Just as Maria's small, easily encompassed head displayed full cheeks, high cheekbones, and generously large eyes on both sides of its almost inconspicuous, inset nose, so her body, which was more small than medium, was provided with somewhat overly broad shoulders, full breasts swelling right from her armpits, and an opulent bottom to match her pelvis, which was supported in turn by legs that were strong but too slender, leaving a visible gap beneath her pubic hair.
Perhaps Maria was a bit knock-kneed back then. And her permanently reddened hands always struck me, compared to her fully grown, fully developed body, as somewhat childlike, with fingers a bit like sausages. To this day she can't deny that she has little paws. Her feet, on the other hand, which trudged about in bulky walking shoes back then and somewhat later in my poor mama's little shoes, which were stylish but old-fashioned and didn't really fit her, gradually lost their childish redness and drollness in spite of being forced into those hand-me-downs, and eventually fit modern models from West Germany and even Italy.
Maria didn't talk much but liked to sing while she washed dishes and while she filled blue pound and half-pound sacks with sugar. After the shop closed, while Matzerath busied himself with his accounts, on Sundays too, and whenever she could take a half-hour break, she would pick up the harmonica her brother Fritz had given her when he was drafted and sent to Groß-Boschpol.
Maria could play pretty much anything on the harmonica. Scout songs she'd learned evenings at the League of German Girls, tunes from operettas, and hits she'd heard on the radio or learned from her brother Fritz, who came back to Danzig for several days on official business at Easter in nineteen-forty. Oskar recalls that Maria could play "Raindrops" with flutter tongue, and coax "The Wind Told Me a Tale" from her harmonica without imitating Zarah Leander. Maria never pulled her Hohner out during business hours. Even when there were no customers she refrained from playing and wrote out price tags and inventory lists in round, childlike letters.
Though you couldn't help seeing that she was in charge of the shop and had won back a number of the customers who'd switched to the competition after my poor mama's death, she maintained a respect for Matzerath that bordered on servility, which he didn't find in the least embarrassing, since he always thought highly of himself.
"After all, I'm the one who hired the girl and taught her the business," his argument ran, whenever the greengrocer Greff and Gretchen Scheffler started teasing him. So simple were the thought processes of this man, who grew refined, sensitive, and therefore interesting only while engaged in his favorite pastime, namely cooking. Oskar had to hand it to him: his Kassler ribs with sauerkraut, his pork kidneys in mustard sauce, his fried Wiener schnitzel, and above all his carp with cream and horseradish, were sights to behold, not to mention smell and taste. There wasn't much he could teach Maria in the shop, because the girl brought an inborn talent for small business with her, and Matzerath, who was almost totally lacking in the fine art of countertop commerce, was fit only for dealing with wholesalers, but he did teach Maria how to boil, roast, and stew, for in spite of spending two years as a maid to a family of civil servants in Schidlitz, she couldn't even boil water when she came to us.
Soon Matzerath had things the way they were in my poor mama's lifetime: he reigned in the kitchen, outdid himself from Sunday roast to Sunday roast, spent hours contentedly washing dishes, while on the side, so to speak, he handled purchases, orders, and payments with wholesale firms and the Rations Office—increasingly difficult during those war years—conducted correspondence with the tax bureau with a certain shrewdness, decorated the shop window every other week, not half badly, showing imagination and good taste, fulfilled his Party nonsense conscientiously, all of which, while Maria stood firm as a rock at the counter, kept him very busy.
You may well be thinking: What's the point of all these preparatory remarks, this detailed concern with a young girl's cheekbones, eyebrows, earlobes, hands, and feet? I totally agree; I don't like describing a person this way any more than you do. Oskar is firmly convinced he's done nothing thus far but distort Maria's image, if not permanently falsify it. So one final sentence that I hope will clarify everything: Maria was, leaving aside all those anonymous nurses, Oskar's first love.
I realized my state while listening to myself drum one day, which I rarely did, and noticed something new: insistently yet gently, Oskar was communicating his passion to the drum. Maria responded to my drumming. Though I didn't much like it when she picked up her harmonica, furrowed her brow in an ugly way, and felt she had to accompany me. But often, when she was darning socks or filling sacks with sugar, she would lower her hands, gaze past the drumsticks at me, gravely and attentively, her face completely calm, and before resuming her darning, with a soft, sleepy motion, run her hand over my short, stubbly hair.
