Dog Years (4 page)

EIGHTH MORNING SHIFT

Many many years ago -- for Brauksel tells nothing more gladly than fairy tales -- there dwelt in Schiewenhorst, a fishing village to the left of the mouth of the Vistula, a merchant by the name of Albrecht Amsel. He sold kerosene, sailcloth, canisters for fresh water, rope, nets, fish traps, eel baskets, fishing tackle of all kinds, tar, paint, sandpaper, yarn, oilcloth, pitch, and tallow, but also carried tools, from axes to pocketknives, and had small carpenter's benches, grindstones, inner tubes for bicycles, carbide lamps, pulleys, winches, and vises in stock. Ship's biscuit was piled up beside cork jackets; a life preserver all ready to have a boat's name written on it embraced a large jar full of cough drops; a schnapps known as "Brotchen" was poured from a stout green bottle encased in basketry; he sold yard goods and remnants, but also new and used clothing, flatirons, secondhand sewing machines, and mothballs. And in spite of the mothballs, in spite of pitch and kerosene, shellac and carbide, Albrecht Amsel's store, a spacious wooden structure resting on a concrete foundation and painted dark green every seven years, smelled first and foremost of cologne and next, before the question of mothballs could even come up, of smoked fish; for side by side with all this retail trade, Albrecht Amsel was known as a wholesale purchaser of fresh-water fish as well as deep-sea fish: chests of the lightest pinewood, golden yellow and packed full of smoked flounder, smoked eel, sprats both loose and bundled, lampreys, codfish roe, and strongly or subtly smoked Vistula salmon, with the inscription: A. Amsel -- Fresh Fish -- Smoked Fish -- Schiewenhorst -- Great Island -- burned into their front panels, were broken open with medium-sized chisels in the Danzig Market, a brick edifice situated be tween Lawendelgasse and Junkergasse, between the Dominican church and the Altstädtischer Graben. The top came open with a crisp crackling; nails were drawn squeaking from the sides. And from Neo-Gothic ogival windows market light fell on freshly smoked fish.

In addition, this farsighted merchant, deeply concerned with the future of the fish-smoking industry on the Vistula delta and the harbor-mouth bar, employed a stone mason specializing in chimney construction, who was kept busy from Plehnendorf to Einlage, that is, in all the villages bordering the Dead Vistula, which villages with their smoke house chimneys had the appearance of fantastic ruins: here he would fix a chimney that was drawing badly, elsewhere he would have to build one of those enormous smokehouse chimneys that towered over lilac bushes and squat fishermen's huts; all this in the name of Albrecht Amsel, who not without reason was said to be wealthy. The rich Amsel, people said -- or: "Amsel the Jew." Of course Amsel was not a Jew. Though he was also no Mennonite, he called himself a good Protestant, possessed a permanent pew, which he occupied every Sunday, in the Fishermen's Church in Bohnsack, and married Lottchen Tiede, a reddish-blonde peasant girl inclined to stoutness from Gross-Zünder; which should be taken to mean: how could Albrecht Amsel be a Jew, when Tiede, the wealthy peasant, who never went from Gross-Zünder to Käsemark otherwise than in a coach-and-four and patent-leather shoes, who was a frequent caller at the District President's, who had put his sons in the Cavalry, or to be more precise, in the rather expensive Langfuhr Hussars, gave him his daughter Lottchen for his wife.

Later a good many people are said to have said that old man Tiede had given the Jew Amsel his Lottchen only because he, like many peasants, merchants, fishermen, millers -- including Miller Matern from Nickelswalde -- was deep in debt, dangerously so for the survival of his coach-and-four, to Albrecht Amsel. In the intention of proving something it was also said that speaking before the Provincial Market Regulation Commission, Albrecht Amsel had expressed strong opposition to the undue encouragement of hog raising.

For the present Brauksel, who is a know-it-all, prefers to have done with conjectures: for regardless of whether it was love or debentures that brought Lottchen Tiede into his house, and regardless of whether he sat in the Fishermen's Church in Bohnsack on Sundays as a baptized Jew or a baptized Christian, Albrecht Amsel, the dynamic merchant of the Lower Vistula, who, it might be added, was also the broad-shouldered cofounder of the Bohnsack Athletic Club reg. 1905, a mighty-voiced baritone in the church choir, rose to be a multiply-decorated reserve lieutenant by the banks of the Somme and Marne, and fell in 1917, not far from the fortress of Verdun, just two months before the birth of his son Eduard.

