Cat and Mouse (9 page)

And I thought: Today I'll go. I'll go and take a look at him. I'll study him. Yes, so I will. There must be something behind all that. Besides, he had invited me.

Osterzeile was a short street: and yet the one-family houses with their empty trellises against house fronts scrubbed till they were sore, the uniform trees along the sidewalks -- the lindens had lost their poles within the last year but still required props -- discouraged and wearied me, although our Westerzeile was identical, or perhaps it was because our Westerzeile had the same smell and celebrated the seasons with the same Lilliputian garden plots. Even today when, as rarely happens, I leave the settlement house to visit friends or acquaintances in Stockum or Lohhausen, between the airfield and the North Cemetery, and have to pass through streets of housing development which repeat themselves just as wearisomely and dishearteningly from house number to house number, from linden to linden, I am still on the way to visit Mahlke's mother and Mahlke's aunt and you, the Great Mahlke; the bell is fastened to a garden gate that I might have stepped over without effort, just by stretching my legs a little. Steps through the wintry but snowless front garden with its top-heavy rosebushes wrapped for the whiter. The flowerless flower beds are decorated with Baltic sea shells broken and intact. The ceramic tree frog the size of a rabbit is seated on a slab of rough marble embedded in crusty garden soil that has crumbled over it in places. And in the flower bed on the other side of the narrow path which, while I think of it, guides me from the garden gate to the three brick steps before the ocher-stained, round-arched door, stands, just across from the tree frog, an almost vertical pole some five feet high, topped with a birdhouse in the Alpine manner. The sparrows go on eating as I negotiate the seven or eight paces between flower bed and flower bed. It might be supposed that the development smells fresh, clean, sandy, and seasonal -- but Osterzeile, Westerzeile, Bärenweg, no, the whole of Langfuhr, West Prussia, or Germany for that matter, smelled in those war years of onions, onions stewing in margarine; I won't try to determine what else was stewing, but one thing that could always be identified was freshly chopped onions, although onions were scarce and hard to come by, although jokes about the onion shortage, in connection with Field Marshal G
ö
ring, who had said something or other about short onions on the radio, were going the rounds in Langfuhr, in West Prussia, and all over Germany. Perhaps if I rubbed my typewriter superficially with onion juice, it might communicate an intimation of the onion smell which in those years contaminated all Germany, West Prussia and Langfuhr, Osterzeile as well as Westerzeile, preventing the smell of corpses from taking over completely.

I took the three brick steps at one stride, and my curved hand was preparing to grasp the door handle when the door was opened from within -- by Mahlke in Schiller collar and felt slippers. He must have refurbished the part in his hair a short while before. Neither light nor dark, in rigid, freshly combed strands, it slanted backward in both directions from the part. Still impeccably neat; but when I left an hour later, it had begun to quiver as he spoke and droop over his large, flamboyant ears.

We sat in the rear of the house, in the living room, which received its light from the jutting glass veranda. There was cake made from some war recipe, potato cake; the predominant taste was rose water, which was supposed to awaken memories of marchpane. Afterward preserved plums, which had a normal taste and had ripened during the fall in Mahlke's garden -- the tree, leafless and with whitewashed trunk, could be seen in the left-hand pane of the veranda. My chair was assigned to me: I was at the narrow end of the table, looking out, while Mahlke, opposite me at the other end, had the veranda behind him. To the left of me, illumined from the side so that gray hair curled silvery, Mahlke's aunt; to the right, her right side illumined, but less glittering because combed more tightly, Mahlke's mother. Although the room was overheated, it was a cold wintry light that outlined the fuzzy edges of her ears and a few trembling wisps of loose hair. The wide Schiller collar gleamed whiter than white at the top, blending into gray lower down: Mahlke's neck lay flat in the shadow.

The two women were rawboned, born and raised in the country. They were at a loss what to do with their hands and spoke profusely, never at the same time, but always in the direction of Joachim Mahlke even when they were addressing me and asking about my mother's health. They both spoke to me through him, who acted as our interpreter: "So now your brother Klaus is dead. I knew him only by sight, but what a handsome boy!"

Mahlke was a mild but firm chairman. When the questions became too personal -- while my father was sending APO letters from Greece, my mother was indulging in intimate relations, mostly with noncoms -- well, Mahlke warded off questions in that direction: "Never mind about that, Auntie. Who can afford to judge in times like this when everything is topsy-turvy? Besides, it's really no business of yours, Mamma. If Papa were still alive, he wouldn't like it, he wouldn't let you speak like that."

Both women obeyed him or else they obeyed the departed engine driver whom he quietly conjured up whenever his aunt or mother began to gossip. When they spoke of the situation at the front -- confusing the battlefields of Russia with those of North Africa, saying El Alamein when they meant the Sea of Azov -- Mahlke managed quietly, without irritation, to guide the conversation into the right geographical channels: "No, Auntie, that naval battle was at Guadalcanal, not in Karelia."

