Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 9

And so we played -- and refused to let Kobyella die. He just couldn't get around to it, for I took good care that the cards should be in movement at all times. When, after an explosion on the stairs, the candles toppled over and the flames vanished, it was I who had the presence of mind to do the obvious, to take a match from Jan's pocket, and Jan's gold-tipped cigarettes too while I was at it; it was I who restored light to the world, lit a comforting Regatta for Jan, and pierced the night with flame upon flame before Kobyella could take advantage of the darkness to make his getaway.

Oskar stuck two candles on his new drum and set down the cigarettes within reach. He wanted none for himself, but from time to time he would pa.s.s Jan a cigarette and put one between Kobyella's distorted lips. That helped; the tobacco appeased and consoled, though it could not prevent Jan Bronski from losing game after game. Jan perspired and, as he had always done when giving his whole heart to the game, tickled his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. He grew so excited that in his enthusiasm he began to call me Alfred or Matzerath and to take Kobyella for my poor mama. When out in the corridor someone screamed: "They've got Konrad!" he looked at me reproachfully and said: "For goodness' sake, Alfred, turn off the radio. A man can't hear himself think in here."

Jan became really irritated when the door was torn open and the lifeless Konrad was dragged in.

"Close that door. You're making a draft!" he protested. There was indeed a draft. The candles flickered alarmingly and came to their senses only when, after dumping Konrad in a corner, the men had closed the door behind them. A strange threesome we made. Striking us from below, the candlelight gave us the look of all-powerful wizards. Kobyella bid his hearts without two; twenty-seven, thirty, he said, or rather gurgled. His eyes had a way of rolling out of sight and there was something in his right shoulder that wanted to come out, that quivered and jumped like mad. It finally stopped, but Kobyella sagged face foremost, setting the mail basket which he was tied to rolling with the dead suspenderless man on top of it. With one blow into which he put all his strength Jan brought Kobyella and the laundry basket to a standstill, whereupon Kobyella, once more prevented from sneaking out on us, finally piped "Hearts." To which Jan hissed "Contra" and Kobyella "Double contra." At this moment it came to Oskar that the defense of the Polish Post Office had been successful, that the a.s.sailants, having scarcely begun the war, had already lost it, even if they succeeded in occupying Alaska and Tibet, the Easter Islands and Jerusalem.

The only bad part of it was that Jan was unable to play out his beautiful, sure-thing grand hand with four and a declaration of schneider schwarz.

He led clubs; now he was calling me Agnes while Kobyella had become his rival Matzerath. With an air of false innocence he played the jack of diamonds -- I was much happier to be my poor mama for him than to be Matzerath -- then the jack of hearts -- it didn't appeal to me one bit to be mistaken for Matzerath. Jan waited impatiently for Matzerath, who in reality was a crippled janitor named Kobyella, to play; that took time, but then Jan slammed down the ace of hearts and was absolutely unwilling and unable to understand, the truth is he had never fully understood, he had never been anything but a blue-eyed boy, smelling of cologne and incapable of understanding certain things, and so he simply could not understand why Kobyella suddenly dropped all his cards, tugged at the laundry basket with the letters in it and the dead man on top of the letters, until first the dead man, then a layer of letters, and finally the whole excellently plaited basket toppled over, sending us a wave of letters as though we were the addressees, as though the thing for us to do now was to put aside our playing cards and take to reading our correspondence or collecting stamps. But Jan didn't feel like reading and he didn't feel like collecting, he had collected too much as a child, he wanted to play, he wanted to play out his grand hand to the end, he wanted to win, Jan did, to triumph. He lifted Kobyella up, set the basket back on its wheels, but let the dead man lie and also neglected to put the letters back in the basket. Anyone could see that the basket was too light, yet Jan showed the utmost astonishment when Kobyella, dangling from the light, unstable basket, just wouldn't sit still but sagged lower and lower. Finally Jan shouted at him: "Alfred, I beg of you, don't be a spoilsport. Just this one little game and then we'll go home. Alfred, will you listen to me!"

Oskar arose wearily, fought down the increasing pains in his limbs and head, laid his wiry little drummer's hands on Jan Bronski's shoulders, and forced himself to speak, gently but with authority: "Leave him be, Papa. He can't play any more. He's dead. We can play sixty-six if you like."

Jan, whom I had just addressed as my father, released the janitor's mortal envelope, gave me an overflowing blue stare, and wept nononono. . . I patted him, but still he said no. I kissed him meaningly, but still he could think of nothing but his interrupted grand.

" I would have won it, Agnes. It was a sure thing." So he lamented to me in my poor mama's stead, and I -- his son -- threw myself into the role, yes, he was right, I said, I swore that he would have won, that to all intents and purposes he actually had won, that he simply must believe what his Agnes was telling him. But Jan wouldn't believe; he believed neither me nor my mama. For a time his weeping was loud and articulate; then his plaint subsided into an unmodulated blubbering, and he began to dig skat cards from beneath the cooling Mount Kobyella; some he sc.r.a.ped from between his legs, and the avalanche of mail yielded a few. Jan would not rest before he had recovered all thirty-two. One by one, he cleaned them up, wiping away the sticky blood. When he had done, he shuffled and prepared to deal. Only then did his well-shaped forehead -- it would have been unjust to call it low, though it was rather too smooth, rather too impenetrable -- admit the thought that there was no third skat hand left in this world.

It grew very still in the storeroom for undeliverable mail. Outside, as well, a protracted minute of silence was dedicated to the memory of the world's last skat hand. To Oskar it seemed, though, that the door was slowly opening. Looking over his shoulder, expecting heaven knows what supernatural apparition, he saw Victor Weluhn's strangely blind empty face. "I've lost my gla.s.ses, Jan. Are you still there? We'd better run for it. The French aren't coming or, if they are, they'll be too late. Come with me, Jan. Lead me, I've lost my gla.s.ses."

