Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  After that they—nine men in civilian clothing—seem to have paid a visit to the Kleinhammerpark. Undisguised and without loden capes, they occupied the bar. They poured in beer and schnapps and ate blood sausage. They intoned: “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden…” Matern was said to have snarled obscene poems and croaked something about the essence of the ground. One of the nine was always in the toilet. But there was no Tulla sitting on a high stool, growing thinner and thinner like a tear-off calendar. No Tulla kept her eye on the toilet door: no beer-hall battle took place.

  Dear Tulla,

  Walter Matern didn’t go to the Reich: the theatrical season continued; The Snow Queen was on the program until mid-February; and The Snow Queen needed a reindeer. Nor did Matern become a member of the SS, he became what he had forgotten but had been since baptism: a Catholic. In that, alcohol helped him. In May ‘38—they were doing Billinger’s play, The Giant; Matern, who played the son of Donata Opferkuch, was fined a number of times for coming to rehearsals drunk—as the theatrical season was drawing to an end, he spent a good deal of his time knocking around the Holm, the waterfront suburb, and Strohdeich. To see him was to hear him. Not only did he perform his usual grinding act on docks and between warehouses, he also quoted with storm and bluster. Only lately, since I have been able to look things up in books, have I begun to unscramble the anthology of quotations that Matern had cooked up: he mixed liturgical texts, the phenomenology of a stocking-cap, and abstrusely secular lyrical poetry into a stew seasoned with the cheapest gin. The poetry especially—I sometimes chased after him—formed marbles that stuck in my ears: expressionist poems. Lemurs were sitting on a raft. There was talk of rubble and bacchanalias. How I, a boy plagued by curiosity, puzzled my head over the word “gillyflowerwave.” Matern writes finis. The longshoremen, good-natured when they didn’t have to unload plywood with the wind in their beam, listened: “… it is late.” The stevedores nodded. “O soul, rotted through and through…” They patted him on the shoulder and he thanked them: “What brotherly joy round Cain and Abel, for whom God journeyed through the clouds—causal-genetic, haïssable: the late I.”

  At that time I only dimly suspected who was meant by Cain and Abel. I padded along behind him, as he reeled—his mouth full of morgue, thrownness, and Dies irae, dies illa—between the loading cranes in Strohdeich. And as he sat there with the Klawitter shipyard behind him and the breath of the Mottlau upon him, the Virgin Mary appeared to him.

  He is sitting on a bollard and has already sent me home several times. But I don’t want any supper. To his bollard and to the others that no one is sitting on, a medium-sized Swedish freighter is made fast. It’s a night beneath hasty clouds, for the freighter is sleeping fitfully and the Mottlau is pulling and pushing. All the hawsers by which the Swede is clinging to the bollards are grinding. But he wants to drown them out. He has already spat out the late I, all his thrownness, and the Sequence for the Dead, now he starts competing with the hawsers. In windbreaker and knickers he sticks fast to his bollard, he grinds, before attacking the bottle, goes on grinding the same song as soon as the bottleneck is released, and keeps on blunting his teeth.

  At the far end of Strohdeich he sits: by Polish Hook, at the confluence of the Mottlau and the Dead Vistula. A good place for tooth grinding. The ferry from Milchpeter had brought him, me, and the longshoremen across. He had started up with his teeth on the ferry, no, already on Fuchswall and Jakobswall, after the gasworks, but it’s only on the bollard that he’s started drinking and grinding himself into a state: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum…” The low-lying Swede helps. The Mottlau pushes, pulls, and mixes with the sluggish waters of the Dead Vistula. The shipyards help, they’re working the night shift: Klawitter behind him; the shipyard on the other side of Milchpeter; farther off the Schichau shipyard and the railroad car factory. The clouds devouring each other help him too. And I help, because he needs an audience.

  That has always been my forte: to pad along behind, to be curious, to listen.

