Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  The first vacation week in the Saskoschin country annex passes amid schlagball games, well-regulated hikes, and moderate scholastic activities. On the one hand, steady consumption of frogs and, the weather permitting, an occasional swallowing of salamander tails; on the other, singing while gathered around the campfire in the evening—cold backs, overheated faces. Someone gashes his knee. Two have sore throats. First little Probst has a sty, then Jochen Witulski has a sty. A fountain pen is stolen, or Horst Behlau has lost it: tedious investigations. Bobbe Ehlers, a first-class goal player, has to go back to Quatschin ahead of time, because his mother is seriously ill. While one of the Syck brothers who had been a bedwetter back in the dormitory is able to report a dry bed in the Saskoschin country annex, his brother, hitherto dry, begins to wet his country annex bed regularly and his cot on the porch as well. Half-waking after noon nap on the porch. Unplayed on, the schlagball field gleams in the sunlight. Amsel’s slumbers raise beads on his smooth forehead. Back and forth, Walter Matern’s eyes prod the distant chickenwire fence and the woods behind it. Nothing. With a little patience you can see hills growing out of the schlagball field: moles go on burrowing even in the midday rest period. At twelve there were peas with smoked pork—as usual slightly burnt. For supper supposedly sautéed mushrooms, followed by blueberry soup and farina pudding, actually there will be something else. And after supper postcards are written home.

  No campfire. A few play Monopoly, others morris or checkers. In the dining hall the dry laborious sound of table tennis tries to make itself heard above the roar of the night-dark forest. In his room Dr. Brunies, while a cough drop grows smaller, classifies the yield of a collector’s day: the region is rich in biotite and muscovite: they rub together gneissly. A silvery glimmer when gneisses grind; no silvery glimmer when Walter Matern’s teeth grind.

  At the edge of the night-dark schlagball field he sits on the concrete rim of the swimming pool rich in frogs and poor in water. Beside him Amsel: “Sti krad ni eht sdoow.”

  Walter Matern stares at the great black wall—near and coming nearer—of Saskoschin Forest.

  Amsel rubs places where the schlagball has hit him that afternoon. Behind what bush? Is he laughing soundlessly? And is the little bundle? Is Bidandengero?

  No mica gneiss; Walter Matern grinds from left to right Heavily breathing toads answer. The forest with its birds groans. No Vistula opening out into sea.

  THIRTY-SECOND MORNING SHIFT

  Brauxel is writing below ground: Hoo, how dark it is in the German forest! Barbale, the ghost that is neither man nor woman, is afoot. Light-handed goblins sprinkle one another. Hoo, how dark it is in the Polish forest! Gakkos are crossing, tinkers. Ashmodai! Ashmodai! Or Beng Dirach Beelzebub, whom the peasants call Old Clootie. Servant girls’ fingers that were once too curious, now spook candles, sleeping lights: so many sleeping lights, so many sleepers. Balderle steps on moss: Efta times efta is forty-nine.—Hoo! But it’s darkest in the German-Polish forest. Beng is crouching there, Balderle flies upward, sleeping lights flit, ants crawl, trees copulate, Gypsies track through the woods: Leopold’s bibi and Bibi the aunt and Estersweh’s bibi and Kite’s bibi, Gashpari’s bibi, all all all strike fulminantes, make light until she shows herself: the immaculate Mashari showing the carpenter’s baby where the milk pours from her goose-white crock. Green and resinous it flows and gathers the snakes, forty-nine of them, efta times efta.

  Through the ferns the border runs on one leg. This side and that side: white, red-rimmed mushrooms battle black, white, and red ants. Estersweh, Estersweh! Who is looking for his little sister? Acorns fall in the moss. Ketterle calls because something glitters: gneiss lies beside granite and rubs. Glittering spray. Slate grinds. But who can hear it?

  Romno, the man behind the bush. Bidandengero, toothless but keen of hearing: Acorns roll, slate slips, high shoe strikes the ground, hush little bundle, high shoe is coming, mushrooms ooze, the snake slithers away into the next century, blueberries burst, ferns tremble—for fear of whom? Light squeezes through the keyhole, steps downstairs into the mixed forest, Ketterle is the magpie—Por, its feather, flies. High shoes creak unpaid. Tittering comes the scrag, the schoolie, the brain buster, the teacher—Brunies, Brunies! Oswald Brunies!—tittering because as they rub, glitter sprays: gneissy slaty grainy scaly knotty: double spar, feldspar, and quartz. Rare, extremely rare, he says, and thrusts his high shoe forward, pulls out his magnifying glass on elastic band, and titters under his Bismarck hat.

