Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 18

My own situation is rather similar. No sooner have I applied the coat of plaster that gives my knot sculptures body than as likely as not I smash them with my fist. In this connection I am reminded of the commission my patient gave me some months ago. He wished me, with plain, ordinary string, to combine Rasputin, the Russian faith healer, and Goethe, the German poet prince, into a single figure which, moreover, should present a striking resemblance to himself. He even knows how many miles of string I have tied into knots, trying to create a valid synthesis of the two extremes. But like the partisan whom Mr. Matzerath so admires, I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters.

But Mr. Matzerath himself is unable to keep his story running in a straight line. Take those four nuns in the freight car. First he refers to them as Franciscans and the next time he calls them Vincentians. But what throws his story out of kilter more than anything else is this young lady with her two names and her one supposedly foxlike face. To be really conscientious, I should have to write two or more separate versions of his journey from East to West. But that kind of thing is not in my line. I prefer to concentrate on the Social Democrat, who managed with one name and, my patient a.s.sures me, one story, which he repeated incessantly until shortly before Stolp, to the effect that up to 1937 he had been a kind of partisan, risking his health and sacrificing his free time pasting posters, for he had been one of the few Social Democrats to put up posters even when it was raining.

He told the same story when shortly before Stolp the convoy was stopped for the nth time by a large gang of youthful bandits. Since there was hardly any baggage left, the visitors devoted their attentions to the travelers' clothing. But they took a very reasonable att.i.tude, all they wanted was gentlemen's outer garments. To the Social Democrat, however, their procedure seemed the very opposite of reasonable; he was of the opinion, which he also stated, that a clever tailor could make several excellent suits from the yards and yards of material in which the nuns were draped. The Social Democrat, as he piously proclaimed, was an atheist. The young bandits made no pious proclamations, but their attachment to the only-saving Church could not be held in doubt. Despite the wood fiber that had gone into the material, the atheist's single-breasted suit interested them far more than the nuns' ample woolens. The atheist declined to remove his jacket, vest, and trousers; instead, he told them about his brief but brilliant career as a Social Democratic poster paster, and when he refused either to stop talking or to take off his suit, he received a kick in the stomach with a boot formerly the property of the German Army.

The Social Democrat vomited. His vomiting fit was long and violent and at the end he threw up blood. He vomited without regard for his clothing, and our young delinquents lost all interest in the suit though it could easily have been salvaged with a good dry cleaning. Turning their backs on men's clothing, they removed a light-blue imitation silk blouse from Mrs. Maria Matzerath and a Bavarian-style knitted jacket from the young lady whose name was not Lucy Rennwand but Regina Raeck. Then they closed the car doors, but not entirely, and the train started up, while the Social Democrat began to die.

A mile or two before Stolp the train was switched onto a siding where it remained all night -- a clear, starry night but rather cool, my informant tells me, for the month of June.

The Social Democrat, who had set too much store by his single-breasted suit, died that night. He died without dignity, loudly blaspheming G.o.d and summoning the working cla.s.s to struggle. His last words, as in the movies, were "Long live freedom!" Then he expired in a fit of vomiting that filled the whole car with horror.

Afterwards, my patient says, there was no screaming or wailing. A long silence fell, broken only by the chattering teeth of Mrs. Maria Matzerath, who was cold without her blouse and had put all the clothing she had left on her son Kurt and Mr. Matzerath. Toward morning two nuns with stout hearts and strong stomachs took advantage of the open door and swept out quant.i.ties of wet straw, the feces of children and grownups, and the Social Democrat's vomit.

In Stolp the train was inspected by Polish officers. Hot soup and a beverage resembling coffee subst.i.tute were distributed. The corpse in Mr. Matzerath's car was confiscated because of the danger of contagion, laid on a plank, and carried away by some medical corps men. At the request of the nuns, a superior officer gave the members of the family time for a short prayer. They were also permitted to remove the dead man's shoes, socks, and suit. During the undressing scene -- later the body was covered with cement bags -- my patient watched the former Social Democrat's niece. Once again, though the young lady's name was Raeck, he was reminded, to his concurrent loathing and fascination, of Lucy Rennwand, whose image in knotted string I have ent.i.tled "The Sandwich Eater". The girl in the freight car, it is true, did not reach for a sandwich at the sight of her despoiled uncle, but she did partic.i.p.ate in the pillage, appropriating the vest of her uncle's suit, putting it on in place of the knitted jacket that had been taken from her, and studying her not unbecoming new costume in a pocket mirror. And then Mr. Matzerath tells me -- he is still seized with panic when he thinks of it -- she captured him in this same mirror and coolly, coldly, observed him out of eyes that were slits in a triangle.

The trip from Stolp to Stettin took two days. There were still plenty of involuntary stops and more visits from juvenile delinquents with tommy guns and paratrooper's knives. But though frequent, the visits became shorter and shorter, because there was very little left to take.

My patient claims that he grew three and a half to four inches between Danzig-Gdansk and Stettin. The stretching was mostly in the legs, there was little change in the chest or head. However, though my patient lay on his back throughout the trip, he could not prevent the emergence of a hump, rather high up and slightly displaced to leftward. Mr. Matzerath also admits that the pain increased after Stettin -- meanwhile German railroad men had taken over -- and that leafing through the family photograph alb.u.m didn't help much. Though the screams that escaped him were loud and protracted, they caused no damage in the gla.s.s of any of the stations (Matzerath: "my voice had lost its power to demolish gla.s.s") but they brought the four nuns scurrying over to his tick of pain, where they began to pray interminably.

A good half of his fellow travelers, including Miss Regina and the other members of the deceased Social Democrat's family, left the convoy at Schwerin. Mr. Matzerath was sorry. He had grown so accustomed to looking at the young girl. The sight of her had indeed become so necessary to him that when she had gone, he was seized with convulsions accompanied by high fever. According to Mrs. Maria Matzerath, he cried out desperately for a certain Lucy, called himself a mythical animal, a unicorn, and seems to have been afraid of falling, but at the same time eager to plunge, from a thirty-foot diving tower.