NINTH MORNING SHIFT

Butted by the Ram, Walter Matern first saw the light of day in April. The Fishes of March drew Eduard Amsel, restless and gifted, from the maternal cavern. In May, when the goose burned and Grandmother Matern rose again, the miller's son was baptized. The proceedings were Catholic. As early as the end of April the son of the late merchant Albrecht Amsel was already sprinkled in good Protestant style in the Fishermen's Church in Bohnsack, half, as was their customary, with Vistula water and half with water taken from the Baltic.

Whatever the other chroniclers, who have been vying with Brauksel for nine morning shifts, may record that is at variance with Brauksel's opinion, they will have to take my word for it in matters concerning the baptizand from Schiewenhorst: among all the characters intended to breathe life into this anniversary volume -- Brauchsel's mine has been producing neither coal, nor iron ores, nor potash for almost ten years -- Eduard Amsel, or Eddi Amsel, Haseloff, Goldmouth, and so on, is the most restless hero, except for Brauxel.

From the very start it was his vocation to invent scarecrows. Yet he had nothing against birds; on the other hand, birds, regardless of plumage and characteristics of flight, had plenty against him and his scarecrow-inventing mind. Immediately after the christening ceremony -- the bells hadn't even stopped ringing -- they knew him for what he was. Eduard Amsel, however, lay plump and rosy on a tight baptismal cushion, and if birds meant anything to him he didn't show it. His godmother was named Gertrud Karweise, later she took to knitting him woolen socks, year in year out, punctually for Christmas. In her robust arms the newly baptized child was presented to the large christening party, which had been invited to an interminable christening dinner. The widow Amsel, n
é
e Tiede, who had stayed home, was supervising the setting of the table, issuing last-minute instructions in the kitchen, and tasting sauces. But all the Tiedes from Gross-Zünder, except for the four sons who were living dangerously in the Cavalry -- the second youngest was later killed -- trudged along in their Sunday best behind the baptismal cushion. Along the Dead Vistula marched: Christian Glomme the Schiewenhorst fisherman and his wife Martha Glomme, n
é
e Liedke; Herbert Kienast and his wife Johanna, n
é
e Probst; Carl Jakob Ayke, whose son Daniel Ayke had met his death on Dogger Bank in the service of the Imperial Navy; the fisherman's widow Brigitte Kabus, whose boat was operated by her brother Jakob Nilenz; between Ernst Wilhelm Tiede's daughters-in-law, who tripped along city fashion in pink, pea-green, and violet-blue, strode, brushed gleaming black, the aged Pastor Blech -- a descendant of the famous Deacon A. F. Blech, who, while Pastor of St. Mary's, had written a chronicle of the City of Danzig from 1807 to 1814, the years of the French occupation. Friedrich Bollhagen, owner of a large smoking establishment, walked behind the retired Captain Bronsard, who had found wartime occupation as a volunteer sluice operator in Plehnendorf. August Sponagel, inn-keeper at Wesslinken, walked beside Frau Major von Ankum, who towered over him by a head. In view of the fact that Dirk Heinrich von Ankum, landowner in Klein-Zünder, had gone out of existence early in 1915, Sponagel held the Frau Major's rigidly-rectangularly offered arm. The rear guard, behind Herr and Frau Busenitz, who had a coal business in Bohnsack, consisted of Erich Lau, the disabled Schiewenhorst village mayor, and his superlatively pregnant Margarete who, as daughter of the Nickelswalde village mayor Momber, had not married below her station. Being on duty, Dike Inspector Haberland had been obliged to take his leave outside the church door. Quite likely the procession also included a bevy of children, all too blond and all too dressed up.

Over sandy paths which only sparsely covered the straggling roots of the scrub pines, they made their way along the right bank of the river to the waiting landaus, to old man Tiede's four-in-hand, which he had managed to hold on to in spite of the war and the shortage of horses. Shoes full of sand. Captain Bronsard laughed loud and breathless, then coughed at length. Conversation waited until after dinner. The woods along the shore had a Prussian smell. Almost motionless the river, a dead arm of the Vistula, which acquired a certain amount of current only farther down when the Mottlau flowed into it. The sun shone cautiously on holiday finery. Tiede's daughters-in-law shivered pink pea-green violet-blue and would have been glad to have the widows' shawls. Quite likely so much widow's black, the gigantic Frau Major, and the disabled veteran's monumental limp contributed to the coming of an event which had been in the making from the start: scarcely had the company left the Bohnsack Fishermen's Church when the ordinarily undisplaceable gulls clouded up from the square. Not pigeons, for fishermen's churches harbor gulls and not pigeons. Now in a steep slant bitterns, sea swallows, and teals rise from the rushes and duckweed. Up go the crested terns. Crows rise from the scrub pines. Starlings and black birds abandon the cemetery and the gardens of whitewashed fishermen's houses. From lilac and hawthorn come wagtails and titmice, robins, finches, and thrushes, every bird in the song; clouds of sparrows from eaves and telegraph wires; swallows from barns and crannies in masonry; what ever called itself bird shot up, exploded, flashed like an arrow as soon as the baptismal cushion hove into sight, and was carried across the river by the sea wind, to form a black-torn cloud, in which birds that normally avoid one another mingled promiscuously, all spurred by the same dread: gulls and crows; a pair of hawks amid dappled songbirds; magpies with magpies I

