by Günter Grass
In the orderly room of the police kennels we had to wait. Lieutenant Mirchau wore his very straight part on the left side. Lieutenant Mirchau exchanged such words with my father as a carpenter exchanges with a police lieutenant when they are seated in a room for a short while. Then Mirchau lowered his head. His part moved back and forth over his work—he was probably looking through reports. The room had two windows to the left and right of the door. The drilling police dogs would have been visible if the windows hadn’t been painted opaque except for the upper third. On the white washed wall across from the window front hung two dozen photographs in narrow black frames. All were of the same format; in two pyramidal groups—six photographs at the bottom, then four, and at the top two—they flanked a picture of large upright format, which though broader was also framed in black. Each of the twenty-four of the pyramidally ordered photographs represented a shepherd heeling for a policeman. The large ceremoniously flanked picture presented the face of an elderly man in a spiked helmet, with tired eyes under heavy eyelids. Much too loudly I asked the man’s name. Lieutenant Mirchau replied, without raising head or part, that this was a picture of the Reichspräsident, and that the signature at the bottom had been affixed by the old gentleman in person. There were also ink tracks crowded in under the photographs of dogs and policemen: probably the names of the dogs, references to their pedigrees, the names and ranks of the policemen, possibly, since these were obviously police dogs, allusions to actions performed in line of duty by the dogs and dog-leading policemen, for instance, the names of the burglars, smugglers, and murderers who had been apprehended with the help of the dog in question.
Behind the desk and Lieutenant Mirchau’s back hung, again symmetrically echeloned, six framed and glassed paper rectangles, illegible from where I was sitting. To judge by the type and sizes of the lettering, they must have been certificates in Gothic print with gold embossing, seals, and raised stamps. Probably dogs, who had served with the police, who had been drilled in the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police kennels, had won first, second, or even third prize at interregional police dog meets. On the desk, to the right of the inclined part, slowly moving back and forth over the lieutenant’s work, stood in tense posture a bronze, or perhaps only plaster shepherd about the height of a dachshund, who, as any dog fancier could see at a glance, was cow-hocked and let his croup, to the onset of the tail, slope much too steeply.
Despite all this emphasis on cynology, the orderly room of the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police kennels didn’t smell of dogs, but rather of lime; for the room had been freshly whitewashed—and the six or seven potted dwarf lindens that adorned both window sills gave off a dry acrid smell: my father was obliged to sneeze loudly several times, which embarrassed me.
After a good half hour Harras was brought back. He didn’t look any different. My father received twenty-five gulden of stud money and the bright-blue stud certificate, the text of which indicated the circumstances of the covering, such as the male’s immediate readiness to mate, and the numbers of two entries in the studbook. To help me preserve it in my memory to this day, Lieutenant Mirchau spat into a white-enameled spittoon, which stood by the left hind leg of his desk, and said they would send word whether it had taken. If the desired result should materialize, he would see to it that the balance of the stud fee was sent as usual.
Harras had his muzzle on again, my father had put away the stud certificate and the five five-gulden pieces, we were already on our way to the door when Mirchau resurfaced from his reports: “You’ve got to keep that animal more in check. His habits on the leash are deplorable. His pedigree makes it quite clear that the animal came from Lithuania three generations back. Suddenly, from one day to the next, a mutation can set in. We’ve seen all sorts of things. More over, breeder Matern should have had the mating of the bitch Senta of Queen Louise’s mill with the stud dog Pluto supervised and confirmed by the local dog club in Neuteich.” He shot a finger at me: “And don’t leave the dog with children too often. He shows signs of reverting to wildness. It’s all the same to us, but you’ll have trouble later on.”
It wasn’t you,
but me the lieutenant’s finger was aimed at. But it was you who demoralized Harras.
Tulla, skinny bony. Through the cracks in every fence. Under the stairs a tangle; a tangle down the banister.
Tulla’s face, in which the overly large, usually crusted nostrils—she talked through her nose—outweighed everything, even the narrow-set eyes, in importance.
