Dog Years (30 page)

A family affair, everybody was there, all old friends: Alfons Bublitz with Lotte and Franzchen Wollschläger: "You 'member the time in Hohne Park. Along the Radaune on the way to Ohra, who do we run into but Dulleck and his brother, and there he is, stewed to the gills."

And in a row at the bar stood beer-assed the SA men Bruno Dulleck, Willy Eggers, Paule Hoppe, Walter Matern, and Otto Warnke. "And one time at the Caf
é
Derra! You're nuts, man, that was in Zinglers Höhe, they beat Brill up. And then another time, only a coupla days ago. Where was that? By the dam in Straschin-Prangschin. I hear they chucked him into the basin. But he climbed out. Not like Wichmann in Klein-Katz, they gave it to him good, with gun butts: shoilem boil 'em! They say he's gone to Spain. That's what you think! They done him in and stuffed the pieces in a sack. I remember him from the Sharpshooters' Club, before they elected him to the Diet with Brost and Kruppke. They got away, slipped across the border near Goldkrug. Say, would you look at Dau. The guy's a walking bank. One time in Müggenwinkel he said. . ."

Gustav Dau came ambling over, arm in arm with Lothar Budzinski. Wherever he went, he stood a couple of rounds and then another round. Tulla and I sat at a table with the Pokriefkes. My father had left immediately after the speeches. There weren't many children left. Tulla looked at the toilet door: MEN. She drank nothing, said nothing, just looked. August Pokriefke was stewed. He was explaining the railroad connections in Koshnavia to a Herr Mikoteit. Tulla was trying to nail the toilet door closed by just looking: but it swung, moved by full and emptied bladders. The express line Berlin, Schneidemühl, Dirschau passed through Koshnavia. But the express didn't stop. Tulla looked at the door of the ladies' toilet: she saw Walter Matern, disappearing into the men's toilet. Mikoteit worked for the Polish railroad, but that didn't prevent August Pokriefke from listing every single local station on the Konitz-Laskowitz run. Every five sips of beer Erna Pokriefke said: "Now go on home to beddy-bye, children, it's time." But Tulla kept her grip on the fluttering toilet door: every exit and entrance was snapshot by her slit-eyes. Now August Pokriefke was rattling off the stations on the third Koshnavian run -- Nakel-Konitz: Gersdorf, Obkass, Schlangenthin. . . Chances were being sold for the Winter Aid raffle. First prize: a dessert set for twelve, including wine glasses; all crystal, pure crystal! Tulla was allowed to draw three lots, because one time, last year, she had drawn an eleven-pound goose. From the all but full SA cap she drew, without removing her eyes from the toilet door: first, a bar of Anglas chocolate; and then, with small scratched hand, she draws the second lot: blank! But none the less the first prize, the crystal: the door to the men's toilet is slammed and wrenched open. Where pants are being unbuttoned or dropped, things are starting up. Quick on the draw, out come the knives. Stabbing each other and slicing each other's jackets, because Tulla is drawing the lot: China against Japan. Shoilem boil 'em.

And kick and clout and turn over and lay out flat and bellow: "Shut up your trap! You crazy loon! You lousy bastard! You stinking ape! Not so rough!" And all the drunks at the bar: Willy Eggers, Paule Hoppe, Alfons Bublitz, the younger Dulleck, and Otto Warnke pull out their clasp knives: "Shoilem boil 'em!" A brawny-armed chorus, stewed to the gills, take their pick of fruit plates, behead glasses, and oil the toilet door. Because Tulla has pulled a blank, they brawl around and tickle each other with knives hooks chivies. Chair and bone, here and now, nobody's yellow, gimme room, plunk on the head, artifacts crack, Willy stands, self-point totters, beer and blood, exaltation. For all ten are champs and have no need to catch their breath. Each looking for each. Who's crawling down there? Whose ink is running out? What are them plug-uglies hollering about? How are toilet doors lifted off their hinges? Who drew the lot? Blank. Uppercut. Tackle. Inside-out. Squirting brains. Telephone: one one eight. Police, shoilem boil 'em! Sneaky and under handed. Never never.
Existent.
Green Room. Chandelier crashes. Being and Time. Fuse blows. No lights. Darkness: for in the Black Room the black beauty doctors of the Black Maria look for pitch-black round heads, until brains, black under black chandelier, and the black women scream: "Light! Where's the light? Oh, my, the police! Shoilem boil 'em."

