But Mr. Meyn had fallen directly from his trumpeting into a deep sleep. His spirit recognized only three repositories: his bottle of gin, his trumpet, and his slumber. It is true that for quite some time after that—to be exact, until he joined the band of the Mounted SA and temporarily gave up gin—we would quite frequently play unrehearsed duets in the attic for the benefit of the roof tiles, the chimneys, the pigeons, and the cats; but I could never get anything out of him as a teacher.

I tried Greff the greengrocer. Without my drum, for Greff didn’t appreciate it, I paid several visits to the basement shop across the way. The wherewithal for thorough and many-sided study seemed to be at hand. In every corner of the two-room flat, all over the shop, under and behind the counter, even in the relatively dry potato cellar, lay books, adventure stories, song books, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, the works of Walter Flex, Wiechert’s Simple Life, Daphnis and Chloe, monographs about artists, piles of sport magazines and illustrated volumes full of half-naked youths, most of whom, for some unfathomable reason, were chasing after a ball amid sand dunes, exhibiting oiled and glistening muscles.

Even then Greff was having a good deal of trouble in the shop. The inspectors from the Bureau of Weights and Measures had not been quite satisfied with his weights. There was talk of fraud. Greff had to pay a fine and buy new weights. He was bowed down with cares; his books and scout meetings and weekend excursions were his only cheer.

He was making out price tabs when I came in and hardly noticed me. Taking advantage of his occupation, I picked up three or four white squares of cardboard and a red pencil and, in the hope of attracting his attention, made a great show of zeal copying his handiwork in my own version of Sütterlin script.

But Oskar was clearly too little for him, not pale and wide-eyed enough. I dropped the red pencil, picked out a book full of the nudities that so appealed to Greff, and pretended to be very busy, inspecting photographs of boys bending and boys stretching and twisting them about so he could see them.

But when there were no customers in the shop asking for beets or cabbages, the greengrocer had eyes only for his price tabs. I tried to arouse his interest in my unlettered presence by clapping book covers or making the pages crackle as I turned them.

To put it very simply: Greff did not understand me. When scouts were in the shop—and in the afternoon there were always two or three of his lieutenants around him—Greff didn’t notice Oskar at all. And when Greff was alone, he was quite capable of jumping up in nervous irritation and dealing out commands: “Oskar, will you leave that book alone. You can’t make head or tail of it anyway. You’re too dumb and you’re too little. You’ll ruin it. That book costs more than six gulden. If you want to play, there’s plenty of potatoes and cabbages.”

He took his nasty old book away and leafed expressionlessly through the pages, leaving me standing amid potatoes and several representatives of the cabbage family, white cabbage, red cabbage, savoy cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, wretchedly lonely, for I had left my drum at home.

There was still Mrs. Greff, and after her husband’s brush-off, I usually made my way to the matrimonial bedroom. Even then Mrs. Lina Greff would lie in bed for whole weeks, vaguely ailing; she smelled of decaying nightgown and though her hands were very active, one thing she never touched was a book that might have taught me anything.

It was not without a suspicion of envy that Oskar, in the weeks that followed, looked upon his contemporaries and their school-bags from which dangled importantly the little sponges or cloths used for wiping off slates. Even so, he cannot remember having harbored such thoughts as: you’ve made your own bed, Oskar, you should have put a good face on the school routine; you shouldn’t have made an everlasting enemy of la Spollenhauer. Those yokels are getting ahead of you. They have mastered the big or at least the little alphabet, whereas you don’t even know how to hold the Neueste Nachrichten properly.

A suspicion of envy, I have said, and that is all it was. A little smell test is all that was needed to disgust me with school for all time. Have you ever taken a sniff of those inadequately washed, worm-eaten sponges appended to pealing, yellow-rimmed slates, those sponges which somehow manage to store up all the effluvia of writing and ‘rithmetic, all the sweat of squeaking, halting, slipping slate pencils moistened with saliva? Now and then, when children on their way home from school laid down their bags to play football or Völkerball, I would bend down over those sponges steaming in the sun, and the thought came to me that if Satan existed, such would be the acrid stench of his armpits.

Certainly I had no yearning for the school of slates and sponges. But, on the other hand, it would be an exaggeration to say that Gretchen Scheffler, who soon took his education in hand, was the precise answer to Oskar’s dreams.

Everything about the Scheffler dwelling behind the bakery in Kleinhammer-Weg set my teeth on edge. Those ornamental coverlets, those cushions embroidered with coats-of-arms, those Käthe Kruse dolls lurking in sofa corners, those plush animals wheresoever one turned, that china crying out for a bull, those ubiquitous travel souvenirs, those beginnings of knitting, crocheting, and embroidery, of plaiting, knotting, and lacework. The place was too sweet for words, so cunning and cozy, stiflingly tiny, overheated in winter and poisoned with flowers in summer. I can think of only one explanation: Gretchen Scheffler was childless; oh, if she had had some little creature to knit for, who can say whether she or Scheffler was to blame, oh, how happy she would have been with a little sugarplum baby, something she could love to pieces and swathe in crocheted blankets and cover with lace and ribbons and little kisses in cross-stitch.

This is where I went to learn my big and little alphabets. I made a heroic effort to spare the china and the souvenirs. I left my glass-destroying voice at home and bore it meekly when Gretchen expressed the opinion that I had drummed enough for now and, baring her equine gold teeth in a smile, removed my drum from my knees and laid it among the teddy bears.

I made friends with two of the Käthe Kruse dolls, clutched the little dears to my bosom, and manipulated the lashes of their permanently startled eyes as though I were madly in love with them. My purpose in this display of affection for dolls, which seemed sincere just because it was so completely false, was to knit a snare round Gretchen’s knitted, knit two purl two, heart.

My plan was not bad. It took only two visits before Gretchen opened her heart; that is, she unraveled it as one unravels a stocking, disclosing a long crinkly thread worn thin in places. She opened all her cupboards, chests, and boxes and spread out all her beaded rubbish, enough baby jackets, baby pants, and bibs to clothe a set of quintuplets, held them up against me, tried them on, and took them off again.

Then she showed me the marksman’s medals won by Scheffler at the veterans’ club and photographs to go with them, some of which were identical with ours. Then she went back to the baby clothes and at long last, while searching for heaven knows what cute little object, she unearthed some books. That was what Oskar had been building up to. He fully expected her to find books under the baby things; he had heard her talk about books with Mama; he knew how feverishly the two of them, while still engaged and after their early and almost simultaneous marriages, had exchanged books and borrowed books from the lending library by the Film-Palast, in the hope of imparting wider horizons and greater luster to their grocery store and bakery marriages.