Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  While the sun climbed and a cock crowed nearby—there were roosters in the neighborhood—Tulla stuck the extended little finger of her right hand vertically into the middle of the layer of tallow, and began cautiously but tenaciously to bore a hole in the tallow. I put the bread aside. The machinist shifted to the other leg and let his face slip out of the sunlight. That was something I wanted to see, how Tulla’s little finger would bore through the layer of tallow, penetrate to the broth, and break open the layer several times more; but I didn’t see how Tulla’s little finger reached into the broth, and the layer of tallow didn’t break into floes, but was picked up from the basin, round and in one piece, by Tulla’s little finger. High over shoulder, hair, and shavings she raises the disk the size of a beer mug mat into the early seven-o’clock sky, offers a glimpse of her screwed-up face, and then hurls the disk with a snap of her wrist into the yard, in the direction of the machinist: in the sand it broke forever, the shards rolled in the sand; and a few fragments of tallow, transformed into tallowy balls of sand, grew after the manner of snowballs and rolled down close to the smok ing machinist and his bicycle with its new bell.

  As I then looked back from the shattered disk of tallow to Tulla, she was kneeling bony and steep, but still cool, under the sun. She spreads the fingers of her left, overstrained hand five times sideways, folds them over three joints and then back over the same joints. Cupping the bowl in her right hand, which rests on the ground, she slowly guides her mouth and the edge of the bowl together. She laps, sips, wastes nothing. In one breath, without removing the bowl from her lips, Tulla drinks the fatless spleen-heart-kidney-liver broth with all its granular delicacies and surprises, with the tiny bits of cartilage at the bottom, with Koshnavian marjoram and coagulated urea. Tulla drinks to the dregs: her chin raises the bowl. The bowl raises the hand beneath the bowl into the beam of the oblique sun. A neck is exposed and grows steadily longer. A head with hair and shavings leans back and beds itself on shoulders. Two narrow-set eyes remain closed. Skinny, sinewy, and pale, Tulla’s childlike neck labors until the bowl lies on top of her face and she is able to lift her hand from the bowl and move it away between the bottom of the bowl and the side-slipping sun. The overturned bowl conceals the screwed-up eyes, the crusty nostrils, the mouth that has had enough.

  I think I was happy in my pajamas behind our kitchen window. Plum butter had set my teeth on edge. In my parents’ bedroom the alarm clock put an end to my father’s slumbers. Down below the machinist was obliged to light up again. Harras raised eyelids. Tulla let the bowl tip off her face. The bowl fell in the sand. It did not break. Tulla fell slowly onto both palms. A few shavings, which the lathe may have spat out, crumbled off her. She executed a ninety-degree turn from the hip, crawled slow sated sluggish first into the oblique sun, then carried sun along with her on her back to the kennel door, pivoted outside the hole, and pushed herself backwards, with hanging head and hair, charged with horizontal sun that made both hair and shavings shimmer, across the threshold into the kennel.

  Then Harras closed his eyes again. Varicolored flies returned. My edgy teeth. Beyond his collar his black neck which no illumination could make lighter. My father’s getting-up sounds. Sparrows strewn around the empty bowl. A patch of material: blue-and-white checks. Wisps of hair, shimmering light, shavings, paws, flies, ears, sleep, morning sun: tar paper grew soft and smelled.

  Dreesen the machinist pushed his bicycle toward the half-glass door to the machine shop. Slowly and in step he shook his head from left to right and right to left. In the machine shop the buzz saw, the band saw, the lathe, the finishing machine, and the planing machine were still cold but hungry. My father coughed solemnly in the toilet. I slipped down off the kitchen stool.

  Toward evening of the fifth dog-kennel day,

  a Friday, the carpenter tried to reason with Tulla. His fifteen-pfennig cigar formed a right angle to his well-cut face and made his paunch—he was standing in side view—look less protuberant. The imposing-looking man spoke sensibly. Kindness as bait. Then he spoke more forcefully, let the ash break prematurely from his teetering cigar, and took on a more protuberant paunch. Prospect of punishment held out. When he crossed the semicircle, whose radius was measured by the dog’s chain, Harras, accompanied by wood shavings, stormed out of the kennel and hurled his blackness and both forepaws against the carpenter’s chest. My father staggered back and went red and blue in the face, his cigar still clung to his lips, though the angle had lost its precision. He seized a roofing lath from one of the piles propped up on sawhorses, but did not strike out at Harras, who tense and unbarking was testing the strength of his chain. Arm and lath were lowered, and it was not until half an hour later that he thrashed the apprentice Hotten Scherwinski with his bare hands, because according to the machinest, Hotten Scherwinski had neglected to clean and oil the lathe, and moreover, the apprentice had allegedly made off with some door mountings and a couple of pounds of one-inch nails.

