Danzig - The Tin Drum Part 6

I was still looking after the cloud of dust that obscured the receding Markus when Mother Truczinski took my hand. They came in groups and grouplets. Leo Schugger had sympathies for all; he called attention to the fine day, asked everyone if he had seen the Lord, and as usual received tips of varying magnitude. Matzerath and Jan Bronski paid the pallbearers, the gravedigger, the s.e.xton, and Father Wiehnke, who with a sigh of embarra.s.sment let Leo Schugger kiss his hand and then proceeded, with his kissed hand, to toss wisps of benediction after the slowly dispersing funeral company.

Meanwhile we -- my grandmother, her brother Vincent, the Bronskis with their children, Greff without wife, and Gretchen Scheffler -- took our seats in two common farm wagons. We were driven past Goldkrug through the woods across the nearby Polish border to the funeral supper at Bissau Quarry.

Vincent Bronski's farm lay in a hollow. There were poplars in front of it that were supposed to divert the lightning. The barn door was removed from its hinges, laid on saw horses, and covered with tablecloths. More people came from the vicinity. It was some time before the meal was ready. It was served in the barn doorway. Gretchen Scheffler held me on her lap. First there was something fatty, then something sweet, then more fat. There was potato schnaps, beer, a roast goose and a roast pig, cake with sausage, sweet and sour squash, fruit pudding with sour cream. Toward evening a slight breeze came blowing through the open barn, there was a scurrying of mice and of Bronski children, who, in league with the neighborhood urchins, took possession of the barnyard.

Oil lamps were brought out, and skat cards. The potato schnaps stayed where it was. There was also homemade egg liqueur that made for good cheer. Greff did not drink but he sang songs. The Kashubians sang too, and Matzerath had first deal. Jan was the second hand and the foreman from the brickworks the third. Only then did it strike me that my poor mama was missing. They played until well into the night, but none of the men succeeded in winning a heart hand. After Jan Bronski for no apparent reason had lost a heart hand without four, I heard him say to Matzerath in an undertone: "Agnes would surely have won that hand."

Then I slipped off Gretchen Scheffler's lap and found my grandmother and her brother Vincent outside. They were sitting on a wagon shaft. Vincent was muttering to the stars in Polish. My grandmother couldn't cry any more but she let me crawl under her skirts.

Who will take me under her skirts today? Who will shelter me from the daylight and the lamplight? Who will give me the smell of melted yellow, slightly rancid b.u.t.ter that my grandmother used to stock for me beneath her skirts and feed me to make me put on weight?

I fell asleep beneath her four skirts, close to my poor mama's beginnings and as still as she, though not so short of air as she in her box tapered at the foot end.

Herbert Truczinski's Back

Nothing, so they say, can take the place of a mother. Soon after her funeral I began to miss my poor mama. There were no more Thursday visits to Sigismund Markus' shop, no one led me to Sister Inge's white uniforms, and most of all the Sat.u.r.days made me painfully aware of Mama's death: Mama didn't go to confession any more.

And so there was no more old city for me, no more Dr. Hollatz' office, and no more Church of the Sacred Heart. I had lost interest in demonstrations. And how was I to lure pa.s.sers-by to shop-windows when even the tempter's trade had lost its charm for Oskar? There was no more Mama to take me to the Christmas play at the Stadt-Theater or to the Krone or Busch circus. Conscientious but morose, I went about my studies, strode dismally through the rectilinear suburban streets to the Kleinhammer-Weg, visited Gretchen Scheffler, who told me about Strength through Joy trips to the land of the midnight sun, while I went right on comparing Goethe with Rasputin or, when I had enough of the cyclic and endless alternation of dark and radiant, took refuge in historical studies. My old standard works, A Struggle for Rome, Keyser's History of the City of Danzig, and Kohler's Naval Calendar, gave me an encyclopedic half-knowledge. To this day I am capable of giving you exact figures about the building, launching, armor, firepower, and crew strength of all the s.h.i.+ps that took part in the battle of the Skagerrak, that sank or were damaged on that occasion.

I was almost fourteen, I loved solitude and took many walks. My drum went with me but I was sparing in my use of it, because with Mama's departure a punctual delivery of tin drums became problematic.

Was it in the autumn of '37 or the spring of '38? In any case, I was making my way up the Hindenburg-Allee toward the city, I was not far from the Cafe of the Four Seasons, the leaves were falling or the buds were bursting, in any event something was going on in nature, when whom should I meet but my friend and master Bebra, who was descended in a straight line from Prince Eugene and consequently from Louis XIV.

We had not seen each other for three or four years and nevertheless we recognized one another at twenty paces' distance. He was not alone, on his arm hung a dainty southern beauty, perhaps an inch shorter than Bebra and three fingers' breadths taller than I, whom he introduced as Roswitha Raguna, the most celebrated somnambulist in all Italy.

Bebra asked me to join them in a cup of coffee at the Four Seasons. We sat in the aquarium and the coffee-time biddies hissed: "Look at the midgets, Lisbeth, did you see them! They must be in Krone's circus. Let's try to go."

