The Tin Drum (79 page)

I followed them slowly. I didn't have far to go. There was a detour around some roadwork. The detour led past a gravel pit. And in the gravel pit, over twenty feet below, lay the black Mercedes with its wheels in the air.

Some workmen in the gravel pit had pulled the three injured occupants and Schmuh's body from the car. The ambulance was already on its way. I clambered down into the pit, my shoes soon full of gravel, and gave what little help I could to the injured; in spite of their pain they tried to ask questions, but I didn't tell them Schmuh was dead. Stiff and
startled he stared at the sky, which was mostly cloudy. The newspaper with its afternoon's plunder had been thrown from the car. I counted twelve sparrows, couldn't find the thirteenth, and was still looking for it when the ambulance was funneled down into the gravel pit.

Schmuh's wife, Klepp, and Scholle had suffered minor injuries: bruises, a few broken ribs. Later, when I went to see Klepp in the hospital and asked what caused the accident, he told me an amazing story: as they were driving past the gravel pit, slowly because of the poor condition of the detour, scores or even hundreds of sparrows rose in clouds from the hedges, bushes, and fruit trees, cast a shadow across the Mercedes, banged against the windshield, frightened Schmuh's wife, and by sheer sparrow power caused the wreck and Schmuh's death.

Whatever you may think of Klepp's story, Oskar remains skeptical, since he counted no more sparrows when Schmuh was buried in South Cemetery than he had in previous years among the gravestones as a stonecutter and letterman. Be that as it may, as I followed along with the train of mourners behind the coffin in a borrowed top hat, I saw the stonecutter Korneff with an assistant I didn't know, setting up a diorite slab for a double plot in Section Nine. As the coffin with Schmuh was carried past the stonecutter on its way to the newly opened Section Ten, Korneff doffed his cap in accordance with cemetery rules, failed to recognize me, perhaps because of the top hat, but did rub the back of his neck, indicating ripening or overripe boils.

Funerals! I've been obliged to take you to so many cemeteries already, and as I've said elsewhere, funerals always make you think of other funerals—so I won't report on Schmuh's funeral and Oskar's retrospective musings at the time—Schmuh's descent into the earth went smoothly, and nothing special happened—but I will tell you that after the funeral—the mood was fairly informal, since the widow was still in the hospital—a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as Dr. Dösch.

Dr. Dösch ran a concert agency. But he didn't own the agency. Dr. Dösch also identified himself as a former customer at The Onion Cellar. I'd never noticed him there. Nevertheless he'd been present when I turned Schmuh's guests into babbling, joyful children. Dösch himself, he told me in confidence, had reverted to a state of childhood bliss under the influence of my tin drum, and now wanted to feature me and what
he called my "cool trick" in a major production. He was fully authorized to offer me a fantastic contract; all I had to do was sign. He pulled it out in front of the crematorium, where Crazy Leo, who was called Weird Willem in Düsseldorf, was waiting in white gloves for the mourners; in return for huge sums of money, I would have to appear alone onstage in theaters seating two to three thousand people and offer solo performances as "Oskar the Drummer." Dösch was inconsolable when I said I couldn't sign right then and there. I offered Schmuh's death as an excuse, I'd been so close to Schmuh, I just couldn't go to work for someone else before I'd even left the cemetery, I needed time to think things over, perhaps take a little trip, and after that I'd look him up, Herr Dr. Dösch, and perhaps then I'd sign the piece of paper he called a work contract.

Though I signed no contract at the cemetery, in the lot outside, where Dösch had parked his car, Oskar found himself compelled by his uncertain financial situation to accept and pocket an advance that Dr. Dösch handed me discreetly, tucked away in an envelope with his business card.

And I did take that trip, and even found a traveling companion. Actually I would have preferred to travel with Klepp. But Klepp was in the hospital and didn't dare laugh because he'd broken four ribs. And I would gladly have gone with Maria. The summer holidays had not yet ended, we could have taken little Kurt along. But she was still tied up with Stenzel, her boss, who had little Kurt calling him Papa Stenzel.

So I wound up traveling with Lankes, the painter. You've met Lankes before as Corporal Lankes, and as the sometime fiancé of Ulla the Muse. When, with my advance and my savings book in my pocket, I looked up Lankes at his studio on Sittarder Straße, I was hoping to find Ulla, my former colleague; I intended to ask her to join me on the trip.