Maybe Victor thought he had got into the wrong room. For when he received no answer and no guiding arm was held out to him, he withdrew his unspectacled face and closed the door. I could still hear Victor's first few steps as, groping his way through the fog, he embarked on his flight.

Heaven knows what comical incident may have transpired in Jan's little head to make him start laughing, first softly and plaintively but then loudly and boisterously, making his fresh, pink little tongue quiver like a bell clapper. He tossed the cards into the air, caught them, and finally, when a Sunday quietness descended on the room with its silent men and silent letters, began, with wary measured movements and bated breath, to build an ever so fragile house of cards. The seven of spades and the queen of clubs provided the foundation. Over them spanned the king of diamonds. The nine of hearts and the ace of spades, spanned by the eight of clubs, became a second foundation adjacent to the first. He then proceeded to join the two with tens and jacks set upright on their edges, using queens and aces as crossbeams, so that one part of the edifice supported another. Then he decided to set a third story upon the second, and did so with the spellbinding hands that my mother must have known in connection with other rituals. And when he leaned the queen of hearts against the king with the red heart, the edifice did not collapse; no, airily it stood, breathing softly, delicately, in that room where the dead breathed no more and the living held their breath. That house of cards made it possible for us to sit back with folded hands, and even the skeptical Oskar, who was quite familiar with the rules of statics governing the construction of card houses, was enabled to forget the acrid smoke and stench that crept, in wisps and coils, through the cracks in the door, making it seem as though the little room with the card house in it were right next door and wall to wall with h.e.l.l.

They had brought in flame throwers; fearing to make a frontal a.s.sault, they had decided to smoke out the last defenders. The operation had been so successful that Dr. Michon resolved to surrender the post office. Removing his helmet, he had picked up a bed sheet and waved it; and when that didn't satisfy him, he had pulled out his silk handkerchief with his other hand and waved that too.

It was some thirty scorched, half-blinded men, arms upraised and hands folded behind their necks, who left the building through the left-hand side door and lined up against the wall of the courtyard where they waited for the slowly advancing Home Guards. Later the story went round that in the brief interval while the Home Guards were coming up, three or four had got away: through the post office garage and the adjoining police garage they had made their way to an evacuated and hence unoccupied house on the Rahm, where they had found clothes, complete with Party insignia. Having washed and dressed, they had vanished singly into thin air. One of them, still according to the story, had gone to an optician's in the Altstadtischer Graben, had himself fitted out with a pair of gla.s.ses, his own having been lost in the battle of the post office. Freshly bespectacled, Victor Weluhn -- for it was he -- allegedly went so far as to have a beer on the Holzmarkt, and then another, for the flame throwers had made him thirsty. Then with his new gla.s.ses, which dispersed the environing mists up to a certain point, but not nearly as well as his old ones had done, had started on the flight that continues -- such is the doggedness of his pursuers! -- to this day.

The others, however -- as I have said, there were some thirty of them who couldn't make up their minds to run for it -- were standing against the wall across from the side entrance when Jan leaned the queen of hearts against the king of hearts and, thoroughly blissful, took his hands away.

What more shall I say? They found us. They flung the door open, shouting "Come out!" stirred up a wind, and the card house collapsed. They had no feeling for this kind of architecture. Their medium was concrete. They built for eternity. They paid no attention whatever to Postal Secretary Bronski's look of indignation, of bitter injury. They didn't see that before coming out Jan reached into the pile of cards and picked up something, or that I, Oskar, wiped the candle ends from my newly acquired drum, took the drum but spurned the candle ends, for light was no problem with all those flashlights s.h.i.+ning in our eyes. They didn't even notice that their flashlights blinded us and made it hard for us to find the door. From behind flashlights and rifles, they shouted: "Come out of there," and they were still shouting "Come out" after Jan and I had reached the corridor. These "come outs" were directed at Kobyella, at Konrad from Warsaw, at Bobek and little Wischnewski, who in his lifetime had kept the telegraph window. The invaders were alarmed at these men's unwillingness to obey. I gave a loud laugh every time the Home Guards shouted "Come out" and after a while they saw they were making fools of themselves, stopped shouting, and said, "Oh!" Then they led us to the thirty in the courtyard with arms upraised and hands folded behind their necks, who were thirsty and having their pictures taken for the newsreels.

The camera had been mounted on top of an automobile. As we were led out through the side door, the photographers swung it around at us and shot the short strip that was later shown in all the movie houses.

I was separated from the thirty defenders by the wall. At this point Oskar remembered his gnomelike stature, he remembered that a three-year-old is not responsible for his comings and goings. Again he felt those disagreeable pains in his head and limbs; he sank to the ground with his drum, began to thrash and flail, and ended up throwing a fit that was half real and half put on, but even during the fit he hung on to his drum. They picked him up and handed him into an official car belonging to the SS Home Guard. As the car drove off, taking him to the City Hospital, Oskar could see Jan, poor Jan, smiling stupidly and blissfully into the air. In his upraised hands he held a few skat cards and with one hand -- holding the queen of hearts, I think -- he waved to Oskar, his departing son.

He Lies in Saspe

I have just reread the last paragraph. I am not too well satisfied, but Oskar's pen ought to be, for writing tersely and succinctly, it has managed, as terse, succinct accounts so often do, to exaggerate and mislead, if not to lie.

