In May the canvas was gone from over the three-wheeler, the sliding door stood open. I could see inside the workshop grey on grey, stones on the cutting bench, a polishing machine that looked like a gallows, shelves full of plaster models, and at last Korneff. He walked with a stoop and permanently bent knees, his head thrust rigidly forward. The back of his neck was crisscrossed with grimy, once pink adhesive tape. He stepped out of the shop with a rake and, assuming no doubt that spring had come, began to clean up the grounds. He raked carefully between the tombstones, leaving tracks in the gravel, occasionally stopping to remove dead leaves from one of the monuments. As he was raking between the shell-lime cushions and diorite slabs near the fence, I was suddenly surprised by his voice: “What’s the matter, boy; don’t they want you at home no more?”

“I’m very fond of your tombstones,” I said.

“Mustn’t say that out loud,” he replied. “Bad luck. Talk like that and they’ll be putting one on top of you.”

Only then did he move his stiff neck, catching me, or rather my hump, in a sidelong glance: “Say, what they done to you? Don’t it get in your way for sleeping?”

I let him have his laugh. Then I explained that a hump was not necessarily a drawback, that it didn’t get me down, that, believe it or not, some women and even young girls had a special weakness for humps and were only too glad to adapt themselves to the special proportions and possibilities of a hunchback.

Leaning his chin on his rake handle, Korneff pondered: “Maybe so. I’ve heard tell of it.”

He went on to tell me about his days in the basalt quarries when he had had a woman with a wooden leg that could be unbuckled. This, to his way of thinking, was something like my hump, even if my gas meter, as he insisted on calling it, was not removable. The stonecutter’s memory was long, broad, and thorough. I waited patiently for him to finish, for his woman to buckle her leg on again. Then I asked if I could visit his shop.

Korneff opened the gate in the fence and pointed his rake in invitation at the open sliding door. Gravel crunched beneath my feet and a moment later I was engulfed in the smell of sulphur, lime, and dampness.

Heavy, pear-shaped wooden mallets with fibrous hollows showing frequent repetition of the same expert blow, rested on roughly hewn slabs of stone. Stippling irons for the embossing mallet, stippling tools with round heads, freshly reforged and still blue from tempering; long, springy etching-chisels and bull chisels for marble, polishing paste drying on four-cornered sawing trestles, and, on wooden rollers, ready to move, an up-ended, polished travertine slab, fatty, yellow, cheesy, porous for a double grave.

“That’s a bush hammer, that’s a spoon chisel, that’s a groove cutter, and that,” Korneff lifted a board a hand’s breadth wide and three feet long and examined the edge closely, “that’s a straight edge; I use it to whack the apprentices with if they don’t keep moving.”

My question was not one of pure politeness: “You employ apprentices then?”

Korneff told me his troubles: “ I could keep five boys busy. But you can’t get none. All the young pantywaists wants to learn nowadays is how to turn a crooked penny on the black market.” Like me, the stonecutter was opposed to the dark machinations that prevented so many a young hopeful from learning a useful trade. While Korneff was showing me carborundum stones ranging from coarse to fine and their effect on a Solnhof slab, I was playing with a little idea. Pumice stones, chocolate-brown sandstone for rough polishing, tripoli for high polish, and there was my little idea popping up again, but it had taken on a higher, shinier polish. Korneff showed me models of lettering, spoke of raised and sunken inscriptions, and told me about gilding; that it wasn’t nearly so expensive as generally supposed, that you could gild a horse and rider with one genuine old taler. This made me think of the equestrian monument of Kaiser Wilhelm on the Heumarkt in Danzig, which the Polish authorities would maybe decide to gild, but neither horse nor rider could make me give up my little idea, which seemed to become shinier and shinier. I continued to toy with it, and went so far as to formulate it while Korneff was explaining the workings of a three-legged stippling machine for sculpture and tapping his knuckles on some plaster models of Christ crucified: “So you’re thinking of taking on an apprentice?” This was my first formulation. My little idea gained ground. What I actually said was: “I gather you’re looking for an apprentice, or am I mistaken?” Korneff rubbed the adhesive tape covering the boils on his neck. “I mean, would you consider taking me on as an apprentice, other things being equal?” I had put it awkwardly and corrected myself at once: “Don’t underestimate my strength, my dear Mr. Korneff. It’s just my legs that are underdeveloped. There’s plenty of strength in my arms.” Delighted with my resolution and determined to go the whole hog, I bared my left arm and asked Korneff to feel my muscle, which was small but tough. When he made no move to feel it, I picked up an embossing chisel that was lying on some shell lime and made the metal bob up and down on my biceps. I continued my demonstration until Korneff turned on the polishing machine; a carborundum disk raced screeching over the travertine pedestal of a slab for a double grave. After a while Korneff, his eyes glued to the machine, shouted above the noise: “Sleep on it, boy. It’s hard work. Come back and see me when you’ve thought it over. I’ll take you on if you still feel like it.”

Following Korneff’s instructions, I slept a whole week on my little idea; I weighed and compared: on the one hand Kurt’s firestones, on the other, Korneff’s tombstones. Maria was always finding fault: “You’re a drain on our budget, Oskar. Why don’t you start something? Tea or cocoa maybe, or powdered milk.” I started nothing; instead, I basked in the approval of Guste, who held up the absent Köster as the example to follow and praised me for my negative attitude toward the black market. What really troubled me was my son Kurt, who sat there writing columns of imaginary figures and overlooking me just as I had managed for years to overlook Matzerath.

We were having our lunch. Guste had disconnected the bell so our customers wouldn’t find us eating scrambled eggs with bacon. Maria said: “You see, Oskar, we have nice things to eat. Why? Because we don’t sit with our hands folded.” Kurt heaved a sigh. Flints had dropped to eighteen. Guste ate heartily and in silence. I too. I savored the eggs, but even while savoring, I felt miserable, perhaps because powdered eggs are not really so very appetizing, and suddenly, while biting into some gristle, experienced a yearning for happiness so intense that it made my cheeks tingle. Against all my better judgment, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness. I wanted to be boundlessly happy. While the others were still eating, content with scrambled egg-powder, I left the table and went to the cupboard, as though it contained happiness. Rummaging through my compartment, I found, not happiness, but behind the photograph album, two packages of Mr. Fajngold’s disinfectant. From one package I took—no, not happiness, but the thoroughly disinfected ruby necklace which had belonged to my mother, which Jan Bronski years ago, on a winter’s night that smelled of more snow to come, had removed from a shopwindow with a circular hole cut out a short while before by Oskar, who in those days was still happy and able to cut glass with his voice. And with that necklace I left the flat. The necklace, I felt, would be my start, my jumping-off place. I took the car to the Central Station, thinking if all goes well… and throughout the lengthy negotiations, the same thoughts were with me. But the one-armed man and the Saxon, whom the other called the Assessor, were aware only of my article’s material value, they failed to suspect what pathways of happiness they laid out before me when in return for my poor mama’s necklace they gave me a real leather briefcase and twelve cartons of “Ami” cigarettes. Lucky Strikes.