by Günter Grass
Before we swam ashore, Mahlke went down again. Winter was having an attack of the weeping jitters and we were trying to pacify him. Fifteen minutes later Winter was still bawling, and Mahlke was back on the bridge, wearing a set of radio operator’s earphones which from the outside at least looked undamaged, almost new; for amidships Mahlke had found the way into a room that was situated inside the command bridge, above the surface of the water; the former radio shack. The place was bone-dry, he said, though somewhat clammy. After considerable stalling he admitted that he had discovered the entrance while disentangling the young Third from the pipes and cables. “I’ve camouflaged it. Nobody’ll ever find it. But it was plenty of work. It’s my private property now, in case you have any doubts. Cozy little joint. Good place to hide if things get hot. Lots of apparatus, transmitter and so on. Might try to put it in working order one of these days.”
But that was beyond Mahlke’s abilities and I doubt if he ever tried. Or if he did tinker some without letting on, I’m sure his efforts were unsuccessful. He was very handy and knew all there was to know about making ship models, but he was hardly a radio technician. Besides, if Mahlke had ever got the transmitter working and started broadcasting witty sayings, the Navy or the harbor police would have picked us up.
In actual fact, he removed all the apparatus from the cabin and gave it to Kupka, Esch, and the Thirds; all he kept for himself was the earphones. He wore them a whole week, and it was only when he began systematically to refurnish the radio shack that he threw them overboard.
The first thing he moved in was books—I don’t remember exactly what they were. My guess is that they included Tsushima, The Story of a Naval Battle, a volume or two of Dwinger, and some religious stuff. He wrapped them first in old woolen blankets, then in oilcloth, and calked the seams with pitch or tar or wax. The bundle was carried out to the barge on a driftwood raft which he, with occasional help from us, towed behind him as he swam. He claimed that the books and blankets had reached their destination almost dry. The next shipment consisted of candles, an alcohol burner, fuel, an aluminum pot, tea, oat flakes, and dehydrated vegetables. Often he was gone for as much as an hour; we would begin to pound frantically, but he never answered. Of course we admired him. But Mahlke ignored our admiration and grew more and more monosyllabic; in the end he wouldn’t even let us help him with his moving. However, it was in our presence that he rolled up the color print of the Sistine Madonna, known to me from his room on Osterzeile, and stuffed it inside a hollow curtain rod, packing the open ends with modeling clay. Madonna and curtain rod were towed to the barge and maneuvered into the cabin. At last I knew why he was knocking himself out, for whom he was furnishing the former radio shack.
My guess is that the print was damaged in diving, or perhaps that the moisture in the airless cabin (it had no portholes or communication with the ventilators, which were all flooded in the first place) did not agree with it, for a few days later Mahlke was wearing something on his neck again, appended to a black shoelace: not a screwdriver, but the bronze medallion with the so-called Black Madonna of Czestochowa in low relief. Our eyebrows shot up knowingly; ah-ha, we thought, there’s the Madonna routine again. Before we had time to settle ourselves on the bridge, Mahlke disappeared down the forward hatch. He was back again in no more than fifteen minutes, without shoelace and medallion, and he seemed pleased as he resumed his place behind the pilothouse.
He was whistling. That was the first time I heard Mahlke whistle. Of course he wasn’t whistling for the first time, but it was the first time I noticed his whistling, which is tantamount to saying that he was really pursing his lips for the first time. I alone—being the only other Catholic on the barge—knew what the whistling was about: he whistled one hymn to the Virgin after another. Leaning on a vestige of the rail, he began with aggressive good humor to beat time on the rickety side of the bridge with his dangling feet; then over the muffled din, he reeled off the whole Pentecost sequence “Veni, Sancte Spiritus” and after that—I had been expecting it—the sequence for the Friday before Palm Sunday. All ten stanzas of the Stabat Mater dolorosa, including Parodisi Gloria and Amen, were rattled off without a hitch. I myself, who had once been Father Gusewski’s most devoted altar boy but whose attendance had become very irregular of late, could barely have recollected the first lines.
Mahlke, however, served Latin to the gulls with the utmost ease, and the others, Schilling, Kupka, Esch, Hotten Sonntag, and whoever else was there, listened eagerly with a “Boyohboy” and “Ittakesyourbreathaway.” They even asked Mahlke to repeat the Stabat Mater, though nothing could have been more remote from their interests than Latin or liturgical texts.