Wis.h.i.+ng to stick to the truth, I shall try to circ.u.mvent Oskar's pen and make a few corrections: in the first place, Jan's last hand, which he was unhappily prevented from playing out and winning, was not a grand hand, but a diamond hand without two; in the second place, Oskar, as he left the storeroom, picked up not only his new drum but also the old broken one, which had fallen out of the laundry basket with the dead suspenderless man and the letters. Furthermore, there is a little omission that needs filling in: No sooner had Jan and I left the storeroom for undeliverable mail at the behest of the Home Guards with their "Come outs," their flashlights, and their rifles, than Oskar, concerned for his comfort and safety, made up to two Home Guards who struck him as good-natured, uncle-like souls, put on an imitation of pathetic sniveling, and pointed to Jan, his father, with accusing gestures which transformed the poor man into a villain who had dragged off an innocent child to the Polish Post Office to use him, with typically Polish inhumanity, as a buffer for enemy bullets. Oskar counted on certain benefits for both his drums, and his expectations were not disappointed: the Home Guards kicked Jan in the small of the back and battered him with their rifle stocks, but left me both drums, and one middle-aged Home Guard with the careworn creases of a paterfamilias alongside of his nose and mouth stroked my cheeks, while another, tow-headed fellow, who kept laughing and in laughing screwed up his eyes so you couldn't see them, picked me up in his arms, which was distasteful and embarra.s.sing to Oskar.

Even today, it fills me with shame to think, as I sometimes do, of this disgusting behavior of mine, but I always comfort myself with the thought that Jan didn't notice, for he was still preoccupied with his cards and remained so to the end, that nothing, neither the funniest nor the most fiendish inspiration of the Home Guards, could ever again lure his attention away from those cards. Already Jan had gone off to the eternal realm of card houses and castles in Spain, where men believe in happiness, whereas the Home Guards and I -- for at this moment Oskar counted himself among the Home Guards -- stood amid brick walls, in stone corridors, beneath ceilings with plaster cornices, all so intricately interlocked with walls and part.i.tions that the worst was to be feared for the day when, in response to one set of circ.u.mstances or another, all this patchwork we call architecture would lose its cohesion.

Of course this belated perception cannot justify me, especially when it is remembered that I have never been able to look at a building under construction without fancying this same building in process of being torn down and that I have always regarded card houses as the only dwellings worthy of humankind. And there is still another incriminating factor. That afternoon I felt absolutely certain that Jan Bronski was no mere uncle or presumptive father, but my real father. Which put him ahead of Matzerath then and for all time: for Matzerath was either my father or nothing at all.

September 1, 1939 -- I a.s.sume that you too, on that ill-starred afternoon, recognized Bronski, the blissful builder of card houses, as my father -- that date marks the inception of my second great burden of guilt.

Even when I feel most sorry for myself, I cannot deny it: It was my drum, no, it was I myself, Oskar the drummer, who dispatched first my poor mama, then Jan Bronski, my uncle and father, to their graves.

But on days when an importunate feeling of guilt, which nothing can dispel, sits on the very pillows of my hospital bed, I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance -- the ignorance which came into style in those years and which even today quite a few of our citizens wear like a jaunty and oh, so becoming little hat.

Oskar, the sly ignoramus, an innocent victim of Polish barbarism, was taken to the City Hospital with brain fever. Matzerath was notified. He had reported my disappearance the night before, although his owners.h.i.+p of me had never been proved.

As for the thirty men with upraised arms and hands folded behind their necks, they -- and Jan -- after having their pictures taken for the newsreels, were taken first to the evacuated Victoria School, then to Schiesstange Prison. Finally, early in October, they were entrusted to the porous sand behind the wall of the run-down, abandoned old cemetery in Saspe.

How did Oskar come to know all this? I heard it from Leo Schugger. For of course there was never any official announcement to tell us against what wall the thirty-one men were shot and what sand was shoveled over them.

Hedwig Bronski first received a notice to vacate the flat in Ringstra.s.se, which was taken over by the family of a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe. While she was packing with Stephen's help and preparing to move to Ramkau -- where she owned a house and a few acres of forest and farmland -- she received the communication which made her officially a widow. She gazed at it out of eyes which mirrored but did not penetrate the sorrows of the world, and it was only very slowly, with the help of her son Stephan, that she managed to distil the sense of it. Here is the communication:

Court-Martial, Eberhardt St. L. Group 41/39 Zoppot, 6 Oct. 1939

Mrs. Hedwig Bronski, You are hereby informed that Bronski, Jan, has been sentenced to death for irregular military activity and executed.

Zelewski (Inspector of Courts-Martial)

So you see, not a word about Saspe. Out of solicitude for the men's relatives, who would have been crushed by the expense of caring for so large and flower-consuming a ma.s.s grave, the authorities a.s.sumed full responsibility for maintenance and perhaps even for transplantation. They had the sandy soil leveled and the cartridge cases removed, except for one -- one is always overlooked -- because cartridge cases are out of place in any respectable cemetery, even an abandoned one.

But this one cartridge case, which is always left behind, the one that concerns us here, was found by Leo Schugger, from whom no burial, however discreet, could be kept secret. He, who knew me from my poor mama's funeral and from that of my scar-covered friend Herbert Truczinski, who a.s.suredly knew where they had buried Sigismund Markus -- though I never asked him about it -- was delighted, almost beside himself with joy, when late in November, just after I was discharged from the hospital, he found an opportunity to hand me the telltale cartridge case.

But before I guide you in the wake of Leo Schugger to Saspe Cemetery with that slightly oxidized cartridge case, which perhaps had harbored the lead kernel destined for Jan, I must ask you to compare two hospital beds, the one I occupied in the children's section of the Danzig City Hospital, and the one I am lying in now. Both are metal, both are painted with white enamel, yet there is a difference. The bed in the children's section was shorter but higher, if you apply a yardstick to the bars. Although my preference goes to the shorter but higher cage of 1939, I have found peace of mind in my present makes.h.i.+ft bed, intended for grownups, and learned not to be too demanding. Months ago I put in a pet.i.tion for a higher bed, though I am perfectly satisfied with the metal and the white enamel. But let the management grant my pet.i.tion or reject it; I await the result with equanimity.