I found her with the painter. We've been engaged for two weeks, she told me in the doorway. Things hadn't worked out with Hänschen Krages, she'd had to break off their engagement; did I know Hänschen Krages?

Oskar was sorry to say he didn't know Ulla's former fiancé, extended his generous offer, then had to watch as Lankes stepped up and, before Ulla could say yes, elected himself Oskar's traveling companion and boxed the Muse, the long-legged Muse, on the ear because she didn't want to stay home and had burst into tears.

Why didn't Oskar defend himself? Why, if he wanted to travel with the Muse, did he not take her side? As attractive as the thought of a trip with the extremely slender, downy blond Ulla was, I still feared becoming too intimate with a Muse. You have to keep the Muses at a distance, I told myself, otherwise the Muse's kiss will start to taste like everyday fare. Better to travel with Lankes, who slaps his Muse when she tries to kiss him.

No lengthy discussions were required about our destination. Normandy was the only choice. We wanted to visit the bunkers between Caen and Cabourg. Because that's where we'd met during the war. The only difficulty was getting visas. But Oskar doesn't waste words on visa stories.

Lankes is a stingy man. The lavishness with which he flings cheap or scrounged paint on poorly primed canvas is matched only by his tight-fistedness when it comes to paper money or hard cash. He never buys cigarettes, but he's always smoking. To show how systematic his stinginess is, consider the following: the moment someone gives him a cigarette, he takes a ten-pfennig piece from his left trouser pocket, lifts the coin briefly, and slips it into his right trouser pocket, where it joins a greater or lesser number of small coins, depending on the time of day. He smokes constantly and once told me, when he was in a good mood, "I make about two marks a day smoking!"

The bombed-out lot Lankes bought in Wersten about a year ago was paid for, or perhaps we should say puffed for, with the cigarettes of his friends and acquaintances.

This was the Lankes with whom Oskar traveled to Normandy. We took an express train. Lankes would rather have hitchhiked. But since he was my guest and I was paying, he had to give in. We went by bus from Caen to Cabourg. Past poplars behind which were meadows bordered by hedges. Brown-and-white cows gave the countryside the look of an ad for milk chocolate. Of course the shiny paper wouldn't dare show the obvious war damage that still marked and disfigured every village, including the little town of Bavent, where I'd lost my Roswitha.

From Cabourg we walked along the beach toward the mouth of the Orne. It was not raining. Just before Le Home, Lankes said, "We're home now, boy! Got a cigarette?" Even while switching the coin from pocket to pocket, he pointed with his wolf's head stretched toward one of the
numerous undamaged pillboxes in the dunes. Long-armed, he held his knapsack, the sketching easel, and a dozen stretched canvases on the left, put his right arm around me, and pulled me toward the concrete. Oskar's luggage consisted of a small suitcase and his drum.

On the third day of our stay on the Atlantic coast—in the meantime we had cleared the interior of Dora Seven of drifted sand, removed the unsightly traces of lovers who'd sought shelter there, and furnished the space with a crate and our sleeping bags—Lankes returned from the beach with a good-sized cod. Some fishermen had given it to him. He'd tossed off a sketch of their boat, they'd palmed off part of their catch.

Since we were still calling the pillbox Dora Seven, it's no wonder Oskar's thoughts turned to Sister Dorothea while cleaning the fish. Liver and milt from the fish flowed over both his hands. I was facing the sun as I scaled the cod, and Lankes took the occasion to dash off a quick watercolor. We sat behind the pillbox, sheltered from the wind. The August sun did a headstand on the concrete dome. I began larding the fish with garlic. The cavity once filled with milt, liver, and guts I stuffed with onions, cheese, and thyme, but didn't throw liver and milt away, lodged both delicacies between the fish's jaws, which I wedged open with a lemon. Lankes nosed about in the area. Scavenging, he disappeared into Dora Four, Three, and bunkers farther on. He returned with boards and some large cartons he could use to paint on, and bequeathed the wood to the little fire.

We had no trouble keeping the fire going all day, since the beach was pierced every step or two by dry, feather-light driftwood casting changing shadows. Over the hot, glowing coals, which were now ready, I laid part of an iron balcony railing that Lankes had torn off a deserted beach villa. I rubbed the fish with olive oil and set it on the hot grate, also oiled. I squeezed lemon over the crackling cod, and slowly—for you mustn't rush a fish—readied it for the table.

