Read The Tin Drum for Free Online Page B

the crowd, to advance the very next day—here the first and second versions of the rescue converge—to the rank of stowaway on one of those famous infamous Greek tankers.
    For the sake of completeness I should mention a third preposterous tale, according to which my grandfather floated out to sea like driftwood, where he was promptly fished out by fishermen from Bohnsack and handed over to a Swedish deep-sea fishing boat beyond the three-mile limit. There, on the Swede, the tale allows him to slowly and miraculously recover his strength, reach Malmo—and so on and so forth.
    All that is nonsense and fishermen's tales. Nor do I give a fig for the reports of all those equally unreliable eyewitnesses in various ports who
claim to have seen my grandfather shortly after the First World War in Buffalo, USA. Called himself Joe Colchic, they say. In the timber trade with Canada. Stockholder in match factories. Founder of fire insurance companies. Filthy rich and lonely my grandfather was, they say, sitting at a huge desk in a skyscraper, rings with glowing stones on every finger, drilling his bodyguards, who wore firemen's uniforms, could sing in Polish, and were known as the Phoenix Guard.

Moth and Light Bulb
    A man left everything behind, crossed the great water, came to America, and grew rich. I think I'll leave it at that with my grandfather, whether he calls himself Goljaczek (Polish), Koljaiczek (Kashubian), or Joe Colchic (American).
    It's not that easy, using a simple tin drum of the sort you can buy in any toy shop or department store, to search through rafts floating downriver almost to the horizon. I have, however, managed to drum my way through the timber port, through all the driftwood lurching in its inlets, tangled in the reeds, and, with less effort, through the building slips of the Schichau and Klawitter shipyards, through all the boatyards, some doing repairs only, the scrap yard at the railroad-car factory, the rancid coconut heap by the margarine factory, all the hiding places I know of on the Speicherinsel. He's dead, doesn't answer, shows no interest in imperial ship launchings, in the decline of a ship that begins with its launching and often lasts decades, in this case a ship named the
Columbus,
known as the pride of the fleet, which obviously set off for America and was later sunk, or scuttled, was perhaps raised and refitted, renamed, or scrapped. Perhaps the
Columbus,
like my grandfather, merely dived under and is still knocking about today with her forty thousand tons, smoking salon, marble gymnasium, swimming pool, and massage booths, at a depth of, say, six thousand meters, in the Philippine Trench or Emden Deep; you'll find the whole story in Weyer or in the naval calendars—I think the first or second
Columbus
was scuttled because the captain couldn't bear to go on living after some sort of disgrace connected with the war.
    I read part of my raft story aloud to Bruno, and then, asking him to be objective, posed my question.
    "A beautiful death!" Bruno exclaimed, and immediately began transforming my drowned grandfather into one of his knotworks. I should rest content with his response, he says, and not head for the USA with some harebrained idea of cadging an inheritance.
    My friends Klepp and Vittlar came to see me. Klepp brought me a jazz record with two pieces by King Oliver, while Vittlar, with a mincing little gesture, held out a chocolate heart dangling from a pink ribbon. They clowned around, parodied scenes from my trial, and to please them, as always on Visitors Day, I put on a cheerful face and managed to laugh at even their worst jokes. In passing, as it were, and before Klepp could begin his inevitable lecture on the relationship of jazz to Marxism, I told the story of a man who, in nineteen-thirteen, shortly before all hell broke loose, wound up under a seemingly endless raft and never came up again; they never even found his body.
    In reply to my question—I asked it casually, in a