Even today, when Bruno is washing my windows, for instance, my drum, as often as not, will find a moment for the rhythm of that little jingle.
More irritating than the children’s lyrical mockery, especially for my parents, was the costly fact that every windowpane broken in the entire neighborhood by rowdies big or little was blamed on me and my voice. At first Mama conscientiously paid for the breakage, most of which was the work of slingshots, then at last she saw what was what and, putting on her frosty businesslike look, demanded proof when damages were claimed. And indeed, I was unjustly accused. Nothing could have been more mistaken at the time than to suppose that I was possessed by a childlike passion for destruction, that I was consumed by an unreasoning hatred of glass and glassware. Only children who play are destructive out of mischief. I never played, I worked on my drum, and as for my voice, its miraculous powers were mobilized, in the beginning at least, only in self-defense. It was only when my right to drum was threatened that I made weapons of my vocal cords. If with the same tones and techniques I had been able to cut up Gretchen Schemer’s beastly, intricately embroidered tablecloths or to remove the somber polish from the piano, I should gladly have left all glassware intact. But tablecloths and varnish were impervious to my voice. It was beyond my powers to efface the pattern of the wallpaper with my screams, or by rubbing together two long-drawn-out tones as our Stone Age ancestors rubbed flints, to produce the heat that would produce the spark needed to kindle decorative flames in the tinder-dry curtains, spiced with tobacco smoke, of our living room windows. I never sang the leg off a chair in which Mat-zerath or Alexander Scheffler was sitting. I should gladly have defended myself in less destructive, less miraculous ways, but no other weapon was available; only glass heeded my commands, and had to pay for it.
It was shortly after my third birthday that I staged my first successful performance of this nature. I had been in possession of the drum for about four weeks and, conscientious as I was, I had pretty well worn it out. The serrated red and white cylinder still held top and bottom together, but the hole in the playing surface could not be overlooked; since I scorned to use the other side, it became larger and larger, spread out in all directions, and developed fierce jagged edges. Bits of tin worn thin by my drumming broke off, fell inside the drum, and at every beat set up a disgruntled clatter of their own; white specks of enamel, unequal to the hard life the drum had been leading, took up residence on the living room rug and the red-brown flooring of the bedroom.
It was feared that I would cut myself on the sharp edges. Particularly Matzerath, who had become exceedingly safety-minded since my fall from the cellar stairs, pleaded with me to be careful. Since, when I drummed, my violently agitated wrists were always close to the jagged edge of the crater, I must own that Matzerath’s fears were not groundless, though they may have been exaggerated. Of course they could have forestalled all danger by giving me a new drum; but this was not their plan; they simply wanted to deprive me of my good old drum, which had taken the fall with me, which had gone to the hospital with me and come home with me, which accompanied me upstairs and down, over cobblestones and sidewalks, through “Pickled herring, one two three” and past “I see something you don’t see” and “Where’s the Witch”—yes, they wanted to take it away from me and give me nothing in return. They tried to bribe me with some silly old chocolate. Mama held it out to me, pursing her lips. It was Matzerath who, with a show of severity, laid hands on my decrepit instrument. I clung to it with all my might. He pulled. My strength, which was barely enough for drumming, began to give out. Slowly, one red tongue of flame after another, the cylinder was slipping from my grasp. At this moment Oskar, who until then had passed as a quiet, almost too well-behaved child, succeeded in emitting that first annihilating scream: the polished round crystal which protected the honey-colored dial of our clock from dust and moribund flies burst and fell to the floor (for the carpet did not reach all the way to the base of the clock), where the destruction was completed. However, the inside of the precious mechanism incurred no harm; serenely the pendulum continued on its way, and so did the hands. Not even the chimes, which otherwise reacted almost hysterically to the slightest jolt, which would be thrown off kilter by the passage of a beer truck, were one bit dismayed by my scream; it was only the glass that broke, but it did a thorough job of it.
“The clock is broken! “ cried Matzerath and let go of the drum. With a brief glance I convinced myself that nothing had happened to the clock proper, that only the glass was gone. But to Matzerath, as well as to Mama and Uncle Jan Bronski, who was paying his usual Sunday afternoon call, it seemed that the damage must be much more serious. They blanched, exchanged shifty, helpless glances, and reached for the nearest solid object, the tile stove, the piano, the sideboard. There they stood fast, afraid to budge. Jan Bronski’s eyes were filled with supplication and I could see his parched lips move. I still believe that he was inwardly muttering a prayer, perhaps: “ O Lamb of God, Who taketh away the sins of the world, miserere nobis.” Three of these, followed by a “ Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; say but the word…”
Naturally the Lord didn’t say a thing. Besides, the clock wasn’t broken, but just the glass. However, there is something very strange and childish in the way grownups feel about their clocks—in that respect, I was never a child. I am willing to agree that the clock is probably the most remarkable thing that grownups ever produced. Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.
What, after all, is a clock? Without your grownup it is nothing. It is the grownup who winds it, who sets it back or ahead, who takes it to the watchmaker to be checked, cleaned, and when necessary repaired. Just as with the cuckoo that stops calling too soon, just as with upset saltcellars, spiders seen in the morning, black cats on the left, the oil portrait of Uncle that falls off the wall because the nail has come loose in the plaster, just as in a mirror, grownups see more in and behind a clock than any clock can justify.
At length, Mama, who with all her flightiness had a cool head on her shoulders and whose very frivolity led her to put optimistic interpretations on all ostensible signs or portents, found words to save the situation.
“Shards are good luck!” she cried, snapping her fingers, brought dustpan and brush, and swept up the good luck.
If Mama’s words are taken at face value, I brought my parents, relatives, friends, and even a good many total strangers plenty of good luck by screaming or singing to pieces any glassware belonging to or being used by persons who tried to take my drum away, including windowpanes, crystal bowls full of artificial fruit, full beer glasses, empty beer bottles, or those little flacons of vernal fragrance that laymen call perfume bottles, in short, any product whatever of the glass blower’s art.
To limit the damage, for I have always been a lover of fine glassware, I concentrated, when they tried to take my drum away at night instead of letting me take it to bed with me, on shattering one or more of the four bulbs in our living room lamp. On my fourth birthday, at the beginning of September, 1928, I threw the whole assembled company—my parents, the Bronskis, Grandma Koljaiczek, the Schefflers, and the Greffs, who had given me everything conceivable, tin soldiers, a sailboat, a fire engine, but no drum; who wanted me to play with tin soldiers and waste my time with this fool fire engine, who were planning to rob me of my battered but trusty old drum, to steal it away from me and leave me, in its place, this sailboat, useless in itself and incorrectly rigged to boot—as I was saying, I threw the whole lot of them, who had eyes for the sole purpose of overlooking me and my desires, into primeval darkness with a circular scream that demolished all four bulbs in our hanging lamp.