Oskar is somewhat at a loss. His flight is drawing to an end and with it his story: Will the escalator in the Maison Blanche Metro station be high, steep, and symbolic enough to clank down the curtain suitably upon these recollections?

But there is also my thirtieth birthday. To all those who feel that an escalator makes too much noise and those who are not afraid of the Black Witch, I offer my thirtieth birthday as an alternate end. For of all birthdays, isn’t the thirtieth the most significant? It has the Three in it, and it foreshadows the Sixty, which thus becomes superfluous. As the thirty candles were burning on my birthday cake this morning, I could have wept with joy and exaltation, but I was ashamed in front of Maria: at thirty, you’ve lost your right to cry.

The moment I trod the first step of the escalator—if an escalator can be said to have a first step—and it began to bear me upward, I burst out laughing. Despite or because of my fear, I laughed. Slowly it mounted the steep incline—and there they were. There was still time for half a cigarette. Two steps above me a couple of lovers were carrying on brazenly. A step below me an old woman, whom I at first, for no good reason, suspected of being the Witch. She had on a hat decorated with fruit. Smoking, I summoned up—I worked hard at it—the kind of thoughts that an escalator should suggest. Oskar was Dante on his way back from hell; up above, at the end of escalator, those dynamic reporters for Der Spiegel were waiting for him. “Well, Dante,” they ask, “how was it down there?” Then I was Goethe, the poet prince, and the reporters asked me how I had enjoyed my visit to the Mothers. But then I was sick of poets and I said to myself: it’s not any reporters for Der Spiegel or detectives with badges in their pockets that are standing up there. It’s She, the Witch. “Here’s the black, wicked Witch. Ha, ha, ha!”

Alongside the escalator there was a regular stairway, carrying people from the street down into the Metro station. It seemed to be raining outside. The people looked wet. That had me worried; I hadn’t had time to buy a raincoat before leaving Düsseldorf. However, I took another look upward, and Oskar saw that the gentlemen with the faces had civilian umbrellas—but that cast no doubt on the existence of the Black Witch.

How shall I address them? I wondered, slowly savoring my cigarette as slowly the escalator aroused lofty feelings in me and enriched my knowledge: one is rejuvenated on an escalator, on an escalator one grows older and older. I had the choice of leaving that escalator as a three-year-old or as a man of sixty, of meeting the Interpol, not to mention the Black Witch, as an infant or as an old man.

It must be getting late. My iron bedstead looks so tired. And Bruno my keeper has twice showed an alarmed brown eye at the peephole. There beneath the water color of the anemones stands my uncut cake with its thirty candles. Perhaps Maria is already asleep. Someone, Maria’s sister Guste, I think, wished me luck for the next thirty years. I envy Maria her sound sleep. What did Kurt, the schoolboy, the model pupil, always first in his class, what did my son Kurt wish me for my birthday? When Maria sleeps, the furniture round about her sleeps too. I have it: Kurt wished me a speedy recovery for my thirtieth birthday. But what I wish myself is a slice of Maria’s sound sleep, for I am tired and words fail me. Klepp’s young wife made up a silly but well-meant birthday poem addressed to my hump. Prince Eugene was also deformed, but that didn’t prevent him from capturing the city and fortress of Belgrade. Prince Eugene also had two fathers. Now I am thirty, but my hump is younger. Louis XIV was Prince Eugene’s presumptive father. In years past, beautiful women would touch my hump in the street, they thought it would bring them luck. Prince Eugene was deformed and that’s why he died a natural death. If Jesus had had a hump, they would never have nailed him to the Cross. Must I really, just because I am thirty years of age, go out into the world and gather disciples round me?

But that’s the kind of idea you get on an escalator. Higher and higher it bore me. Ahead of me and above me the brazen lovers. Behind and below me the woman with the hat. Outside it was raining, and up on top stood the detectives from the Interpol. The escalator steps had slats on them. An escalator ride is a good time to reconsider, to reconsider everything: Where are you from? Where are you going? Who are you? What is your real name? What are you after? Smells assailed me: Maria’s youthful vanilla. The sardine oil that my mother warmed up in the can and drank hot until she grew cold and was laid under the earth. In spite of Jan Bronski’s lavish use of cologne, the smell of early death had seeped through all his buttonholes.

