Dog Years (47 page)

his name was Harry Liebenau and all he was good for was looking on and saying what he'd heard other people say. There he lay flat with half-closed eyes in the sand amid wind-flattened beach grass and made himself still flatter when three figures appeared on the crest of the dune. The four-square staff sergeant, with the sun behind him, held a heavy protective arm around Tulla's shoulder. Tulla was carrying her high-heeled shoes in her right hand and with the left clutched the hind paws of a bleeding dune rabbit. To the right of Tulla -- but without touching her -- Störtebeker held carbine, barrel down. The three figures didn't notice Harry. For an eternity they stood motionlessly silhouetted, because the sun was still behind them, on the crest of the dune. Tulla reached up to the tech sergeant's chest. She carried his arm like a crossbeam. Störtebeker to one side and yet belonging, rigid and on the lookout for Being. A handsome and precise picture that grieved the flat-lying Harry, for he had less rapport than the bleeding rabbit with the three figures against the drooping sun.

There was once a picture,

painful at sunset; Air Force auxiliary Harry Liebenau was never to see it again for suddenly one day he had to pack. Inscrutable decree transferred him, Störtebeker, thirty other Air Force auxiliaries, and the tech sergeant to another battery. No more dunes gently-wavy. No Baltic Sea, smoothly virginal. Beach flexibly musical. No longer did twelve eighty-eights jut somberly into the balmy bugle-call sky. Never again the reminders of home in the background: Brösen's wooden church, Brösen's black and white fishermen's cows, Brösen's fishnets hung on poles to be dried or photographed. Never again did the sun set for them behind rabbits sitting on their haunches and worshiping the departing sun with erect ears.

In the Kaiserhafen battery there were no such pious animals, only rats; and rats worship fixed stars.

The way to the battery led from Troyl, a harbor quarter between the Lower City and the Holm, for three quarters of an hour over sand roads through sparse woods in the direction of Weichselmünde. Left behind: the widely scattered repair shops of the German Railways, the lumber sheds behind the Wojahn shipyard; and here, projected into the area between the Troyl streetcar stop and the Kaiserhafen battery, the water rats held uncontested sway.

But the smell that hung over the battery and didn't budge a step even in a violent west wind, didn't come from rats.

The first night after Harry moved into the battery, his gym shoes were gnawed, both of them. The regulations prohibited getting out of bed with bare feet. Everywhere they sat and grew fatter; on what? They were reviled as the grounds of the ground; but to this name they did not answer. The battery was equipped with metal ratproof lockers. Many were slain, unsystematically. It didn't help much. Then the tech sergeant, who performed the functions of top sergeant in his battery and every morning reported to his Captain Hufnagel how many corporals and sergeants, how many Air Force auxiliaries and Ukrainian volunteers had fallen in, issued an order of the day whereby the water rats were appreciably diminished; but the smell that hung over the battery did not diminish: it didn't come from the grounds of the ground.

There was once an order of the day;

it promised premiums for slain rodents. The p.f.c.s and corporals, all matured in the service, received a cigarette for three rats. The Ukrainian volunteers were illicitly given a package of machorka if they could produce eighteen. The Air Force auxiliaries received a roll of raspberry drops for five rats. Some of the corporals gave us three cigarettes for two rolls of raspberry drops. We didn't smoke machorka. In accordance with the order of the day, the battery split up into hunt groups. Harry belonged to a group that staked out its territory in the washroom, which had only one door and no window. First the washroom door was left open and leftovers of food were deposited in the washtroughs. Then both drains were plugged up. Thereupon we waited behind the windows of the school shack until it began to grow dark. Soon we saw the long shadows pouring past the shack toward the washroom door with a single monotone whistle. No flute strains lured; the suction of an open door. And yet nothing was there but cold grits and kohlrabi stalks. Strewn across the threshold, beef bones ten times boiled and two handfuls of moldy oat flakes -- contributed by the kitchen -- were expected to lure rats. They would have come even without the oats.

