…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.