Dog Years (70 page)

Nothing of the kind. Cases of illness are reported. The parental image is too much for a certain number of girls and boys: They leave home: emigration, Foreign Legion, the usual. Some return. In Hamburg four suicides are registered in rapid succession, in Hanover two, in Cassel six, causing Brauxel & Co. to suspend delivery of the so-called miracle glasses shortly before Easter.

The past flares up for a few months and then blacks out -- forever, it is to be hoped. Only Matern, who is here being spoken of in Materniads, sees the daylight in spite of inner resistance; for when at the Düsseldorf Christmas fair he buys his daughter Walli a pair of these miracle glasses, the child puts them right on: Walli had just been laughing and nibbling Christmas cookies, now she sees Matern through the glasses, drops cookies and gold-beribboned package, starts to scream, and screaming runs away.

Matern with the dog after her. But both of them -- for Walli sees the dog too accurately and terribly -- become more and more terrifying in the eyes of the child, whom they overtake shortly before the Rating Gate. Passers-by feel sorry for the screaming little girl and demand that Matern identify himself as her father. Complications! Words begin to fall: "He was trying to rape the child, that's a sure thing. Just look at him. It's written over his face! Swine!" Then, at last, a policeman breaks up the crowd. Identities are established. Witnesses claim to have seen or not seen this and that. Walli is screaming and still has the glasses on. A patrol car deposits Matern, Pluto, and the horrified child at the Sawatzki residence. But even in the familiar apartment, surrounded by all her expensive toys, Walli doesn't feel at home, for she still has the glasses on: Walli sees not only Matern and the dog, but also Jochen and Inge Sawatzki with new eyes, accurately and terribly. Her screaming drives Pluto under the table, turns the grownups to stone, and fills the nursery. Intermittent words, garbled by screams yet charged with meaning. Walli stammers something about piles of snow and blood dripping in the snow, about teeth, about the poor nice fat man, whom Papa and Uncle Walter and other men, who all look awful, are hitting, hitting the whole time with their fists, most of all Uncle Walter. The nice fat man; he's not standing up any more, he's lying in the snow, because Uncle Walter. . . "Don't! It's not right. Hitting and being cruel to people flowers animals. It's forbidden. People who do that don't go to heaven. God sees it all. Stop stop. . ."

Only when Inge removes the glasses from the face of the delirious child does she calm down a little; but hours later, in her little bed and surrounded by all her dolls, she is still sobbing. Temperature is taken, she has a fever. A doctor is called. He speaks neither of incipient flu nor of the usual children's ailments, but thinks the crisis must have been brought on by a shock, something impossible to put your finger on, she needs rest, the adults should keep away from her. If she doesn't get better, she'll have to be taken to a hospital.

Which is just what happens. For two days the fever refuses to come down and indefatigably, without fear of repetitiousness, spawns the wintry scene: snow lies, blood drips, fists talk, fat man falls, tumbles time and again, into what? into the snow, because Uncle Walter and Papa too, into the snow and so many teeth are spat out, one two five thirteen thirty-two! -- No one can bear to count them any more. And so Walli with her two favorite dolls is taken to St. Mary's Hospital. The men, Sawatzki and Matern, don't sit beside the intolerably empty child's bed; they sit in the kitchen, drinking out of water glasses until they slide off their chairs. Jochen has retained his preference for the kitchen-livingroom environment: in the daytime he is a businessman, correctly clad in well-nigh wrinkleless material; in the evening he shuffles in bedroom slippers from icebox to stove and plucks at suspenders. In the daytime he speaks his brisk business German, to which vestiges of military jargon lend pithiness and time-saving succinctness: "Let's cut the goldbricking, let's wade in!" So, in his time, spoke Guderian, the military genius, and today Sawatzki takes a leaf from his book when he decides to flood the market with a certain single-breasted number; but toward evening, in kitchen and slippers, he eats crisp potato pancakes and speaks at great length and in broad dialect of the good old days and what it was like back home in the north. Matern too learns to appreciate the cozy warmth of the kitchen-livingroom. Tearfully two old buddies clap each other on the back. Emotion and unadulterated schnapps bring tears to their eyes. They push halfhearted feelings of guilt back and forth on the kitchen table, and quarrel only about dates. Matern says something or other happened in June '37. Sawatzki disagrees: "That was exackly in September. Who'da suspected the end was gonna be so rotten." But both are convinced that even then they were against it: "When you come right down to it, our sturm was kind of a hideout for the inner emikrashun. Don'tcha remember the way we slung the philosophy at the bar? Willy Eggers was there, the Dulleck brothers, naturally Franzchen Wollschlager, Bublitz, Hoppe, and Otto Warnke. And you went on gassing about Being, until we wuz all nuts. Shoilem boil 'em! And now? Now what? Now a guy's own kid comes home saying: murderer murderer!"

