Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  All three of us agree about the coat of the dog in the winter garden: short-haired, every hair straight, every hair smooth, harsh, and black.

  My father and I: “Like our Harras.”

  Herr Leeb undaunted: “Like my Thekla.”

  Our giant in uniform says: “Come off it, don’t make such a much. Shepherds all look pretty much the same. The Führer has a whole kennel full of them in the mountains. This trip he took this one. Sometimes he takes different ones, it all depends.”

  My father wants to give him a lecture about our Harras and his ancestry, but the giant motions him to desist and angles his watch arm.

  The Führer’s dog is playing with the empty flowerpot again as I, in leaving, venture to tap on the pane: he doesn’t even raise his head. And the man in the winter garden prefers to look at the Baltic.

  Our withdrawal over soft carpets, past fruit still lifes, peasant scenes, hunt still lifes: pointers licking at dead rabbits and wild boars, no shepherd dogs have been painted. My father caresses furniture. The room full of typewriters and telephones. A dense crowd in the lobby. My father takes me by the hand. Actually he ought to take Herr Leeb’s hand too: he’s always being jostled. Motorcyclists with dust-gray coats and helmets stagger in among the correct uniforms. Dispatch riders with victory dispatches in their bags. Has Modlin fallen yet? The dispatch riders hand in their bags and drop into wide armchairs. Officers give them a light and stop to chat. Our giant pushes us through the entrance under the four-story flag. I still have no monkey on my shoulder that wants to climb up. We are escorted through all the road blocks, then dismissed. The population behind the fence wants to know if we’ve seen the Führer. My father shakes his head: “No, folks, not the Führer, but we’ve seen his dog, and let me tell you, he’s black, just like our Harras.”

  Dear Cousin Tulla,

  no official car carried us back to Langfuhr. My father, Herr Leeb, and I took the suburban railway. We got out first. Herr Leeb stayed in the train and promised to come and see us. I felt humiliated at our having to pass through Elsenstrasse on foot. All the same it had been a wonderful day, and the essay I had, at Father’s suggestion, to write the day after our visit to Zoppot and submit to Dr. Brunies, was entitled: “My most wonderful day.”

  While returning my essay with his corrections, Dr. Brunies looked down from his desk and said: “Very well observed, excellently, in fact. There are, indeed, a number of hunt still lifes, fruit still lifes, and hearty peasant scenes hanging in the Grand Hotel, mostly Dutch masters of the seventeenth century.”

  I was not allowed to read my essay aloud. Dr. Brunies dwelt at some length on the hunt still lifes and peasant scenes, spoke about genre painting and Adriaen Brouwer, his favorite painter. Then he came back to the Grand Hotel and casino—“The Red Room is especially fine and festive. And in that Red Room Jenny is going to dance.” He whispered mysteriously: “As soon as the momentarily reigning warrior caste leaves, as soon they have taken their clanking sabers and shouts of victory to other watering places, the director of the casino, in collaboration with the manager of the Stadt-theater, is going to stage an unpretentious but distinguished ballet program.”

  “Can we come and see it?” asked forty pupils.

  “It’s to be a charity benefit. The proceeds are going to the Winter Aid.” Brunies shared our dismay that Jenny would be dancing for a restricted audience: “She is going to make two appearances. She is actually going to do the famous Pas de Quatre; in a simplified version for children, to be sure, but even so.”

  I returned to my desk with my exercise book. “My most wonderful day” was far behind me.

  Neither Tulla nor I

  saw Jenny balley. But she must have been good, for someone from Berlin wished to engage her immediately. The performance took place shortly before Christmas. The audience consisted of the usual Party bigwigs, but also of scientists, artists, high Navy and Air Force officers, even diplomats. Brunies told us that immediately after the applause had died down at the end, a fashionably dressed gentleman had appeared, had kissed Jenny on both cheeks, and asked to take her away with him. To him, Brunies, he had shown his card and identified himself as the first ballet master of the German Ballet, the former Strength-through-Joy Ballet.

  But Dr. Brunies had declined and had put the ballet master off until some later date: Jenny was still an immature child. She still needed a few more years in her familiar environment: school and home, the good old Stadttheater, Madame Lara.

  I went up to Dr. Oswald Brunies in the playground. As usual he is sucking his cough drops, left and right, left and right.

  “Dr. Brunies,” I ask, “what was that ballet master’s name?”

  “He didn’t tell me, my boy.”

  “But didn’t you say he showed you some kind of a visiting card?”

  Dr. Brumes claps his hands. “Right you are, a visiting card. But what on earth was on it? I’ve forgotten, my boy, forgotten.”

