Dog Years (41 page)

The Frenchman with a gracious gesture:
"Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle."

Jenny curtsied again:
"Merci Monsieur,"
and let her hand disappear in the hand of the French ice hauler. The two of them, hand in hand, were swallowed up by the icehouse. The other ice haulers laughed and cracked jokes.

We didn't laugh but began to count slowly: twenty-four, twenty-five. . . If she isn't out by two hundred, we'll shout for help.

They came out at a hundred and ninety-two, still hand in hand. In the left she held a chunk of ice, curtsied once again to her ice hauler, and then withdrew into the sun with us. We were shivering. Jenny licked the ice with a pale tongue and offered Tulla the ice to lick. Tulla didn't feel like it. I licked: that's how cold iron tastes.

Dear Cousin Tulla,

after the incident with your leeches and Jenny's fainting, when we were on the outs over that, and because you kept wanting to have a child by me, when you had just about stopped coming to Aktien Pond with us and we, Jenny and I, didn't feel like crawling into the lumber shed with you, when the summer was over and school had begun, Jenny and I took to sitting either in the dill outside the garden fences of Indian Village or beside the swan house, and I helped Jenny by fastening my eyes to the ice house, for Jenny had eyes only for the black, windowless cube. That is why the icehouse is clearer in my memory than the buildings of the Aktien Brewery behind the chestnut trees. Possibly the compound rose like a turreted castle behind the gloomy brick wall. Definitely, the high church windows of the machine house were framed in smooth Dutch brick. The chimney was squat but nevertheless, regardless of what direction you looked from, dominated the whole of Langfuhr. I could swear that the Aktien chimney wore a complicated helmet, a knight's helmet. Regulated by the wind, it gave off churning black smoke and had to be cleaned twice a year. New and dressed in bright brick-red, the administration building, when I screw up my eyes, looks at me over the glass-spiked wall. Regularly, I assume, trucks drawn by two horses left the yard of the brewery. Stout short-tailed Belgians. Behind leather aprons, under leather caps, with rigid purple faces: the driver and his helper. The whip in the holder. Order book and money pouch under the apron. Wads of tobacco for the day's work. Harness studded with metal buttons. The jolting and clanking of beer cases as front and hind wheels stumble over the iron threshold of the exit. Iron letters on the arch over the portal: D.A.B. Wet sounds: bottle-washing plant. At half past twelve the whistle blows. At one the whistle repeats itself. The xylophone notes of the bottle washers: the score has been lost, but the smell is still with me.

When the east wind turned the helmet on the brewery chimney and rolled black smoke over the chestnut trees, across Aktien Pond, the icehouse, and Indian Village in the direction of the airfield, a sour smell came down: surface-fermented yeast out of copper kettles: Bock Pils Malt Barley March-Beer Urquell. Not to mention the waste. Despite persistent claims that it drained somewhere else, the discharge from Aktien Brewery mixed with the pond, turned it sour and fetid. Accordingly, when we drank Tulla's leech soup, we drank a bitter beer soup. Anyone who trampled a toad was
ipso facto
opening a bottle of bock beer. When one of the tobacco ruminants threw me a hand-size roach and I cleaned the roach beside the swan house, the liver, the milt, and the rest were overdone malt candy. And when I browned it over a crackling little fire, it rose for Jenny like yeast dough, bubbled, and tasted -- I had stuffed it full of fresh dill -- like last year's pickling fluid. Jenny ate little of the fish.

But when the wind came from the airfield and blew the vapors of the pond and the smoke from the brewery chimney against Kleinhammerpark and the Langfuhr railroad station, Jenny stood up, withdrew her gaze from the ice-filled tar-paper cube, and described numbered steps in the dill. Light to begin with, she weighed only half as much when she balleyed. With a little leap and a graceful curtsy she concluded her act, and I had to applaud as in the theater. Occasionally I gave her a nosegay of dill, having drawn the stems through a rubber beer-bottle washer. These never-fading, ever-red flowers floated by the hundreds on Aktien Pond, formed islands, and were collected: Between the Polish campaign and the taking of the island of Crete, I accumulated over two thousand beer-bottle washers, and felt rich as I counted them. Once I made Jenny a chain out of rubber washers. She wore it like a real necklace, and I was embarrassed for her: "You don't have to wear those things on the street, only by the pond or at home."

