Moth and Light Bulb
A man left everything behind, crossed the great water, came to America, and grew rich. I think I'll leave it at that with my grandfather, whether he calls himself Goljaczek (Polish), Koljaiczek (Kashubian), or Joe Colchic (American).
It's not that easy, using a simple tin drum of the sort you can buy in any toy shop or department store, to search through rafts floating downriver almost to the horizon. I have, however, managed to drum my way through the timber port, through all the driftwood lurching in its inlets, tangled in the reeds, and, with less effort, through the building slips of the Schichau and Klawitter shipyards, through all the boatyards, some doing repairs only, the scrap yard at the railroad-car factory, the rancid coconut heap by the margarine factory, all the hiding places I know of on the Speicherinsel. He's dead, doesn't answer, shows no interest in imperial ship launchings, in the decline of a ship that begins with its launching and often lasts decades, in this case a ship named the Columbus, known as the pride of the fleet, which obviously set off for America and was later sunk, or scuttled, was perhaps raised and refitted, renamed, or scrapped. Perhaps the Columbus, like my grandfather, merely dived under and is still knocking about today with her forty thousand tons, smoking salon, marble gymnasium, swimming pool, and massage booths, at a depth of, say, six thousand meters, in the Philippine Trench or Emden Deep; you'll find the whole story in Weyer or in the naval calendars—I think the first or second Columbus was scuttled because the captain couldn't bear to go on living after some sort of disgrace connected with the war.
I read part of my raft story aloud to Bruno, and then, asking him to be objective, posed my question.
"A beautiful death!" Bruno exclaimed, and immediately began transforming my drowned grandfather into one of his knotworks. I should rest content with his response, he says, and not head for the USA with some harebrained idea of cadging an inheritance.
My friends Klepp and Vittlar came to see me. Klepp brought me a jazz record with two pieces by King Oliver, while Vittlar, with a mincing little gesture, held out a chocolate heart dangling from a pink ribbon. They clowned around, parodied scenes from my trial, and to please them, as always on Visitors Day, I put on a cheerful face and managed to laugh at even their worst jokes. In passing, as it were, and before Klepp could begin his inevitable lecture on the relationship of jazz to Marxism, I told the story of a man who, in nineteen-thirteen, shortly before all hell broke loose, wound up under a seemingly endless raft and never came up again; they never even found his body.
In reply to my question—I asked it casually, in a decidedly bored manner—Klepp twisted his head grumpily on his fat neck, buttoned and unbuttoned himself, made swimming motions, and acted as if he were under the raft. Finally he shook off my question and blamed the early hour of the afternoon for his failure to respond.
Vittlar sat stiffly, crossed his legs, taking care not to disturb the crease in his trousers, displaying that bizarre pinstriped arrogance shared perhaps only by angels in heaven: "I'm on the raft. It's pleasant on the raft. Mosquitoes are biting me, that's annoying—I'm under the raft. It's pleasant under the raft. The mosquitoes aren't biting me, that's pleasant. I think I could live under the raft if I didn't plan to live on the raft and let the mosquitoes bite me."
Vittlar paused in his practiced manner, regarded me closely, raised his already lofty eyebrows as he always did when he wished to look like an owl, and spoke with strong theatrical emphasis: "I take it the drowned man in question, the man under the raft, was your great-uncle, perhaps even your grandfather. He went to his death because, as your great-uncle, and even more so as your grandfather, he felt he owed it to you, since nothing would have been more burdensome to you than a living grandfather. You not only murdered your great-uncle, you mur dered your grandfather. But since, like any true grandfather, he wished to punish you a little, he didn't give you the satisfaction of a grandchild who points proudly at a swollen, waterlogged corpse, and declaims: Behold my dead grandfather. He was a hero. He jumped in the river while they were chasing him. Your grandfather cheated the world and his grandchild of his corpse so that posterity and his grandchild would be worrying their heads about him for years to come."
Then, springing from one sort of pathos to another, a cunning Vittlar leaned slightly forward, as if placating me: "America! Be happy, Oskar! You have a goal, a task. You'll be acquitted, they'll release you here. And whither, if not to America, where you can find everything, even your long-lost grandfather."
However mocking and endlessly offensive Vittlar's answer may have been, it offered more certainty than my friend Klepp's grumbled refusal to choose between life and death, or the response of my keeper Bruno, who found my grandfather's death beautiful only because shortly thereafter the HMS Columbus slid down the slips and made waves. And so I praise Vittlar's America, conserver of grandfathers, a chosen goal, an ideal I can set for myself when, fed up with Europe, I choose to lay aside my drum and my pen: "Keep on writing, Oskar, do it for your filthy-rich but weary grandfather Koljaiczek, plying the timber trade in Buffalo, USA, playing with matches in his skyscraper!"
