Dog Years Read online

  And five hundred birds, not counting sparrows, fled in mass between the sun and the christening party. And five hundred birds cast their ominous shadow upon christening party, baptismal cushion, and baptized child.

  And five hundred birds—who wants to count sparrows?—induced the christening party, from Lau, the disabled village mayor, to the Tiedes, to cluster together and first in silence, then muttering and exchanging stiff glances, to press from back to front and hurry their pace. August Sponagel stumbles over pine roots. Between Bronsard and Pastor Blech, who makes only the barest stab at raising his arms in pastoral appeasement, the gigantic Frau Major storms forward, gathering her skirts as in a rainstorm, and carries all in her wake: the Glommes and Kienast with wife, Ayke and the Kabus, Bollhagen and the Busenitzes; even the disabled Lau and his superlatively pregnant wife, who however did not suffer from shock and was delivered of a normal girl child, keep pace, panting heavily—only the godmother, bearing child and topsy-turvy cushion in her strong arms, drops back and is last to reach the waiting landaus and the Tiedes’ four-in-hand amid the first poplars on the road to Schiewenhorst.

  Did the baptizand cry? Not a whimper, but he didn’t sleep either. Did the cloud of five hundred birds and uncounted sparrows disperse immediately after the hasty and not at all festive departure of the carriages? For a long while the cloud over the lazy river found no rest: for a time it hovered over Bohnsack, for a time it hung long and narrow over the woods and dunes, then broad and fluid over the opposite shore, dropping an old crow into a marshy meadow, where it stood out gray and stiff. Only when landaus and four-in-hand drove into Schiewenhorst did the cloud disperse into its various species, which found their way back to the square outside the church, to cemetery, gardens, barns, rushes, lilac bushes, and pines; but until evening, when the christening party, having eaten and drunk its fill, sat weighing down the long table with elbows, anguish darkened numerous bird hearts of varying sizes; for as Eduard lay on his baptismal cushion, his scarecrow-inventing spirit had made itself known to all the birds. From that moment on they knew all about him.

  TENTH MORNING SHIFT

  Who can tell whether Albrecht Amsel, merchant and reserve lieutenant, wasn’t a Jew after all? The people of Schiewenhorst, Einlage, and Neufahr would hardly have called him a rich Jew for no reason at all. And what about the name? Isn’t it typical? You say he’s of Dutch descent, because in the early Middle Ages Dutch settlers drained the Vistula delta, having brought with them linguistic peculiarities, windmills, and their names?

  Now that Brauksel has insisted in the course of past morning shifts that A. Amsel is not a Jew and declared in so many words: “Of course Amsel was not a Jew,” he can now, with equal justification—for all origins are what we choose to make of them—try to convince you that of course Albrecht Amsel was a Jew. He came of a family of tailors long resident in Preussisch-Stargard and had been obliged—because his father’s house was full of children—to leave Preussisch-Stargard at the age of sixteen for Schneidemühl, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Berlin. Fourteen years later he had come—metamorphosed, Protestant, and wealthy—to the Vistula estuary by way of Schneidemühl, Neustadt, and Dirschau. The cut which had made Schiewenhorst a village on the river was not yet a year old when Albrecht Amsel purchased his property on favorable terms.

  And so he went into business. What else should he have gone into? And so he sang in the church choir. Why shouldn’t he, a baritone, have sung in the church choir? And so he helped to found an athletic club, and among all the inhabitants of the village it was he who most staunchly believed that he Albrecht Amsel was not a Jew, that the name of Amsel came from Holland: lots of people go by the name of Specht (woodpecker), a famous African explorer was even called Nachtigal (nightingale), only Adler (eagle) is a typically Jewish name, and certainly not Amsel (blackbird). The tailor’s son had devoted fourteen years to forgetting his origins and only as a sideline, though with equal success, to amassing a good-Protestant fortune.

  And then in 1903 a precocious young man by the name of Otto Weininger wrote a book. This extraordinary book was named Sex and Character; published in Vienna and Leipzig, it labored for six hundred pages to demonstrate that women have no soul. Because the topic proved timely in those years of feminist agitation, and particularly because the thirteenth chapter, entitled “The Jewish Character,” showed that the Jews, being a feminine race, also have no soul, the extraordinary book ran into an incredible number of editions and found its way into households where otherwise only the Bible was read. And so Weininger’s brain child was also taken into the house of Albrecht Amsel.

