The Tin Drum (78 page)

Nor did Schmuh abuse the onions. The sparrows he shot from the hedges and bushes in his free time were all he needed. Often enough after hunting, Schmuh would lay out the twelve sparrows he'd shot on a newspaper, sometimes shedding tears over the little feathered bundles, still lukewarm, and with tears in his eyes scatter birdseed over the Rhine meadows and riverbank stones. In the onion shop he'd found yet another way to vent his sorrow. He'd fallen into the habit of giving the washroom attendants a tongue lashing once a week, using strangely old-fashioned terms of abuse: hussy, harlot, wench, jade, stew. "Out!" Schmuh would shriek. "Depart from my sight, you harridan!" He would fire these women on the spot and hire new ones, but that proved difficult after a time, for he couldn't find any more, and so had to rehire those he had already thrown out once or twice. These washroom attendants returned to The Onion Cellar gladly, since they hadn't understood most of the names they'd been called, and earned good money. Tears drove more guests to the facilities than in other nightclubs, and a crying man tends to be more generous than one with dry eyes. Particularly the gentlemen who disappeared "in the back" with streaming faces swollen and inflamed reached deeply and gladly into their purses. The women who tended the washrooms also sold customers the famous onion-print handkerchiefs with
The Onion Cellar
printed diagonally across them. These looked quite cheerful, and could be used both to dry tears and as headscarves. Male guests at The Onion Cellar had the colored rectangles sewn into triangular pennants and hung them in the rear windows
of their cars, carrying Schmuh's Onion Cellar with them on holiday to Paris, the Côte d'Azur, to Rome, Ravenna, Rimini, even to far-off Spain.

Our band and music served yet another function: occasionally some of the guests would slice two onions in succession; then there were eruptions that could all too easily have degenerated into orgies. Schmuh disliked this final loss of restraint, and the moment a few gentlemen started loosening their ties and a few ladies began fumbling at their blouses, he would order us to strike up the music to counteract these stirrings of lewdness, yet it was Schmuh himself who repeatedly paved the way toward an orgy by providing particularly susceptible customers with a second onion.

The most violent eruption I can recall at The Onion Cellar was, if not a turning point, at least a decisive moment in Oskar's life. Schmuh's wife, the vivacious Billy, seldom visited the Cellar, and when she did, she came with friends Schmuh had no desire to see. One evening she turned up with Woode, the music critic, and Wackerlei, a pipe-smoking architect. Both were regular customers at The Onion Cellar, burdened with thoroughly boring sorrows: Woode wept for religious reasons—he longed to convert, or had already converted, or was converting for the second time—and the pipe-smoking Wackerlei bewailed a professorship he'd turned down in the twenties for the sake of a flashy Danish woman who'd run off instead with some South American and bore him six children, all of which grieved Wackerlei so deeply that his pipe kept going out. It was the slightly malicious Woode who persuaded Schmuh's wife to cut up an onion. She did so, burst into tears, and started spilling the beans, laid poor Schmuh bare, told stories about him Oskar has the tact to spare you, at which point several strong men were required to keep Schmuh from flinging himself upon his wife; after all, kitchen knives were lying all around on the tables. The enraged man was forcibly restrained long enough for an indiscreet Billy to disappear with her friends Woode and Wackerlei.

Schmuh was both agitated and stunned. I could see it in his flighty hands, which kept rearranging his shawl. He disappeared behind the curtain several times to lash out at the washroom attendant, returned in the end with a full basket, and announced to the guests in a strained and overly cheerful voice that he, Schmuh, was in a generous mood, this round was on the house, and started handing out onions.

Even Klepp, who thought most human situations, no matter how painful and embarrassing, a good joke, appeared pensive, or at least tense, and held his flute at the ready. After all, we knew how dangerous it was to allow this sensitive and refined company a chance to release their inhibitions through tears twice in rapid succession.

