Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  These words and Matern’s claws do the trick: not that the philosopher follows the friendly invitation and steps out of the villa with Alemannic stolidness, in Stockingcap and buckled shoes; instead, Matern lifts the wrought-iron garden gate off its hinges. He brandishes it, and Pluto falls speechless, for several times Matern succeeds in shaking it at the sky. And when the sky, black and smelling of snow, won’t relieve him of the gate, he hurls it into the garden: an amazing distance.

  The wrecker brushes off his hands: “That’s that!” The hero looks around for witnesses: “Did you see? That’s the way Matern does it. Phenomenal!” The avenger savors the aftertaste of accomplished revenge: “He’s got his. Now we’re quits.” But aside from the dog, no one can testify that it happened thus and not otherwise; unless God, despite the snow in the air, was eavesdropping from upstairs: nihilating essentiating catching-cold.

  And the police have no objections when Matern with dog wants to leave the city of Freiburg im Breisgau. He has to travel third class because the ups and downs have exhausted his treasury: he has had to spend one night in Todtnau, two in Cry-of-Anguish, and once each in Nihilation and Overclimb; that’s the price of associating with philosophers—and were it nor for charitable women and tender-hearted young girls, master and dog would hunger thirst perish.

  But they journey after him, eager to cool a brow overheated by philosophical disputation, eager to win a man who has narrowly escaped being shanghaied by Transcendence back to earth and its double beds: cello-playing Fräulein Gelling, Captain Hufnagel’s gorgeous daughter, the brown-haired secretary from Oldenburg, Warnke’s curly black-haired cleaningwoman, as well as Gerda, who gave him the dripping Johnny between Völklingen and Saarbrücken, all whom he enriched with and without goldenrod now want him and only him: Ebeling’s daughter-in-law from Celle; Grete Diering from Bückeburg; Budczinski’s sister leaves lonely Hunsruck; Irma Jaeger the flowering Bergstrasse; Klingenberg’s Upper Franconian daughters Christa and Gisela; from the Soviet zone comes Hildchen Wollschläger without Franz Wollschläger; Johanna Tietz is sick of living with her Tietz in the Bavarian Forest; in search of him go: a Princess von Lippe with her girl friend, daughter of an East Frisian hotel-keeper, women from Berlin and maidens from the Rhine. German women grope for Matern with the help of newspaper ads and detective agencies. They bait their hooks with rewards. An iron will lurks in wait with a dissyllabic goal. They chase find corner him, try to strangle him with Vera Göpfert’s copious hair. They snap at him with Irmapussies, Gretetraps, cleaningwomen’s chasms, garbage-can covers, Elkecracks, housewives’ shopping bags, Berlin rolls, princess-quiffs, fishcakes, and Silesian meat pudding. In compensation they bring with them: tobacco, socks, silver spoons, wedding rings, Wollschläger’s pocket watch, Budczinski’s gold cuff links, Otto Warnke’s shaving soap, their brother-in-law’s microscope, their husband’s savings, the special judge’s violin, the captain’s Canadian currency, and hearts souls love.

  Matern isn’t always able to evade these riches. They wait, touching to look upon, between Cologne’s Central Station and Cologne’s immovable cathedral. Treasures demand to be admired in air-raid-shelter hotels and one-night hotels, on Rhine meadows and pine needles. They’ve also brought sausage skins for the dog, lest counterpart payments be disturbed by demanding dog muzzle: “Don’t do the same thing twice, or you’ll be doing the same thing twice.”

  And whenever he sets out to visit the quiet men’s toilet alone with dog, to meditate and practice detachment, demanding girlfingers housewifefingers princessfingers touch him in the bustling station hall: “Come. I know where. I know a janitor who rents. A girl friend of mine has gone away for a few days. I know a gravel pit they’re not using any more. I’ve taken a place for us in. Only a little while. Time enough to unburden our hearts. Wollschläger sent me. I had no choice. Afterwards I’ll go away, I promise. Come!”

