The Tin Drum (85 page)

Just in passing: today I celebrate my thirtieth birthday. At the age of thirty, one is obliged to speak about flight like a man and not like a boy. Maria, who brought me the cake with the thirty candles, said, "You're thirty now, Oskar, it's about time you started acting sensibly."

Klepp, my friend Klepp, gave me some jazz records as always, and used five matches to light the thirty candles on my birthday cake: "Life begins at thirty!" said Klepp; he's twenty-nine.

Vittlar, however, my friend Gottfried, who's dearest to my heart, gave me candy, leaned over my bedrails, and said in his nasal voice, "When Jesus was thirty years old, he went forth and gathered disciples."

Vittlar has always loved to confuse me. I'm supposed to abandon my bed and gather disciples just because I'm thirty. Then my lawyer came in brandishing a document, trumpeted his congratulations, hung his nylon hat on my bed, and proclaimed to all and sundry: "What a happy coincidence! My client is celebrating his thirtieth birthday, and on this very same thirtieth birthday I've received word that the Ring Finger Case is being reopened, they have a new lead, this Sister Beate, you know her of course..."

Thus, on my thirtieth birthday, the announcement arrives that I've feared for years, feared from the moment I fled: they've found the real murderer, they reopen the case, acquit me, discharge me from the mental institution, deprive me of my beloved bed, toss me out on the cold street, exposed to all the elements, and oblige a thirty-year-old Oskar and his drum to gather disciples.

So now they say Sister Beate murdered my Sister Dorothea, out of yolk-yellow jealousy.

Perhaps you still remember? A certain Dr. Werner, as happens all too often in films and in life, stood between two nurses. A terrible tale: Beate loved Dr. Werner. But Dr. Werner loved Dorothea. Dorothea meanwhile loved no one, except perhaps, in secret, little Oskar. Then Werner fell ill. Dorothea nursed him because his bed was in her ward. Beate could not stand this. So she talked Dorothea into taking a walk with her, and then, in a rye field near Gerresheim, killed her, or perhaps better, got rid of her. Now Beate was free to care for Dr. Werner undisturbed. But it seems he didn't recover under her care, far from it. Perhaps the love-crazed nurse said to herself: As long as he's ill, he's mine. Did she give him an overdose? Did she give him the wrong medicine? At any rate, Dr. Werner died, either from an overdose or the wrong medicine, though Beate confessed to neither, nor to the walk in the rye field that became Sister Dorothea's final stroll. Oskar, who likewise confessed to nothing but owned an incriminating finger in a canning jar, was found guilty of the rye-field deed, but since they were not sure he was all there, they placed me in a mental institution for observation. Of course Oskar fled before they found him guilty and committed him, for by my flight I hoped to enhance substantially the value of my friend Gottfried's accusation.

I was twenty-eight when I made my getaway. Just a few hours ago, thirty glowing candles dripped calmly onto my birthday cake. It was September back then too, when I fled. I was born in the sign of Virgo. But it's my flight we're talking of here, not my birth beneath light bulbs.

Since, as I've said, the escape route eastward toward my grandmother was closed, I was forced like everyone else these days to flee westward. If the world of high-level politics keeps you from your grandmother, Oskar, then flee toward your grandfather who lives in Buffalo, USA. Head for America: let's see how far you get.

Grandfather Koljaiczek in America had come to mind while my eyes were still closed and the cow was licking me in the meadow near Gerresheim. It must have been around seven in the morning and I said to myself: The shops open at eight. I ran off laughing, leaving my drum by the cow, telling myself: Gottfried's tired, he probably won't turn you in till eight or eight-thirty, take advantage of what little head start you've got. It took me ten minutes to raise a taxi by phone in the sleepy little suburb of Gerresheim. It carried me to Central Station. I counted my money on the way, miscounting several times because I kept bursting out in fresh gales of bright morning laughter. Then I leafed through my passport and found that, thanks to the good offices of the West Concert Agency, I had valid visas for both France and the United States; Dr. Dösch's fondest wish had always been to grant those countries a concert tour with Oskar the Drummer.

