For two weeks Mahlke concentrated on medallions; he also found a kind of tin plate commemorating a regatta in the Gdynia roadstead and amidships, between fo'c'sle and engine room, in the cramped, almost inaccessible officers' mess, a silver medal the size of a mark piece, with a silver ring to pass a chain through; the reverse was flat, worn, and anonymous, but the face, amid a profusion of ornament, bore the Virgin and Child in sharp relief.
A raised inscription identified her as the famous Matka Boska Czestochowska; and when Mahlke on the bridge saw what he had found, we offered him sand, but he did not polish his medal; he preferred the black patina.
The rest of us wanted to see shining silver. But before we had finished arguing, he had knelt down on his knobby knees in the shadow of the pilothouse, shifting his treasure about until it was at the right angle for his gaze, lowered in devotion. We laughed as, bluish and shivering, he crossed himself with his waterlogged fingertips, attempted to move his lips in prayer, and produced a bit of Latin between chattering teeth. I still think it was even then something from his favorite sequence, which normally was spoken only on the Friday before Palm Sunday: "Virgo virginum praeclara, Mihi iam non sis amara…"
Later, after Dr. Klohse, our principal, had forbidden Mahlke to wear this Polish article openly on his neck during classes – Klohse was a high party official, though he seldom wore his uniform at school – Joachim Mahlke contented himself with wearing his usual little amulet and the steel screwdriver beneath the Adam's apple which a cat had taken for a mouse.
He hung the blackened silver Virgin between Pilsudski's bronze profile and the postcard-size photo of Commodore Bonte, the hero of Narvik.
Chapter II
Was all this praying and worshiping in jest? Your house was on Westerzeile. You had a strange sense of humor, if any. No, your house was on Osterzeile. All the streets in the housing development looked alike. And yet you had only to eat a sandwich and we would laugh, each infecting the other. Every time we had to laugh at you, it came as a surprise to us. But when Dr. Brumes, one of our teachers, asked the boys of our class what profession they were planning to take up and you – you already knew how to swim – said: "I'm going to be a clown and make people laugh," no one laughed in the classroom – and I myself was frightened. For while Mahlke firmly and candidly stated his intention of becoming a clown in a circus or somewhere else, he made so solemn a face that it was really to be feared that he would one day make people laugh themselves sick, if only by publicly praying to the Virgin between the lion tamer and the trapeze act; but that prayer of yours on the barge must have been in earnest – or wasn't it?
He lived on Osterzeile and not on Westerzeile. The one-family house stood beside, between, and opposite similar one-family houses which could be distinguished perhaps by different patterns or folds in the curtains, but hardly by the vegetation of the little gardens out in front. And each garden had its little birdhouse on a pole and its glazed garden ornaments: frogs, mushrooms, or dwarfs. In front of Mahlke's house sat a ceramic frog. But in front of the next house and the next, there were also green ceramic frogs.
In short, it was number twenty-four, and when you approached from Wolfsweg, Mahlke lived in the fourth house on the left side of the street. Like Westerzeile, which ran parallel to it, Osterzeile was perpendicular to Bärenweg, which ran parallel to Wolfsweg. When you went down Westerzeile from Wolfsweg and looked to the left and westward over the red tiled roofs, you saw the west side and front of a tower with a tarnished bulbiform steeple. If you went down Osterzeile in the same direction, you saw over the rooftops the east side and front of the same belfry; for Christ Church lay on the far side of Bärenweg, exactly halfway between Osterzeile and Westerzeile, and with its four dials beneath the green, bulbiform roof, provided the whole neighborhood, from Max-Halbe-Platz to the Catholic and clockless St. Mary's Chapel, from Magdeburger Strasse to Posadowskiweg near Schellmühl, with the tune of day, enabling Protestant as well as Catholic factory workers and office workers, salesgirls and schoolboys to reach their schools or places of work with interdenominational punctuality.
From his window Mahlke could see the dial of the east face of the tower. He had his room in the attic; the walls were slightly on a slant, and the rain and hail beat down directly over his head: an attic room full of the usual juvenile bric-à-brac, from the butterfly collection to the postcard photos of movie stars, lavishly decorated pursuit pilots and Panzer generals; but in the midst of all this, an untrained color print of the Sistine Madonna with the two chubby-cheeked angels at the lower edge, the Pilsudski medal, already mentioned, and the consecrated amulet from Czestochowa beside a photograph of the commander of the Narvik destroyers.
The very first time I went to see him, I noticed the stuffed snowy owl. I lived not far away, on Westerzeile; but I'm not going to speak of myself, my story is about Mahlke, or Mahlke and me, but always with the emphasis on Mahlke, for his hair was parted in the middle, he wore high shoes, he always had something or other dangling from his neck to distract the eternal cat from the eternal mouse, he knelt at the altar of the Virgin, he was the diver with the fresh sunburn; though he was always tied up in knots and his form was bad, he always had a bit of a lead on the rest of us, and no sooner had he learned to swim than he made up his mind that someday, after finishing school and all that, he would be a clown in the circus and make people laugh.
The snowy owl had Mahlke's solemn part in the middle and the same suffering, meekly resolute look, as of a redeemer plagued by inner toothache. It was well prepared, only discreetly retouched, and held a birch branch in its claws. The owl had been left him by his father.
I did my best to ignore the snowy owl, the color print of the Madonna, and the silver piece from Czestochowa; for me the center of the room was the phonograph that Mahlke had painstakingly raised from the barge. He had found no records; they must have dissolved. It was a relatively modern contrivance with a crank and a player arm. He had found it in the same officers' mess that had already yielded his silver medal and several other items. The cabin was amidships, hence inaccessible to the rest of us, even Hotten Sonntag. For we went only as far as the fo'c'sle and never ventured through the dark bulkhead, which even the fishes seldom visited, into the engine room and the cramped adjoining cabins.
Shortly before the end of our first summer vacation on the barge, Mahlke brought up the phonograph – German-made it was, like the fire extinguisher – after perhaps a dozen dives. Inch by inch he had moved it forward to the foot of the hatch and finally hoisted it up to us on the bridge with the help of the same rope that had served for the fire extinguisher.
We had to improvise a raft of driftwood and cork to haul the tiling ashore; the crank was frozen with rust. We took turns in towing the raft, all of us except Mahlke.
A week later the phonograph was in his room, repaired, oiled, the metal parts freshly plated. The turntable was covered with fresh felt. After winding it in my presence, he set the rich-green turntable to revolving empty. Mahlke stood behind it with folded arms, beside the snowy owl on its birch branch. His mouse was quiet I stood with my back to the Sistine color print, gazing either at the empty, slightly wobbling turntable, or out the mansard window, over the raw-red roof tiles, at Christ Church, one dial on the front, another on the east side of the bulbiform tower. Before the clock struck six, the phonograph droned to a stop. Mahlke wound the thing up again, demanding that I give his new rite my unflagging attention: I listened to the assortment of soft and medium sounds characteristic of an antique phonograph left to its own devices. Mahlke had as yet no records.