Tulla’s scraped, scab-forming, healing, newly scraped knees.
Tulla’s aroma of bone glue, her carpenter’s glue dolls and her wigs of wood shavings, which one of the carpenters had to plane specially for her from long boards.
Tulla could do what she liked with Harras; and she did with Harras everything that entered her head. Our dog and her deaf-mute brother were for a long time her real retinue, whereas I, who wanted passionately to belong, was always just tagging around after the three of them, and yet obliged to do my breathing at a distance from Tulla’s aroma of bone glue when I finally caught up with them by the Striessbach, on Aktien Pond, on the Frobelwiese, in the coconut pile of the Amada margarine factory, or in the police trenches; for when my cousin had wheedled my father long enough—which Tulla was very good at doing—Harras was allowed to go along. Tulla led our Harras to Oliva Forest, to Saspe and across the sewage fields, through the lumber yards behind the New City or to the Brösen pier, until the deaf-mute Konrad drowned while swimming.
Tulla screamed for five hours,
then played deaf and dumb. For two days, until Konrad lay beneath the ground in the Consolidated Cemeteries beside Hindenburgallee, she lay stiff in bed, beside the bed, under the bed, tried to waste away completely, and on the fourth day after Konrad’s death moved into the kennel by the front wall of the lumber and plywood shed, which was properly intended only for Harras.
But it turned out that both found room in the kennel. They lay side by side. Or Tulla lay alone in the kennel and Harras lay across the entrance. This never went on for long, then they were back again, lying flank to flank in the kennel. When it became necessary to bark and growl briefly at a delivery man, bringing door frames or blades for the buzz saw, Harras left the kennel; and when he was drawn to his dinner plate or drinking bowl, Harras left Tulla for a short while, only to push hurriedly and backwards—for in the cramped kennel he had difficulty in turning around—back into the warm hole. He let his superimposed paws, she her thin braids tied up in string, hang out over the threshold of the kennel. Either the sun shone on the tar paper of the kennel roof or they heard the rain on the tar-paper roof; or they didn’t hear the rain, heard perhaps the lathe, the finishing machine, the booming planing machine, and the agitated, tranquillized, freshly and more furiously agitated buzz saw, which went its arduous ways even when the rain was beating down on the yard, forming always the same puddles.
They lay on shavings. On the first day my father came out, and Dreesen the machinist, who called my father by his first name and vice versa after work hours. August Pokriefke came out in wooden shoes. Erna Pokriefke came out in felt slippers. My mother didn’t come out. They all said: “Now come on out of there and get up and stop that.” But Tulla didn’t come out, didn’t get up, and didn’t stop. Anyone at tempting to set foot in the vicinity of the kennel quailed after the first step; for the kennel—and Harras had no need to take one paw off the other—emitted a growling that meant something. Born Koshnavians, long-time residents of Langfuhr, the tenants of the two-and-a-half-room apartments exchanged the opinion from floor to floor: “She’ll come when she’s had enough and when she sees she can’t bring little Konrad back to life by going on that way.”
But Tulla didn’t see,
didn’t come out, and didn’t have enough on the evening of her first dog-kennel day. Two lay on wood shavings. They were renewed every day. August Pokriefke had been doing that for years; and Harras attached importance to the renewal of the shavings.
Consequently, of all those who were concerned over Tulla, only old man Pokriefke was allowed to approach the kennel with a basket of crisp shavings. In addition he had a broom and shovel wedged under his arm. As soon as August Pokriefke came padding along thus laden, Harras left the kennel unasked, tugged a little, then harder at Tulla’s dress, until she dragged herself out into the daylight and crouched down beside the kennel. As she crouched, her eyes, quite sightless, rolled back so that only the whites shimmered; with “bashed-in windows,” she passed water. Not defiantly, indifferently would be more accurate, she waited until August Pokriefke had renewed the shavings and come out with the little speech that was bound to occur to him as a father: “Come on up now. You’re still on vacation now, but pretty soon you’ll have to go to school. D’you think you’re the only one? D’you think we didn’t love the boy? And don’t act like you was nuts. They’ll come and get you and put you in an institution where they swat you from morning to night. They’ll think you’re crazy. So come up now. It’ll be dark soon. Mama’s making potato pancakes. Come along now or they’ll take you away.”
