by Günter Grass
The young delinquents associated with Störtebeker and Tulla Pokriefke thought they had a cellar that would fill the bill. A youngster by the name of Rennwand, whom I knew slightly—he served as an altar boy in the Church of the Sacred Heart—spoke of the place in the most mysterious terms: Mahlke would need a safe-conduct and would have to surrender his pistol. “Of course we’ll have to blindfold him on the way. And he’ll have to sign a pledge not to tell a living soul, but that’s a mere formality. Of course we’ll pay well, either in cash or in Army watches. We don’t do anything for nothing and we, don’t expect him to.”
But Mahlke accepted none of these possibilities, and he was not interested in pay. I tried to prod him: “What do you want anyway? Nothing’s good enough for you. Why don’t you go out to Tuchel-North? There’s a new batch of recruits. The room orderly and the cook remember you. I’m sure they’d be pleased as Punch to have you make a speech.”
Mahlke listened calmly to all my suggestions, smiling in places, nodded assent, asked practical questions about organizing the meeting in question, and once the obstacles were disposed of, tersely and morosely rejected every single proposition, even an invitation from the regional party headquarters, for from the start he had but one aim in mind: the auditorium of our school. He wanted to stand in the dust-swarming light that trickled through Neo-Gothic ogival windows. He wanted to address the stench of three hundred schoolboys, farting high and farting low. He wanted the whetted scalps of his former teachers around him and behind him. He wanted to face the oil painting at the end of the auditorium, showing Baron von Conradi, founder of the school, caseous and immortal beneath heavy varnish. He wanted to enter the auditorium through one of the old-brown folding doors and after a brief, perhaps pointed speech, to leave through the other; but Klohse, in knickers with small checks, stood barring both doors at once: “As a soldier, Mahlke, you ought to realize. No, the cleaning women were scrubbing the benches for no particular reason, not for you, not for your lecture. Your plan may have been excellently conceived, but it cannot be executed. Remember this, Mahlke: There are many mortals who love expensive carpets but are condemned to die on plain floorboards. You must learn renunciation, Mahlke.”
Klohse compromised just a little. He called a meeting of the faculties of both schools, which decided that “Disciplinary considerations make it imperative…”
And the Board of Education confirmed Klohse’s report to the effect that a former student, whose past history, even though he, but particularly in view of the troubled and momentous times, though without wishing to exaggerate the importance of an offense which, it must be admitted, was none too recent, nevertheless and because the case is unique of its kind, the faculty of both schools has agreed that…
And Klohse wrote a purely personal letter. And Mahlke read that Klohse was not free to act as his heart desired. Unfortunately, the times and circumstances were such that an experienced schoolmaster, conscious of his professional responsibilities, could not follow the simple, paternal dictates of his heart; in the interests of the school, he must request manly co-operation in conformity to the old Conradinian spirit; he would gladly attend the lecture which Mahlke, soon, he hoped, and without bitterness, would deliver at the Horst Wessel School; unless he preferred, like a true hero, to choose the better part of speech and remain silent.
But the Great Mahlke had started down a path resembling that tunnel-like, overgrown, thorny, and birdless path in Oliva Castle Park, which had no forks or byways but was nonetheless a labyrinth. In the daytime he slept, played backgammon with his aunt, or sat listless and inactive, apparently waiting for his furlough to be over. But at night he crept with me—I behind him, never ahead of him, seldom by his side—through the Langfuhr night. Our wanderings were not aimless: we concentrated on Baumbachallee, a quiet, genteel, conscientiously blacked-out lane, where nightingales sang and Dr. Klohse lived. I weary behind his uniformed back: “Don’t be an ass. You can see it’s impossible. And what difference does it make? The few days’ furlough you’ve got left. Good Lord, man, don’t be an ass…”
But the Great Mahlke wasn’t interested in my tedious appeals to reason. He had a different melody in his protuberant ears. Until two in the morning we besieged Baumbachallee and its two nightingales. Twice he was not alone, and we had to let him pass. But when after four nights of vigilance, at about eleven o’clock, Dr. Klohse turned in from Schwarzer Weg alone, tall and thin in knickers but without hat or coat, for the air was balmy, and came striding up Baumbachallee, the Great Mahlke’s left hand shot out and seized Klohse’s shirt collar with its civilian tie. He pushed the schoolman against the forged-iron fence, behind which bloomed roses whose fragrance—because it was so dark—was overpowering, louder even than the voices of the nightingales. And taking the advice Klohse had given him in his letter, Mahlke chose the better part of speech, heroic silence; without a word he struck the school principal’s smooth-shaven face left right with the back and palm of his hand. Both men stiff and formal. Only the sound of the slaps alive and eloquent; for Klohse too kept his small mouth closed, not wishing to mix peppermint breath with the scent of the roses.
