Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  At intervals of a few days I wrote Jenny a string of love letters, very repetitious and full of overt desires. I had to write every letter twice, because the first version was always crawling with slips. Any number of times I wrote: “Believe me, Tulla,” wrote: “Why, Tulla? This morning, Tulla. If you want to, Tulla. I want you, Tulla. I dreamed Tulla. Eating Tulla up, holding her tight, loving her, making Tulla a baby.”

  Jenny answered me promptly in a small tidy hand. Evenly but respecting the margins, she filled two sheets of blue writing paper—both sides—with replies to my propositions and descriptions of her new surroundings. To everything I wanted of Tulla Jenny said yes; except for having babies, it was rather too soon for that—I had myself to consider too; first we must get ahead in our work, she on the stage and I as a historian; that’s what I wanted to be.

  About Neroda she wrote that this extraordinary woman owned the world’s largest collection of books on the dance, that she even had an original manuscript from the hand of the great Noverre. She spoke of Heir Haseloff as a rather weird but occasionally comical eccentric, who, once he was through with his strict but imaginatively conducted ballet exercises, cooked up strangely human machines in his cellar workshop. Jenny wrote: “Actually he doesn’t think too much of the classical ballet, for often, when the exercises aren’t going quite as he would wish, he cracks rather nasty jokes. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I’m going to fire you jumping jacks, the whole lot of you. They can put you to work in the munitions factories. If you can’t turn a single pirouette as neatly as my little machines, you’ll be better off turning out shells.’ He claims that his figures in the cellar go into positions lovely enough to give you religion; he says his figures are always well turned out; that he’s planning to put one of them up in front of the class, at the bar: ‘It’ll make you green with envy. Then you’ll realize what classical ballet can be, you little holes and stoppers.’ ”

  That’s what Herr Haseloff called girl and boy dancers. In one of the next letters Jenny wrote me at Elsenstrasse I found a P.S. in which one such mechanical figure was described and summarily sketched. It stood at the bar, displaying a regulation port de bras for the benefit of the little holes and stoppers.

  Jenny wrote: “You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve learned a lot from the mechanical figure, which, incidentally, is neither a hole nor a stopper. Especially, I’ve learned to carry my back properly, and the little dots in the port de bras—Madame Lara neglected that—have become quite clear to me. Whatever I do, whether I’m polishing my shoes or picking up a glass of milk, I always make dots in the air. And even when I yawn—because when the day is over we’re all frankly tired—and cover my mouth with my hand, I always watch the dots. But now I must close. I’ll love you and hold you tight as I fall asleep and tomorrow morning, too, when I wake up. And please don’t read too much or you’ll ruin your eyes.—As ever, Your Jenny.”

  Dear Tulla:

  with one of these Jenny letters I tried to strike a bridge: to you. We ran into each other in the stair well of our apartment house, and I made no attempt to dispel the usual blush: “Look, Jenny’s written me again. You interested? It’s pretty funny, the stuff she writes about love and all that. If you feel like a laugh, you ought to read the stuff she writes. Now she calls herself Angustri like the ring, and pretty soon she’s going on tour with the troupe.”

  I held out the letter as if it were something unimportant and mildly amusing. Tulla flipped the paper with one finger: “You really ought to get some sense into you and stop coming around all the time with the same old applesauce and ballet rubbish.”

  Tulla wore her hair loose, mustard-brown, shoulder-length, and stringy. There were still faint signs of a permanent wave that the sailor from Putzig had treated her to. A strand of hair hung down over her left eye. With a mechanical movement—Haseloff’s figure couldn’t have done anything more mechanical—she pushed back the strand of hair with a contemptuous expulsion of breath, and with a shrug of her bony shoulders sent it back down over the same eye. But she wasn’t wearing make-up yet. By the time the Hitler-Youth patrol caught her in the railroad station after midnight and then on a bench in Uphagenpark with an ensign from the Neuschottland Naval Training School, she wore make-up all over.

  She was kicked out of school. My father spoke of money thrown out the window. To the principal of the Gudrun School, who despite the report of the patrol service wanted to give Tulla another chance, Tulla was said to have said: “Never mind, ma’am, go ahead and throw me out. I’ve got the joint up to here anyway. What I want is to have a baby by somebody, just to get a little action around here.”

