Dog Years (66 page)

Matern has a rough time with his double lemon juice. Good-natured cracks from the Sawatzkis. Leafing through the Morgue's prospectus. Why, they've got everything: specialists for the diseases of the thorax and the thyroid. A neurologist. A special prostate man. Pluto is well behaved under the operating table. Sawatzki says hello to a radio dealer acquaintance and companion at another table. Business is going strong at the bar. The B-doctors aren't being stingy with their knowledge. The calves' knuckles were excellent. Now what? Cheese or something sweet? The waiters come unbidden.

Ah yes, the waiters! They, too, are true to life. White linen tunics, buttoned up to the neck and showing only discreet reminders of the operating room, white surgeon's caps, and a white mask over nose and mouth, making them anonymous sterile soundless. Naturally they don't carry the platters of beef brisket or pork tenderloin
en cro
û
te
in their bare hands, but wear rubber gloves in accordance with professional standards. That's going too far. It is not Inge Sawatzki but Matern who finds the gloves exaggerated: "You've got to draw the line somewhere. But that's typical again: from one extreme to the other, always wanting to drive out the Devil with. Honest shopkeepers if you will, but so stupid and so infernally smug. And they never learn from their history, they always think everyone else is to. Determined to let well enough alone and never to tilt against. Wherever they can make themselves heard, they want to cure the world of what ails it. Salom
é
of nothingness. Over corpses to Neverneverland. Always missed their calling. Always wanting to be brothers with everybody, to embrace the millions. Always coming around in the dead of night with their categorical thingamajig. Any thought of change scares them. Luck was never on their side. Freedom always dwells in mountains that are too high -- geographically speaking, of course. Wedged into a narrow, overcrowded. Revolutions only in music, but never want to foul their own. The best infantry men all the same, though when it comes to artillery the French. Lots of great composers and inventors have been. Copernicus for instance wasn't a Pole but. Even Marx felt himself to be. But they always have to carry things to. Like those rubber gloves. Of course they're supposed to mean something. I wonder what the owner. Assuming him to be one. Because nowadays Italian and Greek, Spanish and Hungarian joints are springing up like mushrooms. And in every dive somebody has thought up some idea. Cutting onions in the Onion Cellar, laughing gas in the Grabbe Room -- and here it's this waiter's rubber gloves. Say, I know that guy! Why, it's. If he'd just take that white rag off his face. Then! Then! His name was. What was it anyway? Got to leaf back, names names, in heart, spleen, and. . ." Matern came to judge with black dog.

But the waiter-surgeon doesn't remove the cloth from nose and mouth. Nameless, with discreetly downcast eyes, he clears the dissected remains of calves' knuckles from the damask-clothed operating table. He will come again and serve the dessert with the same rubber gloves. Meanwhile we can reach into kidney-shaped bowls and chew yams. They're supposed to be good for the memory. Matern has a respite, which he spends chewing on gnarled roots: Why, that was. It must be that bastard who. You've got him and the others to thank if you. I've got a little bone to. He was -- I'm not seeing things -- Number 4 when the nine of us came out of the woods and climbed the. I'll give his memory a jolt. Sawatzki doesn't notice? Or he knows and he isn't saying. But I'll settle his hash all by. Coming around here with rubber gloves and a white rag on his mug. If it were black at least like at Zorro's or like the time when we. It was a curtain. We cut it up with scissors into nine triangles: one for Willy Eggers, one for Otto Warnke, one and then another for the Dulleck brothers, one for Paule Hoppe, one for somebody else, one for Wollschläger, one for Sawatzki, there he sits like a hypocrite, or maybe he really hasn't noticed, and the ninth for that guy, just wait. So we climbed the fence into the grounds of the villa on Steffensweg. The same fence day in day out for dog years. Behind nine black cloths over the fence. But not tied the same way as this character. Completely covering the eyes, with slits to look out of. While this guy: you know those eyes all right. Snow lay heavy as lead. He was a waiter even then, in Zoppot and later at the Eden. Here he comes with the pudding. Bublitz. Of course. I'll tear that rag off his. Alfons Bublitz. O.K., friend, just wait.

