We musicians and our music had still another function. Occasionally some of the guests would partake of two onions in quick succession; the result was an outbreak that might easily have degenerated into an orgy. Schmuh insisted on a certain restraint; when gentlemen began taking off their ties and ladies undoing their blouses, he would order us to step in with our music and counteract the stirrings of lewdness. However, Schmuh himself was largely responsible for these ticklish situations, what with his insidious habit of serving up a second onion to particularly vulnerable customers.

The most spectacular outburst I can recall was to influence Oskar’s whole career, though I shall not go so far as to speak of a crucial turning point. Schmuh’s wife, the vivacious Billy, did not come to the Cellar very often, and when she did, it was in the company of friends to whom Schmuh was far from partial. One night she turned up with Woode, the music critic, and Wackerlei, the architect and pipe-smoker. Both of them were regular customers, but their sorrows were of the most boring variety. Woode wept for religious reasons—he was always being converted or reconverted to something or other; as for Wackerlei, the pipe-smoker, he was still bewailing a professorship he had turned down in the twenties for the sake of a little Danish fly-by-night who had gone and married a South American and had six children by him, which was still a source of grief to Wackerlei and made his pipe go out year after year. It was the somewhat malicious Woode who persuaded Madame Schmuh to cut into an onion. She cut, the tears flowed, and she began to spill. She laid Schmuh bare, told stories about him that Oskar will tactfully pass over in silence; it took several of the more powerful customers to prevent Schmuh from flinging himself on his spouse; don’t forget that there were paring knives on every table. In any case, Schmuh was forcibly restrained until the indiscreet Billy could slip away with her friends Woode and Wackerlei.

Schmuh was very upset. I could see that by the way his hands flew about arranging and rearranging his onion shawl. Several times he vanished behind the curtain and reviled the washroom attendant. Finally he came back with a full basket and informed his guests in a tone of hysterical glee that he, Schmuh, was in a generous mood and was going to hand out a free round of onions. Which he proceeded to do.

Every human situation, however painful, strikes Klepp as a terrific joke, but on this occasion he was tense and held his flute at the ready. For we knew how dangerous it was to offer these high-strung people a double portion of tears, of the tears that wash away barriers.

Schmuh saw that we were holding our instruments in readiness and forbade us to play. At the tables the paring knives were at work. The beautiful outer skins, colored like rosewood, were thrust heedlessly aside. The knives bit into vitreous onion flesh with pale-green stripes. Oddly enough, the weeping did not begin with the ladies. Gentlemen in their prime—the owner of a large flour mill, a hotel-owner with his slightly rouged young friend, a nobleman high in the councils of an important business firm, a whole tableful of men’s clothing manufacturers who were in town for a board meeting, the bald actor who was known in the Cellar as the Gnasher, because he gnashed his teeth when he wept—all were in tears before the ladies joined in. But neither the ladies nor the gentlemen wept the tears of deliverance and release that the first onion had called forth; this was a frantic, convulsive crying jag. The Gnasher gnashed his teeth blood-curdlingly; had he been on the stage, the whole audience would have joined in; the mill-owner hanged his carefully groomed grey head on the table top; the hotel-owner mingled his convulsions with those of his delicate young friend. Schmuh, who stood by the stairs, let his shawl droop and peered with malicious satisfaction at the near-unleashed company. Suddenly, a lady of ripe years tore off her blouse before the eyes of her son-in-law. The hotel-owner’s young friend, whose slightly exotic look had already been remarked on, bared his swarthy torso, and leaping from table top to table top performed a dance which exists perhaps somewhere in the Orient. The orgy was under way. But despite the violence with which it began, it was a dull, uninspired affair, hardly worth describing in detail.

Schmuh was disappointed; even Oskar lifted his eyebrows in disgust. One or two cute strip tease acts; men appeared in ladies’ underwear, Amazons donned ties and suspenders; a couple or two disappeared under the table; the Gnasher chewed up a brassiere and apparently swallowed some of it.

The hubbub was frightful, wows and yippees with next to nothing behind them. At length Schmuh, disgusted and maybe fearing the police, left his post by the stairs, bent down over us, gave first Klepp, then me a poke, and hissed: “Music! Play something, for God’s sake. Make them stop.”

But it turned out that Klepp, who was easy to please, was enjoying himself. Shaking with laughter, he couldn’t do a thing with his flute. Scholle, who looked on Klepp as his master, imitated everything Klepp did, including his laughter. Only Oskar was left—but Schmuh could rely on me. I pulled my drum from under the bench, nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and began to drum.

Without any notion of what I was going to do, I made myself understood. I forgot all about the usual café concert routine. Nor did Oskar play jazz. For one thing I didn’t like to be taken for a percussion maniac. All right, I was a good drummer, but not a hepcat. Sure, I like jazz, but I like Viennese waltzes too. I could play both, but I didn’t have to. When Schmuh asked me to step in with my drum, I didn’t play anything I had ever learned, I played with my heart. It was a three-year-old Oskar who picked up those drumsticks. I drummed my way back, I drummed up the world as a three-year-old sees it. And the first thing I did to these postwar humans incapable of a real orgy was to put a harness on them: I led them to Posadowski-Weg, to Auntie Kauer’s kindergarten. Soon I had their jaws hanging down; they took each other by the hands, turned their toes in, and waited for me, their Pied Piper. I left my post under the staircase and took the lead. “Bake, bake, bake a cake”: that was my first sample. When I had registered my success—childlike merriment on every hand—I decided to scare them out of their wits. “Where’s the Witch, black as pitch?” I drummed. And I drummed up the wicked black Witch who gave me an occasional fright in my childhood days and in recent years has terrified me more and more; I made her rage through the Onion Cellar in all her gigantic, coal-black frightfulness, so obtaining the results for which Schmuh required onions; the ladies and gentlemen wept great round, childlike tears, the ladies and gentlemen were scared pink and green; their teeth chattered, they begged me to have mercy. And so, to comfort them, and in part to help them back into their outer and undergarments, their silks and satins, I drummed: “Green, green, green is my raiment” and “Red, red, red is my raiment”, not to mention “ Blue, blue, blue…” and “ Yellow, yellow, yellow”. By the time I had gone through all the more familiar colors, my charges were all properly dressed. Thereupon I formed them into a procession, led them through the Onion Cellar as though it were Jeschkentaler-Weg. I led them up the Erbsberg, round the hideous Gutenberg Monument, and on the Johannis-Wiese grew daisies which they, the ladies and gentlemen, were free to pick in innocent merriment. Then, at last, wishing to give all those present, including Schmuh the head man, something by which to remember their day in kindergarten, I gave them all permission to do number one. We were approaching Devil’s Gulch, a sinister place it was, gathering beechnuts, when I said on my drum: now, children, you may go. And they availed themselves of the opportunity. All the ladies and gentlemen, Schmuh the host, even the far-off washroom attendant, all the little children wet themselves, psss, psss they went, they all crouched down and listened to the sound they were making and they all wet their pants. It was only when the music had died down—Oskar had left the infant sound effects to themselves except for a soft distant roll—that I ushered in unrestrained merriment with one loud, emphatic boom. All about me the company roared, tittered, babbled childish nonsense: