What with the accuracy of the quotation and the awesome secrecy of the place, I might almost have got religion in the course of time. And then this gloomy conscience of mine wouldn’t be driving me to do underpaid social work in a settlement house, I wouldn’t spend my time trying to discover early Communism in Nazareth or late Christianity in Ukrainian kolkhozes. I should at last be delivered from these all-night discussions with Father Alban, from trying to determine, in the course of endless investigations, to what extent blasphemy can take the place of prayer. I should be able to believe, to believe something, no matter what, perhaps even to believe in the resurrection of the flesh. But one day after I had been chopping kindling in the battalion kitchen, I took the ax and hacked Mahlke’s favorite sequence out of the board and eradicated your name.
It was the old story of the spot that found no takers, kind of grisly-moral and transcendent; for the empty patch of wood with its fresh fibers spoke more eloquently than the chipped inscription. Besides, your message must have spread with the shavings, for in the barracks, between kitchen, guardroom, and dressing room, stories as tall as a house began to go around, especially on Sundays when boredom took to counting flies. The stories were always the same, varying only in minor detail. About a Labor Service man named Mahlke, who had served a good year before in Tuchel-North battalion and must have done some mighty sensational things. Two truck drivers, the cook, and the room orderly had been there the whole time, every shipment had passed them by. Without significantly contradicting one another, they spoke roughly as follows: “This is how he looked the first day. Hair down to here. Well, they sent him to the barber. Don’t make me laugh. He needed more than a barber: ears like an egg beater and a neck, a neck, what a neck! He also had… and once when… and for instance when he… but the most amazing thing about him was when I sent the whole pack of new recruits to Tuchel to be deloused because as room orderly I… When they were all under the shower, I says to myself, my eyes are playing tricks on me, so I look again, and I says to myself, mustn’t get envious now, but that dick of his, take it from me, a monster, when he got excited it would stand up to or maybe more, anyway he made good use of it with the commander’s wife, a strapping piece of in her forties, because the damn-fool commander—he’s been transferred to France, a nut—sent him over to his house, the second from the left in Officers’ Row, to build a rabbit hutch. At first Mahlke, that was his name, refused, no he didn’t fly off the handle, he just quietly quoted chapter and verse from the Service regulations. That didn’t do him a bit of good. The chief personally chewed his ass out till he could hardly and for the next two days he was shoveling shit in the latrine. I hosed him off from a respectful distance, because the boys wouldn’t let him into the washroom. Finally he gave in and went toddling over with tools and boards. All that fuss over rabbits! He must have really screwed that old lady! Every day for more than a week she sent for him to work in the garden; every morning Mahlke toddled off and was back again for roll call. But that rabbit hutch wasn’t making any headway at all, so finally it dawned on the chief. I don’t know if he caught them bare ass, maybe on the kitchen table or maybe between the sheets like mamma and papa, anyway, he must have been struck speechless when he saw Mahlke’s, anyway he never said one word about it here in the barracks: it’s not hard to see why. And he sent Mahlke off on official trips whenever he could to Oliva and Oxhöft for spare parts, just to get that stud and his nuts out of the battalion. Because the chiefs old lady must have had mighty hot pants to judge by the size of his you know. We still get rumors from the orderly room: they correspond. Seems there was more to it than sex. You never know the whole story. And the very same Mahlke—I was there—smoked out a partisan ammunition dump single-handed near Gross-Bislaw. It’s a wild story. A plain ordinary pond like there’s so many around here. We were out there partly for work, partly for field training. We’d been lying beside this pond for half an hour, and Mahlke keeps looking and looking, and finally he says: Wait a minute, there’s something fishy down there. The platoon leader, can’t remember his name, grinned, so did we, but he said to go ahead. Before you could say boo, Mahlke has his clothes off and dives into the muck. And what do you know: the fourth time under, but not two feet below the surface, he finds the entrance to an ultra-modern ammunition dump with a hydraulic loading system. All we had to do was carry the stuff away, four truckloads, and the chief had to commend him in front of the whole battalion. In spite of the business with his old lady, they say he even put him in for a medal. He was in the Army when it came, but they sent it on. He was going into the tanks if they took him.”
