Dog Years (9 page)

This is because. Ever since Herr Olschewski in the low-ceilinged schoolhouse began to speak of all the gods there used to be, who still exist and who existed once upon a time, Amsel has devoted himself to mythology.

It began when a schnapps distiller's shepherd dog took the train with his master from Stutthof to Nickelswalde. The animal's name was Pluto, he had a flawless pedigree, and he came to cover Senta, which took effect. Amsel in the low-ceilinged room wished to know what Pluto was and meant. From that day on Herr Olschewski, a young teacher with ideas about the school system and glad to be inspired by questioning pupils, occupied hours which the schedule assigned to local geography and folklore with long-drawn-out stories revolving first around Wotan, Baldur, Hera, Fafnir, and later around Zeus, Juno, Pluto, Apollo, Mercury, and the Egyptian Isis. He waxed especially eloquent when making old Prussian gods -- Perkunos, Pikollos, and Potrimpos -- lodge in the branches of creaking oak trees.

Naturally Amsel not only listened but, as the sketches in his diary show, he also transmuted, and most ingeniously: he brought the fiery red Perkunos to life with decrepit red ticking obtained from houses where people had died. A split oak log became Perkunos' head; to right and left Amsel wedged superannuated horseshoes into it, and in the cracks he stuck the tail feathers of slaughtered roosters. Glowing, all fire god, the scarecrow was only briefly exhibited on the dike, then it was sold for one gulden twenty and moved to the ulterior of the Island, to Ladekopp.

The pale Pikollos, who was said to have looked up from below and for that reason had handled the affairs of the dead in pagan times, was not, as one might imagine, fashioned from the bedsheets of the deceased, young or old, for to costume the god of death in shrouds would have been much too unimaginative, but -- Amsel procured his accessories in a house from which some peasants had just moved -- was adorned in a fusty-yellow and crumbling bridal dress smelling of lavender, musk, and mouse droppings. This attire draped over his manly form made Pikollos imposing and terrible; when the mortuary-nuptial scarecrow was sold for use on a large farm in Schusterkrug, the god brought in two whole gulden.

And bright and gay as Amsel made him, Potrimpos, the forever laughing youth with the ear of wheat between his teeth, brought in only a single gulden, although Potrimpos protects summer and winter seed against corn cockle, charlock and wild mustard, against couchgrass, vetches, spurry, and ergot. For over a week the youthful scarecrow, a hazelnut bush shirted in silver paper and skirted in cats' skins, stood exposed on the dike, tinkling invitingly with saffron-colored eggshells. Only then was he purchased by a peasant from Fischer-Babke. His wife, who was pregnant and for that reason more inclined than most to mythology, thought the fruit-promising scarecrow cute and giggly-comical: some weeks later she was delivered of twins.

But Senta too had come in for a portion of the boy Potrimpos' blessing: exactly sixty-four days later, under the jack of the Matern windmill, she whelped six blind but, in keeping with their pedigree, black puppies. All six were registered and gradually sold; among them a male, Harras, who will be spoken of frequently in the next book; for a Herr Liebenau bought Harras as a watchdog for his carpenter shop. In answer to an ad that miller Matern had put in the
Neueste Nachrichten,
the carpenter had taken the train to Nickelswalde and closed the deal.

In the obscure beginnings there is said to have been, there was, in Lithuania a she-wolf, whose grandson, the black dog Perkun, sired the bitch Senta; and Pluto covered Senta; and Senta whelped six puppies, among them the male Harras; and Harras sired Prinz; and Prinz will make history in books that Brauxel does not have to write.

But Amsel never designed a scarecrow in the image of a dog, not even of Senta, who ambled about between him and Walter Matern. All the scarecrows in his diary, except for the one with the milk-drinking eels and the other -- half grandmother, half three-headed willow -- are likenesses of men or gods.

The lore that Herr Olschewski dispensed to dozing pupils through the summery droning of flies was reflected, out of school hours, in a series of bird-repellent creations modeled, when not on gods, on the grand masters of the order of Teutonic Knights from Hermann Balke via Konrad von Wallenrod down to von Jungingen: there was a considerable clanking of rusty corrugated iron, and black crosses were cut out of white waxed paper with spiked barrel staves. Various members of the Jagello family, the great Kasimir, the notorious robber Bobrowski, Beneke, Martin Bardewiek, and the unfortunate Lesczynski were obliged to pose in the company of Kniprode, Letzkau, and von Plauen. Amsel couldn't get enough of the history of Brandenburg-Prussia; he pottered through the centuries from Albrecht Achilles to Zieten and from the lees of eastern European history harvested scarecrows to disperse the birds of the heavens.

