The Tin Drum (8 page)

I've detached other rectangles from the album and placed them beside this one. Scenes in which Mama can be observed with Matzerath, or Mama with Jan Bronski. In none of these pictures is the inevitability, the sole possible outcome, as clear as in the balcony scene. Jan and Mama in one: it smells of tragedy, of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the reckless abandon that leads to surfeit, to a surfeit of reckless abandon. Matzerath next to Mama: a trickle of weekend conjugality, the Wiener schnitzels sizzling, a bit of grumbling before dinner, some yawning after the meal, a few jokes before bedtime, or complaints about the tax situation to give some intellectual substance to the marriage. Nevertheless I prefer this photographic tedium to an indecent snapshot of later years that shows Mama on Jan Bronski's lap, against the backdrop of Oliva Forest near Freudenthal. Even though the lewdness—Jan has allowed his hand to disappear under Mama's dress—records only the mad, blind passion of the unhappy pair, adulterous from the first day of Matzerath's marriage, for whom, I presume, Matzerath serves here as benumbed photographer. None of the tranquility, none of the gentle, knowing gestures of the balcony picture are visible, which were no doubt only possible when both men were standing behind or beside Mama, or lying at her feet, as on the beach at the Heubude baths; see photo.

There's yet another rectangle that shows the three most important figures of my early years forming a triangle. Although less concentrated than the balcony picture, it still radiates the same tense peace that can no doubt only be concluded among, and possibly signed by, three people. Complain all you want about the much-loved love triangle in the theater; what are two persons alone on stage to do but talk themselves to death or secretly long for a third to appear? In my little picture the three of them are together. They are playing skat. That is, they are holding their cards like well-arranged fans, but instead of checking their trumps to gauge the strength of their hands, they are looking at the camera. Jan's hand lies flat, except for his raised index finger, beside a pile of change, Matzerath is digging his nails into the tablecloth, Mama indulges in a little joke, which strikes me as rather good: she has drawn a card and shows it to the camera lens but not to her fellow card players. How easy it is, with a single gesture, by simply showing the queen of hearts in skat,
to conjure up an unobtrusive symbol, for who would not swear by the Queen of Hearts!

The game of skat—which, as you probably know, can only be played by three people—was not just the most suitable game for Mama and her two men; it was their refuge, the harbor to which they always returned when life tried to lead them astray into such silly games as Sixty-six or Morris, where they were merely paired with one or the other.

That's enough for now about these three, who brought me into the world although they lacked for nothing. Before I come to myself, a word about Mama's friend Gretchen Schemer and her master-baker husband, Alexander Schemer. He baldheaded, she laughing with equine teeth, a good half of which were gold. He stubby-legged, never reaching the carpet when he sat on chairs, she in clothes she knitted herself in patterns that could never be busy enough. Later on, photos of both Schemers in deck chairs or by lifeboats on the Strength through Joy ship
Wilhelm Gustloff,
or on the promenade deck of the
Tannenberg
of the East Prussian Line. Year after year they took trips and brought souvenirs from Pillau, Norway, the Azores, or Italy safely back to their house on Kleinhammerweg, where he baked rolls and she embroidered pillowcases with tiny loops called mouse teeth. When Alexander Schemer wasn't talking, he was forever licking his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, a habit Matzerath's friend Greff, the greengrocer who lived across the way from us, found obscene and disgusting.

Though Greff was married, he was more scoutmaster than husband. A photo shows him stout, dry-skinned, and healthy, in a uniform with shorts, his scoutmaster cords, and his scout hat. Beside him, similarly outfitted, stands a boy of perhaps thirteen with overly large eyes, whom Greff, his left hand around the boy's shoulder, pulls toward him with obvious affection. I didn't know the boy, but I later met Greff through his wife Lina and came to understand him.

I'm losing myself in snapshots of Strength through Joy tourists and testaments to tender Boy Scout eroticism. Let's flip forward a few pages and come to me, my very first photographic image.

