The Tin Drum (11 page)

Through the series of examinations, through all the tests I knew so well, I remained calm, indifferent or even positive, as long as no one tried to take away my drum. The destruction of Hollatz's collection of snakes, toads, and embryos was still present in the minds of all who examined and tested me, inspiring respect and fear.

It was only at home, indeed on my first school day, that I found myself forced to demonstrate the effect of the diamond in my voice, since Matzerath, against all better judgment, demanded I set out for the Pestalozzi School opposite Fröbel Meadow without my drum, nor was I to take it into the school.

When he finally laid hands on what didn't belong to him, something he didn't know how to treat, something he lacked a feel for, I screamed an empty vase to pieces, one said to be authentic. When the authentic vase was lying in authentic pieces on the carpet, Matzerath, who was quite attached to the vase, raised his hand to strike me. But at this point Mama sprang up, and Jan, who had dropped by briefly with Stephan and his paper school cone, stepped between us.

"Alfred, please," he said in his calm and unctuous way, and Matzerath, struck by the look in Jan's blue and Mama's gray eyes, lowered his hand and stuck it in his trouser pocket.

The Pestalozzi School, decorated in the modern style with sgraffiti and frescoes, was a new, brick-red, three-story, flat-roofed elongated box that had been built by the Senate of our suburb rich in children at
the vociferous insistence of the Social Democrats, who were still quite active back then. Except for its smell and the art nouveau youths playing sports in the sgraffiti and frescoes, I thought the box was not bad.

Unnaturally tiny trees that were actually turning green stood in gravel outside the gate, protected by iron bars reminiscent of crosiers. Mothers pressed forward from all directions, holding brightly colored paper cones and pulling screaming or well-behaved youths after them. Oskar had never seen so many mothers heading in the same direction. It was as if they were on a pilgrimage to a market where they planned to put their first- and second-born children up for sale.

Even in the entrance hall that school smell, described often enough, and more intimate than any known perfume in the world. On the flagstones of the hall stood four or five randomly placed granite basins out of whose depths water bubbled up simultaneously. With children, including some of my own age, crowding about them, they reminded me of my uncle Vinzent's sow in Bissau, who sometimes flung herself on her side and endured the similarly brutal and thirsty assault of her piglets.

The boys bent over the steadily collapsing towers of water in the basins, let their hair fall forward, and allowed the streams of water to poke about in their open mouths. I don't know if they were playing or drinking. Sometimes two boys would straighten up almost simultaneously with inflated cheeks and spray each other loudly in the face with mouth-warmed water, mixed, you may be sure, with saliva and breadcrumbs. For my own part, upon entering the hall I had thoughtlessly cast a glance into the adjoining open gymnasium on the left, and, having spotted the leather pommel horse, the climbing poles and climbing rope, the terrifying horizontal bar, crying out as always for a giant swing, felt a very real thirst I couldn't suppress, and would gladly have taken a drink of water like all the other boys. But I found it impossible to ask Mama, who was holding me by the hand, to lift Oskar, the toddler, over such a basin. Even if I stood on my drum, the fountain would remain out of reach. When, however, with a little jump I took a quick look over the edge of one of these basins and saw the greasy breadcrumbs nearly blocking the drain, and the nasty swill left standing in the bowl, the thirst I had stored up in my mind, and in my body as well, left me, as I wandered aimlessly past equipment in the desert wastes of the gymnasium.

Mama led me up monumental steps hewn for giants, through echoing corridors, into a room with a small plaque above the door bearing the inscription I-A. The room was full of boys my own age. The mothers of the boys pressed against the wall opposite the front windows and towering above me, held in their arms the large, brightly colored paper cones covered at the top with tissue paper which were traditional on the first day of school. Mama too was carrying a paper cone.

As I entered holding her hand, the rabble laughed, as did the rabble's mothers. A pudgy little boy who wanted to pound on my drum had to be kicked a few times in the shins to avoid singshattering glass, upon which the little brat fell over and hit his nicely combed head on a school bench, for which I received a cuff on the back of the head from Mama. The brat screamed. Of course I didn't, for I only screamed if someone tried to take my drum. Mama, who found this scene in front of other mothers embarrassing, shoved me into the first desk of a row by the windows. Of course the desk was too high. But farther back, where the rabble was ever cruder and more freckled, the desks were even higher.

