The Tin Drum (26 page)

Then Herbert would have to lie face down, breathing heavily, for he weighed well over two hundred pounds, and burden his bed for a few days. Mother Truczinski kept up a steady stream of complaints on such occasions while caring for him untiringly, removing a knitting needle from her bun each time she changed his bandages and tapping it on the glass of a picture opposite his bed, the retouched photograph of a solemnly staring man with a mustache who closely resembled some of the mustaches inhabiting the opening pages of my photo album.

The gentleman indicated by Mother Truczinski's knitting needle was not, however, a member of my family, it was the father of Herbert, Guste, Fritz, and Maria.

"You'll end up just like your father," she needled into the ear of the heavily breathing, groaning Herbert. Yet she never said clearly how and where the man in the black lacquered frame had met, or perhaps sought, his end.

"Who was it this time?" the gray-haired mouse asked above her folded arms.

"Swedes and Norskis, same as always." Herbert shifted his weight, and the bed creaked loudly.

"Same as always, same as always. Don't act like they're the only ones. Last time it was some lads from that there training ship, what's its name, come on, yes, from the
Schlageter,
just like I said, and you talk about Swedes and Norskis!"

Herbert's ear—I couldn't see his face—turned red all the way past its rim: "Damn Heinis, always shooting their mouths off and throwing their weight around!"

"Let them, those guys. What do you care? When they're on leave in town they always look decent enough. You told them your ideas about Lenin, didn't you, or started spouting off about the Spanish Civil War?"

Herbert made no further response, and Mother Truczinski shuffled back to the kitchen and her barley coffee.

The moment Herbert's back was healed, I was allowed to look at it.
He would sit on a kitchen chair, let his suspenders fall across his blue-clad thighs, and slowly, as if grave thoughts were giving him pause, strip off his woolen shirt.

His back was round, mobile. Muscles wandered tirelessly. A rosy landscape strewn with freckles. Below the shoulder blades fox-red hair grew rankly on either side of a spine embedded in fat. Downward it curled till it disappeared into the long underwear Herbert wore even in summer. Upward, covering his back from the top of his underwear to the muscles of his neck, interrupting the growth of hair, obliterating the freckles, puckering the skin into folds, ranging in color from blue-black to greenish white, itching at each change in the weather, ran thick, puffy scars. These scars I was allowed to touch.

What have I, lying here in bed, looking out the window, observing the outbuildings of the mental institution and the Oberrath Forest beyond for months on end without ever really seeing them, what to this very day have I been allowed to touch that was as hard, as sensitive, and as disconcerting as the scars on Herbert Truczinski's back? To wit: the parts of a few young girls and women, my own member, the plaster watering can of the boy Jesus, and that ring finger the dog brought me from the rye field barely two years ago, which a year ago I was still allowed to keep, in a glass jar to be sure where it couldn't be touched, yet so clear and complete that even now I can feel each joint of the finger and count them off by just taking my drumsticks in hand. Whenever I wished to recall the scars on Herbert Truczinski's back, I sat down and drummed with that canning jar and finger before me, drumming up memories. Whenever I traced a woman's body, which happened rarely enough, and Oskar was not sufficiently convinced by the scarlike parts of the woman, I would conjure up Herbert Truczinski's scars. But I could just as easily say: the first touch of those welts on the broad back of my friend already promised knowledge and even temporary possession of those transient indurations characteristic of women ready for love. The signs on Herbert's back likewise promised me at that early date the ring finger, and before Herbert's scars made their promises, it was the drumsticks that, from my third birthday on, promised me scars, reproductive organs, and finally the ring finger. Yet I must reach even further back: even as a fetus, before Oskar was even called Oskar, the game with my umbilical cord promised me in succession drumsticks, Herbert's scars, the occa
sionally erupting craters of younger and older women, finally the ring finger, and time and again, from the watering can of the boy Jesus on, my own sex, which I resolutely carry with me as a moody monument to my impotence and limited possibilities.

Today I return to my drumsticks. In any case it is only by way of the detour my drum provides that I recall scars, soft parts, and my own only occasionally functioning equipment. I will have to turn thirty to celebrate my third birthday a second time. I'm sure you've guessed by now: Oskar's goal is a return to the umbilical cord; that's the sole purpose of all this effort, why I've lingered over Herbert Truczinski's scars.