Oskar, who couldn't bear even the slightest contact otherwise, no matter how affectionately intended, accepted Maria's hand, and became so addicted to that caress that he often played for hours, deliberately beating out the seductive rhythm on his drum that led to the caress, till Maria's hand at last obeyed and brought him pleasure.
After a time Maria began putting me to bed each night. She undressed me, washed me, helped me into my pajamas, advised me to empty my bladder again before going to sleep, said an Our Father with me, though she was Protestant, three Hail Marys, and now and then a Jesusiliveforyoujesusidieforyou, and finally tucked me in with a friendly, sleepy-making face.
As pleasant as I found those final minutes before the lights went off—I gradually replaced the Our Father and Jesusiliveforyou with the tenderly allusive Staroftheseaigreetthee and Maryilovethee—the nightly preparations before going to bed embarrassed me and nearly undermined my self-control, reducing me, despite my normal mastery over my features, to the traitorous blush of teenage flappers and lovesick young men. Oskar admits: each time Maria undressed me, placed me in the zinc tub and leached and scrubbed the dust of a day's drumming from my skin with a washcloth, brush, and soap, each time I realized that I, a nearly sixteen-year-old boy, was standing stark naked before a nearly seventeen-year-old girl, I blushed deeply and continued to glow for some time.
But Maria didn't seem to notice the change in the color of my skin. Did she think her brush and washcloth had heated me up so? Did she tell herself it must be hygiene stoking Oskar's fire? Or was Maria modest and tactful enough that she saw through my daily evening glow and simply ignored it?
I'm still a slave to this sudden flush that's impossible to hide and often lasts five minutes or so. Like my grandfather Koljaiczek the arsonist, who turned fire-engine rooster red at the mere mention of the word match, the blood courses through my veins the moment anyone, even a total stranger, tells of small children being plied with washcloth and brush each evening in a bathtub. Oskar stands there like a red Indian; the world smiles, calls me strange, even perverse: for what can it mean to the world if little children are soaped up, scrubbed off, and visited by a little washcloth in the most private of places.
But Maria, who was a child of nature, did the most daring things in my presence without embarrassment. Every time she mopped the living room and bedroom floors she would reach halfway up her thighs and pull off the stockings Matzerath had given her, because she wanted to spare them. One Saturday after closing—Matzerath was busy at local Party headquarters—Maria removed her skirt and blouse, stood beside me in the living room in her worn but clean slip, and started removing spots from her skirt and artificial silk blouse with gasoline.
What could it have been that gave Maria, once she had taken off her outer garments, and as soon as the smell of gasoline had evaporated, the pleasant, naively bewitching smell of vanilla? Did she rub herself with the root? Was there some cheap perfume that tended in that olfactory direction? Or was this fragrance as specific to her as the fumes of ammonia Frau Kater exuded, or the smell of slightly rancid butter beneath my grandmother Koljaiczek's skirts? Oskar, who always liked to get to the bottom of things, investigated t
he vanilla: Maria didn't rub it on herself. Maria just smelled that way. Yes, I'm convinced to this day that she wasn't even aware of the scent that clung to her, for if on a Sunday, after roast veal with mashed potatoes and cauliflower in brown butter, a vanilla pudding trembled on the table because I was kicking the table leg with my boot, Maria, who went into ecstasies over a red berry dessert, ate but little of it and with evident distaste, while to this very day Oskar is in love with this simplest and perhaps most banal of all puddings.
In July of nineteen-forty, shortly after special communiqués had announced the rapid success of the campaign in France, bathing season opened on the Baltic. While Maria's brother Fritz, now an airman second class, was mailing his first picture postcards from Paris, Matzerath and Maria decided Oskar ought to go to the beach, the sea air would do him good. Maria was to take me to the Brôsen beach at midday—the shop closed from one to three—and if she stayed on till four, Matzerath said, that wouldn't be a problem, he enjoyed taking a turn behind the counter now and then and showing himself to the customers.
