Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  In addition to the diary Harry Liebenau kept up an often languishing and then for a time lively correspondence with a girl friend, who under the stage name of Jenny Angustri danced in the German Ballet in Berlin and who in the capital and on tours of the occupied regions appeared first as a member of the corps de ballet, later as a soloist.

  When Air Force auxiliary Harry Liebenau had a pass, he went to the movies and took the pregnant Tulla Pokriefke. Before Tulla was pregnant, Harry had tried several times in vain to persuade her to attend the movies by his side. Now that she was telling all Langfuhr: “Somebody’s knocked me up”—though there were still no visible signs—she was more indulgent and said to Harry: “It’s O.K. with me if you’ll pay.”

  They let several films flicker past them in Langfuhr’s two movie houses. The Art Cinema ran first the newsreel, then the educational film, then the feature. Harry was in uniform; Tulla was sitting there in a much too spacious coat of Navy serge, which she had had tailored especially for her condition. While grapes were being harvested on rainy screen and peasant girls, festooned with grapes, wreathed with vine-leaves, and forced into corsets, were smiling, Harry tried to clinch with his cousin. But Tulla disengaged herself with the mild reproach: “Cut that out, Harry. There’s no sense in it now. You should have come around sooner.”

  In the movies Harry always had a supply of raspberry drops on him, which were paid out in his battery every time you had laid low a specific number of water rats. Accordingly, they were known as rat drops. In the darkness, while up front the newsreel started up with a din, Harry peeled paper and tin foil from a roll of raspberry drops, thrust his thumbnail between the first and the second drop, and offered Tulla the roll. Tulla lifted off the raspberry drop with two fingers, clung to the newsreel with both pupils, sucked audibly, and whispered while up front the muddy season was setting in in Center Sector: “Everything stinks in that battery of yours, even the raspberry drops, of that whatchacallit behind the fence. You ought to ask for a transfer.”

  But Harry had other desires, which were fulfilled in the movies: Gone: the muddy season. No more Christmas preparations on the Arctic front. Counted: the gutted T-34 tanks. Docked: the U-boat after a successful expedition. Taken off: our fighter planes to attack the terror bombers. Different music. Different cameraman: a quiet pebble-strewn afternoon, sunlight sprinkling through autumn leaves: the Führer’s headquarters. “Hey, look. There he runs stands wags his tail. Between him and the aviator. Sure thing, that’s him: our dog. Our dog’s dog, I mean; it’s him all over. Prinz, that’s Prinz, that our Harras…”

  For a good minute, while the Führer and Chancellor under low-pulled visor cap, behind anchored hands, chats with an Air Force officer—was it Rudel?—and walks back and forth among the trees at the Führer’s headquarters, an obviously black shepherd is privileged to stand beside his boots, rub against the Führer’s boots, let the side of his neck be patted—for once the Führer unlocks his anchored hands, only to recouple them as soon as the newsreel has captured the cordiality prevailing between master and dog.

  Before Harry took the last streetcar to Troyl—he had to change at the Main Station for the Heubude train—he took Tulla home. They talked by turns: neither listened: she about the feature; he about the newsreel. In Tulla’s picture a girl was raped while picking mushrooms and consequently—something Tulla refused to understand—jumped in the river; Harry tried, in Störtebeker’s philosophical language, to keep the newsreel alive and at the same time define it: “The way I see it, dog-being—the very fact of it—implies that an essent dog is thrown into his there. His being-in-the-world is the dog-there, regardless of whether his there is a carpenter’s yard or the Führer’s headquarters or some realm removed from vulgar time. For future dog-being is not later than the dog-there of having-beenness, which in turn is not anterior to being-held-out-into the dog-now.”

  Nevertheless, Tulla said outside the Pokriefkes’ door: “Beginning next week I’ll be in my second month, and by Christmas you’re sure to see something.”

  Harry dropped in at his parents’ apartment for fifteen minutes, meaning to take some fresh underwear and edibles. His father, the carpenter, had swollen feet because he had been on them all day: from one building site to another. Consequently he was soaking his feet in the kitchen. Large and gnarled, they moved sadly in the basin. You couldn’t tell from the carpenter’s sighs whether it was the well-being bestowed by his footbath or tangled memories that made him sigh. Harry’s mother was already holding the towel. She was kneeling and had taken off her reading glasses. Harry pulled a chair over from the table and sat down between father and mother: “Want me to tell you a terrific story?”

  As his father took one foot out of the basin and his mother expertly received the foot in the Turkish towel, Harry began: “There was once a dog, his name was Perkun. Perkun sired the bitch Senta. And Senta whelped Harras. And the stud dog Harras sired Prinz. And do you know where I just saw our Prinz? In the newsreel. At the Führer’s headquarters. Between the Führer and Rudel. Plain as day, out of doors. Might have been our Harras. You’ve got to go see it, Papa. You can leave before the feature if you’ve had enough. I’m definitely going again, maybe twice.”