I restrained myself at first. The same with Winter, Jürgen Kupka, and Bansemer; we all clammed up when the conversation came around to Mahike. When we chanced to pass Officers’ Row—on hikes or on our way to the supply room—we would exchange furtive smiles of connivance, for the second house on the left still had no rabbit hutch. Or a meaningful glance would pass between us because a cat lurked motionless in the gently waving grass. We became a kind of secret clan, though I wasn’t very fond of Winter and Kupka, and still less of Bansemer.
Four weeks before the end of our stint, the rumors began to creep in. Partisans had been active in the region; we were on twenty-four-hour alert, never out of our clothes, though we never caught anybody and we ourselves suffered no losses. The same room orderly who had issued Mahike his uniform and taken him to be deloused brought the news from the office: “In the first place there’s a letter from Mahike to the former commander’s wife. It’s being forwarded to France. In the second place, there’s a letter from way up, full of questions about Mahike. They’re still working on it I always knew that Mahike had it in him. But he certainly hasn’t let any grass grow under his feet. In the old days you had to be an officer if you wanted something nice to wrap around your neck, no matter how badly it ached. Nowadays every enlisted man gets his chance. He must be just about the youngest. Lord, when I think of him with those ears…”
At that point words began to roll out of my mouth. Then Winter spoke up. And Jürgen Kupka and Bansemer had their own two cents’ worth to put in.
“Oh, Mahike. We’ve known him for years.”
“We had him in school.”
“He had a weakness for neckwear when he was only fourteen.”
“Christ, yes. Remember when he swiped that lieutenant commander’s thingamajig off the hook in gym class. Here’s how it…”
“Naw, you gotta begin with the phonograph.”
“What about the canned goods? I suppose that was nothing. Right in the beginning he always wore a screwdriver…”
“Wait a minute! If you want to begin at the beginning, you’ll have to go back to the Schlagball match in Heinrich Ehlers Field. Here’s how it was: We’re lying on the ground and Mahlke’s asleep. So a gray cat comes creeping across the field, heading straight for Mahike. And when the cat sees that neck bobbing up and down, she says to herself, my word, that’s a mouse. And she jumps…”
“That’s the bunk. Pilenz picked up the cat and put it… You going to tell me different?”
Two days later we had official confirmation. It was announced at morning roll call: A former Labor Service man from Tuchel-North battalion, serving first as a simple machine-gunner, then as a sergeant and tank commander, always in the thick of battle, strategically important position, so and so many Russian tanks, and furthermore, etcetera etcetera.
Our replacements were expected and we were beginning to turn in our rags when I received a clipping that my mother had cut out of the Vorposten. There it was printed in black and white: A son of our city, always in the thick of battle, first as a simple machine-gunner, later as a tank commander, and so on and so on.
CHAPTER
XII
Marl, sand, glittering bogs, bushes, slanting groups of pines, ponds, hand grenades, carp, clouds over birches, partisans behind the broom, juniper juniper (good old Lons, the naturalist, had come from around there), the movie house in Tuche
l—all were left behind. I took nothing with me but my cardboard suitcase and a little bunch of tired heather. Even during the trip I began irrationally but stubbornly to look for Mahlke, while throwing the heather between the tracks after Karthaus, in every suburban station and finally in Central Station, outside the ticket windows, in the crowds of soldiers who had poured out of the furlough trams, in the doorway of the control office, and in the streetcar to Langfuhr. I felt ridiculous in my outgrown civilian-schoolboy clothes and convinced that everyone could read my mind. I didn’t go home—what had I to hope for at home?—but got out near our school, at the Sports Palace car stop.
