Free The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

merely physical with the aforementioned melancholy smile and a pair of eyes that, more gray than blue, seem accustomed to regarding the souls of her fellow beings, as well as her own, as solid objects—a coffee cup, say, or a cigarette holder. Of course the simple word soulful would not suffice here, were I to place it as an adjective before my mama's gaze.
    No more interesting, but easier to assess and therefore more revealing, are the group photos of that period. It's amazing how much more beautiful and bridal the wedding dresses were when they were signing the Treaty of Rapallo. Matzerath still wears a stiff collar in his wedding picture. He looks handsome, elegant, almost intellectual. His right foot is thrust forward, looking like some movie actor of his day, Harry Liedtke, say. Dresses were short back then. The bridal dress of my mama the bride, a white skirt with a thousand pleats that barely reaches past her knees, shows off her shapely legs and dainty dancer's feet in white strap shoes. The entire wedding party crowds into other prints. Amid the urbanely dressed guests striking various attitudes, my grandmother Anna and her blessed brother Vinzent are always conspicuous for their stern provinciality and guileless insecurity. Jan Bronski, who like my mama comes from the same potato field as his aunt Anna and his heavenly-Virgin-addicted father, manages to hide his rural Kashubian origins behind the festive elegance of a Polish postal clerk. No matter how small and endangered he stands among the robust occupiers of space, his unusual eyes and the almost feminine regularity of his features become the focal point of every photo, even when he's standing off to one side.
    For some time now I've been looking at a group photo taken not long after the marriage. The matte brown rectangle compels me to reach for my drum, to try to conjure with drumsticks on lacquered tin the tristar constellation visible on the print.
    The photograph must have been taken at the corner of Magdeburgerstraße and Heeresanger near the Polish student hostel, in the Bronskis'
apartment, for a balcony typical only of those pasted onto the fronts of flats in the Polish quarter serves as a background, sunlit and half-overgrown with pole beans. Mama is seated, Matzerath and Jan Bronski are standing. But how she sits, and how they stand! For a time I was silly enough to try to plot the constellation formed by this triumvirate—for Mama gave the full value of a man—with a school compass Bruno had to buy for me, and a ruler and triangle. The angle of inclination of the neck, a triangle of unequal sides, led to divergent parallels, to forced congruencies, to circles of the compass that closed significantly outside the triangle, that is, in the greenery of the pole beans, and produced a central point, because I was seeking a point, believed in the point, was addicted to the point, longed for a reference point, a departure point, perhaps even a viewpoint.
    Nothing resulted from this dilettantish series of measurements but tiny yet annoying holes that I dug into the most important areas of this precious photograph with the point of my compass. What was so special about this print? What made me seek, and, if you will, actually find, mathematical and, ridiculous as it seems, even cosmic references in this rectangle? Three people: a seated woman, two standing men. Her dark hair marcelled, Matzerath's curly blond, Jan's chestnut brown, combed back close to his head. All three are smiling: Matzerath more than Jan Bronski, both showing their upper teeth, the smile of the two together five times broader than Mama's, of which you see only a hint at the corners of her mouth, and nothing at all in her eyes. Matzerath rests his left hand on Mama's right shoulder; Jan is content to place his right hand lightly on the back of the chair. She, with her knees to the right, facing forward from the waist up, holding a notebook in her lap that I long took for one of Bronski's