Cat and Mouse Read online

  He and his English screwdriver didn’t have far to go—out of Osterzeile and down Bärenweg. Quantities of two-story houses, villas with gable roofs, porticoes, and espaliered fruit trees. Then two rows of housing developments, plain drab walls ornamented only with water spots. To the right the streetcar line turned off and with it the overhead wires, mostly against a partly cloudy sky. To the left, the sandy, sorry-looking kitchen gardens of the railroad workers: bowers and rabbit hutches built with the black and red boards of abandoned freight cars. Behind the gardens the signals of the railway leading to the Free Port. Silos, movable and stationary cranes. The strange full-colored superstructures of the freighters. The two gray battleships with their old-fashioned turrets were still there, the swimming dock, the Germania bread factory; and silvery sleek, at medium height, a few captive balloons, lurching and bobbing. In the right background, the Gudrun School (the Helen Lange School of former years) blocking out the iron hodgepodge of the Schichau Dockyards as far as the big hammer crane. To this side of it, covered, well-tended athletic fields, freshly painted goal posts, foul lines marked in lime on the short grass: next Sunday Blue-and-Yellow versus Schellmühl 98—no grandstand, but a modern, tall-windowed gymnasium painted in light ocher. The fresh red roof of this edifice, oddly enough, was topped with a tarred wooden cross; for St. Mary’s Chapel had formerly been a gymnasium belonging to the Neuschottland Sports Club. It had been found necessary to transform it into an emergency church, because the Church of the Sacred Heart was too far away; for years the people of Neuschottland, Schellmühl, and the housing development between Osterzeile and Westerzeile, mostly shipyard, railroad, or post-office workers, had sent petitions to the bishop in Oliva until, still during the Free State period, this gymnasium had been purchased, remodeled, and consecrated.

  Despite the tortuous and colorful pictures and ornaments, some privately donated but for the most part deriving from the cellars and storerooms of just about every church in the diocese, there was no denying or concealing the gymnasium quality of this church—no amount of incense or wax candles could drown out the aroma of the chalk, leather, and sweat of former years and former handball matches. And the chapel never lost a certain air of Protestant parsimony, the fanatical sobriety of a meetinghouse.

  In the Neo-Gothic Church of the Sacred Heart, built of bricks at the end of the nineteenth century, not far from the suburban railway station, Joachim Mahlke’s steel screwdriver would have seemed strange, ugly, and sacrilegious. In St. Mary’s Chapel, on the other hand, he might perfectly well have worn it openly: the little chapel with its well-kept linoleum floor, its rectangular frosted glass windowpanes starting just under the ceiling, the neat iron fixtures that had formerly served to hold the horizontal bar firmly in place, the planking in the coarse-grained concrete ceiling, and beneath it the iron (though whitewashed) crossbeams to which the rings, the trapeze, and half a dozen climbing ropes had formerly been affixed, was so modern, so coldly functional a chapel, despite the painted and gilded plaster which bestowed blessing and consecration on all sides, that the steel screwdriver which Mahlke, in prayer and then in communion, felt it necessary to have dangling from his neck, would never have attracted the attention either of the few devotees of early Mass, or of Father Gusewski and his sleepy altar boy—who often enough was myself.

  No, there I’m going too far. It would certainly not have escaped me. As often as I served at the altar, even during the gradual prayers I did my best, for various reasons, to keep an eye on you. And you played safe; you kept your treasure under your shirt, and that was why your shirt had those grease spots vaguely indicating the shape of the screwdriver. Seen from the altar, he knelt in the second pew of the left-hand row, aiming his prayer with open eyes—light gray they were, I think, and usually inflamed from all his swimming and diving—in the direction of the Virgin.

  …and once—I don’t remember which summer it was—was it during the first summer vacation on the barge, shortly after the row in France, or was it the following summer?—one hot and misty day, enormous crowd on the family beach, sagging pennants, overripe flesh, big rush at the refreshments stands, on burning feet over the fiber runners, past locked cabins full of tittering, through a turbulent mob of children engaged in slobbering, tumbling, and cutting then: feet; and in the midst of this spawn which would now be twenty-three years old, beneath the solicitous eyes of the grownups, a little brat, who must have been about three, pounded monotonously on a child’s tin drum, turning the afternoon into an infernal smithy—whereupon we took to the water and swam out to our barge; from the beach, in the lifeguard’s binoculars for instance, we were six diminishing heads in motion; one head in advance of the rest and first to reach the goal.

