Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Tulla and I were witnesses

  as Eddi Amsel succeeded in taking off a few pounds, a loss which, apart from us, was observed only by Jenny Brunies, the little dumpling who had meanwhile turned ten. She too noticed that Amsel’s gelatinous chin was turning into a firm, full-rounded pediment. His chest too lost its tremulous teats and, as his thorax filled out, slipped back into low relief. Yet quite conceivably Eddi Amsel didn’t lost a single pound, but only distributed his fat more evenly, his athletically developed muscles lending athletic structure to his previously structureless layer of fat. His torso, formerly a shapeless sack stuffed with down, took on the contours of a barrel. He began to look like a Chinese idol or the tutelary deity of all faustball players. No, Eddie Amsel didn’t lose so much as half a pound while playing center; it seems more likely that he gained two and a half pounds; but he sublimated the gain after the manner of an athlete: to what speculations the relativity of a man’s weight will lend itself!

  In any event Amsel’s juggling with his hundred and ninety-eight pounds, in which no one would have discerned his two hundred and three pounds, may have moved Dr. Brunies to prescribe physical exercise for his doll-like Jenny as well. Dr. Brunies and Felsner-Imbs the piano teacher decided to send Jenny to a ballet school three times a week. In the suburb of Oliva there was a street named Rosengasse, which began at the market and zigzagged its way into Oliva Forest. On it stood a modest early-nineteenth-century villa, to whose sand-yellow stucco clung, half concealed by red-blowing hawthorn, the enamel sign of the ballet school. Like Amsel’s admission to the Young Prussia Athletic Club, Jenny’s admission to the ballet school was obtained through pull: for many years Felix Felsner-Imbs had been the ballet school pianist. No one was so expert at accompanying bar exercises: Every demi-plié, from the first to the fifth position, hearkened to his adagio. He sprinkled the port de bras. His exemplary rhythm for battement dégagé and his sweat-raising rhythm for the petits battements sur le cou-de-pied. Besides, he had millions of stories. One had the impression that he had seen Marius Petipa and Preobrajenska, the tragic Nijinsky and the miraculous Massine, Fanny Elssler and la Barbarina all dance simultaneously and in person. No one doubted that this was an eyewitness to historical performances: thus he must have been present when, in the early-romantic days of the last century, la Taglioni, la Grisi, Fanny Cerito, and Lucile Grahn danced the famous Grand Pas de Quatre and were showered with roses. He had had difficulty in obtaining a seat on Olympus for the first performance of the ballet Coppélia. It went without saying that so accomplished a ballet pianist was able to render the scores of the entire repertory, from the melancholy Giselle to the evanescent Sylphides, on the piano; and on his recommendation Madame Lara began to make an Ulanova of Jenny.

  It was not long before Eddi Amsel became a persevering onlooker. Sitting by the piano equipped with his sketching pad, extracting mana from soft lead, he followed the bar exercises with swift eyes and was soon able to transfer the various positions to paper more pleasingly than the boys and girls, some of them members of the child ballet at the Stadttheater, could perform them at the bar. Often Madame Lara took advantage of Amsel’s skill and explained a regula tion plié to her pupils with the help of his sketches.

  Jenny on the dancing floor cut a half-miserable, half-en-dearingly ludicrous figure. Conscientiously the child learned all the combinations—how diligently she reversed her little feet in the pas de bourrée, how touchingly her roly-poly petit changement de pieds stood out against the changements of the practiced rats de ballet, how brightly, when Madame Lara practiced Little Swans with the children’s class, shone Jenny’s dust- and time-dispelling gaze, which the austere Madame called her “Swan Lake look”—and yet, for all the glamour that inevitably attaches to a ballerina, Jenny looked like a little pink pig trying to turn into a weightless sylphide.

  Why did Amsel, over and over again, take Jenny’s lamentable arabesque, Jenny’s heart-rending tour à la seconds as an occasion for lightly tossed-off sketches? Because his pencil, without flattering the plumpness away, discerned the dancer’s line behind all the fat, proving to Madame Lara that within the fat a diminutive star was preparing to rise in the heaven of ballet dancers; it would only be necessary to render the tallow and lard, to increase the heat under the pan until a crisp and slender Terpsichorean rind should be able to execute the famous thirty-two fouettés en toumant in the crackling flame.