After one of these laments, the kitchen-livingroom environ ment is as still as a mouse for a minute or two, except perhaps for the coffee water singing its peace-on-earthly song, until Sawatzki starts up again: "And all in all, what do you think, Walter, did we deserve that? Did we? No, we didn't We don't."

When Walli was discharged from the hospital exactly four weeks later, the so-called miracle glasses had vanished from the apartment. Neither did Inge Sawatzki throw them in the garbage pail nor did Jochen and Walter demolish them in the kitchen-livingroom; maybe the dog chewed up, swallowed, digested them. But Walli asks no questions about her missing toy. Quietly the little girl sits at her desk and has to catch up, because she has missed a lot of school. Grown solemn and a little peaked, she can already multiply and add. All hope that the child has forgotten why she has grown so solemn and peaked, why she isn't plump and bumptious any more. Because that's what Walli was in the hospital for: good care to make Walli forget. Little by little this becomes the first principle of all concerned: Forget! Maxims are embroidered on handkerchiefs, pillow slips, and hat linings: Learn to forget. Forgetfulness is natural. The mind should be occupied by pleasant memories and not by nasty tormenting thoughts. It's hard to remember constructively. Ergo, people need some thing they can believe in: God, for instance; or if you can't manage that, there's beauty, progress, the good in man, etcetera. "We, here in the West, believe implicitly in freedom, always have."

In any event, activity! And what activity is more productive than forgetting? Matern buys a large eraser, stations himself on a kitchen chair, and begins to erase the names, crossed off and not crossed off, from his heart, spleen, and kidneys. As for Pluto, that four-legged hunk of past, feeble with age though still running around, he'd be glad to sell him, send him to a rest home for dogs, erase him; but who'd buy an elderly hound? Moreover, mother and child are opposed: not for any price would Inge Sawatzki. She's got used to the dog in the meantime. Walli cries and promises to get sick again if the dog. So, black and ineluctable, he stays. And the names, too, offer stubborn resistance to Matern's big eraser. For instance: while he effaces one and blows eraser crumbs from his spleen, he stumbles, in the course of his newspaper reading, across another, who writes articles about the theater. That's what comes of doing something else while erasing. Every article has an author. This one is a man of the theater, who has pondered his way to wisdom. He says and writes: "Just as man needs the theater, so, and in equal measure, the theater needs man." But a few lines later he deplores: "Today man finds himself in a state of increasing alienation." Yet this he knows for certain: "The history of mankind has its most exemplary parallel in the history of the theater." But if, as he anticipates: "The three-dimensional theater should once again flatten into a picture-frame stage," this man, who signs himself R.Z., can only second the great Lessing in crying out: "To what end have we toiled so bitterly to achieve dramatic form?" His article embodies at once a warning and an exhortation: "The theater does not stop when man ceases to be man; it is the other way around: Close the theaters and man will cease to be man!" In general Herr Rudolf Zander -- Matern remembers him from his theatrical days -- is hipped on the word "man." For example: "The man of coming decades." Or: "All this calls for a stormy reckoning with the problem of man." Or in a polemical vein: "Dehumanized theater? Never!" Be that as it may, R.Z., or Dr. Rolf Zander -- onetime director of the Stadttheater in Schwerin -- has forsaken the "theatrical mission"; of late he has been with the West German radio in an advisory function, an activity which does not deter him from writing articles for the Saturday supplements of several important newspapers: "It is not enough to show man the catastrophe; violent emotion remains an end in itself unless it culminates in exegesis, unless the purifying effect of catharsis tears the wreath from nihilism and lends meaning to chaos."

