The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, Breon Mitchell Read Free Book Online

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,