The school board expressed misgivings and demanded a doctor’s certificate. Hollatz said I was a healthy child; my physical development, he had to admit, was that of a three-year-old and I didn’t talk very well, but otherwise I was not mentally inferior to a normal child of five or six. He also said something about my thyroid.

I was subjected to all sorts of examinations and tests. But I had grown accustomed to that kind of thing and my attitude ranged from benevolent to indifferent, especially as no one tried to take my drum away. The destruction of Hollatz’ collection of snakes, toads, and embryos was still remembered with awe.

It was only at home that I was compelled to unsheathe the diamond in my voice. This was on the morning of my first school day, when Matzerath, against his own better judgment, demanded that I leave my drum at home and moreover pass through the portals of the Pestalozzi School without it.

When at length he resorted to force, when he attempted to take what did not belong to him, to appropriate an instrumert he did not know how to play and for which he lacked all feeling, I shattered an empty and allegedly genuine vase. When the genuine vase lay on the carpet in the form of genuine fragments, Matzerath, who was very fond of it, raised a hand to strike me. But at this point Mama jumped up and Jan, who had dropped in for a moment with Stephan and a large ornate cornucopia, intervened.

“Alfred, please, please!” he said in his quiet unctuous way, and Matzerath, subdued by Jan’s blue and Mama’s grey gaze, dropped his hand and thrust it into his trousers pocket.

The Pestalozzi School was a new brick-red, three-story, flat-roofed, boxlike edifice, decorated with sgraffiti and frescoes, which had been built by the Senate of our prolific suburb at the vociferous insistence of the Social Democrats, who at the time were still exceedingly active. I rather liked the box, except for its smell and the Jugendstil athletes in the sgraffiti and frescoes.

In the expanse of gravel outside the gate stood a few trees so unnaturally diminutive that one was startled to find them beginning to turn green; they were supported by iron stakes that looked like croziers. From all directions poured mothers holding colored cornucopias and drawing screaming or model children after them. Never had Oskar seen so many mothers tending toward a single point. They seemed to be on their way to a market where their first– or second-born could be offered for sale.

In the entrance I already caught a whiff of that school smell which has been described often enough and which is more intimate than any perfume in the world. In the lobby four or five huge granite bowls, in a rather casual arrangement, were affixed to the tile floor. From deep down within them water spouted from several sources at once. Surrounded by boys, including some of my own age, they reminded me of my Uncle Vincent’s sow at Bissau, who would occasionally lie down on one flank and tolerate the equally thirsty and violent assault of her piglets.

The boys bent over the bowls with their vertical geysers, allowing their hair to fall forward and the streams of water to gush into their open mouths. I am not sure whether they were playing or drinking. Sometimes two boys stood up almost simultaneously with bloated cheeks, and with a disgusting gurgle spat the mouth-warm water, mixed, you may be certain, with saliva and bread crumbs, into each other’s faces. I, who on entering the lobby had unsuspectingly cast a glance through the open door of the adjoining gymnasium, caught sight of the leather horse, the climbing bars, the climbing rope, and the horrible horizontal bar, crying out as always for a giant swing. All this made me desperately thirsty and like the other boys I should gladly have taken a gulp of water. But it was hardly possible to ask Mama, who was holding me by the hand, to lift Oskar the Lilliputian up to one of the fountains. Even if I had stood on my drum, the fountain would have been beyond my reach. But when with a quick jump I managed to glance over the edge and noted that the drain was blocked with greasy remnants of bread and that the bottom of the bowl was full of a noxious sludge, the thirst I had accumulated in spirit, while my body was wandering in a desert of gymnastic apparatus, left me.

Mama led me up monumental stairs hewn for giants, through resounding corridors into a room over the door of which hung a sign bearing the inscription I-A. The room was full of boys my own age. Their mothers pressed against the wall opposite the window front, clutching in their arms the colored cornucopias covered with tissue paper that were traditional on the first day of school. The cornucopias towered above me. Mama was also carrying one of them.

As my mother led me in, the rabble laughed and the rabble’s mothers as well. A pudgy little boy wanted to beat my drum. Not wishing to demolish any glass, I was obliged to give him a few good kicks in the shins, whereupon he fell down, hitting his well-combed head on a desk, for which offense Mama cuffed me on the back of my head. The little monster yelled. Not I, I only yelled when someone tried to take my drum away. Mama, to whom this public performance was very embarrassing, pushed me down behind the first desk in the section by the windows. Of course the desk was too high. But further back, where the rabble was still more freckled and uncouth, the desks were still higher.

I let well enough alone and sat calmly, because there was nothing to be uncalm about. Mama, who it seemed to me was still suffering from embarrassment, tried to disappear among the other mothers. Here in the presence of her peers she probably felt ashamed of my so-called backwardness. The peers all behaved as though their young dolts, who had grown much too quickly for my taste, were something to be proud of.

I couldn’t look out the window at Frobel’s Meadow, for the level of the window sill was no more appropriate to my stature than was the size of the desk. Too bad. I would have been glad to gaze out at the meadow where, as I knew, scouts under the leadership of Greff the greengrocer were pitching tents, playing lansquenet, and, as befitted boy scouts, doing good deeds. Not that I was interested in their fulsome glorification of camp life. What appealed to me was the sight of Greff in his short pants. Such was his love of slender, wide-eyed, pale boys that he had donned the uniform of Baden-Powell, father of the boy scouts.

Cheated of the coveted view by the insidious architecture, I gazed up at the sky and was soon appeased. New clouds kept forming and drifting southwestward, as though that direction had some special attraction for clouds. I wedged my drum firmly between my knees and the desk, though it had never for so much as a beat thought of wandering off to southwestward. Oskar’s head was protected in the rear by the back rest. Behind me my so-called schoolmates snarled, roared, laughed, wept, and raged. They threw spitballs at me, but I did not turn around; it seemed to me that the tranquil purposive clouds were better worth looking at than a horde of grimacing, hopelessly hysterical louts.

Class I-A calmed down at the entrance of a person who subsequently introduced herself as Miss Spollenhauer. I had no need to calm down for I was already calm, awaiting things to come in a state of almost complete self-immersion. To be perfectly truthful, Oskar gave barely a thought to what the future might hold in store, for he required no distraction. Let us say, then, that he was not waiting but just sitting at his desk, pleasantly aware that his drum was where it belonged and otherwise preoccupied with the clouds behind the paschally polished windowpanes.

Miss Spollenhauer had on an angularly cut suit that gave her a desiccated mannish look, an impression that was enhanced by the narrow stiff collar, of the kind, it seemed to me, that can be wiped clean, which closed round her Adam’s apple, creating deep furrows in her neck. No sooner had she entered the classroom in her flat walking shoes than she felt the need to make herself popular and asked: “Well, my dear children, are we up to singing a little song?”