The Tin Drum (3 page)

The uniforms stayed a good half-hour. They stood at varying distances from the fire, took bearings on the brickworks chimney, intending to occupy Bissau as well, postponed the attack, and held their reddish blue hands over the fire till my grandmother, without ever interrupting her sighs, gave each of them a split potato on a stick. But in the midst of their chewing, the uniforms remembered their uniforms, leapt a stone's throw into the field along the broom at the edge of the lane, and startled a hare that did not, however, turn out to be Koljaiczek. Back at the fire they recovered their mealy, hotly aromatic spuds, and pacified as well as somewhat war-weary, decided to gather up the raw spuds and return them to the baskets they had overturned earlier in the line of duty.

Only when evening began to squeeze a fine, slanting rain and an inky twilight from the October sky did they attack, briefly and listlessly, a distant, darkening boulder, but once that was taken care of they decided to call it a day. A bit more foot-stamping and hands held out in blessing over the rain-spattered little fire, its thick smoke spreading, more coughing in the green smoke, eyes tearing up in the yellow smoke, then a coughing, teary-eyed stomping toward Bissau. If Koljaiczek wasn't here, then Koljaiczek must be in Bissau. The rural constabulary never sees more than two possibilities.

The smoke from the slowly dying fire enveloped my grandmother like a fifth skirt, so roomy that she too, in her four skirts, with her sighs and names of saints, like Koljaiczek, found herself beneath a skirt. Only when nothing remained of the uniforms but wavering dots slowly drowning in dusk between the telegraph poles did my grandmother rise as laboriously as if she had struck root and was now interrupting that incipient growth, pulling forth tendrils and earth.

Suddenly finding himself lying short and stout in the rain without a hood, Koljaiczek grew cold. Quickly he buttoned the trousers that fear and an overwhelming need for refuge had bidden him open under her skirts. He fiddled quickly with the buttons, fearing an all too rapid cooling of his rod, for the weather carried the threat of autumnal chills.

It was my grandmother who found four more hot potatoes under the ashes. She gave three to Koljaiczek, kept one for herself, then asked before taking a bite if he came from the brickworks, though she must have known that Koljaiczek had nothing to do with the bricks. And paying no heed to his answer, she loaded the lighter basket onto him, bent beneath the heavier one herself, kept one hand free for the garden rake and hoe, and with basket, potatoes, rake, and hoe, billowed away in her four skirts toward Bissau-Abbau.

Bissau-Abbau was not Bissau proper. It lay more in the direction of Ramkau. Leaving the brickworks to their left, they headed for the black forest, where Goldkrug lay, and beyond it Brentau. But in a hollow before the forest lay Bissau-Abbau. And following my grandmother toward it short and stout came Joseph Koljaiczek, who could no longer free himself from her skirts.

It's not so easy, lying here in the scrubbed metal bed of a mental institution, within range of a glazed peephole armed with Bruno's eye, to retrace the swaths of smoke rising from Kashubian potato fires and the fine diagonal strokes of an October rain. If I didn't have my drum, which, when handled properly and patiently, recalls all the little details I need to get the essentials down on paper, and if I didn't have the institute's permission to let my drum speak three or four hours each day, I would be a poor fellow with no known grandparents.

At any rate my drum says: On that October afternoon in eighteen ninety-nine, while Ohm Krüger was brushing his bushy anti-British eyebrows in South Africa, nearer home, between Dirschau and Karthaus, by the Bissau brickworks, beneath four skirts of a single color, beneath smoke, shock, sighs, and saints' names sorrowfully invoked, beneath the slanting rain, beneath the smoke-filled eyes and hapless questioning of two rural constables, short but stout Joseph Koljaiczek begot my mother Agnes.

Anna Bronski, my grandmother, changed her name under cover of that very night's darkness, transformed herself, with the help of a priest who was generous with the sacraments, into Anna Koljaiczek, and followed Joseph, if not into Egypt, at least to the provincial capital on the Mottlau, where Joseph found work as a raftsman and temporary respite from the rural police.

