Chapter 42 Clapp

I'm standing in the hallway with a lock of pale blond hair in my wallet.For a second I tried to feel the clump of hair through leather, jacket linings, vests, shirts and undershirts, but I was too tired, too satisfied, and this satisfaction came with that strange quickness. I got it in an unhappy way, so I couldn't imagine what I'd stolen from the closet as one way or the other, but saw it only as loose hair from a comb. Only then did Oscar admit that he had searched for other treasures just now.During my stay in Sister Dorothea's cell, I wanted to confirm that Dr. Werner existed somewhere in the cell, if only through those familiar envelopes.But there is no sign of it.No envelopes, no written paper.Oskar admitted that he had pulled Sister Dorothea's detective novels out of the hat compartment one by one, flipped through them, checked the titles and bookmarks, and noticed whether there were any pictures between them, because Oskar didn't know about the Marya Hospital. Most of the doctors' names, but recognized their faces.However, no photograph of Dr. Werner was found.

Dr. Werner, it seemed, did not know about Sister Rotheia's cell.If he had seen it, he could not leave a trace.As such, Oscar should have every reason to be happy.Am I not a long way ahead of that doctor?Doesn't the absence of the doctor's trace in the small room just prove that the relationship between doctors and nurses is limited to the hospital, so it is of an official nature, and if it is not of an official nature, it is also unilateral? Oscar's jealousy, however, needs a motive.If Dr. Werner had left a trace, it would have struck me hard, but at the same time would have given me an equal degree of satisfaction.This satisfaction, however, was nothing compared to the small, fleeting results of my sojourn in the closet.

I can't remember now how I got back to my room, but I just remember hearing a feigned, attention-grabbing noise from behind the door at the other end of the corridor, which shuts a room called Mr. Münzel's. coughing.What does that Herr Munzel have to do with me?Hadn't the hedgehog's houseguest bothered me enough?Do I have to add a burden to myself?What's more, who knows what is hidden behind the name Münzel.Therefore, Oscar did not hear the coughing sound of asking for help. To be precise, I did not understand what he wanted me to do.I did not realize until I got back to my room that Mr. Münzel, whom I did not know and had nothing to do with me, was coughing and trying to lure me, Oskar, into his room.

I confess that I regretted for a long time that I did not respond to the coughing, because my room seemed to me to be extremely cramped, but at the same time very spacious, so a chat with the coughing Mr. Münzel, even It is a burden, it is a last resort, and it will also make me feel relieved.However, I didn't have the courage to deliberately cough a few times in the corridor afterwards or on the spot to establish contact with the gentleman behind the door at the other end of the corridor. Instead, I involuntarily handed myself over to the hard right angle of the kitchen chair in the room, and immediately changed. I get agitated, as I tend to be when I sit in a chair, and grab a medical reference book off the bed, then drop the one I bought with my modeling hard-earned money. A thick, expensive book, with creases all over it.I took Raskolnikov's present from the table, the tin drum, and hugged it.Oscar could neither hit the iron sheet with his drum stick, nor did he shed tears, falling on the white lacquered round surface, making rhythmic relief sounds.

Can now start writing a treatise on lost innocence, comparing the always three-year-old Oskar, who plays the drums, with the hunchbacked, voiceless, tearless and drumless Oskar.This is not true, Oscar lost his innocence many times when he was the drummer Oscar, and then regained it, or let it grow back, because innocence is like a weed, which keeps growing and spreading--the reader only needs to think, all innocence Grandma's were all depraved, hateful babies once.Forget it, Oscar doesn't want the game of guilt and innocence to come out of the kitchen chair.No, rather love for Sister Dorothea told me to leave the room, the corridor, Zeidler's apartment, and go to the Academy of Arts, even though Professor Couchen had agreed with me later in the afternoon.

Oscar involuntarily left the room, stepped into the corridor, opened the door of the suite with great effort and made a loud noise, and stayed for a while to listen to whether there was any movement behind Mr. Münzel's door.He didn't cough, I was ashamed, angry, content, hungry, tired of life and hungry for life, smiling, almost crying, and left the apartment, the house on Julichstrasse. A few days later, I proceeded to carry out a plan I had long contemplated, which I should never have thought a good idea, had not the details been prepared.I was out of work that morning, and until three o'clock in the afternoon I posed with Ulla for the imaginative painter Raskolnikov.I play Odysseus, go home, and give Nero a hunchback.I tried to talk the artist out of the idea, but in vain.At the time, he was successful painting Greek gods and demigods.Ulla also felt at home in the mythical world.I had to give in.He painted me first as Vulcan, the god of fire, then as Pluto and Proserpina, and finally, that afternoon, as Odysseus the hunchback.However, for me, it is important to describe that morning.Therefore, instead of telling the princes what Ulla, the Muse, looks like in the guise of Penelope, Oskar will tell about me.It was quiet in Zeidler's apartment.The hedgehog is on a sales trip with his hair clippers.Sister Dorothea worked the day shift and left home at six o'clock.Frau Zeidler was still in bed when the mail arrived just after eight o'clock.

