Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Appraisal and shoptalk with English tobacco in their pipes:

  “How old would he be? Ten is my guess.”

  Matern is more exact: “More likely eleven. But that breed keeps lively up to seventeen. With proper care, mind you.”

  After lunch a few words about the world situation and the atom bomb. Then Westphalian dog stories: “In Bechtrup there was a male shepherd one time, long before the war, that quietly passed away at the age of twenty, which, I always say, makes a hundred and forty human years. And my grandfather used to tell about a dog from Rechede, raised in the Dülmen kennels, that lived to be twenty-two, even if he was half blind, which makes a hundred and fifty-four. Next to him your dog, with his eleven dog years, which makes seventy-seven human years, is still a youngster.”

  His dog, whom he doesn’t send away with stones and hoarseness, but keeps close to him as a nameless possession. “What’s he called anyway?”

  “He isn’t called anything yet.”

  “Are you looking for a name for the dog?”

  “Don’t look for names or you’ll find names.”

  “Well, why don’t you call him Fido or Towser, or Falko or Hasso, or Castor or Wotan… I once knew a male shepherd, believe it or not, his name was Jasomir.”

  Oh lousy shit! Who has squatted here in the open fields, expelled a hard sausage, and is now contemplating his excrement? Someone who doesn’t want to eat it, yet recognizes himself in it: Matern, Walter Matern, who is good at grinding his teeth: gravel in the dung; who is always looking for God and finding at best excrement; who kicks his dog: shit! But across the same field, cutting across the furrows, he whimpers back, and still has no name. Shit shit! Should Matern call his dog Shit?

  Nameless, they make their way across the Lippe-Seiten Canal into the Haard, a moderately hilly forest. He really means to cut across the mixed forest to Marl with the nameless dog—should his name be Kuno or Thor?—but then they turn off on a path to the left—Audifax?—and, emerging from the woods, come across the railroad: Dülmen-Haltern-Recklinghausen. And here there are coal mines with names that would do perfectly well for dogs: Hannibal, Regent, Prosper?—In Speckhorn master and nameless dog find a bed.

  Consult the books, draw up lists. Chiseled in granite and marble. Names names. History is made of them. Can should may a dog bear the name of Totila, Attila, or Kaspar Hauser? What was the first of the long line called? Maybe the other gods could supply a name: Potrimpos or Pikollos?

  Who tosses and turns, unable to sleep, because names, now private ones unfit for any dog, are gouging his spine? In the early morning, through ground fog, the two of them stick to the railroad embankment, walk on ballast, step aside to let overcrowded morning trains pass by. Silhouetted ruins: that’s Recklinghausen or, later on, Herne, to the right Wanne, to the left Eickel, Emergency bridges cross the Emscher Canal and the Rhine-Herne Canal. Nameless figures pick up coal in the mist. On headframes windlays turn or are silent over nameless mines. No noise. Everything bedded in cotton. At most the ballast speaks, or crows in their usual way: namelessly. Until something branches off to the right and has a name. Rails, single-tracked, come from Eickel and don’t want to go to Hüllen. Over an open entrance, on a weatherbeaten sign, big letters: PLUTO BRANCH LINE.

  That does it: “Here Pluto. Sit Pluto. Heel Pluto. Fetch it Pluto. Nice Pluto. Down, fetch it, eat, Pluto. Quick Pluto. Seek Pluto. My pipe Pluto.” Godfather is Pluton, bestower of grain and shekels, who, like Hades—or old Pikollos—at tends to the business of the underworld, shady business, templeless business, invisible business, underground business, the big pension, the elevator to the fill level, where they let you in but not out, he can’t be bribed, you’re there to stay, each and all go to Pluto, whom nobody worships. Only Matern and the Elians pile the altar: with heart, spleen, and kidneys for Pluto!

  They follow the branch line. Weeds between the tracks mean there hasn’t been a train here in a long time, and the rails are dull with rust. Matern tries the new name, loudly and softly. Now that he’s taken possession of the dog, his hoarseness has been letting up. The name works. Surprise at first, then zealous obedience. That dog has had training sometime. He’s no bum. When whistled, Pluto stands and lies down in the middle of the coal fields. Halfway between Dortmund and Oberhausen Pluto shows what he has learned and not forgotten, but only repressed a little because of the troubled, masterless times. Tricks. The mist has begun to curdle and swallow itself up. Around half past four, there’s even a sun in these parts.

