Long-Distance Song Effects from the Stockturm

Fräulein Dr. Hornstetter, who drops by my room almost daily long enough to smoke one cigarette, who's supposed to be treating me but leaves the room less nervous each time I've treated her, who's so shy that the only close relationship she has is to her cigarette, steadfastly maintains that I was too isolated as a child, that I didn't play enough with other children.

Now, as far as other children are concerned, she may not be entirely wrong. Gretchen Schemer's pedagogical venture occupied so much of my time, and I was torn so often between Goethe and Rasputin, that with the best will in the world I found no time for ring-around-the-rosy and counting games. But every time I shunned books, as scholars sometimes do, cursed them as verbal graveyards, and tried to make contact with the common folk, I ran up against the kids in our building and felt fortunate, after a few brushes with those little cannibals, to return to my reading in one piece.

Oskar could either leave his parents' flat through the shop, in which case he would be standing on Labesweg, or he could close the door to the flat behind him and stand in the stairwell, from which he could reach the street to the left, or climb four flights of stairs to the attic where Meyn played his trumpet, or, lastly, go out into the courtyard. The street was cobblestone. On the packed sand of the courtyard rabbits multiplied and carpets were beaten. The attic offered, aside from occasional duets with the drunken Herr Meyn, a view, a vista, and that lovely but deceptive feeling of freedom all tower climbers seek, which makes dreamers of all who dwell in garrets.

While the courtyard was fraught with perils for Oskar, the attic offered him security, till Axel Mischke and his gang drove him from there as well. The courtyard ran the full length of the building but measured only seven paces in depth, and was separated from three other courtyards by a tarred wooden fence sprouting barbed wire from its top. The attic offered a good overview of this labyrinth: the buildings on Labesweg, the two cross streets Hertastraße and Luisenstraße, and Marienstraße in the far distance formed an extensive quadrangle of courtyards that included a cough-drop factory and several small repair shops. Trees and bushes emerged here and there from the courtyards and advertised the season. Otherwise the courtyards indeed differed in size, but as far as rabbits and carpet beatings were concerned they all came from the same litter. While there were rabbits throughout the year, carpets were, according to house rules, beaten only on Tuesdays and Fridays. On such days the size of the courtyard complex was confirmed. Looking down from the attic, Oskar could see and hear it: over one hundred carpets, runners, and bedside rugs were rubbed with sauerkraut, brushed, beaten, and finally forced to show their patterns. One hundred women carried carpet corpses from the houses, lifting their naked round arms as they did so, their hair and hairdos protected by short knotted kerchiefs, threw the carpets over the racks, grabbed the plaited carpet beaters, and blasted the narrow courtyards with a barrage of dry blows.

Oskar hated this single-minded hymn to cleanliness. He battled the din with his drum, yet had to admit, even in the attic, which provided a certain distance, that he was powerless against the housewives. A hundred carpet-beating women could storm the heavens, could blunt the wingtips of young swallows, could bring down with a few blows the little temple Oskar had drummed up in the April air.

On days when no carpets were being beaten, the children of our building did gymnastics on the wooden carpet racks. I was rarely in the courtyard. Only old Herr Heilandt's shed offered me a degree of security, for the old man didn't allow anyone but me in his junk room and gave the children scarcely a peek at the disintegrating sewing machines, the incomplete bicycles, the vises and pulley blocks, the crooked nails pounded straight and kept in cigar boxes. That was his major occupa tion: when he wasn't pulling nails from crate boards, he was at the anvil straightening nails he had pulled out the previous day. Aside from the fact that he never gave up on a nail, he was the man who helped on moving day, who slaughtered rabbits for holidays, and who spat tobacco juice all over the courtyard, stairs, and attic.

