Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 22

We loved the Rhine meadows, and it so happened that Ferdinand Schmuh, the restaurant and night-spot owner, also loved the right bank of the Rhine between Dusseldorf and Kaiserswerth. We did most of our practicing above Stock.u.m. Meanwhile Schmuh, carrying a small-caliber rifle, searched the riverside hedges and bushes for sparrows. That was his hobby, his recreation. When business got on his nerves, Schmuh bade his wife take the wheel of the Mercedes; they would drive along the river and park above Stock.u.m. Slightly flat-footed, his rifle pointing at the ground, he set off across the meadows, followed by his wife, who would rather have stayed in the car. At the end of their cross-country jaunt, he deposited her on a comfortable stone by the riverbank and vanished amid the hedges. While we played our ragtime, he went pop pop in the bushes. While we made music, Schmuh shot sparrows.

When Scholle, who like Klepp knew every bar owner in town, heard shooting in the shrubbery, he announced: "Schmuh is shooting sparrows."

Since Schmuh is no longer living, I may as well put in my obituary right here: Schmuh was a good marksman and perhaps a good man as well; for when Schmuh went sparrow-shooting, he kept ammunition in the left-hand pocket of his coat, but his right-hand pocket was full of bird food, which he distributed among the sparrows with a generous sweeping movement, not before, but after he had done his shooting, and he never shot more than twelve birds in an afternoon.

One cool November morning in 1949, when Schmuh was still among the living and we for our part had been rehearsing for some weeks on the banks of the Rhine, he addressed us in a voice too loud and angry to be taken quite seriously: "How do you expect me to shoot birds when you scare them away with your music?"

"Oh," Klepp apologized, holding out his flute as though presenting arms. "You must be the gentleman with the superb sense of rhythm, whose shooting keeps such perfect time with our melodies. My respects, Mr. Schmuh!"

Schmuh was pleased that Klepp knew him by name, but inquired how so. Klepp, with a show of indignation: Why, everybody knows Schmuh. In the street I can always hear somebody saying: There's Schmuh, there goes Schmuh, did you see Schmuh just now, where is Schmuh today, Schmuh is out shooting sparrows.

Thus transformed into a public figure, Schmuh offered us cigarettes, asked us our names, and requested a piece from our repertory. We obliged with a tiger rag, whereupon he called his wife, who had been sitting in her fur coat on a stone, musing over the waters of the Rhine. Fur-coated, she joined us and again we played; this time it was "High Society", and when we had finished, she said in her fur coat: "Why, Ferdy, that's just what you need for the Cellar." He seemed to be of the same opinion; indeed, he was under the impression that he personally had gone scouting for us and found us. Nevertheless, Schmuh, pondering, maybe calculating, sent several flat stones skipping over the waters of the Rhine before he made his offer: would we play at the Onion Cellar from nine to two, for ten marks an evening apiece, well, let's say twelve? Klepp said seventeen in order that Schmuh might say fifteen; Schmuh said fourteen fifty, and we called it a deal.

Seen from the street, the Onion Cellar looked like many of the newer night clubs which are distinguished from the older bars and cabarets by, among other things, their higher prices. The higher prices were justified by the outlandish decoration of these night spots, many of which termed themselves "Artists' clubs" and also by their names. There was "The Ravioli Room" (discreet and refined), "The Taboo" (mysterious and existentialist), "The Paprika" (spicy and high-spirited). And of course there was "The Onion Cellar".

The words " Onion Cellar " and a poignantly naive likeness of an onion had been painted with deliberate awkwardness on an enamel sign which hung in the old German manner from elaborate wrought-iron gallows in front of the house. The one and only window was gla.s.sed with bottle-green bull's-eye panes. The iron door, painted with red lead, had no doubt seen service outside an air-raid shelter in the war years. Outside it stood the doorman in a rustic sheepskin. Not everyone was allowed in the Onion Cellar. Especially on Fridays, when wages turn to beer, it was the doorman's business to turn away certain Old City characters, for whom the Onion Cellar was too expensive in the first place. Behind the red-lead door, those who were allowed in found five concrete steps. You went down, found yourself on a landing some three feet square, to which a poster for a Pica.s.so show lent an original, artistic turn. Four more steps took you to the checkroom. "Please pay later," said a little cardboard sign, and indeed, the young man at the counter, usually an art student with a beard, refused to take money in advance, because the Onion Cellar was not only expensive but also and nevertheless high cla.s.s.

The owner in person welcomed every single guest with elaborate gestures and mobile, expressive eyebrows, as though initiating him into a secret rite. As we know, the owner's name was Ferdinand Schmuh; he was a man who shot sparrows now and then, and had a keen eye for the society which had sprung up in Dusseldorf (and elsewhere, though not quite so quickly) since the currency reform.

The Onion Cellar -- and here we see the note of authenticity essential to a successful night club -- was a real cellar; in fact, it was quite damp and chilly under foot. Tubular in shape, it measured roughly thirteen by sixty, and was heated by two authentic cast-iron stoves. Yet in one respect the Cellar wasn't a cellar after all. The ceiling had been taken off, so that the club actually included the former ground-floor apartment. The one and only window was not a real cellar window, but the former window of the ground-floor apartment. However, since one might have looked out of the window if not for its opaque bull's-eye panes; since there was a gallery that one reached by a highly original and highly precipitous staircase, the Onion Cellar can reasonably be termed "authentic", even if it was not a real cellar -- and besides, why should it have been?

Oskar has forgotten to tell you that the staircase leading to the gallery was not a real staircase but more like a companionway, because on either side of its dangerously steep steps there were two extremely original clotheslines to hold on to; the staircase swayed a bit, making you think of an ocean voyage and adding to the price.

