“Well?” Lankes asked.

“She’s undressing.” That was all he could get out of me. “Probably means to go swimming. Wants to cool off.”

That struck me as dangerous at high tide, especially so soon after eating. Already she was in up to the knees; her back was bent forward and she sank deeper and deeper. The water could not have been exactly warm, but that didn’t seem to bother her: she swam, she swam well, practicing several different strokes, and dove through the waves.

“Let her swim, and come down off that pillbox.” I looked behind me and saw Lankes sprawling in the sand and puffing away. The smooth backbone of the codfish glistened white in the sun, dominating the table.

As I jumped off the concrete, Lankes opened his painter’s eyes and said: “Christ, what a picture! Nuns at High Tide.”

“You monster,” I shouted. “Supposing she drowns?”

Lankes closed his eyes: “Then we’ll call it: Nuns Drowning.”

“And if she comes back and flings herself at your feet?”

Wide-eyed, the painted declaimed: “Then she and the picture will be called: Fallen Nun.”

With him it was always either-or, head or tail, drowned or fallen. He took my cigarettes, threw the lieutenant off the dune, ate my fish, showed the inside of a pillbox to a little girl who was supposed to be the bride of Christ, and while she was still swimming out to sea, drew pictures in the air with his big lumpy foot. He even listed the titles and plotted the formats: Nuns at High Tide, eight by five, Nuns Drowning, Fallen Nuns, Twenty-five Thousand Nuns. Nuns at Trafalgar. Nuns Defeat Lord Nelson. Nuns Bucking the Wind. Nuns Before the Breeze. Nuns Tacking. Black, lots of black; dingy white and cold blue: The Invasion, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. And on our return to the Rhineland Lankes actually painted all these pictures, in formats ranging from wide and low to high and narrow. He did whole series of nuns, found a dealer who was wild about nuns, exhibited forty-three of these Runsuch canvases and sold seventeen to collectors, industrialists, museums, and an American; some of the critics even saw fit to compare him, Lankes, to Picasso. It was Lankes’ success that persuaded me, Oskar, to dig up the visiting card of Dr. Dösch, the concert manager, for Lankes’ art was not alone in clamoring for bread. The time had come to transmute the prewar and wartime experience of Oskar, the three-year-old drummer, into the pure, resounding gold of the postwar period.

The King Finger

“So that’s it,” said Zeidler. “So you’ve decided not to work any more.” It riled him that Klepp and Oskar should spend the whole day sitting either in Klepp’s or Oskar’s room, doing just about nothing. I had paid the October rent on both rooms out of what was left of Dr. Dösch’s advance, but the prospects, financial and otherwise, for November, were bleak.

And yet we had plenty of offers. Any number of dance halls or night clubs would have taken us on. But Oskar was sick of playing jazz. That put a strain on my relations with Klepp. Klepp said my new drum style had no connection with jazz. He was right and I didn’t deny it. He said I was disloyal to the jazz ideal. Early in November Klepp found a new percussion man, and a good one at that, namely Bobby from the Unicorn, and was able to accept an engagement in the Old City. After that we were friends again, even though Klepp was already beginning to think, or perhaps it would be safer to say talk, along Communist lines.

In the end Dr. Dösch was my only resort. I couldn’t have gone back to live with Maria even if I had wanted to; Stenzel was getting a divorce, meaning to convert my Maria into a Maria Stenzel. From time to time I knocked out an inscription for Korneff or dropped in at the Academy to be blackened or abstracted. Quite frequently I went calling, with nothing definite in mind, on Ulla, who had been obliged to break her engagement to Lankes shortly after our trip to the Atlantic Wall, because Lankes wasn’t doing anything but nuns and didn’t even want to beat Ulla any more.

Dr. Dösch’s visiting card lay silently clamoring on my table beside the bathtub. One day, having decided that I wanted none of Dr. Dösch, I tore it up and threw it away. To my horror I discovered that the address and telephone number were graven on my memory. I could read them off like a poem. I not only could but did. This went on for three days; the telephone number kept me awake at night. On the fourth day, I went to the nearest telephone booth. Dösch spoke as though he had been expecting my call from one minute to the next and asked me to drop in at the office that same afternoon; he wanted to introduce me to the boss, in fact the boss was expecting me.

The West Concert Bureau had its offices on the eighth floor of a new office building. Expensive carpeting, quantities of chrome, indirect lighting, soundproofing, crisp, long-legged secretaries, wafting their boss’s cigar smoke past me; two seconds more and I would have fled.

Dr. Dösch received me with open arms though he did not actually hug me—a narrow escape, it seemed to Oskar. Beside him a green sweater girl was typing; her machine stopped as I entered, but speeded up almost instantly to make up for lost time. Dösch announced me to the boss. Oskar sat down on the front left sixth of an armchair upholstered in English vermilion. A folding door opened, the typewriter held its breath, a hidden force raised me to my feet, the doors closed behind me, a carpet, flowing through the large, luminous room, led me forward until an enormous oak table top supported by steel tubing said to me: now Oskar is standing in front of the boss’s desk, I wonder how much he weighs. I raised my blue eyes, looked for the boss behind the infinitely empty oak surface, and found, in a wheelchair that could be cranked up and tipped like a dentist’s chair, my friend and master Bebra, paralyzed, living only with his eyes and fingertips.

He still had his voice though. And Bebra’s voice spoke: “So we meet again, Mr. Matzerath. Did I not tell you years ago, when you still chose to face the world as a three-year old, that our kind can never lose one another? However, I see to my regret that you have altered your proportions, immoderately so, and not at all to your advantage. Did you not measure exactly three feet in those days?”

I nodded, on the verge of tears. The wall behind the master’s wheelchair—it was operated by an electric motor which gave off a low, steady hum—had just one picture on it: a life-size bust of Roswitha, the great Raguna, in a baroque frame. Bebra didn’t have to follow my eyes to know what I was looking at. His lips, when he spoke, were almost motionless: “Ah, yes, our good Roswitha! How, I wonder, would she have liked the new Oskar? Not too well, I think. It was another Oskar that she cared for, a three-year-old with cheeks like a cherub, but oh, so loving! She worshipped him, as she never wearied of telling me. But one day he was disinclined to bring her a cup of coffee; she herself went for it and lost her life. And if I am not mistaken, that is not the only murder committed by our cherubic little Oskar. Is it not true that he drummed his poor mama into her grave?”

I nodded. I looked up at Roswitha, I was able to cry, thank the Lord. Bebra recoiled for the next blow; “And what of Jan Bronski, the postal secretary, whom three-year-old Oskar liked to call his presumptive father? Oskar handed him over to the centurions who shot him. And now perhaps, Mr. Oskar Matzerath, you who have had the audacity to change your shape, now perhaps you can tell me what became of your second presumptive father, Matzerath the grocer?”

Again I confessed. I admitted that I had murdered Matzerath, because I wanted to be rid of him, and told my judge how I had made him choke to death. I no longer hid behind a Russian tommy gun, but said: “It was I, Master Bebra. I did it; this crime, too, I committed; I am not innocent of this death. Have mercy!”