  Tulla’s next dog-kennel day,

  the sixth, was a Saturday. August Pokriefke in wooden shoes moved the sawhorses out of the way, cleaned up Harras’ droppings, swept and raked the yard, grooving the sand with patterns that were not even ugly, but more on the strong, simple side. Desperately and over and over again, while the sand grew steadily darker and wetter, he raked in the vicinity of the dangerous semicircle. Tulla was not to be seen. She peed, when she had to pee—and Tulla had to make water regularly every hour—in shavings which August Pokriefke had to change in the evening. But on the evening of the sixth dog-kennel day he did not dare to renew the couch of shavings. As soon as he took venturesome steps with clumsy wooden shoes, with shovel and broom, with his basket of curly shavings from the lathe and finishing machine, and thrust himself and his evening chore across the clawed-up ditch of the semicircle, mumbling “good boy, good boy, be a good boy,” the kennel emitted a growling which was not exactly malignant but more in the nature of a warning.

  On Saturday the shavings in the kennel were not renewed; and August Pokriefke did not let the dog Harras off the chain. With watchdog fierce but chained the shop lay unguarded beneath a thin moon. But no burglars called.

  Sunday,

  Tulla’s seventh dog-kennel day brought Erna Pokriefke into the picture. In the early afternoon she came out, drawing behind her on the left a chair, whose fourth leg cut a sharp track across the patterns of her yard-raking husband. On the right she carried the dog’s dish full of knotty beef kidney and halved lamb’s hearts: all the heart chambers lay wide open, revealing their tubes, ligaments, sinews, and smooth inner walls. Near the door of the plywood shed she put down the dish full of innards. A respectful step back from the center of the semicircle, directly across from the kennel door, she set up the chair, and finally sat huddled and askew in her black Sunday dress, with her rat’s eyes and her bobbed hair that seemed more chewed than cut. She pulled her knitting out of her front-buttoned taffeta and knitted in the direction of kennel, Harras, and daughter Tulla.

  We, that is, the carpenter, my mother, August Pokriefke, as well as his sons Alexander and Siegesmund, spent the whole afternoon standing at the kitchen window, looking, bunched together or singly, out into the yard. At the windows of the other apartments on the court stood and sat neighbors and their children; or else a spinster, such as Fräulein Dobslaff, stood at the window of her ground-floor apartment, looking out into the yard.

  I declined to be relieved and stood steadfast the whole time. No game of Monopoly and no Sunday crumb cake could lure me away. It was a balmy August day and on the following day school was to begin. At Erna Pokriefke’s request we had had to close the lower double windows. The square upper windows, also double, were open a crack, admitting air, flies, and the crowing of the neighborhood cocks to our kitchen. Sounds came and went, including the trumpet notes emitted by a man who Sunday after Sunday practiced the trumpet in the attic of a house on Labesweg. But all the while a breathless whispering, babbling, chattering, burbling, and tw
anging: the penetrating nasal clamor of Koshnavian alders in the sandy wind, quantities of lace, a rosary, beads, crumpled paper smoothing out of its own accord, the mouse is cleaning house, straw grows to bundles: not only did Mother Pokriefke knit in the direction of the dog kennel, she whispered, murmured, muttered, smacked her lips, chirped, and whistled luringly in the same direction. I saw her lips in profile, her twitching, grinding, hammering chin, receding and darting forward, her seventeen fingers and four dancing needles, under which something light blue grew in her taffeta lap, something intended for Tulla, and later Tulla actually wore it.

  The dog kennel with its inhabitants gave no sign. At the beginning of the knitting and while a lament refused to die down, Harras had come out of the kennel lazily and unseeing. After yawning with cracking jaws and after stretching exercises, he had found his way to his dish, on his way going into a convulsive crouch to expel his knotty sausage and also lifting a leg. He moved the dish over in front of the kennel, where jerkily, with dancing hocks, he bolted the beef kidney and the lamb’s hearts with all their wide-open chambers, but covered the kennel door with his bulk, making it impossible to tell whether Tulla like himself was eating of the kidney and the hearts.

