Dog Years Page 2

  FOURTH MORNING SHIFT

  Meanwhile—for while Brauxel lays bare the past of a pocket-knife and the same knife, turned missile, follows a trajectory determined by propulsive force, gravitation, and wind resistance, there is still time enough, from morning shift to morning shift, to write off a working day and meanwhile to say—meanwhile, then, Amsel with the back of his hand had pushed back his steel helmet. With one glance he swept the dike embankment, with the same glance took in the thrower, then sent his glance in pursuit of the thrown object; and the pocketknife, Brauxel maintains, has meanwhile reached the ultimate point allotted to every upward-striving object, while the Vistula flows, the cat drifts, the gull screams, the ferry approaches, while the bitch Senta is black, and the sun never ceases to set.

  Meanwhile—for when a missile has reached that infinitesimal point after which descent begins, it hesitates for a moment, and pretends to stand still—while then the pocket-knife stands still at its zenith, Amsel tears his gaze away from the object that has reached this infinitesimal point and once more—the object is already falling quickly fitfully, because now more exposed to the head wind, riverward—has his eye on his friend Matern who is still teetering on the ball of his foot and his toes sockless in high shoe, holding his right hand high and far from his body, while his left arm steers and tries to keep him in balance.

  Meanwhile—for while Walter Matern teeters on one leg, concerned with his balance, while Vistula and cat, mice and ferry, dog and sun, while the pocketknife falls riverward, the morning shift has been lowered into Brauchsel’s mine, the night shift has been raised and has ridden away on bicycles, the changehouse attendant has locked the change-house, the sparrows in every gutter have begun the day… At this point Amsel succeeded, with a brief glance and a directly ensuing cry, in throwing Walter Matern off his precarious balance. The boy on the top of the Nickelswalde dike did not fall, but he began to stagger and stumble so furiously that he lost sight of his pocketknife before it touched the flowing Vistula and became invisible.

  “Hey, Grinder!” Amsel cries. “Is that all you can do? Grind your teeth and throw things?”

  Walter Matern, here addressed as Grinder, is again standing stiff-kneed with parted legs, rubbing the palm of his left hand, which still bears the glowing negative imprint of a pocketknife.

  “You saw me. I had to throw. What’s the use of asking questions?”

  “But you didn’t throw no zellack.”

  “How could I when there ain’t no zellacks up here?”

  “So what do you throw when you ain’t got no zellack?”

  “Well, if I’d had a zellack I’d of thrown the zellack.”

  “If you’d sent Senta, she’d of brought you a zellack.”

  “If I’d sent Senta. Anybody can say that. You try and send a dog anyplace when she’s chasing mice.”

  “So what did you throw if you didn’t have no zellack?”

  “Why do you keep asking questions? I threw some dingbat. You saw me.”

  “You threw my knife.”

  “It was my knife. Don’t be an Indian giver. If I’d had a zellack, I wouldn’t of thrown the knife, I’d of thrown the zellack.”

  “Whyn’t you tell me? Couldn’t you tell me you couldn’t find a zellack, I’d have tossed you one, there’s plenty of them down here.”

  “What’s the good talking so much when it’s gone?”

  “Maybe I’ll get a new knife for Ascension.”

  “I don’t want no new knife.”

  “If I gave you one, you’d take it.”

  “You want to bet I wouldn’t?”

  “You want to bet you would?”

  “Is it a bet?”

  “It’s a bet.”

  They shake hands on it: tin soldiers against magnifying glass. Amsel reaches his hand with its many freckles up the dike, Walter Matern reaches his hand with the pressure marks left by the pocketknife down the dike and with the handshake pulls Amsel up on the dike top.

  Amsel is still friendly. “You’re exactly like your grandma in the mill. All she does is grind the coupla teeth she’s still got the whole time. Except she don’t throw things. Only hits people with her spoon.”

  Amsel on the dike is a little shorter than Walter Matern. As he speaks, his thumb points over his shoulder to the spot where behind the dike lies the village of Nickelswalde and the Materns’ postmill. Up the side of the dike Amsel pulls a bundle of roof laths, beanpoles, and wrung-out rags. He keeps having to push up the front rim of his steel helmet with the back of his hand. The ferry has tied up at the Nickelswalde dock. The two freight cars can be heard. Senta grows larger, smaller, larger, approaches black. More small farm animals drift by. Broad-shouldered flows the Vistula. Walter Matern wraps his right hand in the lower frayed edge of his sweater. Senta stands on four legs between the two of them. Her tongue hangs out to leftward and twitches. She keeps looking at Walter Matern, because his teeth. He has that from his grandmother who was riveted to her chair for nine years and only her eyeballs.

  Now they have taken off: one taller, one smaller on the dike top against the ferry landing. The dog black. Half a pace ahead: Amsel. Half a pace behind: Walter Matern. He is dragging Amsel’s rags. Behind the bundle, as the three grow smaller on the dike, the grass gradually straightens up again.