I went to the mail at once, there was no mine - just received Maria's letter two days ago - but the first thing I saw was an envelope posted in this city, and I couldn't understand Dr. Werner's handwriting. Acknowledge your mistake. I put down this letter together with the letter to Mr. Münzel and Mr. and Mrs. Zeidler, went back to my room, and waited until Mrs. Münzel appeared in the corridor to deliver his letter to Münzel, the lodger. Then into the kitchen, and finally back to the bedroom.Ten minutes later she left the flat and the building, for her work at the Mannesmann office started at nine.

To be on the safe side, Oscar waited a little longer, dressed slowly on purpose, looked calm, washed his fingernails, and then decided to act.I went into the kitchen and put a half-aluminum pot of water on the largest burner of the three-flame gas stove.I carefully guarded my thoughts and focused on what I was about to do as much as possible. I took two steps to Sister Dorothea's small room, and picked up Cai De from the crack under the milky white glass door. Mrs. Le only half stuffed the letter, and went back to the kitchen to steam the back of the envelope until I could open it without damage.Oskar had, of course, turned off the gas before he had the courage to lift Dr. E. Werner's letter onto the cauldron.

I read the doctor's message, but not in the kitchen, but in my own bed.I was almost disappointed, because the address on the letter and the formula at the end did not reveal the relationship between the doctor and the nurse. "My dear Miss Dorothea!" was the address, and the letter ended with: "Your humble Erich Werner." When reading the text of the letter, there is no obvious warm and affectionate words.Werner regretted not being able to speak to Nurse Dorothea the day before, although he had seen her in front of the double doors in the men's private ward.Seeing the doctor talking to Sister Beata, Dorothea's girlfriend, she turned away, but Dr. Werner did not know why.Dr. Werner only asked for clarification, since his own conversation with Sister Beatum was purely official.As Sister Dorothea knew, he had been, and would still be, doing his best to keep his distance from Sister Beater, who was less able to control his emotions.This is not easy to do, and Dorothea must understand this, but fortunately she knows Beate, who often expresses his emotions without restraint.He, Dr. Werner, of course never said anything about it.The last sentence of this letter said: "Please believe that I will provide you with the possibility of talking to me at any time." Although those lines were polite, cold, and even arrogant, I still had no trouble glancing at them. I have seen through the style of Dr. E. Werner's letter, and I think it is a passionate love letter anyway.

I mechanically stuffed the letter into the envelope, and I couldn't care less about being careful.Werner probably licked the wet glue with his tongue, I licked it wet with Oscar's tongue now, and laughed.Immediately afterwards, I slapped myself on the forehead and the back of the head alternately, patted my right hand and finally left Oscar's forehead and put it on the doorknob, and opened the door.I went into the corridor and half-inserted Dr. Werner's letter under the paneled and milk-glass door that locked the familiar Sister Dorothea's closet. While I was still crouching, with one or two fingers resting on the letter, I heard Mr. Münzel's voice from the room down the corridor.I heard every word of his slow, emphatic call for the record: "Oh, dear sir, will you fetch me some water?" ?”

