Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  And who shut the picture book? Who dripped lemon on homemade June clouds? Who let the milk clabber? How did Amsel’s skin and Walter Matern’s skin get that porous look, as though bombarded with sleet?

  The little bundle. The snugglebunny. The toothless mite. From the dead factory Estersweh screamed over the living meadow. Not the dark window holes but the black gate spat the Bismarck hat into the open air. The scrag, schoolie, brain buster, teacher, Oswald Brunies, stood under the sun with the screaming bundle and didn’t know how to hold it. “Bidandengero,” he called, “Bidandengero!” But the woods didn’t answer. Neither Amsel nor Walter Matern, who were picked up by the outcry and tugged step by step through the hissing grass to the factory, neither Dr. Brunies with the strident little bundle nor the picture-book meadow showed surprise when again something miraculous happened: from the south, from Poland, storks came flying over the meadow with measured wingbeat. Two of them described ceremonious loops and dropped, first one, then the other, into the blackened and disheveled nest on the cracked chimney.

  Instantly they began to clatter. All eyes, the schoolmaster’s under the Bismarck hat and the schoolboys’ eyes as well, climbed up the chimney. The snugglebunny broke off its cries. Adebar Adebar the Stork. Oswald Brunies found a piece of mica gneiss, or was it double spar, in his pocket. Let the baby have it to play with. Adebar Adebar the Stork. Walter Matern wanted to give the little bundle the leather schlagball which had come with them so far, with which the whole thing had started. Adebar Adebar the Stork. But the six-months-old baby girl already has something to ringer and play with: Angustri, Bidandengero’s silver ring.

  Quite possibly Jenny Brunies is wearing it to this day.

  LAST MORNING SHIFT

  It seems to have been nothing. No world has come discernibly to an end. Brauxel can write above ground again. Still, the date, February 4, has had something to show for itself: all three manuscripts have been punctually delivered, Brauchsel is able to set young Harry Liebenau’s love letters down on his package of morning shifts; and on “morning shifts” and “love letters” he will pile the actor’s confessions. Should a postscript seem desirable, Brauksel will write it, because he is in charge both of the mine and of the author’s consortium, it is he who pays out the advances, sets the delivery dates, and will read the proof.

  What happened when young Harry Liebenau came to us and applied for the job of authoring the second book? Brauxel examined him. To date he had written and published lyric poetry. His radio plays have all been on the air. He was able to show flattering and encouraging reviews. His style was termed gripping, refreshing, and uneven. Brauchsel began by questioning him about Danzig: “What, young man, were the names of the streets connecting Hopfengasse with the New Mottlau?”

  Harry Liebenau rattled them off: “Kiebitzgasse, Stützengasse, Mausegasse, Brandgasse, Adebargasse, Münchengasse, Judengasse, Milchkannengasse, Schleifengasse, Turmgasse, and Leitergasse.”

  “How, young man,” Brauksel inquired, “will you kindly explain, did Portechaisengasse gets its delightful name?”

  Harry Liebenau explained rather pedantically that it had taken its name from the litters, the taxis of the day, which had stood there in the eighteenth century and in which patricians and their ladies could be carried through muck and pestilence without fear for their costly attire.

  In response to Brauxel’s question as to who in the year 1936 had introduced the modern Italian rubber truncheon in the Danzig police force, Harry Liebenau spoke up like a recruit: “That was done by Police President Friboess!” But I was not yet satisfied: “Who, my young friend—I doubt if you remember—was the last chairman of the Center Party in Danzig? What was the honorable man’s name?” Harry Liebenau had boned up very thoroughly, even Brauxel learned a thing or two: “Richard Stachnik, D.D., clergyman and schoolteacher, became chairman of the Center Party and member of the provincial diet in 1933. In 1937, after dissolution of the Center Party, he was imprisoned for six months: in 1944 he was deported to Stutthof concentration camp, but soon released. All his life Dr. Stachnik was active in behalf of the canonization of the Blessed Dorothea of Montau, who in the year 1392 had caused herself to be immured beside the cathedral of Marienwerder.”

  I still had a raft of tricky questions on hand. I asked him the course of the Striessbach, the names of all the chocolate factories in Langfuhr, the altitude of the Erbsberg in Jäschkental Forest, and obtained satisfactory answers. When in answer to the question: What well-known actors began their careers at the Danzig Stadttheater?—Harry Liebenau replied without hesitation Renate Muller, who died young, and Hans Söhnker, the movie star, I, in my easy chair, gave him to understand that the examination was over and that he had passed.