When Klepp and Vittlar had finally taken their leave, Bruno drove the disturbing smell of my friends from the room with a vigorous airing. Then I returned to my drum, but no longer drummed up death-concealing timber rafts; instead I beat out that quick erratic rhythm all men obeyed from August nineteen-fourteen on. Thus it is inevitable that my text too, as it brings us to the hour of my birth, will sketch but briefly the path taken by the group of mourners my grandfather left behind in Europe.
When Koljaiczek disappeared beneath the raft, my grandmother, her daughter Agnes, Vinzent Bronski, and his seventeen-year-old son Jan were standing frightened among the family members of the raftsmen on the sawmill's landing dock. Slightly to one side stood Gregor Koljaiczek, Joseph's older brother, who had been summoned to the city for questioning. This Gregor was wise enough to keep offering the police the following standard answer: "Hardly knew my brother. All I'm really sure of is that he was called Joseph, and the last time I saw him he was ten, maybe twelve years old. He shined my shoes and went out for beer, if Mother or I wanted some."
Even though it turned out my great-grandmother did in fact drink beer, Gregor Koljaiczek's answer was of no help to the police. But the elder Koljaiczek's existence was a great help to my grandmother Anna. Gregor, who had lived for some years in Stettin, then Berlin, and finally Schneidemühl, settled down in Danzig, got a job at the Bastion Kaninchen powder mill, and, after a year had passed, when all complications such as her marriage to the counterfeit Wranka had been cleared up and filed away, married my grandmother, who planned to stick with Koljaiczeks and wouldn't have married Gregor, or at least not so quickly, if he hadn't been a Koljaiczek.
Gregor's job at the powder mill kept him out of the colorful uniforms that soon turned uniformly gray. The three of them lived in the same one-and-a-half-room flat that had sheltered the arsonist for years. It turned out, however, that not all Koljaiczeks were necessarily alike, for after barely a year of marriage my grandmother found herself forced to rent the basement shop that was standing empty at the time in the apartment house on Troyl to try to make some extra cash by selling odds and ends ranging from pins to cabbages, since Gregor, though he made good money at the gunpowder mill, failed to provide even the bare necessities at home, but drank everything away instead. While Gregor, taking after my great-grandmother no doubt, was a real drinker, my grandfather Joseph was a man who merely enjoyed a schnapps now and then. It wasn't sorrow that drove Gregor to drink. And even when he seemed cheerful, which was seldom enough, since he tended toward melancholy, he didn't drink because he was in high spirits. He drank because he was a thorough man who liked to get to the bottom of things, including his liquor. As long as he lived, no one ever saw Gregor Koljaiczek leave a half-full shot glass of Machandel gin standing.
My mama, a plump fifteen-year-old girl back then, made herself useful, helped in the shop, pasted in food stamps, delivered groceries on Saturday, and wrote clumsy but imaginative reminders meant to bring in cash from customers who bought on credit. Too bad I don't have one of those letters. How nice it would be at this point to quote a few half-childish, half-maidenly cries of distress from the epistles of this half orphan, for whom Gregor Koljaiczek offered less than full value as a stepfather. On the contrary, my grandmother and her daughter were hard-pressed to shield their cashbox, which consisted of one tin plate clapped on top of another, filled mostly with copper and very little silver, from the melancholy gaze of the eternally thirsty powder miller Koljaiczek. Only when Gregor Koljaiczek died of the flu in nineteen-seventeen did the profit margin of the odds-and-ends shop increase slightly, but not by much; for what was there to sell in seventeen?
The smaller room in the one-and-a-half-room flat, which had been standing empty since the powder miller's death because my mama was afraid of ghosts and refused to move into it, was now taken over by Jan Bronski, my mother's cousin, around twenty years old at the time, who, having left Bissau and his father Vinzent behind, graduated with good marks from high school in Karthaus, served his apprenticeship at the post office in the small district capital, and was now entering the second stage of his career at the central post office in Danzig I. In addition to his suitcase, Jan brought an extensive stamp collection to his aunt's flat. He'd been collecting since he was a little boy; his relationship to the post office was thus not merely professional but also personal and deeply engaged. The slender young man, who stooped slightly when he walked, offered a pretty, perhaps overly sweet oval face with eyes blue enough that my mama, who was then seventeen, fell in love with him. Jan had been called up three times but had been rejected on each occasion owing to his poor physical condition, which, given that in those days anyone who could stand even halfway straight got sent to Verdun to assume the eternal horizontal on France's soil, tells you all you need to know about Jan Bronski's constitution.
