As in the drumming machine, which the inventor may have taken as his model, Greff and his counterweight hung inside a frame. Forming a sharp contrast to the four whitewashed crossbeams, a graceful little green ladder stood between him and the potatoes that counterbalanced him. With an ingenious knot such as scouts know how to tie, he had fastened the potato baskets to the main rope. Since the interior of the scaffolding was illumined by four light bulbs which, though painted white, gave off an intense glow, Oskar was able, without desecrating the platform with his presence, to read the inscription on a cardboard tag fastened with wire to the scout knot over the potato basket: 165 lbs. (less 3 oz.).

Greff hung in the uniform of a boy scout leader. On his last day he had resumed the uniform of the pre-war years. But it was now too tight for him. He had been unable to close the two uppermost trouser buttons and the belt, a jarring note in his otherwise trim costume. In accordance with scout ritual Greff had crossed two fingers of his left hand. Before hanging himself, he had tied his scout hat to his right wrist. He had had to forgo the neckerchief. He had also been unable to button the collar of his shirt, and a bush of curly black hair burst through the opening.

On the steps of the platform lay a few asters, accompanied inappropriately by parsley stalks. Apparently he had run out of flowers to strew on the steps, for he had used most of the asters and a few roses to wreathe the four little pictures that hung on the four main beams of the scaffolding. Left front, behind glass, hung Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Left rear, unframed, St. George. Right rear, without glass, the head of Michelangelo’s David. On the right front post, provided with frame and glass, hung the photo of an expressively handsome boy, aged perhaps sixteen: an early picture of his favorite, Horst Donath, later Lieutenant Donath, who had fallen by the Donets.

Perhaps I should say a word about the four scraps of paper on the platform steps between the asters and the parsley. They were disposed in such a way that they could easily be pieced together. Oskar pieced them together and deciphered a summons to appear in court on a morals charge.

The ambulance siren aroused me from my meditations about the greengrocer’s death. A moment later they came hobbling down the cellar stairs, mounted the steps to the platform, and took the dangling Greff in hand. No sooner had they lifted him than the potato baskets making a counterweight fell with a crash, releasing a mechanism similar to that of the drumming machine, housed on top of the scaffolding but discreetly sheathed in plywood. While down below potatoes rolled over the platform or fell directly to the concrete floor, up above clappers pounded upon tin, wood, bronze, and glass, an orchestra of drums was unleashed: Albrecht Greff’s grand finale.

Oskar finds it very difficult to reproduce on his drum an echo of that avalanche of potatoes—a windfall, incidentally, to some of the ambulance orderlies—and of the organized din of Greff’s drumming machine. And yet, perhaps because my drum accounted in good part for the form Greff imprinted upon his death, I occasionally manage to drum a pretty faithful tone-poem of Greff’s death. When friends, or Bruno my keeper, ask me what my piece is called, I tell them the title is “165 Lbs.”

In mid-June, 1942, my son Kurt was one year old. Oskar, the father, attached little importance to this birthday; two years more, he thought to himself. In October, ‘42, Greff, the greengrocer, hanged himself on a gallows so ingeniously conceived that I, Oskar, have ever since looked upon suicide as one of the noble forms of death. In January, ‘43, there was a good deal of talk about the city of Stalingrad. But since Matzerath uttered the name of this city very much in the same tone as previously Pearl Harbor, Tobruk, and Dunkirk, I paid no more attention to the happenings there than I had to those in the other cities whose names had been made familiar to me by special communiqués; for Wehrmacht communiques and newscasts had become Oskar’s school of geography. How else would I have learned the situation of the Kuban, Mius, and Don rivers, who could have taught me more about the Aleutian Islands, Atu, Kiska, and Adak than the radio commentaries ori the events in the Far East? So it came about that in January, 1943, I learned that the city of Stalingrad is situated on the Volga; but I was far less interested in the fate of the Sixth Army than in Maria, who had a slight case of grippe at the time.

As Maria’s grippe drew to a close, the geography lesson went on: to this day, Oskar can locate Rzev and Demyansk instantly and with his eyes shut on any map of Soviet Russia. No sooner was Maria well again than my son Kurt came down with the whooping cough. While I struggled to retain the difficult names of a few hotly disputed Tunisian oases, Kurt’s whooping cough, simultaneously with the Afrika Korps, came to an end.

Oh, merry month of May: Maria, Matzerath, and Gretchen Scheffler made preparations for little Kurt’s second birthday. Oskar, too, took considerable interest in the impending celebration; for from June 12, 1943 it would be only a brief year. If I had been present, I might have whispered into my son’s ear on his second birthday: “Just wait, soon you too will be drumming.” But it so happened that on June 12, 1943, Oskar was no longer in Danzig-Langfuhr but in Metz, an ancient city founded by the Romans. My absence was indeed so protracted that Oskar had considerable difficulty in getting back to his native place by June 12, 1944, before the big air raids and in time for Kurt’s third birthday.

What business took me abroad? I won’t beat around the bush: Outside the Pestalozzi School, which had been turned into an Air Force barracks, I met my master Bebra. But Bebra by himself could not have persuaded me to go out into the world. On Bebra’s arm hung Raguna, Signora Roswitha, the great somnambulist.

Oskar was coming from Kleinhammer-Weg. He had paid Gretchen Scheffler a call and had leafed through the Struggle for Rome. Even then, even in the days of Belisarius, he had discovered, history had its ups and downs, even then victories and defeats at river crossings and cities were celebrated or deplored with a fine geographical sweep.

I crossed the Fröbelwiese, which in the course of the last few years had been turned into a storehouse for the Organization Todt; I was thinking about Taginae—where in the year 552 Narses defeated Totila—but it was not the victory that attracted my thoughts to Narses, the great Armenian; no, what interested me was the general’s build; Narses was a misshapan hunchback, Narses was undersized, a dwarf, a gnome, a midget. Narses, I reflected, was a child’s head taller than Oskar. By then I was standing outside the Pestalozzi School. Eager to make comparisons, I looked at the insignia of some Air Force officers who had shot up too quickly. Surely, I said to myself, Narses hadn’t worn any insignia, he had no need to. And there, in the main entrance to the school, stood the great general in person; on his arm hung a lady—why shouldn’t Narses have had a lady on his arm? As they stepped toward me, they were dwarfed by the Air Force giants, and yet they were the hub and center, round them hung an aura of history and legend, they were old as the hills in the midst of these half-baked heroes of the air—what was this whole barracks full of Totilas and Tejas, full of mast-high Ostrogoths, beside a single Armenian dwarf named Narses? With measured tread Narses approached Oskar; he beckoned and so did the lady on his arm. Respectfully the Air Force moved out of our way as Bebra and Signora Roswitha Raguna greeted me. I moved my lips close to Bebra’s ear and whispered: “Beloved master, I took you for Narses the great general; I hold him in far higher esteem than the athlete Belisarius.”