Today I am almost defenseless against my visitors; then, on visiting days in the children's section, a tall fence separated me from Visitor Matzerath, from Visitors Greff (Mr. and Mrs.) and Scheffler (Mr. and Mrs.). And toward the end of my stay at the hospital, the bars of my fence divided the mountain-of-four-skirts named after my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek, into worried, heavily breathing compartments. She came, sighed, raised her great multifarious hands, disclosing her cracked pink palms, then let hands and palms sink in despair. So violent was her despair that they slapped against her thighs, and I can hear that slapping to this day, though I can give only a rough imitation of it on my drum.

On the very first visit she brought along her brother Vincent Bronski, who clutched the bars of my bed and spoke or sang softly but incisively and at great length about the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland. Oskar was glad when there was a nurse nearby. For those two were my accusers, they turned their unclouded Bronski eyes on me and, quite oblivious of the time I was having with this brain fever I had acquired while playing skat in the Polish Post Office, expected me to comfort them with a kind word, to rea.s.sure them about Jan's last hours, spent between terror and card houses. They wanted a confession from me that would put Jan in the clear; as though I had it in my power to clear him, as though my testimony carried any weight.

Supposing I had sent an affidavit to the court-martial of the Eberhardt Group. What would I have said? I, Oskar Matzerath, avow and declare that on the evening of August 31 I waited outside Jan Bronski's home for him to come home and lured him, on the ground that my drum needed repairing, back to the Polish Post Office, which Jan Bronski had left because he did not wish to defend it.

Oskar made no such confession; he did nothing to exculpate his presumptive father. Every time he decided to speak, to tell the old people what had happened, he was seized with such convulsions that at the demand of the head nurse his visiting hours were curtailed and the visits of his grandmother Anna and his presumptive grandfather Vincent were forbidden.

The two old people, who had walked in from Bissau and brought me apples, left the children's ward with the wary, helpless gait of country folk in town. And with each receding step of my grandmother's four skirts and her brother's black Sunday suit, redolent of cow dung, my burden of guilt, my enormous burden of guilt increased.

So much happened at once. While Matzerath, the Greffs, the Schefflers crowded round my bed with fruit and cakes, while my grandmother and Uncle Vincent walked in from Bissau by way of Goldkrug and Brenntau because the railroad line from Karthaus to Langfuhr had not yet been cleared, while nurses, clad in anesthetic white, babbled hospital talk and subst.i.tuted for angels in the children's ward, Poland was not yet lost, almost lost, and finally, at the end of those famous eighteen days, Poland was lost, although it was soon to turn out that Poland was not yet lost; just as today, despite the efforts of the Silesian and East Prussian patriotic societies, Poland is not yet lost.

O insane cavalry! Picking blueberries on horseback. Bearing lances with red and white pennants. Squadrons of melancholy, squadrons of tradition. Picture-book charges. Racing across the fields before Lodz and Kutno. At Modlin subst.i.tuting for the fortress. Oh, so brilliantly galloping! Always waiting for the sunset. Both foreground and background must be right before the cavalry can attack, for battles were made to be picturesque and death to be painted, poised in mid-gallop, then falling, nibbling blueberries, the dog roses crackle and break, providing the itch without which the cavalry will not jump. There are the Uhlans, they've got the itch again, amid haystacks -- another picture for you -- wheeling their horses, they gather round a man, his name in Spain is Don Quixote, but here he is Pan Kichot, a pure-blooded Pole, a n.o.ble, mournful figure, who has taught his Uhlans to kiss ladies' hands on horseback, ah, with what aplomb they will kiss the hand of death, as though death were a lady; but first they gather, with the sunset behind them -- for color and romance are their reserves -- and ahead of them the German tanks, stallions from the studs of the Krupps von Bohlen und Halbach, no n.o.bler steeds in all the world. But Pan Kichot, the eccentric knight in love with death, the talented, too talented knight, half-Spanish half-Polish, lowers his lance with the red-and-white pennant and calls on his men to kiss the lady's hand. The storks clatter white and red on the rooftops, and the sunset spits out pits like cherries, as he cries to his cavalry: "Ye n.o.ble Poles on horseback, these are no steel tanks, they are mere windmills or sheep, I summon you to kiss the lady's hand."

So rode the squadrons out against the grey steel foe, adding another dash of red to the sunset glow.

Oskar hopes to be forgiven for the poetic effects. He might have done better to give figures, to enumerate the casualties of the Polish cavalry, to commemorate the so-called Polish Campaign with dry but eloquent statistics. Or another solution might be to let the poem stand but append a footnote.

Up to September 20, I could hear, as I lay in my hospital bed, the roaring of the cannon firing from the heights of the Jeschkental and Oliva forests. Then the last nest of resistance on Hela Peninsula surrendered. The Free Hanseatic City of Danzig celebrated the Anschluss of its brick Gothic to the Greater German Reich and gazed jubilantly into the blue eyes (which had one thing in common with Jan Bronski's blue eyes, namely their success with women) of Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer and Chancellor, as he stood in his black Mercedes distributing rectangular salutes.

In mid-October Oskar was discharged from the City Hospital. It was hard for me to take leave of the nurses. When one of them -- her name was Berni or maybe Erni, I think -- when Sister Erni or Berni gave me my two drums, the battered one that had made me guilty and the whole one that I had conquered during the battle of the Polish Post Office, it came to me that I hadn't thought of my drums for weeks, that there was something else in the world for me beside drums, to wit, nurses.

Matzerath held me by the hand as, still rather shaky on my three-year-old pins, I left the City Hospital with my instruments and my new self-knowledge, for the flat in Labesweg, there to face the tedious weekdays and still more tedious Sundays of the first war year.

One Tuesday late in November, I was allowed to go out for the first time after weeks of convalescence. As he was gloomily drumming through the streets, paying little attention to the cold rain, whom should Oskar run into on the corner of Max-Halbe-Platz and Brosener-Weg but Leo Schugger, the former seminarist.