Bebra smiled at me, showing a thousand barely visible little wrinkles.

The waiter who brought us the coffee was very tall. As Signora Roswitha ordered a piece of pastry, he stood there beside her, like a tower in evening clothes.

Bebra examined me: "Our gla.s.s-killer doesn't seem happy. What's wrong, my friend? Is the gla.s.s unwilling or has the voice grown weak?"

Young and impulsive as I was, Oskar wanted to give a sample of his art that was still in its prime. I looked round in search of material and was already concentrating on the great gla.s.s facade of the aquarium with its ornamental fish and aquatic plants. But before I could begin to sing, Bebra said: "No, no, my friend. We believe you. Let us have no destruction, no floods, no expiring fishes."

Shamefacedly I apologized, particularly to Signora Roswitha, who had produced a miniature fan and was excitedly stirring up wind.

"My mama has died," I tried to explain. "She shouldn't have done that. I can't forgive her. People are always saying: a mother sees everything, a mother forgives everything. That's nonsense for Mother's Day. To her I was never anything but a gnome. She would have got rid of the gnome if she had been able to. But she couldn't get rid of me, because children, even gnomes, are marked in your papers and you can't just do away with them. Also because I was her gnome and because to do away with me would have been to destroy a part of herself. It's either I or the gnome, she said to herself, and finally she put an end to herself; she began to eat nothing but fish and not even fresh fish, she sent away her lovers and now that she's lying in Brenntau, they all say, the lovers say it and our customers say so too: The gnome drummed her into her grave. Because of Oskar she didn't want to live any more; he killed her."

I was exaggerating quite a bit, I wanted to impress Signora Roswitha. Most people blamed Matzerath and especially Jan Bronski for Mama's death. Bebra saw through me.

"You are exaggerating, my good friend. Out of sheer jealousy you are angry with your dead mama. You feel humiliated because it wasn't you but those wearisome lovers that sent her to her grave. You are vain and wicked -- as a genius should be."

Then with a sigh and a sidelong glance at Signora Roswitha: "it is not easy for people our size to get through life. To remain human without external growth, what a task, what a vocation!"

Roswitha Raguna, the Neapolitan somnambulist with the smooth yet wrinkled skin, she whose age I estimated at eighteen summers but an instant later revered as an old lady of eighty or ninety, Signora Roswitha stroked Mr. Bebra's fas.h.i.+onable English tailor-made suit, projected her cherry-black Mediterranean eyes in my direction, and spoke with a dark voice, bearing promise of fruit, a voice that moved me and turned me to ice: "Carissimo, Oskarnello! How well I understand your grief. Andiamo, come with us: Milano, Parigi, Toledo, Guatemala!"

My head reeled. I grasped la Raguna's girlish age-old hand. The Mediterranean beat against my coast, olive trees whispered in my ear: "Roswitha will be your mama, Roswitha will understand. Roswitha, the great somnambulist, who sees through everyone, who knows everyone's innermost soul, only not her own, mamma mia, only not her own, Dio!"

Oddly enough, la Raguna had no sooner begun to see through me, to X-ray my soul with her somnambulist gaze, than she suddenly withdrew her hand. Had my hungry fourteen-year-old heart filled her with horror? Had it dawned on her that to me Roswitha, whether maiden or hag, meant Roswitha? She whispered in Neapolitan, trembled, crossed herself over and over again as though there were no end to the horrors she found within me, and disappeared without a word behind her fan.

I demanded an explanation, I asked Mr. Bebra to say something. But even Bebra, despite his direct descent from Prince Eugene, had lost his countenance. He began to stammer and this is what I was finally able to make out: "Your genius, my young friend, the divine, but also no doubt the diabolical elements in your genius have rather confused my good Roswitha, and I too must own that you have in you a certain immoderation, a certain explosiveness, which to me is alien though not entirely incomprehensible. But regardless of your character," said Bebra, bracing himself, "come with us, join Bebra's troupe of magicians. With a little self-discipline you should be able to find a public even under the present political conditions."

I understand at once. Bebra, who had advised me to be always on the rostrum and never in front of it, had himself been reduced to a pedestrian role even though he was still in the circus. And indeed he was not at all disappointed when I politely and regretfully declined his offer. Signora Roswitha heaved an audible sigh of relief behind her fan and once again showed me her Mediterranean eyes.

We went on chatting for a while. I asked the waiter to bring us an empty water gla.s.s and sang a heart-shaped opening in it. Underneath the cutout my voice engraved an inscription ornate with loops and flourishes: "Oskar for Roswitha." I gave her the gla.s.s and she was pleased. Bebra paid, leaving a large tip, and then we arose.

They accompanied me as far as the Sports Palace. I pointed a drumstick at the naked rostrum at the far end of the Maiwiese and -- now I remember, it was in the spring of '38 -- told my master Bebra of my career as a drummer beneath rostrums.

Bebra had an embarra.s.sed smile, la Raguna's face was severe. The Signora drifted a few steps away from us, and Bebra, in leave-taking, whispered in my ear: "I have failed, my friend. How can I be your teacher now? Politics, politics, how filthy it is!"