Still, I don’t think you were planning to turn the radio shack into a chapel for the Virgin. Most of the rubbish that found its way there had nothing to do with her. Though I never inspected your hideout—we simply couldn’t make it—I see it as a miniature edition of your attic room on Osterzeile. Only the geraniums and cactuses, which your aunt, often against your will, lodged on the window sill and the four-story cactus racks, had no counterpart in the former radio shack; otherwise your moving was a perfect job.
After the books and cooking utensils, Mahlke’s ship models, the dispatch boat Cricket and the torpedo boat of the Wolf class, scale 1:1250, were moved below decks. Ink, several pens, a ruler, a school compass, his butterfly collection, and the stuffed snowy owl were also obliged to take the dive. I presume that Mahlke’s furnishings gradually began to look pretty sick in this room where water vapor could do nothing but condense. Especially the butterflies in their glassed-over cigar boxes, accustomed as they were to dry attic air, must have suffered from the dampness.
But what we admired most about this game of moving man, which went on for days, was precisely its absurdity and deliberate destructiveness. And the zeal with which Joachim Mahlke gradually returned to the former Polish mine sweeper so many of the objects which he had painstakingly removed two summers before—good old Pilsudski, the plates with the instructions for operating this or that machine, and so on—enabled us, despite the irritating Thirds, to spend an entertaining, I might even say exciting, summer on that barge for which the war had lasted only four weeks.
To give you an example of our pleasures: Mahlke offered us music. You will remember that in the summer of 1940, after he had swum out to the barge with us perhaps six or seven times, he had slowly and painstakingly salvaged a phonograph from the fo’c’sle or the officers’ mess, that he had taken it home, repaired it, and put on a new turntable covered with felt. This same phonograph, along with ten or a dozen records, was one of the last items to find their way back again. The moving took two days, during which time he couldn’t resist the temptation to wear the crank around his neck, suspended from his trusty shoelace.
Phonograph and records must have come through the trip through the flooded fo’c’sle and the bulkhead in good shape, for that same afternoon he surprised us with music, a hollow tinkling whose source seemed to shift eerily about but was always somewhere inside the barge. I shouldn’t be surprised if it shook loose the rivets and sheathing. Though the sun was far down in the sky, we were still getting some of it on the bridge, but even so that sound gave us gooseflesh. Of course we would shout: “Stop it. No. Go on! Play another!” I remember a well-known Ave Maria, as long-lasting as a wad of chewing gum, which smoothed the choppy sea; he just couldn’t manage without the Virgin.
There were also arias, overtures, and suchlike—have I told you that Mahlke was gone on serious music? From the inside out Mahlke regaled us with something passionate from Tosca, something enchanted from Humperdinck, and part of a symphony beginning with dadada daaah, known to us from popular concerts.
Schilling and Kupka shouted for something hot, but that he didn’t have. It was Zarah who produced the most startling effects. Her underwater voice laid us out flat on the rust and bumpy gull droppings. I don’t remember what she sang in that first record. It was always the same Zarah
. In one, though, she sang something from an opera with which we had been familiarized by a movie called Homeland. “AlasIhavelosther,” she moaned. “Thewindsangmeasong,” she sighed. “Onedayamiraclewillhappen,” she prophesied. She could sound organ tones and conjure the elements, or she could dispense moments of languor and tenderness. Winter hardly bothered to stifle his sobs and in general our eyelashes were kept pretty busy.
And over it all the gulls. They were always getting frantic over nothing, but when Zarah revolved on the turntable down below, they went completely out of their heads. Their glass-cutting screams, emanating no doubt from the souls of departed tenors, rose high over the much-imitated and yet inimitable, dungeon-deep plaint of this tear-jerking movie star gifted with a voice, who in the war years earned an immense popularity on every front including the home front.