Voilà, I said to myself, let's flee to Paris, it looks good, sounds good, could happen in the movies, with Gabin smoking his pipe and chasing after me good-naturedly. But who would play me? Chaplin? Picasso? Laughing and stimulated by these thoughts of flight, I was still slapping the thighs of my slightly rumpled trousers when the taxi driver asked me for seven marks. I paid and had breakfast in the station restaurant. I placed a railway schedule next to my soft-boiled egg, found a good train, had enough time after breakfast to buy some foreign currency, purchased a small suitcase of fine leather, filled it with expensive but ill-fitting shirts, since I was afraid to return to Jülicher Straße, packed a pair of pale green pajamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, and so on, bought a first-class ticket, since there was no need to economize, and was soon comfortably ensconced in a cushioned window seat: I was fleeing without having to run. The cushions aided my reflections: the moment the train pulled out and the flight proper began, Oskar cast about for something worth fearing; for not without reason did I say to myself: No fright, no flight! But what, Oskar, frightens you enough to make you flee, since the police only make you burst out in bright morning laughter?

Today I am thirty, both flight and trial are behind me, but the fear I talked myself into when I fled remains.

Was it the jolting of the tracks, was it the song of the train? The words emerged monotonously, I noticed them just short of Aachen, they took firm hold of me as I sank back on the cushions in first class, still gripped
me, increasingly distinct and terrifying, beyond Aachen—we crossed the border about ten-thirty—so that I was glad when the customs officers, showing more interest in my hump than in my name and passport, provided some distraction—and I said to myself: That Vittlar, the sluggard! It's almost eleven and he still hasn't reached the police station with the canning jar under his arm, while I've been fleeing since the break of dawn for his sake, scaring myself to motivate my flight; what a fright I had in Belgium when the train sang out: Better start running, the Black Cook's coming! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Today I am thirty, my trial will be reopened, the expected acquittal will force me back on my feet, riding trains, trams, exposed to those words: Better start running, the Black Cook's coming! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Yet, apart from my dread of the Black Cook, whose terrifying arrival I expected at every station, the trip was pleasant enough. I had the whole compartment to myself—perhaps she was sitting in the one next to me—made the acquaintance of first Belgian, then French customs officers, dozed off for five minutes or so now and then, awoke with a small cry, and to provide some sort of shield against the Black Cook, leafed through the weekly magazine
Der Spiegel,
which had been passed to me through the compartment window in Düsseldorf, amazed as always by the breadth of knowledge of the journalists, and even found a story on my manager, Dr. Dösch of the West Concert Agency, confirming what I already knew: Dösch's agency was supported by a single mainstay, Oskar the Drummer—not a bad photo of me. And so, all the way to Paris, Oskar the Mainstay contemplated the collapse of the West Concert Agency that would inevitably result from my arrest and the terrifying arrival of the Black Cook.

Never in my life had I feared the Black Cook. It was not till my flight, when I wished to be frightened, that she crawled under my skin, and has remained there in various forms, sleeping for the most part, to this very day, on which I celebrate my thirtieth birthday: it may be the name Goethe, for instance, that makes me cry out and flee beneath the bedcovers in fear. No matter how carefully I studied the poet-prince, even as a boy, his Olympian calm always struck me as slightly sinister. And when he now stands by the rails of my bed disguised in black as a cook, no longer luminous and classical, but darker than any Rasputin, and
says on my thirtieth birthday, "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming!" I'm terrified.

Ha! Ha! Ha! sang the train that carried the fleeing Oskar toward Paris. I actually expected the Interpol agents at the Paris North station—Gare du Nord, as the Parisians say. But the only person who spoke to me was a porter who reeked so strongly of red wine that I couldn't for the life of me see him as the Black Cook, and so entrusted him with my suitcase as far as the gate. The Interpol agents and the Cook won't have wasted any money on a platform ticket, I told myself, they'll accost and arrest you outside the gate. You'd be wise to retrieve your suitcase before you pass through. So I wound up carrying my own suitcase as far as the metro, since not even the officials were there to take it from me.

I won't go on about that world-famous metro smell. I read recently that you can buy it as perfume and spray yourself. I noticed that the metro sang about the Black Cook too, but in a different rhythm from the train, and I saw that those around me must know and fear the Black Cook as I did, for they exuded anxiety and dread. My plan was to take the metro as far as Porte d'Italie, and then a cab from there to Orly Airport; if I couldn't be arrested at the Gare du Nord, I thought the famous airport of Orly—with the Black Cook as airline hostess—would be an amusing and original spot. I had to change trains once, glad that my suitcase was so light, and then headed south on the metro as I pondered: Where will you get off, Oskar—my God, the things that can happen in a single day: this morning you were still being licked by a cow outside Gerresheim, fearless and cheerful you were, and now you're in Paris—where will you alight, where will she come toward you, black and terrible? Place d'Italie or not till the Porte?

