The Tin Drum (71 page)

Sometimes I heard her steps when she returned from the night shift. Heard her around nine in the evening too, when her day shift was over and she went to her room. Oskar didn't always remain seated in his chair when he heard the nurse in the hall. Often he would play with the door handle. For who could resist? Who doesn't look up when something passes by that might be passing by for him? Who can stay seated when every neighboring sound seems to serve the sole purpose of sending a calmly seated person springing to his feet?

Still worse is the silence. We know this from the ship's figurehead, who after all was wooden, silent, and passive. There lay the first museum guard in his blood. They said: Niobe killed him. The director looked for a new guard, since the museum could not be closed. When the second guard was dead, they cried: Niobe killed him. The museum director had difficulty finding a third guard—or was it the eleventh he sought by now?—it hardly matters. One day this long-sought guard lay dead as well. Niobe, they cried, Niobe of the green paint, Niobe gazing from amber eyes. Niobe, wooden, nude, who neither flinches, freezes, sweats, nor breathes, untouched even by woodworms since she'd been sprayed against them, her historical value retained. A witch was burned because of her, the man who carved her lost his gifted hand to the ax, ships sank, but she floated on. Niobe, wooden and fireproof, killed others yet did not lose her value. She silenced with her silence the head of his class, students, an elderly priest, a whole chorus of museum guards. My friend Herbert Truczinski mounted her and sprang a fatal leak; yet Niobe stayed dry and her silence deepened.

When, in the early morning around six, the nurse left her room, the
hall, and the Hedgehog's flat, things grew very still, though she made no noise when she was there. Unable to stand the silence, Oskar had to make his bed creak a time or two, move a chair, or roll an apple against the bathtub. Around eight there was a rustling. This was the mailman, dropping letters and postcards through the slot onto the hall floor. Aside from Oskar, Frau Zeidler too listened for this sound. Her job as a secretary at Mannesmann didn't start until nine, so she let me go first, and it was Oskar who reacted to the rustling. I moved quietly, though I knew she could hear me, left my door open so I wouldn't have to turn on the light, scooped up all the mail, checked for the weekly letter Maria sent me reporting in detail on herself, the child, and her sister Guste, stuck it in my pajama pocket if it had come, then quickly looked through the rest of the mail. Everything addressed to the Zeidlers or a certain Herr Münzer, who lived at the other end of the hall, I let slide back onto the floor, since I was crouching rather than standing; as for the nurse's mail, Oskar turned it about, smelled it, felt it, and, last but not least, checked the return address.

Sister Dorothea seldom received any mail, though she got more than I did. Her full name was Dorothea Köngetter, but I just called her Sister Dorothea, and occasionally forgot her last name, which was superfluous anyway, since she was a nurse. She got mail from her mother in Hildesheim. Letters and postcards arrived from hospitals scattered throughout West Germany. These were from nurses she'd gone through training with. Now she was struggling, somewhat haltingly, to keep up with them by postcard, and was receiving these replies, which, as Oskar hastily noted, seemed rather silly and trite.

I did learn a few things about Sister Dorothea from these postcards, however, most of which showed pictures of hospitals covered with ivy: she had spent some time at St. Vincent's Hospital in Cologne, at a private clinic in Aachen, and had worked in Hildesheim too. That's where her mother was writing from. So she either came from Lower Saxony or was a refugee from the East like Oskar, and had settled there after the war. I also learned that Sister Dorothea was working nearby, at St. Mary's Hospital, and was evidently close friends with a certain Sister Beate, for several postcards referred to this friendship, and bore greetings for Beate.

She disconcerted me, this girlfriend. Her existence gave Oskar all sorts of ideas. I composed letters to Beate, requested her intercession in one, then suppressed all mention of Dorothea in the next, planning to approach Beate first and then switch to her friend later on. I drafted five or six letters, even stuck one or two in envelopes, was on my way to the mailbox, and yet sent none.

But perhaps, in my madness, I might still have sent such a missive to Sister Beate one day, had I not, on a certain Monday—Maria had just begun her affair with her boss, Stenzel, which, strangely enough, left me completely cold—found that letter in the hall which transformed my passion, lacking nothing in love, into jealousy.

