Dog Years (21 page)

They had scarcely laid him on the runway when the life-saving team came with the oxygen apparatus. The steamer
Swan
whistled a second time and resumed its circuit of beach resorts. No one turned off the ice-cream vendor: "Vanilla, lemon, woodruff. . ." Konrad's face had turned blue. His hands and feet, like those of all the drowned, were yellow. The lobe of one ear had been torn between the piles: bright red blood dripped on the boards. His eyes refused to close. His curly hair had remained curly under water. Around him, who looked even tinier drowned than alive, a puddle grew. During the efforts to revive him -- they applied the oxygen apparatus as the regulations prescribed -- I held Tulla's mouth closed. When they removed the apparatus, she bit into my hand and screamed above the voice of the ice-cream vendor to high heaven, because she could no longer talk silently with Konrad for hours, with fingers, cheek to cheek, with the sign on the forehead and the sign for love: hidden in the wood shed, cool under the pier, secretly in the trenches, or quite openly and yet secretly on busy Elsenstrasse.

Dear Tulla,

your scream was to be long-lived: to this day it nests in my ear and holds that one heaven-high tone.

The following summer and the one after that nothing could move our Harras to go out on the breakwater. He remained with Tulla, who also avoided the pier. Their solidarity had a story behind it:

In the summer of the same year, but shortly before the deaf-mute Konrad drowned while bathing, Harras was summoned for mating purposes. The police were acquainted with the dog's pedigree and once or twice a year sent a letter signed by a Police Lieutenant Mirchau. My father never said no to these letters which were framed more or less as commands. As a master carpenter he wished in the first place to avoid trouble with the police; in the second place stud service, when performed by a male of Harras' parts, brought in a tidy little sum; in the third place my father took manifest pride in his shepherd: when the two of them set out for the profitable mating ceremony, an onlooker could easily have been led to believe that the police had called not upon Harras but upon my father to mate.

For the first time I was allowed to go along: unenlightened, but not ignorant. My father despite the heat wearing a suit, which he otherwise put on only when the carpenter's guild had a meeting. A respectable charcoal with belly-spanning vest. Under his velour hat he held a fifteen-pfennig cigar -- he was in the habit of buying seconds. No sooner was Harras out of his kennel and muzzled into inoffensiveness -- because we were going to the police -- than he lit out and was up to his old trick, pulling on the leash: to judge by the ample remains of the cigar, we were in Hochstriess sooner than anyone would have thought possible.

Hochstriess was the name of the street that ran southward from the Main Street of Langfuhr. Past two-family houses where police officers lived with their families; on the right, the gloomy brick barracks built for Mackensen's Hussars, now inhabited by the police. At the Pelonker Weg entrance, which was little used and had no sentry box but only a barrier and a guardroom, my father, without removing his hat, produced Lieutenant Mirchau's letter. Although my father knew the way, a policeman escorted us across gravel-strewn barracks yards where policemen in light-gray twill were drilling or standing in a semicircle around a superior. All the recruits stood at ease with their hands behind their backs and gave the impression of listening to a lecture. The offshore wind sent dust cones whirling through the hole be tween the police garages and the police gymnasium. Along the endless stables of the mounted police, recruits were hurrying over the obstacle course, hurdling walls and ditches, bars and barbed-wire entanglements. All the barracks yards were framed by evenly spaced young lindens about the thickness of a child's arm, supported by props. At that point it became advisable to hold our Harras close. In a small square -- to the left and right windowless storerooms, in the back ground a flat-roofed building -- police dogs, perhaps nine of them, were obliged to heel, to point, to retrieve, to bark, to hurdle walls like the recruits, and finally, after complicated trail work with nose to the ground, attack a policeman who, disguised as a thief and protected by padding, was acting out a classical attempt at a getaway. Well-kept beasts, but none like Harras. All of them iron-gray, ash-gray with white markings, dull yellow with black saddle or dark-brindled on light-brown undercoat. The yard resounded with commands and with the commanded barking of the dogs.