The Onion Cellar was lighted by acetylene lamps such as miners carry, which broadcast a smell of carbide -- again adding to the price -- and transported the customer unto the gallery of a mine, a potash mine for instance, three thousand feet below the surface of the earth: cutters bare to the waist hack away at the rock, opening up a vein; the sc.r.a.per hauls out the salt, the windla.s.s roars as it fills the cars; far behind, where the gallery turns off to Friedrichshall Two, a swaying light; that's the head foreman and here he comes with a cheery h.e.l.lo, swinging a carbide lamp that looks exactly like the carbide lamps that hung from the unadorned, slapdashly whitewashed walls of the Onion Cellar, casting their light and smell, adding to the prices, and creating an original atmosphere.

The customers were uncomfortably seated on common crates covered with onion sacks, yet the plank tables, scrubbed and spotless, recalled the guests from the mine to a peaceful peasant inn such as we sometimes see in the movies.

That was all! But what about the bar? No bar. Waiter, the menu please! Neither waiter nor menu. In fact, there was no one else but ourselves, the Rhine River Three. Klepp, Scholle, and Oskar sat beneath the staircase that was really a companionway. We arrived at nine, unpacked our instruments, and began to play at about ten. But for the present it is only a quarter past nine and I won't be able to speak about us until later. Right now let us keep an eye on Schmuh, who occasionally shot sparrows with a small-caliber rifle.

As soon as the Onion Cellar had filled up -- half-full was regarded as full -- Schmuh, the host, donned his shawl. This shawl had been specially made for him. It was cobalt-blue silk, printed with a golden-yellow pattern. I mention all this because the donning of the shawl was significant. The pattern printed on the shawl was made up of golden-yellow onions. The Onion Cellar was not really "open" until Schmuh had put on his shawl.

The customers -- businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, theater and movie people, well-known figures from the sporting world, officials in the provincial and munic.i.p.al government, in short, a cross section of the world which nowadays calls itself intellectual -- came with wives, mistresses, secretaries, interior decorators, and occasional male mistresses, to sit on crates covered with burlap. Until Schmuh put on his golden-yellow onions, the conversation was subdued, forced, dispirited. These people wanted to talk, to unburden themselves, but they couldn't seem to get started; despite all their efforts, they left the essential unsaid, talked around it. Yet how eager they were to spill their guts, to talk from their hearts, their bowels, their entrails, to forget about their brains just this once, to lay bare the raw, unvarnished truth, the man within. Here and there a stifled remark about a botched career, a broken marriage. One gathers that the gentleman over there with the ma.s.sive head, the intelligent face and soft, almost delicate hands, is having trouble with his son, who is displeased about his father's past. Those two ladies in mink, who still look quite attractive in the light of the carbide lamp, claim to have lost their faith, but they don't say in what. So far we know nothing about the past of the gentleman with the ma.s.sive head, nor have we the slightest idea what sort of trouble his son is making for him on account of this unknown past; if you'll forgive Oskar a crude metaphor, it was like laying eggs; you push and push. . .

The pus.h.i.+ng in the Onion Cellar brought meager results until Schmuh appeared in his special shawl. Having been welcomed with a joyful "Ah!" for which he thanked his kind guests, he vanished for a few minutes behind a curtain at the end of the Onion Cellar, where the toilets and storeroom were situated.

But why did a still more joyous "Ah", an "Ah" of relief and release, welcome the host on his reappearance? The proprietor of a successful nightclub disappears behind a curtain, takes something from the storeroom, flings a choice selection of insults in an undertone at the washroom attendant who is sitting there reading an ill.u.s.trated weekly, reappears in front of the curtain, and is welcomed like the Saviour, like the legendary uncle from Australia!

Schmuh came back with a little basket on his arm and moved among the guests. The basket was covered with a blue-and-yellow checkered napkin. On the cloth lay a considerable number of little wooden boards, shaped like pigs or fish. These he handed out to his guests with little bows and compliments which showed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he had grown up in Budapest and Vienna; Schmuh's smile was like the smile on a copy of a copy of the supposedly authentic Mona Lisa.

The guests, however, looked very serious as they took their little boards. Some exchanged boards with their neighbors, for some preferred the silhouette of a pig, while others preferred the more mysterious fish. They sniffed at the pieces of wood and moved them about. Schmuh, after serving the customers in the gallery, waited until all the little boards had come to rest.

Then -- and every heart was waiting -- he removed the napkin, very much in the manner of a magician: beneath it lay still another napkin, upon which, almost unrecognizable at first glance, lay the paring knives.

These too he proceeded to hand out. But this time he made his rounds more quickly, whipping up the tension that permitted him to raise his prices; he paid no more compliments, and left no time for any exchanges of knives; a calculated haste entered into his movements. "On your mark, get set," he shouted. At " Go" he tore the napkin off the basket, reached into the basket, and handed out, dispensed, distributed among the mult.i.tude onions -- onions such as were represented, golden-yellow and slightly stylized, on his shawl, plain ordinary onions, not tulip bulbs, but onions such as women buy in the market, such as the vegetable woman sells, such as the peasant, the peasant's wife, or the hired girl plants and harvests, onions such as may be seen, more or less faithfully portrayed in the still lifes of the lesser Dutch masters. Such onions, then, Schmuh dispensed among his guests until each had an onion and no sound could be heard but the purring of the stoves and the whistling of the carbide lamps. For the grand distribution of onions was followed by silence. Into which Ferdinand Schmuh cried: "Ladies and gentlemen, help yourselves." And he tossed one end of his shawl over his left shoulder like a skier just before the start. This was the signal.