But Matern, who has come to judge and to tear a rag from a face, doesn't tear and doesn't judge, but stares at the pudding, served in plexiglass bowls such as those used by dentists. With art and precision a pastry cook -- there's no limit to what those fellows can do -- has reproduced the human dentition in two colors: curved pink gums holding shimmering pearly evenly spaced teeth together: the human dentition numbers thirty-two teeth, to wit, above, below, and on either side, two incisors, one canine, five molars -- coated with enamel. At first Grabbe laughter, which, as everyone knows, had the power to laugh Rome to pieces, tries to surge up in Matern and wreck the joint; but as Inge and Jochen Sawatzki, his hosts to left and right of him, apply spatula-shaped dental instruments to their pudding teeth, the Grabbe laughter that has been building up languishes deep within, Rome and the Morgue are not laid waste, but inside him as he stores up breath for a grandiose and seldom enacted scene, dissected calf's knuckle says no to more food, especially sweets. Slowly he slips off his round stool. With difficulty he casts off from the white-covered operating table. He has to prop himself against the glass case where the heart of the Swedish movie actress beats imperturbably. Pilotless, he drifts between occupied tables, at which dinner jackets and muchtoomuchjewelry are eating liver
en brochette
and breaded sweetbreads. Voices in the fog. Chatting B-doctors. Position lights over the bar. Followed by Pluto, he lurches past the blurred pictures of the benefactors Asclepius, Sauerbruch, Paracelsus, and Virchow. And reaches port: which, except for the reproduction of Rembrandt's famous
Anatomy Lesson,
is a perfectly normal toilet. He vomits thoroughly and for years. No one looks on but God in His heaven, for Pluto has to stay outside with the attendant. Reunited with his dog, he washes his hands and face.

When he's through, Matern has no change on him and gives the attendant a two-mark piece. "It's not so bad," she says. "A lot of people get that way the first time." She gives him advice for the homeward voyage: "Take some strong coffee and a slug of schnapps and you'll be all right."

Matern complies: from a clinical porcelain cup he sips black coffee; from cylindrical test tubes he pours down a first -- drink one more schnapps, or you'll be short one schnapps -- then -- why not? -- a second drink of framboise.

Inge Sawatzki is concerned: "What's the matter with you? Can't you hold it any more? Should we call back the urologist or maybe another one that specializes in this sort of thing?"

It's the same waiter who, after calves' knuckles, yams, and pudding teeth, serves the coffee and schnapps; but Matern has lost all desire to cross off a first or last name that keeps itself sterile behind a white surgeon's mask.

During a chance lull, Sawatzki says: "Check please, waiter, or should I say doctor, or professor, hahaha!" On a printed "death certificate" form, the disguised waiter serves up the check with rubber stamp, date, and illegible signature -- doctor's scrawl -- for the tax people: "It's deductible. Business expenses. Where'd we be if we couldn't regularly. If the tax collectors had their way, they'd. Don't worry, the government won't go hungry."

The costumed waiter pantomimes thanks and sees the Sawatzkis and their guest with black shepherd to the door. From there Inge Sawatzki, but not Matern, casts a last backward glance. She waves "so-long" to one of the B-doctors, probably the biochemist, quite inappropriately, especially as it's an authentic hospital double door. First leather, then white enamel, runs on rails. But you don't have to push, it responds to electrical pressure. The sterile waiter presses the button.

Helping each other into their coats in a normal cloakroom, they look behind them; over the double door a red light is shining: "PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. OPERATION IN PROGRESS!"

"Christ!" Jochen Sawatzki draws a deep breath of fresh air. "I wouldn't want to eat there every night. Every two weeks at the most, what do you say?"

Matern breathes deeply, as though to suck in piece by piece the whole Old City with its leaded panes and pewter dishes, with its crooked St. Lambert's steeple and its antiquated wrought iron. Every breath can be the last.

The Sawatzkis are worried about their friend: "You ought to take up athletics, Walter, or you'll go to pieces one of these days."

THE EIGHTY-NINTH ATHLETIC

AND THE NINETIETH STALE BEER MATERNIAD

Been am sick. Got had the grippe. But I didn't put my fever to bed, I took it to the Choo-Choo, and propped it against the bar. What a joint. Latest Lower-Rhenish railroad style, all mahogany and brass like a club car. Sitting between this one and that one until four forty-five, the whole time clutching the same brand of whisky, watching the ice getting smaller and smaller in the glass, holding forth for the benefit of all seven bartenders. Chit-chat with phonies and floozies about the first Cologne football club, about the speed limit in towns and villages, about the end of the world on the fourth of next month, about poppycock and the negotiations over Berlin. Then all of a sudden Mattner gives me hell, because I've been scratching the fancy varnish off the wall with a pipe cleaner: the whole thing is phony! I got to see what's behind it, don't I? And all these people jammed into a club car. Squeezed into dinner jackets, with celluloid cunts in tow: crispy, crunchy, cute. But no place for a first-class act. The most I can do is to work off my manly play instinct: wind it up slowly and let it unroll fast. Out comes
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
In the end it was rich and schmaltzy. It seems that Mattner treated to a round of drinks, whereupon Franz Moor hollered, Act Five, Scene 1: "Slavish wisdom, slavish fears! -- It's still a moot question whether the past is dead or whether there's an eye above. -- Hum, hum! What whispered voice? Is there an avenger up there? -- No, no! -- Yes, yes! That awful whispering around me: Someone above. This very night I'll go to meet the avenger above. No! I say. Miserable subterfuge behind which. It's empty, lonely, deaf up there above. -- And yet if there isn't! I command it: there isn't."