The table consisted of several empty buckets covered by a large piece of tar-board folded in several places. We had our own forks and tin plates. To distract Lankes—who was circling around the slowly steeping fish like a hungry gull after carrion—I brought my drum out from the bunker. I bedded it down in the sand and played against the wind, constantly changing rhythm, breaking up the sounds of the surf and the rising tide: Bebra's Theater at the Front had come to inspect concrete.
From Kashubia to Normandy. Felix and Kitty, the two acrobats, knotted and unknotted themselves on top of the pillbox, recited against the wind—just as Oskar played against the wind—a poem whose refrain proclaimed in the midst of war a coming age of primal gemütlichkeit: "...and Sunday's roast with leaves of bay: The bourgeois life is on its way!" Kitty declaimed in her slight Saxon accent; and Bebra, my wise Bebra, captain of the Propaganda Corps, nodded; and Roswitha, my Mediterranean Raguna, picked up the picnic basket, set the table on concrete, on top of Dora Seven; and Corporal Lankes too ate our white bread, drank our chocolate, smoked Captain Bebra's cigarettes...

"Man, Oskar!" Lankes called me back from the past. "I wish I could paint the way you drum; got a cigarette?"

So I stopped drumming, handed my traveling companion a cigarette, checked the fish and saw that it was good: its eyes bulged tender, soft, and white. Slowly, not missing a spot, I squeezed some lemon over the partially browned, partially cracked skin of the cod.

"Me hungry!" said Lankes. He bared his long, pointed yellow teeth and pounded his chest apelike with both fists against his checkered shirt.

"Heads or tails?" I put to him and slid the fish onto a sheet of wax paper covering the tar-board as a tablecloth. "What would you advise?" Lankes asked, pinching out his cigarette and stowing away the butt.

"As a friend I'd say take the tail. As a cook I've got to recommend the head. But if my mama, who ate a lot of fish, were here now, she'd say take the tail, Herr Lankes, then you know what you've got. The doctor, on the other hand, always advised my father..."

"I stay away from doctors," Lankes said distrustfully.

"Dr. Hollatz always advised my father, when it came to cod, which we call dorsch, always to eat the head."

"Then I'll take the tail. I can see you're trying to pull a fast one on me!" Lankes was still suspicious.

"So much the better for Oskar. I like a good head."

"Then I'll take the head, if you want it so bad."

"You have a hard life, Lankes," I said, to put an end to the conversation. "The head is yours, I'll take the tail."

"Hey, I put one over on you, didn't I?"

Oskar admitted that Lankes had put one over on him. I knew his fish
would only taste good if seasoned with the certainty that he'd put one over on me. I called him a sharp customer, a lucky dog, he must have been born on Sunday—and we pitched into the cod.

He took the head, I squeezed the rest of the lemon juice over the white, crumbling flesh of the tail, from which the butter-soft garlic cloves loosened and fell.

Lankes pried bones from between his teeth, peered over at me and the tail piece: "Let me try some of your tail." I nodded, he tried some, still wasn't sure, till Oskar took a bite of the head and reassured him: as usual he had snagged the better piece.

We drank Bordeaux with the fish. I was sorry about that, said I'd have preferred white wine in the coffee cups. Lankes waved off my concerns, they always drank red wine in Dora Seven when he was a corporal, he recalled, right up till the invasion: "Man, were we drunk when it all started up. Kowalski, Scherbach, and little Leuthold, all buried back there in the same graveyard on the other side of Cabourg, they didn't have a clue what was happening. The English at Arromanches, and loads of Canadians in our sector. They were on to us, saying 'How are you?' before we could get our suspenders up"

Then, stabbing the air with his fork and spitting out bones: "By the way, I saw that nut Herzog today in Cabourg, you met him on your tour of inspection. A lieutenant."

Of course Oskar remembered Lieutenant Herzog. Lankes went on to tell me over fish that Herzog came to Cabourg year in and year out with maps and surveying instruments, because the pillboxes kept him awake nights. He planned to come by Dora Seven too, and take measurements.

We were still on our fish—which was slowly revealing its large, bony structure—when Lieutenant Herzog arrived. Khaki shorts, muscular bulging calves above tennis shoes, gray-brown hair sprouting from his open linen shirt. Naturally we stayed seated. Lankes introduced me as his friend and comrade-in-arms Oskar, and still called Herzog "Lieutenant," although he was now retired.