Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  But Tulla was present

  when the newspapermen and photographers came. Not only did the Vorposten and the Neueste Nachrichten send their reporters. Gentlemen as well as ladies in sports clothes came from Elbing, Königsberg, Schneidemühl, Stettin, and even from the national capital. Only Brost, editor of the Volksstimme, soon to be suppressed, refused to interview our Harras. Instead, he commented on the hubbub in the newspapers under the tide: “Gone to the Dogs.” On the other hand, denominational newspapers and specialized journals sent reporters. The organ of the German Shepherd Dog Association sent a cynologist, whom my father was obliged to turn out of the house. For this dog expert began at once to carp at our Harras’ pedigree. The names, he declared, were revolting and alien to the breed; there were no data about the bitch that had whelped Senta; the animal itself was not bad, but it would be his duty to inveigh against such methods of dog raising; precisely because this was a historical dog, a sense of responsibility was in order.

  In a word, whether inveighingly or in terms of uncritical praise, Harras was described, printed, and photographed. The carpenter shop with machinist, journeymen, helpers, and apprentices also broke into print. Statements by my father, such as: “We are simple artisans with our noses to the grind stone, but all the same we are glad that our Harras…”—in brief, the unvarnished utterances of a carpenter were quoted verbatim, often as photograph captions.

  My guess would be that eight solo pictures of Harras were printed in the papers. Three times, I’d say, he appeared with my father, once in a group picture with the entire personnel of the shop, never with me; but exactly twelve times Tulla found her way with our Harras into German-language and international newspapers: slender, on fragile pins, she held still beside our Harras.

  Dear Cousin,

  and yet you helped him when he moved in. You carried his music, pile after pile, and the porcelain ballerina. For though fourteen tenants went on living in our apartment house, Fräulein Dobslaff moved out of the apartment on the ground floor left, whose windows could be opened on the court. With her remnants of dress material and her numbered photograph albums, with furniture from which wood meal trickled, she went to live with her sister in Schönwarling; and Herr Felsner-Imbs the piano teacher, with his piano and his yellowish stacks of music, his goldfish and his hourglass, his countless photographs of once famous artists, and his porcelain figurine in a porcelain tutu, immobilized on pointed porcelain slipper in a perfect arabesque, moved into the empty apartment, without changing the faded wallpaper in the living room or the large flower pattern that covered the walls of the bedroom. To make matters worse, the erstwhile Dobslaffian rooms were dark by nature, because, not seven paces from the windows of both rooms, the gable end of the carpenter shop with its outside staircase reached up to the second floor of the apartment house and cast shadow. And between apartment house and carpenter shop there were two lilac bushes, which did their duty spring after spring. With my father’s permission Fräulein Dobslaff had had a garden fence put up around the two bushes, which did not prevent Harras from depositing his scent marks in her garden. Still, it was not because of the dog droppings or the darkness of the apartment that Fräulein Dobslaff moved, but because she wished to die in Schönwarling, where she had come from.

  Felsner-Imbs had to burn electric light surrounded by a greenish glass-bead lamp shade when pupils called in the morning or afternoon while the sunshine was putting on an orgy outside. To the left of the house entrance he had had an enamel sign put up: Felix Felsner-Imbs—concert pianist and licensed piano teacher. The wobbly old gentleman had not been living in our house for two weeks when the first pupils came, bringing with them the price of a lesson and Damm’s Piano Method, and were obliged by lamplight to pound out scales and études with right hand, with left hand, with both hands, and once again, until the big hour glass on the piano harbored not a single grain of sand in its upper compartment, so demonstrating in its medieval way that the piano lesson was over.

  Felsner-Imbs didn’t wear a velvet tarn. But flowing blowing hair, snow-white and powdered to boot, hung down over his Schiller collar. Between little boy’s lesson and little girl’s lesson he brushed his artist’s mane. And when on the treeless Neuer Markt a gust of wind had ruffled his mane, he reached for the little brush in the ample pocket of his jacket and, while publicly dressing his astonishing hair, quickly acquired an audience: housewives, schoolchildren, ourselves. As he brushed his hair, an expression of unadulterated pride moved into his eyes. Light blue and lashless, they looked out upon concert halls in which an imaginary public refused to stop applauding him, Felsner-Imbs the concert pianist. Beneath the glass-bead lamp shade a greenish glow fell on the part in his hair: seated on a solidly built piano stool, an Oberon, masterful interpreter of the piano pieces drawn from the opera of that name, metamorphosed boy pupils and girl pupils into water sprites.

