Applause did him good and quieted the jumping mouse on his neck; applause also embarrassed him and started the selfsame mouse up again. Usually he made a disparaging gesture, which brought him new applause. He wasn't one to brag; never once did you say: "You try it." Or: "I dare one of you guys to try." Or: "Remember the day before yesterday, the way I went down four times in a row, the way I went in amidships as far as the galley and brought up that famous can… None of you ever did that. I bet it came from France, there were frogs' legs in it, tasted something like veal, but you were yellow, you wouldn't even try it after I'd eaten half the can. And damned if I didn't raise a second can, hell, I even found a can opener, but the second can stank, rotten corned beef."
No, Mahlke never spoke like that. He did extraordinary things. One day, for instance, he crawled into the barge's one-time galley and brought up several cans of preserves, which according to the inscriptions stamped in the metal were of English or French origin; he even located an almost serviceable can opener. Without a word he ripped the cans open before our eyes, devoured the alleged frogs' legs, his Adam's apple doing push-ups as he chewed – I forgot to say that Mahlke was by nature an eater – and when the can was half empty, he held out the can to us, invitingly but not overbearingly. We said no thank you, because just from watching, Winter had to crawl between the empty gun mounts and retch at length but in vain in the direction of the harbor mouth.
After this bit of conspicuous consumption, Mahlke naturally received his portion of applause; waving it aside, he fed the putrid corned beef and what was left of the frogs' legs to the gulls, which had been coming steadily closer during his banquet. Finally he bowled the cans and shooed the gulls overboard, and scoured the can opener, which alone struck him as worth keeping. From then on he wore the can opener suspended from his neck by a string like the English screwdriver and his various amulets, but not regularly, only when he was planning to look for canned goods in the galley of a former Polish mine sweeper – his stomach never seemed to mind. On such days he came to school with the can opener under his shirt beside the rest of his hardware; he even wore it to early Mass in St. Mary's Chapel; for whenever Mahlke knelt at the altar rail, tilting his head back and sticking out his tongue for Father Gusewski to lay the host on, the altar boy by the priest's side would peer into Mahlke's shirt collar: and there, dangling from your neck was the can opener, side by side with the Madonna and the grease-coated screwdriver; and I admired you, though you were not trying to arouse my admiration. No, Mahlke was never an eager beaver.
In the autumn of the same year in which he had learned to swim, they threw him out of the Young Folk and into the Hitler Youth, because several Sundays in a row he had refused to lead his squad – he was a squad leader in the Young Folk – to the morning meet in Jeschkental Forest. That too, in our class at least, brought him outspoken admiration. He received our enthusiasm with the usual mixture of coolness and embarrassment and continued, now as a rank-and-file member of the Hitler Youth, to shirk his duty on Sunday mornings; but in this organization, which embraced the whole male population from fourteen to twenty, his remissness attracted less attention, for the Hitler Youth was not as strict as the Young Folk, it was a big, sprawling organization in which fellows like Mahlke could blend with their surroundings. Besides, he wasn't insubordinate in the usual sense; he regularly attended the training sessions during the week, made himself useful in the "special activities" that were scheduled more and more frequently, and was glad to help with the junk collections or stand on street corners with a Winter Aid can, as long as it didn't interfere with his early Mass on Sunday. There was nothing unusual about being transferred from the Young Folk to the Hitler Youth, and Member Mahlke remained a colorless unknown quantity in the official youth organization, while in our school, after the first summer on the barge, his reputation, though neither good nor bad, became legendary.
There is no doubt that unlike the Hitler Youth our gymnasium became for you, in the long run, a source of high hopes which no common gymnasium, with its traditional mixture of rigor and good-fellowship, with its colored school caps and its often invoked school spirit, could possibly fulfill.
"What's the matter with him?"
"I say he's got a tic."
"Maybe it's got something to do with his father's death."
"And what about all that hardware on his neck?"
"And he's always running off to pray."
"And he don't believe in nothing if you ask me."
"Hell no, he's too realistic."
"And what about that thing on his neck?"
"You ask him, you're the one that sicked the cat on him…"
We racked our brains and we couldn't understand you. Before you could swim, you were a nobody, who was called on now and then, usually gave correct answers, and was named Joachim Mahlke. And yet I believe that in Sixth or maybe it was later, certainly before your first attempts at swimming, we sat on the same bench; or you sat behind me or in the same row in the middle section, while I sat behind Schilling near the window. Later somebody recollected that you had worn glasses up to Fifth; I never noticed them. I didn't even notice those eternal laced shoes of yours until you had made the grade with your swimming and begun to wear a shoelace for high shoes around your neck. Great events were shaking the world just then, but Mahlke's time reckoning was Before learning to swim and After learning to swim; for when the war broke out all over the place, not all at once but little by little, first on the Westerplatte, then on the radio, then in the newspapers, this schoolboy who could neither swim nor ride a bicycle didn't amount to much; but the mine sweeper of the Czaika class, which was later to provide him with his first chance to perform, was already, if only for a few weeks, playing its military role in the Pitziger Wiek, in the Gulf, and in the fishing port of Hela.
The Polish fleet was small but ambitious. We knew its modern ships, for the most part built in England or France, by heart, and could reel off their guns, tonnage, and speed in knots with never a mistake, just as we could recite the names of all Italian light cruisers, or of all the obsolete Brazilian battleships and monitors.
Later Mahlke took the lead also in this branch of knowledge; he learned to pronounce fluently and without hesitation the names of the Japanese destroyers from the modern Kasumi class, built in '38, to the slower craft of the Asagao class, modernized in '23: "Fumizuki, Satsuki, Yuuzuki, Hokaze, Nadakaze, and Oite."
It didn't take very long to rattle off the units of the Polish fleet. There were the two destroyers, the Blyskawica and the Grom, two thousand tons, thirty-eight knots, but they decommissioned themselves two days before the outbreak of the war, put into English ports, and were incorporated into the British Navy. The Blyskawica is still in existence. She has been converted into a floating naval museum in Gdynia and schoolteachers take their classes to see it.