  He also picks up a beauty, beauty, a piece of reddish mica granite, turns it under the mixed forest into the sun that’s on its way downstairs, until all the tiny mirrors say peep. This one he doesn’t reject, he holds it out into the light, joins it in prayer, and does not turn around. He walks along, mumbling to himself. He lifts his mica granite into the next light and the next one and the next to next one, to let the thousand mirrors say peep again, one after another and only a few simultaneously. With his high shoe he steps close to the bush. Behind it sits Bidandengero, toothless and very still. And the bundle hushes too. No longer is Romno the magpie. Ketterle calls no more. For, its feather, flies no more. Because nearby the scrag, the schoolie, the brain buster, the teacher Oswald Brunies.

  Deep in the woods, he laughs under his hat, for in the deepest part of the German-Polish Saskoschin Forest he has found a piece of extremely rare flesh-colored mica granite. But because the thousand mirrors refuse to suspend their polyphonic peeping, Dr. Oswald Brunies begins to have a bitter dry taste in his mouth. Brushwood and pine cones have to be gathered. With three big stones that glitter only moderately he has to build a stove. Fulminantes from Swedish boxes have to strike a flame, deep in the woods; so that immediately afterward Ketterle calls again: Por—the magpie loses a feather.

  The schoolmaster has a pan in his bag. It is oily, black, covered with tiny mica mirrors, because in his musette he keeps not only the pan, but also pieces of mica gneiss and mica granite and even his rare specimens of double spar. But in addition to pan and mica rock, the teacher’s musette yields up several little brown and blue paper bags of varying sizes. As well as a bottle without a label and a tin can with a screw top. The little flame crackles dry. Resin boils. Mica mirrors leap in the hot pan. The pan sizzles when he pours something into it from the bottle. The fire crackles between three stones. Six heaping teaspoonfuls from the tin can. Moderate quantities shaken from the large blue and the pointed brown bag. He takes a spoon-handleful from the small blue, a pinch from the small brown bag. Then he stirs counterclockwise and with his left hand shakes powder from a tiny sprinkler can. Stirs clockwise while again the magpie, while far away beyond the border Estersweh is still being looked for, although there is no wind to carry.

  He bends down on schoolmaster’s knees and blows until it flares to a blaze. He has to keep stirring until the mash slowly boils down, becomes stickier and more sluggish. Back and forth over the steaming bubbling pan he moves a schoolmaster’s nose with long hairs protruding from both nostrils: drops hang from his singed mustache, candy, and grow vitreous as he stirs the mash. From all directions come ants. Undecided, the smoke creeps over the moss, tangles with the ferns. Under a shifting oblique light the great mound of mica stones—who can have made it?—cries aloud in polyphonic confusion: peep peep peep! The mash over the flame begins to burn, but the recipe says it has to burn. Brown has to rise from the bottom. Wax paper is spread out and greased. Two hands lift the pan: a thick weary dough flows brown bubbly lavalike over the greased paper, immediately takes on a glassy skin, wrinkles from the sudden coolness, and darkens. Quickly, before it grows cold, a knife in the schoolmaster’s hand divides the flat cake into candy-sized squares; for what Dr. Oswald Brunies has brewed in the dark German-Polish woods under the trees of Saskoschin Forest, between Estersweh and Ketterle’s cry, is cough drops.

  Because he is lusting for sweets. Because his supply of sweetness was exhausted. Because his musette is always full of little bags and tins. Because in the ba
gs, tins, and bottle, malt and sugar, ginger, anise, and salt of hartshorn, honey and beer, pepper and mutton suet are always in readiness. Because with tiny sprinkler can—that is his secret—he dusts the hardening mash with crushed cloves: now the forest is fragrant and the fragrance of mushrooms, blueberries, moss, decades-old shrubbery, ferns, and resin abandons the competition. Ants run wild. The snakes in the moss are candied. Ketterle’s cry changes. Por, its feather, sticks. How is Estersweh to be looked for? The sweet way or the sour way? And who weeps behind the bush and snuffles behind the bush because he has been sitting in the acrid smoke? Had the little bundle been given poppy to be so still while the school master, hearing nothing, pried the cooled remnants of lava out of the pan with shrill spoon handle?

