Cat and Mouse (7 page)
Authors: Gunter Grass
Mallenbrandt blew his whistle; after the basketball game both classes had to line up and sing "Tothemountainswegointheearlydewfallera"; then we were dismissed. In the dressing room there was again a huddle around the lieutenant commander. Only the Firsters hung back a little. After carefully washing his hands and armpits over the one and only washbasin -- there were no showers -- the lieutenant commander put on his underwear and stripped off his borrowed gym togs so deftly that we didn't see a thing. Meanwhile he was subjected to more questions, which he answered with good-natured, not too condescending laughter. Then, between two questions, his good humor left him. His hands groped uncertainly. Covertly at first, then openly, he was looking for something. He even looked under the bench. "Just a minute, boys, I'll be back on deck in a second," and in navy-blue shorts, white shirt, socks but no shoes, he picked his way through students, benches, and zoo smell: Pavilion for Small Carnivores. His collar stood open and raised, ready to receive his tie and the ribbon bearing the decoration whose name I dare not utter. On the door of Mallenbrandt's office hung the weekly gymnasium schedule. The lieutenant commander knocked and went right in.
Who didn't think of Mahlke as I did? I'm not sure I thought of him right away, I should have, but the one thing I am sure of is that I didn't sing out: "Hey, where's Mahlke?" Nor did Schilling nor Hotten Sonntag, nor Winter Kupka Esch. Nobody sang out; instead we all ganged up on sickly little Buschmann, a poor devil who had come into the world with a grin that he couldn't wipe off his face even after it had been slapped a dozen times.
The half-dressed lieutenant commander came back with Mallenbrandt in a terry-cloth bathrobe. "Whowasit?" Mallenbrandt roared. "Lethimstepforward!" And we sacrificed Buschmann to his wrath. I too shouted Buschmann; I even succeeded in telling myself as though I really believed it: Yes, it must have been Buschmann, who else could it be?
But while Mallenbrandt, the lieutenant commander, and the upper-class monitor were flinging questions at Buschmann all together, I began to have pins and needles, superficially at first, on the back of my neck. The sensation grew stronger when Buschmann got his first slap, when he was slapped because even under questioning he couldn't get the grin off his face. While my eyes and ears waited for a clear confession from Buschmann, the certainty crawled upward from the back of my neck: Say, I wonder if it wasn't a certain So-and-So!
My confidence seeped away; no, the grinning Buschmann was not going to confess; even Mallenbrandt must have suspected as much or he would not have been so liberal with his slaps. He had stopped talking about the missing object and only roared between one slap and the next: "Wipe that grin off your face. Stop it, I say. I'll teach you to grin."
I may say, in passing, that Mallenbrandt did not achieve his aim. I don't know whether Buschmann is still in existence; but if there should be a dentist, veterinary, or physician by the name of Buschmann -- Heini Buschmann was planning to study medicine -- it is certainly a grinning Dr. Buschmann; for that kind of thing is not so easily got rid of, it is long-lived, survives wars and currency reforms, and even then, in the presence of a lieutenant commander with an empty collar, waiting for an investigation to produce results, it proved superior to the blows of Mr. Mallenbrandt.
Discreetly, though all eyes were on Buschmann, I looked for Mahlke, but there was no need to search; I could tell by a feeling in my neck where he was inwardly singing his hymns to the Virgin. Fully dressed, not far away but removed from the crowd, he was buttoning the top button of a shirt which to judge by the cut and stripes must have been still another hand-me-down from his father. He was having trouble getting his distinguishing mark in under the button.
Apart from his struggles with his shut button and the accompanying efforts of his jaw muscles, he gave an impression of calm. When he realized that the button wouldn't close over his Adam's apple, he reached into the breast pocket of his coat, which was still hanging up, and produced a rumpled necktie. No one in our class wore a tie. In the upper classes there were a few fops who affected ridiculous bow ties. Two hours before, while the lieutenant was still regaling the auditorium about the beauties of nature, he had worn his shirt collar open; but already the tie was in his breast pocket, awaiting the great occasion.
This was Mahlke's maiden voyage as a necktie wearer. There was only one mirror in the dressing room and even so it was covered with spots. Standing before it, but only for the sake of form, for he didn't step close enough to see anything much, he tied on his rag -- it had bright polka dots and was in very bad taste, I am convinced today -- turned down his collar, and gave the enormous knot one last tug. Then he spoke up, not in a very loud voice but with sufficient emphasis that his words could be distinguished from the sounds of the investigation that was still in progress and the slaps which Mallenbrandt, over the lieutenant commander's objections, was still tirelessly meting out. "I'm willing to bet," Mahlke said, "that Buschmann didn't do it. But has anybody searched his clothing?"