  Then I begin to guess: “Was he called Steppuhn, or Stepoteit, or Steppanowski?”

  Brunies sucks merrily at his cough drop: “Far from it, my boy.”

  I try other birds: “Was he called Sperla or Sperlinski or Sperballa?”

  Brunies titters: “Wrong, my boy, wrong.”

  I pause for breath: “Then his name was Sorius. Or it was Zuchel, Zocholl, Zylinski. Well, if it wasn’t one of those and it wasn’t Krisin or Krupkat, I’ve only got one name left.”

  Dr. Brunies hops from one leg to the other. His cough drop hops with him: “And what would that last name be?” I whisper in his ear and he stops hopping. I repeat the name softly, and under his matted eyebrows he makes frightened eyes. Then I mollify him, saying: “I asked the clerk at the Grand Hotel and he told me.” The bell rings and the recreation period is up. Dr. Brunies wants to go on merrily sucking, but he fails to find the cough drop in his mouth. He fishes a fresh one from his jacket pocket and says, while giving me one too: “You’re very curious, my boy, mighty curious.”

  Dear Cousin Tulla,

  then we celebrated Jenny’s thirteenth birthday. It was Dr. Brunies who had picked the foundling’s birthday: we celebrated it on January 18th—King of Prussia proclaimed Emperor of Germany. It was winter outside, but Jenny had asked for a bombe. Dr. Brunies, who knew how to cook candy, had made the ice-cream mold at Koschnick’s bakery according to a recipe of his own. That was Jenny’s unvarying desire. If anyone said: “Would you like something to eat? What can I bring you? What would you like for Christmas, for your birthday, to celebrate your first night?” she always wanted ice cream, ice cream to lick, ice cream to eat.

  We too liked to lick ice cream, but we had other desires. Tulla, for instance, who was a good six months younger than Jenny, was beginning to want a child. Both Jenny and Tulla, in the period after the Polish campaign, had the barest in timations of breasts. It was not until the following summer, during the French campaign and in the weeks after Dunkirk, that a change set in. They would feel each other in the lumber shed: it was as if they had been stung first by wasps, then by hornets. The swellings had come to stay; they were carried about by Tulla with sophistication, by Jenny with wonderment.

  Gradually I had to make up my mind. Actually I preferred to be with Tulla; but the minute we were alone in the lumber shed, Tulla wanted a child by me. So I attached my self to Jenny, who at most demanded a ten-pfennig ice cream cone or a thirty-five-pfennig dish at Toskani’s, an ice-cream parlor of repute. What gave her the greatest pleasure was to be taken to the icehouse between the Kleinhammerpark and Aktien Pond; it belonged to the Aktien Brewery, but was situated outside the brick wall spiked with broken glass, which encircled all three of the brewery buildings.

  The icehouse was cubical, Aktien Pond was round. Willows stood with their feet in the water. Coming from Hochstriess, the Striessbach flowed into it, through it, and out of it, divided the suburb of Langfuhr into two halves, left Langfuhr at Leegstriess, and emptied, near Broschkescher Weg, into the Dead Vistula. Th
e earliest record of the Striessbach, “Fluuium Strycze,” occurs in a document dated 1299, in which it is identified as a brook forming the boundary between the lands of Oliva monastery and those of the township. The Striessbach was neither wide nor deep, but it was rich in leeches. Aktien Pond was also alive with leeches, frogs, and tadpoles. As for the fish in Aktien Pond, we shall get around to them. Over the usually smooth water gnats sustained a single high note, dragonflies hovered transparent and precarious. When Tulla was with us, we had to collect leeches from the inlet in a tin can. A rotting, tumble-down swan house stood crookedly in the muck along the shore. Some years before, there had been swans in Aktien Pond for a single season, then they had died; only the swan house remained. Year in year out, regardless of changes in government, long editorials and indignant letters from readers kept up a stir over Aktien Pond, all demanding, in view of the gnats and the demise of the swans, that it be filled in. But then the Aktien Brewery made a contribution toward a municipal old people’s home, and the pond wasn’t filled in. During the war the pond was out of danger. It obtained a subtitle, it wasn’t just plain Aktien Pond any more, but also the “Kleinhammerpark Fire-fighting Pond.” The air-raid defense people had discovered it and entered it in their operations maps. But the swan house belonged neither to the brewery nor to the air-raid defense; the swan house, somewhat larger than our Harras’ kennel, belonged to Tulla. In it she spent whole afternoons, and we handed the cans with the leeches in to her. She undid her clothing and applied them; on the belly and the legs. The leeches swelled up, turned blue-black like blood blisters, trembled slightly and ever more slightly, and as soon as they were full and easily detachable, Tulla, now green about the gills, tossed them into a second tin can.