  Dear Tulla,

  just as Eddi Amsel became Jenny’s audience, so Jenny Brunies looked on from the lawn terraces in the late afternoon as Amsel helped his faustball team to victory. Even when Amsel was practicing, while he was making a light faustball hop on his broad forearm for the time it takes to say three rosaries, wonderment gaped from Jenny’s open buttonhole mouth. The two of them with their total of three hundred and twenty pounds came to be a familiar sight throughout the suburb if not the city; everybody in the suburb of Langfuhr knew about Jenny and Eddi, just as they all knew about a tiny little fellow with a tin drum. Except that the dwarf, whom everybody called Oskar, was reputed to be an incorrigible lone wolf.

  We all of us,

  Tulla, I, and Tulla’s brothers, met Amsel, roly-poly Jenny, and Walter Matern, the smasher, on the athletic field. Other nine-year-olds, Hänschen Matull, Horst Kanuth, Georg Ziehm, Helmut Lewandowski, Heini Pilenz, and the Rennwand brothers met there as well. We were in the same Cub squad, and over the protests of many athletic clubs our squad leader Heini Wasmuth had obtained permission for us to practice relay racing on the cinder track and to drill in uniform and street shoes on the turf of the athletic field. Once Walter Matern gave our squad leader a piece of his mind. They bellowed at each other. Heini Wasmuth showed official orders and a permit issued by the field management, but Matern, who openly threatened violence, managed to put through a new policy, making the cinder track and the turf of the athletic field out of bounds to persons in uniform and street shoes. From then on we drilled on the Johanneswiese and went to Heinrich Ehlers Field only privately and in gym shoes. There the sun fell obliquely because it was afternoon. Activity on all the fields. Variously pitched referees’ whistles put the ball into or took it out of play in a wide variety of games. Goals were tossed, sides changed, flies struck, announcements roared. Balls were passed, opponents thrown off; fake-outs, block plays, encirclement; teams were out played, contestants played out, games lost and won. Painful cinders in gym shoes. Players dozed while waiting for the return game. The smell from the crematory indicated the direction of the wind. Bats were rubbed, balls greased, foul lines drawn, scores kept, and victors cheered. Lots of laughing, constant yelling, some crying, and frequent irritation over the field manager’s cat. Everyone obeyed my cousin Tulla. Everyone was afraid of Walter Matern. Some covertly threw pebbles at Eddi Amsel. Many made a detour around our Harras. The last one out had to lock the locker room and leave the key with the caretaker; Tulla never did that, I did it sometimes.

  And once—

  Tulla and I were there—Jenny Brunies cried because some body had burned a hole in her brand-new spring-green dress with a magnifying glass.

  Years later—Tulla and I were absent—some high school boys, who were putting on a schlagball tournament, were said to have put the field manager’s cat on the neck of a dozing fellow student.

  Another time—Jenny, Amsel, and Matern were absent be cause Jenny was having her ballet lesson—Tulla swiped two schlagball balls for us, and a kid from the Athletic and Fencing Club was suspected.

  And once after the faustball game—Walter Matern, Eddi Amsel, and Jenny Brunies were lying on the terrace wall to one side of the small ball field—something really happened and it was marvelous:

  We park ourselves a few steps to one side. Tulla, Harras, and I can’t take our eyes off the group. The whole time the setting sun is peeping into the athletic fields from Jäschkental Forest. The uncut grass on the edge of the cinder track casts long shadows. We aren’t even giving a thought to the smoke that rises up vertical
ly from the chimney of the crematory. Now and then Eddi Amsel’s high laugh comes over to us. Harras lets out a brief bark and I have to grab him by the collar. Tulla is pulling up grass with both hands. She isn’t listening to me. Over yonder Walter Matern is miming some part in a play. They say he’s studying to be an actor. Once Jenny waves to us in her white dress that probably has grass spots on it. I wave cautiously back until Tulla turns toward me with her nostrils and incisor teeth. Butterflies go about their business. Nature crawls aimlessly, bumblebees bumble… no, not bumblebees; what we first see, then hear on a late summer afternoon in the year 1936, as we sit in separate groups on Heinrich Ehlers Field, on an early summer evening when the last teams have been whistled off and the broad-jump pit is being raked, is the airship Graf Zeppelin.

