Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  We all went coasting and took Jenny along, because the snow was lying there for all children. The snow had blanketed memories from the days when the rain was pelting down and Jenny lay in the gutter: several times over. Jenny’s joy at Tulla’s offer was almost frightening. Her phiz was radiant, while Tulla’s face revealed nothing. Perhaps Tulla had made the offer only because Jenny’s sled was new and modern. The Pokriefkes’ intricate iron frame was gone with Tulla’s brothers; and Tulla didn’t like to sit on my sled, because I always had to hold on to her and that impaired my coasting technique. Our Harras wasn’t allowed to come along, because the dog behaved like a lunatic in the snow; and yet he was no longer young: a ten-year-old dog corresponds to a man of seventy.

  We pulled our empty sleds through Langfuhr as far as the Johanneswiese. Only Tulla let herself be pulled, sometimes by me, sometimes by Jenny. Jenny liked to pull Tulla and often offered to pull. But Tulla let herself be pulled only when she felt like it and not when somebody offered. We coasted on Zinglers Höhe, on Albrechtshohe, or on the big sled run on the Johannesburg, which was maintained by the city. The sled run was regarded as dangerous and I, a rather scary child, preferred to coast on the gently sloping Johanneswiese, at the foot of the sled run. Often when the city slopes were too crowded, we went coasting in the part of the forest that began to the right of Jäschkentaler Weg and merged with Oliva Forest behind Hochstriess. The hill we coasted on was called the Erbsberg. From its top a sled run led directly to Eddi Amsel’s garden on Steffensweg. We lay on our bellies on our sleds, peering through snow-bearing hazelnut bushes and through gorse that gave off a sharp smell even in winter.

  Amsel often worked in the open. He was wearing a traffic-light-red sweater. Knitted tights, also red, disappeared into rubber boots. A white muffler, crossed over the chest of his sweater, was held together in back by a conspicuously large safety pin. Red again and for the third time, a fuzzy cap with a white pompon stretched over his head: we felt like laughing, but we couldn’t, because the snow would have fallen off the hazelnut bushes. He was pottering with five figures that looked like the orphans from the Almshouse and Orphanage. Sometimes as we lurked behind snow-covered gorse and black gorse pods, a few orphans with a lady supervisor came into Amsel’s garden. In blue-gray smocks under blue-gray caps, with mouse-gray earmuffs and black woolen mufflers, they posed parentless and shivering until Amsel dismissed them with little bags of candy.

  Tulla and I knew

  that Amsel was filling an order at the time. The stage manager of the Stadttheater, to whom Walter Matern had introduced his friend, had examined a portfolio full of sketches and designs submitted by Eddi Amsel, stage and costume designer. Amsel’s stage sets and figurines had appealed to the stage manager, who had commissioned him to design the scenery and costumes for a patriotic play. Since during the last act—the scene was laid in the days of Napoleon: the city was being besieged by Prussians and Russians—orphans had to run back and forth between the advance lines and sing before the duke of Württemberg, Amsel conceived the Amselian idea of putting not real orphans but mechanical orphans on the stage, because, so he maintained, nothing tugs at the heartstrings so much as a quavering mechanical toy; think of the touching music boxes of bygone times. And so Amsel invited the Almshouse children to his garden and dispensed charitable gifts in exchange. He had them pose and sing chorales. “Lord on high, we praise Thee!” sang the Protestant orphans. We, behind the bushes, suppressed our laughter and were all of us glad to have father and mother. When Eddi Amsel was working in his studio, we couldn’t make out what he was working on: the windows behind the terrace with the busily visited birdhouses reflected nothing but Jäschkental Forest. The other children thought he must be pottering with the same kind of thing as outside, comical orphans or cotton and toilet paper brides; only Tulla and I knew he was making SA men who could march and salute, because they had a mechanism in their tummies. Sometimes we thought we could hear the mechanism. We felt our own bellies, looking for the mechanism inside us: Tulla had one.

  Tulla and I

  didn’t stick it out very long behind the bushes. In the first place it was getting too cold; in the second place it was too much of a struggle to keep from laughing; in the third place we wanted to coast.