  With one dry but still steaming foot, the carpenter nodded absently. He said of course he was glad to hear it and would go see the newsreel if he could find time. He was too tired to be pleased aloud though he tried hard, and later, with two dry feet, actually did put his pleasure into words: “You don’t say, our Harras’ Prinz. And the Führer patted him in the newsreel. And Rudel was there too. You don’t say.”

  There was once a newsreel:

  it showed the muddy season in Center Sector, Christmas preparations on the Arctic front, the aftermath of a tank battle, laughing workers in a munitions plant, wild geese in Norway, Hitler Cubs collecting junk, sentries on the Atlantic Wall, and a visit to the Führer’s headquarters. All this and more could be seen not only in the two movie houses of the suburb of Langfuhr, but in Salonika as well. For from there came a letter written to Harry Liebenau by Jenny Brunies, who under the stage name of Jenny Angustri was performing for German and Italian soldiers.

  “Just imagine,” Jenny wrote, “what a small world it is: last night—for once we weren’t playing—I went to the movies with Herr Haseloff. And whom did I see in the newsreel? I couldn’t have been mistaken. And Herr Haseloff also thought the black shepherd, who was there for at least a minute in the headquarters scene, could only be Prinz, your Harras’ Prinz.

  “The funny part of it is that Herr Haseloff can’t possibly have seen your Harras except in the photographs I’ve shown him. But he has tremendous imagination, and not only in artistic matters. And he always wants to know about things down to the slightest details. That’s probably why he has sent in a request to the propaganda unit here. He wants a copy of the newsreel for purposes of documentation. He’ll probably get it, for Herr Haseloff has connections all over, and it’s unusual for anyone to refuse him anything. Oh, Harry, then we’ll be able to look at the newsreel together, any time we please, later, when the war is over. And someday when we have children, we’ll be able to show them on the screen how things used to be.

  “It’s stupid here. I haven’t seen a bit of Greece, just rain. Unfortunately we had to leave our good Felsner-Imbs in Berlin. The school goes on even when we’re on tour.

  “But just imagine—but of course you know all about it—Tulla is expecting a baby. She told me about it on an open postcard. I’m glad for her, though I sometimes think she’s going to have a hard time of it, all alone without a husband to take care of her or any real profession…”

  Jenny did not conclude her letter without pointing out how very much the unaccustomed climate fatigued her and how very much—even in far-off Salonika—she loved her Harry. In a postscript she asked Harry to look out for his cousin as much as possible. “In her condition, you know, she needs a prop, especially as her home isn’t exactly what you would call w
ell regulated. I’m going to send her a package with Greek honey in it. Besides, I’ve unraveled two practically new sweaters I was recently able to buy in Amsterdam. One light-blue, the other pale-pink. I’ll be able to knit her at least four pairs of rompers and two little jackets. We have so much time between rehearsals and even during performances.”

  There was once a baby,

  which, although rompers were already being knitted for him, was not to be born. Not that Tulla didn’t want the baby. She still showed no sign, but she represented herself, with a sweetness verging on the maudlin, as an expectant mother. Nor was there any father growling with averted face: I don’t want a child! for all the fathers that might have come into consideration were absorbed from morning till night in their own affairs. To mention only the tech sergeant from the Kaiserhafen battery and Air Force auxiliary Störtebeker: the tech sergeant shot crows with his carbine and ground his teeth whenever he made a bull’s-eye: Störtebeker soundlessly drew in the sand what his tongue whispered: errancy, the ontological difference, the world-project in all its variations. How, with such existential occupations, could the two of them find time to think of a baby that suffused Tulla Pokriefke with sweetness though it did not yet round out her expressly tailored coat?

  Only Harry, the receiver of letters, the writer of letters, said: “How are you feeling? Are you sick to your stomach before breakfast? What does Dr. Hollatz say? Don’t strain yourself. You really ought to stop smoking. Should I get you some malt beer? Matzerath will give me dill pickles for food tickets. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the child later on.”

