Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  But the several times admonished smoker expresses, as though in passing, the opinion that his constant smoking is not the cause of his chronic hoarseness, but that, thinking much further back, to a time when he was still a nonsmoker submitting to athletic discipline, something, a certain some one, had roughed up his vocal cords: “Hm, you surely remember. It happened early in January.”

  But strenuously as Matern swirls the remnant of beer in his glass, he can’t seem to remember: “What am I supposed to? Are you trying to pull? But joking aside, you really ought to cut out the chain smoking. You won’t have any voice left. Waiter, the check. Where do we go now?”

  This time Goldmouth pays for everything, including the blood sausage for the newly found dog. Obviously their legs need no more stretching. A stone’s throw up Augsburger. Scenes of welcome in the springtime air that has a hard time preserving its balminess against the curry vapors of nearby snack bars. Unaccompanied ladies are glad to see him, but not obtrusive: “Goldmouth here, Goldmouth there!” And the same song and dance at Paul’s Taproom, where they sit on bar stools, because the circular sofa around the big table is fully occupied: trucking men with ladies and interminable stories which even Goldmouth’s feted arrival can interrupt only briefly, and that because they feel obliged to say some thing about the dog. “Mine—sit, Hasso—is a good ten years old.” Dog talk and curiosity: “That’s a purebred. Where’d you get him?” As if the dog belonged not to Matern but to this smoker who, rising above all the questions, gives the order: “Hey, Hannchen. A beer for the gentleman. For me the usual. And a schnapps too for the gentleman, if it’s all right.”

  It’s all right. So long as he doesn’t mix his drinks. Better be careful, keep a clear head and a steady hand in case of trouble. You never can tell.

  Matern’s refreshments are served. Goldmouth sucks the usual with a straw. The newly found dog, described as a purebred by one of the trucking men, receives a hard-boiled egg, which Hannchen in person peels for him behind the counter. A free and easy atmosphere: questions, answers, and some what ambiguous remarks are exchanged between tables. A three-lady table near the ventilator is curious to know whether Goldmouth is in town for business or pleasure. The round table—against a background adorned with photographs of wrestlers and boxers waiting, most of them at the vertical, for the next full nelson or left hook—inquires, without so much as a lull in its internal conversation, how Goldmouth’s business is doing. Trouble with the Internal Revenue Service is mentioned. Goldmouth complains of slow deliveries. The circular sofa counters: “What would you expect, with your export orders?” Hannchen wants to know how his love life is prospering. A question which was already asked by the bustling Zoological Gardens Station and which in both cases Goldmouth answers with a suggestive smoke line in the air.

  But here again, in this pub, where everybody is in the know except for the hick Matern, the smoker insists on flipping his cigarette butts behind him every time Matern pushes up the ash tray: “Some manners you have, I must say. Oh well, these people are used to your routine. Why don’t you try a filter for a change? Or try to fight it off with chewing gum? It’s sheer nervousness. And that throat of yours. It’s none of my business. But if I were you, I’d cut it out completely for two weeks. I’m really worried.”

  Goldmouth is pleased to hear Matern’s concern expressed so prolixly. Though it keeps reminding him that his chronic hoarseness doesn’t come from immoderate smoking, but can be dated with precision: “One January afternoon, years ago. You surely remember, my dear Matern. There was a lot of snow on the ground.”

  Matern counters that there’s usually a lot of snow on the ground in January, that all this is a silly subterfuge to distract attention from his cigarette consumption, because the root of his throat trouble is coffin nails and not any perfectly normal winter cold he caught many years ago.

  The next round is stood by the trucking men, whereupon Matern feels called upon to order seven slugs of gin—“because where it comes from is where I come from”—for the occupants of the round table. “From Nickelswalde, and Tiegenhof was our county seat.” But despite rising spirits, Goldmouth, Matern, and newly found dog gather little moss at Paul’s Taproom. Despite urgent pleas to hang around from the three-lady table—whose occupants change frequently—from the social stability of the trucking men’s table, and from the universally popular Hannchen: “You’re always dropping in for half a second; and you haven’t told us a story in ages”—the gentlemen prefer to ask for the check, which doesn’t mean that Goldmouth—he’s already standing by the ventilator with Matern and dog—has no story up his sleeve.

