The Tin Drum (35 page)

This three-man skat game was putting a strain on Oskar too. Not that the sounds and concussions connected with the siege and defense of the Polish Post Office placed too great a burden on my nerves. It was this first sudden abandonment of all disguise, which I resolved was only temporary. Up till then I'd been my true unvarnished self only with Master Bebra and his somnambulistic Lady Roswitha, but now I laid myself bare to my uncle and presumptive father, as well as a disabled janitor—men who would never come into question as later witnesses—as the fifteen-year-old adolescent indicated on my birth certificate, playing skat somewhat recklessly but not without skill. This strain, which was not too much for my will but far too much for my gnomelike proportions, produced the severest of headaches and bodily pains after barely an hour of skat.

Oskar felt like giving up, and could easily have slipped away at some point, between two blasts that rattled the building in quick succession, say, had not a previously unknown feeling of responsibility told him to
hold on and counter his presumptive father's fear by the only effective means available: a game of skat.

And so we played, and would not let Kobyella die. He just couldn't get around to it. I made sure the cards kept circulating. And when the tallow candles fell beneath the onslaught of an explosion in the stairwell and gave up their little flames, it was I who had the presence of mind to do the obvious thing and reach into Jan's pocket for his matches, pulling Jan's gold-tipped cigarettes out with them, I who restored light to the world, lit a calming Regatta for Jan, and set one little flame after another alight in the darkness before Kobyella could take advantage of that darkness to make his getaway.

Oskar stuck two candles on his new drum, placed the cigarettes close at hand, disdained tobacco himself, but kept passing them to Jan, hung one in Kobyella's crooked mouth, and things went better, the game got livelier, the tobacco comforted, calmed, but could not stop Jan Bronski from losing game after game. He sweated and, as always when deeply involved, tickled his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. He got so fired up that in his excitement he called me Alfred or Matzerath, thought Kobyella was my poor mama playing. And when someone out in the hall yelled, "They got Konrad!" he looked at me reproachfully and said, "Please, Alfred, turn that radio off. I can hardly hear myself think."

Jan really got annoyed when the door to the dead-letter room was torn open and Konrad, who was at the end of his rope, was dragged in.

"Shut the door, there's a draft!" he protested. There really was a draft. The candles flickered wildly and didn't calm down till the men, who had stuffed Konrad into a corner, closed the door behind them. The three of us appeared strangely romantic. The candles lit us from below, gave us the look of all-powerful magicians. And when Kobyella bid his heart without two, calling out, no, gurgling out twenty-seven, thirty, his eyes rolling out of sight, and something lodged in his right shoulder started pushing its way out, twitched, seemed crazily alive, quieted down at last, then tipped Kobyella forward, set the basket he was tied to rolling, the basket filled with letters and the suspenderless dead man, Jan brought Kobyella and the laundry basket to a standstill with one powerful blow, whereupon Kobyella, hindered once more from departing, finally piped up with "heart hand," Jan hissed "contra," and Kobyella forced out his "double contra," Oskar understood then and there that the defense of
the Polish Post Office had succeeded, that those attacking had lost the war from the very start, even if they managed in the course of that war to occupy Alaska and Tibet, the Easter Islands and Jerusalem.

The only sad thing was that Jan, having declared schneider schwarz, was unable to play out his wonderful bulletproof grand hand with four.

He began with his club run, called me Agnes now, thought Kobyella was his rival Matzerath, played the jack of diamonds as innocent as could be—I preferred being Agnes for him to Matzerath, by the way—then the jack of hearts—under no circumstances did I wish to be confused with Matzerath—Jan waited impatiently for Matzerath, who in reality was an incapacitated janitor named Kobyella, to make his discard; that took some time, but then Jan slapped the ace of hearts down on the floor and simply couldn't understand, couldn't believe, could never understand, was always just a blue-eyed boy who smelled of cologne, never understood much of anything, couldn't understand why Kobyella suddenly dropped all his cards, tilted the laundry basket with the letters and the dead man at an angle, till first the dead man, then a layer of letters, and finally the entire carefully woven basket tipped over, delivering a flood of mail as if it were meant for us, as if the thing for us to do now was to shove our playing cards aside and start reading these epistles or collecting stamps. But Jan didn't want to read, didn't want to collect, had spent too much time collecting as a boy, he wanted to play, to play out his grand hand, wanted to win, did Jan, to triumph. And he lifted Kobyella up, set the basket back on its wheels, but left the dead man lying there, didn't shovel the letters back in, didn't put enough weight in the basket, and seemed surprised even so when Kobyella, hanging from the now unstable basket, showed no staying power, leaned farther and farther forward, till Jan yelled at him, "Alfred, please don't be a spoilsport. Just this one last hand and we'll go home."

