What could it have been that gave Maria, whenever she removed her outer garments and as soon as the smell of gasoline had worn off, a pleasantly and naively bewitching smell of vanilla? Did she rub herself with some such extract? Was there a cheap perfume with this sort of smell? Or was this scent as specific to her as, for example, ammonia to Mrs. Kater or rancid butter to my grandmother’s skirts? Oskar, who liked to get to the bottom of things, investigated the vanilla: Maria did not anoint herself. Maria just smelled that way. Yes, I am still convinced that she was not even aware of the scent that clung to her; for on Sunday, when, after roast veal with mashed potatoes and cauliflower in brown butter, a vanilla pudding trembled on the table because I was tapping my foot on the table leg, Maria, who was wild about other varieties of pudding, ate but little and with evident distaste, while Oskar to this day is in love with this simplest and perhaps most commonplace of all puddings.

In July, 1940, shortly after the special communiqués announcing the rapid success of the French campaign, the Baltic bathing season opened. While Maria’s brother Fritz, now a corporal, was sending the first picture postcards from Paris, Matzerath and Maria decided that Oskar must go to the beach, that the sea air would surely be good for his health. It was decided that Maria should take me at midday—the shop was closed from one to three—to the beach at Brösen, and if she stayed out until four, Matzerath said, it didn’t matter; he liked to stand behind the counter from time to time and show himself to the customers.

A blue bathing suit with an anchor sewn on it was purchased for Oskar. Maria already had a green one with red trimmings that her sister Guste had given her as a confirmation present. Into a beach bag from Mama’s days were stuffed a white woolen bathrobe of the same vintage and, quite superfluously, a pail and shovel and a set of sand molds. Maria carried the bag, while I carried my drum.

Oskar was apprehensive of the streetcar ride past the cemetery at Saspe. Was it not to be feared that the sight of this silent, yet so eloquent spot would put a crimp in his enthusiasm about bathing, which was no more than moderate to begin with? What, Oskar asked himself, will the ghost of Jan Bronski do when his assassin, dressed for summer, goes jingling past his grave in a streetcar?

The Number 9 car stopped. The conductor announced Saspe. I looked fixedly past Maria in the direction of Brösen, whence the other car crept toward us, growing gradually larger. Mustn’t let my eyes wander. What, after all, was there to look at? Scrub pines, rusty ironwork, a maze of tumble-down tombstones with inscriptions that only the thistles and wild oats could read. Under such circumstances, it was better to look out the open window and up into the sky: there they hummed, the fat Ju-52’s, as only trimotored planes or enormous flies can hum in a cloudless July sky.

We moved up with a great clanging of bells and the other car cut off our view. The moment we passed the trailer, my head turned of its own accord and I was treated to the whole tumbledown cemetery and also a bit of the north wall; the white patch lay in the shadow, but it was still painfully white…

Then the cemetery was gone, we approached Brösen, and once again I looked at Maria. She had on a light summer dress with a flower pattern. On her round neck with its faintly radiant skin, over her well-upholstered collarbone, she wore a necklace of red wooden cherries, all the same size and simulating bursting ripeness. Was it my imagination or did I really smell it? Maria seemed to be taking her vanilla scent along with her to the Baltic. Oskar leaned slightly forward, took a long whiff of it, and in an instant vanquished the moldering Jan Bronski. The defense of the Polish Post Office had receded into history even before the flesh had fallen from the defenders’ bones. Oskar, the survivor, had very different smells in his nostrils than that of his presumptive father, once so elegant a figure, now dust.

In Brösen Maria bought a pound of cherries, took me by the hand—well she knew that only she was permitted to do so—and led me through the pine woods to the bathing establishment. Though I was nearly sixteen—the attendant had no eye for such things—I was allowed into the ladies’ section. Water: 65, said the blackboard, air: 80; wind: east; forecast: fair. Beside the blackboard hung a poster, dealing with artificial respiration. The victims all had on striped bathing suits, the rescuers wore mustaches, straw hats floated upon treacherous, turbulent waters.

The barefooted girl attendant went ahead. Around her waist, like a penitent, she wore a cord from which hung the enormous key that opened the cabins. Plank walks. Railings. Alongside the cabins a hard runner of coconut fiber. We had cabin Number 53. The wood of the cabin was warm, dry, and of a natural bluish-white hue that I should call blind. Beside the window hung a mirror that had ceased to take itself seriously.

First Oskar had to undress. This I did with my face to the wall and it was only reluctantly that I let Maria help me. Then Maria turned me round in her sturdy, matter-of-fact way, held out my new bathing suit, and forced me ruthlessly into the tight-fitting wool. No sooner had I buttoned the shoulder straps than she lifted me up on the wooden bench against the back wall of the cabin, put my drum and sticks on my lap, and began, with quick energetic movements, to undress.

First I drummed a little and counted the knotholes in the floorboards. Then I stopped counting and drumming. It was quite beyond me why Maria, with oddly pursed lips, should whistle while removing her shoes, two high notes, two low notes, and while stripping off her socks. Whistling like the driver of a brewery truck, she took off the flowery dress, whistling she hung up her petticoat over her dress, dropped her brassiere, and still without finding a tune, whistled frantically while pulling her panties, which were really gym shorts, down to her knees, letting them slip to the floor, climbing out of the rolled-up pants legs, and kicking the shorts into the corner with one foot.

Maria frightened Oskar with her hairy triangle. Of course he knew from his poor mama that women are not bald down there, but for him Maria was not a woman in the sense in which his mama had shown herself to be a woman in her dealings with Matzerath or Jan Bronski.

And I recognized her at once. Rage, shame, indignation, disappointment, and a nascent half-comical, half-painful stiffening of my watering can under my bathing suit made me forget drum and drumsticks for the sake of the new stick I had developed.

Oskar jumped up and flung himself on Maria. She caught him with her hair. He buried his face in it. It grew between his lips. Maria laughed and tried to pull him away. I drew more and more of her into me, looking for the source of the vanilla smell. Maria was still laughing. She even left me to her vanilla, it seemed to amuse her, for she didn’t stop laughing. Only when my feet slipped and I hurt her—for I didn’t let go the hair or perhaps it was the hair that didn’t let me go—only when the vanilla brought tears to my eyes, only when I began to taste mushrooms or some acrid spice, in any case, something that was not vanilla, only when this earthy smell that Maria concealed behind the vanilla brought me back to the smell of the earth where Jan Bronski lay moldering and contaminated me for all time with the taste of perishability—only then did I let go.

Oskar slipped on the blind-colored boards of the bathhouse cabin and was still crying when Maria, who was laughing once more, picked him up, caressed him, and pressed him to the necklace of wooden cherries which was all she had on.

Shaking her head, she picked her hairs from between my lips and said in a tone of surprise: “What a little rascal you are! You start up and you don’t know what’s what and then you cry.”