Their flirtation should actually have started as they pored over stamp albums together, examining the perforations of particularly valuable items tête-à-tête. But it began, or first erupted, when Jan was called up for the fourth time. Since she had to go into town anyway, my mama accompanied him to district headquarters, waited outside next to a sentry box manned by a reservist, and felt, as Jan did, that this time he would surely be heading to France to cure his ailing chest in the iron- and lead-rich air of that land. My mama may well have been counting the reservist's buttons with varying results. It wouldn't surprise me if the buttons of all uniforms were arranged so that the last button always stood for Verdun, or Hartmannsweilerkopf, where men got buttoned down, or some little river called the Somme or the Marne.
When, after barely an hour, the little fellow who'd been called up for the fourth time slipped through the portal of district headquarters, stumbled down the stairs, and, falling on the neck of my mama Agnes, whispered the then popular saying, "No neck and a skinny rear, rejected for another year," my mother hugged Jan Bronski for the first time, and I doubt she ever hugged him more happily.
The details of that young wartime love are not known to me. Jan sold part of his stamp collection to meet the needs of my mama, who had a lively sense for pretty, dressy, and expensive things, and is said to have kept a diary back then, which unfortunately has been lost. My grandmother seems to have tolerated the bond between the two youngsters—one can assume that it went beyond the familial—for Jan Bronski lived in the cramped flat on Troyl until shortly after the war. He didn't move out until the existence of a certain Herr Matzerath proved undeniable and undenied. My mother must have met this gentleman in the summer of nineteen-eighteen, when she was serving as an auxiliary nurse in the Silberhammer Military Hospital at Oliva. Alfred Matzerath, a native Rhinelander, lay there with a clean shot through his upper thigh and, with his merry Rhenish ways, was soon the favorite of all the nurses—Sister Agnes not excepted. Half healed, he hobbled along the corridor on the arm of this or that nurse and helped Sister Agnes in the kitchen, both because her round face looked so pretty in her little nurse's cap and because, as a passionate cook, he could convert his emotions into soups.
When his wound had healed, Alfred Matzerath stayed on in Danzig and found work straightaway as a local salesman for his Rhenish firm, one of the larger enterprises in the paper-manufacturing industry. The war had worn itself out. Peace treaties that would give cause for further wars were being crudely crafted: the region around the mouth of the Vistula—from roughly Vogelsang on the Nehrung along the Nogat to Pieckel, from there down the Vistula to Czattkau, taking a right angle leftward to Schönfließ, then tracing a hump around Saskoschin Forest to Lake Ottomin, leaving Mattern, Ramkau, and my grandmother's Bissau behind, and returning to the Baltic Sea at Klein-Katz—was now proclaimed a Free State and placed under the control of the League of Nations. In the city itself, Poland received a free port, the Westerplatte with its munitions depot, control of the railroad, and its own post office on Heveliusplatz.
While the Free State postage stamps spread a splendid display of Hanseatic cogs and red and gold coats of arms on letters, the Poles stamped them with macabre scenes in violet illustrating the histories of Casimir and Báthory.
Jan Bronski moved to the Polish Post Office. His transfer seemed spontaneous, as did opting for Poland. There were many who felt his choice of Polish citizenship was a reaction to something my mama did. In nineteen-twenty, the year Marszałek Piłsudski defeated the Red Army at Warsaw—a Miracle on the Vistula attributed by people like Vinzent Bronski to the Virgin Mary, and by military experts to either General Sikorski or General Weygand—in that eminently Polish year, my mama became engaged to Herr Matzerath, a citizen of the German Reich. I tend to think my grandmother Anna approved of the engagement as little as Jan did. Turning over the basement shop on Troyl, which had begun to prosper in the meantime, to her daughter, she withdrew with her brother Vinzent to Bissau, that is, to Polish territory, took over the farm with its turnip and potato fields, as she had in the pre-Koljaiczekian era, left her increasingly grace-ridden brother to his association and conversations with the Virgin Queen of Poland, and was content to squat in her four skirts behind autumnal potato-top fires and squint out blinking toward a horizon where telegraph poles still formed a grid.
