I was in no mood for talking and gave Tulla and her entourage only half an idea of what was up before vanishing into my cabin. I dressed quickly and caught Mahlke at the No. 9 car stop. Throughout the ride I tried to persuade him, if it had to be, to return the medal personally to the lieutenant commander, whose address it would have been easy to find out.
I don't think he was listening. We stood on the rear platform, wedged in among the late Sunday morning crowd. From one stop to the next he opened his hand between his shirt and mine, and we both looked down at the severe dark metal with the rumpled, still wet ribbon. When we reached Saspe Manor, Mahlke held the medal over the knot of his tie, and tried to use the platform window as a mirror. As long as the car stood motionless, waiting for the car in the opposite direction to pass, I looked out over one of his ears, over the tumbledown Saspe Cemetery toward the airfield. I was in luck: a large trimotored Ju52 was circling cautiously to a landing. That helped me.
Yet it was doubtful whether the Sunday crowd in the car had eyes to spare for the Great Mahlke's exhibition. Amid benches and bundles of beach equipment, they were kept busy struggling with small children worn out from bathing. The whining and blubbering of children, rising, falling, rising, squelched, and ebbing off into sleep, echoed from the front to the rear platform and back – not to mention smells that would have turned the sweetest milk sour.
At the terminus on Brunshöferweg we got out and Mahlke said over his shoulder that he was planning to disturb the noonday repose of Dr. Waldemar Klohse, our principal, that he was going in alone and there was no point in my waiting for him.
Klohse – as we all knew – lived on Baumbachallee. I accompanied the Great Mahlke through the tiled underpass, then I let him go his way; he did not hurry, I would even say that he zigzagged slightly. He held the ends of the ribbon between thumb and forefinger of his left hand; the medal twirled, serving as a propeller on his course to Baumbachallee.
An infernal idea! And why did he have to carry it out! If you had only thrown the damn thing up into the linden trees: in that residential quarter full of shade-dispensing foliage there were plenty of magpies that would have carried it off to their secret store, and tucked it away with the silver teaspoon, the ring and the brooch and the kit and boodle.
Mahlke was absent on Monday. The room was full of rumors. Dr. Brunies conducted his German class, incorrigibly sucking the Cebion tablets he should have distributed to his pupils. Eichendorff lay open before him. Sweet and sticky, his old man's mumble came to us from the desk: a few pages from the Scamp, then poems: The Mill Wheel, The Little Ring, The Troubadour - Two hearty journeymen went forth – If there's a fawn you love the best – The song that slumbers in all things – Mild blows the breeze and blue. Not a word about Mahlke.
It was not until Tuesday that Klohse came in with a gray portfolio, and took his stance beside Dr. Erdmann, who rubbed his hands in embarrassment. Over our heads resounded Klohse's cool breath: a disgraceful thing had happened, and in these fateful times when we must all pull together. The student in question – Klohse did not mention the name – had already been removed from the establishment. It had been decided, however, that other authorities, the district bureau for example, would not be notified. In the interests of the school the students were urged to observe a manly silence, which alone could minimize the effects of such scandalous behavior. Such was the desire of a distinguished alumnus, the lieutenant commander and U-boat captain, bearer of the and so on…"
And so Mahlke was expelled, but – during the war scarcely anyone was thrown out of secondary school for good – transferred to the Horst Wessel School, where his story was kept very quiet
Chapter IX
The Horst Wessel School, which before the war had been called the Crown Prince Wilhelm School, was characterized by the same dusty smell as our Conradinum. The building, built in 1912, I think, seemed friendlier than our brick edifice, but only on the outside. It was situated on the southern edge of the suburb, at the foot of Jeschkental Forest; consequently Mahlke's way to school and my way to school did not intersect at any point when school resumed in the autumn.
But there was no sign of him during the summer vacation either – a summer without Mahlke! – the story was that he had signed up for a premilitary training camp offering courses in radio operation. He displayed his sunburn neither in Brösen nor at Glettkau Beach. Since there was no point in looking for him at St. Mary's Chapel, Father Gusewski was deprived of one of his most reliable altar boys. Altar Boy Pilenz said to himself: No Mahlke, no Mass.
The rest of us lounged about the barge from time to time, but without enthusiasm. Rotten Sonntag tried in vain to find the way into the radio shack. Even the Thirds had heard rumors of an amazing and amazingly furnished hideaway inside the bridge. A character with eyes very close together, whom the infants submissively addressed as Störtebeker, dove indefatigably. Tulla Pokriefke's cousin, a rather sickly little fellow, came out to the barge once or twice, but never dove. Either in my thoughts or in reality I try to strike up a conversation with him about Tulla; I was interested in her. But she had ensnared her cousin as she had me – what with, I wonder? With her threadbare wool, with her ineradicable smell of carpenter's glue? "It's none of your God-damn business!" That's what the cousin said to me – or might have.
Tulla didn't swim out to the barge; she stayed on the beach, but she had given up Hotten Sonntag. I took her to the movies twice, but even so I had no luck; she'd go to the movies with anybody. It was said that she had fallen for Störtebeker, but if so her love was unrequited, for Störtebeker had fallen for our barge and was looking for the entrance to Mahlke's hideout. As the vacation drew to an end there was a good deal of whispering to the effect that his diving had been successful. But there was never any proof: he produced neither a waterlogged phonograph record nor a decaying owl feather. Still, the rumors persisted; and when, two and a half years later, the so-called Dusters, a somewhat mysterious gang supposedly led by Störtebeker, were arrested, our barge and the hiding place under the bridge appear to have been mentioned. But by then I was in the Army; all I heard was a line or two in letters – for until the end, or rather as long as the mails were running, Father Gusewski wrote me letters ranging from pastoral to friendly. In one of the last, written in January '45 – as the Russian armies were approaching Elbing – there was something about a scandalous assault of the Dusters on the Church of the Sacred Heart, where Father Wiehnke officiated. In this letter Störtebeker was referred to by his real name; and it also seems to me that I read something about a three-year-old child whom the gang had cherished as a kind of mascot. I am pretty certain, though sometimes I have my doubts, that in his last or next to last letter – I lost the whole packet and my diary as well near Cottbus – there was some mention of the barge which had its big day before the onset of the summer vacation of '42, but whose glory paled in the course of the summer; for to this day that summer has a flat taste in my mouth – what was summer without Mahlke?