Then he kissed me on the forehead as he had done years before when I met him among the circus trailers. Lady Roswitha held out her hand like porcelain, and I bent over it politely, almost too expertly for a fourteen-year-old.

"We shall meet again, my son," said Mr. Bebra. "Whatever the times may be, people like us don't lose each other."

"Forgive your fathers," the Signora admonished me. "Accustom yourself to your own existence that your heart may find peace and Satan be discomfited!"

It seemed to me as though the Signora had baptized me a second time, again in vain. Satan, depart -- but Satan would not depart. I looked after them sadly and with an empty heart, waved at them as they entered a taxi and completely vanished inside it -- for the Ford was made for grownups, it looked empty as though cruising for customers as it drove off with my friends.

I tried to persuade Matzerath to take me to the Krone circus, but Matzerath was not to be moved; he gave himself entirely to his grief for my poor mama, whom he had never possessed entirely. But who had? Not even Jan Bronski; if anyone, myself, for it was Oskar who suffered most from her absence, which upset, and threatened the very existence of, his daily life. Mama had let me down. There was nothing to be expected of my fathers. Bebra my master had found his master in Propaganda Minister Goebbels. Gretchen Scheffler was entirely taken up with her Winter Relief work. Let no one go hungry, let no one suffer cold. I had only my drum to turn to, I beat out my loneliness on its once white surface, now drummed thin. In the evening Matzerath and I sat facing one another. He leafed through his cookbooks, I lamented on my drum. Sometimes Matzerath wept and hid his head in the cookbooks. Jan Bronski's visits became more and more infrequent. In view of the political situation, both men thought they had better be careful, there was no way of knowing which way the wind would blow. The skat games with changing thirds became fewer and farther between; when there was a game, it was late at night under the hanging lamp in our living room, and all political discussion was avoided. My grandmother Anna seemed to have forgotten the way from Bissau to our place in Labesweg. She had it in for Matzerath and maybe for me too; once I had heard her say: "My Agnes died because she couldn't stand the drumming any more."

Despite any guilt I may have felt for my poor mama's death, I clung all the more desperately to my despised drum; for it did not die as a mother dies, you could buy a new one, or you could have it repaired by old man Heilandt or Laubschad the watchmaker, it understood me, it always gave the right answer, it stuck to me as I stuck to it.

In those days the apartment became too small for me, the streets too long or too short for my fourteen years; in the daytime there was no occasion to play the tempter outside of shop-windows and the temptation to tempt was not urgent enough to make me lurk in dark doorways at night. I was reduced to tramping up and down the four staircases of our apartment house in time to my drum; I counted a hundred and sixteen steps, stopped at every landing, breathed in the smells, which, because they too felt cramped in those two-room flats, seeped through the five doors on each landing.

At first I had occasional luck with Meyn the trumpeter. I found him lying dead-drunk among the bed sheets hung out in the attic to dry, and sometimes he would blow his trumpet with such musical feeling that it was a real joy for my drum. In May, '38 he gave up gin and told everyone he met: "I am starting a new life." He became a member of the band corps of the Mounted SA. Stone sober, in boots and breeches with a leather seat, he would take the steps five at a time. He still kept his four cats, one of whom was named Bismarck, because, as might have been expected, the gin gained the upper hand now and then and gave him a hankering for music.

I seldom knocked at the door of Laubschad the watchmaker, a silent man amid a hundred clocks. That seemed like wasting time on too grand a scale and I couldn't face it more than once a month.

Old man Heilandt still had his shop in the court. He still hammered crooked nails straight. There were still rabbits about and the offspring of rabbits as in the old days. But the children had changed. Now they wore uniforms and black ties and they no longer made soup out of brick flour. They were already twice my size and were barely known to me by name. That was the new generation; my generation had school behind them and were learning a trade: Nuchi Eyke was an apprentice barber. Axel Mischke was preparing to be a welder at the Schichau s.h.i.+pyards, Susi was learning to be a salesgirl at Sternfeld's department store and was already going steady. How everything can change in three, four years! The carpet rack was still there and the house regulations still permitted carpet-beating on Tuesdays and Fridays, but by now there was little pounding to be heard and the occasional explosions carried an overtone of embarra.s.sment: since Hitler's coming to power the vacuum cleaner was taking over; the carpet racks were abandoned to the sparrows.

All that was left me was the stairwell and the attic. Under the roof tiles I devoted myself to my usual reading matter; on the staircase I would knock at the first door left on the second floor whenever I felt the need for human company, and Mother Truczinski always opened. Since she had held my hand at Brenntau Cemetery and led me to my poor mother's grave, she always opened when Oskar plied the door with his drumsticks.

"Don't drum so loud, Oskar. Herbert's still sleeping, he's had a rough night again, they had to bring him home in an ambulance." She pulled me into the flat, poured me imitation coffee with milk, and gave me a piece of brown rock candy on a string to dip into the coffee and lick. I drank, sucked the rock candy, and let my drum rest.