Just to heighten the suspense somewhat, I won't name that city at the mouth of the Mottlau just yet, though as my mother's birthplace it would certainly deserve mention at this point. At the end of July nineteen hundred—they were deciding to double the construction plans for
the imperial navy—Mama first saw the light of day, under the sign of Leo. Self-confidence and imagination, generosity and vanity. The first house, also known as
domus vitae,
in the sign of the ascendant: the easily influenced Pisces. The constellation of the sun in opposition to Neptune, seventh house or
domus matrimonii uxoris,
would bring confusion. Venus in opposition to Saturn, called the sour planet, known to induce ailments of the spleen and liver, dominant in Capricorn and celebrating its destruction in Leo, to which Neptune offers eels and receives the mole in return, which loves belladonna, onions, and beets, which coughs lava and sours wine; he lived with Venus in the eighth house, the house of death, which spoke of accidents, while conception in the potato field gave promise of a most hazardous happiness under the protection of Mercury in the house of relatives.

Here I must insert my mama's protest, for she always denied having been conceived in the potato field. Her father—this much she admitted—had tried it there, but his situation and Anna Bronski's position were not sufficiently well chosen to provide Koljaiczek with the preconditions for conception.

"It must have happened that night, while we were on the run, or in Uncle Vinzent's box cart, or later on the island of Troyl, when we found a room and safe haven with the raftsmen."

With such words did my mama date the founding of her existence, and my grandmother, who surely must have known, would nod patiently and announce to the world, "That's right, child, maybe it was in the cart or on Troyl, but not in the field, because it was windy and raining like the dickens."

Vinzent was my grandmother's brother. Spurred on by the death of his young wife, he made a pilgrimage to Częstochowa, where the Matka Boska Częstochowska charged him to recognize her as the future Queen of Poland. From then on he spent all his time rummaging through strange books, where he found the Virgin Mother's claim to the Polish throne confirmed in every line, and let his sister handle the farmhouse and his few acres. Jan, his four-year-old son, a frail child always on the verge of tears, tended the geese, collected brightly colored cards and, steered by fate from an early age, stamps.

Into that farmhouse dedicated to the divine Queen of Poland my grandmother brought her potato baskets and Koljaiczek, whereupon
Vinzent, seeing what had happened, ran to Ramkau and drummed up a priest to come armed with the sacraments and join Anna and Joseph in marriage. No sooner had His Reverence, groggy with sleep, yawned his drawn-out blessing and, supplied with a good side of bacon, turned his consecrated back than Vinzent hitched the horse to the cart, bundled the newlyweds into the back, bedded them down on straw and empty sacks, set a shivering and weakly weeping Jan beside him on the box, and gave his horse to understand that he was to head hard and straight into the night: the honeymooners were in a hurry.

The night was dark, but almost spent, when the wagon reached the timber port of the provincial capital. Fellow raftsmen, friends of Koljaiczek, took in the fugitive couple. Vinzent turned and headed his horse toward Bissau again: a cow, the goat, a sow with her piglets, eight geese, and the farmyard dog were waiting to be fed and his son Jan to be put to bed, for he was running a slight fever.

Joseph Koljaiczek remained in hiding for three weeks, trained his hair to take a new part, shaved off his mustache, provided himself with unblemished papers, and found work as a raftsman named Joseph Wranka. But why did Koljaiczek find it necessary to appear before timber merchants and sawmills with Wranka's papers in his pocket, a man who, unbeknownst to the local authorities, had been shoved off a raft in a scuffle above Modlin and then drowned in the Bug River? Because, having given up rafting for a time, Koljaiczek worked in a sawmill near Schwetz and got into a row with the mill boss over a fence Koljaiczek had painted a provocative red and white. No fence sitter himself when it came to politics, the mill boss ripped two slats from the fence, one white and one red, and smashed them to Polish kindling across Koljaiczek's Kashubian back, grounds enough for the battered man, on the following no doubt starry night, to set the newly constructed, whitewashed sawmill ablaze in red, to the greater glory of an indeed partitioned but therefore even more firmly united Poland.

So Koljaiczek was an arsonist, and this several times over, for in the days that followed, sawmills and woodlots all over West Prussia provided tinder for the flare-up of bicolored nationalist feelings. As always when the future of Poland was at stake, the Virgin Mary appeared in the crowd at these conflagrations, and there were eyewitnesses—a few might still be alive today—who claimed to have seen the Mother
of God, adorned with the crown of Poland, atop the collapsing roofs of several sawmills. The crowd that always gathers at such great conflagrations is said to have burst out in the Hymn to Bogurodzica, Mother of God—Koljaiczek's fires, we have every reason to believe, were affairs of great solemnity: solemn oaths were sworn.

While Koljaiczek was pursued as an arsonist, the raftsman Joseph Wranka—with an unblemished past and no parents, a harmless, even slow-witted fellow no one was looking for and hardly anyone even knew—had divided his chewing tobacco into daily rations till the Bug swallowed him up, leaving behind his jacket with three days' worth of chewing tobacco and his papers. Since Wranka, having drowned, could no longer show up, and no embarrassing questions were raised about him, Koljaiczek, who was about the same size and had the same round head as the drowned man, crept first into his jacket, then into his skin, complete with official papers and free of any prior conviction, gave up his pipe, took to chewing tobacco, even adopted Wranka's most characteristic trait, his speech impediment, and in the years that followed played the part of an honest and thrifty raftsman with a slight stutter who conveyed entire forests down the Niemen, the Bobr, the Bug, and the Vistula. To which must be added that he even rose to Private First Class in the Crown Prince's Leib-Hussars under Mackensen, for Wranka had not yet done his service, while Koljaiczek, who was four years older than the drowned man, had left a checkered record behind in the artillery at Thorn.

Even as they steal, murder, and set fires, the most dangerous of thieves, murderers, and arsonists are on the lookout for a more respectable trade. By effort or luck, some get that chance: Koljaiczek in the guise of Wranka made a good husband, and was so thoroughly cured of the fiery vice that the mere sight of a match made him tremble. A box of matches lying openly and smugly on the kitchen table was never safe from him, even though he might well have invented them. He cast temptation out the window. My grandmother had a hard time getting a hot lunch on the table by noon. The family often sat in darkness for lack of a match to light the oil lamp.

Yet Wranka was no tyrant. On Sunday he took his Anna Wranka to church in the lower city and allowed her, his legally wedded wife,
to wear four skirts one atop the other, as she had in the potato held. In winter, when the rivers were frozen over and times were lean for the raftsmen, he sat like a good fellow on Troyl, where only raftsmen, stevedores, and dockers lived, and watched over his daughter Agnes, who seemed to take after her father, for when she wasn't crawling under the bed, she was hiding in the wardrobe, and when there were visitors she sat under the table with her rag dolls.

Thus little Agnes tried to keep hidden, seeking in her hiding place the same security, though not the same pleasure, that Joseph found under Anna's skirts. Koljaiczek the arsonist had been burned badly enough to understand his daughter's need for shelter. So when it became necessary to build a rabbit hutch on the balcony-like porch of their one-and-a-half-room flat, he added a small addition just her size. In such housing my mother sat as a child, played with dolls, and kept growing. It's said that later, when she was already at school, she threw her dolls away and, playing with glass beads and colored feathers, revealed her first taste for fragile beauty.

Since I'm burning to announce the beginning of my own existence, perhaps I may be permitted to leave the Wrankas' family raft drifting peacefully along without further comment till nineteen-thirteen, when the
Columbus
was launched at Schichau's; that's when the police, who never forget, picked up the trail of the false Wranka.

It all began in August of nineteen-thirteen, when, as he did toward the end of each summer, Koljaiczek helped man the great raft that floated down from Kiev by way of the Pripet, through the canal, along the Bug as far as Modlin, and from there on down to the Vistula. Twelve raftsmen in all, they steamed upriver on the tugboat
Radaune,
operated by the sawmill, from Westlich Neufähr along the Dead Vistula as far as Einlage, then up the Vistula past Käsemark, Letzkau, Czattkau, Dirschau, and Pieckel, and tied up that evening at Thorn. There the new sawmill manager came on board, sent to oversee the purchase of timber in Kiev. When the
Radaune
cast off at four that morning he was said to be on board. Koljaiczek saw him for the first time at breakfast in the galley. They sat opposite each other, chewing, and slurping barley coffee. Koljaiczek recognized him at once. The stout, prematurely bald man had vodka brought for the empty coffee cups. Still chewing, and
while the vodka was being poured at the end of the table, he introduced himself: "Just so you know, I'm the new boss, Dückerhoff, and I run a tight ship."