I was a handsome child. The picture was taken on Whitsuntide, nineteen twenty-five. I was eight months old, two months younger than Stephan Bronski, who appears on the very next page in the same format, radiating an indescribable ordinariness. The postcard has a scal
loped edge, its verso lined for the address, no doubt printed in bulk for use by the family. The photographic portion of the extended rectangle is in the shape of an overly symmetrical egg. Nude and symbolizing the egg's yolk, I lie on my tummy on a white fur pelt that some arctic polar bear must have donated to an East European professional specializing in children's photographs. As with many photos of that period, they have chosen for my first image the warm, unmistakable sepia tone that I would term human, as opposed to the inhuman glossy black-and-white photos of our day. Dull, blurred foliage, no doubt painted, provides the dark background, relieved by a few flecks of light. While my smooth, healthy body rests tranquilly angled on the fur pelt, basking in the polar bear's native habitat, I hold my rounded baby's head strained upward, and regard with shiny eyes the various spectators of my nakedness.

A baby picture like any other, you might say. Please observe the hands: you must admit that my earliest likeness differs distinctly from the usual crop of droll little creatures in countless photo albums. You see me with clenched fists. No little sausage fingers playing absent-mindedly with tufts of polar-bear rug in response to some still obscure haptic urge. The little clutched hands hover gravely gathered at my temples, ready to strike, to sound the beat. What beat? The drum beat.

I still don't have what was promised me at birth beneath light bulbs for my third birthday; but it would be a simple matter for anyone skilled in photomontage to add a suitably reduced image of a toy drum without having to retouch the position of my body in the slightest. Only the silly stuffed animal I'm ignoring would have to be removed. It's an alien element in this otherwise harmonious composition, which strikes the theme of the astute, clearsighted age when the first milk teeth are about to come through.

Later I was no longer placed on polar-bear rugs. At eighteen months I must have been pushed along in a high-wheeled baby buggy past a fence whose pointed laths and crossbars are so clearly outlined by a layer of snow that I can only assume the picture was taken in January of nineteen twenty-six. The crude construction of the fence, its wood smelling of tar, connects it for me, on further observation, with the suburb of Hochstrieß, whose extensive barracks once sheltered Mackensen's Hussars and in my time the Free State Police. Since I can't recall anyone who lived in that suburb, however, the picture must have been
taken on the occasion of a single visit my parents paid to people they never saw again, or saw only rarely.

Mama and Matzerath, flanking the baby buggy, are not wearing winter coats, in spite of the cold. On the contrary, Mama is dressed in a long-sleeved Russian blouse whose embroidered decorations suggest another wintry scene: in deepest Russia a picture is being taken of the Tsar's family, Rasputin holds the camera, I am the Tsarevich, and behind the fence crouch Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, rigging homemade bombs, plotting the destruction of my aristo-autocratic family. Matzerath's correct, Middle European, petit-bourgeois exterior, bearing, as we shall see, the seeds of the future, interrupts the telling point of the photo's moral tale. They were in the quiet suburb of Hochstrieß, had emerged for a moment, without donning their winter coats, from their hosts' flat so the master of the house could take their picture on either side of little Oskar, who obliged them with a droll expression, and were soon deliciously warming themselves with coffee, cake, and whipped cream.

There are another good dozen snapshots of Oskar lying, sitting, crawling, walking, aged one, two, two and a half. Some pictures are better than others, but taken as a whole they are a mere preliminary to the full-length portrait they had taken of me on my third birthday.

There, I have it now, my drum. There it hangs, brand-new, zigzagged white and red, on my tummy. There I am, self-assured, my face solemn and resolute, my drumsticks crossed upon the tin. There I am in my striped sweater. There I stand in gleaming patent-leather shoes. There my hair stands, like a brush ready for action atop my head, there, mirrored in each blue eye, a will to power that needs no followers. There I am back then, in a stance I found no reason to abandon. There and then I decided, there I declared, there I decreed, that I would never be a politician and most certainly not a grocer, that I would make a point instead of remaining as I was—and so I did, remained that size, kept that attire, for years to come.