Oskar rose wearily, overcame the increasing pain in his limbs and his head, laid his little, tough drummer-boy hands on Jan Bronski's shoulders, and forced himself to speak, softly but insistently: "Leave him alone, Papa. He's dead and can't go on. If you want we can play Sixty-six."

Jan, whom I'd just addressed as my father, released the janitor's bodily remains, stared at me with those blue eyes, the blue overflowing, and wept: Nonononono.... I stroked him, but he kept saying no.
I kissed him with meaning, but he couldn't get his mind off the grand hand he hadn't finished.

"I would have won it, Agnes. I'm sure I could have brought it home." Thus he lamented to me in my poor mama's stead, and I—his son—threw myself into the role, agreed with him, swore he would have won, that he'd already basically won, he just had to believe in it firmly and listen to his Agnes. But Jan believed neither me nor my mama, wept loudly at first in high lament, then fell into a soft, unmodulated babbling, scratched skat cards from beneath cold Mount Kobyella, mined between his legs, the letter landslide yielded a few, Jan didn't rest till he'd gathered up all thirty-two. Then he cleaned off the sticky sap that had seeped onto them from Kobyella's trousers, working hard on each card, shuffled, and started to deal again, when his finely shaped forehead, which was by no means low but somewhat too smooth and impenetrable, finally admitted the thought that there was no third skat man left in this world.

A deep silence fell over the dead-letter room. Outside as well, an extended minute of silence was devoted to the last skat player and third man. It seemed to Oskar that someone had quietly opened the door. And looking over his shoulder, expecting some sort of supernatural apparition, he saw Viktor Weluhn's strangely blind and empty face. "I've lost my glasses, Jan. Are you still here? We've got to run for it. The French aren't coming, or they'll be too late. Come with me, Jan. Show me the way, I've lost my glasses."

Perhaps poor Viktor thought he was in the wrong room. For when he received neither answer nor glasses nor Jan's flight-ready arm, he withdrew his unspectacled face and shut the door, and I listened for a few more steps as Viktor, feeling his way forward through the fog, set out in flight.

Who knows what comical incident transpired in Jan's small head to make him break into laughter, softly at first, still amid tears, then loudly and joyfully, to let his tongue play, pink, poised for tender caresses, to throw the deck of skat cards high and catch them, and finally, since a windless Sunday-like calm fell over the room holding the silent men and letters, he began, with careful, well-balanced movements and bated breath, to construct an extremely delicate house of cards: the seven of spades and the queen of clubs provided the base. Both were topped by the king of diamonds. Then he built a second base beside the first from
the nine of hearts and the ace of spades, topped by the eight of clubs. Then he connected both bases with tens and jacks set upright, with queens and aces laid crosswise, so that all parts supported the whole. Then he decided to place a third story upon the second, and did so with spellbinding hands my mother must have known from similar rituals. And when the queen of hearts leaned against the king with the heart of red, the edifice did not collapse; no, airily it stood, sensitive, breathing softly in that room full of breathless dead and living beings with bated breath, and permitted us to fold our hands, allowed even a skeptical Oskar, who saw through a house of cards and what held it up as well as anyone, to forget the acrid smoke and stink that crept sinuously and sparingly through the cracks of the mailroom door, making it seem that the little chamber with the house of cards stood door to door with Hell.

They'd brought in flamethrowers and, shying away from a frontal assault, had decided to smoke out the remaining defenders. This had moved Dr. Michon to take off his steel helmet, seize a bedsheet, and when that didn't seem enough, pull out his silk handkerchief, wave them both, and offer the surrender of the Polish Post Office.

