Dog Years (18 page)

BOOK TWO

Love Letters

Dear Cousin Tulla:

I am advised to put you and your Christian name at the beginning, to address you, because you were, are, and will be matter everywhere, informally, as though this were the beginning of a letter. Yet I am telling my story to myself, only and incurably to myself; or can it be that I am telling you that I am telling it to myself? Your family, the Pokriefkes and the Damses, came from Koshnavia.

Dear Cousin:

since every one of my words to you is lost, since all my words, even if I speak obstinately to myself, have only you in mind, let us at last make peace on paper and cement a frail foundation for my livelihood and pastime: I speak to you. You don't listen. And the salutation -- as though I were writing you one or a hundred letters -- will be my formal crutch, which even now I would like to throw away, which I shall often and with fury in my arm throw into the Striessbach, into the sea, into Aktien Pond: but the dog, black on four legs, will bring it back as he has been trained to do.

Dear Tulla:

like all the Pokriefkes, my mother, a Pokriefke by birth and sister to your father August Pokriefke, hailed from Koshnavia. On the seventh of May, when Jenny Brunies was about six months old, I was normally and properly born. Seventeen years later somebody picked me up with two fingers and put me into a life-size tank as an ammunition loader. In the middle of Silesia, a region which is not as familiar to me as Koshnavia south of Konitz, the tank went into position and backed up, for purposes of camouflage, into a wooden shed which some Silesian glass blowers had filled with their products. Whereas hitherto I had never stopped searching for a word that would rhyme with you, Tulla, that tank backing into position and those screaming glasses showed your Cousin Harry the way to a rhymeless language: from then on I wrote simple sentences, and now that a certain Herr Brauxel has advised me to write a novel, I am writing a normal rhymeless novel.

Dear Cousin Tulla:

about Lake Constance and the girls around there I don't know a thing; but about you and Koshnavia I know every thing. The geographical co-ordinates of Koshnavia are north latitude fifty-three twenty, east longitude thirty-five. You weighed four pounds and ten ounces at birth. Koshnavia proper consists of seven villages: Frankenhagen, Petztin, Deutsch-Cekzin, Granau, Lichtnau, Schlangenthin, and Osterwick. Your two elder brothers Siegesmund and Alexander were born in Koshnavia; Tulla and her brother Konrad were registered in Langfuhr. The name of Pokriefke is to be found even earlier than 1772 in the parish register of Osterwick. The Damses, your mother's family, are mentioned years after the partitions of Poland, first in Frankenhagen, then in Schlangenthin; probably immigrants from Prussian Pomerania, for I am inclined to doubt that "Dams" is derived from the archbishopric of Damerau, especially in view of the fact that Damerau, along with Obkass and Gross Zirkwitz, was donated to the Archbishop of Gnesen as early as 1275. Damerau was then called Louisseva Dambrova, occasionally Dubrawa; it is not properly a part of Koshnavia: the Damses are outsiders.

Dear Cousin:

you first saw the light of day in Elsenstrasse. We lived in the same apartment house. It belonged to my father, master carpenter Liebenau. Diagonally across the street, in the so-called Aktienhaus, lived my future teacher, Dr. Oswald Brunies. He had adopted a baby girl, whom he called Jenny, although in our region no one had ever borne the name of Jenny. The black shepherd dog in our yard was called Harras. You were baptized Ursula, but called Tulla from the start, a nickname probably derived from Thula the Koshnavian water nymph, who lived in Osterwick Lake and was written in various ways: Duller, Tolle, Tullatsch, Thula or Dul, Tul, Thul. When the Pokriefkes were still living in Osterwick, they were tenants on Mosbrauch Hill near the lake, on the Konitz highway. From the middle of the fourteenth century to the time of Tulla's birth in 1927, Osterwick was written as follows: Ostirwig, Ostirwich, Osterwigh, Osterwig, Osterwyk. Ostrowit, Ostrowite, Osterwieck, Ostrowitte, Ostr
ô
w. The Koshnavians said: Oustewitsch. The Polish root of the village name Osterwick, the word
ostr
ó
w,
means an island in a river or lake; for originally, in the fourteenth century that is, the village of Osterwick was situated on the island in Osterwick Lake. Alders and birches surrounded this body of water, which was rich in carp. In addition to carp and crucians, roaches, and the compulsory pike, the lake contained a red-blazed calf that could talk on St. John's Day, a legendary leather bridge, two sacks full of yellow gold from the days of the Hussite incursions, and a capricious water nymph: Thula Duller Tul.