  While one sled run led down Philosophenweg and the second carried our sleds down to Amsel’s garden, the third sled run deposited us near the Gutenberg monument. You never saw many children in that clearing, because all the children, except for Tulla, were afraid of Gutenberg. I didn’t like to get too close to the Gutenberg monument either. No one knew how the monument had got into the forest; probably the monument builders had been unable to find a suitable place in town; or else they chose the forest, because Jäschkental Forest was a beech woods and Gutenberg, before casting metal type, had carved the letters he printed his books with out of beechwood. Tulla made us coast down to the Gutenberg monument from the Erbsberg, because she wanted to scare us.

  For in the middle of the white clearing stood a soot-black cast-iron temple. Seven cast-iron columns supported the embossed cast-iron mushroom roof. Between the columns hung cold cast-iron chains held by cast-iron lion jaws. Blue granite steps, five of them, surrounded the temple, giving it elevation. And in the middle of the iron temple, amidst the seven columns, stood a cast-iron man: a curly iron beard flowed down over his cast-iron printer’s apron. On the left he held a black iron book wedged against apron and beard. With the iron index finger of his iron right hand he pointed at the letters of the iron book. You could have read in the book if you had climbed the five granite steps and stood by the iron chain. But we never dared to take those few paces. Only Tulla, the feather-light exception, hopped, as we stood by with bated breath, up the steps to the chain, stood slim and tiny in front of the temple without touching the chain, sat between two iron columns on an iron garland, swung wildly, then more calmly, slipped off the still swinging chain, was in the temple, danced around the gloomy Gutenberg, and climbed up on his left cast-iron knee. It provided support, because he had set his left cast-iron foot with its cast-iron sandal sole on the upper edge of a cast-iron memorial tablet with the informative inscription: Here stands Johannes Gutenberg. To get an idea of how black the man reigned in the Harras-black temple, you have to remember that in front of, above, and behind the temple snow was falling, now in big, now in little flakes: the cast-iron mushroom roof of the temple was wearing a snowcap. While the snow fell, while the chain, set in motion by Tulla, came slowly to rest, while Tulla sat on the iron man’s left thigh, Tulla’s white index finger—she never wore gloves—spelled out the selfsame iron letters that Gutenberg was pointing at with his iron finger.

  When Tulla came back—we had been standing motionless and were snowed in—she asked if we’d like to know what was written in the iron book. We didn’t want to know and shook our heads violently, without a word. Tulla claimed the letters were changed from day to day, that every day you could read new but always terrible words in the iron book. This time they were especially terrible: “D’yuh wanna or don’tcha wanna?” We didn’t. Then one of the Esch brothers wanted to know. Hänschen Matull and Rudi Ziegler wanted to know. Heini Pilenz and Georg Ziehm still didn’t want to know and then they did want to know. Finally Jenny Brunies also wanted to know what was written in Johannes Gutenberg’s iron book.

  We were frozen to the spot and Tulla danced around us. Our sleds had thick pillows on them. Around the Gutenberg monument the forest cleared, letting the inexhaustible sky down on us. Tulla’s bare finger pointed at Hänschen Matull: “You!” His lips became uncertain. “No, you!” Tulla’s finger meant me. I’d surely have burst into tears if a moment later Tulla hadn’t tapped little Esch and then reached into Jenny’s fluffy duffel coat: “You you you! it says. You! You gotta go up or he’s coming down and getcha.”

  The snow melted on our caps. “Kuddenpech said you. He said you. He wants Jenny, nobody else.” Repetitions poured out of Tulla, more and more close-knit. As sh
e described witch’s circles in the snow around Jenny, the cast-iron Kuddenpech looked gloomily over our heads out of his cast-iron temple.

  We began to confer. What, we asked, did Kuddenpech want of Jenny? Does he want to eat her or turn her into an iron chain? Does he want to stick her under his apron or press her flat in his iron book? Tulla knew what Kuddenpech wanted of Jenny. “She’s gotta dance for Kuddenpech, ’cause she’s always doing ballet with Imbs.”

  Jenny stood rigid, a doll-like ball in a teddy-bear fur, clutching the rope of her sled. The two snow roofs fell from her long, thick eyelashes: “NonoIdon’twanttoIdon’twantto!” she whispered, probably meaning to scream. But be cause she had no mouth for screaming, she ran away with her sled: floundered, rolled over, picked herself up, rolled into the beech woods in the direction of Johanneswiese.

  Tulla and I let Jenny run;

  we knew she couldn’t get away from Kuddenpech. If it was written in Kuddenpech’s iron book: “It’s Jenny’s turn!”—then she’d just have to dance for Kuddenpech the way she was taught to at ballet school.

