He Lies in Saspe

I've just read through my last paragraph again. Even if I'm not satisfied, Oskar's pen has every right to be, for in its succinct summary it has managed, as succinctly summarizing treatises often do, to embellish now and then, if not to lie.

But I'd like to stick to the truth, stab Oskar's pen in the back, and report, first of all, that Jan's last hand, which alas he was unable to play out to the end and win, was not a grand but a diamond without two; second, that before leaving the mailroom, Oskar picked up not only his new tin instrument but also his old broken one, which had fallen from the laundry basket that held the dead man without suspenders and the letters. To which must be added: no sooner had Jan and I left the mail-room, as ordered by the Home Guard with their "Rausss!" and their flashlights and carbines, than Oskar, seeking protection, inserted himself between two avuncular and seemingly good-natured members of the Home Guard, put on a show of pathetic weeping, and pointed at Jan, his father, with accusatory gestures, transforming the poor man into a villain who had dragged an innocent child to the Polish Post Office in typically barbaric Polish fashion to use as a human shield.

Oskar hoped this Judas performance would produce certain benefits vis-à-vis his intact drum and his damaged one, and he was right: the Home Guard kicked Jan in the small of the back, struck him with their rifle butts, but left me both drums, and one of the men, a somewhat older member of the Home Guard with the careworn creases of a paterfamilias alongside his nose and mouth, patted my cheek, while another towheaded fellow with eyes that were always laughing and therefore narrowed to slits and permanently invisible, lifted me up in his arms, which embarrassed Oskar greatly.

Today, since I'm occasionally ashamed of my disgraceful behavior, I like to tell myself that Jan didn't notice, that he was preoccupied with his cards and remained so to the end, that nothing, neither the funniest nor the most fiendish notion of the Home Guard, could lure him from those skat cards. Jan had already entered the eternal realm of card houses, dwelt happily in one of those houses that trust in good fortune, whereas the Home Guard and I—for Oskar counted himself among the Home Guard—stood amid brick walls, on tiled corridor floors, under roofs with stucco cornices, with walls and partitions so tightly interlocked that one could only expect the worst on that day when, in response to some set of circumstances or other, all this patchwork we call architecture would come unglued.

Of course this belated insight hardly excuses me, especially since the mere sight of scaffolding turns my thoughts toward demolition, and a belief in card houses as the only dwellings worthy of humankind was not at all foreign to me. To which must be added the incriminating family factor. I was firmly convinced that afternoon that Jan Bronski was not only my uncle but also my actual and not merely presumptive father. Which put him ahead of Matzerath for good: for Matzerath was either my father or nothing at all.

The first of September nineteen thirty-nine—and I assume that you too, on that less than blissful afternoon, recognized the blissful Jan Bronski who played with cards as my father—that day marks the assumption of my second great burden of guilt.

I can never silence that inner voice, be it ever so plaintive: It was my drum, no, it was I myself, Oskar the drummer, who sent first my poor mama, then Jan Bronski, my uncle and father, to the grave.

Yet on days when a rude feeling of guilt simply refuses to leave the room and presses me back into the cushions of my hospital bed, I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance, an ignorance that was just then coming into fashion and, like a jaunty hat, still looks oh so good on many a person today.

Oskar, sly and ignorant, an innocent victim of Polish atrocities, was transported to the municipal hospital running a fever and suffering from inflammation of the nerves. Matzerath was notified. He'd reported me missing the previous evening, though it was still unclear whether I was his to miss.

The thirty men with upraised arms and hands crossed behind their necks, plus Jan, having been filmed for the newsreels, were taken first to Victoria School, which had been evacuated, then received at Schießstange Prison, and finally, in early October, by the porous sand behind the wall of the rundown abandoned cemetery at Saspe.

How does Oskar know this? I heard it from Crazy Leo. For of course there was no official announcement as to the sort of sand the thirty-one men had been shot on, or against what wall, or in what sand the thirty-one had been buried.

Hedwig Bronski first received an eviction notice for the flat on Ringstraße, which was taken over by the family of a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe. While Stephan was helping her pack and prepare for the move to Ramkau—where she owned a few acres of farmland and forest, along with the tenant's cottage—the widow received notification of something that her eyes, reflecting but not grasping the pain of this world, deciphered only slowly, with the help of her son Stephan, something that rendered her a widow in black and white.