The storage cellar of Greff’s vegetable store had smelled of winter potatoes. And once again the smell of the dry sponges that dangled from the slates of the first-graders. And my Roswitha who smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg. I had floated on a cloud of carbolic acid when Mr. Fajngold sprinkled disinfectant on my fever. Ah, and the Catholic smells of the Church of the Sacred Heart, all those vestments that were never aired, the cold dust, and I, at the left side-altar, lending my drum, to whom?

But that’s the kind of idea you get on an escalator. Today they want to pin me down, to nail me to the Cross. They say: you are thirty. So you must gather disciples. Remember what you said when they arrested you. Count the candles on your birthday cake, get out of that bed and gather disciples. Yet so many possibilities are open to a man of thirty. I might, for example, should they really throw me out of the hospital, propose to Maria a second time. My chances would be much better today. Oskar has set her up in business, he is famous, he is still making good money with his records, and he has grown older, more mature. At thirty a man should marry. Or I could stay single and marry one of my professions, buy a good shell-lime quarry, hire stonecutters, and deliver directly to the builders. At thirty a man should start a career. Or—in case my business is ruined by prefabricated slabs—I could revive my partnership with the Muse Ulla, side by side we would dispense inspiration to artists. Some day I might even make an honest woman of the Muse, poor thing, with all those blitz engagements. At thirty a man should marry. Or should I grow weary of Europe, I could emigrate: America, Buffalo, my old dream: Off I go, in search of my grandfather, Joe Colchic, formerly Joseph Koljaiczek, the millionaire and sometime firebug. At thirty a man should settle down. Or I could give in and let them nail me to the Cross. Just because I happen to be thirty, I go out and play the Messiah they see in me; against my better judgment I make my drum stand for more than it can, I make a symbol out of it, found a sect, a party, or maybe only a lodge.

This escalator thought came over me in spite of the lovers above me and the woman with hat below me. Have I said that the lovers were two steps, not one, above me, that I put down my suitcase between myself and the lovers? The young people in France are very strange. As the escalator carried us all upward, she unbuttoned his leather jacket, then his shirt, and fondled his bare, eighteen-year-old skin. But so businesslike, so completely unerotic were her movements that a suspicion arose in me: these youngsters are being paid by the government to keep up the reputation of Paris, city of unabashed love. But when they kissed, my suspicion vanished, for he nearly choked on her tongue and was still in the midst of a coughing fit when I snuffed out my cigarette, preferring to meet the detectives as a non-smoker. The old woman below me and her hat—what I am trying to say is that her hat was on a level with my head because the two steps made up for my small stature—did nothing to attract attention, all she did was to mutter and protest a bit all by herself, but lots of old people do that in Paris. The rubber-covered bannister moved up along with us. You could put your hand on it and give your hand a free ride. I should have done so if I had brought gloves along. Each tile on the wall reflected a little drop of electric light. Cream-colored pipes and cables kept us company as we mounted. It should not be thought that this escalator made a fiendish din. Despite its mechanical character, it was a gentle, easygoing contrivance. In spite of the witch jingle, the Maison Blanche Metro station struck me as a pleasant place to be in, almost homelike. I felt quite at home on that escalator; despite my terror, despite the Witch, I should have esteemed myself happy if only the people round me on the escalator had not been total strangers but my friends and relatives, living and dead: my poor mama between Matzerath and Jan Bronski; Mother Truczinski, the grey-haired mouse, with her children Herbert, Guste, Fritz, Maria; Greff the greengrocer and his slovenly Lina; and of course Bebra the master and Roswitha so lithe and graceful—all those who had framed my questionable existence, those who had come to grief on the shoal of my existence. But at the top, where the escalator ended, I should have liked, in place of the Interpol men, to see the exact opposite of the Black Witch: my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek standing there like a mountain, ready to receive me and my retinue, our journey ended, under her skirts, into the heart of the mountain. Instead there were two gentlemen, wearing not wide skirts, but American-style raincoats. And toward the end of my journey, I had to smile with all ten of my toes and admit to myself that the brazen lovers above me and the muttering woman below me were plain ordinary detectives.