One day when the children, as children do, were making soup next to his shed, Nuchi Eyke asked old man Heilandt to spit in the soup three times. The old man did so, bringing it up from his depths, then disappeared into his shanty and started pounding nails again, while Axel Mischke added a further ingredient, some pulverized brick. Oskar regarded this culinary experiment with curiosity but stood off to one side. Axel Mischke and Harry Schlager had erected a sort of tent out of blankets and rags so no grownups could peek into the soup. As the brick gruel came to a boil, little Hans Kollin emptied his pockets and contributed two live frogs he'd caught at Aktien Pond to the soup. Susi Kater, the only girl in the tent, puckered her mouth in disappointment and bitterness as the frogs sank silently into the soup, unheralded and unsung, without the slightest attempt at a last jump. Nuchi Eyke was the first to unbutton his trousers and, undeterred by Susi's presence, pee into the hotpot. Axel, Harry, and little Hans Kollin followed suit. When Little Cheese tried to show the ten-year-olds what he could do, nothing came forth. Now all eyes turned to Susi, and Axel Mischke handed her a Persil-blue enamel cook pot with a battered rim. Oskar was ready to leave by now. But he waited till Susi, who apparently had no panties on, squatted down, wrapped her arms around her knees, shoved the pot under her, gazed blankly into space, then wrinkled her nose as the pot announced with a metallic tinkle that she too had a little something to spare for the soup.

I ran away at the time. I shouldn't have run, I should have walked calmly. But because I ran, everyone who'd been fishing around in the pot with their eyes till then looked up at me. I heard Susi Kater's voice behind me saying, "He's going to rat on us, look at him run!"; her voice was still stabbing at me as I stumbled up four flights of stairs and finally caught my breath in the attic.

I was seven and a half. Susi may have been nine. Little Cheese was barely eight. Axel, Nuchi, little Hans, and Harry were ten or eleven. Then there was Maria Truczinski. She was a little older than me but never played in the courtyard; instead she played with dolls in Mother Truczinski's kitchen, or with her grown-up sister Guste, who helped out at the Protestant kindergarten.

Small wonder that to this day I can't stand to hear the sound of women urinating in chamber pots. Just when Oskar had soothed his ears by stirring his drum, felt safely removed in the attic from the soup that bubbled below, the whole contingent arrived, barefoot or in laced shoes, everyone who'd done their bit for the soup, and Nuchi had the soup with him. They surrounded Oskar, with Little Cheese bringing up the rear. They poked each other, whispering "Do it!" till Axel grabbed Oskar from behind, pinned his arms, and Susi, laughing, baring her moist, even teeth, her tongue between them, said why not? She took the spoon from Nuchi, wiped the tin to silver on her thigh, dipped the little spoon in the steaming pot, stirred around in it slowly, enjoying its mushy resistance to the full like any good housewife, blew on the spoon to cool it, and finally fed it to Oskar: she fed it to me, I've never eaten anything like it again, that taste will stay with me forever.

Not until the mob, so overly concerned with my physical well-being, had left because Nuchi had vomited into the pot, did I too crawl into a corner of the drying loft where only a few bedsheets were hanging at the time, and disgorge several spoonfuls of reddish brew, but could discover no vestiges of frog in what I threw up. I climbed up on a box under an open dormer window, gazed out at distant courtyards, grinding brick residue between my teeth, felt the urge to act, checked the distant windows of the houses on Marienstraße, glass gleaming, screamed, sang long-distance toward them, with no visible result, yet was so convinced long-distance song would work that henceforth my courtyard and all other courtyards grew too small for me, and hungering for distant climes, distant places, distant views, I seized each opportunity, alone or holding Mama's hand, that led me far from Labesweg, far from our neighborhood, and delivered me from the persecution of all those soup chefs in our small courtyard.

Every Thursday Mama went shopping in the city. She usually took me along. She always took me along when we needed to buy a new drum from Sigismund Markus in the Arsenal Arcade at Kohlenmarkt. In that period, from roughly the age of seven to ten, I wrecked a drum in two weeks flat. From ten to fourteen I would pound through the tin in less than a week. Later on I could reduce a drum to scrap metal in a single day, or, if I was in a more harmonious mood, drum firmly yet sensitively for three or four months at a time with no visible damage to my drum, apart from a few cracks in the lacquer.