Salvation twinkles humanely between the lines. There's a man for Matern to turn to, all the more so as he knows him well from former days and carries the name of Rolf Zander around with him, incised somewhere: either in the heart or in the spleen or in kidney script; no eraser, not even the newly purchased one, can efface it.

Everybody has an address. R. Zander is no exception. He works in the beautiful new Radio Building in Cologne; and he resides -- so whispers the phone book -- in Cologne-Mariendorf.

With or without dog? To judge -- or to ask advice in a situation of human-chaotic distress? With revenge in my baggage or with a little human question? Both. Matern cannot desist from. He is looking simultaneously for work and revenge. Carnage and entreaty slumber in the same fist. With identically black dog he calls on friend and enemy. Not that he makes a beeline to the door, saying: "Here I am, Zander, for better or for worse!"; several times he creeps -- Don't turn around -- through the old park, determined to strike, if not the former theater director, then at least the trees in his park.

One stormy evening in August -- all this is perfectly true: it was August, it was hot, and a storm came up -- he vaults the wall with dog and lands on the soft ground of Zander's park. He bears neither ax nor saw but a white powder. Oh, Matern has a hand with poison! He is experienced: exactly three hours later Harras was dead. No sprinkling of nux vomica; plain rat poison. This time it's plant poison. From tree to tree he scurries with dog shadow. A dance of nature worship. Minuet and gavotte determine the sequence of steps in the dusky, goblin-inhabited, ninefold green, nymphean lovers' maze of Zander's park. A figure bows low, a hand is held out: on dragon-thick roots he strews his powder without muttering spells. However, Matern grinds as usual:

Don't turn around:

the Grinder's around.

But how can the trees be expected to! They don't even feel like rustling, for not a breeze is stirring under the sultry sky. No magpie warns. No jay denounces. Moss-covered baroque putti are in no mood for giggling. Even Diana, with hunting dog at hastening heel, is disinclined to turn around and bend her unfailing bow; out of a dusky thinking-grotto Herr Zander in person addresses the winged powder strewer: "Gracious! Do my eyes deceive me? Matern, is it you? Goodness, and what amiable occupation are you engaged in? Putting chemical fertilizer on the roots of my giants? Aren't they big enough for you? But you've always been drawn to the colossal! Chemical fertilizer! How absurd and yet delightful. But you haven't taken the weather into account. Any minute a storm is going to pour down on us mortals and the park. The very first shower will wash away the traces of your horticultural enthusiasm. But let us not tarry! The first gusts of wind herald the storm. Undoubtedly the first drops have been released on high, they are coming, coming. . . May I invite you, as well as that magnificent specimen of a dog, to my modest home!"

A light tug at a reluctant arm, guidance in the direction of shelter. The last few steps, now over gravel paths, are rapid: only on the veranda is the conversation resumed: "Gracious, what a small world it is! How often I've wondered: what can Matern be doing? That child of nature, that -- begging your pardon -- ecstatic drinker? -- And here you are, standing in my library, feeling my furniture, looking around, and your dog as well, both casting shadows in the lamplight, a warm human presence. Welcome!"

