Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  After one of these laments, the kitchen-livingroom environ ment is as still as a mouse for a minute or two, except perhaps for the coffee water singing its peace-on-earthly song, until Sawatzki starts up again: “And all in all, what do you think, Walter, did we deserve that? Did we? No, we didn’t We don’t.”

  When Walli was discharged from the hospital exactly four weeks later, the so-called miracle glasses had vanished from the apartment. Neither did Inge Sawatzki throw them in the garbage pail nor did Jochen and Walter demolish them in the kitchen-livingroom; maybe the dog chewed up, swallowed, digested them. But Walli asks no questions about her missing toy. Quietly the little girl sits at her desk and has to catch up, because she has missed a lot of school. Grown solemn and a little peaked, she can already multiply and add. All hope that the child has forgotten why she has grown so solemn and peaked, why she isn’t plump and bumptious any more. Because that’s what Walli was in the hospital for: good care to make Walli forget. Little by little this becomes the first principle of all concerned: Forget! Maxims are embroidered on handkerchiefs, pillow slips, and hat linings: Learn to forget. Forgetfulness is natural. The mind should be occupied by pleasant memories and not by nasty tormenting thoughts. It’s hard to remember constructively. Ergo, people need some thing they can believe in: God, for instance; or if you can’t manage that, there’s beauty, progress, the good in man, etcetera. “We, here in the West, believe implicitly in freedom, always have.”

  In any event, activity! And what activity is more productive than forgetting? Matern buys a large eraser, stations himself on a kitchen chair, and begins to erase the names, crossed off and not crossed off, from his heart, spleen, and kidneys. As for Pluto, that four-legged hunk of past, feeble with age though still running around, he’d be glad to sell him, send him to a rest home for dogs, erase him; but who’d buy an elderly hound? Moreover, mother and child are opposed: not for any price would Inge Sawatzki. She’s got used to the dog in the meantime. Walli cries and promises to get sick again if the dog. So, black and ineluctable, he stays. And the names, too, offer stubborn resistance to Matern’s big eraser. For instance: while he effaces one and blows eraser crumbs from his spleen, he stumbles, in the course of his newspaper reading, across another, who writes articles about the theater. That’s what comes of doing something else while erasing. Every article has an author. This one is a man of the theater, who has pondered his way to wisdom. He says and writes: “Just as man needs the theater, so, and in equal measure, the theater needs man.” But a few lines later he deplores: “Today man finds himself in a state of increasing alienation.” Yet this he knows for certain: “The history of mankind has its most exemplary parallel in the history of the theater.” But if, as he anticipates: “The three-dimensional theater should once again flatten into a picture-frame stage,” this man, who signs himself R.Z., can only second the great Lessing in crying out: “To what end have we toiled so bitterly to achieve dramatic form?” His article embodies at once a warning and an exhortation: “The theater does not stop when man ceases to be man; it is the other way around: Close the theaters and man will cease to be man!” In general Herr Rudolf Zander—Matern remembers him from his theatrical days—is hipped on the word “man.” For example: “The man of coming decades.” Or: “All this calls for a stormy reckoning with the problem of man.” Or in a polemical vein: “Dehumanized theater? Never!” Be that as it may, R.Z., or Dr. Rolf Zander—onetime director of the Stadttheater in Schwerin—has forsaken the “theatrical mission”; of late he has been with the West German radio in an advisory function, an activity which does not deter him from writing articles for the Saturday supplements of several important newspapers: “It is not enough to show man the catastrophe; violent emotion remains an end in itself unless it culminates in exegesis, unless the purifying effect of catharsis tears the wreath from nihilism and lends meaning to chaos.”

  Salvation twinkles humanely between the lines. There’s a man for Matern to turn to, all the more so as he knows him well from former days and carries the name of Rolf Zander around with him, incised somewhere: either in the heart or in the spleen or in kidney script; no eraser, not even the newly purchased one, can efface it.

  Everybody has an address. R. Zander is no exception. He works in the beautiful new Radio Building in Cologne; and he resides—so whispers the phone book—in Cologne-Mariendorf.