Mahlke treated us several times to this concert until the records were so worn that nothing emerged but a tortured gurgling and scratching. To this day no music has given me greater pleasure, though I seldom miss a concert at Robert Schumann Hall and whenever I am in funds purchase long-playing records ranging from Monteverdi to Bartok. Silent and insatiable, we huddled over the phonograph, which we called the Ventriloquist. We had run out of praises. Of course we admired Mahlke; but in the eerie din our admiration shifted into its opposite, and we thought him so repulsive we couldn’t look at him. Then as a low-flying freighter hove into view, we felt moderately sorry for him. We were also afraid of Mahlke; he bullied us. And I was ashamed to be seen on the street with him. And I was proud when Hotten Sonntag’s sister or the little Pokriefke girl met the two of us together outside the Art Cinema or on Heeresanger. You were our theme song. We would lay bets: “What’s he going to do now? I bet you he’s got a sore throat again. I’m taking all bets: Someday he’s going to hang himself, or hell get to be something real big, or invent something terrific.”
And Schilling said to Hotten Sonntag: “Tell me the honest truth; if your sister went out with Mahlke, to the movies and all, tell me the honest truth; what would you do?”
CHAPTER
VII
The appearance of the lieutenant commander and much-decorated U-boat captain in the auditorium of our school put an end to the concerts from within the former Polish mine sweeper Rybitwa. Even if he had not turned up, the records and the phonograph couldn’t have held out for more than another three or four days. But he did turn up, and without having to pay a visit to our barge he turned off the underwater music and gave all our conversations about Mahlke a new, though not fundamentally new, turn.
The lieutenant commander must have graduated in about ’34. It was said that before volunteering for the Navy he had studied some at the university: theology and German literature. I can’t help it, I am obliged to call his eyes fiery. His hair was thick and kinky, maybe wiry would be the word, and there was something of the old Roman about his head. No submariner’s beard, but aggressive eyebrows that suggested an overhanging roof. His forehead was that of a philosopher-saint, hence no horizontal wrinkles, but two vertical lines, beginning at the bridge of the nose and rising in search of God. The light played on the uppermost point of the bold vault. Nose small and sharp. The mouth he opened for us was a delicately curved orator’s mouth. The auditorium was overcrowded with people and morning sun. We were forced to huddle in the window niches. Whose idea had it been to invite the two upper classes of the Gudrun School? The girls occupied the front rows of benches; they should have worn brassieres, but didn’t.
When the proctor called us to the lecture, Mahlke hadn’t wanted to attend. Flairing some possible gain in prestige for myself, I took him by the sleeve. Beside me, in the window niche—behind us the windowpanes and the motionless chestnut trees in the recreation yard—Mahlke began to tremble before the lieutenant commander had even opened his mouth. Mahlke’s hands clutched Mahlke’s knees, but the trembling continued. The teachers, including two lady teachers from the Gudrun School, occupied a semicircle of oak chairs with high backs and leather cushions, which the proctor had set up with remarkable precision. Dr. Moeller clapped his hands, and little by little the audience quieted down for Dr. Klohse, our principal. Behind the twin braids and pony tails of the upper-class girls sat Fourths with pocketknives; braids were quickly shifted from back to front. Only the pony tails remained within reach of the Fourths and their knives. This time there was an introduction. Klohse spoke of all those who are out there fighting for us, on land, on the sea, and in the air, spoke at length and with little inflection of himself and the students at Langemarck, and on the Isle of Osel fell Walter Flex. Quotation: Maturebutpure—the manly virtues. Then some Fichte or Arndt. Quotation: Onyou-aloneandwhatyoudo. Recollection of an excellent paper on Fichte or Arndt that the lieutenant commander had written in Second: “One of us, from our midst, a product of our school and its spirit, and in this spirit let us…”
