The Tin Drum (44 page)

Of course this line of reasoning never occurred to Matzerath, who issued the invitation. Even in moments of greatest self-doubt—after losing his shirt in a game of skat, for example—he always regarded himself as a begetter, father, and provider twice over. Oskar saw his grandparents again owing to other factors. The two old people had been Germanized. They were no longer Poles, and only their dreams remained Kashubian. Ethnic Germans they called them, Ethnic Group Three. In addition, Hedwig Bronski, Jan's widow, had married a Baltic German who ran the Local Farm Association in Ramkau. Petitions had already been submitted which, once granted, would allow Marga and Stephan Bronski to take on the name of their stepfather Ehlers. Seventeen-year-old Stephan had volunteered, he was at the Infantry Training Camp at Groß-Boschpol, and chances were good he'd get to visit various European theaters of war, while Oskar, who would soon be of military age himself, would have to wait behind his drum until the army, navy, or perhaps even the air force could think of a way to use a three-year-old tin-drummer boy.

Local Farm Leader Ehlers took the initiative. Two weeks before the baptism he pulled up at Labesweg in a carriage and pair with Hedwig on the box beside him. He was bowlegged, had a bad stomach, and didn't come close to measuring up to Jan Bronski. He sat a full head shorter beside the cow-eyed Hedwig at the living room table. Even Matzerath was surprised at his appearance. No one could think of anything to say. They discussed the weather, agreed that all sorts of things were happening in the east, that they were making good progress, much better than they had in nineteen-fifteen, as Matzerath, who'd been there in nineteen-fifteen, recalled. They were all at pains to avoid any mention of Jan Bronski till I drew a line through their silent calculations by giving a droll, childish pout and crying out loudly several times for Oskar's uncle Jan. Matzerath gave a start, and made a few amiable remarks followed by some thoughtful words about his former friend and rival. Ehlers quickly chimed in at some length, though he'd never laid eyes on
his predecessor. Hedwig even produced a few authentic tears that rolled slowly down her cheeks and offered the concluding observation on Jan: "A good man he was. And wouldn't hurt a fly. Who'd think he'd end like that, he was always such a scaredy-cat, scared of the least little thing."

Moved by these words, Matzerath asked Maria, who was standing behind him, to fetch a few bottles of beer, and asked Ehlers if he played skat. Ehlers was sorry to say he didn't, but Matzerath was magnanimous enough to forgive the Local Farm Leader this minor shortcoming. He even clapped him on the shoulder and assured him, with beer already in their glasses, that it didn't matter if he couldn't play skat, they could still be friends.

So Hedwig Bronski found her way back to our flat as Hedwig Ehlers, and, along with her Local Farm Leader, brought her former father-in-law Vinzent Bronski and his sister Anna to my son Kurt's baptism. Matzerath seemed to be in the know, gave the old folks a loud, friendly welcome on the street, beneath the neighbors' windows, and said in the living room, when my grandmother reached under her four skirts and pulled out the baptismal gift, a fine fat goose, "You didn't have to do that, dearie. I'm just glad you came, even if you didn't bring a thing." But that didn't sit right with my grandmother, who wanted some appreciation for her goose. She slapped her flat palm on the fat bird in protest: "Don't be like that, Alfie. This is no Kashubian goose, it's ethnic German, and tastes just like before the war."

That solved all the ethnic problems, and there were no further difficulties till the baptism, when Oskar refused to set foot in the Protestant church. Even when they fetched my drum from the taxi, used it as bait, and kept assuring me that drums could be carried openly in Protestant churches, I remained the blackest of Catholics and would sooner have poured a brief, summary confession into Father Wiehnke's pastoral ear than listen to a Protestant baptismal sermon. Matzerath gave in. He probably dreaded my voice and attendant claims for damages. So while the baptism took place in the church I stayed in the taxi and examined the back of the driver's head, scrutinized Oskar's face in the rearview mirror, and recalled my own baptism all those years ago and Father Wiehnke's repeated attempts to drive Satan from the infant Oskar.