A blue bathing suit with an anchor sewn on it was purchased for Oskar. Maria already had a green one trimmed in red that her sister Guste had given her for confirmation. Into a beach bag from Mama's day were stuffed a white terrycloth bathrobe of the same vintage and, quite superfluously, a little pail and shovel and various sandcake molds. Maria carried the bag. My drum I carried myself.
Oskar was apprehensive about the tram ride past the cemetery at Saspe. Was it not to be feared that the sight of that so silent yet eloquent spot would spoil his enthusiasm for the beach, which wasn't all that great anyway? What will the spirit of Jan Bronski do, Oskar asked himself, when the agent of his undoing, lightly clad for summer, jangles past his grave on a tram?
The Number Nine rolled to a stop. The conductor called out Saspe. I stared fixedly past Maria toward Brôsen, where the oncoming tram grew slowly larger as it crept toward us. Don't let your eyes wander. What was there to see anyway? Twisted beach pines, ornate rusted iron, a jumble of loose gravestones whose inscriptions only beach thistles and wild oats could read. Better to look out the open window and upward: there they were, droning overhead, the fat Ju 52s, as only tri-engine planes or very fat flies could drone in a cloudless July sky.
We set off, jingling and jangling, and the other tram blocked our view. Just past the trailing car my head turned of its own accord: I caught the whole rundown cemetery, including a portion of the north wall with a noticeably white patch that lay in shadow, but was still extremely embarrassing...
And then we were past it, we approached Brösen, and I looked at Maria again. She filled out a light, flowery summer dress. About her softly glowing neck, on her well-padded collarbone, lay a necklace of antique red wooden cherries, all the same size and looking ready to burst. Was it my imagination, or did I actually smell it? Oskar leaned forward slightly—Maria was taking her vanilla scent along with her to the Baltic—took a deep breath of the fragrance, and instantly vanquished the moldering Jan Bronski. The defense of the Polish Post Office had receded into history before the flesh had even fallen from the defenders' bones. Oskar, the survivor, had totally different smells in his nostrils from those of his once so elegant and now crumbling presumptive father.
In Brösen Maria bought a pound of cherries, took me by the hand—she knew that Oskar allowed her alone to do this—and led us through the stand of beach pines to the bathhouse. In spite of my nearly sixteen years—the bath attendant had no eye for that—I was allowed into the women's side. Water: eighteen degrees centigrade; air: twenty-six; wind: east—continued fair, stood on the black slate next to a poster for the Lifesavers' Association showing various techniques for artificial respiration accompanied by clumsy, old-fashioned drawings. All of the drowned were wearing striped bathing suits, the lifesavers wore mustaches, straw hats floated on treacherously dangerous waters.
The barefoot bath attendant led the way. She wore a cord around her body like a penitent, and from the cord hung a mighty key that unlocked all the cabins. Boardwalks. The railings of the walks. A rough coconut-fiber runner outside all the cabins. We were given cabin 53. The wood of the cabin was warm, dry, of a natural bluish white color I'd call blind. Beside the cabin window, a mirror that no longer took itself seriously.
Oskar had to undress first. I did this with my face to the wall, ac cepting help only reluctantly. Then Maria turned me around with her practical firm grip, held out my new bathing suit, and forced me ruthlessly into the tight-fitting wool. No sooner had she buttoned my shoulder straps than she lifted me up onto the wooden bench against the back wall of the cabin, put the drum and drumsticks down on my lap, and began to undress with rapid, energetic movements.
At first I drummed a little and counted the knotholes in the floorboards. Then I stopped drumming and counting. I still don't know why Maria was whistling to herself with comically pursed lips as she stepped from her shoes, two high notes, two low notes as she stripped off her socks, whistled like a beer-truck driver, removed her flowered dress, whistled as she hung her slip over the dress, let her bra fall, still straining to whistle but without finding a tune as she pulled her underpants, which were actually gym shorts, down to her knees, let them fall to her ankles, stepped from her rolled-up shorts, and kicked them off into a corner with her left foot.