In Luneburg Mr. Oskar Matzerath was taken to a hospital. There in his fever he made the acquaintance of several nurses but was soon transferred to the University Clinic in Hanover, where they managed to bring his fever down. For a time Mr. Matzerath saw little of Maria Matzerath and her son Kurt; it was only after she had found work as a cleaning woman in the clinic that she was able to visit him every day. Mrs. Matzerath was not lodged at the clinic; she and her little boy ended up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city and she spent at least three hours traveling back and forth, always in overcrowded trains, usually on the running board. Soon she was thoroughly exhausted, and the doctors, despite grave misgivings, granted permission to move the patient to Dusseldorf, where Mrs. Matzerath had a sister. This sister, whose name was Guste, was married to a headwaiter whom she had met during the war. The headwaiter was receiving free board and lodging in Russia at the time, and that enabled her to give Mrs. Matzerath one of her two and a half rooms. Mr. Matzerath was admitted to the Dusseldorf City Hospital.

The apartment was conveniently located. There were several streetcar lines going directly to the City Hospital.

There Mr. Matzerath lay from August, 1945, to May, 1946. For the last hour or more he has been telling me about several nurses at once. Their names are Sister Monica, Sister Helmtrud, Sister Walburga, Sister Ilse, and Sister Gertrude. He remembers all sorts of the most tedious chitchat and seems to be obsessed by nurses' uniforms and the details of their daily life. Not a word about the hospital food, which, if my memory does not mislead me, was unspeakable in those days, or about the freezing-cold rooms. All he can talk about is nurses, he goes on and on about this most boring of all social groups. It seems that Sister Ilse had told the head nurse, in the strictest confidence, whereupon the head nurse had had the gall to inspect the quarters of the nurses in training shortly after lunch hour; something or other had been stolen and some nurse from Dortmund -- Gertrude I think he said -- was accused unjustly. Then there were the young doctors who were always chasing after the nurses and they wanted just one thing -- the nurses' cigarette stamps. On top of all this he sees fit to tell me about a laboratory a.s.sistant -- not a nurse, for once -- who was accused of giving herself an abortion, perhaps abetted by one of the interns. It is beyond me why my patient wastes his time and brains on such trivialities.

Mr. Matzerath has just asked me to describe him. It will be a pleasure. Now I shall be able to omit several dozen of his sententious and interminable stories about nurses.

My patient is four feet one inch tall. He carries his head, which would be too large even for a person of normal proportions, between his shoulders on an almost nonexistent neck. His eyes are blue, brilliant, alive with intelligence; occasionally they take on a dreamy, ecstatic, wide-eyed look. He has dense, slightly wavy, dark-brown hair. He likes to exhibit his arms, which are powerful in comparison with the rest of the body, and his hands, which, as he himself says, are beautiful. Especially when Mr. Matzerath plays the drum -- which the management allows for three or at most four hours a day -- his fingers move as though of their own accord and seem to belong to another, better proportioned body. Mr. Matzerath has made a fortune on phonograph records and they are still bringing in money. Interesting people come to see him on visiting days. Even before his trial, before he was brought here to us, his name was familiar to me, for Mr. Oskar Matzerath is a well-known performer. I personally believe him to be innocent and am not sure whether he will stay here with us or be let out and resume his successful career. Now he wants me to measure him, though I did so only two days ago.

Without bothering to read over what Bruno my keeper has written, I, Oskar, take up my pen again.

Bruno has just measured me with his folding rule. He has left the rule lying alongside me, and hurried out of the room, loudly proclaiming the result. He even dropped the knot creation he was secretly working on while I was telling him my story. I presume that he has gone to get Dr. (Miss) Hornstetter.

But before she comes in and confirms Bruno's measurements, Oskar will tell you what it is all about: In the three days during which I told my keeper the story of my growth, I grew a whole inch.

And so, as of today, Oskar measures four feet two. He will now relate how he fared after the war when in relatively good health, despite my deformity, writing with difficulty, but fluent at talking and reading, I was discharged from the Dusseldorf City Hospital in the hope that I might embark -- as people discharged from hospitals are always expected to do -- on a new and adult life.

BOOK THREE.

Firestones and Tombstones

Fat, sleepy, good-natured. There had been no need for Guste Truczinski to change in becoming Guste Koster, especially as her a.s.sociation with Koster had been so very limited: they had been engaged for two weeks when he was s.h.i.+pped out to the Arctic Front; when he came home on furlough, they had married and spent a few nights together, most of them in air-raid shelters. Though there was no news of Koster's whereabouts after the army in Courland surrendered, Guste, when asked about her husband, would reply with a.s.surance, at the same time gesturing toward the kitchen: "Oh, he's a prisoner in Russia. There's going to be some changes around here when he gets back."

The changes she had in mind involved Maria and more particularly little Kurt. Discharged from the hospital, I said goodbye to the nurses, promising to come and see them as soon as I had the chance. Then I took the streetcar to Bilk, where the two sisters and my son Kurt were living. The apartment house stopped at the fourth floor; the rest, including the roof, had been destroyed by fire. Entering the third-floor flat, I found Maria and my son busily engaged in black market operations. Kurt, who was six years old, counted on his fingers. Even in the black market Maria remained loyal to her Matzerath. She dealt in synthetic honey. She spooned the stuff from unlabeled pails and weighed out quarter-pounds on the kitchen scales. I had barely time to get my bearings in the cramped flat before she put me to work doing up packages.