After the baptism we ate. Two tables were shoved together and we started with mock turtle soup. Spoons and bowl rims. The country folk
slurped. Greff crooked his little finger. Gretchen Scheffler bit into the soup. Guste smiled broadly over her spoon. Ehlers talked with the spoon in his mouth. With a shaky hand Vinzent searched with his spoon. Only the old women, Grandmother Anna and Mother Truczinski, were devoting themselves wholly to their spoons, while Oskar, dropping the spoon so to speak, slipped off while they were still spooning, and sought his son's cradle in the bedroom, for he wanted to think about his son, while the others shriveled up behind their spoons with blank minds, spooned out, in spite of all the soup they were spooning in.

Light blue tulle heavens over the little basket on wheels. Since the basket's rim was too high, all I could spot at first was something reddish blue and pinched. I placed my drum under me and watched my son twitching nervously in his sleep. O paternal pride, always seeking grandiose phrases. Since I could think of nothing in the infant's presence but the brief sentence, When he's three years old he'll get a drum—since my son offered no information about the inner world of his thoughts, since I could only hope that, like me, he might belong to the race of clairaudient infants, I again promised him a tin drum on his third birthday, repeated it several times, descended from my own drum, and tried my luck once more with the grownups in the living room.

They were just finishing off the mock turtle soup. Maria brought out the sweet green canned peas in butter. Matzerath, who was responsible for the pork roast, served it himself from the platter: he removed his jacket, cut slice after slice in his shirtsleeves, and looked with such unabashed tenderness at the tender juicy meat that I had to avert my eyes.

The greengrocer Greff was served separately. He was given canned asparagus, hardboiled eggs, and radishes with cream, since vegetarians don't eat meat. Like everyone else, however, he took a dollop of homemade mashed potatoes, but didn't pour sauce from the roast over them, using instead the browned butter an attentive Maria brought him from the kitchen in a sizzling pan. While the others drank beer, Greff had a glass of fruit juice. They talked about the encirclement of Kiev, counted up the number of prisoners on their fingers. Ehlers, the Baltic native, was particularly deft at this; he shot up a finger for each hundred thousand, and then when his spread hands had reached a million, he continued to count by lopping the top off one finger after another. When they'd
exhausted the subject of Russian prisoners of war, who grew increasingly worthless and uninteresting as their numbers increased, Scheffler told us about the U-boats in Gotenhafen, and Matzerath whispered in my grandmother Anna's ear that two submarines a week were being launched at Schichau. Upon which the greengrocer Greff explained to the guests why submarines had to be launched sideways rather than stern first. He tried to give them a vivid picture of the whole procedure, using gestures that a few of the guests, who were fascinated by U-boats, imitated attentively and awkwardly. Vinzent Bronski knocked over his beer glass with his left hand trying to duplicate a diving U-boat. My grandmother scolded him. But Maria calmed her down, said it didn't matter, the tablecloth was going into the wash tomorrow anyway; you had to expect a few stains at a baptismal dinner. And there came Mother Truczinski with a rag to sop up the puddle of beer, and in her left hand she held the big crystal bowl full of chocolate pudding with cracked almonds.

Oh, if that chocolate pudding had only had some other sauce, or none at all! But it had to be vanilla. Vanilla sauce: flowing thick and yellow. A totally banal vanilla sauce, commonplace, yet unparalleled. There may be nothing in this world as joyous as vanilla sauce, nor anything as sad. The vanilla gently released its fragrance, enveloping me more and more in Maria, prime source of all vanilla, so that I could no longer bear to look at her, sitting there by Matzerath, holding his hand in hers.

Oskar scooted down off his little chair, clinging tightly to Frau Greff's skirts as he did so, remained lying at her feet as she spooned away, and partook for the first time of Lina Greff's own particular effluvium, which instantly shouted down, swallowed up, killed off all vanilla.

As sourly as it struck me, I persevered on this new aromatic course till all my memories connected with vanilla seemed numbed. Slowly, silently, and steadily, I was overcome by a liberating nausea. While the mock turtle soup, chunks of roast pork, nearly intact canned green peas, and a few small spoonfuls of chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce escaped me, I realized my helplessness, floundered in my helplessness, spread Oskar's helplessness out at the feet of Lina Greff—and decided from then on to carry my helplessness daily to Frau Greff.