  Now that the riveters fall silent and briefly, in all the shipyards at once, hold their breath, there’s nothing left but Matern’s teeth and the sullen Swede, until the wind blows around from Kielgraben: there, on Englischer Damm, cattle are being driven into the slaughterhouse. The Germania bread factory is quiet, though all three floors are lit up. Matern has finished his bottle. The Swede slips away. I wide awake in a freight-car shed. With its hangars, grain elevators, ramps, and cranes Strohdeich stretches out as far as Bay Horse Bastion, where the ferryboat with lights on is chugging across to the Brabank pier. His grinding has dwindled to leftovers and he has stopped listening to hawsers. What can he hear when he hears no riveters? Hoarse cattle and sensitive hogs? Does he hear angels? Liber scriptus proferetur. Is he reading masthead lights, port and starboard lights line for line? Is he plotting nihilation or writing finis: last rose’s dying, raft of lemurs, boulders of the east, barcaroles, Hades rises, morgue, Inca tablets, castle of the moon? This last of course is still at large, still sharp after a second shaving. Over the lead foundry and the pumping station it is licking at the municipal salt elevator, pissing sideways along silhouetted backdrop—Altstadt, Pfefferstadt, Jungstadt, that is to say, the churches of St. John, St. Catherine, St. Bartholomew, St. Mary; until with moon-inflated shift She appears. She must have come on the ferry from Brabank. From lamppost to lamppost She saunters up Strohdeich, disappears behind bird-necked cranes on the waterfront, hovers be tween shunting tracks, blossoms up again under a street lamp; and closer and closer he grinds her over to his bollard: “Hail, Mary!” But as she stands billowing before him, sheltering a little lamp under her shift, he doesn’t get up but sticks fast and sulks: “Say, you. What should I do? Thou’rt weary and footsore from seeking me… So see here, Mary: do you know where he’s taken himself? Hail, Mary, O.K., but now tell me, could I help it, it was that cynical streak I couldn’t stomach: nothing was sacred to him. That’s why. Actually we only wanted to teach him a little lesson: Confutatis maledictis… and now he’s gone, he’s left me his rags. I’ve mothproofed them, can you imagine, mothproofed, the whole damn lot! Come sit down, Mary. The thing with the money out of the cash drawer, O.K., I did it, but what about him, where is he? Has he run off to Sweden? Or to Switzerland where his dough is stashed away? Or to Paris?—that’s where he belongs. Or Holland? Or overseas? Come on, sit down for God’s sake. Bathed in tears, the day will dawn… Even as a kid—good Lord, was he fat!—he was always overdoing it: once he wanted a skull from under the Church of the Trinity. To him everything was funny, and always Weininger, that’s why we. Where is he? I’ve got to. Tell me. Blessed art Thou among… But only if you. The Germania bread factory is working the night shift. See? Who’s going to eat all that bread? Tell me. That’s not riveters, it’s. Sit down. Where?”

  But the illuminated shift doesn’t want to sit down. Standing, two hands’ breadths above the pavement, She has prepared a little piece: “Dona eis requiem: things will be better soon. You will live in the true faith and be an actor in Schwerin. But before you depart for Schwerin, a dog will stand in your path. Fear not.”

  He on the bollard wants details: “A black dog?”

  She with “balloon” in her shift: “A hound of hell.”

  He nailed to the bollard: “Does he belong to a carpenter?”

  She enlightens him: “How can the dog belong to a carpenter when he is dedicated to hell and trained to serve Satan?”

  He remembers: “Eddi called him Pluto, but only as a joke.”

  She with raised index finger: “He will stand in your path.”

  He tries to worm out of it: “Send him the distemper.”

  She counsels him: “Poison is obtainable in every drug store.”

  He tries to blackmail her: “But first you’ve got to tell me where Eddi…”

  Her last word: “Amen!”

  I in the freight-car shed know more than both of them put together: he smokes cigarettes and has an entirely different name
.

  Dear Tulla,

  on her way home the Virgin Mary probably took the ferry to Milchpeter beside the gasworks; and Walter Matern crossed with me at Brabank. One thing is certain, that he became even more Catholic than before: he even drank cheap vermouth, because schnapps and gin didn’t do the trick any more. His teeth on edge from sugared sweet wine, he may have ground the Virgin to within speaking distance two or three times more: on the Holm, between the lumberyards on either side of Breitenbach Bridge or, as usual, at Strohdeich. It’s doubtful whether they discussed anything new. He wanted to know where someone had taken himself to; she no doubt sicked him on the dog: “Formerly people used crow’s eyes, but nowadays Gronke, the pharmacist, has a pharmacy on Neuer Markt that carries everything, corrosive, narcotic, and septic poisons. For instance: As2O3—a white vitreous powder extracted from ores, a simple arsenic salt, in a word, rat poison, but if you don’t stint, it can do for a dog too.”