  The next day, when we gathered our sleds on the hard-stamped snow of Elsenstrasse after lunch, Jenny didn’t come out, although we whistled up at Dr. Brunies’ windows, with fingers and without fingers. We didn’t wait long: she was bound to come sooner or later.

  Jenny Brunies came the day after. Without a word she fell into line, as usual filling her fluffy yellowish coat.

  Tulla and I had no way of knowing

  that Eddi Amsel stepped out into his garden at the same time. As usual he had on his knottily knitted traffic-light-red tights. Red again was his fluffy sweater. His matted white muffler was held together in back by a safety pin. He had had all his woolens knitted from unraveled wool: he never wore anything new. A lead-gray afternoon. It has stopped snowing; but there’s a smell of snow that wants to fall. Amsel carries a figure over his shoulder into the garden. He puts it down man-high in the snow. Purse-lipped, he whistles his way across the terrace and into the house, and comes back laden with another figure. He plants the second beside the first. With the march—“We are the guard…”—he whistles his way back into the studio and sweats round beads as he totes the third figure to join the two that are waiting in the garden. But he has to whistle the march all over again from the beginning: a path is gradually beaten through the knee-high snow until nine full-grown figures stand lined up in the garden, waiting for his orders. Burlap faced with dry brown. Chin strap under pig’s bladder chin. Shined and polished and ready for duty: one-dish-devouring Spartans, nine against Thebes, at Leuthen, in Teutoburg Forest, the nine loyal stalwarts, the nine Swabians, nine brown swans, the last levy, the lost platoon, the rear guard, the advance guard, nine alliterated Burgundian noses: this is the sorrow of the Nibelungs in Eddi Etzel’s snow-covered garden.

  Tulla, I, and the others

  had meanwhile left Jäschkentaler Weg behind us. Single file: sled track in sled track. Good crunchy snow. Imprints in the snow: many variously outlined rubber heels and hobnailed soles, with two, five, or no hobnails missing. Jenny stepped in Tulla’s tracks; I in Jenny’s tracks; Hänschen Matull in my tracks; obediently, little Esch and all who followed. Silently, without shouting or arguing, we trotted along behind Tulla. Only the little sleigh bells tinkled brightly. We were not, as might be supposed, going to cross the Johanneswiese to the top of the big sled run; shortly before the forester’s house Tulla hove to: under the beeches we grew tiny. At first we met other children with sleds or on barrel staves. When there was no one left but us, the cast-iron monument had to be near. With short steps we entered Kuddenpech’s realm.

  While we crept stealthily, still stealthily,

  Eddi Amsel was still whistling merrily merrily, still merrily. From one SA man he hurried to the next. Into the left pants pocket of nine storm troopers he reached: and then he released the mechanism inherent in all of them. They still sat fast on their central axes—metal pipes affixed to broad feet, rather like umbrella stands—and nevertheless, but without gaining ground, they fling eighteen twilightofthegodsy booted legs a hand’s breadth above the snow. Nine creaky-boned marchers that have to be taught to march in time. This Amsel does to two of the marchers with the old faithful thrust into their left pockets: now they’re in order, functioning, marching calmly firmly resolutely forward on ward across toward upon and past, first in march step, then in goose step, as required in parades; all nine of them. And nine times the chin-strapped pig’s bladders under SA visor caps snap almost simultaneously to the right: eyes right. They all look at him, for Eddi Amsel has pasted pig’s bladder faces on all of them. Reproductions from paintings by Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who, as everyone should know, painted the sorrow of the Nibelungs, provide the features: the gloomy SA man Hagen of Tronje; the SA men, father and son, Hildebrand and Hadubrand; the luminous SA Sturmführer Siegfried of Xanten; the sensitive Obersturmführer Gunther; the ever-merry Volker Baumann; and three doughty heroes who had capitalized on the sorrows of the Nibelungs: the noble Hebbel of Wesselburen, Richard the Wagoner, and the painter who with subdued Nazarene palette had portrayed the sorrows of the Nibelungs. And as they, all nine of them, are still looking rigidly to the right, their arms, which only a moment before were swinging in march time, rise up jerkily and yet with a remarkable steadiness: slowly but conscientiously right arms climb to the regulation height for the German salute, while left arms bend stiffly until blackened rubber gloves stop near belt buckles. But who is being saluted? To whom are the eyes right addressed? What is the name of the Führer who is expected to look into all their pasted eyes? Who looks, returns the salute, and passes them in review?