It read as follows:

Department of Justice
Staff Headquarters
Eberhardt Subsection 41/39
Zoppot, 6 Oct. 1939

Frau Hedwig Bronski,

You are hereby informed that Bronski, Jan, has been found guilty of irregular military activity by military tribunal, sentenced to death, and executed.

Zelewski

(Inspector of Courts-Martial)

As you see, not a word about Saspe. Out of solicitude for the family members, wishing to spare them the expense of caring for such a large and flower-devouring mass grave, the authorities took full responsibility for its maintenance and any future relocation by leveling out Saspe's sandy soil and gathering up all the empty shells but one—for one is al ways left behind—since empty shells lying about spoil the looks of any decent cemetery, even an abandoned one.

But the empty shell that's always left behind, the one that counts, was found by Crazy Leo, from whom no burial, be it ever so secret, could remain hidden. He, who knew me from my poor mama's funeral and that of my scar-crossed friend Herbert Truczinski, and who surely knew where they had buried Sigismund Markus—though I never asked him that—was elated and nearly overwhelmed by joy that late November—I'd been released from the hospital—when he passed the telltale shell to me.

But before I take you and the already slightly oxidized housing that may have harbored the very kernel of lead meant for Jan to Saspe Cemetery, following Crazy Leo, I must ask you to compare the metal bed in the children's ward of Danzig Municipal Hospital with the one in this mental institution. Both enameled in white yet different. The bed in the children's ward was shorter with respect to length, but higher if we measure the rails with a ruler. Though I prefer the shorter but higher cage of nineteen thirty-nine, I've found the modest peace I now seek in my compromise grownup's bed, and leave it to the institution's administration to accept or deny the request I submitted some months ago for higher bed rails, likewise metal and enameled.

Though I'm nearly defenseless now against my visitors, in the children's ward a towering fence separated me on Visitors Day from Visitor Matzerath, Visiting Couples Greff and Schemer, and toward the end of my hospital stay my bars divided that mountain in four rotating skirts named after my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek into worried, heavily breathing sections. She came, sighed, lifted those large hands with so many wrinkles, disclosing her pink cracked palms, then let both hands and palms fall despondently to her thighs with a slap whose sound I can still hear today, though I can only begin to approximate it on my drum.

On her very first visit she brought along her brother Vinzent Bron-ski, who clutched the bed rails and spoke, or sang, or spoke as he sang, softly but insistently and without pause, about the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland. Oskar was glad to have one of the nurses nearby. For my visitors accused me. Turned their unclouded Bronski eyes upon me, expected me, struggling as I was to recover from the nervous fever I'd acquired during the skat game in the Polish Post Office, to provide a commentary, condolences, an exculpatory report on Jan's final hours of life, filled with fear and cards. They wanted to hear a confession that would exonerate Jan—as if I could exonerate him, as if my testimony would carry any weight.

What would my affidavit to the Eberhardt Subsection have said: I, Oskar Matzerath, hereby declare that on the eve of the first of September I lay in wait for Jan Bronski, who was returning home, and on the pretext of a drum in need of repair, lured him into the Polish Post Office, which he'd just left because he did not wish to defend it.

Oskar didn't submit this testimony, did not exonerate his presumptive father, but on the contrary fell into such powerful convulsions the moment he started to bear witness that at the request of the head nurse his visiting hours were curtailed and further visits from his grandmother Anna and his presumptive grandfather Vinzent were forbidden.

As the two old folk—they'd walked all the way from Bissau, and had brought apples for me—left the children's ward, helplessly, moving with exaggerated caution, as country folk do, my guilt, my most grievous guilt, grew in direct proportion to the increasing distance from my grandmother's four swaying skirts and her brother's black Sunday suit, smelling of cow dung.

So many things happened at once. While Matzerath, the Greffs, and the Schefflers crowded round my bed with fruit and cake, while Grandmother and Vinzent arrived on foot from Bissau by way of Goldkrug and Brentau because the railway line from Karthaus to Langfuhr had not yet been cleared, while nurses, white and anesthetic, babbled hospital gossip and stood in for angels in the children's ward, Poland was not yet lost, then nearly lost, then finally, after those famous eighteen days, Poland was lost, though it soon turned out that Poland was not yet lost, just as today, in spite of Silesian and East Prussian Societies, Poland is not yet lost.