That happened on a Thursday and took less than a minute. We left Klohse standing by the iron fence. That is to say, Mahlke about-faced and strode in his combat boots across the gravel-strewn sidewalk beneath the red maple tree, which was not red at night but formed a black screen between us and the sky. I tried to give Klohse something resembling an apology, for Mahlke—and for myself. The slapped man waved me away; he no longer looked slapped but stood stiff as a ramrod, his dark silhouette, sustained by roses and the voices of rare birds, embodying the school, its founder, the Conradinian spirit, the Conradinum; for that was the name of our school.
After that we raced through lifeless suburban streets, and from that moment on neither of us had a word to spare for Klohse. Mahlke talked and talked, with exaggerated coolness, of problems that seemed to trouble him at that age—and myself, too, to some extent. Such as: Is there a life after death? Or: Do you believe in transmigration? “I’ve been reading quite a bit of Kierkegaard lately,” he informed me. And “you must be sure to read Dostoevski. Later, when you’re in Russia. It will help you to understand all sorts of things, the mentality and so on.”
Several times we stood on bridges across the Striessbach, a rivulet full of horse leeches. It was pleasant to lean over the railing and wait for rats. Each bridge made the conversation shift from schoolboy banalities—erudition, for instance, about the armor plate, firepower, and speed of the world’s battleships—to religion and the so-called last questions. On the little Neuschottland bridge we gazed for a long while at the star-studded June sky and then—each for himself—into the stream. Mahlke in an undertone, while below us the shallow outlet of Aktien Pond, carrying away the yeasty vapors of Aktien Brewery, broke over shoals of tin cans: “Of course I don’t believe in God. He’s just a swindle to stultify the people. The only thing I believe in is the Virgin Mary. That’s why I’m never going to get married.”
There was a sentence succinct and insane enough to be spoken on a bridge. It has stayed with me. Whenever a brook or canal is spanned by a small bridge, whenever there is a gurgling down below and water breaking against the rubbish which disorderly people the world over throw from bridges into rivulets and canals, Mahlke stands beside me in combat boots and tanker’s monkey jacket, leaning over the rail so that the big thingamajig on his neck hangs down vertical, a solemn clown triumphing over cat and mouse with his irrefutable faith: “Of course not in God. A swindle to stultify the people. There’s only Mary. I’ll never get married.”
And he uttered a good many more words which fell into the Striessbach. Possibly we circled Max-Halbe-Platz ten times, raced twelve times up and down Heeresanger. Stood undecided at the terminus of Line No. 5. Looked on, not without hunger, as the streetcar conductors and marcelled conductorettes, sitting in the blued-out trailer, bit into sandwiches and drank out of thermos bottles.
…and then came a car—or should have—in which the conductorette under the cocked cap was Tulla Pokriefke, who had been drafted as a wartime helper several weeks before. We’d have spoken to her and I would certainly have made a date with her if she had been working on Line No. 5. But as it was, we saw only her little profile behind the dark-blue glass and we were not sure.
I said: “You ought to give it a try with her.”
Mahlke, tormented: “I just told you that I’m never going to get married.”
I: “It would cheer you up.”
He: “And who’s going to cheer me up afterward?”
I tried to joke: “The Virgin Mary of course.”
He had misgivings: “What if she’s offended?”
I offered my help. “If you want me to, I’ll be Gusewski’s altar boy tomorrow morning.”
I was amazed at the alacrity with which he said: “It’s a deal!” And he went off toward the trailer which still held out the promise of Tulla Pokriefke’s profile in a conductor’s cap. Before he got in, I called out: “Say, how much more furlough have you got left?”
