Not more interesting, but easier to appraise and hence more revealing, are the group photos of that period. How beautiful, how nuptial the wedding dresses were in the days of the Treaty of Rapallo. In his wedding photo Matzerath is still wearing a stiff collar. A fine figure of a man, he looks distinctly elegant, almost intellectual. His right foot is thrust forward, and he rather resembles a movie actor of the day, Harry Liedtke perhaps. The dresses were short. My mama’s wedding dress, white and accordion-pleated, reaches barely below the knee, showing her shapely legs and cunning little dancing feet in white buckled shoes. Other pictures show the whole bridal assemblage. Surrounded by people who dress and pose like city dwellers, my grandmother Anna and her grace-favored brother Vincent are always conspicuous for their provincial gravity and a confidence-inspiring air of unsureness. Jan Bronski, who like my mama stems from the same potato field as his father and his Aunt Anna, manages to hide his rural Kashubian origins behind the festive elegance of a Polish postal official. He is small and frail amid these robust occupiers of space, and yet the extraordinary look in his eyes, the almost feminine regularity of his features, make him the center of every picture, even when he is on the edge of it.

For some time now I have been looking at a group picture taken shortly after the marriage. I have been compelled to take up my drum and drumsticks and, gazing at the faded brownish rectangle, attempt to conjure up the dimly visible three-cornered constellation.

The picture must have been taken in the Bronski flat in Magdeburger-Strasse not far from the Polish Students’ House, for in the background we perceive a sunlit balcony of a type seen only in the Polish quarter, half-concealed by the vinelike foliage of pole beans. Mama is seated, Matzerath and Jan Bronski are standing. But how she sits and how they stand! For a time I foolishly tried to plot the constellation of this triumvirate—for she gave the full value of a man—with the help of a ruler, a triangle, and a school compass that Bruno had to go out for. Starting with the angle between neck and shoulder, I drew a triangle; I spun out projections, deduced similarities, described arcs which met significantly outside the triangle, i.e., in the foliage, and provided a point, because I needed a point, a point of vantage, a point of departure, a point of contact, a point of view.

All I accomplished with my metaphysical geometry was to dig a number of small but annoying holes in the precious photo with the point of my compass. What, I cannot help wondering, is so remarkable about that print? What was it that made me seek and, if you will, actually find mathematical and, preposterously enough, cosmic references in it? Three persons: a woman sitting, two men standing. She with a dark marcel wave, Matzerath curly blond, Jan chestnut brown, combed back flat from the forehead. All three are smiling, Matzerath more than Jan Bronski; and both men a good deal more than Mama, for their smile shows their upper teeth while of her smile there is barely a trace in the corners of her mouth and not the least suggestion in her eyes. Matzerath has his left hand resting on Mama’s right shoulder; Jan contents himself with leaning his right hand lightly on the back of the chair. She, her knees slightly to one side but otherwise directly facing the camera, has in her lap a portfolio which I took years ago for one of Jan’s stamp albums, later reinterpreted as a fashion magazine, and more recently as a collection of movie stars out of cigarette packages. Her hands look as if she would begin to leaf through the album the moment the picture was taken. All three seem happy, as though congratulating one another on their immunity to surprises of the sort that can arise only if one member of the triumvirate should acquire a secret life—if he hasn’t had one all along. In their tripartite solidarity, they have little need of the fourth person, Jan’s wife Hedwig Bronski née Lemke, who may at that time have been pregnant with the future Stephan; all they needed her for was to aim the camera at them, so perpetuating their triangular felicity, photographically at least.

I have detached other rectangles from the album and held them next to this one. Scenes showing either Mama with Matzerath or Mama with Jan Bronski. In none of these pictures is the immutable, the ultimate solution so clearly discernible as in the balcony picture. Jan and Mama by themselves: this one smacks of tragedy, money-grubbing, exaltation turning to surfeit, a surfeit of exaltation. Matzerath and Mama: here we find an atmosphere of conjugal weekends at home, a sizzling of cutlets, a bit of grumbling before dinner and a bit of yawning after dinner; jokes are told before going to bed, and the tax returns are discussed: here we have the cultural background of the marriage. And yet I prefer such photographed boredom to the distasteful snapshot of later years, showing Mama seated on Jan Bronski’s lap in the Forest of Oliva near Freudenthal; because this last picture with its lewdness—Jan’s hand has disappeared under Mama’s skirt—communicates nothing but the mad passion of this unhappy pair, steeped in adultery from the very first day of Mama’s marriage; Matzerath, I presume, was the disabused photographer. Here we see none of the serenity of the balcony picture, none of the delicate, circumspect little gestures which seem to have been possible only when both men were together, standing behind or beside Mama or lying at her feet as on the bathing beach at Heubude; see photo.

There is still another picture which shows the three protagonists of my early years forming a triangle. Though it lacks the concentration of the balcony scene, it emanates the same tense peace, which can probably be concluded only among three persons. We may get pretty sick of the triangle situations in plays; but come to think of it, what can two people do if left to themselves on the stage except dialogue each other to death or secretly long for a third? In my picture the three of them are together. They are playing skat. That is, they are holding their cards like well-organized fans, but instead of looking at their trumps and plotting their strategy, they are looking into the camera. Jan’s hand lies flat, except for the raised forefinger, beside a pile of change; Matzerath is digging his nails into the tablecloth; Mama is indulging in a little joke which strikes me as rather good: she has drawn a card and is showing it to the camera lens but not to her fellow players. How easy it is with a single gesture, by merely showing the queen of hearts, to conjure up a symbol that is not too blatant; for who would not swear by the queen of hearts?

Skat—as everyone should know, skat can only be played three-handed—was not just a handy game for Mama and the two men; it was their refuge, their haven, to which they always retreated when life threatened to beguile them into playing, in one combination or another, such silly two-handed games as backgammon or sixty-six.

That’s enough now for those three, who brought me into the world though they wanted for nothing. Before I come to myself, a word about Gretchen Scheffler, Mama’s girl friend, and her baker consort Alexander Scheffler. He bald-headed, she laughing with her great equine teeth, a good half of which were gold. He short-legged, his feet when he is sitting down dangling several inches above the carpet, she always in dresses she herself had knitted, with patterns that could not be too intricate. From later years, photos of both Schefflers in deck chairs or standing beside lifeboats belonging to the “Strength through Joy” ship Wilhelm Gustloff, or on the promenade deck of the Tannenberg (East Prussian Steamship Lines). Year by year they took trips and brought souvenirs from Pillau, Norway, the Azores, or Italy, safely home to their house in Kleinhammer-Weg, where he baked rolls and she embroidered cushion covers. When Alexander Scheffler was not talking, he never stopped moistening his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, a habit which Matzerath’s friend, Greff the greengrocer who lived across the way, thought obscene and disgusting.