O insane cavalry!—picking blueberries on horseback. With wimpled lances, red and white. Squadrons of melancholy and tradition. Picture-book charges. Over the fields of Lodz and Kuno. Modlin, freeing the fortress. Galloping so brilliantly. Always awaiting the setting sun. Only then does the cavalry attack, when both foreground and background are splendid, for battle is so picturesque, and Death the artist's model, one leg engaged and one leg free, then plunging, nibbling blueberries, rosehips tumble and burst, release the itch that spurs the cavalry to charge. Uhlans, itching again, wheel their horses about where shocks of straw are standing—this too a striking image—and gather round a man called Don Quixote in Spain, but this one's name is Pan Kichot, a pureblood Pole of sad and noble mien, who's taught his uhlans how to kiss a lady's hand on horseback, so now they always kiss the hand of Death as if he were a lady, but gather first with sunset at their backs—for atmosphere and mood are their reserves—the German tanks before them, stallions from the stud farms of Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach, nobler steeds there never were. But that half-Spanish, half-Polish knight so in love with death—brilliant Pan Kichot, too brilliant—lowers his red-white wimpled lance, bids you all to kiss the lady's hand, cries out so that the evening glows, red-white storks clatter on the rooftops, cherries spit out their pits, and he cries to the cavalry, "Ye noble Poles on horseback, those are not tanks of steel, they are windmills or sheep. I bid you all to kiss the lady's hand!"

And so the squadrons charged the steel-gray flanks, and gave a further tinge of red to evening's glow upon the land. I hope you'll forgive Oskar for adding this final couplet and for the poetic nature of the battle scene. I might have done better to indicate the number of men lost by the Polish cavalry, and commemorate the so-called Polish Campaign with dry but impressive statistics. But if asked, I could introduce an asterisk here, add a footnote, and let the poem stand.

Up to about the twentieth of September I could hear the salvos of the artillery batteries firing from the heights of the Jäschkental and Oliva forests while lying in my hospital bed. Then the final pocket of resistance on Hela Peninsula surrendered. The Free Hanseatic City of Danzig celebrated the Anschluß of its Gothic brick to the Greater German Reich and gazed jubilantly into the blue eyes of the Führer—which had one trait in common with Jan Bronski's blue eyes: success with women—the eyes of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who stood tirelessly in his black Mercedes delivering one rectangular salute after another, almost without pause.

Oskar was released from the municipal hospital in mid-October. I found it hard to say goodbye to the nurses. And when one of them—I think her name was Sister Berni, or perhaps Erni—as Sister Erni or Berni handed me my two drums, the beat-up one that occasioned my guilt and the undamaged one I had captured during the defense of the Polish Post Office, I realized that there was something else in this world I cared for besides tin drums: nurses.

Equipped with instruments and with new knowledge, I left the municipal hospital holding Matzerath's hand, returned to Labesweg, a permanent three-year-old still slightly wobbly on my sandals, and gave myself up to everyday life, to everyday boredom, and to the special boredom of Sundays in those early war years.

One Tuesday toward the end of November—I was out on the streets again for the first time after weeks of convalescence—Oskar was drumming along morosely to himself, hardly noticing the cold, wet weather, when, at the corner of Max-Halbe-Platz and Brösener Weg, he ran into the former seminarian Crazy Leo.

We stood for some time exchanging embarrassed smiles, and it was not until Leo reached into his pockets, pulled out his kid gloves, and slowly stretched the whitish yellow, skinlike casings over his fingers and palms that I realized whom I had met and what this meeting would yield—and Oskar was afraid.

We spent a little more time looking in the shop windows at Kaisers-Kaffee, watched a few Number Five and Nine trams cross Max-Halbe-Platz, followed the uniform row of buildings along Brösener Weg, circled an advertising pillar several times, studied an announcement about when and how to exchange Danzig guldens for German marks, scratched at a Persil poster and found something red beneath the blue and white, left it at that, and were just heading back toward the square when Crazy Leo pushed Oskar into the entranceway of a building with both gloved hands, reached back with his left gloved fingers, lifted his coattails, poked around in his trouser pocket, sifted the contents, found something, tested his find with his fingers still in the pocket, then, satisfied with what he'd found, removed his closed hand from his pocket, let his coattail fall, slowly extended his gloved fist, extended it farther, forced Oskar back against the wall, his long arm long—the wall solid—and just as I was starting to think that his arm would pull right out of its socket, break free, push against my chest, pass through it, exit between my shoulder blades, and penetrate the wall of the musty stairwell—that Oskar would never find out what Leo had in his hand, would learn at best the text of the house rules on Brösener Weg, which were not substantially different from those on Labesweg—he opened his five sheathed fingers.