  And so, after three work sessions, we agreed to link up Brauxe’ls “morning shifts” and Harry Liebenau’s “love letters” with a transitional passage. Here it is:

  Tulla Pokriefke was born on June 11, 1927.

  When Tulla was born, the weather was variable, mostly cloudy, with a possibility of showers. Light gyratory winds fluttered the chestnut trees in Kleinhammer Park.

  When Tulla was born, Dr. Luther, the former chancellor, coming from Königsberg and on his way to Berlin, landed at the Danzig-Langfuhr airfield. In Königsberg he had spoken at a meeting of former German colonials; in Langfuhr he took a snack at the airport restaurant.

  When Tulla was born, the Danzig police band, conducted by chief bandmaster Ernst Stieberitz, gave a concert in the gardens of the Zoppot casino.

  When Tulla was born, Lindbergh, the transatlantic flier, boarded the cruiser Memphis.

  When Tulla was born, the police, as their records for the eleventh of the month inform us, arrested seventeen persons.

  When Tulla was born, the Danzig delegation to the forty-fifth session of the League of Nations council arrived in Geneva.

  When Tulla was born, the Berlin stock exchange reported foreign buying of rayon and electrical industry stocks. Prices were generally firmer: Essen Anthracite: four and one-half points; Ilse and Stolberger Zinc: three points. Certain special securities also advanced. Glanzstoff opened at four points, Bemberg at two points above previous quotations.

  When Tulla was born, the Odeon Cinema was showing His Biggest Bluff with Harry Piel in his dual and most brilliant role.

  When Tulla was born, the NSDAP, Gau Danzig, called a monster mass meeting in the Sankt Josephshaus on Töpfergasse from five to eight. Party Comrade Heinz Haake of Cologne was to speak on the topic of “German workers of brawn and brain, unite!” On the day following Tulla’s birth the meeting was to be repeated in the Red Room of the Zoppot casino under the motto: “Nation in distress: who will save it?” The poster was signed by a Herr Hohenfeld, member of the provincial diet, who called upon his fellow citizens to “Come in droves!”

  When Tulla was born, the rediscount rate of the Bank of Danzig was unchanged at five and one-half per cent. At the grain exchange rye debentures brought nine gulden sixty a hundredweight: money.

  When Tulla was born, the book Being and Time had not yet appeared, but had been written and announced.

  When Tulla was born, Dr. Citron still had his practice in Langfuhr; later he was obliged to take refuge in Sweden.

  When Tulla was born, the chimes in the City Hall tower played “Glory alone to God on high” when even hours were to be struck and “Heavenly Host of Angels” for the odd hours. The chimes of St. Catherine’s played “Lord Jesus Christ, hear our prayer” every half hour.

  When Tulla was born, the Swedish steamer Oddewold put in to Danzig empty, coming from Oxelösund.

  When Tulla was born, the Danish steamer Sophie left for Grimsby with a cargo of timber.

  When Tulla was born, a child’s rep dress cost two gulden fifty at Sternfeld’s department store. Girls’ “princess” slips two gulden sixty-five. A pail and shovel cost eighty-five gulden pfennigs. Watering cans one gulden twenty-five. And tin drums lacquered, with accessories, were on sale for one gulden
and seventy-five pfennigs.

  When Tulla was born, it was Saturday.

  When Tulla was born, the sun rose at three eleven.

  When Tulla was born, the sun set at eight eighteen.

  When Tulla was born, her cousin Harry Liebenau was one month and four days old.

  When Tulla was born, Dr. Oswald Brunies adopted a foundling, aged six months, who was cutting her milk teeth.

  When Tulla was born, Harras, her uncle’s watchdog, was one year and two months old.

  BOOK TWO | Love Letters

  Dear Cousin Tulla:

  I am advised to put you and your Christian name at the beginning, to address you, because you were, are, and will be matter everywhere, informally, as though this were the beginning of a letter. Yet I am telling my story to myself, only and incurably to myself; or can it be that I am telling you that I am telling it to myself? Your family, the Pokriefkes and the Damses, came from Koshnavia.

  Dear Cousin:

  since every one of my words to you is lost, since all my words, even if I speak obstinately to myself, have only you in mind, let us at last make peace on paper and cement a frail foundation for my livelihood and pastime: I speak to you. You don’t listen. And the salutation—as though I were writing you one or a hundred letters—will be my formal crutch, which even now I would like to throw away, which I shall often and with fury in my arm throw into the Striessbach, into the sea, into Aktien Pond: but the dog, black on four legs, will bring it back as he has been trained to do.