Not till Jan Bronski found and married his Hedwig, a Kashubian girl from the city, but one who still owned some farmland in Ramkau, did relations between Jan and my mama improve. At a dance in the Café Woyke, where they ran into each other by accident, she is said to have introduced Jan to Matzerath. The two gentlemen, so different by nature yet so similar in their feelings for Mama, took a fancy to each other, though Matzerath bluntly declared in his Rhenish way that Jan's transfer to the Polish Post Office was a harebrained idea. Jan danced with Mama, Matzerath with the big-boned, lanky Hedwig, whose inscrutable bovine gaze always made those around her think she was pregnant. They continued to dance with, around, and into each other all evening, always thinking as they danced of the next dance to come, a step ahead in the two-step, swept away by the English waltz, till they found their self- confidence at last in the Charleston, and settled into a sensual flow bordering on the religious during the slow-moving foxtrot.
When Alfred Matzerath married my mama in nineteen twenty-three, a year when you could paper your bedroom with zeroes for the price of a box of matches, Jan was one witness and a grocer named Mühlen the other. I can't tell you much about Mühlen. He rates a mention only because, just as the Rentenmark was being introduced, he sold Mama and Matzerath a struggling grocery store in the suburb of Langfuhr that had been nearly ruined by selling on credit. Within a relatively short time, Mama, who had acquired skills for dealing with every sort of deadbeat in the basement shop on Troyl and was blessed with cleverness, a ready wit, and a natural head for business, had lifted the fortunes of the failing business so substantially that Matzerath was forced to give up his job as a salesman in the paper industry, which was glutted in any case, in order to help out in the shop.
The two complemented each other perfectly. Mama's skills with customers were matched by the Rhinelander's rapport with agents and his deals on the wholesale market. Moreover, Matzerath's love for the cook's apron, for kitchen work including cleaning up, was a great relief to Mama, who stuck to quick meals.
The flat, which adjoined the store, was cramped and poorly laid out, but compared with living conditions on Troyl, which I've only heard stories about, it was sufficiently middle-class that Mama, at least during the early years of her marriage, must have felt comfortable on Labesweg.
In addition to a long, slightly crooked hall, stacked for the most part with boxes of Persil, there was a spacious kitchen, though it too was half-filled with goods such as canned food, sacks of flour, and packets of oatmeal. The central feature of the ground-floor flat was a living room that looked out through two windows onto the street and a front garden area adorned in summer with Baltic seashells. The wallpaper held a good deal of wine red, while the couch verged on purple. Standing black-legged on a blue carpet, a dining room leaf table with rounded corners, four black leather chairs, and a little round smoking table that was constantly shifted about. Black and gold, an upright clock, flanked by the windows. Black, pressed against the purple couch, the piano, first rented, then slowly paid for over time, with revolving stool atop a pale yellow longhair pelt. Opposite it the buffet. The black buffet with its sliding, cut-glass doors, bordered by black egg-and-dart bars, with heavy black fruit carved on the lower doors enclosing the china and linen, with black claw feet, black carved headboard—and between the crystal bowl with artificial fruit and the green loving cup won in a lottery, a gap, which thanks to my mama's business acumen was later filled by a light brown radio.
The bedroom was done in yellow and looked out on the inner courtyard of the four-story building. You'll have to take my word for it that the canopy above the broad matrimonial fortress was light blue, cast light blue light on a framed and glazed repentant Mary Magdalene above the bed, lying flesh-colored in a grotto, sighing toward the top right edge of the picture and wringing so many fingers at her breast that you had to re-count them constantly, thinking there must be more than ten. Across from the marriage bed a white-enameled wardrobe with mirror doors, to the left a little dressing table, to the right a marble-topped chest of drawers, and hanging from the ceiling, not shaded with fabric as in the living room, but on two brass arms beneath pale pink porcelain globes that left the bulbs visible, the bedroom lamp spreading its light.
Today I drummed away a long morning putting questions to my drum, wanting to know if the light bulbs in our bedroom were forty or sixty watts. It's not the first time I've asked my drum and myself this burning question. It often takes hours to find my way back to those bulbs. For must not the thousands of lights I've brought to life or put to sleep by switching them on or off when entering or leaving countless flats first be forgotten if I'm to make my way, by the plainest and simplest of drumming, through a forest of standard bulbs back to those lights in our bedroom on Labesweg?
Mama's confinement took place at home. When the contractions started she was still standing in the shop filling blue pound and half-pound bags with sugar. It was too late to take her to the women's clinic; an elderly midwife, who took up her bag only occasionally now, had to be summoned from nearby Hertastraße. In the bedroom she helped Mama and me break free from each other.
