The Tin Drum (66 page)

"Well, today, for instance, I get off at five. But nothing's happening in town," Sister Gertrud said with resignation.

I told her it was worth a try. At first she declined, she'd rather get a good night's sleep. Then I was more direct, came out with my invitation, and since she still couldn't make up her mind, concluded mysteriously with the words: "Show a little spirit, Sister Gertrud. You're only young once. There'll certainly be no lack of cake stamps." I illustrated this by giving the breast pocket of my jacket a slightly stylized tap, offered her another sweet, and, strangely enough, felt a mild wave of terror when I heard this strapping young Westphalian, who was not at all my type, turn away toward a small medicine cabinet and say, "All right then, if you think so. At six, let's say, but not here, at Corneliusplatz."

I would hardly have expected Sister Gertrud to meet me in the lobby or at the entrance to the hospital. At six o'clock I was waiting for her under the city clock on Corneliusplatz, which was still suffering the effects of war and could not tell time. She was punctual, as I could see from the relatively inexpensive pocket watch I had purchased a few weeks before. I almost didn't recognize her, and if I had seen her step off the tram
in time, some fifty paces away say, at the tram stop across the street, before she noticed me, I would have slipped away, sidled off in disappointment; for Sister Gertrud did not arrive as Sister Gertrud, did not appear in white with her Red Cross pin, but as just another woman in civilian clothes of the poorest cut, just another Fräulein Gertrud Wilms from Hamm or Dortmund or some other place between Hamm and Dortmund.

She didn't notice my dismay, but said she'd almost been late because the head nurse had given her something to do shortly before five, just to be mean.

"Now, Fräulein Gertrud, may I offer a few suggestions? Perhaps we could go to a pastry shop first and relax a while, and whatever you want after that: a movie perhaps, I'm afraid it's too late for theater tickets, but how about a little dancing?"

"Oh, yes, let's go dancing!" she cried with enthusiasm, then realized too late, with a distress she could scarcely conceal, that although I was well dressed, I would cut an impossible figure as her dancing partner.

With mild schadenfreude—why hadn't she appeared in the nurse's uniform I so admired?—I seconded the plan, one she herself had approved, and, lacking any true power of imagination, she soon recovered from her shock and joined me in some cake that seemed filled with cement, one slice for me and three for her, and after I'd paid with cake stamps and cash, we boarded the Gerresheim tram at Koch am Wehrhahn, since, according to Korneff, there was a dance hall below Grafenberg.

The tram only went as far as the incline, so we made our way slowly up the last stretch on foot. A picture-perfect September evening. Gertrud's wooden sandals, no redeemable coupons necessary, clattered like the mill on the floss. That made me feel gay. People coming downhill turned around and stared at us. Fräulein Gertrud was embarrassed. I was used to it and took no notice: after all, my cake stamps had helped her to three slices of cement cake at Kürten's Pastry Shop.

The dance hall was called Wedig's and was subtitled Löwenburg, or The Lions' Den. The giggling started at the ticket window, and when we entered, heads began to turn. Sister Gertrud was ill at ease in her civilian clothes and almost tripped over a folding chair before a waiter and
I caught her. The waiter led us to a table near the dance floor and I ordered two cold drinks, adding in an undertone, so only the waiter could hear, "And put a little something in them, please."

The Löwenburg consisted of one large room that might once have served as a riding academy. The upper regions of the room, including its heavily damaged ceiling, were festooned with paper streamers and garlands from last year's Carnival. Dim colored lights revolved overhead, casting reflections on the tightly slicked-back hair of young black marketers, some quite elegant, and on the taffeta blouses of the young women, who all seemed to know one another.

When the cold drinks with a little something in them were served, I bought ten Yankee cigarettes from the waiter, offered one to Sister Gertrud and another to the waiter, who stuck it behind his ear, and after giving my lady a light, pulled out Oskar's amber cigarette holder and smoked about half a Camel. The tables near us quieted down. Sister Gertrud dared look up. And when I crushed out the stately stub of the Camel in the ashtray and left it there, Sister Gertrud picked up the butt smoothly and tucked it away in a side pocket of her oilcloth handbag.

"For my fiancé in Dortmund," she said, "he smokes like crazy."

I was glad I wasn't her fiancé, and that the music had started up.

The five-man band played "Don't Fence Me In." Young men in crêpe soles dashed diagonally across the dance floor without colliding and angled for young ladies who entrusted their handbags to friends as they rose.