Herr Zander's housekeeper hastens to brew strong manly tea. Brandy is in readiness. Environment, undescribed, gains the upper hand again. While outside, as Herr Zander would put it, the storm hits the stage, a useful conversation about the theater runs its course in dry and comfortable armchairs. "My dear friend -- you've done well to come right out with your grievances -- but you're mistaken and you do me a grave injustice. Admitted: it was I, I couldn't help myself, who canceled your contract with the Schwerin Stadttheater. However, the reason why all this was done to you -- and had to be -- was not, as you now suppose, political, but -- how shall I put it? -- purely and simply alcoholic. It just wouldn't do. Yes, yes, we all of us enjoyed a glass or two. But you went to extremes. Quite frankly: even today in our more or less democratic Federal Republic, any responsible director or stage manager would have to do the same: you came to rehearsals drunk, you came to performances drunk and without your lines. Yes, of course I remember your ringing speeches. No objection, not the slightest even then, to their content or expressiveness, but plenty, then and today as well, to the place and time of your resounding declamations. Nevertheless, my hat off to you: You pronounced, a hundred times, what the rest of us may have thought but didn't dare to state in public. I admired your magnificent courage, I still do; the freedom with which you spoke of certain very delicate matters would have been highly effective if not for your advanced alcoholic state. As it was, denunciations, mostly from stagehands, piled up on my desk. I stalled, smoothed things over, but in the end I had to take action, not least in order to protect you, yes, protect you; for if I hadn't, by a simple disciplinary measure, given you an opportunity to leave Schwerin, which had gradually got to be a very hot place for you, Lord, I don't like to think what would have happened to you. You know, Matern, when those people struck, it wasn't with kid gloves. The individual counted for nothing." Outside, the stage thunder doesn't miss a cue. Inside, Matern ponders what might have become of him but for the philanthropic Dr. Zander. Outside, wholesome rain washes away the plant-killing poison from the roots of age-old all-knowing trees. Inside, Pluto sighs out of dog dreams. Outside, Shakespearean rain functions like clockwork. Naturally a clock is ticking in the dryness too, no, three costly timepieces are ticking at once, variously pitched, into the silence between former theater director and former
jeune premier.
Peals of thunder do not traverse the footlights. Moistening of lips. Massaging of scalps. Inside, illuminated by outside lightning: Rolf Zander, an experienced host, gets back into the conversation: "Good Lord, Matern! Do you remember how you introduced yourself to us? Franz Moor, Act Five, Scene 1: Slavish wisdom, slavish fears! You were magnificent. No no, I mean it, shattering! An Iffland couldn't have wrung such horror from his entrails. A discovery, fresh from Danzig, which has given us full many an outstanding mime -- think of S
ö
hnker, or even, if you wish, of Dieter Borsche. Fresh and promising, you came to us. If I'm not mistaken, the excellent Gustav Nord, so lovable both as a man and as a colleague, who was to perish so wretchedly at the end of the war, was your teacher. Wait: You attracted my attention in a beastly play by Billinger. Didn't you play the son of Donata Opferkuch? Right, and La Bargheer saved the show with her Donata. I could still die laughing when I think of Fritzchen Blumhoff playing the Prince of Arcadia, in '36-'37 I think it was, with his excruciating Saxon accent. Then there was Carl Kliever, the indestructible Dora Ottenburg. Heinz Brede, whom I remember in a very decent performance of
Nathan the Wise,
and of course your teacher: what a versatile Polonius! A fine Shakespearean actor and magnificent at Shaw too. Mighty courageous of your Stadt-theater to put on
Saint Joan
as late as '38. I can only repeat: if it weren't for the provinces! What was it you people called the building? That's it. The Coffee Mill! I hear it was totally destroyed. Hasn't been rebuilt. But I'm told they're planning to on the same site and in the same neoclassical style. The Poles are amazing, always were. The heart of the Old City, too. I hear that Langgasse, Frauengasse, and Jopengasse have already been laid out. Why, I'm from the same neck of the woods: Memel. Am I thinking of? No, my friend, never marry the same. The spirit that presides over our West German theaters really doesn't. Theatrical mission? Theater as a medium of mass communication? The stage as a mere generic concept? And man as the measure of all things? Where everything becomes a purpose in itself and nothing culminates in exegesis? What of purification? Catharsis? -- Gone, my dear Matern -- or perhaps not, for my work on the radio satisfies me completely and leaves me time for short essays that have wanted to be written for years. And what about you? Enthusiasm gone? Act Five, Scene 1: Slavish wisdom, slavish fears!"