Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  But even Matern doesn’t travel for nothing. As souvenirs or spoils of the chase—for Matern is traveling with dog, to judge—he brings back to Cologne: a tightly knitted winter muffler, donated by former Kreisleiter Sellke’s secretary; a Bavarian loden coat, for Otto Warnke’s cleaningwoman possessed a supply of warm outer garments; and from Saarbrücken, where Willy Eggers briefs him on the frontier traffic between Gross-Rosseln and Klein-Rosseln, he brings, because the Dulleck brothers in the hills of the upper Weser had nothing to offer him but country air and three-handed skat, a good case of urban and French-occupied gonorrhea.

  DON’T TURN AROUND—THE CLAP’S GOING AROUND. With pistol thus loaded, with barbed scourge of love, with serum-maddened hypodermic, Matern with dog visits the cities of Bückeburg and Celle, the lonely Hunsrück, the smiling Bergstrasse, Upper Franconia including the Fichtel Mountains, even Weimar in the Russian occupation zone—where he stops at the Hotel Elephant—and the Bavarian Forest, an underdeveloped region.

  Wherever the two of them, master and dog, set their six feet, whether on the rugged Alb, on East Frisian marshland, or in the destitute villages of the Westerwald, everywhere the clap has a different name: here they say dripping Johnny, there they warn against lovesnot; here they count candledrops, there they tell of snipe honey; goldenrod and his lordship’s cold, widow’s tears and pistachio oil are pithy regional terms, as are cavalryman and runner; Matern calls it “the milk of vengeance.”

  Equipped with this product, he visits all four occupation zones and the quartered remains of the former national capital. Here Pluto is taken with nervous jitters, which subside only when they are west of the Elbe again, still delivering the milk of vengeance, which is nothing other than sweat gathered from the dripping forehead of blind Justitia.

  Don’t turn around, the clap’s going around. And faster and faster, because Matern’s avenging apparatus gives the avenger no rest and, leaping ahead of vengeance just inflicted, is off to a new start: on to Freudenstadt; around the corner, as it were, to Rendsburg; from Passau to Kleve; Matern doesn’t shrink back from changing trains four times and even makes his way straddle-legged on foot.

  Anyone who takes a look at the statistics on venereal disease in Germany during the first postwar years will be struck by a sudden increase in this benign but troublesome venereal ailment beginning in May ’47. The curve attains its apogee at the end of October in the same year, then falls rapidly, and finally flattens off at its springtime level. The determining factors in the minor fluctuations that occur from then on appear to be demographic shifts and changes in the stations of the occupation troops, and no longer Matern who, privately and without a license, journeyed through the land to cross off names with a gonococcus-loaded syringe and to de-Nazify a large circle of acquaintances. Accordingly Matern, when post war adventures are being retailed among friends, refers to his six-months case of gonorrhea as antifascist gonorrhea; and indeed, Matern was able to subject the female relations of former Party mediumshots to an influence which can be described, by extension, as salutary.

  But who will cure him? Who will draw the pain from the root of him who has put the plague into circulation? Physician, heal thyself.

  Now after forays through Teutoburg Forest and a brief stay in Detmold, he is in a little village near Camp Munster, where the rolling stone started rolling. Figures back and compares with his memo book: all around him heather in bloom and goldenrod as well, for in among the heath sheep and the heath peasants Matern finds any number of old friends; among others, Hauptbannführer Uli Göpfert who, in co-operation with Jungbannführer Wendt, had year after year directed the popular tent camps in Poggenkrug Forest near Oliva. He is living here in Elmke without Otto Wendt, but attached to a knot of long hair that formerly had been leading German girls, in two rooms which actually have electric light.

  Pluto has plenty of freedom. Göpfert on the other hand sits fettered near the stove, putting on peat that he cut in the spring, grumbling at himself and the world, cussing out swine whom he never calls by name, and pondering: What now? Should he emigrate? Should he join the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, or the lost squadron of olden days? Later, after ups and downs, he will join the Liberals and carve out a career for himself in North Rhenish Westphalia as a so-called Free Democrat; but for the present—and here in Elmke—he is obliged to doctor himself without results for a case of gonorrhea brought into the house by a sick friend with a healthy dog.