  Why did you want a baby? Because!—Tulla was thrown out but didn’t get a baby. In the daytime she sat home listening to the radio, after supper she went out. Once she brought home six yards of the best Navy serge for herself and her mother. Once she came home with a fox fur from the Arctic front. Once her loot was a bolt of parachute silk. She and her mother wore underthings from all over Europe. When somebody came from the Labor Office and wanted to put her to work in the power plant, she had Dr. Hollatz make out a certificate of poor health: anemia and a shadow on her lung. Tulla obtained extra food tickets and a sick benefit, but not much.

  When Felsner-Imbs moved to Berlin with hourglass, porcelain ballerina, goldfish, stacks of music, and faded photographs—Haseloff had engaged him as pianist for the ballet—Tulla gave him a letter to take with him: for Jenny. I have never been able to find out what Tulla wrote with her fountain pen, for all Jenny said in her next to next letter was that Felsner-Imbs had arrived safely, that she had received a very nice letter from Tulla, and that she sent Tulla her very best regards.

  There I was on the outside again, and the two of them had something in common. When I ran into Tulla, I didn’t turn red anymore but chalky. Yes, I stuck to you, but I gradually learned to hate you and your glue; and hatred—a disease of the soul with which one can live to a ripe old age—made it easier for me to get along with Tulla: amiably and condescendingly, I gave her good advice. My hatred never made me violent, for in the first place I watched myself even in my sleep, in the second place I read too much, in the third place I was a conscientious student, almost a grind, with no time to vent my hatred, and in the fourth place I built myself an altar, on which stood Jenny turned out in her tutu, her arms opened for second position; or more accurately, I piled up Jenny’s letters and resolved to become engaged to her.

  My darling Tulla,

  Jenny could be awfully prim and boring when you sat facing her or walked beside her, but she could be very entertaining with her witty saucy letters. Seen from without, her eyes were silly under melancholy lashes; appraised from within, they had the gift of seeing things dryly and sharply etched, even things that stood on the tips of silver slippers and in stage lighting signified a dying swam.

  Thus she described for my benefit a ballet class that Haseloff had given his little holes and stoppers. They were rehearsing a ballet that was going to be called Scarecrows or The Scarecrows or The Gardener and the Scarecrows.

  And everything—at the bar and on the floor—went wrong. Felsner-Imbs sat with endlessly bowed back and repeated the bit of Chopin to no avail. In the rain outside the windows stood pine trees full of squirrels and the Prussian past. In the morning there had been an air-raid alarm and practice in the furnace room. Now the little holes in leotards were wilting on the long practice bar. Injected with cod-liver oil, the stoppers flapped their eyelashes until Haseloff with a tensing of his knees jumped up on the piano, an occurrence quite familiar to Felsner-Imbs and not at all harmful to the piano, for Haseloff was able, from a standing position, to make high, slow, and long leaps and land delicately on the brown piano lid without jolting the innards of the hard-tuned instrument. At this the holes and stoppers should have come to life, for they all knew perfectly well what Haseloff s rage-propelled leap to the piano meant and boded.

  From aloft, not directly but into the big mirror that turned th
e front wall into a spy, Haseloff spoke warningly to the holes and stoppers: “Do you want my brush to show you how to dance? Haven’t you any joie de vivre? Do you want rats to bite the swans from underneath? Must Haseloff take out his bag of pepper?”

  Once again he built up his notorious bar exercise: “Grand pIié—twice each in the first, second, and fifth position; eight slow dégagés and sixteen quick ones in the second position; eight petits battements dégagés, dabbed on the floor with the accent on the outside.” But only the holes put the accent on the outside and dabbed in the dot; as for the stoppers, neither the threatened bag of pepper nor Chopin in league with Felsner-Imbs could give them joie de vivre or a tidy plié: batter on a spoon, mayonnaise, Turkish honey make threads: so stretched the boys, or stoppers—Wolf, Marcel, Schmitt, Serge, Gotti, Eberhard, and Bastian. They fluttered their eyelashes, sighed a little between battements tendus on half-toe, in the rond de jambes à la seconde they twisted their necks like swans just before feeding, and waited in resignation, seven sleep-warm stoppers, for Haseloff’s second leap, which, on the occasion of the grand battement, was not long in coming.