Mother Truczinski had a little round head, covered so transparently with thin, ash-grey hair that her pink scalp shone through. The spa.r.s.e threads converged at the back of her head to form a bun which despite its small size -- it was smaller than a billiard ball -- could be seen from all sides however she twisted and turned. It was held together with knitting needles. Every morning Mother Truczinski rubbed her round cheeks, which when she laughed looked as if they had been pasted on, with the paper from chicory packages, which was red and discolored. Her expression was that of a mouse. Her four children were named Herbert, Guste, Fritz, and Maria.

Maria was my age. She had just finished grade school and was living with a family of civil servants in Schidlitz, learning to do housework. Fritz, who was working at the railway coach factory, was seldom seen. He had two or three girl friends who received him by turns in their beds and went dancing with him at the "Race Track" in Ohra. He kept rabbits in the court, "Vienna blues," but it was Mother Truczinski who had to take care of them, for Fritz had his hands full with his girl friends. Guste, a quiet soul of about thirty, was a waitress at the Hotel Eden by the Central Station. Still unwed, she lived on the top floor of the Eden with the rest of the staff. Apart from Monsieur Fritz' occasional overnight visits, that left only Herbert, the eldest, at home with his mother. Herbert worked as a waiter in the harbor suburb of Neufahrwa.s.ser. For a brief happy period after the death of my poor mama, Herbert Truczinski was my purpose in life; to this day I call him my friend.

Herbert worked for Starbusch. Starbusch was the owner of the Sweden Bar, which was situated across the street from the Protestant Seamen's Church; the customers, as the name might lead one to surmise, were mostly Scandinavians. But there were also Russians, Poles from the Free Port, longsh.o.r.emen from Holm, and sailors from the German wars.h.i.+ps that happened to be in the harbor. It was not without its perils to be a waiter in this very international spot. Only the experience he had ama.s.sed at the Ohra "Race Track" -- the third-cla.s.s dance hall where Herbert had worked before going to Neufahrwa.s.ser -- enabled him to dominate the linguistic volcano of the Sweden Bar with his suburban Plattdeutsch interspersed with crumbs of English and Polish. Even so, he would come home in an ambulance once or twice a month, involuntarily but free of charge.

Then Herbert would have to lie in bed for a few days, face down and breathing hard, for he weighed well over two hundred pounds. On these days Mother Truczinski complained steadily while taking care of him with equal perseverance. After changing his bandages, she would extract a knitting needle from her bun and tap it on the gla.s.s of a picture that hung across from Herbert's bed. It was a retouched photograph of a man with a mustache and a solemn steadfast look, who closely resembled some of the mustachioed individuals on the first pages of my own photograph alb.u.m.

This gentleman, however, at whom Mother Truczinski pointed her knitting needle, was no member of my family, it was Herbert's, Guste's, Fritz', and Maria's father.

"One of these days you're going to end up like your father," she would chide the moaning, groaning Herbert. But she never stated clearly how and where this man in the black lacquer frame had gone looking for and met his end.

"What happened this time?" inquired the grey-haired mouse over her folded arms.

"Same as usual. Swedes and Norwegians." The bed groaned as Herbert s.h.i.+fted his position.

"Same as usual, he says. Don't make out like it was always them. Last time it was those fellows from the training s.h.i.+p, what's it called, well, speak up, that's it, the Schlageter, that's just what I've been saying, and you try to tell me it's the Swedes and Norskes."

Herbert's ear -- I couldn't see his face -- turned red to the brim: "G.o.d-d.a.m.n Heinies, always shooting their yap and throwing their weight around."

"Leave them be. What business is it of yours? They always look respectable when I see them in town on their time off. You been lecturing them about Lenin again, or starting up on the Spanish Civil War?"

Herbert suspended his answers and Mother Truczinski shuffled off to her imitation coffee in the kitchen.

As soon as Herbert's back was healed, I was allowed to look at it. He would be sitting in the kitchen chair with his braces hanging down over his blue-clad thighs, and slowly, as though hindered by grave thoughts, he would strip off his woolen s.h.i.+rt.

His back was round, always in motion. Muscles kept moving up and down. A rosy landscape strewn with freckles. The spinal column was embedded in fat. On either side of it a luxuriant growth of hair descended from below the shoulder blades to disappear beneath the woolen underdrawers that Herbert wore even in the summer. From his neck muscles down to the edge of the underdrawers Herbert's back was covered with thick scars which interrupted the vegetation, effaced the freckles. Multicolored, ranging from blue-black to greenish-white, they formed creases and itched when the weather changed. These scars I was permitted to touch.