  “Tell us about the ballets you used to put on.”

  “Or when you were a so-called cultural-affairs officer in the occupation.”

  “The one about the worms is good too.”

  But this time Goldmouth’s mood is running in a very different direction. Facing the round table, grazing the three-lady table, and taking in Hannchen, he hoarsely whispers words which the trucking men, nodding weightily weightily, load up.

  “Just a very short story, because we’re all so cozy here together. Once upon a time there were two little boys. One of them, out of friendship, gave the other a lovely pocketknife. With this gift the other boy did all sorts of things, and once, with that very same pocketknife, he scored his own arm and the arm of his friend whom friendship had made generous. And so the two little boys became blood brothers. But one day when the boy to whom the pocketknife had been given wanted to throw a stone in the river, but found no stone for throwingintheriver, he threw the pocketknife in the river. And it was gone forever.”

  The story makes Matern pensive. They’re out in the street again: up Augsburger, across Nürnberger. The smoker is on the point of turning right to pay a visit to Rankestrasse and somebody he calls Prince Alexander, when he notices Matern’s somber thoughtfulness and decides that he himself, Matern, and the newly found dog need a little exercise: up Fuggerstrasse, across Nollendorfplatz, and then to the left down Bülowstrasse.

  “See here.” That’s Matern. “That story about the pocket-knife sounds mighty familiar to me.”

  “That’s perfectly natural, my friend,” Goldmouth croaks. “It’s a story out of a German schoolbook, so to speak. Every body knows it. Even the men at the round table nodded in the right places, because they knew the story.”

  Matern suspects there’s something behind all this and bores deep holes that are meant to get to the bottom of the enigma: “And what about the symbolism of it?”

  “Nonsense! A common ordinary story. Just think, my good friend: two boys, a pocketknife, and a river. That’s a story you can find in every German schoolbook. Edifying and easy to remember.”

  Even though the story oppresses him less since he has decided to call it symbolic, Matern can’t help arguing some more: “You very much overestimate the quality of German schoolbooks. Still the same old rubbish as before. Nothing to enlighten the young people about the past and all that. Lies! Nothing but lies!”

  Goldmouth smiles all around his cigarette: “My dear good friend, my story, too, though extremely edifying and easy to remember, is a lie. Just look. The end of my fable goes: The boy threw the pocketknife in the river. And it was gone forever—But what have I here? Examine it closely. It’s lost its sparkle after all these years. Well, what do you say?”

  In the flat of his hand lies, as though conjured out of the air, a rusty pocketknife. The street lamp, under which Matern, the dog, and Goldmouth are standing, bends over the object: used to have three blades, a corkscrew, a saw, and a leather punch.

  “And you think it’s the same one as in your story?”

  Gaily and always glad to do tricks with his ebony cane, Goldmouth replies in the affirmative: “That’s the pocket-knife out of my lying schoolbook story. You really oughtn’t to make derogatory remarks about German schoolbooks. They’re not so bad. If they mostly omit the point, as in the case of the knife that was found again, it’s beca
use the truth is too unbearable and might be harmful to a child’s innocent mind. But German schoolbooks smell good, the stories are edifying and easy to remember.”

  Already the Hermitage is opening its arms to the trio, already Goldmouth is about to give the recovered pocketknife back to the air, his spacious prop room, already the hasty imagination sees the trio standing at the bar or sitting in the Green Room, already the Hermitage is snapping its jaws at them with no intention of disgorging them before dawn—for none of the bars around the Church of the Apostles has a stomach better able to hold its guests—when a magnanimous mood carries the smoker away.

  As they cross the street and, turning off to the right, succumb to the compulsion of Potsdamer Strasse, Goldmouth’s gift-endowment-bequest is formulated: “Listen, my dear friend: the night—almost cloudless and extravagantly supplied with moonlight—has put me in a generous mood: take it. Of course we’re neither of us boys any more, and with rusty blades such as these it would be dangerous to score arms, to swear blood brotherhood, but take it just the same. It comes from the heart.”