  Haseloff’s second leap also started from the standing position: from the piano lid it carried him, with straight knees and amazingly high instep, over the pianist’s snow-white hair into the middle of the room, in front of the mirror. And concealing nothing from the mirror, he produced the announced bag, miraculously. The pointed bag, the cone-shaped bag, feared, familiar, the bag, powder-soft doesaworldofgood butinmoderation, he drew the two-ounce bag from his special breast pocket and ordered all the girls or holes to desist from the bar. He sent them into the corner beside the sizzling, glow-cheeked pot-belled stove. There they crowded together twittering, turned toward the wall, covering their eyes with pale fingers. And Felsner-Imbs also covered his leonine head with his silk scarf.

  For while eyes were covered and a head modestly veiled, Haseloff commanded: “Face à la barre!” Seven boys or stoppers excitedly peeled black, pink, egg-yellow, and spring-green leotards from each other’s boyish flesh. “Préparation!” cried Haseloff with a dry snap of the fingers: their faces to the wall, they lined up along the bar with their indefatigable eyelashes and with fourteen hands clutched the worn wood. Supported by blindly played Chopin, seven trunks bent for ward with straight arms and knees, making one and the same soft-skinned boyish bottom jut sevenfold into the well-heated room.

  Then Haseloff went into first position alongside the first bottom; in his left hand he held the little conical bag; in the right, as though conjured out of the air, he had a paint brush between his fingers. He dipped the badger-hair brush, expensive and durable, into the little bag and, sustained by Felsner-Imbs, began to whistle merrily the time-honored polonaise as he shifted nimbly, always sure of the mirror, from boy-bottom to stopper-bottom.

  In so doing—and this is what all the fuss was about—he made the powder-charged badger brush emerge seven times from the bag and vanish seven times powder-charged in the young men’s rear ends, the stopper-bottoms, abracadabra. No foot powder this. Nor was sleeping powder injected. Nor reducing powder, nor anti-lion powder, nor baking powder, not insect powder, nor milk powder; neither cocoa nor powdered sugar, nor flour to bake buns with, nor face powder nor tooth powder; it was pepper, black, finely ground pepper, that Haseloff discharged seven times unflaggingly with his brush. Finally, only a hair’s breadth from the mirror, he concluded his educational performance with a slow pirouette, stood, his mouth full of gold teeth, facing the room and trumpeted: “Alors, mes enfants! Stoppers first, then holes. Première position: Grand plié, bras en couronne.”

  And scarcely had Imbs, no longer blind, flung his Chopin-laden fingers at the keys, than quick as a flash and as though self-propelled, colored leotards rolled over seven peppered stopper-bottoms. An exercise got a wiggle on: swift feet, long legs, graceful arm movements. Eyelashes fell silent, lines awakened, beauty perspired; and Haseloff made his badger brush disappear—somewhere. Such was the long-lasting effect of the pepper that after a successful exercise the holes without pepper and the pepper-animated stoppers could be summoned to a rehearsal of the scarecrow ballet: Third Act, Destruction of the garden by the massed scarecrows, culminating in a pas de deux.

  Because subsequently the big scene, danced to traditional Prussian military music, was so spicily successful—a precise chaos sur pointes—Haseloff called it a day with thirty-two gold teeth, waved his towel, bade Felsner-Imbs close the piano and bury Chopin and Prussia’s marches in his brief case, and distributed compliments: “Bravo Wolfchen, bravo Schmittchen, bravo all holes and stoppers! A special bravo for Marcel and Jenny. Hang around, the two of you. We’ll do the gardener’s daughter and the Prince, first act, without music en demie-pointe. The rest of you, go right to bed and no gallivanting around. Tomorrow morning, the whole corps de ballet, abduction of the gardener’s daughter and grand finale.”

