Bebra laughed, though I don’t know what with. His wheelchair trembled, winds ruffled his gnome’s hair over the hundred thousand wrinkles that constituted his face.

Again I begged for mercy, charging my voice with a sweetness which I knew to be effective and covering my face with my hands, which I knew to be touchingly beautiful: “Mercy, dear Master Bebra! Have mercy!”

Bebra, who had set himself up as my judge and played the role to perfection, pressed a button on the little ivory-white switchboard that he held between his hands and knees.

The carpet behind me brought in the green sweater girl, carrying a folder. She spread out the contents of the folder on the oak table top, which was roughly on a level with my collarbone, too high for me to see exactly what she was spreading out. Then she handed me a fountain pen: I was to purchase Bebra’s mercy with my signature.

Still, I ventured to ask a few questions. I couldn’t just sign with my eyes closed.

“The document before you,” said Bebra, “is a contract for your professional services. Your full name is required. We have to know whom we are dealing with. First name and last name: Oskar Matzerath.”

The moment I had signed, the hum of the electric motor increased in force. I looked up from the fountain pen just in time to see a wheelchair race across the room and vanish through a side door.

The reader may be tempted to believe that the contract in duplicate to which I affixed my signature provided for the sale of my soul or committed me to some monstrous crime. Nothing of the sort. With the help of Dr. Dösch I studied the contract in the foyer and found no difficulty in understanding that all Oskar had to do was to appear in public all by himself with his drum, to drum as I had drummed as a three-year-old and once again, more recently, in Schmuh’s Onion Cellar. The West Concert Bureau undertook to organize tours for me and to provide suitable advance publicity.

I received a second generous advance, on which I lived while the publicity campaign was in progress. From time to time I dropped in at the office and submitted to interviewers and photographers. Dr. Dösch and the sweater girl were always most obliging, but I never saw Master Bebra again.

Even before the first tour I could well have afforded better lodgings. However, I stayed on at Zeidler’s for Klepp’s sake. Klepp resented my dealings with an agency; I did what I could to placate him but I did not give in, and there were no more expeditions to the Old City to drink beer or eat fresh blood sausage with onions. Instead, to prepare myself for the life of a traveling man, I treated myself to excellent dinners at the railroad station.

Oskar hasn’t space enough to describe his success at length. The publicity posters, building me up as a miracle man, a faith-healer, and little short of a Messiah, proved scandalously effective. I made my debut in the cities of the Ruhr Valley in halls with a seating capacity of fifteen hundred to two thousand. The spotlight discovered me in a dinner jacket, all alone against a black velvet curtain. I played the drum, but my following did not consist of youthful jazz addicts. No, those who flocked to hear me were the middle-aged, the elderly, and the doddering. My message was addressed most particularly to the aged, and they responded. They did not sit silent as I awakened my three-year-old drum to life; they gave vent to their pleasure, though not in the language of their years, but burbling and babbling like three-year-olds. “Rashu, Rashu!” they piped when Oskar drummed up an episode from the miraculous life of the miraculous Rasputin. But most of my listeners were not really up to Rasputin. My biggest triumphs were with numbers evoking not any particular happenings, but stages of infancy and childhood. I gave these numbers such titles as: “Baby’s First Teeth”, “That Beastly Whooping Cough”, “Itchy Stockings”, “Dream of Fire and You’ll Wet Your Bed”.

That appealed to the old folks. They went for it hook, line, and sinker. They cut their first teeth and their gums ached. Two thousand old folks hacked and whooped when I infected them with whooping cough. How they scratched when I put woolen stockings on them! Many an old lady, many an aged gentleman wet his or her underwear, not to mention the upholstery he or she was sitting on, when I made the children dream of a fire. I don’t recall whether it was in Wuppertal or in Bochum; no, it was in Recklingshausen: I was playing to a house of aged miners, the performance was sponsored by the union. These old-timers, I said to myself, have been handling black coal all their lives; surely they’ll be able to put up with a little black fright. Whereupon Oskar drummed “The Wicked Black Witch” and lo and behold, fifteen hundred crusty old miners, who had lived through cave-ins, explosions, flooded pits, strikes, and unemployment, let out the most bloodcurdling screams I have ever heard. Their screams—and this is why I mention the incident—demolished several windows in spite of the heavy drapes covering them. Indirectly, I had recovered my glass-killing voice. However, I made little use of it; I didn’t want to ruin my business.

Yes, business was good. When the tour was over and I reckoned up with Dr. Dösch, it turned out that my tin drum was a gold mine.

I hadn’t even asked after Bebra the master and had given up hope of seeing him again. But as Dr. Dösch soon informed me, Bebra was waiting for me.

My second meeting with the master was quite different from the first. This time Oskar was not made to stand in front of the oak table top. Instead, I sat in an electric wheelchair, made to order for Oskar. Dr. Dösch had made tape recordings of my press notices, and Bebra and I sat listening as he ran them off. Bebra seemed pleased. To me the effusions of the newspapers were rather embarrassing. They were building me up into a cult, Oskar and his drum had become healers of the body and soul. And what we cured best of all was loss of memory. The word “Oskarism” made its first appearance, but not, I am sorry to say, its last.

Afterward, the sweater girl brought me tea and put two pills on the master’s tongue. We chatted. He had ceased to be my accuser. It was like years before at the Four Seasons Café, except that the Signora, our Roswitha, was missing. When I couldn’t help noticing that Master Bebra had fallen asleep over some long-winded story about my past, I spent ten or fifteen minutes playing with my wheelchair, making the motor hum, racing across the floor, circling to left and right. I had difficulty in tearing myself away from this remarkable piece of furniture, which offered all the possibilities of a harmless vice.

My second tour was at Advent. I conceived my program accordingly and was highly praised in the religious press. For I succeeded in turning hardened old sinners into little children, singing Christmas carols in touching watery voices. “Jesus, for thee I live, Jesus, for thee I die,” sang two thousand five hundred aged souls, whom no one would have suspected of such childlike innocence or religious zeal.

My third tour coincided with carnival, and again I rearranged my program. No so-called children’s carnival could have been merrier or more carefree than those evenings that turned palsied grandmas into Carmens and Indian maidens, while Grampa went bang-bang and led his robbers into battle.

After carnival I signed a contract with a record company. The recording was done in soundproof studios. The sterile atmosphere cramped my style at first, but then I had the walls plastered with enormous photographs of old people such as one sees in homes for the aged and on park benches. By fixing my attention on them, I was able to drum with the same conviction as in concert halls full of human warmth.

The records sold like hotcakes. Oskar was rich. Did that make me give up my miserable sometime bathroom in the Zeidler flat? No. Why not? Because of my friend Klepp and also because of the empty room behind the frosted-glass door, where Sister Dorothea had once lived and breathed. What did Oskar do with all his money? He made Maria, his Maria, a proposition.