The Tin Drum (38 page)

Matzerath simply lacked judgment. I don't know if he was trying to raise me properly or if he just didn't think of providing me with an ample supply of drums in a timely fashion. Things were headed for disaster, and it was only because it was impossible to hide the mounting disorder in our grocery shop at the very moment of my impending disaster that help arrived—as one always thinks it will when times are hard—and saved both me and the shop.

Since Oskar possessed neither the necessary height nor the inclination to stand behind the store counter selling Ryvita, margarine, and
synthetic honey, Matzerath, whom I'll resume calling my father for the sake of simplicity, hired Maria Truczinski, my poor friend Herbert's youngest sister, to work in the store.

Maria wasn't just named for a saint, she was one. Not only did she manage, within a few weeks, to restore the good reputation of our shop, she also showed, along with her friendly but firm approach to business, to which Matzerath gladly submitted, some true understanding for my situation.

Even before taking her place behind the counter, Maria had offered me an old washbasin on several occasions as a substitute for the scrapheap I held at my tummy as I stamped accusingly up and down the hundred-plus steps of the stairwell. But Oskar would accept no substitute. He steadfastly refused to drum on an overturned washbasin. No sooner had Maria gained a firm foothold in the business, however, than she managed, in spite of Matzerath, to accommodate my wishes. Of course Oskar could not be persuaded to enter a toy store at her side. The interiors of those brightly colored, overstocked shops would surely have evoked painful comparisons with Sigismund Markus's devastated shop. Maria, gentle and compliant, let me wait outside, or went shopping on her own, brought me a new drum every four or five weeks as needed, and during the final years of the war, when even tin drums were rare and rationed, offered the shopkeepers sugar or an ounce of real coffee and received my drum under the table, as so-called UT goods. All this she did without sighing, shaking her head, or glancing heavenward, but with the same serious, attentive, and matter-of-fact air she assumed when she dressed me in freshly laundered, properly mended trousers, socks, and smocks. Though relations between Maria and me have remained in constant flux over the intervening years, and are unsettled to this day, the way in which she hands me my drum remains unchanged, though the price of tin drums has risen substantially since nineteen-forty.

Today, Maria subscribes to a fashion magazine. She looks more elegant from one Visitors Day to the next. And back then?

Was Maria beautiful? She had a round, freshly washed face, gazed out coolly but not coldly from slightly protruding gray eyes with short but thick lashes beneath strong, dark eyebrows that merged above the bridge of her nose. Clearly defined cheekbones—with skin that grew
taut, turned bluish, and chapped painfully in cold weather—lent a calming regularity to her features, barely interrupted by a diminutive nose that was by no means unattractive or comical in any way, but rather, in spite of its delicacy, nicely shaped. Her forehead was small and round, and even early on marked by thoughtful vertical creases above the brows that merged over her nose. Rounded too was the slightly curly brown hair at her temples, which still has the sheen of wet tree trunks today, drawn back tightly, like Mother Truczinski's, to span a small, round skull that barely revealed its back. When Maria donned her long white smock and took her place behind our shop counter, she still wore braids behind her flushed, robustly healthy ears, whose earlobes unfortunately were not free but attached, growing straight into the flesh of her lower jaws, without any ugly creases to be sure, but still degenerate enough to draw conclusions about Maria's character. Later, Matzerath talked the young girl into a permanent wave and her ears remained hidden. These days Maria lets her attached earlobes show beneath a short, stylish hairdo, but hides this blemish by means of large and slightly tasteless clip-ons.

Just as Maria's small, easily encompassed head displayed full cheeks, high cheekbones, and generously large eyes on both sides of its almost inconspicuous, inset nose, so her body, which was more small than medium, was provided with somewhat overly broad shoulders, full breasts swelling right from her armpits, and an opulent bottom to match her pelvis, which was supported in turn by legs that were strong but too slender, leaving a visible gap beneath her pubic hair.

Perhaps Maria was a bit knock-kneed back then. And her permanently reddened hands always struck me, compared to her fully grown, fully developed body, as somewhat childlike, with fingers a bit like sausages. To this day she can't deny that she has little paws. Her feet, on the other hand, which trudged about in bulky walking shoes back then and somewhat later in my poor mama's little shoes, which were stylish but old-fashioned and didn't really fit her, gradually lost their childish redness and drollness in spite of being forced into those hand-me-downs, and eventually fit modern models from West Germany and even Italy.