Some couples danced with a smoothness born of long practice. Quantities of chewing gum in motion, a few fellows stopped dancing for several beats, held their partners, who continued impatiently bobbing up and down in place, by the arm—scraps of English now leavened the stock of Rhenish words. Before the couples returned to their dance, small items had been passed on: true black marketers never have a night off.

We sat out that dance, and the next foxtrot as well. Now and then Oskar glanced at the men's feet and, as the band struck up "Rosamunde," asked Gertrud, who reacted with dismay, to dance.

Recalling Jan Bronski's choreographic skills, realizing I was nearly two heads shorter than Sister Gertrud, well aware that our alliance offered a note of the grotesque and even wishing to emphasize it, I tried a
one-step: placing my hand on her bottom, I turned my palm outward, felt thirty percent wool, and with my cheek on her blouse as she gave in to my lead, shoved a strong Sister Gertrud back lock, stock, and barrel, followed hard on her heels, cleared the way to our left with arms stretched out, and crossed the dance floor from corner to corner. It went better than I had dared hope. I allowed myself a few fancy steps, clung to her blouse above and her hips below, to the hold that they offered, left and right, dancing about her, maintaining the classical one-step position, where the lady looks as if she were falling, and the gentleman pushing her over seems ready to fall right on top of her; yet because they're such good dancers, they never fall.

We soon had an audience. I heard cries like: "Didn't I tell you he could dance! Look at 'im go! A real Jimmy the Tiger.
Come on,
Jimmy!
Let's go,
crazylegs! Go, man, go!"

Unfortunately I couldn't see Sister Gertrud's face and could only hope that she was accepting this youthful ovation with proud composure, having resigned herself to their applause, just as she resigned herself as a nurse to the often awkward flattery of her patients.

They were still clapping when we sat down. The five-man band gave a flourish, their drummer leading the way, then another and yet a third. "Hey you, Jimmy!" they called out, and "Did you see those two?" Then Sister Gertrud rose, mumbled something about the ladies' room, picked up the handbag with the cigarette butt for her fiancé in Dortmund, and, blushing furiously, pushed her way out, knocking into chairs and tables on every side, heading toward the ladies' room near the ticket window.

She never came back. From the fact that she'd downed her drink in one gulp before leaving I gathered that draining a glass signaled farewell: Sister Gertrud had jilted me.

And Oskar? A Yankee cigarette in his amber holder, he ordered a straight schnapps from the waiter, who was discreetly removing the nurse's glass, drained to the dregs. Oskar forced a smile. Painfully, it's true, but he smiled, crossed his arms above, his legs below, wagged his delicate black shoe, size thirty-five European, and enjoyed the moral superiority of the abandoned.

The young people, regular guests at the Löwenburg, were kind, waved to me as they swung by on the dance floor. "Hey, there!" the fellows yelled, and the girls,
"Take it easy!
" I thanked these representatives
of true humanity by waving my cigarette holder and grinned indulgently as the percussionist gave an elaborate drumroll, reminding me of my good old days in the grandstands, launched into a solo on snare, bass drum, cymbals, and triangle, and announced a ladies' choice.

The band played a hot number, "Jimmy the Tiger." This was meant for me, no doubt, though no one in the Löwenburg could possibly have known of my career as a drummer under grandstands. At any rate the young quicksilvery thing with a mop of henna-red curls who'd singled me out as the man of her choice whispered tobacco hoarse and chewing-gum wide into my ear, "Jimmy the Tiger." And while we danced a fast Jimmy, conjuring up the jungle and all its dangers, the tiger prowled on tiger paws for almost ten minutes. Again a flourish, applause, and another flourish, because I had a well-dressed hump, was nimble on my feet, and didn't cut a bad figure at all as Jimmy the Tiger. I invited the young lady so favorably disposed toward me to sit at my table, and Helma—that was her name—asked if her friend Hannelore could join us. Hannelore was silent, sedentary, and hard drinking. Helma in turn had a thing for Yankee cigarettes, and I had to order more from the waiter.

The evening went well. I danced "Hey Ba Ba Re Bop," "In the Mood," and "Shoeshine Boy," made small talk in between, and entertained two easily pleased young women who told me they both worked at the longdistance telephone exchange on Graf-Adolf-Platz, and said even more girls from the exchange came to Wedig's on Saturdays and Sundays. At any rate they came every weekend, unless they had to work, and I promised I would come often too, because Helma and Hannelore were so nice, and because girls who worked long distance—and here I made a little play on words they both caught at once—also knew how to work up close.