  Sometimes, when Frau Vera Göpfert is teaching school and her bun isn’t there to tempt dripping Johnny, Göpfert and Matern sit peaceably by the warm stove, making each other soothing peat poultices, doctoring the selfsame misery in the manner of the heath peasants, and cussing out swine, some of them nameless and others who have made quite a name for themselves.

  “How those bastards screwed us!” laments the former Hauptbannführer. “And we believed and hoped and trusted implicitly, we went along blindly, and now, what now?”

  Matern reels off names from Sawatzki to Göpfert. So far he has been able to cross off some eighty entries in his heart, spleen, and kidneys. No end of common acquaintances. Göpfert remembers, for instance, the band leader of SA Brigade 6, Erwin Bukolt was his name: “That, my boy, wasn’t in ’36, but exactly on April 20th, ’38, because believe it or not, you were there on monitor duty. At ten a.m. in Jäschkental Forest. Führerweather. Stage set up in the woods. Young people’s Eastland celebration with a cantata by Baumann: ‘Call from the East.’ A chorus of a hundred and twenty boys and a hundred and eighty girls. All first-rate voices. Parade on three terraces. Out of the woods in measured tread over beechnuts from the year before. The girls were all doing their year of farm duty. I can still see them: full blouses, red and blue aprons and kerchiefs. That rhythmic marching flow. The merging of the choruses. On the main terrace stands the small boys’ chorus, and after I have made a brief introductory speech, they ask the fateful questions. Two large boys’ choruses and two large girls’ choruses give the answers slowly and word for word. In between—do you remember?—a cuckoo called from the Gutenberg clearing. Regularly in the pauses between fateful questions and fateful answers: Cuckoo! But it doesn’t upset those four boys, the solo speakers on the second terrace, raised above the choruses. On the third terrace stands the brass band. You fellows from the Langfuhr-North SA Sturm are standing at the lower left held in reserve behind Bukolt’s band, because when it’s over you’ll have to organize the homeward march. Man, that was good! Jäschkental Forest has amazing echoes: they come back from the Gutenberg clearing, where the cuckoo goes on and on, from the Erbsberg, and from Friedrichshöhe. The cantata is about the destiny of the East. A horseman rides through German lands, proclaiming: ‘The Reich is bigger than its borders.’ The choruses and the four main questioners ask questions which the horseman answers as though hammering on metal: ‘Yours to hold the fort and the gate to the East.’ Slowly the questions and answers culminate in a single ardent profession of faith. Finally the cantata rises to a mighty close with a hymn to the Greater Germany. Echo effects. It was a beech forest. First-rate voices. The cuckoo didn’t bother anybody. Führerweather. You were there too, my boy. Don’t kid yourself. In 1938. On April 20th. Lousy shit. We wanted to set out for the Eastland with Holderlin and Heidegger in our knapsacks. Now we’re sitting here in the West with the clap.”

  Thereupon Matern grinds his teeth, rubbing East against West. He’s fed up on avenging nettle juice, on the milk of vengeance, on love pearls and candledrops. Low and peat-warm is the peasants’ room where he stands straddle-legged after four and eighty Materniads. Enough enough! cries his pain-inhabited root.

  Enough is never enough! admonish other names incised in heart, spleen, and kidneys.

  “Two shots of cement and every hour a fresh peat poultice,” laments former Hauptbannführer Göpfert, “and still no improvement. Penicillin’s out of sight and even belladonna’s very scarce.”

  Thereupon Matern with pants wide open strides tow
ard a white-washed wall that bounds the room on the east. This festive hour will have to get along without cuckoo and brass bands. Nevertheless he raises his honey-sweating penis to eastward. “The Reich is bigger than its borders!” Nine million refugees’ identity cards pile up westward of Matern: “Yours to hold the fort and the gate to the East!” A horseman rides through German lands, but in the east he looks not for a door but for a simple wall socket. And between the socket and his penis contact is established. Matern, to put it plainly, pisses into the socket and obtains—thanks to an unbroken stream of water—a powerful, electric, skyhigh-sending, and salutary shock; for as soon as he can stand up again, pale and trembling under hair aghast, all the honey drains. The milk of vengeance curdles. The love pearls roll into cracks in the floor. The goldenrod withers. Dripping Johnny breathes again. Runner marks time. The widow’s tears dry up. His lordship’s cold has been cured by an electric shock. The physician has healed himself. Pluto has looked on. Former Hauptbannführer Göpfert has also looked on. And naturally God in His heaven has looked on too. Only Frau Vera Göpfert has seen nothing; for when she comes home from the village school with ample bun, all she finds of Matern is rumors and undarned woolen socks: Cured but unredeemed, master and dog leave the withered Lüneberg Heath. From this moment on, the clap is on the decline in Germany. Every pestilence purifies. Every plague has its day. Every joy is the last.

