Dog Years (22 page)

Tulla's first dog-kennel day ended like this:

she stayed in the kennel. August Pokriefke took Harras off the chain. With different keys he locked the lumber shed, the plywood shed, the machine room, and the office where the varnishes and frames, the saw blades and the cakes of bone glue were kept, left the yard, also locked the door to the yard; and no sooner had he locked up than it grew darker and darker. It grew so dark that I, looking out between the curtains of our kitchen window, could no longer distinguish the tar paper of the dog kennel from the ordinarily lighter front wall of the lumber shed.

On the second dog-kennel day,

a Tuesday, Harras no longer had to tug when August Pokriefke wanted to renew the shavings. Tulla began to take food, that is, she ate with Harras out of his dish, after Harras had dragged a boneless chunk of dog meat into the kennel and whetted her appetite by nuzzling the meat with his cold nose.

Now this dog meat really wasn't bad. Usually it was stringy cow meat and was cooked in large quantities on our kitchen stove, always in the same rust-brown enamel pot. We had all of us, Tulla and her brothers and myself as well, eaten this meat in our bare hands, without bread to push it down. It tasted best when cold and hard. We cut it into cubes with our pocketknives. It was cooked twice a week and was compact, gray-brown, traversed by pale-blue little veins, sinews, and sweating strips of fat. It smelled sweetish soapy forbidden. Long after gulping down the marbled cubes of meat -- often while playing we had both pockets full of them -- our palates were still deadened and tallowy. We even spoke differently when we had eaten of those meat cubes: our speech became palatal metamorphosed four-legged: we barked at each other. We preferred this dish to many that were served at the family board. We called it dog meat. When it wasn't cow meat, it was never anything worse than horse meat or the mutton from a forced slaughtering. My mother threw coarse-grained salt -- a handful -- into the enamel pot, piled up the foot-long tatters of meat in the boiling salt water, let the water boil up again for a moment, put in marjoram, because marjoram is supposed to be good for a dog's sense of smell, turned the gas down, covered the pot, and didn't touch it for a whole hour; for that was the time required by cow-horse-sheep meat to turn into the dog meat which Harras and we ate and which, thanks to the marjoram cooked with it, provided us all, Harras and the rest of us, with sensitive olfactories. It was a Koshnavian recipe. Between Osterwick and Schlangenthin they said: Marjoram is good for your looks. Marjoram makes money go further. Against Devil and hell strew marjoram over the threshold. The squat long haired Koshnavian sheep dogs were celebrated for their marjoram-favored keenness of smell.

Rarely, when there was no meat displayed on the low-price counter, the pot was filled with innards: knotted fatty beef hearts, pissy, because unsoaked, pig's kidneys, also small lamb kidneys which my mother had to detach from a finger-thick coat of fat lined with crackling parchment: the kidneys went into the dog pot, the suet was rendered in a cast-iron frying pan and used in the family cooking, because mutton suet wards off tuberculosis. Sometimes, too, a piece of dark spleen, halfway between purple and violet, went into the pot, or a chunk of sinewy beef liver. But because lung took longer to cook, required a larger cooking pot, and when you come right down to it doesn't yield much meat, it almost never went into the enamel pot, in actual fact only during the occasional summer meat shortages brought on by the cattle plague that sometimes came to Kashubia as well as Koshnavia. We never ate the boiled innards. Only Tulla, unbeknownst to the grownups, but before our eyes as we looked on with a tightening of the throat, took long avid gulps of the brownish-gray broth in which the coagulated excretion of the kidneys floated sleetlike and mingled with blackish marjoram to form islands.

