Up there on the tower, a good hundred feet above the Kohlenmarkt with its streetcars and throngs of homeward-bound office workers, high above Markus’ sweet-smelling shop and the Café Weitzke with its cool marble table tops, two cups of mocha, far above Mama and Jan Bronski, above all courtyards, all bent and straightened nails, all juvenile soup-makers—up there on the tower, I who had hitherto screamed only for good and sufficient reason, became a gratuitous screamer. Until the day when I took it into my head to climb the Stockturm I had projected my cutting notes upon glasses, light bulbs, beer bottles, but only when someone wanted to take away my drum; now on the tower I screamed though my drum was not even remotely threatened.

No one was trying to take Oskar’s drum away, and still he screamed. No pigeon had sullied his drum with its droppings. Near me there was verdegris on copper plates, but no glass. And nevertheless Oskar screamed. The eyes of the pigeons had a reddish glitter, but no one was eying him out of a glass eye; yet he screamed. What did he scream at? What distant object? Did he wish to apply scientific method to the experiment he had attempted for the hell of it in the loft after his meal of brick soup? What glass had Oskar in mind? What glass—and it had to be glass—did Oskar wish to experiment with?

It was the Stadt-Theater, the dramatic coffee mill, whose windowpanes gleaming in the evening sun attracted the modernistic tones, bordering on mannerism, that I had first tried out in our loft. After a few minutes of variously pitched screams which accomplished nothing, I succeeded in producing an almost soundless tone, and a moment later Oskar noted with joy and a blush of telltale pride that two of the middle panes in the end window of the lobby had been obliged to relinquish their share of the sunset, leaving two black rectangles that would soon require attention from the glazier.

Still, the effect had to be verified. Like a modern painter who, having at last found the style he has been seeking for years, perfects it and discloses his full maturity by turning out one after another dozens of examples of his new manner, all equally daring and magnificent, I too embarked on a productive period.

In barely a quarter of an hour I succeeded in unglassing all the lobby windows and some of the doors. A crowd, from where I was standing one would have said an excited crowd, gathered outside the theater. But the stupidest incident draws a crowd. The admirers of my art made no particular impression on me. At most they led Oskar to discipline his art, to strive for greater formal purity. I was just getting ready to lay bare the very heart of things with a still more daring experiment, to send a very special cry through the open lobby, through the keyhole of one of the loge doors into the still darkened theater, a cry that should strike the pride of all subscribers, the chandelier with all its polished, facetted, light-reflecting and refracting hardware, when my eye lit on a bit of rust-brown material in the crowd outside of the theater: Mama was on her way back from the Café Weitzke, she had had her mocha and left Jan Bronski.

Even so, it must be admitted that Oskar aimed a cry at the chandelier. But apparently it had no effect, for the newspapers next day spoke only of the windows and doors that had burst asunder for unknown, mysterious reasons. For several weeks purveyors of scientific and semiscientific theories were to fill the back pages of the daily press with columns of fantastic nonsense. The Neueste Nachrichten spoke of cosmic rays. The unquestionably well-informed staff of the local observatory spoke of sunspots.

I for my part descended the spiral staircase as quickly as my short legs would carry me and, rather out of breath, joined the crowd outside the theater. Mama’s rust-brown autumn suit was nowhere to be seen, no doubt she was in Markus’ shop, telling about the destruction wrought by my voice. And Markus, who took my so-called backwardness and my diamond-like voice perfectly for granted, would be wagging the tip of his tongue and rubbing his yellowed white hands.

As I entered the shop the sight that met my eyes made me forget all about my success as a singer. Sigismund Markus was kneeling at Mama’s feet, and all the plush animals, bears, monkeys, dogs, the dolls with eyes that opened and shut, the fire engines, rocking horses, and even the jumping jacks that guarded the shop, seemed on the point of kneeling with him. He held Mama’s two hands in his, there were brownish fuzzy blotches on the backs of his hands, and he wept.

Mama also looked very solemn, as though she were giving the situation the attention it deserved. “No, Markus,” she said, “ please, Markus. Not here in the store.”

But Markus went on interminably. He seemed to be overdoing it a little, but still I shall never forget the note of supplication in his voice. “Don’t do it no more with Bronski, seeing he’s in the Polish Post Office. He’s with the Poles, that’s no good. Don’t bet on the Poles; if you gotta bet on somebody, bet on the Germans, they’re coming up, maybe sooner maybe later. And suppose they’re on top and Mrs. Matzerath is still betting on Bronski. All right if you want to bet on Matzerath, what you got him already. Or do me a favor, bet on Markus seeing he’s just fresh baptized. We’ll go to London, I got friends there and plenty stocks and bonds if you just decide to come, or all right if you won’t come with Markus because you despise me, so despise me. But I beg you down on my knees, don’t bet no more on Bronski that’s meshugge enough to stick by the Polish Post Office when the Poles are pretty soon all washed up when the Germans come.”

Just as Mama, confused by so many possibilities and impossibilities, was about to burst into tears, Markus saw me in the doorway and pointing five eloquent fingers in my direction: “Please, Mrs. Matzerath. We’ll take him with us to London. Like a little prince he’ll live.”

Mama turned toward me and managed a bit of a smile. Maybe she was thinking of the paneless windows in the theater lobby or maybe it was the thought of London Town that cheered her. But to my surprise she shook her head and said lightly, as though declining a dance: “Thank you, Markus, but it’s not possible. Really it’s impossible—on account of Bronski.”

Taking my uncle’s name as a cue, Markus rose to his feet and bowed like a jackknife. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking all along. On account of him you couldn’t do it.”

It was not yet closing time when we left the shop, but Markus locked up from outside and escorted us to the streetcar stop. Passers-by and a few policemen were still standing outside the theater. But I wasn’t the least bit scared, I had almost forgotten my triumph. Markus bent down close to me and whispered, more to himself than to us: “That little Oskar! He knocks on the drum and hell is breaking loose by the theater.”

The broken glass had Mama worried and he made gestures that were intended to set her mind at rest. Then the car came and he uttered a last plea as we were climbing into the trailer, in an undertone for fear of being overheard: “Well, if that’s the case, do me a favor and stay by Matzerath what you got him already, don’t bet no more on that Polisher.”

When today Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed but in either case drumming, revisits Arsenal Passage and the Stockturm with the scribbles on its dungeon walls and its well-oiled instruments of torture, when once again he looks down on those three windows outside the lobby of the Stadt-Theater and thereafter returns to Arsenal Passage and Sigismund Markus’ store, searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ.