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

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