I left my suitcase with the caretaker, but asked him no questions. Sure of what to expect, I raced up the big granite stairway, taking three or more steps at a time. Not that I expected to catch him in the auditorium—both doors stood open, but inside there were only cleaning women, upending the benches and scrubbing them—for whom? I turned off to the left: squat granite pillars good for cooling feverish foreheads. The marble memorial tablet for the dead of both wars: still quite a lot of room to spare. Lessing in his niche. Classes were in session, for the corridors were empty, except for one spindle-legged Fourth carrying a rolled map through the all-pervading octagonal stench. 3a—3b—art room—5a—glass case for stuffed mammals—what was in it now? A cat, of course. But where was the delirious mouse? Past the conference room. And there at the end of the corridor, with the bright front window at his back, between the secretariat and the principal’s office, stood the Great Mahlke, mouseless—for from his neck hung that very special article, the abracadabra, the magnet, the exact opposite of an onion, the galvanized four-leaf clover, good old Schinkel’s brain child, the trinket, the all-day sucker, the thingamajig, the Iwillnotutterit.
And the mouse? It was asleep, hibernating in June. Slumbering beneath a heavy blanket, for Mahlke had put on weight. Not that anyone, fate or an author, had erased or obliterated it, as Racine obliterated the rat from his escutcheon, tolerating only the swan. Mahlke’s heraldic animal was still the mouse, which acted up in its dreams when Mahlke swallowed; for from time to time the Great Mahlke, notwithstanding his glorious decoration, had to swallow.
How he looked? I have said that he had filled out in action, not too much, about two thicknesses of blotting paper. You were half leaning, hair sitting on the white enameled window sill. You were wearing the banditlike combination of black and field-gray, common to all those who served in the Tank Corps: gray bloused pants concealed the shafts of black, highly polished combat boots. The black, tight-fitting tanker’s jacket bunched up under the arms, making them stand out like handles, but it was becoming even so and made you look frail in spite of the few pounds you had gained. No decorations on the jacket. And yet you had both Crosses and some other thing, but no wound insignia: the Virgin had made you invulnerable. It was perfectly understandable that there should be nothing on the chest to distract attention from the new eye-catcher. Around your waist a worn and negligently polished pistol belt, and below it only a hand’s breadth of goods, for the tanker’s jacket was very short, which is why it was sometimes called a monkey jacket. Sagging from the weight of the pistol, which hung down nearly to your ass, the belt relieved the stiffness of your attitude and gave you a lopsided, jaunty look. But your gray field cap sat straight and severe without the then as now customary tilt; a rectilinear crease down the middle recalled your old love of symmetry and the part that divided your hair in your schoolboy and diving days, when you planned, or so you said, to become a clown. Nevertheless, the Redeemer’s hairdo was gone. Even before curing your chronic throat trouble with a piece of metal, they must have given you the ludicrous brush cut which was then characteristic of recruits and today gives some of our pipe-smoking intellectuals their air of functional asceticism. But the countenance was still that of a redeemer: the eagle on your inflexibly vertical cap spread its wings over your brow like the dove of the Holy Ghost. Thin skin, sensitive to the light. Blackheads on fleshy nose. Lowered eyelids traversed by fine red veins. And when I stood breathless between you and the stuffed cat, your eyes scarcely widened.
A little joke: “Greetings, Sergeant Mahlke!”
My joke fell flat. “I’m waiting for Klohse. He’s giving a math class somewhere.”
“He’ll be mighty pleased.”
“I want to speak to him about the lecture.”
“Have you been in the auditorium?”
“My lecture’s ready, every word of it.”
“Have you seen the cleaning women? They’re scrubbing down the benches.”
“I’ll look in later with Klohse. We’ll have to discuss the seating arrangement on the platform.”
“He’ll be mighty pleased.”
“I’m going to suggest that they limit the audience to students from the lower Third up.”
“Does Klohse know you’re waiting?”
“Miss Hersching from the secretariat has gone in to tell him.”
“Well, he’ll be mighty pleased.”
“My lecture will be short but full of action.”
“I should think so. Good Lord, man, how did you swing it so quick?”
“Have a little patience, my dear Pilenz: all the circumstances will be discussed in my lecture.”
“My, won’t Klohse be pleased!”