The preprinted return address told me that a certain Dr. Erich Werner—St. Mary's Hospital—had written a letter to Sister Dorothea. On Tuesday a second letter arrived. Thursday brought a third. What was that Thursday like? Oskar returned to his room, fell onto one of the kitchen chairs that served as furniture, pulled Maria's weekly letter from his pajama pocket—in spite of her new lover Maria continued to write punctually, neatly, and clearly, omitting nothing—even opened the envelope, read without reading, heard Frau Zeidler in the hall, then her voice calling for Herr Münzer, who failed to answer, though he must have been home, for she opened his door, handed the mail to him, and kept right on talking.

Though she continued to talk, I no longer heard Frau Zeidler's voice. I surrendered myself to the wallpaper's madness, its vertical, horizontal, diagonal madness, its curving, thousandfold madness, saw myself as Matzerath, shared with him the suspiciously wholesome daily bread of the betrayed, costumed with ease my own Jan Bronski as a cheaply and poorly drawn seducer in satanic makeup, appearing first in the traditional overcoat with velvet collar, then in the hospital smock of Dr. Hollatz, quickly followed by that of the surgeon, Dr. Werner, all to seduce, to corrupt, to ravish, to desecrate, to whip, to torture—to do everything a seducer must do to retain his credibility.

Today I can smile when I recall the thought that then turned Oskar as yellow and mad as the wallpaper: I decided to study medicine and graduate as quickly as possible. I would become a doctor, at St. Mary's Hospital of course. I would drive Dr. Werner out, expose him, reveal his incompetence, even accuse him of manslaughter for botching a larynx
operation. It would transpire that Herr Werner never went to medical school. He'd served in a field hospital during the war and picked up a thing or two: away with the charlatan! And Oskar becomes head surgeon, so young and yet such a responsible position. A new Sauerbruch strides through echoing corridors with Sister Dorothea, his surgical assistant, at his side, surrounded by a retinue clad in white, visiting patients, making a last-minute decision to operate. How fortunate that film was never made.

Now, no one should believe that Oskar thought only about nurses. After all, I had my professional life. Summer semester had begun at the Art Academy and I had to give up the part-time work I'd had chiseling letters over the holidays, for now Oskar sat still for good wages, challenging old styles to prove themselves, while new styles tested themselves on me and Ulla the Muse; the latter destroyed our substance, denied us, negated us, covering canvas and sketchpads with lines, squares, and spirals, stuff learned by heart, fit at best for wallpaper, and endowed those commercial patterns, which contained everything but Oskar and Ulla and thus lacked all mystery and tension, with pretentious titles that reeked of the marketplace:
Woven Upward. Song above Time. Red in New Spaces.

This latter style was favored mostly by new students who still couldn't draw very well. My old friends working with Professors Kuchen and Maruhn, top-flight students like the Goat and Raskolnikov, were too rich in charcoal and color to sing a song in praise of poverty with pale curlicues and anemic lines.

But Ulla the Muse, who, when she descended to earth, revealed a distinct taste for arts and crafts, warmed to the new wallpaper designs so thoroughly that she quickly forgot Lankes, the painter who had abandoned her, and turned to the decorative patterns in various sizes of a somewhat older artist named Meitel, which she found pretty, cheerful, funny, fantastic, awesome, and even chic. That she was soon engaged to the artist, who had a special fondness for forms suggesting sugary-sweet Easter eggs, meant little; she was constantly getting engaged, and at this very moment—as she told me the other day when she came by with
sweets for Bruno and me — she's about to enter into what she always refers to as a serious relationship.

When the semester began, Ulla wished to limit the vision she offered as Muse solely to those heading in this new direction, which she failed to see was such a sadly blind alley. Meitel, her Easter-egg painter, had put that flea in her ear and as an engagement present had provided her with a vocabulary she tried out on me in our conversations about art. She spoke of relationships, of constellations, accents, perspectives, irrigative structures, processes of fusion, phenomena of erosion. She, whose daily fare consisted solely of bananas and tomato juice, now spoke of proto-cells, of color atoms, which not only reached their natural positions through dynamic flat trajectories within their force fields, but could even be said to ... That's more or less what Ulla came out with during our breaks, or now and then over a cup of coffee on Ratinger Straße. Even when her engagement to the dynamic Easter-egg painter was a thing of the past and, after the briefest of episodes with a lesbian, she'd taken up with one of Kuchen's students and been drawn back into the world of solid objects, she still retained this vocabulary, which put such a strain on her little face that two sharp and somewhat fanatical creases formed on either side of her mouth.

