Before we swam ashore, Mahlke went down again. Winter was having an attack of the weeping jitters and we were trying to pacify him. Fifteen minutes later Winter was still bawling, and Mahlke was back on the bridge, wearing a set of radio operator's earphones which from the outside at least looked undamaged, almost new; for amidships Mahlke had found the way into a room that was situated inside the command bridge, above the surface of the water; the former radio shack. The place was bone-dry, he said, though somewhat clammy. After considerable stalling he admitted that he had discovered the entrance while disentangling the young Third from the pipes and cables. "I've camouflaged it. Nobody'll ever find it. But it was plenty of work. It's my private property now, in case you have any doubts. Cozy little joint. Good place to hide if things get hot. Lots of apparatus, transmitter and so on. Might try to put it in working order one of these days."
But that was beyond Mahlke's abilities and I doubt if he ever tried. Or if he did tinker some without letting on, I'm sure his efforts were unsuccessful. He was very handy and knew all there was to know about making ship models, but he was hardly a radio technician. Besides, if Mahlke had ever got the transmitter working and started broadcasting witty sayings, the Navy or the harbor police would have picked us up.
In actual fact, he removed all the apparatus from the cabin and gave it to Kupka, Esch, and the Thirds; all he kept for himself was the earphones. He wore them a whole week, and it was only when he began systematically to refurnish the radio shack that he threw them overboard.
The first thing he moved in was books – I don't remember exactly what they were. My guess is that they included Tsushima, The Story of a Naval Battle, a volume or two of Dwinger, and some religious stuff. He wrapped them first in old woolen blankets, then in oilcloth, and calked the seams with pitch or tar or wax. The bundle was carried out to the barge on a driftwood raft which he, with occasional help from us, towed behind him as he swam. He claimed that the books and blankets had reached their destination almost dry. The next shipment consisted of candles, an alcohol burner, fuel, an aluminum pot, tea, oat flakes, and dehydrated vegetables. Often he was gone for as much as an hour; we would begin to pound frantically, but he never answered. Of course we admired him. But Mahlke ignored our admiration and grew more and more monosyllabic; in the end he wouldn't even let us help him with his moving. However, it was in our presence that he rolled up the color print of the Sistine Madonna, known to me from his room on Osterzeile, and stuffed it inside a hollow curtain rod, packing the open ends with modeling clay. Madonna and curtain rod were towed to the barge and maneuvered into the cabin. At last I knew why he was knocking himself out, for whom he was furnishing the former radio shack.
My guess is that the print was damaged in diving, or perhaps that the moisture in the airless cabin (it had no portholes or communication with the ventilators, which were all flooded in the first place) did not agree with it, for a few days later Mahlke was wearing something on his neck again, appended to a black shoelace: not a screwdriver, but the bronze medallion with the so-called Black Madonna of Czestochowa in low relief. Our eyebrows shot up knowingly; ah-ha, we thought, there's the Madonna routine again. Before we had time to settle ourselves on the bridge, Mahlke disappeared down the forward hatch. He was back again in no more than fifteen minutes, without shoelace and medallion, and he seemed pleased as he resumed his place behind the pilothouse.
He was whistling. That was the first time I heard Mahlke whistle. Of course he wasn't whistling for the first time, but it was the first time I noticed his whistling, which is tantamount to saying that he was really pursing his lips for the first time. I alone – being the only other Catholic on the barge – knew what the whistling was about: he whistled one hymn to the Virgin after another. Leaning on a vestige of the rail, he began with aggressive good humor to beat time on the rickety side of the bridge with his dangling feet; then over the muffled din, he reeled off the whole Pentecost sequence "Veni, Sancte Spiritus" and after that – I had been expecting it – the sequence for the Friday before Palm Sunday. All ten stanzas of the Stabat Mater dolorosa, including Parodisi Gloria and Amen, were rattled off without a hitch. I myself, who had once been Father Gusewski's most devoted altar boy but whose attendance had become very irregular of late, could barely have recollected the first lines.
Mahlke, however, served Latin to the gulls with the utmost ease, and the others, Schilling, Kupka, Esch, Hotten Sonntag, and whoever else was there, listened eagerly with a "Boyohboy" and "Ittakesyourbreathaway." They even asked Mahlke to repeat the Stabat Mater, though nothing could have been more remote from their interests than Latin or liturgical texts.
Still, I don't think you were planning to turn the radio shack into a chapel for the Virgin. Most of the rubbish that found its way there had nothing to do with her. Though I never inspected your hideout – we simply couldn't make it – I see it as a miniature edition of your attic room on Osterzeile. Only the geraniums and cactuses, which your aunt, often against your will, lodged on the window sill and the four-story cactus racks, had no counterpart in the former radio shack; otherwise your moving was a perfect job.
After the books and cooking utensils, Mahlke's ship models, the dispatch boat Cricket and the torpedo boat of the Wolf class, scale 1:1250, were moved below decks. Ink, several pens, a ruler, a school compass, his butterfly collection, and the stuffed snowy owl were also obliged to take the dive. I presume that Mahlke's furnishings gradually began to look pretty sick in this room where water vapor could do nothing but condense. Especially the butterflies in their glassed-over cigar boxes, accustomed as they were to dry attic air, must have suffered from the dampness.
But what we admired most about this game of moving man, which went on for days, was precisely its absurdity and deliberate destructiveness. And the zeal with which Joachim Mahlke gradually returned to the former Polish mine sweeper so many of the objects which he had painstakingly removed two summers before – good old Pilsudski, the plates with the instructions for operating this or that machine, and so on – enabled us, despite the irritating Thirds, to spend an entertaining, I might even say exciting, summer on that barge for which the war had lasted only four weeks.
To give you an example of our pleasures: Mahlke offered us music. You will remember that in the summer of 1940, after he had swum out to the barge with us perhaps six or seven times, he had slowly and painstakingly salvaged a phonograph from the fo'c'sle or the officers' mess, that he had taken it home, repaired it, and put on a new turntable covered with felt. This same phonograph, along with ten or a dozen records, was one of the last items to find their way back again. The moving took two days, during which time he couldn't resist the temptation to wear the crank around his neck, suspended from his trusty shoelace.
Phonograph and records must have come through the trip through the flooded fo'c'sle and the bulkhead in good shape, for that same afternoon he surprised us with music, a hollow tinkling whose source seemed to shift eerily about but was always somewhere inside the barge. I shouldn't be surprised if it shook loose the rivets and sheathing. Though the sun was far down in the sky, we were still getting some of it on the bridge, but even so that sound gave us gooseflesh. Of course we would shout: "Stop it. No. Go on! Play another!" I remember a well-known Ave Maria, as long-lasting as a wad of chewing gum, which smoothed the choppy sea; he just couldn't manage without the Virgin.
There were also arias, overtures, and suchlike – have I told you that Mahlke was gone on serious music? From the inside out Mahlke regaled us with something passionate from Tosca, something enchanted from Humperdinck, and part of a symphony beginning with dadada daaah, known to us from popular concerts.