If Mama"s words are taken at face value, I brought my parents, relatives, friends, and even a good many total strangers plenty of good luck by screaming or singing to pieces any gla.s.sware belonging to or being used by persons who tried to take my drum away, including windowpanes, crystal bowls full of artificial fruit, full beer gla.s.ses, empty beer bottles, or those little flacons of vernal fragrance that laymen call perfume bottles, in short, any product whatever of the gla.s.s blower"s art.
To limit the damage, for I have always been a lover of fine gla.s.sware, I concentrated, when they tried to take my drum away at night instead of letting me take it to bed with me, on shattering one or more of the four bulbs in our living room lamp. On my fourth birthday, at the beginning of September, 1928, I threw the whole a.s.sembled company -- my parents, the Bronskis, Grandma Koljaiczek, the Schefflers, and the Greffs, who had given me everything conceivable, tin soldiers, a sailboat, a fire engine, but no drum; who wanted me to play with tin soldiers and waste my time with this fool fire engine, who were planning to rob me of my battered but trusty old drum, to steal it away from me and leave me, in its place, this sailboat, useless in itself and incorrectly rigged to boot -- as I was saying, I threw the whole lot of them, who had eyes for the sole purpose of overlooking me and my desires, into primeval darkness with a circular scream that demolished all four bulbs in our hanging lamp.
Ah, grownups! After the first cries of terror, after the first almost desperate demands for light, they grew accustomed to the darkness, and by the time my Grandma Koljaiczek, who aside from little Stephan Bronski was the only one who had nothing to gain by the darkness, had gone to the shop, with blubbering little Stephan hanging on her skirts, for candles and returned to the room bearing light, the rest of the company, by now in an advanced state of intoxication, had paired off strangely.
As was to be expected, Mama, with disheveled corsage, was sitting on Jan Bronski"s lap. It was the opposite of appetizing to see Alexander Scheffler, the short-legged baker, almost submerged amid the billows of Mrs. Greff. Matzerath was licking Gretchen Scheffler"s gold horse teeth. Only Hedwig Bronski sat alone with her hands in her lap, her cow"s eyes pious in the candlelight, close but not too close to Greff the greengrocer, who, though he had had nothing to drink, was singing in a sad sweet voice, full of languor and melancholy. Turning toward Hedwig Bronski, he invited her to join him in a duet and together they sang a boy-scout song about a scoutmaster named Rubezahl whose spirit haunted the mountains of Bohemia.
I had forgotten. Under the table sat Oskar with the ruins of his drum, coaxing a last vestige of rhythm from it. My feeble but regular drumbeats may well have been welcome to the ecstatically displaced persons who were sitting or lying about the room. For, like varnish, my drumming covered over the persistent sounds of smacking and sucking.
I stayed under the table when my grandmother came in like an angel of wrath with her candles, beheld Sodom and Gomorrah in the candlelight, flew into a rage that made her candles tremble, called them pigs the whole lot of them, and put an end both to the idyll and to Rubezahl"s excursions in the mountains by sticking the candles on saucers, taking skat cards out of the sideboard, and throwing them down on the table, all the while comforting Stephan, who was still blubbering. Soon Matzerath put new bulbs in the old fixtures of our lamp, chairs were moved, beer bottles popped open; over my head, a game of skat began for a tenth of a pfennig a point. Mama proposed at the very start that the stakes be raised to a quarter of a pfennig, but this struck Uncle Jan as too risky and the game continued on this n.i.g.g.ardly level except when the stakes were raised by a double count or an occasional grand with four.
I felt fine under the table, in the shelter of the tablecloth. Lightly drumming, I fell in with the sounds overhead, followed the developments of the game, and in exactly an hour announced skat: Jan Bronski had lost. He had good cards, but he lost all the same. It was no wonder; he wasn"t paying attention. His mind was on very different things than his diamonds without two. Right at the start, while still talking with his aunt, trying to tell her that the little orgy in the dark was nothing to get excited about, he had slipped off one shoe, and thrust forward, past my head, a grey sock with a foot in it, searching for, and finding, my mama"s knee. Thereupon Mama had moved closer to the table and Jan, who, in response to Matzerath"s bid, had just pa.s.sed, lifted the hem of her dress with his toe, so enabling his entire inhabited sock, which luckily he had put on fresh that same day, to wander about between her thighs. I have to hand it to my mother, who in spite of this woolen provocation beneath the table managed, up there on the crisp tablecloth, to execute the most daring games, including clubs without four, accompanied by a flow of the sprightliest talk, and won while Jan, growing more and more intrepid under the table, lost several games which even Oskar would have carried to a successful conclusion with somnambulistic certainty.
Later on poor tired little Stephan joined me under the table and, quite at a loss to know what his father"s trouser leg was doing under my mama"s skirt, soon fell asleep.
Clear to slightly cloudy. Light showers in the afternoon. The very next day Jan Bronski came over, took away the wretched sailboat he had given me, and exchanged it for a drum at Sigismund Markus" toystore. Slightly wilted from the rain, he came back late in the afternoon with a brand-new drum of the model with which I had grown so familiar, with the same red flames on a white field, and held it out to me, at the same time withdrawing my old wreck, which had retained only the barest vestiges of its paint. As Jan gripped the tired drum and I the new one, the eyes of Jan, Mama, and Matzerath were glued on Oskar; I almost had to smile, goodness, did they think I clung to tradition for its own sake, that I was burdened by principles?