  Dear Tulla:

  like all the Pokriefkes, my mother, a Pokriefke by birth and sister to your father August Pokriefke, hailed from Koshnavia. On the seventh of May, when Jenny Brunies was about six months old, I was normally and properly born. Seventeen years later somebody picked me up with two fingers and put me into a life-size tank as an ammunition loader. In the middle of Silesia, a region which is not as familiar to me as Koshnavia south of Konitz, the tank went into position and backed up, for purposes of camouflage, into a wooden shed which some Silesian glass blowers had filled with their products. Whereas hitherto I had never stopped searching for a word that would rhyme with you, Tulla, that tank backing into position and those screaming glasses showed your Cousin Harry the way to a rhymeless language: from then on I wrote simple sentences, and now that a certain Herr Brauxel has advised me to write a novel, I am writing a normal rhymeless novel.

  Dear Cousin Tulla:

  about Lake Constance and the girls around there I don’t know a thing; but about you and Koshnavia I know every thing. The geographical co-ordinates of Koshnavia are north latitude fifty-three twenty, east longitude thirty-five. You weighed four pounds and ten ounces at birth. Koshnavia proper consists of seven villages: Frankenhagen, Petztin, Deutsch-Cekzin, Granau, Lichtnau, Schlangenthin, and Osterwick. Your two elder brothers Siegesmund and Alexander were born in Koshnavia; Tulla and her brother Konrad were registered in Langfuhr. The name of Pokriefke is to be found even earlier than 1772 in the parish register of Osterwick. The Damses, your mother’s family, are mentioned years after the partitions of Poland, first in Frankenhagen, then in Schlangenthin; probably immigrants from Prussian Pomerania, for I am inclined to doubt that “Dams” is derived from the archbishopric of Damerau, especially in view of the fact that Damerau, along with Obkass and Gross Zirkwitz, was donated to the Archbishop of Gnesen as early as 1275. Damerau was then called Louisseva Dambrova, occasionally Dubrawa; it is not properly a part of Koshnavia: the Damses are outsiders.

  Dear Cousin:

  you first saw the light of day in Elsenstrasse. We lived in the same apartment house. It belonged to my father, master carpenter Liebenau. Diagonally across the street, in the so-called Aktienhaus, lived my future teacher, Dr. Oswald Brunies. He had adopted a baby girl, whom he called Jenny, although in our region no one had ever borne the name of Jenny. The black shepherd dog in our yard was called Harras. You were baptized Ursula, but called Tulla from the start, a nickname probably derived from Thula the Koshnavian water nymph, who lived in Osterwick Lake and was written in various ways: Duller, Tolle, Tullatsch, Thula or Dul, Tul, Thul. When the Pokriefkes were still living in Osterwick, they were tenants on Mosbrauch Hill near the lake, on the Konitz highway. From the middle of the fourteenth century to the time of Tulla’s birth in 1927, Osterwick was written as follows: Ostirwig, Ostirwich, Osterwigh, Osterwig, Osterwyk. Ostrowit, Ostrowite, Osterwieck, Ostrowitte, Ostrôw. The Koshnavians said: Oustewitsch. The Polish root of the village name Osterwick, the word ostrów, means an island in a river or lake; for originally, in the fourteenth century that is, the village of Osterwick was situated on the island in Osterwick Lake. Alders and birches surrounded this body of water, which was rich in carp. In addition to carp and crucians, roaches, and the compulsory pike, the lake contained a red-blazed calf that could talk on St. John’s Day, a legendary leather bridge, two sacks full of yellow gold from the days of the Hussite incursions, and a capricious water nymph: Thula Duller Tul.

  Dear Tulla:

  my father the carpenter liked to say and often did: “The Pokriefkes will never get anywhere around here. They should have stayed where they came from, with their cabbages.”

  The allusions to Koshnavian cabbage were for the benefit of my mother, a Pokriefke by birth; for it was she who had lured her brother with his wife and two children from sandy Koshnavia to the city suburb. At her behest carpenter Liebenau had taken on the cottager and farmhand August Pokriefke as an assistant in his shop. My mother had persuaded my father to rent the two-and-a-half-room apartment that had become vacant on the floor above us to the family of four—Erna Pokriefke was already pregnant with Tulla—at a low price.