  Dear Tulla,

  in the Jenny letter whose contents I have tried to reproduce, as in all other Jenny letters, it was written how very much she loved me now and forever, even though Haseloff was making up to her—with restraint and ever so ironically. But I mustn’t worry about that. Incidentally, she would be coming to Langfuhr, though only for two days: “The apartment after all has to be vacated. And so we’ve decided to move the furniture and the stone collection to a safe place. You can imagine all the red tape it took to get permission to move the things. But Haseloff knows how to handle people. But he thinks the furniture will be safer in Langfuhr, because Berlin is being bombed more and more. Just the same he wants to move the mica stones to Lower Saxony, where he knows some peasants and the manager of a mine.”

  Dear Tulla,

  first a moving van drove up across the street. Fifteen families occupied the windows of our house. Then, soundlessly, the Mercedes pulled up behind the moving van, but left room for loading. The chauffeur stood promptly at the door with lifted cap: in a black fur coat, possibly mole, her face ensconced in the turned-up collar, Jenny stood on the side walk, and raised her eyes for a moment to our windows: a lady who isn’t allowed to catch cold. In a black ulster with a brown fur collar, nutria, Haseloff took Jenny’s arm. The switchman, the great impresario, half a head shorter than Jenny: Hermann Haseloff, his mouth full of gold teeth. But he didn’t laugh, didn’t look at our house. Elsenstrasse didn’t exist.

  My father said from behind his newspaper: “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t help with the moving as long as you’re always writing each other.”

  I almost missed Jenny’s hand in the wide sleeve of her fur coat. She introduced me. Haseloff had only an eighth of a glance available. “Hm,” he said, and “Nice-looking stopper.” Then he directed the moving men like a corps de ballet. I wasn’t allowed to help or even to go up to the apartment. The loading of the furniture, heavy pieces, dark brown for the most part, all oak, was exciting, because under Haseloff’s direction a bookcase as wide as a wall became weightless. When Jenny’s room left the Aktienhaus—Biedermeier in light birch—the pieces hovered over the cubical men and had “balloon.” Between the coat rack and the Flemish chest Haseloff half turned to me. Without leaving the movers to their own strength he invited Jenny and me to dinner at the Hotel Eden by the Main Station, where they were staying. Heavy open crates were piled on the sidewalk in among the last kitchen chairs. I accepted: “At half past seven.” All at once, as though Haseloff had staged it, the sun broke through up above, awakening sparkle in open crates. The smell of the absent teacher revived too: cold pipe smoke joined in the moving; but some of the mica gneiss had to stay behind. Eight or nine crates walled up the moving van, for two there was no room. That gave me my entrance in Haseloff’s moving-man’s ballet, for I offered to make room in our cellar for mica gneiss and mica granite, for biotite and muscovite.

  My father, whom I asked for permission in the machine room, surprised me by calmly consenting: “That’s a good idea, my son. There’s plenty of room in the second cella
r next to the window frames. Put Dr. Brunies’ crates in there. If the old gentleman collected stones all his life, he must have had his reasons.”

  Dear Tulla,

  the crates were moved to our cellar and in the evening I sat beside Jenny, across from Haseloff, in the dining room of the Hotel Eden. Allegedly you had met Jenny in town that afternoon, without Haseloff. Why? Because. We hardly spoke, and Haseloff looked between Jenny and me. You had met, so I heard, at the Café Weitzke on Wollwebergasse. What did you have to talk about? All sorts of things! Jenny’s little finger had meanwhile hooked itself to my little finger under the table. I’m sure Haseloff noticed. What had there been to eat at the Café Weitzke? Bad cake and watery ice cream for Jenny. At the Hotel Eden there was turtle soup, breaded veal cutlet with canned asparagus, and for dessert, at Jenny’s request, frozen pudding. Maybe I rode after you as far as Kohlenmarkt and saw you in the Café Weitzke: sitting, talking, laughing, saying nothing, crying. Why? Because. After dinner I noticed a thousand and more ice-gray freckles on Haseloff’s tense or rigid face. Eddi Amsel, when he still existed, had fewer but larger freckles in his fat face, brownish and genuine. You spent at least two hours chattering away in the Café Weitzke. At half past nine I had to speak: “I used to know somebody who looked like you, but he had a different name.”

  Haseloff summoned the waiter: “A glass of hot lemonade, please.”

  I had my lines ready: “First he was called Stephuhn, then he was called Sperballa, then Sperlinski. Do you know him?”

  Haseloff, who had a cold, received his hot lemonade: “Thank you. Check please.”