What, I should like to know, have I, who lie here in bed, looking out of the window, I who for months have been gazing at and through the outbuildings of this mental hospital and the Oberrath Forest behind them, what to this day have I been privileged to touch that felt as hard, as sensitive, and as disconcerting as the scars on Herbert Truczinski's back? In the same cla.s.s I should put the secret parts of a few women and young girls, my own p.e.c.k.e.r, the plaster watering can of the boy Jesus, and the ring finger which scarcely two years ago that dog found in a rye field and brought to me, which a year ago I was still allowed to keep, in a preserving jar to be sure where I couldn't get at it, yet so distinct and complete that to this day I can still feel and count each one of its joints with the help of my drumsticks. Whenever I wanted to recall Herbert Truczinski's back, I would sit drumming with that preserved finger in front of me, helping my memory with my drum. Whenever I wished -- which was not very often -- to reconst.i.tute a woman's body, Oskar, not sufficiently convinced by a woman's scarlike parts, would invent Herbert Truczinski's scars. But I might just as well put it the other way around and say that my first contact with those welts on my friend's broad back gave promise even then of acquaintance with, and temporary possession of, those short-lived indurations characteristic of women ready for love. Similarly the symbols on Herbert's back gave early promise of the ring finger, and before Herbert's scars made promises, it was my drumsticks, from my third birthday on, which promised scars, reproductive organs, and finally the ring finger. But I must go back still farther: when I was still an embryo, before Oskar was even called Oskar, my umbilical cord, as I sat playing with it, promised me successively drumsticks, Herbert's scars, the occasionally erupting craters of young and not so young women, and finally the ring finger, and at the same time in a parallel development beginning with the boy Jesus' watering can, it promised me my own s.e.x which I always and invariably carry about with me -- capricious monument to my own inadequacy and limited possibilities.

Today I have gone back to my drumsticks. As for scars, tender parts, my own equipment which seldom raises its head in pride nowadays, I remember them only indirectly, by way of my drum. I shall have to be thirty before I succeed in celebrating my third birthday again. You've guessed it no doubt: Oskar's aim is to get back to the umbilical cord; that is the sole purpose behind this whole vast verbal effort and my only reason for dwelling on Herbert Truczinski's scars.

Before I go on describing and interpreting my friend's back, an introductory remark is in order: except for a bite in the left s.h.i.+n inflicted by a prost.i.tute from Ohra, there were no scars on the front of his powerful body, magnificent target that it was. It was only from behind that they could get at him. His back alone bore the marks of Finnish and Polish knives, of the snickersnees of the longsh.o.r.emen from the Speicherinsel, and the sailor's knives of the cadets from the training s.h.i.+ps.

When Herbert had had his lunch -- three times a week there were potato pancakes, which no one could make so thin, so greaseless, and yet so crisp as Mother Truczinski -- when Herbert had pushed his plate aside, I handed him the Neueste Nachrichten. He let down his braces, peeled off his s.h.i.+rt, and as he read let me question his back. During these question periods Mother Truczinski usually remained with us at table: she unraveled the wool from old stockings, made approving or disapproving remarks, and never failed to put in a word or two about the -- it is safe to a.s.sume -- horrible death of the man who hung, photographed and retouched, behind gla.s.s on the wall across from Herbert's bed.

I began my questioning by touching one of the scars with my finger. Or sometimes I would touch it with one of my drumsticks.

"Press it again, boy. I don't know which one. It seems to be asleep." And I would press it again, a little harder.

"Oh, that one! That was a Ukrainian. He was having a row with a character from Gdingen. First they were sitting at the same table like brothers. And then the character from Gdingen says: Russki. The Ukrainian wasn't going to take that lying down; if there was one thing he didn't want to be, it was a Russki. He'd been floating logs down the Vistula and various other rivers before that, and he had a pile of dough in his shoe. He'd already spent half his shoeful buying rounds of drinks when the character from Gdingen called him a Russki, and I had to separate the two of them, soft and gentle the way I always do. Well, Herbert has his hands full. At this point the Ukrainian calls me a Water Polack, and the Polack, who spends his time hauling up muck on a dredger, calls me something that sounds like n.a.z.i. Well, my boy, you know Herbert Truczinski: a minute later the guy from the dredger, pasty-faced guy, looks like a stoker, is lying doubled-up by the coatroom. I'm just beginning to tell the Ukrainian what the difference is between a Water Polack and a citizen of Danzig when he gives it to me from behind -- and that's the scar."

When Herbert said "and that's the scar," he always lent emphasis to his words by turning the pages of his paper and taking a gulp of coffee. Then I was allowed to press the next scar, sometimes once, sometimes twice.

"Oh, that one! It don't amount to much. That was two years ago when the torpedo boat flotilla from Pillau tied up here. Christ, the way they swaggered around, playing the sailor boy and driving the little chickadees nuts. How Schwiemel ever got into the Navy is a mystery to me. He was from Dresden, try to get that through your head, Oskar my boy, from Dresden. But you don't know, you don't even suspect what it means for a sailor to come from Dresden."

Herbert's thoughts were lingering much too long for my liking in the fair city on the Elbe. To lure them back to Neufahrwa.s.ser, I once again pressed the scar which in his opinion didn't amount to much.

