The Tin Drum Read Online Free PDF Page A

left a checkered record behind in the artillery at Thorn.
    Even as they steal, murder, and set fires, the most dangerous of thieves, murderers, and arsonists are on the lookout for a more respectable trade. By effort or luck, some get that chance: Koljaiczek in the guise of Wranka made a good husband, and was so thoroughly cured of the fiery vice that the mere sight of a match made him tremble. A box of matches lying openly and smugly on the kitchen table was never safe from him, even though he might well have invented them. He cast temptation out the window. My grandmother had a hard time getting a hot lunch on the table by noon. The family often sat in darkness for lack of a match to light the oil lamp.
    Yet Wranka was no tyrant. On Sunday he took his Anna Wranka to church in the lower city and allowed her, his legally wedded wife,
to wear four skirts one atop the other, as she had in the potato held. In winter, when the rivers were frozen over and times were lean for the raftsmen, he sat like a good fellow on Troyl, where only raftsmen, stevedores, and dockers lived, and watched over his daughter Agnes, who seemed to take after her father, for when she wasn't crawling under the bed, she was hiding in the wardrobe, and when there were visitors she sat under the table with her rag dolls.
    Thus little Agnes tried to keep hidden, seeking in her hiding place the same security, though not the same pleasure, that Joseph found under Anna's skirts. Koljaiczek the arsonist had been burned badly enough to understand his daughter's need for shelter. So when it became necessary to build a rabbit hutch on the balcony-like porch of their one-and-a-half-room flat, he added a small addition just her size. In such housing my mother sat as a child, played with dolls, and kept growing. It's said that later, when she was already at school, she threw her dolls away and, playing with glass beads and colored feathers, revealed her first taste for fragile beauty.
    Since I'm burning to announce the beginning of my own existence, perhaps I may be permitted to leave the Wrankas' family raft drifting peacefully along without further comment till nineteen-thirteen, when the
Columbus
was launched at Schichau's; that's when the police, who never forget, picked up the trail of the false Wranka.
    It all began in August of nineteen-thirteen, when, as he did toward the end of each summer, Koljaiczek helped man the great raft that floated down from Kiev by way of the Pripet, through the canal, along the Bug as far as Modlin, and from there on down to the Vistula. Twelve raftsmen in all, they steamed upriver on the tugboat
Radaune,
operated by the sawmill, from Westlich Neufähr along the Dead Vistula as far as Einlage, then up the Vistula past Käsemark, Letzkau, Czattkau, Dirschau, and Pieckel, and tied up that evening at Thorn. There the new sawmill manager came on board, sent to oversee the purchase of timber in Kiev. When the
Radaune
cast off at four that morning he was said to be on board. Koljaiczek saw him for the first time at breakfast in the galley. They sat opposite each other, chewing, and slurping barley coffee. Koljaiczek recognized him at once. The stout, prematurely bald man had vodka brought for the empty coffee cups. Still chewing, and
while the vodka was being poured at the end of the table, he introduced himself: "Just so you know, I'm the new boss, Dückerhoff, and I run a tight ship."
    At his bidding the raftsmen reeled off their names in turn as they sat, then drained their cups with bobbing Adam's apples. Koljaiczek gulped his down first, then said "Wranka" and looked Dückerhoff straight in the eye. The latter nodded just as he'd done before, repeated the name Wranka just as he had repeated those of the other men. Yet it seemed to Koljaiczek that Dückerhoff had spoken the name of the drowned raftsman with special emphasis, not pointedly but with a thoughtful air.
    The
Radaune
pounded along against the muddy tide that knew but one