  In the manner of the Reich Chancellor, with arm bent at an angle, Eddi Amsel answers the salute of the parading storm troopers. For his own benefit and that of his nine mobile men, he whistles a march, this time the Badenweiler.

  What Tulla didn’t know:

  while Eddi Amsel was still whistling, Gutenberg cast his terrible cast-iron gaze over the little group who, with sleds of various sizes, were crowding into his sphere of influence yet remaining at a respectful distance, and who finally excreted one little individual: doll-like fluffy condemned. Step by step, Jenny plodded in the direction of the cast iron. New snow on old snow stuck to rubber soles: Jenny grew a good inch. Believe it or not, crows rose from the white beeches of Jäschkental Forest. Snowy burdens tumbled from branches. Subdued terror lifted Jenny’s chubby hands. She grew another half inch because she was again, step by step, approaching the iron temple; while overhead the crows creaked unoiled, while nine black holes glided over the Erbsberg and fell into the beeches bordering the forest and Amsel’s garden.

  What Tulla couldn’t know:

  when the crows moved, Eddi Amsel and his nine parading storm troopers were not alone in Amsel’s garden; five, six, or more figures with mechanisms built in not by Amsel but by Our Father who art in Heaven, are trampling down the snow. It’s not Amsel’s studio that has spat them out. They’ve come in from outside, over the fence: masked disguised shady. With their pulled-down civilian caps, with wide loden capes and black rags slit at eye level, they seem scarecrowy and in vented, but it’s not scarecrows, it’s warm-blooded men who climb over the fence the moment the mechanism in Amsel’s figures begins running down: nine saluting right cudgels fall with a jerk; rubber gloves slide away from belt buckles; goose step simplifies itself into marchstep funeral-march drag-step, halt; tinkling, the mechanism runs down; at this point Amsel unpurses his lips; the pig’s snout has stopped whistling; cocking his fat head so that his fuzzy cap dangles, he is intrigued by his uninvited guests. While his nine invented creatures stand at attention as commanded, while gradually their over-heated mechanism cools off, the nine masked figures move according to plan: they form a semicircle, breathe warm breath through black masks into the January air, and approaching step by step, transform the semicircle around Eddi Amsel into a circle around Eddi Amsel. Soon he will be able to smell them.

&
nbsp; Then Tulla called the crows back:

  she called the cacophonous birds from across the Erbsberg into the beeches around the Gutenberg monument. The crows saw Jenny stiffen at the foot of the granite steps leading to Kuddenpech’s iron temple and look back with her round face: Jenny saw Tulla, saw me, little Esch, Hänschen Matull, Rudi Ziegler, she saw the lot of them far in the distance. Did she count? Did the nine crows count: seven eight nine children in a cluster and one child alone? It wasn’t cold. A smell of wet snow and cast iron. “Gwan dance around, dance around him!” Tulla yelled. The forest had an echo. We yelled too and echoed, to make her start dancing, to get the fool dancing over with. All the crows in the beeches, Kuddenpech under his iron mushroom roof, and we saw Jenny pull her right shoe, into which a knitted pants leg disappeared, out of the snow and with her right suggest something in the nature of a battement développé: passer la jambe. A plaque of snow fell from her shoe sole just before she sank the right shoe into the snow again and pulled out the left one. She repeated the awkward angle, stood on her right foot, lifted her left, ventured a cautious rond de jambe en l’air, went into fifth position, left her hands lying on the air in the port de bras, embarked on an attitude croisée devant, wobbled an attitude éffacée, and took her first fall when her attitude croisée derriére went wrong. When she emerged, her coat was no longer yellowish but dusted with white. Under a topsy-turvy woolen cap short leaps were now supposed to continue the dance in Kuddenpech’s honor: from the fifth position into the demi-plié: petit changement de pieds. The ensuing figure was probably supposed to be the difficult pas assemblé, but Jenny took a second fall; and when, in an attempt to shine with a daring pas de chat, she took a third fall, tumbling when she should have been floating on air, when instead of weightlessly rejoicing the iron Kuddenpech’s heart she flopped like a sack of potatoes into the snow, the crows rose up out of the beeches and squawked their heads off.