We clasped our slightly trembling knees, chewed gull droppings into a sludge; half weary, half fascinated, we counted a formation of Navy cutters, followed the stacks of the hospital ship, whence smoke was still rising vertically, exchanged sidelong glances. He stayed down a long while – gulls circled, the swell gurgled over the bow, broke against the forward gun mount – the gun itself had been removed. A splashing as the water flowed back between the ventilators behind the bridge, licking always at the same rivets; lime under fingernails; itching on dry skin, shimmering light, chugging of motors in the wind, private parts half stiff, seventeen poplars between Brösen and Glettkau – and then he came shooting upward: bluish-red around the chin, yellowish over the cheekbones. His hair parted exactly in the middle, he rose like a fountain from the hatch, staggered over the bow through water up to his knees, reached for the jutting gun mount, and fell watery-goggle-eyed to his knees; we had to pull him up on the bridge. But before the water had stopped flowing from his nose and the corner of his mouth, he showed us his find, a steel screwdriver in one piece. Made in England. Stamped on the metal: Sheffield. No scars, no rust, still coated with grease. The water formed into beads and rolled off.

Every day for over a year Mahlke wore this heavy, to all intents and purposes unbreakable screwdriver on a shoelace, even after we had stopped or almost stopped swimming out to the barge. Though he was a good Catholic, it became a kind of cult with him. Before gym class, for instance, he would give the thing to Mr. Mallenbrandt for safekeeping; he was dreadfully afraid it might be stolen, and even took it with him to St. Mary's Chapel; for not only on Sunday, but also on weekdays, he went to early Mass on Marineweg, not far from the Neuschottland co-operative housing development.

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.