Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Inge’s idea is that Pluto should stay with the maid in the five-room apartment to guard the sleeping Walli, but Matern insists that Pluto come along to the Morgue. Sawatzki suggests: “Hadn’t we better go to the Czikos?” But Inge is dead set on the Morgue. The three of them with dog push off. Up Flingerstrasse, down Bolkertstrasse. Naturally the Morgue, like all authentic Düsseldorf nightclubs, is in the Old City. Who owns the place is uncertain. Some speak of F. Schmuh, owner of the Onion Cellar. Otto Schuster of the Czikos is also mentioned. Right now Film-Mattner, owner of the Choo-Choo and the Dacha, which they had first wanted to call the “Troika,” is the coming man; just recently he opened a new joint, the Fleamarket. But at the time when Matern went out on the town with dog and Sawatzkis, he was only starting out. Along Mertenstrasse, before they venture into the Morgue, Inge Sawatzki racks her brains behind her doll’s face that has grown five years older: “I really wonder who hit on the idea. Somebody had to think of it, didn’t they? Goldmouth used to say such funny things sometimes. Of course we never believed the line he spills. In business matters you can trust him, but in other things? For instance, he tried to make us believe that he’d owned a whole ballet. And all that tripe about the Front Line Theater during the war and so on. And he’s certainly not a pure Aryan. They’d have noticed that in those days. I asked him a couple of times: Tell me, Goldmouth, where do you actually come from? Once he said Riga, another time: They call it Swibno today. What it was called before he didn’t say. But there must be some truth in the ballet business. Maybe they really didn’t notice. They say Schmuh’s one too. He’s the one with the Onion Cellar. They say he was some kind of an air-raid warden the whole time. But they’re the only ones I. And they’re both typical. That’s why I say that an idea like the Morgue could only have been thought up by somebody like Goldmouth who. You’ll see. I’m not exaggerating. Am I, Jochen? It’s right after Andreasgasse, across from the Magistrate’s Court.”

  There it is—in white letters on a black tombstone: THE MORGUE. And yet, if you don’t look too closely, it could be a plain funeral parlor. In the window there’s even an ivory-colored child’s coffin—empty. And the usual: wax lilies and unusually attractive coffin mountings. Pedestals fitted with white velvet support photographs of first-class funerals. Wreaths as round as life preservers lean against them. In the foreground stands an impressive stone urn of the bronze age, found, as a small plaque informs one, in Coesfeld near Minister.

  Inside, the guests find equally gentle reminders of human transcience. Although they have made no reservations, the Sawatzkis, with Matern and dog, are shown to a table not far from the Swedish movie actress killed in an automobile accident and now lying in state. She is under glass and naturally made of wax. A white quilt, showing no contours, the welted edges attenuated by clouds of lace, covers the actress to the navel; but from the softly wavy black hair to the waist, the left half of her, the cheek, the chin, the gently sloping neck, the barely delineated collarbone, the steeply rising bosom are of waxen, yet pink-and-yellow-skinned flesh; to the right, however, as seen by Matern and the Sawatzkis, the illusion is created that a surgeon’s scalpel has laid her bare; also modeled in wax, but true to life: heart, spleen, and the left kidney. The prize package is the heart, which beats exactly as it should, and a few of the Morgue’s customers are always standing around the glass case, trying to see how it works.

  Hesitantly, Inge Sawatzki last, they sit down. In indirectly lighted wall niches the roving eye distinguishes various parts of the human skeleton, the arm with radius and ulna, the inevitable death’s-head, but also clearly displayed in large labeled flasks, as though for purposes of instruction, the lobe of a lung, a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and a placenta. There is even a library offering book after book, not glassed in but ready at hand: volumes on general physiology, richly illustrated, and more exacting works for the specialist—an account, for example, of experiments in the grafting of organs and a two-volume study of the pituitary gland. And between the niches, all of the same format and framed in good taste, photographs and engravings of celebrated physicians: Paracelsus, Virchow, Sauerbruch, and the Greek god of medicine leaning on a snake-entwined staff watch the guests at dinner.

  The menu is nothing unusual: wiener schnitzel, beef brisket with horseradish, calves’ brains on toast, beef tongue in Madeira, lamb kidneys flambd, even common pig’s knuckles, and the usual roast chicken with French-fried potatoes. At most the cutlery and china are deserving of mention: Matern and the Sawatzkis eat calves’ knuckles with sterile dissecting instruments; around the plates runs the inscription: “Academy of Medicine—Autopsy”; the beer, common Düsseldorf brew, foams in Erlenmeyer flasks; but otherwise there is no exaggeration. The average restaurant owner or proponent of the Düsseldorf modern style, the now-prominent Film-Mattner and his interior decorators, for instance, would have made too much of a good thing. They might, for example, have run off tape recordings of operating-room sounds: the slow, chewinggum-sluggish counting before the anesthetic takes effect, whispered or sharp instructions, metal touches metal, a saw functions, something buzzes on one note, something else pumps more and more slowly, then faster, staccato instructions, heart sounds, heart sounds… Nothing of the kind. Not even muffled dinner music fills the Morgue with irrelevant sound. Softly the dissecting instruments tinkle over the main course. Evenly sprinkled conversation at every table; but the tables again, apart from the damask tablecloths, are authentic: operating-room tables, elongated, on rollers, adjustable, are not mercilessly illuminated by powerful operating-room lamps, but watched over and bathed in a warm, personal light by charmingly old-fashioned, definitely Biedermeier lampshades. Nor are the guests doctors in civilian clothes, but, like the Sawatzkis and Matern, business people with friends, an occasional member of the provincial diet, a sprinkling of foreigners whose hosts want to show them something special, rarely young couples, and in every case consumers who wish to spend money on their evening out; for the Morgue—originally it was to be called the “Mortuary”—isn’t exactly cheap, and besides, it’s full of temptations. At the bar sit none of the usual hostesses, encouraging liquor consumption, no such sexy tactics as at the Rififi or the Taboo; instead, conservatively dressed young men, in a word, graduate physicians, are prepared, over a glass of champagne, well, perhaps not to provide final diagnoses, but to tell instructive and yet generally intelligible tales out of school. Here, far from his overkindly family doctor, many a guest has been made aware for the first time that his ailment bears this or that name, arteriosclerosis, for instance. Deposits of a fatty substance, cholesterol for example, have caused a hardening of the blood vessels. Amiably, but without the familiarity characteristic of most barroom conversation, the learned employee of the Morgue calls attention to possible consequences, coronary thrombosis, apoplexy, or what have you, then beckons a colleague, sitting nearby over a drink, to come over: The colleague, a biochemist and authority on the metabolism of fats, enlightens the guest—they stick to champagne—about animal fats and vegetable fats: “You needn’t worry, the only fats used in our establishment are those containing acids that reduce cholesterol: our calves’ brains on toast are prepared with pure corn oil. We also use sunflower oil and, you may be surprised to learn, even whale oil, but never lard or butter.”

  The Sawatzkis, especially Inge Sawatzki, try to persuade Matern, who has been troubled by kidney stones of late, to join one of the “B-doctors,” as Inge calls them, at the bar. But Matern dislikes the idea of crossing the room, and so Sawatzki with a gesture summons one of the young men, who introduces himself as a urologist. No sooner has the word “kidney stones” been dropped than the young man insists on ordering the juice of two lemons: “You see, we used to be glad if we could eliminate small stones with a long and troublesome treatment; our lemon cure brings better results and all in all it’s less expensive. We simply dissolve the stones, but only the so-called urate stones, I have to admit. Generally speaking, our guests’ urine is normal at the end
of two months. On one condition, I’m sorry to say: absolutely no liquor.”

  Matern puts down the beer he has just picked up. Not wishing to outstay his welcome, the urologist—it has come out that he studied under big men in Berlin and Vienna—takes his leave: “Against oxalate stones—you can see them over there, in the second case from the left—we are still powerless. But our lemon cure—perhaps you’d like me to leave you a prospectus—is the simplest thing in the world. Herodotus tells us that the Babylonians were curing kidney stones with lemon juice more than two thousand years ago; of course when he speaks of stones the size of an infant’s head, we have to bear in mind that Herodotus was sometimes given to exaggeration.”

  Matern has a rough time with his double lemon juice. Good-natured cracks from the Sawatzkis. Leafing through the Morgue’s prospectus. Why, they’ve got everything: specialists for the diseases of the thorax and the thyroid. A neurologist. A special prostate man. Pluto is well behaved under the operating table. Sawatzki says hello to a radio dealer acquaintance and companion at another table. Business is going strong at the bar. The B-doctors aren’t being stingy with their knowledge. The calves’ knuckles were excellent. Now what? Cheese or something sweet? The waiters come unbidden.

  Ah yes, the waiters! They, too, are true to life. White linen tunics, buttoned up to the neck and showing only discreet reminders of the operating room, white surgeon’s caps, and a white mask over nose and mouth, making them anonymous sterile soundless. Naturally they don’t carry the platters of beef brisket or pork tenderloin en croûte in their bare hands, but wear rubber gloves in accordance with professional standards. That’s going too far. It is not Inge Sawatzki but Matern who finds the gloves exaggerated: “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. But that’s typical again: from one extreme to the other, always wanting to drive out the Devil with. Honest shopkeepers if you will, but so stupid and so infernally smug. And they never learn from their history, they always think everyone else is to. Determined to let well enough alone and never to tilt against. Wherever they can make themselves heard, they want to cure the world of what ails it. Salomé of nothingness. Over corpses to Neverneverland. Always missed their calling. Always wanting to be brothers with everybody, to embrace the millions. Always coming around in the dead of night with their categorical thingamajig. Any thought of change scares them. Luck was never on their side. Freedom always dwells in mountains that are too high—geographically speaking, of course. Wedged into a narrow, overcrowded. Revolutions only in music, but never want to foul their own. The best infantry men all the same, though when it comes to artillery the French. Lots of great composers and inventors have been. Copernicus for instance wasn’t a Pole but. Even Marx felt himself to be. But they always have to carry things to. Like those rubber gloves. Of course they’re supposed to mean something. I wonder what the owner. Assuming him to be one. Because nowadays Italian and Greek, Spanish and Hungarian joints are springing up like mushrooms. And in every dive somebody has thought up some idea. Cutting onions in the Onion Cellar, laughing gas in the Grabbe Room—and here it’s this waiter’s rubber gloves. Say, I know that guy! Why, it’s. If he’d just take that white rag off his face. Then! Then! His name was. What was it anyway? Got to leaf back, names names, in heart, spleen, and…” Matern came to judge with black dog.