And five hundred birds, not counting sparrows, fled in mass between the sun and the christening party. And five hundred birds cast their ominous shadow upon christening party, baptismal cushion, and baptized child.

And five hundred birds -- who wants to count sparrows? -- induced the christening party, from Lau, the disabled village mayor, to the Tiedes, to cluster together and first in silence, then muttering and exchanging stiff glances, to press from back to front and hurry their pace. August Sponagel stumbles over pine roots. Between Bronsard and Pastor Blech, who makes only the barest stab at raising his arms in pastoral appeasement, the gigantic Frau Major storms forward, gathering her skirts as in a rainstorm, and carries all in her wake: the Glommes and Kienast with wife, Ayke and the Kabus, Bollhagen and the Busenitzes; even the disabled Lau and his superlatively pregnant wife, who however did not suffer from shock and was delivered of a normal girl child, keep pace, panting heavily -- only the godmother, bearing child and topsy-turvy cushion in her strong arms, drops back and is last to reach the waiting landaus and the Tiedes' four-in-hand amid the first poplars on the road to Schiewenhorst.

Did the baptizand cry? Not a whimper, but he didn't sleep either. Did the cloud of five hundred birds and uncounted sparrows disperse immediately after the hasty and not at all festive departure of the carriages? For a long while the cloud over the lazy river found no rest: for a time it hovered over Bohnsack, for a time it hung long and narrow over the woods and dunes, then broad and fluid over the opposite shore, dropping an old crow into a marshy meadow, where it stood out gray and stiff. Only when landaus and four-in-hand drove into Schiewenhorst did the cloud disperse into its various species, which found their way back to the square outside the church, to cemetery, gardens, barns, rushes, lilac bushes, and pines; but until evening, when the christening party, having eaten and drunk its fill, sat weighing down the long table with elbows, anguish darkened numerous bird hearts of varying sizes; for as Eduard lay on his baptismal cushion, his scarecrow-inventing spirit had made itself known to all the birds. From that moment on they knew all about him.

TENTH MORNING SHIFT

Who can tell whether Albrecht Amsel, merchant and reserve lieutenant, wasn't a Jew after all? The people of Schiewenhorst, Einlage, and Neufahr would hardly have called him a rich Jew for no reason at all. And what about the name? Isn't it typical? You say he's of Dutch descent, because in the early Middle Ages Dutch settlers drained the Vistula delta, having brought with them linguistic peculiarities, windmills, and their names?

Now that Brauksel has insisted in the course of past morning shifts that A. Amsel is not a Jew and declared in so many words: "Of course Amsel was not a Jew," he can now, with equal justification -- for all origins are what we choose to make of them -- try to convince you that of course Albrecht Amsel was a Jew. He came of a family of tailors long resident in Preussisch-Stargard and had been obliged -- because his father's house was full of children -- to leave Preussisch-Stargard at the age of sixteen for Schneidemühl, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Berlin. Fourteen years later he had come -- metamorphosed, Protestant, and wealthy -- to the Vistula estuary by way of Schneidemühl, Neustadt, and Dirschau. The cut which had made Schiewenhorst a village on the river was not yet a year old when Albrecht Amsel purchased his property on favorable terms.

And so he went into business. What else should he have gone into? And so he sang in the church choir. Why shouldn't he, a baritone, have sung in the church choir? And so he helped to found an athletic club, and among all the inhabitants of the village it was he who most staunchly believed that he Albrecht Amsel was not a Jew, that the name of Amsel came from Holland: lots of people go by the name of Specht (woodpecker), a famous African explorer was even called Nachtigal (nightingale), only Adler (eagle) is a typically Jewish name, and certainly not Amsel (blackbird). The tailor's son had devoted fourteen years to forgetting his origins and only as a sideline, though with equal success, to amassing a good-Protestant fortune.