Though he had spoken to the mirror, Mahlke found ready listeners. His necktie, his new act, was noticed only later, and then not very much. Mallenbrandt personally searched Buschmann's clothes and soon found reason to strike another blow at the grin: in both coat pockets he found several opened packages of condoms, with which Buschmann carried on a retail trade in the upper classes; his father was a druggist. Otherwise Mallenbrandt found nothing, and the lieutenant commander cheerfully gave up, knotted his officer's tie, turned his collar down, and, tapping at the spot which had previously been so eminently decorated, suggested to Mallenbrandt that there was no need to take the incident too seriously: "It's easily replaced. It's not the end of the world. Just a silly boyish prank."
But Mallenbrandt had the doors of the gymnasium and dressing room locked and with the help of two Firsters searched our pockets as well as every corner of the room that might have been used as a hiding place. At first the lieutenant commander was amused and even helped, but after a while he grew impatient and did something that no one had ever dared to do in our dressing room: he began to chain smoke, stamping out the butts on the linoleum floor. His mood soured visibly after Mallenbrandt had silently pushed up a spittoon that for years had been gathering dust beside the washbowl and had already been searched as a possible hiding place.
The lieutenant commander blushed like a schoolboy, tore the cigarette he had just begun from his delicately curved orator's mouth, and stopped smoking. At first he just stood there with his arms folded; then he began to look nervously at the time, demonstrating his impatience by the sharp left hook with which he shook his wrist watch out of his sleeve.
He took his leave by the door with gloved fingers, giving it to be understood that he could not approve of the way this investigation was being handled, that he would put the whole irritating business into the hands of the principal, for he had no intention of letting his leave be spoiled by a bunch of ill-behaved brats.
Mallenbrandt tossed the key to one of the Firsters, who created an embarrassing pause by his clumsiness in unlocking the dressing-room door.
Chapter
VIII
The investigation dragged on, ruining our Saturday afternoon and bringing no results. I remember few details and those are hardly worth talking about, for I had to keep an eye on Mahlke and his necktie, whose knot he periodically tried to push up higher; but for Mahlke's purposes a hook would have been needed. No, you were beyond help.
But what of the lieutenant commander? The question seems hardly worth asking, but it can be answered in few words. He was not present at the afternoon investigation, and it may well have been true, as unconfirmed rumors had it, that he spent the afternoon with his fianc
é
e, looking through the city's three or four medal shops. Somebody in our class claimed to have seen him on Sunday at the Four Seasons Caf
é
, sitting with his fianc
é
e and her parents, and allegedly nothing was missing between his collarbones: the visitors to the caf
é
may have noticed, with a certain awe, who was sitting there in their midst, trying his well-mannered best to cut the recalcitrant cake of the third war year with a fork.
I didn't go to the caf
é
that Sunday. I had promised Father Gusewski to serve as his altar boy at early Mass. Shortly after seven Mahlke came in with his bright necktie and was unable, despite the aid of the usual five little old women, to dispel the emptiness of the former gymnasium. He received communion as usual on the outer left. The previous evening, immediately after the investigation at school, he must have come to St. Mary's Chapel and confessed; or perhaps, for one reason or another, you whispered into Father Wiehnke's ear at the Church of the Sacred Heart.
Gusewski kept me, inquired after my brother, who was fighting in Russia, or maybe he had stopped fighting, for there had been no news of him for several weeks. Once again I had ironed and starched all the altar covers and the alb, and it is perfectly possible that he gave me a roll or two of raspberry drops; what I know for sure is that Mahlke was gone when I left the sacristy. He must have been one car ahead of me. On Max-Halbe-Platz I boarded the trailer of a No. 9 car. Schilling jumped on at Magdeburger Strasse after the car had gathered considerable speed. We spoke of something entirely different. Maybe I offered him some of Father Gusewski's raspberry drops. Between Saspe Manor and Saspe Cemetery, we overtook Hotten Sonntag. He was riding a lady's bicycle and carrying the little Pokriefke girl astraddle on the baggage rack. The spindly little thing's thighs were still as smooth as frogs' legs, but she was no longer flat all over. The wind showed that her hair had grown longer.
We had to wait at the Saspe siding for the car coming from the opposite direction, and Hotten Sonntag and Tulla passed us. At the Brösen stop the two of them were waiting. The bicycle was leaning against a waste-paper basket provided by the beach administration. They were playing brother and sister, standing there with their little fingers linked. Tulla's dress was blue blue washing blue, and in every way too short too tight too blue. Hotten Sonntag was carrying the bundle of bathrobes etc. We managed to exchange a few silent glances, and to catch each other's meaning. At length words fell from the supercharged silence: "Of course it was Mahlke, who else could it have been? What a guy!"
