Only once in the course of our activity did any grownups approach us. Some shipyard workers—with Communist affiliations, as I could tell at a glance—tried to gain influence over us through our apprentices at the Schichau dockyards and turn us into a Red underground movement. The apprentices were not unwilling. But the schoolboys among us rejected all political trends. Mister, an Air Force Auxiliary who was the cynic and theoretician of the gang, stated his views at one of our meetings: “We have nothing to do with parties,” he declared. “Our fight is against our parents and all other grownups, regardless of what they may be for or against.”

He put it rather too strongly, no doubt, but all the schoolboys agreed; the outcome was a factional split. The shipyard apprentices started a club of their own—I was sorry to lose them, they were good workers. Despite the objections of Störtebeker and Moorkähne, they continued to call themselves Dusters. At the trial—their outfit was caught at the same time as ours—the burning of the training sub in the shipyard basin was pinned on them. Over a hundred U-boat captains and ensigns had met a terrible death in the fire which broke out below decks; the U-boat crews were blocked in their quarters, and when the ensigns, lads of eighteen, tried to escape through portholes, their hips wouldn’t pass and the fire caught them from behind. They had hung there screaming and the only way of putting them out of their misery had been to bring a cutter alongside and shoot them.

We had nothing to do with that fire. It may have been the Schichau apprentices and it may have been the Westerland Society. The Dusters were not firebugs though I, their spiritual guide, may have inherited an incendiary gene or two from my grandfather Koljaiczek.

I remember well the mechanic, recently transferred to Schichau from the Deutsche Werke at Kiel, who came to see us in our cellar shortly before the split. Erich and Horst Pietzger, the sons of a longshoreman in Fuchswall, had brought him. He inspected our storehouse with a professional air, deplored the absence of any weapons in working order, but uttered a few grudging words of approval. When he asked to speak to the chief, Störtebeker promptly, and Moorkähne with some hesitation, referred him to me. Thereupon he flew into a gale of laughter so long and so insolent that Oskar came very close to handing him over to the dusters for a dusting.

“What kind of a sawed-off runt do you call that?” he said to Moorkähne, pointing his thumb at me over his shoulder.

Moorkähne smiled in visible embarrassment. Before he could think of anything to say, Störtebeker replied with ominous calm: “He is our Jesus.”

That was too much for the mechanic, whose name was Walter; he took it on himself to insult us right there in our own headquarters. “Say, are you revolutionaries or a bunch of choirboys getting ready for a Christmas play?”

The blade of a paratrooper’s knife popped out of Störtebeker’s sleeve; he opened the cellar door, gave Firestealer a sign, and said, more to the gang than to the mechanic: “We’re choirboys and we’re getting ready for a Christmas play.”

But nothing drastic happened to the mechanic. He was blindfolded and led away. A few days later this same Walter organized the dockyard apprentices into a club of their own, and I am quite sure it was they who set the training sub on fire.

From my point of view Störtebeker had given the right answer. We were not interested in politics. Once we had so intimidated the Hitler Youth Patrols that they scarcely left their quarters except occasionally to check the papers of flighty young ladies at the railroad stations, we shifted our field of operations to the churches and began, as the Communist mechanic had put it, to occupy ourselves with Christmas plays.

Our first concern was to find replacements for the invaluable Schichau apprentices. At the end of October, Störtebeker swore in the brothers Felix and Paul Rennwand, both choirboys at Sacred Heart. Störtebeker had approached them through their sister Lucy, a girl of sixteen who, over my protest, was allowed to attend the swearing-in ceremony. Setting their left hands on my drum, which the boys, incurable Romantics that they were, liked to think of as some sort of symbol, the Rennwand brothers repeated the oath of allegiance, a text so absurd and full of hocus-pocus that I can no longer remember it.

Oskar watched Lucy during the ceremony. In one hand she held a sandwich that seemed to quiver slightly, she shrugged her shoulders and gnawed at her lower lip. Her triangular fox face was expressionless, and she kept her eyes riveted on Störtebeker’s back. Suddenly I had misgivings about the Dusters’ future.

We began to redecorate our basement. In close collaboration with the choirboys, I oversaw the acquisition of the required furnishings. From St. Catherine’s we took a sixteen-century half-length Joseph who turned out to be authentic, a few candelabra, some chalices, patens, and cruets, and a Corpus Christi banner. A night visit to the Church of the Trinity brought us a wooden, trumpet-blowing angel of no artistic interest, and a colored tapestry, copied from an older original, showing a lady who seemed ever so prim, prissy, and deceitful, and a mythical animal known as a unicorn, who was obviously very much under her influence. The lady’s smile, as Störtebeker observed, had the same playful cruelty as that which predominated in Lucy’s fox face, and I hoped my lieutenant would not prove as submissive as the unicorn. We hung the tapestry on the rear wall of our cellar, formerly decorated with death’s heads, black hands, and other such absurdities, and soon the unicorn motif seemed to dominate all our deliberations. Meanwhile Lucy had made herself at home in our midst, coming and going as she pleased and sniggering behind my back. Why then, I asked myself, did we have to bring in this second, woven Lucy, who is turning your lieutenants into unicorns, who alive or woven is really out to get you, Oskar, for you alone of the Dusters are truly fabulous and unique, you are the human unicorn.

But then Advent was upon us, and I was mighty glad of it. We began to collect Nativity figures from all the churches in the neighborhood, and soon the tapestry was so well hidden behind them that the fable—or so I thought—was bound to lose its influence. In mid-December Rundstedt opened his offensive in the Ardennes and we completed preparations for our major coup.

Several Sundays running I attended ten o’clock Mass with Maria, who, to Matzerath’s chagrin, had become thoroughly immersed in Catholicism. The Dusters, too, at my behest, had become regular churchgoers. This was our way of casing the joint. Finally, on the night of September 18, we broke into the Church of the Sacred Heart. “Broke” is a manner of speaking. Thanks to our choirboys, there was no need to break anything, not even for Oskar to sing at any glass.

It was snowing, but the snow melted as it fell. We stowed the three handcarts behind the sacristy. The younger Rennwand had the key to the main door. Oskar went in first, led the boys one by one to the holy-water font, where at his bidding they genuflected toward the high altar. Then I had them throw a Labor Service blanket over the statue of Jesus bearing his Sacred Heart, lest his blue gaze interfere with our work. Bouncer and Mister carried the tools to the scene of action, the left side-altar. The manger with its Nativity figures and evergreen boughs had to be cleared out of the way. We already had all the shepherds and angels, all the sheep, asses, and cows we needed. Our cellar was full of extras; all that was lacking were the central figures. Belisarius removed the flowers from the altar. Totila and Teja rolled up the carpet. Firestealer unpacked the tools. Oskar, on his knees behind a pew, supervised the operations.