How I envied those bricks wrapped in newspaper, those storehouses and bestowers of warmth! To this day I wish I could be a toasty warm brick, constantly exchanged for myself, lying beneath my grandmother’s skirts. What, you will ask, can Oskar be after beneath his grandmother’s skirts? Does he wish to imitate his grandfather Koljaiczek and take liberties with an old woman? Is he searching for oblivion, a home, the ultimate Nirvana?

Oskar replies: I was looking for Africa under the skirts, or perhaps Naples, which, as we all know, one must have seen before dying. This was the watershed, the union of all streams; here special winds blew, or else there was no wind at all; dry and warm, you could listen to the whishing of the rain; here ships made fast or weighed anchors; here our Heavenly Father, who has always been a lover of warmth, sat beside Oskar; the Devil cleaned his spyglass, and the angels played blindman’s buff; beneath my grandmother’s skirts it was always summer, even when it was time to light the candles on the Chrismas tree or to hunt for Easter eggs; even on All Saints’ Day. Nowhere could I have been more at peace with the calendar than beneath my grandmother’s skirts.

But she seldom let me take shelter under her tent, and never at market. I sat beside her on a crate, receiving a kind of warmth from her arm, and looked on as the bricks came and went. Here it was that I learned my grandmother’s trick of tempting people. Her equipment consisted of Vincent Bronski’s old pocketbook with a string tied to it. She would toss the pocketbook out on the hard-packed snow of the sidewalk. Against the grey sand strewn over the slipperiness no one but my grandmother and I could see the string.

Housewives came and went. Cheap as her wares were, they were not in the mood to buy; they wanted the merchandise for nothing, if possible with a little premium thrown in. In this state of mind, a lady would bend down to pick up Vincent’s pocketbook, her fingers were already touching it. And then my grandmother would pull in the hook, drawing a well-dressed, slightly embarrassed fish over to her stall: “Well, my dear lady, would you like a little butter, golden creamy, or a few eggs, two and a half dozen for a gulden?”

This was how Anna Koljaiczek sold her produce. I for my part learned the magic of temptation, not the kind of temptation that lured the fourteen-year-olds on our block down to the cellar with Susi Kater to play doctor and patient. That tempted me not at all, I avoided it like the plague after the little monsters, Axel Mischke and Nuchi Eyke, in the role of serum donors, and Susi Kater playing the doctor, had used me as a patient, making me swallow medicines that were not so sandy as the brick soup but had an aftertaste of putrid fish. My temptation was almost disembodied and kept its distance from its victims.

Long after nightfall, an hour or two after the shops closed, I slipped away from Mama and Matzerath and went out into the winter night. Standing in a doorway sheltered from the wind, I would peer across the silent, almost deserted streets at the nearby shopwindows, displays of delicatessen, haberdashery, shoes, watches, jewelry, all articles both desirable and easy to carry. All the windows were not illuminated. Indeed, I preferred those that were half in darkness, beyond the beam of the street lamps, because light attracts everyone, even the most commonplace people, while only the elect choose to linger in the penumbra.

I was not interested in the kind of people who in strolling by cast a glance into brightly lit shopwindows, more concerned with the price tags than the merchandise; nor did I concern myself with those who looked at themselves in the plate-glass panes to see if their hats were on right. The kind for whom I lurked in wait on crisp dry nights, on nights when the air was full of great silent snowfiakes, or beneath the waxing wintry moon, were the kind who stopped to look in a shopwindow as though in answer to a call; their eyes did not wander about aimlessly, but quickly came to rest on a single object.

I was the hunter, they were my game. My work required patience, coolness, and a sure eye. It was my voice which felled the victim, painlessly and without bloodshed. By temptation. What sort of temptation?

The temptation to steal. With my most inaudible cry I made a circular incision in the shopwindow on a level with the bottommost displays, close to the coveted article. And then, with a last vocal effort, I toppled the cut-out disk into the interior of the showcase. It fell with a quickly muffled tinkle, which however was not the tinkle of breaking glass. I did not hear it, Oskar was too far away; but the young woman in the threadbare brown coat with the rabbit collar heard the sound and saw the circular aperture, gave a start that sent a quiver through her rabbit fur, and prepared to set off through the snow, but stood still, perhaps because it was snowing and everything is permitted when it is snowing, provided it is snowing hard enough. Yet she looked round, suspicious of the snowflakes, looked round as though behind the snowflakes there were something else beside more snowflakes, and she was still looking round when her right hand slipped out of her muff, which was also made of bunny fur. Then she stopped looking round and reached through the circular hole, pushed aside the glass disk which had fallen on top of the desired object, and pulled out first one then the other black suede pump through the hole without scratching the heels, without cutting her hand on the sharp edge of the aperture. One to the left, one to the right, the shoes vanished into her coat pockets. For a moment, for the time it takes five snowflakes to fall, Oskar saw a pretty but insignificant profile; perhaps, the thought flashed through his mind, she was a model at Sternfeld’s; and then she had vanished into the falling snow. She was once more briefly visible in the yellow glow of the next street lamp and then, emancipated model or newly wedded wife, she was gone for good.

My work done—and believe me it was hard work to lurk undrummingly in wait and to sing so neat a hole into the icy glass—I too made my way home, without spoils but with a hot flame and a cold chill in my heart.

My arts of seduction were not always crowned with such unequivocal success. One of my ambitions was to turn a couple into a couple of thieves. Either both were unwilling, or even as he stretched out his hand, she pulled it back; or it was she who had the courage while he went down on his knees and pleaded, with the result that she obeyed and despised him forever after. Once I seduced a young couple who in the falling snow seemed particularly young. This time it was a perfumer’s shop. He played the hero and seized a bottle of cologne. She whimpered and said she didn’t want it. However, he wanted her to be fragrant and had his way up to the first street lamp. But there in the lamplight the young thing stood up on tiptoe and kissed him—her gestures were as blatantly demonstrative as if her purpose had been to annoy me—until he retraced his steps and put the bottle back in the window.

I had several similar experiences with elderly gentlemen, of whom I expected more than their brisk step in the wintry night promised. An old fellow would stand gazing devoutly into the window of a cigar store; his thoughts were in Havana, Brazil, or the Brissago Islands, and when my voice produced its custom-made incision and an aperture appeared directly opposite a box of “Black Wisdom,” a jackknife folded up in his heart. He turned about, crossed the street waving his cane, and hurried past me and my doorway without noticing me, giving Oskar an opportunity to smile at his stricken countenance, yes, he looked as if the Devil had been giving him a good shaking. But there was a tinge of anxiety in my smile, for the poor old gentleman—and most of these veteran cigar-smokers were very very old—was visibly in a cold sweat and especially in changing weather I was afraid he might catch his death of cold.