Tulla wanted details, squirmed up to us, and wheedled with a pointed forefinger. But neither of us called the object by name. She got no more out of us than a terse "WhoelsebutMahlke" and an "It'sasclearasday.'' But Schilling, no, it was I, dreamed up a new title. Into the gap between Hotten Sonntag's head and Tulla's head I inserted the words: "The Great Mahlke. The Great Mahlke did it, only the Great Mahlke can do such things."
And the title stuck. All previous attempts to fasten nicknames on Mahlke had been short-lived. I remember "Soup Chicken"; and when he stood aloof, we had called him "Swallower" or "The Swallower." But the first title to prove viable was my spontaneous cry: '"The Great Mahlke!" And in these papers I shall speak now and then of "The Great Mahlke."
At the cashier's window we got rid of Tulla. She disappeared into the ladies' cabins, stretching her dress with her shoulder blades. Before the verandalike structure in front of the men's bathhouse lay the sea, pale and shaded by fair-weather clouds, blowing across the sky in dispersed order. Water: 65. Without having to search, the three of us caught sight, behind the second sandbank, of somebody swimming frantically on his back, splashing and foaming as he headed for the superstructure of the mine sweeper. We agreed that only one of us should swim after him. Schilling and I suggested Hotten Sonntag, but he preferred to lie with Tulla Pokriefke behind the sun screen on the family beach and sprinkle sand on frogs' legs. Schilling claimed to have eaten too much breakfast: "Eggs and all. My grandma from Krampitz has chickens and some Sundays she brings in two or three dozen eggs."
I could think of no excuse. I rarely observed the rule about fasting before communion and I had eaten breakfast very early. Besides, it was neither Schilling nor Hotten Sonntag who had said 'The Great Mahlke," but I. So I swam after him, in no particular hurry.
Tulla Pokriefke wanted to swim along with me, and we almost came to blows on the pier between the ladies' beach and the family beach. All arms and legs, she was sitting on the railing. Summer after summer she had been wearing that same mouse-gray, grossly darned child's bathing suit; what little bosom she had was crushed, elastic cut into her thighs, and between her legs the threadbare wool molded itself in an intimate dimple. Curling her nose and spreading her toes, she screamed at me. When in return for some present or other -- Hotten Sonntag was whispering in her ear -- she agreed to withdraw, three or four little Thirds, good swimmers, whom I had often seen on the barge, came climbing over the railing; they must have caught some of our conversation, for they wanted to swim to the barge though they didn't admit it. "Oh no," they protested, "we're going somewhere else. Out to the breakwater. Or just to take a look." Hotten Sonntag attended to them: "Anybody that swims after him gets his balls polished."
After a shallow dive from the pier I started off, changing my stroke frequently and taking my time. As I swam and as I write, I tried and I try to think of Tulla Pokriefke, for I didn't and still don't want to think of Mahlke. That's why I swam breast stroke, and that's why I write that I swam breast stroke. That was the only way I could see Tulla Pokriefke sitting on the railing, a bag of bones in mouse-gray wool; and as I thought of her, she became smaller, crazier, more painful; for Tulla was a thorn in our flesh -- but when I had the second sandbank behind me, she was gone, thorn and dimple had passed the vanishing point, I was no longer swimming away from Tulla, but swimming toward Mahlke, and it is toward you that I write: I swam breast stroke and I didn't hurry.
I may as well tell you between two strokes -- the water will hold me up -- that this was the last Sunday before summer vacation. What was going on at the time? They had occupied the Crimea, and Rommel was advancing again in North Africa. Since Easter we had been in Upper Second. Esch and Hotten Sonntag had volunteered, both for the Air Force, but later on, just like me who kept hesitating whether to go into the Navy or not, they were sent to the Panzer Grenadiers, a kind of high-class infantry. Mahlke didn't volunteer; as usual, he was the exception. "You must be nuts," he said. However, he was a year older, and there was every likelihood that he would be taken before we were; but a writer mustn't get ahead of himself.
I swam the last couple of hundred yards all in breast stroke, but still more slowly in order to save my breath. The Great Mahlke was sitting as usual in the shadow of the pilothouse. Only his knees were getting some sun. He must have been under once. The gargling remnants of an overture wavered in the fitful breeze and came out to meet me with the ripples. That was his way: dove down into his den, cranked up the phonograph, put on a record, came up with dripping watershed, sat down in the shade, and listened to his music while above him the screams of the gulls substantiated the doctrine of transmigration.