  Late in the night—the month of May has populated all the drives and cemeteries, the Tiergarten and Kleist Park—Matern, who has already acquired a rejuvenated dog, receives a present of a heavy and, as he soon discovers, unopenable pocketknife. He thanks Goldmouth kindly but in return, as it were, can’t refrain from expressing his sincere concern over Goldmouth’s extreme hoarseness: “As a favor to me. I’m not a monster and I won’t ask the impossible, but couldn’t you skip every third cigarette? I’ve only known you a few hours, but even so. Maybe you think I should mind my own business. But I’m really worried.”

  What good can it do for the smoker to keep harping on the true source of his chronic hoarseness, that January frost which suddenly turned to a thaw; Matern continues to put the blame on cigarettes, which Goldmouth persists in terming harmless and a vital necessity: “Not tonight, my dear friend. Your company stimulates me. But tomorrow, yes tomorrow, we shall live abstinently. And so, let us stop in here. I have to admit that a hot lemonade would do me and my throat good. Here, this wooden shed, temporary premises to be sure, will be glad to receive us and the dog. You shall have your beer and your petits verres; to me the usual will be served; and our good Pluto will be fed meatballs or weenies, hard-boiled eggs or a cutlet in aspic—ah, the world is so rich!”

  What a set! In the background menaces the Sports Palace, a barn whose wheat was threshed years before; the foreground is occupied, with gaps in between, by wooden booths employed for various trades. One promises bargains. The second, amid undying curry aroma, provides shashlik and fried sausages. In the third, ladies can have ladders in their stockings picked up at any hour of the day. The fourth booth awakens hope of tombola winnings. And the seventh shed, hammered together from remnants of other sheds and bearing the name of Chez Jenny, will provide the trio with their next environment.

  But before they go in, a question jells within Matern, a question that doesn’t want to emerge in the seventh shanty, but to unfold in the balmy spring air: “Tell me this: This knife—it’s mine now—where’d you get it? Because I can’t really believe it’s the same one as the little boy—the one in the story, I mean—is supposed to have thrown in the river.”

  Already the smoker has hooked the ivory crook of his cane into the door handle—he has opened the doors of all the joints in this way: Anna Helene Barfuss’ place, Lauffersberger’s White Moor, Paul’s Taproom, and the Billow Hermitage almost—already Jenny, the proprietress of the place that is not called Chez Jenny for nothing, is anticipating the arrival of new customers—she suspects who is coming and is starting to squeeze lemons—when Goldmouth’s sandpapered vocal cords bring forth words of explanation: “Try to follow me, my good friend. We have been talking about a pocket-knife. In the beginning every pocketknife is new. Then every pocketknife is used for what it is and ought to be, or it is alienated from its proper function and utilized as a paper weight, a counterweight, or—for lack of stone missiles—as a missile. Every pocketknife gets lost someday. It is stolen, forgotten, confiscated, or thrown away. Now, half of all the existing pocketknives in this world are found knives. These in turn may be be subdivided into common and preferred pocketknives. It is undoubtedly to the preferred class that we must assign the one I found in order to return it to you, its original owner. Or would you, here on the corner of Pallasstrasse and Potsdamer, here in the presence of the historical and actual Sports Palace, here, before this shed engulfs us, claim you never owned one, secondly that you never lost one, forgot one, or threw one away, and finally, that you haven’t just recovered one?—And believe me, I had my troubles arranging this little reunion. My schoolbook story says: The pocketknife fell into a river and was gone forever. Forever is a lie. For there are fish that eat pocket-knives and end, made manifest, on a kitchen table; what’s more, there are dredges which bring everything to light, including pocketknives that have been thrown away; in addition there is chance, but that doesn’t enter into the present case.—For years, just to give you an idea of the pains I’ve taken, for years and shunning no expense, I sent in petition after petition, I went so far as to bribe high officials of various flood-control commissions. Finally, and thanks to the complaisance of Polish officialdom, I obtained the desired permit: in the Vistula estuary—for as you and I know, the knife was thrown into the Vistula—a dredge, put to work especially for me by a high-level bureau in Warsaw, brought the object to light approximately where it had taken leave of the light in March or April 1926: between the villages of Nickelswalde Schiewenhorst, but nearer the Nickelswalde dike. No doubt was possible. And to think that I’d been having the Gulf of Bothnia and the southern coast of Sweden dredged for years, that the alluvial deposits off Hela Peninsula had been dug over any number of times at my expense and under my supervision. And so, to wind up our discussion of lost and found objects, there seems to be every reason to conclude that it’s absurd to throw pocketknives into rivers. Every river gives back pocketknives without asking anything in return. And not only pocketknives! It was equally silly to sink the so-called Hoard of the Nibelungs in the Rhine. For if someone should come along who is seriously interested in the treasures hoarded by that restless race—as I, for instance, was in the fate of the pocketknife—the Hoard of the Nibelungs would come to light and, unlike the pocketknife whose rightful owner is still in the land of the living, find its way to a provincial museum.—But enough of this chatting in doorways. Don’t thank me! Just bear with me and accept a little piece of advice: take better care of your newly found property. Don’t throw it in the Spree as you once threw it in the Vistula; although the Spree surrenders pocketknives with less resistance than the Vistula, where you grew up—your accent still shows it.”