  Perhaps the merchant would not have opened the thick book if he had known that a certain Herr Pfennig was engaged in denouncing Otto Weininger as a plagiarist. In 1906 there appeared a vicious pamphlet attacking the late Weininger—the young man had meanwhile taken his own life—in the crudest terms. Much as he deplored the tone of the vicious pamphlet, even S. Freud, who had called the deceased Weininger an extremely gifted young man, could not overlook the well-documented fact that Weininger’s central idea—bisexuality—was not original with him, but had first occurred to a certain Herr Fliess. And so Albrecht Amsel opened the book all unsuspecting and read in Weininger who in a footnote had introduced himself as a Jew: The Jew has no soul. The Jew does not sing. The Jew does not engage in sports. The Jew must surmount the Jewishness within him… And Albrecht Amsel surmounted by singing in the church choir, by not only founding the Bohnsack Athletic Club reg. 1905, but also by coming out for the squad in appropriate attire, by doing his part on the horse and horizontal bar, by high jumping, broad jumping, participating in relay races, and finally, despite opposition—here again a founder and pioneer—by introducing schlagball, a relatively new sport, in the territory to the right and left of all three mouths of the Vistula.

  Like the villagers of the Island, Brauksel, who is recording these matters to the best of his ability, would know nothing of the town of Preussisch-Stargard and Eduard Amsel’s tailor grandfather, if Lottchen Amsel, née Tiede, had kept silence. Many years after the fatal day in Verdun she opened her mouth.

  Young Amsel, of whom we shall be speaking, though with interruptions, from now on, had hastened from the city to his mother’s deathbed and she, who was succumbing to diabetes, had whispered feverishly in his ear: “Ah, son. Forgive your poor mother. Amsel, you never knew him but he was your very own father, was one of the circumcised as they say. I only hope they don’t catch you now the laws are so strict.”

  At the time of the strict laws—which, however, were not yet in force in the Danzig Free State—Eduard Amsel inherited the business, the property, and the house with everything in it, including a shelf of books: The Kings of Prussia, Prussia’s Great Men, Frederick the Great, Count Schlieffen, The Battle of Leuthen, Frederick and Katte, Frederick the Great and La Barbarina, and Otto Weininger’s extraordinary book which Amsel henceforth kept about him, whereas the other books were gradually lost. In his own way he read in it, he even read the marginal notes which his singing, athletic father had jotted down. He saved the book down through hard times, and it is thanks to him that the book is now lying on Brauxel’s desk, where it can be consulted today and at all times: Weininger has grafted quite a few ideas onto the present writer. The scarecrow is created in man’s image.

  ELEVENTH MORNING SHIFT

  Brauschel’s hair is growing. As he writes or manages the mine, it grows. As he dines, walks, slumbers, breathes, or holds his breath, as the morning shift is lowered, the night shift raised, and sparrows inaugurate the day, it grows. In fact, while with cold fingers the barber shortens Brauksel’s hair at his request because the year is drawing to a close, it grows back under his scissors. One day Brauksel, like Weininger, will be dead, but his hair, toenails, and fingernails will survive him for a time—just as this handbook on the construction of effective scarecrows will be read long after the writer has gone out of existence.

  Yesterday mention was made of stric
t laws. But at the present point in our story, which is just beginning, the laws are still mild, they do not punish Amsel’s origin in any way; Lottchen Amsel, née Tiede, knows nothing about the horrors of diabetes; “naturally” Albrecht Amsel was not a Jew; Eduard Amsel is also a good Protestant and has his mother’s quickly growing reddish-blond hair; plump, already in possession of all his freckles, he spends his time amid drying fishnets and his favorite way of viewing the world is: filtered through fishnets; small wonder that the world soon takes on for him a net-like pattern, obstructed by beanpoles.

  Scarecrows! Here it is contended that at first little Eduard Amsel—he was five and a half when he built his first scarecrow deserving of the name—had no intention of building anything of the sort. But people from the village and salesmen on their way around the Island with fire insurance and seed samples, peasants on their way home from the notary’s, in short, all those who watched him as he set up his fluttering figures on the dike near the Schiewenhorst dock, thought along those lines. And Kriwe said to Herbert Kienast: “Look what Amsel’s kid has been making: honest-to-goodness scarecrows.” As on the day of his christening, Eduard Amsel still had nothing against birds; but all those creatures to left and right of the Vistula that let themselves be carried bird-like by the wind had something against his products, namely scarecrows. He built one every day, and they were never alike. What the day before it had taken him three hours to make from striped pants, a jacketlike rag with bold checks, a brimless hat, and, with the help of an incomplete and ramshackle ladder, an armful of freshly cut willow switches, he tore down the following morning, to construct from the same materials an oddity of a very different race and faith, but which like its predecessor commanded birds to keep their distance.

