When he started brushing in sunsets, it got really embarrassing: “And before the Atlantic night descends on us like a flock of ravens transformed by enchantment into a black shroud, the sky takes on colors we never see at home. An orange flares up, fleshy and unnatural, then airy and weightless, bejeweled at the edges as in the paintings of old masters; and in between, feathery clouds; and oh what a strange light over the rolling full-blooded sea!”
Standing there with his sugar candy on his neck, he sounded the color organ, rising to a roar, descending to a whisper, from watery blue to cold-glazed lemon yellow to brownish purple. Poppies blazed in the sky, and in their midst clouds, first silver, then suffused with red: “So must it be,” these were his actual words, “when birds and angels bleed to death.” And suddenly from out of this sky, so daringly described, from out of bucolic little clouds, he conjured up a seaplane of the Sunderland type. It came buzzing toward his U-boat but accomplished nothing. Then with the same orator’s mouth but without metaphors, he opened the second part of his lecture. Chopped, dry, matter-of-fact: “I’m sitting in the periscope seat. Just scored a hit. Probably a refrigerator ship. Sinks stern first. We take the boat down at one one zero. Destroyer comes in on one seven zero. We come left ten degrees. New course: one two zero, steady on one two zero. Propeller sounds fade, increase, come in at one eight zero, ash cans: six… seven… eight… eleven: lights go out; pitch-darkness, then the emergency lighting comes on, and one after another the stations report all clear. Destroyer has stopped. Last bearing one six zero, we come left ten degrees. New course four five…”
Unfortunately, this really exciting fillet was followed by more prose poems: “The Atlantic winter” or “Phosphorescence in the Mediterranean,” and a genre painting: “Christmas on a submarine,” with the inevitable broom transformed into a Christmas tree. In conclusion he rose to mythical heights: the homecoming after a successful mission, Ulysses, and at long last: “The first sea gulls tell us that the port is near.”
I don’t know whether Dr. Klohse ended the session with the familiar words “And now back to work,” or whether we sang “Welovethestorms.” I seem, rather, to recall muffled but respectful applause, disorganized movements of getting up, begun by girls and pigtails. When I turned around toward Mahlke, he was gone; I saw his hair with the part in the middle bob up several times by the right-hand exit, but one of my legs had fallen asleep during the lecture and for a few moments I was unable to jump from the window niche to the waxed floor.
It wasn’t until I reached the dressing room by the gymnasium that I ran into Mahlke; but I could think of nothing to start a conversation with. While we were still changing, rumors were heard and soon confirmed. We were being honored: the lieutenant commander had asked Mallenbrandt, his former gym teacher, for leave to participate in the good old gym class, though he was out of shape. In the course of the two hours which as usual on Saturday closed the school day, he showed us what he could do. In the second hour, we were joined by the Firsters.
Squat, well built, with a luxuriant growth of black hair on his chest. From Mallenbrandt he had borrowed the traditional red gym pants, the white shirt with the red stripe at chest level, and the black C embedded in the stripe. A cluster of students formed around him while he was dressing. Lots of questions: “…may I look at it close up? How long does it take? And what if? But a friend of my brother’s in the mosquito boats says…” He answered patiently. Sometimes he laughed for no reason but contagiously. The dressing room whinnied; and the only reason why Mahlke caught my attention just then was that he didn’t join in the laughter; he was busy folding and hanging up his clothes.
The trill of Mallenbrandt’s whistle called us to the gymnasium, where we gathered around the horizontal bar. The lieutenant commander, discreetly seconded by Mallenbrandt, directed the class. Which meant that we were not kept very busy, because he was determined to perform for us, among other things, the giant swing ending in a split. Aside from Hotten Sonntag only Mahlke could compete, but so execrable were his swing and split—his knees were bent and he was all tensed up—that none of us could bear to watch him. When the lieutenant commander began to lead us in a series of free and carefully graduated ground exercises, Mahlke’s Adam’s apple was still dancing about like a stuck pig. In the vault over seven men, he landed askew on the mat and apparently turned his ankle. After that he sat on a ladder off to one side and must have slipped away when the Firsters joined us at the beginning of the second hour. However, he was back again for the basketball game against the First; he even made three or four baskets, but we lost just the same.