Little people and big people, Little Dipper and Big Dipper, little and big ABCs, Little Hans and Karl the Great, David and Goliath, Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the Giant; I remained the three-year-old, the gnome, Tom Thumb, stayed the half-pint that's never topped up, all to bypass distinctions like big and little catechisms, to flee the clutches of a man who, while shaving at the mirror, called himself my father, to avoid, as
a so-called grownup of five foot eight, being bound to a business, a grocery store that Matzerath hoped would become the grown-up world for Oskar at twenty-one. So as not to have to rattle a cash register, I stuck to my drum and didn't grow a finger's breadth from my third birthday on, remained the three-year-old, who, three times as smart, was towered over by grownups, yet stood head and shoulders above them all, who felt no need to measure his shadow against theirs, who was inwardly and outwardly fully mature while others driveled on about development well into their dotage, who merely confirmed for himself what others learned with difficulty and often painfully, who felt no need to increase his shoe and trouser size from year to year just to prove he was growing.

And yet—and here Oskar too must admit to development—something was growing, and not always to my own advantage, ultimately taking on messianic proportions; but what grownup in my day had eyes and ears for Oskar, the eternally three-year-old drummer?

Having just described a full-length photo of Oskar with drum and drumsticks, and having announced at the same time the fully matured decisions Oskar reached during that photographic session in the presence of those gathered round the birthday cake with its three candles, I must now, since the album beside me maintains a closed silence on the subject, relate other events that, though they don't explain why I remained a three-year-old, also took place, and which I initiated.

It was clear to me from the very beginning: grownups won't understand you, they will call you retarded if they can't see you grow, they'll drag you and their money to scores of doctors in search of an explanation, if not a cure, for your disorder. So to keep consultations to an endurable minimum, I had to provide a plausible explanation for my failure to grow before the doctor offered his.

A sunny day in September, my third birthday. Delicate, late summer glass-blowing, even Gretchen Schemer's laughter was subdued. Mama at the piano intoning airs from
The Gypsy Baron,
Jan behind her at the stool, touching her shoulder, pretending to study the score. Matzerath getting supper ready in the kitchen. Grandmother Anna with Hedwig Bronski and Alexander Schemer gathering around the greengrocer Greff, who was always full of stories, Boy Scout stories in which loyalty and courage played important roles; a grandfather clock as well, which did not miss a single quarter-hour of that gossamer September day; and since, like the clock, they were all so busy, and since a line ran from the Gypsy Baron's Hungarian countryside through Greff's Boy Scouts wandering in the Vosges, past Matzerath's kitchen, where Kashubian mushrooms with scrambled eggs and pork belly sputtered in fright in the
pan, and down the hallway to the shop, I, casually sorting things out on my drum, followed that flight line and soon stood behind the counter in the shop—piano, mushrooms, and the Vosges far distant now—and saw that the trapdoor to the cellar stood open; Matzerath, who had brought up a can of mixed fruit for dessert, must have forgotten to close it.

It took me a minute or two to understand what the trapdoor to our cellar demanded of me. Not suicide, by God! That would have been far too simple. But the alternative was difficult, painful, demanded sacrifice; and even then, as always when a sacrifice is demanded of me, my brow broke out in a sweat. Above all, no harm must come to my drum; I would have to carry it safely down the sixteen well-worn steps and place it among the sacks of flour to explain its undamaged state. Then back up to the eighth step, no, down one, actually the fifth would do just as well. But from there safety and credible injury could not be combined. Back up then, too high this time, to the tenth, and finally, from the ninth step, I flung myself down, carrying a shelf laden with bottles of raspberry syrup along with me, and landed head-first on the cement floor of our cellar.

Even before the curtain descended on my consciousness, I registered the success of the experiment: the raspberry bottles I had intentionally pulled down made enough clatter to attract Matzerath from the kitchen, Mama from the piano, and the rest of the birthday party from the Vosges, luring them into the shop, to the open trapdoor, and down the stairs.

Before they arrived, I basked in the fragrance of flowing raspberry syrup, noted that my head was bleeding, and pondered—by now they were already on the stairs—whether it was Oskar's blood or the raspberries that smelled so sweet and soporific, but was greatly relieved that everything had gone so well and that thanks to my foresight my drum had sustained no damage.