As for me, I knew all about the errands that Mama characterized as important and attended to so zealously. For a time she had let me accompany her to a cheap hotel in Tischlergasse, where she left me with the landlady and vanished up the stairs for exactly three-quarters of an hour. Without a word the landlady, who as a rule was sipping half-and-half, set a glass of some foul-tasting soda pop before me, and there I waited until Mama, in whom no particular change was discernible, returned. With a word of good-by to the landlady, who didn’t bother to look up from her half-and-half, she would take me by the hand. It never occurred to her that the temperature of her hand might give me ideas. Hand in overheated hand, we went next to the Café Weitzke in Wollwebergasse. Mama would order mocha, Oskar lemon ice, and they would wait, but not for long, until Jan Bronski should happen by, and a second cup of mocha should be set down on the soothingly cool marble table top.

They spoke in my presence almost as though I were not there, and their conversation corroborated what I had long known: that Mama and Uncle Jan met nearly every Thursday to spend three-quarters of an hour in a hotel room in Tischlergasse, which Jan paid for. It must have been Jan who objected to these visits of mine to Tischlergasse and the Café Weitzke. Sometimes he was very modest, more so than Mama, who saw no reason why I should not witness the epilogue to their hour of love, of whose legitimacy she always, even afterward, seemed to be convinced.

At Jan’s request, then, I spent almost every Thursday afternoon, from half-past four to shortly before six o’clock, with Sigismund Markus. I was allowed to look through his assortment of drums, and even to use them—where else could Oskar have played several drums at once? Meanwhile, I would contemplate Markus’ hangdog features. I didn’t know where his thoughts came from, but I had a pretty fair idea where they went; they were in Tischlergasse, scratching on numbered room doors, or huddling like poor Lazarus under the marble-topped table at the Café Weitzke. Waiting for what? For crumbs?

Mama and Jan Bronski left no crumbs. Not a one. They ate everything themselves. They had the ravenous appetite that never dies down, that bites its own tail. They were so busy that at most they might have interpreted Markus’ thoughts beneath the table as the importunate attentions of a draft.

On one of those afternoons—it must have been in September, for Mama left Markus’ shop in her rust-colored autumn suit—I saw that Markus was lost in thought behind his counter. I don’t know what got into me. Taking my newly acquired drum, I drifted out into Arsenal Passage. The sides of the cool dark tunnel were lined with sumptuous window displays: jewelry, books, fancy delicatessen. But desirable as these articles may have been, they were clearly beyond my reach. They did not hold me; I kept on going, through the passage and out to the Kohlenmarkt. Emerging in the dusty light, I stood facing the Arsenal. The basalt grey façade was larded with cannon balls dating back to various sieges, which recorded the history of the city of Danzig for the benefit of all who should pass by. The cannon balls were of no interest to me, particularly as I knew that they had not stuck in the wall of their own accord, that there lived in the city of Danzig a mason employed and paid conjointly by the Public Building Office and the Office for the Conservation of Monuments, whose function it was to immure the ammunition of past centuries in the façades of various churches and town halls, and specifically in the front and rear walls of the Arsenal.

I decided to head for the Stadt-Theater, whose portico I could see on the right, separated from the Arsenal only by a short unlighted alley. Just as I had expected, the theater was closed—the box office for the evening performance opened only at seven. Envisaging a retreat, I drummed my way irresolutely to leftward. But then Oskar found himself between the Stockturm and the Langgasser Gate. I didn’t dare to pass through the gate into Langgasse and turn left into Grosse Wollwebergasse, for Mama and Jan Bronski would be sitting there; and if they were not there yet, it seemed likely that they had just completed their errand in Tischlergasse and were on their way to take their refreshing mochas on the little marble table.

I have no idea how I managed to cross the Kohlenmarkt, to thread my way between the streetcars hastening to squeeze through the arch or popping out of it with a great clanging of bells and screeching round the curve as they headed for the Holzmarkt and the Central Station. Probably a grownup, perhaps a policeman, took me by the hand and guided me through the perils of the traffic.

I stood facing the Stockturm, steep brick wall pinned against the sky, and it was only by chance, in response to a faint stirring of boredom, that I wedged my drumsticks in between the masonry and the iron mounting of the door. I looked upward along the brickwork, but it was hard to follow the line of the façade, for pigeons kept flying out of niches and windows, to rest on the oriels and waterspouts for the brief time it takes a pigeon to rest before darting downward and forcing my gaze to follow.

Those pigeons really got on my nerves with their activity. There was no point in looking up if I couldn’t follow the wall to its end in the sky, so I called back my gaze and, to dispel my irritation, began in earnest to use my drumsticks as levers. The door gave way. It had no need to open very far, already Oskar was inside the tower, climbing the spiral staircase, advancing his right foot and pulling the left one after it. He came to the first dungeons and still he climbed, on past the torture chamber with its carefully preserved and instructively labeled instruments. At this point he began to advance his left foot and draw the right one after it. A little higher he glanced through a barred window, estimated the height, studied the thickness of the masonry, and shooed the pigeons away. At the next turn of the staircase he met the same pigeons. Now he shifted back to his right foot and after one more change reached the top. He felt a heaviness in his legs, but it seemed to him that he could have kept on climbing for ages. The staircase had given up first. In a flash Oskar understood the absurdity, the futility of building towers.

I do not know how high the Stockturm was (and still is; for it survived the war). Nor have I any desire to ask Bruno my keeper for a reference work on East German brick Gothic. My guess is that it must measure a good 150 feet from top to toe.

I was obliged—because of that staircase that lacked the courage of its convictions—to stop on the gallery that ran around the spire. I sat down, thrust my legs between the supports of the balustrade, and leaned forward. I clasped one of the supports in my right arm and looked past it, down toward the Kohlenmarkt, while with my left hand I made sure that my drum, which had participated in the whole climb, was all right.

I have no intention of boring you with a bird’s-eye view of Danzig—venerable city of many towers, city of belfries and bells, allegedly still pervaded by the breath of the Middle Ages—in any case you can see the whole panorama in dozens of excellent prints. Nor shall I waste my time on pigeons, or doves as they are sometimes called, though some people seem to regard them as a fit subject for literature. To me pigeons mean just about nothing, even gulls are a little higher in the scale. Your “dove of peace” makes sense only as a paradox. I would sooner entrust a message of peace to a hawk or a vulture than to a dove, which is just about the most quarrelsome animal under God’s heaven. To make a long story short: there were pigeons on the Stockturm. But after all, there are pigeons on every self-respecting tower.

At all events it was not pigeons that held my eyes but something different: the Stadt-Theater, which I had found closed on my way from the Arsenal. This box with a dome on it looked very much like a monstrously blown-up neoclassical coffee mill. All the Temple of the Muses lacked was a crank with which to grind up its contents, actors and public, sets and props, Goethe and Schiller, slowly but exceeding small. The building annoyed me, especially the column-flanked windows of the lobby, sparkling in the rays of a sagging afternoon sun which kept mixing more and more red in its palette.