  We’ve been expecting it. The newspapers had said it was coming. First Harras gets restless, then we too—Tulla first—hear the sound. It swells, although the zeppelin is supposed to come from the west, from all directions at once. And then suddenly there it is in mid-air, over Oliva Forest. Of course the sun just happens to be setting. Accordingly, the zeppelin isn’t silvery but pink. Now that the sun is slipping behind the Karlsberg and the airship is heading toward the open sea, pink gives way to silver. All stand shading their eyes. Choral singing is wafted over to us from the vocational and home economics school. Polyphonically the girls sing at the zeppelin. On Zinglers Höhe a brass band attempts something along the same lines with the “Hohenfriedberger March.” Matern looks hard in a different direction. He has something against the zeppelin. Eddi Amsel applauds with small hands on short arms. Jenny too is jubilant. “Zeppelin, zeppelin!” she cries and bounces like a ball. Even Tulla distends her nostrils, trying to suck up the zeppelin. All Harras’ restlessness has gone into his tail. It’s so silvery a magpie would want to steal it. While on Zinglers Höhe the “Badenweiler March” follows the “Hohenfriedberger March,” while the vocational girls interminably sing “Sacred Fatherland,” while the zeppelin out toward Hela grows smaller, yet more silvery, smoke—I’m positive—rises imperturbably and vertically from the chimney of the municipal crematory. Matern, who doesn’t believe in the zeppelin, watches the Protestant smog.

  My cousin Tulla,

  otherwise invariably guilty, or at least an accomplice, was not to blame for the scandal at Heinrich Ehlers Field. Walter Matern did something. What he did was recounted in three versions: Either he distributed leaflets in the locker room; or he pasted leaflets on the grandstand benches shortly before the handball game between Schellmühl 98 and the Athletic and Fencing Club; or, while all the fields were busy with games or practice, he secretly stuck leaflets into the hanging pants and jackets of the junior and senior athletes in the locker room; and the manager caught him in the act. It doesn’t matter much which version is accredited, for the leaflets, whether openly distributed, pasted, or secretly stuck in pockets, were all identically red.

  But since the Danzig senate, first under Rauschning, then under Greiser, had dissolved the Communist Party in ‘34 and the Social Democratic Party in ‘36—the Center Party, under its chairman Dr. Stachnik, dissolved itself in October 1937—the propagandist activities of the student Walter Matern—he still wasn’t studying but doing something connected with dramatics—could only be regarded as illegal.

  Nevertheless, no one wanted to create a disturbance. After brief proceedings in the manager’s house, amid loving cups, photographs of athletes, and framed certificates—Koschnik, the field manager, had made a name for himself as a track man in the early twenties—Walter Matern was expelled from the Young Prussians. Eddi Amsel, who, it appears, had been closely and critically examining the bronze statue of a javelin thrower during the proceedings, was also urgently advised, though no reasons were stated, to resign from the club. The two erstwhile Young Prussians were given handwritten documents commemorating the victory of Amsel’s faustball team in the last tournament and hands were shaken in a spirit of sportsmanship. All the Young Prussians and the field manager as well took leave of Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern with guarded words of regret and a promise to make no report to the Athletic Association.

  Walter Matern remained an esteemed member of the Hockey Club and even joined up for a course in gliding. Near Kahlberg on the Frische Nehrung he is said to have made a number of twelve-minute glider flights and to have photographed the lagoon from the air. But Eddi Amsel had had his fill of sports: he took another fling at the fine arts, and my cousin Tulla helped him.

