At first we all decided to walk to Glettkau, but then, though nothing was said, we took the opposite direction to the breakwater. Broad and lazy, the Baltic lapped at the beach. As far as the harbor mouth, from the white lighthouse to the beacon light on the breakwater, not a soul to be seen. A recent rainfall had imprinted its regular pattern on the sand; it was fun to break it up with our footprints; Mama and I had taken off our shoes and stockings. Matzerath picked up smooth little disks of brick the size of gulden pieces and skipped them eagerly, ambitiously over the greenish water. Less skillful, Jan Bronski looked for amber between his attempts to skip stones, and actually found a few splinters and a nugget the size of a cherry pit, which he gave Mama, who kept looking back, as though in love with her footprints. The sun shone cautiously. The day was cool, still and clear; on the horizon you could make out a stripe that meant the Hela Peninsula and two or three vanishing smoke trails; from time to time the superstructure of a merchant ship would bob up over the horizon.

In dispersed order we reached the first granite boulders of the breakwater. Mama and I put our shoes and stockings back on. Matzerath and Jan started off into the open sea, hopping from stone to stone, while she was still helping me to lace my shoes. Scraggly clumps of seaweed grew from the interstices at the base of the wall. Oskar would have liked to comb them. But Mama took me by the hand and we followed the men, who were gamboling like schoolboys. At every step my drum beat against my knee; even here, I wouldn’t let them take it away from me. Mama had on a light-blue spring coat with raspberry-colored facings. She had difficulty in negotiating the granite boulders in her high-heeled shoes. As always on Sundays and holidays, I was wearing my sailor coat with the gold anchor buttons. The band on my sailor hat came from Gretchen Scheffler’s grab bag; S.M.S. Seydlitz, it said, and it would have fluttered if there had been any breeze. Matzerath unbuttoned his brown overcoat. Jan, always the soul of fashion, sported an ulster with a resplendent velvet collar.

We hopped and hobbled as far as the beacon at the end of the breakwater. At the base of the little tower sat an elderly man in a longshoreman’s cap and a quilted jacket. Beside him there was a potato sack with something wriggling and writhing in it. The man—I figured he must be from Brösen or Neufahrwasser—was holding one end of a clothesline. The other end, caked with seaweed, vanished in the brackish Mottlau water which, still unmixed with the clear open sea, splashed against the stones of the breakwater.

We were all curious to know why the man in the longshoreman’s cap was fishing with a common clothesline and obviously without a float. Mama asked him in tones of good-natured mockery, calling him “Uncle”. Uncle grinned, showing tobacco-stained stumps; offering no explanation, he spat out a long, viscous train of tobacco juice which landed in the sludge amid the granite boulders, coated with tar and oil, at the base of the sea wall. There his spittle bobbed up and down so long that a gull circled down and, deftly avoiding the boulders, caught it up and flew off, drawing other screaming gulls in its wake.

We were soon ready to go, for it was cold out there and the sun was no help, but just then the man in the longshoreman’s cap began to pull in his line hand over hand. Mama still wanted to leave. But Matzerath couldn’t be moved, and Jan, who as a rule acceded to Mama’s every wish, gave her no support on this occasion. Oskar didn’t care whether we stayed or went. But as long as we were staying, he watched. While the longshoreman, pulling evenly hand over hand and stripping off the seaweed at every stroke, gathered the line between his legs, I noted that the merchantman which only half an hour before had barely shown its superstructure above the horizon, had changed its course; lying low in the water, she was heading for the harbor. Must be a Swede carrying iron ore to draw that much water, Oskar reflected.

I turned away from the Swede when the longshoreman slowly stood up. “ Well, s’pose we take a look.” His words were addressed to Matzerath, who had no idea what it was all about but nodded knowingly. “S’pose we take a look,” the longshoreman said over and over as he continued to haul in the line, now with increasing effort. He clambered down the stones toward the end of the line and stretched out both arms into the foaming pond between the granite blocks, clutched something—Mama turned away but not soon enough—he clutched something, changed his hold, tugged and heaved, shouted at them to make way, and flung something heavy and dripping, a great living lump of something down in our midst: it was a horse’s head, a fresh and genuine horse’s head, the head of a black horse with a black mane, which only yesterday or the day before had no doubt been neighing; for the head was not putrid, it didn’t stink, or if it did, then only of Mottlau water; but everything on the breakwater stank of that.

The man in the longshoreman’s cap—which had slipped down over the back of his neck—stood firmly planted over the lump of horsemeat, from which small light-green eels were darting furiously. The man had trouble in catching them, for eels move quickly and deftly, especially over smooth wet stones. Already the gulls were screaming overhead. They wheeled down, three or four of them would seize a small or medium-sized eel, and they refused to be driven away, for the breakwater was their domain. Nevertheless the longshoreman, thrashing and snatching among the gulls, managed to cram a couple of dozen small eels into the sack which Matzerath, who liked to be helpful, held ready for him. Matzerath was too busy to see Mama turn green and support first her hand, then her head, on Jan’s shoulder and velvet collar.

But when the small and medium-sized eels were in the sack and the longshoreman, whose cap had fallen off in the course of his work, began to squeeze thicker, dark-colored eels out of the cadaver. Mama had to sit down. Jan tried to turn her head away but Mama would not allow it; she kept staring with great cow’s eyes into the very middle of the longshoreman’s activity.

“Take a look,” he groaned intermittently. And “S’pose we!” With the help of his rubber boot he wrenched the horse’s mouth open and forced a club between the jaws, so that the great yellow horse teeth seemed to be laughing. And when the longshoreman—only now did I see that he was bald as an egg—reached both hands into the horse’s gullet and pulled out two at once, both of them as thick and long as a man’s arm, my mother’s jaws were also torn asunder: she disgorged her whole breakfast, pouring out lumpy egg white and threads of egg yolk mingled with lumps of bread soaked in café au lait over the stones of the breakwater. After that she retched but there was nothing more to come out, for that was all she had had for breakfast, because she was overweight and wanted to reduce at any price and tried all sorts of diets which, however, she seldom stuck to. She ate in secret. She was conscientious only about her Tuesday gymnastics at the Women’s Association, but on this score she stood firm as a rock though Jan and even Matzerath laughed at her when, carrying her togs in a drawstring bag, she went out to join those comical old biddies, to swing Indian clubs in a shiny blue gym suit, and still failed to reduce.

Even now Mama couldn’t have vomited up more than half a pound and retch as she might, that was all the weight she succeeded in taking off. Nothing came but greenish mucus, but the gulls came. They were already on their way when she began to vomit, they circled lower, they dropped down sleek and smooth; untroubled by any fear of growing fat, they fought over my Mama’s breakfast, and were not to be driven away—and who was there to drive them away in view of the fact that Jan Bronski was afraid of gulls and shielded his beautiful blue eyes with his hands.