  The pupils who sat facing the open Piano Method at Herr Felsner-Imbs’ piano must have been keen of hearing, for from the omnipresent all-day arias of the buzz saw and the lathe, from the modulations of the finishing machine and planing machine, and the ingenuous singsong of the band saw, only a remarkable ear could have hoped to pluck, neatly and note by note, the scales that had to be pounded out beneath the lashless gaze of Felsner-Imbs. Because this concert of machines buried even a fortissimo run of the pupil’s hand fathoms deep, the green drawing room behind the lilac bushes resembled an aquarium, silent but full of movement. The piano teacher’s goldfish in its bowl on the little lacquered stand was not needed to confirm this impression; it was an accessory too many.

  Felsner-Imbs attached particular importance to a correct position of the hands. With a little luck wrong notes could be submerged by the replete yet all-devouring soprano of the buzz saw, but if in playing an étude a pupil let the balls of his hands sink down upon the black wood of the altogether black piano in the course of an ascending or descending scale, if the backs of his hands departed from the desired horizontal position, no amount of carpenter’s din could make this obvious lapse in technique unseen. More over Felsner-Imbs had made it a feature of his teaching method to lay a pencil across any pupil’s hand condemned to execute scales. The hand that failed the test by slumping on the wood in quest of repose sent the control pencil hurtling downward.

  Jenny Brunies, the schoolteacher’s adoptive daughter from across the street, also had to ride a control pencil on her pudgy right and left hands for the duration of many scales; for, a month after the piano teacher moved in, she became one of his pupils.

  You and I

  watched Jenny from the little lilac garden. We pressed our faces flat against the windowpanes of the seaweed-green aquarium and saw her sitting on the piano stool; plump and doll-like in brown corduroy. An enormous pinwheel bow performed the function of a brimstone butterfly—in reality the bow was white—on her smoothly falling, approximately medium-brown hair, which was cut to shoulder length. Where as other pupils frequently enough received a quick painful smack on the back of their hand with the previously fallen pencil, Jenny, although her pencil too fell occasionally on the polar bear skin under the piano stool, never had to fear the punishing blow; at the worst she came in for a look of concern from Felsner-Imbs.

  Possibly Jenny was extremely musical—with the buzz saw and the lathe behind us, we, Tulla and I, outside the window-panes, seldom heard the faintest note; besides, we were not equipped by nature to distinguish winged, accomplished scales from painfully climbed scales—in any case the pudgy little creature from across the street was permitted to ply the keys with both hands sooner than other pupils; moreover, the pencil toppled more and more infrequently and in the end the writing instrument and sword of Damocles was set aside altogether. Through the screaming and squeaking of the daily sawing, planing, and falsetto singing of the carpenter’s opera, one could, by trying very hard, more surmise than hear the thin melodies of Damm’s Piano Method: “Winter Adieu”—“A Hunter from the Palatinate”—“I graze by
the Neckar, I graze by the Rhine”…

  Tulla and I,

  we remember that Jenny was favored. Whereas the lessons of the other pupils sometimes came to an abrupt end in the middle of “With Bow and Arrow,” because the last grain of sand in the medieval hourglass had said amen to the piano, no hourglass hour struck for either teacher or pupil when Jenny’s doll flesh submitted to instruction on the piano stool. And when plump Eddi Amsel got into the habit of escorting plump Jenny Brunies to her piano lesson—Amsel was Dr. Brunies’ favorite student and came and went as he pleased across the street—it was perfectly possible that the next pupil would have to wait his turn for an hour glass quarter of an hour on the lumpy sofa in the dusky background of the music room; for Eddi Amsel, who seems to have taken piano lessons at the Conradinum, liked to sit beside the green-maned Felsner-Imbs, playing “Prussia’s Glory,” the “Finnish Cavalry March,” and “Old Comrades” with four-handed gusto.