Without emitting the cry expected by all, without so much as a note of gla.s.s-destroying song, I relinquished the relic and devoted myself with both hands to the new instrument. After two hours of attentive drumming, I had got the hang of it.
But not all the grownups around me proved as understanding as Jan Bronski. Shortly after my fifth birthday, in 1929 -- there had been considerable talk about the stock market crash in New York and I had begun to wonder whether my grandfather Koljaiczek, with his lumber business in far-off Buffalo, had also suffered losses -- Mama, alarmed at my by now quite obvious failure to grow, took me by the hand and inaugurated our Wednesday visits to the office of Dr. Hollatz in Brunshofer-Weg. His examinations were interminable and exasperating, but I put up with them, because even at that tender age I was very much taken with the white dress of Sister Inge, Dr. Hollatz" a.s.sistant, which reminded me of Mama"s much-photographed wartime activity as a nurse. Intense concentration on the new system of pleats in her uniform enabled me to ignore the stream of words, by turns sternly authoritative and unpleasantly uncle-ish, that poured from the doctor"s lips.
His spectacles reflecting the furnishings of his office -- lots of chrome, nickel, and smooth enamel; shelves and gla.s.s cabinets with neatly labeled bottles containing snakes, toads, salamanders, and the embryos of humans, pigs, and monkeys -- Hollatz, after each examination, shook his head thoughtfully, leafed through my case history, questioned Mama about my fall, and quieted her when she began to vilify Matzerath, guilty now and forever of leaving the trap door open.
One Wednesday, after this had been going on for months, when Dr. Hollatz, probably in order to convince himself and perhaps Sister Inge as well that his treatment was bringing results, tried to take my drum away, I destroyed the greater part of his collection of snakes, toads, and embryos.
This was the first time Oskar had tried his voice on a whole set of filled and carefully sealed gla.s.ses. The success was unique and overwhelming for all present, even for Mama, who knew all about my private relation to gla.s.sware. With my very first trim, economical scream, I cut the cabinet in which Hollatz kept his loathsome curiosities wide open, and sent an almost square pane of gla.s.s toppling to the linoleum floor where, still preserving its square shape, it cracked into a thousand pieces. Then, lending my scream greater relief and throwing economy to the winds, I shattered one test tube after another.
The tubes popped like firecrackers. The greenish, partly coagulated alcohol squirted and splashed, carrying its prepared, pale, gloomy-eyed contents to the red linoleum floor, and filling the room with so palpable a stench that Mama grew sick to her stomach and Sister Inge had to open the windows.
Dr. Hollatz managed to turn the loss of his collection to his advantage. A few weeks after my act of violence, he published an article about me, Oskar M., the child with the gla.s.s-shattering voice, in a medical journal. The theory with which Dr. Hollatz succeeded in filling more than twenty pages is said to have attracted attention in medical circles both in Germany and abroad, and led to a whole series of articles by specialists, both in agreement and disagreement. He sent Mama several copies of his article and the pride she took in it gave me food for thought. She never wearied of reading pa.s.sages from it to the Greffs, the Schefflers, her Jan, and, regularly after dinner, to Matzerath. Even her customers were subjected to readings and were filled with admiration for Mama, who had a strikingly imaginative way of misp.r.o.nouncing the technical terms. As for me, the first appearance of my name in periodical literature left me just about cold. My already keen skepticism led me to judge Dr. Hollatz" opusculum for what it essentially was: a long-winded, not unskillfully formulated display of irrelevancies by a physician who was angling for a professorship.
Today as he lies in his mental hospital, unable to damage even his toothbrush gla.s.s with his singing, with doctors of the same type as Hollatz coming in and out, giving him Rorschach tests, a.s.sociation tests, and tests of every other conceivable kind in the hope of finding a high-sounding name for the disorder that led to his confinement, Oskar likes to think back on the archaic period of his voice. In those early days he shattered gla.s.s only when necessary, but then with great thoroughness, whereas later on, in the heyday and decadence of his art, he exercised it even when not impelled by outward circ.u.mstances. Succ.u.mbing to the mannerism of a late period, he began to sing out of pure playfulness, becoming as it were a devotee of art for art"s sake. He employed gla.s.s as a medium of self-expression, and grew older in the process.
The Schedule
Klepp often spends hours drawing up schedules. The fact that while doing so he regularly devours blood sausage and warmed-over lentils, confirms my thesis, which is simply that dreamers are gluttons. And the a.s.siduity with which he fills in his hours and half-hours confirms another theory of mine, to wit, that only first-cla.s.s lazybones are likely to turn out labor-saving inventions.
This year again Klepp has spent more than two weeks trying to schedule his activities. He came to see me yesterday. For a while he behaved mysteriously, then fished an elaborately folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to me. He was obviously very pleased with himself: another of his labor-saving schemes.
I looked through his handiwork, there was nothing very new about it: breakfast at ten; contemplation until lunchtime; after lunch a nap (one hour), then coffee, in bed if transportation was available; flute playing in bed (one hour); get up; play bagpipes while marching round the room (one hour); more bagpipes out in the courtyard (half an hour). Next came a two-hour period, spent every other day over beer and blood sausage and the alternate day at the movies; in either case, before the movies or over the beer, discreet propaganda for the illegal Communist Party of Germany, not to exceed half an hour, mustn"t overdo it. Three nights a week to be spent playing dance music at the Unicorn; on Sat.u.r.day, beer and progaganda transferred to the evening, afternoon reserved for a bath and ma.s.sage in Grunstra.s.se, followed by hygiene with girl (three-quarters of an hour) at the "U 9," then with the same girl and her girl friend coffee and cake at Schwab"s, a shave and if necessary a haircut just before the barber"s closing time; quick to the Photomaton; then beer, blood sausage, Party propaganda, and relaxation.