  This mania for taking your bearings once a day: Where are we anyway? A memorable spot! To the left Schalke-North with Wilhelmine-Victoria Mine, to the right Wanne without Eickel, past the Emscher marshes Gelsenkirchen stops, and here, which is where the branch line with its rusty rails and weeds was headed, there lies, silenced and half destroyed by bombs beneath an old-fashioned knock-kneed headfrarne, that Pluto Mine which has given Pluto, the black shepherd male, his name.

  What a war can do: everything closed down. Nettles and buttercups grow faster than the world can imagine. Crumpled walls that were expected to stand forever. T-girders and radiators twisted into iron bellyaches. Wreckage shouldn’t be described but turned into cash; and so junk dealers will come and bend the scrap-iron question marks straight. Just as bluebells ring in the summer, so junk dealers will strike peaceful notes from scrap iron and announce the great smelting process. O ye unshaven angels of peace, spread your wings, bestir your battered mudguards and settle in places like this: Pluto Mine, between Schalke and Wanne.

  The environment appeals to both of them: Matern and his four-legged buddy. Why not a little training right away? A nice piece of wall, about four feet three inches high, is still standing. Go to it, Pluto. It won’t be hard, not with those long withers and perfectly angulated forelegs, not with that comparatively short but powerful back, not with those efficient hindquarters. Jump, Pluto. Black bow-wow, without spots or markings on straight back: speed, staying power, willingness to jump. Go to it, doggy, I’ll put a little some thing on top. Those two hocks will bring home the bacon. Away from the earthly. A little trip through the Rhenish-Westphalian air. Land softly, it’s easier on the joints. Good-dog modeldog: shipshape Pluto!

  Pants here, sniffs there. Nose to the ground, he collects scent marks: antiques. In a burned-out headframe he barks at dangling chain hoists and hooks, though second sight is needed to glimpse what’s left of the rags of the last morning shift. Echo. It’s fun to make a racket in abandoned ruins; but the master whistles his dog into the sun, out into the playground. In a wrecked shunting engine a fireman’s cap is found. You can throw it up in the air or put it on. Fireman Matern: “All this belongs to us. We’ve got the head-frame. Now let’s occupy the offices. The proletariat seizes the means of production.”

  But there wasn’t a single rubber stamp in the thoroughly ventilated offices. And if not for the—“Say, there’s a hole in the floor!”—they would have had every reason to go back to the sunlit playground. “Say, there’s a way down!” an almost complete staircase. “But watch your step!” there might be a mine lying around from the day before yesterday. But there are no mines in the furnace room. “Let’s take a look in here.” Step by little step: “Where is my candle and what about my good old lighter? Picked it up in Dunkirk, it’s seen Piraeus, Odessa, and Novgorod, and lighted my way home; it’s always done its stuff, why not here?”

  Every dark place knows why. All secrets are ticklish. Every treasure seeker has expected more. There they stand on six feet in the full-to-bursting cellar. No crates to break open; no little bottles to glug out of; neither displaced Persian carpets nor silver spoons; no church treasure nor castle valuables: nothing but paper. Not naked white paper, that might still have been good business. Or a correspondence between great men on handmade ragpaper. This paper was printed, in four colors: forty thousand posters still smelled fresh. One as smooth as the next. On each one He with low-pulled visor cap: solemn rigid Führergaze: As of four forty-five t
oday. Providence has saved. When long ago I decided. Innumerable. Ignominious. Pitiful. If need be. To the very last. In the end. Remains, will again, never. Contemptible traitors. In this hour the whole world. The turning point. I call upon you. We will join ranks. I have. I will. I am well aware. I…

  And every poster that Matern brushes from the pile with two fingers hovers for a time in midair and then settles in front of Pluto’s forepaws. Only a few fall on the face. For the most part He stares at the furnace pipes on the ceiling: solemn rigid Führergaze. Matern’s two fingers are indefatigable, as though he had reason to expect a different gaze from the next or next-to-next poster. Where there’s life…

  Then a siren swells in the pin-drop cellar. The Führer gaze has set off this aria in the dog’s heart. The dog croons and Matern can’t turn him off, “Quiet Pluto. Lie down Pluto.”

  But the whimpering dog tips his erect ears, all four legs go limp, and his tail sags. Rising to the concrete ceiling, the sound threads its way into burst pipes, and Matern has nothing to oppose it with but a dry grinding of the teeth. Ineffectual, the grinding breaks off, and he spits: phlegm on a picture portrait taken before the attempt on his life; oysters into the solemn rigid Führergaze; lung butter loops the loop and strikes: him him him. But it doesn’t lie for long, for the dog has a tongue, which licks, long and colorful, the Führer’s flatlying face: snot from his cheek. No longer does spittle cloud the gaze. Laps saliva from the little square mustache: faithfulasadog.