" Well, as I was saying. He was a signalman second cla.s.s on a torpedo boat. Talked big. He thought he'd start up with a quiet kind of Scotsman what his tub was in drydock. Starts talking about Chamberlain, umbrellas and such. I advised him, very quietly the way I do, to stow that kind of talk, especially cause the Scotsman didn't understand a word and was just painting pictures with schnaps on the table top. So I tell him to leave the guy alone, you're not home now, I tell him, you're a guest of the League of Nations. At this point, the torpedo fritz calls me a 'pocketbook German', he says it in Saxon what's more. Quick I bop him one or two, and that calms him down. Half an hour later, I'm bending down to pick up a coin that had rolled under the table and I can't see 'cause it's dark under the table, so the Saxon pulls out his pickpick and sticks it into me."

Laughing, Herbert turned over the pages of the Neueste Nachrichten, added "And that's the scar," pushed the newspaper over to the grumbling Mother Truczinski, and prepared to get up. Quickly, before Herbert could leave for the can -- he was pulling himself up by the table edge and I could see from the look on his face where he was headed for -- I pressed a black and violet scar that was as wide as a skat card is long. You could still see where the st.i.tches had been.

"Herbert's got to go, boy. I'll tell you afterwards." But I pressed again and began to fuss and play the three-year-old, that always helped.

"All right, just to keep you quiet. But I'll make it short." Herbert sat down again. "That was on Christmas, 1930. There was nothing doing in the port. The longsh.o.r.emen were hanging around the streetcorners, betting who could spit farthest. After midnight Ma.s.s -- we'd just finished mixing the punch -- the Swedes and Finns came pouring out of the Seamen's Church across the street. I saw they were up to no good, I'm standing in the doorway, looking at those pious faces, wondering why they're playing that way with their anchor b.u.t.tons. And already she breaks loose: long are the knives and short is the night. Oh, well, Finns and Swedes always did have it in for each other. By why Herbert Truczinski should get mixed up with those characters, G.o.d only knows. He must have a screw loose, because when something's going on, Herbert's sure to be in on it. Well, that's the moment I pick to go outside. Starbusch sees me and shouts: 'Herbert, watch out!' But I had my good deed to do. My idea was to save the pastor, poor little fellow, he'd just come down from Malmo fresh out of the seminary, and this was his first Christmas with Finns and Swedes in the same church. So my idea is to take him under my wing and see to it that he gets home with a whole skin. I just had my hand on his coat when I feel something cold in my back and Happy New Year I say to myself though it was only Christmas Eve. When I come to, I'm lying on the bar, and my good red blood is running into the beer gla.s.ses free of charge, and Starbusch is there with his Red Cross medicine kit, trying to give me so-called first aid."

"What," said Mother Truczinski, furiously pulling her knitting needle out of her bun, "makes you interested in a pastor all of a sudden when you haven't set foot in a church since you was little?"

Herbert waved away her disapproval and, trailing his s.h.i.+rt and braces after him, repaired to the can. His gait was somber and somber was the voice in which he said: "And that's the scar." He walked as if he wished once and for all to get away from that church and the knife battles connected with it, as though the can were the place where a man is, becomes, or remains a freethinker.

A few weeks later I found Herbert speechless and in no mood to have his scars questioned. He seemed dispirited, but he hadn't the usual bandage on his back. Actually I found him lying back down on the living-room couch, rather than nursing his wounds in his bed, and yet he seemed seriously hurt. I heard him sigh, appealing to G.o.d, Marx, and Engels and cursing them in the same breath. Now and then he would shake his fist in the air, and then let it fall on his chest; a moment later his other fist would join in, and he would pound his chest like a Catholic crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Herbert had knocked a Latvian sea captain dead. The court acquitted him -- he had struck, a frequent occurrence in his trade, in self-defense. But despite his acquittal the Latvian remained a dead Latvian and weighed on his mind like a ton of bricks, although he was said to have been a frail little man, afflicted with a stomach ailment to boot.

Herbert didn't go back to work. He had given notice. Starbusch, his boss, came to see him a number of times. He would sit by Herbert's couch or with Mother Truczinski at the kitchen table. From his briefcase he would produce a bottle of s...o...b..'s 100 proof gin for Herbert and for Mother Truczinski half a pound of unroasted real coffee from the Free Port. He was always either trying to persuade Herbert to come back to work or trying to persuade Mother Truczinski to persuade her son. But Herbert was adamant -- he didn't want to be a waiter any more, and certainly not in Neufahrwa.s.ser across the street from the Seamen's Church.

Actually he didn't want to be a waiter altogether, for to be a waiter means having knives stuck into you and to have knives stuck into you means knocking a Latvian sea captain dead one fine day, just because you're trying to keep him at a distance, trying to prevent a Latvian knife from adding a Latvian scar to all the Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Free-City, and German scars on Herbert Truczinski's lengthwise and crosswise belabored back.

"I'd sooner go to work for the customs than be a waiter any more in Neufahrwa.s.ser," said Herbert. But he didn't go to work for the customs.

Niobe

In '38 the customs duties were raised and the borders between Poland and the Free City were temporarily closed. My grandmother was unable to take the narrow-gauge railway to the market in Langfuhr and had to close her stand. She was left sitting on her eggs so to speak, though with little desire to hatch them. In the port the herring stank to high heaven, the goods piled up, and statesmen met and came to an agreement. Meanwhile my friend Herbert lay on the couch, unemployed and divided against himself, mulling over his troubles.