I made do alone and sat quietly, having no reason to worry. Mama, who still seemed embarrassed, ducked in among the other mothers. She was probably ashamed to face her peers, owing to my so-called backward state. They acted as if they had some reason to be proud of their own little louts, who had grown far too quickly for my taste.

I couldn't look out the window at Fröbel Meadow, since the height of the windowsill was no better suited to me than the height of the school bench. But I would have liked to look over at Fröbel Meadow, where I knew that Boy Scouts were pitching tents under Greff's leadership, playing at lansquenets, and, as befitted Boy Scouts, doing good deeds. Not that I would have participated in this inflated glorification of camp life. Only the figure of Greff in short trousers interested me. His love of slim, if somewhat pale, wide-eyed boys was so great that he had clothed it in the uniform of the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell.

Denied a worthwhile view by the insidious architecture, I simply stared at the sky and found pleasure in that. One new cloud after another emigrated from northwest to southeast, as if that direction had something special to offer. I wedged my drum, though it had not spent one drumbeat thinking about emigration, between my knees and the
desk drawer. The backrest protected the back of Oskar's head. Behind me my so-called schoolmates cackled, roared, laughed, wept, and raged. They threw paper pellets at me, but I didn't turn around, finding the resolute clouds more aesthetically pleasing than the sight of a horde of grimacing, overexcited oafs.

When a woman entered and announced that she was Fräulein Spollenhauer, things settled down in class I-A. I didn't need to settle down, since I'd been waiting for what was to come in a calm, almost self-absorbed state. To tell the honest truth: Oskar wasn't even waiting for what was to come, he had no need for entertainment, and thus was not waiting, but simply holding his drum and sitting at his desk, content with the clouds behind or more properly beyond the paschally polished panes of the school windows.

Fräulein Spollenhauer wore an angularly tailored suit that gave her a dry, mannish look. This impression was reinforced by a stiff, tight collar that looked washable to me, which furrowed her neck and closed about her Adam's apple. She had scarcely entered the classroom in her flat walking shoes when, in an attempt to make herself immediately popular, she asked, "Now, dear children, how about singing a little song?"

She received a roar in answer that she must have taken for a positive response, for she set out in a prim, high-pitched voice on the spring song "In the Merry Month of May," though we were in mid-April. She had barely signaled May when all hell broke loose. Without waiting for a sign to start, without knowing the lyrics, without the slightest feeling for the simple rhythm of this ditty, the pack behind me began to loosen the plaster from the walls with their yowling.

In spite of her yellowish skin, her bobbed hair, and the man's tie peeping from beneath her collar, I felt sorry for Spollenhauer. Tearing myself free from the clouds, which apparently didn't have school that day, I rose to my feet, pulled the drumsticks from beneath my suspenders with a single motion, and drummed out the beat of the song loudly and emphatically. But the pack behind me had no ear or understanding for my efforts. Only Fräulein Spollenhauer gave me a nod of encouragement, smiled at the troop of mothers clinging to the wall, and sent a special wink toward Mama, which I took as a sign to continue drumming, simply at first, then with increased complexity, displaying all the
tricks of my trade. The pack behind me had long since ceased their barbaric vocal medley. I had already begun to imagine that my drum was teaching my fellow pupils, educating them, turning them into my pupils, when Spollenhauer stopped before my desk, observed my hands and drumsticks closely, and even tried to tap along with my beat, not entirely without skill, smiling to herself, lost in thought, portraying for one brief moment a somewhat sympathetic older woman who, forgetting her teaching profession, escapes the existential caricature it prescribes and turns human, that is, childlike, curious, complex, immoral.

However, when Fräulein Spollenhauer could not follow my beat quickly and correctly, she sank back again into her old rectilinear, obtuse, and poorly paid role, pulled herself together, as teachers must from time to time, and said, "You must be little Oskar. We've heard so much about you. How nicely you drum. Isn't that so, children? Isn't Oskar a good drummer?"