Need I say how zealously notes were passed back and forth between us in the window niches and the girls from Upper Second. Of course the Fourths mixed in a few obscenities of their own. I wrote a note saying Godknowswhat either to Vera Plötz or to Hildchen Matull, but got no answer from either. Mahlke’s hands were still clutching Mahlke’s knees. The trembling died down. The lieutenant commander on the platform sat slightly crushed between old Dr. Brunies, who as usual was calmly sucking hard candy, and Dr. Stachnitz, our Latin teacher. As the introduction droned to an end, as our notes passed back and forth, as the Fourths with pocket-knives, as the eyes of the Führer’s photograph met those of the oil-painted Baron von Conradi, as the morning sun slipped out of the auditorium, the lieutenant commander moistened his delicately curved orator’s mouth and stared morosely at the audience, making a heroic effort to exclude the girl students from his field of vision. Cap perched with dignity on his parallel knees. Under the cap his gloves. Dress uniform. The hardware on his neck plainly discernible against an inconceivably white shirt. Sudden movement of his head, half followed by his decoration, toward the lateral windows: Mahlke trembled, feeling no doubt that he had been recognized, but he hadn’t. Through the window in whose niche we huddled the U-boat captain gazed at dusty, motionless chestnut trees; what, I thought then or think now, what can he be thinking, what can Mahlke be thinking, or Klohse while speaking, or Brumes while sucking, or Vera Plötz while your note, or Hildchen Matull, what can he he he be thinking, Mahlke or the fellow with the orator’s mouth? For it would have been illuminating to know what a U-boat captain thinks while obliged to listen, while his gaze roams free without cross-wires and dancing horizon, until Joachim Mahlke feels singled out; but actually he was staring over schoolboys’ heads, through double windowpanes, at the dry greenness of the poker-faced trees in the recreation yard, giving his orator’s mouth one last moistening with his bright-red tongue, for Klohse was trying, with words on peppermint breath, to send a last sentence out past the middle of the auditorium: “And today it beseems us in the homeland to give our full attention to what you sons of our nation have to report from the front, from every front.”
The orator’s mouth had deceived us. The lieutenant commander started out with a very colorless survey such as one might have found in any naval manual: the function of the submarine. German submarines in the First World War: Weddigen and the U9, submarine plays decisive role in Dardanelles campaign, sinking a total of thirteen million gross register tons. Our first 250-ton subs, electric when submerged, diesel on the surface, the name of Prien was dropped, Prien and the U47, and Lieutenant Commander Prien sent the Royal Oak to the bottom—hell, we knew all that—as well as the Repulse, and Schuhart sank the Courageous, and so on and so on. And then all the old saws: “The crew is a body of men who have sworn to stand together in life and death, for far from home, terrible nervous strain, you can imagine, living in a sardine can in the middle of the Atlantic or the Arctic, cramped humid hot, men obliged to sleep on spare torpedoes, nothing stirring for days on end, empty horizon, then suddenly a convoy, heavily guarded, everything
has to go like clockwork, not an unnecessary syllable; when we bagged our first tanker, the Amdale, 17,200 tons, with two fish amidships, believe it or not, I thought of you, my dear Dr. Stachnitz, and began to recite out loud, without turning off the intercom, qui quae quod, cuius cuius cuius… until our exec called back: Good work, skipper, you may take the rest of the day off. But a submarine mission isn’t all shooting and tube one fire and tube two fire; for days on end it’s the same monotonous sea, the rolling and pounding of the boat, and overhead the sky, a sky to make your head reel, I tell you, and sunsets…”
Although the lieutenant commander with the hardware on his neck had sunk 250,000 gross register tons, a light cruiser of the Despatch class and a heavy destroyer of the Tribal class, the details of his exploits took up much less space in his talk than verbose descriptions of nature. No metaphor was too daring. For instance: “…swaying like a train of priceless, dazzlingly white lace, the foaming wake follows the boat which, swathed like a bride in festive veils of spray, strides onward to the marriage of death.”
The tittering wasn’t limited to the pigtail contingent; but in the ensuing metaphor the bride was obliterated: “A submarine is like a whale with a hump, but what of its bow wave? It is like the twirling, many times twirled mustache of a hussar.”
The lieutenant commander also had a way of intoning dry technical terms as if they had been dark words of legend. Probably his lecture was addressed more to Papa Brunies, his former German teacher, known as a lover of Eichendorff, than to us. Klohse had mentioned the eloquence of his school themes, and perhaps he wished to show that his tongue had lost none of its cunning. Such words as “bilge pump” and “helmsman” were uttered in a mysterious whisper. He must have thought he was offering us a revelation when he said “master compass” or “repeater compass.” Good Lord, we had known all this stuff for years. He saw himself as the kindly grandmother telling fairy tales. The voice in which he spoke of a dog-watch or a watertight door or even something as commonplace as a “choppy cross sea”! It was like listening to dear old Andersen or the Brothers Grimm telling a spooky tale about “sonar impulses.”