  With or without dog? To judge—or to ask advice in a situation of human-chaotic distress? With revenge in my baggage or with a little human question? Both. Matern cannot desist from. He is looking simultaneously for work and revenge. Carnage and entreaty slumber in the same fist. With identically black dog he calls on friend and enemy. Not that he makes a beeline to the door, saying: “Here I am, Zander, for better or for worse!”; several times he creeps—Don’t turn around—through the old park, determined to strike, if not the former theater director, then at least the trees in his park.

  One stormy evening in August—all this is perfectly true: it was August, it was hot, and a storm came up—he vaults the wall with dog and lands on the soft ground of Zander’s park. He bears neither ax nor saw but a white powder. Oh, Matern has a hand with poison! He is experienced: exactly three hours later Harras was dead. No sprinkling of nux vomica; plain rat poison. This time it’s plant poison. From tree to tree he scurries with dog shadow. A dance of nature worship. Minuet and gavotte determine the sequence of steps in the dusky, goblin-inhabited, ninefold green, nymphean lovers’ maze of Zander’s park. A figure bows low, a hand is held out: on dragon-thick roots he strews his powder without muttering spells. However, Matern grinds as usual:

  Don’t turn around:

  the Grinder’s around.

  But how can the trees be expected to! They don’t even feel like rustling, for not a breeze is stirring under the sultry sky. No magpie warns. No jay denounces. Moss-covered baroque putti are in no mood for giggling. Even Diana, with hunting dog at hastening heel, is disinclined to turn around and bend her unfailing bow; out of a dusky thinking-grotto Herr Zander in person addresses the winged powder strewer: “Gracious! Do my eyes deceive me? Matern, is it you? Goodness, and what amiable occupation are you engaged in? Putting chemical fertilizer on the roots of my giants? Aren’t they big enough for you? But you’ve always been drawn to the colossal! Chemical fertilizer! How absurd and yet delightful. But you haven’t taken the weather into account. Any minute a storm is going to pour down on us mortals and the park. The very first shower will wash away the traces of your horticultural enthusiasm. But let us not tarry! The first gusts of wind herald the storm. Undoubtedly the first drops have been released on high, they are coming, coming… May I invite you, as well as that magnificent specimen of a dog, to my modest home!”

  A light tug at a reluctant arm, guidance in the direction of shelter. The last few steps, now over gravel paths, are rapid: only on the veranda is the conversation resumed: “Gracious, what a small world it is! How often I’ve wondered: what can Matern be doing? That child of nature, that—begging your pardon—ecstatic drinker?—And here you are, standing in my library, feeling my furniture, looking around, and your dog as well, both casting shadows in the lamplight, a warm human presence. Welcome!”

