oskar has blue eyes. During an intermission -- for every model is ent.i.tled to fifteen minutes' rest after posing for three-quarters of an hour -- I took a look at the sixteen sketches. On all sides my cadaverous features thundered condemnation, but nowhere did I see the blue radiance of my eyes; where there should have been a clear, winning sparkle, I saw narrow, sinister orbs of crumbling coal-black charcoal.

However, the essence of art is freedom. I took an indulgent view. These sons and daughters of the Muses, I said to myself, have recognized the Rasputin in you; but will they ever discover the Goethe who lies dormant in your soul, will they ever call him to life and put him on paper, not with expressive charcoal but with a sensitive and restrained pencil point? Neither the sixteen students, gifted as they may have been, nor Professor Kuchen with his supposedly unique charcoal stroke, succeeded in turning out an acceptable portrait of Oskar. Still, I made good money and was treated with respect for six hours a day. Facing the clogged washbasin, a screen, or the sky-blue, slightly cloudy studio windows, I posed for six hours a day, displaying an expression valued at one mark and eighty pfennigs an hour.

In a few weeks' time the students produced a number of pleasant little sketches. The "expression" became more moderate, the dimensions of my hump more plausible; sometimes they even managed to get the whole of me into the picture from top to toe, from the jacket b.u.t.tons over my chest to the hindmost promontory of my hump. Occasionally there was room for a background. Despite the currency reform, these young people had not forgotten the war; behind me they erected ruins with accusing black holes where the windows had been. Or they would represent me as a forlorn, undernourished refugee, amid blasted tree trunks; or their charcoal would imprison me, weave ferociously barbed barbed-wire fences behind me, and build menacing watchtowers above me; they dressed me as a convict and made me hold an empty tin bowl, dungeon windows lent me graphic charm. And all in the name of artistic expression.

But since it was a black-haired gypsy-Oskar who was made to look upon all this misery out of coal-black eyes, and not my true blue-eyed self, I stood (or sat) still and kept my peace though I well knew that barbed wire is no fit subject for drawing. Nevertheless I was glad when the sculptors, who, as everyone knows, have to manage without timely backgrounds, asked me to pose for them in the nude.

This time it was not a student but the master in person who spoke to me. Professor Maruhn was a friend of my charcoal-crusher. One day when I was standing motionless in Kuchen's private studio, a dismal repair full of framed charcoal sketches, letting the black beard with the inimitable black stroke put me on paper. Professor Maruhn dropped in. A short, stocky man in his fifties, whose neat white smock might have suggested a surgeon if a dusty beret hadn't identified him as an artist.

Maruhn, as I could see at a glance, was a lover of cla.s.sical form. He thoroughly disapproved of my build and began to poke fun at Kuchen: couldn't he be satisfied with the gypsy models who had earned him the nickname of Gypsy Cake? Must he try his hand at freaks? The gypsy period had sold well, there was that to be said for it; did the charcoal-crusher entertain hopes that a midget period would sell still better?

Smarting under his friend's mockery, Professor Kuchen translated it into furious strokes of charcoal: of all his pictures of Oskar this was the blackest. It was all black except for a touch of murky dawn on the cheekbones, nose, forehead, and hands -- Kuchen always made my hands enormous, swollen with gout, screaming with expression, and put them in the middle ground of his charcoal orgies. In this drawing, however, which was later admired at exhibitions, my eyes are blue, that is, the usual somber glow has given way to a distinctly light tone. Oskar attributes this anomaly to the influence of Maruhn, who was not a fanatic of coal-black expression but a cla.s.sicist, alert to the Goethean clarity of my eyes. It can only have been Oskar's eyes that persuaded this lover of cla.s.sical harmony to select me as a fit model for sculpture, his sculpture.

Maruhn's studio was light, dusty, and bare. It contained not a single piece of finished work. But everywhere there were skeletons for projected sculptures, so perfectly thought out that wire, iron, and bare lead tubing, even without modeling clay, gave promise of future harmony.