  FIFTH MORNING SHIFT

  And so Brauksel, as planned, sits bent over his paper and, while the other chroniclers bend likewise and punctually over the past and begin recording, has let the Vistula flow. It still amuses him to recall every detail: Many many years ago, when the child had been born but was not yet able to grind his teeth because like all babies he had been born toothless, Grandma Matern was sitting riveted to her chair in the overhang room, unable as she had been for the last nine years to move anything except her eyeballs, capable only of bubbling and drooling.

  The overhang room jutted out over the kitchen, it had one window looking out on the kitchen, from which the maids could be observed at work, and another window in back, facing the Matern windmill, which sat there on its jack, with its tailpole pivoting on its post and was accordingly a genuine postmill; as it had been for a hundred years. The Materns had built it in 1815, shortly after the city and fortress of Danzig had been taken by the victorious Russian and Prussian armies; for August Matern, the grandfather of our grandmother sitting there riveted to her chair, had managed, during the long-drawn-out and listlessly conducted siege, to carry on a lucrative trade with both sides; on the one hand, he began in the spring to supply scaling ladders in exchange for good convention talers; on the other hand, he arranged, in return for Laubtalers and even more substantial Brabant currency, to smuggle little notes in to General Count d’Heudelet, calling his attention to the odd conduct of the Russians who were having quantities of ladders made, though it was only spring and the apples were in no shape to be picked.

  When at length the governor, Count Rapp, signed the capitulation of the fortress, August Matern in out-of-the-way Nickelswalde counted the Danish specie and two-thirds pieces, the quickly rising rubles, the Hamburg mark pieces, the Laubtalers and convention talers, the little bags of Dutch gulden and the newly issued Danzig paper money; he found himself nicely off and abandoned himself to the joys of reconstruction: he had the old mill, where the fugitive Queen Louise is said to have spent the night after the defeat of Prussia, the historical mill whose sails had been damaged first on the occasion of the Danish attack from the sea, then of the night skirmish resulting from a sortie on the part of Capitaine de Chambure and his volunteer corps, torn down except for the jack which was still in good condition, and on the old jack built the new mill which was still sitting there with its pole on its jack when Grandmother Matern was reduced to sitting riveted and motionless in her chair. At this point Brauxel wishes, before it is too late, to concede that with his money, some hard, some easy-earned, August Matern not only built the new postmill, but also endowed the little chapel in Steegen, which numbered a few Catholics, with a Mad
onna, who, though not wanting in gold leaf, neither attracted any pilgrimages worth mentioning nor performed any miracles.

  The Catholicism of the Matern family, as one might expect of a family of millers, was dependent on the wind, and since there was always a profitable breeze on the Island, the Matern mill ran year in year out, deterring them from the excessive churchgoing that would have antagonized the Mennonites. Only baptisms and funerals, marriages and the more important holidays sent part of the family to Steegen; and once a year on Corpus Christi, when the Catholics of Steegen put on a procession through the countryside, the mill, with its jack and all its dowels, with its mill post, its oak lever, and its meal bin, but most of all with its sails, came in for its share of blessing and holy water; a luxury which the Materns could never have afforded in such rough-Mennonite villages as Junkeracker and Pasewark. The Mennonites of Nickelswalde, who all raised wheat on rich Island soil and were dependent on the Catholic mill, proved to be the more refined type of Mennonites, in other words, they had buttons, buttonholes, and normal pockets that it was possible to put something into. Only Simon Beister, fisherman and small holder, was a genuine hook-and-eye Mennonite, rough and pocketless; over his boatshed hung a painted wooden sign with the ornate inscription:

  Wear hooks and eyes,

  Dear Jesus will save you.

  Wear buttons and pockets,

  The Devil will have you.

  But Simon Beister was and remained the only inhabitant of Nickelswalde to have his wheat milled in Pasewark and not in the Catholic mill. Even so, it was not necessarily he who in ‘13, shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, incited a degenerate farmhand to haul kindling of all sorts to the Matern postmill and set it on fire. The flames were already creeping under jack and pole when Perkun, the young shepherd dog belonging to Pawel the miller’s man, whom everyone called Paulchen, began, black and with tail straight back, to describe narrowing circles around hummock, jack, and mill, and brought miller’s man and miller running out of the house with his staccato barks.

  Pawel or Paul had brought the animal with him from Lithuania and on request exhibited a kind of pedigree, which made it clear to whom it may concern that Perkun’s grand mother on her father’s side had been a Lithuanian, Russian, or Polish she-wolf.

  And Perkun sired Senta; and Senta whelped Harras; and Harras sired Prinz; and Prinz made history… But for the present Grandma Matern is still sitting riveted to her chair, able to move only her eyeballs. She is obliged to look on inactive as her daughter-in-law carries on in the house, her son in the mill, and her daughter Lorchen with the miller’s man. But the war took the miller’s man and Lorchen went out of her mind: after that, in the house, in the kitchen garden, on the dikes, in the nettles behind Folchert’s barn, on the near side and far side of the dunes, barefoot on the beach and in among the blueberry bushes in the nearby woods, she goes looking for her Paulchen, and never will she know whether it was the Prussians or the Russians who sent him crawling underground. The gentle old maid’s only companion is the dog Perkun, whose master had been her master.