  Toward evening Erna Pokriefke went back into the house with an almost finished light-blue knitted jacket. She said nothing. We were afraid to ask questions. The Monopoly game had to be put away. There was crumb cake left over. After supper my father pulled himself up to his full height, stared grimly at the oil painting of the Kurish elk, and said that this had been going on too long and something had to be done.

  On Monday morning:

  the carpenter made ready to go to the police; Erna Pokriefke, her legs firmly planted in our kitchen, reviled him in an amplified voice, calling him a no-good dumbhead; I alone, already harnessed with my school satchel, looking out the kitchen window. And then Tulla tottering, bony, followed by Harras with hanging head, left the kennel. At first she crawled on all fours, then stood up like a normal human and, without interference from Harras, crossed the semicircle with fragile steps. On two legs, grimy, gray, licked shiny in places by a long dog’s tongue, she found the yard door.

  Harras howled after her only once, but his howl cut through the screaming of the buzz saw.

  While for Tulla and me,

  for Jenny and all the other schoolchildren school began again, Harras resumed his dog’s life, a varied routine which was not even interrupted by the arrival, exactly three weeks later, of the news that the stud dog Harras had once again earned twenty-five gulden for my father. Brief as it had been, his visit to the kennels of the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police barracks had produced the desired effect. After an appropriate lapse of time we were informed by a card specially printed for the correspondence of the police kennels that the shepherd dam Thekla of Schüddelkau, breeder: Albrecht Leeb, registration no. 4356, had whelped five puppies. And then, several months later, after the Sundays of Advent, after Christmas, after New Year’s, after snow, thaw, more snow, long-lasting snow, after the beginning of spring and the distribution of Easter report cards—everybody was promoted—after a period in which nothing happened—unless I should mention the accident in the machine shop: the apprentice Hotten Scherwinski lost the middle finger and index finger of his left hand to the buzz saw—came the registered letter announcing, over the signature of Gauleiter Forster, that the shepherd puppy Prinz of the litter Falko, Kastor, Bodo, Mira, Prinz—out of Thekla of Schüddelkau, breeder A. Leeb, Danzig-Ohra, by Harras of Queen Louise’s mill, breeder and owner Friedrich Liebenau, master carpenter in Danzig-Langfuhr, had been purchased from the police kennels in Langfuhr-Hochstriess and that it had been decided in the name of the Party and the German population of the German city of Danzig, to present the shepherd Prinz to the Führer and Chancellor through a delegation on the occasion of his forty-sixth birthday. The Führer and Chancellor, so the communication went on, had graciously accepted the gift of the Gau of Danzig and declared his intention of keeping the shepherd Prinz along with his other dogs.

  Enclosed in the registered letter was a postcard-size photo graph of the Führer, signed by his own hand. In the picture he wore the costume of an Upper Bavarian villager, except that the jacket was more fashionably cut. At his feet, with his tongue hanging out, a gray-clouded shepherd dog with light, probably yellow markings on his chest and over his stop. Mountains towered in the distance. The Führer was laughing in the direction of someone who was not in the picture.

  Letter and picture of the Führer—both were immediately placed under glass and framed in our own shop—went on long excursions in the neighborhood. As a result, first my father, then August Pokriefke, and finally quite a few of the neighbors joined the Party, while Gustav Mielawske—for over fifteen years a journeyman in our shop and a quiet Social Democrat—gave notice and did not return to his bench until two months later, after a good deal of coaxing by the master carpenter.

  Tulla received a new school satchel from my father. I was given a complete Hitler Cub uniform. Harras was presented with a new collar, but couldn’t be given better care because he was well taken care of as it was.

  Dear Tulla,

  did our dog Harras’ sudden career have consequences for us? To me Harras brought schoolboy fame. I had to step up to the blackboard and tell the class all about it. Of course I was not allowed to speak about breeding and mating, about the stud certificate and the stud money, about Harras’ prowess at stud as noted in the stud-book, or about the heat of the bitch Thekla. I was obliged and permitted to babble in baby talk about Papa Harras and Mama Thekla, about their babies Falko, Kastor, Bodo, Mira, and Prinz. Fräulein Spollenhauer wanted to know all about it: “Why did the Herr Gauleiter make our Führer a present of the little dog Prinz?”