It was a long time before I dropped by the hospital again. And when I resumed my occasional visits, Sister Gertrud had been transferred to the women's ward. I no longer saw her, except once, briefly, waving in the distance. I became a regular and welcome guest at the Löwenburg. The girls exploited me a good deal, but not excessively. Through them I came to know several members of the British Army of Occupation, picked up dozens of English words and phrases, and even became close friends with a couple of the band members at the Löwenburg, but
as for drumming I held back, never sat down at the drums, and instead rested content with the modest joy of tapping out letters in stone at Korneff's workshop.

During the hard winter of forty-seven to forty-eight I remained in contact with the girls from the telephone exchange, and was warmed from time to time, at no great cost, by the silent, sedentary Hannelore, though we always maintained a certain distance and restricted ourselves to noncommittal manual labor.

In winter the stonecutter rests and restores. Tools are resharpened, the surfaces of a few old slabs are pounded flat for inscriptions, missing corners are ground into chamfers and fluted. Korneff and I replenished the gravestone display, which had thinned out during the fall season, and cast a few synthetic slabs from a mixture of shell limestone, sand, and cement. I also tried my hand at some of the easier sculptural elements with the pointing machine—reliefs of the heads of angels, Christ's head with a crown of thorns, the dove of the Holy Spirit. When it snowed I shoveled snow, and when it didn't snow I thawed the water line to the grinder.

Toward the end of February forty-eight, shortly after Ash Wednesday—I'd lost weight during Carnival and may have been looking a bit wan and intellectual, for some of the girls at the Löwenburg took to calling me Doctor—the first farmers from the left bank of the Rhine arrived to inspect our stock of gravestones. Korneff was away. He was taking his annual rheumatism cure, working at a blast furnace in Duisburg, and when he returned fourteen days later, dried out and sans boils, I had already managed to sell three stones, one of them for a triple plot, at a good price. Korneff sold off another two slabs of Kirchheim shell limestone, and in mid-March we began installing them. One of Silesian marble went to Grevenbroich; the two Kirchheim meter-high stones are in a village graveyard near Neuss; the red Main sandstone with my angel heads may still be admired today at the cemetery in Stomml. At the end of March we loaded up the diorite slab for the triple plot with Christ's thorn-crowned head and drove off slowly, because the three-wheeler was overloaded, toward Kappes-Hamm and the bridge crossing the Rhine at Neuss. From Neuss by way of Grevenbroich to Rommerskirchen, then right on the road to Bergheim Erft, leaving Rheydt and Niederaußem behind us, we delivered the block and its base with
out breaking an axle to the cemetery in Oberaußem, which lay on a hill that sloped gently toward the village.

What a view! At our feet the soft-coal district of Erftland. The eight chimneys of the Fortuna Works, steaming heavenward. The new Fortuna North power plant, hissing as though about to explode. Midrange mountains of slag, topped by cable cars and tipping wagons. Every three minutes an electric train, full of coke or empty. Coming from the power plant or headed toward it, small and toylike; next, leaping over the left corner of the cemetery, a toy for giants: high-voltage wires in triple ranks, buzzing with high tension, racing off toward Cologne. Other lines in rank rushing toward the horizon, toward Belgium and Holland: hub of the world—we set up the diorite slab for the Flies family—electricity is generated when ... The gravedigger and his helper, who substituted for Crazy Leo on this occasion, arrived with tools, we stood in a field of electric tension, the gravedigger began unearthing a grave three rows down from us to relocate its occupant—war reparations rushed on their way—the breeze brought us the typical smells of a premature exhumation—not too disgusting, it was still March. Slag heaps of coke on the March fields. The gravedigger wore a pair of glasses held together with string and argued in an undertone with his Crazy Leo till the siren at Fortuna expelled its breath for one long minute, we were out of breath too, not to mention the woman being moved, only the high-tension lines kept right on working as the siren tipped, toppled overboard, and drowned—while smoke curled up in noonday fashion from the slate-gray slate roofs of the village and church bells chimed in: Pray now, work now—industry and religion hand in hand. Change of shift at Fortuna, bacon sandwiches for us, but no rest for those moving the woman or for the high-voltage current rushing restlessly through to the victorious powers, lighting up Holland, while here the current was still constantly being cut off—and yet the dead woman was brought to the light.