Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  And it took form: a pig’s bladder was to be had for nothing because the Lickfetts had just slaughtered. It provided the taut udder. The smoked skin of real eels was stuffed with straw and coiled wire, sewed up and attached to the pig’s bladder—upside down, so that the eels twined and twisted like thick hair and stood on their heads on the udder. The Gorgon’s head was raised over Karweise’s wheat on two forked sticks.

  And in his diary Amsel sketched the new scarecrow just as Karweise would buy it—later the tattered hide of a dead cow was thrown over the forked sticks like an overcoat. In the sketch it is overcoatless and more striking, a finished product with its own ragged hide.

  FIFTEENTH MORNING SHIFT

  Our friend the actor is creating difficulties. Whereas Brauxel and the young man write day after day—the one about Amsel’s diary, the other about and to his cousin—he has come down with a light case of January flu. Has to suspend operations, isn’t getting proper care, has always been kind of delicate at this time of year, begs leave once again to remind me of the promised advance. It’s been sent, my friend. Quarantine yourself, my friend; your manuscript will benefit by it. Oh sober joy of conscientious effort: There is a diary in which Amsel in beautiful newly learned Sütterlin script noted his expenses in connection with the fashioning of scarecrows for field and garden. The pig’s bladder was free. Kriwe procured the worthless cowhide for two sticks of chewing tobacco.

  On credit balance, what lovely round words: There is a diary in which Amsel, with figures plump and figures angular, entered his receipts from the sale of various scarecrows for garden and field—eels on udder netted him a whole gulden.

  Eduard Amsel kept this diary for about two years, drew lines vertical and horizontal, painted Sütterlin pointed, Sütterlin rich in loops, put down blueprints and color studies for various scarecrows, immortalized almost every scarecrow he had sold, and gave himself and his products marks in red ink. Later, as a high school student, he wrapped the several times folded little notebook in cracked black oilcloth, and years later, when he had to hurry from the city to the Vistula to bury his mother, found it in a chest used for a bench. The diary lay among the books left by his father, side by side with those about the battles and heroes of Prussia and underneath Otto Weininger’s thick volume, and had a dozen or more empty pages which Amsel later, under the names of Haseloff and Goldmouth, filled in with sententious utterances at irregular intervals separated by years of silence.

  Today Brauxel, whose books are kept by an office manager and seven clerks, owns the touching little notebook wrapped in scraps of oilcloth. Not that he uses the fragile original as a prop to his memory! It is stowed away in his safe along with contracts, securities, patents, and essential business secrets, while a photostatic copy of the diary lies between his well-filled ash tray and his cup of lukewarm morning coffee and serves him as work material. The first page of the notebook is wholly taken up by the sentence, more painted than written: “Scarecrows made and sold by Eduard Heinrich Amsel.”

  Underneath, undated and painted in smaller letters, a kind of motto: “Began at Easter because I shouldn’t forget anything. Kriwe said so the other day.”

  Brauksel holds that there isn’t much point in reproducing here the broad Island idiom written by Eduard Amsel as an eight-year-old schoolboy; in the present narrative it will be possible at most to record in direct discourse the charms of this language, which will soon die out with the refugees’ associations and once dead may prove to be of interest to science in very much the same way as Latin. Only when Amsel, his friend Walter, Kriwe, or Grandma Matern open their mouths in the Island dialect, will Brauchsel’s pen follow suit. But since in his opinion the value of the diary is to be sought, not in the schoolboy’s adventurous spelling but in his early and resolute efforts in behalf of scarecrow development, Eduard’s village schoolboy idiom will be reproduced only in a stylized form, halfway between the Island brogue and the literary language. For example: “Today after milking recieved anuther gulden for scarcro what stands on one legg and holds the uther croocked Wilhelm Ledwormer tuk it. Throo in a Ulan’s helmet and a peece of lining what uset to be a gote.”

  Brauksel will make a more serious attempt to describe the sketch that accompanies this entry: The scarecrow “what stands on one legg and holds the uther croocked” is not a preliminary study but was sketched after completion with all sorts of crayons, brown cinnabar lavender pea-green Prussian-blue, which, however, never reveal their tonality in pure strokes but are laid on in superimposed strata bearing witness to the transience of worn-out clothing. The actual construction sketch, tossed off in a few black lines and still fresh today, is startling when compared to this crayon drawing: the position “what stands on one legg…” is suggested by a slightly inclined ladder lacking two rungs; the position “and holds the uther croocked” must be that pole which tries to posture by inclining dancerlike at an angle of forty-five degrees to the middle of the ladder, while the ladder leans slightly to the left. Especially the construction sketch, but the ex post facto crayon drawing as well, suggested a dancer tightly clad in the late reflected splendor of a uniform worn by the musketeers of the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau Infantry Regiment at the battle of Liegnitz.

