Dog Years (13 page)

Sacred ludicrous moment of inspiration: angel taps on forehead. Muses with frayed rosebud mouths. Planets in Aquarius. A brick falls. The egg has two yolks. The ash tray is running over. Dripping from the roof: celluloid. Short circuit. Hatboxes. What turns the corner: a patent-leather shoe. What enters without knocking: La Barbarina, the Snow Queen, snow men. What lends itself to being stuffed: God, eels, and birds. What is extracted from mines: coal, iron, pot ash, scarecrows, the past.

This scarecrow comes into being soon thereafter. It is Amsel's last for many a year. For under the no doubt ironically intended title "The Great Cuckoo Bird" -- suggested, as a note informs us, not by Amsel but by Kriwe the ferry man -- this creation, handed down both in a preliminary sketch and in a color study, is the last recorded in the diary which is today still relatively safe in Brauxel's safe.

Rags -- as the diary tells us in its own words -- have first to be coated with pitch or tar. Rags coated with tar or pitch have to be studded on the outside with large and small feathers and on the inside as well if enough of them are available. But in an unnatural, not a natural, way.

And indeed, when the completed Great Cuckoo Bird, tarred, feathered, and superman-high, was set out on the dike to the amazement of all who approached, its feathers stood unnaturally on end. It looked altogether spooky. The most hardened fisherwomen fled, convinced that looking at the monster could induce goiter, swivel eye, or miscarriage. The men stood their ground stiff and stolid, but let their pipes grow cold. Johann Lickfett said: "Friend, I wouldn't want that thing for a present."

It was hard to find a purchaser. And yet for all the tar and feathers the price was not high. In the forenoon it stood alone on the Nickelswalde dike, silhouetted against the sky. Only when the commuting schoolchildren returned from the city did a few come strolling out as though by chance, but stopped at a safe distance, appraised it, expressed opinions, and were disinclined to buy. Not a gull in the cloudless sky. The mice in the dike looked for other lodgings. The Vistula was unable to make a loop or it would have. Everywhere cockchafers, not in Nickelswalde. When with a laugh that was much too loud Herr Olschewski, the schoolteacher who was by nature rather high-strung, expressed interest, more for the fun of it than to protect his sixty square feet of front garden -- the Great Cuckoo Bird had to be unloaded far below the price originally set. It was moved in Olschewski's rack wagon.

For two weeks the monster stood in the front garden, casting its shadow upon the teacher's flat-roofed, whitewashed cottage. No bird dared to let out a peep. The sea wind ruffled tarry feathers. Cats grew hysterical and shunned the village. Schoolchildren made detours, dreamt wet at night, and woke up screaming, with white fingertips. In Schiewenhorst Hedwig Lau came down with a bad case of tonsillitis, complicated by sudden nosebleeds. While old man Folchert was chopping wood, a chip flew into his eye, which for a long time refused to heal. When Grandma Matern passed out in the middle of the poultry yard, there were many who blamed the Great Cuckoo Bird; however, both hens and rooster had been carrying straw around in their beaks for the last month: which has always been a presage of death. Everyone in the miller's house, beginning with poor Lorchen, had heard the woodworm, the deathwatch. Grandma Matern took note of all these omens and sent for the sacraments. Once they had been administered, she lay down and died in the midst of straw-toting chickens. In her coffin she looked surprisingly peaceful. Gloved in white, she was holding a lavender-scented lace handkerchief between her crookedly folded hands. It smelled just right. Unfortunately they forgot to take out her hairpins before the coffin was closed and relegated to Catholically consecrated earth. This omission was no doubt responsible for the shooting headaches that assailed Frau Matern n
é
e Stange immediately after the funeral and from then on left her no peace.

When the body was laid out in the overhang room, when the villagers all stiff and starched stood crowded together in the kitchen and on the stairs leading to the overhang room, while they muttered their "Now she's gone!," their "Now she don't need to scold no more," and their "Now her troubles are over, now she's earned eternal rest" over the body, Kriwe the ferryman asked leave to touch the dead woman's right index finger to one of his few teeth, which had been aching and suppurating for several days. Standing between window and armchair, the miller, an unfamiliar figure in black with out sack or mealworm, struck by no changing light, for the new mill was not yet running, nodded slowly: gently Grand mother Matern's right glove was removed, and Kriwe conveyed his bad tooth to the tip of her crooked index finger: sacred ludicrous moment of miraculous healing: angel taps, lays on hands, strokes against the grain, and crosses fingers. Toad's blood, crow's eyes, mare's milk. In each of the Twelve Nights thrice over left shoulder, seven times eastward. Hair pins. Pubic hair. Neck fuzz. Exhume, scatter to the winds, drink of the corpse's bath water, pour it across the threshold alone at night before cockcrow on St. Matthew's Day. Poison made from cockles. Fat of a newborn babe. Sweat of the dead. Sheets of the dead. Fingers of the dead: for the truth of the matter is that the suppuration at the base of Kriwe's tooth was said to have subsided after contact with the deceased Grandmother Matern's crooked index finger and, in strict accordance with the superstitious belief that a dead person's finger cures toothache, the pain was also said to have eased and gone away.