  As a result of all this solicitude, Matern goes to the dogs and Pluto gets fat. O recoiling vengeance! Rage bites cotton. Hate excretes love. The boomerang strikes when he thinks he has struck five and eighty times: don’t do the same thing twice—it’s never the same. For with the best of fare he loses weight: Göpfert’s shirts have begun to fit him; cool and soothing as Otto Warnke’s birch tonic is to his scalp, Matern’s hair is falling. Bankrupt! And who should turn up as the receiver but his old friend dripping Johnny; for what he thought he had got rid of in the Bavarian Forest or in the District of Arich, reinfects him in Upper Franconia, the Soviet zone, the backwoods. Leitmotives and murder motives: six times, on dripping Johnny’s account, he has to piss into wall sockets. It knocks him cold. It flattens him. Horse medicine cures him. Gonococci infect him. Electricity sends Matern for the count. Double beds transform a traveling avenger into a leaky Don Juan. Already he presents the saturated look. Already he talks glibly and seductively about love and death. He can turn on the tenderness without even looking. He’s begun to fondle his clap like the favorite child of genius. Minor madness has dropped its visiting card. Soon he’ll be wanting to emasculate himself after shaving, to throw his lopped-off phenotype to Leporello, to the dog.

  Who will save Matern? For what is all presumptuous philosophy compared to a single bounceback man without reason! What is the sevenfold stockingcap-maddened ascent of the Feldberg compared to six contact-crazed light sockets! And to make matters worse, the blubbering: “Make me a baby. Spill me one. Knock me up. Be careful, don’t waste any. Pump me full. Curette me. Clean me out. Ovaries!” Who saves Matern, combs away the dead hair, and buttons up his pants till the next time? Who is kind to him, selfless? Who puts himself between Matern and the hairy soggy Vienna rolls?

  At most the dog. Pluto manages to avert the worst: He chases Otto Warnke’s cleaningwoman and Göpfert’s Vera, the one in April, the other in May, across the Rhine meadows out of a gravel pit where they’ve been trying to suck Matern’s spinal fluid and bite off his testicles. And Pluto manages to sniff about and make it known when one of them turns up with dripping Johnny’s love pearls in her purse. He barks, growls, gets between, and with butting nose indicates the treacherous focus of pestilence. By unmasking Hildchen Wollschläger and the princess’s girl friend, the servant spares his master two additional electric shocks; but even he cannot save Matern.

  Cologne’s double prongs see him thus: broken, cavern-eyed, bald at the temples, with Pluto, faithfulasadog, frolicking around him. And this picture of misery, so close to the footlights, starts out again, makes his way through the bustle of Central Station, resolved to descend to quiet regions, tiled, Catholic, and whispering; for Matern still senses the presence of names, painfully incised in internal organs and demanding to be crossed off—be it with trembling hand.

  And step by step with knotted stick he almost makes it. Thus she sees him: man and stick with dog. The picture moves her. Without hesitation she, the sugarbeet woman with whom all his vengeance began, comes toward him: compassionate charitable motherly. Inge Sawatzki pushes a baby carriage, in which dwells a Novemberly sugarbeet bunny, who came into the world syrupsweet a year ago next July and since then has been called Walli, for Walburga; for such is Inge Sawatiki’s certainty that little Walli’s father answers to a name beginning with W, such as Walter—although Willibald and Wunibald, the saintly brothers of the great witch-banishing saint, makers to this day of Walburga Oil, a product still in demand, are closer to her from a Catholic point of view.

  Matern stares darkly into the occupied baby carriage. Inge Sawatzki curtails the usual period of silent admiration. “Pretty baby, isn’t she? You’re not looking at all well. She’ll be walking any day now. Don’t worry. I don’t want anything of you. But Jochen would be pleased. You look all worn out. Really, we’re both so fond of you. Besides, it’s sweet the way he takes care of the baby. An easy confinement. We were lucky. Was supposed to be in Cancer, but she turned out to be a Leo girl, with Libra in the ascendant. They have an easy time of it later on: usually pretty, domestic, adaptable, versatile, affectio
nate, and with all that, strong-willed. We’re living over in Mülheim now. We can take the ferry if you like, sailing, sailing over the bounding main. You really need rest and care. Jochen’s working in Leverkusen. I advised against it, because wherever he goes he gets mixed up in politics, and he swears by Reimann. My goodness, you look tired. We could take the train too, but I like the ferry. Oh, well, Jochen must know what he’s doing. He says a man has to show his colors. After all you were in there too. Is that where you met or was it in the SA sturm? You’re not saying a word. I really don’t want anything of you. If you feel like it, we’ll baby you for a couple of weeks. You need a rest. A homey place. We’ve got two and a half rooms. You’ll have the attic room all to yourself. I’ll leave you alone, honest. I love you. But in a perfectly peaceful way. Walli just smiled at you. Did you see? She’s doing it again. Does the dog like babies? They say shepherds love children. I love you and the dog. And I wanted to sell him, remember, I was dumb in those days. You’ve got to do something to save your hair.”

