Dog Years (53 page)

And yet Jenny went on living: a dismal life, never again on toes. The toes -- how hard a thing to write! -- of both feet had to be amputated. Shoes, ungainly things, were made for the stumps. And Harry Liebenau, whom Jenny had loved until then, received a matter-of-factly typewritten letter, the last. He too, Jenny asked, should write no more. All that was over. He should try to forget everything, almost everything. "I too will try hard not to think of us."

Some days later -- Harry Liebenau was packing his bags, he was off to the wars -- a package came with melancholy contents. In packets tied with silk ribbon: Harry's half-true letters; knitted jackets and rompers, finished, pink and blue. He found a necklace made of bottle washers. Harry had given it to Jenny when they were children playing by Aktien Pond, on whose surface floated bottle washers and no lotus blossoms.

There was once a streetcar --

it ran from Heeresanger in Langfuhr to Weidengasse in the Lower City and belonged to Line Number 5. Like all cars that ran between Langfuhr and Danzig, the Number 5 also stopped at the Main Station. The motorman of this particular car, concerning which it has been said: there was once a streetcar, was name Lemke; the conductor in the lead car was named Erich Wentzeck; and the conductorette in the trailer of this particular car was named Tulla Pokriefke. No longer was she working on the Number 2 Line to Oliva. Every day for nine hours she rode back and forth on the Number 5: quick, as though born to the trade, somewhat foolhardy; for in the evening rush hour when the car was overcrowded and it was impossible to get through inside, she jumped, with the car running at moderate speed, off the front platform and onto the rear platform. When Tulla Pokriefke collected fares, all those who rode with her coughed up their money: even her cousin Harry had to pay.

Two minutes after Tulla Pokriefke had rang the bell as a sign that this particular car, concerning which it has been said: there was once a streetcar, namely, the 10:05 p.m. car, due at the Main Station at 10:17, could and should push off from the Heeresanger terminus, a boy of seventeen got on at Max-Halbe-Platz, pushed a cardboard suitcase reinforced with leather corners onto the rear platform of the trailer, and lit a cigarette.

The car was empty and remained relatively empty. At "Reichskolonie" stop an elderly couple got on, and they got out at the Sporthalle. At "Halbe-Allee" four Red Cross nurses got into the trailer and asked for transfers to Heubude. The lead car was busier.

While on the rear platform of the trailer conductorette Tulla Pokriefke made entries in her trip book, the seventeen-year-old smoked awkwardly beside his lurching cardboard suitcase. It is only because the two of them, she with her trip book, he with the unaccustomed cigarette, knew each other -- as a matter of fact they were related, cousins -- only because the two of them were about to part for life, that this car on Line Number 5 was a special car; in other respects it was running normally on schedule.

When Tulla had rung the bell at "Women's Clinic," she closed her trip book and said: "Leaving town?" Harry Liebenau, with his induction order in the breast pocket of his jacket, replied quite in the spirit of the indispensable leave-taking scene: "The farther the better."

Tulla's trip book, a prosaic prop, was encased in worn wooden covers: "Don'tcha like our town any more?"

Because Harry knew Tulla was no longer working on the Number 2 Line, he had decided in favor of a last trip on the Number 5: "I'm off to the Prussians. They're stymied without me."

Tulla jiggled the wooden covers: "I thought you were joining the Navy."

Harry offered Tulla a cigarette: "Nothing doing out there any more."

Tulla put the Juno away in the pigeonhole where the trip book was kept: "Watch out or they'll putcha in the infantry. It's no skin off their ass."

This dialogue drunk with parting was beheaded by Harry: "Maybe so. It's all one to me. So long as I get out of this lousy burg."

The particular car with trailer lurched down the avenue. Cars whished by in the opposite direction. Neither of them could look out, because all the windows in the trailer were blinded with blackout paint. So they had to keep looking at each other; but no one will ever find out how Tulla saw her cousin Harry when he stared at her as if to store up a supply: Tulla Tulla Tulla! The pimples on her forehead had dried out. But she had a fresh permanent, paid for with her own earnings. If you're not pretty, you've got to fix yourself up. But still and for the last time the smell of bone glue, carpenter's glue, rode back and forth with her between Heeresanger und Weidesgasse. The four Red Cross nurses inside the car were all talking at once in an undertone. Harry had his mouth full of artistically turned phrases. But no delicate phrase wanted to start out. After "Four Seasons," he put himself to the torture: "How's your father?" But Tulla replied with a shrug of the shoulders and the usual counter-question: "How's yours?"