Before I go on to describe and interpret my friend's scars in greater detail, one preliminary remark: except for a bite wound on his left shin that a prostitute from Ohra left behind, there were no scars on the front of his powerful body, though it offered a target so large as to be nearly indefensible. They could only attack him from behind. They could only get at him from behind, his back alone was marked by Finnish and Polish knives, by the frog stickers of dockers from Speicherinsel, by the sailor's knives of cadets from the training ship.

When Herbert had finished his lunch—three times a week they had potato pancakes, which no one could bake so thin, so greaseless yet crispy, as Mother Truczinski—when Herbert shoved his plate aside, I handed him the
Neueste Nachrichten.
He dropped his suspenders, peeled off his shirt, and let me question his back while he read. Mother Truczinski usually sat with us at the table during these question sessions, unraveling old wool socks, offering remarks of approval or disapproval, and not omitting an occasional reference to the—one presumes—horrible death of her husband, who, photographed and retouched, hung behind glass on the wall across from Herbert's bed.

The questioning began when I would tap on a scar with my finger. At times I tapped with one of my drumsticks.

"Press on it again, boy. I don't know which one it is. It seems to be asleep today." Then I would press again, a little harder.

"Oh, that one. That was a Ukrainian. He got into a scrap with a guy from Gdingen. At first they were sitting at the same table like brothers. Then the guy from Gdingen calls the other one a Russki. The Ukrainian wasn't going to take that lying down, no way was he a Russki, anything but. He'd floated logs down the Vistula and a few rivers before that, and
now he had a wad of money in his boot, with half a bootful already laid out buying rounds from Starbusch, when the guy from Gdingen says Russki, and I have to jump right in and push them apart, gently, the way I always do. So Herbert has his hands full, when the Ukrainian up and calls me a Water Polack, and the Polack, who spends his day hauling up muck on a dredger, adds something that sounds like Nazi. Well, Oskar, you know Herbert Truczinski: the one from the dredger, a pasty-faced guy, looks like a stoker, is soon lying in a heap by the cloakroom. And I'm just about to explain to the Ukrainian the difference between a Water Polack and a fine Danzig lad when he sticks me from behind—and that's the scar."

Whenever Herbert said "and that's the scar," he would turn a page of the newspaper to emphasize his words and take a gulp of his barley coffee before I was allowed to press the next scar, once or sometimes twice.

"Oh, that one! It don't amount to much. Two years or so ago it was, a whole fleet of torpedo boats from Pillau tied up here, swaggered about playing sailor boy in blue and the Danzig girls went crazy. How a skinny rag like that ever got into the navy is a mystery to me. And he was from Dresden, Oskar, can you believe it, from Dresden! You got no idea how odd that sounds, a sailor from Dresden."

Herbert's thoughts now lingered about in the beautiful city of Dresden on the Elbe, and to lure them back to their home in Neufahrwasser, I tapped again on that scar he thought didn't amount to much.

"Yeh, like I was saying. A signalman on the torpedo boat he was. Talked high and mighty, starts ribbing a quiet Scotsman with a tub in dry dock. Starts in with Chamberlain, umbrellas, and the like. I advise him gently, the way I always do, to stow that sort of talk, since the Scot can't cop a word anyway and was just drawing pictures on the tabletop with schnapps. And when I say, Drop it, boy, this ain't your home, this here's the League of Nations, the torpedo fritz calls me 'German booty,' in Saxon you understand—and I whack him a time or two, which quiets him down. A half-hour later, when I'm bending down to fish out a gulden that'd rolled under the table and can't see nothing, since it's dark under there, the Saxon hauls out his pik-pik and piks me quick!"

Herbert turned the page of the
Neueste Nachrichten
and laughed, then added, "And that's the scar," pushed the newspaper over to a grum
bling Mother Truczinski, and prepared to rise. Quickly, before Herbert could head for the toilet—I could tell from his face where he was headed—while he was still pressing his hands on the edge of the table to rise, I tapped on a blackish violet stitched scar as broad as a skat card is tall.

"Herbert's got to go to the can, son. I'll tell you when I'm back." But I tapped again, stamped my feet, played the three-year-old; that always helped.