  For all these benefits your mother gave my father little thanks. On the contrary. Whenever there was a family scene, she blamed him and his carpenter shop for the deafness of her deaf-mute son Konrad. She maintained that our buzz saw, which roared from morning to closing time and only rarely fell silent, which made all the dogs in the neighborhood including our Harras howl themselves hoarse in accompaniment, had withered and deafened Konrad’s tiny ears while he was still in the womb.

  The carpenter listened to Erna Pokriefke with serenity, for she fulminated in the Koshnavian manner. Who could under stand it? Who could pronounce it? The inhabitants of Koshnavia said “Tchatchhoff” for Kirchhof (churchyard). Basch was Berg (mountain)— Wäsch was Weg (way, path). The “Preistewäs” was the meadow (Wiese), some two acres in size, belonging to the priest in Osterwick.

  You’ll have to admit, Tulla,

  that your father was a rotten helper. The machinist couldn’t even use him on the buzz saw. The drive belt would keep slipping off, and he ruined the most expensive blades on nail-studded sheathing which he converted into kindling for his own use. There was only one job that he performed punctually and to the satisfaction of all: the gluepot on the cast-iron stove upstairs from the machine room was always hot and in readiness for five journeymen carpenters at five car penter’s benches. The glue ejected bubbles, blubbered sulkily, managed to turn honey-yellow or muddy-cloudy, succeeded in thickening to pea soup and forming elephant hide. In part cold and crusty, in part sluggishly flowing, the glue climbed over the rim of the pot, formed noses upon noses, leaving not so much as a speck of enamel uncovered and making it impossible to recognize the gluepot as an erstwhile cookpot. The boiling glue was stirred with a section of roofing lath. But the wood also put on skin over skin, swelled bumpy leathery crinkly, weighed heavier and heavier in August Pokriefke’s hand and, when the five journeymen called the horny monster an elephant’s trunk, had to be exchanged for a fresh section of always the same, positively endless roofing lath.

  Bone glue, carpenter’s glue! The brown, grooved cakes of glue were piled on a crooked shelf amid a finger-thick layer of dust. From the third to the seventeenth year of my life I faithfully carried a chunk of carpenter’s glue in my pants pocket; to me glue was that sacred; I called your father a glue god; for not only had the glue god thorough
ly gluey fingers which crackled brittlely whenever he moved, but in addition he invariably gave off a smell that followed him wherever he went. Your two-and-a-half-room apartment, your mother, your brothers smelled of it. But most generously he garnished his daughter with his aroma. He patted her with gluey fingers. He sprayed the child with particles of glue when ever he conjured up finger bunnies for her benefit. In short, the glue god metamorphosed Tulla into a glue maiden; for wherever Tulla went stood ran, wherever she had stood, wherever she had gone, whatever space she had traversed at a run, whatever Tulla took hold of, threw away, touched briefly or at length, whatever she wrapped clothed hid herself in, whatever she played with: shavings nails hinges, every place and object that Tulla had encountered retained a faint to infernal and in no wise to be quenched smell of bone glue. Your Cousin Harry stuck to you too: for quite a few years we clung together and smelled in unison.

  Dear Tulla:

  when we were four years old, they said you had a calcium deficiency. The same contention was made concerning the marly soil of Koshnavia. The marl dating from the diluvian times, when the ground moraines formed, contains, as we know, calcium carbonate. But the weather-beaten, rain-washed layers of marl in the Koshnavian fields were poor in calcium. No fertilizer helped and no state subsidies. No amount of processions—the Koshnavians were Catholic to a man—could inject calcium into the fields; but Dr. Hollatz gave you calcium tablets: and soon, at the age of five, your calcium deficiency was overcome. None of your milk teeth wobbled. Your incisors protruded slightly: they were soon to become a source of dread to Jenny Brunies, the foundling from across the street.

  Tulla and I never believed

  that Gypsies and storks had anything to do with the finding of Jenny. A typical Papa Brunies story: with him nothing happened naturally, everywhere he sniffed out hidden forces, he always managed to dwell in an eerie eccentric light. Whether feeding his mania for mica gneiss with ever new and often magnificent specimens—there were similar cranks in cranky Germany with whom he corresponded—or, on the street, in the playground, or in his classroom, carrying on like an Old Celtic druid, a Prussian oak-tree god, or Zoroaster—he was generally thought to be a Freemason—he invariably displayed the qualities that we all of us love in our eccentrics. But it was Jenny, his association with the doll-like infant, that first made Dr. Brunies into an eccentric who acquired a standing not only within the precinct of the high school but also in Elsenstrasse and the streets intersecting or running parallel to it in the big little suburb of Langfuhr.