At this Harry too had only a shrug of the shoulders to spare, although his father wasn't very well. Swollen feet had deterred the carpenter from taking his son to the station; and Harry's mother never went out without Harry's father.

Even so, a member of the family witnessed Harry's departure: the streetcar uniform was becoming to his cousin. The uniform skiff clung tilting to permanent waves. Shortly before "Oliva Gate," she removed two empty ticket pads from her ticket box: "D'you wanna ticket pad?"

The parting gift! Harry received two cardboard covers to which metal clasps fastened a finger-thick wad of ticket stubs. Instantly his fingers became childlike and made the thin paper purr. Tulla gave a bleating and almost good-natured laugh. But then she remembered something that had been forgotten amid protracted leavetaking: Her cousin hadn't paid his fare. Harry was playing with the empty ticket pads and hadn't provided himself with a valid ticket. Tulla pointed at the pads and at Harry's smugly playing fingers: "You can keep 'em, but you gotta pay your fare all the same. One to the station with baggage."

After Harry had let his purse slip back into his back pocket, he found a colorless slit in the blackout paint on the platform window; somebody had scratched with his fingernail in order that Harry might stop staring at his cousin and capture in one eye the panorama of the approaching city. Moonlight for his express benefit. He counted the towers. Not a one was missing. All grew toward him. What a silhouette! Brick Gothic strained his eye till it moistened: tears? Only one. For already Tulla was calling out his stop: "Main Station!" -- and Harry let two empty ticket pads slip into his pocket.

When he clutched his cardboard suitcase by the handle, Tulla held out a little hand; a red rubber finger was supposed to protect the thumb and make it reliable at counting change. Tulla's other hand waited by the bellpull: "Take care of yourself, don't let 'em shoot off your nose, hear."

Tulla's cousin nodded obediently again and again, even after Tulla had rung for the car to push off and he for her and she for him -- he on the sidewalk outside the station, she on the departing Number 5 -- were growing smaller and smaller.

No wonder that when Harry Liebenau was sitting on his suitcase in the express, playing with empty ticket pads from Danzig to Berlin, he had a Koshnavian ditty in his ears, which ran to the rhythm of the joints in the tracks: "Duller Duller, Tulla. Dul Did Dul, Tulla. Tulla, Tulla, Dul."

There was once a ditty;

it was about love, it was short, easy to remember, and so strikingly rhythmical that armored infantryman Harry Liebenau, who had gone off with two purring ticket pads to learn what fear was, had it between his teeth, kneeling standing lying, in his sleep, over his pea soup, while cleaning his rifle, crawling hopping snoozing, under his gas mask, while tossing real hand grenades, when falling in for guard duty, weeping sweating miserable, on foot blisters, under his steel helmet, on his ass in the latrine, while taking the oath to the flag in Fallingbostel, kneeling without support, looking for the bead in the notch, in other words, shooting swearing shitting, and similarly while shining his shoes and lining up for coffee: so persistent and universally appropriate was the ditty. For when he hammered a nail in his locker to hang up a framed photograph -- Führer with black shepherd -- hammerhead and nailhead spoke up: Dul Dul, Tulla. When for the first time bayonets were fixed in three steps, his three steps were called: Tulla Tulla Dul! When he had to mount guard at night behind Meat Depot 2, and drowsiness hit him behind the knees with the flat of its hand, he awakened himself rhythmically: Duller Duller, Tulla! He worked the universally appropriate Tulla text into every marching song, regardless of whether it featured Erika, Rosemarie, or Anushka, or dark-brown hazelnuts. When he picked his lice and night after night -- until the company was deloused in Münster -- searched the seams of his drawers and undershirts with lice-cracking fingernails, he didn't crush two and thirty lice, but subjugated Tulla two and thirty times. Even when he had a chance to stay out until reveille, to insert his member for the first time and very briefly into an honest-to-goodness girl, he didn't pick an Air Force auxiliary or a nurse, but screwed, in Lüneburg's autumnal park, a Lüneburg streetcar conductress; her name was Ortrud but he, meanwhile and during, called her Tulla Tulla Tulla! Which appealed to her only moderately.