Soon after the carpenter, Harry Liebenau's father, bought the dog Harras from miller Anton Matern, but at a time when the world had not yet registered the presence either of Harry Liebenau or of his cousin Tulla, the
Neueste Nachrichten
offered all those who could read an article dealing lengthily and poetically with the Island. The region and its people were knowledgeably described. The author did not forget the anomalies of the storks' nests or the special features of the farmhouses, those old porch posts, for example. And in the middle section of this article, which Brauksel has had photostated in the East German newspaper archives, one could, and still can, read approximately the following knowledgeable lines: "Though in other respects everything runs its accustomed course on Great Island and the technology that is changing our whole world has not yet made its triumphant entry, an astonishing transformation is becoming discernible in what is, if you will, a secondary domain: The scarecrows in the far-billowing wheatfields of these magnificent plains -- which only a few years ago were commonplace and merely useful or at most a trifle ludicrous and sad, but in any event closely resembled the scarecrows of other provinces and regions -- now reveal, in the vicinity of Einlage, Jungfer, and Ladekopp, but also as far upstream as Käsemark and Montau and occasionally even in the region to the south of Neuteich, a new and richly variegated aspect: elements of fantasy mingle with immemorial folk ways; delightful figures, but gruesome ones as well, may be seen standing in surging fields and in gardens blessed with abundance; might it not even now be time to call the attention of the local folklore museums or of the provincial Museum to these treasure of na
ï
ve, yet formally mature folk art? For we have the impression that in the very midst of a civilization that is leveling everything in its path, the Nordic heritage is here flowering afresh and anew: the spirit of the Vikings and Christian simplicity in an East-German symbiosis. Especially a group of three figures in a far-billowing wheatfield between Scharpau and Barwalde, which with its striking simplicity suggests the Crucifixion group on the mount of Calvary, the Lord and the two thieves, is marked by a simple piety which goes straight to the heart of the traveler wending his way amid these blessed far-billowing fields -- and he does not know why."

Now let no one suppose that Amsel fashioned this group with its childlike piety -- only one thief was sketched in the diary -- with a view to divine reward: according to the diary, it brought in two gulden twenty.

What became of all the money that the peasants of the Great Island district spontaneously or after brief bargaining counted out into Amsel's palm? Walter Matern kept this mounting wealth in a small leather pouch. He guarded it with a dark frown and not without grinding of the teeth. Slung around his wrist he carried the pouch full of Free State silver currency between the poplars on the highway and through the windy clearings in the scrub pine forest; with it he had himself ferried across the river; he swung it, struck it against garden fences or slapped it challengingly against his own knee, and opened it ceremoniously when a peasant became a customer.

Amsel did not take payment. While Amsel made a show of indifference, Walter Matern had to state the price, seal the bargain with a handshake after the manner of cattle dealers, and pocket or pouch the coins. In addition Walter Matern was responsible for the transportation of sold or rented scarecrows. Amsel made him his flunky. Now and then he rebelled and tried to regain his freedom, but never for very long. The incident with the pocketknife was a feeble attempt of this kind; for Amsel, rolling through the world plump on short legs, was always ahead of him. When the two ran along the dike, the miller's son, after the manner of body servants, remained half a step behind the untiring builder of scarecrows. The servant also carried his master's materials: beanpoles and wet rags and whatever the Vistula had washed ashore.

NINETEENTH MORNING SHIFT

"Flunky, flunky!" blasphemed the children when Walter Matern flunkied for his friend Eduard Amsel. Many who blaspheme God are punished; but who is going to bring down the law on all the rancid little stinkpots who daily blaspheme the Devil? Like God and the Devil the two of them -- Brauksel is now referring to the miller's son and little fatso from over yonder -- were so smitten with each other that the blaspheming of the village youth was if anything incense to them. Moreover, the two of them, like Devil and God, had scored each other with the same knife.