Here I must admit that it was not solely Raskolnikov's idea to paint Ulla as a nurse beside Oskar. After
Madonna 49
he portrayed us as
The Rape of Europa
— I was the bull. And immediately following the somewhat controversial
Rape
came
The Fool Heals the Nurse.

It was a little suggestion on my part that inflamed Raskolnikov's imagination. Brooding darkly and furtively in his redheaded way, cleaning his brushes, staring fixedly at Ulla, he began speaking of guilt and atonement, so I suggested he picture me as Guilt, Ulla as Atonement; my guilt was obvious and Atonement could be dressed as a nurse.

That this fine painting was subsequently given a different and quite misleading title was Raskolnikov's doing. I would have called it
Temptation,
because my painted right hand was holding a latch, pressing it down, and opening the door to a room in which the nurse was standing. Or it might simply have been called
The Latch,
for if I had to give a new name to temptation I'd recommend latch, since that handy protuberance cries out to be seized, and since the latch on the frosted-glass door to Sister Dorothea's room tempted me whenever I knew that Zeidler the
Hedgehog was away for the day on business, that the nurse was at the hospital and Frau Zeidler in the office at Mannesmann.

Oskar would leave his room with the drainless tub, step into the corridor of Zeidler's flat, station himself outside the nurse's room, and try the latch.

Until around the middle of June, and I tried it almost every day, the door had not yielded. I had almost concluded that the nurse had been so schooled in orderliness by the responsibilities of her profession that it would be advisable to abandon all hope of a door left open by accident. Thus the mindless mechanical reaction that caused me to close it again immediately on the day I found it unlocked.

For what was surely several minutes, Oskar stood there, almost bursting at the seams, assailed by so many thoughts of the most varied origins simultaneously that his heart was hard-pressed to suggest even the hint of a plan.

It was only after I'd managed to graft other relationships to myself and my thoughts—Maria and her lover, I thought, Maria has a lover, the lover gives Maria a coffeepot, Maria and her lover go to the Apollo on Saturday night, Maria cozies up to her lover after hours, at work she calls him sir, he owns the business—not till I considered Maria and her lover from various angles did I manage to bring my poor brain into some sort of order—and I opened the frosted-glass door.

I had already pictured the room as windowless, for the dimly translucent upper section of the door had never betrayed a strip of daylight. Reaching to the right, just as in my room, I found the light switch. The forty-watt bulb was perfectly adequate for a chamber of this size, which was much too narrow to be called a room. I was annoyed to find myself immediately confronted by my upper half in a mirror. However, Oskar did not turn aside from this reversed image, though it told him so little; for the objects on the equally wide washstand before the mirror attracted him strongly, raised Oskar on tiptoe.

The white enamel of the washbowl showed chipped spots of bluish black. The marble washstand top in which the bowl was sunk up to its overlapping rim revealed some damage as well. The missing left corner of the marble top lay before the mirror, showing the mirror its veins. Traces of flaking glue on its broken edge testified to an awkward attempt at repair. My stonecutter's fingers itched. I thought of Korneff's homemade
marble cement, which transformed even the most fragile Lahn marble into those durable tiles affixed to the facades of large butcher shops.

Now, after these familiar thoughts of limestone allowed me to forget my badly distorted image in that nasty mirror, I succeeded in naming the smell that had struck Oskar immediately upon entering the room.

It was vinegar. Later, till just a few weeks ago in fact, I justified the acrid odor by assuming that the nurse must have washed her hair the day before and added vinegar to the water before rinsing. True, there were no vinegar bottles on the washstand. Nor could I detect any vinegar in containers with other labels; nor, I kept telling myself, would Sister Dorothea heat water in Zeidler's kitchen, which would require advance permission on his part, and go to all the bother of washing her hair in her own room, when she had the most modern facilities at St. Mary's Hospital. Of course a general prohibition may have been issued by the head nurse or the hospital administration forbidding the nurses to use certain sanitary arrangements in the hospital, so that Sister Dorothea had no choice but to wash her hair in the enamel washbowl before that distorted mirror. Even if there was no vinegar bottle on the washstand, there were plenty of little jars and tins on the clammy marble. A package of cotton wool and a half-empty box of sanitary napkins discouraged Oskar from further investigation of the little jars and their contents. But I still believe today they contained only cosmetics, or at most harmless salves.