Matzerath slammed the living room door and vanished into the kitchen. We heard him officiating with a demonstrative clatter. He killed the eels with a crosswise incision in the backs of their necks and Mama, who had an over-lively imagination, had to sit down on the sofa, promptly followed by Jan Bronski. A moment later they were holding hands and whispering in Kashubian. I hadn’t gone to the cupboard yet. While the three grownups were thus distributing themselves about the apartment, I was still in the living room. There was a baby chair beside the tile stove. There I sat, dangling my legs while Jan stared at me; I knew I was in their way, though they couldn’t have done much, because Matzerath was right next door, threatening them invisibly but palpably with moribund eels that he brandished like a whip. And so they exchanged hands, pressed and tugged at twenty fingers, and cracked knuckles. For me that was the last straw. Wasn’t Mrs. Kater’s carpet-beating enough? Didn’t it pierce the walls, growing no louder but moving closer and closer?

Oskar slipped off his chair, sat for a moment on the floor beside the stove lest his departure be too conspicuous, and then, wholly preoccupied with his drum, slid across the threshold into the bedroom.

I left the bedroom door half-open and noted to my satisfaction that no one called me back. I hesitated for a moment whether to take refuge under the bed or in the clothes cupboard. I preferred the cupboard because under the bed I would have soiled my fastidious navy-blue sailor suit. I was just able to reach the key to the cupboard. I turned it once, pulled open the mirror doors, and with my drumsticks pushed aside the hangers bearing the coats and other winter things. In order to reach and move the heavy coats, I had to stand on my drum. At last I had made a cranny in the middle of the cupboard; though it was not exactly spacious, there was room enough for Oskar, who climbed in and huddled on the floor. I even succeeded, with some difficulty, in drawing the mirror doors to and in jamming them closed with a shawl that I found on the cupboard floor, in such a way that a finger’s-breadth opening let in a certain amount of air and enabled me to look out in case of emergency. I laid my drum on my knees but drummed nothing, not even ever so softly; I just sat there in utter passivity, letting myself be enveloped and penetrated by the vapors arising from winter overcoats.

How wonderful that this cupboard should be there with its heavy, scarcely breathing woolens which enabled me to gather together nearly all my thoughts, to tie them into a bundle and give them away to a dream princess who was rich enough to accept my gift with a dignified, scarcely perceptible pleasure.

As usual when I concentrated and took advantage of my psychic gift, I transported myself to the office of Dr. Hollatz in Brunshöfer-Weg and savored the one part of my regular Wednesday visits that I cared about. My thoughts were concerned far less with the doctor, whose examinations were becoming more and more finicky, than with Sister Inge, his assistant. She alone was permitted to undress me and dress me; she alone was allowed to measure and weigh me and administer the various tests; in short, it was Sister Inge who conscientiously though rather grumpily carried out all the experiments to which Dr. Hollatz subjected me. Each time Sister Inge, not without a certain irony, reported failure which Hollatz metamorphosed into “partial success.” I seldom looked at Sister Inge’s face. My eyes and my sometimes racing drummer’s heart rested on the clean starched whiteness of her nurse’s uniform, on the weightless construction that she wore as a cap, on a simple brooch adorned with a red cross. How pleasant it was to follow the folds, forever fresh, of her uniform! Had she a body under it? Her steadily aging face and rawboned though well-kept hands suggested that Sister Inge was a woman after all. To be sure, there was no such womanish smell as my mama gave off when Jan, or even Matzerath, uncovered her before my eyes. She smelled of soap and drowsy medicines. How often I was overcome by sleep as she auscultated my small, supposedly sick body: a light sleep born of the folds of white fabrics, a sleep shrouded in carbolic acid, a dreamless sleep except that sometimes in the distance her brooch expanded into heaven knows what: a sea of banners, the Alpine glow, a field of poppies, ready to revolt, against whom, Lord knows: against Indians, cherries, nosebleed, cocks’ crests, red corpuscles, until a red occupying my entire field of vision provided the background for a passion which then as now was self-evident but not to be named, because the little word “red” says nothing, and nosebleed won’t do it, and flag cloth fades, and if I nonetheless say “red,” red spurns me, turns its coat to black. Black is the Witch, black scares me green, green grow the lilacs but lavender’s blue, blue is true blue but I don’t trust it, do you? Green is for hope, green is the coffin I graze in, green covers me, green blanches me white, white stains yellow and yellow strikes me blue, blue me no green, green flowers red, and red was Sister Inge’s brooch: she wore a red cross, to be exact, she wore it on the collar of her nurse’s uniform; but seldom, in the clothes cupboard or anywhere else, could I keep my mind on this most monochrome of all symbols.

