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, Böll, 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.