At first, however, my mind was not at rest. Oskar felt himself observed by the furniture and the light bulb. Wishing to make my sojourn in the cupboard more intimate, I tried to pull the doors shut. It was none too easy, the catch was worn out, the doors refused to close properly. Light still entered, but not enough to disturb me. The smell became more concentrated. An old-fashioned, clean smell, no longer of vinegar, but of some mild moth deterrent; a good smell.

What did Oskar do as he sat in the cupboard? He leaned his forehead against Sister Dorothea’s nearest uniform, which opened the door to every aspect of life. My left hand, perhaps in search of something for me to lean on, reached backward, past the civilian clothes, went astray, lost its hold, shot out, gripped something smooth and flexible, and finally—still holding the smoothness—found a horizontal strut, intended to support the rear wall of the cupboard, but willing to do the same for me. My hand was free, I brought it forward and showed myself what I had found behind me.

I saw a black leather belt, but instantly I saw more than the belt because it was so grey in the cupboard that a patent-leather belt could easily be something else. It might just as well have been something different, something just as smooth and long, something I had seen as an incorrigible three-year-old drummer on the harbor breakwater at Neufahrwasser: my poor mama in her light-blue spring coat with the raspberry-colored facings, Matzerath in his brown overcoat, Jan Bronski with his velvet collar, Oskar in his sailor hat with the gold-embroidered inscription “S.M.S. Seydlitz ”; ulster and velvet collar jumped on ahead of me and Mama, who because of her high heels could not jump from stone to stone as far as the beacon, at the foot of which sat the longshoreman with the clothesline and the potato sack full of salt and movement. At the sight of the sack and clothesline, we asked the man under the beacon why he was fishing with a clothesline, but this fellow from Neufahrwasser or Brösen just laughed and spat out viscous brown juice, which bobbed up and down in the water beside the breakwater and didn’t stir from the spot until a seagull carried it away; for a seagull will pick up anything under the sun, it’s not one of your picky-and-choosy doves, nor is it by any stretch of the imagination a nurse—wouldn’t it be just too simple if you could lump everything white under one head and toss it into a cupboard? And the same goes for black, for in those days I was not yet afraid of the wicked black Witch, I sat fearless in the cupboard and then again not in the cupboard, but equally fearless on the breakwater in Neufahrwasser, in the one case holding a patent-leather belt, in the other something else, which was also black and slippery but not a belt. Because I was in the cupboard, I cast about for a comparison, for cupboards force comparisons, called the wicked black Witch by name, but at that time she meant little to me, I was farther gone on the subject of white, scarcely able to distinguish between a gull and Sister Dorothea. Nevertheless, I expelled doves, pigeons, and all such rot from my thoughts, all the more readily as it wasn’t Pentecost but Good Friday when we rode out to Brösen and continued on to the breakwater—besides, there were no pigeons over the breakwater where this fellow from Neufahrwasser was sitting with his clothesline, sitting and spitting. And when the longshoreman from Brösen pulled the line in until the line stopped and showed why it had been so hard to pull it out of the brackish waters of the Mottlau, when my poor mama laid her hand on Jan Bronski’s shoulder and velvet collar, because her face was as green as green cheese, because she wanted to go away but had to look on as this longshoreman flung the horse’s head down on the stones, as the smaller, sea-green eels fell out of the mane and he pulled the larger, darker ones out of the cadaver. Someone ripped open a featherbed which is just a way of saying that the gulls swooped down and set to, because gulls, when there are three or more of them, can easily finish off a small eel, though they have a bit of trouble with the bigger fellows. The longshoreman wrenched open the horse’s mouth, forced a piece of wood between the teeth, which made the horse laugh, and reached in with his hairy arm, groped and reached some more, like me in the cupboard, and extracted, as I in the cupboard had extracted the patent-leather belt, two eels at once. He swung them through the air and dashed them against the stones, until my poor mama’s face disgorged her whole breakfast, consisting of café au lait, egg white and egg yolk, a bit of jam, and a few lumps of white bread. So copious was that breakfast that in an instant the gulls had assumed an oblique position, come a story lower, and fallen to—I won’t even mention the screams, and that gulls have wicked eyes is generally known. They wouldn’t be driven off, not in any case by Jan Bronski, for he was scared stiff of gulls and held both hands before his frantic blue eyes. They wouldn’t even pay any attention to my drum, but gobbled, while I with fury, but also with enthusiasm, created many a new rhythm on my drum. But to my poor mama it was all one, she was too busy; she gagged and gagged, but nothing more would come up, she hadn’t eaten so very much, for my mama was trying to lose weight and did gymnastics twice a week at the Women’s Association, but it didn’t help because she kept eating in secret and always found some little loophole in her resolutions. As for the man from Neufahrwasser, when all present thought it was over, there could be no more, he, in defiance of all theory, pulled one last eel out of the horse’s ear. It was all full of white porridge, it had been exploring the horse’s brains. But the longshoreman swung it about until the porridge fell off, until the eel showed its varnish and glittered like a patent-leather belt. What I am trying to get at is that Sister Dorothea wore just such a belt when she went out in civvies, without her Red Cross pin.

We started homeward although Matzerath wanted to stay on because a Finnish ship of some eighteen hundred tons was putting into port and making waves. The longshoreman left the horse’s head on the breakwater. A moment later the horse turned white and screamed. But he didn’t scream like a horse, he screamed more like a cloud that is white and voracious and descends on a horse’s head. Which was all to the good, because now the horse was hidden from sight, though one could imagine what was at the bottom of that white frenzy. The Finn diverted us too; he was as rusty as the fence in Saspe Cemetery and was carrying timber. But my poor mama turned to look neither at the Finn nor the gulls. She was done in. Though formerly she had not only played “Fly, little seagull, fly away to Heligoland” on our piano, but sung it as well, she never sang that song again or anything else for that matter; at first she wouldn’t eat any more fish, but suddenly she began to eat so much fish, such big fish and fat fish, that one day she couldn’t, wouldn’t eat any more, that she was sick of it, sick of eels and sick of life, especially of men, perhaps also of Oskar, in any case she, who had never been able to forgo anything, became frugal and abstemious and had herself buried in Brenntau. I have inherited this combination of self-indulgence and frugality. I want everything but there’s nothing I cannot do without—except for smoked eels; whatever the price, I can’t live without them. And another such exception was Sister Dorothea, I whom I had never seen, whose patent-leather belt I was not really wild about—and yet I could not tear myself away from it, it was endless, it multiplied, and with my free hand I unbuttoned my trousers in order to reclarify my image of Sister Dorothea, which had been blurred by the Finnish merchantman and those innumerable varnished eels.