No, not yet. Once again, before it is too late, let me turn over on my back and contemplate the great clouds shaped like potato sacks, which rose from Putziger Wiek and passed over our barge in endless procession, providing changes of light and a cloud-long coolness. Never since -- except at the exhibition of our local children's painting which Father Alban organized two years ago at our settlement house with my help, have I seen such beautiful, potato-sack-shaped clouds. And so once again, before the battered rust of the barge comes within reach, I ask: Why me? Why not Hotten Sonntag or Schilling? I might have sent the Thirds, or Tulla with Hotten Sonntag. Or the whole lot of them including Tulla, for the Thirds, especially one of them who seems to have been related to her, were always chasing after the little bag of bones. But no, bidding Schilling to make sure that no one followed me, I swam alone. And took my time.
I, Pilenz -- what has my first name got to do with it? -- formerly an altar boy dreaming of every imaginable future, now secretary at the Parish Settlement House, just can't let magic alone; I read Bloy, the Gnostics, B
öll
, Friedrich Heer, and often with profound emotion the
Confessions
of good old St. Augustine. Over tea brewed much too black, I spend whole nights discussing the blood of Christ, the Trinity, and the sacrament of penance with the Franciscan Father Alban, who is an open-minded man though more or less a believer. I tell him about Mahlke and Mahlke's Virgin, Mahlke's neck and Mahlke's aunt, Mahlke's sugar water, the part in the middle of his hair, his phonograph, snowy owl, screwdriver, woolen pompoms, luminous buttons, about cat and mouse and
mea culpa
. I tell him how the Great Mahlke sat on the barge and I, taking my time, swam out to him alternating between breast stroke and back stroke; for I alone could be termed his friend, if it was possible to be friends with Mahlke. Anyway I made every effort. But why speak of effort? To me it was perfectly natural to trot along beside him and his changing attributes. If Mahlke had said: "Do this and that," I would have done this and that and then some. But Mahlke said nothing. I ran after him, I went out of my way to pick him up on Osterzeile for the privilege of going to school by his side. And he merely put up with my presence without a word or a sign. When he introduced the pompom vogue, I was the first to take it up and wear pompoms on my neck. For a while, though only at home, I even wore a screwdriver on a shoelace. And if I continued to gratify Gusewski with my services as an altar boy, it was only in order to gaze at Mahlke's neck during holy communion. When in 1942, after Easter vacation -- aircraft carriers were battling in the Coral Sea -- the Great Mahlke shaved for the first time, I too began to scrape my chin, though no sign of a beard was discernible. And if after the submarine captain's speech Mahlke had said to me: "Pilenz, go swipe that business on the ribbon," I would have taken medal and ribbon off the hook and kept it for you.
But Mahlke attended to his own affairs. And now he was sitting in the shadow of the pilothouse, listening to the tortured remains of his underwater music:
Cavalleria Rusticana
-- gulls overhead -- the sea now smooth now ruffled now stirred by short-winded waves -- two fat ships in the roadstead -- scurrying cloud shadows -- over toward Putzig a formation of speedboats: six bow waves, a few trawlers in between -- I can already hear the gurgling of the barge, I swim slowly, breast stroke, look away, look beyond, in between the vestiges of the ventilators -- I can't remember exactly how many -- and before my hands grip the rust, I see you, as I've been seeing you for a good fifteen years: You! I swim, I grip the rust, I see You: the Great Mahlke sits impassive in the shadow, the phonograph record in the cellar catches, in love with a certain passage which it repeats till its breath fails; the gulls fly off; and there you are with the ribbon and
it
on your neck.
It was very funny-looking, because he had nothing else on. He sat huddled, naked and bony in the shade with his eternal sunburn. Only the knees glared. His long, semirelaxed pecker and his testicles lay flat on the rust. His hands clutching his knees. His hair plastered in strands over his ears but still parted in the middle. And that face, that Redeemer's countenance! And below it, motionless, his one and only article of clothing, the large, the enormous medal a hand's breadth below his collarbone.
For the first time the Adam's apple, which, as I still believe -- though he had auxiliary motors -- was Mahlke's motor and brake, had found its exact counterweight. Quietly it slumbered beneath his skin. For a time it had no need to move, for the harmonious cross that soothed it had a long history; it had been designed in the year 1813, when iron was worth its weight in gold, by good old Schinkel, who knew how to capture the eye with classical forms: slight changes in 1871, slight changes in 1914-18, and now again slight changes. But it bore no resemblance to the
Pour le M
é
rite
,
a development of the Maltese Cross, although now for the first time Schinkel's brain child moved from chest to neck, proclaiming symmetry as a Credo.
"Hey, Pilenz! What do you think of my trinket? Not bad, eh?"
"Terrific! Let me touch it."
"You'll admit I earned it."
"I knew right away that you'd pulled the job."
"Job nothing. It was conferred on me only yesterday for sinking five ships on the Murmansk run plus a cruiser of the
Southampton
class. . ."