I admired Klepp"s carefully custom-made schedule, asked him for a copy, and inquired what he did to fill in occasional gaps. "Sleep, or think of the Party," he replied after the briefest reflection.
Naturally this led me to Oskar"s first experience with a schedule.
It began quite harmlessly with Auntie Kauer"s kindergarten. Hedwig Bronski called for me every morning and took me, along with her Stephan, to Auntie Kauer"s place in Posadowski-Weg, where we and six to ten other little urchins -- a few were always sick -- were compelled to play ad nauseam. Luckily my drum pa.s.sed as a toy, I was never obliged to play with building blocks, and I was constrained to mount a rocking horse only when an equestrian drummer in a paper helmet was required. My drumming score was Auntie Kauer"s black silk, extraordinarily b.u.t.ton-some dress. Several times a day I unb.u.t.toned her on my drum and once her dress was open b.u.t.toned it up again. She was all wrinkles and very skinny, I don"t think it was her body I had in mind.
The afternoon walks down avenues bordered with chestnut trees to Jeschkentaler Forest, past the Gutenberg Monument, and up to the Erbsberg were so pleasantly tedious and angelically silly that even today I should be very glad to go on one of those picture-book outings, guided by Auntie Kauer"s papery hand.
First we were harnessed, all six, eight, or twelve of us. The shaft was a pale-blue strip of knitted wool. To each side were attached six woolen bridles with bells, room for twelve children in all. Auntie Kauer held the reins, and we trotted along ahead of her tinkling and twittering, I sluggishly drumming, through the autumnal suburban streets. Now and then Auntie Kauer struck up "Jesus, for thee we live, Jesus, for thee we die" or "Star of the Sea, I greet thee." We filled the clear October air with "O Mary, help me" and "Swe-e-e-t Mother of G.o.d," and the pa.s.sers-by found it very touching. When we came to the main street, the traffic had to stop for us. Street cars, automobiles, horse-drawn vehicles stood motionless as we carried the Star of the Sea across the avenue. There was crackling as of paper when Auntie Kauer waved her hand to thank the policeman who had directed our crossing.
"Our Lord Jesus will reward you," she promised with a rustle of her silk dress.
Actually I was sorry when Oskar, in the spring of his seventh year, had to leave Fraulein Kauer and her b.u.t.tons along with and because of Stephan. Politics was at the bottom of it, and where there is politics, there is violence. We had just reached the Erbsberg. Auntie Kauer removed our woolen harness, the leaves glistened, and new life was stirring in the treetops. Auntie Kauer sat on a moss-covered road marker indicating the various spots that could be reached ou foot in one, one and a half, and two hours. Like a young girl in whom the spring has awakened unidentified feelings, she began to sing tra-la-la with the spasmodic movements of the head that one would ordinarily expect of a guinea hen, knitting the while a new harness, which was to be flaming red. Unhappily, I never got to wear it, for just then cries were heard from the bushes, Fraulein Kauer fluttered to her feet and, drawing red yarn behind her, raced on stiltlike legs into the thicket. I followed her and the yarn, which was not as red as the sight that soon met my eyes: Stephan"s nose was bleeding profusely and a boy named Lothar, with curly hair and fine blue veins on his temples, was kneeling on the sickly little fellow"s chest, resolutely belaboring his nose.
"Polack!" he hissed between blows. "Polack!" When, five minutes later, Auntie Kauer had us back in our light-blue harness -- I alone ran free, winding up the red yarn -- she uttered a prayer that is normally recited between Consecration and Communion: "Bowed with shame, full of pain and remorse. . ."
We descended the Erbsberg and halted at the Gutenberg Monument. Pointing a long finger at Stephan, who was whimpering and holding a handkerchief to his nose, she remarked gently: "He can"t help it if he"s a little Pole."
On Auntie Kauer"s advice, Stephan was taken out of kindergarten. Though Oskar was not a Pole and was no great admirer of Stephan, he made it clear that if Stephan couldn"t go, he wouldn"t either. Then Easter came and they resolved to give school a try. Dr. Hollatz decided behind his horn-rimmed gla.s.ses that it could do no harm, and this was also his spoken opinion: "It can do little Oskar no harm."
Jan Bronski, who was planning to send his Stephan to Polish public school after Easter, refused to be dissuaded. Over and over again he pointed out to my Mama and Matzerath that he was a Polish civil servant, receiving good pay for good work at the Polish Post Office. He was a Pole after all and Hedwig would be one too as soon as the papers came through. Besides, a bright little fellow like Stephan would learn German at home. As for Oskar -- Jan always sighed a little when he said " Oskar " -- he was six years old just like Stephan; true, he still couldn"t talk properly; in general, he was quite backward for his age, and as for his size, enough said, but they should try it just the same, schooling was compulsory after all -- provided the school board raised no objection.
The school board expressed misgivings and demanded a doctor"s certificate. Hollatz said I was a healthy child; my physical development, he had to admit, was that of a three-year-old and I didn"t talk very well, but otherwise I was not mentally inferior to a normal child of five or six. He also said something about my thyroid.
I was subjected to all sorts of examinations and tests. But I had grown accustomed to that kind of thing and my att.i.tude ranged from benevolent to indifferent, especially as no one tried to take my drum away. The destruction of Hollatz" collection of snakes, toads, and embryos was still remembered with awe.
