Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Without moving his shoulders, Matern looks round and round. Familiar environment. So here we are. Don’t bother. Won’t be staying long. No time for visitors, especially the visitor who has come on Christmas Eve to judge: “Well, Captain Hufnagel? Memory need refreshing? You look be wildered. Glad to help you: 22nd AA Regiment, Kaiserhafen battery. Magnificent country: lumber piles, water rats, Air Force auxiliaries, volunteers, crow shooting, pile of bones across the way, stank whichever way the wind was blowing, I initiated operation raspberry drop, I was your first sergeant: Matern, Tech Sergeant Matern reporting. The fact is that once, in the area of your excellent battery, I shouted some thing about Reich, nation, Führer, mound of bones. Unfortunately my poem didn’t appeal to you. But that didn’t prevent you from writing it down with a fountain pen. It was a Pelikan too, just like the young lady’s. And then you sent in a report: court-martial, demotion, punitive battalion, mine removal, suicide team. All that because you with your Pelikan fountain pen…”

  However, it’s not the indicted wartime fountain pen, but a blameless postwar fountain pen that Matern grabs out of warm Elkefingers and crushes, smearing his fingers with ink. Phooey!

  Captain Hufnagel grasps the situation in a flash. Frau Hufnagel doesn’t grasp anything at all, but does the right thing: presuming the intruder in her fragile Christmas room to be a slave laborer from the East, now masterless, she holds out, with bravely trembling hands, the brand-new immersion heater, expecting the brute to blow off steam by demolishing this household utensil. But Matern, misjudged on account of his outspread inky fingers, declines to be fed the first thing that comes to mind. In a pinch he might find the Christmas tree to his taste, or maybe the chairs, or the whole kit and boodle: How much cozy comfort can you stand?

  Fortunately Captain Hufnagel, who has a position in the civilian administration of the Canadian occupation authorities and is able to treat himself and his family to a genuine peacetime Christmas—he’s even managed to scare up some nut butter!—takes a different and more civilized view: “On the one hand—and on the other hand. After all, there are two sides to every question. But meanwhile, Matern, won’t you be seated. Very well, stand if you prefer. Well then, on the one hand, of course, you’re perfectly; but on the other hand—whatever injustice you’ve—it was I who saved you from. Perhaps you are unaware that in your case the death penalty, and if my testimony hadn’t led the court-martial to remove your case from the jurisdiction of the special court… Very well, you won’t believe me, you’ve been through too much. I don’t expect you to. However—and I’m saying this tonight, on Christmas Eve, in full consciousness—if not for me you wouldn’t be standing here playing the raving Beckmann. Excellent play, incidentally. Took the whole family to see it in Hagen, pathetic little theater. Goes straight to the heart. Weren’t you a professional actor? What a part that would be for you. That Borchert hits the nail on the head. Haven’t we all of us been through it, myself too? Didn’t we all become strangers to ourselves and our loved ones while we were out there at the front? I came back four months ago. French prison camp. Take it from me! Bad Kreuznach, if that rings a bell. But even that’s better than. That’s what we had coming to us if we hadn’t cleared out of the Vistula sector before. Anyway, there I stood empty-handed with nothingness literally staring me in the face. My business gone, my little house occupied by Canadians, wife and children evacuated to Espei in the mountains, no coal, nothing but trouble with the authorities, in short, a Beckmann situation straight out of Outside the Door! And so, my dear Matern—won’t you please be seated—I am doubly, triply, aware how you. After all I knew you in the 22nd AA Regiment as a serious young man, who liked to get to the bottom of things. I trust and hope you haven’t changed. And so let us be Christians and treat this holy night as it deserves. My dear Herr Matern, from the bottom of my heart and in the name of my cherished family, I wish you a merry and a blessed Christmas.”

