Most of the stores in our suburb were insured against theft, and that winter the insurance companies had to pay out considerable indemnities. Though I never engineered any depredations on a large scale and purposely made my apertures so small that only one or two objects could be removed from the displays at a time, so many burglaries were reported that the police scarcely had a moment’s rest and were nevertheless treated very harshly by the press. From November, ‘36 to March, ‘37, when Colonel Koc formed a National Front government in Warsaw, sixty-four attempted and twenty-eight successful burglaries of the same type were listed. Of course the majority of those salesmen, housemaids, old ladies, and pensioned high school principals had no vocation for theft and the police were usually able to recover the stolen articles next day; or else the amateur shoplifter, after the object of his desires had given him a sleepless night, could think of nothing better than to go to the police and say: “ Mm, I beg your pardon. It will never happen again. Suddenly there was a hole in the glass and by the time I had halfway recovered from my fright and was three blocks away, I discovered to my consternation that I was illegally harboring a pair of wonderful calfskin gloves, very expensive I’m sure, in my coat pocket.”

Since the police did not believe in miracles, all who were caught and all who went to the police of their own free will were given jail sentences ranging from four to eight weeks.

I myself was punished occasionally with house arrest, for of course Mama suspected, although she did not admit it to herself and—very wisely—refrained from communicating with the police, that my glass-cutting voice had something to do with the crime wave.

Now and then Matzerath would put on his stern, law-abiding face and try to question me. I refused to reply, taking refuge more and more astutely behind my drum and the undersized backwardness of the eternal three-year-old. After these hearings Mama would always cry out: “It’s the fault of that midget that kissed him on the forehead. Oskar never used to be that way. The moment I saw it I knew something would go wrong.”

I own that Mr. Bebra exerted a lasting influence on me. Even those terms of house arrest could not deter me from going AWOL for an hour or so whenever possible, time enough to sing the notorious circular aperture in a shopwindow and turn a hopeful young man, who happened to be drawn to a certain window display, into the possessor of a pure silk, burgundy necktie.

If you ask me: Was it evil that commanded Oskar to enhance the already considerable temptation offered by a well-polished plate-glass window by opening a passage through it?—I must reply: Yes, it was evil. If only because I stood in dark doorways. For as everyone should know, a doorway is the favorite dwelling place of evil. On the other hand, without wishing to minimize the wickedness of my acts, I am compelled, now that I have lost all opportunity or inclination to tempt anyone, to say to myself and to Bruno my keeper: Oskar, you not only contented the small and medium-sized desires of all those silent walkers in the snow, those men and women in love with some object of their dreams; no, you helped them to know themselves. Many a respectably well-dressed lady, many a fine old gentleman, many an elderly spinster whose religion had kept her young would never have come to know the thief in their hearts if your voice had not tempted them to steal, not to mention the changes it wrought in self-righteous citizens who until that hour had looked upon the pettiest and most incompetent of pickpockets as a dangerous criminal.

After I had lurked in wait for him several evenings in a row and he had thrice refused to steal but turned thief the fourth time though the police never found him out, Dr. Erwin Scholtis, the dreaded prosecuting attorney, is said to have become a mild, indulgent jurist, a hander-down of almost humane sentences, all because he sacrificed to me, the little demigod of thieves, and stole a genuine badger-hair shaving brush.

One night in January, ‘37 I stood for a long while shivering, across the way from a jeweler’s shop which, despite its situation in this quiet suburban street bordered with maple trees, was regarded as one of the best in town. The showcase with its jewelry and watches attracted a number of possible victims whom I should have shot down without hesitation if they had been looking at the other displays, at silk stockings, velour hats, or liqueurs.

That is what jewelry does to you. You become slow and exacting, adapting your rhythm to endless circuits of beads. I no longer measured the time in minutes but in pearl years, figuring that the pearl outlasts the neck, that the wrist withers but not the bracelet, that rings but not fingers are found in ancient tombs; in short, one window-shopper struck me as too pretentious, another as too insignificant to bestow jewels on.