And out they came, some thirty scorched, half-blind men with arms raised and hands crossed behind their necks, from the left side entrance to the post office, then stood by the courtyard wall, waiting for the slowly advancing Home Guard. It was said later that during the brief interval before the attack force arrived, while the defenders were still standing in the courtyard, three or four escaped by way of the post office garage, passing through the adjoining police garage into houses on Rähm that had been evacuated and were hence unoccupied. There they'd found clothes, complete with Party badges, had washed, tidied themselves up, and slipped away one by one; and one of them, it's said, visited an optician's shop on Altstädtischer Graben and got fitted with a pair of glasses, having lost his own during the battle at the post office. Newly bespectacled, Viktor Weluhn, for it was he, even had a beer, and then another, for the flamethrowers had made him thirsty, and then, with his new glasses, which indeed lightened the fog he gazed into, but by no means lifted it as his old glasses had done, set out on a flight that continues to this day, so persistent have been his pursuers.

But the others—and as I say, there were around thirty who decided not to run—were already standing by the wall opposite the side en
trance when Jan leaned the queen of hearts against the king of hearts and withdrew his hands in happiness.

What more can I say? They found us. They yanked the door open, screamed "Rausss!," stirred up the air, created a breeze, brought down the house of cards. They didn't have the nerve for that kind of architecture. They swore by concrete. They built for eternity. They paid no attention to Postal Clerk Bronski's indignant, offended face. And as they dragged him out, they didn't notice that Jan had reached in among the cards and taken something with him, or that I, Oskar, wiped the candle stubs from my newly won drum and took the drum along, disdaining the candle stubs since far too many flashlights were trained upon us; they didn't see that their miserable lamps blinded us, so that we could barely find the door. They screamed behind torchlamps and raised carbines, "Rausss!" They kept screaming "Rausss!" when Jan and I had already reached the hall. Their "Rausss!" was meant for Kobyella and Konrad from Warsaw, for Bobek and little Wischnewski, who, when he lived, sat at the telegram window. Their refusal to obey frightened the men. I laughed so loud when they kept shouting "Rausss!" that the Home Guard finally realized they were making themselves ridiculous, stopped shouting, said "Ach, so," and took us to join the thirty men in the courtyard with raised arms and hands crossed behind their necks, who were thirsty and were being filmed for the weekly newsreels.

We'd just been led out the side entrance when the newsreel crew swung the camera they'd mounted on a car toward us and shot that short film which was later shown in all the movie houses.

I was separated from the cluster standing by the wall. Recalling his gnomelike stature, knowing that no one would hold a three-year-old responsible for anything, beset once more by pains in my limbs and head, Oskar fell to the ground with his drum, thrashing about in a seizure he half felt and half faked, but throughout which he clung to his drum. And as they picked him up and stuck him in an official SS Home Guard car, Oskar could see, as the car carried him off to the municipal hospital, Jan, poor Jan, smiling foolishly and happily to himself, holding a few skat cards in his upraised hands and waving one in his left—I think it was the queen of hearts—toward Oskar, his departing son.

I've just read through my last paragraph again. Even if I'm not satisfied, Oskar's pen has every right to be, for in its succinct summary it has managed, as succinctly summarizing treatises often do, to embellish now and then, if not to lie.

But I'd like to stick to the truth, stab Oskar's pen in the back, and report, first of all, that Jan's last hand, which alas he was unable to play out to the end and win, was not a grand but a diamond without two; second, that before leaving the mailroom, Oskar picked up not only his new tin instrument but also his old broken one, which had fallen from the laundry basket that held the dead man without suspenders and the letters. To which must be added: no sooner had Jan and I left the mail-room, as ordered by the Home Guard with their "Rausss!" and their flashlights and carbines, than Oskar, seeking protection, inserted himself between two avuncular and seemingly good-natured members of the Home Guard, put on a show of pathetic weeping, and pointed at Jan, his father, with accusatory gestures, transforming the poor man into a villain who had dragged an innocent child to the Polish Post Office in typically barbaric Polish fashion to use as a human shield.