Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Behind me the waiter added up the bill: “For a few minutes the man I knew was even called Zocholl. Then he was called Zylinski. And then he found a name that he still goes by. Would you like to know what it is, or would you, Jenny?”

  Haseloff let two white tablets dissolve in a teaspoon and paid with bank notes hidden under the check: “Keep the change.”

  When I wanted to tell them the man’s name, Haseloff swallowed the tablets and took a long drink from the lemonade glass. Then it was too late. And Jenny was tired. Only in the hotel lobby, after Jenny had been allowed to give me a kiss, Haseloff showed a few of his gold teeth and said in a hoarse voice: “You’re talented. You know lots of names. I’ll help you, today or the day after tomorrow, and now let me tell you one more name: Brauxel written with an x; or Brauksel written like Häksel; or Rrauchsel, written like Weichsel. Remember that name and the three ways of spelling it.”

  Then they both, elegantly and with unnatural slowness, climbed the stairs. Jenny looked round and round and round; even when I wasn’t in the hotel lobby any more with three times Brauxel in my head.

  Dear Tulla,

  he exists. I found him while I was looking for you. He tells me how to write when I write to you. He sends me money so I can write you without having to worry. He owns a mine between Hildesheim and Sarstedt. Or maybe he only manages it. Or holds the biggest block of shares. Or maybe the whole thing is sculduggery camouflage fifth column, even if his name is Brauxel Brauksel Brauchsel. Brauksel’s mine produces no ore, no salt, no coal. Brauksel’s mine produces something else. I am not allowed to name it. All I am allowed and ordered to say is Tulla, over and over again. And I have to keep the deadline, the fourth of February. And I have to heap up the pile of bones. And I have to start on the last story, for Brauchsel has sent me an urgent telegram: “Aquarius conjunction approaching stop heap up bone pile stop start miscarriage stop let dog loose and finish on time.”

  There was once a girl, her name was Tulla,

  and she had the pure forehead of a child. But nothing is pure. Not even the snow is pure. No virgin is pure. Even a pig isn’t pure. The Devil never entirely pure. No note rises pure. Every violin knows that. Every star chimes that. Every knife peels it: even a potato isn’t pure: it has eyes, they have to be scooped out.

  But what about salt? Salt is pure! Nothing, not even salt, is pure. It’s only on boxes that it says: Salt is pure. After all, it keeps. What keeps with it? But it’s washed. Nothing can be washed clean. But the elements: pure? They are sterile but not pure. The idea? Isn’t it always pure? Even in the beginning not pure. Jesus Christ not pure. Marx Engels not pure. Ashes not pure. And the host not pure. No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn’t pure. And the sun has spots. All geniuses menstruate. On sorrow floats laughter. In the heart of roaring lurks silence. In angles lean compasses.—But the circle, the circle is pure!

  No closing of the circle is pure. For if the circle is pure, then the snow is pure, the virgin is, the pigs are, Jesus Christ, Marx and Engels, white ashes, all sorrows, laughter, to the left roaring, to the right silence, ideas immaculate, wafers no longer bleeders and geniuses without efflux, all angles pure angles, piously compasses would describe circles: pure and human, dirty, salty, diabolical, Christian and Marxist, laughing and roaring, ruminant, silent, holy, round pure angular. And the bones, white mounds that were recently heaped up, would grow immaculately without crows: pyramids of glory. But the crows, which are not pure, were creaking unoiled, even yesterday: nothing is pure, no circle, no bone. And piles of bones, heaped up for the sake of purity, will melt cook boil in order that soap, pure and cheap; but even soap can not wash pure.

  There was once a girl, her name was Tulla,

  and she let numerous pimples, big and little, bloom and fade on her childlike forehead. Her cousin Harry long combated pimples of his own. Tulla never tried tinctures and remedies. Neither ground almonds nor stinky sulphur nor cucumber milk nor zinc ointment found a place on her forehead. Untroubled, she strode through the world pimples first, for she still had the jutting forehead of a child, and dragged sergeants and ensigns into night-black parks: for she wanted to have a baby, but didn’t.

  After Tulla had vainly tried every rank and branch of service, Harry advised her to try uniformed high school students. He had lately been wearing attractive Air Force blue and living no longer in Elsenstrasse but, in tiptop bathing weather, in the barracks of the Brösen-Glettkau shore battery, a large battery strung out behind the dunes, equipped with twelve 88-millimeter guns and a whole raft of 40-millimeter AA-guns.