Dear Tulla:

my father the carpenter liked to say and often did: "The Pokriefkes will never get anywhere around here. They should have stayed where they came from, with their cabbages."

The allusions to Koshnavian cabbage were for the benefit of my mother, a Pokriefke by birth; for it was she who had lured her brother with his wife and two children from sandy Koshnavia to the city suburb. At her behest carpenter Liebenau had taken on the cottager and farmhand August Pokriefke as an assistant in his shop. My mother had persuaded my father to rent the two-and-a-half-room apartment that had become vacant on the floor above us to the family of four -- Erna Pokriefke was already pregnant with Tulla -- at a low price.

For all these benefits your mother gave my father little thanks. On the contrary. Whenever there was a family scene, she blamed him and his carpenter shop for the deafness of her deaf-mute son Konrad. She maintained that our buzz saw, which roared from morning to closing time and only rarely fell silent, which made all the dogs in the neighborhood including our Harras howl themselves hoarse in accompaniment, had withered and deafened Konrad's tiny ears while he was still in the womb.

The carpenter listened to Erna Pokriefke with serenity, for she fulminated in the Koshnavian manner. Who could under stand it? Who could pronounce it? The inhabitants of Koshnavia said
"Tchatchhoff"
for
Kirchhof
(churchyard).
Basch
was
Berg
(mountain) --
W
ä
sch
was
Weg
(way, path). The
"Preistew
ä
s"
was the meadow
(Wiese),
some two acres in size, belonging to the priest in Osterwick.

You'll have to admit, Tulla,

that your father was a rotten helper. The machinist couldn't even use him on the buzz saw. The drive belt would keep slipping off, and he ruined the most expensive blades on nail-studded sheathing which he converted into kindling for his own use. There was only one job that he performed punctually and to the satisfaction of all: the gluepot on the cast-iron stove upstairs from the machine room was always hot and in readiness for five journeymen carpenters at five car penter's benches. The glue ejected bubbles, blubbered sulkily, managed to turn honey-yellow or muddy-cloudy, succeeded in thickening to pea soup and forming elephant hide. In part cold and crusty, in part sluggishly flowing, the glue climbed over the rim of the pot, formed noses upon noses, leaving not so much as a speck of enamel uncovered and making it impossible to recognize the gluepot as an erstwhile cookpot. The boiling glue was stirred with a section of roofing lath. But the wood also put on skin over skin, swelled bumpy leathery crinkly, weighed heavier and heavier in August Pokriefke's hand and, when the five journeymen called the horny monster an elephant's trunk, had to be exchanged for a fresh section of always the same, positively endless roofing lath.

Bone glue, carpenter's glue! The brown, grooved cakes of glue were piled on a crooked shelf amid a finger-thick layer of dust. From the third to the seventeenth year of my life I faithfully carried a chunk of carpenter's glue in my pants pocket; to me glue was that sacred; I called your father a glue god; for not only had the glue god thoroughly gluey fingers which crackled brittlely whenever he moved, but in addition he invariably gave off a smell that followed him wherever he went. Your two-and-a-half-room apartment, your mother, your brothers smelled of it. But most generously he garnished his daughter with his aroma. He patted her with gluey fingers. He sprayed the child with particles of glue when ever he conjured up finger bunnies for her benefit. In short, the glue god metamorphosed Tulla into a glue maiden; for wherever Tulla went stood ran, wherever she had stood, wherever she had gone, whatever space she had traversed at a run, whatever Tulla took hold of, threw away, touched briefly or at length, whatever she wrapped clothed hid herself in, whatever she played with: shavings nails hinges, every place and object that Tulla had encountered retained a faint to infernal and in no wise to be quenched smell of bone glue. Your Cousin Harry stuck to you too: for quite a few years we clung together and smelled in unison.