  We too had to apply leeches: I three, Jenny one, on the forearm and not on the legs, because she had to dance. With finely chopped nettles and water from Aktien Pond, Tulla cooked her leeches and ours over a small wood fire until they were done; then they burst, and despite the nettles cooked up with them, colored the soup a brownish black. We had to drink the muddy broth; for to Tulla the cooking of leeches was sacred. If we didn’t want to drink, she said: “The sheeny and his friend were blood brothers too, the sheeny told me one time.” We drank to the lees and all felt akin.

  But one time Tulla almost spoiled the fun. When her cookery was done, she frightened Jenny: “If we drink now, we’ll both get a baby and it’ll be from him.” But I didn’t want to be a father. And Jenny said it was too soon for her, she wanted to dance first, in Berlin and all over.

  And once when there was already a certain amount of friction between me and Tulla about the baby routine, Tulla forced Jenny in the swan house to put on nine leeches.: “If you don’t do it this minute, my oldest brother that’s fighting in France will bleed to death this minute.” Jenny applied all nine leeches all over her, went white, and then fainted. Tulla evaporated and I pulled off the leeches with both hands. They stuck because they weren’t full yet. Some of them burst and I had to wash Jenny off. The water brought her to, but she was still livid. The first thing she wanted to know was whether Siegesmund Pokriefke, Tulla’s brother in France, was safe now.

  “Sure thing,” I said, “for the present.”

  The self-sacrificing Jenny said: “Then we’ll have to do it every few months.”

  I enlightened Jenny. “Now they have blood banks all over. I’ve read about it.”

  “Oh!” said Jenny and was a little disappointed. We sat down in the sun beside the swan house. The broad front of the icehouse building was reflected in the smooth surface of Aktien Pond.

  Tulla,

  I’m telling you what you already know: the icehouse was a box with a flat roof. From corner to corner they had covered it with tar paper. Its door was a tar-paper door. Windows it had none. A black die without white dots. We couldn’t stop staring at it. It had nothing to do with Kuddenpech; but Kuddenpech might have put it there, although it wasn’t made of cast iron but of tar paper, but Jenny wasn’t afraid of Kuddenpech any more and always wanted to go inside the icehouse. If Tulla said: “Now I want a baby, right away,” Jenny said: “I’d awfully like to see the icehouse on the inside, will you come with me?” I wanted neither nor; I still don’t.

  The icehouse smelled like the empty kennel in our yard. Only the dog kennel didn’t have a flat roof and actually, in spite of the tar paper, it smelled entirely different: it still smelled of Harras. On the one hand my father didn’t want to get another dog, but on the other hand he still didn’t wish to chop the kennel into kindling but often, as the journeymen were working at their benches and the machines were biting into wood, stood in front of the kennel for five minutes, staring at it.

  The icehouse was reflected in Aktien Pond and darkened the water. Nevertheless, there were fish in Aktien Pond. Old men, with chewing tobacco behind sunken lips, fished from the Kleinhammerpark shore and toward eveing caught hand-size roaches. Either they tossed the roaches back or they gave them to us. For they weren’t really fit to eat. They were putrid through and through and even when washed in clean water lost none of their living corruption. On two occasions corpses were fished out of Aktien Pond. By the outlet an iron grating collected driftwood. The corpses drifted into it: one was an old man, the other a housewife from Pelonken. Both times I got there too late to see the corpses. For as fervently as Jenny longed to penetrate into the icehouse and Tulla to be with child, I wanted to see an honest-to-goodness corpse; but when relatives died in Koshnavia—my mother had aunts and cousins there—the coffin was always closed by the time we reached Osterwick. Tulla claimed there were little children on the bottom of Aktien Pond, weighted down with stones. In any event Aktien Pond was a convenient place for drowning kittens and puppies. Sometimes there were also elderly cats, floating aimless and bloated; in the end they got caught in the grating and were fished out with a hooked pole by the municipal park guard—his name was Ohnesorge like the Reich Postmaster General. But that is not why Aktien Pond stank, it stank because the waste from the brewery flowed into it. “Bathing prohibited,” said a wooden sign. Not we, only the kids from Indian Village went swimming regardless, and always, even in winter, smelled of Aktien beer.