  Herr Zander’s housekeeper hastens to brew strong manly tea. Brandy is in readiness. Environment, undescribed, gains the upper hand again. While outside, as Herr Zander would put it, the storm hits the stage, a useful conversation about the theater runs its course in dry and comfortable armchairs. “My dear friend—you’ve done well to come right out with your grievances—but you’re mistaken and you do me a grave injustice. Admitted: it was I, I couldn’t help myself, who canceled your contract with the Schwerin Stadttheater. However, the reason why all this was done to you—and had to be—was not, as you now suppose, political, but—how shall I put it?—purely and simply alcoholic. It just wouldn’t do. Yes, yes, we all of us enjoyed a glass or two. But you went to extremes. Quite frankly: even today in our more or less democratic Federal R
epublic, any responsible director or stage manager would have to do the same: you came to rehearsals drunk, you came to performances drunk and without your lines. Yes, of course I remember your ringing speeches. No objection, not the slightest even then, to their content or expressiveness, but plenty, then and today as well, to the place and time of your resounding declamations. Nevertheless, my hat off to you: You pronounced, a hundred times, what the rest of us may have thought but didn’t dare to state in public. I admired your magnificent courage, I still do; the freedom with which you spoke of certain very delicate matters would have been highly effective if not for your advanced alcoholic state. As it was, denunciations, mostly from stagehands, piled up on my desk. I stalled, smoothed things over, but in the end I had to take action, not least in order to protect you, yes, protect you; for if I hadn’t, by a simple disciplinary measure, given you an opportunity to leave Schwerin, which had gradually got to be a very hot place for you, Lord, I don’t like to think what would have happened to you. You know, Matern, when those people struck, it wasn’t with kid gloves. The individual counted for nothing.” Outside, the stage thunder doesn’t miss a cue. Inside, Matern ponders what might have become of him but for the philanthropic Dr. Zander. Outside, wholesome rain washes away the plant-killing poison from the roots of age-old all-knowing trees. Inside, Pluto sighs out of dog dreams. Outside, Shakespearean rain functions like clockwork. Naturally a clock is ticking in the dryness too, no, three costly timepieces are ticking at once, variously pitched, into the silence between former theater director and former jeune premier. Peals of thunder do not traverse the footlights. Moistening of lips. Massaging of scalps. Inside, illuminated by outside lightning: Rolf Zander, an experienced host, gets back into the conversation: “Good Lord, Matern! Do you remember how you introduced yourself to us? Franz Moor, Act Five, Scene 1: Slavish wisdom, slavish fears! You were magnificent. No no, I mean it, shattering! An Iffland couldn’t have wrung such horror from his entrails. A discovery, fresh from Danzig, which has given us full many an outstanding mime—think of Söhnker, or even, if you wish, of Dieter Borsche. Fresh and promising, you came to us. If I’m not mistaken, the excellent Gustav Nord, so lovable both as a man and as a colleague, who was to perish so wretchedly at the end of the war, was your teacher. Wait: You attracted my attention in a beastly play by Billinger. Didn’t you play the son of Donata Opferkuch? Right, and La Bargheer saved the show with her Donata. I could still die laughing when I think of Fritzchen Blumhoff playing the Prince of Arcadia, in ’36-’37 I think it was, with his excruciating Saxon accent. Then there was Carl Kliever, the indestructible Dora Ottenburg. Heinz Brede, whom I remember in a very decent performance of Nathan the Wise, and of course your teacher: what a versatile Polonius! A fine Shakespearean actor and magnificent at Shaw too. Mighty courageous of your Stadt-theater to put on Saint Joan as late as ’38. I can only repeat: if it weren’t for the provinces! What was it you people called the building? That’s it. The Coffee Mill! I hear it was totally destroyed. Hasn’t been rebuilt. But I’m told they’re planning to on the same site and in the same neoclassical style. The Poles are amazing, always were. The heart of the Old City, too. I hear that Langgasse, Frauengasse, and Jopengasse have already been laid out. Why, I’m from the same neck of the woods: Memel. Am I thinking of? No, my friend, never marry the same. The spirit that presides over our West German theaters really doesn’t. Theatrical mission? Theater as a medium of mass communication? The stage as a mere generic concept? And man as the measure of all things? Where everything becomes a purpose in itself and nothing culminates in exegesis? What of purification? Catharsis?—Gone, my dear Matern—or perhaps not, for my work on the radio satisfies me completely and leaves me time for short essays that have wanted to be written for years. And what about you? Enthusiasm gone? Act Five, Scene 1: Slavish wisdom, slavish fears!”

  Matern sulks and drinks tea. Knotted in his entrails, twined round heart, spleen, and tortured kidneys, the rosary chatters: Opportunist! Potential Nazi! Phony! Opportunist! Potential Nazi! But over the teacup a sheepish voice: “Theater? Never again. Self-confidence gone? Possibly. There’s also the leg injury. Hardly noticeable, yes I know, but on the stage? The rest is in good shape, organ of speech, energy, enthusiasm. Ah yes, everything but the opportunity.”