The children roared, the mothers drew closer together, Spollenhauer had herself under control again. "But now," she piped in falsetto, "let's put the drum safely away in the classroom locker, it's tired and wants to sleep. Afterward, when school's out, you can have your drum back."

While she was still reeling off this hypocritical speech, she showed me her close-clipped teacher's fingernails and initiated a tenfold close-clipped assault on my drum, which, God knows, was neither tired nor wished to sleep. At first I held on tight, wrapped the arms of my sweater around the red and white flames of the cylinder, and stared at her; then, since she maintained the ancient stereotypical schoolteacher's gaze without flinching, I looked right through her, finding sufficient narrative material inside Fräulein Spollenhauer for three chapters of depravity, then tore myself loose from her inner life, since my drum was at stake, and as my gaze passed through her shoulder blades, registered the presence on her well-preserved skin of a mole the size of a gulden piece with long hairs sprouting from it.

Whether she sensed I'd seen through her, or because of my voice, with which, by way of warning, I had inflicted a small scratch, causing no real damage, on the right lens of her glasses, she abandoned the use of naked power that had chalked her knuckles white, no doubt unable to stand the glass scraping that gave her goose bumps, released my drum with a shiver and said, "You're a bad little Oskar," threw a re
proachful glance at my mother, who didn't know where to look, left me my wide-awake drum, turned on her heel, marched on flat heels to her desk, rummaged through her briefcase, pulled out another pair of glasses, probably for reading, briskly removed from her nose the spectacles my voice had scraped as fingernails scrape a windowpane, acting as if I had desecrated them, placed the second pair on her nose, lifting her little finger as she did, drew herself up so stiffly you could hear her bones rattle, and announced, as she reached once more into her briefcase, "I'll now read you the schedule."

She fished out a stack of sheets from her pigskin case, took one for herself, passed the rest on to the mothers, Mama among them, and revealed at last to the six-year-olds, who were growing restless, what the schedule had to offer: "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; Saturday: arithmetic, singing, play, play."

All this Fräulein Spollenhauer proclaimed as an irrevocable fate, reading out this product of a teachers' conference in strict tones that gave full weight to every letter, then, recalling her days at teacher-training college, turned gentle and progressive, burst out joyfully in pedagogical high spirits: "Now, my dear children, let's all repeat it together. All right—Monday?"

The horde roared, "Monday."

She continued: "Religion?" The baptized heathens roared out the word Religion. I spared my voice, but drummed the religious syllables on tin by way of substitute.

Behind me, spurred on by Spollenhauer, they screamed, "Wri—ting!" Twice my drum responded. "A-rith—me-tic!" Four beats this time.

The screaming continued behind me, Spollenhauer leading the litany in front of me, while I beat out the syllables soberly on my drum, putting a good face on a foolish game, till Spollenhauer—I don't know at what inner urge—sprang up, clearly annoyed—but it wasn't the louts behind me who were making her cross, no, I was the one turning her cheeks a hectic red, Oskar's poor drum was the stumbling block that made her draw the drummer keeping the beat into prayer.

"Now listen to me, Oskar: Thursday: geography?" Ignoring the word
Thursday, I struck the drum four times for geography, four times for arithmetic, twice for writing, and a triune trinity as the only true and saving drumbeats for religion.

But Spollenhauer had no ear for such distinctions. To her all drumming was equally repugnant. Ten times she bared again at me the shortest-hacked of fingernails and tried ten times to grab my drum.

Before she had so much as touched it, I unleashed my glass-slaying scream, deleting the upper panes from the three oversize windows of the classroom. The middle panes fell victim to my second scream. A mild spring breeze flowed freely into the classroom. Obliterating the lower panes with a third scream was basically superfluous, purely a matter of high spirits, for Spollenhauer had pulled in her claws when the upper and middle panes failed. Instead of assaulting those last panes in an aesthetically questionable burst of pure wantonness, God knows Oskar would have been smarter to keep his eye on the reeling Spollenhauer.