"All right, then. Just to keep you quiet. But I'm making it short." Herbert sat down again. "It was Christmas nineteen-thirty. Nothing going on at the harbor. Dockers hanging out on street corners seeing how far they could spit. After midnight mass—we'd just finished mixing the punch—the Swedes and the Finns come pouring out of the Seaman's Church across the way, all neatly combed and polished in their blues. I've already got a feeling they're up to no good, stand there in the doorway watching those real pious faces, thinking why are they fiddling around with their anchor buttons? And all of a sudden they're at it: long are the knives and short is the night. Well, Finns and Swedes have always had a thing about each other. But why Herbert Truczinski gets mixed up with them, the devil only knows. When something's up, the monkey bites him and Herbert's got to join in. I was out the door with Starbusch calling after me, 'Watch yourself, Herbert.' But Herbert's on a mission to save the pastor, a small young fella, fresh from the seminary at Malmo, who'd never spent a Christmas with Finns and Swedes in one church before, he's going to take him under his wing, get him home safe and sound, so I've barely got ahold of the churchman's sleeve when there's a nice clean blade in my back and I think 'Happy New Year,' though it's only Christmas Eve. When I come to, I'm lying on the bar at our place, with my beautiful blood filling the beer glasses free of charge, and Starbusch comes with his Red Cross kit and wants to give me so-called first aid"

"What'd you want to stick your nose in for?" Mother Truczinski said angrily, and pulled a knitting needle from her bun. "You don't never go to church. Never ever!"

Herbert waved her off, headed for the can, his suspenders dangling, his shirt trailing along behind him. He went angrily, added angrily, "And that's the scar!" and undertook the journey as if to distance himself once
and for all from the church and all its knife fights, as if the can were the one place to sit where one is, becomes, or remains a freethinker.

A few weeks later I found Herbert wordless and in no mood for a question session. He appeared grief-stricken but didn't have the customary bandage on his back. Instead I found him lying quite normally on his back on the living room sofa. He wasn't lying in bed like a wounded man and yet he seemed severely wounded. I heard Herbert groan, cry out to God, Marx, and Engels, and curse them. Now and then he shook his fist in the air, then let it fall to his chest, joined in with the other fist, and hammered himself like a Catholic crying
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Herbert had killed a Latvian sea captain. The court had acquitted him—he'd acted, as so often in his profession, in self-defense. But the Latvian remained a dead Latvian in spite of the acquittal and weighed on the waiter like a ton of bricks, even though the captain was supposedly frail and delicate, with a bad stomach to boot.

Herbert stopped going to work. He'd quit his job. Starbusch, the owner, visited several times, sat by the sofa near Herbert or at the kitchen table with Mother Truczinski, pulled a bottle of Stobbes Machandel Double Null from his briefcase for Herbert, and a half-pound of un-roasted real coffee from the Free Port for Mother Truczinski. He tried either to talk Herbert into coming back, or to talk Mother Truczinski into talking Herbert into coming back. But Herbert was now hardened, or softened—whichever way you see it—he no longer wished to be a waiter, and certainly not in Neufahrwasser, across from the Seaman's Church. He no longer wished to be a waiter at all; for waiters always get stabbed, and one fine day someone who's stabbed will strike a little Latvian captain dead, just because he's trying to make him keep his distance, because he's not about to let a Latvian knife add its Latvian scar to all the Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Free Port, and German scars that crisscross the plowed back of a Herbert Truczinski.

"I'd sooner go to work for customs than go back to waiting in Fahrwasser," said Herbert. But he didn't go to work for customs.

In nineteen thirty-eight the customs duties were raised and the borders between Poland and the Free State temporarily closed. My grandmother could no longer take the narrow-gauge railway to the weekly market in Langfuhr and had to close down her stand. She was left sitting on her eggs, so to speak, but in no mood to brood. In the harbor the herring stank to high heaven, the goods piled up, and statesmen met and reached an agreement; it was only my friend Herbert who lay on the sofa, jobless and at odds with himself, brooding like a man with plenty to brood about.

Meanwhile the customs service offered bread and wages. It offered a green uniform and a green border worth guarding. Herbert didn't want to work for customs, had no wish to wait tables, he just wanted to lie on the sofa and brood.