When Stefan Batory vainly besieged the city fifty years later, Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of the Oliva Monastery, put the blame on the sinful woman in his penitential sermons. The king of the Poles, to whom the city had made a present of her, took her with him in his encampments, and she gave him bad advice. To what extent the wooden lady affected the Swedish campaigns against the city and how much she had to do with the long incarceration of Dr. Aegidius Strauch, the religious zealot who had conspired with the Swedes and also demanded that the green woman, who had meanwhile found her way back into the city, be burned, we do not know. There is a rather obscure report to the effect that a poet by the name of Opitz, a fugitive from Silesia, was granted asylum in the city for some years but died before his time, having found the ruinous wood carving in an attic and having attempted to write poems in her honor.

Only toward the end of the eighteenth century, at the time of the partitions of Poland, were effective measures taken against her. The Prussians, who had taken the city by force of arms, issued a Royal Prussian edict prohibiting “the wooden figure Niobe”. For the first time she was mentioned by name in an official document and at the same time evacuated or rather incarcerated in that Stockturm in whose courtyard Paul Beneke had been drowned and from whose gallery I had first tried out my long-distance song effects. Intimidated perhaps by the presence of the choice products of human ingenuity of which I have spoken (for she was lodged in the torture chamber), she minded her business throughout the nineteenth century.

When in ‘25 I climbed to the top of the Stockturm and haunted the windows of the Stadt-Theater with my voice, Niobe, popularly known as “the Green Kitten”, had long since and thank goodness been removed from the torture chamber of the tower. Who knows whether my attack on the neoclassical edifice would otherwise have succeeded?

It must have been an ignorant museum director, a foreigner to the city, who took Niobe from the torture chamber where her malice was held in check and, shortly after the founding of the Free City, settled her in the newly installed Maritime Museum. Shortly thereafter he died of blood poisoning, which this over-zealous official had brought on himself while putting up a sign saying that the lady on exhibition above it was a figurehead answering to the name of Niobe. His successor, a cautious man familiar with the history of the city, wanted to have Niobe removed. His idea was to make the city of Lübeck a present of the dangerous wooden maiden, and it is only because the people of Lübeck declined the gift that the little city on the Trave, with the exception of its brick churches, came through the war and its air raids relatively unscathed.

And so Niobe, or “the Green Kitten”, remained in the Maritime Museum and was responsible in the short space of fourteen years for the death of three directors—not the cautious one, he had got himself transferred—for the demise of an elderly priest at her feet, the violent ends of a student at the Engineering School, of two graduates of St. Peter’s Secondary School who had just passed their final examinations, and the end of four conscientious museum attendants, three of whom were married. All, even the student of engineering, were found with transfigured countenances and in their breasts sharp objects of a kind to be found only in maritime museums: sailor’s knives, boarding hooks, harpoons, finely chiseled spearheads from the Gold Coast, sailmakers’ needles; only the last of the students had been obliged to resort first to his pocketknife and then to his school compass, because shortly before his death all the sharp objects in the museum had been attached to chains or placed behind glass.

Although in every case the police as well as the coroner spoke of tragic suicide, a rumor which was current in the city and echoed in the newspapers had it that “The Green Kitten does it with her own hands”. Niobe was seriously suspected of having dispatched men and boys from life to death. There was no end of discussion. The newspapers devoted special columns to their readers’ opinions on the “Niobe case”. The city government spoke of untimely superstition and said it had no intention whatsoever of taking precipitate action before definite proof was provided that something sinister and supernatural had actually occurred.

Thus the green statue remained the prize piece of the Maritime Museum, for the District Museum in Oliva, the Municipal Museum in Fleischergasse, and the management of the Artushof refused to accept the man-crazy individual within their walls.

There was a shortage of museum attendants. And the attendants were not alone in refusing to have anything to do with the wooden maiden. Visitors to the museum also avoided the room with the amber-eyed lady. For quite some time utter silence prevailed behind the Renaissance windows which provided the sculpture with the necessary lateral lighting. Dust piled up. The cleaning women stopped coming. As to the photographers, formerly so irrepressible, one of them died soon after taking Niobe’s picture; a natural death, to be sure, but the man’s colleagues had put two and two together. They ceased to furnish the press of the Free City, Poland, Germany, and even France with likenesses of the murderous figurehead, and even went so far as to expunge Niobe from their files. From then on their photographic efforts were devoted exclusively to the arrivals and departures of presidents, prime ministers, and exiled kings, to poultry shows. National Party Congresses, automobile races, and spring floods.

Such was the state of affairs when Herbert Truczinski, who no longer wished to be a waiter and was dead set against going into the customs service, donned the mouse-grey uniform of a museum attendant and took his place on a leather chair beside the door of the room popularly referred to as “the Kitten’s parlor”.

On the very first day of his job I followed Herbert to the streetcar stop on Max-Halbe-Platz. I was worried about him.

“Go home, Oskar, my boy. I can’t take you with me.” But I stood there so steadfast with my drum and drumsticks that Herbert relented: “Oh, all right. Come as far as the High Gate. And then you’ll ride back again and be a good boy.” At the High Gate I refused to take the Number 5 car that would have brought me home. Again Herbert relented; I could come as far as Heilige-Geist-Gasse. On the museum steps he tried again to get rid of me. Then with a sigh he bought a child’s admission ticket. It is true that I was already fourteen and should have paid full admission, but what people don’t know won’t hurt them.

We had a pleasant, quiet day. No visitors, no inspectors. Now and then I would drum a little while; now and then Herbert would sleep for an hour or so. Niobe gazed out into the world through amber eyes and strove double-breasted toward a goal that was not our goal. We paid no attention to her. “She’s not my type,” said Herbert disparagingly. “Look at those rolls of fat, look at that double chin she’s got.”

He tilted his head and began to muse: “And look at the ass on her, like a family-size clothes cupboard. Herbert’s taste runs more to dainty little ladies, cute and delicate like.”

I listened to Herbert’s detailed description of his type and looked on as his great shovel-like hands kneaded and modeled the contours of a lithe and lovely person of the fair sex, who was to remain for many years, to this very day as a matter of fact and even beneath the disguise of a nurse’s uniform, my ideal of womanhood.

By the third day of our life in the museum we ventured to move away from the chair beside the door. On pretext of cleaning—the room really was in pretty bad shape—we made our way, dusting, sweeping away spiderwebs from the oak paneling, toward the sunlit and shadow-casting green wooden body. It would not be accurate to say that Niobe left us entirely cold. Her lures were heavy but not unshapely and she wasn’t backward about putting them forward. But we did not look upon her with eyes of covetousness. Rather, we looked her over in the manner of shrewd connoisseurs who take every detail into account. Herbert and I were two esthetes soberly drunk on beauty, abstract beauty. There we were, studying feminine proportions with our thumbnails. Niobe’s thighs were a bit too short; aside from that we found that her lengthwise measurements—eight head lengths—lived up to the classical ideal; beamwise, however, pelvis, shoulders, and chest demanded to be judged by Dutch rather than Greek standards.