Our Neo-Gothic gymnasium preserved its air of solemnity just as St. Mary’s Chapel in Neuschottland, regardless of all the painted plaster and ecclesiastical trappings Father Gusewski could assemble in the bright gymnastic light of its broad window fronts, never lost the feel of the modern gymnasium it had formerly been. While there clarity prevailed over all mysteries, we trained our muscles in a mysterious twilight: our gymnasium had ogival windows, their panes broken up by rosettes and flamboyant tracery. In the glaring light of St. Mary’s Chapel, offering, transubstantiation, and communion were disenchanted motions that might have been performed in a factory; instead of wafers, one might just as well have handed out hammers, saws, or window frames, or for that matter gymnastic apparatus, bats and relay sticks, as in former days. While in the mystical light of our gymnasium the simple act of choosing the two basketball teams, whose ten minutes of play was to wind up the session, seemed solemnly moving like an ordination or confirmation ceremony. And when the chosen ones stepped aside into the dim background, it was with the humility of those performing a sacred rite. Especially on bright mornings, when a few rays of sun found their way through the foliage in the yard and the ogival windows, the oblique beams, falling on the moving figures of athletes performing on the trapeze or rings, produced strange, romantic effects. If I concentrate, I can still see the squat little lieutenant commander in altar-boy-red gym pants, executing airy, fluid movements on the flying trapeze, I can see his flawlessly pointed feet—he performed barefoot—diving into a golden sunbeam, and I can see his hands—for all at once he was hanging by his knees—reach out for a shaft of agitated golden dust. Yes, our gymnasium was marvelously old-fashioned; why, even the dressing room obtained its light through ogival windows; that was why we called it the Sacristy.
Mallenbrandt blew his whistle; after the basketball game both classes had to line up and sing “Tothemountainswegointheearlydewfallera”; then we were dismissed. In the dressing room there was again a huddle around the lieutenant commander. Only the Firsters hung back a little. After carefully washing his hands and armpits over the one and only washbasin—there were no showers—the lieutenant commander put on his underwear and stripped off his borrowed gym togs so deftly that we didn’t see a thing. Meanwhile he was subjected to more questions, which he answered with good-natured, not too condescending laughter. Then, between two questions, his good humor left him. His hands groped uncertainly. Covertly at first, then openly, he was looking for something. He even looked under the bench. “Just a minute, boys, I’ll be back on deck in a second,” and in navy-blue shorts, white shirt, socks but no shoes, he picked his way through students, benches, and zoo smell: Pavilion for Small Carnivores. His collar stood open and raised, ready to receive his tie and the ribbon bearing the decoration whose name I dare not utter. On the door of Mallenbrandt’s office hung the weekly gymnasium schedule. The lieutenant commander knocked and went right in.
Who didn’t think of Mahlke as I did? I’m not sure I thought of him right away, I should have, but the one thing I am sure of is that I didn’t sing out: “Hey, where’s Mahlke?” Nor did Schilling nor Hotten Sonntag, nor Winter Kupka Esch. Nobody sang out; instead we all ganged up on sickly little Buschmann, a poor devil who had come into the world with a grin that he couldn’t wipe off his face even after it had been slapped a dozen times.
The half-dressed lieutenant commander
came back with Mallenbrandt in a terry-cloth bathrobe. “Whowasit?” Mallenbrandt roared. “Lethimstepforward!” And we sacrificed Buschmann to his wrath. I too shouted Buschmann; I even succeeded in telling myself as though I really believed it: Yes, it must have been Buschmann, who else could it be?
But while Mallenbrandt, the lieutenant commander, and the upper-class monitor were flinging questions at Buschmann all together, I began to have pins and needles, superficially at first, on the back of my neck. The sensation grew stronger when Buschmann got his first slap, when he was slapped because even under questioning he couldn’t get the grin off his face. While my eyes and ears waited for a clear confession from Buschmann, the certainty crawled upward from the back of my neck: Say, I wonder if it wasn’t a certain So-and-So!
My confidence seeped away; no, the grinning Buschmann was not going to confess; even Mallenbrandt must have suspected as much or he would not have been so liberal with his slaps. He had stopped talking about the missing object and only roared between one slap and the next: “Wipe that grin off your face. Stop it, I say. I’ll teach you to grin.”