  They go on board: mother and child—master and dog. The well-fed sun cooks Mülheim’s ruins and Mulheim’s meagerly fed consumers in the same pot. Never has Germany been so beautiful. Never has Germany been so healthy. Never have there been more expressive faces in Germany than in the days of the thousand and thirty-two calories. But Inge Sawatzki declares while the Mulheim ferry is docking: “Well be getting new money pretty soon. Goldmouth even knows when. What, you don’t know him? Everybody that knows which way is up around here knows him. Take my word for it, he’s got a finger in everything. The whole black market, from Trankgasse to the Amis in Bremerhaven, takes its cue from Goldmouth. But he says it’s on the way out. He says we should reconvert. The new money won’t be worthless paper; it’ll be rare and precious, you’ll have to work for it. He came to the christening. Hardly anybody knows his real name. Jochen says he’s not a pure Aryan. I couldn’t care less. Anyway he didn’t come into the church, but gave us two sets of baby clothes and piles of gin. He himself doesn’t touch it, he only smokes. My goodness, he doesn’t smoke them, he eats them. Right now he’s out of town. They say he has his headquarters near Düren. Other people say it’s somewhere near Hanover. But with Goldmouth you never know. This is where we live. You get used to the view.”

  Staying with good old friends, Matern witnesses X-Day, the currency reform. This is the time to take stock of the situation. Sawatzki walks straight out of the C.P. For his money it stinks anyway. Everybody gets his quota. They don’t drink it up. Certainly not: “This here is our investment capital. We’ll live on our reserves. The syrup’ll do us for twelve months at least. By the time we’ve worn out all the shirts and underwear, Walli will be going to school. ’Cause we haven’t been sitting on our stocks, we saw what was coming, we unloaded. That was Goldmouth’s advice. A tip like that is worth its weight in gold. He let Inge in on a way of getting care packages, just to be obliging, because he likes us. He’s always asking about you, because we told him about you. Where you been keeping yourself all this time?”

  With leaden pauses in between, Matern, who is slowly regaining his strength, lists German countrysides: East Frisia, the rugged Alb, Upper Franconia, charming Bergstrasse, Sauerland, the Hunsrück, the Eifel, the Saar, Lüneburg Heath, Thuringia or the green heart of Germany. He describes the Black Forest where it is highest and blackest. And his vivid geography lesson is enriched with the names of cities: “On my way from Celle to Bückeburg. Aachen, the ancient city founded by the Romans, where the Holy Roman emperors were crowned. Passau, where the Inn and the Ilz flow into the Danube. Of course I went to see the Goethe house in Weimar. Munich was a disappointment but Stade, the country behind the Elbe dikes, is a highly developed fruit-growing region.”

  Sawatzki’s question “AND NOW WHAT?” ought to be embroidered, given a border, and hung up over the couch. Matern wants to sleep, eat, read the paper, sleep, look out the window, commune with himself, and look at Matern in the shaving mirror: Gone the bleary eyes. The hollows under the cheekbones excellently filled in. But there’s no holding the hair, it’s emigrating. His forehead grows, lengthening his character-actor’s phiz, molded by thirty-one dog years. “And what now?” Eat humble pie? Go dogless into business now that things are starting up? Go back to acting, leave the dog in the checkroom? Grind teeth no longer on the open hunting ground, but only on the stage? Franz Moor? Danton? Faust in Oberhausen? Sergeant Beckmann in Trier? Hamlet in the experimental theater? No. Never! Not yet. His accounts aren’t settled yet. Matern’s X-Day hasn’t dawned yet, Matern wants to pay his debts in the old currency, that’s why he raises hell in Sawatzki’s two-and-a-half-room apartment. With heavy hand he crushes a celluloid rattle and expresses doubts that Walli stems from the stem of Walter. Matern also wipes all the sure-fire tips grown in Goldmouth’s garden off the breakfast table with the sugar bowl. He takes his cue from himself, from his heart, spleen, and kidneys. He and Sawatzki aren’t calling each other by their first names any more, but denounce each other, according to mood and time of day, as “Trotzkyite, Nazi, you traitor, you crumby little fellow traveler!” But only when Matern boxes Inge’s ears in the middle of the living room—let the reason lie buried in Matern’s attic room—does Jochen Sawatzki throw his guest with dog out of the two-and-a-half-room apartment. Instantly Inge wants to be thrown out too with child. But Sawatzki brings a flat hand down on the oilclothed tabletop: “The kid stays here with me. She ain’t going to be mixed up in this. Go where you please, go to the dogs. But not with the kid, I’ll take care of her.”