  “Because it was the Führer’s birthday and he’d always wanted a little dog from our city.”

  “And why is the little dog Prinz so happy on the Obersalzberg that he isn’t the least bit homesick for his mama?”

  “Because our Führer loves dogs and is always kind to dogs.”

  “And why should we be glad that Prinz is with the Führer?”

  “Because Harry Liebenau is a member of our class.”

  “Because Harras belongs to his father.”

  “Because Harras is the little dog Prinz’s father.”

  “And because it is a great honor for our class and our school and our beautiful city.”

  Were you there, Tulla,

  when Fräulein Spollenhauer with me and the whole class paid a visit to our carpenter shop? You were not there, you were in school.

  The class stood in a semicircle around the semicircle that Harras had described around his domain. Once again I had to repeat my lecture, then Fräulein Spollenhauer asked my father to say a few words to the children. Assuming that the class had been apprised of the dog’s political career, the carpenter obliged with a few sidelights on our Harras’ pedigree. He spoke of a she-dog named Senta and of a male by the name of Pluto, both of them just as black as Harras or little Prinz for that matter. They had been Harras’ parents. The she-dog Senta had belonged to a miller in Nickelswalde in the Vistula estuary—“Have you ever been in Nickelswalde, children? I went there years ago on the narrow-gauge railway, and the mill there is a place of historical importance, be cause Queen Louise of Prussia spent the night there when she was fleeing before the French.” Under the jack of the mill, said the carpenter, he had found six whelps—“That’s what they call dog babies”—and he had bought one baby dog from the miller. “That was our Harras, who has always been such a joy to us, especially lately.”

  Where were you, Tulla,

  when I, under the machinist’s supervision, was allowed to show our class through the machine shop? You were in school, unable to see or hear me naming all the machines to my classmates and Fräulein Spollenhauer: The lathe. The finishing machine. The band saw. The planing machine. The buzz saw.

  Then Herr Dreesen explained the different kinds
of wood to the children. He drew a distinction between cross-grained wood and long-grained, knocked on elm, pine, pear wood, oak, maple, beech, and soft linden wood, chatted about rare woods and the annual rings in trees.

  Then we had to stand out in the yard and sing a song that Harras didn’t want to listen to.

  Where was Tulla

  when Hauptbannführer Göpfert accompanied by Jungbannführer Wendt and several lesser leaders visited our shop? We were both in school and not present when the decision was made to name a newly formed squad of Cubs after our Harras.

  And Tulla and Harry were absent

  when after the Röhm putsch and the death of the old gentleman at Neudeck a get-together was arranged on the Obersalzberg behind bright rustic cotton curtains in a low-ceilinged imitation of a peasants’ living room; but Frau Raubal, Rudolf Hess, Herr Hanfstaengl, Danzig SA leader Linsmayer, Rauschning, Forster, August Wilhelm of Prussia, called “Auwi” for short, Beanpole Bruckner, and Reich-Peasant Leader Darré listened to the Führer—and Prinz was there. Prinz out of our Harras, whom Senta had whelped, and Perkun sired Senta.

  They ate apple tart that Frau Raubal had baked and spoke of branch and root, of Strasser, Schleicher, Röhm, root and branch. Then they discussed Spengler, Gobineau, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Then Hermann Rauschning mistakenly called Prinz the shepherd pup a “magnificent black wolfhound.” Later on all the historians unthinkingly followed him. Yet every cynologist will agree with me that the only real wolfhound is the Irish wolfhound, which differs significantly from the German shepherd. With his long fine drawn head he is related to the degenerate greyhound. He measures thirty-two inches at the withers or seven inches more than our Harras. The Irish wolfhound has long hair. And small, soft ears which do not stand erect but topple. A decorative luxury dog, which the Führer would never have had in his kennels; whereby it is proved for all time that Rauschning was mistaken: no Irish wolfhound weaved nervously around the legs of the cake-eating company; Prinz, our Prinz, listened to conversations and worried about his master with canine fidelity. For the Führer feared for his life. Artful plots might well have been baked into every piece of cake. Fearfully he drank his soda water and often had to vomit for no reason.