  SIXTH MORNING SHIFT

  Long long ago—Brauxel counts on his fingers—when the world was in the third year of the war, when Paulchen had been left behind in Masuria, Lorchen was roaming about with the dog, but miller Matern was permitted to go on toting bags of flour, because he was hard of hearing on both sides, Grandma Matern sat one sunny day, while a child was being baptized—the pocketknife-throwing youngster of earlier morning shifts was receiving the name Walter—riveted to her chair, rolling her eyeballs, bubbling and drooling but unable to compose one word.

  She sat in the overhang room and was assailed by mad shadows. She flared up, faded in the half-darkness, sat bright, sat somber. Pieces of furniture as well, the headpiece of the tall carved cupboard, the embossed cover of the chest, and the red, for nine years unused, velvet of the prie-dieu flared up, faded, disclosed silhouettes, resumed their massive gloom: glittering dust, dustless shadow over grandmother and her furniture. Her bonnet and the glass-blue drinking cup on the cupboard. The frayed sleeves of her bedjacket. The floor scrubbed lusterless, over which the turtle, roughly the size of a man’s hand, given to her by Paul the miller’s man, moved from corner to corner, glittered and survived the miller’s man by nibbling little scallops out of the edges of lettuce leaves. And all the lettuce leaves scattered about the room with their turtle-scallops were struck bright bright bright; for outside, behind the house, the Matern postmill, in a wind blowing thirty-nine feet a second, was grinding wheat into flour, blotting out the sun with its four sails four times in three-and-a-half seconds.

  Concurrently with these demonic dazzling-dark goings-on in Grandma’s room, the child was being driven to Steegen by way of Pasewark and Junkeracker to be baptized, the sunflowers by the fence separating the Matern kitchen garden from the road grew larger and larger, worshiped one another and were glorified without interruption by the very same sun which was blotted out four times in three-and-a-half seconds by the sails of the windmill; for the mill had not thrust itself between sun and sunflowers, but only, and this in the forenoon, between the riveted grandmother and a sun which shone not always but often on the Island.

  How many years had Grandma been sitting motionless?

  Nine years in the overhang room.

  How long behind asters, ice flowers, sweet peas, or convolvulus?

  Nine years bright dark bright to one side of the windmill.

  Who had riveted her so solidly to her chair?

  Her daughter-in-law Ernestine, née Stange.

  How could such a thing come to pass?

  This Protestant woman from Junkeracker had first expelled Tilde Matern, who was not yet a grandmother, but more on the strapping loud-mouthed side, from the kitchen; then she had appropriated the living room and taken to washing windows on Corpus Christi. When Stine drove her mother-in-law out of the barn, they came to blows for the first time. The two of them went at each other with feed pans in among the chickens, who lost quite a few feathers on the occasion.

  This, Brauxel counts back, must have happened in 1905; for when two years later Stine Matern, née Stange, still failed to clamor for green apples and sour pickles and continued inexorably to come around in accordance with the calendar, Tilde Matern spoke to her daughter-in-law, who stood facing her with folded arms in the overhang room, in the following terms: “It’s just like I always thought, Protestant women got the Devil’s mouse in their hole. It nibbles everything away so nothing can come out. All it does is stink!”

  These words unleashed a war of religion, fought with wooden cooking spoons and ultimately reducing the Catholic party to the chair: for the oaken armchair, which stood before the window between the stove and prie-dieu, received a Tilde Matern felled by a stroke. For nine years now she had been sitting in this chair except when Lorchen and the maids, for reasons of cleanliness, lifted her out just long enough to minister to her needs.

  When the nine years were past and it had developed that the wombs of Protestant women do not harbor a diabolical mouse that nibbles everything away and won’t let anything germinate, when, on the contrary, something came full term, was born as a son, and had his umbilical cord cut, Grandmother sat, was still sitting, while the christening was proceeding in Steegen under favorable weather conditions, still and forever riveted, in the overhang room. Below the room, in the kitchen, a goose lay in the oven, sizzling in its own fat. This the goose did in the third year of the Great War, when geese had become so rare that the goose was looked upon as a species close to extinction. Lorchen Matern with her birthmark, her flat bosom, her curly hair, Lorchen, who had never got a husband—because Paulchen had crawled into the earth, leaving nothing but his black dog behind—Lorchen, who was supposed to be looking after the goose in the oven, was not in the kitchen, didn’t baste the goose at all, neglected to turn it, to say the proper charms over it, but stood in a row with the sunflowers behind the fence—which the new miller’s man had f
reshly whitewashed that spring—and spoke first in a friendly, then in an anxious tone, two sentences angrily, then lovingly, to someone who was not standing behind the fence, who was not passing by in greased yet squeaky shoes, who wore no baggy trousers, and who was nevertheless addressed as Paul or Paulchen and expected to return to her, Lorchen Matern with the watery eyes, something he had taken from her. But Paul did not give it back, although the time of day was favorable—plenty of silence, or at any rate buzzing—and the wind blowing at a velocity of twenty-six feet a second had boots big enough to kick the mill on its jack in such a way that it turned a mite faster than the wind and was able in one uninterrupted session to transform Miehlke’s—for it was his milling day—wheat into Miehlke’s flour.