Bruno got to his feet in agitation, walked twice, then a third time around the desk, and when he sat down again there were two little doves perching on the lamp, one white and one gray, looking at him in silence. On the window sill above there were more doves, and some beside his chair as well, but he took no notice of this sudden plague of birds in his basement study. “Dr Franck and I,” he went on writing, pausing again and again, “are in no doubt, Dr Mann, of what is going on here: we are being spied on! Exactly what the Germans plan to do we do not know. We know only how the Jews are faring in their old home, and we hope that the new Nazi realm will not go on and on growing, to reach our town one day with its kraken arms. Dr Franck, who as President of the Poalei Zion movement in the old days would have liked to move the whole of Drohobycz to the banks of the Jordan or the mountains of Galilee, now says that if the enemies of the Jews begin to rage, there will be nothing left for us anyway but prayer. And he thinks we ought to continue remaining on good terms with your double, as it may help us later. So Dr Franck has also offered him his own apartment in Drohobycz for the rest of his stay here, because it is much lighter and more comfortable than the hotel manager’s bathroom. After we had been standing together in silence for a little longer — while the noise made by the students went on in the art room — Dr Franck suddenly took my arm and asked me whether he could stay with us until the worst was over. What was I to reply? That Hania hates having guests? That the atmosphere on his bleak station bench is better than in our cold, sad house? That we are all lost anyway, and God has another end in view for every one of us?”
No sooner had Bruno written the last sentence than the warm gray lump in his belly became so hot that he had to take off his heavy tweed jacket and unbutton the collar of his shirt. He hung the jacket over the back of Papa’s chair, and spent some time looking in silence at the two doves on his desk. Without moving, they looked back, also in silence. Then he carefully opened the lower compartment of his desk and took a large old cigar box out of it. He kept the things that were really important to him in this box: the tiny, well-worn brass hearing trumpet that Papa, in his last months of life, was always holding against the floor of the family’s old house on the market place, so as to get a better idea of what the mice, spiders and martens living under it had to say. Adele’s feather duster, of which he had both good and bad memories. And distributed everywhere in the cigar box was the sawdust, with its unpleasant odor, that he had secretly collected from the smelly, tangled hair of Helena Jakubowicz over the past years. Like someone digging for gold, he would run his fingers through that damp yellow pile of sawdust, thinking of the delightful and dangerous things that Helena Jakubowicz bought for the two of them in one of the badly lit shops that were always changing their location beyond the market place — and soon he felt reassured again and stopped sweating.
“Professor Schulz,” the gray dove said to him, in the firm but still slightly pubertal voice of young Theo Rosenstock, staring at him out of small black eyes as if he were blind, “Mrs Jakubowicz has sent us again. She says you must hurry. She doesn’t have much time, because afterwards she has a date to meet the gentleman from Germany in the Savoy Bar, and she also has to correct our philosophy essays by tomorrow.”
“I’m sure to get top marks,” said the white dove, giggling. Bruno recognized the girlish voice of Hermann, the baker Lisowski’s middle son, who was as stupid as he was sweet, and he wished very much that the boy was right in what he said.