Cat and Mouse

by Günter Grass

  Later on I stopped serving regularly at St. Mary’s and came only when Gusewski sent for me because his boys were busy with Sunday hikes or collecting funds for Winter Aid.

  I’m telling you all this only to explain my presence at the main altar, for from there I was able to observe Mahlke as he knelt at the altar of the Virgin. My, how he could pray! That calflike look. His eyes would grow steadily glassier. His mouth peevish, perpetually moving without punctuation. Fishes tossed up on the beach gasp for air with the same regularity. I shall try to give you an idea of how relentlessly Mahlke could pray. Father Gusewski was distributing communion. When he came to Mahlke, who always, seen from the altar, knelt at the outer left, this particular kneeler was one who had forgotten all caution, allowing his muffler and gigantic safety pin to shift for themselves, whose eyes had congealed, whose head and parted hair were tilted backward, who allowed his tongue to hang out, and who, in this attitude, left an agitated mouse so exposed and defenseless that I might have caught it in my hand. But perhaps Joachim Mahlke realized that his cynosure was convulsed and exposed. Perhaps he intentionally accentuated its frenzy with exaggerated swallowing, in order to attract the glass eyes of the Virgin standing to one side of him; for I cannot and will not believe that you ever did anything whatsoever without an audience.

  CHAPTER

  V

  I never saw him with pompoms at St. Mary’s Chapel. Although the style was just beginning to take hold, he wore them less and less. Sometimes when three of us were standing in the recreation yard, always under the same chestnut tree, all talking at once over our woolen doodads, Mahlke removed his pompoms from his neck; then, after the second bell had rung, he would tie them on again, irresolutely, for lack of a better counterweight.

  When for the first time a graduate of our school returned from the front, a special bell signal called us to the auditorium though classes were still in progress. On the return journey he had stopped briefly at the Führer’s Headquarters, and now he had the coveted lozenge on his neck. He stood, not behind but beside the old-brown pulpit, at the end of the hall, against a background of three tall windows, a row of potted leafy plants, and the faculty gathered in a semicircle. Lozenge on neck, red rosebud mouth, he projected his voice into the space over our heads and made little explanatory gestures. Mahlke was sitting in the row ahead of me and Schilling. I saw his ears turn a flaming transparent red; he leaned back stiffly, and I saw him, left right, fiddling with something on his neck, tugging, gagging, and at length tossing something under his bench: something woolen, pompoms, a green and red mixture I think they were. The young fellow, a lieutenant in the Air Force, started off hesitantly and rather too softly, with an appealing awkwardness; he even blushed once or twice, though there was nothing in what he was saying to warrant it: “…well, boys, don’t get the idea that life in the Air Force is like a rabbit hunt, all action and never a dull moment. Sometimes nothing happens for whole weeks. But when they sent us to the Channel, I says to myself, if things don’t start popping now, they never will. And I was right. On the very first mission a formation with a fighter escort came straight at us, and believe me, it was some merry-go-round. In and out of the clouds, winding and circling the whole time. I try to gain altitude, down below me there’s three Spitfires circling, trying to hide in the clouds. I says to myself, it’s just too bad if I can’t… I dive, I’ve got him in my sights, bam, he’s trailing smoke. Just time to turn over on my left wing tip when there’s a second Spitfire coming toward me in my sights, I go straight for his nose, it’s him or me; well, as you can see, it’s him that went into the drink, and I says to myself, as long as you’ve got two, why not try the third and so on, as long as your gas holds out. So I see seven of them down below me, they’ve broken formation and they’re trying to get away. I pick out one of them, I’ve got a good sun well in back of me. He gets his, I repeat the number, turns out OK, I pull back the stick as far as shell go, and there’s the third in my line of fire: he goes into a spin, I must have got him, instinctively I trail him, lose him, clouds, got him again, give another burst, he drops into the pond, but so do I pretty near; I honestly can’t tell you how I got my crate upstairs again. Anyway, when I come home flapping my wings—as you probably know, you must have seen it in the newsreels, we come in flapping our wings if we’ve bagged anything—I can’t get the landing gear down. Jammed. So I had to make my first crash landing. Later in the officers’ club they tell me I’ve been marked up for a certain six, it’s news to me; as you can imagine, I’d been too excited to count. I was mighty happy, but about four o’clock we’ve got to go up again. Well, to make a long story short, it was pretty much the same as in the old days when we played handball in our good old recreation yard—’cause the stadium hadn’t been built yet. Maybe Mr. Mallenbrandt remembers: either I didn’t shoot a single goal or I’d shoot nine in a row; that’s how it was that day: six that morning and three more in the afternoon. That was my ninth to seventeenth; but it wasn’t until a good six months later, when I had my full forty, that I was commended by our CO, and by the time I was decorated at the Führer’s Headquarters I had forty-four under my belt; ’cause we guys up at the Channel just about lived in our crates. The ground crews got relieved, not us. There were some that couldn’t take it. Well, now I’ll tell you something funny for relief. In every airfield there’s a squadron dog. One day it was beautiful weather and we decided to take Alex, our dog…”

