The ground was frozen. While Matzerath and old man Heilandt took turns with the pickax and Maria tried to dig up some ivy beside the stone benches, Oskar slipped away to Hindenburg-Allee. What traffic! Tanks retreating from the heights and the Delta, some being towed. From the trees—lindens if I remember rightly—dangled soldiers and Volkssturm men. To their jackets were affixed cardboard signs identifying them quite legibly as traitors. I looked into the convulsed faces of several of these hanging men and drew comparisons—with other hanged men as such and in general and with Greff the greengrocer in particular. There were also whole clusters of youngsters strung up in uniforms that were too big for them, and several times I thought I recognized Störtebeker—but youngsters at the end of a rope all look alike. Nevertheless, I said to myself: so now they’ve hanged Störtebeker, I wonder if they’ve strung up Lucy Rennwand.

That thought gave Oskar wings. He searched the trees to left and right for a skinny, dangling girl, and even crossed the street in between the tanks, but there too he found only soldiers, old men in Volkssturm uniforms, and youngsters who looked like Störtebeker. Disappointed, I trotted along as far as the half-demolished Four Seasons Café, and turned back only reluctantly. As I stood by Mother Truczinski’s grave, helping Maria to strew ivy and leaves over the fresh earth, the vision, clear in every detail, of a dangling Lucy was still with me.

We didn’t return the cart to the vegetable shop. Matzerath and old man Heilandt took it apart and piled up the pieces by the counter. “Maybe we’ll be needing the cart again,” said Matzerath. “Here it’s fairly safe.” Then he gave the old man three packs of Derby cigarettes.

Old man Heilandt said nothing but helped himself to several packages of noodles and two bags of sugar from the near-empty shelves. Then he shuffled off in his felt slippers, which he had worn for the funeral, leaving Matzerath to remove what little remained of his stock from the shelves and carry it down to the cellar.

After that we seldom emerged from our hole. The Russians were said to be in Zigankenberg, Pietzgendorf, and on the outskirts of Schidlitz. There was no doubt that they occupied the heights, for they were firing straight down into the city. Inner City and Outer City, Old City, New City and Old New City, Lower City and Spice City—what had taken seven hundred years to build burned down in three days. Yet this was not the first fire to descend on the city of Danzig. For centuries Pomerellians, Brandenburgers, Teutonic Knights, Poles, Swedes, and a second time Swedes, Frenchmen, Prussians, and Russians, even Saxons, had made history by deciding every few years that the city of Danzig was worth burning. And now it was Russians, Poles, Germans, and Englishmen all at once who were burning the city’s Gothic bricks for the hundredth time. Hook Street, Long Street, and Broad Street, Big Weaver Street and Little Weaver Street were in flames; Tobias Street, Hound Street, Old City Ditch, Outer City Ditch, the ramparts and Long Bridge, all were in flames. Built of wood. Crane Gate made a particularly fine blaze. In Breechesmaker Street, the fire had itself measured for several pairs of extra-loud breeches. The Church of St. Mary was burning inside and outside, festive light effects could be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St. Catherine, St. John, St. Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elisabeth, Peter, and Paul, from Trinity and Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theater was giving a première, a one-act play entitled The Firebug’s Dream. The town fathers decided to raise the firemen’s wages retroactively after the fire. Holy Ghost Street was burning in the name of the Holy Ghost. Joyously, the Franciscan Monastery blazed in the name of St. Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market, and Hay Market burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk Pitcher Street the milk boiled over. Only the West Prussian Fire Insurance Building, for purely symbolic reasons, refused to burn down.

Oskar has never been very much interested in fires. I would have stayed in the cellar when Matzerath ran up the stairs for a view of Danzig in flames, if I had not improvidently stored my few, highly inflammable belongings in the attic. I was determined to save the last of the drums Bebra had given me and my volume of Goethe-Rasputin. Between the pages of the book, I had been saving a fan, light as gossamer and delicately painted, that my Roswitha had wielded, so gracefully, so graciously, in her lifetime. Maria remained in the cellar. But little Kurt wanted to go up on the roof with me and Matzerath, to see the fire. Though irritated by my son’s uncontrollable enthusiasm, Oskar told himself that Kurt must have inherited his interest in fire from his great-grandfather, my grandfather, Koljaiczek the firebug. Maria kept Kurt downstairs, I was allowed to go up with Matzerath. I took my belongings, cast a glance through the window of the loft, and was amazed to see what a burst of vitality our venerable old city had been able to summon up.

When shells began to land nearby, we went downstairs. Later on, Matzerath wanted to go up again, but Maria wouldn’t let him. He gave in and burst into tears while giving a detailed description of the fire to the widow Greff, who had remained below. Once more he returned to the flat and turned on the radio, but nothing came out. You couldn’t even hear the crackling flames of the burning radio station, let alone a special newscast.

Matzerath stood there in the middle of the cellar, tugging at his suspenders, as bewildered as a child who can’t make up his mind whether to go on believing in Santa Claus, and for the first time expressed doubts about the final victory. On the widow Greff’s advice, he removed his Party pin from his lapel, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it; for the cellar had a concrete floor, Lina Greff was unwilling to take it, Maria said he should bury it in the winter potatoes, but the potatoes didn’t seem safe, and he was afraid to go upstairs, because they were bound to come soon, they were on their way, they had already reached Brenntau and Oliva when he had looked from the attic, and he was sorry now that he hadn’t left it up there in the air-defense sand, for it would be a fine kettle of fish if they found him with the thing in his hand. He dropped it on the concrete, meaning to stamp on it, to grind it to powder, but Kurt and I leapt at it both together. I had it first and I kept my hold on it when Kurt began to punch as he always did when he wanted something, but I wouldn’t give my son the Party badge for fear of endangering him, because you didn’t joke with the Russians. Oskar remembered that from his readings in Rasputin, and I wondered, while Kurt pummeled me and Maria tried to separate us, whether it would be White Russians or Great Russians, Cossacks or Georgians, Kalmucks or Crimean Tartars, Ruthenians or Ukrainians, or maybe even Kirghizes who would find the Party badge on Kurt if Oskar were to give way under his son’s blows.

When Maria with the widow Greff’s help parted us, I was clutching the pin victoriously in my fist. Matzerath was glad to be rid of it. Maria was busy with Kurt, who was bawling. The open pin pricked my hand. I had never liked the thing much and I still didn’t. But just as I was trying to pin it to the back of Matzerath’s jacket—what business of mine, after all, was that Party of his?—they were in the shop over our heads and, to judge by the screaming women, in the neighboring cellars as well.