  So without child but with dog and little of the new currency. Matern still has Wollschläger’s pocket watch, Budczinski’s gold cuff links, and two Canadian dollars. Between Cologne’s cathedral and Cologne’s Central Station they make merry on the proceeds of the watch. There’s just enough left over for a week in a hotel in Benrath, offering a view of the castle with round pond and square garden.

  “And what now?” she says.

  He massages his scalp at the wardrobe mirror.

  She points her thumb in the direction of the curtains: “It seems to me if you want work the Henkel works are over there, and over there on the right Demag is starting up again. We could look for a place to live in Wersten or right in Düsseldorf.”

  But at the mirror and later, out in the wet cold, Matern doesn’t feel like working; he wants to wander. After all, he comes of a miller’s family, and millers, says the poet, delight in wandering. Besides, the dog needs exercise. And before he raises a finger for those capitalist swine, he’ll… “Henkel, Demag, Mannesmann! Don’t make me laugh!”

  Two with dog along the Trippelsberg, across the Rhine meadows to Himmelgeist. There they find an inn that has a room available and doesn’t bother about marriage certificates and manandwife. A restless night, for from Mülheim Inge Sawatzki has brought not hiking shoes but an ornamental coverlet with the embroidered question “And what now?” Won’t let him sleep. Always in the same groove. Pillow-whispering: “Do something. Anything. Goldmouth says: invest, invest, and invest some more, it’ll pay off in three years at the latest. Sawatzki, for instance, is going to quit his job in Leverkusen and go into business for himself in some small town. Goldmouth suggested men’s coats and suits. Wouldn’t you like to try something, anything? You’re educated, after all, as you’re always saying. A consultant’s bureau, for instance, or a horoscope magazine, something serious-looking. Goldmouth says there’s a future in that kind of thing. People have simply stopped believing in the old baloney. They want something different, really reliable information about what’s written in the stars… You’re Capricorn, for instance, and I’m Cancer. You can do whatever you please with me.”

  Obligingly Matern does for her next day. They have barely enough money left for the Rhine ferry from Himmelgeist to Udesheim. The rain is free of charge. O wet cold bondage! In sopping shoes they hike in single file, the dog in the lead, to Grimlinghausen. There hunger is waiting but nothing to eat. They can’t
even change sides and ferry to Volmerswerth on the right bank. He does for her on the left bank of the Rhine, under the eyes of St. Quirinus, who was burned in Moscow under the name of Kuhlmann and nevertheless was powerless to protect the city of Neuss from bombs.

  Where do you sleep without a penny to your name, but with a pious sinful heart? You get yourself locked up in a church, more precisely in an only true, unheated, namely, Catholic church. Familiar environment. Restless night. For a long time they lie, each in his own pew, until only she is lying and he with dog and dragging leg is roaming about the nave: everywhere scaffoldings and pails of whitewash. A cockeyed kind of place. A little of everything. Typical Transition style. Romanesquely begun when it was already too late, later pasted over with baroque, the dome for example. Damp plaster steams. With floating plaster dust is mingled the smell of elaborate pontifical offices from the dog years of the thirties. Still hovering indecisively and refusing to settle. Matern has been here before, in the days when he carried on conversations with the Virgin Mary. Today Ingewife does the talking: “And what now?” is her ever-ready question. “It’s cold,” she says. And: “Can’t you sit down?” And: “Should we get a rug?” And: “If it weren’t a church, I’d say come on, would you like to too?” And then in the somnolent three-quarters darkness: “Say, look. There’s a confessional. You think it’s closed?”

  It isn’t closed but ready at all times. In a confessional he does for her. Something new for a change. In there it’s a safe bet that nobody ever. So the dog has to go in where ordinarily the priest has his ear. For Pluto joins in the game. Matern with her enters the adjacent cubicle. And as she kneels, he bucks her uncomfortably from behind, while she has to blabber through the grating behind which Pluto is playing the father confessor. And he presses her fuckedout doll’s face against the sinfully ornate wooden grille: baroque, masterly, Rhenish woodcarving outlives the centuries, doesn’t break, but squashes the doll face’s nose. Every sin counts. Works of penance are imposed. A prayer for intercession is offered up. Not, St. Quirinus, help! But: “Sawatzki, come and help me. Oh oh oh!”