Before looking up the addresses, I went to see Korneff the stonecutter at his shop in Bittweg. It was a long time since I had seen him. I was drawn by my fondness for him, but I was also in search of work during the vacation period; I had a few hours of private posing with or without Ulla, but that could hardly be expected to keep me for the next six weeks, and moreover if I was to take a room, I would have to raise the rent.

I found Korneff unchanged—one boil that had not yet come to a head and two that were nearly healed—over a block of Belgian granite that he had roughed out and was now engaged in polishing. We spoke a while; I began to play suggestively with the lettering chisels and looked round for stones that were already cut and polished, waiting for an inscription. Two stones, one of shell lime, the other of Silesian marble, looked as if Korneff had sold them and they were waiting for an expert cutter of inscriptions. I congratulated Korneff on his success in weathering the hard times after the currency reform. Yet even at the time we had drawn comfort from the thought that a currency reform, however vigorous, vital, and optimistic, cannot deter people from dying and ordering tombstones.

Our prediction had been confirmed. Once more people were dying and buying. In addition, moreover, the currency reform had brought new business: butchers were having their fronts and sometimes even the insides of their shops faced with fancy marble; certain banks and department stores were obliged, in order to recapture their old prestige, to have their damaged sandstone and tufa façades repaired and redecorated.

I complimented Korneff on his industry and asked him if he was able to handle all the work. At first he replied evasively, then he admitted that he had sometimes wished he had four hands, and finally he made me a proposition: I could cut inscriptions for him on a half-time basis; he would pay forty-five pfennigs a letter for hollow lettering in limestone, fifty-five in granite and diorite, while for raised lettering he was prepared to pay sixty and seventy-five.

I started right in on a piece of shell lime. Quickly recovering my knack, I cut out: Aloys Küfer, September 3, 1887—June 10, 1946. I had the thirty-four letters and figures done in just three hours and received fifteen marks and thirty pfennigs on leaving.

This was more than a third of the monthly rent I had decided I could afford. I was determined to pay no more than forty, for Oskar still felt in duty bound to help with the upkeep of the household in Bilk.

The people in the Housing Office had been kind enough to give me four addresses. My first choice was: Zeidler, Jülicher-Strasse 7, because it was near the Academy.

Early in May, a warm, misty day typical of spring in the lower Rhineland, I started out, provided with sufficient cash. Maria had ironed my suit, I looked presentable. Crumbling stucco facade, in front of it a dusty chestnut tree. As Jülicher-Strasse was half in ruins, it would be unrealistic to speak of the house next door or across the street. To the left, a mound of rubble overgrown with grass and dandelions, here and there disclosing part of a rusty T-girder, suggested the previous existence of a four-story building. To the right a partly damaged house had been repaired as far as the third floor. But the builders had apparently run out of funds; the façade of polished, black Swedish granite was cracked in many places and in urgent need of repair. The inscription “Schornemann, Undertaker” lacked several letters, I don’t remember which. Fortunately, the two palm branches incised in the mirror-smooth granite were still intact and helped to give the shop a certain air of piety and respectability.

This enterprise had been in existence for seventy-five years. Its coffin warehouse was in the court, across from my window, and I often found it worth looking at. In good weather I watched as the workmen rolled a coffin or two out of the shed and set them up on sawhorses, to refresh their polish. All of these last dwelling places, as I noted with pleasure, were tapered at the foot end in the old familiar way.

It was Zeidler in person who opened at my ring. Short, squat, breathless, and hedgehoggy, he stood in the doorway; he had on thick glasses and the lower half of his face was hidden beneath a dense shaving lather. He held his shaving brush against his cheek, appeared to be an alcoholic, and sounded like a Westphalian.

“If you don’t like the room, don’t shilly-shally. I’m shaving and after that I’ve got to wash my feet.”

Clearly Zeidler didn’t stand on ceremony. I took a look at the room. Of course I didn’t like it; it was a decommissioned bathroom, half in turquoise tile, half in wallpaper with a convulsive sort of pattern. However, I kept my feelings to myself. Disregarding Zeidler’s drying lather and unwashed feet, I asked if the bathtub could be taken out, especially as it had no drainpipe in the first place.

Smiling, Zeidler shook his grey hedgehog’s head, and tried in vain to whip up a lather. That was his reply. Thereupon I expressed my willingness to take the room with bathtub for forty marks a month.

We returned to the dimly lighted, tubular corridor, disclosing several partly glassed doors, painted in various colors, and I asked who else lived in the flat.

“Wife and roomers.”

I tapped on a frosted-glass door, hardly a step from the entrance to the flat.

“A nurse,” said Zeidler. “But it’s no skin off your nose. You’ll never see her. She only comes here to sleep and sometimes she doesn’t.”

I am not going to tell you that Oskar trembled at the word “nurse”. He nodded his head, not daring to ask about the other roomers, but noted the situation of his room with bathtub; it was on the right-hand side, at the end of the hall.

Zeidler tapped me on the lapel: “You can cook in your room if you’ve got an alcohol stove. You can use the kitchen off and on too, for all I care, if the stove isn’t too high for you.”

That was his first allusion to Oskar’s stature. He gave my recommendation from the Academy a cursory glance; it was signed by Professor Reuser, the director, and seemed to impress him favorably. I agreed to all his do’s and don’ts, impressed it on my mind that the kitchen was next to my room on the left, and promised to have my laundry done outside; he was afraid the steam would be bad for the bathroom wallpaper. It was a promise I could make with a clear conscience; Maria had agreed to do my washing.

At this point I should have left, announcing that I was going to get my baggage and fill out the police registration forms. But Oskar did nothing of the sort. He couldn’t bear to leave that apartment. For no reason at all, he asked his future landlord to show him the toilet. With his thumb mine host pointed to a plywood door reminiscent of the war and postwar years. When something in Oskar’s movements suggested a desire to use it—the toilet, that is—Zeidler, his face itching with crumbling shaving soap, turned on the light.

Once within, I was vexed, for Oskar didn’t have to go. However, I waited stubbornly for Oskar to make a little water. In view of my insufficient bladder pressure and also because the wooden seat was too close, I had to be very careful not to wet the seat or the tile floor. Even so, I had to daub a few drops off the worn-down seat with my handkerchief and efface a few unfortunate traces on the tiles with the soles of my shoes.

Zeidler had not taken advantage of my absence to wash the hardened soap from his face. He had preferred to wait in the hallway, perhaps because he had sensed the joker in me. “Aren’t you the funny guy! Using the toilet before you’ve even signed your lease.”

He approached me with a cold crusty shaving brush, surely planning some silly joke. But he did nothing, just opened the door for me. While Oskar slipped out backward into the stairway, keeping an eye on the Hedgehog as I passed him, observed that the toilet door was situated between the kitchen door and the frosted-glass door behind which a trained nurse sometimes, not always, spent her nights.