To this Mama said nothing, stood up from the bed, smoothed out the yellow bedspread, tossed her hair into shape in front of my mirror doors, and left the bedroom behind Jan. I removed my eye from the slit and soon heard them shuffling cards. I think Jan was bidding against Matzerath, who passed at twenty-three. Whereupon Mama bid Jan up to thirty-six; at this point he backed down, and Mama played a grand which she just barely lost. Next Jan bid diamond single and won hands down, and Mama won the third game, a heart hand without two, though it was close.

Certain that this family skat game, briefly interrupted by scrambled eggs, mushrooms, and fried potatoes, would go on far into the night, I scarcely listened to the hands that followed, but tried to find my way back to Sister Inge and her white, sleepy-making uniforms. But I was not to find the happiness I sought in Dr. Hollatz’ office. Not only did green, blue, yellow, and black persist in breaking into the redness of the Red Cross pin, but the events of the morning kept crowding in as well: whenever the door leading to the consultation room and Sister Inge opened, it was not the pure and airy vision of the nurse’s uniform that presented itself to my eyes, but the longshoreman at the foot of the beacon on the Neufahrwasser breakwater, pulling eels from the dripping, crawling horse’s head, and what set itself up to be white, so that I tried to connect it with Sister Inge, was the gulls’ wings which for barely a moment covered the horse’s head and the eels in it, until the wound broke open again but did not bleed red, but was black like the black horse, and bottle-green the sea, while the Finnish timber ship contributed a bit of rust color to the picture and the gulls—don’t talk to me of doves—descended like a cloud on the sacrifice, dipped in their wingtips and tossed the eel to Sister Inge, who caught it, celebrated it, and turned into a gull, not a dove, but in any case into the Holy Ghost, let it take the form of a gull, descending cloudlike upon the flesh to feast the Pentecost.

Giving up the struggle, I left the cupboard. Angrily pushing the doors open, I stepped out and found myself unchanged in front of the mirrors, but even so I was glad Mrs. Kater had stopped beating carpets. Good Friday was over for Oskar, but it was only after Easter that his Passion began.

And mama’s as well. On Easter Sunday we went with the Bronskis to visit Grandma and Uncle Vincent in Bissau. It was after that that her sufferings began—sufferings that the smiling spring weather was powerless to attenuate.

It is not true that Matzerath forced Mama to start eating fish again. Quite of her own accord, possessed by some mysterious demon, she began, exactly two weeks after Easter, to devour fish in such quantities, without regard for her figure, that Matzerath said: “For the Lord’s sake stop eating so much fish like somebody was making you.”

She started in at breakfast on canned sardines, two hours later, unless there happened to be customers in the shop, she would dig into a case of Bohnsack sprats, for lunch she would demand fried flounder or codfish with mustard sauce, and in the afternoon there she was again with her can opener: eels in jelly, rollmops, baked herring, and if Matzerath refused to fry or boil more fish for supper, she would waste no breath in arguing, but would quietly leave the table and come back from the shop with a chunk of smoked eel. For the rest of us it was the end of our appetites, because she would scrape the last particle of fat from the inside and outside of the eel’s skin with a knife, and in general she took to eating her fish with a knife. She would have to vomit at intervals throughout the day. Helplessly anxious, Matzerath would ask: “Maybe you’re pregnant, or what’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Mama if she said anything at all. One Sunday when green eels with new potatoes swimming in cream sauce were set on the table, Grandma Koljaiczek smacked the table with the flat of her hand and cried out: “What’s the matter, Agnes? Tell us what’s the matter? Why do you eat fish when it don’t agree with you and you don’t say why and you act like a lunatic?” Mama only shook her head, pushed the potatoes aside, pulled out an eel through the sauce, and set to with relentless determination. Jan Bronski said nothing. Once when I surprised the two of them on the couch, they were holding hands as usual and their clothing was normally disarranged, but I was struck by Jan’s tear-stained eyes and by Mama’s apathy, which, however, suddenly shifted into its opposite. She jumped up, clutched me, lifted me up and squeezed me, revealing an abyss of emptiness which apparently nothing could fill but enormous quantities of fried, boiled, preserved, and smoked fish.

A few days later I saw her in the kitchen as she not only fell upon the usual accursed sardines, but poured out the oil from several cans she had been saving up into a little saucepan, heated it over the gas, and drank it down. Standing in the doorway, I was so upset that I dropped my drum.

That same evening Mama was taken to the City Hospital. Matzerath wept and lamented as we were waiting for the ambulance: “Why don’t you want the child? What does it matter whose it is? Or is it still on account of that damn fool horse’s head? If only we’d never gone out there. Can’t you forget it, Agnes? I didn’t do it on purpose.”

The ambulance came, Mama was carried out. Children and grownups gathered on the sidewalk; they drove her away and it soon turned out that Mama had forgotten neither the breakwater nor the horse’s head, that she had carried the memory of that horse—regardless of whether his name was Hans or Fritz—along with her. Every organ in her body stored up the bitter memory of that Good Friday excursion and for fear that it be repeated, her organs saw to it that my mama, who was quite in agreement with them, should die.

Dr. Hollatz spoke of jaundice and fish poisoning. In the hospital they found Mama to be in her third month of pregnancy and gave her a private room. For four days she showed those of us who were allowed to visit her a face devastated by pain and nausea; sometimes she smiled at me through her nausea.

Although she tried hard to make her visitors happy, just as today I do my best to seem pleased when visitors come, she could not prevent a periodic retching from seizing hold of her slowly wasting body, though there was nothing more to come out of it except, at last, on the fourth day of that strenuous dying, the bit of breath which each of us must give up if he is to be honored with a death certificate.

We all sighed with relief when there was nothing more within her to provoke that retching which so marred her beauty. Once she had been washed and lay there in her shroud, she had her familiar, round, shrewdly naive face again. The head nurse closed Mama’s eyes because Matzerath and Bronski were blind with tears.

I could not weep, because the others, the men and Grandma, Hedwig Bronski and the fourteen-year-old Stephan, were all weeping. Besides, my mama’s death was no surprise to me. To Oskar, who went to the city with her on Thursdays and to the Church of the Sacred Heart on Saturdays, it seemed as though she had been searching for years for a way of breaking up the triangle that would leave Matzerath, whom perhaps she hated, with the guilt and enable Jan Bronski, her Jan, to continue his work at the Polish Post Office fortified by thoughts such as: she died for me, she didn’t want to stand in my way, she sacrificed herself.

With all the cool calculation the two of them, Mama and Jan, were capable of when it was a question of finding an undisturbed bed for their love, they nevertheless revealed quite a talent for romance: it requires no great stretch of the imagination to identify them with Romeo and Juliet or with the prince and princess who allegedly were unable to get together because the water was too deep.