To Oskar it was a source of modest satisfaction to learn that my excellent lieutenant had been the son of the chief of police. I offered no resistance, but stepped automatically into the role of a sniveling three-year-old who had been led astray by gangsters. All I wanted was to be comforted and protected. Father Wiehnke picked me up in his arms.

Everyone was quiet except for the policemen. The boys were led away. Father Wiehnke felt faint and had to sit down, but first he deposited me on the floor not far from our equipment. Behind hammers and crowbars, I found the basket full of sandwiches that Bouncer had made before we started on our expedition.

I took the basket, went over to Lucy, who was shivering in her light coat, and offered her the sandwiches. She picked us both up, Oskar and basket. A moment later she had a sandwich between her teeth. I studied her flaming, battered, swollen face: restless eyes in black slits, a chewing triangle, a doll, a wicked witch devouring sausage and, even as she ate, growing skinnier, hungrier, more triangular, more doll-like. The sight set its stamp on me. Who will efface that triangle from my mind? How long will it live within me, chewing sausage, chewing men, and smiling as only triangles, or lady unicorn-tamers on tapestries, can smile.

As he was led away between two inspectors, Störtebeker turned his blood-smeared face toward Lucy and Oskar. I looked past him. I recognized him no longer. When all my erstwhile followers had left, I too was led away, still in the arms of the sandwich-eating Lucy.

Who stayed behind? Father Wiehnke with our flashlights, still shining red, and the vestments hurriedly shed by Father Mister and his assistants. Chalice and ciborium lay on the steps to the altar. The sawed-off John and the sawed-off Jesus were still there with the Virgin, who was to have formed a counterweight to the lady with the unicorn in our cellar headquarters.

Oskar, however, was carried away to a trial that I still call the second trial of Jesus, a trial that ended with the acquittal of Oskar, hence also of Jesus.

Imagine, if you please, a swimming pool lined with azure-blue tiles. Quite a few sunburned, athletic young people in the water, and more sunburned young men and women sitting or reclining on the tiles round the edges. Perhaps a bit of soft music from the loudspeaker. Healthy boredom and a mild, noncommittal sexuality. The tiles are smooth, but no one slips. Only a few signs prohibiting anything; no need of them, the bathers come only for an hour or two and have other places to do what is forbidden. Now and then someone dives from the ten-foot springboard but fails to attract the attention of those in the water, or to lure the eyes of those reclining on the tiles away from their illustrated weeklies. Suddenly a breeze! No, not a breeze, but a young man who slowly, resolutely; reaching from rung to rung, climbs the ladder to the thirty-foot diving tower. Magazines droop, eyes rise, recumbent bodies grow longer, a young woman shades her forehead, someone forgets what he was thinking about, a word remains unspoken, a flirtation, just begun, comes to a sudden end in the middle of the sentence—for there he stands virile and well built, jumps up and down on the platform, leans on the gently curved tubular railing, casts a bored look downward, moves away from the railing with a graceful swing of the haunches, ventures out on the springboard that sways at every step, focuses his eyes on an azure-blue, alarmingly small swimming pool, full of intermingling bathing caps: yellow, green, white, red, yellow, green, white, red, yellow, green…. That’s where his friends must be sitting, Doris and Erika Schiller, and Jutta Daniels with her boy friend, who isn’t right for her. They wave, Jutta waves too. Rather worried about his balance, he waves back. They shout. What can they want? He should go ahead, they shout, dive, cries Jutta. But he had climbed up with no such intention, he had just wanted to see how things looked from up here, and then climb down, slowly, rung by rung. And now they are shouting so everybody can hear: Dive! Go ahead and dive! Go ahead.

This, you will admit, though a diving tower may be a step nearer heaven, is a desperate plight to be in. In January, 1945, the Dusters and I, though it was not the bathing season, found ourselves in a similar situation. We had ventured high up, we were all crowded together on the diving tower, and below, forming a solemn horseshoe round a waterless pool, sat the judges, witnesses, and court clerks.

Störtebeker stepped out on the supple, railingless springboard.

“Dive!” cried the judges.

But Störtebeker didn’t feel like it.

