While Korneff dug the five-foot holes for the foundation, she was brought up into the fresh air. She hadn’t been lying very long down in the darkness, only since the fall, and already she had made progress, keeping pace with the improvements that were everywhere under way. Those who were dismantling industrial plants in the Ruhr and Rhineland had progressed like anything; during the winter that I had frittered away at the Lions’ Den, this woman had made serious progress and now, as we were laying on concrete and putting the pedestal in place, it was piece by piece that she had to be persuaded to let herself be dug up. But that’s what the zinc casket was for, to prevent anything, even the most negligible part of her, from getting lost. Just as when free coal was distributed at Fortuna, children ran behind the overloaded trucks and picked up the chunks that fell out, because Cardinal Frings had proclaimed from the pulpit: Verily I say unto you, it is not a sin to filch coal. But for this woman there was no longer any need to keep up a fire. I don’t think she was cold in the proverbially chilly March air, she had quite a good deal of skin left; to be sure it had sprung leaks and runners; but these were compensated for by vestiges of cloth and hair, the latter still permanently waved, hence the term. The coffin fittings were also worth moving and there were even bits of wood that wanted to go along to the other cemetery, where there would be no peasants or miners from Fortuna, for this next last resting place was in the city where there was always something doing, nineteen movie houses operating all at once. For as the grave-digger told us, she wasn’t from around here, she had been evacuated: “She was from Cologne, and now they’re taking her to Mülheim on the other side of the Rhine.” He would have said more if the siren hadn’t gone off again for another minute. Taking advantage of the siren, I approached the grave; tacking against the siren, I wanted to witness this exhumation, and I took something with me which turned out, when I reached the zinc casket, to be my spade, which I put into action, not in order to help but because I happened to have it with me. On the blade I picked up something that had fallen on the ground. This spade had formerly been the property of the Reich Labor Service. And what I picked up on the Reich Labor Service spade was or had been the middle finger and, as I am still convinced, the ring finger of the evacuated woman; they had not fallen off but had been chopped off by the gravedigger, an unfeeling sort. But it seemed to me that they had been beautiful and adroit. Similarly the woman’s head, which had already been placed in the casket, had preserved a certain regularity through the winter of ‘47 to ‘48, which was a severe one as you surely remember, and it was reasonably possible to speak of beauty, though on the decline. Moreover, this woman’s head and fingers were closer to me, more human, than the beauty of Fortuna North. It seems safe to say that I enjoyed the industrial landscape as I had enjoyed Gustaf Gründgens at the theater—a surface beauty which I have always distrusted, though assuredly there was art in it, whereas the effect produced by this evacuee was only too natural. Granted that the high-tension lines, like Goethe, gave me a cosmic feeling, but the woman’s fingers touched my heart. They still touched my heart when I began to think of her as a man, because it was more compatible with my thing about making decisions and with the fancy that transformed me into Yorick and the woman—half of her still in the earth, half in the zinc casket—into Hamlet. And I, Yorick, Act V, the fool, “I knew him, Horatio,” Scene I, I who on all the stages of this world—“Alas, poor Yorick!”—lend Hamlet my skull so that some Gründgens or Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of Hamlet may ponder over it: “Where be your gibes now? your gambols?” I held Gründgens’ Hamlet fingers on the blade of the Labor Service shovel, stood on the solid ground of the Rhenish soft coal fields, amid the graves of miners, peasants, and their families, and looked down on the slate roofs of the village of Oberaussem. The village cemetery became for me the center of the world, while Fortuna North stood there as the redoubtable demigod, my antagonist. The fields were the fields of Denmark; the Erft was my Belt, whatever rot lay round about was rotten in the state of Denmark—and I was Yorick. Charged with high tension, crackling, the high-tension angels, in lines of three, sang as they made their way to the horizon, to Cologne with its fabulous Gothic monster, heavenly hosts over the beet fields. But the earth yielded up coal and the corpse, not of Yorick but of Hamlet. As to the others, who had no parts in the play, they lay buried for good—“The rest is silence”—weighed down with tombstones just as we were weighing down the Flies family with this ponderous diorite slab. But for me, Oskar Matzerath Bronski Yorick, a new era was dawning, and scarcely aware of it, I took another quick look at Hamlet’s worn-out fingers on the blade of my shovel—“He is fat and scant of breath”—I looked on as Gründgens, Act III, Scene I, labored his dilemma about being or not being, rejected this absurd formulation, and put the question more concretely: “My son and my son’s lighter flints, my presumptive earthly and heavenly father, my grandmother’s four skirts, the beauty, immortalized in photographs, of my poor mama, the maze of scars on Herbert Truczinski’s back, the blood-absorbing mail baskets at the Polish Post Office, America—but what is America compared to Streetcar Number 9 that went to Brösen? I considered Maria’s scent of vanilla, still perceptible now and then, and my hallucination of Lucy Rennwand’s triangular face; I asked Mr. Fajngold, that disinfector unto death, to search for the Party pin that had disappeared in Matzerath’s windpipe. And at last, turning to Korneff, or more to the pylons of the power line, I said—my decision was made, but before coming out with it, I felt the need of a theatrical question that would cast doubt on Hamlet but legitimize me, Yorick, as a citizen—turning, then, to Korneff, who had called me because it was time to join our slab to the pedestal, I, stirred by the desire to become an honest citizen, said, slightly imitating Gründgens, although he could scarcely have played Yorick, said across the shovel blade: “To marry or not to marry, that is the question.”

After this crisis at the cemetery facing Fortuna North, I gave up dancing at Wedig’s Lions’ Den, broke off all connections with the girls at the telephone exchange, whose foremost quality had been their ability to provide connections.

In May I took Maria to the movies. After the show we went to a restaurant and ate relatively well. We had a heart to heart talk. Maria was dreadfully worried because Kurt’s source was drying up, because the honey business was falling off, because I, weakling, so she put it, that I was, had been supporting the whole family for several months. I comforted Maria, told her that Oskar was glad to be doing what he could, that Oskar liked nothing better than to bear a heavy responsibility, complimented her on her looks, and finally came out with a proposal.

She asked for time to think it over. For weeks the only answer to my Yorick’s question was silence and evasion; in the end it was answered by the currency reform.

Maria gave me innumerable reasons. She caressed my sleeve, called me “dear Oskar,” said I was too good for this world, begged me to understand and always be her friend, wished me the best of everything for my future as a stonecutter and otherwise, but when asked more explicitly and urgently, declined to marry me.

And so Yorick did not become a good citizen, but a Hamlet, a fool.