Dear Tulla:

when we were four years old, they said you had a calcium deficiency. The same contention was made concerning the marly soil of Koshnavia. The marl dating from the diluvian times, when the ground moraines formed, contains, as we know, calcium carbonate. But the weather-beaten, rain-washed layers of marl in the Koshnavian fields were poor in calcium. No fertilizer helped and no state subsidies. No amount of processions -- the Koshnavians were Catholic to a man -- could inject calcium into the fields; but Dr. Hollatz gave you calcium tablets: and soon, at the age of five, your calcium deficiency was overcome. None of your milk teeth wobbled. Your incisors protruded slightly: they were soon to become a source of dread to Jenny Brunies, the foundling from across the street.

Tulla and I never believed

that Gypsies and storks had anything to do with the finding of Jenny. A typical Papa Brunies story: with him nothing happened naturally, everywhere he sniffed out hidden forces, he always managed to dwell in an eerie eccentric light. Whether feeding his mania for mica gneiss with ever new and often magnificent specimens -- there were similar cranks in cranky Germany with whom he corresponded -- or, on the street, in the playground, or in his classroom, carrying on like an Old Celtic druid, a Prussian oak-tree god, or Zoroaster -- he was generally thought to be a Freemason -- he invariably displayed the qualities that we all of us love in our eccentrics. But it was Jenny, his association with the doll-like infant, that first made Dr. Brunies into an eccentric who acquired a standing not only within the precinct of the high school but also in Elsenstrasse and the streets intersecting or running parallel to it in the big little suburb of Langfuhr.

Jenny was a fat child. Even when Eddi Amsel was roaming around Jenny and Brunies, she seemed no slimmer. Amsel and his friend Walter Matern -- they were both Dr. Brunies' students -- were said to have witnessed the miraculous finding of Jenny. In any case Amsel and Matern made up half of the group which elicited smiles in our Elsenstrasse and in all Langfuhr.

For Tulla I am going to paint an early picture:

I want to show you an elderly gentleman with a bulbous nose, innumerable wrinkles, and a broad-brimmed soft hat on ice-gray matted hair. He is striding along in a green loden cape. To the left and right of him two schoolboys are trying to keep up with him. Eddi Amsel is what is commonly known as a fatty. His clothes are full to bursting. His knees are marked with little dimples. Wherever his flesh is visible, a crop of freckles burgeons. The general impression is one of boneless waddling. Not so his friend: rawboned and masterful, he stands beside Brunies, looking as though the teacher, Eddi Amsel, and plump little Jenny were under his protection. At the age of five and a half the little girl is still lying in a large baby carriage, because she has walking difficulties. Brunies is pushing. Sometimes Eddi Amsel pushes, rarely the Grinder. And at the foot end lies a half-open crumpled brown paper bag. Half the kids in the neighborhood are following the baby carriage; they are out for candy, which they call "blubblubs."

But only when we reached the Aktienhaus, across the street from where we lived, did Dr. Brunies bring the high-wheeled carriage to a halt and distribute a handful from the brown bag to Tulla, myself, and the other children, on which occasion he never forgot to help himself as well, even if he hadn't quite finished the vitreous remnant in his mumbling elderly mouth. Sometimes Eddi Amsel sucked a candy to keep him company. I never saw Walter Matern accept a candy. But Jenny's fingers were as tenaciously sticky with rectangular cough drops as Tulla's fingers with the bone glue which she rolled into marbles and played with.

Dear Cousin,

just as I am trying to gain clarity about you and your carpenter's glue, so I am determined to get things straight about the Koshnavians, or Koschneiders as they are also called. It would be absurd to accept an allegedly historical but thus far undocumented explanation of the term "Koshnavian." This so-called explanation is that during the Polish uprisings the Koshnavians had been stirred to acts of violence against the Germans, so that the collective noun "Koschneider" derives from the collective noun
"Kopfschneider"
(head cutter). Though I had good reason to adopt this exegesis -- you, the scrawny Koshnavian maiden, had every aptitude for the head cutter's trade -- I shall nevertheless content myself with the unimaginative but reasonable explanation that in the year 1484 a starosty official in Tuchel, Kosznewski by name, signed a document officially defining the rights and obligations of all the villages in the region, and that these villages later came to be known as Kosznew or Koshnavian villages after him. A vestige of uncertainty remains. The names of towns and districts may lend themselves to pedantry of this kind, but Kosznewski, the methodical starosty official, is no help in deciphering Tulla, more a something than a girl.