Schmuh, who saw that we had taken up our instruments, forbade us to play. The knives on the tables set to work. The first oh-so-beautiful rosewood skins were cast carelessly aside. Glassy onion flesh with pale green stripes went under the knife. Strangely enough, the ladies weren't the first to weep. Gentlemen in the prime of life—the owner of a large mill, the proprietor of a hotel with his lightly rouged friend, a nobleman representing his firm, a whole table of clothes manufacturers in town for a board meeting, and a bald actor we nicknamed the Gnasher, because he gnashed his teeth when he cried—were all in tears before the ladies joined in. But these ladies and gentlemen did not dissolve in the tears of relief that the first onions called forth; instead they fell prey to convulsive fits of weeping: the Gnasher gnashed so fiercely he would have moved any audience to tearful gnashing, the mill owner kept pounding his carefully groomed gray head on the table, the hotel owner blended his crying jag with that of his graceful friend; Schmuh, standing by the stairs, let his shawl dangle, eyed the unleashed company with a pinched mouth, but not without pleasure. And then an older woman tore off her blouse before the eyes of her son-in-law. Suddenly the hotel owner's friend, whose slightly exotic appearance had already attracted attention, stood on a table, his naturally brown body bare from the waist up, moved on to the next, and launched into some sort of Oriental dance, signaling the advent of an orgy that was lively enough to begin with, but was so lacking in imagination, so downright silly, that it's not worth describing in detail.

Schmuh was not the only one disappointed; Oskar too lifted his eyebrows in bored disgust. A few silly striptease acts, gentlemen wearing ladies' underwear, amazons donning ties and suspenders, a couple or two who vanished beneath the tables; only the Gnasher distinguished himself by chewing up a bra and apparently swallowing part of it.

It was probably the terrible din, all the ouhhhs and uahhhs signifying little or nothing, that caused a disappointed Schmuh to give up his place beside the stairs, perhaps fearing the police. He bent down to us where we were sitting under the hen-house ladder, poked Klepp,
then me, and hissed, "Music! Play something, for God's sake. Put an end to this."

But it turned out that Klepp, who was easily pleased, was having a good time. He was shaking so hard with laughter he couldn't lift his flute. Scholle, who looked on Klepp as his master, followed his lead in everything, including laughter. So that left only Oskar—but Schmuh could count on me. I pulled my tin drum out from under the bench, nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and began to drum.

With no plan in mind, I made myself understood on tin. I forgot all the standard nightclub routines. No jazz for Oskar either. I didn't like being taken for a maniacal drummer by the crowd anyway. Though I considered myself a decent percussionist, I was no purebred jazz musician. I love jazz, just as I love Viennese waltzes. I could have played either, but didn't feel I had to. When Schmuh asked me to step in with my drum, I didn't play what I could play, but what was in my heart. Oskar pressed his drumsticks into the hands of a three-year-old Oskar. I drummed up and down former paths, showed the world as a three-year-old sees it, and the first thing I did was harness that postwar crowd incapable of a true orgy to a cord, that is, I led them down Posadowskiweg into Auntie Kauer's kindergarten, had them standing with their mouths hanging open, holding one another by the hand, turning their toes inward, waiting for me, their Pied Piper. And so I left my post beneath the hen-house ladder, took the lead, began by drumming up a sample of "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man," then, when childish glee from all corners indicated its success, sent them into a paroxysm of terror with "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming!" I feared her now and then as a child, but in recent days she scares me more and more, and now I sent her raging through The Onion Cellar, monstrous, coal-black, vast, and accomplished something Schmuh could only manage with onions: the gentlemen and ladies shed big, round, children's tears, were scared to death, begged me for mercy, so that to comfort them, and help them back into their clothes, their underwear, their silk and satin, I drummed "Green, green, green are all my clothes," and "Red, red, red are all my clothes," and "Blue, blue, blue..." and "Yellow..." too, through every shade and color till all stood decently clad once more, then lined the kindergarten up to leave, led them through The Onion Cellar as though it were Jäschkentaler Weg, climbed up the Erbs
berg, past the creepy Gutenberg Memorial, and on to Johanniswiese, as though real daisies bloomed there, which they, those ladies and gentlemen, were free to pick in childish joy. And then I gave them all permission, all those present, including Schmuh, to leave a little souvenir of that playful kindergarten afternoon, to do their business, told them on my drum—we neared the deep, dark Devil's Gorge, gathered beechnuts on the way—go right ahead now, children: and they did their little children's business, all wet themselves, gentlemen and ladies, Schmuh the host, my friends Klepp and Scholle, even the washroom attendant in the back, went peepee peepee in their pants, crouched and listened to themselves as they did so. Once this music faded—Oskar merely tapped lightly along with that children's orchestra—I banged the drum loudly and ushered in a boundless joy. With a rollicking:

Glass, glass, little glass,

Sugar and no beer,

Mother Holle runs upstairs

And sheds a tiny tear...