It was only at home that I was compelled to unsheathe the diamond in my voice. This was on the morning of my first school day, when Matzerath, against his own better judgment, demanded that I leave my drum at home and moreover pa.s.s through the portals of the Pestalozzi School without it.
When at length he resorted to force, when he attempted to take what did not belong to him, to appropriate an instrumert he did not know how to play and for which he lacked all feeling, I shattered an empty and allegedly genuine vase. When the genuine vase lay on the carpet in the form of genuine fragments, Matzerath, who was very fond of it, raised a hand to strike me. But at this point Mama jumped up and Jan, who had dropped in for a moment with Stephan and a large ornate cornucopia, intervened.
"Alfred, please, please!" he said in his quiet unctuous way, and Matzerath, subdued by Jan"s blue and Mama"s grey gaze, dropped his hand and thrust it into his trousers pocket.
The Pestalozzi School was a new brick-red, three-story, flat-roofed, boxlike edifice, decorated with sgraffiti and frescoes, which had been built by the Senate of our prolific suburb at the vociferous insistence of the Social Democrats, who at the time were still exceedingly active. I rather liked the box, except for its smell and the Jugendstil athletes in the sgraffiti and frescoes.
In the expanse of gravel outside the gate stood a few trees so unnaturally diminutive that one was startled to find them beginning to turn green; they were supported by iron stakes that looked like croziers. From all directions poured mothers holding colored cornucopias and drawing screaming or model children after them. Never had Oskar seen so many mothers tending toward a single point. They seemed to be on their way to a market where their first- or second-born could be offered for sale.
In the entrance I already caught a whiff of that school smell which has been described often enough and which is more intimate than any perfume in the world. In the lobby four or five huge granite bowls, in a rather casual arrangement, were affixed to the tile floor. From deep down within them water spouted from several sources at once. Surrounded by boys, including some of my own age, they reminded me of my Uncle Vincent"s sow at Bissau, who would occasionally lie down on one flank and tolerate the equally thirsty and violent a.s.sault of her piglets.
The boys bent over the bowls with their vertical geysers, allowing their hair to fall forward and the streams of water to gush into their open mouths. I am not sure whether they were playing or drinking. Sometimes two boys stood up almost simultaneously with bloated cheeks, and with a disgusting gurgle spat the mouth-warm water, mixed, you may be certain, with saliva and bread crumbs, into each other"s faces. I, who on entering the lobby had unsuspectingly cast a glance through the open door of the adjoining gymnasium, caught sight of the leather horse, the climbing bars, the climbing rope, and the horrible horizontal bar, crying out as always for a giant swing. All this made me desperately thirsty and like the other boys I should gladly have taken a gulp of water. But it was hardly possible to ask Mama, who was holding me by the hand, to lift Oskar the Lilliputian up to one of the fountains. Even if I had stood on my drum, the fountain would have been beyond my reach. But when with a quick jump I managed to glance over the edge and noted that the drain was blocked with greasy remnants of bread and that the bottom of the bowl was full of a noxious sludge, the thirst I had acc.u.mulated in spirit, while my body was wandering in a desert of gymnastic apparatus, left me.
Mama led me up monumental stairs hewn for giants, through resounding corridors into a room over the door of which hung a sign bearing the inscription I-A. The room was full of boys my own age. Their mothers pressed against the wall opposite the window front, clutching in their arms the colored cornucopias covered with tissue paper that were traditional on the first day of school. The cornucopias towered above me. Mama was also carrying one of them.
As my mother led me in, the rabble laughed and the rabble"s mothers as well. A pudgy little boy wanted to beat my drum. Not wishing to demolish any gla.s.s, I was obliged to give him a few good kicks in the shins, whereupon he fell down, hitting his well-combed head on a desk, for which offense Mama cuffed me on the back of my head. The little monster yelled. Not I, I only yelled when someone tried to take my drum away. Mama, to whom this public performance was very embarra.s.sing, pushed me down behind the first desk in the section by the windows. Of course the desk was too high. But further back, where the rabble was still more freckled and uncouth, the desks were still higher.
I let well enough alone and sat calmly, because there was nothing to be uncalm about. Mama, who it seemed to me was still suffering from embarra.s.sment, tried to disappear among the other mothers. Here in the presence of her peers she probably felt ashamed of my so-called backwardness. The peers all behaved as though their young dolts, who had grown much too quickly for my taste, were something to be proud of.
I couldn"t look out the window at Frobel"s Meadow, for the level of the window sill was no more appropriate to my stature than was the size of the desk. Too bad. I would have been glad to gaze out at the meadow where, as I knew, scouts under the leadership of Greff the greengrocer were pitching tents, playing lansquenet, and, as befitted boy scouts, doing good deeds. Not that I was interested in their fulsome glorification of camp life. What appealed to me was the sight of Greff in his short pants. Such was his love of slender, wide-eyed, pale boys that he had donned the uniform of Baden-Powell, father of the boy scouts.
Cheated of the coveted view by the insidious architecture, I gazed up at the sky and was soon appeased. New clouds kept forming and drifting southwestward, as though that direction had some special attraction for clouds. I wedged my drum firmly between my knees and the desk, though it had never for so much as a beat thought of wandering off to southwestward. Oskar"s head was protected in the rear by the back rest. Behind me my so-called schoolmates snarled, roared, laughed, wept, and raged. They threw spitb.a.l.l.s at me, but I did not turn around; it seemed to me that the tranquil purposive clouds were better worth looking at than a horde of grimacing, hopelessly hysterical louts.