  Dr. Oswald Brunies picks up what splinters have not fallen into the moss or jumped in among the mica stones and guides them beneath his oversweet mustache: sucks, draws juice, lets them melt away. With sticky fingers, kept busy crushing ants between them, he sits beside the fire, which has collapsed and is smoking only feebly, and breaks the hard, glassy-brown cake on the greased paper into some fifty previously scored squares. Along with fragments and candied ants he stuffs the sweet concoction into a large blue sack which before his candymaking had been full of sugar. Everything—the pan, the rumpled bags, the bag with the newly acquired supply of candy, the tin can, the empty bottle, and the tiny sprinkler can—finds its way back to the mica gneiss in the musette bag. Now he is standing, holding the brown-crusted spoon in his schoolmaster’s mouth. Now he is striding over the moss in high shoes under Bismarck hat. He leaves nothing behind him except for tiny splinters and the greased paper. And now the schoolboys come loudly through the blueberries between the tree trunks. Little Probst is crying because of an encounter with wasps. Six have stung him. Four boys have to carry him. Dr. Oswald Brunies greets his colleague Dr. Mallenbrand.

  When the class moved on, was no longer there, when nothing remained of it but calls, laughter, screams, and the voices of the scrags, schoolies, brain busters, in short, teachers, the magpie called three times. Por: its feather flew again. Then Bidandengero left his bush. And the other Gakkos as well: Gashpari, Hite, and Leopold disengaged themselves from the bushes, glided from the trees. Near the greased paper that had contained candy lava, they met. Black with ants, the paper moved in the direction of Poland. The Gakkos followed the ants: Hite, Gashpari, Leopold, and Bidandengero whished silently over moss and through ferns in a southerly direction. Bidandangero was the last to grow smaller amid the tree trunks. Along with him went a thin whimpering as though his little bundle, a toothless snuggle-bunny, a hungry mite, as though Estersweh were crying.

  But the border was near, permitting a quick passage back and forth. Two days after the candymaking deep in the woods, Walter Matern, standing solidly planted in the striking zone, struck, quite contrary to his habit and only because Heini Kadlubek had said he could only hit flies but not long-distance balls, a long-distance ball that passed over both goals, over the whole field, and over the swimming pool rich in frogs and destitute of water. Walter Matern sent the schlagball into the woods. Before Mallenbrand came to count the balls, he had to go after it, hell bent for leather, over the chickenwire fence and into the mixed woods.

  But he did not find the ball and kept looking where there was none. He lifted every fan of ferns. Outside a half-ruined foxhole, which he knew to be uninhabited, he went down on his knees. He poked about with a branch in the trickling hole. He was about to lie down on his belly and reach a long arm into the foxhole when the magpie screamed, the feather flew, the leather struck him: what bush had thrown it?

  The bush was the man. The little bundle kept still. The brass ring in the man’s ear jiggled, because the man was laughing soundlessly. His tongue fluttered bright red in his toothless mouth. A frayed string cut into his coat over his left shoulder. In front three hedgehogs dangled on the string, bleeding from pointed snouts. When the man turned slightly, a small bag hung down behind him, forming a counterweight to the hedgehogs. The man had braided the black oiled hair over his temples into short, stiffly protruding pigtails. Zieten’s hussars had done the same.

  “Are you a hussar?”

  “Part hussar, part tinker.”

  “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Bi-dan-den-gero. Have no tooth left.”

  “And the hedgehogs?”

  “To cook in clay.”

  “And the bundle up front?”

  “Estersweh, little Estersweh.”

  “And the bundle in back? And what are you looking for here? And how do you catch the hedgehogs? And where do you live? And have you really got such a funny name? And suppose the forester catches you? And is it true that the Gypsies? And the ring on your little finger? And the bundle up front?”

  Por—that was the magpie calling from deep within the mixed forest. Bidandengero was in a hurry. He had, so he said, to go to the factory without windows. The schoolmaster was there. He was waiting for wild honey for his candy. He also wanted to bring the schoolmaster sparklers, and another little present too.