  To come right out with it: Amsel’s diary teems with uniformed scarecrows: here a grenadier of the Third Guards Battalion is storming Leuthen cemetery; the Poor Man of Toggenburg appears in the Itzenplitz Infantry Regiment; a Belling hussar capitulates at Maxen; blue and white Natzmer uhlans and Schorlem dragoons battle on foot; blue with red lining, a fusilier of the Baron de La Motte-Fouqué’s regiment lives on; in short, just about everybody who for seven years and even earlier had frequented the battlefields of Bohemia and Saxony, Silesia and Pomerania, had escaped at Mollwitz, lost his tobacco pouch at Katholisch-Hennersdorf, sworn allegiance to Fritz in Pirna, deserted to the enemy at Kolin, and achieved sudden fame at Rossbach, came to life under Amsel’s hands, though what it was their duty to disperse was no longer a motley Imperial Army, but the birds of the Vistula delta. Whereas Sevdlitz was under orders to chase Hildburghausen—”… voilà au moins mon martyre est fini…” —to the Main via Weimar, Erfurt, and Saalfeld, the peasants Lickfett, Mommsen, Beister, Folchert, and Karweise were quite satisfied if the scarecrows itemized in Amsel’s diary chased the birds of the Vistula delta from beardless Epp wheat to chestnut trees, willows, alders, and scrub pines.

  SIXTEENTH MORNING SHIFT

  He acknowledges by phone. The call, it goes without saying, is collect and goes on for a good seven minutes: the money has come, he’s beginning to feel better, the crisis is past, his flu is clearing up, tomorrow or at latest the day after he’ll be back at his typewriter; yes, unfortunately he has to write directly on the machine, for he is unable to read his own handwriting; but excellent ideas had come to him during his spell of flu… As though ideas fostered by fever ever looked like ideas when your temperature was back to normal. My actor friend doesn’t think so much of double-entry bookkeeping, even though Brauxel, after years of reckoning up scrupulous accounts, has helped him to achieve a scrupulous credit balance.

  It may be that Amsel learned the habit of bookkeeping not only from Kriwe’s log but also from his mother, who sat up into the wee hours moaning over her books while her gifted son learned by looking on: conceivably he helped her to order, to file, and to check her accounts.

  Despite the economic difficulties of the postwar years, Lottchen Amsel née Tiede managed to keep the firm of A. Amsel afloat and even to reorganize and expand the business—a risk her late husband would never have taken in times of crisis. She began to deal in cutters, some fresh from the Klawitter shipyard, others secondhand, which she had overhauled in Strohdeich, and in outboard motors. She sold the cutters or—as was more profitable—rented them to young fishermen who had just set up housekeeping.

  Although Eduard’s filial piety never permitted him to fashion even a remote likeness of his mother as a scarecrow, he had no inhibitions whatever
, from the age of seven on, about copying her business practices: if she rented out fishing cutters, he rented out extra-stable scarecrows, made expressly for rental. Several pages of the diary show how often and to whom scarecrows were rented. In a steep column Brauxel has added up roughly what they netted him with their scaring: a tidy little sum. Here we shall be able to mention only one rental scarecrow which, though the fees it commanded were nothing out of the ordinary, played an illuminating part in the plot of our story and consequently in the history of scarecrows.

  After the above-mentioned study of willows by the brook, after Amsel had built and sold a scarecrow featuring the milk-drinking eels motif, he devised a model revealing on the one hand the proportions of a three headed willow tree and on the other hand commemorating the spoon-swinging and teeth-grinding Grandmother Matern; it too left its trace in Amsel’s diary; but beside the preliminary sketch stood a brief sentence which distinguished this product from all its fellows: “Have to smash it up today, cause Kriwe says it just makes trouble.”

  Max Folchert, who had it in for the Matern family, had rented the scarecrow, half willow half grandmother, from Amsel and set it up beside the fence of his garden, which bordered the Stutthof highway and faced the Matern vegetable garden. It soon became evident that this rented scarecrow not only drove away birds, but also made horses shy and run off in a shower of sparks. Cows on the way to the barn dispersed as soon as the spoon-swinging willow cast its shadow. The bewildered farm animals were joined by poor Lorchen of the curly hair, who had her daily cross to bear with the real spoon-swinging grandmother. Now she was so terrified and beset by an additional grandmother, who to make matters worse had three heads and was disguised as a willow, that she would wander, frantically wind-blown and disheveled, through fields and scrub pines, over dunes and dikes, though house and garden, and might almost have tangled with the moving sails of the Matern windmill if Lorchen’s brother, miller Matern, hadn’t grabbed her by the apron. On Kriwe’s advice and against the will of old man Folchert, who afterward promptly demanded the refund of part of the rental fee, Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel destroyed the scarecrow during the night. Thus it was brought home to an artist for the first time that, when his works embodied a close enough study of nature, they had power not only over the birds of heaven, but over horses and cows as well and were also capable of disorganizing the tranquil rural gait of Lorchen, a human being. To this insight Amsel sacrificed one of his most successful scarecrows. Moreover, he never again took a willow tree for a model though he occasionally, in times of ground fog, found a niche in a hollow willow or deemed the thirsty eels on their way from the brook to the recumbent cows worthy of his attention. He avoided mating human and tree, and with self-imposed discipline limited his choice of models to the Island peasants, who, stolid and unoffending as they might be, were effective enough as scarecrows. He made the country folk, disguised as the King of Prussia’s grenadiers, fusiliers, corporals, standard bearers, and officers, hover over vegetable gardens, wheat, and rye. He quietly perfected his rental system and, though he never suffered the consequences, became guilty of bribery by persuading a conductor on the Island railway, with the help of carefully wrapped gifts, to transport Amsel’s rental scarecrows—or Prussian history put to profitable use—free of charge in the freight car of the narrow-gauge line.