Bursting in from the living room, a furious uproar crashed against the doors of my cupboard, waked me from my scarcely begun half-slumber dedicated to Sister Inge. Sobered and with my heart in my mouth I sat, holding my drum on my knees, among winter coats of varying length and cut, breathed in the aroma of Matzerath’s Party uniform, felt the presence of sword belt and shoulder straps, and was unable to find my way back to the white folds of the nurse’s uniform: flannel and worsted hung down beside me, above me stood the hat fashions of the last four years, at my feet lay big shoes and little shoes, waxed puttees, heels with and without hobnails. A faint beam of light suggested the whole scene; Oskar was sorry he had left a crack open between the mirror doors.

What could those people in the living room have to offer me? Perhaps Matzerath had surprised the two of them on the couch, but that was very unlikely for Jan always preserved a vestige of caution and not just when he was playing skat. Probably, I figured, and so indeed it turned out, Matzerath, having slaughtered, cleaned, washed, cooked, seasoned, and tasted his eels, had put them down on the living room table in the form of eel soup with boiled potatoes, and when the others showed no sign of sitting down, had gone so far as to sing the praises of his dish, listing all the ingredients and intoning the recipe like a litany. Whereupon Mama began to scream. She screamed in Kashubian. This Matzerath could neither understand nor bear, but he was compelled to listen just the same and had a pretty good idea of what she was getting at. What, after all, could she be screaming about but eels, leading up, as everything led up once my Mama started screaming, to my fall down the cellar stairs. Matzerath answered back. They knew their parts. Jan intervened. Without him there could have been no show. Act Two: bang, that was the piano lid being thrown back; without notes, by heart, the three of them all at once but not together howled out the “Huntsmen’s Chorus” from Freischütz: “What thing on earth resembles…” And in the midst of the uproar, bang shut went the piano lid, bang went the overturned piano stool, and there was Mama coming into the bedroom. A quick glance in the mirror of my mirror doors, and she flung herself, I could see it all through the cleft, on the marriage bed beneath the blue canopy and wrung her hands with as many fingers as the repentant gold-framed Mary Magdalene in the color print at the head end of the matrimonial fortress.

For a long time all I could hear was Mama’s whimpering, the soft creaking of the bed, and faint murmurs from the living room. Jan was pacifying Matzerath. Then Matzerath asked Jan to go and pacify Mama. The murmuring thinned down, Jan entered the bedroom. Act Three: He stood by the bed, looking back and forth between Mama and the repentant Mary Magdalene, sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed, stroked Mania’s back and rear end—she was lying face down—spoke to her soothingly in Kashubian—and finally, when words were no help, inserted his hand beneath her skirt until she stopped whimpering and he was able to remove his eyes from the many-fingered Mary Magdalene. It was a scene worth seeing. His work done, Jan arose, dabbed his fingers with his handkerchief, and finally addressed Mama loudly, no longer speaking Kashubian and stressing every word for the benefit of Matzerath in the kitchen or living room: “Now come along, Agnes. Let’s forget the whole business. Alfred dumped the eels in the toilet long ago. Now we’ll play a nice game of skat, for a quarter of a pfennig if you like, and once we’ve all forgotten and made up, Alfred will make us mushrooms with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes.”