  But the waiter-surgeon doesn’t remove the cloth from nose and mouth. Nameless, with discreetly downcast eyes, he clears the dissected remains of calves’ knuckles from the damask-clothed operating table. He will come again and serve the dessert with the same rubber gloves. Meanwhile we can reach into kidney-shaped bowls and chew yams. They’re supposed to be good for the memory. Matern has a respite, which he spends chewing on gnarled roots: Why, that was. It must be that bastard who. You’ve got him and the others to thank if you. I’ve got a little bone to. He was—I’m not seeing things—Number 4 when the nine of us came out of the woods and climbed the. I’ll give his memory a jolt. Sawatzki doesn’t notice? Or he knows and he isn’t saying. But I’ll settle his hash all by. Coming around here with rubber gloves and a white rag on his mug. If it were black at least like at Zorro’s or like the time when we. It was a curtain. We cut it up with scissors into nine triangles: one for Willy Eggers, one for Otto Warnke, one and then another for the Dulleck brothers, one for Paule Hoppe, one for somebody else, one for Wollschläger, one for Sawatzki, there he sits like a hypocrite, or maybe he really hasn’t noticed, and the ninth for that guy, just wait. So we climbed the fence into the grounds of the villa on Steffensweg. The same fence day in day out for dog years. Behind nine black cloths over the fence. But not tied the same way as this character. Completely covering the eyes, with slits to look out of. While this guy: you know those eyes all right. Snow lay heavy as lead. He was a waiter even then, in Zoppot and later at the Eden. Here he comes with the pudding. Bublitz. Of course. I’ll tear that rag off his. Alfons Bublitz. O.K., friend, just wait.

  But Matern, who has come to judge and to tear a rag from a face, doesn’t tear and doesn’t judge, but stares at the pudding, served in plexiglass bowls such as those used by dentists. With art and precision a pastry cook—there’s no limit to what those fellows can do—has reproduced the human dentition in two colors: curved pink gums holding shimmering pearly evenly spaced teeth together: the human dentition numbers thirty-two teeth, to wit, above, below, and on either side, two incisors, one canine, five molars—coated with enamel. At first Grabbe laughter, which, as everyone knows, had the power to laugh Rome to pieces, tries to surge up in Matern and wreck the joint; but as Inge and Jochen Sawatzki, his hosts to left and right of him, apply spatula-shaped dental instruments to their pudding teeth, the Grabbe laughter that has been building up languishes deep within, Rome and the Morgue are not laid waste, but inside him as he stores up breath for a grandiose and seldom enacted scene, dissected calf’s knuckle says no to more food, especially sweets. Slowly he slips off his round stool. With difficulty he casts off from the white-covered operating table. He has to prop himself against the glass case where the heart of the Swedish movie actress beats imperturbably. Pilotless, he drifts between occupied tables, at which dinner jackets and muchtoomuchjewelry are eating liver en brochette and breaded sweetbreads. Voices in the fog. Chatting B-doctors. Position lights over the bar. Followed by Pluto, he lurches past the blurred pictures of the benefactors Asclepius, Sauerbruch, Paracelsus, and Virchow. And reaches port: which, except for the reproduction of Rembrandt’s famous Anatomy Lesson, is a perfectly normal toilet. He vomits thoroughly and for years. No one looks on but God in His heaven, for Pluto has to stay outside with the attendant. Reunited with his dog, he washes his hands and face.

  When he’s through, Matern has no change on him and gives the attendant a two-mark piece. “It’s not so bad,” she says. “A lot of people get that way the first time.” She gives him advice for the homeward voyage: “Take some strong coffee and a slug of schnapps and you’ll be all right.”

  Matern complies: from a clinical porcelain cup he sips black coffee; from cylindrical test tubes he pours down a first—drink one more schnapps, or you’ll be short one schnapps—then—why not?—a second drink of framboise.

  Inge Sawatzki is concerned: “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you hold it any more? Should we call back the urologist or maybe another one that specializes in this sort of thing?”