I stood up and thought, maybe this man is sick, but at the same time I realized that the man behind the door was not sick, and it was Oskar who convinced himself that he was sick, so that he could find a reason to send him water, because just by saying It is impossible for me to be lured into the room of a stranger by a call for no reason. I first wanted to send him the still-warm water in the aluminum pot that helped me open the doctor's letter.But then I poured the used water into the sink, filled the pot with new water, and walked to the door with the pot and water.Herr Munzel's voice came from behind the door, asking me to bring water, or just water. Oscar knocked on the door, and when he entered, Klip's unique smell immediately came to his nostrils.If I say that the smell is sour, I am not saying that it also has an extremely sweet component.There is no analogy with the air around Klepp but the vinegar-smelling air in the nurses' cubicle.Saying it is sweet and sour is not true.That Herr Munzel or Klepp (as I call him today), a fat, lazy, but not immobile, sweaty, superstitious, unwashed, but not rancid, always Dying but not dying flutist and jazz clarinetist, he was and still smells of death.He smoked incessantly and sipped peppermint in his mouth to get rid of the stink of garlic.He was already exuding it then, exuding it today, exhaling it today, attacking me with it on visiting days in the nursing home, and with it the joys of life and all that is fleeting.He always has a set of cumbersome movements when he leaves, and he always announces his next return.After he was gone, Bruno always had to open the windows and doors to let the air in. Today, Oscar is bedridden.At the time, in Zeidler's apartment, I met Klepp among the leftovers on the bed.He stinks, but is in a good mood.On the bed, within his reach, was an old-fashioned, rather baroque, alcohol stove, twelve packs of pasta, several bottles of olive oil, tube tomato sauce, damp salt poured on newspaper, A case of bottled beer, as I later learned, was lukewarm.He lay down and urinated into an empty beer bottle, which he told me an hour later when he could talk to me intimately, and then capped the green bottle, which was mostly full and exactly the size he wanted, and set it aside, while It is true that the bottles of Shengbei wine are strictly differentiated, so that when the bedridden person wants to drink beer, there is no danger of taking the wrong bottle.Although there was water in his room—he could have urinated in the sink if he had had a little bit of enterprise—he was too lazy, or rather, he prevented himself from getting up, otherwise Well, he could get up from the bed that had been arranged with so much effort, and fetch fresh water from the pot where he cooked the noodles. Since Klepp, Herr Münzel, always cooks the noodles in the same pot, protects the decanted, thickening soup like an eyeball, and, besides, relies on a store of empty beer bottles, he You can maintain a horizontal posture and often stay in bed for more than four days in a row.However, when the noodle soup boiled down to a mush, he was in an emergency situation.Although Klepp could starve himself, he did not have the ideological premise to do so at the time; it seems that his asceticism was stipulated from the beginning as a cycle of four or five days, or else Zeidler, who sent him a letter, Da Tai will give him a bigger noodle pot and storage water corresponding to the noodles he stores, making him more independent of his environment. On the day Oscar violated the secrets of other people's communications, Klepp had been bedridden for five days independent of his surroundings.The leftover noodle soup can already be used for advertising.Then he heard my unsteady steps in the corridor, for Sister Dorothea and her letter.After he learned that Oskar ignored the feigned coughing to greet people, he had to work his throat out the day I read Dr. Werner's indifferent love letter:" Oh, my dear sir, will you fetch me some water?" So I picked up the pot, poured out the warm water, turned on the faucet, let the water rush, filled the pot halfway, added a little more, and sent fresh water to him.I really am what he supposed my dear sir.I introduced myself as Matzerath the stonemason and engraver. He, also politely, raised his upper body a few degrees and called himself Egon Münzel, the jazz player, but please let me call him Klepp, since his father had already taken the surname Münzel.I can understand his desire so well.I prefer to call myself Koljacek or simply Oskar, I use the surname Matzerath out of humility, and only in rare cases decide to use the name Oskar Bronski.Therefore, I had no difficulty in simply calling this fat young man Klepp.I figured he was thirty, but he wasn't that old.He called me Oscar because the last name Koljacek was too much for him. When we chatted, it was difficult at first to be unrestrained.Let's talk about the easiest topics.I wonder if he thinks our fate is immutable.He thought it was immutable.Oscar wondered if he thought everyone had to die.He also believes that all people must eventually die, but he is not sure whether all people must be born.He spoke of himself as of a wrong-born man who should not have been born, and Oskar felt like him.We both believed in God, too.However, when he talked about the sky, people heard a kind of schadenfreude laughter and scratched under the quilt.It may be supposed that Mr. Klepp, while he was alive, had