  At the very start Harry was assigned as Number 6 to an 88-millimeter gun with outriggers. The Number 6 had to adjust the fuze setter with the aid of two cranks. This Harry did throughout his term as an Air Force auxiliary. A priviledged job, for the Number 6 alone of nine cannoneers was entitled to sit on a little stool attached to the gun; when the gun was rotated quickly, he traveled along free of charge and didn’t bash his shins against the iron of the outriggers. During gunnery practice Harry sat with his back to the muzzle of the cannon and while with his cranks he made two mechanical pointers hurry after two electrical pointers, he pounded back and forth between Tulla and Jenny. This he did rather adroitly: the mechanical pointer chased the electrical pointer, Tulla chased Jenny, and as far as Harry Liebenau was concerned, the fuze setter was operated to the complete satisfaction of the tech sergeant in charge of training.

  Once there was a tech sergeant,

  who could grind his teeth loudly. Along with other decorations he wore the silver wound insignia. Accordingly he limped slightly but obviously between the shacks of the Brösen-Glettkau shore battery. He was looked upon as strict but fair, admired, and superficially imitated. When he went out to the dunes to hunt dune rabbits, he chose as his companion an Air Force auxiliary whom the others called Störtebeker. While hunting dune rabbits the tech sergeant either didn’t say a single word or he uttered quotations, interspersed by ponderous pauses, from one and the same philosopher. Störtebeker repeated his quotations and created a philosophical schoolboy language that was soon prattled by many, with varying success.

  Störtebeker prefixed most of his sentences with “I, as a pre-Socratic.” Anyone who looked on as he mounted guard could see him drawing in the sand with a stick. With a superiorly guided stick he plotted the advent of the still unuttered essence of unconcealment, or to put it more bluntly, of Being. But if Harry said: “Being,” Störtebeker corrected him impatiently: “There you go again. What you really mean is essents—things that are.”

  Even in everyday matters philosophical tongues made pre-Socratic leaps, appraising every commonplace incident or object with the tech sergeant’s painstakingly acquired knowledge. Underdone potatoes in their jackets—the kitchen was poorly supplied and even more poorly run—were called “spuds forgetful of Being.” If someone reminded someone of something that had been borrowed, promised, or asserted days before, the answer came prompt and absolute: “Who thinks about thoughts any more,” or, analogically, about the borrowed, the promised, or the asserted? The daily facts of life in an AA battery, such as semi-serious disciplinary drill, tedious practice alerts, or greasy-messy rifle cleaning, were disposed of with an expression overheard from the tech sergeant: “After all, the essence of being-there is its existence.”

  The word “existence” and its collaterals met all requirments: “Would you exist me a cigarette? Who feels like existing a movie with me? Shut your trap or I’ll exist you one.”

  To go on sick call was to plug for a sack existence. And anybody who had hooked a girl—as Störtebeker had hooked Harry’s cousin Tulla—boasted after taps how often he had bucked the girl’s existence.

  And existence itself—Störtebeker tried to draw it in the sand with a stick: it looked different each time.

  There was once an Air Force auxiliary

  named Störtebeker, who was supposed to get Harry’s cousin with child and probably did his best. On Sundays wh
en the Brösen-Glettkau battery was open to visitors, Tulla came out in high-heeled shoes and took her nostrils and pimply forehead for a stroll amid 88-millimeter guns. Or she hobbled into the dunes between the tech sergeant and Air Force auxiliary Störtebeker, in the hope that they would both make her a baby; but tech sergeant and Air Force auxiliary preferred to indulge in other proofs of existence: they shot dune rabbits.

  There was once a cousin,

  his name was Harry Liebenau and all he was good for was looking on and saying what he’d heard other people say. There he lay flat with half-closed eyes in the sand amid wind-flattened beach grass and made himself still flatter when three figures appeared on the crest of the dune. The four-square staff sergeant, with the sun behind him, held a heavy protective arm around Tulla’s shoulder. Tulla was carrying her high-heeled shoes in her right hand and with the left clutched the hind paws of a bleeding dune rabbit. To the right of Tulla—but without touching her—Störtebeker held carbine, barrel down. The three figures didn’t notice Harry. For an eternity they stood motionlessly silhouetted, because the sun was still behind them, on the crest of the dune. Tulla reached up to the tech sergeant’s chest. She carried his arm like a crossbeam. Störtebeker to one side and yet belonging, rigid and on the lookout for Being. A handsome and precise picture that grieved the flat-lying Harry, for he had less rapport than the bleeding rabbit with the three figures against the drooping sun.