I led the cheering, giggling, childishly babbling company first to the cloakroom, where a bewildered bearded student handed out coats to Schmuh's childish guests, then drummed the ladies and gentlemen up the concrete steps with the popular little song "If Washerwomen You Would See," past the doorman in sheepskin, and out. Beneath a night sky studded with fairy-tale stars, slightly cool, but seemingly made to order for the occasion, in the spring of nineteen-fifty, I dismissed the gentlemen and ladies, who carried on for some time with their childish nonsense in the Altstadt and did not return home till the police finally helped them recall their age, social position, and telephone numbers.

As for me, I returned to The Onion Cellar, a giggling Oskar caressing his drum, to find Schmuh still clapping his hands, standing knock-kneed in wet trousers by the hen-house ladder, and seemingly as happy in Auntie Kauer's kindergarten as he had been on the Rhine meadows, when a grown-up Schmuh went shooting sparrows.

I'd only meant to help Schmuh, the host of The Onion Cellar. But he couldn't forgive me for the tin drum solo that transformed his high-rolling guests into babbling, blithely merry children who still wet their pants and therefore cried—cried without onions.

Oskar tries to understand. How could he help but fear my competition when customers kept pushing aside his traditional crying onions and calling for Oskar, for Oskar's drum, for me, who could conjure up on tin the childhood of any guest, no matter how advanced in years?

Schmuh, who up till then had restricted himself to firing washroom attendants on the spot, now fired our band and hired a strolling fiddler who, if you squinted a little, might have been taken for a gypsy.

When we were tossed out, however, several of Schmuh's best customers threatened to boycott The Onion Cellar, and within a few weeks he was forced to accept a compromise: Three times a week the strolling fiddler fiddled. Three times a week we performed, having demanded and received a raise: our salary was now twenty marks a night, and increasingly generous tips poured in too—Oskar opened a savings account and looked forward to the interest.

All too soon my little savings book became a friend indeed in time of need, for Death came and carried off Ferdinand Schmuh, along with our work and wages.

As I've said before, Schmuh shot sparrows. Sometimes he took us along in his Mercedes and let us watch. Despite occasional quarrels over my drum, which also drew in Klepp and Scholle, who always stuck by me, relationships between Schmuh and the band remained friendly until, as I say, Death came.

We piled in. Schmuh's wife sat at the wheel as always. Klepp beside her. Schmuh between Oskar and Scholle. The rifle Schmuh held on his knees, stroking it from time to time. We stopped just short of Kaiserswerth. A backdrop of trees on both sides of the Rhine. Schmuh's wife stayed in the car and unfolded a newspaper. Klepp had bought some raisins and was eating them at a more or less steady pace. Scholle, who'd studied something or other before taking up the guitar, managed to recite a few poems about the Rhine River from memory. The river was showing its poetical side as well, bearing not only the usual tow barges, but autumnal leaves rocking their way toward Duisburg, even if the calendar claimed it was still summer; and if Schmuh's rifle hadn't spoken up now and then, that afternoon below Kaiserswerth might well have been called peaceful.

By the time Klepp had finished his raisins and wiped his fingers on the grass, Schmuh was finished too. To the eleven cold balls of feather lying on the newspaper he added a twelfth, still kicking, as he put it. The sharpshooter was already packing up his plunder—for some inexplicable reason, Schmuh always took what he shot home—when a sparrow settled on a nearby tree root that had washed onto the bank, and did it so openly, this gray, fine specimen of a sparrow, that Schmuh couldn't resist; he who never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon shot a thirteenth—which Schmuh should not have done.

After he'd laid the thirteenth beside the other twelve, we walked back and found Schmuh's wife sleeping in the black Mercedes. First Schmuh got in front. Then Scholle and Klepp climbed in the back. I was to get in next, but I didn't, said I felt like a little stroll, that I would take the tram, not to worry about me, and so they headed off toward Düsseldorf without Oskar, who had wisely declined to get in.