With his unbound book Oskar would repair to the attic or hide behind the bicycle frames in old Mr. Heilandt’s shed, where he would shuffle the loose leaves of Rasputin and The Elective Affinities like playing cards, so creating a new book. He would settle down to read this remarkable work and look on with intense though smiling wonderment as Ottilie strolled demurely through the gardens of Central Germany on Rasputin’s arm while Goethe, seated beside a dissolutely aristcratic Olga, went sleighing through wintry St. Petersburg from orgy to orgy.

But let us get back to my schoolroom in Kleinhammer-Weg. Even if I seemed to be making no progress, Gretchen took the most maidenly pleasure in me. Thanks to me, though the invisible but hairy hand of the Russian faith healer also had something to do with it, she blossomed mightily and even imparted some of her newfound vitality to her potted trees and cactuses. If Scheffler in those years had only seen fit once in a while to take his fingers out of his dough, to relinquish his bakery rolls for a human roll! Gretchen would gladly have let him knead her and roll her, brush her with egg white and bake her. Who knows what might have come out of the oven. Perhaps, in the end, a baby. Too bad. It was a pleasure she had coming to her.

As it was, she sat there after an impassioned reading of Rasputin with fiery eyes and slightly tousled hair; her gold horse teeth moved but she had nothing to bite on, and she sighed mercy me, thinking of flour and dough, flour and dough. Since Mama, who had her Jan, had no way of helping Gretchen, this part of my education might have ended in grief if Gretchen had not been so buoyant of heart.

She would leap into the kitchen and come back with the coffee mill; embracing it like a lover, she would sing with melancholy passion while grinding, “Dark Eyes” or “Red Sarafan,” and Mama would join in. Taking the Dark Eyes into the kitchen with her, she would put water on to boil; then as the water was heating over the gas flame, she would run down to the bakery and, often over Scheffler’s opposition, bring back cakes and pastries, set the table with flowered cups, cream pitchers, sugar bowls, and cake forks, and strew pansies in the interstices. She would pour the coffee, hum airs from The Tsarevich, pass around the sand tarts and chocolate dewdrops. A soldier stands on the Volga shore, coffee ring garnished with splintered almonds. Have you many angels with you up there?, topped off with meringues filled with whipped cream, so sweet, so sweet. As they chewed, the conversation would come back to Rasputin, but now things appeared to them in their proper perspective, and once glutted with cake, they were even able to deplore, in all sincerity, the abysmal corruption of court life under the tsars.

I ate much too much cake in those years. As the photographs show, I grew no taller, just fat and lumpy. After the cloying sweetness of those lessons in Kleinhammer-Weg I would often sneak into our shop and await my opportunity. As soon as Matzerath had his back turned, I would tie a string around a piece of dry bread, dip the bread in the pickled herring barrel, and remove it only when the bread was saturated with brine. You can’t imagine what a blissful emetic that was for one who had eaten too much cake. In the hope of reducing, Oskar would often vomit up a whole Danzig gulden’s worth of Scheffler’s cake in our toilet. That was a lot of money in those days.

I paid for Gretchen’s lessons in still another way. With her passion for sewing, knitting, or crocheting baby clothes, she used me as a dressmaker’s dummy. I was compelled to try on little frocks and little bonnets, little pants and little coats with and without hoods, in all styles, colors, and materials.

I do not know whether it was Mama or Gretchen who transformed me, on the occasion of my eighth birthday, into a little tsarevich who fully deserved to be shot. Their Rasputin cult was then at its height. A photo taken that day shows me standing beside a birthday cake hedged about by eight dripless candles; I am wearing an embroidered Russian smock, a Cossack’s cap perched at a jaunty angle, two crossed cartridge belts, baggy white breeches, and low boots.

Luckily my drum was allowed to be in the picture. Another bit of luck was that Gretchen Scheffler—possibly I had asked her to do so—tailored me a suit which, cut in the unassuming, electively affinitive style of the early nineteenth century, still conjures up the spirit of Goethe in my album, bearing witness to the two souls in my breast, and enables me, with but a single drum, to be in St. Petersburg and in Weimar at once, descending to the realm of the Mothers and celebrating orgies with ladies.

Dr. Hornstetter, the lady doctor who drops in on me almost every day just long enough to smoke a cigarette, who is supposed to be taking care of me but who, thanks to my treatment, leaves the room after every visit a little less nervous than she was when she came, a retiring sort who is intimate only with her cigarettes, keeps insisting that I suffered from isolation in my childhood, that I didn’t play enough with other children.

Well, as far as other children are concerned, she may be right. It is true that I was so busy with Gretchen Scheffler’s lessons, so torn between Goethe and Rasputin, that even with the best of intentions I could have found no time for ring-around-a-rosy or post office. But whenever, as scholars sometimes do, I turned my back on books, declaring them to be the graveyards of the language, and sought contact with the simple folk, I encountered the little cannibals who lived in our building, and after brief association with them, felt very glad to get back to my reading in one piece.

Oskar had the possibility of leaving his parents’ flat through the shop, then he came out on Labesweg, or else through the front door that led to the stairwell. From here he could either continue straight ahead to the street, or climb four flights of stairs to the attic where Meyn the musician was blowing his trumpet, or, lastly, go out into the court. The street was paved with cobblestones. The packed sand of the court was a place where rabbits multiplied and carpets were beaten. Aside from occasional duets with the intoxicated Mr. Meyn, the attic offered a view and that pleasant but deceptive feeling of freedom which is sought by all climbers of towers and which makes dreamers of those who live in attics.

While the court was fraught with peril for Oskar, the attic offered him security until Axel Mischke and his gang drove him out of it. The court was as wide as the building, but only seven paces deep; in the rear it was separated from other courts by a tarred board fence topped with barbed wire. The attic offered a good view of this maze which occupied the inside of the block bordered by Labesweg, by Hertastrasse and Luisenstrasse on either side, and Marienstrasse in the distance. In among the irregularly shaped courts that made up the sizable rectangle there was also a cough-drop factory and several run-down repair shops. Here and there in the yards one could discern some tree or shrub indicative of the time of year. The courts varied in size and shape, but all contained rabbits and carpet-beating installations. The rabbits were present and active every day; carpets, however, as the house regulations decreed, were beaten only on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Fridays it became evident how large the block really was. Oskar looked and listened from the attic as more than a hundred carpets, runners, and bedside rugs were rubbed with sauerkraut, brushed, beaten, and bullied into showing the patterns that had been woven into them. With a great display of bare arms a hundred housewives, their hair tied up in kerchiefs, emerged from the houses carrying mounds of carpets, threw the victims over the rack supplied for that very purpose, seized their plaited carpet beaters, and filled the air with thunder.