  There was once a picture,

  painful at sunset; Air Force auxiliary Harry Liebenau was never to see it again for suddenly one day he had to pack. Inscrutable decree transferred him, Störtebeker, thirty other Air Force auxiliaries, and the tech sergeant to another battery. No more dunes gently-wavy. No Baltic Sea, smoothly virginal. Beach flexibly musical. No longer did twelve eighty-eights jut somberly into the balmy bugle-call sky. Never again the reminders of home in the background: Brösen’s wooden church, Brösen’s black and white fishermen’s cows, Brösen’s fishnets hung on poles to be dried or photographed. Never again did the sun set for them behind rabbits sitting on their haunches and worshiping the departing sun with erect ears.

  In the Kaiserhafen battery there were no such pious animals, only rats; and rats worship fixed stars.

  The way to the battery led from Troyl, a harbor quarter between the Lower City and the Holm, for three quarters of an hour over sand roads through sparse woods in the direction of Weichselmünde. Left behind: the widely scattered repair shops of the German Railways, the lumber sheds behind the Wojahn shipyard; and here, projected into the area between the Troyl streetcar stop and the Kaiserhafen battery, the water rats held uncontested sway.

  But the smell that hung over the battery and didn’t budge a step even in a violent west wind, didn’t come from rats.

  The first night after Harry moved into the battery, his gym shoes were gnawed, both of them. The regulations prohibited getting out of bed with bare feet. Everywhere they sat and grew fatter; on what? They were reviled as the grounds of the ground; but to this name they did not answer. The battery was equipped with metal ratproof lockers. Many were slain, unsystematically. It didn’t help much. Then the tech sergeant, who performed the functions of top sergeant in his battery and every morning reported to his Captain Hufnagel how many corporals and sergeants, how many Air Force auxiliaries and Ukrainian volunteers had fallen in, issued an order of the day whereby the water rats were appreciably diminished; but the smell that hung over the battery did not diminish: it didn’t come from the grounds of the ground.

  There was once an order of the day;

  it promised premiums for slain rodents. The p.f.c.s and corporals, all matured in the service, received a cigarette for three rats. The Ukrainian volunteers were illicitly given a package of machorka if they could produce eighteen. The Air Force auxiliaries received a roll of raspberry drops for five rats. Some of the corporals gave us three cigarettes for two rolls of raspberry drops. We didn’t smoke machorka. In accordance with the order of the day, the battery split up into hunt groups. Harry belonged to a group that staked out its territory in the washroom, which had only one door and no window. First the washroom door was left open and leftovers of food were deposited in the washtroughs. Then both drains were plugged up. Thereupon we waited behind the windows of the school shack until it began to grow dark. Soon we saw the long shadows pouring past the shack toward the washroom door with a single monotone whistle. No flute strains lured; the suction of an open door. And yet nothing was there but cold grits and kohlrabi stalks. Strewn across the threshold, beef bones ten times boiled and two handfuls of moldy oat flakes—contributed by the kitchen—were expected to lure rats. They would have come even without the oats.

