But my poor mama had long been dead. Why was Jan Bronski sweating? When I saw how he prepared to leave the car at every approaching stop but each time remembered my presence at the last moment, when I realized that if he resumed his seat it was because of me and my drum, I knew why he was sweating. It was because Jan, as an official, was expected to help defend the Polish Post Office. He had already made his getaway, but then he had run into me and my scrap metal on the corner of Ringstrasse and the Heeresanger, and resolved to follow the call of duty. Pulling me, who was neither an official nor fit to defend a post office, after him, he had boarded the car and here he sat smoking and sweating. Why didn’t he get out? I certainly would not have stopped him. He was still in the prime of life, not yet forty-five, blue of eye and brown of hair. His trembling hands were well manicured, and if he hadn’t been perspiring so pitifully, the smell that came to Oskar’s nostrils as he sat beside his presumptive father would have been cologne and not cold sweat.

At the Holzmarkt we got out and walked down the Altstädtischer Graben. It was a still summer night. The bells pealed heavenward as they always did toward eight o’clock, sending up clouds of pigeons. “Be True and Upright to the Grave”, sang the chimes. It was beautiful and made you want to cry. But all about us there was laughter. Women with sunburned children, terry-cloth beach robes, bright-colored balls and sailboats alit from the streetcars bearing their freshly bathed multitudes from the beaches of Glettkau and Heubude. Girls still drowsy from the sun nibbled raspberry ice. A fifteen-year-old dropped her ice cream cone and was about to pick it up, but then she hesitated and finally abandoned the rapidly melting delicacy to the paving stones and the shoe soles of future passers-by; soon she would be a grownup and stop eating ice cream in the street.

At Schneidermühlen-Gasse we turned left. The Hevelius-Platz, to which the little street led, was blocked off by SS Home Guards standing about in groups: youngsters and grown men with the armbands and rifles of the security police. It would have been easy to make a detour around the cordon and get to the post office from the Rahm. Jan Bronski went straight up to the SS men. His purpose was clear: he wanted to be stopped under the eyes of his superiors, who were certainly having the Hevelius-Platz watched from the post office, and sent back. He hoped to cut a relatively dignified figure as a thwarted hero and return home by the same Number 5 streetcar that had brought him.

The Home Guards let us through; it probably never occurred to them that this well-dressed gentleman leading a three-year-old child by the hand meant to go to the post office. They politely advised us to be careful and did not shout “Halt” until we were through the outside gate and approaching the main entrance. Jan turned irresolutely. The heavy door was opened a crack and we were pulled inside: there we were in the pleasantly cool half-light of the main hall.

The greeting Jan Bronski received from his colleagues was not exactly friendly. They distrusted him, they had probably given him up. Some, as they declared quite frankly, had even begun to suspect that he, Postal Secretary Bronski, was going to shirk his duties. Jan had difficulty in clearing himself. No one listened. He was pushed into a line of men who were busy hauling sandbags up from the cellar. These sandbags and other incongruous objects were piled up behind the plate-glass windows; filing cabinets and other items of heavy furniture were moved close to the main entrance with a view to barricading it in case of emergency.

Someone asked who I was but had no time to wait for Jan’s answer. The men were nervous; they would shout at one another and then suddenly, grown overcautious, start whispering. My drum and its distress seemed forgotten. Kobyella the janitor, on whom I had counted, whom I expected to rehabilitate the mass of scrap metal hanging from my neck, was not to be seen; he was probably on the second or third floor of the building, feverishly at work like the clerks and postmen around me, piling up sandbags that were supposed to resist bullets. Oskar’s presence was obviously embarrassing to Bronski. The moment a man, whom the others called Dr. Michon, came up to give Jan instructions I slipped away. After cautiously circumnavigating this Dr. Michon, who wore a Polish steel helmet and was obviously the postmaster, I looked about and finally found the stairs leading to the second floor. Toward the end of the second-floor corridor, I discovered a medium-sized, windowless room, where no one was hauling crates of ammunition or piling sandbags. In fact, the room was deserted.

A number of baskets on rollers had been pushed close together; they were full of letters bearing stamps of all colors. It was a low-ceilinged room with ocher-red wallpaper. I detected a slight smell of rubber. An unshaded light bulb hung from the ceiling. Oskar was too tired to look for the switch. Far in the distance the bells of St. Mary’s, St. Catherine’s, St. John’s, St. Bridget’s, St. Barbara’s, Trinity, and Corpus Christi announced: It is nine o’clock. You must go to sleep now, Oskar. And so I lay down in one of the mail baskets, bedded down my drum that was as tired as I was by my side, and fell asleep.

I slept in a laundry basket full of letters mailed in Lodz, Lublin, Lemberg, Thorn, Krakau, and Tschenstochau or addressed to people in Lodz, Lublin, Lwow, Torin, Krakow, and Czestochowa. But I dreamed neither of the Matka Boska Czestochowska nor of the Black Madonna. In my dreams I nibbled neither on Marszalek Pilsudski’s heart, preserved in Cracow, nor on the gingerbread that has made the city of Thorn so famous. I did not even dream of my still unrepaired drum. Lying dreamless in a laundry basket on rollers, Oskar heard none of the whispering, twittering, and chattering that allegedly fill the air when many letters lie in a heap. To me those letters didn’t breathe a word, I wasn’t expecting any mail, and no one could have had the slightest ground for regarding me as an addressee, let alone a sender. Lordly and self-sufficient, I slept with retracted antennae on a mountain of mail gravid with news, a mountain which might have been the world.

Consequently I was not awakened by the letter which a certain Lech Milewczyk in Warsaw had written his niece in Danzig-Schidlitz, a letter alarming enough to have awakened a millenarian turtle; what woke me up was either the nearby machine-gun fire or the distant roar of the salvos from the double turrets of the battleships in the Free Port.

All that is so easily written: machine guns, double turrets. Might it not just as well have been a shower, a hailstorm, the approach of a late summer storm similar to the storm that had accompanied my birth? I was too sleepy and speculation of this sort was not in my repertory. With the sounds still fresh in my ears, I guessed right and like all sleepyheads called a spade a spade: They are shooting, I said to myself.

Oskar climbed out of the laundry basket and stood there wobbling on his pins. His first thought was for the fate of his sensitive drum. With both hands he scooped out a hole in the letters that had sheltered his slumbers, but he was not brutal about it; though loosely piled, the letters were often dovetailed, but he did not tear, bend, or deface, no, cautiously I picked out the scrambled letters, giving individual attention to each single envelope with its “Poczta Polska” postmark—most of them were violet—and even to the postcards. I took care that none of the envelopes should come open, for even in the presence of events so momentous as to change the face of the world, the secrecy of the mails must remain sacred.

As the machine-gun fire increased, the crater in the laundry basket deepened. Finally I let well enough alone, laid my mortally wounded drum to rest in its freshly dug bed, and covered it well, with ten, perhaps twenty layers of envelopes fitted together in overlapping tiers, as masons fit bricks together to build a solid wall.