The response was a roar which she must have taken to mean yes, for she embarked at once, in a mincing high-pitched voice, on “This Is the Merry Month of May,” though it was only the middle of April. Her premature announcement of the month of May was all it needed to make hell break loose. Without waiting for the signal to come in, without more than the vaguest notion of the words, or the slightest feeling for the simple rhythm of the song, the rabble behind me began to shake loose the plaster from the walls with their howling.

Despite her bilious complexion, despite her bobbed hair and the man’s tie peering out from behind her collar, I felt sorry for la Spollenhauer. Tearing myself away from the clouds which obviously had no school that day, I leapt to my feet, pulled my drumsticks out from under my suspenders, and loudly, emphatically, drummed out the time of the song. But the populace had neither ear nor feeling for my efforts. Only Miss Spollenhauer gave me a nod of encouragement, smiled at the line of mothers glued to the wall, with a special twinkle for Mama. Interpreting this as a go-ahead signal, I continued my drumming, first quietly and simply, then displaying all my arts and burgeoning into rhythmic complexities. The rabble behind me had long ceased their barbaric howls. I was beginning to fancy that my drum was teaching, educating my fellow pupils, making them into my pupils, when la Spollenhauer approached my desk. For a time she watched my hands and drumsticks, I wouldn’t even say that her manner was inept; she smiled self-forgetfully and tried to clap her hands to my beat. For a moment she became a not unpleasant old maid, who had forgotten her prescribed occupational caricature and become human, that is, childlike, curious, complex, and immoral.

However, when she failed to catch my rhythm, she fell back into her usual rectilinear, obtuse, and to make matters worse underpaid role, pulled herself together as teachers occasionally must, and said: “You must be little Oskar. We have heard so much about you. How beautifully you drum! Doesn’t he, children? Isn’t our Oskar a fine drummer?”

The children roared, the mothers huddled closer together, Miss Spollenhauer was herself again. “But now,” she piped with a voice like a pencil sharpener, “we shall put the drum in the locker; it must be tired and want to sleep. Then when school is out, you will have it back again.”

Even before she had finished reeling off this hypocritical nonsense, she bared her close-clipped teacher’s fingernails and ten close-clipped fingers tried to seize my drum, which, so help me, was neither tired nor sleepy. I held fast, clutching the red and white casing in the sleeves of my sweater. At first I stared at her, but when she kept on looking like a stencil of a public school teacher, I preferred to look through her. In Miss Spollenhauer’s interior I found enough interesting material for three scabrous chapters, but since my drum was in danger, I tore myself away from her inner life and, my gimlet eyes drilling between her shoulder blades, detected, mounted on well-preserved skin, a mole the size of a gulden with a clump of long hairs growing in it.

I can’t say whether it was because she felt herself seen through or whether it was my voice with which I gave her a harmless warning scratch on the lens of her right eyeglass: in any case, she suspended the show of force that had already blanched her knuckles. It seems likely that she could not bear the scraping on the glass, probably it gave her goose flesh. With a shudder she released my drum and, casting a look of reproach at my Mama, who was preparing to sink into the earth, declared: “Why, you are a wicked little Oskar.” Thereupon she left me my wide-awake drum, about-faced, and marched with flat heels to her desk, where she fished another pair of spectacles, probably her reading glasses, from her briefcase, briskly took off her nose those which my voice had scraped as one scrapes windowpanes with one’s fingernails, with a grimace which seemed to imply that I had profaned her spectacles, put on the other pair, straightening herself up so you could hear the bones rattle, and, reaching once again into her briefcase, announced: “I will now read you your schedule!” What issued from the briefcase this time was a little bundle of cards. Keeping one for herself, she passed the rest on to the mothers, including Mama, and at length communicated the schedule to the already restive class. “Monday: religion, writing, arithmetic, play; Tuesday: arithmetic, penmanship, singing, nature study; Wednesday: arithmetic, writing, drawing, drawing; Thursday: geography, arithmetic, writing, religion; Friday: arithmetic, writing, play, penmanship; Saturday: arithmetic, singing, play, play.”

Proclaimed in a stern voice that neglected not one jot or tittle, this product of a solemn faculty meeting assumed the force of irrevocable fate. But then, remembering what she had learned at Normal School, Miss Spollenhauer became suddenly mild and mellow. “And now, my dear children,” she cried in an outburst of progressive merriment, “let us all repeat that in unison: Now: Monday?”

The horde shouted “Monday.”

“Religion?” And the baptized heathen roared “religion.” Rather than strain my voice, I for my part beat out the syllables on my drum.

Behind me, spurred on by la Spollenhauer, the heathen bellowed: “Writing!” Boom-boom went my drum. “A-rith-me-tic! “ That was good for four beats.

Before me la Spollenhauer’s litany, behind me the howling of the mob. Putting a good face on a sorry and ludicrous business, I beat out the syllables, with moderation I should say, and so it continued until la Spollenhauer, goaded by some inner demon, leapt up in palpable fury, but not over the Tartars behind me; no, it was I who sent the red blotches to her cheeks; Oskar’s poor little drum was her stumbling block, her bone of contention; it was I she chose to rebuke.

“Oskar, you will now listen to me: Thursday, geography?” Ignoring the word Thursday, I drummed four beats for geography, four beats for arithmetic, and two for writing; to religion I devoted not four, but, in accordance with sound theological principles, three triune and only-saving drumbeats.

But la Spollenhauer had no ear for subtleties. To her all drumming was equally repugnant. Once again she bared her ten truncated fingernails and once again they tried to seize my drum.

But before she had so much as touched it, I unleashed my glass-demolishing scream, which removed the upper panes from the three oversized windows. The middle windows succumbed to a second cry. Unobstructed, the mild spring air poured into the classroom. With a third shriek I annihilated the lower window-panes, but this I admit was quite superfluous, pure exuberance as it were, for la Spollenhauer had already drawn in her claws at the discomfiture of the upper and middle panes. Instead of assaulting the last remaining windowpanes out of pure and, from an artistic standpoint, questionable malice, Oskar would have done more wisely to keep an eye on la Spollenhauer as she beat a disorderly retreat.

Lord only knows where she found that cane. In any case it was suddenly at hand, vibrant in the classroom air now mingled with springtime air. Through this atmospheric mixture she whished it, endowing it with resiliency, with hunger and thirst for bursting skin, for the whistling wind, for all the rustling curtains that a whishing cane can impersonate. And down it came on my desk so hard that a violet streak sprang from my inkwell. Then, when I wouldn’t hold out my hand to be whipped, she struck my drum. She struck my darling. She, la Spollenhauer, struck my instrument. What ground had she to strike? And if she was bent on hitting something, why my drum? What about the yokels behind me? Did it have to be my drum? By what right did she, who knew nothing, nothing whatsoever, about the drummer’s art, assault and batter my drum? What was that glint in her eye? That beast ready to strike? What zoo had it escaped from, what did it lust for, what prey was it after? The very same beast invaded Oskar; rising from unknown depths, it rose up through the soles of his shoes, through the soles of his feet, rose and rose, investing his vocal cords and driving him to emit a rutting cry that would have sufficed to unglass a whole Gothic cathedral resplendent with the refracted light of a hundred windows.