Nor would they pay attention to Oskar, not even when he enlisted his drum against them, not even when he tried to fight off their whiteness with a roll of his drumsticks on white lacquer. His drumming was no help; if anything it made the gulls whiter than ever. As for Matzerath, he was not in the least concerned over Mama. He laughed and aped the longshoreman; ho-ho, steady nerves, that was him. The longshoreman was almost finished. When in conclusion he extracted an enormous eel from the horse’s ear, followed by a mess of white porridge from the horse’s brain, Matzerath himself was green about the gills but went right on with his act. He bought two large and two medium-sized eels from the longshoreman for a song and tried to bargain even after he had paid up.

My heart was full of praise for Jan Bronski. He looked as if he were going to cry and nevertheless he helped my mama to her feet, threw one arm round her waist, and led her away, steering with his other arm, which he held out in front of her. It was pretty comical to see her hobbling from stone to stone in her high-heeled shoes. Her knees buckled under her at every step, but somehow she managed to reach the shore without spraining an ankle.

Oskar remained with Matzerath and the longshoreman. The longshoreman, who had put his cap on again, had begun to explain why the potato sack was full of rock salt. There was salt in the sack so the eels would wriggle themselves to death in the salt and the salt would draw the slime from their skin and innards. For when eels are in salt, they can’t help wriggling and they wriggle until they are dead, leaving their slime in the salt. That’s what you do if you want to smoke the eels afterward. It’s forbidden by the police and the SPCA but that changes nothing. How else are you going to get the slime out of your eels? Afterward the dead eels are carefully rubbed off with dry peat moss and hung up in a smoking barrel over beechwood to smoke.

Matzerath thought it was only fair to let the eels wriggle in salt. They crawl into the horse’s head, don’t they? And into human corpses, too, said the longshoreman. They say the eels were mighty fat after the Battle of the Skagerrak. And a few days ago one of the doctors here in the hospital told me about a married woman who tried to take her pleasure with a live eel. But the eel bit into her and wouldn’t let go; she had to be taken to the hospital and after that they say she couldn’t have any more babies.

The longshoreman, however, tied up the sack with the salted eels and tossed it nimbly over his shoulder. He hung the coiled clothesline round his neck and, as the merchantman put into port, plodded off in the direction of Neufahrwasser. The ship was about eighteen hundred tons and wasn’t a Swede but a Finn, carrying not iron ore but timber. The longshoreman with the sack seemed to have friends on board, for he waved across at the rusty hull and shouted something. On board the Finn they waved back and also shouted something. But it was a mystery to me why Matzerath waved too and shouted “Ship ahoy!” or some such nonsense. As a native of the Rhineland he knew nothing about ships and there was certainly not one single Finn among his acquaintances. But that was the way he was; he always had to wave when other people were waving, to shout, laugh, and clap when other people were shouting, laughing, and clapping. That explains why he joined the Party at a relatively early date, when it was quite unnecessary, brought no benefits, and just wasted his Sunday mornings.

Oskar walked along slowly behind Matzerath, the man from Neufahrwasser, and the overloaded Finn. Now and then I turned around, for the longshoreman had abandoned the horse’s head at the foot of the beacon. Of the head there was nothing to be seen, the gulls had covered it over. A glittering white hole in the bottle-green sea, a freshly washed cloud that might rise neatly into the air at any moment, veiling with its cries this horse’s head that screamed instead of whinnying. When I had had enough, I ran away from the gulls and Matzerath, beating my fist on my drum as I ran, passed the longshoreman, who was now smoking a short-stemmed pipe, and reached Mama and Jan Bronski at the shore end of the breakwater. Jan was still holding Mama as before, but now one hand had disappeared under her coat collar. Matzerath could not see this, however, nor could he see that Mama had one hand in Jan’s trouser pocket, for he was still far behind us, wrapping the four eels, which the longshoreman had knocked unconscious with a stone, in a piece of newspaper he had found between the stones of the breakwater.

When Matzerath caught up with us, he swung his bundle of eels and boasted: “He wanted one fifty. But I gave him a gulden and that was that.”

Mama was looking better and both her hands were visible again. “I hope you don’t expect me to eat your eel,” she said. “I’ll never touch fish again as long as I live and certainly not an eel.”

Matzerath laughed: “Don’t carry on so, pussycat. You’ve always known how they catch eels and you’ve always eaten them just the same. Even fresh ones. We’ll see how you feel about it when your humble servant does them up with all the trimmings and a little salad on the side.”

Jan Bronski, who had withdrawn his hand from Mama’s coat in plenty of time, said nothing. I drummed all the way to Brösen so they wouldn’t start in again about eels. At the streetcar stop and in the car I went right on drumming to prevent the three grownups from talking. The eels kept relatively quiet. The car didn’t stop in Saspe because the other car was already there. A little after the airfield Matzerath, despite my drumming, began to tell us how hungry he was. Mama did not react, she looked past us and through us until Jan offered her one of his Regattas. While he was giving her a light and she was adjusting the gold tip to her lips, she smiled at Matzerath, for she knew he didn’t like her to smoke in public.

At Max-Halbe-Platz we got out, and in spite of everything Mama took Matzerath’s arm and not Jan’s as I had expected. While Matzerath was opening up the apartment, Mrs. Kater, who lived on the fourth floor next door to Meyn the trumpeter, passed us on the stairs. A rolled brownish carpet was slung over her shoulder, and she was supporting it with her upraised arms, enormous and meat-red. Her armpits displayed flaming bundles of blond hair, knotted and caked with sweat. The carpet hung down in front of her and behind her. She might just as well have been carrying a drunken man over her shoulder, but her husband was no longer alive. As this mass of fat moved past us in a shiny black house smock, her effluvia struck me: ammonia, pickles, carbide—she must have had the monthlies.

Shortly thereafter the rhythmic reports of carpet-beating rose from the yard. It drove me through the apartment, it pursued me, until at last I escaped into our bedroom clothes cupboard where the worst of the pre-paschal uproar was damped out by the winter overcoats.

But it wasn’t just Mrs. Kater and her carpet-beating that sent me scurrying to the clothes cupboard. Before Mama, Jan, and Matzerath had even taken their coats off, they began to argue about the Good Friday dinner. But they didn’t stick to eels. As usual when they needed something to argue about, they remembered me and my famous fall from the cellar stairs: “You’re to blame, it’s all your fault, now I am going to make that eel soup, don’t be so squeamish, make anything you like but not eels, there’s plenty of canned goods in the cellar, bring up some mushrooms but shut the trap door so it doesn’t happen again or something like it. I’ve heard enough of that song and dance, we’re having eels and that’s that, with milk, mustard, parsley, and boiled potatoes, a bay leaf goes in and a clove, no, no, please Alfred, don’t make eels if she doesn’t want them, you keep out of this, I didn’t buy eels to throw them away, they’ll be nicely cleaned and washed, no, no, we’ll see when they’re on the table, we’ll see who eats and who don’t eat.”