Maria didn't talk much but liked to sing while she washed dishes and while she filled blue pound and half-pound sacks with sugar. After the shop closed, while Matzerath busied himself with his accounts, on
Sundays too, and whenever she could take a half-hour break, she would pick up the harmonica her brother Fritz had given her when he was drafted and sent to Groß-Boschpol.

Maria could play pretty much anything on the harmonica. Scout songs she'd learned evenings at the League of German Girls, tunes from operettas, and hits she'd heard on the radio or learned from her brother Fritz, who came back to Danzig for several days on official business at Easter in nineteen-forty. Oskar recalls that Maria could play "Raindrops" with flutter tongue, and coax "The Wind Told Me a Tale" from her harmonica without imitating Zarah Leander. Maria never pulled her Hohner out during business hours. Even when there were no customers she refrained from playing and wrote out price tags and inventory lists in round, childlike letters.

Though you couldn't help seeing that she was in charge of the shop and had won back a number of the customers who'd switched to the competition after my poor mama's death, she maintained a respect for Matzerath that bordered on servility, which he didn't find in the least embarrassing, since he always thought highly of himself.

"After all, I'm the one who hired the girl and taught her the business," his argument ran, whenever the greengrocer Greff and Gretchen Scheffler started teasing him. So simple were the thought processes of this man, who grew refined, sensitive, and therefore interesting only while engaged in his favorite pastime, namely cooking. Oskar had to hand it to him: his Kassler ribs with sauerkraut, his pork kidneys in mustard sauce, his fried Wiener schnitzel, and above all his carp with cream and horseradish, were sights to behold, not to mention smell and taste. There wasn't much he could teach Maria in the shop, because the girl brought an inborn talent for small business with her, and Matzerath, who was almost totally lacking in the fine art of countertop commerce, was fit only for dealing with wholesalers, but he did teach Maria how to boil, roast, and stew, for in spite of spending two years as a maid to a family of civil servants in Schidlitz, she couldn't even boil water when she came to us.

Soon Matzerath had things the way they were in my poor mama's lifetime: he reigned in the kitchen, outdid himself from Sunday roast to Sunday roast, spent hours contentedly washing dishes, while on the side, so to speak, he handled purchases, orders, and payments with
wholesale firms and the Rations Office—increasingly difficult during those war years—conducted correspondence with the tax bureau with a certain shrewdness, decorated the shop window every other week, not half badly, showing imagination and good taste, fulfilled his Party nonsense conscientiously, all of which, while Maria stood firm as a rock at the counter, kept him very busy.

You may well be thinking: What's the point of all these preparatory remarks, this detailed concern with a young girl's cheekbones, eyebrows, earlobes, hands, and feet? I totally agree; I don't like describing a person this way any more than you do. Oskar is firmly convinced he's done nothing thus far but distort Maria's image, if not permanently falsify it. So one final sentence that I hope will clarify everything: Maria was, leaving aside all those anonymous nurses, Oskar's first love.

I realized my state while listening to myself drum one day, which I rarely did, and noticed something new: insistently yet gently, Oskar was communicating his passion to the drum. Maria responded to my drumming. Though I didn't much like it when she picked up her harmonica, furrowed her brow in an ugly way, and felt she had to accompany me. But often, when she was darning socks or filling sacks with sugar, she would lower her hands, gaze past the drumsticks at me, gravely and attentively, her face completely calm, and before resuming her darning, with a soft, sleepy motion, run her hand over my short, stubbly hair.

Oskar, who couldn't bear even the slightest contact otherwise, no matter how affectionately intended, accepted Maria's hand, and became so addicted to that caress that he often played for hours, deliberately beating out the seductive rhythm on his drum that led to the caress, till Maria's hand at last obeyed and brought him pleasure.

After a time Maria began putting me to bed each night. She undressed me, washed me, helped me into my pajamas, advised me to empty my bladder again before going to sleep, said an Our Father with me, though she was Protestant, three Hail Marys, and now and then a Jesusiliveforyoujesusidieforyou, and finally tucked me in with a friendly, sleepy-making face.

As pleasant as I found those final minutes before the lights went off—I gradually replaced the Our Father and Jesusiliveforyou with the tenderly allusive Staroftheseaigreetthee and Maryilovethee—the nightly preparations before going to bed embarrassed me and nearly
undermined my self-control, reducing me, despite my normal mastery over my features, to the traitorous blush of teenage flappers and lovesick young men. Oskar admits: each time Maria undressed me, placed me in the zinc tub and leached and scrubbed the dust of a day's drumming from my skin with a washcloth, brush, and soap, each time I realized that I, a nearly sixteen-year-old boy, was standing stark naked before a nearly seventeen-year-old girl, I blushed deeply and continued to glow for some time.

But Maria didn't seem to notice the change in the color of my skin. Did she think her brush and washcloth had heated me up so? Did she tell herself it must be hygiene stoking Oskar's fire? Or was Maria modest and tactful enough that she saw through my daily evening glow and simply ignored it?

I'm still a slave to this sudden flush that's impossible to hide and often lasts five minutes or so. Like my grandfather Koljaiczek the arsonist, who turned fire-engine rooster red at the mere mention of the word match, the blood courses through my veins the moment anyone, even a total stranger, tells of small children being plied with washcloth and brush each evening in a bathtub. Oskar stands there like a red Indian; the world smiles, calls me strange, even perverse: for what can it mean to the world if little children are soaped up, scrubbed off, and visited by a little washcloth in the most private of places.

But Maria, who was a child of nature, did the most daring things in my presence without embarrassment. Every time she mopped the living room and bedroom floors she would reach halfway up her thighs and pull off the stockings Matzerath had given her, because she wanted to spare them. One Saturday after closing—Matzerath was busy at local Party headquarters—Maria removed her skirt and blouse, stood beside me in the living room in her worn but clean slip, and started removing spots from her skirt and artificial silk blouse with gasoline.

What could it have been that gave Maria, once she had taken off her outer garments, and as soon as the smell of gasoline had evaporated, the pleasant, naively bewitching smell of vanilla? Did she rub herself with the root? Was there some cheap perfume that tended in that olfactory direction? Or was this fragrance as specific to her as the fumes of ammonia Frau Kater exuded, or the smell of slightly rancid butter beneath
my grandmother Koljaiczek's skirts? Oskar, who always liked to get to the bottom of things, investigated the vanilla: Maria didn't rub it on herself. Maria just smelled that way. Yes, I'm convinced to this day that she wasn't even aware of the scent that clung to her, for if on a Sunday, after roast veal with mashed potatoes and cauliflower in brown butter, a vanilla pudding trembled on the table because I was kicking the table leg with my boot, Maria, who went into ecstasies over a red berry dessert, ate but little of it and with evident distaste, while to this very day Oskar is in love with this simplest and perhaps most banal of all puddings.

In July of nineteen-forty, shortly after special communiqués had announced the rapid success of the campaign in France, bathing season opened on the Baltic. While Maria's brother Fritz, now an airman second class, was mailing his first picture postcards from Paris, Matzerath and Maria decided Oskar ought to go to the beach, the sea air would do him good. Maria was to take me to the Brôsen beach at midday—the shop closed from one to three—and if she stayed on till four, Matzerath said, that wouldn't be a problem, he enjoyed taking a turn behind the counter now and then and showing himself to the customers.

A blue bathing suit with an anchor sewn on it was purchased for Oskar. Maria already had a green one trimmed in red that her sister Guste had given her for confirmation. Into a beach bag from Mama's day were stuffed a white terrycloth bathrobe of the same vintage and, quite superfluously, a little pail and shovel and various sandcake molds. Maria carried the bag. My drum I carried myself.

Oskar was apprehensive about the tram ride past the cemetery at Saspe. Was it not to be feared that the sight of that so silent yet eloquent spot would spoil his enthusiasm for the beach, which wasn't all that great anyway? What will the spirit of Jan Bronski do, Oskar asked himself, when the agent of his undoing, lightly clad for summer, jangles past his grave on a tram?