Such, approximately, were the words of the gloriously decorated lieutenant. In between two air battles, as an interlude, he told the story of Alex, the squadron dog, who had been compelled to learn parachute jumping. There was also the little anecdote about the corporal who was always too slow in getting up when the alert was sounded and was obliged to fly several missions in his pajamas.

The lieutenant laughed with his audience; even the graduating class laughed, and some of the teachers indulged in a chuckle. He had graduated from our school in '33 and was shot down over the Ruhr in '43. His hair was dark brown, imparted, combed rigorously back; he wasn't very big, looked rather like a dapper little waiter in a night club. While speaking he kept one hand in his pocket, but took it out whenever he needed two hands to illustrate an air battle with. His use of his outspread palms was subtle and masterful; with a twist of his shoulders, he could make you see his plane banking as it circled in quest of victims, and he had no need of long, explanatory sentences. His chopped phrases were more like cues for his pantomime. At the height of his act he roared out engine noises or stuttered when an engine was in trouble. It was safe to assume that he had practiced his number at his airfield officers' club, especially as the term "officers' club" kept cropping up in his narrative: "We were sitting peacefully in the officers' club… I was just heading for the officers' club 'cause I wanted to… In our officers' club there's a…" But even aside from his mime's hands and his realistic sound effects, he knew how to appeal to his audience; he managed, for instance, to get in a few cracks at some of our teachers, who still had the same nicknames as in his day. But he was always pleasant, full of harmless mischief. And no boaster. He never claimed credit for the difficult things he had done, but put everything down to his luck: "I've always been lucky, even in school, when I think of some of my report cards…" And in the middle of a schoolboy's joke he suddenly remembered three of his former classmates who, as he said, shall not have died in vain. He concluded his talk not with the names of the three dead comrades, but with this naïve, heartfelt admission: "Boys, let me tell you this: every last one of us who's out there fighting likes to think back on his school days and, believe me, we often do."

We clapped, roared, and stamped at great length. Only when my hands were hot and burning did I observe that Mahlke was holding back and contributing no applause.

Up front Dr. Klohse shook both his former student's hands demonstratively as long as the applause went on. Then, after gripping the frail figure for a moment by the shoulders, he turned abruptly away, and took up his stance behind the pulpit, while the lieutenant quickly sat down.

The principal's speech went on and on. Boredom spread from the lush green plants to the oil painting on the rear wall of the auditorium, a portrait of Baron von Conradi, the founder of our school. Even the lieutenant, a slender figure between Brunies and Mallenbrandt, kept looking at his fingernails. In this lofty hall Klohse's cool peppermint breath, which suffused all his mathematics classes, substituting for the odor of pure science, wasn't much of a help. From up front his words barely carried to the middle of the auditorium: "Thosewhocomeafterus – Andinthishour – whenthetravelerreturns – butthistimethehomeland – andletusnever – pureofheart – asIsaidbefore – pureofheart – andifanyonedisagreeslet – andinthishour – keepclean – toconcludewiththewordsofSchiller – ifyourlifeyoudonotstake – thelaurelneverwillyoutake – Andnowbacktowork!"

Dismissed, we formed two clusters at the narrow exits. I pushed in behind Mahlke. He was sweating and his sugar-water hair stood up in sticky blades around his ravaged part. Never, not even in gym, had I seen Mahlke perspire. The stench of three hundred schoolboys stuck like corks in the exits. Beads of sweat stood out on Mahlke's flushed anxiety cords, those two bundles of sinew running from the seventh vertebra of his neck to the base of his jutting occiput. In the colonnade outside the folding doors, amid the hubbub of the little Sixths, who had resumed their perpetual game of tag, I caught up with him. I questioned him head on: "Well, what do you say?"

Mahlke stared straight ahead. I tried not to look at his neck. Between two columns stood a plaster bust of Lessing: but Mahlke's neck won out. Calmly and mournfully, as though speaking of his aunt's chronic ailments, his voice said: "Now they need a bag of forty if they want the medal. At the beginning and after they were through in France and in the north, it only took twenty – if it keeps on like this…"

I guess the lieutenant's talk didn't agree with you. Or you wouldn't have resorted to such cheap compensations. In those days luminous buttons and round, oval, or open-work plaques were on display in the windows of stationery and dry-goods stores. They glowed milky-green in the darkness, some disclosing the contours of a fish, others of a flying gull. These little plaques were purchased mostly by elderly gentlemen and fragile old ladies, who wore them on their coat collars for fear of collisions in the blacked-out streets; there were also canes with luminous stripes.

You were not afraid of the blackout, and yet you fastened five or six plaques, a luminous school of fish, a flock of gliding gulls, several bouquets of phosphorescent flowers, first on the lapels of your coat, then on your muffler; you had your aunt sew half a dozen luminous buttons from top to bottom of your coat; you turned yourself into a clown. In the winter twilight, through slanting snowflakes or well-nigh uniform darkness, I saw you, I still see you and always will, striding toward me down Bärenweg, enumerable from top to bottom and back, with one two three four five six coat buttons glowing moldy-green: a pathetic sort of ghost, capable at most of scaring children and grandmothers – trying to distract attention from an affliction which no one could have seen in the pitch-darkness. But you said to yourself, no doubt: No blackness can engulf this overdeveloped fruit; everyone sees, suspects, feels it, wants to grab hold of it, for it juts out ready to be grabbed; if only this winter were over, so I could dive again and be underwater.

Chapter VI

But when the summer came with strawberries, special communiqués, and bathing weather, Mahlke didn't want to swim. On the first of June we swam out to the barge for the first time. We weren't really in the mood. We were annoyed at the Thirds who swam with us and ahead of us, who sat on the bridge in swarms, dived, and brought up the last hinge that could be unscrewed. "Let me come with you, I can swim now," Mahlke had once pleaded. And now it was Schilling, Winter, and myself who pestered him: "Aw, come along. It's no fun without you. We can sun ourselves on the barge. Maybe you'll find something interesting down below."

Reluctantly, after waving us away several times, Mahlke stepped into the tepid soup between the beach and the first sandbank. He swam without his screwdriver, stayed between us, two arms' lengths behind Hotten Sonntag, and for the first time I saw him swim calmly, without excitement or splashing. On the bridge he sat huddled in the shadow of the pilothouse and no one could persuade him to dive. He didn't even turn his neck when the Thirds vanished into the fo'c'sle and came up with trinkets. Yet Mahlke could have taught them a thing or two. Some of them even asked him for pointers – but he scarcely answered. The whole time he looked out through puckered eyes over the open sea in the direction of the harbor mouth buoy, but neither inbound freighters, nor outbound cutters, nor a formation of torpedo boats could divert him. Maybe the submarines got a slight rise out of him. Sometimes, far out at sea, the periscope of a submerged U-boat could be seen cutting a distinct stripe of foam. The 750-ton vessels, built in series at the Schichau Dockyards, were given trial runs in the Gulf or behind Hela; surfacing in the deep channel, they put in toward the harbor and dispelled our boredom. Looked good as they rose to the surface, periscope first. The moment the conning tower emerged, it spat out one or two figures. In dull-white streams the water receded from the gun, ran off the bow and then the stern. Men scrambled out of the hatches, we shouted and waved – I'm not sure whether they answered us, though I still see the motion of waving in every detail and can still feel it in my shoulders. Whether or not they waved back, the surfacing of a submarine strikes the heart, still does – but Mahlke never waved.