  And once more Matern stands at a bar, with dog at heel, anchored to a beer glass on the left and a double-decker schnapps on the right. While he ponders: How does he know all this, where did he… Goldmouth and the woman in charge of the otherwise empty bar play out a reunion scene, in which titles such as “Jennyofmyheart,” “Jennymyconsolation,” “dearest Jenny,” show that the withered person behind the bar means more to Goldmouth than four plank walls can hold. While the faded spinster in the limp knitted jacket is squeezing the juice from lemon halves, Matern is told that this Jenny is among other things a silver Jenny and a Snow Queen to boot: “But we won’t call her Angustri, though it’s her real name, because that puts her in a melancholy frame of mind and reminds her of Bidandengero, in case you’ve heard of him.”

  Matern, who in his innermost soul is still arguing with the pocketknife, refuses to burden his memory with unpronounceable Gypsy names and to appraise a silver ring that has been worn thin. As far as he is concerned, this fulsomely praised Jenny—a single glance is enough—is some shopworn dancing girl; an acute observation that is confirmed by the decor of the shanty: while Paul’s Taproom is graced with the photographs of flatnosed boxers and wrestlers, Jenny has decorated her joint wi
th a corps de ballet of dance-worn ballet slippers: from the low ceiling they dangle pale-pink, once-silvery, and Swan Lake-white. Of course there are also pictures of various Giselles. With well-informed finger Goldmouth points to attitudes and arabesques: “That’s la Deege at the lower left. Always lyrical, always lyrical. There’s Svea Köller, la Skorik, Maria Fris in her first big part, as Dulcinea. And there, next to the ill-starred Leclerq, our Jenny Angustri with her partner Marcel, whose real name in those days, when Jenny was dancing the gardener’s daughter, was just plain Fenchel.”

  A dancers’ hangout. After the show you drop in for a moment Chez Jenny, and if you’re in luck you’ll meet little Bredow or Reinholm, the Vesco sisters, Klauschen Geitel, or Rama the ballet photographer, who has retouched most of the photographs here displayed, for no neck must show strain and every instep wants to be the highest.

  Ah, what ambition and ephemeral beauty these ballet slippers have danced away! And now the place, for all its tap beer, in spite of Mampe’s Schnapps and Stobbe’s Juniper, persists in smelling of chalk, sweat, and sour jersey. And that careworn goat face behind the bar, which, Goldmouth claims, is capable of making him the best and most soothing hot lemonade in the world. Even now, after the first greedy gulps, so the smoker assures us in his enthusiasm, relief is suffusing his throat, and his voice—as a boy, he informs me, he was able to sing steeple-high—is beginning to remember the most high-climbing of Mozart arias, and soon—only a few more glasses of Jennyhot Jennylemonade—he’ll be able to awaken the angel within him and let him sing for joy.