Cla.s.s I-A calmed down at the entrance of a person who subsequently introduced herself as Miss Spollenhauer. I had no need to calm down for I was already calm, awaiting things to come in a state of almost complete self-immersion. To be perfectly truthful, Oskar gave barely a thought to what the future might hold in store, for he required no distraction. Let us say, then, that he was not waiting but just sitting at his desk, pleasantly aware that his drum was where it belonged and otherwise preoccupied with the clouds behind the paschally polished windowpanes.
Miss Spollenhauer had on an angularly cut suit that gave her a desiccated mannish look, an impression that was enhanced by the narrow stiff collar, of the kind, it seemed to me, that can be wiped clean, which closed round her Adam"s apple, creating deep furrows in her neck. No sooner had she entered the cla.s.sroom in her flat walking shoes than she felt the need to make herself popular and asked: "Well, my dear children, are we up to singing a little song?"
The response was a roar which she must have taken to mean yes, for she embarked at once, in a mincing high-pitched voice, on "This Is the Merry Month of May," though it was only the middle of April. Her premature announcement of the month of May was all it needed to make h.e.l.l break loose. Without waiting for the signal to come in, without more than the vaguest notion of the words, or the slightest feeling for the simple rhythm of the song, the rabble behind me began to shake loose the plaster from the walls with their howling.
Despite her bilious complexion, despite her bobbed hair and the man"s tie peering out from behind her collar, I felt sorry for la Spollenhauer. Tearing myself away from the clouds which obviously had no school that day, I leapt to my feet, pulled my drumsticks out from under my suspenders, and loudly, emphatically, drummed out the time of the song. But the populace had neither ear nor feeling for my efforts. Only Miss Spollenhauer gave me a nod of encouragement, smiled at the line of mothers glued to the wall, with a special twinkle for Mama. Interpreting this as a go-ahead signal, I continued my drumming, first quietly and simply, then displaying all my arts and burgeoning into rhythmic complexities. The rabble behind me had long ceased their barbaric howls. I was beginning to fancy that my drum was teaching, educating my fellow pupils, making them into my pupils, when la Spollenhauer approached my desk. For a time she watched my hands and drumsticks, I wouldn"t even say that her manner was inept; she smiled self-forgetfully and tried to clap her hands to my beat. For a moment she became a not unpleasant old maid, who had forgotten her prescribed occupational caricature and become human, that is, childlike, curious, complex, and immoral.
However, when she failed to catch my rhythm, she fell back into her usual rectilinear, obtuse, and to make matters worse underpaid role, pulled herself together as teachers occasionally must, and said: "You must be little Oskar. We have heard so much about you. How beautifully you drum! Doesn"t he, children? Isn"t our Oskar a fine drummer?"
The children roared, the mothers huddled closer together, Miss Spollenhauer was herself again. "But now," she piped with a voice like a pencil sharpener, "we shall put the drum in the locker; it must be tired and want to sleep. Then when school is out, you will have it back again."
Even before she had finished reeling off this hypocritical nonsense, she bared her close-clipped teacher"s fingernails and ten close-clipped fingers tried to seize my drum, which, so help me, was neither tired nor sleepy. I held fast, clutching the red and white casing in the sleeves of my sweater. At first I stared at her, but when she kept on looking like a stencil of a public school teacher, I preferred to look through her. In Miss Spollenhauer"s interior I found enough interesting material for three scabrous chapters, but since my drum was in danger, I tore myself away from her inner life and, my gimlet eyes drilling between her shoulder blades, detected, mounted on well-preserved skin, a mole the size of a gulden with a clump of long hairs growing in it.
I can"t say whether it was because she felt herself seen through or whether it was my voice with which I gave her a harmless warning scratch on the lens of her right eyegla.s.s: in any case, she suspended the show of force that had already blanched her knuckles. It seems likely that she could not bear the sc.r.a.ping on the gla.s.s, probably it gave her goose flesh. With a shudder she released my drum and, casting a look of reproach at my Mama, who was preparing to sink into the earth, declared: "Why, you are a wicked little Oskar." Thereupon she left me my wide-awake drum, about-faced, and marched with flat heels to her desk, where she fished another pair of spectacles, probably her reading gla.s.ses, from her briefcase, briskly took off her nose those which my voice had sc.r.a.ped as one sc.r.a.pes windowpanes with one"s fingernails, with a grimace which seemed to imply that I had profaned her spectacles, put on the other pair, straightening herself up so you could hear the bones rattle, and, reaching once again into her briefcase, announced: "I will now read you your schedule!" What issued from the briefcase this time was a little bundle of cards. Keeping one for herself, she pa.s.sed the rest on to the mothers, including Mama, and at length communicated the schedule to the already restive cla.s.s. "Monday: religion, writing, arithmetic, play; Tuesday: arithmetic, penmanship, singing, nature study; Wednesday: arithmetic, writing, drawing, drawing; Thursday: geography, arithmetic, writing, religion; Friday: arithmetic, writing, play, penmanship; Sat.u.r.day: arithmetic, singing, play, play."
Proclaimed in a stern voice that neglected not one jot or t.i.ttle, this product of a solemn faculty meeting a.s.sumed the force of irrevocable fate. But then, remembering what she had learned at Normal School, Miss Spollenhauer became suddenly mild and mellow. "And now, my dear children," she cried in an outburst of progressive merriment, "let us all repeat that in unison: Now: Monday?"
The horde shouted "Monday."