Stopping just short of my sailor's jacket, already pressing on an anchor button, Leo opened the glove so quickly I heard his joints crack: on the fusty, shiny cloth protecting the palm of his hand lay an empty shell.

When Leo closed his fist again, I was ready to follow him. That little piece of metal spoke directly to me. Side by side, we walked down Brösener Weg, Oskar on Leo's left, no longer stopping at shop windows or advertising pillars, crossed Magdeburger Straße, turned left behind the two tall, boxy buildings at the end of Brösener Weg, topped at night by warning lights for planes that were taking off and landing, tramped along the periphery of the fenced-in airfield for a time, then finally switched over to the drier asphalt street and followed the rails of the Number Nine tram toward Brösen.

We didn't say a word, but Leo still held the empty shell in his glove. When I hesitated and started to turn back because of the cold and the rain, he opened his fist, made the little piece of metal hop up and down in his palm, lured me on a hundred paces, then another hundred smaller paces, and when, just before we reached the Saspe grounds, I made a serious decision to retreat, he even resorted to music. He turned on his heel, held the shell with its open end upward, pressed the hole like the mouthpiece of a flute against his protruding lower lip, and sent a raspy tone, now shrill, now muffled as though by fog, into the ever more intensely falling rain. Oskar was freezing: it wasn't just the music on the empty shell that made him shiver, the lousy weather, arriving as if on cue to fit the mood, played its part too, so that I didn't even try to hide my miserable state.

What lured me to Brösen? Well, yes, Leo the Pied Piper, piping on his empty shell. But other things piped to me too. Beyond November's laundry-room fog, from the roadstead and Neufahrwasser, the sirens of the steamships and the hungry howl of a torpedo boat running in or out reached us over Schottland, Schellmühl, and Reichskolonie, so that with foghorns, sirens, and a whistling shell, it was child's play for Leo to draw a freezing Oskar after him.

Not far from where the wire fence curved off toward Pelonken, sepa rating the airfield from the new drill ground with its encircling trenches, Crazy Leo paused, his head cocked to one side, slobbering over the empty shell, and observed for a time my shivering, trembling body. He sucked at the shell, held it with his lower lip, and following a sudden inspiration, flailed his arms about, pulled off his long-tailed frock coat and threw the heavy cloth, smelling of damp earth, over my head and shoulders.

We set off again. I don't know if Oskar was any less cold. Now and then Leo would leap forward five paces, pause, and strike a figure in his rumpled yet shockingly white shirt that might have sprung mysteriously from some medieval dungeon—the Stockturm, say—with the harshly bright shirt that style demands of the insane. Whenever Leo turned to see Oskar tottering along in his frock coat, he would burst out laughing and flap his wings like a croaking raven. Indeed I must have looked like some strange bird, if not a raven, then a crow, since my coattails dragged behind me like a train, mopping up the asphalt street, leaving behind a broad, majestic track that made Oskar proud each time he glanced back over his shoulder, and foreshadowed, perhaps even symbolized, a tragic fate that slept within him and was gradually to awaken.

Even before leaving Max-Halbe-Platz, I suspected that Leo had no intention of taking me to Brösen or Neufahrwasser. From the very start the only possible goal of this march was Saspe Cemetery and the training trenches, near which a modern rifle range had been set up for the police.

From the end of September through the end of April, the trams to the seaside resorts ran only every thirty-five minutes. As we were leaving the suburb of Langfuhr, a single-car tram approached. A few moments later the tram that had been waiting for it on the siding at Magdeburger Straße overtook us. We had almost reached Saspe Cemetery, where a second siding had been installed, when another tram jangled past, then the moist, yellow headlight of a tram we'd seen waiting ahead in the mist came toward us.

The flat, morose face of the tram driver was still sharp in Oskar's mind as Crazy Leo led him off the asphalt street through loose sand hinting at the sand dunes on the beach. A wall that enclosed the cemetery formed a square. A small gate on the south side, ornately rusted and only pretending to be locked, permitted us to enter. Unfortunately Leo left me no time to inspect more closely the slanted gravestones, heading for a fall or already flat on their faces, carved mostly from black Swedish granite or diorite, rough-hewn on their backs and sides, their fronts polished smooth. Five or six stunted beach pines, which had taken various detours as they grew, filled in as decorative trees for the cemetery. When Mama was alive and gazing out from the streetcar she always preferred this little rundown spot to any other final resting place. Now she lay in Brentau. The soil was richer there; elms and maples grew.

