Dog Years (8 page)

SEVENTEENTH MORNING SHIFT

The actor is protesting. His waning flu, so he says, has not prevented him from carefully studying Brauxel's work schedule, which has been sent to both coauthors. It doesn't suit him that a monument should be erected to miller Matern in the course of this morning shift. Such a monument, he feels, is his affair. Brauksel, who fears for the cohesion of his literary consortium, has abandoned the sweeping portrait he was planning, but must insist on mirroring that aspect of the miller which had already cast its reflected splendor on Amsel's diary.

Though the eight-year-old was especially given to combing the battlefields of Prussia for ownerless uniforms, there was nonetheless a model, the above-mentioned miller Matern, who was portrayed directly, without Prussian trappings, but with his flour sack over his shoulder.

The result was a lopsided scarecrow, because the miller was an extremely lopsided man. Because he carried his sacks of grain and flour over his right shoulder, this shoulder was a hand's breadth broader, so that all who looked upon miller Matern full face had to fight down a strong temptation to seize the miller's head in both hands and straighten it out. Since neither his work smock nor his Sunday clothes were made to order, every one of his jackets, smocks, or overcoats looked twisted, formed wrinkles around the neck, was too short in the right sleeve, and had permanently burst seams. He was always screwing up his right eye. On the same side of his face, even when there was no hundred weight sack bent over his right shoulder, something tugged the corner of his mouth upward. His nose went along with the movement. Finally -- and this is why the present portrait is being drawn -- his right ear, for many years subjected to the lateral pressure of thousands of hundredweight, lay creased and flattened against his head, while contrastingly his left ear protruded mightily in pursuit of its natural bent. Seen in front view, the miller had only one ear; but the ear that was missing or discernible only in relief was the more significant of the two.

Though not in a class with poor Lorchen, the miller was not exactly made for this world. The gossip of several villages had it that Grandma Matern had corrected him too freely with her cooking spoon in his childhood. The worst of the Matern family's oddities were traced back to Materna, the medieval robber and incendiary, who had ended up in the Stockturm with his companion in crime. The Mennonites, both rough and refined, exchanged winks, and Simon Beister, the rough, pocketless Mennonite, maintained that Catholicism had done the Materns no good, that there was certainly some Catholic deviltry in the way the brat, who was always prowling around with the tubby Amsel kid from over yonder, gnashed his teeth; and just take a look at their dog, eternal damnation could be no blacker. Yet miller Matern was of rather a gentle disposition and -- like poor Lorchen -- he had few if any enemies in the villages round about, though there were many who made fun of him.

The miller's ear -- and when mention is made of the miller's ear, it is always the right flattened one, pressed down by flour sacks, that is meant -- the miller's ear, then, is worth mentioning for two reasons: first, because in a scarecrow, the blue print of which found its way into his diary, Amsel daringly omitted it, and secondly, because this miller's ear, though deaf to all ordinary sounds, such as coughing talking preaching, the singing of hymns, the tinkling of cowbells, the forging of horseshoes, the barking of dogs, the singing of birds, the chirping of crickets, was endowed with the most sensitive understanding for everything down to the slightest whispers, murmurs, and hush-hush revelations that transpired inside a sack of grain or flour. Whether beardless wheat or the bearded variety that was seldom grown on the Island; whether threshed from tough or brittle ears; whether in tended for brewing, for baking, for the making of semolina, noodles, or starch, whether vitreous, semivitreous, or mealy, the miller's otherwise deaf ear had the faculty of distinguishing exactly what percentage of vetch seed and mildewed or even sprouting grain it contained. It could also identify a sample, sight unseen, as pale-yellow Frankenstein, varicolored Kujave, reddish Probstein, red flower wheat, which grown in loamy soil yields a good brewer's mash, English club wheat, or as either of two varieties that were grown experimentally on the Island, Urtoba, a hard Siberian winter variety, and Schliephacke's white wheat, No. 5.

The miller's otherwise deaf ear was even more clairaudient when it came to flour. While as an earwitness he was able to tell how many wheat beetles, including pupas and doodle bugs, how many ichneumon flies and flour beetles resided in it, he was able with his ear to the sack to indicate the exact number of mealworms --
Tenebrio molitor
-- present in a hundredweight of wheat flour. Moreover -- and this is in deed astonishing -- he knew, thanks to his flat ear, either instantly or after some minutes of clairaudient listening, how many dead mealworms the living mealworms in a sack had to deplore, because as he slyly revealed with puckered right eye, right corner of his mouth upward and nose acceding to the movement, the sound made by living worms indicated the number of their dead.