On the fourth dog-kennel day

-- on the advice of the neighbors and of the doctor who came in when there was an accident in the shop, Tulla was given her way -- I brought her -- no one was up yet, even the machinist, who was always first at work, hadn't arrived yet -- a bowlful of heart, kidney, spleen, and liver broth. The broth in the bowl was cold, for Tulla preferred to drink her broth cold. A layer of fat, a mixture of beef tallow and mutton tallow, covered the bowl like an icecap. The cloudy liquid emerged only at the edges, and drops of it rolled over the layer of tallow. I tiptoed cautiously in my pajamas. I had taken the key to the yard from the big key rack without jangling the other keys. Very early and very late all staircases creak. On the flat roof of the woodshed the sparrows were starting up. In the kennel no sign of life. But varicolored flies on tar paper already touched by slanting sun. I ventured as far as the semicircular earthworks and foot-deep ditch which marked the range of the dog's chain. Inside the kennel: peace, darkness, and not a single varicolored fly. Then there awakened in the darkness: Tulla's hair mixed with shavings. Harras held his head on his paws. Lips pressed tight. Ears scarcely playing, but playing. Several times I called, but there was sleep in my throat and I didn't do very well, swallowed, and called louder: "Tulla!" I also stated my name: "It's Harry and I've brought you something." I tried to lure her with the broth in the bowl, attempted lip-smacking sounds, whistled softly and hissingly, as though trying to lure not Tulla but Harras to the edge of the semicircle.

When there was no life or sign of life but flies, a little oblique sun, and sparrow chatter, at the most dog ears -- and once Harras yawned at length but kept his eyes shut -- I set down the bowl at the edge of the semicircle, or more precisely, in the ditch dug by the dog's forepaws, left it, and without turning went back into the house. Behind my back: sparrows, varicolored flies, climbing sun, and the kennel.

The machinist was just pushing his bicycle through the passage. He asked, but I didn't answer. In our apartment the windows were still shuttered. My father's sleep was peaceful, confident in the alarm clock. I pushed a stool up to the kitchen window, grabbed a big chunk of dry bread and the pot of plum butter, pushed the curtains to left and right, dipped the bread into the plum butter, and was already gnawing and tugging when Tulla crawled out of the kennel. Even when Tulla had the threshold of the kennel behind her, she stayed on all fours, shook herself limply, shed wood shavings, crawled sluggish and wobbly toward the semicircle described by the dog's chain, reached ditch and earthworks right next to the door to plywood shed, hove to with a sharp twist of the hips, shook off more shavings -- her light blue cotton dress was gradually developing blue and white checks -- yawned in the direction of the yard -- there in the shade, only his cap struck by the oblique rays of the sun, stood the machinist beside his bicycle, rolling himself a cigarette and looking toward the kennel; while I with bread and plum butter looked down on Tulla, ignored the kennel, and aimed only at her, her and her back. And Tulla with sluggish sleepy movements crawled along the semicircle, letting her head and matted hair hang down, and stopped only, but still behind lowered head, when she reached the glazed brown earthenware bowl, whose contents were covered by an unbroken layer of tallow.

As long as I upstairs forgot to chew, as long as the machinist, whose cap was growing more and more into the sun, used both hands to light his conical handmade cigarette -- three times his lighter failed to light -- Tulla held her face rigid against the sand, then turned slowly but again from the hips, without raising her head with its hair and shavings. When her face was over the bowl and would have been mirrored if the layer of tallow had been a round pocket mirror, all movement was suspended. And I too, up above, was still not chewing. Almost imperceptibly Tulla's weight was shifted from two supporting arms to her left supporting arm, until seen from the kitchen window her left open palm disappeared under her body. And then, though I couldn't see her free arm coming, she had her right hand on the basin, while I dipped my chunk of bread in the plum butter.

The machinist smoked rhythmically and let his cigarette cling to his lower lip as he blew out smoke till the still-horizontal sun struck it. Strained with propping, Tulla's left shoulder blade stretched the blue-and-white gingham of her dress. Harras, head on paws, raised his eyelids one more slowly than the other and looked toward Tulla: she extended the little finger of her right hand; he slowly and successively lowered his lids. Now, because the sun disclosed the dog's ears, flies flared up and were extinguished in the kennel.

While the sun climbed and a cock crowed nearby -- there were roosters in the neighborhood -- Tulla stuck the extended little finger of her right hand vertically into the middle of the layer of tallow, and began cautiously but tenaciously to bore a hole in the tallow. I put the bread aside. The machinist shifted to the other leg and let his face slip out of the sunlight. That was something I wanted to see, how Tulla's little finger would bore through the layer of tallow, penetrate to the broth, and break open the layer several times more; but I didn't see how Tulla's little finger reached into the broth, and the layer of tallow didn't break into floes, but was picked up from the basin, round and in one piece, by Tulla's little finger. High over shoulder, hair, and shavings she raises the disk the size of a beer mug mat into the early seven-o'clock sky, offers a glimpse of her screwed-up face, and then hurls the disk with a snap of her wrist into the yard, in the direction of the machinist: in the sand it broke forever, the shards rolled in the sand; and a few fragments of tallow, transformed into tallowy balls of sand, grew after the manner of snowballs and rolled down close to the smok ing machinist and his bicycle with its new bell.