  THE PHILOSOPHICAL EIGHTY-FIFTH

  AND THE CONFESSED EIGHTY-SIXTH MATERNIAD

  What does Brauxel want? He’s pestering the life out of Matern. As if it weren’t bad enough vomiting up his guts for pages on end for a measly advance, now he has to send in a report every week: “How many pages today? How many tomorrow? Will the episode with Sawatzki and wife have consequences? Was snow falling when he began to shuttle back and forth between Freiburg im Breisgau and the ski slopes of Todtnau? In which bay of the men’s toilet in Cologne Central Station did he find his travel order to the Black Forest? Written or scratched?”

  O.K., Brauxel, here it is. Matern’s excretion amounts to: Seven pages today. Seven pages tomorrow. Seven pages yesterday. Every day seven pages. Every episode has consequences. Snow wasn’t falling between Todtnau and Freiburg. It is falling. In the twelfth bay from the left it wasn’t written, it is written. Matern writes in the present: All Holzwege, all woodcutter’s tracks, lead astray.

  Crowds at every bay. The damp cold fills the men’s toilet, for the cathedral is unheated. Matern doesn’t shove, but when at long last he has occupied his bay, the twelfth from the left, he’s in no hurry to leave it: Man is entitled to a resting place on earth. But already they’re jostling behind him. All right, so he isn’t entitled. “Hurry up, buddy. We gotta go too, buddy. He ain’t pissing no more, he’s just looking. What’s so interesting to look at, buddy? Tell us about it.”

  Fortunately Pluto assures the reading Matern of privacy and leisure. Seven times he is able to lap up the delicate inscription that seems to have been breathed on the wall with silver point. After so much lust and pestilence he is comforted by spiritual fare. The passed water of all men in this world steams. But Matern stands alone and copies the subtile trace of the silver point in heart, spleen, and kidneys. The steaming Catholic men’s toilet is a steaming Catholic kitchen. Behind Matern push cooks bent on cooking: “Hurry up, buddy. You’re not the only pebble on the beach, buddy! Love your neighbor, buddy!”

  But Matern stands central. The large ruminant ruminates every word in the twelfth bay from the left: “The Alemannic Stockingcap is capping between Todtnau and Freidburg.”

  Thus edified, Matern turns away. “At last!” He holds Pluto to heel. “Think it over, dog, but not with reason! He was with me when I flew gliders and played chess. With him—soul in soul, arm in arm—I roamed the streets and the waterfront. Eddi passed him on to me as a joke. Words that read like soft butter. He was good for headache and warded off thought when Eddi ratiocinated about sparrows. Think back, dog, but without reason. I read him aloud to Langfuhr SA Sturm 84. They were doubled up at the bar, I had them whinnying out of Being and Time. He wears a Stockingcap that’s longer than any march forward or backward. I took him with me in my musette bag from Warsaw to Dunkirk, from Salonika to Odessa, from the Mius front to Kaiserhafen battery, from police headquarters to Kurland, and from there—those are long distances—to the Ardennes; with him I deserted all the way to southern England, I dragged him to Camp Munster, Eddi bought him secondhand in Tagnetergasse: a copy of the first edition, published in 1927, dedicated to little Husserl, whom he later with his Stockingcap… Get this straight, dog: he was born in Messkirch. That’s near Braunau on the Inn. He and the Other had their umbilical cords cut in the same Stockingcap year. He and the Other Guy invented each other. One day He and the Other will stand on the same pedestal. He is calling me, he is always calling me. Think it over, dog, but without reason! Where will the train take us this very day?”

  They get out in Freiburg im Breisgau and drop in at the university. The environment is still ringing with the turgid speech he delivered in ’33—“Our own selves: that is our goal!”—but there’s no Stockingcap hanging in any of the lecture halls. “He isn’t allowed to any more, because he…”

  Master and dog ask their way and find a villa with wrought-iron garden gate in front of it. They bellow and bark in the quiet residential quarter: “Open up, Stockingcap! Matern is here, manifesting himself as the call of care. Open up!”