The Babylonians, Herodotus tells us, grew wheat with grains the size of peas; but who can lend credence to Herodotus?

Anton Matern the miller made detailed statements about grain and flour; was miller Matern believed?

In Lührmann's taproom, between Folchert's farm and Lührmann's dairy, he was put to the test. The taproom was an ideal testing ground and past tests had left visible traces. From the bar, first of all, there protruded an inch length of nail, allegedly belonging to a two-inch nail, which as a test Erich Block, master brewer in Tiegenhof, had driven into the plank with a single blow of his bare fist; secondly, the whitewashed ceiling of the taproom offered evidence of a different kind: ten or a dozen foot or rather shoe prints, suggesting that someone of succubine origin had been strolling about on the ceiling with his head down. Actually they bear witness to a perfectly human display of strength. When a certain fire insurance salesman expressed doubts about Karweise's muscular prowess, Karweise tossed him up at the ceiling head down and the soles of his shoes heavenward. This he did several times, always catching him in mid-air, careful that the man should incur no harm but live to corroborate the material evidence of an Island test of strength, namely, the prints of his salesman's shoes on a taproom ceiling.

When Anton Matern was put to the test, the atmosphere wasn't athletic -- Matern seemed frail -- but more on the spooky and mysterious side. It is Sunday. Door and windows closed. The summer is shut out. Four strips of fly paper, vociferous and variously pitched, are the only reminders of the season. In the bar the inch length of nail, shoe prints on gray, once whitewashed ceiling. The usual photographs of shooting matches and the usual prizes awarded at shooting matches. On the shelf only a few green glass bottles, contents distilled from grain. Competing smells are tobacco, shoe polish, and whey, but alcoholic breath, which had got off to a good start on Saturday, wins by a hair's breadth. They talk chew bet. Karweise, Momber, and young Folchert put up a keg of Neuteich bock beer. Silent over a little glass of goldwater -- which only city people drink in these parts -- miller Matern puts up an identical keg. From behind the bar Lührmann passes the twenty-pound sack and stands in readiness with the flour sieve for the control test. First a moment's contemplation as the sack rests on the hands of the utterly lopsided miller, then he beds the cushion against his flat ear. At once, because no one is chewing, talking broad brogue, or hardly even breathing alcohol fumes any longer, the flypaper be comes more audible: what is the song of dying swans in the theater beside the death song of iridescent flies in the lowlands!

Lührmann has slipped a slate with pencil attached under the miller's free hand. It lists, for inventory is to be taken: 1. mealworms; 2. pupas; 3. beetles. The miller is still listening. The flies drone. Whey and shoe polish predominate, because hardly anyone dares to expel any alcohol fumes. And now the awkward hand, for the miller's right hand is lightly supporting the sack, creeps across the bar to the slate: after mealworms the pencil grates a stiff 17. Twenty-two pupas it squeaks. These the sponge obliterates and as the wet spot dries, it becomes increasingly clear that there are only nineteen pupas. Eight living beetles are alleged to reside in the sack. And as an extra feature, for the rules of the bet do not demand it, the miller announces on strident slate: "Five dead beetles in the sack." Immediately thereafter alcohol fumes recapture the lead over shoe polish and whey. Someone has turned down the swan song of the flies. The spotlight is on Lührmann with his flour sieve.

To make a long story short, the predicted debit of parchment-hard worms, of soft pupae, horny only at the tip, and of grown beetles, otherwise known as flour beetles, was perfectly accurate. Only one dead beetle of the five dead flour beetles announced was missing; perhaps or undoubtedly its desiccated fragments had passed through the flour sieve.

