What then was he holding? What was so important, so eminently worth showing me?

I reached out between his warm jaws, I had the thing in my hand, I knew what I was holding but pretended to be puzzled, as though looking for a word to name this object that Lux had brought me from the rye field.

There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and accurately when detached, when alienated from the center. It was a finger. A woman’s finger. A ring finger. A woman’s ring finger. A woman’s finger with an attractive ring on it. Between the metacarpus and the first finger joint, some three-quarters of an inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be chopped off. The section was neat, clearly revealing the tendon of the extensor muscle.

It was a beautiful finger, a mobile finger. The stone on the ring was held in place by six gold claws. I identified it at once—correctly, it later turned out—as an aquamarine. The ring itself was worn so thin at one place that I set it down as an heirloom. Despite the line of dirt, or rather of earth under the nail, as though the finger had been obliged to scratch or dig earth, the nail seemed to have been carefully manicured. Once I had removed it from the dog’s warm muzzle, the finger felt cold and its peculiarly yellowish pallor also suggested coldness.

For several months Oskar had been wearing a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He laid the ring finger down on this square of silk and observed that the inside of the finger up to the third joint was marked with lines indicating that this had been a hardworking finger with a relentless sense of duty.

After folding up the finger in the handkerchief, I rose from the cable drum, stroked Lux’s neck, and started for home, carrying handkerchief and finger in my right hand. Planning to do this and that with my find, I came to the fence of a nearby garden. It was then that Vittlar, who had been lying in the crook of an apple tree, observing me and the dog, addressed me.

The Last Streetcar or Adoration of a Preserving Jar

That voice for one thing, that arrogant, affected whine! Besides, he was lying in the crook of an apple tree. “That’s a smart dog you’ve got there,” he whined.

I, rather bewildered: “What are you doing up there?”

He stretched languidly: “They are only cooking apples. I assure you, you have nothing to fear.”

He was beginning to get on my nerves: “Who cares what kind of apples you’ve got? And what do you expect me to fear?”

“Oh, well! “ His whine was almost a hiss. “You might mistake me for the Snake. There were cooking apples even in those days.”

I, angrily: “Allegorical rubbish! “

He, slyly: “I suppose you think only eating apples are worth sinning for?”

I was about to go. I hadn’t the slightest desire to discuss the fruit situation in Paradise. Then he tried a more direct approach. Jumping nimbly down frem the tree, he stood long and willowy by the fence: “What did your dog find in the rye?”

I can’t imagine why I said: “A stone.”

“And you put the stone in your pocket?” Blessed if he wasn’t beginning to cross-examine me.

“I like to carry stones in my pocket.”

“It looked more like a stick to me.”

“That may well be. But I still say it’s a stone.”

“Aha! So it is a stick?”

“For all I care: stick or stone, cooking apples or eating apples…”

“A flexible little stick?”

“The dog wants to go home. I’ll have to be leaving.”

“A flesh-colored stick?”

“Why don’t you attend to your apples? Come along. Lux.”

“A flesh-colored, flexible little stick with a ring on it?”

“What do you want of me? I’m just a man taking a walk with this dog I borrowed to take a walk with.”

“Splendid. See here, I should like to borrow something too. Won’t you let me, just for a second, try on that handsome ring that sparkled on the stick and turned it into a ring finger? My name is Vittlar. Gottfried von Vittlar. I am the last of our line.”

So it was that I made Vittlar’s acquaintance. Before the day was out, we were friends, and I still call him my friend. Only a few days ago, when he came to see me, I said: “I am so glad, my dear Gottfried, that it was you who turned me in to the police and not some common stranger.”

If angels exist, they must look like Vittlar: long, willowy, vivacious, collapsible, more likely to throw their arms around the most barren of lampposts than a soft, eager young girl.

You don’t see Vittlar at first. According to his surroundings, he can make himself look like a thread, a scarecrow, a clothestree, or the limb of a tree. That indeed is why I failed to notice him when I sat on the cable drum and he lay in the apple tree. The dog didn’t even bark, for dogs can neither see, smell, nor bark at an angel.

“Will you be kind enough, my dear Gottfried,” I asked him the day before yesterday, “ to send me a copy of the statement you made to the police just about two years ago?” It was this statement that led to my trial and formed the basis of Vittlar’s subsequent testimony.

Here is the copy, I shall let him speak as he testified against me in court:

On the day in question, I, Gottfried Vittlar, was lying in the crook of an apple tree that grows at the edge of my mother’s garden and bears each year enough apples to fill our seven preserving jars with applesauce. I was lying on my side, my left hip embedded in the bottom of the crook which is somewhat mossy. My feet were pointing in the direction of the Gerresheim glassworks. What was I looking at? I was looking straight ahead, waiting for something to happen within my field of vision.

The accused, who is today my friend, entered my field of vision. A dog came with him, circling round him, behaving like a dog. His name, as the accused later told me, was Lux, he was a rottweiler, and could be rented at a “dog rental shop” not far from St. Roch’s Church.

The accused sat down on the empty cable drum which has been lying ever since the war outside the aforesaid kitchen garden belonging to my mother, Alice von Vittlar. As the court knows, the accused is a small man. Moreover, if we are to be strictly truthful, he is deformed. This fact caught my attention. What struck me even more was his behavior. The small, well-dressed gentleman proceeded to drum on the rusty cable drum, first with his fingers, then with two dry sticks. If you bear in mind that the accused is a drummer by trade and that, as has been established beyond any shadow of a doubt, he practices his trade at all times and places; if you consider, furthermore, that there is something about a cable drum which, as the name suggests, incites people to drum on it, it seems in no wise unreasonable to aver that one sultry summer day the accused Oskar Matzerath sat on a cable drum situated outside the kitchen garden of Mrs. Alice von Vittlar, producing rhythmically arranged sound with the help of two willow sticks of unequal length.

I further testify that the dog Lux vanished for some time into a field of rye; yes, the rye was about ready to mow. If asked exactly how long he was gone, I should be unable to reply, because the moment I lie down in the crook of our apple tree, I lose all sense of time. If I say notwithstanding that the dog disappeared for a considerable time, it means that I missed him, because I liked his black coat and floppy ears.

The accused, however—I feel justified in saying—did not miss the dog.

When the dog Lux came back out of the ripe rye, he was carrying something between his teeth. I thought of a stick, a stone, or perhaps, though even then it did not seem very likely, a tin can or even a tin spoon. Only when the accused removed the corpus delicti from the dog’s muzzle did I definitely recognize it for what it was. But between the moment when the dog rubbed his muzzle, still holding the object, against the trouser leg of the accused—the left trouser leg, I should say—to the moment when the accused took possession of it, several minutes passed—exactly how many I should not venture to say.