Vyazma and Bryansk; then the era of mud set in. In mid-October of forty-one Oskar too began wallowing robustly in mud. I hope you will indulge me if I draw a parallel between the mud-logged victories of Army Group Center and my victories in the trackless and equally muddy terrain of Frau Lina Greff. Just as tanks and trucks bogged down outside Moscow, so I too bogged down; of course the wheels did not stop spinning there, throwing up mud, nor did I slacken my efforts—I managed literally to whip up a little froth in the Greffian mud—but no territory of any note was gained outside Moscow, or in the bedroom of the Greffian flat.

I'm not yet ready to abandon this comparison: just as future strategists would draw lessons from those bogged-down muddy campaigns, I drew my own conclusions from my battle with that Greffian phenomenon of nature. One should not underestimate these campaigns on the home front during the last world war. Oskar was seventeen back then, yet in spite of his youth he developed into a man on the treacherously convoluted training grounds of Lina Greff. Abandoning the military comparisons, let me now measure Oskar's progress in artistic terms: if Maria taught me the minor modes in her naively bewitching vanilla fog, familiarizing me with lyrical forms like fizz powder and mushroom gathering, I found in the stringent, sour, and multilayered Greffian effluvium that expansive epic breath which today allows me to combine victories on the front and victories in bed in a single sentence. Music! From Maria's childlike and sentimental yet ever so sweet harmonica straight to the conductor's stand; for Lina Greff offered me an orches
tra of a depth and range found only in Bayreuth or Salzburg. There I learned to blow, strum, puff, pluck, and bow, whether it involved continuo or counterpoint, twelve-tone or atonal, the entry to the scherzo or the tempo of the andante, my emotional tone was at once rigorously precise and softly flowing; Oskar drew all there was from Frau Greff and, though satisfied, remained dissatisfied, like any true artist.

It was only twenty short steps from our grocery store to the Greffs' vegetable shop. Their shop was conveniently located just across and down the street, and was far easier to reach than the flat of Alexander Scheffler, the master baker, on Kleinhammerweg. It may have been due to this more favorable location that I made more progress in female anatomy than in the study of my masters Goethe and Rasputin. Perhaps this gaping disparity in knowledge, which persists to this very day, may be explained and even excused by the difference between my two female teachers. While Lina Greff had no interest in educating me but simply placed her riches straightforwardly and passively at my disposal, to be viewed and experimented with as I wished, Gretchen Scheffler took her role as a teacher all too seriously. She wanted to see progress, wanted me to read aloud, wanted to see my drummer-boy fingers engaged in penmanship, wanted me to make friends with fair Grammatika and even profit from that friendship herself. When Oskar nonetheless refused to show any visible signs of progress, Gretchen Scheffler lost patience, and soon after my poor mama's death, following what had after all been seven years of instruction, returned to her embroidery and, since her baker's marriage remained childless, merely favored me now and then, particularly on major holidays, with sweaters, socks, and mittens she had knitted herself. There was no more talk of Goethe and Rasputin, and it was only thanks to the excerpts from the works of both masters which I continued to stash away here and there, mostly in the drying attic of our building, that this side of Oskar's studies didn't bog down entirely; I educated myself and formed my own judgments.

The ailing Lina Greff was confined to her bed, however, and could neither avoid nor abandon me, for her illness was indeed a lingering one, but not serious enough that Death could snatch my teacher Lina from me before her time. But since nothing on this star lasts forever, it was Oskar who abandoned the bedridden woman the moment he considered his studies complete.

You will say: What a narrow world this young man was reduced to for his education! Forced to piece together his armor for a later manly life from a grocery store, a bakery, and a vegetable shop. Though I must admit that Oskar received his first, all so important impressions in extremely stuffy petit-bourgeois surroundings, he also had a third teacher. To this man fell the task of opening up the world to Oskar, of making him what he is today, a person upon whom, for want of any better designation, I bestow the inadequate title cosmopolitan.

I'm referring, as the most attentive among you will have noted, to my teacher and master Bebra, direct descendant of Prince Eugen, scion of the house of Louis the Fourteenth, the dwarf and musical clown Bebra. When I say Bebra, I include of course the lady at his side, the great somnambulist Roswitha Raguna, the timeless beauty to whom my thoughts were often drawn during those dark years after Matzerath took my Maria from me. How old, I wondered, can she be, the Signora? Is she a blooming girl of twenty, or even nineteen? Or is she that delicately graceful ninety-nine-year-old lady, who, a hundred years from now, will still indestructibly embody the small-scale format of eternal youth?