  Listen, Tulla:

  sometimes, and it doesn’t even have to be quiet in the street outside, I hear my hair growing. I don’t hear my fingernails, I don’t hear any toenails growing, only my hair. Be cause you once reached into my hair, because you left your hand for a second and eternity in my hair—we were sitting in the lumber shed amid your collection of extra-long shavings that were wavy like my hair—because afterward, but still in the lumber shed you said: “But that’s the only thing that’s any good about you.” Because you recognized this one and only quality in me, my hair made itself independent, it doesn’t really belong to me, it belongs to you. Our Harras belonged to you. The lumber shed belonged to you. All the gluepots and beautiful curly wood shavings belonged to you. It’s you I’m writing to, even if I’m writing for Brauxel.

  But no sooner had Tulla withdrawn her hand from my hair and said something about my hair than she was gone, over resinous planks, between tall sections of plywood. She was outside in the yard and I, with still electric hair, was too slow in following to prevent her assault on the piano teacher and ballet pianist.

  Felsner-Imbs had entered the yard. Stooped, he strode stiffly to the machine shop and inquired of the machinist when the buzz saw and lathe were planning to take a fairly protracted intermission, because he, the ballet pianist and former concert pianist, wished to practice, very softly, some thing complicated, a so-called adagio. Once or twice a week Felsner-Imbs asked this favor of our machinist or of my father, and it was always granted, though not always immediately. No sooner had the machinist nodded and, pointing a thumb at the buzz saw, said that he just had to run through two more planks; no sooner had Felsner-Imbs, after elaborate bows that looked perilous so near the buzz saw, left the machine shop; scarcely had he covered half the distance to the yard door—I was just crawling out of the lumber shed—when my cousin Tulla let Harras, our watchdog, off the chain.

  At first Harras didn’t know quite what to do with his sudden freedom, for ordinarily he was put right on the leash when released from his chain; but then he, who a moment before had stood distrustful, with head cocked, bounded into the air with all four legs, landed, shot diagonally across the yard, turned just before the lilac bushes, hurdled a sawhorse with neck outstretched, and went leaping frolicsomely around the pianist who had frozen into a statue: playful barking, a harmless snap, dancing hindquarters; and only when Felsner-Imbs sought safety in flight and Tulla from in front of the kennel—she was still holding the snap of the chain—had sicked our Harras on the game with an inflammatory skiss-skiss-skiss, did Harras pursue the pianist and catch him by his flowing swallowtails; for Felsner-Imbs, who during piano lessons wore only a velvet artist’s jacket, slipped, as soon as he had to practice a difficult concert piece or play to an imaginary or actually present audience, into the swallow tails of a concert performer.

  The coat was done for and my father had to replace it Otherwise the pianist had suffered no injury, for the machinist and the master carpenter had managed to pull Harras, who as a matter of fact was only playing, away from the festive cloth.

  Tulla was supposed to be spanked. But Tulla had turned to unpunishable air. I got a licking instead, for I had failed to restrain Tulla, I had stood by inactive and as the boss’s son I was responsible. My father smacked me with a piece of roofing lath until Felsner-Imbs, whom Dreesen the machinist had put back on his legs, interceded. While with a hairbrush, which in the inside pocket of his swallowtail coat had survived Harras’ onslaught, he first b
rushed his artist’s mane against the grain—a sight that made Harras growl—then curried it into his usual leonine hairdo, he remarked that actually not I, but Tulla or the dog was deserving of punishment. But where Tulla had been standing there was only a hole; and my father never laid a hand on our Harras.

  Listen, Tulla:

  half an hour later buzz saw, lathe, and finishing machine fell silent, as arranged, the band saw was soundless, Harras lay once more lazily on his chain, the deep booming of the planing machine ceased, and from Felsner-Imbs’ music room delicate, elaborately slow sounds, now solemn, now sad, detached themselves. Fragilely they strutted across the yard, climbed the façade of the apartment house as far as the third story, then fell headlong, gathered together, and dispersed: Imbs was practicing his complicated piece, the so-called adagio, and the machinist, with a manipulation of the black switch box, had turned off all the machines for the time required to go through the piece three times.