  Walter Matern stood with the ball and didn’t know what to do, in what direction. Finally he decided to climb back across the fence to the schlagball field—for the game was proceeding—when Amsel came rolling out of the bushes, asked no questions, had heard everything, and knew of only one direction: Bidandengero… He pulled his friend after him. They followed the man with the dead hedgehogs, and when they lost him, they found bright hedgehog blood from three hedgehog snouts on the ferns. They read the trace. And when the hedgehogs on Bidandengero’s string were dry and silent, the magpie screamed in their stead: Por—Ketterle’s feather—flew ahead. The forest grew denser, more crowded. Branches struck Amsel’s face. Walter Matern stepped on the white and red mushroom, fell in the moss, and bit into the cushion. Trees made faces. A fox froze. Faces through spider-webs. Fingers full of resin. Bark tasted sour. The woods thinned out. Downstairs went the sun as far as the teacher’s mound of stones. Afternoon concert: gneisses, some augite, hornblende, slate, mica, Mozart, twittering eunuchs from the Kyrie to the chorale Dona nobis: polyphonic peeping—but no sign of a teacher under a Bismarck hat.

  Only the cold fireplace. Gone was the greased paper. And only when the beeches came together again behind the clearing and screened off the sun, did they overtake the paper: it was black with ants and on its way. Like Bidandengero with his hedgehogs, the ants wished to make off across the border with their prey. They marched in single file, just as Walter Matern and his friend trotted along in single file, following the magpie’s lure: here here here. Through knee-high ferns. Through neatly ordered beech trees. Through green church light. Swallowed up again, far away, here again: Bidandengero. But no longer alone. Ketterle had called the Gakkos. Gashpari and Hite, Leopold and Kite’s bibi, Aunt Bibi and Leopold’s bibi, all the Gypsies, tinkers, and forest hussars had gathered under beech trees in the hushed ferns around Bidandengero. Gashpari’s bibi was pulling Bartmann, the goat.

  And when the forest thinned out again, eight or nine Gakkos left the woods with Bartmann the goat. Until they reached the trees on the other side, they were hidden by the tall grass of the trough-shaped treeless meadow spreading southward: and in the open meadow stands the factory, shimmering.

  An elongated one-story building, gutted. Untrimmed brick, empty window holes blackened with soot. From the ground to mid-height the chimney yawns, a brick maw with teeth missing. All the same it stands upright, probably just topping the beeches huddled close at the far end of the clearing. But it isn’t the chimney of a brickworks, although there are plenty of those in the region. Formerly it evacuated the smoke of a distillery, and now that the factory is dead and the chimney cold, it houses a jutting stork’s nest. But the nest too is dead. Blackish rotting straw covers the cracked chimney and shimmers emptily.

  They approach the factory in fan formation. No more magpie calling. Gakkos swimming in the tall grass. Butterflies staggering ove
r the meadow. Amsel and Walter Matern reach the edge of the woods, lie flat, peer out over the trembling spikes, and see all the Gakkos climbing simultaneously but through different window holes into the dead factory. Gashpari’s bibi has tied Bartmann to a hook in the wall.

  A white long-haired goat. The factory is not alone in shimmering; the blackish straw on the cracked chimney and the meadow shimmer too, and Bartmann is dissolved in light. It’s dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.

  Amsel isn’t sure whether or not this is Polish territory. Walter Matern thinks he has recognized Bidandengero’s head in a window hole: oily braids hussar style, brass in ear, gone again.

  Amsel thinks he has seen the Bismarck hat first in one, then briefly in the next window hole.

  Neither of them sees the border. Only bantering white butterflies. And above the variously pitched bumbling of the bumblebees a rising and falling garble. Not a distinct howling, cursing, or screaming. More like a crescendo of blubbering and squeaking. Bartmann the goat bleats two three volleys heavenward.

  Then from the fourth window hole on the left leaps the first Gakko: Hite with Kite’s bibi in tow. She unties Bartmann. Then another, and then two more in dappled Gypsy tatters: Gashpari and Leopold, his bibi, in numerous skirts. None through the open door, all the Gypsies through window holes, head-first, last of all Bidandengero.

  For all Gypsies have sworn by the Virgin Mashari: never through doors, only through windows.

  Fanwise as they have come, the Gakkos swim through the quaking grass to the woods that swallow them up. Once again the white goat. Ketterle does not call. Por, her feather, does not fly. Silence, until the clearing begins to buzz again: bantering butterflies. Bumblebees like double deckers, dragon-flies pray, sumptuous flies, wasps, and such-like vagabonds.