Kurt was sitting behind his counter -- a soap box. He looked in the direction of his homecoming father, but his chilly grey eyes seemed to be concerned with something of interest that could be seen through me. Before him on his counter lay a sheet of paper on which he was adding up imaginary columns of figures. After just six weeks of schooling in overcrowded, poorly heated cla.s.srooms, he had the look of a very busy self-made man.

Guste Koster was drinking coffee, real coffee, as Oskar noticed when she presented me with a cupful. While I busied myself with the honey, she observed my hump with curiosity and a look suggesting commiseration with her sister Maria. It was all she could do to sit still and not caress my hump, for like all women she was convinced that it's good luck to touch, pat, or stroke a hump. To Guste good luck meant the return of Koster, who would change everything. She restrained herself, patted her coffee cup instead, and heaved a sigh, followed by the litany that I was to hear several times a day for several months: "When Koster gets home there's going to be changes around here before you can say Jakob Schmidt. You can bet your bottom taler on that."

Guste frowned on black market activities but was not averse to drinking the real coffee obtained for synthetic honey. When customers came, she left the living room and padded away into the kitchen, where she raised an ostentatious clatter in protest.

There was no shortage of customers. At nine o'clock, right after breakfast, the bell began to ring: short, long, short. At 10 p.m. Guste disconnected the bell, often amid protests from Kurt, whose schooling made distressing inroads on his business day.

"Synthetic honey?" said the visitor.

Maria nodded gently, and asked: "A quarter or a half a pound?" But there were other customers who didn't want honey. They would say: "Flints?" Whereupon Kurt, who had school alternately in the morning and afternoon, would emerge from his columns of figures, grope about under his sweater for a little cloth bag, and project his challenging childlike voice into the living room air: "Would you like three or four? My advice is to take five. They'll be up to twenty-four before you know it. Last week they were eighteen, and this morning I had to ask twenty. If you'd come two hours ago, right after school, I could have let you have them for twenty-one."

In a territory six blocks long and four blocks wide, Kurt was the only dealer in flints. He had a "source"; he never told anybody who or what it was, though he never stopped talking about it. Even before going to sleep at night, he would say, instead of his prayers: "I've got a source."

As his father, I claimed that I was ent.i.tled to know my son's source. He didn't even trouble to inject a note of mystery into his voice when he said "I've got a source." If his tone conveyed anything at all, it was pride and self-a.s.surance. "Where did you get those flints?" I roared at him. "You will tell me this minute."

Maria's standing remark in that period, whenever I tried to get at the source, was: "Leave the kid alone. In the first place, it's none of your business; in the second place, if anybody's going to ask questions, it's me; in the third place, don't take on like you was his father. A few months ago, you couldn't even say boo."

When I went on too long about Kurt's source, Maria would smack her hand down on the honey pail and, indignant to the elbow, launch into a diatribe against me and also Guste, who sometimes supported Oskar in his effort to penetrate the source: "A fine lot you are. Trying to ruin the kid's business. Biting the hand that feeds you. When I think of the ten calories Oskar gets for sick relief that he gobbles up in two days, it makes me good and sick, in fact, it makes me laugh."

Oskar can't deny it: I had a monstrous appet.i.te in those days: it was thanks to Kurt and his source, which brought in more than the honey, that Oskar was able to regain his strength after the meager hospital fare.

Oskar was reduced to shamefaced silence; taking the ample pocket money with which little Kurt deigned to provide him, he would leave the flat in Bilk and stay away as much as he could, to avoid having his nose rubbed in his shame.

Today there are plenty of well-heeled critics of the economic miracle who proclaim nostalgically -- and the less they remember about the situation in those days the more nostalgic they become -- " Ah, those were the days, before the currency reform! Then people were still alive! Their empty stomachs didn't prevent them from waiting in line for theater tickets. And the wonderful parties we used to improvise with two pretzels and a bottle of potato schnaps, so much more fun than the fancy doings today, with all their caviar and champagne."

This is what you might call the romanticism of lost opportunities. I could lament with the best of them if I chose, for in the days when Kurt's "source" was gus.h.i.+ng, I developed a sudden interest in adult education and imbibed a certain amount of culture almost free of charge. I took courses at night school, became a steady visitor at the British Center, also known as "Die Brucke", discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants alike, and shared the guilt feelings of all those who said to themselves: "Let's do our stint now; when things begin to look up we'll have it over with and our consciences will be all right."

Be that as it may, it is to night school that I owe what education I possess; I am the first to own that it doesn't amount to much, though there is something rather grandiose about the gaps in it. I began to read avidly, no longer satisfied, now that I had grown, with an oversimplified world evenly divided between Goethe and Rasputin or with the information that could be culled from the 1904-1916 issues of Kohler's Naval Calendar. I was always reading, though I don't remember what. I read in the toilet. I read while waiting in line for theater tickets, surrounded by young girls with Mozart pigtails, also reading. I read while Kurt sold his flints and while I myself was packaging synthetic honey. And when the current was shut off, I read by the light of tallow candles also obtained from Kurt's "source".

I am ashamed to say that what I read in those days did not become a part of me, but went in one eye and out the other. I have retained a few turns of phrase, an aphorism or two, and that is about all. And the theater? A few names of actors: Hoppe, Peter Esser, Flickenschildt and her special way of p.r.o.nouncing the letter r. I recall some drama students in experimental theaters, who tried to improve on Flickenschildt's r's; I remember Grundgens as Ta.s.so, he wore the regulation black, but had discarded the laurel wreath called for in Goethe's text, alleging that the greenery burned his hair. And Grundgens again, still in black, as Hamlet. And la Flickenschildt claiming that Hamlet is fat. Yorick's skull made quite an impression on me because of the impressive remarks it drew from Grundgens. Draussen vor der Tur played in unheated theaters to spellbound audiences; to me Beckmann as the man with the broken gla.s.ses was Koster, Guste's husband, who would change everything on his return home and stop up my son Kurt's source forever.