Only when Tulla in the darkness drew a third lot from the SA cap that had stayed with us between her knees, only when my cousin had drawn and unrolled the third lot -- it won her a pail of dill pickles from the Kühne Mustard Co. -- did the lights go on again. The four stand-by policemen under Sergeant Burau and the sixteen reinforcements under Police Lieutenant Sausin moved in: from the bar and the swinging door to the cloakroom: green, loved, and feared. All twenty-two cops had police whistles between their lips and warbled down on the crowd. They worked with the new night sticks, introduced from Italy by Police President Froboess, there termed
manganelli,
here beauty doctors. The new billies had the advantage over the old ones that they left no open wounds, but operated dryly, almost silently. After one blow with the new police truncheon, each victim turned two and a half times in patent consternation on his own axis and then, but still in corkscrew fashion, collapsed to the floor. Near the toilet door August Pokriefke also submitted to the authority of the article imported from Mussolini's Italy. Without open wounds he was laid up for a week. Not counting him, the final count was three seriously injured and seventeen slightly injured, including four cops. SA men Willy Eggers and Franzchen Wollschläger, Gustav Dau, the mason, and Lothar Budzinski, the coal dealer, were taken to police headquarters but released the following morning. Herr Koschinski, manager of the Kleinhammerpark, reported one thousand two hundred gulden worth of damages to the insurance company: glass, chairs, the chandelier, the demolished toilet door, the mirror in the toilet, the potted plants around the speaker's stand, the first prize: crystal crystal! -- and so on. A police investigation revealed that there had been a short circuit, that someone -- I know who! -- had unscrewed the fuses.

But nobody suspected that by drawing the blank lot my cousin Tulla had given the signal, had unleashed the beer-hall battle.

Dear Tulla,

all that was within your power. You had the eye and the finger. But what is important for this story is not your beer-hall battle -- although you had a part in it, it was a common place affair, indistinguishable from other beer-hall battles -- the significant item is that Eddi Amsel, owner of a villa on Steffensweg, was able to take delivery of a beer-sour bundle of battle-scarred and blood-encrusted uniforms: Walter Matern was the slightly injured donor.

This time the loot wasn't limited to SA uniforms. It included the togs of plain Party members. But everything was brown: not the brown of summer oxfords; not hazelnut-brown or witch-brown; no brown Africa; no grated tree bark, no furniture, brown with age; no medium-brown or sand-brown; neither young soft coal nor old peat, dug with a peat spade; no breakfast chocolate, no morning coffee enriched with cream; tobacco, so many varieties, but none so brown as; neither the roebuck brown that so deceives the eye nor the suntan-lotion brown of a two weeks' vacation; no autumn spat on the palette when this brown: shit brown, at best clay brown, sodden, pasty, Party brown, SA brown, the brown of all Brown Books, Brown Houses, Braunau brown, Eva Braun, uniform brown, a far cry from khaki brown, the brown shat on white plates by a thousand pimply asses, brown derived from split peas and sausages; no, no, ye gentle witch-brown, hazelnut-brown brunettes, you were not the godmothers when this brown was boiled, born, and dyed, when this dungheap brown -- I'm still being polite about it -- lay before Eddi Amsel.

Amsel sorted out the brown, took the big scissors from Solingen and made them twitter experimentally. Amsel began to cut into the indescribable brown. A new implement stood voluted beside the genuine Renaissance writing desk supporting Weininger's always open standard work: the tailor's horse, the tailor's organ, the tailor's confessional: a Singer sewing machine. How the kitten purred when from coarse burlap, onion sacks, and other permeable material Eddi Amsel sewed shirtlike undergarments. And the puffed-up Amsel behind the slender little machine: were they not one? Might not the two of them, born, baptized, vaccinated, educated as they were, have borne witness to the same identical development? And with big stitches and little stitches, he sewed scraps of the horrible brown on the burlap shirts like beauty spots. But he also fragmented the armband-red and the sunstroke-maddened bellyache of the swastika. He stuffed with kapok and sawdust. In illustrated magazines and yearbooks he looked for and found faces, a coarse-grained photograph of Gerhard Hauptmann or a glossy black-and-white print of a popular actor of those years: Birgel or Tannings. He fastened Schmeling and Pacelli, the bruiser and the ascetic, under the visors of the brown caps. He turned the League of Nations High Commissioner into an SA man Brand. Undaunted, he snipped at reproductions of old engravings and played God with Solingen scissors until Schiller's bold profile or the dandyface of the young Goethe gave its features to one or another of the movement's martyrs, Herbert Norkus or Horst Wessel. Amsel dismembered, speculated, cross-bred, and gave the centuries a chance to kiss each other under SA caps.