  Thereupon counteraction. Matern has ten fingers which crumple radically what smoothly records a four-tone face, what lies on the floor, what lies in piles, what looks up at the ceiling: He He He. No! says the dog. Growling in crescendo. Pluto’s iron jaws: No! A dog says no: Stop that, stop it this minute! The fist over Matern’s head relaxes: “O.K. Pluto. Sit Pluto. Come come. I didn’t mean it that way, Pluto. Why don’t we take a little nap and save the candle? Sleep and be nice to each other again? Nice Pluto, nice Pluto.”

  Matern blows out the candle. On piled-up Führergaze lie master and dog. Panting heavily in the darkness. Each breathes by himself. God in His heaven looks on.

  SECOND MATERNIAD

  They are no longer walking on six feet, one of which seems to be defective and has to be dragged; they are riding in a packjammed train from Essen via Duisburg to Neuss, for a man must have some goal or other: a doctor’s degree or a sharpshooter’s medal, the kingdom of heaven or a home of his own, on his way to Robinson Crusoe’s island, world-record, Cologne on the Rhine.

  The trip is hard and long. Lots of people, if not the whole population, are on the move with sacks of potatoes or sugarbeets. Accordingly—if sugarbeets are to be trusted—they are not riding into the spring but toward St. Martin’s Day. And so, for Novemberly reasons, life, for all the crush of smelly overcoats, is more tolerable inside the packjammed car than on the rounded roof, on the jangling bumpers, or on running boards that have to be reconquered at every station. For not all the travelers have the same destination.

  Even before the train pulls out of Essen, Matern gets Pluto settled. Inside the car an acrid smell mingles with the effluvia of late potatoes, earth-damp sugarbeets, and sweating humanity.

  Out in the wind Matern smells only the locomotive. In league with his barracks bag, he holds the running board against enemy onslaughts at the Grossenbaum and Kalkum stations. It would be pointless to grind his teeth against the wind. In the old days, when he challenged the buzz saw with his jaws—the story was that he could grind his teeth even under water—in the old days his teeth would have spoken up even in the train wind. Silently, then, but his head full of dramatic parts, he speeds through the unmoving landscape. In Derendorf Matern makes room on the running board for a bilious watchmaker, who might also be a professor, by upending his barracks bag. The watchmaker is trying to convey eight briquettes to Kuppersteg. At Düsseldorf Central Station Matern manages to save him, but in Benrath he is swallowed up by the mob along with his briquettes. Simply to be fair, Matern forces the character who in the watchmaker’s place is determined to transport his kitchen scales to Cologne, to change in Leverkusen. Glances over his shoulder reassure him: Inside the car a dog is still standing on four paws and keeping an eye, faithfulasadog, on the window: “Good dog, good dog, just a little longer. That pile of bricks for instance promises to be Mülheim. We don’t stop in Kalk. But from Deutz we can see the double prongs, the Devil’s Gothic horns, the cathedral. And where the cathedral is, its secular counterpart, the Central Station, can’t be far off. They go together like Scylla and Charybdis, throne and altar, Being and Time, master and dog.”

  So that’s what they call the Rhine! Matern grew up by the Vistula. In recollection, every Vistula is wider than every Rhine. And it’s only because the Materns must always live by rivers—the everlasting parade of water gives them a sense of being alive—that we’ve undertaken this crusade to Cologne. But also because Matern has been here before. And because his forebears, the brothers Simon and Gregor Materna, always came back mostly to wreak vengeance with fire and sword: that was how Drehergasse and Petersiliengasse went up in flames, how Langgarten and St. Barbara’s burned down in the east wind; well, in this place others have had ample opportunity to try out their lighters. There’s not much kindling left. “I come to judge with a black dog and a list of names incised in my heart, spleen, and kidneys. THAT DEMAND TO BE CROSSED OFF.

  O acrid unglassed drafty holy Catholic Central Station of Cologne! Nations with suitcases and knapsacks come to see and smell you, disperse throughout the world, and can never again forget you: you and the double stone monstrosity across the way. Anyone who wants to understand humanity must kneel down in your waiting rooms; for here all are pious and confess to one another over watery beer. What ever they do, whether they sleep with open jaws, embrace their pathetic baggage, quote earthly prices for heavenly lighter flints and cigarettes, whatever they may omit and pass over in silence, whatever they may add and repeat, they are working on the great confession. At the ticket windows, in the paper-blown station hall—two overcoats a plot, three overcoats in cahoots a riot!—and similarly down below in the tiled toilets, where the beer flows off again, warmed. Men unbutton, stand silently as though deep in thought in white-enameled bays, whisper with prematurely worn-out cocks, seldom in a straight line, usually with a slight but calculated elevation. Urine comes-to-be. Pissing stallions stand for eternities with arched back on two legs in pants, forming a roof over their excrescences with right hands, mostly married, prop their hips with their left hands, look ahead with mournful eyes, and decipher inscriptions, dedications, confessions, prayers, outcries, rhymes, and names, scribbled in blue pencil scratched with nail scissors, leather punch, or nail.