Now all that is behind me; today I know that a postwar binge is only a binge and therefore followed by a hangover, and one symptom of this hangover is that the deeds and misdeeds which only yesterday were fresh and alive and real, are reduced to history and explained as such. Today I am able once more to appreciate the instruction Gretchen Scheffler meted out to me amid her travel souvenirs and her knitting: not too much Rasputin, Goethe in moderation, Keyser's History of the City of Danzig, the armament of a battles.h.i.+p that has long been lying on the bottom of the sea, the speed (in knots) of all the j.a.panese torpedo boats that took part in the battle of Tsus.h.i.+ma, not to mention Belisarius and Na.r.s.es, Totila and Teja, as represented in Felix Dahn's A Struggle lor Rome.

In the spring of '47 I abandoned night school, the British Center, and Pastor Niemoller, and took my leave, from the second balcony, of Gustaf Grundgens, who still figured on the program as Hamlet.

Two years had not pa.s.sed since at Matzerath's grave I had resolved to grow, and already I had lost interest in grown-up life. I dreamed of my lost three-year-old dimensions. I wanted to be three feet tall again, smaller than my friend Bebra, smaller than the dear departed Roswitha. Oskar missed his drum. I took long walks which often ended up at the City Hospital. In any event I was expected to call once a month on Professor Irdell, who regarded Oskar as an interesting case. At regular intervals Oskar visited the nurses he had known during his illness, and even when they had no time for him, their hurrying white uniforms, betokening recovery or death, gave him a feeling bordering on happiness.

The nurses liked me, they played childish, but not malicious, games with my hump, gave me good things to eat, and told me interminable, pleasantly soporific stories about the complexities of hospital life. I listened, gave advice, and was able even to arbitrate some of their little disputes, for I enjoyed the sympathy of the head nurse. On these days Oskar was the only man among twenty or more young or not so young girls camouflaged beneath nurse's uniforms -- and in some strange way he was an object of desire.

As Bruno has already said, Oskar has lovely, expressive hands, fine wavy hair, and those winning, ever so blue, Bronski eyes. Possibly the attractiveness of my hands, eyes, and hair was accentuated by my hump and the shocking proximity of my chin to my narrow, vaulted chest. It was not infrequent, in any case, that as I was sitting in the nurses' room, they would take hold of my hands, play with my fingers, fondle my hair, and say to one another in leaving: "When you look into his eyes, you forget all the rest."

Thus I was superior to my hump and I might well have attempted a conquest in the hospital if I had still had my drum, if I had been able to count on my reliable drummer's potency of former years. As it was, I felt unsure of myself and my physical reactions and I would leave the hospital after these affectionate hors d'oeuvres, fearing to reach out for the main course. I would take the air, go for a walk in the garden or around the wire fence which, with its close-meshed regularity, gave me a peace of mind that I expressed by whistling. I would watch the streetcars headed for Wersten and Benrath or stroll along the park promenade beside the bicycle path, smiling in pleasant boredom at the efforts of nature, which was playing spring and, following the program to a T, making buds burst open almost audibly.

Across the way, our Sunday painter who art in heaven, was each day adding a little more green fresh from the tube to the trees of Wersten Cemetery. Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.

Along the northern wall of the cemetery ran a street called Bittweg, occupied by no less than six manufacturers of tombstones. There were two large establishments: C. Schnoog and Julius Wobel. The rest were small artisans: R. Haydenreich, J. Bois, Kuhn & Muller, and P. Korneff. Sheds and workshops with large signs hanging from the roofs, some freshly painted, others barely legible, indicating the name of the firm and the nature of its wares: Tombstones -- Mortuary Monuments and Borders -- Natural and Artificial Stone -- Mortuary Art. Korneff's sign, in such disrepair that I had to spell it out, said: P. Korneff, Stonecutter and Mortuary Sculptor.

Between the workshop and the wire fence enclosing the yard stood neat rows of monuments on simple and double pedestals; they were of different sizes, calculated to adorn anything from a solitary one-man grave to a family vault with room for four. Just behind the fence, reflecting its diamond-shaped pattern in sunny weather, an a.s.sortment of tombstones: sh.e.l.l-lime cus.h.i.+ons for modest pocketbooks, polished diorite slabs with unpolished palms, standard thirty-inch children's tombstones of slightly cloudy Silesian marble, surrounded by fluting and adorned toward the top with sunken reliefs, most of which represented broken roses. Next came a row of plain, red sandstone slabs taken from the facades of bombed-out banks and department stores. At the center the prize piece was displayed: a monument of bluish-white Tyrolian marble with three pedestals, two side-pieces, and a large richly carved slab featuring what is known in the trade as a corpus. This corpus was beardless; his distinguis.h.i.+ng features were: head and knees turned leftward, a crown of thorns, three nails, open hands, and stylized bleeding from the wound in his flank, five drops, I seem to recall.

This was far from being the only mortuary monument in Bittweg showing a corpus turned leftward -- sometimes there were as many as ten of them getting ready for the spring season. But Korneff's Jesus Christ had made a particular impression on me, because, well, because he showed a marked resemblance to my Athlete on the Cross, flexing his muscles and expanding his chest over the main altar of the Church of the Sacred Heart. I spent hours by that fence, sc.r.a.ping a stick along the close wire meshes, thinking of everything and nothing and toying perhaps with a wish or two. For a long while Korneff remained in hiding. A stovepipe full of knees and elbows emerged from one of the windows of the shop and jutted over the flat roof. You couldn't get very good coal in those days. Yellow smoke arose in fitful puffs and fell back on the roofing paper. More smoke seeped from the windows, slid down the drainpipe, and lost itself amid tombstones in various stages of completion. Outside the sliding door of the workshop stood a three-wheeled truck under several tarpaulins, as though camouflaged against attack from low-flying planes. Sounds from the shop -- wood striking iron, iron chipping stone -- bore witness to the stonecutter at work.