The guests peeled the onions. Onions are said to have seven skins. The ladies and gentlemen peeled the onions with the paring knives. They removed the first, third, blond, golden-yellow, rust-brown, or better still, onion-colored skin, they peeled until the onion became gla.s.sy, green, whitish, damp, and water-sticky, until it smelled, smelled like an onion. Then they cut it as one cuts onions, deftly or clumsily, on the little chopping boards shaped like pigs or fish; they cut in one direction and another until the juice spurted or turned to vapor -- the older gentlemen were not very handy with paring knives and had to be careful not to cut their fingers; some cut themselves even so, but didn't notice it -- the ladies were more skillful, not all of them, but those at least who were housewives at home, who knew how one cuts up onions for hash-brown potatoes, or for liver with apples and onion rings; but in Schmuh's onion cellar there was neither, there was nothing whatever to eat, and anyone who wanted to eat had to go elsewhere, to the "Fischl", for instance, for at the Onion Cellar onions were only cut. Why all these onions? For one thing, because of the name. The Onion Cellar had its specialty: onions. And moreover, the onion, the cut onion, when you look at it closely. . . but enough of that, Schmuh's guests had stopped looking, they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were so full; for it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board -- pig or fish -- a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice -- what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it? After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human beings who have had a good cry open their mouths to speak. Still hesitant, startled by the nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbors on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves be turned inside-out like overcoats. But Oskar, who with Klepp and Scholle sat tearless behind the staircase or companionway, will be discreet; from among all the disclosures, self-accusations, confessions that fell on his ears, he will relate only the story of Miss Pioch, who lost her Mr. Vollmer many times over, so acquiring a strong heart and a tearless eye, which necessitated frequent visits to Schmuh's Onion Cellar.

We met, said Miss Pioch when she had finished crying, in the streetcar. I had just come from the store -- she owns and operates an excellent bookstore. The car was full and w.i.l.l.y -- that's Mr. Vollmer -- stepped on my right foot. He stepped so hard that I couldn't stand on it any more, and we loved each other at first sight. I couldn't walk either, so he offered me his arm, escorted, or rather carried, me home, and from that day on he took loving care of the toenail which had turned black and blue under his heel. He loved me, not just my toe, until the toenail came loose from its toe -- the right big toe -- and there was nothing to prevent a new toenail from growing in. The day the dead toenail fell, his love began to cool. Both of us were miserable about it. It was then that w.i.l.l.y -- he still cared for me in a way and, besides, we had so much in common -- had his terrible idea. Let me, he pleaded, trample your left big toe until the nail turns a light, then a darker purple. I consented and he trampled. Again he loved me with his whole being, and his love endured until my big toenail, the left one it was, fell away like a withered leaf; and then it was autumn again for our love. w.i.l.l.y wanted to start in again on my right big toe, the nail had meanwhile grown in again. But I wouldn't let him. If your love for me is really so overpowering, I said, it ought to outlast a toenail. He couldn't seem to understand. He left me. Months later, we met at a concert. The seat beside me happened to be unoccupied and after the intermission he sat down in it. They were doing the Ninth Symphony. When the chorus started up, I removed the shoe from my right foot and held the foot out in front of him. He stepped on it with might and main, but I didn't do anything to interfere with the concert. Seven weeks later w.i.l.l.y left me again. We had two more brief reprieves; twice more I held out my toe, first the left one, then the right one. Today both my toes are maimed. The nails won't grow in again. From time to time w.i.l.l.y comes to see me; shaken, full of pity for me and for himself, he sits at my feet on the rug and stares, unloving and unweeping, at the two nailless victims of our love. Sometimes I say: Come along w.i.l.l.y, let's go to Schmuh's Onion Cellar and have a good cry. But so far he has refused to come. What the poor soul must suffer without the consolation of tears!

Later -- this Oskar relates only to satisfy the curious among you -- Mr. Vollmer (he sold radios, I might mention in pa.s.sing) did come to our Cellar. They cried together and it seems, as Klepp told me yesterday in visiting hour, that they have just been married.

It was from Tuesday to Sat.u.r.day -- the Onion Cellar was closed on Sunday -- that the onion brought the more basic tragedies of human existence welling to the surface. But the most violent weeping was done on Mondays, when our cellar was patronized by the younger set. On Monday Schmuh served onions to students at half-price. The most frequent guests were medical and pre-medical students -- of both s.e.xes. Quite a few art students as well, particularly among those who were planning to teach drawing later on, spent a portion of their stipends on onions. But where, I have wondered ever since, did the boys and girls in their last year of high school get the money for onions?

Young people have a different way of crying. They have entirely different problems from their elders, but this doesn't mean that examinations are their only source of anguish. Oh. what conflicts between father and son, mother and daughter, were aired in the Onion Cellar! A good many of the young people felt that they were not understood, but most of them were used to it; nothing to cry about. Oskar was glad to see that love, and not just s.e.xual frustration, could still wring tears from the young folks. Gerhard and Gudrun for instance.

At first they sat downstairs; it was only later that they wept side by side in the gallery. She, large and muscular, a handball player and student of chemistry. She wore her hair over her neck in a big bun. Most of the time she looked straight ahead of her out of grey, motherly eyes, a clean forthright gaze that reminded me of the Women's a.s.sociation posters during the war.

