Dismissed, we formed two clusters at the narrow exits. I pushed in behind Mahlke. He was sweating and his sugar-water hair stood up in sticky blades around his ravaged part. Never, not even in gym, had I seen Mahlke perspire. The stench of three hundred schoolboys stuck like corks in the exits. Beads of sweat stood out on Mahlke's flushed anxiety cords, those two bundles of sinew running from the seventh vertebra of his neck to the base of his jutting occiput. In the colonnade outside the folding doors, amid the hubbub of the little Sixths, who had resumed their perpetual game of tag, I caught up with him. I questioned him head on: "Well, what do you say?"
Mahlke stared straight ahead. I tried not to look at his neck. Between two columns stood a plaster bust of Lessing: but Mahlke's neck won out. Calmly and mournfully, as though speaking of his aunt's chronic ailments, his voice said: "Now they need a bag of forty if they want the medal. At the beginning and after they were through in France and in the north, it only took twenty – if it keeps on like this…"
I guess the lieutenant's talk didn't agree with you. Or you wouldn't have resorted to such cheap compensations. In those days luminous buttons and round, oval, or open-work plaques were on display in the windows of stationery and dry-goods stores. They glowed milky-green in the darkness, some disclosing the contours of a fish, others of a flying gull. These little plaques were purchased mostly by elderly gentlemen and fragile old ladies, who wore them on their coat collars for fear of collisions in the blacked-out streets; there were also canes with luminous stripes.
You were not afraid of the blackout, and yet you fastened five or six plaques, a luminous school of fish, a flock of gliding gulls, several bouquets of phosphorescent flowers, first on the lapels of your coat, then on your muffler; you had your aunt sew half a dozen luminous buttons from top to bottom of your coat; you turned yourself into a clown. In the winter twilight, through slanting snowflakes or well-nigh uniform darkness, I saw you, I still see you and always will, striding toward me down Bärenweg, enumerable from top to bottom and back, with one two three four five six coat buttons glowing moldy-green: a pathetic sort of ghost, capable at most of scaring children and grandmothers – trying to distract attention from an affliction which no one could have seen in the pitch-darkness. But you said to yourself, no doubt: No blackness can engulf this overdeveloped fruit; everyone sees, suspects, feels it, wants to grab hold of it, for it juts out ready to be grabbed; if only this winter were over, so I could dive again and be underwater.
Chapter VI
But when the summer came with strawberries, special communiqués, and bathing weather, Mahlke didn't want to swim. On the first of June we swam out to the barge for the first time. We weren't really in the mood. We were annoyed at the Thirds who swam with us and ahead of us, who sat on the bridge in swarms, dived, and brought up the last hinge that could be unscrewed. "Let me come with you, I can swim now," Mahlke had once pleaded. And now it was Schilling, Winter, and myself who pestered him: "Aw, come along. It's no fun without you. We can sun ourselves on the barge. Maybe you'll find something interesting down below."
Reluctantly, after waving us away several times, Mahlke stepped into the tepid soup between the beach and the first sandbank. He swam without his screwdriver, stayed between us, two arms' lengths behind Hotten Sonntag, and for the first time I saw him swim calmly, without excitement or splashing. On the bridge he sat huddled in the shadow of the pilothouse and no one could persuade him to dive. He didn't even turn his neck when the Thirds vanished into the fo'c'sle and came up with trinkets. Yet Mahlke could have taught them a thing or two. Some of them even asked him for pointers – but he scarcely answered. The whole time he looked out through puckered eyes over the open sea in the direction of the harbor mouth buoy, but neither inbound freighters, nor outbound cutters, nor a formation of torpedo boats could divert him. Maybe the submarines got a slight rise out of him. Sometimes, far out at sea, the periscope of a submerged U-boat could be seen cutting a distinct stripe of foam. The 750-ton vessels, built in series at the Schichau Dockyards, were given trial runs in the Gulf or behind Hela; surfacing in the deep channel, they put in toward the harbor and dispelled our boredom. Looked good as they rose to the surface, periscope first. The moment the conning tower emerged, it spat out one or two figures. In dull-white streams the water receded from the gun, ran off the bow and then the stern. Men scrambled out of the hatches, we shouted and waved – I'm not sure whether they answered us, though I still see the motion of waving in every detail and can still feel it in my shoulders. Whether or not they waved back, the surfacing of a submarine strikes the heart, still does – but Mahlke never waved.
…and once – it was the end of June, summer vacation hadn't started yet and the lieutenant commander hadn't yet delivered his lecture in our school auditorium – Mahlke left his place in the shade because a Third had gone down into the fo'c'sle of the mine sweeper and hadn't come up. Mahlke went down the hatch and brought the kid up. He had wedged himself in amidships, but he hadn't got as far as the engine room. Mahlke found him under the deck between pipes and bundles of cable. For two hours Schilling and Hotten Sonntag took turns working on the kid according to Mahlke's directions. Gradually, the color came back into his face, but when we swam ashore we had to tow him.
The next day Mahlke was diving again with his usual enthusiasm, but without a screwdriver. He swam across at his usual speed, leaving us all behind; he had already been under once when we climbed up on the bridge.
The preceding winter's ice and February storms had carried away the last bit of rail, both gun mounts, and the top of the pilothouse. Only the encrusted gull droppings had come through in good shape and, if anything, had multiplied. Mahlke brought up nothing and didn't answer the questions we kept thinking up. But late in the afternoon, after he had been down ten or twelve times and we were starting to limber up for the swim back, he went down and didn't come up. We were all of us out of our minds.
When I speak of a five-minute intermission, it doesn't mean a thing; but after five minutes as long as years, which we occupied with swallowing until our tongues lay thick and dry in dry hollows, we dove down into the barge one by one: in the fo'c'sle there was nothing but a few baby herring. Behind Hotten Sonntag I ventured through the bulkhead for the first time, and looked superficially about the former officers' mess. Then I had to come up, shot out of the hatch just before I would have burst, went down again, shoved my way twice more through the bulkhead, and didn't give up until a good half hour later. Seven or eight of us lay flat on the bridge, panting. The gulls circled closer and closer; must have noticed something.
Luckily, there were no Thirds on the barge. We were all silent or all talking at once. The gulls flew off to one side and came back again. We cooked up stories for the lifeguard, for Mahlke's mother and aunt, and for Klohse, because there was sure to be an investigation at school. Because I was Mahlke's neighbor, they saddled me with the visit to his mother on Osterzeile. Schilling was to tell our story to the lifeguard and in school.
"If they don't find him, we'll have to swim out here with a wreath and have a ceremony."
"We'll chip in. We'll each contribute at least fifty pfennigs."
"We can throw him overboard from here, or maybe just lower him into the fo'c'sle."
"Well have to sing something," said Kupka. But the hollow tinkling laughter that followed this suggestion did not originate with any of us: it came from inside the bridge. We all gaped at some unknown point, waiting for the laughter to start up again, but when it did, it was a perfectly normal kind of laughter, had lost its hollowness, and came from the fo'c'sle. The waters parting at his watershed, Mahlke pushed out of the hatch, breathing scarcely harder than usual, and rubbed the fresh sunburn on his neck and shoulders. His bleating was more good-natured than scornful. "Well," he said, "have you got that funeral oration ready?"