And from the door of the trailer the Great Mahlke said: “My train left four and a half hours ago. If nothing has gone wrong, it must be pulling into Modlin.”
CHAPTER
XIII
“Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus, et, dimissis peccatis vestris …” The words issued light as a soap bubble from Father Gusewski’s pursed lips, glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, swayed hesitantly, broke loose from the hidden reed, and rose at last, mirroring windows, the altar, the Virgin, mirroring you me everything—and burst painlessly, struck by the bubbles of the absolution: “Indulgentiam, absolutionem et remissionem peccatorum vestrorum …” and the moment these new bubbles of spirit were pricked in their turn by the Amen of the seven or eight faithful, Gusewski elevated the host and began with full-rounded lips to blow the big bubble, the bubble of bubbles. For a moment it trembled terror-stricken in the draft; then with the bright-red tip of his tongue, he sent it aloft; and it rose and rose until at length it fell and passed away, close to the second pew facing the altar of Our Lady: “Ecce Agnus Dei…”
Of those taking communion, Mahlke was first to kneel. He knelt before the “LordIamnotworthythatthoushouldstenterundermyroof” had been repeated three times. Even before I steered Gusewski down the altar steps to the communicants’ rail, he leaned his head back, so that his face, peaked after a sleepless night, lay parallel to the whitewashed concrete ceiling, and parted his lips with his tongue. A moment’s wait, while over his head the priest makes a small quick sign of the Cross with the wafer intended for this communicant. Sweat oozed from Mahlke’s pores and formed glistening beads which quickly broke, punctured by the stubble of his beard. His eyes stood out as though boiled. Possibly the blackness of his tanker’s jacket enhanced the pallor of his face. Despite the wooliness of his tongue, he did not swallow. In humble self-effacement the iron object that had rewarded his childish scribbling and crossing-out of so and so many Russian tanks, crossed itself and lay motionless over his top collar button. It was only when Father Gusewski laid the host on Mahlke’s tongue and Mahlke partook of the light pastry, that you swallowed; and then the thingamajig joined in.
Let us all three celebrate the sacrament, once more and forever: You kneel, I stand behind dry skin. Sweat distends your pores. The reverend father deposits the host on your coated tongue. All three of us have just ended on the same syllable, whereupon a mechanism pulls your tongue back in. Lips stick together. Propagation of sobs, the big thingamajig trembles, and I know that the Great Mahlke will leave St. Mary’s Chapel fortified, his sweat will dry; if immediately afterward drops of moisture glistened on his face, they were raindrops. It was drizzling.
In the dry sacristy Gusewski said: “He must be waiting outside. Maybe we should call him in, but…”
I said: “Don’t worry, Father. I’ll take care of him.”
Gusewski, his hands busy with the sachets of lavender in the closet: “You don’t think he’ll do anything rash?”
For once I made no move to help him out of his vestments: “You’d better keep out of it, Father.” But to Mahlke, when he stood before me wet in his uniform, I said: “You damn fool, what are you hanging around here for? Get down to the assembly point on Hochstriess. Tell them some story about missing your train. I refuse to have anything to do with it.”
With those words I should have left him, but I stayed and got wet. Rain is a binder. I tried to reason with him: “They won’t bite your head off if you’re quick about it. Tell them something was wrong with your mother or your aunt.”
Mahlke nodded when I made a point, let his lower jaw sag from time to time, and laughed for no reason. Then suddenly he bubbled over: “It was wonderful last night with the Pokriefke kid. I wouldn’t have thought it. She’s not the way she puts on. All right, I’ll tell you the honest truth: it’s because of her that I don’t want to go back. Seems to me that I’ve done my bit—wouldn’t you say so? I’m going to put in a petition. They can ship me out to Gross-Boschpol as an instructor. Let other people be brave. It’s not that I’m scared, I’ve just had enough. Can you understand that?”
I refused to fall for his nonsense; I pinned him down. “Oho, so it’s all on account of the Pokriefke kid. Hell, that wasn’t her. She works on the No. 2 Line to Oliva, not on the No. 5. Everybody knows that. You’re scared shitless, that’s all. I can see how you feel.”
