Dog Years (79 page)

This music in Matern's ears while outside a film unrolls: an industrial landscape working to capacity under the sign of the free-market economy. No commentary. Chimneys speak for themselves. Anyone who feels like it can count them. Not a one made of cardboard. All jutting skyward. Industry's Song of Songs. Sustained dynamic solemn; blast furnaces are no joke. Legal wages, subject to revocation. Capital and labor, eye to eye. Coalandchemicals ironandsteel RhineandRuhr. -- Don't look out the window or, spooks is what you've got in store. The show begins in the coal basin and rises to a climax on the plains. In the smoking compartment plaintive palatal music: "My son-in-law over there says, and my second daughter over here wants to," while outside -- Don't look out the window! -- first from kitchen gardens, then from fields of spring-green grain, the uprising spreads. Mobilization -- spook dynamics -- scarecrow movements. They race along while the interzonal train runs on schedule. But they don't overtake it. No spooks jumping aboard a moving train in defiance of regulations. Just continuous running. While in the smoking compartment the grandma says: "I didn't want to come over without my sister, though she's always saying: Go on over, who knows when they'll close the border," outside -- Don't look out the window -- scarecrows tear themselves away from their fixed stations. Functionally dressed hatracks leave salad beds and knee-high wheat. Beanpoles buttoned up for winter start and take hurdles. What a moment before was blessing goose berries with wide-sleeved arms, says amen and trots off. But it's not a flight, more like a relay race. It's not as if they were all hightailing it eastward to the Peaceloving Camp; no, their purpose is to pass something on over here, some news or a watchword; for scarecrows uproot themselves from their vegetable gardens, hand on the baton with the terrible message rolled in it, to other scarecrows who have hitherto been guarding rye, and as the vegetable scarecrows are catching their breath in rye, the rye scarecrows sprint beside the interzonal train until, in a good stand of barley, they encounter scarecrows ready to start, who take over the spook post, relieve breathless rye scarecrows, and with bold checks and beanpole joints keep pace with the on-schedule train, until once again herringbone-patterned rye scarecrows take over. One two six scarecrows -- for teams are battling for victory -- carry six handily rolled letters, an original and five copies -- or is the treacherous import of one and the same message conveyed in six different versions? -- to what address? But no Zatopek takes the baton from a Nurmi. No athletic uniforms suggest that Wersten (blue-and-white) is leading but that the Unterrath Athletic Club is coming up, passing the Derendorf boys, fighting neck and neck with Lohhausen '07. Distances are being devoured in civilian clothes of every conceivable style: under velours hats, night caps, and helmets of all sorts flutter coachmen's capes, Prussian Army coats, and carpets -- chewed by whom? -- long strides are taken by trouser legs ending in galoshes and buckled shoes, army boots, and friar's sandals. A duffel coat relays a Glasenapp Hussar. Loden passes on the baton to raglan. Rayon to muslin. Scarlet to synthetic fiber, poplin to herringbone, nankeen and piqu
é
send brocade and chiffon on their way. Dutch bonnet and trenchcoat fall behind. A heavy ulster outdistances a wind-filled negligee and the Second Empire. Directoire and functional fashions are relayed by the twenties and by fusty furbelows. A genuine Gainsborough in collaboration with Prince Pückler-Muskau demonstrates the classical method of handing on the baton. Balzac catches up. Suffragettes hold their own. And then for quite some time a princess' skirt is in the lead. O bold and muted colors: shot silks, pastel shades, rainbow! O you prints: millefleurs and modest stripes. O you changing trends: the neoclassical note gives way to the functional, the military to the casual. The waist moves down again. The invention of the sewing machine contributes to the democratization of ladies' fashions. Crinolines have seen their day. But Makart opens the old chests, liberating velvet and plush, tassels and pompons: see how they run: Don't look out the window or, spooks is what you've got in store!, while in the smoking compartment! -- O story without end! -- the grandma from over here and over there is still at it when the Westphalian landscape passes on the baton with scarecrow-ease to the incoming Lower Saxon landscape, speeding it on its way from over here to over there: for scarecrows know no borders: parallel to Matern, the scarecrow message journeys to the Peaceloving Camp, shakes off the dust, leaves capitalistic rye behind it, is taken up by class-conscious scarecrows in socialized oats: from over here to over there without customs inspection or pass; for scarecrows don't, but Matern does have to show his papers, and so does the grandma, who was over there and is now coming back over here.

Matern sighs with relief: oh, how different the sausages smell in the Socialist Peaceloving Camp. Gone forever that capitalistic curry smell. Matern's heart bursts iron bands: Marienborn! How beautiful the people are here, and even the tenements, Vopos, windowboxes, and spittoons. And the well-fed redness of the flags, and the billowing streamers with their slogans. After all the bad years, with black dog at heel, at last socialism triumphs. No sooner is the interzonal train in motion than Matern wants to communicate the red jubilation of his heart. But as he starts to speak and to praise the Peaceloving Socialist Camp, quietly and suitcasedraggingly the smoking compartment empties. The smoke is getting too thick, there must be room in a compartment for nonsmokers. No offense and a pleasant trip.

