Slowly the thought took root in me: it’s not Poland they’re worried about, it’s my drum. Jan had lured me to the post office in order to give his colleagues, for whom Poland wasn’t a good enough rallying signal, an inflammatory standard and watchword. That night, as I slept in a laundry basket on rollers, though neither rolling nor dreaming, the waking post office clerks had whispered to one another: A dying toy drum has sought refuge with us. We are Poles, we must protect it, especially since England and France are bound by treaty to defend us.
While these useless and abstract meditations hampered my freedom of movement outside the half-open door of the storeroom for undeliverable mail, machine-gun fire rose up for the first time from the court. As I had foreseen, the Home Guards were making their first attack from the Police Headquarters Building on Schneidermühlen-Gasse. A little later we were all sent sprawling. The Home Guard had managed to blast the door into the package room above the loading ramp. In another minute they were in the package room, and soon the door to the corridor leading to the main hall was open.
The men who had carried up the wounded man and bedded him in the mail basket where my drum lay rushed off; others followed them. By the noise I judged that they were fighting in the main-floor corridor, then in the package room. The Home Guards were forced to withdraw.
First hesitantly, then with assurance, Oskar entered the storeroom. The wounded man’s face was greyish-yellow; he showed his teeth and his eyeballs were working behind closed lids. He spat threads of blood. But since his head hung out over the edge of the mail basket, there was little danger of his soiling the letters. Oskar had to stand on tiptoe to reach into the basket. The man’s seat was resting, and resting heavily, exactly where Oskar’s drum lay buried. At first Oskar pulled gingerly, taking care not to hurt either the wounded postal clerk or the letters; then he tugged more violently. At length, with a furious ripping and tearing, he managed to remove several dozen envelopes from beneath the groaning man.
Today, it pleases me to relate that my fingers were already touching the rim of my drum when men came storming up the stairs and down the corridor. They were coming back, they had driven the Home Guards from the package room; for the time being they were victorious. I heard them laughing.
Hidden behind one of the mail baskets, I waited near the door until they crowded round the wounded man. At first shouting and gesticulating, then cursing softly, they bandaged him.
Two antitank shells struck the wall of the façade on the level of the ground floor, then two more, then silence. The salvos from the battleships in the Free Port, across from the Westerplatte, rolled along in the distance, an even, good-natured grumbling—you got used to it.
Unnoticed by the bandagers, I slipped out of the storeroom, leaving my drum in the lurch, to resume my search for Jan, my presumptive father and uncle, and also for Kobyella the janitor.
On the third floor was the apartment of Chief Postal Secretary Naczalnik, who had apparently sent his family off to Bromberg or Warsaw in time. First I searched a few storerooms on the court side, and then I found Jan and Kobyella in the nursery of the Naczalnik flat.
It was a light, friendly room with amusing wallpaper, which unfortunately had been gashed here and there by stray bullets. In peaceful times, it must have been pretty nice to look out the windows at the Hevelius-Platz. An unharmed rocking horse, balls of various sizes, a medieval castle full of upset tin soldiers mounted and on foot, an open cardboard box full of rails and miniature freight cars, several more or less tattered dolls, doll’s houses with disorderly interiors, in short a superabundance of toys showed that Chief Postal Secretary Naczalnik must have been the father of two very spoiled children, a boy and a girl. How lucky that the brats had been evacuated to Warsaw and that I was spared a meeting with such a pair, the like of which was well known to me from the Bronskis. With a slight sadistic pleasure I reflected how sorry the little boy must have been to leave his tin soldiers. Maybe he had put a few Uhlans in his pants pocket to reinforce the Polish cavalry later on at the battle for the fortress of Modlin.
Oskar has been going on too much about tin soldiers; the truth is that there’s a confession he has to make and he may as well get on with it. In this nursery there was a kind of bookcase full of toys, picture books, and games; the top shelf was taken up with miniature musical instruments. A honey-yellow trumpet lay silent beside a set of chimes which followed the hostilities with enthusiasm, that is to say, whenever a shell struck, they went bim-bim. A brightly painted accordion hung down on one side. The parents had been insane enough to give their offspring a real little fiddle with four real strings. And next to the fiddle, showing its white, undamaged roundness, propped on some building blocks to keep it from rolling off the shelf, stood—you’ll never believe it!—a toy drum encased in red and white lacquer.
I made no attempt to pull the drum down from the rack by my own resources. Oskar was quite conscious of his limited reach and was not beyond asking grownups for favors in cases where his gnomelike stature resulted in helplessness.
Jan Bronski and Kobyella lay behind a rampart of sandbags filling the lower third of the windows that started at the floor. Jan had the left-hand window. Kobyella’s place was on the right. I realized at once that the janitor was not likely to find the time to recover my drum from its hiding place beneath the wounded, blood-spitting post-office defender who was surely crushing it, and repair it. Kobyella was very busy; at regular intervals he fired his rifle through an embrasure in the sandbag rampart at an antitank gun that had been set up on the other side of the Hevelius-Platz, not far from Schneidermuhlen-Gasse and the Radaune Bridge.
Jan lay huddled up, hiding his head and trembling. I recognized him only by his fashionable dark-grey suit, though by now it was pretty well covered with plaster and sand. The lace of his right, likewise grey shoe had come open. I bent down and tied it into a bow. As I drew the bow tight, Jan quivered, raised his disconcertingly blue eyes above his sleeve, and gave me an unconscionably blue, watery stare. Although, as Oskar quickly determined, he was not wounded, he was weeping silently. He was afraid. I ignored his whimpering, pointed to young Naczalnik’s drum, and asked Jan with transparent gestures to step over to the bookcase, with the utmost caution of course and taking advantage of the dead comer of the nursery, and hand me down the drum. My uncle did not understand me. My presumptive father did not see what I was driving at. My mama’s lover was busy with his fear, so full of it that my pleading gestures had no other effect than to add to his fear. Oskar would have liked to scream at him, but was afraid of distracting Kobyella, who seemed to have ears only for his rifle.
And so I lay down beside Jan on the sandbags and pressed close to him, in the hope of communicating a part of my accustomed equanimity to my unfortunate uncle and presumptive father. In a short while he seemed rather calmer. By breathing with exaggerated regularity, I persuaded his pulse to become approximately regular. But when, far too soon I must admit, I tried once more to call Jan’s attention to Naczalnik Junior’s drum by turning his head slowly and gently but firmly in the direction of the bookcase, he still failed to see what I wanted. Terror invaded him by way of his feet, surged up through him and filled him entirely; then it flowed back down again, but was unable to escape, perhaps because of the inner soles he always wore, and rebounded invading his stomach, his spleen, his liver, rising to his head and expanding so mightily that his blue eyes stood out from their sockets and the whites disclosed a network of blood vessels which Oskar had never before had occasion to observe in his uncle’s eyes.