In the orderly room of the police kennels we had to wait. Lieutenant Mirchau wore his very straight part on the left side. Lieutenant Mirchau exchanged such words with my father as a carpenter exchanges with a police lieutenant when they are seated in a room for a short while. Then Mirchau lowered his head. His part moved back and forth over his work -- he was probably looking through reports. The room had two windows to the left and right of the door. The drilling police dogs would have been visible if the windows hadn't been painted opaque except for the upper third. On the white washed wall across from the window front hung two dozen photographs in narrow black frames. All were of the same format; in two pyramidal groups -- six photographs at the bottom, then four, and at the top two -- they flanked a picture of large upright format, which though broader was also framed in black. Each of the twenty-four of the pyramidally ordered photographs represented a shepherd heeling for a policeman. The large ceremoniously flanked picture presented the face of an elderly man in a spiked helmet, with tired eyes under heavy eyelids. Much too loudly I asked the man's name. Lieutenant Mirchau replied, without raising head or part, that this was a picture of the Reichspr
ä
sident, and that the signature at the bottom had been affixed by the old gentleman in person. There were also ink tracks crowded in under the photographs of dogs and policemen: probably the names of the dogs, references to their pedigrees, the names and ranks of the policemen, possibly, since these were obviously police dogs, allusions to actions performed in line of duty by the dogs and dog-leading policemen, for instance, the names of the burglars, smugglers, and murderers who had been apprehended with the help of the dog in question.

Behind the desk and Lieutenant Mirchau's back hung, again symmetrically echeloned, six framed and glassed paper rectangles, illegible from where I was sitting. To judge by the type and sizes of the lettering, they must have been certificates in Gothic print with gold embossing, seals, and raised stamps. Probably dogs, who had served with the police, who had been drilled in the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police kennels, had won first, second, or even third prize at interregional police dog meets. On the desk, to the right of the inclined part, slowly moving back and forth over the lieutenant's work, stood in tense posture a bronze, or perhaps only plaster shepherd about the height of a dachshund, who, as any dog fancier could see at a glance, was cow-hocked and let his croup, to the onset of the tail, slope much too steeply.

Despite all this emphasis on cynology, the orderly room of the Langfuhr-Hochstriess police kennels didn't smell of dogs, but rather of lime; for the room had been freshly whitewashed -- and the six or seven potted dwarf lindens that adorned both window sills gave off a dry acrid smell: my father was obliged to sneeze loudly several times, which embarrassed me.

After a good half hour Harras was brought back. He didn't look any different. My father received twenty-five gulden of stud money and the bright-blue stud certificate, the text of which indicated the circumstances of the covering, such as the male's immediate readiness to mate, and the numbers of two entries in the studbook. To help me preserve it in my memory to this day, Lieutenant Mirchau spat into a white-enameled spittoon, which stood by the left hind leg of his desk, and said they would send word whether it had taken. If the desired result should materialize, he would see to it that the balance of the stud fee was sent as usual.

Harras had his muzzle on again, my father had put away the stud certificate and the five five-gulden pieces, we were already on our way to the door when Mirchau resurfaced from his reports: "You've got to keep that animal more in check. His habits on the leash are deplorable. His pedigree makes it quite clear that the animal came from Lithuania three generations back. Suddenly, from one day to the next, a mutation can set in. We've seen all sorts of things. More over, breeder Matern should have had the mating of the bitch Senta of Queen Louise's mill with the stud dog Pluto supervised and confirmed by the local dog club in Neuteich." He shot a finger at me: "And don't leave the dog with children too often. He shows signs of reverting to wildness. It's all the same to us, but you'll have trouble later on."

It wasn't you,

but me the lieutenant's finger was aimed at. But it was you who demoralized Harras.

Tulla, skinny bony. Through the cracks in every fence. Under the stairs a tangle; a tangle down the banister.

Tulla's face, in which the overly large, usually crusted nostrils -- she talked through her nose -- outweighed everything, even the narrow-set eyes, in importance.

Tulla's scraped, scab-forming, healing, newly scraped knees.

Tulla's aroma of bone glue, her carpenter's glue dolls and her wigs of wood shavings, which one of the carpenters had to plane specially for her from long boards.