But we're speaking now of the time I would leave our courtyard with its carpet racks, old man Heilandt pounding nails, the kids making new soups, and go with my mama once every two weeks to the shop of Sigismund Markus, where I was permitted to select a new instrument from his stock of tin drums. Sometimes Mama would take me along even though my drum was in a relatively sound condition, and I enjoyed those afternoons in the colorful Altstadt, which always had a museum-like quality, with bells ringing from this or that church tower.

For the most part these visits passed with pleasing regularity. A few purchases at Leiser, Sternfeld, or Machwitz, then the visit to Markus, who made a habit of addressing Mama with a carefully selected assortment of the most flattering compliments. There was no doubt that he was courting her, but so far as I know he never gave in to any greater overture than silently kissing Mama's warmly grasped hand and declaring it worth its weight in gold—except for the time he fell to his knees, which I'll tell about later.

Mama, who had inherited her full, firm, stately figure from Grandmother Koljaiczek, as well as a charming vanity coupled with good nature, submitted to the attentions of Sigismund Markus all the more willingly because of the dirt-cheap assortment of sewing silk and ladies' stockings, purchased in bulk but nonetheless flawless, that he practically gave to her. To say nothing of the tin drum he passed over the counter to me every two weeks at a ridiculously low price.

On every visit, at precisely four-thirty in the afternoon, Mama would ask Sigismund if she could leave me, Oskar, at the shop in his care, since she had important and pressing errands to attend to. Smiling oddly, Markus would bow and promise in flowery phrases to protect me like the apple of his eye while she took care of her important errands. A very gentle, by no means offensive mockery, which gave his sentences a peculiar intonation, made Mama blush on occasion and suspect that Markus knew what was what.

But I too knew the sort of errands Mama called important, to which she attended all too eagerly. For a time I was allowed to accompany her to a cheap boarding house on Tischlergasse, where she disappeared into a stairwell, returning three-quarters of an hour later, while I was left to wait with the landlady, who was usually slurping a bottle of Mampe, with a soft drink before me, silently served, always awful, till Mama came back, apparently unchanged, greeted the landlady, who didn't glance up from her half and half, and took me by the hand, forgetting that the temperature of her hand would give her away. Hot hand in hand we then visited the Café Weitzke on Wollwebergasse. Mama would order a strong Mocha coffee for herself, a lemon ice cream for Oskar, and wait till, right on time and as if by chance, Jan Bronski happened by, joined us at the table, and had his own Mocha placed on the cool, calming marble top.

They spoke quite openly in front of me, and their conversation confirmed what I'd known for some time: Mama and Uncle Jan met almost every Thursday to do it with each other for three-quarters of an hour in a room Jan rented at the boarding house on Tischlergasse. It was probably Jan who objected to these visits of mine to Tischlergasse and the Café Weitzke. He was quite prudish at times, more so than Mama, who saw no problem with my witnessing the conclusion to their hour of love, of whose legitimacy, it appears, she always remained convinced.

So at Jan's request I spent almost every Thursday afternoon from four-thirty till nearly six at Sigismund Markus's, where I could inspect and use his assortment of tin drums, even play several at once—where else could Oskar have done that?—while gazing into the hangdog face of Markus. Though I had no idea where his thoughts came from, I had a pretty good idea where they were headed: they hung around Tischlergasse, scratched at the numbered doors of rooms, or crouched like poor Lazarus beneath a marble table at the Café Weitzke, waiting for what? For crumbs?

Mama and Jan Bronski left no crumbs. They ate it all themselves. They had that ravenous hunger that's never satisfied, that swallows its own tail. They were so busy they would have sensed the thoughts of Markus beneath the table as merely the insistent caress of a draft.

