Outside the storeroom and emergency hospital, we ran into Dr. Michon; he still had on his steel helmet and his silk handkerchief still peered from his breast pocket; he was talking with one Konrad, the liaison officer sent from Warsaw. Seized with fifty-seven varieties of terror, Jan made it plain that he was seriously wounded. Victor Weluhn, who was unhurt and as long as he had his glasses could reasonably be expected to do his bit with a rifle, was sent down to the main hall. Jan and I were admitted to the windowless room, scantily lit by tallow candles, the municipal power plant having declared and implemented its unwillingness to supply the Polish Post Office with current.

Dr. Michon wasn’t exactly taken in by Jan’s wounds but on the other hand he had little faith in my uncle’s military prowess. Converting the postal secretary and former rifleman into a medic, he commissioned him to care for the wounded and also—at this point the postmaster and commander honored me with a brief and, it seemed to me, despairing pat on the head—to keep an eye on me, lest the poor child get mixed up in the fighting.

The field howitzer scored a hit down below. We took quite a shaking. Michon in his helmet, Konrad, the liaison officer from Warsaw, and Weluhn dashed down to their battle stations. Jan and I found ourselves with seven or eight casualties in a sealed-off room where the sounds of battle were muffled. The candles hardly flickered when the howitzer struck home. It was quiet in spite, or perhaps because, of the moaning around us. With awkward haste Jan wrapped some strips of bed sheet around Kobyella’s thighs; then he prepared to treat his own wounds. But his cheek and the back of his hand had stopped bleeding. His cuts had nothing to say for themselves, yet they must have hurt and the pain fed his terror, which had no outlet in the low-ceilinged, stuffy room. Frantically he looked through his pockets and found the complete deck of cards. From then till the bitter end we played skat.

Thirty-two cards were shuffled, cut, dealt, and played. Since all the mail baskets were occupied by wounded men, we sat Kobyella down against a basket. When he kept threatening to keel over, we tied him into position with a pair of suspenders taken from one of the wounded men. We made him sit up straight, we forbade him to drop his cards, for we needed Kobyella. What could we have done without a third? Those fellows in the mail baskets could hardly tell black from red; they had lost all desire to play skat. Actually Kobyella didn’t much feel like it either. He would have liked to lie down. Just let things take their course, that was all Kobyella wanted. He just wanted to look on, his janitor’s hands inactive for once in his life, to look on through lowered lashless eyelids as the demolition work was completed. But we wouldn’t stand for such fatalism, we tied him fast and forced him to play the third hand, while Oskar played the second—and no one was the least bit surprised that Tom Thumb could play skat.

When for the first time I lent my voice to adult speech and bid “Eighteen,” Jan, it is true, emerged from his cards, gave me a brief and inconceivably blue look, and nodded. “Twenty?” I asked him. And Jan without hesitation: “Yes, yes.” And I: “Two? Three? Twenty-four?” No, Jan couldn’t go along. “Pass.” And Kobyella? Despite the braces, he was sagging again. But we pulled him up and waited for the noise of a shell that had struck somewhere far from our gaming room to die down. Then Jan hissed into the erupting silence: “Twenty-four, Kobyella. Didn’t you hear the boy’s bid?”

Who knows from what cavernous depths the janitor awoke. Ever so slowly he jacked up his eyelids. Finally his watery gaze took in the ten cards which Jan had pressed discreetly, conscientiously refraining from looking at them, into his hand.

“Pass,” said Kobyella, or rather we read it from his lips, which were too parched for speech.

I played a club single. On the first tricks Jan, who was playing contra, had to roar at Kobyella and poke him good-naturedly in the ribs, before he would pull himself together and remember to play. I started by drawing off all their trumps. I sacrificed the king of clubs, which Jan took with the jack of spades, but having no diamonds, I recovered the lead by trumping Jan’s ace of diamonds and drew his ten of hearts with my jack. Kobyella discarded the nine of diamonds, and then I had a sure thing with my chain of hearts. One-play-two-contra-three-schneider-four-times-clubs-is-forty-eight-or-twelve-pfennigs. It wasn’t until the next hand, when I attempted a more than risky grand without two that things began to get exciting. Kobyella, who had had both jacks but only bid up to thirty-three, took my jack of diamonds with the jack of clubs. Then, as though revived by the trick he had taken, he followed up with the ace of diamonds and I had to follow suit. Jan threw in the ten, Kobyella took the trick and played the king, I should have taken but didn’t, instead I discarded the eight of clubs, Jan threw in what he could, he even led once with the ten of spades, I bettered it and I’m damned if Kobyella didn’t top the pile with the jack of spades, I’d forgotten that fellow or rather thought Jan had it, but no, Kobyella had it. Naturally he led another spade, I had to discard, Jan played something or other, the rest of the tricks were mine but it was too late: grand-without-two-play-three-makes-sixty-hundred-and-twenty-for-the-loser-makes-thirty-pfennigs. Jan loaned me two gulden in change, and I paid up, but despite the hand he had won, Kobyella had collapsed again, he didn’t take his winnings and even the first antitank shell bursting on the stairs didn’t mean a thing to the poor janitor, though it was his staircase that he had cleaned and polished relentlessly for years.

Fear regained possession of Jan when the door to our mailroom rattled and the flames of our tallow candles didn’t know what had come over them or in which direction to lie down. Then it grew relatively still in the stairwell and the next antitank shell burst far off against the façade. But even so, Jan Bronski shuffled with an insane frenzy and misdealt twice, but I let it pass. As long as there was shooting to be heard, Jan was too overwrought to hear anything I could say, he neglected to follow suit, even forgot to discard the skat, and sometimes sat motionless, his sensory ear attuned to the outer world while we waited impatiently for him to get on with the game. Yet, while Jan’s play became more and more distraught, Kobyella kept his mind pretty well on the game though from time to time he needed a poke in the ribs to keep him from sagging. His playing wasn’t nearly as bad as the state he seemed to be in. He only collapsed after he had won a hand or had spoiled a grand for Jan or me. He didn’t care one bit whether he had won or lost. It was only the game itself that could hold his attention. As we counted up the score, he would sag on the borrowed suspenders, giving no sign of life except for the terrifying spasms of his Adam’s apple.

This card game was a great strain on Oskar too. Not that the sounds connected with the siege and defense of the post office bothered him particularly. For me the nerve-racking part of it was that for the first time I had suddenly dropped all disguises—though not, I resolved, for long. Up until then I had been my true unvarnished self only for Master Bebra and his somnambulistic Lady Roswitha. And now I had laid myself bare not only to my uncle and presumptive father but also to an invalid janitor (neither of whom, to be sure, looked much like a future witness) as the fifteen-year-old inscribed in my birth certificate, who, despite his diminutive stature, played a rather foolhardy but not unskillful hand of skat. My will was up to it, but the exertion was too much for my gnomelike proportions. After barely an hour of skat-playing, my limbs and head were aching abominably. Oskar felt inclined to give up; it would not have been hard for him to slip away between two of the shell hits which were shaking the building in quick succession, if a feeling of responsibility, such as he had never before experienced, had not bidden him hold on and counter his presumptive father’s terror by the one effective means: skat-playing.