I posed in the nude for five hours a day, and he paid me two marks an hour. A chalk mark on the platform showed where my right foot was to take root. An imaginary vertical rising from the instep had to pa.s.s directly between my collarbones. The left leg was "free moving". Illusory freedom. I was expected to bend the knee slightly and hold this leg slightly to one side, with an air of negligence, but I was not allowed to move it. It too was rooted in a chalk mark on the platform.

I spent several weeks posing for Maruhn. In all that time he was able to find no set pose for my arms comparable to that of the legs. He made me try everything: left arm drooping, right arm curved over my head; both arms folded over my chest or crossed under my hump; hands on hips; the possibilities were legion and the sculptor tried just about everything, first on me, then on the iron skeleton with the flexible lead joints.

When finally, after a month of strenuous effort, he decided to do me in clay, either with hands folded behind my head or as an armless torso, he was so exhausted from building and rebuilding his skeleton that he could do no more. He would pick up a handful of clay, sometimes he would even move forward to apply it, but then he would drop the dull, unformed clod back in the box. Then he would sit and stare at me and my skeleton, trembling as with fever: the skeleton was too perfect.

He sighed with resignation, said he had a headache, and without resentment toward Oskar gave up. He picked up the humpbacked skeleton, with fixed leg and free-moving leg, with tubular arms and upraised wire fingers joined behind iron neck, and put it in the corner with all his other prematurely finished skeletons. Gently, without mockery, aware of their own futility, the wooden bars, known also as b.u.t.terflies, which were to have borne the weight of the clay, quivered in the s.p.a.cious cage that was my hump.

After that we drank tea and chatted for an hour or so, which was counted as posing time. He spoke of former times when, vigorous and uninhibited as a young Michelangelo, he had spread whole wagonloads of clay on skeletons and completed innumerable sculptures, most of which had been destroyed during the war. I told him about Oskar's activity as a stonecutter and engraver of inscriptions. We talked shop a while and then he took me to pose for his students.

If long hair is an indication of s.e.x, six of Professor Maruhn's ten pupils can be designated as girls. Four were homely and talented. Two were pretty, lively, and scatterbrained: real girls. It has never embarra.s.sed me to pose in the nude. On the contrary, Oskar savored the astonishment of the two pretty, scatterbrained sculptresses when they viewed me on the platform for the first time and observed, not without a certain dismay, that Oskar, despite his hump, despite his small size, carried with him a s.e.x organ which could, in a pinch, have borne comparison with just about anyone else's.

The students' trouble was rather different from the master's. The framework was complete in two days; with the frenzy of genius, they would fling clay on the hastily and inexpertly fastened lead tubes, but apparently they hadn't put enough wooden b.u.t.terflies into my hump. For no sooner was the moist modeling clay in place, representing an Oskar who looked for all the world like a rugged mountain landscape, than this mountain-Oskar, or rather ten of them, would begin to sag. My head fell between my feet, the clay parted from the tubing, my hump drooped nearly to my knees, and I came to appreciate Maruhn, the master, whose skeletons were so perfect that there was no need to hide them beneath vile flesh.

The homely but gifted sculptresses wept when the clay Oskar parted from the skeleton Oskar. The pretty but scatterbrained sculptresses laughed as the perishable flesh fell symbolically from my bones. After several weeks, however, the cla.s.s managed to turn out a few pa.s.sable sculptures, first in clay, then in plaster and imitation marble. They were shown at the End of Term Exhibition and I had occasion to draw new comparisons between the homely but gifted sculptresses and the pretty but scatterbrained young ladies. While the homely but not untalented young ladies reproduced my head, limbs, and hump with the utmost care but, seized with a strange diffidence, either ignored my s.e.x organ or stylized it ad absurdum, the pretty young ladies with the big blue eyes, with the shapely but awkward fingers, gave little heed to the articulations and proportions of my body, but reproduced my imposing genitals with the utmost precision. But while I am on this subject, I mustn't forget the four male sculptors: they abstracted me; making use of flat, grooved boards, they slapped me into a cube. As for the object that the homely young ladies neglected and the pretty ones rendered with carnal verism, they, with their masculine intellects, saw it as two cubes of like size, surmounted by an elongated rectangular block: Priapus in terms of solid geometry.