I may say, in passing, that Mallenbrandt did not achieve his aim. I don’t know whether Buschmann is still in existence; but if there should be a dentist, veterinary, or physician by the name of Buschmann—Heini Buschmann was planning to study medicine—it is certainly a grinning Dr. Buschmann; for that kind of thing is not so easily got rid of, it is long-lived, survives wars and currency reforms, and even then, in the presence of a lieutenant commander with an empty collar, waiting for an investigation to produce results, it proved superior to the blows of Mr. Mallenbrandt.
Discreetly, though all eyes were on Buschmann, I looked for Mahlke, but there was no need to search; I could tell by a feeling in my neck where he was inwardly singing his hymns to the Virgin. Fully dressed, not far away but removed from the crowd, he was buttoning the top button of a shirt which to judge by the cut and stripes must have been still another hand-me-down from his father. He was having trouble getting his distinguishing mark in under the button.
Apart from his struggles with his shut button and the accompanying efforts of his jaw muscles, he gave an impression of calm. When he realized that the button wouldn’t close over his Adam’s apple, he reached into the breast pocket of his coat, which was still hanging up, and produced a rumpled necktie. No one in our class wore a tie. In the upper classes there were a few fops who affected ridiculous bow ties. Two hours before, while the lieutenant was still regaling the auditorium about the beauties of nature, he had worn his shirt collar open; but already the tie was in his breast pocket, awaiting the great occasion.
This was Mahlke’s maiden voyage as a necktie wearer. There was only one mirror in the dressing room and even so it was covered with spots. Standing before it, but only for the sake of form, for he didn’t step close enough to see anything much, he tied on his rag—it had bright polka dots and was in very bad taste, I am convinced today—turned down his collar, and gave the enormous knot one last tug. Then he spoke up, not in a very loud voice but with sufficient emphasis that his words could be distinguished from the sounds of the investigation that was still in progress and the slaps which Mallenbrandt, over the lieutenant commander’s objections, was still tirelessly meting out. “I’m willing to bet,” Mahlke said, “that Buschmann didn’t do it. But has anybody searched his clothing?”
Though he had spoken to the mirror, Mahlke found ready listeners. His necktie, his new act, was noticed only later, and then not very much. Mallenbrandt personally searched Buschmann’s clothes and soon found reason to strike another blow at the grin: in both coat pockets he found several opened packages of condoms, with which Buschmann carried on a retail trade in the upper classes; his father was a druggist. Otherwise Mallenbrandt found nothing, and the lieutenant commander cheerfully gave up, knotted his officer’s tie, turned his collar down, and, tapping at the spot which had previously been so eminently decorated, suggested to Mallenbrandt that there was no need to take the incident too seriously: “It’s easily replaced. It’s not the end of the world. Just a silly boyish prank.”
But Mallenbrandt had the doors of the gymnasium and dressing room locked and with the help of two Firsters searched our pockets as well as every corner of the room that might have been used as a hiding place. At first the lieutenant commander was amused and even helped, but after a while he grew impatient and did something that no one had ever dared to do in our dressing room: he began to chain smoke, stamping out the butts on the linoleum floor. His mood soured visibly after Mallenbrandt had silently pushed up a spittoon that for years had been gathering dust beside the washbowl and had already been searched as a possible hiding place.
The lieutenant commander blushed like a schoolboy, tore the cigarette he had just begun from his delicately curved orator’s mouth, and stopped smoking. At first he just stood there with his arms folded; then he began to look nervously at the time, demonstrating his impatience by the sharp left hook with which he shook his wrist watch out of his sleeve.
He took his leave by the door with gloved fingers, giving it to be understood that he could not approve of the way this investigation was being handled, that he would put the whole irritating business into the hands of the principal, for he had no intention of letting his leave be spoiled by a bunch of ill-behaved brats.
Mallenbrandt tossed the key to one of the Firsters, who created an embarrassing pause by his clumsiness in unlocking the dressing-room door.
CHAPTER
VIII
The investigation dragged on, ruining our Saturday afternoon and bringing no results. I remember few details and those are hardly worth talking about, for I had to keep an eye on Mahlke and his necktie, whose knot he periodically tried to push up higher; but for Mahlke’s purposes a hook would have been needed. No, you were beyond help.