As I then looked back from the shattered disk of tallow to Tulla, she was kneeling bony and steep, but still cool, under the sun. She spreads the fingers of her left, overstrained hand five times sideways, folds them over three joints and then back over the same joints. Cupping the bowl in her right hand, which rests on the ground, she slowly guides her mouth and the edge of the bowl together. She laps, sips, wastes nothing. In one breath, without removing the bowl from her lips, Tulla drinks the fatless spleen-heart-kidney-liver broth with all its granular delicacies and surprises, with the tiny bits of cartilage at the bottom, with Koshnavian marjoram and coagulated urea. Tulla drinks to the dregs: her chin raises the bowl. The bowl raises the hand beneath the bowl into the beam of the oblique sun. A neck is exposed and grows steadily longer. A head with hair and shavings leans back and beds itself on shoulders. Two narrow-set eyes remain closed. Skinny, sinewy, and pale, Tulla's childlike neck labors until the bowl lies on top of her face and she is able to lift her hand from the bowl and move it away between the bottom of the bowl and the side-slipping sun. The overturned bowl conceals the screwed-up eyes, the crusty nostrils, the mouth that has had enough.

I think I was happy in my pajamas behind our kitchen window. Plum butter had set my teeth on edge. In my parents' bedroom the alarm clock put an end to my father's slumbers. Down below the machinist was obliged to light up again. Harras raised eyelids. Tulla let the bowl tip off her face. The bowl fell in the sand. It did not break. Tulla fell slowly onto both palms. A few shavings, which the lathe may have spat out, crumbled off her. She executed a ninety-degree turn from the hip, crawled slow sated sluggish first into the oblique sun, then carried sun along with her on her back to the kennel door, pivoted outside the hole, and pushed herself backwards, with hanging head and hair, charged with horizontal sun that made both hair and shavings shimmer, across the threshold into the kennel.

Then Harras closed his eyes again. Varicolored flies returned. My edgy teeth. Beyond his collar his black neck which no illumination could make lighter. My father's getting-up sounds. Sparrows strewn around the empty bowl. A patch of material: blue-and-white checks. Wisps of hair, shimmering light, shavings, paws, flies, ears, sleep, morning sun: tar paper grew soft and smelled.

Dreesen the machinist pushed his bicycle toward the half-glass door to the machine shop. Slowly and in step he shook his head from left to right and right to left. In the machine shop the buzz saw, the band saw, the lathe, the finishing machine, and the planing machine were still cold but hungry. My father coughed solemnly in the toilet. I slipped down off the kitchen stool.

Toward evening of the fifth dog-kennel day,

a Friday, the carpenter tried to reason with Tulla. His fifteen-pfennig cigar formed a right angle to his well-cut face and made his paunch -- he was standing in side view -- look less protuberant. The imposing-looking man spoke sensibly. Kindness as bait. Then he spoke more forcefully, let the ash break prematurely from his teetering cigar, and took on a more protuberant paunch. Prospect of punishment held out. When he crossed the semicircle, whose radius was measured by the dog's chain, Harras, accompanied by wood shavings, stormed out of the kennel and hurled his blackness and both forepaws against the carpenter's chest. My father staggered back and went red and blue in the face, his cigar still clung to his lips, though the angle had lost its precision. He seized a roofing lath from one of the piles propped up on sawhorses, but did not strike out at Harras, who tense and unbarking was testing the strength of his chain. Arm and lath were lowered, and it was not until half an hour later that he thrashed the apprentice Hotten Scherwinski with his bare hands, because according to the machinest, Hotten Scherwinski had neglected to clean and oil the lathe, and moreover, the apprentice had allegedly made off with some door mountings and a couple of pounds of one-inch nails.

Tulla's next dog-kennel day,