In spite of her fine forehead, smooth, milky-white, and radiant with health, her face was her misfortune. Her cheeks and her round, firm chin down to her Adam's apple bore the distressing traces of a vigorous growth of beard that the poor thing kept trying in vain to shave off. Her sensitive skin reacted violently to the razor blade. Gudrun wept for her red, cracked, pimply complexion, she wept for the beard that kept growing back in. They had not met in the streetcar like Miss Pioch and Mr. Vollmer, but in the train. He was sitting opposite her, they were both on their way back from their between-semesters vacation. He loved her instantly in spite of the beard. She, because of her beard, was afraid to love him, but was full of admiration for what to him was his misfortune, his chin, which was as smooth and beardless as a baby's bottom, and made him bashful in the presence of girls. Nevertheless, Gerhard spoke to Gudrun, and by the time they left the train at the Dusseldorf station, they were friends at least. After that they saw each other every day. They spoke of this and that, and shared a good part of their thoughts, but never alluded to the beard that was missing or the beard that was all too present. Gerhard was considerate of Gudrun; knowing that her skin was sensitive, he never kissed her. Their love remained chaste, though neither of them set much store by chast.i.ty, for she was interested in chemistry while he was studying medicine. When a friend suggested the Onion Cellar, they smiled contemptuously with the skepticism characteristic of chemists and medical men. But finally they went, for purposes of doc.u.mentation, as they a.s.sured each other. Never has Oskar seen young people cry so. They came time and time again; they went without food to save up the six marks forty it cost them, and wept about the beard that was absent and the beard that devastated the soft, maidenly skin. Sometimes they tried to stay away from the Onion Cellar. One Monday they didn't come, but the following Monday they were back again. Rubbing the chopped onion between their fingers, they admitted that they had tried to save the six marks forty; they had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.

This was another case in which the Onion Cellar bestowed not only tears but also, little by little, a cure. Apparently the tears washed away their inhibitions and brought them, as the saying goes, closer together. He kissed her tortured cheeks, she fondled his smooth chin, and one day they stopped coming to the Onion Cellar; they didn't need it any more. Oskar met them months later in Konigs-Allee. He didn't recognize them at first. He, the glabrous Gerhard, sported a waving, reddish-blond beard; she, the p.r.i.c.kly Gudrun, had barely a slight dark fuzz on her upper lip, very becoming to her. Her chin and cheeks were smooth, radiant, free from vegetation. Still studying but happily married, a student couple. Oskar can hear them in fifty years talking to their grandchildren. She, Gudrun: "That was long ago, before Grandpa had his beard." And he, Gerhard: "That was in the days when your Grandma was having trouble with her beard and we went to the Onion Cellar every Monday."

But to what purpose, you may ask, are three musicians still sitting under the companionway or staircase? What use had the onion shop, what with all this weeping, wailing, and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth, for a regular, and regularly paid, band?

Once the customers had finished crying and unburdening themselves, we took up our instruments and provided a musical transition to normal, everyday conversation. We made it easy for the guests to leave the Onion Cellar, and make room for more guests. Klepp, Scholle, and Oskar were not personally lovers of onions. Besides, there was a clause in our contract forbidding us to "use" onions in the same way as the guests. We had no need of them anyway. Scholle, the guitarist, had no ground for sorrow, he always seemed happy and contented, even when two strings on his banjo snapped at once in the middle of a rag. As to Klepp, the very concepts of crying and laughing are to this day unclear to him. Tears make him laugh; I have never seen anyone laugh as hard as Klepp did at the funeral of the aunt who used to wash his s.h.i.+rts and socks before he got married. But what of Oskar? Oskar had plenty of ground for tears. Mightn't he have used a few tears to wash away Sister Dorothea and that long, futile night spent on a still longer coconut-fiber runner? And my Maria? There is no doubt that she gave me cause enough for grief. Didn't Stenzel, her boss, come and go as he pleased in the flat in Bilk? Hadn't Kurt, my son, taken to calling the grocery-store-owner first "Uncle Stenzel" and then "Papa Stenzel"? And what of those who lay in the faraway sand of Saspe Cemetery or in the clay at Brenntau: my poor mama, the foolish and lovable Jan Bronski, and Matzerath, the cook who knew how to transform feelings into soups? All of them needed to be wept for. But Oskar was one of the fortunate who could still weep without onions. My drum helped me. Just a few very special measures were all it took to make Oskar melt into tears that were no better or worse than the expensive tears of the Onion Cellar.

As for Schmuh, the proprietor, he never touched his onions either. In his case the sparrows he shot out of hedges and bushes in his free time filled the bill. Sometimes, after shooting, Schmuh would line up his twelve dead sparrows on a newspaper, shed tears over the little bundles of feathers before they even had time to grow cold, and, still weeping, strew bird food over the Rhine meadows and the pebbles by the water. In the Cellar he had still another outlet for his sorrow. He had gotten into the habit of giving the washroom attendant a ferocious tongue-las.h.i.+ng once a week, making more and more use of archaic expressions like "s.l.u.t", "miserable strumpet", "blasted old harridan". "Out of my sight!" we could hear him bellow, "Despicable monster! You're fired!" He would dismiss his victim without notice and hire a new one. But soon he ran into difficulty, there were no washroom attendants left. There was nothing for it but to hire back those he had previously fired. They were only too glad to accept; most of Schmuh's insults didn't mean much to them anyway, and they made good money. The guests at the Onion Cellar -- an effect of so much weeping no doubt -- made exorbitant use of the facilities, and moreover h.o.m.o lacrimans tends to be more generous than his dry-eyed counterpart. Especially the gentlemen, who, after begging leave in voices choked with tears to step out for a minute, could be counted on to reach deep into their purses. Another source of income for the washroom attendant was the sale of the famous onion-print handkerchiefs inscribed with the legend: "In the Onion Cellar". They sold like hotcakes, for when they were no longer needed to wipe the eyes with they made attractive souvenirs and could be worn on the head. They could also be made into pennants which the habitues of the Onion Cellar would hang in the rear windows of their cars, so bearing the fame of Schmuh's Onion Cellar, in vacation time, to Paris, the Cote d'Azur, Rome, Ravenna, Rimini, and even remote Spain.

We musicians and our music had still another function. Occasionally some of the guests would partake of two onions in quick succession; the result was an outbreak that might easily have degenerated into an orgy. Schmuh insisted on a certain restraint; when gentlemen began taking off their ties and ladies undoing their blouses, he would order us to step in with our music and counteract the stirrings of lewdness. However, Schmuh himself was largely responsible for these ticklish situations, what with his insidious habit of serving up a second onion to particularly vulnerable customers.