In May the canvas was gone from over the three-wheeler, the sliding door stood open. I could see inside the workshop grey on grey, stones on the cutting bench, a polis.h.i.+ng machine that looked like a gallows, shelves full of plaster models, and at last Korneff. He walked with a stoop and permanently bent knees, his head thrust rigidly forward. The back of his neck was crisscrossed with grimy, once pink adhesive tape. He stepped out of the shop with a rake and, a.s.suming no doubt that spring had come, began to clean up the grounds. He raked carefully between the tombstones, leaving tracks in the gravel, occasionally stopping to remove dead leaves from one of the monuments. As he was raking between the sh.e.l.l-lime cus.h.i.+ons and diorite slabs near the fence, I was suddenly surprised by his voice: "What's the matter, boy; don't they want you at home no more?"

"I'm very fond of your tombstones," I said.

"Mustn't say that out loud," he replied. "Bad luck. Talk like that and they'll be putting one on top of you."

Only then did he move his stiff neck, catching me, or rather my hump, in a sidelong glance: "Say, what they done to you? Don't it get in your way for sleeping?"

I let him have his laugh. Then I explained that a hump was not necessarily a drawback, that it didn't get me down, that, believe it or not, some women and even young girls had a special weakness for humps and were only too glad to adapt themselves to the special proportions and possibilities of a hunchback.

Leaning his chin on his rake handle, Korneff pondered: "Maybe so. I've heard tell of it."

He went on to tell me about his days in the basalt quarries when he had had a woman with a wooden leg that could be unbuckled. This, to his way of thinking, was something like my hump, even if my gas meter, as he insisted on calling it, was not removable. The stonecutter's memory was long, broad, and thorough. I waited patiently for him to finish, for his woman to buckle her leg on again. Then I asked if I could visit his shop.

Korneff opened the gate in the fence and pointed his rake in invitation at the open sliding door. Gravel crunched beneath my feet and a moment later I was engulfed in the smell of sulphur, lime, and dampness.

Heavy, pear-shaped wooden mallets with fibrous hollows showing frequent repet.i.tion of the same expert blow, rested on roughly hewn slabs of stone. Stippling irons for the embossing mallet, stippling tools with round heads, freshly reforged and still blue from tempering; long, springy etching-chisels and bull chisels for marble, polis.h.i.+ng paste drying on four-cornered sawing trestles, and, on wooden rollers, ready to move, an up-ended, polished travertine slab, fatty, yellow, cheesy, porous for a double grave.

"That's a bush hammer, that's a spoon chisel, that's a groove cutter, and that," Korneff lifted a board a hand's breadth wide and three feet long and examined the edge closely, "that's a straight edge; I use it to whack the apprentices with if they don't keep moving."

My question was not one of pure politeness: "You employ apprentices then?"

Korneff told me his troubles: " I could keep five boys busy. But you can't get none. All the young pantywaists wants to learn nowadays is how to turn a crooked penny on the black market." Like me, the stonecutter was opposed to the dark machinations that prevented so many a young hopeful from learning a useful trade. While Korneff was showing me carborundum stones ranging from coa.r.s.e to fine and their effect on a Solnhof slab, I was playing with a little idea. Pumice stones, chocolate-brown sandstone for rough polis.h.i.+ng, tripoli for high polish, and there was my little idea popping up again, but it had taken on a higher, s.h.i.+nier polish. Korneff showed me models of lettering, spoke of raised and sunken inscriptions, and told me about gilding; that it wasn't nearly so expensive as generally supposed, that you could gild a horse and rider with one genuine old taler. This made me think of the equestrian monument of Kaiser Wilhelm on the Heumarkt in Danzig, which the Polish authorities would maybe decide to gild, but neither horse nor rider could make me give up my little idea, which seemed to become s.h.i.+nier and s.h.i.+nier. I continued to toy with it, and went so far as to formulate it while Korneff was explaining the workings of a three-legged stippling machine for sculpture and tapping his knuckles on some plaster models of Christ crucified: "So you're thinking of taking on an apprentice?" This was my first formulation. My little idea gained ground. What I actually said was: "I gather you're looking for an apprentice, or am I mistaken?" Korneff rubbed the adhesive tape covering the boils on his neck. "I mean, would you consider taking me on as an apprentice, other things being equal?" I had put it awkwardly and corrected myself at once: "Don't underestimate my strength, my dear Mr. Korneff. It's just my legs that are underdeveloped. There's plenty of strength in my arms." Delighted with my resolution and determined to go the whole hog, I bared my left arm and asked Korneff to feel my muscle, which was small but tough. When he made no move to feel it, I picked up an embossing chisel that was lying on some sh.e.l.l lime and made the metal bob up and down on my biceps. I continued my demonstration until Korneff turned on the polis.h.i.+ng machine; a carborundum disk raced screeching over the travertine pedestal of a slab for a double grave. After a while Korneff, his eyes glued to the machine, shouted above the noise: "Sleep on it, boy. It's hard work. Come back and see me when you've thought it over. I'll take you on if you still feel like it."

Following Korneff's instructions, I slept a whole week on my little idea; I weighed and compared: on the one hand Kurt's firestones, on the other, Korneff's tombstones. Maria was always finding fault: "You're a drain on our budget, Oskar. Why don't you start something? Tea or cocoa maybe, or powdered milk." I started nothing; instead, I basked in the approval of Guste, who held up the absent Koster as the example to follow and praised me for my negative att.i.tude toward the black market. What really troubled me was my son Kurt, who sat there writing columns of imaginary figures and overlooking me just as I had managed for years to overlook Matzerath.

