Without bothering to read over what Bruno my keeper has written, I, Oskar, take up my pen again.

Bruno has just measured me with his folding rule. He has left the rule lying alongside me, and hurried out of the room, loudly proclaiming the result. He even dropped the knot creation he was secretly working on while I was telling him my story. I presume that he has gone to get Dr. (Miss) Hornstetter.

But before she comes in and confirms Bruno’s measurements, Oskar will tell you what it is all about: In the three days during which I told my keeper the story of my growth, I grew a whole inch.

And so, as of today, Oskar measures four feet two. He will now relate how he fared after the war when in relatively good health, despite my deformity, writing with difficulty, but fluent at talking and reading, I was discharged from the Düsseldorf City Hospital in the hope that I might embark—as people discharged from hospitals are always expected to do—on a new and adult life.

Fat, sleepy, good-natured. There had been no need for Guste Truczinski to change in becoming Guste Köster, especially as her association with Köster had been so very limited: they had been engaged for two weeks when he was shipped out to the Arctic Front; when he came home on furlough, they had married and spent a few nights together, most of them in air-raid shelters. Though there was no news of Köster’s whereabouts after the army in Courland surrendered, Guste, when asked about her husband, would reply with assurance, at the same time gesturing toward the kitchen: “Oh, he’s a prisoner in Russia. There’s going to be some changes around here when he gets back.”

The changes she had in mind involved Maria and more particularly little Kurt. Discharged from the hospital, I said goodbye to the nurses, promising to come and see them as soon as I had the chance. Then I took the streetcar to Bilk, where the two sisters and my son Kurt were living. The apartment house stopped at the fourth floor; the rest, including the roof, had been destroyed by fire. Entering the third-floor flat, I found Maria and my son busily engaged in black market operations. Kurt, who was six years old, counted on his fingers. Even in the black market Maria remained loyal to her Matzerath. She dealt in synthetic honey. She spooned the stuff from unlabeled pails and weighed out quarter-pounds on the kitchen scales. I had barely time to get my bearings in the cramped flat before she put me to work doing up packages.

Kurt was sitting behind his counter—a soap box. He looked in the direction of his homecoming father, but his chilly grey eyes seemed to be concerned with something of interest that could be seen through me. Before him on his counter lay a sheet of paper on which he was adding up imaginary columns of figures. After just six weeks of schooling in overcrowded, poorly heated classrooms, he had the look of a very busy self-made man.

Guste Köster was drinking coffee, real coffee, as Oskar noticed when she presented me with a cupful. While I busied myself with the honey, she observed my hump with curiosity and a look suggesting commiseration with her sister Maria. It was all she could do to sit still and not caress my hump, for like all women she was convinced that it’s good luck to touch, pat, or stroke a hump. To Guste good luck meant the return of Köster, who would change everything. She restrained herself, patted her coffee cup instead, and heaved a sigh, followed by the litany that I was to hear several times a day for several months: “When Köster gets home there’s going to be changes around here before you can say Jakob Schmidt. You can bet your bottom taler on that.”

Guste frowned on black market activities but was not averse to drinking the real coffee obtained for synthetic honey. When customers came, she left the living room and padded away into the kitchen, where she raised an ostentatious clatter in protest.

There was no shortage of customers. At nine o’clock, right after breakfast, the bell began to ring: short, long, short. At 10 p.m. Guste disconnected the bell, often amid protests from Kurt, whose schooling made distressing inroads on his business day.

“Synthetic honey?” said the visitor.

Maria nodded gently, and asked: “A quarter or a half a pound?” But there were other customers who didn’t want honey. They would say: “Flints?” Whereupon Kurt, who had school alternately in the morning and afternoon, would emerge from his columns of figures, grope about under his sweater for a little cloth bag, and project his challenging childlike voice into the living room air: “Would you like three or four? My advice is to take five. They’ll be up to twenty-four before you know it. Last week they were eighteen, and this morning I had to ask twenty. If you’d come two hours ago, right after school, I could have let you have them for twenty-one.”

In a territory six blocks long and four blocks wide, Kurt was the only dealer in flints. He had a “source”; he never told anybody who or what it was, though he never stopped talking about it. Even before going to sleep at night, he would say, instead of his prayers: “I’ve got a source.”

As his father, I claimed that I was entitled to know my son’s source. He didn’t even trouble to inject a note of mystery into his voice when he said “I’ve got a source.” If his tone conveyed anything at all, it was pride and self-assurance. “Where did you get those flints?” I roared at him. “You will tell me this minute.”

Maria’s standing remark in that period, whenever I tried to get at the source, was: “Leave the kid alone. In the first place, it’s none of your business; in the second place, if anybody’s going to ask questions, it’s me; in the third place, don’t take on like you was his father. A few months ago, you couldn’t even say boo.”

When I went on too long about Kurt’s source, Maria would smack her hand down on the honey pail and, indignant to the elbow, launch into a diatribe against me and also Guste, who sometimes supported Oskar in his effort to penetrate the source: “A fine lot you are. Trying to ruin the kid’s business. Biting the hand that feeds you. When I think of the ten calories Oskar gets for sick relief that he gobbles up in two days, it makes me good and sick, in fact, it makes me laugh.”

Oskar can’t deny it: I had a monstrous appetite in those days: it was thanks to Kurt and his source, which brought in more than the honey, that Oskar was able to regain his strength after the meager hospital fare.

Oskar was reduced to shamefaced silence; taking the ample pocket money with which little Kurt deigned to provide him, he would leave the flat in Bilk and stay away as much as he could, to avoid having his nose rubbed in his shame.

Today there are plenty of well-heeled critics of the economic miracle who proclaim nostalgically—and the less they remember about the situation in those days the more nostalgic they become—“ Ah, those were the days, before the currency reform! Then people were still alive! Their empty stomachs didn’t prevent them from waiting in line for theater tickets. And the wonderful parties we used to improvise with two pretzels and a bottle of potato schnaps, so much more fun than the fancy doings today, with all their caviar and champagne.”

This is what you might call the romanticism of lost opportunities. I could lament with the best of them if I chose, for in the days when Kurt’s “source” was gushing, I developed a sudden interest in adult education and imbibed a certain amount of culture almost free of charge. I took courses at night school, became a steady visitor at the British Center, also known as “Die Brücke”, discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants alike, and shared the guilt feelings of all those who said to themselves: “Let’s do our stint now; when things begin to look up we’ll have it over with and our consciences will be all right.”