And all this -- Tulla song, oath to the flag, lice and Lüneburg -- was recorded in love letters, three a week, to Tulla. History was made in January February March; but he searches for timeless words for Tulla. Between Lake Balaton and the Danube the Fourth Cavalry Brigade is fighting off counterattacks; but he describes the bucolic beauty of Lüneburg Heath to his cousin. The relief offensive never reached Budapest but comes to a standstill near Pressburg; he, indefatigably, compares Lüneburg Heath with Tuchler Heath. Slight gains in the Bastogne sector; and he sends Tulla a little bag of juniper berries done up with violet greetings. South of Bologna the 362nd Infantry Division parries armored attacks by pulling back the main line of battle; but he writes a poem -- for whom, I wonder? -- in which heather, at the beginning of January, is still in bloom: purple, purple! From dawn to dusk a thousand American bombers attack targets in the Paderborn, Bielefeld, Koblenz, Mannheim area; he, unmoved, reads L
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ns, who molds his epistolary style and lends a purple coloration to the Tulla poem he has begun. Full-scale offensive near Baranov; he, without looking up, paints the one word, not blue, not red, with his fountain pen. The Tarnow bridgehead is evacuated -- breakthrough to the Inster; but armored infantryman Harry Liebenau, who has completed his training, is looking for a rhyme to conjure up Tulla. Thrusts toward Leslau by way of Kutno -- break through at Hohensalza; but the armored infantryman of Munster-North Company has still found no suitable rhyme for his cousin. Enemy armored spearheads in Gumbinnen and across the Rominte. At this point armored infantryman Harry Liebenau, with marching orders and marching rations but without the vital word, is set in motion in the direction of Kattowitz, where he is supposed to make contact with the 18th Armored Division, which is being transferred just then from the northern Danube front to upper Silesia. Gleiwitz and Oppeln fall -- he never gets to Kattowitz, for new marching orders, accompanied by extra rations project armored infantryman Harry Liebenau to Vienna, where he has a chance of finding the 11th Air Force Divison that has retreated from the southeast, and perhaps also the cover that fits the pot named Tulla. The main line of battle is now twelve miles east of Königsberg; in Vienna armored infantryman Harry Liebenau climbs to the top of St. Stephen's and searches under the half-clouded sky. For what? Enemy armored spearheads reach the Oder and establish a bridgehead near Steinau; Harry sends rhymeless picture postcards and fails to find the headquarters of the Air Force division that had been promised him. The battle of the Ardennes is over. Budapest is still holding out. In Italy not much fighting. Colonel-General Schorner takes over Center Sector. The barrier at Lotzen is forced. Near Glogau successful defensive action. Enemy spearheads in Prussian Holland. Geography! Bielitz -- Pless -- Ratibor. Who knows where Zielenzig is located? For it is to Zielenzig, northwest of Küstrin, that new marching orders are supposed to propel armored infantryman Harry Liebenau, who has just been issued fresh rations; but he only gets as far as Pirna; there he is rounded up and attached to a nameless replacement battalion, which is expected to wait in an evacuated school building until the 21st Armored Division has been transferred from Küstrin to the area north of Breslau. Combat reserves. Harry finds a dictionary in the basement of the school, but refuses to rhyme such names as Sulla and Abdullah, which yield no meaning, with Tulla. The promised armored division fails to materialize. But Budapest falls. Glogau is cut off. The combat reserve, including armored infantryman Harry Liebenau, is set in motion in no particular direction. And every day, punctually, there is a smidgin of four-fruit jam, a third of a loaf of army bread, the sixteenth part of a two-pound can of fat pork, and three cigarettes. Orders from Sch
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rner's Hq.: new combat unit set up. Spring breaks through. Buds burst between Troppau and Leobschütz. Near Schwarzwasser four spring poems sprout. In Sagan, shortly before crossing the Bober north of the city, Harry Liebenau makes the acquaintance of a Silesian girl; her name is Ulla and she darns two pairs of his socks. In Lauban he is swallowed up by the 25th Armored Infantry Division, which has been pulled back from the Western front and sent to Silesia.

Now at last he knows where he belongs. No more marching orders sending him to units that cannot be found. Pondering and looking for rhymes, he sits huddled with five other armored infantrymen on a self-propelled gun that is being moved back and forth between Lauban and Sagan, but always behind the lines. He receives no mail. But that doesn't prevent him from writing to his cousin Tulla, who, when she is not cut off in Danzig-Langfuhr with elements of the Vistula Army Group, goes on working as a streetcar conductress; for the streetcar runs till the bitter end.