Nevertheless, his aunt had given the cue and we lost ourselves in conjectures about the Japanese and American aircraft carriers that might have been sunk off Guadalcanal. Mahlke believed that the carriers
Hornet
and
Wasp,
the keels of which had been laid only in 1939, as well as the
Ranger,
had been completed in time to take part in the battle, for either the
Saratoga
or the
Lexington,
perhaps both, had meanwhile been sunk. We were still more in the dark about the two big Japanese carriers, the
Akagi
and the
Kaga,
which was decidedly too slow to be effective. Mahlke expressed daring opinions: only aircraft carriers, he said, would figure in the naval battles of the future, there was no longer any point in building battleships, it was the small, fast craft and the carriers that counted. He went into details. When he rattled off the names of the Italian
esploratori,
both women gaped in amazement and Mahlke's aunt clapped her bony hands resoundingly; there was something girlish about her enthusiasm, and in the silence that followed her clapping, she fiddled with her hair in embarrassment.

Not a word fell about the Horst Wessel School. I almost seem to remember that, as I was getting up to go, Mahlke laughingly mentioned his old nonsense about his neck, as he put it, and even went so far -- his mother and aunt joined in the laughter -- as to tell the story about the cat: this time it was J
ü
rgen Kupka who put the cat on his throat; if only I knew who made up the story, he or I, or who is writing this in the first place!

In any case -- this much is certain -- his mother found some wrapping paper and packed up two little pieces of potato cake for me as I was taking my leave. In the hall, beside the staircase leading to the upper story and his attic, Mahlke pointed out a photograph hanging beside the brush bag. The whole width of the photograph was taken up with a rather modern-looking locomotive with tender, belonging to the Polish railways -- the letters PKP could be clearly distinguished in two places. In front of the engine stood two men, tiny but imposing, with folded arms. The Great Mahlke said: "My father and Labuda the fireman, shortly before they were killed in an accident near Dirschau in '34. But my father managed to prevent the whole tram from being wrecked; they awarded him a medal posthumously."

Chapter

X

Early in the new year I thought I would take violin lessons -- my brother had left a violin -- but we were enrolled as Air Force auxiliaries and today it is probably too late although Father Alban keeps telling me that I ought to. And it was he who encouraged me to write about Cat and Mouse: "Just sit yourself down, my dear Pilenz, and start writing. Yes, yes, there was too much Kafka in your first poetic efforts and short stories, but even so, you've got a style of your own: if you won't take up the fiddle, you can get it off your chest by writing -- the good Lord knew what He was doing when He gave you talent."

So we were enrolled in the Brösen-Glettkau shore battery, or training battery if you will, behind the gravel-strewn beach promenade, amid dunes and blowing beach grass, in buildings that smelled of tar, socks, and the beach grass used to stuff our mattresses. There might be lots of things to say about the daily life of an Air Force auxiliary, a schoolboy in uniform, subjected in the morning to gray-haired teachers and the traditional methods of education and in the afternoon obliged to memorize gunnery instructions and the secrets of ballistics; but this is not the place to tell my story, or the story of Hotten Sonntag's simple-minded vigor, or to recount the utterly commonplace adventures of Schilling -- here I am speaking only of you; and Joachim Mahlke never became an Air Force auxiliary.

Just in passing and without trying to tell a coherent story beginning with cat and mouse, some students from the Horst Wessel School, who were also being trained in the Brösen-Glettkau shore battery, contributed a certain amount of new material: "Just after Christmas they drafted him into the Reich Labor Service. Oh yes, he graduated, they gave him the special wartime diploma. Hell, examinations were never any problem for him, he was quite a bit older than the rest of us. They say his battalion is out on Tuchler Heath. Cutting peat maybe. They say things are happening up there. Partisans and so on."

In February I went to see Esch at the Air Force hospital in Oliva. He was lying there with a fractured collarbone and wanted cigarettes. I gave him some and he treated me to some sticky liqueur. I didn't stay long. On the way to the streetcar bound for Glettkau I made a detour through the Castle Park. I wanted to see whether the good old whispering grotto was still there. It was: some convalescent alpine troops were trying it out with the nurses, whispering at the porous stone from both sides, tittering, whispering, tittering. I had no one to whisper with and went off, with some plan or other in mind, down a birdless, perhaps brambly path which led straight from the castle pond and whispering grotto to the Zoppot highway. It was rather like a tunnel because of the bare branches that joined overhead and it kept growing frighteningly narrower. I passed two nurses leading a hobbling, laughing, hobbling lieutenant, then two grandmothers and a little boy who might have been three years old, didn't want to be connected with the grandmothers, and was carrying but not beating a child's drum. Then out of the February-gray tunnel of brambles, something else approached and grew larger: Mahlke.