planned the unseemly deeds which he would come to heaven to carry out.As we moved on to politics, he became almost agitated, listing to me the names of more than three hundred German royal families, as if to confer upon them dignity, throne, and power at once, and to grant the territory of Hanover to the British Empire.When I asked about the fate of the former Liberty City of Danzig, unfortunately he didn't know where.But that didn't matter, he suggested on the spot to send a Belgian count to be the monarch of this little town he didn't know.According to him, the earl was a direct descendant of Jan Wellen.Finally, when we were defining the concept of truth and making some progress, I tactfully asked a few questions and learned that Mr. Klepp had been tenant and rent-paying at the Zeidler house for three years.We regret that we did not get to know each other sooner.I blamed the hedgehog for not telling me the details of the bedridden person, and he also didn't think that he should tell me more about the nurse, but only said: There is a nurse living behind the milky white glass door. -------- ① Jan Wellen (165-1716), the Duke, owned the Palatinate-Neuburg, Jülich and Berg, and expanded the city of Dusseldorf. Oscar didn't want Mr. Minzel or Klepp to share his worries right away.I didn't ask him about the nurse, but I was concerned about his condition first. "By the way," I put in the question, "are you in poor health?" Klepp raised his upper body a few degrees again.When he saw that he could not form a right angle, he let himself lie down again, and then told me that he was lying in bed to find out whether his body was good or bad or not.He hopes that within weeks he will realize that his health is neither bad nor bad. Then happened what I feared, and what I thought I could prevent by a long, rambling conversation. "Ah, my dear sir, please eat a piece of noodles with me!" In this way, we ate noodles cooked in fresh water that I brought.I was ashamed to insist that he give me the sticky pot and I would wash it thoroughly in the sink.Klepp rolled over on his side, without saying a word, cooking the noodles with the sure motions of a sleepwalker.He carefully decanted the water into a larger can, barely changing the posture of his upper body, reached under the bed, took out a greasy plate full of dry leftover tomato sauce, hesitated for a moment, then reached out again Go under the bed, take out the crumpled newspaper, wipe the dishes with it, put the paper under the bed again, blow on the dirty dishes as if to blow off the last speck of dust, and then with a gesture of generosity blow the world's dirtiest Pass me the plate, ask Oscar to take it, you don't have to be polite! I asked him to fill it for himself first, and then for me.He gave me the tableware with dirty and sticky fingers, and then used a spoon and fork to lift nearly half of the noodles onto my plate, squeezed a long strip of tomato sauce onto the noodles with an elegant gesture, drew a pattern, and poured it over again. Put a lot of oil on it, then add the same condiments to the noodle pot, sprinkle pepper on the two servings of noodles, sprinkle some more on his own share, and signal with his eyes that I want me to cook like him. Mix one of mine. "Oh, my dear sir, I beg your pardon, I have no parmesan here. I wish you a good appetite!" To this day, Oscar still doesn't know how he bit the bullet and used the spoon and fork.Oddly enough, I thought the meal tasted amazing.From that day on, Klepp's cooked noodles have even become the standard by which I measure the delicious value of every meal in front of me. While eating noodles, I carefully observed the bedridden room without attracting his attention.The most striking thing in the room was the round hole of an unplugged chimney in the wall below the ceiling, from which black smoke rose.There was a wind blowing outside the window, and now and then clouds of soot were blown into Klepp's room through the chimney hole.Soot fell on the furniture like a grand funeral.By furniture, I mean the bed in the center of the room and the Zeidler family rug covered with wrapping paper and rolled up.It can therefore be affirmed that the only things blackened in that room were the sheet which had been white, the pillow under Klepp's head, and a towel which the bedridden used when the gust of wind blew the cloud of soot into the room. It covers its face. The two windows of the room, like the windows of the Zeidler's living room and bedroom, looked out on Julichstrasse, or rather, on the ashen green leaves of the chestnut tree in front of the apartment.The only decoration is a painting, pinned between the two windows.It is a color portrait of Elizabeth of England, evidently torn from a illustrated magazine.A bagpipe hangs from a coat hook below the picture, covered in soot, with just enough checks to show it.I looked at the color picture and thought not of Elizabeth and her Philip, but of Sister Dorothea, perhaps at a loss, standing between Oskar and Dr. Werner.Klepp told me at this time that he was such a loyal and ardent follower of the English Crown that he had given lessons to a Scottish regiment of bagpipers in the British occupation forces, especially since the regiment was commanded by Elizabeth herself.He, Klepp, had seen Elizabeth inspect the regiment on a weekly newsreel.She wore a kilt with a head-to-toe checkered pattern.Oddly enough, the Catholic spirit in me manifested itself.I expressed doubts about