The most spectacular outburst I can recall was to influence Oskar's whole career, though I shall not go so far as to speak of a crucial turning point. Schmuh's wife, the vivacious Billy, did not come to the Cellar very often, and when she did, it was in the company of friends to whom Schmuh was far from partial. One night she turned up with Woode, the music critic, and Wackerlei, the architect and pipe-smoker. Both of them were regular customers, but their sorrows were of the most boring variety. Woode wept for religious reasons -- he was always being converted or reconverted to something or other; as for Wackerlei, the pipe-smoker, he was still bewailing a professors.h.i.+p he had turned down in the twenties for the sake of a little Danish fly-by-night who had gone and married a South American and had six children by him, which was still a source of grief to Wackerlei and made his pipe go out year after year. It was the somewhat malicious Woode who persuaded Madame Schmuh to cut into an onion. She cut, the tears flowed, and she began to spill. She laid Schmuh bare, told stories about him that Oskar will tactfully pa.s.s over in silence; it took several of the more powerful customers to prevent Schmuh from flinging himself on his spouse; don't forget that there were paring knives on every table. In any case, Schmuh was forcibly restrained until the indiscreet Billy could slip away with her friends Woode and Wackerlei.

Schmuh was very upset. I could see that by the way his hands flew about arranging and rearranging his onion shawl. Several times he vanished behind the curtain and reviled the washroom attendant. Finally he came back with a full basket and informed his guests in a tone of hysterical glee that he, Schmuh, was in a generous mood and was going to hand out a free round of onions. Which he proceeded to do.

Every human situation, however painful, strikes Klepp as a terrific joke, but on this occasion he was tense and held his flute at the ready. For we knew how dangerous it was to offer these high-strung people a double portion of tears, of the tears that wash away barriers.

Schmuh saw that we were holding our instruments in readiness and forbade us to play. At the tables the paring knives were at work. The beautiful outer skins, colored like rosewood, were thrust heedlessly aside. The knives bit into vitreous onion flesh with pale-green stripes. Oddly enough, the weeping did not begin with the ladies. Gentlemen in their prime -- the owner of a large flour mill, a hotel-owner with his slightly rouged young friend, a n.o.bleman high in the councils of an important business firm, a whole tableful of men's clothing manufacturers who were in town for a board meeting, the bald actor who was known in the Cellar as the Gnasher, because he gnashed his teeth when he wept -- all were in tears before the ladies joined in. But neither the ladies nor the gentlemen wept the tears of deliverance and release that the first onion had called forth; this was a frantic, convulsive crying jag. The Gnasher gnashed his teeth blood-curdlingly; had he been on the stage, the whole audience would have joined in; the mill-owner hanged his carefully groomed grey head on the table top; the hotel-owner mingled his convulsions with those of his delicate young friend. Schmuh, who stood by the stairs, let his shawl droop and peered with malicious satisfaction at the near-unleashed company. Suddenly, a lady of ripe years tore off her blouse before the eyes of her son-in-law. The hotel-owner's young friend, whose slightly exotic look had already been remarked on, bared his swarthy torso, and leaping from table top to table top performed a dance which exists perhaps somewhere in the Orient. The orgy was under way. But despite the violence with which it began, it was a dull, uninspired affair, hardly worth describing in detail.

Schmuh was disappointed; even Oskar lifted his eyebrows in disgust. One or two cute strip tease acts; men appeared in ladies' underwear, Amazons donned ties and suspenders; a couple or two disappeared under the table; the Gnasher chewed up a bra.s.siere and apparently swallowed some of it.

The hubbub was frightful, wows and yippees with next to nothing behind them. At length Schmuh, disgusted and maybe fearing the police, left his post by the stairs, bent down over us, gave first Klepp, then me a poke, and hissed: "Music! Play something, for G.o.d's sake. Make them stop."

But it turned out that Klepp, who was easy to please, was enjoying himself. Shaking with laughter, he couldn't do a thing with his flute. Scholle, who looked on Klepp as his master, imitated everything Klepp did, including his laughter. Only Oskar was left -- but Schmuh could rely on me. I pulled my drum from under the bench, nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and began to drum.

Without any notion of what I was going to do, I made myself understood. I forgot all about the usual cafe concert routine. Nor did Oskar play jazz. For one thing I didn't like to be taken for a percussion maniac. All right, I was a good drummer, but not a hepcat. Sure, I like jazz, but I like Viennese waltzes too. I could play both, but I didn't have to. When Schmuh asked me to step in with my drum, I didn't play anything I had ever learned, I played with my heart. It was a three-year-old Oskar who picked up those drumsticks. I drummed my way back, I drummed up the world as a three-year-old sees it. And the first thing I did to these postwar humans incapable of a real orgy was to put a harness on them: I led them to Posadowski-Weg, to Auntie Kauer's kindergarten. Soon I had their jaws hanging down; they took each other by the hands, turned their toes in, and waited for me, their Pied Piper. I left my post under the staircase and took the lead. "Bake, bake, bake a cake": that was my first sample. When I had registered my success -- childlike merriment on every hand -- I decided to scare them out of their wits. "Where's the Witch, black as pitch?" I drummed. And I drummed up the wicked black Witch who gave me an occasional fright in my childhood days and in recent years has terrified me more and more; I made her rage through the Onion Cellar in all her gigantic, coal-black frightfulness, so obtaining the results for which Schmuh required onions; the ladies and gentlemen wept great round, childlike tears, the ladies and gentlemen were scared pink and green; their teeth chattered, they begged me to have mercy. And so, to comfort them, and in part to help them back into their outer and undergarments, their silks and satins, I drummed: "Green, green, green is my raiment" and "Red, red, red is my raiment", not to mention " Blue, blue, blue. . ." and " Yellow, yellow, yellow". By the time I had gone through all the more familiar colors, my charges were all properly dressed. Thereupon I formed them into a procession, led them through the Onion Cellar as though it were Jeschkentaler-Weg. I led them up the Erbsberg, round the hideous Gutenberg Monument, and on the Johannis-Wiese grew daisies which they, the ladies and gentlemen, were free to pick in innocent merriment. Then, at last, wis.h.i.+ng to give all those present, including Schmuh the head man, something by which to remember their day in kindergarten, I gave them all permission to do number one. We were approaching Devil's Gulch, a sinister place it was, gathering beechnuts, when I said on my drum: now, children, you may go. And they availed themselves of the opportunity. All the ladies and gentlemen, Schmuh the host, even the far-off washroom attendant, all the little children wet themselves, psss, psss they went, they all crouched down and listened to the sound they were making and they all wet their pants. It was only when the music had died down -- Oskar had left the infant sound effects to themselves except for a soft distant roll -- that I ushered in unrestrained merriment with one loud, emphatic boom. All about me the company roared, t.i.ttered, babbled childish nonsense:

Smash a little windowpane Put sugar in your beer, Mrs. Biddle plays the fiddle.

Dear, dear, dear.

I led them to the cloakroom, where a bewildered student gave Schmuh's kindergarteners their wraps; then, with the familiar ditty "Hard-working washerwomen scrubbing out the clothes," I drummed them up the concrete steps, past the doorman in the rustic sheepskin. I dismissed the kindergarten beneath the night sky of spring, 1950, a trifle cool perhaps, but studded with fairytale stars, as though made to order for the occasion. Forgetful of home, they continued for quite some time to make childish mischief in the Old City, until at length the police helped them to remember their age, social position, and telephone number.

As for me, I giggled and caressed my drum as I went back to the Onion Cellar, where Schmuh was still clapping his hands, still standing bowlegged and wet beside the staircase, seemingly as happy in Auntie Kauer's kindergarten as on the Rhine meadows when a grown-up Schmuh went shooting sparrows.

On the Atlantic Wall or Concrete Eternal

I had only been trying to help him. But Schmuh, owner and guiding spirit of the Onion Cellar, could not forgive me for my drum solo which had transformed his well-paying guests into babbling, riotously merry children who wet their pants and cried because they had wet their pants, all without benefit of onions.

Oskar tries to understand him. Could he help fearing my compet.i.tion when his guests began to push aside the traditional onions and cry out for Oskar, for Oskar's drum, for me who on my drum could conjure up the childhood of every one of them, however old and feeble?

Up until then, Schmuh had contented himself with dismissing his washroom attendants without notice. Now it was the whole Rhine River Three that he fired. In our place he took on an ambulatory fiddler who, if you closed an eye or two, might have been taken for a gypsy.

But when, as a result of our dismissal, several of the guests, the most faithful at that, threatened to leave the Onion Celhr for good, Schmuh had to accept a compromise. Three times a week the fiddler fiddled. Three times a week we performed, having demanded and obtained a raise: twenty DM a night. There were good tips too; Oskar started a savings account and rejoiced as the interest accrued.

Only too soon my savings account was to become a friend in need and indeed, for then came Death and carried away our Ferdinand Schmuh, our job, and our earnings.

I have already said that Schmuh shot sparrows. Sometimes he took us along in his Mercedes and let us look on. Despite occasional quarrels about my drum, which involved Klepp and Scholle, because they took my part, relations between Schmuh and his musicians remained friendly until, as I have intimated, death came between us.

We piled in. As usual, Schmuh's wife was at the wheel. Klepp beside her. Between Oskar and Scholle sat Schmuh, holding his rifle over his knees and caressing it from time to time. We stopped just before Kaiserswerth. On both banks of the Rhine lines of trees: the stage was set. Schmuh's wife stayed in the car and unfolded a newspaper. Klepp had bought some raisins which he munched with noteworthy regularity. Scholle, who had been a student of something or other before taking up the guitar in earnest, managed to conjure up from his memory a number of poems about the river Rhine, which had indeed put its poetic foot forward and, apart from the usual barges, was giving us quite a display of swaying autumnal foliage in the direction of Duisburg, though according to the calendar it was still summer. If Schmuh's rifle had not spoken up from time to time, that afternoon below Kaiserswerth might well have been termed peaceful or even serene.

By the time Klepp had finished his raisins and wiped his fingers on the gra.s.s, Schmuh too had finished. Beside the eleven cold b.a.l.l.s of feathers on the newspaper, he laid a twelfth -- still quivering, as he remarked. The marksman was already packing up his "bag" -- for some unfathomable reason Schmuh always took his victims home with him -- when a sparrow settled on a tree root that the river had washed ash.o.r.e not far from us. The sparrow was so c.o.c.ky about it, so grey, such a model specimen of a sparrow, that Schmuh couldn't resist; he who never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon shot a thirteenth -- he shouldn't have.

After he had laid the thirteenth beside the twelve, we went back to the black Mercedes and found Madame Schmuh asleep. Scholle and Klepp got into the back seat. I was about to join them but didn't; I felt like a little walk, I said, I'd take the streetcar, no need to bother about me. And so they drove off without Oskar, who had been very wise not to ride with them.

I followed slowly. I didn't have far to go. There was a detour round a stretch of road that was under repair. The detour pa.s.sed by a gravel pit. And in this gravel pit, some twenty feet below the surface of the road, lay the black Mercedes with its wheels in the air.

Some workmen from the gravel pit had removed the three injured persons and Schmuh's body from the car. The ambulance was on its way. I climbed down into the pit -- my shoes were soon full of gravel -- and busied myself a little with the injured; in spite of the pain they were in, they asked me questions, but I didn't tell them Schmuh was dead. Stiff and startled, he stared up at the sky, which was mostly cloudy. The newspaper containing his afternoon's bag had been flung out of the car. I counted twelve sparrows but couldn't find the thirteenth; I was still looking for it when they eased the ambulance down into the gravel pit.

