I led them to the cloakroom, where a bewildered student gave Schmuh’s kindergarteners their wraps; then, with the familiar ditty “Hard-working washerwomen scrubbing out the clothes,” I drummed them up the concrete steps, past the doorman in the rustic sheepskin. I dismissed the kindergarten beneath the night sky of spring, 1950, a trifle cool perhaps, but studded with fairytale stars, as though made to order for the occasion. Forgetful of home, they continued for quite some time to make childish mischief in the Old City, until at length the police helped them to remember their age, social position, and telephone number.

As for me, I giggled and caressed my drum as I went back to the Onion Cellar, where Schmuh was still clapping his hands, still standing bowlegged and wet beside the staircase, seemingly as happy in Auntie Kauer’s kindergarten as on the Rhine meadows when a grown-up Schmuh went shooting sparrows.

I had only been trying to help him. But Schmuh, owner and guiding spirit of the Onion Cellar, could not forgive me for my drum solo which had transformed his well-paying guests into babbling, riotously merry children who wet their pants and cried because they had wet their pants, all without benefit of onions.

Oskar tries to understand him. Could he help fearing my competition when his guests began to push aside the traditional onions and cry out for Oskar, for Oskar’s drum, for me who on my drum could conjure up the childhood of every one of them, however old and feeble?

Up until then, Schmuh had contented himself with dismissing his washroom attendants without notice. Now it was the whole Rhine River Three that he fired. In our place he took on an ambulatory fiddler who, if you closed an eye or two, might have been taken for a gypsy.

But when, as a result of our dismissal, several of the guests, the most faithful at that, threatened to leave the Onion Celhr for good, Schmuh had to accept a compromise. Three times a week the fiddler fiddled. Three times a week we performed, having demanded and obtained a raise: twenty DM a night. There were good tips too; Oskar started a savings account and rejoiced as the interest accrued.

Only too soon my savings account was to become a friend in need and indeed, for then came Death and carried away our Ferdinand Schmuh, our job, and our earnings.

I have already said that Schmuh shot sparrows. Sometimes he took us along in his Mercedes and let us look on. Despite occasional quarrels about my drum, which involved Klepp and Scholle, because they took my part, relations between Schmuh and his musicians remained friendly until, as I have intimated, death came between us.

We piled in. As usual, Schmuh’s wife was at the wheel. Klepp beside her. Between Oskar and Scholle sat Schmuh, holding his rifle over his knees and caressing it from time to time. We stopped just before Kaiserswerth. On both banks of the Rhine lines of trees: the stage was set. Schmuh’s wife stayed in the car and unfolded a newspaper. Klepp had bought some raisins which he munched with noteworthy regularity. Scholle, who had been a student of something or other before taking up the guitar in earnest, managed to conjure up from his memory a number of poems about the river Rhine, which had indeed put its poetic foot forward and, apart from the usual barges, was giving us quite a display of swaying autumnal foliage in the direction of Duisburg, though according to the calendar it was still summer. If Schmuh’s rifle had not spoken up from time to time, that afternoon below Kaiserswerth might well have been termed peaceful or even serene.

By the time Klepp had finished his raisins and wiped his fingers on the grass, Schmuh too had finished. Beside the eleven cold balls of feathers on the newspaper, he laid a twelfth—still quivering, as he remarked. The marksman was already packing up his “bag”—for some unfathomable reason Schmuh always took his victims home with him—when a sparrow settled on a tree root that the river had washed ashore not far from us. The sparrow was so cocky about it, so grey, such a model specimen of a sparrow, that Schmuh couldn’t resist; he who never shot more than twelve sparrows in an afternoon shot a thirteenth—he shouldn’t have.

After he had laid the thirteenth beside the twelve, we went back to the black Mercedes and found Madame Schmuh asleep. Scholle and Klepp got into the back seat. I was about to join them but didn’t; I felt like a little walk, I said, I’d take the streetcar, no need to bother about me. And so they drove off without Oskar, who had been very wise not to ride with them.