On one of those afternoons—it must have been in September, for Mama left Markus's shop in a rust-brown autumn suit—when I saw that Markus was deeply immersed, completely buried, and no doubt thoroughly lost in thought behind the counter, something impelled me to carry my newly acquired drum into the Arsenal Arcade, a darkly cool tunnel lined on both sides by the windows of the choicest establishments, such as jewelry shops, delicatessens, and bookstores. But the displayed wares, no doubt reasonably priced but clearly beyond my means, could not hold me; instead that same force impelled me out of the tunnel and into the Kohlenmarkt. At its very center I stood in the dusty light before the arsenal, its basalt-gray facade studded with cannonballs of all sizes from all sorts of former sieges, iron bumps intended to remind each passerby of the city's history. The cannonballs failed to move me, for I knew they had not lodged there on their own, but that a mason who lived in the city, employed and paid by the Building Surveyor's Office in conjunction with the Office of Historical Preservation, embedded munitions from past centuries in the facades of various churches and town halls, including the front and rear walls of the arsenal.

I was headed for the Stadt-Theater, whose columned portal could be seen on the right, separated from the arsenal only by a narrow, dark lane. But since, as I expected, I found the Stadt-Theater closed at that hour—the box office for the evening performance wouldn't open till seven—I drummed off indecisively to the left, already weighing a retreat, till Oskar stood between the Stockturm and Langgasser Gate. I didn't dare pass through the gate down Langgasse and left onto Große Wollwebergasse, for Mama and Jan would be sitting there, and if they weren't yet there they might be just finishing up on Tischlergasse, or perhaps already on their way to their refreshing Mochas on the little marble table.

I don't know how I managed to cross the avenue on Kohlenmarkt, with the streetcars jangling in and out through the gate, screeching round the curve toward Kohlenmarkt, Holzmarkt, and Central Station. Perhaps some grownup—it may even have been a policeman—took me by the hand and guided me safely through the perils of the traffic.

I stood before the buttressed brick of the Stockturm, which rose steeply toward the sky, and only by chance, stirred by encroaching boredom, lodged my drumsticks between the brickwork and the ironclad frame of the tower door. From the moment I directed my gaze upward along the brick it proved hard to follow the line of the facade, for pigeons were busy taking off from niches and windows in the tower, coming to rest for brief pigeon-measured moments on waterspouts and in alcoves, then plunging down the wall, dragging my gaze along.

This pigeon business irritated me. My gaze deserved better; I withdrew it and, to dispel my irritation, used both my drumsticks in earnest as a lever: the door yielded, and before he had even pushed it fully open, Oskar was inside the tower, climbing the spiral staircase, leading with his right leg, pulling the left one after, reached the first barred dungeons, spiraled still higher, leaving behind the torture chambers with their carefully polished and instructively labeled instruments, cast a glance through a narrow barred window as he continued to climb—now leading with his left leg, pulling his right after—estimated how high he was, noted the thickness of the masonry, startled pigeons into flight, met the same pigeons one turn of the stairs higher, led with his right leg again, pulling his left after, and as Oskar, continuing to switch legs, finally reached the top, he would gladly have kept on climbing, though both his right and left legs felt heavy. But the stairs had tired too soon. He grasped the absurdity and futility of building towers.

I don't know how high the Stockturm was—and still is, for it survived the war. Nor do I have any desire to ask my keeper Bruno for a reference work on East German brick Gothic. I guess it must have been a good hundred fifty feet to the very top of the tower.

As the spiral staircase tired too soon, I had to stop at a gallery that circled the tower's dome. I sat down, thrust my legs between the little columns of the balustrade, leaned forward, and peering past a column I had wrapped my right arm around, gazed down at the Kohlenmarkt, while with my left I made sure of my drum, which had shared the entire journey.

I have no intention of boring you with a bird's-eye view of Danzig, with that panorama of bell towers, still suffused, they say, with the breath of the Middle Ages, portrayed in a thousand good engravings. Nor will I go on about the pigeons, even if it's true ten times over that pigeons, which some people call doves, are good literary material. Pigeons and doves do next to nothing for me, though gulls are somewhat more interesting. The phrase dove of peace is simply a paradox. I would sooner entrust a peace message to a hawk or even a vulture than to a dove, the most belligerent tenant under the sun. To make a long story short: there were pigeons on the Stockturm. But there are pigeons on any self-respecting tower that wants to keep up appearances with the help of its conservators.