  Though all these transitory edifices revealed industry and imagination on the part of the architect, it was Eduard Amsel’s keen sense of reality in all its innumerable forms, the curious eye surmounting his plump cheek, which provided his products with closely observed detail, which made them functional and crow-repellent. They differed not only in form but also in effect from the local scarecrows that stood wavering in the fields and gardens round about; whereas the run-of-the-mill article registered small success with the feathered folk, a succès d’estime at best, his creatures, though built for no purpose and with no enemy in view, had the power to instill panic in birds.

  They seemed to be alive, and if you looked at them long enough, even in process of construction or when they were being torn down and nothing remained but the torso, they were alive in every way: they sprinted along the dike, running figures beckoned, threatened, attacked, thrashed, waved from shore to shore, let themselves be carried by the wind, engaged in conversation with the sun, blessed the river and its fish, counted the poplars, overtook the clouds, broke off the tips of steeples, tried to ascend to heaven, to board or pursue the ferry, to take flight, they were never anonymous, but signified Johann Lickfett the fisherman, Pastor Blech, time and time again Kriwe the ferryman, who stood with his mouth open and his head to one side, Captain Bronsard, Inspector Haberland, or whomever else those lowlands had to offer. Thus, although the rawboned Frau Major von Ankum had her small homestead in Klein-Zünder and seldom posed at the ferry landing, she made herself at home on the Schiewenhorst dike in the form of a giantess terrifying to birds and children alike, and remained there for three days.

  A little later, when school began for Eduard Amsel, it was Herr Olschewski, the young schoolmaster in Nickelswalde—for Schiewenhorst did not maintain a school—who was obliged to stand still when his freckliest pupil planted him, insubstantial as a scarecrow, on the great dune to the right of the river mouth. Amid the wind-bowed pines on the crest of the dune Amsel planted the schoolmaster’s double and before his canvas-shod feet laid out the griddle-flat Island from the Vistula to the Nogat, the plain as far as the towers of Danzig, the hills and woods beyond the city, the river from mouth to horizon, and the open sea reaching out to ward an intimation of Hela Peninsula, including the ships anchored in the roadstead.

  TWELFTH MORNING SHIFT

  The year is running out. It is ending in an odd kind of way, because what with the Berlin crisis, New Year’s Eve is to be celebrated not with noisy fireworks but only with the luminous kind. And still another reason for not celebrating New Year’s Eve with the usual noise makers here in Lower Saxony is that Hinrich Kopf, a faithful likeness of a chief of state, has just been carried to his grave. As a precaution Brauxel, after consulting the shop committee, has put up a notice in the surface installations, in the administration building, in the gangways, and on the fill level, so worded: The workers and staff of Brauxel and Co.—Exporters and Importers—are requested to celebrate New Year’s Eve quietly, in a manner befitting the troubled times. In addition the present writer, who could not resist the temptation to quote himself, has had his little motto—“The scarecrow is created in man’s image”—printed on deckle-edged cards and sent to customers and business friends as a New Year’s greeting.

  The first school year brought Eduard Amsel a variety of surprises. Displayed each day ludicrously round and freckle-faced to the eyes of two villages, he became a whipping boy. Whatever games the children happened to be playing, he had to join in, or rather, he was joined in. Of course young Amsel cried when the gang dragged him into the nettles behind Folchert’s barn or tied him to a post with rotten ropes that stank of tar and painfully if not imaginatively tortured him; but through the tears which, as everyone knows, confer a blurred but uncommonly precise vision, his greenish-gray, fat-encased little eyes never ceased to observe, to appraise, and to analyze typical movements. Two or three days after one of these beatings—and it was quite possible that in between blows, along with other insults and nicknames the word “Sheeny” would be uttered accidentally on purpose—the very same torture scene would be reproduced in the form of a single many-armed scarecrow between dunes or directly on the beach, licked by the sea.

  Walter Matern put an end to these beatings and to the ensuing replicas of beatings. One day, perhaps because he had discovered on the beach a tattered but furiously flailing scarecrow, which far from looking unlike him looked like nine of him, he who for quite some time had taken an active part in beatings, who had even accidentally on purpose introduced the word “Sheeny,” dropped his fists in mid-action, allowed both fists to reflect as it were for the time it would have taken to deal out five punches, and then went on punching: but from that time on it was no longer young Amsel who had to submit quietly when Walter Matern’s fists declared their independence; instead, Matern attacked Amsel’s tormentors, and this with so much dedication and rhythmic grinding of his teeth that he was still boxing at the soft summer air behind Folchert’s barn long after all but the blinking Amsel had vanished.