We stood for some time exchanging embarra.s.sed smiles, and it was not until Leo plucked a pair of kid gloves from the pockets of his morning coat and pulled the yellowish-white, skinlike coverings over his fingers and palms, that I realized whom I had met and what this encounter would bring me. Oskar was afraid.

For a while we examined the windows of Kaiser's grocery store, looked after a few streetcars of lines Number 5 and 9, which crossed on Max-Halbe-Platz, skirted the uniform houses on Brosener-Weg, revolved several times round an advertising pillar, studied a poster telling when and how to exchange Danzig guldens for reichsmarks, scratched a poster advertising Persil soap powder, and found a bit of red under the blue and white but let well enough alone. We were just starting back for Max-Halbe-Platz when suddenly Leo Schugger pushed Oskar with both hands into a doorway, reached under his coat-tails with the gloved fingers of his left hand, poked about in his pants pocket, sifted the contents, found something, studied it for a moment with his fingers, then, satisfied with what he had found, removed his closed fist from his pocket, and let his coat-tail fall back into place. Slowly he thrust forward the gloved fist, forward and still forward, pus.h.i.+ng Oskar against the wall of the doorway; longer and longer grew his arm, but the wall did not recede. That arm, I was beginning to think, was going to jump out of its socket, pierce my chest, pa.s.s through it, and make off between my shoulder blades and the wall of this musty doorway. I was beginning to fear that Oskar would never see what Leo had in his fist, that the most he would ever learn in this doorway was the text of the house regulations, which were not very different from those in his own house in Labesweg. And then the five-fingered skin opened.

Pressing against one of the anchor b.u.t.tons on my sailor coat, Leo's glove opened so fast that I could hear his finger joints crack. And there, on the stiff, s.h.i.+ny leather that protected the inside of his hand, lay the cartridge case.

When Leo closed his fist again, I was prepared to follow him. That little sc.r.a.p of metal had spoken to me directly. We walked side by side down Brosener-Weg; this time no shopwindow, no advertising pillar detained us. We crossed Magdeburger-Stra.s.se, left behind us the last two tall, boxlike buildings on Brosener-Weg, topped at night by warning lights for planes that were taking off or about to land, skirted the fence of the airfield for a time, but then moved over to the asphalt road, where the going was less wet, and followed the rails of the Number 5 streetcar line in the direction of Brosen.

We said not a word, but Leo still held the cartridge case in his glove. The weather was miserably cold and wet, but when I wavered and thought of going back, he opened his fist, made the little piece of metal hop up and down on his palm, and so lured me on, a hundred paces, then another hundred paces, and even resorted to music when, shortly before the city reservation in Saspe, I seriously decided to turn back. He turned on his heel, held the cartridge case with the open end up, pressed the hole like the mouthpiece of a flute against his protruding, slavering lower lip, and projected a new note, now shrill, now m.u.f.fled as though by the fog, into the mounting whish of the rain. Oskar s.h.i.+vered. It wasn't just the music that made him s.h.i.+ver; the wretched weather, which seemed made to order for the occasion, had more than a little to do with it. So intense was my misery that I hardly bothered to hide my s.h.i.+vering.

What lured me to Brosen? Leo, the pied piper, of course, piping on his cartridge case. But there was more to it than that. From the roadstead and from Neufahrwa.s.ser, from behind the November fog, the sirens of the steams.h.i.+ps and the hungry howling of a torpedo boat entering or leaving the harbor carried over to us past Schottland, Sch.e.l.lmuhl, and Reichskolonie. In short, it was child's play for Leo, supported by foghorns, sirens, and a whistling cartridge case, to draw a frozen Oskar after him.

Not far from the wire fence which turns off in the direction of Pelonken and divides the airfield from the new drill ground, Leo Schugger stopped and stood for a time, his head c.o.c.ked on one side, his saliva flowing over the cartridge case, observing my trembling little body. He sucked in the cartridge case, held it with his lower lip, then, following a sudden inspiration, flailed wildly with his arms, removed his long-tailed morning coat, and threw the heavy cloth, smelling of moist earth, over my head and shoulders.

We started off again. I don't know whether Oskar was any less cold. Sometimes Leo leapt five steps ahead and then stopped; as he stood there in his rumpled but terrifying white s.h.i.+rt, he seemed to have stepped directly out of a medieval dungeon, perhaps the Stockturm, to ill.u.s.trate a disquisition on What the Lunatics Will Wear. Whenever Leo turned his eyes on Oskar staggering along in the long coat, he burst out laughing and flapped his wings like a raven. I must indeed have looked like a grotesque bird, a raven or crow, especially with those coat-tails dragging over the asphalt highway like a train or a huge mop and leaving a broad majestic track, which filled Oskar with pride whenever he looked back, and foreshadowed, if it did not symbolize, the tragic fate, not yet fully implemented, that slumbered within him.

Even before leaving Max-Halbe-Platz, I had suspected that Leo had no intention of taking me to Brosen or Neufahrwa.s.ser. From the very start it was perfectly clear that our destination could only be the cemetery in Saspe, near which a modern rifle range had been laid out for the Security Police.

From September to April the cars serving the seaside resorts ran only every thirty-five minutes. As we were leaving the suburb of Langfuhr, a car without trailer approached from the direction of Brosen and pa.s.sed us by. A moment later the car that had been waiting on the Magdeburger-Stra.s.se siding came up behind us and pa.s.sed by. It was not until we had almost reached the cemetery, near which there was a second siding, that another car moved up clanking and tinkling behind us, and soon its companion piece, which we had long seen waiting in the mist up ahead, its yellow light s.h.i.+ning wet in the fog, started up and pa.s.sed us by.