Tulla could do what she liked with Harras; and she did with Harras everything that entered her head. Our dog and her deaf-mute brother were for a long time her real retinue, whereas I, who wanted passionately to belong, was always just tagging around after the three of them, and yet obliged to do my breathing at a distance from Tulla's aroma of bone glue when I finally caught up with them by the Striessbach, on Aktien Pond, on the Frobelwiese, in the coconut pile of the Amada margarine factory, or in the police trenches; for when my cousin had wheedled my father long enough -- which Tulla was very good at doing -- Harras was allowed to go along. Tulla led our Harras to Oliva Forest, to Saspe and across the sewage fields, through the lumber yards behind the New City or to the Brösen pier, until the deaf-mute Konrad drowned while swimming.

Tulla screamed for five hours,

then played deaf and dumb. For two days, until Konrad lay beneath the ground in the Consolidated Cemeteries beside Hindenburgallee, she lay stiff in bed, beside the bed, under the bed, tried to waste away completely, and on the fourth day after Konrad's death moved into the kennel by the front wall of the lumber and plywood shed, which was properly intended only for Harras.

But it turned out that both found room in the kennel. They lay side by side. Or Tulla lay alone in the kennel and Harras lay across the entrance. This never went on for long, then they were back again, lying flank to flank in the kennel. When it became necessary to bark and growl briefly at a delivery man, bringing door frames or blades for the buzz saw, Harras left the kennel; and when he was drawn to his dinner plate or drinking bowl, Harras left Tulla for a short while, only to push hurriedly and backwards -- for in the cramped kennel he had difficulty in turning around -- back into the warm hole. He let his superimposed paws, she her thin braids tied up in string, hang out over the threshold of the kennel. Either the sun shone on the tar paper of the kennel roof or they heard the rain on the tar-paper roof; or they didn't hear the rain, heard perhaps the lathe, the finishing machine, the booming planing machine, and the agitated, tranquillized, freshly and more furiously agitated buzz saw, which went its arduous ways even when the rain was beating down on the yard, forming always the same puddles.

They lay on shavings. On the first day my father came out, and Dreesen the machinist, who called my father by his first name and vice versa after work hours. August Pokriefke came out in wooden shoes. Erna Pokriefke came out in felt slippers. My mother didn't come out. They all said: "Now come on out of there and get up and stop that." But Tulla didn't come out, didn't get up, and didn't stop. Anyone at tempting to set foot in the vicinity of the kennel quailed after the first step; for the kennel -- and Harras had no need to take one paw off the other -- emitted a growling that meant something. Born Koshnavians, long-time residents of Langfuhr, the tenants of the two-and-a-half-room apartments exchanged the opinion from floor to floor: "She'll come when she's had enough and when she sees she can't bring little Konrad back to life by going on that way."

But Tulla didn't see,

didn't come out, and didn't have enough on the evening of her first dog-kennel day. Two lay on wood shavings. They were renewed every day. August Pokriefke had been doing that for years; and Harras attached importance to the renewal of the shavings. Consequently, of all those who were concerned over Tulla, only old man Pokriefke was allowed to approach the kennel with a basket of crisp shavings. In addition he had a broom and shovel wedged under his arm. As soon as August Pokriefke came padding along thus laden, Harras left the kennel unasked, tugged a little, then harder at Tulla's dress, until she dragged herself out into the daylight and crouched down beside the kennel. As she crouched, her eyes, quite sightless, rolled back so that only the whites shimmered; with "bashed-in windows," she passed water. Not defiantly, indifferently would be more accurate, she waited until August Pokriefke had renewed the shavings and come out with the little speech that was bound to occur to him as a father: "Come on up now. You're still on vacation now, but pretty soon you'll have to go to school. D'you think you're the only one? D'you think we didn't love the boy? And don't act like you was nuts. They'll come and get you and put you in an institution where they swat you from morning to night. They'll think you're crazy. So come up now. It'll be dark soon. Mama's making potato pancakes. Come along now or they'll take you away."