  And in this spirit the evening passes: Matern cleans up his fingers in the kitchen with pumice stone, sits down freshly combed at the family board, allows Hans-Ulrich to pet Pluto, cracks, in the absence of a proper nutcracker, walnuts with his hands for the whole Hufnagel family, receives a present of some socks, washed only once, from Frau Dorothea, promises the gorgeous Elkedaughter a new Pelikan fountain pen, tells stories about his medieval forebears, robbers and heroes of independence, until weariness sets in, sleeps with the dog in the attic, has dinner with the family on the first day of Christmas: sauerbraten with mashed potatoes; on the second day of Christmas barters two packs of Camels on Altena’s black market for an almost new Mont-Blanc fountain pen, in the evening tells the assembled family the rest of his stories about the Vistula estuary and the heroes of independence Simon and Gregor Materna, plans, at a late hour when every weary head lies elsewhere, to deposit stocking-footed the Mont-Blanc fountain pen outside Elke’s bedroom door; but instead of co-operating, the boards creak, whereupon a soft “Come in” threads its way through the keyhole. Not every room is barred. And so in his stocking feet he enters Elke’s bed chamber to bestow. But he’s welcome there and able to take vengeance on the father by: Elkeblood flows demonstrably:

  “You’re the first that ever. On Christmas Eve the moment you, and wouldn’t even take your hat off. And now do you think I’m a bad girl? It’s not the way I usually, and my girl friend always says. Are you as happy as I am now, without any other desire, except only. Do you know what? When I’m through with school, I’m going to travel, travel the whole time! Say, what’s that? Is it a scar, and this one here too. Oh, that awful war! It didn’t spare anybody. And now what? Are you going to stay here? It can be awfully nice around here when it’s not raining: the woods, the animals, the mountains, the Lenne, the High Sondern, and all the dams, and Lüdenschied is an awfully pretty place, and wherever you look, woods and mountains and lakes and rivers and deer and dams and woods and mountains, oh, please stay!”

  Nevertheless Matern, stocking-footed with black dog, goes his way. He even carries the almost new Mont-Blanc fountain pen away to Cologne on the Rhine; for he hadn’t gone to the Sauerland to make presents, but to judge the father by dishonoring: Only God in His heaven looked on, this time framed and glassed above the bookshelf.

  And so justice pursues its course. Cologne’s station toilet, that warm Catholic place, speaks of a Sergeant Leblich, resident in Bielefeld, where underwear blooms and a children’s choir sings. Accordingly, a long trip on rails with return ticket in pocket, up three flights, second door on the right, straight into the environment without knocking: but Erwin Leblich, through no fault of his own, has had an accident at work and is lying in bed with a high-hoisted plaster leg and an angular plaster arm, but with powers of speech unimpaired. “All right, do anything you please with me, let your dog eat plaster. All right. I chewed you out and made you doubletime with your gas mask on; but two years before that somebody chewed me out and made me doubletime with my gas mask on; and the same thing happened to him: running and singing with his gas mask on. So what the hell do you want?”

  Questioned about his wishes, Matern looks around and wants Leblich’s wife; but Veronika Leblich had died in ’44 in the air-raid shelter. Whereupon Matern asks for Leblich’s daughter; but the six-year-old child has recently started school and gone to live with her grandmother in Lemgo. But Matern is determined to build a monument to his vengeance at any price; he kills the Leblichs’ canary, who has managed to come through the war in good shape, despite strafing and saturation bombing.

  When Erwin Leblich asks him to bring him a glass of water from the kitchen, he leaves the sickroom, picks up a glass in the kitchen with his left hand, fills it under the faucet, and on the way back, quickly in passing, reaches into the bird cage with his right hand: except for the dripping faucet, only God in His heaven looks upon Matern’s fingers.

  The same onlooker sees Matern in Gottingen. There, with out the help of the dog, he wrings the neck of some chickens—five of them—belonging to Paul Wes
seling, an unmarried postman: because Wesseling, when still an MP, had picked him up in a brawl in Le Havre. The consequence had been three days in solitary; in addition Matern, who was to be rewarded with a transfer to Officers Training School for his resolute conduct during the French campaign, was prevented by this blot on his record from becoming a lieutenant.

  The following day, between Cologne’s cathedral and Cologne’s Central Station, he sells the neck-wrung chickens unplucked for two hundred and eighty reichsmarks. His treasury is in need of replenishment; for the trip from Cologne to Stade near Hamburg, first class with dog and return, costs a tidy sum.