The flat morose face of the motorman was still sharp in Oskar's mind when Leo Schugger led him off the asphalt road, through loose sand not very different from that of the dunes by the beach. The cemetery was square with a wall running round it. We went in on the south side, through a little gate that was covered with ornamental rust and only supposed to be locked. Most of the tombstones were of black Swedish granite or diorite, rough hewn on the back and sides and polished in front. Some leaned perilously, others had already toppled. Unfortunately Leo left me no time to look at them more closely. The place was poor in trees; five or six gnarled and moth-eaten scrub pines, that was all. Mama in her lifetime had admired this tumble-down graveyard; as she often said, it was her favorite among last resting places. And now she lay in Brenntau. There the soil was richer, elms and maples grew.

By way of an open gate that had lost its grating, Leo led me out of the cemetery through the northern wall, before I could attune my thoughts to its romantic decay. Close behind the wall the soil was flat and sandy. Amid the steaming fog, broom, scrub pine, and dog rose stretched out toward the coast. When I looked back toward the cemetery, it struck me at once that a piece of the northern wall had been freshly whitewashed.

Close to this stretch of wall, which gave the impression of being new, as painfully white as Leo's rumpled s.h.i.+rt, Leo became very active. He took great long strides which he appeared to count; at all events, he counted aloud and, as Oskar believes to this day, in Latin. Whatever this litany was, he chanted it as he had no doubt learned to do at the seminary. Leo marked a spot some ten yards from the wall and also set down a piece of wood not far from the whitewashed portion, where, it seemed pretty obvious, the wall had been mended. All this he did with his left hand, for in his right hand he held the cartridge case. Finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he bent down near the piece of wood and there deposited the hollow metallic cylinder, slightly tapered at the front end, which had lodged a lead kernel until someone with a curved forefinger had exerted just enough pressure to evict the lead projectile and start it on its death-dealing change of habitat.

We stood and stood. The spittle flowed from Leo Schugger's mouth and hung down in threads. Wringing his gloves, he chanted for a time in Latin, but stopped after a while as there was no one present who knew the responses. From time to time he turned about and cast a peevish, impatient look over the wall toward the highway, especially when the streetcars, empty for the most part, stopped at the switch and clanged their bells as they pa.s.sed one another by and moved off in opposite directions. Leo must have been waiting for mourners. But neither on foot nor by car did anyone arrive to whom he could extend a glove in condolence.

Once some planes roared over us, preparing to land. We did not look up, we submitted to the noise without bothering to ascertain that three planes of the Ju-52 type, with blinking lights on their wing tips, were preparing to land.

Shortly after the motors had left us -- the stillness was as painful as the wall facing us was white -- Leo Schugger reached into his s.h.i.+rt and pulled something out. A moment later he was standing beside me. Tearing his crow costume from Oskar's shoulders, he darted off coastward, into the broom, dog rose, and scrub pine, and in departing dropped something with a calculated gesture suggesting that it was meant to be found.

Only when Leo had vanished for good -- for a time he could be seen moving about in the foreground like a spook, until at last he was swallowed up by low-lying pools of milky mist -- only when I was all alone with the rain, did I reach out for the object that lay in the sand: it was a skat card, the seven of spades.

A few days after this meeting at Saspe Cemetery, Oskar met his grandmother Anna Koljaiczek at the weekly market in Langfuhr. Now that there was no more borderline at Bissau, she was able once again to bring her eggs, b.u.t.ter, cabbages, and winter apples to market. The people bought plentifully, they had begun to lay in stocks, for food rationing was in the offing. Just as Oskar caught sight of his grandmother sitting behind her wares, he felt the skat card on his bare skin, beneath his coat, sweater, and unders.h.i.+rt. At first, while riding back from Saspe to Max-Halbe Platz, after a streetcar conductor had invited me to come along free of charge, I had meant to tear up that seven of spades. But Oskar did not tear it up. He gave it to his grandmother. She seemed to take fright behind her cabbages when she saw him. Maybe it pa.s.sed through her mind that Oskar's presence could bode no good. But then she motioned the three-year-old urchin, half-hiding behind some baskets of fish, to come over. Oskar took his time; first he examined a live codfish nearly a yard long, lying in a bed of moist seaweed, then watched some crabs crawling about in a basket; finally, himself adopting the gait of a crab, he approached his grandmother's stand with the back of his sailor coat and, turning to show her his gold anchor b.u.t.tons, jostled one of the sawhorses under her display and started the apples rolling.

Schwerdtfeger came over with his hot bricks wrapped in newspaper, shoved them under my grandmother's skirts, removed the cold bricks with his rake as he had done ever since I could remember, made a mark on the slate that hung from his neck, and proceeded to the next stand while my grandmother handed me a s.h.i.+ning apple.

What could Oskar give her if she gave him an apple? He gave her first the skat card and then the cartridge case, for he hadn't abandoned that in Saspe either. For quite some time Anna Koljaiczek stared uncomprehending at these two so disparate objects. Then Oskar's mouth approached her aged cartilaginous ear beneath her kerchief and, throwing caution to the winds, I whispered, thinking of Jan's pink, small, but fleshy ear with the long, well-shaped lobes. "He's lying in Saspe," Oskar whispered and ran off, upsetting a basket of cabbages.

Maria

While history, blaring special communiques at the top of its lungs, sped like a well-greased amphibious vehicle over the roads and waterways of Europe and through the air as well, conquering everything in its path, my own affairs, which were restricted to the belaboring of lacquered toy drums, were in a bad way. While the history-makers were throwing expensive metal out the window with both hands, I, once more, was running out of drums. Yes, yes, Oskar had managed to save a new instrument with scarcely a scratch on it from the Polish Post Office, so lending some significance to the defense of said post office, but what could Naczalnik Junior's drum mean to me, Oskar, who in my least troubled days had taken barely eight weeks to transform a drum into sc.r.a.p metal?