  And sometimes, as though to replace the two plausible but persistently absent fathers in the expectant mother’s eyes, he stared gloomily at two imaginary points, ground inexperienced teeth in the tech sergeant’s manner, drew Störtebeker’s symbols in the sand with a stick, and prattled with Störtebeker’s philosophical tongue, which, with slight variations, might also have been the tech sergeant’s tongue: “Listen to me, Tulla, I’ll explain. The fact is that the average everydayness of child-being can be defined as thrown, projected being-in-the-child-world, which in its child-being-in the-world and its child-being-with-others involves the very core of child-being capacity.—Understand? No? Let’s try again…”

  But it was not only his innate imitativeness that inspired Harry with such sayings; in the becoming uniform of an Air Force auxiliary he occasionally took up his stance in the middle of the Pokriefkes’ kitchen and delivered self-assured lectures to Tulla’s grumbling father, a dyspeptic Koshnavian from the region between Konitz and Tuchel. He made no profession of fatherhood, but took everything on himself. He even offered—“I know what I’m doing”—to become his pregnant cousin’s future husband, yet was relieved when, instead of taking him up, August Pokriefke found troubles of his own to chew on: August Pokriefke had been drafted. Near Oxhoft—he had been declared fit only for home-front duty—he had to guard military installations, an occupation which enabled him, in the course of long weekend furloughs, to tell the whole family—the master carpenter and his wife were also obliged to lend their ears—interminable stories about partisans; for in the winter of ’43 the Poles began to extend their field of operations: whereas previously they had made only Tuchler Heath insecure, now partisan activity was also reported in Koshnavia. Even in the wooded country inland from the Gulf of Danzig and extending to the foot of Hela Peninsula, they were making raids and imperiling August Pokriefke.

  But Tulla, with flat hands on still-flat tummy, had other things to think about besides guerrillas stealthy and insidious, and guerrilla-fighter groups. Often she stood up in the middle of a night attack west of Heisternest and left the kitchen so noticeably that August Pokriefke was unable to bring in his two prisoners and save his motor pool from plunder.

  When Tulla left the kitchen, she went to the lumber shed. What could her cousin do but follow her as in the years when he had been permitted to carry the school satchel on his back. Tulla’s hiding place was still there among the timber. The logs were still piled in such a way as to leave an empty space just big enough for Tulla and Harry.

  There sit an expectant sixteen-year-old mother and an Air Force auxiliary who has enlisted in the Army and is looking forward to his induction, in a children’s hiding place: Harry had to lay a hand on Tulla and say: “I can feel something. Plain as day. There it is again.” Tulla potters with tiny wood-shaving wigs, weaves wood-shaving dolls from soft linden shavings, and as ever disseminates her aroma of bone glue. Unquestionably the baby, as soon as emerged, will distill his mother’s unbanishable smell; but only months later, when sufficient milk teeth are present, and still later at the sandbox age, will it become apparent whether the child often and significantly grinds his teeth or whether he prefers to draw little men and world-projects in the sand.

  Neither bone-glue aroma nor grinding tech sergeant nor sign-setting Störtebeker. The baby didn’t feel like it; and on the occasion of an outing—Tulla obeyed Harry, who, putting on the airs of a father, said an expectant mother needed plenty of fresh air—under the open sky, the infant gave it to be understood that it had no desire to disseminate the aroma of bone glue after the manner of its mother, or to perpetuate the paternal habits of teeth-grinding or world-projecting.

  Harry had a weekend pass: an existential pause. Because the air was so Decemberly, cousin and cousin decided to go out to Oliva Forest, and if it wasn’t too much for Tulla, to walk as far as the Schwedenschanze. The streetcar, Line Number 2, was crowded, and Tulla was furious because nobody stood up for her. Several times she poked Harry, but the sometimes bashful Air Force auxiliary was disinclined to speak up and demand a seat for Tulla. In front of her, with rounded knees, sat a dozing infantry p.f.c. Tulla fumed at him: couldn’t he see she was expecting? Instantly the p.f.c. transformed his rounded sitting knees into neatly pressed standing knees. Tulla sat down, and on all sides total strangers exchanged glances of complicity. Harry was ashamed not to have demanded a seat and ashamed a second time that Tulla had asked for a seat so loudly.

  The car had already passed the big bend on Hohenfriedberger Weg and was jogging from stop to stop on a stretch that was straight as a die. They had agreed to get out at “White Lamb.” Right after “Friedensschluss,” Tulla stood up and directly behind Harry pushed her way through winter coats to the rear platform. Even before the trailer reached the traffic island at “White Lamb”—so called after an inn favored by excursionists—Tulla was standing on the bottom most running board, screwing up her eyes in the head wind.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Harry above her.

  Tulla had always like to jump off streetcars.

  “Wait till it stops,” Harry had to say from above.

  From way back, jumping on and off had been Tulla’s favorite sport.

  “Don’t do it, Tulla, watch out, be careful!” But Harry didn’t hold her back.

  Beginning roughly in her eighth year, Tulla had jumped from moving streetcars. She had never fallen. Never, as stupid, foolhardy people do, had she risked jumping against the motion of the car; and now, on the trailer of the Number 2, which had been running between Main Station and the suburb of Oliva since the turn of the century, she did not jump from the front platform, but from the rear platform. Nimbly and light as a cat, she jumped with the motion of the car and landed with an easy flexing of the knees and gravel-scraping soles.