"Religion?" And the baptized heathen roared "religion." Rather than strain my voice, I for my part beat out the syllables on my drum.
Behind me, spurred on by la Spollenhauer, the heathen bellowed: "Writing!" Boom-boom went my drum. "A-rith-me-tic! " That was good for four beats.
Before me la Spollenhauer"s litany, behind me the howling of the mob. Putting a good face on a sorry and ludicrous business, I beat out the syllables, with moderation I should say, and so it continued until la Spollenhauer, goaded by some inner demon, leapt up in palpable fury, but not over the Tartars behind me; no, it was I who sent the red blotches to her cheeks; Oskar"s poor little drum was her stumbling block, her bone of contention; it was I she chose to rebuke.
"Oskar, you will now listen to me: Thursday, geography?" Ignoring the word Thursday, I drummed four beats for geography, four beats for arithmetic, and two for writing; to religion I devoted not four, but, in accordance with sound theological principles, three triune and only-saving drumbeats.
But la Spollenhauer had no ear for subtleties. To her all drumming was equally repugnant. Once again she bared her ten truncated fingernails and once again they tried to seize my drum.
But before she had so much as touched it, I unleashed my gla.s.s-demolishing scream, which removed the upper panes from the three oversized windows. The middle windows succ.u.mbed to a second cry. Un.o.bstructed, the mild spring air poured into the cla.s.sroom. With a third shriek I annihilated the lower window-panes, but this I admit was quite superfluous, pure exuberance as it were, for la Spollenhauer had already drawn in her claws at the discomfiture of the upper and middle panes. Instead of a.s.saulting the last remaining windowpanes out of pure and, from an artistic standpoint, questionable malice, Oskar would have done more wisely to keep an eye on la Spollenhauer as she beat a disorderly retreat.
Lord only knows where she found that cane. In any case it was suddenly at hand, vibrant in the cla.s.sroom air now mingled with springtime air. Through this atmospheric mixture she whished it, endowing it with resiliency, with hunger and thirst for bursting skin, for the whistling wind, for all the rustling curtains that a whishing cane can impersonate. And down it came on my desk so hard that a violet streak sprang from my inkwell. Then, when I wouldn"t hold out my hand to be whipped, she struck my drum. She struck my darling. She, la Spollenhauer, struck my instrument. What ground had she to strike? And if she was bent on hitting something, why my drum? What about the yokels behind me? Did it have to be my drum? By what right did she, who knew nothing, nothing whatsoever, about the drummer"s art, a.s.sault and batter my drum? What was that glint in her eye? That beast ready to strike? What zoo had it escaped from, what did it l.u.s.t for, what prey was it after? The very same beast invaded Oskar; rising from unknown depths, it rose up through the soles of his shoes, through the soles of his feet, rose and rose, investing his vocal cords and driving him to emit a rutting cry that would have sufficed to ungla.s.s a whole Gothic cathedral resplendent with the refracted light of a hundred windows.
In other words, I composed a double cry which literally pulverized both lenses of la Spollenhauer"s spectacles. Slightly bleeding at the eyebrows, squinting through the empty frames, she groped her way backward, and finally began to blubber repulsively, with a lack of self-control quite unbefitting an educator, while the rabble behind me fell into a terrified silence, some sitting there with chattering teeth, others vanishing beneath their desks. A few of them slid from desk to desk in the direction of the mothers. The mothers for their part, perceiving the extent of the damage, looked round for the culprit and were about to pounce on my mother. They would surely have torn her to pieces had I not gathered up my drum and rushed to her a.s.sistance.
Past the purblind Miss Spollenhauer, I made my way to my mama, who was menaced by the Furies, seized her by the hand, and drew her out of the drafty headquarters of Cla.s.s I-A. Resounding corridors, stone stairs for giant children. Crusts of bread in gushing granite fountains. In the open gymnasium boys were trembling beneath the horizontal bar. Mama was still holding her little card. Outside the portals of the Pestalozzi School, I took it from her and transformed a schedule into a speechless wad of paper.
However, Oskar allowed the photographer, who was waiting for the new pupils and their mothers between the doorposts, to take a picture of him and of his cornucopia, which for all the tumult had not been lost. The sun came out, cla.s.srooms buzzed overhead. The photographer placed Oskar against a blackboard on which was written: My First School Day.
Rasputin and the Alphabet
I have just been telling my friend Klepp and Bruno my keeper, who listened with only half an ear, about Oskar"s first experience with a school schedule. On the blackboard (I said) which provided the photographer with the traditional background for postcard-size pictures of six-year-old boys with knapsacks and cornucopias, these words were inscribed: My First School Day.
Of course the words could only be read by the mothers who, much more excited than their children, were standing behind the photographer. The boys, who were in front of the blackboard, would at best be able to decipher the inscription a year later, either at Easter time when the next first grade would turn up at school or on their own old photographs. Then and only then would they be privileged to read that these lovely pictures had been taken on the occasion of their first school day.
This testimonial to a new stage in life was recorded in Sutterlin script that crept across the blackboard with malignant angularity. However, the loops were not right, too soft and rounded. The fact is that Sutterlin script is especially indicated for succinct, striking statements, slogans for instance. And there are also certain doc.u.ments which, though I admit I have never seen them, I can only visualize in Sutterlin script. I have in mind vaccination certificates, sport scrolls, and handwritten death sentences. Even then, I knew what to make of the Sutterlin script though I couldn"t read it: the double loop of the Sutterlin M, with which the inscription began, smelled of hemp in my nostrils, an insidious reminder of the hangman. Even so, I would have been glad to read it letter for letter and not just dimly guess at what is said. Let no one suppose that I drummed in revolutionary protest and shattered gla.s.s so highhandedly at my first meeting with Miss Spollenhauer because I had already mastered my ABC"s. Oh, no, I was only too well aware that this intuition of mine about Sutterlin script was not enough, that I lacked the most elementary school learning. It was just unfortunate that Miss Spollenhauer"s methods of inculcating knowledge did not appeal to Oskar.