Before I could find my footing in all that romantic decay, Leo led me out of the cemetery through a small, gateless portal in the northern wall. Just beyond the wall we found ourselves on sandy level ground. Broom, pines, and rosehip shrubs drifted off toward the coast with striking clarity through a misty brew. Looking back at the cemetery, I saw at once that a portion of the northern wall had been freshly whitewashed.

Leo busied himself before the seemingly new wall, its harsh brightness matching his rumpled shirt. He strained to take long strides, seemed to be counting them, counted aloud in what Oskar believes to this day was Latin. And chanted a text too, one he might have learned in the seminary. Approximately thirty feet from the wall Leo marked a point, then placed a wooden stick near the whitewashed section, which I imagine had also been repaired, all this with his let hand, for in his right he held the empty shell, and finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he removed the wooden stick and replaced it with that hollow metallic cylinder, somewhat narrowed at the tip, which had housed a lead kernel till someone tightened his index finger, sought the pressure point, and smoothly, without jerking, issued the lead's eviction notice and ordered its death-dealing relocation.

We stood and stood. Crazy Leo drooled threads of spittle. Wringing his gloves, he chanted a few more Latin phrases, then fell silent, as there was no one present who knew the responses. Then Leo turned round, peered over the wall toward Brösener Landstraße with peevish impatience, and kept turning his head that way every time the trams, empty for the most part, pulled onto the siding and jangled past each other, then distanced themselves again. Leo was probably waiting for mourners. But no one arrived on foot or by tram to whom he could offer his glove in sympathy.

Some planes roared overhead, coming in for a landing. We didn't look up, submitted to the noise of the engines, had no desire to satisfy ourselves that three Ju 52s with blinking lights on their wingtips were coming in to land.

Shortly after the engines left us—the stillness was as painful as the wall we faced was white—Crazy Leo reached into his shirt, pulled something out, stepped up beside me, tore his crow's coat from Oskar's shoulders, leapt off toward the broom, rosehips, and beach pines, heading for the coast, and in bounding away, with a calculating gesture suggesting it was meant to be found, let something drop.

Only when Leo had disappeared for good—he roamed about in the foreground like a ghost till milky tendrils of fog clinging to the ground swallowed him up—only when I found myself totally alone in the rain, did I pick up the small rectangle of cardboard stuck in the sand: it was a skat card—the seven of spades.

A few days after this meeting at Saspe Cemetery, Oskar met his grandmother Anna Koljaiczek at the weekly market in Langfuhr. Now that there was no longer any border or customs at Bissau, she could take her eggs, butter, even green kale and winter apples to market. People were busy buying all they could, for food would soon be rationed and they had to lay in stores. The very moment Oskar saw his grandmother squatting behind her wares, he felt the skat card against his bare skin, beneath his coat, sweater, and undershirt. At first, having hopped on the tram free of charge at the conductor's urging, I'd meant to tear up the seven of spades on the way back from Saspe to Max-Halbe-Platz.

Oskar didn't tear up the card. He gave it to his grandmother. She was startled behind her green kale when she saw him. She may have thought that Oskar's presence could bode no good. Nevertheless, she waved the three-year-old, who was half hiding behind some baskets of fish, over to her. Oskar took his time, looked over a live cod nearly a yard long lying on damp seaweed, then watched some pocket crabs from Lake Ottominer still hard at work practicing their crabwalk in a basket; then Oskar tried this method of locomotion himself, approaching his grandmother's stand with the back of his sailor's jacket, and didn't show her his golden anchor buttons till he bumped against one of the wooden trestles under her display and set the apples rolling.

Schwerdtfeger came with his hot bricks wrapped in newspaper, shoved them under my grandmother's skirts, drew out the cold bricks with a slide as he always did, made a mark on the slate tablet dangling from him, moved on to the next stand, and my grandmother handed me a shiny apple.

What could Oskar give her when she gave him an apple? He handed her the skat card and then the empty shell, for he hadn't wished to leave it lying in Saspe either. Anna Koljaiczek stared uncomprehendingly at those two quite disparate objects for some time. Then Oskar's mouth approached her gristly old woman's ear beneath her scarf, and casting all caution to the wind, I whispered, thinking of Jan's small but fleshy pink ear with the long, nicely shaped lobes: "He lies in Saspe," Oskar whispered, and dashed off, upsetting a shoulder basket of green kale.