Thus at one -- for the occasional flunkying was an act of love -- the two friends often sat in the overhang room, whose illumination was determined by the sun and the sails of the Matern windmill. They sat side by side on footstools at Grandmother Matern's feet. Outside it was late afternoon. The wood worms were silent. The shadows of the mill were falling somewhere else. The poultry yard was turned down very low, because the window was closed. Only on the fly paper a fly was dying of too much sweetness and couldn't stop. Far below the fly, grumpily, as though no ear were good enough for her yarns, Grandma was telling stories, always the same ones. With her bony grandmother's hands, which indicated all the dimensions that occurred in her tales, she dealt out stories about floods, stories about bewitched cows, the usual stories about eels, the one-eyed blacksmith, the three-legged horse, or how Duke Kynstute's young daughter went out to dig for mice, and the story about the enormous dolphin that a storm had washed ashore in the exact same year as Napoleon marched into Russia.

But decoyed by Amsel with adroit questions, she always ended up -- though the detours could be very long -- in the dark passageways and dungeons of the endless tale, endless because it has not been concluded to this day, about the twelve headless nuns and the twelve knights with their heads and helmets under their arms, who in four coaches -- two drawn by white, two drawn by black horses -- drove through Tiegenhof over resounding cobbles, stopped outside a deserted inn, and twelve and twelve went in: Music broke loose. Woodwinds brasses plucked strings. Tongues fluttered and voices twanged expertly. Sinful songs with sinful refrains from male throats -- the heads and helmets under the sharply bent arms of the knights -- alternated with the watery litanies of pious women. Then it was the turn of the headless nuns. From heads held out in hands a part song poured forth, obscene words to an obscene tune, and there was dancing and stamping and squealing and reeling. And in between, a humble shuffling procession cast headless shadows twelve and twelve through the windows of the inn and out on the paving stones, until once again leching and retching, roaring and stamping loosened the mortar and the dowels of the house. Finally toward morning, just before cockcrow, the four coaches with black horses and white horses drove up without coachmen. And twelve clanking knights, giving off clouds of rust, veils billowing on top, left the inn at Tiegenhof with maggot-pale nuns' faces. And twelve nuns, wearing knights' helmets with closed visors over their habits, left the bin. Into the four coaches, white horses black horses, they mounted six and six and six and six, but not mixed -- they had already exchanged heads -- and rode through the cowed village, and again the cobblestones resounded. To this day, said Grandma Matern, before spinning the story out some more, directing the coaches to other places and making them draw up outside chapels and castles -- they say that to this day pious hymns and blasphemous prayers can be heard farting from the fireplace of that weird inn, where nobody is willing to live.

Thereupon the two friends would gladly have gone to Tiegenhof. But though they started out a number of times, they never got any farther than Steegen or at the farthest Ladekopp. Only in the following winter, which for a builder of scarecrows was naturally bound to be the quiet, truly creative season, did Eduard Amsel find occasion to take the measurements of those headless people: and that was how he came to build his first mechanical scarecrows, an undertaking that used up an appreciable part of the fortune in Matern's leather pouch.

TWENTIETH MORNING SHIFT

This thaw is drilling a hole in Brauxel's head. The water is dripping on the zinc ledge outside his window. Since there are windowless rooms available in the administration building, Brauksel could easily avoid this therapy; but Brauchsel stays put and welcomes the hole in his head: celluloid, celluloid -- if you've got to be a doll, you may as well be a doll with little holes in your dry celluloid forehead. For Brauxel once lived through a thaw and underwent a transformation beneath the water dripping from a dwindling snow man; but before that, many many thaws ago, the Vistula flowed under a thick sheet of ice traversed by horse-drawn sleighs. The young people of the nearby fishing villages tried their hand at sailing on curved skates known as
Schlaifjen.
Two by two -- a bedsheet nailed to roofing laths would fill with wind and send them whipping over the ice. Every mouth steamed. Snow was in the way and had to be shoveled. Behind the dunes, barren and fertile land was topped with the same snow. Snow on both dikes. The snow on the beach blended into the snow on the ice sheet that covered the rimless sea and its fish. Under a crooked snow cap, for the snow was falling from the east, the Matern windmill stood splay-footed on its round white hummock amid white fields distinguishable only by their unyielding fences, and milled. Napoleon's poplars sugar-coated. A Sunday painter had covered the scrub pines with white sizing fresh from the tube. When the snow turned gray, the mill was stopped for the day and turned out of the wind. Miller and miller's man went home. The lopsided miller stepped in the miller's man's footsteps. Senta the black dog, nervous since her puppies had been sold, was following trails of her own and biting into the snow. Across from the mill, on a fence that they had previously kicked clear of snow with the heels of their boots, sat Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel mufflered and mittened.