  That was what everyone called the housing development which extended from behind the pond, all the way to the airfield. In the development lived longshoremen with large families, widowed grandmothers, and retired bricklayers. I incline to a political explanation of the name “Indian Village.” Once upon a time, long before the war, many Socialists and Communists had lived there, and “Red Village” may well have become metamorphosed into “Indian Village.” In any case, when Walter Matern was still an SA man, a worker at the Schichau Shipyard was murdered in Indian Village. “Murder in Indian Village,” said the headline in the Vorposten. But the murderers—possibly nine masked men in loden capes—were never caught.

  Neither Tulla’s

  stories about Aktien Pond nor mine—I’m full of them and have to hold myself back—can outdo certain stories revolving around the icehouse. One of them was that the murderers of the Schichau Shipyard worker had taken refuge in the icehouse and had been sitting ever since, eight or nine frozen murderers, in the iciest part of the icehouse. Many also presumed Eddi Amsel, who had disappeared without trace, to be in the icehouse, but not I. Mothers threatened children who didn’t want to finish their soup with the black windowless cube. And it was rumored that because little Matzerath hadn’t wanted to eat, his mother had punished him by shutting him up in the icehouse for several hours, and since then he hadn’t grown so much as a fraction of an inch.

  For there was something mysterious inside that icehouse. As long as the ice trucks were standing out in front and resonant ice blocks were being loaded on, the tar paper door stood open. When to prove our courage we leaped past the open door, the icehouse breathed on us, and we had to stand in the sun. Especially Tulla, who was unable to pass an open door, was afraid of the icehouse and hid when she saw the broad swaying men who
wore black leather, aprons and had purple faces. When the ice men pulled the blocks out of the icehouse with iron hooks, Jenny went up to the men and asked if she could touch a block of ice. Sometimes they let her. Then she held one hand on the block until a cubical man pulled her hand away: “That’s enough now. You want to get stuck?”

  Later there were Frenchmen among the ice haulers. They shouldered the blocks in exactly the same way as the native ice haulers, were exactly as cubical, and had the same purple faces. They were called “foreign workers,” and we didn’t know whether we were allowed to talk to them. But Jenny, who was learning French in school, accosted one of the Frenchmen: “Bonjour, Monsieur.”

  He, very courteous: “Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”

  Jenny curtsied: “Pardon, Monsieur, vous permettez, Mon sieur, que j’entre pour quelques minutes?”

  The Frenchman with a gracious gesture: “Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle.”

  Jenny curtsied again: “Merci Monsieur,” and let her hand disappear in the hand of the French ice hauler. The two of them, hand in hand, were swallowed up by the icehouse. The other ice haulers laughed and cracked jokes.

  We didn’t laugh but began to count slowly: twenty-four, twenty-five… If she isn’t out by two hundred, we’ll shout for help.

  They came out at a hundred and ninety-two, still hand in hand. In the left she held a chunk of ice, curtsied once again to her ice hauler, and then withdrew into the sun with us. We were shivering. Jenny licked the ice with a pale tongue and offered Tulla the ice to lick. Tulla didn’t feel like it. I licked: that’s how cold iron tastes.

  Dear Cousin Tulla,

  after the incident with your leeches and Jenny’s fainting, when we were on the outs over that, and because you kept wanting to have a child by me, when you had just about stopped coming to Aktien Pond with us and we, Jenny and I, didn’t feel like crawling into the lumber shed with you, when the summer was over and school had begun, Jenny and I took to sitting either in the dill outside the garden fences of Indian Village or beside the swan house, and I helped Jenny by fastening my eyes to the ice house, for Jenny had eyes only for the black, windowless cube. That is why the icehouse is clearer in my memory than the buildings of the Aktien Brewery behind the chestnut trees. Possibly the compound rose like a turreted castle behind the gloomy brick wall. Definitely, the high church windows of the machine house were framed in smooth Dutch brick. The chimney was squat but nevertheless, regardless of what direction you looked from, dominated the whole of Langfuhr. I could swear that the Aktien chimney wore a complicated helmet, a knight’s helmet. Regulated by the wind, it gave off churning black smoke and had to be cleaned twice a year. New and dressed in bright brick-red, the administration building, when I screw up my eyes, looks at me over the glass-spiked wall. Regularly, I assume, trucks drawn by two horses left the yard of the brewery. Stout short-tailed Belgians. Behind leather aprons, under leather caps, with rigid purple faces: the driver and his helper. The whip in the holder. Order book and money pouch under the apron. Wads of tobacco for the day’s work. Harness studded with metal buttons. The jolting and clanking of beer cases as front and hind wheels stumble over the iron threshold of the exit. Iron letters on the arch over the portal: D.A.B. Wet sounds: bottle-washing plant. At half past twelve the whistle blows. At one the whistle repeats itself. The xylophone notes of the bottle washers: the score has been lost, but the smell is still with me.