We were having our lunch. Guste had disconnected the bell so our customers wouldn't find us eating scrambled eggs with bacon. Maria said: "You see, Oskar, we have nice things to eat. Why? Because we don't sit with our hands folded." Kurt heaved a sigh. Flints had dropped to eighteen. Guste ate heartily and in silence. I too. I savored the eggs, but even while savoring, I felt miserable, perhaps because powdered eggs are not really so very appetizing, and suddenly, while biting into some gristle, experienced a yearning for happiness so intense that it made my cheeks tingle. Against all my better judgment, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness. I wanted to be boundlessly happy. While the others were still eating, content with scrambled egg-powder, I left the table and went to the cupboard, as though it contained happiness. Rummaging through my compartment, I found, not happiness, but behind the photograph alb.u.m, two packages of Mr. Fajngold's disinfectant. From one package I took -- no, not happiness, but the thoroughly disinfected ruby necklace which had belonged to my mother, which Jan Bronski years ago, on a winter's night that smelled of more snow to come, had removed from a shopwindow with a circular hole cut out a short while before by Oskar, who in those days was still happy and able to cut gla.s.s with his voice. And with that necklace I left the flat. The necklace, I felt, would be my start, my jumping-off place. I took the car to the Central Station, thinking if all goes well. . . and throughout the lengthy negotiations, the same thoughts were with me. But the one-armed man and the Saxon, whom the other called the a.s.sessor, were aware only of my article's material value, they failed to suspect what pathways of happiness they laid out before me when in return for my poor mama's necklace they gave me a real leather briefcase and twelve cartons of "Ami" cigarettes. Lucky Strikes.

That afternoon I was back in Bilk. I unloaded twelve cartons of Lucky Strikes, a fortune. I savored their amazement, thrust the mountain of blond tobacco at them, and said: this is for you. From now on I want you to leave me alone. It's not too much to ask for all these cigarettes. Aside from that I want a lunchbox with lunch in it, beginning tomorrow. I hope you will be happy with your honey and flints, I said without anger or resentment; as for me, I shall practice another art, my happiness will be written, or to put it more professionally, incised on tombstones.

Korneff took me on as his helper for a hundred reichsmarks a month. Not much money, but I worked hard for it just the same. It was clear by the end of the first week that I was not strong enough for the heavy work. I had been given the job of embossing a slab of Belgian granite, fresh from the quarry, for a family vault. In an hour's time I could scarcely hold the chisel and my mallet hand was numb. I also had to leave the blunt chiseling for Korneff, but thanks to my skill, I was able to take over the fine chiseling and scalloping, to square off the slabs, draw the lines for the four blows, and finish the dolomite borders. Sitting on an improvised stool, in my right hand the chisel and in my left, despite the objections of Korneff, who wished to make me right-handed, a pear-shaped wooden mallet or an iron bush hammer; metal rang on stone, the sixty-four teeth of the bush hammer bit simultaneously into the stone to soften it. Here was happiness; not my drum, to be sure, just an ersatz, but there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness, perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz, perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness. Here I was, then, in a storehouse of ersatz happiness: Marble happiness, sandstone happiness. Hard happiness: Carrara. Cloudy, brittle happiness: alabaster. The happiness of chrome steel cutting into diorite. Dolomite: green happiness; gentle happiness: tufa. Colored happiness from the river Lahn. Porous happiness: basalt. Cold happiness from the Eifel. Like a volcano the happiness erupted and fell in a layer of dust, of grit between my teeth. I proved most talented at cutting inscriptions. I soon outdid Korneff and he entrusted me with all the ornamental work, the acanthus leaves, the broken roses for those who died in their tender years, such Christian symbols as XP or INRI, the flutes and beads, the eggs and anchors, chamfers and double chamfers. Oskar provided tombstones at all prices with all manner of ornaments. And when I had spent eight hours clouding a polished diorite slab with my breath and incising an inscription such as: Here rests in G.o.d my beloved husband -- new line -- Our beloved father, brother, and uncle -- new line -- Joseph Esser -- new line -- b. April 3, 1885, d. June 22, 1946 -- new line -- Death is the Gateway to Life -- I was conscious, as I reread the text, of an ersatz happiness, that is, I was pleasantly happy. In grat.i.tude to Joseph Esser, who had pa.s.sed away at the age of sixty-one, and to the little green clouds of diorite raised by my chisel, I took special care with the O's in Esser's epitaph; Oskar was particularly fond of the letter O, and there was always a fine regularity and endlessness about my O's, though they tended to be rather too large.

At the end of May I went to work as a stonecutter's helper; at the beginning of October Korneff developed two new boils, and it was time to set up the travertine slab for Hermann Webknecht and Else Webknecht, nee Freytag, in the South Cemetery. Until then Korneff, doubting my strength, had refused to take me with him to the cemetery. When he had a tombstone to haul and set up, he usually borrowed one of Julius Wobel's helpers, who was almost stone-deaf but otherwise a satisfactory worker. In return Korneff would give Wobel -- who employed eight men -- a hand in emergencies. Time and time again I had offered my services for work at the cemetery; cemeteries had retained their attraction for me, though at the time there were no decisions to be made. Fortunately, the beginning of October was the rush season at Wobel's, he would need all his men until the frosts set in; Korneff had to fall back on me.

We put the travertine slab on hardwood rollers and rolled it up the ramp onto the back of the three-wheel truck. We set the pedestal beside it, cus.h.i.+oned the edges in empty paper sacks, loaded on tools, cement, sand, gravel, and the rollers and crates for unloading; I shut the tail gate, Korneff got in and started the motor. Then he stuck his head and boil-infested neck out of the cab and shouted: "Come along, boy. Get your lunchbox and pile in."