Maria frightened Oskar with her hairy triangle. Of course he knew from his poor mama that women weren't bald down there, but to him Maria wasn't a woman in the sense in which his mama had shown herself to be a woman with Matzerath or Jan Bronski.
And I recognized her at once. Rage, shame, indignation, disappointment, and a half-comic, half-painful incipient stiffening of the little watering can under my bathing suit made me forget both drum and drumsticks in favor of a newly grown stick.
Oskar jumped up and flung himself at Maria. She caught him with her hair. His face was now overgrown. It grew between his lips. Maria laughed and tried to push him away. But I was drawing more and more of her in, tracking down that vanilla scent. Maria was still laughing. She even let me reach her vanilla, it seemed to amuse her, for she didn't stop laughing. Only when my legs slipped and I hurt her—for I didn't let go of her hair, or it wouldn't let go of me—only when the vanilla brought tears to my eyes, only when I tasted mushrooms or something else sharp and pungent, but no longer vanilla, only when this earthy smell that Maria concealed behind the vanilla nailed the moldering Jan Bronski to my brow and infected me for all time with the taste of the transient nature of all things—only then did I let go of her.
Oskar slid down onto the blind-colored boards of the bathhouse cabin and was still crying as Maria, who was laughing again, lifted him up into her arms, caressed him, and pressed him to her necklace of wooden cherries, the only thing she was still wearing.
Shaking her head, she picked her hairs from my lips and said in surprise, "You are such a little rascal! Head for it but don't know what it is, and then you cry."
Fizz Powder
Do you know what that is? It came in little flat packets and you could buy it all year round. In our shop my mama sold a vomit-green packet of woodruff-flavored fizz powder. A packet that borrowed its color from half-ripened oranges styled itself fizz powder with orange flavor. You could get raspberry too, and another one that hissed, bubbled, and acted excited when you added clear tap water, and if you drank it before it settled down, it tasted very faintly and remotely of lemon, was lemon-colored in the glass, but even more so: an artificial yellow masquerading as poison.
What else was shown on the little packet besides its flavor? All-Natural Product, it said—Patented—Keep Dry—and below a dotted line: Tear Here.
Where else could you buy fizz powder? It wasn't sold just in my mama's shop, every grocery store in town—except for Kaisers-Kaffee and the Konsum cooperatives—stocked the little powder. A packet cost three pfennigs there and at any refreshment stand.
Maria and I got our fizz powder free. But when we couldn't wait ti
ll we got home, we would wind up paying three pfennigs at some grocery store or refreshment stand, or even six, since we could never get enough of it and sometimes asked for two packets.
Who started with the fizz powder? That old lovers' quarrel. I say Maria started it. Maria never claimed Oskar did. She left the question open, found such interrogations painful, and if pressed might well have said, "The fizz powder started it."
Of course everyone will say Maria was right. Oskar alone could not accept the verdict. I could never admit to myself that a little three pfennig packet of fizz powder had managed to seduce Oskar. I was sixteen years old and set great store by declaring myself to blame, or possibly Maria, but certainly not fizz powder you had to keep dry.
It began a few days after my birthday. According to the calendar, the bathing season was drawing to a close. The weather, however, would hear nothing of September. After a rainy August, summer was showing its mettle; its belated accomplishments could be read on the board nailed up beside the Lifesavers' Association poster in the bathing attendant's cabin—air: twenty-nine degrees centigrade; water: twenty; wind: southeast; mostly fair.
While Fritz Truczinski was writing postcards as an airman second class in the Luftwaffe from Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Brussels—the fellow was always traveling on official business—Maria and I managed to acquire a bit of a tan. In July we had our regular little spot by the sun shield in the family area. Since Maria was never safe there from the awkward horseplay of senior boys from the Conradinum in their red gym shorts and the boring, long-winded declarations of love of a student from the Petri School, we abandoned the family area in mid-August and found a quieter spot near the water in the women's area, where fat ladies, short of breath and wheezing like the short-lived waves of the Baltic, ventured into the water up to the varicose veins at the back of their knees, where little urchins, naked and badly behaved, struggled against fate: that is, saw how high they could pile sand towers before they collapsed.