And so Mahlke was expelled, but – during the war scarcely anyone was thrown out of secondary school for good – transferred to the Horst Wessel School, where his story was kept very quiet

Chapter IX

The Horst Wessel School, which before the war had been called the Crown Prince Wilhelm School, was characterized by the same dusty smell as our Conradinum. The building, built in 1912, I think, seemed friendlier than our brick edifice, but only on the outside. It was situated on the southern edge of the suburb, at the foot of Jeschkental Forest; consequently Mahlke's way to school and my way to school did not intersect at any point when school resumed in the autumn.

But there was no sign of him during the summer vacation either – a summer without Mahlke! – the story was that he had signed up for a premilitary training camp offering courses in radio operation. He displayed his sunburn neither in Brösen nor at Glettkau Beach. Since there was no point in looking for him at St. Mary's Chapel, Father Gusewski was deprived of one of his most reliable altar boys. Altar Boy Pilenz said to himself: No Mahlke, no Mass.

The rest of us lounged about the barge from time to time, but without enthusiasm. Rotten Sonntag tried in vain to find the way into the radio shack. Even the Thirds had heard rumors of an amazing and amazingly furnished hideaway inside the bridge. A character with eyes very close together, whom the infants submissively addressed as Störtebeker, dove indefatigably. Tulla Pokriefke's cousin, a rather sickly little fellow, came out to the barge once or twice, but never dove. Either in my thoughts or in reality I try to strike up a conversation with him about Tulla; I was interested in her. But she had ensnared her cousin as she had me – what with, I wonder? With her threadbare wool, with her ineradicable smell of carpenter's glue? "It's none of your God-damn business!" That's what the cousin said to me – or might have.

Tulla didn't swim out to the barge; she stayed on the beach, but she had given up Hotten Sonntag. I took her to the movies twice, but even so I had no luck; she'd go to the movies with anybody. It was said that she had fallen for Störtebeker, but if so her love was unrequited, for Störtebeker had fallen for our barge and was looking for the entrance to Mahlke's hideout. As the vacation drew to an end there was a good deal of whispering to the effect that his diving had been successful. But there was never any proof: he produced neither a waterlogged phonograph record nor a decaying owl feather. Still, the rumors persisted; and when, two and a half years later, the so-called Dusters, a somewhat mysterious gang supposedly led by Störtebeker, were arrested, our barge and the hiding place under the bridge appear to have been mentioned. But by then I was in the Army; all I heard was a line or two in letters – for until the end, or rather as long as the mails were running, Father Gusewski wrote me letters ranging from pastoral to friendly. In one of the last, written in January '45 – as the Russian armies were approaching Elbing – there was something about a scandalous assault of the Dusters on the Church of the Sacred Heart, where Father Wiehnke officiated. In this letter Störtebeker was referred to by his real name; and it also seems to me that I read something about a three-year-old child whom the gang had cherished as a kind of mascot. I am pretty certain, though sometimes I have my doubts, that in his last or next to last letter – I lost the whole packet and my diary as well near Cottbus – there was some mention of the barge which had its big day before the onset of the summer vacation of '42, but whose glory paled in the course of the summer; for to this day that summer has a flat taste in my mouth – what was summer without Mahlke?

Not that we were really unhappy about his absence. I myself was glad to be rid of him, so I didn't have to chase after him the whole time; but why, I wonder, did I report to Father Gusewski as soon as school began again, offering my services at the altar? The reverend father's eyes crinkled with delight behind his rimless glasses and grew smooth and solemn behind the selfsame glasses only when – we were sitting in the sacristy and I was brushing his cassock – I asked, as though in passing, about Joachim Mahlke. Calmly, raising one hand to his glasses, he declared: "Yes, yes, he is still one of the most faithful members of my congregation; never misses a Sunday Mass. You know, I presume, that he was away for four weeks, at a so-called premilitary training camp; but I shouldn't like to think that you're coming back to us only on Mahlke's account. Speak up, Pilenz!"

Exactly two weeks earlier, we had received news that my brother Klaus, a sergeant in the Army, had fallen in the Kuban. I spoke of his death as my reason for wishing to resume my duties as an altar boy. Father Gusewski seemed to believe me; at any rate he tried to believe in me and in my renewed piety.

I don't recollect the particulars of Winter's or Hotten Sonntag's face. But Father Gusewski had thick wavy hair, black with the barest sprinkling of gray, which could be counted on to sprinkle his cassock with dandruff. Meticulously tonsured, the crown of his head had a bluish glint. He gave off an aroma compounded of hair tonic and Palmolive soap. Sometimes he smoked Turkish cigarettes in an ornately carved amber holder. He enjoyed a reputation for progressiveness and played ping-pong in the sacristy with the altar boys and those preparing for their first communion. He liked the ecclesiastical linen, the humeral and the alb, to be immoderately starched, a chore attended to by a certain Mrs. Tolkmit or, when the old lady was ailing, by a handy altar boy, often myself. He himself appended sachets of lavender to every maniple, every stole, to all the Mass vestments, whether they lay in chests or hung in closets. Once when I was about thirteen, he ran his small, hairless hand down my back under my shirt from my neck to the waist of my gym shorts, but stopped there because my shorts had no elastic band and I tied them in front with tapes. I didn't give the incident much thought, for Father Gusewski had won my sympathy with his friendly, often boyish ways. I can still remember his ironic benevolence; so not another word about the occasional wanderings of his hand; all perfectly harmless, it was really my Catholic soul he was looking for. All in all, he was a priest like hundreds of others; he maintained a well-selected library for a working-class congregation that read little; his zeal was not excessive, his belief had its limits – in regard to the Assumption, for instance – and he always spoke, whether over the corporal about the blood of Christ or in the sacristy about ping-pong, in the same tone of unctuous serenity. It did strike me as silly when early in 1940 he put in a petition to have his name changed – less than a year later he called himself, and had others call him, Father Gusewing. But the fashion for Germanizing Polish-sounding names ending in ki or ke or a – like Formella – was taken up by lots of people in those days: Lewandowski became Lengrüsch; Mr. Olczewski, our butcher, had himself metamorphosed into a Mr. Ohlwein; Jürgen Kupka's parents wanted to take the East Prussian name of Kupkat, but their petition, heaven knows why, was rejected. Perhaps in emulation of one Saul who became Paul, a certain Gusewski wished to become Gusewing – but in these papers Father Gusewski will continue to be Gusewski; for you, Joachim Mahlke, did not change your name.

When for the first time after summer vacation I served early Mass at the altar, I saw him again and anew. Immediately after the prayers at the foot of the altar – Father Gusewski stood on the Epistle side and was busy with the Introit – I sighted him in the second pew, before the altar of Our Lady. But it was only between the reading of the Epistle and the gradual, and more freely during the Gospel reading, that I found time to examine his appearance. His hair was still parted in the middle and still held in place with the usual sugar water; but he wore it a good inch longer. Stiff and candied, it fell over his two ears like the two sides of a steep-pointed roof: he would have made a satisfactory Jesus the way he held up his joined hands on a level with his forehead without propping his elbows; beneath them I perceived a bare, unguarded neck that concealed none of its secrets; for he was wearing his shirt collar open and folded over his jacket collar in the manner hallowed by Schiller: no tie, no pompoms, no pendants, no screwdriver, nor any other item from his copious arsenal. The only heraldic beast in an otherwise vacant field was the restless mouse which he harbored under his skin in place of a larynx, which had once attracted a cat and had tempted me to put the cat on his neck. The area between Adam's apple and chin was still marked with a few crusty razor cuts. At the Sanctus I almost came in too late with the bell.