Then, with a quick transition from one brand of pathos to another, he bent slightly forward and assumed the wily countenance of a purveyor of false consolation: “America! Take heart, Oskar. You have an aim, a mission in life. You’ll be acquitted, released. Where should you go if not to America, the land where people find whatever they have lost, even missing grandfathers.”
Sardonic and offensive as Vittlar’s answer was, it gave me more certainty than my friend Klepp’s ill-humored refusal to decide between life and death, or the reply of Bruno, my keeper, who thought my grandfather’s death had been beautiful only because it had been immediately followed by the launching of the Columbus. God bless Vittlar’s America, preserver of grandfathers, goal and ideal by which to rehabilitate myself when, weary of Europe, I decide to lay down my drum and pen: “Go on writing, Oskar. Do it for your grandfather, the rich but weary Koljaiczek, the lumber king of Buffalo, U.S.A., the lonely tycoon playing with matches in his skyscraper.”
When Klepp and Vittlar had finally taken their leave, Bruno drove their disturbing aroma out of the room with a thorough airing. I went back to my drum, but I no longer drummed up the logs of death-concealing rafts; no, I beat out the rapid, erratic rhythm which commanded everybody’s movements for quite some time after August, 1914. This makes it impossible for me to touch more than briefly on the life, up to the hour of my birth, of the little group of mourners my grandfather left behind him in Europe.
When Koljaiczek disappeared under the raft, my grandmother, her daughter Agnes, Vincent Bronski, and his seven-year-old son Jan were standing among the raftsmen’s relatives on the sawmill dock, looking on in anguish. A little to one side stood Gregor Koljaiczek, Joseph’s elder brother, who had been summoned to the city for questioning. Gregor had always had the same answer ready for the police: “I hardly know my brother. All I’m really sure of is that he was called Joseph. Last time I saw him, he couldn’t have been more than ten or maybe twelve years old. He shined my shoes and went out for beer when mother and I wanted beer.”
Though it turned out that my great-grandmother actually did drink beer, Gregor Koljaiczek’s answer was no help to the police. But the elder Koljaiczek’s existence was a big help to my grandmother Anna. Gregor, who had spent most of his life in Stettin, Berlin, and lastly in Schneidemühl, stayed on in Danzig, found work at the gunpowder factory, and after a year’s time, when all the complications, such as her marriage with the false Wranka, had been cleared up and laid at rest, married my grandmother, who was determined to stick by the Koljaiczeks and would never have married Gregor, or not so soon at least, if he had not been a Koljaiczek.
His work in the gunpowder factory kept Gregor out of the peacetime and soon the wartime army. The three of them lived together in the same one-and-a-half-room apartment that had sheltered the incendiary for so many years. But it soon became evident that one Koljaiczek need not necessarily resemble another, for after the first year of marriage my grandmother was obliged to rent the basement shop in Troyl, which happened to be available, and to make what money she could selling miscellaneous items from pins to cabbages, because though Gregor made piles of money at the powder works, he drank it all up; what he brought home wasn’t enough for the barest necessities. Unlike Joseph my grandfather, who merely took an occasional nip of brandy, Gregor was a real drinker, a quality he had probably inherited from my great-grandmother. He didn’t drink because he was sad. And even when he seemed cheerful, a rare occurrence, for he was given to melancholia, he didn’t drink because he was happy. He drank because he was a thorough man, who liked to get to the bottom of things, of bottles as well as everything else. As long as he lived, no one ever saw Gregor Koljaiczek leave so much as a drop in the bottom of his glass.
My mother, then a plump little girl of fifteen, made herself useful around the house and helped in the store; she pasted food stamps in the ledger, waited on customers on Saturdays, and wrote awkward but imaginative missives to those who bought on credit, admonishing them to pay up. It’s a pity that I possess none of these letters. How splendid if at this point I could quote some of my mother’s girlish cries of distress—remember, she was half an orphan, for Gregor Koljaiczek was far from giving full value as a stepfather. Quite the contrary, it was only with great difficulty that my grandmother and her daughter were able to conceal their cashbox, which consisted of a tin plate covered by another tin plate and contained more copper than silver, from the sad and thirsty gaze of the gunpowder-maker. Only when Gregor Koljaiczek died of influenza in 1917 did the profits of the shop increase a little. But not much; what was there to sell in 1917?
The little room which had remained empty since the powder-maker’s death, because my mama was afraid of ghosts and refused to move into it, was occupied later on by Jan Bronski, my mother’s cousin, then aged about twenty, who, having graduated from the high school in Karthaus and served a period of apprenticeship at the post office in the district capital, had left Bissau and his father Vincent to pursue his career at the main post office in Danzig. In addition to his suitcase, Jan brought with him a large stamp collection that he had been working on since he was a little boy. So you see, he had more than a professional interest in the post office; he had, indeed, a kind of private solicitude for that branch of the administration. He was a sickly young man who walked with a slight stoop, but he had a pretty oval face with perhaps a little too much sweetness about it, and a pair of blue eyes that made it possible for my mama, who was then seventeen, to fall in love with him. Three times Jan had been called to the colors, but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition, a circumstance which threw ample light on Jan Bronski’s constitution in those days, when every male who could stand halfway erect was being snipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change of posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal.
Their flirtation ought reasonably to have begun as they were looking at stamps together, as their two youthful heads leaned over the perforations and watermarks. Actually it began or, rather, erupted only when Jan was called up for service a fourth time. My mother, who had errands in town, accompanied him to district headquarters and waited for him outside the sentry box occupied by a militiaman. The two of them were both convinced that this time Jan would have to go, that they would surely send him off to cure his ailing chest in the air of France, famed for its iron and lead content. It is possible that my mother counted the buttons on the sentry’s uniform several times with varying results. I can easily imagine that the buttons on all uniforms are so constituted that the last to be counted always means Verdun, the Hartmannsweilerkopf, or some little river, perhaps the Somme or the Marne.
When, barely an hour later, the four-times-summoned young man emerged from the portal of the district headquarters, stumbled down the steps, and, falling on the neck of Agnes, my mama, whispered the saying that was so popular in those days:
“They can’t have my front, they can’t have my rear. They’ve turned me down for another year “—my mother for the first time held Jan Bronski in her arms, and I doubt whether there was ever more happiness in their embrace.
The details of this wartime love are not known to me. Jan sold part of his stamp collection to meet the exigencies of my mama, who had a lively appreciation of everything that was pretty, becoming to her, and expensive, and is said to have kept a diary which has unfortunately been lost. Evidently my grandmother tolerated the relations between the young people—which seem to have been more than cousinly—for Jan Bronski stayed on in the tiny flat in Troyl until shortly after the war. He moved out only when the existence of a Mr. Matzerath became undeniable and undenied. My mother must have met this Mr. Matzerath in the summer of 1918, when she was working as an auxiliary nurse in the Silberhammer Hospital near Oliva. Alfred Matzerath, a native of the Rhineland, lay there wounded—the bullet had passed clear through his thigh—and soon with his merry Rhenish ways became the favorite of all the nurses, Sister Agnes not excluded. When he was able to get up, he hobbled about the corridor on the arm of one of the nurses and helped Sister Agnes in the kitchen, because her little nurse’s bonnet went so well with her little round face and also because he, an impassioned cook, had a knack for metamorphosing feelings into soup.