And so miller Anton Matern received his keg of Neuteich bock beer and gave all those present, especially Karweise, Momber, and young Folchert who had staked the beer, a prophecy as a consolation and premium to take home with them. While setting the keg on his shoulder where the interrogated sack of flour had lain only a moment before, the miller with the flat ear told them, quite incidentally, as though relaying gossip he had just heard, how several mealworms -- he couldn't say exactly how many, because they had all been talking at once -- had been discussing the prospects for the next harvest -- he had heard them distinctly with his flat ear while the twenty pounds had been lying beside it. Well, in the opinion of the mealworms, it would be advisable to mow the Epp variety a week before Seven Brothers and the Kujave wheat as well as Schliephacke's No. 5 two days after Seven Brothers.

Years before Amsel fashioned a scarecrow after the clairaudient miller, the miller had become part of a familiar formula of greeting: "Good morning to you, friend. I wonder what Matern's little mealworm is telling him today."

Skeptical or not, many of the peasants questioned the miller, meaning that he should question a well-filled sack capable of providing information as to when winter wheat or summer wheat should be sowed and knowing pretty well when the wheat should be mowed and when the sheaves should be brought in. And even before he was constructed as a scarecrow and put down in Amsel's diary as a preliminary sketch, the miller issued other predictions, more on the gloomy than on the bright side, which have always been borne out, even to this day when the actor in Düsseldorf has ideas about making the miller into a monument.

For he saw not only the threat of poisonous ergot in the grain, hailstorms warranting insurance benefits, and multitudes of field mice in the near future, but predicted to the day when prices would take a dive on the Berlin or Budapest grain exchange, bank crashes in the early thirties, Hindenburg's death, the devaluation of the Danzig gulden in May 1935. And the mealworms also gave him advance notice of the day when the guns would begin to speak.

It goes without saying that thanks to his flat ear, he also knew more about the dog Senta, mother of Harras, than the dog, who stood black beside the white miller, revealed to the naked eye.

But after the war when the miller with his "A" refugee certificate was living between Krefeld and Düren, he was still able, with the help of a twenty-pound sack that had lived through the flight from the east and the turmoil of war, to prophesy how in the future. . . But as the authors' consortium has decided, not Brauxel but our friend the actor will be privileged to tell about that.

EIGHTEENTH MORNING SHIFT

Crows in the snow -- what a subject! The snow puts caps on the rusty scoops and windlasses of potash-mining days. Brauxel is going to have that snow burnt, for who can bear such a sight: crows in the snow, which, if you keep looking, turn into nuns in the snow: the snow must go. Before the night shift pile into the changehouse, let them put in an hour of paid overtime; or else Brauxel will have the new models, which have already been tested -- Perkunos, Pikollos, Potrimpos -- brought up from the twenty-five-hundred-foot floor and put to work on the snow, then those crows and nuns will see what becomes of them and the snow won't have to be burnt. Unsprinkled, it will lie outside Brauxel's window and lend itself to description: And the Vistula flows, and the mill mills, and the narrow-gauge railway runs, and the butter melts, and the milk thickens -- put a little sugar on top -- and the spoon stands upright, and the ferry comes over, and the sun is gone, and the sun returns, and the sea sand passes, and the sea licks sand. . . Barefoot run the children and find blueberries and look for amber and step on thistles and dig up mice and climb barefoot into hollow willows. . . But he who looks for amber, steps on the thistle, jumps into the willow, and digs up the mouse will find in the dike a dead and mummified maiden: Tulla Tulla, that's Duke Swantopolk's little daughter Tulla, who was always shoveling about for mice in the sand, bit into things with two incisor teeth, and never wore shoes or stockings: Barefoot run the children, and the willows shake themselves, and the Vistula flows for evermore, and the sun now gone now back again, and the ferry comes or goes or lies groaning in its berth, while the milk thickens until the spoon stands upright, and slowly runs the narrow-gauge train, ringing fast on the bend. And the mill creaks with the wind at a rate of twenty-five feet a second. And the miller hears what the mealworm says. And teeth grind when Walter Matern grinds his teeth from left to right. Same with his grandmother: all around the garden she chases poor Lorchen. Black and big with young, Senta crashes through a trellis of broad beans. For terrible she approaches, raising an angular arm: and in the hand on the arm the wooden spoon casts its shadow on curly-headed Lorchen and grows bigger and bigger, fatter and fatter, more and more. . . Also Eduard Amsel, who is always watching and forgets nothing because his diary stores it all up, has raised his prices some; now he is asking one gulden twenty for a single scarecrow.