Distressed over the loss of my nurses, I began to drum furiously soon after my discharge from the City Hospital. That rainy afternoon in Saspe Cemetery did nothing to diminish my drumming; on the contrary, Oskar redoubled his efforts to destroy the last witness to his shameful conduct with the Home Guards, namely, that drum.

But the drum withstood my a.s.saults; as often as I struck it, it struck back accusingly. The strange part of it is that during this pounding, whose sole purpose was to eradicate a very definite segment of my past, Victor Weluhn, the carrier of funds, kept turning up in my mind, although, nearsighted as he was, his testimony against me couldn't have amounted to much. But hadn't he managed to escape despite his nearsightedness? Could it be that the nearsighted see more than others, that Weluhn, whom I usually speak of as poor Victor, had read my gestures like the movements of a black silhouette, that he had seen through my betrayal and that now, on his flight, he would carry Oskar's secret, Oskar's shame, all over the world with him?

It was not until the middle of December that the accusations of the serrated red and white conscience round my neck began to carry less conviction: the lacquer cracked and peeled; the tin grew thin and fragile. Condemned to look on at this death agony, I was eager, as one always is in such cases, to shorten the sufferings of the moribund, to hasten the end. During the last weeks of Advent, Oskar worked so hard that Matzerath and the neighbors held their heads, for he was determined to settle his accounts by Christmas Eve; I felt confident that for Christmas I should receive a new and guiltless drum.

I made it. On the twenty-fourth of December I was able to rid my body and soul of a rusty, dissipated, shapeless something suggestive of a wrecked motor car; by discarding it, I hoped, I should be putting the defense of the Polish Post Office behind me forever.

Never has any human being -- if you are willing to accept me as one -- known a more disappointing Christmas than Oskar, who found everything imaginable under the Christmas tree, save only a drum.

There was a set of blocks that I never opened. A rocking swan, viewed by the grownups as the most sensational of presents, was supposed to turn me into Lohengrin. Just to annoy me, no doubt, they had had the nerve to put three or four picture books on the gift table. The only presents that struck me as in some sense serviceable were a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and a red sweater knitted by Gretchen Scheffler. In consternation Oskar looked from the building blocks to the swan, and stared at a picture in one of the picture books, showing an a.s.sortment of teddy bears which were not only too cute for words but, to make matters worse, held all manner of musical instruments in their paws. One of these cute hypocritical beasts even had a drum; he looked as if he knew how to drum, as if he were just about to strike up a drum solo; while as for me, I had a swan but no drum, probably more than a thousand building blocks but not one single drum; I had mittens for bitter-cold winter nights, but between my gloved fists no round, smooth-lacquered, metallic, and ice-cold object that I might carry out into the winter nights, to warm their icy heart.

Oskar thought to himself: Matzerath has hidden the drum. Or Gretchen Scheffler, who has come with her baker to polish off our Christmas goose, is sitting on it. They are determined to enjoy my enjoyment of the swan, the building blocks, the picture books, before disgorging the real treasure. I gave in; I leafed like mad through the picture books, swung myself upon the swan's back and, fighting back my mounting repugnance, rocked for at least half an hour. Despite the overheated apartment I let them try on the sweater; aided by Gretchen Scheffler, I slipped into the shoes. Meanwhile the Greffs had arrived, the goose had been planned for six, and after the goose, stuffed with dried fruit and masterfully prepared by Matzerath, had been consumed, during the dessert, consisting of stewed plums and pears, desperately holding a picture book which Greff had added to my four other picture books; after soup, goose, red cabbage, boiled potatoes, plums, and pears, under the hot breath of a tile stove which had hot breath to spare, we all sang, Oskar too, a Christmas carol and an extra verse. Rejoice, and Ochristmastree, ochristmastree, greenarethybellstingalingtingelingyearafteryear, and I was good and sick of the whole business; outside the bells had already started in, and I wanted my drum; the alcoholic bra.s.s band, to which Meyn the musician had formerly belonged, blew so the icicles outside the window. . . but I wanted my drum, and they wouldn't give it to me, they wouldn't cough it up. Oskar: "Yes!" The others: "No!" Whereupon I screamed, it was a long time since I had screamed, after a long rest period I filed my voice once again into a sharp, gla.s.s-cutting instrument; I killed no vases, no beer gla.s.ses nor light bulbs, I opened up no showcase nor deprived any spectacles of their power of vision -- no, my vocal rancor was directed against all the b.a.l.l.s, bells, light refracting silvery soap bubbles that graced the Ochristmastree: with a tinkle tinkle and a klingaling, the tree decorations were shattered into dust. Quite superfluously several dustpans full of fir needles detached themselves at the same time. But the candles went on burning, silent and holy, and with it all Oskar got no drum.

Matzerath had no perception. I don't know whether he was trying to wean me away from my instrument or whether it simply didn't occur to him to keep me supplied, amply and punctually, with drums. I was threatened with disaster. And it was only the coincidence that just then the mounting disorder in our shop could no longer be overlooked which brought help, before it was too late, both to me and the shop.

Since Oskar was neither big enough nor in any way inclined to stand behind a counter selling crackers, margarine, and synthetic honey, Matzerath, whom for the sake of simplicity I shall once more call my father, took on Maria Truczinski, my poor friend Herbert's youngest sister, to work in the store.

She wasn't just called Maria; she was one. It was not only that she managed, in only a few weeks, to restore the reputation of our shop; quite apart from her firm though friendly business management, to which Matzerath willingly submitted, she showed a definite understanding for my situation.