Was it because of my blue eyes or because of the sun-bowl heaters with which the sculptors surrounded the nude Oskar: in any case, some young painters who had come to see the pretty young sculptresses discovered a picturesque charm either in the blue of my eyes or in my glowing, irradiated, lobster-red skin and carried me away to the upper floors where the painting cla.s.ses were held.

At first the painters were too much under the influence of my blue eyes and saw the whole of me as blue. Oskar's fresh complexion, his brown wavy hair, his fresh, pink mouth -- all were submerged in macabre blues; here and there, serving only to intensify the putrefaction, a moribund green, a nauseous yellow crept in between the patches of blue flesh.

Oskar did not take on other colors until carnival week, when, in the course of festivities held in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Academy, he discovered Ulla and brought her to the painters to be their Muse.

Was it on Shrove Monday? Yes, it was on Shrove Monday that I decided to join in the festivities, to put on a costume and to add a costumed Oskar to the motley throng.

When Maria saw me at the mirror, she said: "You'd better stay home, Oskar. They'll just step on you." Nevertheless, she helped me with my costume, cutting out patches which her sister Guste, with garrulous needle, joined into a jester costume. My first idea had been one of Velasquez' dwarfs. I should also have liked to appear as Na.r.s.es or as Prince Eugene. When at length I stood before the big mirror, whose image was slightly distorted by a diagonal crack left over from the war, when the whole motley costume, baggy, slashed, and hung with bells came to light, making my son Kurt laugh so hard that he couldn't stop coughing, I said to myself softly and none too happily: Now, Oskar, you are Yorick, the fool. But where is the king for you to play the fool to?

In the streetcar that took me to Ratinger Tor, near the Academy, I soon noted that Oskar-Yorick did not bring laughter to the populace -- all these cowboys and Spanish dancers trying to forget their tawdry daily occupations. No, I frightened them. They edged away from me, so much so that though the car was jammed, I easily found a seat. Outside the Academy, policemen were wielding genuine billies which had no connection with carnival make-believe.

The art students' ball was jam-packed and still there were crowds trying to get in. The resulting forays with the police were more colorful than b.l.o.o.d.y.

When Oskar made his bells tinkle, the throng parted like the Red Sea, and a policeman, his eye sharpened by his occupation, perceived my true stature. He looked down, saluted, and swinging his billy escorted me to the cellar festivities. When I arrived, the pot was on the fire but hadn't quite come to a boil.

No one should suppose that an artists' ball is an affair at which artists have themselves a ball. Most of the actual artists, looking rather worried and serious through their carnival paint, were standing behind amusingly decorated but very unstable counters, trying to make a little extra money selling beer, schnaps, champagne, and sausages. The merrymakers, for the most part, were workaday citizens who thought it would be fun, just this once, to carouse and fling money about like artists.

After spending an hour or so on staircases, in nooks and corners, under tables, frightening couples who seemed to be investigating the charms of discomfort, I made friends with two Chinese girls from Lesbos, or should I say Lesbians from China? They were very much wrapped up in one another. Though they left no finger unturned in their mutual dealings, they did not trespa.s.s on my more critical zones and offered me a spectacle that was entertaining at times. We drank warm champagne together and at length, with my permission, they made use of my hump, which was sharp and h.o.r.n.y at the extremity, for experiments which were crowned with success, once more confirming my thesis that a hump is good luck to women.

In the long run, however, these occupations made me more and more morose. Thoughts plagued me, I began to worry about the political situation; I painted the blockade of Berlin on the table top with champagne and sketched out a picture of the air lift. Contemplating these Chinese girls who couldn't get together, I despaired of the reunification of Germany and did something that is very unlike me. Oskar, in the role of Yorick, began to look for the meaning of life.