When the washroom promised sufficient game, the school shack spat out five men in high rubber boots, armed with clubs, whose tips were armed with hooks. The washroom swallowed up the five. The last slammed the door. Obliged to remain outside: belated rats, forgetful of Being; the smell grounded on the battery; the moon in case it should nihilate; stars in so far as they were thrown; the radio, blaring from world-related noncoms' barracks; the ontic voices of ships. For inside rose up a music
sui generis.
No longer monotone, but leaping over octaves: grit-shrill kohlrabi-soft bony tinny plucked nasal inauthentic. And, as rehearsed, suddenly illumination came-to-be: five left-handed flashlights part the darkness. For the space of two sighs, silence. Now they rise up lead-gray in the light, slide on their bellies over tin-sheathed washtroughs, smack halfpoundly on the tile flooring, crowd around the drains plugged with oakum, try to climb up the concrete pillar and get at the brown wood. Claw themselves fast, scurry away. Unwilling to leave the grits and stalks. Eager to save beef bones and not their own skins: smooth, waxed, waterproof, sound, lovely, precious, vulnerable, currycombed for thousands of years, upon which the hooks descend without regard: No, rat blood is not green but. Are stripped off with boots and nothing else. Are spitted, two with the same hook: Being-beside -- Being-with. Are caught in mid-air: music! The same old song since the days of Noah. Rat stories, true and made up. World-relation attitude irruption: grain ships gnawed bare. Hollowed-out granaries. The Nothing acknowledged. Egypt's lean years. And when Paris was besieged. And when the rat sat in the tabernacle. And when thought forsook metaphysics. And when help was most needed. And when the rats left the ship. And when the rats came back. When they attacked even infants and old people riveted to their chairs. When they negated the newborn babe away from the young mother's breast. When they attacked the cats and nothing was left of the rat-terriers but bare teeth, which sparkle to this day, lined up in the museum. And when they carried the plague back and forth and pierced the pink flesh of the pigs. When they devoured the Bible and multiplied in accordance with its instructions. When they disemboweled the clocks and confuted time. When they were sanctified in Hamelin. And when someone invented the poison that struck their fancy. When rattail knotted with rattail to make the rope that plumbed the well. When they grew wise, as long as poems, and appeared on the stage. When they channelized transcendence and crowded into the light. When they nibbled away the rainbow. When they announced the beginning of the world and made leaks in hell. When rats went to heaven and sweetened St. Cecilia's organ. When rats squeaked in the ether and were resettled on stars, ratless stars. When rats existed self-grounded. When an order of the day became known, which offered rewards for rats, slain ones: coarse tobacco, hand-rolled cigarettes, sweet-and-sour raspberry drops. Rat stories rat stories: They collect in the corners. If it doesn't hit them, it hits concrete. They pile up. Stringtails. Curly noses. Fleeing forward. Vulnerable, they attack. Club must help club. Flashlights fall soft, roll hard, are rolled; but buried crosswise, they still glare through, and when dug up they point again to something bounding from a mound that lay still, already written off. For each club counts as it goes along: seventeen, eighteen, thirty-one. But the thirty-second runs, is gone, back again, two hooks too late, a club pounces too soon, whereupon it bites its way through and through and through and topples Harry over: the soles of his rubber boots slip on terror-wet tiles. He falls back soft and screams loud; from the other clubs constrained laughter. On blood-soaked furs, on prey, on quivering layers, on gluttonous generations, on never-ending rat history, on consumed grits, on stalks, Harry screams: "I've been bitten. Been bitten. Bitten. . ." But no rat had. Only fear when he fell, when he fell not hard but soft.

Then all grew still within the washroom walls. Anyone who had an ear available heard the world-related radio blaring from the noncoms' barracks. A few clubs kept aiming dispiritedly and struck what was quivering-to-an-end. Perhaps clubs couldn't cease-to-exist from one second to the next just because there was silence. The clubs still hold a vestige of life; it had to emerge and carry on a vestigial existence. But even when on top of the silence club-peace set in, the rat story wasn't over; for Harry Liebenau filled in this existential pause. Because he had fallen soft, he was obliged to throw up at length into an empty bowl that had contained grits. He couldn't empty his stomach on the rats. They had to be counted, lined up, and tied by their tails to a wire. There were four heavily tenanted lengths of wire, which the tech sergeant, aided by the company clerk who kept the tally, was able to count at morning roll call: A hundred and fifty-eight rats, rounded out on the friendly side, yielded thirty-two rolls of raspberry drops, half of which Harry's hunt group exchanged for cigarettes.