  There behind the Elbe dike lives Wilhelm Dimke with dim wife and deaf father. Dimke, the assistant magistrate who had served as associate judge on the special court in Danzig-Neugarten while a case of undermining military discipline and insulting the Führer was being tried, had threatened Matern with the death penalty until, on the advice of Matern’s former battery commander, the case was transferred to the competent court-martial. From Stargard, where he had last participated in the deliberations of a special court, Associate Judge Dimke had succeeded in rescuing a large stamp collection, possibly of considerable value. On the table, between half-emptied coffee cups, lie the albums: the Dimkes are engaged in cataloguing their possessions. Environmental studies? Matern has no time. Since Dimke remembers lots of cases on which he has deliberated, but not Matern’s, Matern, by way of refreshing Dimke’s memory, tosses album after album into the blazing pot-bellied stove, concluding with the colorful and exotic colonial issues: the stove is delighted, warmth spreads through the overcrowded fugitives’ room; in the end, he even tosses in the stock of adhesive corners and the tweezers; but Wilhelm Dimke still can’t remember. His dim wife is in tears. Dimke’s deaf father utters the word: “Vandalism.” On top of the cupboard lie shriveled winter apples. No one offers Matern any. Matern, who had come to judge, feels unappreciated and leaves the Dimke family with a dog who has shown little interest, but without saying good-by.

  O eternal tiled men’s toilet of Cologne Central Station. It has a memory. It doesn’t lose a name: for as previously in the ninth and twelfth bays the name of the MP and the associate judge were inscribed, so now the name and address of Alfred Lüxenich, sometime special judge, are etched legibly and precisely in the enamel of the second bay from the left: Aachen, Karolingerstrasse 112.

  There Matern finds himself in musical surroundings. District Magistrate Lüxenich is of the opinion that music, the great consoler, can help us to live through hard and troubled times. He advises Matern, who has come to judge the former special judge, to listen first to the second movement of a Schubert trio: Lüxenich is a violin virtuoso; a Herr Petersen is no mean hand at the piano; Fräulein Gelling plies the cello; and Matern, with restless dog, listens resignedly, though his heart, his spleen, his kidneys are good and sick of it and are beginning in their introverted way to cough. Then Matern’s dog and Matern’s three sensitive organs are treated to the third movement of the same trio. Whereupon District Magistrate Lüxenich is not quite satisfied with himself or with Fräulein Ceiling’s cello playing: “My goodness! Let’s have the third movement again; and then our Herr Petersen, who, it may interest you to know, teaches mathematics at the local high school, will play you the Kreutzer Sonata; I for my part should like to conclude the evening, before we enjoy a glass of Moselle together, with a Bach violin sonata. Now there’s a piece for connoisseurs!”

  All music begins. Unmusical from the waist up, Matern falls under the sway of classical rhythm. All music feeds comparisons. He and the cello between Fräulein Ceiling’s knees. All music opens up abysses. It tugs and pulls and supplies the background for silent films. The Great Masters. Imperishable heritage. Leitmotives and murder motives. God’s pious Minstrel. If in doubt, Beethoven. A prey to harmony. It’s lucky nobody’s singing; for he sang silvery bubbling: Dona nobis. Voice always in the upper story. A Kyrie that could pull your teeth. An Agnus Dei that melted like butter. Like a cutting torch: a boy soprano. For in every fat man a thin man is hidden, who wants to come out and sing higher than buzz saw and band saw. The Jews do not sing; he sang. Tears roll down over the letter scales, heavy tears. Only the truly unmusical can cry over serious classical German music. Hitler cried when his mother died and in 1918 when Germany collapsed; and Matern, who has come to judge with black dog, sheds tears while Dr. Petersen, the school teacher, plays the genius’s piano sonata note for note. While District Magistrate Lüxenich bows the Bach violin sonata note for note on an instrument that has come through the war safe and sound, he is unable to dam the rising torrent.

  Who is ashamed of manly tears? Who still has hatred in his heart as St. Cecilia glides through the music room? Who is not thankful to Fräulein Oelling when, all-understanding, she seeks Matern out, lets her woman’s gaze strike roots, lays her well-manicured but clawlike cellist’s fingers on his hand, and with whispered words plows Matern’s soul? “Open your heart, dear friend. Please. You must have a great sorrow. May we share it? Ah, what can be going on inside you? When you came in with that dog, I felt as if a world were crashing down on me, a world torn by grief, lashed by storms, filled with despair. But now that I see you are a man, a human being, who has come among us—a stranger, yet somehow close to us—now that we have been privileged to help him with the modest means at our disposal, I find faith again, and courage. Courage to lift you from despair. For you too, my friend, ought to. What was it that moved you so deeply? Memories? Dark days rising up before your mind’s eye? Is it some loved one, long dead, who holds your soul in thrall?”