I followed slowly. I didn’t have far to go. There was a detour round a stretch of road that was under repair. The detour passed by a gravel pit. And in this gravel pit, some twenty feet below the surface of the road, lay the black Mercedes with its wheels in the air.

Some workmen from the gravel pit had removed the three injured persons and Schmuh’s body from the car. The ambulance was on its way. I climbed down into the pit—my shoes were soon full of gravel—and busied myself a little with the injured; in spite of the pain they were in, they asked me questions, but I didn’t tell them Schmuh was dead. Stiff and startled, he stared up at the sky, which was mostly cloudy. The newspaper containing his afternoon’s bag had been flung out of the car. I counted twelve sparrows but couldn’t find the thirteenth; I was still looking for it when they eased the ambulance down into the gravel pit.

Schmuh’s wife, Klepp, and Scholle had nothing very serious the matter with them: bruises, a few broken ribs. When I went to see Klepp in the hospital and asked him what had caused the accident, he told me an amazing story: As they were driving past the gravel pit, slowly because of the poor condition of the road, hundreds maybe thousands of sparrows had swarmed out of the hedges, bushes, and fruit trees, casting a great shadow over the Mercedes, crashing against the windshield, and frightening Mrs. Schmuh. By sheer sparrow power, they had brought about the accident and Schmuh’s death.

You are free to think what you please of Klepp’s story; Oskar is skeptical, especially when he considers that when Schmuh was buried in the South Cemetery, he, Oskar, was able to count no more sparrows than years before when he had come here to set up tombstones. Be that as it may, as I, in a borrowed top hat, was following the coffin with the mourners, I caught a glimpse of Korneff in Section Nine, setting up a diorite slab for a two-place grave, with an assistant unknown to me. As the coffin with Schmuh in it was carried past the stonecutter on its way to the newly laid-out Section Ten, Korneff doffed his cap in accordance with cemetery regulations; perhaps because of the top hat, he failed to recognize me, but he rubbed his neck in token of ripening or over-ripe boils.

Funerals! I have been obliged to take you to so many cemeteries. Somewhere, I went so far as to say that funerals remind one of other funerals. Very well, I will refrain from speaking at length of Schmuh’s funeral or of Oskar’s retrospective musings at the time. Suffice it to say that Schmuh had a normal, decent burial and that nothing unusual happened. All I really have to tell you is that when they had finished burying Schmuh—the widow was in the hospital, or perhaps a little more decorum would have been maintained—I was approached by a gentleman who introduced himself as Dr. Dösch.

Dr. Dösch ran a concert bureau but the concert bureau did not belong to him. He had been a frequent guest, he told me, at the Onion Cellar. I had never noticed him, but he had been there when I transformed Schmuh’s customers into a band of babbling, happy children. Dösch himself, in fact, as he told me in confidence, had returned to childhood bliss under the influence of my drum, and he was dead set on making a big thing out of me and my “ terrific stunt”, as he called it. He had been authorized to offer me a contract, a terrific contract; why wouldn’t I sign it on the spot? Outside the crematorium, where Leo Schugger, who in Düsseldorf bore the name of Willem Slobber, was waiting in his white gloves for the mourners, Dr. Dösch pulled out a paper which, in return for enormous sums of money, committed the undersigned, hereinafter referred to as “Oskar, the drummer”, to give solo performances in large theaters, to appear all by myself on the stage before audiences numbering two to three thousand. Dösch was inconsolable when I said I could not sign right away. As my reason, I gave Schmuh’s death; Schmuh, I said, had been very close to me, I just couldn’t go to work for someone else before he was cold in his grave, I’d have to think the matter over, maybe I’d take a little trip somewhere; I’d look up Dr. Dösch the moment I got back and then perhaps I would sign this paper that he called a contract.