We were both ill at ease. There was something eerie, almost awesome, about a meeting on such a path without forks or byways, cut off even from the sky: it was fate or the rococo fantasy of a French landscape architect that had brought us together -- and to this day I avoid inextricable castle parks designed in the manner of good old Le N
ô
tre.

Of course a conversation started up, but I couldn't help staring transfixed at his head covering; for the Labor Service cap, even when worn by others than Mahlke, was unequaled for ugliness: a crown of disproportionate height sagged forward over the visor; the whole was saturated with the color of dried excrement; the crown was creased in the middle in the manner of a civilian hat, but the bulges were closer together, so close as to produce the plastic furrow which explains why the Labor Service head covering was commonly referred to as "an ass with a handle." On Mahlke's head this hat made a particularly painful impression, for it seemed to accentuate the very same part in the middle that the Labor Service had forced him to give up. We were both of us on edge as we stood facing one another between and beneath the brambles. And then the little boy came back without the grandmothers, pounding his tin drum, circumnavigated us in a semicircle with magical overtones, and at last vanished down the tapering path with his noise.

We exchanged a hasty good-by after Mahlke had tersely and morosely answered my questions about fighting with partisans on Tuchler Heath, about the food in the Labor Service, and as to whether any Labor Service Maidens were stationed near them. I also wanted to know what he was doing in Oliva and whether he had been to see Father Gusewski. I learned that the food was tolerable, but that he had seen no sign of any Labor Service Maidens. He thought the rumors about fighting with partisans to be exaggerated but not entirely unfounded. His commander had sent him to Oliva for some spare parts: official business, justifying a two days' absence. "I spoke to Gusewski this morning, right after early Mass." Then a disparaging wave of the hand: "Hell can freeze over, hell always be the same!" and the distance between us increased, because we were taking steps.

No, I didn't look after him. Unbelievable, you think? But if I say "Mahlke didn't turn around in my direction," you won't doubt me. Several times I had to look behind me because there was no one, not even the little boy with his noise box, coming toward me to help.

Then as I figure it, I didn't see you for a whole year; but not to see you was not, and still is not, to forget you and your fearful symmetry. Besides, there were reminders: if I saw a cat, whether gray or black or pepper-and-salt, the mouse ran into my field of vision forthwith; but still I hesitated, undecided whether the mouse should be protected or the cat goaded into catching it

Until summer we lived at the shore battery, played endless games of handball, and on visiting Sundays rollicked to the best of our ability in the beach thistles, always with the same girls or their sisters; I alone accomplished nothing at all. Hesitation was my trouble; I haven't got over it yet, and this weakness of mine still inspires me with the same ironical reflections. What else occupied our days? Distributions of peppermint drops, lectures about venereal diseases; in the morning
Hermann and Dorothea,
in the afternoon the 98-K rifle, mail, four-fruit jam, singing contests. In our hours off duty we sometimes swam out to our barge, where we regularly found swarms of the little Thirds who were coming up after us and who irritated us no end, and as we swam back we couldn't for the life of us understand what for three summers had so attached us to that mass of rust encrusted with gull droppings. Later we were transferred to the 88-millimeter battery in Pelonken and then to the Zigankenberg battery. There were three or four alerts and our battery helped to shoot down a four-motor bomber. For weeks several orderly rooms submitted rival claims to the accidental hit -- and through it all, peppermint drops,
Hermann and Dorothea,
and lots of saluting.

Because they had volunteered for the Army, Hotten Sonntag and Esch were sent to the Labor Service even sooner than I. Hesitating as usual, unable to make up my mind which branch of service I favored, I had missed the deadline for volunteering. In February 1944, with a good half of our class, I took and passed the final examinations -- which differed little from the usual peacetime variety -- and promptly received notice to report for Labor Service. Discharged from the Air Force Auxiliaries, I had a good two weeks ahead of me and was determined to do something conclusive in addition to winning my diploma. Whom did I light on but Tulla Pokriefke, who was sixteen or over and very accessible, but I had no luck and didn't get anywhere with Hotten Sonntag's sister either. In this situation and state of mind -- I was comforted to some extent by letters from one of my cousins; the whole family had been evacuated to Silesia after an air raid had left their house a total loss -- I made a farewell visit to Father Gusewski, promised to help at the altar during the furloughs I hoped I would get, and was given a new Missal and a handy metal crucifix, specially manufactured for Catholic recruits. Then at the corner of Bärenweg and Osterzeile on my way home, I ran into Mahlke's aunt, who wore thick glasses when she went out and was not to be avoided.