  When the washroom promised sufficient game, the school shack spat out five men in high rubber boots, armed with clubs, whose tips were armed with hooks. The washroom swallowed up the five. The last slammed the door. Obliged to remain outside: belated rats, forgetful of Being; the smell grounded on the battery; the moon in case it should nihilate; stars in so far as they were thrown; the radio, blaring from world-related noncoms’ barracks; the ontic voices of ships. For inside rose up a music sui generis. No longer monotone, but leaping over octaves: grit-shrill kohlrabi-soft bony tinny plucked nasal inauthentic. And, as rehearsed, suddenly illumination came-to-be: five left-handed flashlights part the darkness. For the space of two sighs, silence. Now they rise up lead-gray in the light, slide on their bellies over tin-sheathed washtroughs, smack halfpoundly on the tile flooring, crowd around the drains plugged with oakum, try to climb up the concrete pillar and get at the brown wood. Claw themselves fast, scurry away. Unwilling to leave the grits and stalks. Eager to save beef bones and not their own skins: smooth, waxed, waterproof, sound, lovely, precious, vulnerable, currycombed for thousands of years, upon which the hooks descend without regard: No, rat blood is not green but. Are stripped off with boots and nothing else. Are spitted, two with the same hook: Being-beside—Being-with. Are caught in mid-air: music! The same old song since the days of Noah. Rat stories, true and made up. World-relation attitude irruption: grain ships gnawed bare. Hollowed-out granaries. The Nothing acknowledged. Egypt’s lean years. And when Paris was besieged. And when the rat sat in the tabernacle. And when thought forsook metaphysics. And when help was most needed. And when the rats left the ship. And when the rats came back. When they attacked even infants and old people riveted to their chairs. When they negated the newborn babe away from the young mother’s breast. When they attacked the cats and nothing was left of the rat-terriers but bare teeth, which sparkle to this day, lined up in the museum. And when they carried the plague back and forth and pierced the pink flesh of the pigs. When they devoured the Bible and multiplied in accordance with its instructions. When they disemboweled the clocks and confuted time. When they were sanctified in Hamelin. And when someone invented the poison that struck their fancy. When rattail knotted with rattail to make the rope that plumbed the well. When they grew wise, as long as poems, and appeared on the stage. When they channelized transcendence and crowded into the light. When they nibbled away the rainbow. When they announced the beginning of the world and made leaks in hell. When rats went to heaven and sweetened St. Cecilia’s organ. When rats squeaked in the ether and were resettled on stars, ratless stars. When rats existed self-grounded. When an order of the day became known, which offered rewards for rats, slain ones: coarse tobacco, hand-rolled cigarettes, sweet-and-sour raspberry drops. Rat stories rat stories: They collect in the corners. If it doesn’t hit them, it hits concrete. They pile up. Stringtails. Curly noses. Fleeing forward. Vulnerable, they attack. Club must help club. Flashlights fall soft, roll hard, are rolled; but buried crosswise, they still glare through, and when dug up they point again to something bounding from a mound that lay still, already written off. For each club counts as it goes along: seventeen, eighteen, thirty-one. But the thirty-second runs, is gone, back again, two hooks too late, a club pounces too soon, whereupon it bites its way through and thro
ugh and through and topples Harry over: the soles of his rubber boots slip on terror-wet tiles. He falls back soft and screams loud; from the other clubs constrained laughter. On blood-soaked furs, on prey, on quivering layers, on gluttonous generations, on never-ending rat history, on consumed grits, on stalks, Harry screams: “I’ve been bitten. Been bitten. Bitten…” But no rat had. Only fear when he fell, when he fell not hard but soft.

  Then all grew still within the washroom walls. Anyone who had an ear available heard the world-related radio blaring from the noncoms’ barracks. A few clubs kept aiming dispiritedly and struck what was quivering-to-an-end. Perhaps clubs couldn’t cease-to-exist from one second to the next just because there was silence. The clubs still hold a vestige of life; it had to emerge and carry on a vestigial existence. But even when on top of the silence club-peace set in, the rat story wasn’t over; for Harry Liebenau filled in this existential pause. Because he had fallen soft, he was obliged to throw up at length into an empty bowl that had contained grits. He couldn’t empty his stomach on the rats. They had to be counted, lined up, and tied by their tails to a wire. There were four heavily tenanted lengths of wire, which the tech sergeant, aided by the company clerk who kept the tally, was able to count at morning roll call: A hundred and fifty-eight rats, rounded out on the friendly side, yielded thirty-two rolls of raspberry drops, half of which Harry’s hunt group exchanged for cigarettes.

  The strung-up rats—that same morning they had to be buried behind the latrine—smelled damp, earthy, with an overtone of sourness, like an open potato cellar. The smell over the battery had greater density: no rat exhaled it.

  There was once a battery—

  it was near Kaiserhafen and for that reason was called the Kaiserhafen battery. Conjointly with the Brösen-Glettkau battery, the Heubude, Pelonken, Zigankenberg, Camp Narvik, and Altschottland batteries, it guarded the air space over Danzig and its harbor.