But to Jenny the necklace was not without value: "I'm fond of it, because you made it. It seems so personal, you know."

The necklace wasn't bad-looking. Actually I had strung it for Tulla. But Tulla would have thrown it away. When Jenny danced in the dill, the necklace actually looked very nice. After the dance she always said: "But now I'm tired," and looked past the icehouse: "I still have homework to do. And tomorrow we rehearse and the day after tomorrow too."

With the icehouse behind me I made a try: "Have you heard any more from the ballet master in Berlin?"

Jenny supplied information: "Not long ago Herr Haseloff wrote us a postcard from Paris. He says I have to exercise my instep."

I burrowed: "What does this Haseloff look like?"

Jenny's indulgent reproach: "But you've asked me that a dozen times. He's very slim and elegant. He's always smoking long cigarettes. He never laughs or at most with his eyes."

I systematically repeated myself: "But when he does laugh with his mouth for a change and when he speaks?"

Jenny came out with it: "It looks funny but also a little spooky, because when he talks, he has a mouth full of gold teeth."

I: "Real gold?"

Jenny: "I don't know."

I: "Ask him sometime."

Jenny: "I wouldn't like to do that. Maybe they're not real gold."

I: "After all your necklace is only made out of beer-bottle washers."

Jenny: "All right, then I'll write and ask him."

I: 'Tonight?"

Jenny: "Tonight I'll be too tired."

I: "Then tomorrow."

Jenny: "But how should I put it?"

I dictated: "Just write: Herr Haseloff, there's something I've been wanting to ask you. Are your teeth real gold? Did you have different teeth before? And if so, what became of them?"

Jenny wrote the letter and Herr Haseloff answered by return mail that the gold was genuine, that he had formerly had white teeth, thirty-two of them; that he had thrown them behind him into the bushes and had bought himself new ones, gold ones; that they had been more expensive than thirty-two pair of ballet slippers.

I said to Jenny: "Now count how many bottle washers there are in your necklace."

Jenny counted and didn't understand: "What a coincidence, exactly thirty-two."

Dear Tulla,

it was inevitable that you should come around again with your scratched-up legs.

At the end of September -- the dill went to seed and turned yellow, and the choppy waves of Aktien Pond made a soapy wreath of foam along the shore -- at the end of September came Tulla.

Indian Village spat her out, and seven or eight boys. One was smoking a pipe. He stood behind Tulla, using her for a windbreak, and handed her the boiler. Speechlessly she smoked. Slowly, by a calculated detour, they approached, stood looking in the air, looked past us, turned back and were gone: behind the fences and whitewashed cottages of Indian Village.

And once toward evening -- we had the sun behind us, the helmet of the brewery chimney sat on the bleeding head of a bleeding knight -- they appeared to one side of the icehouse and came goose-stepping through the nettles along the front tar-paper wall. In the dill they spread out, Tulla handed the pipe to the left and said to the gnats: "They've forgotten to close up. Wouldn't you like to go in, Jenny, and see what it's like?"

Jenny was so friendly and always polite: "Oh no, it's late and I'm rather tired. We have English tomorrow, you know, and I have to be rested for my dancing lesson."

Tulla had the pipe again: "O.K., if you don't want to. Then we'll go tell the caretaker to lock up."

But Jenny was already on her feet and I had to stand up: "You can't go, Jenny, it's out of the question. Anyway, you're tired, you just said so." Jenny wasn't tired any more and wanted to look in just for a second: "It's very interesting in there, please, Harry."

I stuck by her side and got into the nettles. Tulla in the lead, the others behind us. Tulla's thumb pointed at the tar-paper door: it was open just a crack and scarcely breathed. Then I had to say: "But I won't let you go alone." And Jenny, slender in the door jamb, said ever so politely: "That's awfully nice of you, Harry."