And yet the customs service offered wages and bread. It offered green uniforms and a border that was worth guarding. Herbert didn't go to the customs and he didn't want to be a waiter anymore; he only wanted to lie on the couch and mull.

But a man must work. And not only Mother Truczinski was of that opinion. Although she resisted Starbusch's pleas that she persuade Herbert to go back to waiting on tables in Neufahrwa.s.ser, she definitely wanted to get Herbert off that couch. He himself was soon sick of the two-room flat, his mulling had become purely superficial, and he began one fine day to look through the Help Wanted ads in the Neueste Nachrichten and reluctantly, in the n.a.z.i paper, the Vorposten.

I wanted to help him. Should a man like Herbert have to look for work other than his proper occupation in the harbor suburb? Should he be reduced to stevedoring, to odd jobs, to burying rotten herring? I couldn't see Herbert standing on the Mottlau bridges, spitting at the gulls and degenerating into a tobacco chewer. It occurred to me that Herbert and I might start up a partners.h.i.+p: two hours of concentrated work once a week and we would be made men. Aided by his still diamond-like voice, Oskar, his wits sharpened by long experience in this field, would open up shopwindows with worthwhile displays and stand guard at the same time, while Herbert would be quick with his fingers. We needed no blowtorch, no pa.s.skeys, no tool kit. We needed no bra.s.s knuckles or shootin' irons. The Black Maria and our partners.h.i.+p -- two worlds that had no need to meet. And Mercury, G.o.d of thieves and commerce, would bless us because I, born in the sign of Virgo, possessed his seal, which I occasionally imprinted on hard objects.

There would be no point in pa.s.sing over this episode. I shall record it briefly but my words should not be taken as a confession. During Herbert's period of unemployment the two of us committed two medium-sized burglaries of delicatessen stores and one big juicy one -- a furrier's: the spoils were three blue foxes, a sealskin, a Persian lamb m.u.f.f, and a pretty, though not enormously valuable, pony coat.

What made us give up the burglar's trade was not so much the misplaced feelings of guilt which troubled us from time to time, as the increasing difficulty of disposing of the goods. To unload the stuff profitably Herbert had to go back to Neufahrwa.s.ser, for that was where all the better fences hung out. But since this locality inevitably reminded him of the Latvian sea captain with the stomach trouble, he tried to get rid of the goods everywhere else, along Schichauga.s.se, on the Burgerwiesen, in short everywhere else but in Neufahrwa.s.ser, where the furs would have sold like b.u.t.ter. The unloading process was so slow that the delicatessen finally ended up in Mother Truczinski's kitchen and he even gave her, or tried to give her, the Persian lamb m.u.f.f.

When Mother Truczinski saw the m.u.f.f, there was no more joking. She had accepted the edibles in silence, sharing perhaps the folk belief that the theft of food is legitimate. But the m.u.f.f meant luxury and luxury meant frivolity and frivolity meant prison. Such were Mother Truczinski's sound and simple thoughts; she made mouse eyes, pulled a knitting needle out of her bun, and said with a shake of the needle: "You'll end up like your father," simultaneously handing her Herbert the Neueste Nachrichten or the Vorposten, which meant, Now go and get yourself a job and I mean a regular job, or I won't cook for you any more.

Herbert lay for another week on his mulling couch, he was insufferable, available neither for an interrogation of his scars nor for a visit to promising shopwindows. I was very understanding, I let him savor his torment to the dregs and spent most of my time with Laubschad the watchmaker and his time-devouring clocks. I even gave Meyn the musician another try, but he had given up drinking and devoted his trumpet exclusively to the tunes favored by the Mounted SA, dressed neatly and went briskly about his business while, miserably underfed, his four cats, relics of a drunken but splendidly musical era, went slowly to the dogs. On the other hand, I often, coming home late at night, found Matzerath, who in Mama's lifetime had drunk only in company, sitting gla.s.sy-eyed behind a row of schnaps gla.s.ses. He would be leafing through the photograph alb.u.m, trying, as I am now, to bring Mama to life in the little, none too successfully exposed rectangles; toward midnight he would weep himself into an elegiac mood, and begin to apostrophize Hitler or Beethoven, who still hung there looking each other gloomily in the eye. From the genius, who, it must be remembered, was deaf, he seemed to receive an answer, while the teetotaling Fuhrer was silent, because Matzerath, a drunken little unit leader, was unworthy of Providence.

One Tuesday -- so accurate is my memory thanks to my drum -- Herbert finally made up his mind. He threw on his duds, that is, he had Mother Truczinski brush his blue bell-bottom trousers with cold coffee, squeezed into his sport shoes, poured himself into his jacket with the anchor b.u.t.tons, sprinkled the white silk scarf from the Free Port with cologne which had also ripened on the duty-free dungheap of the Free Port, and soon stood there ready to go, stiff and square in his blue visor cap.

