Shortly after Haniel, Mr. Matzerath had gone inside the car to smoke a cigarette. So it was I, the motorman, who had to cry “All aboard! “ Two of the men were wearing green hats with black bands; the third, whom they held between them, was hat-less. I observed that in getting on this third man missed the running board several times, either because of clumsiness or poor eyesight. His companions or guards helped him, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they dragged him brutally, onto my motorman’s platform and then into the car.

I had started off again when suddenly from behind me, from inside the car, I heard a pitiful whimpering and a sound as of someone being slapped. But then I was reassured to hear the firm voice of Mr. Matzerath giving the new arrivals a piece of his mind, telling them to stop hitting an injured, half-blind man who had lost his glasses.

“ You mind your own business,” I heard one of the green hats roar. “This time he’s going to get what’s coming to him. It’s been going on long enough.”

While I drove on slowly in the direction of Gerresheim, my friend Matzerath asked what the poor fellow had done. Then the conversation took a strange turn: We were carried back to the days, in fact to the very first day, of the war: September 1, 1939: it seemed that this man, who was so nearsighted as to be almost blind, had participated as an irregular in the defense of some Polish post office. Strange to say, Mr. Matzerath, who could not have been more than fifteen at the time, knew all about it; he even recognized the poor devil as one Victor Weluhn, a nearsighted carrier of money orders, who had lost his glasses in the battle, escaped while the battle was still on, and given his pursuers the slip. But the chase had continued, they had pursued him till the end of the war, and even then they had not given up. They produced a paper issued in 1939, an execution order. At last they had him, cried the one green hat; the other agreed: “And damn glad to get it over with. I’ve given up all my free time, even my vacations. An order, if you please, is an order, and this one has been hanging fire since ‘39. You think I’ve nothing else to do? I’ve got my work.” He was a salesman, it appeared, and his associate had his troubles too, he had lost a good business in the East Zone and been obliged to start up from scratch. “But enough’s enough; tonight we carry out that order, and that’s an end to the past. Damn lucky we were to catch the last car! “

Thus quite unintentionally I became a motorman on a streetcar carrying two executioners and their intended victim to Gerresheim. The Gerresheim marketplace was deserted and looked rather lopsided; here I turned right, meaning to unload my passengers at the terminus near the glassworks and start home with Mr. Matzerath. Three stations before the terminus, Mr. Matzerath came out on the platform and deposited his briefcase, in which as I knew the preserving jar stood upright, approximately in the place where professional motormen put their lunch-boxes.

“We’ve got to save him. It’s Victor, poor Victor! “ Mr. Matzerath was very upset.

“He still hasn’t found glasses to fit him. He’s terribly nearsighted, they’ll shoot him and he’ll be looking in the wrong direction.” The executioners looked unarmed to me. But Mr. Matzerath had noticed the ungainly lumps in their coats.

“He carried money orders at the Polish Post Office. Now he has the same job at the Federal Post Office. But they hound him after working hours; they still have an order to shoot him.”

Though I could not entirely follow Mr. Matzerath’s explanations, I promised to attend the shooting with him and help him if possible to prevent it.

Behind the glassworks, just before the first gardens—if the moon had been out I could have seen my mother’s garden with its apple tree—I put on the brakes and shouted into the car: “Last stop! All out!” And out they came with their green hats and black hatbands. Again poor Victor had trouble with the running board. Then Mr. Matzerath got out, but first he pulled out his drum from under his coat and asked me to take care of his briefcase with the jar in it.

We followed the executioners and their victim. The lights of the car were still on, and looking back we could see it far in the distance.

We passed along garden fences. I was beginning to feel very tired. When the three of them stopped still ahead of us, I saw that my mother’s garden had been chosen as the execution site. Both of us protested. Paying no attention, they knocked down the board fence, not a very difficult task for it was about to collapse of its own accord, and tied poor Victor to the apple tree just below my crook. When we continued to protest, they turned their flashlight on the crumpled execution order. It was signed by an inspector of courts-martial by the name of Zelewski and dated, if I remember right, Zoppot, October 5, 1939. Even the rubber stamps seemed to be right. The situation looked hopeless. Nevertheless, we talked about the United Nations, collective guilt, Adenauer, and so on; but one of the green hats swept aside all our objections, which were without juridical foundation, he assured us, because the peace treaty had never been signed, or even drawn up. “I vote for Adenauer just the same as you do,” he went on. “But this execution order is still valid; we’ve consulted the highest authorities. We are simply doing our duty and the best thing you can do is to run along.”

We did nothing of the sort. When the green hats produced the machine pistols from under their coats, Mr. Matzerath put his drum in place. At that moment the moon—it was almost full, just the slightest bit battered—burst through the clouds. And Mr. Matzerath began to drum… desperately.

A strange rhythm, yet it seemed familiar. Over and over again the letter O took form: lost, not yet lost, Poland is not yet lost! But that was the voice of poor Victor, he knew the words to Mr. Matzerath’s drumming: While we live, Poland cannot die. The green hats, too, seemed to know that rhythm, I could see them take fright behind their hardware in the moonlight. And well they might. For the march that Mr. Matzerath and poor Victor struck up in my mother’s garden awakened the Polish cavalry to life. Maybe the moon helped, or maybe it was the drum, the moon, and poor, nearsighted Victor’s cracking voice all together that sent those multitudes of horsemen springing from the ground: stallions whinnied, hoofs thundered, nostrils fumed, spurs jangled, hurrah, hurrah!… No, not at all: no thundering, no jangling, whinnying, or shouts of hurrah; silently they glided over the harvested fields outside of Gerresheim, but beyond any doubt they were a squadron of Polish Uhlans, for red and white like Mr. Matzerath’s lacquered drum, the pennants clung to the lances; no, clung is not right, they floated, they glided, and indeed the whole squadron floated beneath the moon, coming perhaps from the moon, floated off, wheeled to the left, toward our garden, floated, seemingly not of flesh and blood, floated like toys fresh out of the box, phantoms, comparable perhaps to the spooklike figures that Mr. Matzerath’s keeper makes out of knotted string: Polish cavalry of knotted string, soundless yet thundering, fleshless, bloodless, and yet Polish, down upon us they thundered, and we threw ourselves upon the ground while the moon and Poland’s horsemen passed over us and over my mother’s garden and all the other carefully tended gardens. But they did not harm the gardens. They merely took along poor Victor and the two executioners and were lost in the open fields under the moon—lost, not yet lost, they galloped off to the east, toward Poland beyond the moon.

Panting, we waited for the night to quiet down, for the heavens to close again and remove the light that alone could have persuaded those riders long dead, long dust, to mount a last charge. I was first to stand up. Though I did not underestimate the influence of the moon, I congratulated Mr. Matzerath on his brilliant performance; a triumph I called it. He waved me aside with a weary, dejected gesture: “Triumph, my dear Gottfried? I have had too many triumphs, too much success in my life. What I would like is to be unsuccessful for once. But that is very difficult and calls for a great deal of work.”