  So too Matern. Except that he doesn’t prop his hip with his left hand, but holds behind him a leather leash, which cost two Camels in Essen and in Cologne joins him with Pluto. All men stand for eternities, but Matern’s eternity is longer, even after his water has stopped leaning on enamel. Already he is fingering button after button, with pauses the length of a paternoster in between, into the corresponding buttonhole, his back no longer arched, but rather humped like that of a reader. Nearsighted people hold their eyes that close to printed matter or script. Thirst for knowledge. Reading room atmosphere. The student of Scripture. Don’t disturb the reader. Knowledge is power. An angel passes through the enormous tiled warm sweetandpungentsmelling holy Catholic men’s toilet of Cologne Central Station.

  There it is written: “Deadhead, watch out.” Recorded for all time: “Dobshe dobshe trallala—Schnapps is good for cholera.” A Lutheran nail has scratched: “And though the world were full of devils…” Hard to decipher: “Germany awaken!” Perpetuated in capitals: “ALL WOMEN ARE SLUTS.” A poet has written: “In ice and flame—we’re still the same.” And someone has stated tersely: “The Führer is alive.” But another handwriting knew more and added: “Right, in Argentina.” Brief ejaculations such as: “No! Count me out! Chin up!” are
frequent. So are drawings, which over and over again have as their subject the indestructible Vienna roll with its hairy halo, as well as recumbent women viewed as Mantegna viewed the recumbent Christ, that is, by an eye situated between the soles of their feet. Finally, wedged in between the cry of rejoicing: “Happy New Year ’46!” and the obsolete warning: “Caution! Enemy ears are listening!,” Matern, buttoned below, open on top, reads a name and address without rhymed or prose commentary: “Jochen Sawatzki—Fliesteden—Bergheimer Strasse 32.”

  Instantly Matern—with heart, spleen, and kidneys already on his way to Fliesteden—has a nail in his pocket that wants to write. Significantly cutting across dedications, confessions, and prayers, across the strangely hairy Vienna rolls and the recumbent Mantegna ladies, the nail scratches the child’s jingle: “DON’T TURN AROUND, THE GRINDER’S AROUND.”

  It’s a village lined up along the highway between Cologne and Erft. The bus from the main post office to Grevenbroich by way of Müngersdorf, Lovenich, Brauweiler, stops there before Busdorf, where it turns off to Stommeln. Matern finds his way without having to ask. Sawatzki in rubber boots opens: “Man, Walter, you still alive? Ain’t that a surprise? Come on in, or wasn’t it us you was coming to see?”

  Inside it smells of boiling sugarbeets. Up from the cellar, head in kerchief, comes a doll who smells no better. “See, we’re cooking syrup. Then we peddle it. It’s rough work, but it pays. This here’s my little wife. Her name’s Inge, she’s a native of Frechen. Inge, this here’s a friend of mine, a buddy, kind of. We were in the same sturm for a while. My, oh my, haven’t we been screwed: Shoilem boil ’em! remember, the two of us in the Kleinhammerpark, lights out—knives out! Get in there and fight. Christ, what a brawl! You remember Gustav Dau and Lothar Budczinski? Franzchen Wollschläger and the Dulleck brothers? And Willy Eggers, man! And Otto Warnke, hell, and little Bublitz? Rough customers one and all, but good as gold, except they drank too much and you can say that again.—So there you are again. Man, I’m kind of scared of that mutt. Couldn’t you lock him up in the other room?—All right, let him stay here. So give: where did you run off to at exactly the right time? Because once you left the sturm, we were through. Oh, it’s easy to say when it’s all over that we were damn fools to throw you out for nothing. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. But that’s how they wanted it, especially the Dulleck brothers and Wollschläger too: Court of honor! An SA man don’t steal! Robbing his comrades!—I really cried—honest to God, Inge—when he had to go. Well, here you are. You can take it easy in here or come into the laundry where the beets are cooking. You can flop in the deck chair and watch. Man, you old rascal. You can’t lose a bad penny is what I always say to Inge, eh, Inge? I’m mighty glad.”