They applauded with hands as big as office folders and snapped at Matern with powder boxes, encore: "Command it: there isn't."

What does an avenger do when his victims pat him familiarly on the back: "It's all right, boy. We get you: When you command, it isn't. Let bygones be bygones. Put on a new record. Weren't you a glider flier one time? -- Sure, sure, you're perfectly right. You're an A-1 antifascist and we're lousy little Nazis, the whole lot of us. O.K.? But weren't you once, and didn't you once, and somebody told me you used to play faustball, a lineman, the captain . . ."

Bronze, silver, and gold. Every athlete refurbishes his past. Every athlete was better once upon a time. Every day both Sawatzkis, before and after dinner: "You've got to get some exercise, Walter. Go hiking in the woods, or goswimmingintheRhine. Think of your kidney stones. Do something about them. Take our bicycle out of the cellar or buy a punching bag and charge it to me."

Nothing can tickle Matern out of his chair. He sits, hands planted on both knees, as fused with the furniture as if he were planning to sit it out for nine years like his grand mother, old grandma Matern, who sat riveted to her chair for nine years, only rolling her eyeballs. And yet, what riches Düsseldorf and the world have to offer: thirty-two movie houses, Gr
ü
ndgens' Theater, up and down the K
ö
nigsstrasse, tart Düsseldorf beer, the Rhine famed in song, the reconstructed Old City, the swan-mirroring castle gardens, Bach Society, Art Society, Schumann Hall, men's fashion shows, the carnival bells that ring in the carnival, athletic fields; the Sawatzkis list them all: "Why don't you go out to Flingern and have a look at the Fortuna Stadium? There's all sorts of things going on there, not just football." But none of these sports -- and Sawatzki lists more than he has fingers -- can lift Matern off his chair. And then by chance -- his friends have already given up -- the word "faustball" is dropped. It makes no difference who whispered it, Inge or Jochen, or maybe little Walli, mighty cute. In any event, no sooner has the word fallen than he is on his feet. Just as Düsseldorf and the world are about to write him off, Matern takes short steps on the pocketbook-thick carpet. Little limbering-up movements. Startled cracking of joints. Sudden loquacity: "Boy, it's been a long time. Faustball. '35 and '36 on Heinrich Ehlers Field. The Engineering School on the right, the crematory on the left. We won every tournament, crashed them all: the Athletic and Fencing Club, the Danzig Touring Club, Schellmilhl 98, even the police. Played line man for the Young Prussians. We had a marvelous center. He teased every ball up in the air for me and served with dauntless calm. His calm was Olympian, I'm telling you; with machinelike underhand shots he hit one ball after another down to the line, and I just pounced: sharp forehand shots and long shots that the opposing team couldn't. Just before the war, I played here for a while with the Unterrath Atheletic Club, until they. Well, better not talk about that."

It's not far, you take the Number 12 from Schadowplatz to Ratingen, up Grafenberger Alice to the Haniel and Lueg plant, then turn off to the left through vegetable gardens, through Morsenbroich and the Municipal Forest, to the Rath Stadium, a medium-sized setup at the foot of Aap Forest. A fine flourishing piece of woods, with a view through the nearby gardens down to the city immersed in the usual mist: churches and factories alternate significantly. Empty lots, fenced-in building sites, and, massive on the other side, the Mannesheim Corporation. Here and there: activity on every field. They're always laying out fresh cinders somewhere. Junior handball teams, sloppy playing, three-thousand-meter runners trying to better their time; and on a small field off to one side and surrounded by Lower-Rhenish poplars, the Unterrath Seniors are playing the Derendorf Seniors. Seems to be an unscheduled game. The field is sheltered from the wind, but Unterrath is losing. Matern with dog can see that at a glance. He can also see why: the lineman is no good and doesn't co-ordinate with the center, who under different circumstances wouldn't be bad.