He was determined that there should be something between them. “You can take my word for it about Tulla. The fact is she took me home with her, lives on Elsenstrasse. Her mother doesn’t mind. But you’re right, I’ve had my bellyful. Maybe I’m scared too. I was scared before Mass. It’s better now.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God and all that stuff.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“OK, forget it. And now what?”
“Maybe Störtebeker and the boys could… You know them pretty well, don’t you?”
“No dice. I’m having no further dealings with those characters. It’s not healthy. You should have asked the Pokriefke kid in case you really…”
“Wise up. I can’t show my face on Osterzeile. If they’re not there already, it won’t be long—say, could I hide in your cellar, just for a few days?”
That too struck me as unhealthy. “You’ve got other places to hide. What about your relatives in the country? Or in Tulla’s uncle’s woodshed… Or on the barge.”
For a while the word hung in mid-air. “In this filthy weather?” Mahlke said. But the thing was already decided; and though I refused stubbornly and prolixly to go with him, though I too spoke of the filthy weather, it gradually became apparent that I would have to go: rain is a binder.
We spent a good hour tramping from Neuschottland to Schellmühl and back, and then down the endless Posedowskiweg. We took shelter in the lee of at least two advertising pillars, bearing always the same posters warning the public against those sinister and unpatriotic figures Coalthief and Spendthrift, and then we resumed our tramp. From the main entrance of the Women’s Hospital we saw the familiar backdrop: behind the railroad embankment, the gable roof and spire of the sturdy old Conradinum; but he wasn’t looking or he saw something else. Then we stood for half an hour in the shelter of the Reichskolonie car stop, under the echoing tin roof with three or four grade-school boys. At first they spent the time roughhousing and pushing each other off the bench. Mahlke had his back turned to them, but it didn’t help. Two of them came up with open copybooks and said something in broad dialect. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked.
“Not until nine. In case we decide to go.”
“Well, hand them over, but make it fast.”
Mahlke wrote his name and rank in the upper left-hand corner of the last page of both copybooks. They were not satisfied, they wanted the exact number of tanks he had knocked out—and Mahlke gave in; as though filling out a
money order blank, he wrote the number first in figures, then in letters. Then he had to write his piece in two more copybooks. I was about to take back my fountain pen when one of the kids asked: “Where’d you knock ’em off, in Bjälgerott [Byelgorod] or Schietemier [Zhitomir]?”
Mahlke ought just to have nodded and they would have subsided. But he whispered in a hoarse voice: “No, most of them around Kovel, Brody, and Brzezany. And in April when we knocked out the First Armored Corps at Buczacz.”
The youngsters wanted it all in writing and again I had to unscrew the fountain pen. They called two more of their contemporaries in out of the rain. It was always the same back that held still for the others to write on. He wanted to stretch, he would have liked to hold out his own copybook; they wouldn’t let him: there’s always one fall guy. Mahlke had to write Kovel and Brody-Brzezany, Cherkassy and Buczacz. His hand shook more and more, and again the sweat oozed from his pores. Questions spurted from their grubby faces: “Was ya in Kriewäurock [Krivoi Rog] too?” Every mouth open. In every mouth teeth missing. Paternal grandfather’s eyes. Ears from the mother’s side. And each one had nostrils: “And where dya think they’ll send ya next?”
“He ain’t allowed to tell. What’s the use of asking?”
“I bet he’s gonna be in the invasion.”
“They’re keepin ’im for after the war.”
“Ask him if he’s been at the Führer’s HQ?”
“How about it, Uncle?”
“Can’t you see he’s a sergeant?”
“You gotta picture?”
“ ‘Cause we collect ’em.”
“How much more furlough time ya got?”
“Yeah, whenner ya leavin?”
“Ya still be here tomorrow?”
“Yeah, when’s yer time up?”
Mahlke fought his way out, stumbling over satchels. My fountain pen stayed in the shelter. Marathon through crosshatching. Side by side through puddles: rain is a binder. It was only after we passed the stadium that the boys fell back. But still they shouted after us; they had no intention of going to school. To this day they want to return my fountain pen.