Accordingly, when I left the Pestalozzi School, I was far from deciding that my first school day should be my last, that I had had my fill of pencils and books, not to mention teacher"s dirty looks. Nothing of the sort. Even while the photographer was capturing my likeness for all eternity, I thought: There you are in front of a blackboard, under an inscription that is probably important and possibly portentous. You can judge the inscription by the character of the writing and call forth a.s.sociations such as solitary confinement, protective custody, inspector, and hang-them-all-by-one-rope, but you can"t read the words. And yet, with all your ignorance that cries out to the overcast heavens, you will never again set foot in this schedule-school. Where, oh where, Oskar, are you going to learn your big and little alphabet?
Actually a little alphabet would have been plenty for me, but I had figured out that there must be a big as well as a little one, among other things from the crushing and undeniable fact of the existence of big people, who called themselves grownups.
In the next few months, neither Matzerath nor Mama worried about my education. They had tried to send me to school, and as far as they were concerned, this one attempt, so humiliating for Mama, was quite sufficient. They behaved just like Uncle Jan Bronski, sighed as they looked down on me, and dug up old stories such as the incident on my third birthday: "The trap door! You left it open, didn"t you? You were in the kitchen and before that you"d been down in the cellar, hadn"t you? You brought up a can of mixed fruit for dessert, didn"t you? You left the cellar door open, didn"t you?"
Everything Mama held up to Matzerath was true, and yet, as we know, it was not. But he took the blame and sometimes even wept, for he was a sensitive soul at times. Then Mama and Jan Bronski had to comfort him, and they spoke of me, Oskar, as a cross they had to bear, a cruel and no doubt irrevocable fate, a trial that had been visited on them, it was impossible to see why.
Obviously no help was to be expected from such sorely tried cross-bearers and victims of fate. Nor could Aunt Hedwig, who often took me to Steffens-Park to play in the sand pile with her two-year-old Marga, have possibly served as my preceptor. She was good-natured enough, but as dull-witted as the day is long. I also had to abandon any ideas about Dr. Hollatz" Sister Inge, who was neither dull-witted nor good-natured, for she was no common door-opener but a real and indispensable doctor"s a.s.sistant and consequently had no time for me.
Several times a day I tramped up and down the steps of the four-story apartment house -- there were more than a hundred of them -- drumming in quest of counsel at every landing. I sniffed to see what each of the nineteen tenants was having for dinner, but I did not knock at any of the doors, for I recognized my future preceptor neither in old man Heilandt nor in Laubschad the watchmaker, and definitely not in the corpulent Mrs. Kater nor, much as I liked her, in Mother Truczinski.
Under the eaves dwelt Meyn the trumpet player. Mr. Meyn kept four cats and was always drunk. He played dance music at "Zinglers Hohe" and on Christmas Eve he and five fellow sots plodded through the snow-clad streets battling the frost with carols. One day I saw him in his attic: clad in black trousers and a white evening shirt, he lay on his back, rolling an empty gin bottle about with his unshod feet and playing the trumpet just wonderfully. He did not remove his instrument from his lips, but merely squinted vaguely round at me for a moment. He acknowledged me as his drummer accompanist. His instrument was no more precious to him than mine to me. Our duet drove his four cats out on the roof and set up a slight vibration in the gutter tiles.
When the music was finished and we lowered our instruments, I drew an old copy of the Neueste Nachrichten from under my sweater, smoothed out the paper, sat down beside the trumpeter, held out my reading matter, and asked him to instruct me in the big and little alphabets.
But Mr. Meyn had fallen directly from his trumpeting into a deep sleep. His spirit recognized only three repositories: his bottle of gin, his trumpet, and his slumber. It is true that for quite some time after that -- to be exact, until he joined the band of the Mounted SA and temporarily gave up gin -- we would quite frequently play unrehea.r.s.ed duets in the attic for the benefit of the roof tiles, the chimneys, the pigeons, and the cats; but I could never get anything out of him as a teacher.
I tried Greff the greengrocer. Without my drum, for Greff didn"t appreciate it, I paid several visits to the bas.e.m.e.nt shop across the way. The wherewithal for thorough and many-sided study seemed to be at hand. In every corner of the two-room flat, all over the shop, under and behind the counter, even in the relatively dry potato cellar, lay books, adventure stories, song books, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, the works of Walter Flex, Wiechert"s Simple Life, Daphnis and Chloe, monographs about artists, piles of sport magazines and ill.u.s.trated volumes full of half-naked youths, most of whom, for some unfathomable reason, were chasing after a ball amid sand dunes, exhibiting oiled and glistening muscles.
Even then Greff was having a good deal of trouble in the shop. The inspectors from the Bureau of Weights and Measures had not been quite satisfied with his weights. There was talk of fraud. Greff had to pay a fine and buy new weights. He was bowed down with cares; his books and scout meetings and weekend excursions were his only cheer.
He was making out price tabs when I came in and hardly noticed me. Taking advantage of his occupation, I picked up three or four white squares of cardboard and a red pencil and, in the hope of attracting his attention, made a great show of zeal copying his handiwork in my own version of Sutterlin script.
