Dog Years (84 page)

Here Brauxel, the director, puts in: "That will do, Wernicke. And I hope no one will dare to set potash, coal, and iron ore above our finished products. What we raise from below can bear inspection from all sides."

But when Walter Matern, the stranger below, asks why it stinks so here at the fill level, where the smell comes from and what it's composed of, the director and foreman have to admit that the place still smells predominantly of potash-mining days: "The smell of brine oozing from the still damp waste blends with the earthy smell of sandstone and with lingering powder smoke, which is full of saltpeter because they used blasting gelatin to open up the roof. In addition, sulphur compounds deriving from algae and diatoms, mixed with the ozone generated by the sparks of electric cars and tramways, impregnate the air throughout the galleries and stalls. Further ingredients of the smell are: the salt dust that fills the air and settles everywhere, billows of acetylene from the lamps, traces of carbon dioxide, and stale grease. When the ventilation isn't too good, you can even guess what brand of beer was consumed here and is still being consumed in the era of Brauxel's finished products, namely, Herrenhauser Pilsner, the bottled beer with the horse of Lower Saxony on the label."

And Matern, the stranger below, enlightened about the smell prevailing in all the well-ventilated galleries and in
the poorly ventilated stalls, is of the opinion that in addition to the acrid smell there is also an oppressively warm draft blowing from the pit bottom to the fill level, although any amount of fresh spring air is available on the surface.

When they begin -- and Pluto is not left behind -- to move at first horizontally through the gallery on an electric trolley, and then vertically by cage to the waste stall -- two thousand feet below the surface -- they enter into a sultry August fug, the content of which is brine on top, sulphur compounds in the middle, and at the very bottom ancient blast smoke compounded with recent trolley ozone. The sweat dries faster than it breaks out.

"This is hell itself," says Matern.

But foreman Wernicke corrects him: "This is the place where our materials are made ready for the manufacturing process. This stall, which we call the first in accordance with the program of our visit, is where our new materials, requisitioned from above, are degraded, as we call it."

Dog in the lead, they enter the first stall through the narrow gangway. A room the size of a church nave opens up. Marked by neatly-halved drill holes, layers of salt -- overhang ing cuts, face cuts, and underlying cuts -- extend toward the far wall of the stall, which towers in such sacral remoteness as to suggest a chancel. But the room contains only two rows of enormous vats, sixteen on each side, extending at knee height from the narrow gangway to the far wall of the stall. In the narrow passage between the rows, Hinrich Schr
ö
tter, formerly a powderman, services the vats with a long spoon-billed pole.

And the man in charge of the brine baths in stall No. 1 informs the stranger Matern: "We chiefly process cotton, synthetic wool, popeline, twill, calico, quick-shrinking flannel, jersey, taffeta, and tulle, but also raw silk and rayon. Not so long ago we handled a sizable lot of corduroy and twelve bolts of shot silk; occasionally there is a demand for small to medium lots of cashmere, cambric, and chiffon. Today, since the beginning of the night shift eight bolts of Irish linen, forty-eight inches in width before treatment, are in the first stage of degradation. We also have furs on hand, mostly pony, Persian lamb, and South African goat, and in the last three vats, on the upper left, a few brocades, an assortment of Brussels lace, and small quantities of piqu
é
, crepe de Chine, and suede are in process of degradation. The remaining vats are degrading lining materials, denim, onion sacks, English sailcloth, and rope of every thickness. We work for the most part with cold caustic solutions, consisting of the usual waste brine with an admixture of magnesium choride. Only when intensive degradation of new materials is required do we make use of a hot sylvinite solution to which magnesium bromide is added. Actually all our degradation baths, especially those containing bromide, call for above-average ventilation. But unfortunately, and Herr Wernicke, our foreman, will back me up, the ventilation on the two-thousand-foot level wasn't up to regulation even in the past, when they were still blasting open the stalls."

But Director Brauxel takes the reference to inadequate ventilation lightly. "Everything will be all right, boys, when the centrifugal ventilators come. They'll speed up the intake."