  Then, after three Empire clocks have been permitted to tick for a minute or two undisturbed, the redeeming words fall from Rolf Zander’s mouth. The rather delicate little man paces the floor of the suitable room, speaking softly, sagely, sympathetically. Outside, in the park, trees drip a reminder of the short-lived August storm. As Dr. Zander talks, his hand caresses book spines on broad shelves, or he takes out a book, opens it, hesitates, imparts a quotation which fits easily into his monologue, puts the book away booklovingly. Outside, the dusk brings the trees closer together. Inside, Zander comes to rest among the fruits of a lifelong collec tor’s passion—Balinese dance masks, demonic Chinese marionettes, colored morris dancers—without damming his flow of speech. Twice the housekeeper comes in with fresh tea and pastry; she too a rare piece like the Empire clocks, first editions, and musical instruments from Hindustan. Matern sprawls in the armchair. The standing lamp communicates with his polished skull. Pluto makes raiding sounds in his sleep: a dog as old as the trees outside. Inside, Zander speaks of his work on the radio. He takes care of the early morning hours and bedtime: children’s program and late night program. No contradiction for Zander, on the contrary. He speaks of tensions, of building bridges between. We must find our way back if we are to. At one time Matern too was allowed to sound off on a children’s radio program. He was Little Red Riding Hood’s Wolf; he devoured the seven kids. “Splendid!” Zander joins the threads: “We need voices, voices like yours, Matern. Voices that stand up in space. Voices that resemble the elements. Voices that carry, voices that bend the bow. Voices that give resonance to our past. For instance, we’ve been working up a new program, thinking of calling it ‘Discussion with the Past,’ or better still, ‘discussion with our past.’ A young colleague of mine, a countryman of yours, incidentally—talented, dangerously so, I’m almost inclined to think—is trying to develop new forms of radio entertainment. I can easily imagine that in our station you, my dear Matern, you in particular, might work your way into a vocation commensurate with your talents. Urgent search for truth. The eternal question of man. Whence come we—whither are we going? Silence has barred the way, but now speech will open the gate!—What do you say?”

  Thereupon the age-old dog awakens hesitantly, and Matern says yes. Shake on it?—Shake on it. Day after tomorrow, 10 a.m. at the Radio Building?—Day after tomorrow at ten. But be punctual.—Punctual and sober. May I call you a cab?—Dr. Rolf Zander is entitled to charge the West German Radio. All expenses are deductible. All risks are tax-exempt. Every Matern finds his Zander.

  THE HUNDREDTH PUBLICLY DISCUSSED MATERNIAD

  He speaks rumbles roars. His voice enters every home. Matern, the popular radio speaker. The children dream of him and his voice, which awakens all their terrors. It will go rumbling on and little children grown into shriveling old folks will say: “In my childhood we had a radio uncle, whose voice gave me, took away from me, inspired me, forced me, so that sometimes even now, but that’s how it is with any number of Maternoids, who in those days.” But right now adults, upon whom other voices have set their stamp, make use of Matern’s voice as an aid in child rearing; when the kids act up, their mother threatens: “Do you want me to turn the radio on again and let the wicked uncle speak?”

  Over medium wave and short wave, a bogeyman can be brought into the room. His voice is in demand. And other stations want Matern to speak, rumble, and roar in their broadcasting rooms. His colleagues, it is true, remark in private that his pronunciation is bad, that he lacks training, but they have to admit that his voice has a certain something: “That atmospheric quality, that barbaric uncouthness, that voracious naïveté is worth its weight in gold—people are sick of perfection nowadays.�
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  Matern buys a date book, for every day, sometimes here sometimes there and at specified hours, his voice is recorded. He speaks rumbles roars mostly over the West German Radio, sometimes over the Hessian Radio, never over the Bavarian, occasionally on the North German, with alacrity and in Low German on the Bremen Station, very recently on the South German Radio in Stuttgart, and, when time permits, on the Southwestern Radio. He steers clear of trips to West Berlin. Consequently, RIAS and the Free Berlin Radio have had to drop their plans for live broadcasts that would rely on the very special character of Matern’s voice, but within the exchange program they relay Matern’s children’s broadcasts from the West German Radio Station in Cologne, where his precious voice is at home.