The flat morose face of the motorman was still sharp in Oskar’s mind when Leo Schugger led him off the asphalt road, through loose sand not very different from that of the dunes by the beach. The cemetery was square with a wall running round it. We went in on the south side, through a little gate that was covered with ornamental rust and only supposed to be locked. Most of the tombstones were of black Swedish granite or diorite, rough hewn on the back and sides and polished in front. Some leaned perilously, others had already toppled. Unfortunately Leo left me no time to look at them more closely. The place was poor in trees; five or six gnarled and moth-eaten scrub pines, that was all. Mama in her lifetime had admired this tumble-down graveyard; as she often said, it was her favorite among last resting places. And now she lay in Brenntau. There the soil was richer, elms and maples grew.

By way of an open gate that had lost its grating, Leo led me out of the cemetery through the northern wall, before I could attune my thoughts to its romantic decay. Close behind the wall the soil was flat and sandy. Amid the steaming fog, broom, scrub pine, and dog rose stretched out toward the coast. When I looked back toward the cemetery, it struck me at once that a piece of the northern wall had been freshly whitewashed.

Close to this stretch of wall, which gave the impression of being new, as painfully white as Leo’s rumpled shirt, Leo became very active. He took great long strides which he appeared to count; at all events, he counted aloud and, as Oskar believes to this day, in Latin. Whatever this litany was, he chanted it as he had no doubt learned to do at the seminary. Leo marked a spot some ten yards from the wall and also set down a piece of wood not far from the whitewashed portion, where, it seemed pretty obvious, the wall had been mended. All this he did with his left hand, for in his right hand he held the cartridge case. Finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he bent down near the piece of wood and there deposited the hollow metallic cylinder, slightly tapered at the front end, which had lodged a lead kernel until someone with a curved forefinger had exerted just enough pressure to evict the lead projectile and start it on its death-dealing change of habitat.

We stood and stood. The spittle flowed from Leo Schugger’s mouth and hung down in threads. Wringing his gloves, he chanted for a time in Latin, but stopped after a while as there was no one present who knew the responses. From time to time he turned about and cast a peevish, impatient look over the wall toward the highway, especially when the streetcars, empty for the most part, stopped at the switch and clanged their bells as they passed one another by and moved off in opposite directions. Leo must have been waiting for mourners. But neither on foot nor by car did anyone arrive to whom he could extend a glove in condolence.

Once some planes roared over us, preparing to land. We did not look up, we submitted to the noise without bothering to ascertain that three planes of the Ju-52 type, with blinking lights on their wing tips, were preparing to land.

Shortly after the motors had left us—the stillness was as painful as the wall facing us was white—Leo Schugger reached into his shirt and pulled something out. A moment later he was standing beside me. Tearing his crow costume from Oskar’s shoulders, he darted off coastward, into the broom, dog rose, and scrub pine, and in departing dropped something with a calculated gesture suggesting that it was meant to be found.

Only when Leo had vanished for good—for a time he could be seen moving about in the foreground like a spook, until at last he was swallowed up by low-lying pools of milky mist—only when I was all alone with the rain, did I reach out for the object that lay in the sand: it was a skat card, the seven of spades.

A few days after this meeting at Saspe Cemetery, Oskar met his grandmother Anna Koljaiczek at the weekly market in Langfuhr. Now that there was no more borderline at Bissau, she was able once again to bring her eggs, butter, cabbages, and winter apples to market. The people bought plentifully, they had begun to lay in stocks, for food rationing was in the offing. Just as Oskar caught sight of his grandmother sitting behind her wares, he felt the skat card on his bare skin, beneath his coat, sweater, and undershirt. At first, while riding back from Saspe to Max-Halbe Platz, after a streetcar conductor had invited me to come along free of charge, I had meant to tear up that seven of spades. But Oskar did not tear it up. He gave it to his grandmother. She seemed to take fright behind her cabbages when she saw him. Maybe it passed through her mind that Oskar’s presence could bode no good. But then she motioned the three-year-old urchin, half-hiding behind some baskets of fish, to come over. Oskar took his time; first he examined a live codfish nearly a yard long, lying in a bed of moist seaweed, then watched some crabs crawling about in a basket; finally, himself adopting the gait of a crab, he approached his grandmother’s stand with the back of his sailor coat and, turning to show her his gold anchor buttons, jostled one of the sawhorses under her display and started the apples rolling.

Schwerdtfeger came over with his hot bricks wrapped in newspaper, shoved them under my grandmother’s skirts, removed the cold bricks with his rake as he had done ever since I could remember, made a mark on the slate that hung from his neck, and proceeded to the next stand while my grandmother handed me a shining apple.

What could Oskar give her if she gave him an apple? He gave her first the skat card and then the cartridge case, for he hadn’t abandoned that in Saspe either. For quite some time Anna Koljaiczek stared uncomprehending at these two so disparate objects. Then Oskar’s mouth approached her aged cartilaginous ear beneath her kerchief and, throwing caution to the winds, I whispered, thinking of Jan’s pink, small, but fleshy ear with the long, well-shaped lobes. “He’s lying in Saspe,” Oskar whispered and ran off, upsetting a basket of cabbages.

While history, blaring special communiqués at the top of its lungs, sped like a well-greased amphibious vehicle over the roads and waterways of Europe and through the air as well, conquering everything in its path, my own affairs, which were restricted to the belaboring of lacquered toy drums, were in a bad way. While the history-makers were throwing expensive metal out the window with both hands, I, once more, was running out of drums. Yes, yes, Oskar had managed to save a new instrument with scarcely a scratch on it from the Polish Post Office, so lending some significance to the defense of said post office, but what could Naczalnik Junior’s drum mean to me, Oskar, who in my least troubled days had taken barely eight weeks to transform a drum into scrap metal?

Distressed over the loss of my nurses, I began to drum furiously soon after my discharge from the City Hospital. That rainy afternoon in Saspe Cemetery did nothing to diminish my drumming; on the contrary, Oskar redoubled his efforts to destroy the last witness to his shameful conduct with the Home Guards, namely, that drum.

But the drum withstood my assaults; as often as I struck it, it struck back accusingly. The strange part of it is that during this pounding, whose sole purpose was to eradicate a very definite segment of my past, Victor Weluhn, the carrier of funds, kept turning up in my mind, although, nearsighted as he was, his testimony against me couldn’t have amounted to much. But hadn’t he managed to escape despite his nearsightedness? Could it be that the nearsighted see more than others, that Weluhn, whom I usually speak of as poor Victor, had read my gestures like the movements of a black silhouette, that he had seen through my betrayal and that now, on his flight, he would carry Oskar’s secret, Oskar’s shame, all over the world with him?