  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 sh
oulders, 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.

  …and once—it was the end of June, summer vacation hadn’t started yet and the lieutenant commander hadn’t yet delivered his lecture in our school auditorium—Mahlke left his place in the shade because a Third had gone down into the fo’c’sle of the mine sweeper and hadn’t come up. Mahlke went down the hatch and brought the kid up. He had wedged himself in amidships, but he hadn’t got as far as the engine room. Mahlke found him under the deck between pipes and bundles of cable. For two hours Schilling and Hotten Sonntag took turns working on the kid according to Mahlke’s directions. Gradually, the color came back into his face, but when we swam ashore we had to tow him.

  The next day Mahlke was diving again with his usual enthusiasm, but without a screwdriver. He swam across at his usual speed, leaving us all behind; he had already been under once when we climbed up on the bridge.

  The preceding winter’s ice and February storms had carried away the last bit of rail, both gun mounts, and the top of the pilothouse. Only the encrusted gull droppings had come through in good shape and, if anything, had multiplied. Mahlke brought up nothing and didn’t answer the questions we kept thinking up. But late in the afternoon, after he had been down ten or twelve times and we were starting to limber up for the swim back, he went down and didn’t come up. We were all of us out of our minds.

  When I speak of a five-minute intermission, it doesn’t mean a thing; but after five minutes as long as years, which we occupied with swallowing until our tongues lay thick and dry in dry hollows, we dove down into the barge one by one: in the fo’c’sle there was nothing but a few baby herring. Behind Hotten Sonntag I ventured through the bulkhead for the first time, and looked superficially about the former officers’ mess. Then I had to come up, shot out of the hatch just before I would have burst, went down again, shoved my way twice more through the bulkhead, and didn’t give up until a good half hour later. Seven or eight of us lay flat on the bridge, panting. The gulls circled closer and closer; must have noticed something.

  Luckily, there were no Thirds on the barge. We were all silent or all talking at once. The gulls flew off to one side and came back again. We cooked up stories for the lifeguard, for Mahlke’s mother and aunt, and for Klohse, because there was sure to be an investigation at school. Because I was Mahlke’s neighbor, they saddled me with the visit to his mother on Osterzeile. Schilling was to tell our story to the lifeguard and in school.

  “If they don’t
find him, we’ll have to swim out here with a wreath and have a ceremony.”

  “We’ll chip in. We’ll each contribute at least fifty pfennigs.”

  “We can throw him overboard from here, or maybe just lower him into the fo’c’sle.”

  “Well have to sing something,” said Kupka. But the hollow tinkling laughter that followed this suggestion did not originate with any of us: it came from inside the bridge. We all gaped at some unknown point, waiting for the laughter to start up again, but when it did, it was a perfectly normal kind of laughter, had lost its hollowness, and came from the fo’c’sle. The waters parting at his watershed, Mahlke pushed out of the hatch, breathing scarcely harder than usual, and rubbed the fresh sunburn on his neck and shoulders. His bleating was more good-natured than scornful. “Well,” he said, “have you got that funeral oration ready?”