Free The Tin Drum by Günter Grass Page B

which were gold. He stubby-legged, never reaching the carpet when he sat on chairs, she in clothes she knitted herself in patterns that could never be busy enough. Later on, photos of both Schemers in deck chairs or by lifeboats on the Strength through Joy ship
Wilhelm Gustloff,
or on the promenade deck of the
Tannenberg
of the East Prussian Line. Year after year they took trips and brought souvenirs from Pillau, Norway, the Azores, or Italy safely back to their house on Kleinhammerweg, where he baked rolls and she embroidered pillowcases with tiny loops called mouse teeth. When Alexander Schemer wasn't talking, he was forever licking his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, a habit Matzerath's friend Greff, the greengrocer who lived across the way from us, found obscene and disgusting.
    Though Greff was married, he was more scoutmaster than husband. A photo shows him stout, dry-skinned, and healthy, in a uniform with shorts, his scoutmaster cords, and his scout hat. Beside him, similarly outfitted, stands a boy of perhaps thirteen with overly large eyes, whom Greff, his left hand around the boy's shoulder, pulls toward him with obvious affection. I didn't know the boy, but I later met Greff through his wife Lina and came to understand him.
    I'm losing myself in snapshots of Strength through Joy tourists and testaments to tender Boy Scout eroticism. Let's flip forward a few pages and come to me, my very first photographic image.
    I was a handsome child. The picture was taken on Whitsuntide, nineteen twenty-five. I was eight months old, two months younger than Stephan Bronski, who appears on the very next page in the same format, radiating an indescribable ordinariness. The postcard has a scal
loped edge, its verso lined for the address, no doubt printed in bulk for use by the family. The photographic portion of the extended rectangle is in the shape of an overly symmetrical egg. Nude and symbolizing the egg's yolk, I lie on my tummy on a white fur pelt that some arctic polar bear must have donated to an East European professional specializing in children's photographs. As with many photos of that period, they have chosen for my first image the warm, unmistakable sepia tone that I would term human, as opposed to the inhuman glossy black-and-white photos of our day. Dull, blurred foliage, no doubt painted, provides the dark background, relieved by a few flecks of light. While my smooth, healthy body rests tranquilly angled on the fur pelt, basking in the polar bear's native habitat, I hold my rounded baby's head strained upward, and regard with shiny eyes the various spectators of my nakedness.
    A baby picture like any other, you might say. Please observe the hands: you must admit that my earliest likeness differs distinctly from the usual crop of droll little creatures in countless photo albums. You see me with clenched fists. No little sausage fingers playing absent-mindedly with tufts of polar-bear rug in response to some still obscure haptic urge. The little clutched hands hover gravely gathered at my temples, ready to strike, to sound the beat. What beat? The drum beat.
    I still don't have what was promised me at birth beneath light bulbs for my third birthday; but it would be a simple matter for anyone skilled in photomontage to add a suitably reduced image of a toy drum without having to retouch the position of my body in the slightest. Only the silly stuffed animal I'm ignoring would have to be removed. It's an alien element in this otherwise harmonious composition, which strikes the theme of the astute, clearsighted age when the first milk teeth are about to come through.
    Later I was no longer placed on polar-bear rugs. At eighteen months I must have been pushed along in a high-wheeled baby buggy past a fence whose pointed laths and crossbars are so clearly outlined by a layer of snow that I can only assume the picture was taken in January of nineteen twenty-six. The crude construction of the fence, its wood smelling