And they leave the first stall, over whose caustic solutions white vapors swirl, and find their way, foreman with raised lamp in the lead, to the second stall, where caustic-treated materials and new materials are subjected to dry degradation: a scoop driven by a sprocket wheel is moving a mountain of materials over loose muck, a leftover from potash-mining days.

But when with dog as chipper as ever they enter the third stall, no sprocket wheel is roaring, no magnesium chloride develops vapors; here, in lateral lockers, men's suits and overcoats and an assortment of uniforms are being devoured by moths. The articles here being degraded require attention only once a week. But Wernicke, the foreman, has the power of the keys and opens one of the lockers; moth silver sweeps up in a cloud. Quickly the door is closed.

In the fourth stall the visitors are introduced to an assortment of machines operated by former muckers and drillers, which on the one hand give caustic-scoop-moth-degraded materials an additional tearing, subject them to searing heat, and mark them with oil, ink, and wine spots, and on the other hand cut the now fully degraded materials to pattern, line them, and stitch them up. The director with dog, the overseer, and Matern the stranger are then received by the fifth stall, which rather resembles an engine room.

Scrap from the all-devouring surface, accumulated by auto graveyards, engendered by wars and wrecking operations, scrap sorted out after boiler explosions, an anthology of scrap lies here in mounds, travels on conveyor belts, is disentangled with blow torches, takes rust-removing baths, hides a little while, and then returns galvanized to the conveyor belt: parts are assembled, ball joints play, gears come through the sand test unclogged, index wheels with chain hooks form a conveyor system that runs empty. Piston rods, clutches, bushings, governors, and suchlike gadgets obey electric motors. On man-high frames hang mechanical monsters. In busy skeletons elevators dawdle adagio from floor to floor. In stiffly vaulted thoraxes hammer mills have undertaken the never-ending task of crushing loud steel balls. Noise, noise!

And still more educational training in the sixth stall. Their ears are subjected to an experience which first makes Pluto restless, then sets him to howling under the steep late-Gothic roof.

And Matern, the stranger, says: "This is hell, indeed! We ought to have left the dog up top. The poor fellow is suffering."

But Brauxel, the director, is of the opinion that the dog's howling, flung vertically at the roof, blends admirably with the pretested electronic systems of the skeletons in process of manufacture: "Yet what has unthinkingly been termed a hell gives bread and wages shift in shift out to thirty miners, trained by internationally known metal sculptors and sound experts. Our head foreman, the worthy Herr Wernicke, will bear me out when I say that muckers and drillers, who have been working in the mine for twenty years, are inclined to find hell anywhere on the surface, but no proof of hell below ground, not even when the ventilation is poor."

The mine-wise foreman nods several times and leads his director, the director's perseveringly howling dog, and the stranger out of the sixth stall, where the noise is unable to catch up with itself, through the muffling gangway, and out to the gallery, where the noise continues to recede.

They follow his buzzing carbide lamp to the mining shaft which at the beginning of the visit carried them from the pit bottom to the waste stall and the vent shaft.

Again descent is re-enacted, but only briefly, down to the level which the foreman traditionally calls the pit bottom but the director refers to as the "path of first-class disciplines."

In the seventh, eighth, and ninth stalls, the stranger below is exposed, in the interest of training, to the three cardinal emotions and their echo effects.

