Next day she filled out the application and three days later we had our papers. After that Mr. Fajngold was silent. He closed the shop. While Maria was packing, he sat in the dark shop on the counter, beside the scale; he hadn’t even the heart to spoon out honey. But when Maria came to say goodbye, he slid off the counter, got out the bicycle and trailer, and said he would take us to the station.

Oskar and the baggage—we were allowed fifty pounds each—were loaded on the two-wheeled rubber-tired trailer. Mr. Fajngold pushed the bicycle. Maria held Kurt by the hand and took a last look back as we turned left into Elsenstrasse. I couldn’t look back at Labesweg because it hurt me to twist my neck. Oskar’s head remained motionless on his shoulders, and it was only with my eyes, which had preserved their mobility, that I took leave of Marienstrasse, Striessbach, Kleinhammer-Park, the underpass, which still oozed as disgustingly as ever, Bahnhofstrasse, my undestroyed Church of the Sacred Heart, and the Langfuhr station—Langfuhr was now called Wrzeszcz, but who can pronounce that?

We had to wait. When a train finally rolled in, it was a freight. There were hordes of people and far too many children. The baggage was inspected and weighed. Soldiers threw a bale of straw into each car. There was no music, but at least it wasn’t raining. The weather was partly cloudy with an easterly wind.

We found a place in the fourth car from the end. Mr. Fajngold stood below us on the tracks, his thin, reddish hair blowing in the wind. When the locomotive revealed its arrival with a jolt, he stepped closer, handed Maria three packages of margarine and two of synthetic honey, and when orders in Polish, screaming and wailing, announced that the train was pulling out, he added a package of disinfectant to our provisions—Lysol is more important than life. Then we began to move, leaving Mr. Fajngold behind. He stood there with his reddish hair blowing in the wind, becoming smaller and smaller, as is fitting and proper when trains leave, until nothing was left of him but a waving arm, and soon he had ceased to exist altogether.

Those aches and pains are still with me. They have thrown me back on my pillows. I have taken to grinding my teeth to keep from hearing the grinding in my bones and joints. I look at my ten fingers and have to admit that they are swollen. A last attempt to beat my drum has proved to me that Oskar’s fingers are not only somewhat swollen but temporarily no good for drumming; they just can’t hold the drumsticks.

My fountain pen also refuses my guidance. I shall have to ask Bruno for cold compresses. Then, when my hands, feet, and knees are all wrapped and cool, when Bruno has put a cool cloth on my forehead too, I shall give him paper and pencil; for I don’t like lending him my fountain pen. Will Bruno be willing and able to listen properly? Will his record do justice to that journey in a freight car, begun on June 12, 1945? Bruno is sitting at the table under the picture of the anemones. Now he turns his head, showing me the side of it that calls itself face, while with the eyes of a mythical animal he looks past me, one eye to the left, the other to the right of me. He lays the pencil slantwise over his thin, puckered lips. That is his way of impersonating someone who is waiting. But even admitting that he is really waiting for me to speak, waiting for the signal to begin taking down my story, his thoughts are busy with his knotted fantasies. He will knot strings together, whereas Oskar’s task will be to disentangle my knotted history with the help of many words. Now Bruno writes:

I, Bruno Münsterberg, of Altena in Sauerland, unmarried and childless, am a male nurse in the private pavilion of the local mental hospital. Mr. Matzerath, who has been here for over a year, is my patient. I have other patients, of whom I cannot speak here. Mr. Matzerath is my most harmless patient. He never gets so wild that I have to call in other nurses. Today, in order to rest his overstrained fingers, he has asked me to write for him and to stop making my knotted figures. However, I have put a supply of string in my pocket and as he tells his story, I shall start on the lower limbs of a figure which, in accordance with Mr. Matzerath’s story, I shall call “Refugee from the East.” This will not be the first figure I have derived from my patient’s stories. So far, I have done his grandmother, whom I call “Potato in Four Skirts,” and his grandfather, the raftsman, whose string image I have called, rather pretentiously perhaps, “Columbus”; my strings have turned his poor mama into “The Beautiful Fish Eater,” and his two fathers, Matzerath and Jan Bronski, have become “The Two Skat Players.” I have also rendered the scarry back of his friend Herbert Truczinski; this piece is entitled “Rough Going.” In addition, I have drawn inspiration from such sites and edifices as the Polish Post Office, the Stockturm, the Stadt-Theater, Arsenal Passage, the Maritime Museum, the cellar of Greff’s vegetable store, Pestalozzi School, the Brösen bathing establishment, the Church of the Sacred Heart, the Four Seasons Café, the Baltic Chocolate Factory, the pillboxes of the Atlantic Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Stettin Station in Berlin, Reims Cathedral, and neither last nor least the apartment house where Mr. Matzerath first saw the light of this world. The fences and tombstones of the cemeteries of Saspe and Brenntau suggested ornaments; with knot upon knot, I have made the Vistula and the Seine flow and set the waves of the Baltic and Atlantic dashing against coasts of pure disembodied string. I have shaped pieces of string into Kashubian potato fields and Norman pastures, and peopled the resulting landscape, which I call Europe for short, with such figures as post office defenders, grocers, people on rostrums, people at the foot of the rostrums, schoolboys with cornucopias, expiring museum attendants, juvenile delinquents preparing for Christmas, Polish cavalrymen at sunset, ants that make history. Theater at the Front, standing men, disinfecting recumbent figures in Treblinka Camp. I have just begun “Refugee from the East,” which will probably develop into a group of refugees from the East.

On June 12, 1945, at approximately 11 a.m., Mr. Matzerath pulled out of Danzig, which at the time was already called Gdansk. He was accompanied by the widow Maria Matzerath, whom my patient refers to as his former mistress, and by Kurt Matzerath, my patient’s alleged son. In addition, he tells me, there were thirty-two other persons in the freight car, including four Franciscan nuns, dressed as such, and a young girl with a kerchief on her head, whom Mr. Oskar Matzerath claims to have recognized as one Lucy Rennwand. In response to repeated questions, my patient admits that this young lady’s real name was Regina Raeck, but he continues to speak of a nameless triangular fox face and call it by name, namely Lucy. All this to the contrary notwithstanding, the young lady’s real name, as I here beg leave to state, was Miss Regina Raeck. She was traveling with her parents, her grandparents, and a sick uncle who for his part was accompanied by, in addition to his family, an acute cancer of the stomach. The sick uncle was a big talker and lost no time in identifying himself as a former Social Democrat.

As far as my patient can remember, the trip was uneventful as far as Gdynia, which for four and a half years had borne the name of Gotenhafen. Two women from Oliva, several children, and an elderly gentleman from Langfuhr cried until the train had passed Zoppot, while the nuns resorted to prayer.

In Gdynia the convoy stopped for five hours. Two women with six children were shown into the car. The Social Democrat, as my patient tells me, protested on the ground that he was sick and was entitled, as a prewar Social Democrat, to special treatment. But when he refused to sit down and hold his tongue, the Polish officer in charge of the convoy slapped him in the face and gave him to understand in very fluent German that he, the Polish officer, didn’t know what “Social Democrat” meant. During the war he had paid forced visits to various parts of Germany, and never had the word Social Democrat been dropped in his hearing. The Social Democrat with the stomach cancer never did get a chance to explain the aims, nature, and history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany to the Polish officer, for the Polish officer left the car, closed the doors, and bolted them from outside.