Tulla’s first dog-kennel day ended like this:
she stayed in the kennel. August Pokriefke took Harras off the chain. With different keys he locked the lumber shed, the plywood shed, the machine room, and the office where the varnishes and frames, the saw blades and the cakes of bone glue were kept, left the yard, also locked the door to the yard; and no sooner had he locked up than it grew darker and darker. It grew so dark that I, looking out between the curtains of our kitchen window, could no longer distinguish the tar paper of the dog kennel from the ordinarily lighter front wall of the lumber shed.
On the second dog-kennel day,
a Tuesday, Harras no longer had to tug when August Pokriefke wanted to renew the shavings. Tulla began to take food, that is, she ate with Harras out of his dish, after Harras had dragged a boneless chunk of dog meat into the kennel and whetted her appetite by nuzzling the meat with his cold nose.
Now this dog meat really wasn’t bad. Usually it was stringy cow meat and was cooked in large quantities on our kitchen stove, always in the same rust-brown enamel pot. We had all of us, Tulla and her brothers and myself as well, eaten this meat in our bare hands, without bread to push it down. It tasted best when cold and hard. We cut it into cubes with our pocketknives. It was cooked twice a week and was compact, gray-brown, traversed by pale-blue little veins, sinews, and sweating strips of fat. It smelled sweetish soapy forbidden. Long after gulping down the marbled cubes of meat—often while playing we had both pockets full of them—our palates were still deadened and tallowy. We even spoke differently when we had eaten of those meat cubes: our speech became palatal metamorphosed four-legged: we barked at each other. We preferred this dish to many that were served at the family board. We called it dog meat. When it wasn’t cow meat, it was never anything worse than horse meat or the mutton from a forced slaughtering. My mother threw coarse-grained salt—a handful—into the enamel pot, piled up the foot-long tatters of meat in the boiling salt water, let the water boil up again for a moment, put in marjoram, because marjoram is supposed to be good for a dog’s sense of smell, turned the gas down, covered the pot, and didn’t touch it for a whole hour; for that was the time required by cow-horse-sheep meat to turn into the dog meat which Harras and we ate and which, thanks to the marjoram cooked with it, provided us all, Harras and the rest of us, with sensitive olfactories. It was a Koshnavian recipe. Between Osterwick and Schlangenthin they said: Marjoram is good for your looks. Marjoram makes money go further. Against Devil and hell strew marjoram over the threshold. The squat long haired Koshnavian sheep dogs were celebrated for their marjoram-favored keenness of smell.
Rarely, when there was no meat displayed on the low-price counter, the pot was filled with innards: knotted fatty beef hearts, pissy, because unsoaked, pig’s kidneys, also small lamb kidneys which my mother had to detach from a finger-thick coat of fat lined with crackling parchment: the kidneys went into the dog pot, the suet was rendered in a cast-iron frying pan and used in the family cooking, because mutton suet wards off tuberculosis. Sometimes, too, a piece of dark spleen, halfway between purple and violet, went into the pot, or a chunk of sinewy beef liver. But because lung took longer to cook, required a larger cooking pot, and when you come right down to it doesn’t yield much meat, it almost never went into the enamel pot, in actual fact only during the occasional summer meat shortages brought on by the cattle plague that sometimes came to Kashubia as well as Koshnavia. We never ate the boiled innards. Only Tulla, unbeknownst to the grownups, but before our eyes as we looked on with a tightening of the throat, took long avid gulps of the brownish-gray broth in which the coagulated excretion of the kidneys floated sleetlike and mingled with blackish marjoram to form islands.
