And now it is time to say something about Mahlke's face. A few of us have survived the war; we live in small small towns and large small towns, we've gained weight and lost hair, and we more or less earn our living. I saw Schilling in Duisburg and Jürgen Kupka in Braunschweig shortly before he emigrated to Canada. Both of them started right in about the Adam's apple. "Man, wasn't that something he had on his neck! And remember that time with the cat. Wasn't it you that sicked the cat on him…" and I had to interrupt: "That's not what I'm after; it's his face I'm interested in."

We agreed as a starter that he had gray or gray-blue eyes, bright but not shining, anyway that they were not brown. The face thin and rather elongated, muscular around the cheekbones. The nose not strikingly large, but fleshy, quickly reddening in cold weather. His overhanging occiput has already been mentioned. We had difficulty in coming to an agreement about Mahlke's upper lip. Jürgen Kupka was of my opinion that it curled up and never wholly covered his two upper incisors, which in turn were not vertical but stuck out like tusks – except of course when he was diving. But then we began to have our doubts; we remembered that the little Pokriefke girl also had a curled-up lip and always visible incisors. In the end we weren't sure whether we hadn't mixed up Mahlke and Tulla, though just in connection with the upper lip. Maybe it was only she whose lip was that way, for hers was, that much is certain. In Duisburg Schilling – we met in the station restaurant, because his wife had some objection to unannounced visitors – reminded me of the caricature that had created an uproar in our class for several days. In '41 I think it was, a big, tall character turned up in our class, who had been evacuated from Latvia with his family. In spite of his cracked voice, he was a fluent talker; an aristocrat, always fashionably dressed, knew Greek, lectured like a book, his father was a baron, wore a fur cap in the winter, what was his name? – well, anyway, his first name was Karel. And he could draw, very quickly, with or without models: sleighs surrounded by wolves, drunken Cossacks, Jews suggesting Der Stürmer, naked girls riding on lions, in general lots of naked girls with long porcelainlike legs, but never smutty, Bolsheviks devouring babies, Hitler disguised as Charlemagne, racing cars driven by ladies with long flowing scarves; and he was especially clever at drawing caricatures of his teachers or fellow students with pen, brush, or crayon on every available scrap of paper or with chalk on the blackboard; well, he didn't do Mahlke on paper, but with rasping chalk on the blackboard.

He drew him full face. At that time Mahlke already had his ridiculous part in the middle, fixated with sugar water. He represented the face as a triangle with one corner at the chin. The mouth was puckered and peevish. No trace of any visible incisors that might have been mistaken for tusks. The eyes, piercing points under sorrowfully uplifted eyebrows. The neck sinuous, half in profile, with a monstrous Adam's apple. And behind the head and sorrowful features a halo: a perfect likeness of Mahlke the Redeemer. The effect was immediate.

We snorted and whinnied on our benches and only recovered our senses when someone hauled off at the handsome Karel So-and-So, first with his bare fist, then, just before we managed to separate them, with a steel screwdriver.

It was I who sponged your Redeemer's countenance off the blackboard.

Chapter IV

With and without irony: maybe you wouldn't have become a clown but some sort of creator of fashions; for it was Mahlke who during the winter after the second summer on the barge created the pompoms: two little woolen spheres the size of ping-pong balls, in solid or mixed colors, attached to a plaited woolen cord that was worn under the collar like a necktie and tied into a bow so that the two pompoms hung at an angle, more or less like a bow tie. I have checked and am able to state authoritatively that beginning in the third winter of the war, the pompoms came to be worn almost all over Germany, but mostly in northern and eastern Germany, particularly by high-school students. It was Mahlke who introduced them to our school. He might have invented them. And maybe he actually did. He had several pair made according to his specifications by his Aunt Susi, mostly out of the frayed yarn unraveled from his dead father's much-darned socks. Then he wore the first pair to school and they were very very conspicuous on his neck.

Ten days later they were in the dry-goods stores, at first in cardboard boxes bashfully tucked away by the cash register, but soon attractively displayed in the showcases. An important factor in their success was that they could be had without coupons. From Langfuhr they spread triumphantly through eastern and northern Germany; they were worn – I have witnesses to bear me out – even in Leipzig, in Pirna, and months later, after Mahlke had discarded his own, a few isolated pairs made their appearance as far west as the Rhineland and the Palatinate. I remember the exact day when Mahlke removed his invention from his neck and will speak of it in due time.

We wore the pompoms for several months, toward the end as a protest, after Dr. Klohse, our principal, had branded this article of apparel as effeminate and unworthy of a German young man, and forbidden us to wear pompoms inside the school building or even in the recreation yard. Klohse's order was read in all the classrooms, but there were many who complied only during actual classes. The pompoms remind me of Papa Brunies, a pensioned teacher who had been recalled to his post during the war; he was delighted with the merry little things; once or twice, after Mahlke had given them up, he even tied a pair of them around his own stand-up collar, and thus attired declaimed Eichendorff: "Weathered gables, lofty windows…" or maybe it was something else, but in any case it was Eichendorff, his favorite poet. Oswald Brunies had a sweet tooth and later, ostensibly because he had eaten some vitamin tablets that were supposed to be distributed among the students, but probably for political reasons – Brunies was a Freemason – he was arrested at school. Some of the students were questioned. I hope I didn't testify against him. His adoptive daughter, a doll-like creature who took ballet lessons, wore mourning in public; they took him to Stutthof, and there he stayed – a dismal, complicated story, which deserves to be written, but somewhere else, not by me, and certainly not in connection with Mahlke.

Let's get back to the pompoms. Of course Mahlke had invented them to make things easier for his Adam's apple. For a time they quieted the unruly jumping jack, but when the pompoms came into style all over the place, even in Sixth, they ceased to attract attention on their inventor's neck. I can still see Mahlke during the winter of '42 – which must have been hard for him because diving was out and the pompoms had lost their efficacy – always in monumental solitude, striding in his high, black laced shoes, down Osterzeile and up Bärenweg to St. Mary's Chapel, over crunching cinder-strewn snow. Hatless. Ears red, brittle, and prominent. Hair stiff with sugar water and frost, parted in the middle from crown to forehead. Brows knitted in anguish. Horror-stricken, watery-blue eyes that see more than is there. Turned-up coat collar. The coat had also come down to him from his late father. A gray woolen scarf, crossed under his tapering to scrawny chin, was held in place, as could be seen from a distance, by a safety pin. Every twenty paces his right hand rises from his coat pocket to feel whether his scarf is still in place, properly protecting his neck – I have seen clowns, Crock in the circus, Charlie Chaplin in the movies, working with the same gigantic safety pin. Mahlke is practicing: men, women, soldiers on furlough, children, singly and in groups, grow toward him over the snow. Their breath, Mahlke's too, puffs up white from their mouths and vanishes over their shoulders. And the eyes of all who approach him are focused, Mahlke is probably thinking, on that comical, very comical, excruciatingly comical safety pin.