But Oskar was clearly too little for him, not pale and wide-eyed enough. I dropped the red pencil, picked out a book full of the nudities that so appealed to Greff, and pretended to be very busy, inspecting photographs of boys bending and boys stretching and twisting them about so he could see them.
But when there were no customers in the shop asking for beets or cabbages, the greengrocer had eyes only for his price tabs. I tried to arouse his interest in my unlettered presence by clapping book covers or making the pages crackle as I turned them.
To put it very simply: Greff did not understand me. When scouts were in the shop -- and in the afternoon there were always two or three of his lieutenants around him -- Greff didn"t notice Oskar at all. And when Greff was alone, he was quite capable of jumping up in nervous irritation and dealing out commands: "Oskar, will you leave that book alone. You can"t make head or tail of it anyway. You"re too dumb and you"re too little. You"ll ruin it. That book costs more than six gulden. If you want to play, there"s plenty of potatoes and cabbages."
He took his nasty old book away and leafed expressionlessly through the pages, leaving me standing amid potatoes and several representatives of the cabbage family, white cabbage, red cabbage, savoy cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, wretchedly lonely, for I had left my drum at home.
There was still Mrs. Greff, and after her husband"s brush-off, I usually made my way to the matrimonial bedroom. Even then Mrs. Lina Greff would lie in bed for whole weeks, vaguely ailing; she smelled of decaying nightgown and though her hands were very active, one thing she never touched was a book that might have taught me anything.
It was not without a suspicion of envy that Oskar, in the weeks that followed, looked upon his contemporaries and their school-bags from which dangled importantly the little sponges or cloths used for wiping off slates. Even so, he cannot remember having harbored such thoughts as: you"ve made your own bed, Oskar, you should have put a good face on the school routine; you shouldn"t have made an everlasting enemy of la Spollenhauer. Those yokels are getting ahead of you. They have mastered the big or at least the little alphabet, whereas you don"t even know how to hold the Neueste Nachrichten properly.
A suspicion of envy, I have said, and that is all it was. A little smell test is all that was needed to disgust me with school for all time. Have you ever taken a sniff of those inadequately washed, worm-eaten sponges appended to pealing, yellow-rimmed slates, those sponges which somehow manage to store up all the effluvia of writing and "rithmetic, all the sweat of squeaking, halting, slipping slate pencils moistened with saliva? Now and then, when children on their way home from school laid down their bags to play football or Volkerball, I would bend down over those sponges steaming in the sun, and the thought came to me that if Satan existed, such would be the acrid stench of his armpits.
Certainly I had no yearning for the school of slates and sponges. But, on the other hand, it would be an exaggeration to say that Gretchen Scheffler, who soon took his education in hand, was the precise answer to Oskar"s dreams.
Everything about the Scheffler dwelling behind the bakery in Kleinhammer-Weg set my teeth on edge. Those ornamental coverlets, those cushions embroidered with coats-of-arms, those Kathe Kruse dolls lurking in sofa corners, those plush animals wheresoever one turned, that china crying out for a bull, those ubiquitous travel souvenirs, those beginnings of knitting, crocheting, and embroidery, of plaiting, knotting, and lacework. The place was too sweet for words, so cunning and cozy, stiflingly tiny, overheated in winter and poisoned with flowers in summer. I can think of only one explanation: Gretchen Scheffler was childless; oh, if she had had some little creature to knit for, who can say whether she or Scheffler was to blame, oh, how happy she would have been with a little sugarplum baby, something she could love to pieces and swathe in crocheted blankets and cover with lace and ribbons and little kisses in cross-st.i.tch.
This is where I went to learn my big and little alphabets. I made a heroic effort to spare the china and the souvenirs. I left my gla.s.s-destroying voice at home and bore it meekly when Gretchen expressed the opinion that I had drummed enough for now and, baring her equine gold teeth in a smile, removed my drum from my knees and laid it among the teddy bears.
I made friends with two of the Kathe Kruse dolls, clutched the little dears to my bosom, and manipulated the lashes of their permanently startled eyes as though I were madly in love with them. My purpose in this display of affection for dolls, which seemed sincere just because it was so completely false, was to knit a snare round Gretchen"s knitted, knit two purl two, heart.
My plan was not bad. It took only two visits before Gretchen opened her heart; that is, she unraveled it as one unravels a stocking, disclosing a long crinkly thread worn thin in places. She opened all her cupboards, chests, and boxes and spread out all her beaded rubbish, enough baby jackets, baby pants, and bibs to clothe a set of quintuplets, held them up against me, tried them on, and took them off again.
Then she showed me the marksman"s medals won by Scheffler at the veterans" club and photographs to go with them, some of which were identical with ours. Then she went back to the baby clothes and at long last, while searching for heaven knows what cute little object, she unearthed some books. That was what Oskar had been building up to. He fully expected her to find books under the baby things; he had heard her talk about books with Mama; he knew how feverishly the two of them, while still engaged and after their early and almost simultaneous marriages, had exchanged books and borrowed books from the lending library by the Film-Palast, in the hope of imparting wider horizons and greater l.u.s.ter to their grocery store and bakery marriages.
Gretchen had little enough to offer me. Like Mama, who had given up reading in favor of Jan Bronski, she who no longer read, now that she spent all her time knitting, had evidently given away the sumptuous volumes of the book club, to which both had belonged for years, to people who still read because they did not knit and had no Jan Bronski.