“I’m going to ask him not to introduce me.”
“Mallenbrandt maybe?”
“The proctor can announce the lecture. That’s enough.”
“Well, he’ll be mighty…”
The bell signal leaped from floor to floor, announcing that classes were at an end. Only then did Mahlke open both eyes wide. Short, sparse lashes. His bearing was meant to be free and easy, but he was tensed to leap. Disturbed by something behind my back, I turned half toward the glass case: the cat wasn’t gray, more on the black side. It crept unerringly toward us, disclosing a white bib. Stuffed cats are able to creep more convincingly than live ones. “The Domestic Cat,” said a calligraphed cardboard sign. The bell stopped, an aggressive stillness set in; the mouse woke up and the cat took on more and more meaning. Consequently I cracked a little joke and another little joke in the direction of the window; I said something about his mother and his aunt; I talked, in order to give him courage, about his father, his father’s locomotive, his father’s death near Dirschau, and his father’s posthumous award for bravery: “How happy your father would be if he were still alive!”
But before I had finished conjuring up Mahlke’s father and persuading the mouse that there was no need to fear the cat, Dr. Waldemar Klohse, our principal, stepped between us with his high, smooth voice. Klohse uttered no congratulations, he didn’t address Mahlke as Sergeant or Bearer of the Thingamajig, nor did he say, Mr. Mahlke, I am sincerely pleased. After evincing a pointed interest in my experience in the Labor Service and in the natural beauties of Tuchler Heath—“you will remember that Löns grew up there”—he sent a trim column of words marching over Mahlke’s field cap: “So you see, Mahlke, you’ve made it after all. Have you been to the Horst Wessel School? My esteemed colleague, Dr. Wendt, will certainly be glad to see you. I feel sure that you will wish to deliver a little lecture for the benefit of your former schoolmates, to reinforce their confidence in our armed forces. Would you please step into my office for a moment?”
And the Great Mahlke, his arms raised like handles, followed Dr. Klohse into the principal’s office and in the doorway whisked his cap off his stubblehead. Oh, that bumpy dome! A schoolboy in uniform on his way to a solemn conference, the outcome of which I did not wait for, although I was curious to know what the already wide-awake and enterprising mouse would say, after the interview, to that cat which though stuffed had never ceased to creep.
Nasty little triumph! Once again I enjoyed my moment of superiority. Just wait and see! He can’t won’t can’t give in. I’ll help him. I’ll speak to Klohse. I’ll find words to touch his heart. Too bad they’ve taken Papa Brunies to Stutthof. He’d come ou
t with his good old Eichendorff in his pocket and extend a helping hand.
But no one could help Mahlke. Perhaps if I had spoken to Klohse. But I did speak to him; for half an hour I let him blow peppermint breath in my face. I was crushed, and my answer was very feeble: “By all reasonable standards, sir, you are probably right. But couldn’t you in view of, I mean, in this particular case? On the one hand, I understand you perfectly. Yes, it can’t be denied, a school has to have discipline. What’s done can’t be undone, but on the other hand, and because he was so young when he lost his father…”
And I spoke to Father Gusewski, and to Tulla, whom I asked to speak to Störtebeker and his gang. I went to see my former group leader in the Young Folk. He had a wooden leg from Crete and was sitting behind a desk in the section headquarters on Winterplatz. He was delighted with my proposal and cursed all schoolmasters: “Sure thing, we’ll do it. Bring him over. I dimly remember him. Wasn’t there some sort of trouble? Forget it. I’ll drum up the biggest crowd I can. Even the League of German Girls and the Women’s Association. I can get a hall across from the postal administration, seats three hundred and fifty…”
Father Gusewski wanted to gather his old ladies and a dozen Catholic workers in the sacristy, for the public meeting halls were not available to him.
“Perhaps, to bring his talk into line with the concerns of the Church,” Father Gusewski suggested, “your friend could say something about St. George to begin with and conclude with a word or two about the power of prayer in times of great distress.” He was eagerly looking forward to the lecture.