Elizabeth's understanding of bagpipe music, and said a few words about the humiliating end of the Catholic Maria Stuart.In short, Oscar made it clear to Klepp that he thought Elizabeth didn't understand music. -------- ①Refers to Queen Elizabeth II, who came to the throne in 1952.Her husband is Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ② Maria Stuart (1542-1587), Queen of Scots, was deposed by the Calvinist nobles, fled to London, was imprisoned for nineteen years, and was finally killed by Queen Elizabeth I of England. I had expected the Royalist to be furious.He smiled like a man who thinks he knows it all, and asked me to explain, so that he could deduce from it whether my little man, as the fat man called me, had musical judgment. . Oscar stared at Klepp for a long time.He talked to me and inadvertently sparked a spark in me.This spark flashed through the brain until the hunchback.It was as if all my old, battered, disposed of tin drums were celebrating their doom.The thousand tin drums I threw into the scrap heap and the one that was buried in the Saspe cemetery, all emerged, reborn, celebrating resurrection intact, drums rumbling, reverberating in my chest , driving me up from the edge of the bed.I asked Klepp to forgive me and waited for a while, then I was dragged out of the room by the drum of resurrection, and dragged me through the milky glass door of Sister Dorothea's closet, under which the letter was still inserted, half exposed.The drum of the Resurrection spurred me into my room, towards the drum that the painter Raskolnikov gave me when he painted "Our Lady of '49".I grab the drum, hang it up, pick up two sticks, turn or be turned, leave my room, leap past that accursed little question, like a return after a long voyage Like a survivor, he stepped into Klip's noodle kitchen, sat down on the edge of the bed, moved the red and white lacquered iron sheet, and played drum sticks in the air. , and then let a drum stick fall on the iron sheet as if by chance.Ah, Tinhide gave Oskar an answer, and Oskar let down the second stick.I started to beat the drums, step by step, first the first day, the moth between the light bulbs beat the drum of my birth; I beat the nineteen cellar stairs and people celebrated my legendary three years old I fell down the stairs on my birthday; I knocked out the Pestalozzi school timetable, climbed the tower with the drum, stayed under the political lectern with the drum, knocked out the eels and seagulls, beat the rug on Good Friday ;I sat by my poor mother's little coffin with a drum, and imitated Herbert Truczynski's scarred back on the drum; During the defense of the Polish post office on the Square, I noticed a movement at the head of the bed where I was sitting, and peeked at Klepp sitting up straight, took out a ridiculous flute from under the pillow, put it to his mouth, and played it. Sound, so sweet, so unnatural, so in tune with my drumming; so I took him to Saspe Cemetery to meet Sugar Leo, who finished a dance; Before Lupp, for him, with him, I frothed my first lover's soda powder; I even took him into Mrs. The fifteen-kilogram large drum machine rumbled; I absorbed Klepp into Bebra's front-line theater troupe, let my iron skin make the voice of Jesus, and under the sound of the drums, Steutbeck and all the ashes spread from the diving tower Jumping up and down, below sat Luzzi; I let the ants and the Russians take over my drum, but didn't take Klepp again to the Saspe cemetery to watch me throw the drum at Matzerath, but Knocked out my great, never-ending theme: Kashube potato fields, October rains, on which sat my grandmother in four dresses; and then I heard the flute from Klepp From here came the sound of the dribbling October rain, his flute in the rain, under my grandmother's four skirts, found the arsonist Joseph Koljacek, and confirmed and celebrated the birth of my poor mother; At this moment, Oscar's heart almost turned into stone. We played for hours.We made a good variation on my grandfather's escape on the raft, and ended our ensemble, slightly weary but happy, with carols suggesting the possible miraculous rescue of the arsonist. While the last note was still on the flute, Klepp jumped up from his tired bed.The stench of corpses followed him.He opened the windows, plugged the chimney holes with newspapers, tore and shredded the coloring pages of Elizabeth of England, announced the end of the Royalist era, and let water rush from the taps into the sink.Washing, he was washing, and Klepp began to wash his body, from head to toe.This is no longer body washing, but baptism.After he had washed, he drained the water from the pool.He, dripping, naked, fat, full-bodied, with the obscene slung at the side, stood in front of me, picked me up, and lifted me up with outstretched arms.Yeah, Oscar was and still is light.At this time, a laugh broke out in his chest, and the sound wave hit the ceiling.Only then did I understand that not only Oscar's drum was resurrected, but Klip was also resurrected.We congratulated each other and kissed each other on the cheek. In the evening of the same day, we went out together, drank beer, and ate blood sausage and onions.Klepp suggested to me to form a jazz band with him.Although I asked him to give me some time to think about it, Oskar has made up his mind not only to give up his career as an engraver at the mason Konev, but also to stop being a model with the muse Ulla, I want to be a jazz band percussionist.