I got off one stop before the Porte, at Maison Blanche, thinking: They think, of course, that I think they'll be waiting for me at the Porte. But she knows what I think and what they think. Besides, I was fed up with the whole thing. My flight and the effort to keep up my fright had exhausted me. Oskar had lost all desire to go to the airport, now thought Maison Blanche would be more amusing than Orly Airport, and turned out to be right: for the metro station had an escalator that was to inspire several lofty notions in me, while adding its escalator clatter: "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Oskar is somewhat at a loss. His flight is drawing to a close, and with it this report: Will the rattling escalator at the Maison Blanche metro station be high, steep, and symbolic enough to serve as a final image for his recollections?

But now there is my thirtieth birthday. To all those who find the escalator too noisy, to those who don't find the Black Cook sufficiently frightening, I offer my thirtieth birthday as an ending. For of all birthdays, is not the thirtieth the most significant? It contains Three, and foreshadows Sixty, rendering it superfluous. As the thirty candles were burning on my birthday cake this morning, I could have wept for joy and rapture, but was ashamed to do so in front of Maria: at thirty a man may no longer weep.

The moment I mounted the first step of the escalator—if an escalator can be said to have a first step—and it carried me upward, I burst out laughing. I laughed despite my fear, or because of it. Slowly, steeply I rose—and there they were, waiting at the top. There was still time for half a cigarette. Two steps above me a nonchalant pair of lovers were carrying on. A step below me stood an old woman, whom I suspected at first, for no reason at all, of being the Black Cook. She wore a hat decorated with artificial fruit. While I smoked, I tried my best to conjure up a whole range of escalator-related comparisons: first Oskar played the poet Dante, who returns from the inferno and is greeted at the top, where the escalator ends, by manic
Spiegel
reporters who ask, "Well, Dante, what was it like down there?" I went through the same little scene as Goethe, prince of poets, and reporters for
Der Spiegel
asked how I liked it down below with the Mothers. Finally I grew tired of poets and said to myself: It's not reporters for
Der Spiegel
or men with tin badges in their coat pockets waiting up there, it's the Black Cook, the escalator rattled, the Black Cook's coming, and Oskar replied, "Better start running!"

There was a normal flight of stairs next to the escalator. It led people from the street down into the metro. It must have been raining outside. The people looked wet. That worried me, because I hadn't had time to buy a raincoat in Düsseldorf. Glancing upward, however, Oskar saw that the men with the conspicuously inconspicuous faces were carrying civilian umbrellas—none of which cast any doubt on the existence of the Black Cook.

What will I say to them? I wondered, slowly savoring my cigarette on a slowly rising escalator that lifted my emotions and enriched my knowledge: you grow younger on an escalator, you grow older and older on an escalator. The choice was up to me: I could step off the escalator at age three or age sixty, greet the Interpol agents as a child or an old man, fear the Black Cook at either age.

It must be getting late. My metal bed looks so tired. And my keeper Bruno showed his anxious brown eye twice at the peephole. There, beneath the watercolor of the anemones, stands my uncut cake with its thirty candles. Maria may already be asleep. Someone, I think it was Maria's sister Guste, wished me luck for the next thirty years. I wish I could sleep like Maria. But what was it my son Kurt, the schoolboy, the model pupil, always first in his class, wished me on my birthday? When Maria sleeps, the furniture around her sleeps too. Now I have it: for my thirtieth birthday Kurt wished me a speedy recovery. But what I would like is a slice of Maria's sleep, for I'm tired and running out of words. Klepp's young wife made up a silly but well-intentioned birthday poem addressed to my hump. Prince Eugen was hunchbacked too, and yet he captured the city and fortress of Belgrade. Maria should know by now that a hump brings luck. Prince Eugen also had two fathers. I'm thirty now, but my hump is younger. Louis the Fourteenth was Prince Eugen's presumptive father. Beautiful women used to touch my hump on the open street to bring them luck. Prince Eugen was hunchbacked, that's why he died a natural death. If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross. Just because I've turned thirty, must I really go out into the world and gather disciples?