From page 4 of his copy he cut the head of the full-length photograph of the slender, boyish Otto Weininger, author of the standard work, who had committed suicide while still a young man, had the section enlarged to life size at Sonnker's, and then proceeded to work at length but always with unsatisfactory results, on "SA man Weininger."

Eddi Amsel's self-portrait was more successful. In addition to the Renaissance desk and the Singer sewing machine, his equipment included a tall, narrow mirror, reaching up to the ceiling paneling, of the kind to be found in tailor shops and ballet schools. Before this responsive glass he sat in a self-tailored Party uniform -- among the SA uniforms he had found none capable of containing him -- and hung his full-figure likeness on a naked skeleton which, in the middle, as a sort of solar plexus, lodged a winding mechanism. In the end the authentic Amsel sat Buddhalike tailor fashion, appraising the constructed and still more authentic Party Comrade Amsel. He stood blown up to capacity in burlap and Party brown. The shoulder strap circumscribed him like a tropic. Insignia of rank on his collar made him into a modest section chief. A pig's bladder, daringly simplified and daubed only with a few suggestive black strokes, supported, an excellent likeness, the section chief's cap. And then in the Party comrade's solar plexus the winding mechanism began to operate: the breeches came to attention. Starting at the belt buckle, the right rubber glove, full to bursting, moved jerkily, by remote control, to chest, then to shoulder level, presented first the straight-arm, then the bent-arm Party salute, returned sluggishly, just barely in time, for the mechanism was running down, to the belt buckle, gave a senile tremor or two and fell asleep. Eddi Amsel was in love with his new creation. At the narrow studio mirror he imitated the salute of his life-size facsimile: the Amsel quartet. Walter Matern, to whom Amsel displayed himself and the figure on the floor as well as the mirror images of himself and the figure, laughed, at first overloudly and then with embarrassment. Then he just stared in silence at Amsel, at the scarecrow, and at the mirror by turns. He stood in civilian clothes among four figures in uniform. The sight provoked the inborn grinding of his teeth. And grinding he gave it to be understood that he could take a joke but that too much was enough; Amsel should stop harping on one and the same theme; after all there were plenty of people in the SA and the Party as well who were seriously striving for an ideal, good guys and not just bastards.

Amsel replied that precisely this had been his artistic purpose, that he hadn't intended criticism of any kind, but merely wished, through his art, to create a hodgepodge of good guys and bastards, after the manner of life itself.

Thereupon he tinkered with a prefabricated frame until he had turned out a bullish-looking good guy: SA man Walter Matern. Tulla and I, who were peering from the night-black garden into the electrically lit up and oak-paneled studio, saw with round eyes how Walter Matern's uniformed likeness -- blood spots still bore witness to the brawl at the Kleinhammerpark -- bared the teeth of his photographed face with the help of a built-in mechanism and ground its mechanically moved teeth: yes, we only saw it -- but anyone who saw Walter Matern's teeth heard them too.

Tulla and I saw

how Walter Matern, who with his SA sturm had to do guard duty at a monster mass meeting on the snow-covered Maiwiese, caught sight of the uniformed Eddi Amsel in the crowd. Lobsack spoke. Greiser and Forster spoke. Snow was falling in big flakes, and the crowd shouted
Heil
so long that snowflakes slipped into the open mouths of the
Heil-
shouters. Party Comrade Eddi Amsel also shouted
Heil
and snapped after particularly large snowflakes, until SA man Walter Matern fished him out of the crowd and pushed him off the slushy field into Hindenburgallee. There he gave him hell and we thought in another minute he was going to slug him.