  Amsel also sang. Not only in the high school chorus did his high soprano triumph; Amsel also sang in St. Mary’s choir in the venerable Church of St. Mary, whose nave once every month resounded full and round with Bach cantatas and Mozart Masses. Eddi Amsel’s high soprano was discovered when the choir decided to do Mozart’s early work, the Missa Brevis. Every school chorus in town was scoured for a boy soprano. The esteemed conductor of St. Mary’s choir surged up to Amsel and assailed him with his enthusiasm: “Truly, my son, you will sing the Benedictus more sweetly than Antonio Cesarelli, the celebrated eunuch, who lent his voice when the Mass was first performed. I can hear you rise to such heights of jubilation in the Dona nobis that everyone will think: Verily, St. Mary’s is too small for that voice.”

  The story is that although Mr. Lester still represented the league of Nations in the Danzig Free State and all racial laws were constrained to halt at the borders of the diminutive state, Amsel expressed misgivings: “But, sir, they say I’m a half-Jew.”

  The conductor’s answer: “Nonsense, you’re a soprano, I expect you to introduce the Kyrie!” This succinct reply proved to be long-lived and is said to have been cited with respect many years later in conservative resistance circles. In any case the chosen boy soprano practiced the difficult passages of the Missa Brevis in Felsner-Imbs’ green music room. The two of us, Tulla and I, once heard his voice when buzz saw and lathe both had to catch their breath at once: He mined silver. Little knives ground thin as angel’s breath quartered the air. Nails melted. Sparrows were ashamed. Apartment houses grew pious, for a corpulent angel sang Dona nobis over and over again.

  Dear Cousin Tulla,

  the only reason for this long and scaly introduction is that Eddi Amsel took to frequenting our apartment house. At first he came only with Jenny, then he brought his bullish friend. Walter Matern might have been regarded as our relation, because his father’s shepherd bitch Senta had whelped our Harras. Often my father, as soon as he saw the boy, asked him questions about how the miller was getting along and the economic situation on Great Island. As a rule Eddi Amsel, who was well versed in economics, answered prolixly and with facts which made the employment-promoting plan of the Party and Senate seem unrealistic. He recommended closer relations with the sterling bloc, for want of which he predicted an appreciable devaluation of the gulden. Eddi Amsel even cited figures: the devaluation would have to come to roughly 42 per cent; goods imported from Poland could expect to cost 70 per cent more; even now the devaluation could be predicted for the first days in May; he had all these facts and figures from Matern’s father, the miller, who always knew everything in advance. Needless to say, the miller’s predictions were confirmed on May 2, 1935.

  Amsel and his friend were then in first, working moderately toward their final exams. Both wore real suits with long pants, drank Aktien beer at the Sports Palace or on Zinglers Höhe, and Walter Matern, who smoked Regatta and Artus cigarettes, was said to have seduced a girl in second from the Helene Lange School in Oliva Forest the previous year. No one would have thought of imputing such achievements to the copious Eddi Amsel. Fellow students and girls who were occasionally invited to hear the school choir regarded him as something which they daringly designated as a eunuch. Others expressed themselves more cautiously, saying that Eddi was still rather infantile, more in the neuter gender. As far as I know from hearsay, Walter Matern long put up with this calumny in silence, until one day in the presence of several schoolboys and some girls who were more or less members of the group, he made a speech of some length showing his friend in his true light. Arnsel, he said approximately, was far in advance of all the boys present as far as girls etcetera were concerned. He called quite regularly on the whores in Tischlergasse across the street from Adler’s Beer Hall. But he did not limit his calls to the usual five minutes, he was a respected guest, because the girls regarded him as an artist. With India ink, brush and pen, at first with pencil as well, he had done a whole pile of portraits and nudes, which were not in the least obscene and not half bad as art. For with a portfolio full of such drawings Eddi Amsel had gone unannounced to see Pfuhle, the celebrated teacher and painter of horses, who taught the architects drawing at the Engineering School, and submitted his drawings. And Pfuhle, who was known as a hard man to approach, had recognized his talent and promised to help him.