  The villa remains wintry still. No window is yellowed by electric light. But a note stuck to the mailbox beside the iron gate yields information: “The cap is capping on the ski slopes.”

  And so master and dog have to climb on six feet in the shadow of the Feldberg. Above Todtnau the snowstorm buffets them. Philosopher’s weather—insight weather! Swirls in swirls, grounding. And no Black Forest fir to give information. If not for the dog without reason, they would be lost in errancy. Nose to the ground, he finds the ski hut, shelter from the wind. And instantly big words and dog’s barking are clipped by the storm: “Open up, Stockingcap! Matern is here, manifesting revenge! We who have come here to enact our Being in Materniads and make visible Simon Materna, the hero of independence. He forced the cities of Danzig, Dirschau, and Elbing to their knees, sent Drehergasse and Petersiliengasse up in flames; that’s what’s going to happen to your cap, you skiing Nothing—open up.”

  Though the hut remains barred, doweled, chinkless, and in hospitable, there is a note, snow-powdered and barely legible, stuck on barkless Black Forest wood: “Stockingcap has to read Plato in the valley.”

  Downhill. This is no Erbsberg, it’s the Feldberg. Without map through Todtnau and Cry-of-Anguish—such are the names of the places around here—to Care, Overclimb, Nihilation. For that very reason Plato fouled up. Why shouldn’t he? What Syracuse was to the one philosopher, a rectoral address was to the other. Therefore settle down in the sticks. Why do we stay in the sticks? Because Stockingcap sticks to them. When he’s not skiing up top, he’s reading Plato down below. That is the subtle provincial distinction. A little game among philosophers: Peekaboo, here I am. Peekaboo, I fooled you: up down—down up. Applesauce! O Matern, seven times down the Feldberg without ever overtaking himself! Cap, capping, uncapped, cappedness: always ahead of oneself, never being-with, never being-already-in, no present-at-hand togetherness, always away-from-oneself-toward, neither curable nor incurable, hopelessly surrounded by fir environment, exceptionless. Once again Matern plummets from lofty attunedness to rockbottom contingency without at-handness; for in the valley, on the little square note beside the garden door, an already familiar script whispers: “Stockingcap, like all greatness, is out in the storm.” And up above, storm-ventilated, he reads: “Stockingcap has to rake the field path below.”

  What hard work is the execution of vengeance! Rage snaps at snowflakes. Hatred sabers icicles. But the firs nihilate and guard the riddle of the enduring: if he isn’t erring below, he’s enacting his Being up above; if he isn’t comi
ng-to-be up top, he’s grounding on a slip of paper beside the iron gate: “The amplitude of all the Black Forest firs that dwell around Stockingcap confers world and powder snow.” Skiingweather skiingweather! O Matern, what will you do when after seven times up and down the Feldberg you haven’t overtaken yourself, when seven times you have had to read down below: “Stockingcap up top” and seven times up top the words have flickered before your eyes: “Down below Stockingcap manifests Nothing.”

  Then in the quiet residential quarter master and dog stand panting outside a particular villa: exhausted duped fir-crazed, hatred and rage try to piss into a mailbox. Shouting climbs iron fences, larded with pauses: “Say, where can I catch you, Cap? What book is bookmarked with your cap?—In what cap have you hidden the lime-sprinkled forgetful of Being?—How long was the Stockingcap you strangled little Husserl with? How many of your teeth do I have to pull to turn thrownness into essent stockingcapped Being?”

  That’s a lot of questions, but don’t let it worry you. Matern answers them all by himself. He’s in the habit. The questions of one who always stands central—phenotype, self-point-possessed—are never at a loss for answers. Matern doesn’t formulate, he acts with two paws. First the iron gate outside the garden of a certain villa is shaken and cursed. But no more Alemannic Stockingcap language; Matern’s vituperation is down-to-earth and autonomously idiomatic: “C’mon out, ya louse! I’ll show ya, ya clunk! Ya slimy gazoop! Ya big beezack! Ya—hatrack. I’m gonna kick ya in the slats and cut yer bleeding heart out. I’m gonna unravel you like an old sock. I’m gonna make hamburger out of ya and feed ya to the dog in little pieces. We’re fed up on thrownness and existence-into-nuttin. Matern’s gonna getcha. Matern’s gonna getcha. C’mon out, philospher! Matern’s a philosopher too: Shoilem boil ’em.”