Dog Years (58 page)

Matern prefers to lie on the left. As host Sawatzki contents himself with the right. To Inge belongs the middle. Oh, ancient friendship, grown cold after two and thirty beer house brawls, now rewarmed in lurching marriage fortress. Matern, who came with black dog to judge, explores Inge-pussy with affectionate finger: there be meets his friend's goodnatured husbandfinger; and both, friendly affectionate goodnatured, as long ago on the Bürgerwiese, at the Ohra Riding Academy or the Kleinhammerpark bar, join forces, find a cozy nook, and take turns. She's having a fine time: so much choice and variety; and emulation spurs the friends on -- for potato schnapps makes a body sleepy. A race is run in friendly competition: neck and neck. O night of open doors, when Ingemouse lies on her side, so the friend in front, with the husband politely following up from the rear: so spacious, though slight and Rhenish-maidenly, Ingepussy offers shelter and comfort. If only there weren't this restlessness. O friendship, so complex! Each the other's phenotype. Intentions, leitmotives, murder motives, the difference in education, the yearning for intricate harmony: so many arms and legs! Who's kissing whom around here? Did you -- did I? Who in such a case can stand on possession? Who pinches himself to make his counterpart yell? Who has come here to judge with names incised in his heart, spleen, and kidneys? Let us be fair! Each wants to crawl across to the sunny side. Each wants a chance at the buttered side. Three in a bed always need a referee: Ah, life is so rich: nine and sixty positions has heaven designed, has hell granted us: the knot, the loop, the parallelogram, the seesaw, the anvil, the preposterous rondo, the scales, the hop-skip-jump, the hermitage; and names kindled by Ingepussy: Ingeknee -- Suckinge -- Ingescream -- Snapinge Ingefish Yesinge Spreadumslegsinge, Blowinge Biteinge Ingetired Ingeclosed Ingeintermission -- Wakeupinge Openupinge Visitorsinge Bringingcodliveringe Twofriendsinge Yourlegmyarminge Don'tfallasleepinge Turnaroundinge Itwassolovelyinge It'slateinge She'sworkedhardtodayinge: Sugarbeetsinge -- Syrupinge -- Dog-tiredinge -- Goodnightinge -- Godinhisheaven'swatchinginge!

Now they are lying in the black, formerly square room, breathing unevenly. No one has lost. All have won: Three victors in one bed. Inge holds her pillow in her arms. The men sleep with open mouths. It sounds roughly as if they were sawing tree trunks. They are felling the whole Jäschkental Forest, round about the Gutenberg monument: beech after beech. Already the Erbsberg is bare. Soon Steffensweg can be seen: villa after villa. And in one of these Steffensweg villas lives Eddi Amsel in oak-paneled rooms, building life-sized scarecrows: one represents a sleeping SA man; the second represents a sleeping SA Sturmführer; the third signifies a girl, splattered from top to toe with sugarbeet syrup which attracts ants. While the plain SA man grinds his teeth in his sleep, the SA Sturmführer snores normally. Only the syrup girl emits no sound, but thrashes her arms and legs, because everywhere ants. While outside the beautiful smooth beeches of Jäschkental Forest continue to be felled one by one -- to make matters worse, it would have been a good beechnut year -- Eddi Amsel in his villa on Steffensweg builds the fourth life-size scarecrow: a black mobile twelve-legged dog. To enable the dog to bark, Eddi Amsel builds in a barking mechanism. And then he barks and wakes up the snorer, the grinder, the ant-maddened syrupfigure.

It's Pluto in the kitchen. He demands to be heard. The three of them roll out of bed without saying good morning. "Never sleep three in a bed -- or you'll wake up three in a bed."

For breakfast there's coffee with milk and bread spread with syrup. Each chews by himself. All syrup is too sweet. Every cloud has shed rain. Every room is too square. Every forehead is against. Every child has two fathers. Every head is somewhere else. Every witch burns better. And that for three weeks, breakfast for breakfast: Each chewing by himself. The triangle play is still on the program. Secret and semi-overt designs to turn the farce into a one-man play: Jochen Sawatzki soliloquizes as he cooks sugarbeets. Into a whispering twosome: Walterkins and Ingemouse sell a dog, grow rich and happy; but Matern doesn't want to sell and turn into a whispering twosome, he'd rather be alone with the dog. Sick of rubbing shoulders.

Meanwhile, outside the square bedroom-livingroom, that is to say, between Fliesteden and Büsdorf, between Ingendorf and Glessen, and similarly between Rommerskirchen, Pulheim, and Quadrath-Ichendorf, a hard postwar winter has set in. Snow is falling for reasons of de-Nazification: everybody is putting objects and facts out into the severe wintry countryside to be snowed under.