  After this speech, which I can repeat only in substance, Amsel, or so I heard, was almost exempted from teasing. On several occasions classmates came to see him and wanted to be taken along to Tischlergasse, a request which he, amiably and with Matern’s support, turned down. One day, however, when Eddi Amsel—as I was later told—asked his friend to accompany him to Tischlergasse, he met with a rebuff. He, said Walter Matern with precocious assurance, had no wish to disappoint the poor girls. The professional aspect of the thing repelled him. He’d never be able to get a hard on. That would only make him behave like a brute, which in the end would be embarrassing for both parties. It had to be admitted that love was indispensable, or at least passion.

  Amsel had no doubt listened to his friend’s firm utterances with a shake of the head and, taking his portfolio and an attractive box of assorted candies, gone by himself to call on the girls across the street from Adler’s Beer Hall. And yet—if I am correctly informed—he succeeded one wretched day in December in persuading his friend to celebrate the second or third Sunday of Advent with him and the girls. It was only on the fourth Sunday that Matern screwed up the courage. It turned out, however, that the professional aspect of the thing repelled him so attractively that despite his prognosis he did get a hard on, which he was able to lodge securely and discharge at student’s prices with a girl of few words by the name of Elisabeth. Yet, I was told, the kindness that had been shown him did not prevent him on the way home, up Altstädtischer Graben and down Pfefferstadt, from grinding his teeth malignantly and lapsing into dark meditations about venal womanhood.

  Dear Cousin,

  with exactly the same chocolate-brown and egg-yellow tiger-striped portfolio that had made his visits to the ill-famed Tischlergasse into legitimate artistic excursions, Eddi Amsel, accompanied by Walter Matern, came to our apartment house. In Felsner-Imbs’ music room we both saw him breathing sketches of the porcelain ballerina onto paper. And one brightly decked day in May I saw him step up to my father, point to his tiger-striped portfolio, and open the portfolio forthwith in an attempt to let his drawings speak for him. But my father, without further ado, gave him permission to draw our watchdog Harras. Only he advised him to station himself and his equipment outside the semi circle which demonstrated with ditch and wall the range of the dog’s chain. “The dog is ferocious and I’m sure he doesn’t think much of artists,” said my father.

  From the very first day our Harras heeded Eddie Amsel’s slightest word. Amsel made Harras into a canine model. Amsel did not, for instance, say “Sit, Harras!” as Tulla said “Harras, sit!” when Harras was supposed to sit down. From the very first day Amsel ignored the name Harras and said to our dog when he wanted a change
of pose: “Now, Pluto, would you kindly first stand on all four legs, then raise the right foreleg and bend it slightly, but make it relaxed, a little more relaxed. And now would you be so kind as to turn your noble shepherd’s head half left, like that, that’s good, now, Pluto, if you please, stay that way.”

  And Harras hearkened to the name of Pluto as if he had always been a hound of hell. The ungainly Amsel almost burst his gray-checked sports suit. His head was covered by a white linen visor cap, that gave him somewhat the look of an English reporter. But his clothes were not new: everything Eddi Amsel wore on his body made an impression of secondhandness and was indeed secondhand; for the story was that, although he received a fabulous allowance, he purchased only worn clothes, either from the pawnshop or from the junkshops on Tagnetergasse. His shoes must have belonged previously to a postman. He sat with broad posterior on a preposterous little camp chair, which proved however to be inexplicably stable. While on his left bulging thigh he supported the stiff cardboard to which his drawing paper was clamped and with his right hand, with remarkable ease, guided an always rich-black brush, which covered the drawing paper from the upper left to the lower right-hand corner with daintily skimming sketches, some unsuccessful, others excellent and strikingly fresh, of the watchdog Harras or the hellhound Pluto, our yard became each day a little more—and Eddi Amsel spent about six afternoons drawing in our yard—the scene of various tensions.

  There stood Walter Matern in the background. Disreputably dressed; a costumed proletarian in a problem play, who has learned social indictments by heart, who in the third act will become an agitator and ringleader, and who nevertheless fell a victim to our buzz saw. Like our Harras, who time and time again, under certain weather conditions, accompanied the song of the buzz saw—never that of the lathe—with a rising and falling howl out of a vertically held head, so the gloomy young man from Nickelswalde reacted directly to the buzz saw. He did not, to be sure, move his head into a vertical position, he did not stammer anarchist manifestoes, but in his old familiar way underscored the sound of work with a dry grinding of the teeth.