On the fourth dog-kennel day
—on the advice of the neighbors and of the doctor who came in when there was an accident in the shop, Tulla was given her way—I brought her—no one was up yet, even the machinist, who was always first at work, hadn’t arrived yet—a bowlful of heart, kidney, spleen, and liver broth. The broth in the bowl was cold, for Tulla preferred to drink her broth cold. A layer of fat, a mixture of beef tallow and mutton tallow, covered the bowl like an icecap. The cloudy liquid emerged only at the edges, and drops of it rolled over the layer of tallow. I tiptoed cautiously in my pajamas. I had taken the key to the yard from the big key rack without jangling the other keys. Very early and very late all staircases creak. On the flat roof of the woodshed the sparrows were starting up. In the kennel no sign of life. But varicolored flies on tar paper already touched by slanting sun. I ventured as far as the semicircular earthworks and foot-deep ditch which marked the range of the dog’s chain. Inside the kennel: peace, darkness, and not a single varicolored fly. Then there awakened in the darkness: Tulla’s hair mixed with shavings. Harras held his head on his paws. Lips pressed tight. Ears scarcely playing, but playing. Several times I called, but there was sleep in my throat and I didn’t do very well, swallowed, and called louder: “Tulla!” I also stated my name: “It’s Harry and I’ve brought you something.” I tried to lure her with the broth in the bowl, attempted lip-smacking sounds, whistled softly and hissingly, as though trying to lure not Tulla but Harras to the edge of the semicircle.
When there was no life or sign of life but flies, a little oblique sun, and sparrow chatter, at the most dog ears—and once Harras yawned at length but kept his eyes shut—I set down the bowl at the edge of the semicircle, or more precisely, in the ditch dug by the dog’s forepaws, left it, and without turning went back into the house. Behind my back: sparrows, varicolored flies, climbing sun, and the kennel.
The machinist was just pushing his bicycle through the passage. He asked, but I didn’t answer. In our apartment the windows were still shuttered. My father’s sleep was peaceful, confident in the alarm clock. I pushed a stool up to the kitchen window, grabbed a big chunk of dry bread and the pot of plum butter, pushed the curtains to left and right, dipped the bread into the plum butter, and was already gnawing and tugging when Tulla crawled out of the kennel. Even when Tulla had the threshold of the kennel behind her, she stayed on all fours, shook herself limply, shed wood shavings, crawled sluggish and wobbly toward the semicircle described by the dog’s chain, reached ditch and earthworks right next to the door to plywood shed, hove to with a sharp twist of the hips, shook off more shavings—her light blue cotton dress was gradually developing blue and white checks—yawned in the direction of the yard—there in the shade, only his cap struck by the oblique rays of the sun, stood the machinist beside his bicycle, rolling himself a cigarette and looking toward the kennel; while I with bread and plum butter looked down on Tulla, ignored the kennel, and aimed only at her, her and her back. And Tulla with sluggish sleepy movements crawled along the semicircle, letting her head and matted hair hang down, and stopped only, but still behind lowered head, when she reached the glazed brown earthenware bowl, whose contents we
re covered by an unbroken layer of tallow.
As long as I upstairs forgot to chew, as long as the machinist, whose cap was growing more and more into the sun, used both hands to light his conical handmade cigarette—three times his lighter failed to light—Tulla held her face rigid against the sand, then turned slowly but again from the hips, without raising her head with its hair and shavings. When her face was over the bowl and would have been mirrored if the layer of tallow had been a round pocket mirror, all movement was suspended. And I too, up above, was still not chewing. Almost imperceptibly Tulla’s weight was shifted from two supporting arms to her left supporting arm, until seen from the kitchen window her left open palm disappeared under her body. And then, though I couldn’t see her free arm coming, she had her right hand on the basin, while I dipped my chunk of bread in the plum butter.
The machinist smoked rhythmically and let his cigarette cling to his lower lip as he blew out smoke till the still-horizontal sun struck it. Strained with propping, Tulla’s left shoulder blade stretched the blue-and-white gingham of her dress. Harras, head on paws, raised his eyelids one more slowly than the other and looked toward Tulla: she extended the little finger of her right hand; he slowly and successively lowered his lids. Now, because the sun disclosed the dog’s ears, flies flared up and were extinguished in the kennel.