We drove slowly round the City Hospital. Outside the main gate white clouds of nurses, including one I knew. Sister Gertrude. I waved, she waved back. Lucky seeing her like that, I thought, I ought to ask her out one of these days, even if she has disappeared now that we've turned off toward the Rhine, invite her to do something with me, heading for Kappeshamm; the movies maybe, or to the theater to see Grundgens; ha, there it is, that yellow brick building, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the theater, smoke rising from the crematory over autumnal trees, a change of surroundings might do you good, Sister Gertrude. Another cemetery, other makers of tombstones: Beutz & Kranich, Pottgiesser, natural stones, Bohm, mortuary art, Gockeln, mortuary gardening and landscaping; questions at the entrance, it's not so easy to get into a cemetery: travertine for grave Number 79, Section Eight, Webknecht Hermann. Guard raises two fingers to his cap, leave lunchpails at the crematory to be warmed up, and in front of the ossuary stood Leo Schugger.

"The fellow with the white gloves," I ask Korneff, "isn't that Leo Schugger?"

Korneff, feeling his boils: " No, no, never heard of any Leo Schugger. That's Willem s...o...b..r; he lives here."

How could I have contented myself with this information? I myself, after all, had been in Danzig and now I was in Dusseldorf, but I was still called Oskar: "In Danzig there was a fellow who hung around the cemeteries and looked exactly like this fellow. His name was Leo Schugger; before he was in the cemeteries he was called just plain Leo and he was a student at the seminary."

Korneff, left hand on his boils, right hand turning the wheel as we curved round the crematory: "I don't doubt it. I know a whole raft of them that look the same, that started out at the seminary, and now they're living in cemeteries under different names. This one here is Willem s...o...b..r."

We drove past Willem s...o...b..r. He waved a white glove at us, and I felt at home at the South Cemetery.

October, cemetery paths, the world losing its hair and teeth, which is just another way of saying that yellow leaves kept falling from the trees. Silence, sparrows, people out for a stroll, our three-wheeler chugging along on its way to Section Eight, which is still far off. Here and there old women with watering cans and grandchildren, sun on black Swedish granite, obelisks, truncated columns -- symbolic or real war damage -- a tarnished green angel behind a yew tree or something that looked like a yew tree. A woman shading her eyes with a marble hand, dazzled by her own marble. Christ in stone sandals blessing the elm trees, and in Section Four another Christ, blessing a birch. Delicious daydreams on the path between Section Four and Section Five: the ocean, for instance. And this ocean casts, among other things, a corpse up on the beach. From the direction of the Zoppot beach promenade, violin music and the bashful beginnings of a fireworks display for the benefit of the war blind. Oskar, aged three, bends down over the flotsam, hoping it will prove to be Maria, or perhaps Sister Gertrude, whom I should ask out some time. But it is fair Lucy, pale Lucy, as I can see by the light of the fireworks, now hurrying toward their climax. Even if I couldn't see her face, I'd recognize her by the knitted Bavarian jacket she always has on when she is planning evil. When I take it off her, the wool is wet. Wet too is the jacket she has on under the jacket. Another little Bavarian jacket. And at the very end, as the fireworks die down and only the violins are left, I find, under wool on wool on wool, her heart wrapped in an athletic jersey marked League of German Girls, her heart, Lucy's heart, a little cold tombstone, on which is written : Here lies Oskar -- Here lies Oskar -- Here lies Oskar. . .

"Wake up, boy," Korneff interrupted my daydreams, washed ash.o.r.e by the sea, illumined by the fireworks. We turned left and Section Eight, a new section without trees and with but few tombstones, lay flat and hungry before us. The graves were all alike, too fresh to be decorated, but the last five burials were easily recognizable: moldering mounds of brown wreaths with faded, rain-soaked ribbons.

We quickly found Number 79 at the beginning of the fourth row, adjoining Section Seven, which already had a more settled look with its sprinkling of young, quick-growing trees and its considerable number of tombstones, mostly of Silesian marble, arranged with a certain regularity. We approached 79 from the rear, unloaded the tools, cement, gravel, and the travertine slab with its slightly oily sheen. The three-wheeler gave a jump as we rolled the slab down on the crates waiting to receive it. Korneff removed the temporary cross, bearing the names of H. Webknecht and E. Webknecht, from the head end of the grave; I handed him the drill and he began to dig the two holes -- depth five feet three inches, stipulated the cemetery regulations -- for the concrete posts, while I brought water from Section Seven and mixed concrete. I had finished just as he, having dug five feet, said he had finished. I began to fill the holes with concrete while Korneff sat catching his breath on the travertine slab, reaching behind him and feeling his boils. "Coming to a head," he said. "I can always feel it when they're ready to bust." My mind just about vacant, I rammed in the concrete. Coming from Section Seven, a Protestant funeral crawled through Section Eight to Section Nine. As they were pa.s.sing three rows away from us, Korneff slid off the travertine slab and, in compliance with the cemetery regulations, we took our caps off for the procession from the pastor to the next of kin. Immediately after the coffin came, all alone, a lopsided little woman in black. Those who followed her were all much bigger and solidly built.

"Gawd a'mighty," Korneff groaned. "I got a feeling they're going to pop before we can get that slab up."

Meanwhile the funeral party had reached Section Nine, where it arranged itself and poured forth the pastor's voice, rising and falling. The concrete had contracted, and we could have put the pedestal on its foundations. But Korneff lay p.r.o.ne on the travertine slab. He slipped his cap under his forehead and pulled down the collar of his jacket and s.h.i.+rt, baring his neck, while the biography of the dear departed drifted over to us from Section Nine. I had to climb up on the slab and sit on Korneff's back. I took in the situation at a glance; there were two of them almost on top of each other. A straggler with an enormous wreath hurried toward Section Nine and the sermon that was drawing slowly to an end. I tore off the plaster at one tug, wiped away the ichthyol salve with a beech leaf, and examined the two indurations. They were almost the same size, tar-brown shading into yellow. "Let us pray," said the breeze from Section Nine. Taking this as a sign, I turned my head to one side and simultaneously pressed and pulled the beech leaves under my thumbs. "Our Father. . ." Korneff croaked: "Don't squeeze, pull." I pulled. ". . .be Thy name." Komeff managed to join in the prayer: ". . .Thy Kingdom come." Pulling didn't help, so I squeezed again. "Will be done, on as it is in." A miracle that there was no explosion. And once again: " give us this day." And again Korneff caught up the thread: "trespa.s.ses and not into temptation. . ." There was more of it than I had expected. "Kingdom and the power and the glory." I squeezed out the last colorful remnant. ". . .and ever, amen." While I give a last squeeze, Korneff: "Amen," and a last pull: " Amen." As the folks over in Section Nine started on their condolences, Korneff said another amen. Still flat on the travertine slab, he heaved a sigh of relief: "Amen," to which he added: "Got some concrete left for under the pedestal?" Yes, I had. And he: "Amen."

