This is what I said to Maria: If you give Stenzel his walking papers, if you not only forget about marrying him but throw him out altogether, I’ll buy you a modern, up-and-coming delicatessen store. Because after all, my dear Maria, you were born for business and not for any no-good Mr. Stenzel.

I was not mistaken in Maria. She gave up Stenzel and with my financial assistance built up a first-class delicatessen store in Friedrichstrasse. The business prospered and three years later, last week that is—as Maria informed me only yesterday, bursting with joy and not without gratitude—she opened a branch store in Ober-Kassel.

Was it on my return from my seventh or from my eighth tour? In any case it was July and very hot. From the Central Station, where I was besieged by aged autograph hunters, I took a cab straight to the concert bureau and was besieged on alighting by some more aged autograph hunters, who should have been looking after their grandchildren. I sent in my name; the folding doors were open, the carpet still led to the big desk, but behind the desk there was no Bebra and no wheelchair was waiting for me. There was only a smiling Dr. Dösch.

Bebra was dead. He had died several weeks ago. He had not wished them to inform me of his illness. Nothing, not even his death, he had said, must interfere with Oskar’s tour. The will was soon read; I inherited a small fortune and the picture of Roswitha that hung over his desk. At the same time I incurred a severe financial loss, for I was in no state to perform. I called off two whole tours—in Southern Germany and Switzerland—on insufficient notice and was sued for breach of contract.

And alas, my loss was more than financial. Bebra’s death was a severe blow to me and I did not recover overnight. I locked up my drum and refused to stir from my room. To make matters worse, this was the moment my friend Klepp chose to get married, to take a redheaded cigarette girl as his life companion, and all because he had once given her a photograph of himself. Shortly before the wedding, to which I was not invited, he gave up his room and moved to Stockum. Oskar was left as Zeidler’s only roomer.

My relations with the Hedgehog had changed. Now that the papers carried my name in banner headlines, he treated me with respect; in return for a bit of change, he even gave me the key to Sister Dorothea’s room. Later I rented the room to prevent anyone else from doing so.

My sorrow had its itinerary. I opened the doors of both rooms, dragged myself from my bathtub down the fiber runner to Dorothea’s room, gazed into the empty clothes cupboard, faced the ridicule of the washstand mirror, despaired at the sight of the gross, coverless bed, retreated to the hallway, and fled to my room. But there too it was intolerable.

Speculating no doubt on the needs of lonely people, an enterprising East Prussian who had lost his Masurian estates had opened, not far from Julicher-Strasse, an establishment specializing in the rental of dogs.

There I rented Lux, a rottweiler—glossy black, powerful, a trifle too fat. As the only alternative to racing back and forth between my bathtub and Sister Dorothea’s empty clothes cupboard, I began to take walks with Lux.

Lux often led me to the Rhine, where he barked at the ships. He often led me to Rath, to Grafenberg Forest, where he barked at lovers. At the end of July, 1951, he led me to Gerresheim suburb which, with the help of a few factories including a large glassworks, is rapidly losing its rural character. Beyond Gerresheim the path winds between kitchen gardens separated by fence from the outlying pastures and grainfields.

Have I said that it was hot on the day when Lux led me to Gerresheim and past Gerresheim between the grain—rye, it was, I think—and the gardens? When the last houses of the suburb were behind us, I let Lux off the leash. Still he tagged along at my heels; he was a faithful dog, an unusually faithful dog when you consider that in his line of business he had to be faithful to several masters.

The fact is he was too well behaved for my liking, I should rather have seen him run about, and indeed I kicked him to give him the idea. But when he did run off, it was plain that his conscience troubled him; on his return, he would hang his glossy black head and look up at me with those proverbially faithful eyes.

“Run along now. Lux,” I demanded. “Get going.”

Lux obeyed several times but so briefly that I was delighted when at length he disappeared into the rye field and stayed and stayed. Lux must be after a rabbit, I thought. Or maybe he just feels the need to be alone, to be a dog, just as Oskar would like for a little while to be a human without a dog.

I paid no attention to my surroundings. Neither the gardens nor Gerresheim nor the low-lying city in the mist behind it attracted my eye. I sat down on a rusty iron drum, on which cable had at one time been wound, and hardly had Oskar taken his rusty seat when he began to drum on the cable drum with his knuckles. It was very hot. My suit was too heavy for this kind of weather. Lux was gone and did not come back. Of course no cast-iron cable drum could take the place of my little tin drum, but even so: gradually I slipped back into the past. When I bogged down, when the images of the last few years, full of hospitals and nurses, insisted on recurring, I picked up two dry sticks, and said to myself: Just wait a minute, Oskar. Let’s see now who you are and where you’re from. And there they glowed, the two sixty-watt bulbs of the hour of my birth. Between them the moth drummed, while the storm moved furniture in the distance. I heard Matzerath speak, and a moment later my mama. He promised me the store, she promised me a toy; at the age of three I would be given a drum, and so Oskar tried to make the three years pass as quickly as possible; I ate, drank, evacuated, put on weight, let them weigh me, swaddle, bathe, brush, powder, vaccinate, and admire me; I let them call me by name, smiled when expected to, laughed when necessary, went to sleep at the proper time, woke up punctually, and in my sleep made the face that grownups call an angel face. I had diarrhea a few times and several colds, caught whooping cough, hung on to it, and relinquished it only when I had mastered its difficult rhythm, when I had it in my wrists forever, for, as we know, “Whooping Cough” is one of the pieces in my repertory, and when Oskar played “Whooping Cough” to an audience of two thousand, two thousand old men and women hacked and whooped.

Lux whimpered at my feet, rubbed against my knees. Oh, this rented dog that my loneliness had made me rent! There he stood four-legged and tail-wagging, definitely a dog, with that doggy look and something or other in his slavering jaws: a stick, a stone, or whatever may seem desirable to a dog.

Slowly my childhood—the childhood that means so much to me—slipped away. The pain in my gums, foreshadowing my first teeth, died down; tired, I leaned back: an adult hunchback, carefully though rather too warmly dressed, with a wristwatch, identification papers, a bundle of banknotes in his billfold. I put a cigarette between my lips, set a match to it, and trusted the tobacco to expel that obsessive taste of childhood from my oral cavity.

And Lux? Lux rubbed against me. I pushed him away, blew cigarette smoke at him. He didn’t like that but he held his ground and kept on rubbing. He licked me with his eyes. I searched the nearby telegraph wires for swallows, a remedy it seemed to me against importunate dogs. There were no swallows and Lux refused to be driven away. He nuzzled in between my trouser legs, finding his way to a certain spot with as much assurance as if his East Prussian employer had trained him for that kind of thing.

The heel of my shoe struck him twice. He retreated a few feet and stood there, four-legged and quivering, but continued to offer me his muzzle with its stick or stone as insistently as if what he was holding had been not a stick or stone but my wallet which I could feel in my jacket or my watch that was ticking audibly on my wrist.