Schmuh's wife, Klepp, and Scholle had nothing very serious the matter with them: bruises, a few broken ribs. When I went to see Klepp in the hospital and asked him what had 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 road, hundreds maybe thousands of sparrows had swarmed out of the hedges, bushes, and fruit trees, casting a great shadow over the Mercedes, cras.h.i.+ng against the winds.h.i.+eld, and frightening Mrs. Schmuh. By sheer sparrow power, they had brought about the accident and Schmuh's death.

You are free to think what you please of Klepp's story; Oskar is skeptical, especially when he considers that when Schmuh was buried in the South Cemetery, he, Oskar, was able to count no more sparrows than years before when he had come here to set up tombstones. Be that as it may, as I, in a borrowed top hat, was following the coffin with the mourners, I caught a glimpse of Korneff in Section Nine, setting up a diorite slab for a two-place grave, with an a.s.sistant unknown to me. As the coffin with Schmuh in it was carried past the stonecutter on its way to the newly laid-out Section Ten, Korneff doffed his cap in accordance with cemetery regulations; perhaps because of the top hat, he failed to recognize me, but he rubbed his neck in token of ripening or over-ripe boils.

Funerals! I have been obliged to take you to so many cemeteries. Somewhere, I went so far as to say that funerals remind one of other funerals. Very well, I will refrain from speaking at length of Schmuh's funeral or of Oskar's retrospective musings at the time. Suffice it to say that Schmuh had a normal, decent burial and that nothing unusual happened. All I really have to tell you is that when they had finished burying Schmuh -- the widow was in the hospital, or perhaps a little more decorum would have been maintained -- I was approached by a gentleman who introduced himself as Dr. Dosch.

Dr. Dosch ran a concert bureau but the concert bureau did not belong to him. He had been a frequent guest, he told me, at the Onion Cellar. I had never noticed him, but he had been there when I transformed Schmuh's customers into a band of babbling, happy children. Dosch himself, in fact, as he told me in confidence, had returned to childhood bliss under the influence of my drum, and he was dead set on making a big thing out of me and my " terrific stunt", as he called it. He had been authorized to offer me a contract, a terrific contract; why wouldn't I sign it on the spot? Outside the crematorium, where Leo Schugger, who in Dusseldorf bore the name of Willem s...o...b..r, was waiting in his white gloves for the mourners, Dr. Dosch pulled out a paper which, in return for enormous sums of money, committed the undersigned, hereinafter referred to as "Oskar, the drummer", to give solo performances in large theaters, to appear all by myself on the stage before audiences numbering two to three thousand. Dosch was inconsolable when I said I could not sign right away. As my reason, I gave Schmuh's death; Schmuh, I said, had been very close to me, I just couldn't go to work for someone else before he was cold in his grave, I'd have to think the matter over, maybe I'd take a little trip somewhere; I'd look up Dr. Dosch the moment I got back and then perhaps I would sign this paper that he called a contract.

However, though I signed no contract at the cemetery, Oskar's financial situation impelled him to accept an advance which Dr. Dosch handed me discreetly, hidden away in an envelope with his visiting card, outside the cemetery where he had parked his car.

And I did take the trip, I even found a traveling companion. Actually I should have liked Klepp to go with me. But Klepp was in the hospital, Klepp couldn't even laugh, for he had four broken ribs. I should have liked to take Maria. But the summer holidays were still on, little Kurt would have to come with us. And besides, she was still tied up with Stenzel, her boss, who had got Kurt to call him Papa Stenzel.

In the end I set out with Lankes. You remember him no doubt as Corporal Lankes and as the Muse Ulla's sometime fiance. When, with my advance and my savings book in my pocket, I repaired to Lankes' studio in Sittarder-Stra.s.se, I was hoping to find Ulla, my former partner; I thought I would ask the Muse to come along on my trip.

Ulla was there. Right in the doorway she told me: We're engaged. Been engaged for two weeks. It hadn't worked with Hanschen Krages, she had been obliged to break it off. Did I know Hanschen Krages?

No, said Oskar, to his infinite regret he hadn't known Ulla's former fiance. Then Oskar made his generous offer but before Ulla could accept, Lankes, emerging from the studio, elected himself Oskar's travel companion and boxed the long-legged Muse on the ear because she didn't want to stay home and had burst into tears in her disappointment.

Why didn't Oskar defend himself? Why, if he wanted the Muse as his traveling companion, didn't he take the Muse's part? Much as I was attracted by the prospect of a journey with Ulla by my side, Ulla so slender, Ulla so fuzzy and blond, I feared too close an intimacy with a Muse. Better keep the Muses at a distance, I said to myself, or the kiss of the Muses will get to be a domestic habit. It will be wiser to travel with Lankes, who gives his Muse a good licking when she tries to kiss him.

There was little discussion about our destination. Normandy, of course, where else? We would visit the fortifications between Caen and Cabourg. For that is where we had met during the war. The only difficulty was getting visas. But Oskar isn't one to waste words on visas.

Lankes is a stingy man. The lavishness with which he flings paint -- cheap stuff to be sure, and scrounged as often as not -- on poorly prepared canvas is equalled only by his tight-fistedness with money, coins as well as paper. A constant smoker, he has never been known to buy a cigarette. Moreover his stinginess is systematic: whenever someone gives him a cigarette, he takes a ten-pfennig piece out of his left pants pocket, raises his cap in a brief gesture of recognition, and drops the coin into his right pants pocket where it takes its place among other coins -- how many depends on the time of day. As I have said, he is always smoking, and one day when he was in a good humor, he confided in me: "Every day I make about two marks, just by smoking."