Matern and Sawatzki have made a little birdhouse for the innocent birds, who aren't to blame. They are planning to set it up in the garden so they can watch it from the kitchen window. Sawatzki reminisces: "I've never seen so much snow piled up except once. That was in '37-'38, the time we paid Fatso a visit on Steffensweg. It was snowing like today, it just went on snowing and snowing."

Later on, he's down in the laundry room, corking two-quart bottles. Meanwhile the stay-at-home couple have counted all the outdoor sparrows. By that time their love needs an airing. They and the dog make tracks in the famous triangle: Fliesteden-Büsdorf-Stommeln, but see none of those villages, because of the snow drifting and steaming round about. Along the Büsdorf-Stommeln highway, only the telegraph poles coming from Bergheim-Erft and running toward Worringen on the Rhine, remind Walterkins and Ingemouse that this whiter is numbered, that the snow is earthly, and that under the snow sugarbeets once grew, on whose coveted substance they are still living; all four of them, for, says he, the dog needs proper care; whereas she says we ought to sell it, it's a revolting mutt, she doesn't love anybody but him him him: "If it weren't so cold, I'd do it with you right here in the open, day and night, under the open sky, in the bosom of nature -- but the dog has to go, see? He gets on my nerves."

Pluto is still black. The snow becomes him. Ingemouse wants to cry, but it's too cold. Matern is patient and speaks, between one-sidedly snow-laden telegraph poles, about parting, which must always be anticipated. He also pours forth his favorite poet. Self-immortelle, says the leavetaker, and: Last rose's dying. However, he doesn't lose himself in the causal-genetic, but transfers in the nick of time to the ontic. Ingemouse loves it when, snapping snowflakes, he roars, grinds, hisses, and squeezes out strange words: "I exist self-grounded! World never is, but worldeth. Freedom is freedom to the I. I essent. The projecting I as projecting midst. I, localized and encompassed. I, world-project! I, source of grounding! I, possibility -- soil -- identification! I, GROUND, GROUNDING IN THE GROUNDLESS!"

Ingemouse learns the meaning of these obscure words shortly before Christmas. Though she has got together any number of attractive and useful little presents, he leaves. He shoves off -- "Take me with you!" -- He wants to celebrate Christmas, I I I, alone with the dog -- "Take me with you!" -- Consequently, lamentations in the snow shortly before Stommeln: "Me with you!" But thinly as she threads her little voice into his hairy masculine ear: Every train pulls in. Every train pulls out. Ingemouse stays behind.

He who had come to judge, with a black dog and with names incised in his heart, spleen, and kidneys, leaves the sugarbeet environment and takes the train, after crossing off the names of Jochen Sawatzki and wife, to Cologne on the Rhine. In the holy Central Station, in view of the avenging double finger, master and dog stand once again, centrally on six feet.

THIRD TO EIGHTY-FOURTH MATERNIAD

This was Matern's idea: We, Pluto and I, will celebrate Christmas all alone with sausage and beer in the big silent drafty holy Catholic waiting room in Cologne. We will think, alone, in the midst of humanity, about Ingemouse and Ingepussy, about ourselves and the Glad Tidings. But things turn out differently, they always do: There in Cologne's tiled men's toilet a message has been scratched on the wall in the sixth enameled bay from the right. Amid the usual meaningless outcries and proverbs Matern reads, after buttoning up, the significant entry: Captain Erich Hufnagel, Altena, Lenneweg 4.

And so they celebrate Christmas Eve not in Cologne's Central Station, but with a family in the Sauerland. A hilly wooded Christmas countryside, where for the rest of the year it mostly rains. A wretched climate that induces specifically regional ailments: isolated forest Westphalians succumb to melancholy and work and drink too-much too-quickly too-cheap.

To avoid too much sitting, master and dog leave the train in Hohenlimburg and start uphill early in the Holy Night. An arduous climb, for here too snow has fallen abundantly and gratis. Across Hohbräcker Rücken and on toward Wibblingswerde, Matern recites himself and Pluto through a forest made for robbers: by turns Franz and Karl Moor invoke fate, Amalie, and the gods: "Another complainant against God! -- Continue." Step by step. Snow grinds, stars grind, Franz Moor grinds, virgin branches grind, nature grinds: "Do I hear you hissing, adders of the abyss?" -- but from the sparkling valley of the Lenne Altena's unsmelted bells ring in the second postwar Christmas.

Lenneweg leads from homeofmyown to homeofmyown. Every homeofmyown has already lighted its Christmas tree candles. All Christmas angels lisp. All doors can be opened: Captain Hufnagel, wearing bedroom slippers, opens in person.

This time it doesn't smell of sugarbeets but instantly and overpoweringly of gingerbread. The slippers are new. The Hufnagels have already distributed their Christmas gifts. Master and dog are requested to wipe their six feet on the door mat. Without effort it becomes manifest that Frau Dorothea Hufnagel has been made happy with an immersion heater. The thirteen-year-old Hans-Ulrich in turn is immersed in a book on submarine warfare, and Elke, the gorgeous daughter, is trying out, on Christmas wrapping paper which in her mother's opinion really ought to be smoothed out and put away for next Christmas, a genuine Pelikan fountain pen. In capitals she writes: ELKE ELKE ELKE.

Without moving his shoulders, Matern looks round and round. Familiar environment. So here we are. Don't bother. Won't be staying long. No time for visitors, especially the visitor who has come on Christmas Eve to judge: "Well, Captain Hufnagel? Memory need refreshing? You look be wildered. Glad to help you: 22nd AA Regiment, Kaiserhafen battery. Magnificent country: lumber piles, water rats, Air Force auxiliaries, volunteers, crow shooting, pile of bones across the way, stank whichever way the wind was blowing, I initiated operation raspberry drop, I was your first sergeant: Matern, Tech Sergeant Matern reporting. The fact is that once, in the area of your excellent battery, I shouted some thing about Reich, nation, Führer, mound of bones. Unfortunately my poem didn't appeal to you. But that didn't prevent you from writing it down with a fountain pen. It was a Pelikan too, just like the young lady's. And then you sent in a report: court-martial, demotion, punitive battalion, mine removal, suicide team. All that because you with your Pelikan fountain pen. . ."

However, it's not the indicted wartime fountain pen, but a blameless postwar fountain pen that Matern grabs out of warm Elkefingers and crushes, smearing his fingers with ink. Phooey!

Captain Hufnagel grasps the situation in a flash. Frau Hufnagel doesn't grasp anything at all, but does the right thing: presuming the intruder in her fragile Christmas room to be a slave laborer from the East, now masterless, she holds out, with bravely trembling hands, the brand-new immersion heater, expecting the brute to blow off steam by demolishing this household utensil. But Matern, misjudged on account of his outspread inky fingers, declines to be fed the first thing that comes to mind. In a pinch he might find the Christmas tree to his taste, or maybe the chairs, or the whole kit and boodle: How much cozy comfort can you stand?

Fortunately Captain Hufnagel, who has a position in the civilian administration of the Canadian occupation authorities and is able to treat himself and his family to a genuine peacetime Christmas -- he's even managed to scare up some nut butter! -- takes a different and more civilized view: "On the one hand -- and on the other hand. After all, there are two sides to every question. But meanwhile, Matern, won't you be seated. Very well, stand if you prefer. Well then, on the one hand, of course, you're perfectly; but on the other hand -- whatever injustice you've -- it was I who saved you from. Perhaps you are unaware that in your case the death penalty, and if my testimony hadn't led the court-martial to remove your case from the jurisdiction of the special court. . . Very well, you won't believe me, you've been through too much. I don't expect you to. However -- and I'm saying this tonight, on Christmas Eve, in full consciousness -- if not for me you wouldn't be standing here playing the raving Beckmann. Excellent play, incidentally. Took the whole family to see it in Hagen, pathetic little theater. Goes straight to the heart. Weren't you a professional actor? What a part that would be for you. That Borchert hits the nail on the head. Haven't we all of us been through it, myself too? Didn't we all become strangers to ourselves and our loved ones while we were out there at the front? I came back four months ago. French prison camp. Take it from me! Bad Kreuznach, if that rings a bell. But even that's better than. That's what we had coming to us if we hadn't cleared out of the Vistula sector before. Anyway, there I stood empty-handed with nothingness literally staring me in the face. My business gone, my little house occupied by Canadians, wife and children evacuated to Espei in the mountains, no coal, nothing but trouble with the authorities, in short, a Beckmann situation straight out of
Outside the Door!
And so, my dear Matern -- won't you please be seated -- I am doubly, triply, aware how you. After all I knew you in the 22nd AA Regiment as a serious young man, who liked to get to the bottom of things. I trust and hope you haven't changed. And so let us be Christians and treat this holy night as it deserves. My dear Herr Matern, from the bottom of my heart and in the name of my cherished family, I wish you a merry and a blessed Christmas."