  As we all know from breathtaking movies, friendships concluded during or after beatings are often and breathtakingly put to the test. In the course of this book—and this in itself will make it kind of long—it will be necessary to subject the Matern-Amsel friendship to many more trials. From the very start Walter Matern’s fists—luckily for the new friendship—were kept busy, because the local yokels, progeny of fishermen and peasants, were unable to digest this pact of friendship that had been so suddenly concluded; no sooner was school out than, succumbing to old habit, they dragged the struggling Amsel off behind Folchert’s barn. For slowly flowed the Vistula, slowly the dikes tapered off, the seasons changed, slowly clouds drifted, slowly the ferry labored, slowly the denizens of the lowlands changed over from oil lamps to electric light, and only slowly did the children in the villages to the right and left of the Vistula get it through their heads that anyone who wanted to pick a bone with young Amsel would have Walter Matern to reckon with. The mystery of friendship began gradually to work wonders. A unique scene, representative of the many colorful situations that youthful friendship could involve in a rural district amid the unchanging embodiments of country life—peasant, farmhand, pastor, schoolm
aster, postmaster, peddler, cheesemaker, dairy co-operative inspector, apprentice forester, and village idiot—perpetuated itself for many years without being photographed: somewhere in the dunes, with his back to the woods and their aisles, Amsel is at work. Garments of various cut are spread out in such a way that the artist can find what he needs at a glance. No one style is predominant. Driftwood and small sand heaps weigh down the cotton twill of the defunct Prussian Army and the checkered, stiff-dry yield of the latest flood, inhibiting their tendency to flutter away: nightgowns, morning coats, pants without seats, kitchen rags, jerkins, shriveled dress uniforms, curtains with peepholes, camisoles, pinafores, coachmen’s coats, trusses, chest bandages, chewed-up carpets, the bowels of neckties, pennants from a shooting match, and a dowry of table linen stink and attract flies. A many-segmented caterpillar of felt and velours hats, caps, helmets, bonnets, night caps, garrison caps, low-crowned caps, and straw hats squirms, tries to bite its tail, clearly exhibits each one of its segments, lies there embroidered with flies, and waits to be used. The sun impels all the fence laths implanted in the sand, not to mention the fragments of ladders, the bean poles, the smooth canes and knotted canes, and the common sticks washed ashore by sea and river, to cast moving shadows of varying lengths, which carry time along with them in their passage. Further: a mountain of string, wire, half-rotted rope, crumbling leather articles, matted veils, entangled woolens, and bundles of straw blackened with mildew, dislodged from the disintegrating roofs of barns. Potbellied bottles, bottomless milking pails, chamber pots, and soup tureens form a pile by themselves. And amid all this accumulated stock, astonishingly nimble: Eduard Amsel. Sweating, stepping on beach thistles with his bare feet but taking no notice, he groans, grunts, giggles some, plants a beanpole, tosses a roofing lath against it slantwise, throws some wire after it—he doesn’t tie things together, just tosses, and they stay in place miraculously—makes a reddish-brown silver-threaded curtain climb three-and-a-half times around bean pole and roofing lath, allows matted bundles of straw to turn into a head around a mustard pot, selects a visor cap, ex changes the student cap for a Quaker’s hat, mixes up the caterpillar of hats and the bright-colored sand flies as well, favors a nightcap for a time, but finally appoints a coffee cozy stiffened by the last flood to function as a summit. At the last moment he realizes that the whole lacks a vest and more specifically a vest that is shiny in back, chooses from among the mildewed tatterdemalion tatters, and, half over his shoulder and without really looking, tosses a vest on his creature under the coffee cozy. Already he is planting a tired little ladder to the left, crossing two man-size logs to the right, twisting a triple-width section of garden fence into a screwlike arabesque. He aims briefly, throws stiff army twill and hits, joins with creaking belts, and with the help of the tangled woolens gives this figure, the outrider of his group, a certain military authority. An instant later, laden with rags, hung with leather, entwined in rope, seven times hatted, and surrounded by jubilant flies, he is in front, to one side, to southeast and to starboard of his derelict junk-pile, which is little by little metamorphosed into a crow-repellent group; for from the dunes, the lyme grass, the pine woods rise common and—ornithologically speaking—rare birds. Cause and effect: they coagulate into a cloud high above Eduard Amsel’s place of work. They write their terror in a birdscript that grows steadily steeper, narrower, and more jumbled. The root sound of this text is crah, which with the help of the wood pigeons puts forth the branch mah-roo-croo. The text ends when it does end with pee, but it also has its inner ferment comprising a great deal of uebü, a great deal of ek, the ra-atch of the teals, and the ox-like roar of the bitterns. Inspired by Amsel’s creations, every conceivable kind of terror found expression. But who made his rounds over the rippling crests of the dunes, ensuring the peace necessary to his friend’s bird-repellent labors?