Who else but Tulla

pushed me through the doorway behind Jenny. And I had forgotten to disarm you and the boys outside with a crossyourheartandhopetodie. As the breath of the icehouse took us in tow -- Jenny's little finger hooked itself into my little finger -- as icy lungs drew us in, I knew: now Tulla, alone or with that young thug, is going to the caretaker and getting the key, or she's getting the caretaker with the key: and the gang are palavering in nine voices so the caretaker won't hear us while he's locking up.

For that reason or because Jenny had me by the finger, I didn't succeed in calling for help. She led me surefootedly through the black crackling windpipe. From all sides, from the top and bottom too, breath made us light until there was no ground under our feet. We passed over trestles and stairways that were marked with red position lights. And Jenny said in a perfectly normal voice: "Watch out, please, Harry: we'll be going downstairs now, twelve steps."

But hard as I tried to find ground from step to step, I sank, breathed in by a suction coming from below. And when Jenny said: "Now we're in the first basement, we've got to keep to the left, that's where the entrance to the second basement is supposed to be," I would gladly, though busy with a skin itch, have stayed in the first basement. That was the nettles from before; but what was beating down on my skin was the breath coming from all sides. And every direction creaked, no, crackled, no, crunched: piled blocks, complete sets of teeth rubbed against each other till the enamel splintered, and the breath of iron was yeasty stale stomach-sour furry clammy. The barest touch of tar paper. Yeast rose. Vinegar evaporated. Mushrooms sprouted. "Careful, a step," said Jenny. In whose malt-bitter maw? The second basement of what hell had left pickles uncovered to spoil? What devil had stoked the furnace to subzero?

I wanted to scream and whispered: "They'll lock us in if we don't. . ."

But Jenny was still her methodical self: "They always lock up at seven."

"Where are we?"

"Now we're in the second basement. Some of these blocks are many years old."

My hand wanted to know exactly: "How many years?" and reached out to the left, looked for resistance, found it, and stuck fast on prehistoric giant's teeth: "I'm stuck, Jenny! I'm stuck!"

Then Jenny rests her hand on my sticking hand: instantly I am able to remove my fingers from the giant tooth, but I keep hold of Jenny's arm, arm lovely from dancing, arm that can lie and sleep on air, the other one too. And both rubbed hot by breath in blocks. In the armpits: August. Jenny titters: "You mustn't tickle me, Harry."

But I just want "to hold tight, Jenny."

She lets me and is again "a little tired, Harry."

I don't think "there's a bench here, Jenny."

She is not of little faith: "Why shouldn't there be a bench here, Harry?" And because she says so, there is one, an iron bench. But because Jenny sits down, the iron bench turns, the longer she sits on it, into a cozy well-worn wooden bench. Now Jenny, precociously motherly, says to me in the second basement of the icehouse: "You mustn't shiver any more, Harry. You know, once I was hidden inside a snow man. And I learned a great deal in there. So if you can't stop shivering, you must hold me tight. And then if you're still cold, because you weren't ever in a snow man, you must kiss me, that helps, you know. I could give you my dress too, I don't need it, I'm positive. You mustn't be embarrassed. We're all alone. And I'm perfectly at home here. You can throw it around your neck like a muffler. Later on I'll sleep a little, because I have to go to Madame Lara's tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow I have to practice again. Besides, I really am a little tired, you know."

And so we sat through the night on the iron wooden bench. I held Jenny tight. Her dry lips were tasteless. I threw her cotton dress -- if I only knew whether it had dots, stripes, or checks -- I threw her short-sleeve summer dress over my shoulders and around my neck. Dressless but in her slip, she lay in my arms, which didn't tire, because Jenny was light even when she slept. I didn't sleep, for fear she'd slip away from me. For I'd never been inside a snow man, and without her dry lips, without her cotton dress, without her weightless weight in my arms, without Jenny, I'd have been lost. Surrounded by crackling, sighing, and crunching, in the breath of the ice blocks, breathed on breathed in: the ice would have held me in its clutches to this day.

But as it was, we lived to see the next day. The morning rumbled in the basement above us. That was the icemen in the leather aprons. Jenny in her dress wanted to know: "Did you sleep a little too?"