Then from the witnesses’ bench there arose a slender figure with a grey pleated skirt and a little Bavarian-style jacket. A pale but not indistinct face which, I still maintain, formed a triangle, rose up like a target indicator: Lucy Rennwand did not shout. She only whispered: “Jump, Störtebeker, jump!”

Then Störtebeker jumped. Lucy sat down again on the witnesses’ bench and pulled down the sleeves of her Bavarian jacket over her fists.

Moorkähne limped onto the springboard. The judges ordered him to dive. But Moorkähne didn’t feel like it; smiling in embarrassment at his fingernails, he waited for Lucy to pull up her sleeves, let her fists fall out of the wool, and display the black-framed triangle with the slits for eyes. Then he plunged furiously at the triangle, but missed it.

Even on the way up, Firestealer and Putty hadn’t been exactly lovey-dovey; on the springboard they came to blows. Putty was dusted, and even when he plunged, Firestealer wouldn’t let him go.

Bouncer, who had long silky eyelashes, closed his deep, sad doe’s eyes before taking the leap.

The Air Force Auxiliaries had to take off their uniforms before plunging.

Nor were the Rennwand brothers permitted to take their heavenward plunge attired as choirboys; that would have been quite unacceptable to their sister Lucy, sitting on the witnesses’ bench in her jacket of threadbare wartime wool and encouraging young men to dive.

In defiance of history, Belisarius and Narses dove first, then Totila and Teja. Bluebeard plunged, Lionheart plunged, then the rank and file: The Nose, Bushman, Tanker, Piper, Mustard Pot, Yatagan, and Cooper.

The last to jump was Stuchel, a high school student so crosseyed it made you dizzy to look at him; he had only half belonged to the gang and that by accident. Only Jesus was left on the platform. Addressing him as Oskar Matzerath, the judges asked him to dive, but Jesus did not comply. Lucy, the stern and unbending, Lucy with the scrawny Mozart pigtail hanging between her shoulders, rose from the witnesses’ bench, spread her sweater arms, and whispered without visibly moving her compressed lips: “Jump, sweet Jesus, jump.” At this moment I understood the fatal lure of a thirty-foot springboard; little grey kittens began to wriggle in my knee joints, hedgehogs mated under the soles of my feet, swallows took wing in my armpits, and at my feet I saw not only Europe but the whole world. Americans and Japanese were doing a torch dance on the island of Luzon, dancing so hard that slant-eyes and round-eyes alike lost the buttons off their uniforms. But at the very same moment a tailor in Stockholm was sewing buttons on a handsome suit of evening clothes. Mountbatten was feeding Burmese elephants shells of every caliber. A widow in Lima was teaching her parrot to say “Caramba”. In the middle of the Pacific two enormous aircraft carriers, done up to look like Gothic cathedrals, stood face to face, sent up their planes, and simultaneously sank one another. The planes had no place to land, they hovered helplessly and quite allegorically like angels in mid-air, using up their fuel with a terrible din. This was all one to the streetcar conductor in Haparanda, who had just gone off duty. He was breaking eggs into a frying pan, two for himself and two for his fiancée, whom he was expecting any minute, having planned the whole evening in advance. Obviously the armies of Koniev and Zhukov could be expected to resume their forward drive; while rain fell in Ireland, they broke through on the Vistula, took Warsaw too late and Königsberg too soon, and even so were powerless to prevent a woman in Panama, who had five children and only one husband, from burning the milk she was warming up on her gas range. Inevitably the thread of events wound itself into loops and knots which became known as the fabric of History. I also saw that activities such as thumb-twiddling, frowning, looking up and down, handshaking, making babies, counterfeiting, turning out the light, brushing teeth, shooting people, and changing diapers were being practiced all over the world, though not always with the same skill. My head swimming at the thought of so much purposive movement, I turned back to the trial which was continuing in my honor at the foot of the diving tower. “Jump, sweet Jesus, jump,” whispered Lucy Rennwand, the witness and virgin temptress. She was sitting on Satan’s lap, and that brought out her virginity. He handed her a sandwich. She bit into it with pleasure, but lost none of her chastity. “Jump, sweet Jesus,” she chewed, offering me her triangle, still intact.