I first saw the light of this world in the form of two sixty-watt bulbs. As a result, the biblical text "Let there be light and there was light" still strikes me today as the perfect slogan for Osram light bulbs. With the exception of the obligatory perineal tear, my birth went smoothly. Effortlessly I freed myself from the head-first position favored by mothers, embryos, and midwives alike.
Let me say at once: I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is complete at birth and thereafter simply confirmed. As impervious to influence as I had been as an embryo, listening only to myself, gazing at my own reflection in the amniotic fluid, so closely and critically did I now eavesdrop upon my parents' first spontaneous remarks beneath the light bulbs. My ear was wide awake. Although it could be described as small, bent, gummed up, and of course dainty, it nonetheless caught and preserved each of those watchwords that, offered as my first impressions, were henceforth so important to me. Still more: what my ear took in, my tiniest of brains immediately evaluated, and I decided, after devoting sufficient thought to all I had heard, to do certain things and most certainly not to do others.
"It's a boy," this Herr Matzerath said, who presumed he was my father. "He'll take over the business someday. At last we know why we've been working our fingers to the bone."
Mama was thinking less about the business and more about equipping her son: "Well, I knew it would be a boy, even if I sometimes said it would be a little lass."
Thus prematurely acquainted with feminine logic, I heard the following: "When little Oskar is three years old, we'll give him a tin drum."
Weighing maternal and paternal promises against each other carefully and at some length, Oskar observed and listened to a moth that had flown into the room. Medium-sized and hairy, it wooed the two sixty-watt light bulbs, casting shadows out of all proportion to its wing-span, enveloping, filling, enlarging the room and its contents with flickering motion. What stayed with me, however, was less this light-and-shadow play than the sound produced by the moth and the light bulb: the moth chattered away as though in haste to unburden itself of its knowledge, as though it had no time for further cozy chats with fonts of light, as though this dialogue of moth and bulb were now its last confession, and once the absolution dispensed by light bulbs was granted, there'd be no further chance for sin or ecstasy.
Today Oskar says simply: The moth drummed. I've heard rabbits, foxes, and dormice drum. Frogs can drum up a storm. They say wood peckers drum worms from their casings. And men beat on timpani, cymbals, kettles, and drums. We have eardrums and brake drums, we drum up excuses, drum into our heads, drum out of the corps. Drummer boys do that, to the beat of a drum. Composers pen concerti for strings and percussion. I might mention Tattoos, both minor and major, and Oskar's attempts up to now: all that is nothing compared with the orgy of drumming staged by that moth with two simple sixty-watt bulbs on the day of my birth. Perhaps there are Negroes in darkest Africa, and those in America who have not yet forgotten Africa, who with their innate sense of rhythm might manage, in imitation of my moth, or of African moths—which as everyone knows are larger and more splendid than those of Eastern Europe—to drum in a similar fashion: with discipline, yet freed of all restraint; I hold to my East European standards, cling to that medium-sized, powdery-brown moth of the hour of my birth, declare him Oskar's master.
It was in the first days of September. The sun was in the sign of Virgo. A late-summer storm pushed its way through the night from afar, shifting chests and cupboards about. Mercury made me critical, Uranus ingenious, Venus made me believe in modest happiness, Mars in my ambition. Libra was rising in the house of the ascendant, which made me sensitive and prone to exaggeration. Neptune entered the tenth house, the house of midlife, and anchored me between miracle and deception. It was Saturn, in the third house in opposition to Jupiter, that cast doubt on my origins. But who sent the moth, and allowed him and a late-summer thunderstorm, banging and blustering like a high school principal, to stimulate my longing for the tin drum my mother had promised me, and to steadily increase over time both my aptitude and my desire for it?
Outwardly screaming and impersonating a reddish blue baby, I reached a decision: I would reject my father's suggestion and everything else to do with the grocery store point-blank, but when the proper time came, that is, on the occasion of my third birthday, I would give favorable consideration to my mother's wish.
In addition to all this speculation about my future, I realized the following: Mama and this father Matzerath had no ear at all for my protests and decisions, and would neither understand nor in the end respect them. Lonely and misunderstood, Oskar lay beneath the light bulbs, concluded that things would go on that way for sixty or seventy years until a final short circuit cut off all fonts of light, and so lost his enthusiasm before this life beneath light bulbs even began; and only the prospect of a tin drum back then kept me from expressing more forcefully my desire to return to my embryonic head-first position.
Besides, the midwife had already cut my umbilical cord; there was nothing more to be done.