My gaze had turned toward something totally different: the Stadt-Theater, which I'd found closed upon leaving the Arsenal Arcade. The box with its dome bore a fiendishly close resemblance to a senselessly enlarged, neoclassical coffee grinder, though it lacked the handle on the rounded top of its dome which, in that temple devoted to culture and the muses filled to the brim each evening, would have allowed it to grind to grisly scrap a five-act play with its entire assemblage of tragedians, stage sets, prompters, props, and curtains. This building, from whose column-flanked lobby windows a sagging afternoon sun, steadily applying more red, refused to depart, annoyed me.

At that hour, some one hundred fifty feet above the Kohlenmarkt, above streetcars and clerks heading home from work, high above Markus's sweet-smelling junk shop, above the cool marble tables at the Café Weitzke, above two cups of Mocha, towering above Mama and Jan Bronski, above our building, our courtyard, all other courtyards, above bent and straightened nails, leaving the neighborhood children and their brick soup far below, I, who up till then had screamed only when forced by circumstances, now screamed without cause or compulsion. Until I climbed the Stockturm, I'd only sent my piercing tones into glass, the interior of a light bulb, or a bottle of flat beer when someone tried to take away my drum; now on the tower I screamed down, though my drum was not threatened in any way.

No one was trying to take Oskar's drum away, and yet he screamed. No pigeon had sullied his drum with his droppings, to be repaid with a scream. There was verdigris on copper plates nearby but no glass, yet Oskar screamed. The pigeons had blank reddish eyes, but no glass eye eyed him, yet he screamed. What was he screaming at, what distant horizon lured him? Was it a focused attempt to demonstrate what he'd tried at random in the attic above the courtyard after enjoying his brick soup? What glass did Oskar have in mind? With what glass—and it had to be glass—did Oskar plan to experiment?

It was the Stadt-Theater, the dramatic coffee grinder, whose setting-sun windowpanes attracted my newfangled tones, first tested in our attic and bordering now, I might say, on mannerism. After a few minutes of screams of various calibers, which however produced no results, an almost soundless tone took effect, and Oskar could report with joy and telltale pride that two midlevel panes in the left window of the lobby had been forced to surrender the evening sun and now registered as two black quadrangles in need of immediate reglazing.

This success required further confirmation. Like a modern painter who, having at last found the style he's been seeking for years, bestows upon a stunned world a whole series of equally wonderful, equally bold, equally worthy, similarly formatted finger exercises in the same mode, I proceeded to put on a show.

Within a mere quarter-hour I managed to deglaze all the windows in the lobby and a portion of the doors. What appeared from above to be an excited crowd gathered in front of the theater. There are always curious bystanders. I was not particularly impressed by my admirers. Of course they forced Oskar to work with even greater rigor, even greater formal skill. I was just setting out on an even bolder experiment to lay bare the inner essence of all things, namely to project a special scream through the open lobby, through a keyhole in a lobby door, into the still darkened interior of the theater and strike the pride of all season-ticket holders, the theater's chandelier, with all its polished, reflecting, refracting, faceted claptrappery, when I spotted a rust-brown suit in the crowd outside the theater. Mama had found her way back from the Café Weitzke, had enjoyed her Mocha, had left Jan Bronski.

Admittedly, Oskar still sent a scream toward the fancy chandelier. It appeared to have had no effect, however, for the following day the newspapers reported only the mysteriously shattered panes in the lobby windows and doors. For weeks afterward semi-scientific and even scientific investigations appeared in the feature sections of the daily press, spreading one column after another of the most fantastic nonsense. The Neueste Nachrichten referred to cosmic rays. Staff members at the local observatory, highly qualified academics, spoke of sunspots.

I made my way down the spiral stairs of the Stockturm as quickly as my little legs would carry me and arrived somewhat breathlessly among the crowd in front of the theater portal. Mama's rust-brown autumn suit no longer stood out, she must have been inside Markus's shop, perhaps reporting the damage my voice had caused. And Markus, who accepted my so-called retarded condition, as well as my diamond voice, as the most natural thing in the world, would be wagging the tip of his tongue, so Oskar thought, and rubbing his yellow-white hands.