When my girl friends could think of nothing more to show me, they began to cry, leaving telltale traces in their oriental make-up. Slashed and baggy and powdered, I stood up, ringing my bells. Two-thirds of me wanted to go home, but the remaining third still hoped for some little carnivalesque experience. It was then that I caught sight of Corporal Lankes, that is, he spoke to me.

Do you remember? We met on the Atlantic Wall during the summer of '44. He had guarded concrete and smoked my master Bebra's cigarettes.

A dense crowd sat necking on the stairs. I tried to squeeze through. I had just lighted up when someone poked me and a corporal from the last war spoke: "Hi, buddy, can you spare a b.u.t.t?"

Quite aside from these familiar words, he was costumed in field grey. Small wonder that I recognized him at once. Even so, I should have made no move to revive our acquaintance if the young lady sitting on the corporal and concrete painter's field-grey lap had not been the Muse in person.

Let me speak with the painter first and describe the Muse afterwards. I not only gave him a cigarette, but even lighted it for him, and said as the first cloud of smoke arose: "Corporal Lankes, do you remember? Bebra's Theater at the Front? Barbaric, mystical, bored?"

A tremor ran through the painter as I addressed him in these terms; he managed to keep a hold on his cigarette, but the Muse fell from his knees. She was hardly more than a child, long-legged and very drunk. I caught her in mid-air and returned her to him. As the two of us, Lankes and Oskar, exchanged reminiscences with a disparaging remark or two for Lieutenant Herzog, whom Lankes called a nut, and a thought for Bebra my master as well as the nuns who had been picking up crabs that day amid the Rommel asparagus, I gazed in amazement at the Muse. She had come as an angel and had on a hat molded from the variety of cardboard that is used for s.h.i.+pping eggs. Despite her drooping wings and far-advanced drunkenness, she still exerted the somewhat artsy-craftsy charm of a dweller in heaven.

"This here is Ulla," Lankes informed me. "She studied to be a dressmaker, but now she wants to be an artist, but I say to h.e.l.l with it, with dressmaking she can bring in some dough."

Oskar, who made a good living on art, offered forthwith to introduce Ulla to the painters at the Academy, who would be sure to take her on as a model and Muse. Lankes was so delighted with my proposal that he helped himself to three cigarettes at once, but in return asked me to come see his studio if I didn't mind paying the taxi fare.

Off we rode, leaving the carnival behind us. I paid the fare, and Lankes, on his alcohol stove, made us some coffee that revived the Muse. Once she had relieved the weight on her stomach with the help of my right forefinger, she seemed almost sober.

Only then did I see the look of wonderment in her light-blue eyes and hear her voice, which was a little birdlike, a little tinny perhaps, but touching in its way and not without charm. Lankes submitted my proposal that she should pose at the Academy, putting it more as an order than as a suggestion. At first she refused; she wished to be neither a Muse nor a model for other painters, but to belong to Lankes alone.

Thereupon he, as talented painters sometimes do, gave her a resounding slap in the face; then he asked her again and chuckled with satisfaction when, weeping just as angels would weep, she professed her willingness to become the well-paid model and maybe even the Muse of the painters at the Academy.

It must be borne in mind that Ulla measures roughly five feet ten; she is exceedingly slender, lithe, and fragile, reminding one of Botticelli, Cranach, or both. We posed together in the nude. Lobster meat has just about the color of her long, smooth flesh, which is covered by a light childlike down. The hair on her head is perhaps a trifle thin, but long and straw-blonde. Her pubic hair is reddish and curly, restricted to a small triangle. Ulla shaves under her arms regularly once a week.

As one might have expected, the run-of-the-mill students couldn't do much with us, they made her arms too long, my head too big, and were unable to squeeze us into any known format. It was only when Ziege and Raskolnikov discovered us that pictures worthy of Oskar and the Muse came into being. She asleep. I startling her awake: faun and nymph.