Before we had even exchanged greetings, she began to talk, at a good clip in spite of her rural drawl. When people came by, she gripped my shoulder and pulled until one of my ears approached her mouth. Hot, moist sentences. She began with irrelevant chit-chat. The shopping situation: "You can't even get what you've got coupons for." I learned that onions were not to be found, but that brown sugar and barley grits were obtainable at Matzerath's and that Ohlwein, the butcher, was expecting some canned pork. Finally, with no cue from me, she came to the point: "The boy is better now, though he don't exactly say so in his letters. But he's never been one to complain, he's just like his father, who was my brother-in-law. And now they've put him in the tanks. He'll be safer than in the infantry and dry when it rains."

Then whispers crept into my ear and I learned of Mahlke's new eccentricities, of the infantile pictures he drew under the signature of his letters.

"The funny part of it is that he never drew when he was little, except for the water colors he had to make in school. But here's his last letter in my pocketbook. Dear, how rumpled it is! Oh, Mr. Pilenz, there's so many people want to see how the boy is doing."

And Mahlke's aunt showed me Mahlke's letter. "Go ahead and read it." But I didn't read. Paper between gloveless fingers. A dry, sharp wind came circling down from Max-Halbe-Platz and nothing could stop it. Battered my heart with the heel of its boot and tried to kick the door in. Seven brothers spoke within me, but none of them followed the writing. There was snow in the wind but I could still see the letter paper distinctly, though it was grayish brown, poor quality. Today I may say that I understood immediately, but I just stared, wishing neither to look nor to understand; for even before the paper crackled close to my eyes, I had realized that Mahlke was starting up again: squiggly line drawings under neat Sütterlin script. In a row which he had taken great pains to make straight, but which was nevertheless crooked because the paper was unlined, eight, twelve, thirteen, fourteen unequally flattened circles and on every kidney a wartlike knob, and from each wart a bar the length of a thumbnail, projecting beyond the lopsided boiler toward the left edge of the paper. And on each of these tanks -- for clumsy as the drawings were, I recognized the Russian T-34 -- there was a mark, mostly between turret and boiler, a cross indicating a hit. And in addition -- evidently the artist didn't expect the viewers of his work to be very bright -- all fourteen of the T-34s -- yes, I'm pretty sure there were fourteen of them -- were canceled very emphatically with large crosses in blue pencil.

Quite pleased with myself, I explained to Mahlke's aunt that the drawings obviously represented tanks that Joachim had knocked out. But Mahlke's aunt didn't show the least surprise, plenty of people had already told her that, but what she couldn't understand was why there were sometimes more, sometimes fewer of them, once only eight and, in the letter before last, twenty-seven.

"Maybe it's because the mails are so irregular. But now, Mr. Pilenz, you must read what our Joachim writes. He mentions you too, in connection with candles, but we've already got some." I barely skimmed through the letter: Mahlke was thoughtful, inquiring about all his aunt's and mother's major and minor ailments -- the letter was addressed to both of them -- varicose veins, pains in the back, and so on. He asked for news of the garden: "Did the plum tree bear well this year? How are my cactuses doing?" Only a few words about his duties, which he called fatiguing and responsible: "Of course we have our losses. But the Blessed Virgin will protect me as in the past." Would his mother and aunt kindly give Father Gusewski one or if possible two candles for the altar of Our Lady? And then: "Maybe Pilenz can get you some; they have coupons." He furthermore asked them to offer prayers to St. Judas Thaddaeus -- a nephew twice-removed of the Virgin Mary, Mahlke knew his Holy Family -- and also have a Mass said for his late lamented father, who "left us without receiving the sacraments." At the end of the letter, more trifles and some pale landscape painting: "You can't imagine how run-down everything is here, how wretched the people are and all the many children. No electricity or running water. Sometimes I begin to wonder what it's all for, but I suppose it has to be. And someday if you feel like it and the weather is good, take the car out to Brösen -- but dress warmly -- and look out to the left of the harbor mouth, but not so far out, to see whether the superstructure of a sunken ship is still there. There used to be an old wreck there. You can see it with the naked eye, and Auntie has her glasses -- it would interest me to know if it's still. . ."

I said to Mahlke's aunt: "You can spare yourself the ride. The barge is still in the same place. And give Joachim my best when you write. He can set his mind at rest, nothing changes around here, and nobody's likely to walk off with the barge."

And even if the Schichau Dockyards had walked off with it, that is, raised it, scrapped or refitted it, would it have done you any good? Would you have stopped scribbling Russian tanks with childish precision on your letters and crossing them off with blue pencil? And who could have scrapped the Virgin? And who could have bewitched our good old school and turned it into birdseed? And the cat and the mouse? Are there stories that can cease to be?