  SEVENTEENTH MORNING SHIFT

  The actor is protesting. His waning flu, so he says, has not prevented him from carefully studying Brauxel’s work schedule, which has been sent to both coauthors. It doesn’t suit him that a monument should be erected to miller Matern in the course of this morning shift. Such a monument, he feels, is his affair. Brauksel, who fears for the cohesion of his literary consortium, has abandoned the sweeping portrait he was planning, but must insist on mirroring that aspect of the miller which had already cast its reflected splendor on Amsel’s diary.

  Though the eight-year-old was especially given to combing the battlefields of Prussia for ownerless uniforms, there was nonetheless a model, the above-mentioned miller Matern, who was portrayed directly, without Prussian trappings, but with his flour sack over his shoulder.

  The result was a lopsided scarecrow, because the miller was an extremely lopsided man. Because he carried his sacks of grain and flour over his right shoulder, this shoulder was a hand’s breadth broader, so that all who looked upon miller Matern full face had to fight down a strong temptation to seize the miller’s head in both hands and straighten it out. Since neither his work smock nor his Sunday clothes were made to order, every one of his jackets, smocks, or overcoats looked twisted, formed wrinkles around the neck, was too short in the right sleeve, and had permanently burst seams. He was always screwing up his right eye. On the same side of his face, even when there was no hundred weight sack bent over his right shoulder, something tugged the corner of his mouth upward. His nose went along with the movement. Finally—and this is why the present portrait is being drawn—his right ear, for many years subjected to the lateral pressure of thousands of hundredweight, lay creased and flattened against his head, while contrastingly his left ear protruded mightily in pursuit of its natural bent. Seen in front view, the miller had only one ear; but the ear that was missing or discernible only in relief was the more significant of the two.

  Though not in a class with poor Lorchen, the miller was not exactly made for this world. The gossip of several villages had it that Grandma Matern had corrected him too freely with her cooking spoon in his childhood. The worst of the Matern family’s oddities were traced back to Materna, the medieval robber and incendiary, who had ended up in the Stockturm with his companion in crime. The Mennonites, both rough and refined, exchanged winks, and Simon Beister, the rough, pocketless Mennonite, maintained that Catholicism had done the Materns no good, that there was certainly some Catholic deviltry in the way the brat, who was always prowling around with the tubby Amsel kid from over yonder, gnashed his teeth; and just take a look at their dog, eternal damnation could be no blacker. Yet miller Matern was of rather a gentle disposition and—like poor Lorchen—he had few if any enemies in the villages round about, though there were many who made fun of him.

  The miller’s ear—and when mention is made of the miller’s ear, it is always the right flattened one, pressed down by flour sacks, that is meant—the miller’s ear, then, is worth mentioning for two reasons: first, because in a scarecrow, the blue print of which found its way into his diary, Amsel daringly omitted it, and secondly, because this miller’s ear, though deaf to all ordinary sounds, such as coughing talking preaching, the singing of hymns, the tinkling of cowbells, the forging of horseshoes, the barking of dogs, the singing of birds, the chirping of crickets, was endowed with the most sensitive understanding for everything down to the slightest whispers, murmurs, and hush-hush revelations that transpired inside a sack of grain or flour. Whether beardless wheat or the bearded variety that was seldom grown on the Island; whether threshed from tough or brittle ears; whether in tended for brewing, for baking, for the making of semolina, noodles, or starch, whether vitreous, semivitreous, or mealy, the miller’s otherwise deaf ear had the faculty of distinguishing exactly what percentage of vetch seed and mildewed or even sprouting grain it contained. It could also identify a sample, sight unseen, as pale-yellow Frankenstein, varicolored Kujave, reddish Probstein, red flower wheat, which grown in loamy soil yields a good brewer’s mash, English club wheat, or as either of two varieties that were grown experimentally on the Island, Urtoba, a hard Siberian winter variety, and Schliephacke’s white wheat, No. 5.

  The miller’s otherwise deaf ear was even more clairaudient when it came to flour. While as an earwitness he was able to tell how many wheat beetles, including pupas and doodle bugs, how many ichneumon flies and flour beetles resided in it, he was able with his ear to the sack to indicate the exact number of mealworms—Tenebrio molitor—present in a hundredweight of wheat flour. Moreover—and this is in deed astonishing—he knew, thanks to his flat ear, either ins
tantly or after some minutes of clairaudient listening, how many dead mealworms the living mealworms in a sack had to deplore, because as he slyly revealed with puckered right eye, right corner of his mouth upward and nose acceding to the movement, the sound made by living worms indicated the number of their dead.