Felix and Kitty accompanied me as far as Max-Halbe-Platz, said goodbye, with Kitty getting teary-eyed, then, shortly before twenty-one hundred hours, proceeded to the control station in Hochstrieß while Oskar plodded down Labesweg with his luggage. The Homecoming. There's an unfortunate tendency nowadays to regard every young man who forges a small check, joins the Foreign Legion, then returns home in a few years, slightly older and full of stories, as a modern-day Ulysses. Some absent-minded fellow climbs onto the wrong train, winds up in Oberhausen instead of Frankfurt, has some sort of encounter on the way—how could he not?—and starts bandying about names like Circe, Penelope, and Telemachus the minute he gets home. Oskar was no Ulysses, if for no other reason than that he found things unchanged at his homecoming. His beloved Maria, to whom the role of Penelope would have fallen, was not surrounded by lecherous suitors, she still had her Matzerath, whom she had chosen over Oskar long before his departure.