From the door of the shop I saw something that made me forget all my long-distance singshattering triumphs. Sigismund Markus knelt before my mama, and all the stuffed toys, bears, monkeys, dogs, even dolls with click-open eyes, fire engines, rocking horses, all the puppets hanging round guarding his shop, seemed about to kneel down with him. He, however, held Mama's two hands covered by his own, their backs showing lightly downed brownish spots, and he was crying.

Mama looked equally solemn and concerned by the situation. "Please, Markus," she said, "please, not here in the shop."

But Markus couldn't stop, and his words had an unforgettable cadence, pleading and overwrought at the same time: "Drop this Bronski business, with him and the Polish Post Office, it's bad I tell you. Don't bet on the Poles, if you got to bet on someone, bet on the Germans, they're going to be on top, sooner or later; they're partway there already, on their way up, and you're still betting on Bronski, Frau Agnes. Bet on Matzerath if you want, him you've got already. Or bet on Markus if you'd like, please, come with Markus, newly baptized and all. Let's go to London, Frau Agnes, I got people there and funds if you come, but if you won't come with Markus, if you despise him, then you despise him. But he's begging you, from his heart he's begging, please don't bet on this meshuge Bronski who sticks with the Polish Post Office when it's clear the Poles are finished once the Germans come."

Just as Mama, confused by so many possibilities and impossibilities, was about to burst into tears, Markus saw me in the shop door and, releasing one of Mama's hands, gestured toward me with five eloquent fingers: "Please, we'll take him with us to London. Like a prince he'll live, a prince!"

Now Mama looked at me too, and started to smile. Perhaps she was thinking of the paneless lobby windows of the Stadt-Theater, or felt good about the prospect of metropolitan London. But to my surprise she shook her head and said lightly, as if declining an offer to dance, "Thank you, Markus, but I can't, I really can't—on account of Bronski."

Taking my uncle's name as a cue, Markus rose at once, jackknifed a bow, and replied, "Forgive Markus, please, that's what he thought, that it wouldn't work on account of him."

As we left the shop in the Arsenal Arcade, Markus locked it from the outside, though it wasn't yet closing time, and walked with us to the stop for the Number Five line. Passersby and a few policemen were still standing outside the Stadt-Theater. I wasn't afraid, however, and scarcely recalled my triumphs over glass. Markus bent down to me, whispering more to himself than to us, "The things he can do, that Oskar. Beats his drum and raises a ruckus at the theater."

He calmed Mama's growing anxiety over the broken glass with soothing gestures, and as the tram arrived and we stepped into the second car, he implored her again softly, fearing he might be overheard, "Well, stick with Matzerath then, please, him you have, and don't bet on no more Poles."

When Oskar, lying or sitting on his metal bed today, drumming in either case, revisits the Arsenal Arcade, the words scribbled on the walls of the Stockturm's dungeons, the Stockturm itself with its oiled instruments of torture, the three lobby windows of the Stadt-Theater behind its columns, then returns to Arsenal Arcade and Sigismund Markus's shop to trace the details of that September day, he must, at the same time, seek the land of the Poles. How does he seek it? He seeks it with his drumsticks. Does he seek the land of the Poles with his soul as well? He seeks it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ.

And I seek the land of the Poles that is lost, that is not yet lost. Some say nearly lost, already lost, lost once more. Here in Germany they seek Poland with credits, with Leicas, with compasses, with radar, with divining rods and delegations, with humanism, with leaders of the opposition and clubs of exiles mothballing regional costumes. While they search for the land of the Poles with the soul in this land—some with Chopin, some with revenge in their hearts—while they dismiss plans one through four for partitioning the land of the Poles and sit down to work on a fifth, while they fly with Air France to Warsaw and place a wreath in remorse where the ghetto once stood, while they seek the land of the Poles with rockets someday, I search on my drum for the land of the Poles and drum: lost, not yet lost, lost once more, lost to whom, lost too soon, lost by now, Poland's lost, all is lost, Poland is not yet lost.