  Tulla said to Harry, who had jumped off right behind her: “Watcha always nagging for? You think I’m dumb?”

  They took a dirt road to one side of the White Lamb Inn. Turning off through the fields at right angles to the rectilinear streetcar line, it led toward the dark forest, huddled on hills. The sun was shining with spinsterish caution. Rifle practice somewhere near Saspe punctuated the afternoon with irregular dots. The White Lamb, haven of excursionists, was closed, shuttered, boarded. The owner, it seemed, had been jailed for economic subversion—buying canned fish on the black market. The furrows of the field and the froz
en ruts of the road were filled with wind-blown snow. Ahead of them hooded crows were shifting from stone to stone. Small, under a sky too high and too blue, Tulla clutched her belly first over, then under, the material of her coat. For all the fresh December air, her face couldn’t produce a healthy color: two nostrils dilated with fright in a shrinking, chalky phiz. Luckily Tulla was wearing ski pants.

  “Something’s gone wrong.”

  “What’s wrong? I don’t get it. You feel sick? You want to sit down? Or can you make it to the woods? What is it, anyway?”

  Harry was frightfully excited, knew nothing, understood nothing, half suspected and didn’t want to know. Tulla’s nose crinkled, the bridge sprouted beads of sweat that didn’t want to fall off. He dragged her to the nearest stone—the crows abandoned it—then to a farm roller, its shaft spitting the December air. Then at the edge of the woods, after crows had had to move another few times, Harry leaned his cousin against the trunk of a beech tree. Her breath flew white. Harry’s breath too came in puffs of white steam. Distant rifle practice was still putting sharp pencil points on nearby paper. From crumbly furrows ending just before the woods, crows peered out with cocked heads. “It’s good I got pants on, or I wouldn’t have made it this far. It’s all running off!”

  Their breath at the edge of the woods rose up and blew away. Undecided. “Should I?” First Tulla let her Navy serge coat slip off. Harry folded it neatly. She herself undid her waistband, Harry did the rest with horrified curiosity: the finger-size two-months-old fetus lay there in her panties. Made manifest: there. Sponge in gelatin: there. In bloody and in colorless fluids: there. Through world onset: there. A small handful: unkept, beforelike, partly there. Dismal in sharp December air. Grounding as fostering steamed and cooled off quickly. Grounding as taking root, and Tulla’s handkerchief as well. Unconcealed into what? By whom attuned? Space-taking never without world-disclosure. Therefore: panties off. Ski pants up, no child, but. What a vision of essence! Lay there warm, then cold: Withdrawal provides the commitment of the enduring project with a hole at the edge of Oliva Forest: “Don’t stand there! Do something. Dig a hole. Not there, that’s a better place.” Ah, are we ourselves ever, is mine ever, now under the leaves, in the ground, not deeply frozen; for higher than reality is potentiality: here manifested: what primarily and ordinarily does not show itself, what is hidden but at the same time is an essential part of what does primarily and ordinarily show itself, namely, its meaning and ground, which is not frozen but loosened with heels of shoes from the Air Force supply room, in order that the baby may come into its there. There into its there. But only project there. Shorn of its essence: there. A mere neuter, a mere impersonal pronoun—and the impersonal pronoun not there in the same sense as the there in general. And happening-to-be-present confronts being-there with the facticity of its there and without disgust sets it down with bare fingers, unprotected by gloves: Ah, the ecstatic-horizontal structure! There only toward death, which means: tossed in layers, with a few leaves and hollow beechnuts on top, lest the crows, or if foxes should come, the forester, diviners, vultures, treasure seekers, witches, if there are any, gather fetuses, make tallow candles out of them or powder to strew across thresholds ointments for everything and nothing. And so: fieldstone on it. Grounding in the ground. Placedness and abortion. Matter and work. Mother and child. Being and time. Tulla and Harry. Jumps off the streetcar into her there, without stumbling. Jumps shortly before Christmas, nimbly but too overarchingly: pushed in two moons ago, out through the same hole. Bankrupt! The nihilating Nothing. Lousy luck. Come-to-be in errancy. Spitting cunt. Not even transcendental but vulgar ontic unconcealed ungrinded unstörtebekert. Washed up. Error fostered. Empty egg. Wasn’t a pre-Socratic. A bit of care. Bullshit. Was a latecomer. Vaporized, evaporated, cleared out. “You shut your trap. Stinking luck. Why did it have to happen to me? Beans. I was going to call him Konrad or after him. After who? After him. Come on, Tulla. Let’s go. Yes, come on, let’s go.”