I sitting; she, with small, always slightly s.h.i.+vering b.r.e.a.s.t.s, leaning over me, stroking my hair: Beauty and the beast.

She lying, I between her legs, playing with the mask of a horned horse: The lady with the unicorn.

All this in the style of Ziege or Raskolnikov; color or delicate grey tones laid on with a fine brush (Raskolnikov) or with the impetuous palette knife of genius (Ziege). Some of these paintings carried an intimation of the mystery surrounding Ulla and Oskar; they were the work of Raskolnikov, who, with our help, found his way to surrealism: Oskar's face became a honey-yellow dial like that of our grandfather clock; in my hump bloomed mechanical roses which Ulla picked; Ulla, smiling on one end and long-legged on the other, was cut open in the middle and inside sat Oskar between her spleen and liver, turning over the pages of a picture book. Sometimes they put us in costume, turning Ulla into a Columbine and me into a mournful mime covered with white grease paint. It was Raskolnikov -- so nicknamed because he never stopped talking of crime and punishment, guilt and atonement -- who turned out the masterpiece: I sitting on Ulla's milk-white, naked thigh, a crippled child -- she was the Madonna, while I sat still for Jesus.

This painting, ent.i.tled "Madonna 49", was shown at a number of exhibitions; it also proved effective as a poster, which came to the eyes of my ever so respectable Maria and brought on a domestic quarrel. However, it was purchased for a considerable sum by a Rhenish industrialist and today it is hanging in the boardroom of a big business firm, influencing the board of directors.

I was amused by the ingenious monstrosities perpetrated on the basis of my hump and proportions. Ulla and I were in great demand, and received two marks fifty each for posing together. Ulla was delighted with her new career. Now that she was bringing in a regular income, the h.o.r.n.y-handed Lankes treated her better and beat her only when his own abstractions demanded an angry mood. He could make no use of her as a model, but for him too she was a kind of Muse, for it was only by boxing her ears that his hand could achieve its true creative power.

I too was fired to acts of violence by Ulla's plaintive fragility, which was actually the indestructibility of an angel; however, I kept myself under control, and whenever the desire to whip her became too strong, I took her out to a pastry shop. Or else, with a certain dandyism inspired by my a.s.sociation with artists, I would exhibit her as a rare plant, highlighted by the contrast with my own proportions, on the busy Konigs-Allee, where we would be much gaped at. Or as a last resort I would buy her lavender stockings and pink gloves.

It was a different story with Raskolnikov, who, without ever touching her, kept up the most intimate relations with her. He would have her pose sitting down, her legs far apart. On such occasions he did not paint. He would settle himself on a stool a few steps away, stare at her private parts, and talk, in a hoa.r.s.e, impa.s.sioned whisper, of guilt and atonement. The Muse's private parts became moist and distended, and after a while Raskolnikov, by dint of looking and listening to himself would experience exultation and release. Thereupon, he would jump up from his stool and belabor the "Madonna 49" on his easel with grandiose brushstrokes.

Sometimes Raskolnikov stared at me as well, but for other reasons. It seemed to him that I lacked something. He spoke of a vacuum between my fingers and kept putting one object after another -- what with his surrealist imagination he was never at a loss for an object -- into my hands. He armed Oskar with a pistol, made Oskar-Jesus take aim at the Madonna. Or I would hold out an hourgla.s.s to her or a mirror which, being convex, would distort her horribly. He made me hold scissors, fishbones, telephone receivers, death's heads, little airplanes, armored cars, steams.h.i.+ps, but none of these filled the vacuum. Oskar dreaded the day when the painter would turn up with the object which alone of all objects was made to be held by me. When at length he brought the drum, I cried out: " No! "

Raskolnikov: "Take the drum, Oskar. I have seen through you."

I, trembling: "Never again. All that is ended."