  We threw ourselves on burning though wind-cooled rust and gull droppings and lay motionless. Mahlke had already been under twice. He came up with something in his left hand. He had searched the crew’s quarters, in and under the half-rotted hammocks, some tossing limply, others still lashed fast, amid swarms of iridescent sticklebacks, through forests of seaweed where lampreys darted in and out, and in a matted mound, once the sea kit of Seaman Duszynski or Liszinski, he had found a bronze medallion the size of a hand, bearing on one side, below a small embossed Polish eagle, the name of the owner and the date on which it had been conferred, and on the other a relief of a mustachioed general. After a certain amount of rubbing with sand and powdered gull droppings the circular inscription told us that Mahlke had brought to light the portrait of Marshal Pilsudski.

  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.

  There were books on a long sagging shelf. He read a good deal, including religious works. In addition to the cactuses on the window sill, to models of a torpedo boat of the Wolf class and the dispatch boat Cricket, I must also mention a glass of water that always stood on the washstand beside the bowl; the water was cloudy and there was an inch-thick layer of sugar at the bottom. In this glass Mahlke each morning, with sugar and care, stirred up the milky solution designed to hold his thin, limp hair in place; he never removed the sediment of the previous day. Once he offered me the preparation and I combed the sugar water into my hair; it must be admitted that thanks to his fixative, my hairdo preserved a vitreous rigidity until evening: my scalp itched, my hands were sticky, like Mahlke’s hands, from passing them over my hair to see how it was doing—but maybe the stickiness of my hands is only an idea that came to me later, maybe they were not sticky at all.

  Below him, in three rooms only two of which were used, lived his mother and her elder sister. Both of them quiet as mice when he was there, always worried and proud of the boy, for to judge by his report cards Mahlke was a good student, though not at the head of the class. He was—and this detracted slightly from the merit of his performance—a year older than the rest of us, because his mother and aunt had sent the frail, or as they put it sickly, lad to grade school a year later than usual.

  But he was no grind, he studied with moderation, let everyone copy from him, never snitched, showed no particular zeal except in gym class, and had a conspicuous horror of the nasty practical jokes customary in Third. He interfered, for instance, when Hotten Sonntag, having found a condom in Steffenspark, brought it to class mounted on a branch, and stretched it over our classroom doorknob. The intended victim was Dr. Treuge, a dottering half-blind pedant, who ought to have been pensioned years before. A voice called from the corridor: “He’s coming,” whereupon Mahlke arose, strode without haste to the door, and removed the loathsome object with a sandwich paper.

  No one said a word. Once more he had shown us; and today I can say that in everything he did or did not do—in not being a grind, in studying with moderation, in allowing all and sundry to copy from him, in showing no particular zeal except in gym class, in shunning nasty practical jokes—he was always that very special, individual Mahlke, always, with or without effort, gathering applause. After all he was planning to go into the circus later or maybe on the stage; to remove loathsome objects from doorknobs was to practice his clowning; he received murmurs of approval and was almost a clown when he did his knee-swings on the horizontal bar, whirling his silver Virgin through the fetid vapors of the gymnasium. But Mahlke piled up the most applause in summer vacation on the sunken barge, although it would scarcely have occurred to us to consider his frantic diving a circus act. And we never laughed when Mahlke, time and time again, climbed blue and shivering on
to the barge, bringing up something or other in order to show us what he had brought up. At most we said with thoughtful admiration: “Man, that’s great. I wish I had your nerves. You’re a cool dog all right. How’d you ever get ahold of that?”

  Applause did him good and quieted the jumping mouse on his neck; applause also embarrassed him and started the selfsame mouse up again. Usually he made a disparaging gesture, which brought him new applause. He wasn’t one to brag; never once did you say: “You try it.” Or: “I dare one of you guys to try.” Or: “Remember the day before yesterday, the way I went down four times in a row, the way I went in amidships as far as the galley and brought up that famous can… None of you ever did that. I bet it came from France, there were frogs’ legs in it, tasted something like veal, but you were yellow, you wouldn’t even try it after I’d eaten half the can. And damned if I didn’t raise a second can, hell, I even found a can opener, but the second can stank, rotten corned beef.”

  No, Mahlke never spoke like that. He did extraordinary things. One day, for instance, he crawled into the barge’s one-time galley and brought up several cans of preserves, which according to the inscriptions stamped in the metal were of English or French origin; he even located an almost serviceable can opener. Without a word he ripped the cans open before our eyes, devoured the alleged frogs’ legs, his Adam’s apple doing push-ups as he chewed—I forgot to say that Mahlke was by nature an eater—and when the can was half empty, he held out the can to us, invitingly but not overbearingly. We said no thank you, because just from watching, Winter had to crawl between the empty gun mounts and retch at length but in vain in the direction of the harbor mouth.