"Guess I'll have a look around for a job," said Herbert, giving a faintly audacious tilt to his cap. Mother Truczinski let her newspaper sink to the table.

Next day Herbert had a job and a uniform. It was not customs-green but dark grey; he had become a guard in the Maritime Museum.

Like everything that was worth preserving in this city so altogether deserving to be preserved, the treasures of the Maritime Museum occupied an old patrician mansion with a raised stone porch and a playfully but substantially ornamented facade. The inside, full of carved dark oak and winding staircases, was devoted to records of the carefully catalogued history of our seaport town, which had always prided itself on its ability to grow or remain stinking rich in the midst of its powerful but for the most part poor neighbors. Ah, those privileges, purchased from the Teutonic Knights or from the kings of Poland and elaborately defined in elaborate doc.u.ments! Those color engravings of the innumerable sieges incurred by the fortress at the mouth of the Vistula! There within the walls of the city stands Stanislaw Leszczynski, who has just fled from the Saxon anti-king. The oil painting shows exactly how scared he is. Primate Potocki and de Monti the French amba.s.sador are also scared out of their wits, because the Russians under General Lascy are besieging the city. All these scenes are accurately labeled, and the names of the French s.h.i.+ps are legible beneath the fleur-de-lys banner. A legend with an arrow informs us that on this s.h.i.+p King Stanislaw Leszczynski fled to Lorraine when the city was surrendered on the third of August. But most of the exhibits consisted of trophies acquired in wars that had been won, for the simple reason that lost wars seldom or never provide museums with trophies.

The pride of the collection was the figurehead from a large Florentine galleon which, though its home port was Bruges, belonged to the Florentine merchants Portinari and Tani. In April, 1473, the Danzig city-captains and pirates Paul Beneke and Martin Bardewiek succeeded, while cruising off the coast of Zealand not far from Sluys, in capturing the galleon. The captain, the officers, and a considerable crew were put to the sword, while the s.h.i.+p with its cargo were taken to Danzig. A folding "Last Judgment" by Memling and a golden baptismal font -- both commissioned by Tani for a church in Florence -- found a home in the Marienkirche; today, as far as I know, the "Last Judgment" gladdens the Catholic eyes of Poland. It is not known what became of the figurehead after the war. But in my time it was in the Maritime Museum.

A luxuriant wooden woman, green and naked, arms upraised and hands indolently clasped in such a way as to reveal every single one of her fingers; sunken amber eyes gazing out over resolute, forward-looking b.r.e.a.s.t.s. This woman, this figurehead, was a bringer of disaster. She had been commissioned by Portinari the merchant from a sculptor with a reputation for carving figureheads; the model was a Flemish girl close to Portinari. Scarcely had the green figure taken its place beneath the bowsprit of a galleon than the girl, as was then customary, was put on trial for witchcraft. Put to the question before going up in flames, she had implicated her patron, the Florentine merchant, as well as the sculptor who had taken her measurements so expertly. Portinari is said to have hanged himself for fear of the fire. As to the sculptor, they chopped off both his gifted hands to prevent him from ever again transforming witches into figureheads. While the trials were still going on in Bruges, creating quite a stir because Portinari was a rich man, the s.h.i.+p bearing the figurehead fell into the piratical hands of Paul Beneke. Signer Tani, the second merchant, fell beneath a pirate's poleax. Paul Beneke was the next victim; a few years later he incurred the disfavor of the patricians of his native city and was drowned in the courtyard of the Stockturm. s.h.i.+ps to whose bows the figurehead was affixed after Beneke's death had a habit of bursting into flames before they had even put out of the harbor, and the fire would spread to other vessels; everything burned but the figurehead, which was fireproof and, what with her alluring curves, always found admirers among s.h.i.+powners. But no sooner had this woman taken her place on a vessel than mutiny broke out and the crew, who had always been a peaceful lot until then, decimated each other. The unsuccessful Danish expedition of the Danzig fleet under the highly gifted Eberhard Ferber in the year 1522 led to Ferber's downfall and b.l.o.o.d.y insurrection in the city. The history books, it is true, speak of religious disorders -- in 1523, a Protestant pastor named Hegge led a mob in an iconoclastic a.s.sault on the city's seven parish churches -- but we prefer to blame the figurehead for this catastrophe whose effects were felt for many years to come; it is known at all events that the green woman graced the prow of Ferber's s.h.i.+p.

When Stefan Batory vainly besieged the city fifty years later, Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of the Oliva Monastery, put the blame on the sinful woman in his penitential sermons. The king of the Poles, to whom the city had made a present of her, took her with him in his encampments, and she gave him bad advice. To what extent the wooden lady affected the Swedish campaigns against the city and how much she had to do with the long incarceration of Dr. Aegidius Strauch, the religious zealot who had conspired with the Swedes and also demanded that the green woman, who had meanwhile found her way back into the city, be burned, we do not know. There is a rather obscure report to the effect that a poet by the name of Opitz, a fugitive from Silesia, was granted asylum in the city for some years but died before his time, having found the ruinous wood carving in an attic and having attempted to write poems in her honor.