The strung-up rats -- that same morning they had to be buried behind the latrine -- smelled damp, earthy, with an overtone of sourness, like an open potato cellar. The smell over the battery had greater density: no rat exhaled it.

There was once a battery --

it was near Kaiserhafen and for that reason was called the Kaiserhafen battery. Conjointly with the Brösen-Glettkau battery, the Heubude, Pelonken, Zigankenberg, Camp Narvik, and Altschottland batteries, it guarded the air space over Danzig and its harbor.

During Harry's term of service in the Kaiserhafen battery, there were only two air-raid alerts; but rats were hunted every day. When once a four-engine bomber was shot down over Oliva Forest, the Pelonken and Altschottland batteries shared the credit; the Kaiserhafen battery came off empty-handed, but could point to increasing success in purging the battery area of water rats.

Ah yes, this being-in-the-midst-of surpassed itself, attaining the dimension of a world-project! And Harry's hunt group was among the most successful. But all the groups, even the volunteer auxiliaries who worked behind the latrine, were outdone by Störtebeker, who joined no group.

He withdrew rats in broad daylight and always had an audience. As a rule he lay on his belly in front of the kitchen shack, right next to the drain cover. He grounded with long arm in a drain which provided Störtebeker with overarching withdrawal from the sewer that ran from Troyl to the drainage fields.

O manifold why! Why thus and not otherwise? Why water rats and not other essents? Why anything at all rather than nothing? These questions in themselves contained the first-last primordial answer to all questioning: "The essence of the rat is the transcendentally originating threefold dispersion of the rat in the world-project or in the sewage system."

You couldn't help admiring Störtebeker, although a heavy leather glove, such as welders wear, protected his right hand that lurked open in the drain. To tell the truth, we all waited to see rats, four or five of them, chew up his glove and lacerate his bare hand. But Störtebeker lay serenely with barely open eyes, sucking his raspberry drop -- he didn't smoke -- and every two minutes with suddenly rising leather glove smacked down a water rat with rat head on the corrugated edge of the drain cover. Between rat death and rat death he whispered in his own tongue, which however had been infected with obscurity by the tech sergeant's language, rat propositions and ontological rat truths, which, so we all believed, lured the prey within reach of his glove and made possible his overarching withdrawal. Imperturbably, while he harvested below and piled up above, his discourse ran its course: "The rat withdraws itself by unconcealing itself into the ratty. So the rat errates the ratty, illuminating it with errancy. For the ratty has come-to-be in the errancy where the rat errs and so fosters error. That is the essential area of all history."

Sometimes he called not-yet-withdrawn rats "latecomers." He referred to the piled-up rats as "foretimely" or as "essents." When, his work accomplished, Störtebeker surveyed his ordered prey, he spoke almost tenderly and with a mild didacticism: "The rat can endure without the ratty, but never can there be rattiness without the rat." In an hour he produced as many as twenty-five water rats and could have withdrawn more if he had wanted to. Störtebeker used the same wire as we did for stringing up water rats. This tail-knotted and enumerable demonstration, repeated every morning, he termed his being-there-relatedness. With it he earned quantities of raspberry drops. Sometimes he gave Harry's cousin a roll. Often, as though to appease the ratty, he tossed three separate drops ceremonially into the open drain outside the kitchen shack. Concepts gave rise to a controversy among schoolboys. We were never sure whether the sewer should be termed world-project or errancy.

But the smell that grounded on the battery came neither from world-project nor from errancy, as Störtebeker called his multirelational drain.

There was once a battery,

over which, from first gray to last gray, there flew busy, never-resting crows. Not gulls but crows. There were gulls over Kaiserhafen proper, over the lumber warehouses, but not over the battery. If gulls ever invaded the area, a furious cloud immediately darkened brief happening. Crows do not tolerate gulls.

But the smell that hung over the battery came neither from crows nor from gulls, which weren't there anyway. While p.f.c.s, corporals, Ukrainian volunteer auxiliaries, and Air Force auxiliaries slew rats for reward, the ranks from sergeant to Captain Hufnagel had a different distraction: shooting -- though not for promised rewards, but only to fire and hit something -- individuals crows out of the agglomeration of crows over the battery. Yet the crows remained and became no fewer.