Even before Maria took her place behind the counter, she had several times offered me an old washbasin as a subst.i.tute for the lump of sc.r.a.p metal with which I had taken to stamping accusingly up and down the more than hundred steps of our stairway. But Oskar wanted no subst.i.tute. Steadfastly he refused to drum on the bottom of a washbasin. But no sooner had Maria gained a firm foothold in the shop than she succeeded, Matzerath to the contrary notwithstanding, in fulfilling my desires. It must be admitted that Oskar could not be moved to enter a toystore with her. The inside of one of those emporiums bursting with multicolored wares would surely have inspired painful comparisons with Sigismund Markus' devastated shop. The soul of kindness, Maria would let me wait outside while she attended to the purchases alone; every four or five weeks, according to my needs, she would bring me a new drum. And during the last years of the war, when even toy drums had grown rare and come to be rationed, she resorted to barter, offering the storekeepers sugar or a sixteenth of a pound of real coffee and receiving my drum under the counter in return. All this she did without sighing, shaking her head, or glancing heavenward, but seriously and attentively and as matter-of-factly as though dressing me in freshly washed, properly mended pants, stockings, and school smocks. Though, in the years that followed, the relations between Maria and me were in constant flux and have not been fully stabilized to this day, the way in which she hands me a drum has remained unchanged, though the prices are a good deal higher than in 1940.

Today Maria subscribes to a fas.h.i.+on magazine. She is becoming more chic from one visiting day to the next. But what of those days?

Was Maria beautiful? She had a round, freshly washed face and the look in her somewhat too prominent grey eyes with their short but abundant lashes and their dark, dense brows that joined over the nose, was cool but not cold. High cheekbones -- when it was very cold, the skin over them grew taut and bluish and cracked painfully -- gave the planes of which her face was constructed a rea.s.suring balance which was scarcely disturbed by her diminutive but not unbeautiful or comical nose, which though small was very well shaped. Her forehead was small and round, marked very early by thoughtful vertical creases toward the middle. Rising from the temples, her brown, slightly curly hair, which still has the sheen of wet tree trunks, arched tightly over her little round head, which, like Mother Truczinski's, showed little sign of an occiput. When Maria put on her white smock and took her place behind the counter in our store, she still wore braids behind her florid, healthy ears, the lobes of which unfortunately did not hang free but grew directly into the flesh of her lower jaws -- there were no ugly creases, but still the effect was degenerate enough to admit of inferences about Maria's character. Later on, Matzerath talked her into a permanent and her ears were hidden. Today, beneath tousled, fas.h.i.+onably short-cropped hair, Maria exhibits only the lobes of her ears; but she hides the flaw in her beauty beneath large clips that are not in very good taste.

Similar in its way to her small head with its full cheeks, prominent cheekbones, and large eyes on either side of her small, almost insignificant nose, Maria's body, which was distinctly on the small side, disclosed shoulders that were rather broad, full b.r.e.a.s.t.s swelling upward from her armpits, and an ample pelvis and rear end, which in turn were supported by legs so slender, though quite robust, that you could see between them beneath her pubic hair.

It is possible that Maria was a trifle knock-kneed in those days. Moreover, it seemed to me that in contrast to her figure, which was that of a grown woman, her little red hands were childlike and her fingers reminded me rather of sausages. To this day there is something childlike about those paws of hers. Her feet, however, shod at the time in lumpy hiking shoes and a little later in my poor mama's chic, but outmoded high heels, which were scarcely becoming to her, gradually lost their childish redness and drollness in spite of the ill-fitting hand-me-downs they were forced into and gradually adapted themselves to modern shoe fas.h.i.+ons of West German and even Italian origin.

Maria did not talk much but liked to sing as she was was.h.i.+ng the dishes or filling blue pound and half-pound bags with sugar. When the shop closed and Matzerath busied himself with his accounts, or on Sundays, when she sat down to rest, Maria would play the harmonica that her brother Fritz had given her when he was drafted and sent to Gross-Boschpol.

Maria played just about everything on her harmonica. Scout songs she had learned at meetings of the League of German Girls, operatta tunes, and song hits that she had heard on the radio or learned from her brother Fritz, who came to Danzig for a few days at Easter 1940 on official business. But Maria never took out her "Hohner" during business hours. Even when there were no customers about, she refrained from music and wrote price tags and inventories in a round childlike hand.

Though it was plain for all to see that it was she who ran the store and had won back a part of the clientele that had deserted to our compet.i.tors after my poor mama's death, her att.i.tude toward Matzerath was always respectful to the point of servility; but that didn't embarra.s.s Matzerath, who had never lacked faith in his own worth.

"After all," he argued when Greff the greengrocer and Gretchen Scheffler tried to nettle him, " it was me that hired the girl and taught her the business." So simple were the thought processes of this man who, it must be admitted, became more subtle, more sensitive, and in a word more interesting only when engaged in his favorite occupation, cookery. For Oskar must give the devil his due: his Ka.s.sler Rippchen with sauerkraut, his pork kidneys in mustard sauce, his Wiener Schnitzel, and, above all, his carp with cream and horse radish, were splendid to look upon and delectable to smell and taste. There was little he could teach Maria in the shop, because the girl had a native business sense whereas Matzerath himself knew little about selling over the counter though he had a certain gift for dealing with the wholesalers, but he did teach Maria to boil, roast, and stew; for though she had spent two years working for a family of civil servants in Schidlitz, she could barely bring water to a boil when she first came to us.

Soon Matzerath's program was very much what it had been in my poor mama's lifetime: he reigned in the kitchen, outdoing himself from Sunday roast to Sunday roast, and spent hours of his time contentedly was.h.i.+ng the dishes. In addition, as a sideline so to speak, he attended to the buying and ordering, the accounts with the wholesale houses and the Board of Trade -- occupations which became more and more complicated as the war went on -- carried on, and not without shrewdness, the necessary correspondence with the fiscal authorities, decorated the showcase with considerable imagination and good taste, and conscientiously performed his so-called Party duties. All in all -- while Maria stood imperturbably behind the counter -- he was kept very busy.