  So it happened that Walter Matern, after long absence, reappeared in our apartment house. Of course he didn’t stagger straight into our yard and start caterwauling up at the eaves; he knocked at Felsner-Imbs’ door and plumped himself down on the decrepit divan. The pianist brewed tea and kept his patience when Matern began to question him: “Where is he? Man, don’t be like that. You know where he is. He can’t just have evaporated. If anybody knows, it’s you. So speak up!”

  Behind windows left ajar I wasn’t sure whether the pianist knew any more than I did. Matern threatened. From the divan he worked with his teeth and Imbs clutched a pile of music. Matern reeled in the electric-green music room. Once he reached into the goldfish bowl and threw a handful of water at the flowered wallpaper, unaware that he had thrown only water. But he hit the porcelain ballerina when he tried to smash the big hourglass with his shag pipe. The horizontal arabesque leg fell, after a clean break, on soft sheet music. Matern apologized and promised to pay for the damage, but Imbs mended the figure himself with a glue called “Omnistick.” Walter Matern wanted to help but the pianist stood there stooped over and unapproachable. He poured more tea and gave Matern photographs to look at: in a stiff tutu stood Jenny doing an arabesque, like the porcelain ballerina except that her leg was all in one piece. Apparently Matern saw more than the picture, for he muttered things that didn’t stand on their toes in silver slippers. The usual questions: “Where? He can’t just have. Clears out without even leaving a message. Pushes off without. I’ve asked all over, even in Tischlergasse and in Schiewenhorst. Hedwig Lau has married in the meantime and broken off all relations with him, she says, broken off…”

  Walter Matern pushed the music-room window wide open, slipped over the sill, and shoved me into the lilac bushes. By the time I had scrambled to my feet, he was approaching the ravaged semicircle indicating the reach of the chain that attached Harras to the lumber shed in the daytime.

  Harras was still keen and black. Only above the eyes he had two little ice-gray islands. And the lips were no longer quite tight. The moment Walter Matern left the lilac garden, Harras was out of his kennel, straining his chain as far as the semicircle. Matern ventured to within two or three feet. Harras panted and Matern looked for a word. But the buzz saw interfered, or the lathe. And to our black shepherd Walter Matern, when he had found the word between buzz saw and lathe, when he had coughed it up and chewed it over, when it lay indigestible between his teeth, said “Nazi!”; to our Harras he said: “Nazi!”

  Dear Tulla,

  these visits went on for a week or more. Matern brought the word with him; and Harras stood straining forward, for to him was attached the lumber shed where we lodged: you and I and sometimes Jenny, who didn’t take up much room. We knelt narrow-eyed behind peepholes. Outside, Matern went down on his knees and assumed the attitude of the dog. Human cranium versus dog’s skull, with a child’s head’s worth of air in between. On one side growling: rising, falling, yet restrained; on the other side a grinding more of sea sand than of gravel, and then in rapid fire the word: “Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi!”

  Lucky that no one, except for us in the shed, heard the snapped word. Yet the windows on the court were chock-full. “The actor’s here again,” said the neighbors from window to window when Walter Matern came calling on our dog Harras. August Pokriefke ought to have turned him out of his yard, but the machinist said this was none of his business.

  And so my father had to cross the yard. He kept one hand in his pocket, and I am sure he was holding a chisel warm. He stopped behind Matern and laid his free hand momentously on Matern’s shoulder. In a loud voice, meant to be heard by all the occupied windows of the apartment house and by the journeymen in the second-floor windows of the shop, he said: “Leave the dog alone. Right away. And get out of here. You’re drunk. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Matern, whom my father had raised to his feet with his carpenter’s grip, couldn’t resist the temptation to look him menacingly, ominously in the eye in the worst ham actor tradition. My father had very blue, firmly rounded eyes, which blunted Matern’s stare. “It won’t do you any good to make eyes. There’s the door.” But Matern chose the route through the lilac garden to Felsner-Imbs’ music room.

  And once, when Matern did not leave our yard through the pianist’s apartment, he said to my father from the doorway of the yard: “Your dog has distemper, hadn’t you noticed?”