When the coffin had been carried out of the house and was swaying first past Folchert's farm, then past the teacher's cottage, one of the pallbearers stumbled, because the Great Cuckoo Bird was still standing hideous and gruesome in the teacher's garden. Stumbling means something. Stumbling is an omen. The pallbearer's stumbling was the last straw: the peasants and fishermen of several villages submitted a petition to Herr Olschewski and threatened to send an even more strongly worded one to the school board.

The following Monday, when Amsel and Walter Matern came home from school, Herr Olschewski was waiting for them at the Schiewenhorst ferry landing. He was standing beneath a straw hat. He was standing in knickers, a sports jacket with large checks, and canvas shoes. While the train was being run onto the ferry, the schoolteacher, seconded by Kriwe the ferryman, remonstrated with the two boys. This just couldn't go on, he declared, a number of parents had complained and were planning to write the school board, they had already got wind of it in Tiegenhof, people
were
superstitious, of course that had something to do with it, even the unfortunate death of Grandmother Matern -- a fine woman! -- was being attributed -- all this in our enlightened twentieth century, but no one, especially here in the villages of the Vistula delta, could swim against the stream, realities were realities: beautiful as the scarecrow was, it was more than village people, especially here on the Island, could stomach.

Literally, Herr Olschewski spoke as follows to Eduard Amsel, his former pupil: "My boy, you're going to high school now, you've taken quite a step out into the wide world. From now on, the village will be too small for you. Let us hope that your zeal, your artistic nature, that gift of God as they say, will find new fields to conquer out there, in the world. But here let well enough alone. You know I'm saying this for your own good."

The following day was marked by mildly apocalyptic doings: Amsel broke up shop in Folchert's barn. In other words, Matern opened the padlock and an amazing number of volunteer helpers carried the milliner's -- as Amsel was called in the villages -- building materials into the open: four scarecrows in process of construction, bundles of roofing laths and flower stakes. Kapok was shredded. Mattresses vomited seaweed. Horsehair exploded from sofa cushions. The helmet, the beautiful full-bottomed wig from Krampitz, the shako, the poke bonnets, the plumed hats, the butterfly bonnets, the felt-straw-velours hats, the sombrero and the Wellington hat donated by the Tiedes of Gross-Z
ü
nder, everything that can shelter a human crown passed from head to head, from the twilight of the barn to honey-yellow sunshine: "Milliner milliner!" Amsel's chest, which would have driven a hundred order-loving barracks orderlies out of their minds, poured forth ruffles, sequins, rhinestone beads, braid, clouds of lace, upholstery cord, and carnation-scented silk pompons. Everybody got into the act, pitched in to help the milliner, put things on, took them off, and threw them on the pile: jumpers and jackets, breeches and the frog-green litewka. A traveling agent for a dairy concern had given Amsel the zouave's jacket and a plum-blue vest. Hey, the corset, the corset! Two wrapped themselves in the Blücher overcoat. Brides dancing furiously in bridal dresses fragrant with lavender. Sack races in leggings. Pea-green screamed the shift. Muff equals ball. Young mice in the cape. Jagged holes. Shirts without collars. Roman collars and mustache holders, cloth violets, wax tulips, paper roses, shooting match medals, dogtags and pansies, beauty spots, tinsel. "Milliner milliner!" Whom the shoe fitted and whom it did not fit slipped or struggled into galoshes, top boots, knee boots, laced boots, strode in pointed shoes through tobacco-brown curtains, leapt shoeless but in gaiters through the curtains of a countess, princess, or even queen. Prussian, West Prussian, and Free City wares fell on the pile: What a shindig in the nettles behind Folchert's barn: "Milliner milliner!" And uppermost on the pyre, whence moths were still escaping, stood, supported by beanpoles, the public scandal, the bugaboo, Baal tarred and feathered, the Great Cuckoo Bird.