The showcase of Bansemer’s jewelry store was not overcrowded. A few choice watches, Swiss quality articles, an assortment of wedding rings on sky-blue velvet, and in the center six or seven of the choicest pieces. There was a snake in three coils, fashioned in multicolored gold, its finely chiseled head adorned and made valuable by a topaz and two diamonds, with two sapphires for eyes. I am not ordinarily a lover of black velvet, but the black velvet on which Bansemer’s snake lay was most appropriate, and so was the grey velvet which created a provocative quietness beneath certain strikingly harmonious articles of hammered silver. There was a ring with a gem so lovely that you knew it would wear out the hands of equally lovely ladies, growing more and more beautiful in the process until it attained the degree of immortality which is no doubt the exclusive right of jewels. There were necklaces such as no one can put on with impunity, necklaces that wear out their wearers; and finally, on a pale yellow velvet cushion shaped like a simplified neck base, a necklace of infinite lightness. Subtly, playfully woven, a web perpetually broken off. What spider can have secreted gold to catch six small rubies and one large one in this net? Where was the spider sitting, for what was it lurking in wait? Certainly not for more rubies; more likely for someone whose eye would be caught by the ensnared rubies which sat there like modeled blood—in other words: To whom should I, in conformity with my plan or the plan of the gold-secreting spider, give this necklace?

On the eighteenth of January, 1937, on crunching hard-trodden snow, in a night that smelled like more snow, the kind of night that is made to order for one who wishes to hold the snow responsible for anything that may happen, I saw Jan Bronski crossing the street not far from my observation post; I saw him pass the jeweler’s shop without looking up and then hesitate or rather stop still as though in answer to a summons. He turned or was turned—and there stood Jan before the showcase amid the quiet maple trees topped with white.

The handsome, too handsome Jan Bronski, always rather sickly, submissive in his work and ambitious in love, a dull man enamored of beauty; Jan Bronski, who lived by my mother’s flesh, who, as to this day I believe and doubt, begot me in Matzerath’s name—there he stood in his fashionable overcoat that might have been cut by a Warsaw tailor, and became a statue of himself, a petrified symbol. Like Parsifal he stood in the snow, but whereas Parsifal’s attention had been captured by drops of blood on the snow, Jan’s gaze was riveted to the rubies in the golden necklace.

I could have called or drummed him away. My drum was right there with me. I could feel it under my coat. I had only to undo a button and it would have swung out into the frosty night. I had only to reach into my coat pockets and the sticks would have been ready for action. Hubert the huntsman withheld his arrow when that very special stag entered his field of vision. Saul became Paul. Attila turned back when Pope Leo raised his finger with the ring on it. But I released my arrow, I was not converted, I did not turn back, I, Oskar, remained a hunter intent on my game; I did not unbutton my coat, I did not let my drum swing out into the frosty night, I did not cross my drumsticks over the wintry white drumhead, I did not turn that January night into a drummer’s night, but screamed silently, screamed as perhaps a star screams or a fish deep down in the sea. I screamed first into the frosty night that new snow might fall at last, and then into the glass, the dense glass, the precious glass, the cheap glass, the transparent glass, the partitioning glass, the glass between worlds, the virginal, mystical glass that separated Jan Bronski from the ruby necklace, cutting a hole just right for Jan’s glove size, which was well known to me. I made the cutout fall inward like a trap door, like the gate of heaven or the gate of hell: and Jan did not flinch, his fine leather hand emerged from his coat pocket and moved heavenward; from heaven or hell it removed a necklace whose rubies would have satisfied all the angels in the world, including the fallen. Full of rubies and gold, his hand returned to his pocket, and still he stood by the gaping window although to keep standing there was dangerous, although there were no more bleeding rubies to tell him, or Parsifal, which way to look.