And once again Matern ventures to cry out: "This is hell, indeed!" although the weeping, every human variety of which is here represented, is tearless. Dry emotion turns the stall into a house of woe. Swathed in degraded mourning garments, frames, which only a little while before were scrap iron and then, resurrected as skeletons, were invested with noisy or soundless mechanisms and submitted to various mechanical and acoustical tests, now stand in weeping circles on the bare-scraped floor. Each circle has set itself a different tear-promoting yet desert-dry task. Here it begins. The next circle can't turn off the whimpering. This circle sobs deep within. Wailing, crescendo and decrescendo, dents and distends every circle. Muffled weeping, as into pillows. Blubbering as though the milk had been burned. Sniveling, handkerchief between teeth. Misery is contagious. Knotted into convulsions and threatened with hiccups. Plaintive to tearful: Bawling Suzy and Blubbering Lizzie. And above the shoulder-shaking, the breast-beating, the silent inward weeping, a voice on the verge of tears recites sob stories, snot-and-water stories, stories to soften a stone: "And then the cruel bailiff said to the frozen little flower girl. But when the poor child held out her hands in supplication to the rich peasant. And when the famine was at its height, the king commanded that every third child in the land. The blind old woman was so lonely she thought she would have to. And when the brave young warrior lay thus miserably in his blood. Then grief spread like a shroud over the land. The ravens croaked. The wind moaned. The horses went lame. The deathwatch ticked in the beams. Woe! Woe! That will be your fate. There shall not be left one stone upon another, nor shall any eye remain dry. Woe!"

But those who in the seventh stall are subjected to the discipline of weeping, have no glands to open the floodgates. Here not even onion juice would help. These automats weep, but the coins refuse to jingle. And how indeed could this lacrimal discipline, encompassed as it is by salt above, below, and on all sides, be expected to release fountains with a crystalline residue, capable of seducing a goat?

And after so much futility, the director with dog and the foreman followed by the stranger leave the seventh chamber of the first emotion, to follow the busy gallery in silence until the foreman's lamp leads them through a gangway into the eighth stall, which seems almost too small to contain so much glee.

And once again Matern cannot hold back his cry: "What hellish laughter!" But actually -- as Director Brauxel immediately points out -- in the eighth stall only the gamut of the second emotion, human laughter, is assembled. We know the scale from tittering to splitting a gut. "It should be pointed out," says Wernicke, the foreman, "that the eighth stall is the only one in our entire plant which, because of the continuous explosions, has to be secured against cave-in with three rows of the finest mine props."

This is understandable. Frames, which sackcloth-clad were practicing grief and lamentation only a short time ago, are now guffawing bleating laughing in bright-colored, though also degraded, Scotch plaids and cowboy shirts. They double up, they lie down, they roll on the ground. Their built-in mechanisms permit belly-holding, thigh-slapping, and stamping. And while limbs make themselves independent, it bursts from a fist-size opening: the roar of people laughing themselves sick and sound, old men's laughter, tapped from beer barrels and wine cellars, staircase and lobby laughter, insolent, groundless, Satanic, sardonic laughter, nay more, insane and desperate laughter. It resounds in the cathedral with its forest of columns, mingles mates multiplies, a chorus struggling for breath: here laugh the company, the regiment, the army, the loons, homerically the gods, the people of the Rhineland, all Germany laughs at, with, in spite of, without end: German scarecrow laughter.

It is Walter Matern, the stranger below, who first speaks the characterizing word. And since neither the director nor the foreman corrected him when he spoke of hellish laughter, he calls the jokes that run back and forth between the laughing automats, which may as well be termed scarecrows, scarecrow jokes: "You heard this one? Two blackbirds and a starling meet in the Cologne Central Station. . . Or this one? A lark takes the interzonal tram to Berlin for Corpus Christi, and when it gets to Marienborn. . . Or this one, it's really good: Three thousand two hundred and thirty-two sparrows decide to go to a whorehouse together, and when they come out, one of them has the clap. Which one? Wrong! Once again now, listen carefully: Three thousand two hundred and thirty-two sparrows. . ."

Matern, the stranger below, pronounces this brand of humor too cynical for his taste. To his mind, humor should have a liberating, healing, often even a saving effect. He misses human warmth, or call it kindness, charity. Such qualities are promised him for the ninth stall. Whereupon all, including the never laughing Pluto, turn away from the scarecrow laughter and follow the gallery until a gangway branching off to the left announces the stall inhabited by the third cardinal emotion.

And Matern sighs, because the foretaste of dishes not yet served embitters his palate. At this Brauxel has to raise his curious lamp and ask what there is to sigh about. "I'm sorry for the dog, who hasn't a chance to romp about up above where the spring is green, who has to follow at heel down below and live through this meticu lously organized inferno."