All the fellow travelers on their way to Oschersleben, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg, and finally the grandma who is changing in Magdeburg for Dessau leave him. In his loneliness Matern is haunted by the rhythm of the rails: posts ghosts posts ghosts.

Message-bearing, they are on their way. Now clad like Spartacus or the toiling masses. Strike pickets hand on the baton. Sansculottes smell blood. Even in mixed forests Matern thinks he sees rebellious proletarians. Woods spit out scare crows in windbreakers. Brooks are no obstacles. Hedges taken at a leap. Long-legged over knolls. Swallowed up, there again. Stockingless in wooden shoes, in Phrygian caps. Cross-country scarecrows. Field and stream scarecrows. Peasants' Revolt scarecrows: Bundschuh and Poor Konrad, vagabonds and iron miners, mendicant friars and Ana baptists, the monk Pfeiffer, Hipler and Geyer, the Fury of Allstedt, the peasants of Mansfeld and Eichsfeld, Balthasar and Bartel, Krumpf and Velten, on to Frankenhausen, where already the rainbow of rags and tatters, of leitmotives and murder motives. . . At this point Matern changes his view; but on the corridor side of the interzonal train he is horrified to find the same spooks behind sash windows, all moving in the same direction.

Out! At every station where the train doesn't stop, he wants to get out. Distrust germinates. Every train has a different destination. And will the Peaceloving Camp really take me to its bosom when this locomotive, hitched to first and second class, hitched to my dreams, says amen? Matern checks his ticket: all in order and paid for. What, seen through sash windows, is happening outside, is happening free of charge. Why should he have forebodings just because he sees a few plain ordinary scarecrows running? After all, it's the nationalized Magdeburg Bowl, famed for its sugarbeets, and not the capitalistic desert of Nevada that is being traversed by swift dynamic scarecrows. Besides, there have always been scarecrows. He wasn't the first and won't be the last to make dozens of them out of old rags and chicken-wire. But these here -- a glance out of the window -- might have been made by him. His style. His work. Eddi's deft fingers.

Thereupon Matern takes flight. Where can you run to on a speeding interzonal train, rendered transparent to left and right by sash windows, mostly stuck, if not to the john. He even manages to take a shit and so motivate his flight. Relax. Settle down. Put away all fear; for, generally speaking, the toilet windows of all trains, whether fast or slow, are made of frosted glass. Frosted glass windows negate spooks. O peaceful idyl. Almost holy and just as Catholic as the station toilet that Cologne held in readiness for him when he went to Cologne and was looking for a quiet place. Here too scribble-scrabble on damaged enamel. The usual: verses, confessions, suggestions for doing something this way or that way, names unknown to him; for neither heart, spleen, nor kidneys quiver as he tries to decipher individual words. But when the hand-sized and cross-hatched drawing catches his eye -- the black-sketched dog Perkun Senta Harras Prinz Pluto jumping over a garden fence -- his heart blackens, his purple spleen darkens, the urine curdles in his kidneys. Once again, this time from a skillfully sketched dog, Matern takes flight.

But where can you run to on a speeding interzonal train if you leave the one refuge which frosted glass windowpanes secure against the spook show? At first, quite logically, he wants to get out in Magdeburg, but then, like a hypnotized rabbit, remains faithful to the destination on his ticket, expecting salvation from the River Elbe. The Elbe forms a barrier. The Elbe is the natural frontier of the Peaceloving Camp. Bird-repellent spooks and anyone else who may be headed in that direction will halt at the Western shore of the Elbe and send their scarecrow screams or other spectral bowlings heavenward, while the interzonal train hurries off across the not yet fully repaired Elbe bridge.

But as Matern and the meanwhile half-empty interzonal train -- most of the travelers have got out in Magdeburg -- leave behind that saving event, the Elbe bridge, multiplied evil bursts forth from the rushes of the East-Elbian shore: not only are the usual news-pregnant scarecrows racing along as from Marathon to Athens; in addition, his coat still Elbe-wet, a dog glistening deep black knows only one direction: after the interzonal train! A race begins, neck and neck, dog versus express train roaring through the Peaceloving Camp. For a time the animal takes the lead -- the train is running slightly late because the roadbed is soggy in the Peaceloving Camp and, timetable or not, can't afford to be in too much of a hurry -- but then drops back, enabling Matern to feast his eyes on blackness.

Oh, if you had only left Pluto at the Catholic mission instead of its animal-loving competitor! If you had given him reliable poison, or if a club, properly handled, had destroyed the half-blind mutt's drive and his passion for the chase. But as it is, a black shepherd grows dog years younger between Genthin and Brandenburg. Rises in the ground swallow him up. Hollows spit him out. Fences split him into sixteenths. Fine steady driving gait. Soft landings. Powerful hind quarters. No one but he can jump like that. The line from the withers to the slightly sloping croup. