Dog Years (42 page)

"Of course not. Somebody had to be on the lookout."

"Imagine, I dreamt my instep had improved and in the end I was able to do the thirty-two
fouett
é
s:
and Herr Haseloff laughed."

"With his gold teeth?"

"Every single one of them, while I turned and turned."

Without difficulty, amid whispering and interpretation of dreams, we made our way to the first basement and then up some more steps. The red position lights showed the path between piled ice blocks to the exit, the rectangular light. But Jenny held me back. We mustn't let anybody see us, because "If they catch us," said Jenny, "they'll never let us in again."

When the glaring rectangle disclosed no more men in leather aprons, when the hefty Belgian horses pulled up and the ice truck rolled away on rubber tires, we dashed through the door before the next ice truck drove up. The sun slanted down from chestnut trees. We slipped along tar-paper walls. Everything smelled different from the day before. My legs were in the nettles again. On Kleinhammerweg, while Jenny was saying her irregular English verbs, I began to dread the carpenter's hand waiting for me at home.

You know,

that night we spent in the icehouse had several consequences: I got a licking; the police, notified by Dr. Brumes, asked questions; we had grown older and left Aktien Pond with its smells to the twelve-year-olds. I got rid of my collection of bottle washers the next time the junkman came around. Whether Jenny stopped wearing her bottle-washer necklace, I don't know: We elaborately went out of each other's way. Jenny blushed when we couldn't avoid each other on Elsenstrasse; and I went red in the face every time Tulla met me on the stairs or in our kitchen, when she came in for salt or to borrow a saucepan.

Is your memory any good?

There are at least five months, with Christmas in the middle, that I can't piece together. During this period, in the gap between the French campaign and the Balkan campaign, more and more of our workmen were drafted and later, when the war had started in the East, replaced by Ukrainian helpers and one French carpenter. Wischnewski fell in Greece; Arthur Kuleise, another of our carpenters, fell right in the beginning at Lemberg; and then my cousin, Tulla's brother Alexander Pokriefke, fell -- that is, he didn't fall, he was drowned in a submarine: the battle of the Atlantic had started. Not only the Pokriefkes, but the master carpenter and his wife as well, each wore crape. I too wore crape and was very proud of it. Whenever anyone asked me why I was in mourning, I said: "A cousin of mine, who was very close to me, was on duty in the Caribbean Sea in a submarine and he didn't come home." Actually I hardly knew Alexander Pokriefke, and the Caribbean Sea was hokum too.

Did something else happen?

My father received big orders. His shop was turning out nothing but doors and windows for Navy barracks in Putzig. Suddenly and for no apparent reason he began to drink, and once, on a Sunday morning, beat my mother because she was standing where he wanted to stand. But he never neglected his work and went on smoking his seconds, which he obtained on the black market in exchange for door frames.

What else happened?

They made your father a cell leader. August Pokriefke threw himself body and soul into his Party claptrap. He got a certificate of disability from a Party doctor -- the usual knee injury -- and decided to give indoctrination lectures in our machine shop. But my father wouldn't allow it. Old family quarrels were dug up. Something about two acres of pasture land left by my grandparents in Osterwick. My mother's dowry was itemized on fingers. My father argued to the contrary that he was paying for Tulla's schooling. August Pokriefke pounded the table: the Party would advance the money for Tulla's school, you bet they will! And he, August Pokriefke, would deliver his indoctrination lectures come hell and high water, after hours if necessary.

And where were you that summer?

Off in Brösen with the thirds. If anyone went looking for you, he found you on the hulk of a Polish mine sweeper, which lay on the bottom not far from the harbor mouth. The thirds dived down into the mine sweeper and brought stuff up. I was a poor swimmer and never dared to open my eyes under water. Consequently I went looking for you in other places and never on the barge. Besides, I had Jenny; and you always wanted the same old thing: a baby. Did they make you one on the mine sweeper?

You showed no sign of it. Or the kids in Indian Village? They left you no reminders. The two Ukrainians in our shop with their perpetually frightened potato faces? Neither of them took you into the shed, and nevertheless my father was always grilling them. And August Pokriefke knocked one of them, Kleba was his name, cold with a spirit level between finishing machine and lathe, because he was always begging for bread. Whereupon my father threw your father out of the shop. Your father threatened to put in a report; but it was my father, who enjoyed a certain standing with the Chamber of Commerce and with the Party as well, who did the reporting. A court of honor of sorts was held. August Pokriefke and master carpenter Liebenau were instructed to make up; the Ukrainians were exchanged for two other Ukrainians -- there were plenty of them -- and the first two, so we heard, were sent to Stutthof.

Stutthof: on your account!

That little word took on more and more meaning. "Hey, you! You got a yen for Stutthof?" -- "If you don't keep that trap of yours shut, you'll end up in Stutthof." A sinister word had moved into apartment houses, went upstairs and downstairs, sat at kitchen tables, was supposed to be a joke, and some actually laughed: "They're making soap in Stutthof now, it makes you want to stop washing."

You and I were never in Stutthof.

Tulla didn't even know Nickelswalde; a Hitler Cub camp took me to Steegen; but Herr Brauxel, who pays me my advances and calls my letters to Tulla important, is familiar with the region between the Vistula and Frisches Haff. In his day Stutthof was a rich village, larger than Schiewenhorst and Nickelswalde and smaller than Neuteich, the county seat. Stutthof had 2698 inhabitants. They made money when soon after the outbreak of the war a concentration camp was built near the village and had to be enlarged again and again. Railroad tracks were even laid in the camp. The tracks connected with the Island narrow-gauge railway from Danzig-Niederstadt. Everybody knew that, and those who have forgotten may as well remember: Stutthof: Danzig-Lowlands County, Reich Province of Danzig-West Prussia, judicial District of Danzig, known for its fine timber-frame church, popular as a quiet seaside resort, an early German settlement. In the fourteenth century the Teutonic Knights drained the flats; in the sixteenth century hard-working Mennonites moved in from Holland; in the seventeenth century the Swedes several times pillaged the Island; in 1813 Napoleon's retreat route ran straight across the flats; and between 1939 and 1945, in Stutthof Concentration Camp, Danzig-Lowlands County, people died, I don't know how many.

Not you but we,

the thirds at the Conradinum, were taken out to Nickelswalde near Stutthof by our school. The Party had acquired the old Saskoschin country annex and turned it into a staff school. A piece of land between Queen Louise's mill in Nickelswalde and the scrub pine forest was purchased half from miller Matern, half from the village of Nickelswalde, and on it was erected a one-story building with a tall brick roof. As in Saskoschin we played schlagball in Nickelswalde. In every class there were crack players who could hit flies sky-high and whipping boys who were encircled with hard leather balls and made into mincemeat. In the morning the flag was raised; in the evening it was taken down. The food was bad; nevertheless we gained weight; the air on the Island was nourishing.

Often between games I watched miller Matern. He stood between mill and house. On the left a sack of flour pressed against his ear. He listened to the mealworms and saw the future.

Let us assume that I carried on a conversation with the lopsided miller. Maybe I said in a loud voice, for he was hard of hearing: "What's new, Herr Matern?"

He definitely answered: "In Russia the winter will set in too early."

Possibly I wanted to know more: "Will we get to Moscow?"

He oracularly: "Many of us will get as far as Siberia."

Then I may have changed the subject: "Do you know a man by the name of Haseloff, who lives mostly in Berlin?"

No doubt he listened at length to his flour sack: "I only hear about somebody who had a different name before. The birds were afraid of him."

I'd have had reason enough to be curious: "Has he gold in his mouth and does he never laugh?"

The miller's mealworms never spoke directly: "He smokes a lot of cigarettes, one after another, though he's always hoarse because he caught cold once."

I'm sure I concluded: "Then it's him."

The miller saw the future with precison: "It always will be."

Since there was no Tulla and no Jenny in Nickelswalde,

it cannot be my job to write about the adventures of the thirds in Nickelswalde; anyway the summer was drawing to an end.

The fall brought changes in the school system. The Gudrun School, formerly the Helene Lange School, was turned into an Air Force barracks. All the girls' classes moved to our Conradinum with its stench of boys. The school was operated in shifts: girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon, or vice versa. Some of our teachers, among them Dr. Brunies, also had to teach girls' classes. He taught Tulla's and Jenny's class history.

We no longer saw each other at all. Because we went to school in shifts, we had no difficulty in avoiding each other: Jenny no longer had to blush; I ceased to go red in the face; exceptions are memorable:

for once, around noon -- I had left home early and was carrying my school satchel in my right hand -- Jenny Brunies came toward me under the hazelnut bushes on Uphagenweg. She must have had five periods that morning and stayed on at the Conradinum for reasons unknown to me. In any case she was coming from school and also carrying her satchel in her right hand. Green hazelnuts and a few pale brownish ones were already lying on the ground, because a wind had been blowing the day before. Jenny in a dark blue woolen dress with white cuffs and a dark blue hat, but not a beret, some thing more like a tarn, Jenny blushed and shifted her satchel from right to left when she was still five hazelnut bushes away from me.

The villas on either side of Uphagenweg seemed to be uninhabited. Everywhere silver firs and weeping willows, red maples and birches, dropping leaf after leaf. We were fourteen years old and walked toward each other. Jenny seemed thinner than I remembered her.

Her toes turned out from all the balleying. Why was she wearing blue when she could have said to herself: I'll turn red if he comes along.

Because I was early and because she flushed to the edge of her tam, because she had shifted her satchel, I stopped, also shifted my satchel, and held out my hand. She briefly let a dry anxious hand slip into mine. We stood amid unripe nuts. Some had been stepped on or were hollow. When a bird in a maple tree had finished, I began: "Hi there, Jenny, why so late? Have you tried the nuts? Want me to crack you a few? They haven't any taste, but after all they're the first. And what have you been doing with yourself? Your old man is still mighty chipper. Only the other day he had his pocket full of sparklers again: must have been ten pounds of them, or at least eight, not bad. And all that tramping around at his age, but what I wanted to ask you: how's the ballet going? How many pirouettes can you do? And how's the instep, improving? I wish I could get to the old Coffee Mill one of these days. How's the first soloist, the one you got from Vienna? I heard you're in
The Masked Ball.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to, because I. But they say you're good, I'm mighty glad. And have you been back to the icehouse? Don't be like that. It was only a joke. But I remember well because when I got home my father. Have you still got the necklace, the one made of bottle washers? And what about Berlin? Have you heard any more from those people?"

I chatted stammered repeated myself. I cracked hazelnuts with my heel, picked half-crushed kernels from splintered shells with nimble fingers, gave some took some; and Jenny amiably ate soapy nuts that dulled the teeth. My fingers were sticky. She stood stiffly, still kept all her blood in her head, and replied slowly monotonously compliantly. Her eyes had agoraphobia. They clung to the birches, weeping willows, silver firs: "Yes, thank you, my father is very well. Except he's been teaching too much. Sometimes I have to help him correct papers. And he smokes too much. Yes, I'm still with Madame Lara. She's really an excellent teacher and widely recognized. Soloists come to her from Dresden and even from Berlin for a little extra workout. You see, she's had the Russian style in her bones ever since she was a child. She learned all sorts of things from watching Preobrajensky and Trefilova. Even if she does seem dreadfully pedantic, always correcting and fussing over something, she never loses sight of the dance, and we learn something more than technique. There's really no need for you to see
The Masked Ball.
Our standards here aren't really the highest. Yes, Harry, of course I remember. But I've never gone back. I read somewhere that you can't or shouldn't repeat certain things, or they disappear entirely. But I wear your necklace sometimes. Yes, Herr Haseloff has written again. To Papa of course. He's really a funny man and writes about thousands of little things other people wouldn't notice. But Papa says he's a great success in Berlin. He's been doing all sorts of things, stage designs too. He's said to be a very strict teacher, but a good one. He goes on the road with Neroda, who really directs the ballet: Paris, Belgrade, Salonika. They don't only dance for soldiers. But Papa says I'm not ready for it yet."