But what of the lieutenant commander? The question seems hardly worth asking, but it can be answered in few words. He was not present at the afternoon investigation, and it may well have been true, as unconfirmed rumors had it, that he spent the afternoon with his fiancée, looking through the city’s three or four medal shops. Somebody in our class claimed to have seen him on Sunday at the Four Seasons Café, sitting with his fiancée and her parents, and allegedly nothing was missing between his collarbones: the visitors to the café may have noticed, with a certain awe, who was sitting there in their midst, trying his well-mannered best to cut the recalcitrant cake of the third war year with a fork.
I didn’t go to the café that Sunday. I had promised Father Gusewski to serve as his altar boy at early Mass. Shortly after seven Mahlke came in with his bright necktie and was unable, despite the aid of the usual five little old women, to dispel the emptiness of the former gymnasium. He received communion as usual on the outer left. The previous evening, immediately after the investigation at school, he must have come to St. Mary’s Chapel and confessed; or perhaps, for one reason or another, you whispered into Father Wiehnke’s ear at the Church of the Sacred Heart.
Gusewski kept me, inquired after my brother, who was fighting in Russia, or maybe he had stopped fighting, for there had been no news of him for several weeks. Once again I had ironed and starched all the altar covers and the alb, and it is perfectly possible that he gave me a roll or two of raspberry drops; what I know for sure is that Mahlke was gone when I left the sacristy. He must have been one car ahead of me. On Max-Halbe-Platz I boarded the trailer of a No. 9 car. Schilling jumped on at Magdeburger Strasse after the car had gathered considerable speed. We spoke of something entirely different. Maybe I offered him some of Father Gusewski’s raspberry drops. Between Saspe Manor and Saspe Cemetery, we overtook Hotten Sonntag. He was riding a lady’s bicycle and carrying the little Pokriefke girl astraddle on the baggage rack. The spindly little thing’s thighs were still as smooth as frogs’ legs, but she was no longer flat all over. The wind showed that her hair had grown longer.
We had to wait at the Saspe siding for the ca
r coming from the opposite direction, and Hotten Sonntag and Tulla passed us. At the Brösen stop the two of them were waiting. The bicycle was leaning against a waste-paper basket provided by the beach administration. They were playing brother and sister, standing there with their little fingers linked. Tulla’s dress was blue blue washing blue, and in every way too short too tight too blue. Hotten Sonntag was carrying the bundle of bathrobes etc. We managed to exchange a few silent glances, and to catch each other’s meaning. At length words fell from the supercharged silence: “Of course it was Mahlke, who else could it have been? What a guy!”
Tulla wanted details, squirmed up to us, and wheedled with a pointed forefinger. But neither of us called the object by name. She got no more out of us than a terse “WhoelsebutMahlke” and an “It’sasclearasday.” But Schilling, no, it was I, dreamed up a new title. Into the gap between Hotten Sonntag’s head and Tulla’s head I inserted the words: “The Great Mahlke. The Great Mahlke did it, only the Great Mahlke can do such things.”
And the title stuck. All previous attempts to fasten nicknames on Mahlke had been short-lived. I remember “Soup Chicken”; and when he stood aloof, we had called him “Swallower” or “The Swallower.” But the first title to prove viable was my spontaneous cry: ‘“The Great Mahlke!” And in these papers I shall speak now and then of “The Great Mahlke.”
At the cashier’s window we got rid of Tulla. She disappeared into the ladies’ cabins, stretching her dress with her shoulder blades. Before the verandalike structure in front of the men’s bathhouse lay the sea, pale and shaded by fair-weather clouds, blowing across the sky in dispersed order. Water: 65. Without having to search, the three of us caught sight, behind the second sandbank, of somebody swimming frantically on his back, splashing and foaming as he headed for the superstructure of the mine sweeper. We agreed that only one of us should swim after him. Schilling and I suggested Hotten Sonntag, but he preferred to lie with Tulla Pokriefke behind the sun screen on the family beach and sprinkle sand on frogs’ legs. Schilling claimed to have eaten too much breakfast: “Eggs and all. My grandma from Krampitz has chickens and some Sundays she brings in two or three dozen eggs.”