Last year Lankes bought a bombed-out lot in Wersten. He paid for it with the cigarettes of his friends and acquaintances.

This was the Lankes with whom Oskar went to Normandy. We took the train -- an express. Lankes would rather have hitchhiked. But since he was my guest and I was paying, he had to give in. We rode past poplars, behind which there were meadows bounded by hedgerows. Brown and white cows gave the countryside the look of an advertis.e.m.e.nt for milk chocolate, though of course for advertising purposes one would have had to block out the war damage. The villages, including the village of Bavent where I had lost my Roswitha, were still in pretty bad shape.

From Cabourg we walked along the beach toward the mouth of the Orne. It wasn't raining. As we approached Le Home, Lankes said: "We're home again, my boy. Give me a b.u.t.t." Before he had finished transferring his coin from pocket to pocket, he stretched out his wolf's head toward one of the numerous unharmed pillboxes in the dunes. With one long arm he toted his knapsack, his traveling easel, and his dozen frames; with the other, he pulled me toward the concrete. Oskar's luggage consisted of a suitcase and his drum.

On the third day of our stay on the Atlantic Coast -- we had meanwhile cleared the drifted sand out of Dora Seven, removed the distasteful traces of lovers who had found a haven there, and furnished the place with a crate and our sleeping bags -- Lankes came up from the beach with a good-sized codfish. Some fishermen had given it to him in return for a picture he had done of their boat.

In view of the fact that we still called the pillbox Dora Seven, it is hardly surprising that Oskar's thoughts, as he cleaned the fish, turned to Sister Dorothea. The liver and milt spurted over both my hands. While scaling, I faced the sun, which gave Lankes a chance to dash off a water color. We sat behind the pillbox, sheltered from the wind. The August sun beat down on the concrete dome. I larded the fish with garlic. The cavity once occupied by the milt, liver, and entrails, I stuffed with onions, cheese, and thyme; but I didn't throw away the milt and liver; I lodged both delicacies between the fish's jaws, which I wedged open with a lemon. Lankes reconnoitred. He disappeared into Dora Four, Dora Three, and so on down the line. Soon he returned with boards and some large cartons. The cartons he kept to paint on; the wood was for the fire.

There was no difficulty in keeping up the fire; the beach was covered with pieces of dry, feather-light driftwood, casting a variety of shadows. Over the hot coals I laid part of an iron balcony grating which Lankes had torn off a deserted beach villa. I rubbed the fish with olive oil and set it down on the hot grate, which I had also smeared with oil. I squeezed lemon juice over the crackling codfish and let it broil slowly -- one should never be in a hurry about cooking fish.

We had made a table by laying a big piece of tarboard over some empty buckets. We had our own forks and tin plates. To divert Lankes -- he was circling round the fish like a hungry sea gull -- I went to the pillbox and brought out my drum. Bedding it in the sand, I drummed into the wind, variations on the sounds of the surf and the rising tide: Bebra's Theater at the Front had come to inspect the concrete. From Kashubia to Normandy. Felix and Kitty, the two acrobats, tied themselves into knots on top of the pillbox and, just as Oskar was drumming against the wind, recited against the wind a poem the refrain of which, in the very midst of the war, announced the coming of an era of cozy comfort: ". . . The thought of comfort's like a drug: The trend is toward the bourgeois-smug," declaimed Kitty with her Saxon accent; and Bebra, my wise Bebra, captain of the Propaganda Company, nodded; and Roswitha, my Raguna from the Mediterranean, took up the picnic basket and set the table on the concrete, on top of Dora Seven; and Corporal Lankes, too, ate our white bread, drank our chocolate, and smoked Captain Bebra's cigarettes. . .

"Man!" Lankes called me back from the past. "Man, Oskar! If I could only paint like you drum; give me a b.u.t.t."

I stepped drumming, gave my traveling companion a cigarette, examined the fish, and saw that it was good: the eyes were white, serene, and liquid. Slowly I squeezed a last lemon, omitting not the slightest patch of the skin, which had cracked in places but was otherwise a beautiful brown.

"I'm hungry," said Lankes. He showed his long yellow fangs and, apelike, beat his breast with both fists through his checkered s.h.i.+rt.

"Head or tail?" I asked, setting the fish down on a sheet of waxed paper, which we had spread over the larboard in lieu of a tablecloth.

"What's your advice?" Lankes pinched out his cigarette and put away the b.u.t.t.

"As a friend, I'd say: Take the tail. As a cook, I can only recommend the head. On the other hand, if my mama, who was a big fish-eater, were here now, she'd say: Mr. Lankes, take the tail, then you know what you've got. On the third hand, the doctor used to advise my father. . ."

"I'm not interested in doctors," said Lankes distrustfully.

"Dr. Hollatz advised my father always to eat the head of the codfish."

"Then I'll take the tail. I see you're trying to sell me a bill of goods." Lankes was still suspicious.

"So much the better for Oskar. The head is what I prefer."

"Well, if you're so crazy about it, I'll take the head."

"You're having a tough time, aren't you, Lankes," I said. "All right, the head is yours, I'll take the tail." This, I hoped, would be the end of our dialogue.

"Heh, heh!" said Lankes. "I guess I put one over on you."

Oskar admitted that Lankes had put one over on him. Well I knew that his portion wouldn't taste right unless it were seasoned with the asurance that he had put one over on me. A shrewd article, a lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I called him -- then we fell to.

He took the head piece, I squeezed what was left of the lemon juice over the white, crumbling flesh of the tail piece, whence, as I picked it up, two or three b.u.t.ter-soft wedges of garlic detached themselves.

Sucking at his bones, Lankes peered over at me and the tail piece: "Give me a taste of your tail." I nodded, he took his taste, and was undecided until Oskar took a taste of his head piece and a.s.sured him once again that he, Lankes, had as usual got the better deal.