I spread the last shovelfuls as a binder between the two posts. Then Korneff slid down off the polished inscription and Oskar showed him the autumnal beech leaves and the similarly colored contents of his boils. We put our caps back on, took hold of the stone, and, as the funeral in Section Nine dispersed, put up the slab that would mark the grave of Hermann Webknecht and Else Webknecht, nee Freytag.

Fortuna North

In those days only people who left something valuable behind them on the surface of the earth could afford tombstones. It didn't have to be a diamond or a string of pearls. For five sacks of potatoes, you could get a plain but good-sized stone of Grenzheim sh.e.l.l lime. A Belgian granite monument on three pedestals for a tomb for two brought us material for two three-piece suits. The tailor's widow, who gave us the goods, still had an apprentice working for her; she agreed to make the suits in return for a dolomite border.

One evening after work Korneff and I took the Number 10 car out to Stock.u.m, where we dropped in on the Widow Lennert and had our measurements taken. Absurd as it may sound, Oskar was wearing an armored infantry uniform with alterations by Maria. The b.u.t.tons on the jacket had been moved, but even so, what with my peculiar build, it was impossible to b.u.t.ton them.

The suit which Anton the apprentice proceeded to make me was dark blue with a pin stripe and light grey lining; it was single-breasted, adequately but not misleadingly padded at the shoulders: it did not conceal my hump, but made the most of it, though without exaggeration; cuffs on the trousers but not ostentatiously wide. My model, in matters of dress, was still Master Bebra, hence no loops for a belt but b.u.t.tons for suspenders; vest s.h.i.+ny in back, subdued in front, lined with old rose. The whole thing took five fittings.

While Anton was still working on Korneff's double-breasted and my single-breasted suit, a trafficker in shoes came to see us about a tombstone for his wife, who had been killed in an air raid in '43. First he tried to palm off ration coupons on us, but we demanded merchandise. For Silesian marble with fancy border plus installation Komeff obtained for himself one pair of dark-brown oxfords and one of carpet slippers and for me a pair of high, old-fas.h.i.+oned but wonderfully supple black shoes size five, which supported my weak ankles and, despite their archaic cut, had a pleasingly elegant look.

Laying a bundle of reichsmarks on the honey scales, I asked Maria to buy me two white s.h.i.+rts, one with pin stripes, and two ties, one light grey, the other dark brown. "The rest," I said, "is for Kurt and for you, my dear Maria, who never think of yourself but only of others."

While my giving spree lasted, I gave Guste an umbrella with a real bone handle and a deck of almost new skat cards, for she liked to lay out cards, but it pained her to borrow a deck from the neighbors every time she was curious to know when Koster would come home.

Maria carried out my commission without delay. With the money that was left -- and there was quite a lot -- she bought herself a raincoat and Kurt a school satchel of imitation leather, which was horrible to look upon but served its purpose for the time. To my s.h.i.+rts and ties she added three pairs of grey socks that I had forgotten to order.

When Korneff and Oskar called for our suits, we were embarra.s.sed at our reflections in the gla.s.s, but quite impressed by one another. Korneff hardly dared to turn his ravaged neck. His arms hung forward from drooping shoulders, and he tried to straighten his bent knees. My new clothes give me a demonic, intellectual look, especially when I folded my arms over my chest, so adding to my upper horizontal dimension, and, supporting my weight on my feeble right leg, held out my left at a nonchalant angle. Smiling at Korneff and his astonishment, I approached the mirror, stood close enough to kiss my reverse image, but was satisfied to cloud myself over with my breath and said as though in pa.s.sing: "Ho, there, Oskar. You still need a tie pin."

When, one Sunday afternoon a week later, I visited my nurses in the City Hospital and not without vanity displayed my spruce, brand-new self, I was already in possession of a silver tie pin with a pearl in it.

The dear girls were speechless when they saw me sitting in the nurses' room. That was late in the summer of '47. I crossed my arms over my chest in the traditional way and played with my leather gloves. For more than a year now I had been a stonecutter's helper, a master at fluting and grooving. I crossed my legs, careful not to disturb the crease in my trousers. Our good Guste took care of my suit as though it had been made to order for Koster, whose homecoming was going to change everything. Sister Helmtrud wanted to feel the material and of course I let her. In the spring of '47 we celebrated Kurt's seventh birthday with home-mixed egg liqueur and homemade sand cake -- take two pounds of b.u.t.ter. Take this, take that -- and I gave him a mouse-grey loden coat. Meanwhile Sister Gertrude had joined the other nurses and I pa.s.sed around some candy which, in addition to twenty pounds of brown sugar, we had been given for a diorite slab. Little Kurt, it seemed to me, was much too fond of school. His teacher, who was young and attractive and in no way resembled la Spollenhauer, spoke well of him; she said he was bright, though a trifle solemn. How gay nurses can be when you bring them candy. When left alone for a moment with Sister Gertrude, I inquired about her free Sundays.

"Well, today for instance, I'm off at five. But," said Sister Gertrude with resignation, "there's nothing doing in town."