  My father with the chisel in his pocket: “Let me worry about that. And the dog hasn’t got distemper, but you’re stewed and you’d better not show your face around here any more.”

  The journeymen made menacing noises behind him and brandished drills and spirit levels. Nevertheless my father sent for the veterinary: Harras didn’t have distemper. No mucous discharge from his eyes or nose, no drowsy look, no vomiting after feeding. Even so, brewer’s yeast was spooned into him: “You never can tell.”

  Dear Tulla,

  then the theatrical season of 1937 to 1938 was over, and Jenny told us: “Now he’s in the theater in Schwerin.” He didn’t stay in Schwerin long but went, this too we heard from Jenny, to Düsseldorf on the Rhine. But because he had been fired without notice in Schwerin, he was unable to find work in any other theater, either in Düsseldorf or else where. “Those things get around,” said Jenny. As one might have expected, the next letter informed us that he was working on the radio, lending his voice to children’s programs; the letter said he had become engaged but it wouldn’t last long; that he still didn’t know where Eddi Amsel was keeping himself, but he was sure he must be; that liquor was plaguing him less, he had gone back to sports: field hockey and even faustball, as in happier days; that he had a number of friends, all of them ex-Communists, who like him had their bellies full; but that Catholicism was a lot of shit, he’d got to know a few priests in Neuss and Maria Laach, they were revolting specimens; there’d probably be war soon; and Walter Matern wanted to know whether the beastly black dog was still alive—but Felsner-Imbs didn’t answer.

  Dear Tulla,

  then Matern in person took the train and turned up in Langfuhr to see whether our Harras was still alive. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if months hadn’t passed since his last visit, he was suddenly standing in our yard, dressed fit to kill: English cloth, red carnation in button hole, short-haired, and stewed to the gills. He had left all caution in the train or somewhere else, he no longer went down on his knees in front of Harras, no longer hissed and ground the word, but bellowed it into the yard. He didn’t mean only our Harras; the neighbors in the windows, our journeymen, the machinist, and my father were all sick. The word. The neighbors all vanished into their two-and-a-half-room apartments. The journeymen fastened hinges. The machinist unleashed the buzz saw. My father manned the lathe. Nobody wanted to have heard that. August Pokriefke stirred carpenter’s glue.

  For to our Harras who alone remained available Walter Matern was saying: “You black Catholic hog!” Hymnally he spewed up his guts: “You Catholic Nazi hog! I’m going to grind you up int
o dogballs. Dominican! Christian dog! I’m twenty-two dog years old, and I still haven’t done any thing to earn immortality… just wait!”

  Felsner-Imbs took the raving young man, who was breathless from roaring against lathe and buzz saw, by the sleeve and led him into the music room, where he served him tea.

  In many apartments, on the second floor of our shop and in the machine shop, denunciations to the police were formulated; but no one turned him in.

  Dear Tulla,

  from May ‘39 to June 7, ‘39, Walter Matern was held for questioning in the cellar of police headquarters in Düsseldorf..

  This was no theater gossip, passed on to us by Jenny; I sleuthed it out from the records.

  For two weeks he was in the Marien Hospital in Düsseldorf, because they had cracked a few of his ribs in the cellar of police headquarters. For a long while he had to wear a bandage and wasn’t allowed to laugh, which wasn’t very hard on him. No teeth were knocked out.

  I had no need to sleuth out these details, they were written black on white—though without mention of the police cellar—on a picture postcard, the picture side of which disclosed the Church of St. Lambert in Düsseldorf. The addressee was not the pianist Felsner-Imbs but Dr. Oswald Brunies.

  Who had sent Walter Matern to the police cellar? The director of the Schwerin Stadttheater had not reported him. He had not been dismissed for political unreliability; it was because of continuous drunkenness that he was no longer allowed to act in Schwerin. This information didn’t fall in my lap, it had to be painstakingly sleuthed out.

  But why did Walter Matern remain in custody for only five weeks? Why only a few ribs and no teeth? He would not have been released from the police cellar if he had not volunteered for the Army: his Free City of Danzig passport saved him. In civilian clothes but with an induction order over still painful ribs he was sent to his home city. There he reported to the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police barracks. Until they were permitted to don uniforms, Walter Matern and several hundred civilians from the Reich had to spoon up one-dish meals for a good eight weeks: the war wasn’t quite ripe.