The sun shines down almost vertically. Kindled by Kriwe's hand with Kriwe's lighter, the fire spreads rapidly. All take a few steps backward, but stay on, eager to witness the great holocaust. While Walter Matern, as he always did at official functions, makes big noises, trying to drown out the crackling by sheer grinding of the teeth, Eduard Amsel, known as "the milliner" and occasionally -- the merry bonfire is another such occasion -- called "Sheeny," stands negligently on freckled legs, rubs his upholstered palms strenuously together, screws up his eyes and sees something. No green-yellow smoke, no stewing leather goods, no glittering flight of sparks and moths compels him to transform round eyes into oblique slits: no, it is the bird, spouting innumerable tongues of flame, the bird going up in smoke that falls to the ground and creeps over the nettles, which makes him a present of brisk ideas and suchlike flimflam. For as the burning beast, creature of rags, tar, and feathers, sizzling and showering sparks and very much alive, makes a last stab at flying, then collapses into dust, Amsel has resolved in his heart and diary that later, one day when he is big, he will revive the idea of the Great Cuckoo Bird: he will build a giant bird which will burn, spark, and blaze everlastingly, yet never be consumed, but continue in all eternity, forever and ever, by its very nature, apocalypse and ornament in one, to burn, spark, and blaze.

TWENTY-SIXTH MORNING SHIFT

A few days before the fourth of February, before the critical constellation of the heavenly luminaries calls this world into question, Brauxel decides to add an item to his stock or pandemonium: the burning
perpetuum mobile
in the form of a bird, inspired by Amsel -- he will have it built. The world is not so rich in ideas that he should abjectly forgo one of the finest inspirations even if the world were coming to an end within the next few morning shifts; especially as Eduard Amsel, after the auto-da-f
é
behind Folchert's barn, offered an example of stoical fortitude by helping to put out the fire that flying sparks had kindled in Folchert's barn.

A few weeks after the public burning of Amsel's stock and his latest crow-scaring model, after a fire which, as we shall see, kindled all sorts of kindling in Amsel's little head and produced a fire that was never again to be quenched, the widow Lottchen Amsel, nee Tiede, and Herr Anton Matern, miller in Nickelswalde, received blue letters, from which it could be gathered that Dr. Battke, principal of Sankt Johann High School, wished to see them in his office on a certain day and hour.

Widow Amsel and miller Matern took one and the same train to the city -- they sat facing one another, each in a seat by the window. At Langgart Gate they took the streetcar as far as Milchkannen Bridge. Because they were early, they were able to attend to a few business matters. She had to call on Hahn & Lochel, then on Haubold & Lanser; he had to drop in on the construction firm of Prochnow on Adebargasse in connection with the new mill. They met in Long Market, stopped at Springer's for a drink, and then -- although they might have walked -- took a taxi and reached Fleischergasse ahead of time.

To speak in round numbers, they had to wait for ten minutes in Dr. Rasmus Battke's waiting room, before the principal, in light gray shoes and the sports clothes they implied, appeared, imposing and without glasses, in the waiting room. With a small hand on a short arm, he motioned them into his office, and when the country folk hesitated to sit down in the club chairs, he cried out airily: "No formalities, please. I am sincerely delighted to meet the parents of two such promising students."

Two walls of books, one wall of windows. His pipe tobacco smelled English. Schopenhauer glowered between bookshelves, because Schopenhauer. . . Water glass, water pitcher, pipe cleaners on heavy red desk with green felt cover. Four embarrassed hands on upholstered leather arms. Miller Matern showed the principal his protruding ear, not the one that hearkened to mealworms. Widow Amsel nodded after every subordinate clause uttered by the fluent principal. The subjects of his discourse were: First, the economic situation in the countryside, hence the impending regulation of the market necessitated by the Polish customs laws, and the problems of the cheese producers on Great Island. Secondly, Great Island in general, and in particular the wind-swept far-billowing wheatfields; the advantages of the Epp variety and of the winter-resistant Siberian variety; the campaign against corn cockle -- "but what a fertile blessed region, yes indeed. . ." Thirdly, Dr. Rasmus Battke had the following to say: Two such gifted students, though of course their gifts lay in very different directions -- everything came so easily to little Eduard -- two students bound by so productive a friend ship -- how touching it was to see little Matern defending his friend against the teasing, quite devoid of malice you may rest assured, of his fellow students -- in short, two students so deserving of benevolent encouragement as Eduard Amsel, but in no less degree Walter Matern, were to say the least deterred by the long trip in the dreadful, though of course highly entertaining narrow-gauge railroad, from devoting their maximum energies to their work; he, the principal of the establishment, an old hand, as you may well imagine, at problems connected with schooling, who had learned a thing or two from his years of experience with commuting students, wished accordingly to suggest that even before the summer holidays broke upon the land, next Monday in fact, both boys should transfer to a different school. The Conradinum in Langfuhr, whose principal, an old friend, had already been consulted and supported his views wholeheartedly, had an in-student plan, or in plain German, a dormitory where a considerable number of students were provided with board and lodging -- for a reasonable fee -- thanks to the ample endowment from which the Conradinum benefited; in a word, they would both be well taken care of, it was an arrangement which he as principal of the Sankt Johann High School could only recommend.