I had no sooner completed my precautionary measures, with which I hoped to protect my drum from bullets and shell fragments, when the first antitank shell burst against the post office façade, on the Hevelius-Platz side.

The Polish Post Office, a massive brick building, could be counted on to absorb a good many such hits. There seemed to be no danger that the Home Guard would quickly open up a breach wide enough to permit the frontal attack they had often rehearsed.

I left my safe, windowless storeroom enclosed by three offices and the corridor, to go looking for Jan Bronski. In searching for Jan, my presumptive father, there is no doubt that I was also looking, perhaps with still greater eagerness, for Kobyella, the crippled janitor. For, after all, had I not gone without supper the evening before, had I not taken the streetcar to the Hevelius-Platz and braved the soldiery to enter this post office building which under normal conditions left me cold, in order to have my drum repaired? If I should not find Kobyella in time, that is, before the all-out attack that was surely coming, it seemed scarcely possible that my ailing drum would ever get the expert treatment it needed.

And so Oskar thought of Kobyella and looked for Jan. His arms folded across his chest, he paced the long, tiled corridor and found nothing but solitude. Amid the steady not to say lavish gunfire of the Home Guard, he could make out single shots that must have been fired from inside the building, but the economy-minded defenders had no doubt stayed right in their offices, having merely exchanged their rubber stamps for other implements that could also do a stamp job of sorts. There was no one sitting, standing, or lying in the corridor in readiness for a possible counterattack. Oskar patrolled alone; drumless and defenseless he faced the history-making introitus of the early, far too early hour, which carried plenty of lead but, alas, no gold in its mouth.

The offices on the court side were equally empty. Very careless, I thought. The building should have been guarded there too, for there was only a wooden fence separating the Police Building on Schneidermühlen-Gasse from the post office court and the package ramp—for the attackers, indeed, the layout was almost too good to be true. I pattered through the offices, the registered letter room, the money order room, the payroll room, the telegraph office. And there they lay. Behind sandbags and sheets of armor plate, behind overturned office furniture, there they lay, firing very intermittently.

In most of the rooms the windows had already made contact with the Home Guard’s machine-gun fire. I took a quick look at the damage, making comparisons with the windowpanes that had collapsed in quiet, deep-breathing times of peace, under the influence of my diamond voice. Well, I said to myself, if they ask me to do my bit for the defense of the Polish Post Office, if this wiry little Dr. Michon approaches me not as postmaster but as military commander of the post office building, if he tries to enlist me in the service of Poland, my voice will do its duty. For Poland and for Poland’s unfilled but perpetually fruitful economy, I would gladly have shattered the windows of all the houses on the other side of the Hevelius-Platz, the transparent house fronts on the Rahm, the windows of Schneidermühlen-Gasse, including Police Headquarters; carrying my long-distance technique to new heights and lengths, I should gladly have transformed every sparkling windowpane on the Altstädtischer Graben and Rittergasse into a black, draft-fomenting hole. That would have created confusion among the Home Guard and the onlookers as well. It would have had the effect of several machine guns and, at the very outset of the war, given rise to talk of secret weapons. But it would not have saved the Polish Post Office.

Oskar’s abilities were not put to the test. This Dr. Michon with the Polish steel helmet and the directorial countenance did not enlist me; instead, when, having run down the stairs to the main hall, I got tangled up in his legs, he gave me a painful box on the ear and immediately afterwards, cursing loudly in Polish, resumed his military duties. I could only swallow my chagrin. Obviously all these people, and most of all Dr. Michon, who bore the responsibility, were very excited and scared; I had to forgive them.

The clock in the main hall told me that it was 4:20. When it was 4:21, I inferred that the first hostilities had left the clockwork unharmed. The clock was running, and I was at a loss to know whether this equanimity on the part of time should be taken as a good or bad omen.

In any case, I remained for the present in the main hall, looking for Jan and Kobyella and keeping out of Dr. Michon’s way. I found neither my uncle nor the janitor. I noted damage to the glass windows and also cracks and ugly holes in the plaster beside the main entrance, and I had the honor of being present when the first two wounded were carried in. One of them, an elderly gentleman, his grey hair still neatly parted, spoke excitedly and without interruption as his wound—a bullet had grazed his forearm—was being bandaged. No sooner had his arm been swathed in white than he jumped up, seized his rifle, and started back to the rampart of sandbags, which was not, I think, quite bulletproof. How fortunate that a slight faintness brought on by loss of blood forced him to lie down again and take the rest indispensable to an elderly gentleman who has just been wounded. Moreover, the wiry little quinquagenarian, who wore a steel helmet but from whose breast pocket peered the tip of a silk handkerchief, this gentleman with the elegant movements of a knight in government office, the very same Dr. Michon who had sternly questioned Jan Bronski the previous evening, commanded the wounded elderly gentleman to keep quiet in the name of Poland. The second wounded man lay breathing heavily on a straw tick and showed no further desire for sandbags. At regular intervals he screamed loudly and without shame; he had been shot in the belly.

Still searching, Oskar was about to give the row of men behind the sandbags another inspection when two shells, striking almost simultaneously above and beside the main entrance, set the hall to rattling. The chests that had been moved against the door burst open, releasing piles of bound records, which fluttered aloft, scattered, and landed on the tile floor where they came into contact with slips and tags whose acquaintance they were never intended to make. Needless to say, the rest of the window glass burst asunder, while great chunks and smaller chunks of plaster fell from the walls and ceiling. Another wounded man was carried into the middle of the hall through clouds of plaster and calcimine, but then, by order of the steel-helmeted Dr. Michon, taken upstairs to the first floor.

The wounded postal clerk moaned at every step. Oskar followed him and his carriers. No one called him back, no one asked him where he was going or, as Michon had done a short while before, boxed his ears. It is true that he did his best to keep out of the grown-up post-office defenders’ way.

When I reached the second floor behind the slow-moving carriers, my suspicion was confirmed: the wounded man was being taken to the windowless and therefore safe storeroom that I had reserved for myself. No mattresses being available, it was decided that the mail baskets, though rather too short, would provide relatively comfortable resting places for the wounded.

Already I regretted having put my drum to bed in one of these movable laundry baskets full of undeliverable mail. Would the blood of these torn and punctured postmen and postal clerks not seep through ten or twenty layers of paper and give my drum a color it had hitherto known only in the form of enamel? What had my drum in common with the blood of Poland? Let them color their records and blotting paper with their life sap! Let them pour the blue out of their inkwells and fill them up again with red! Let them dye their handkerchiefs and starched white shirts half-red and make Polish flags out of them! After all, it was Poland they were concerned with, not my drum! If they insisted that Poland, though lost, must remain white and red, was that any reason why my drum, rendered suspect by the fresh paint job, should be lost too?