  Then Matern speaks bit by bit. He sets building blocks one on another. But the building he has in mind isn’t the Danzig-Neugarten Courthouse with the Special Court on the fourth floor; rather, it is the thickset Church of St. Mary, which he erects Gothically, brick by brick. And in that acoustically superb vaulted church—cornerstone laid on March 28, 1343—a fat boy, supported by the main organ and the echo organ, sings a slender Credo. “Yes, I loved him. And they took him away from me. As a boy, I defended him with my fists, for we Materns, all my ancestors, Simon Materna, Gregor Materna, have always protected the weak. But the others were stronger, and I could only look on helplessly as terror broke that voice. Eddi, my Eddi! Since then a lot of things have broken inside me incurably: dissonance, ostracism, shards, fragments of myself, that can never be put together again.”

  At this point Fräulein Oelling disagrees and Herren Lüxenich and Petersen, sympathizing over sparkling Moselle, side with her: “Dear friend, it’s never too late. Time heals wounds. Music heals wounds. Faith heals wounds. Art heals wounds. Especially love heals wounds!” Omnistickum. Gum arabic. The glue with the iron grip. Spittle.

  Still incredulous, Matern is willing to make a try. At a late hour, when both gentlemen are beginning to doze over their Moselle, he offers Fräulein Gelling his strong arm and the powerful jaws of his dog Pluto as an escort home through the nocturnal Aachen. Since their path takes them into no park and past no riverside meadows, Matern sits Fräulein Oelling—she’s heavier than she sounded—down on a garbage can. She expresses no objection to offal and stench. Yes says she to the fermenting refuse, demanding only that love be stronger than the ugliness of this world: “Throw me, roll shove carry me wherever you please, into the gutter, into the foulest of places, down into cellars unspeakable; as long as it’s you who do the throwing, rolling, shoving, and carrying.” Of this there can be no doubt: she rides the garbage can but doesn’t make an inch of headway, because Matern, who had come to judge, is leaning against it three-legged; an uncomfortable position which only the desperate can profitably maintain for any length of time.

  This time—it isn’t raining snowing moonshining—someone besides God in His heaven is looking on: Pluto on four legs. He is guarding the garbage-can horse, the garbage-can equestrienne, the horse trainer, and a cello full of all-healing music.

  Matern spends six weeks in Fräulein Oelling’s care. He le
arns that her first name is Christine and that she doesn’t like to be called Christel. They live in her attic room, where it smells of environment, rosin, and gum arabic. This is rough on Herren Lüxenich and Petersen. The district magistrate and his friend have to do without their trios. Matern punishes a former special court judge by forcing him to practice duets from February to early April; and when Matern leaves Aachen with dog and three freshly ironed shirts—Cologne has called him and he responds—a district magistrate and a schoolteacher have to find many comforting, pieces-mending, and faith-restoring words, before Fräulein Oelling is in any condition to round out the trio with her well-nigh flawless cello playing.

  All music stops sooner or later, but the tiled men’s toilet in Cologne Central Station will never for all eternity stop whispering names that are incised in the inner organs of railway traveler Walter Matern: now he has to pay a visit to former Kreisleiter Sellke in Oldenburg. Suddenly he realizes how big Germany still is; for from Oldenburg, where there are still honest-to-goodness court barbers and court pastry cooks, he must hurry via Cologne to Munich. There, according to the station toilet, lives his good old friend Otto Warnke, with whom he has to wind up certain discussions begun long ago at the bar of the Kleinhammerpark. The city on the Isar proves a disappointment—two days are more than enough; but he becomes very familiar with the hills of the upper Weser, for in Witzenhausen, as Matern can’t help finding out in Cologne, Bruno Dulleck and Egon Dulleck, the so-called Dulleck brothers, have holed up. For a good two weeks, for all three soon run out of topics of conversation, he plays skat with them, after which he turns to further visitations. Next comes the city of Saarbrücken, where he enters the sphere of Willy Eggers, whom he tells about Jochen Sawatzki, Otto Warnke, Bruno and Egon Dulleck, all old friends: thanks to Matern, they are able to write each other postcards with greetings from buddies.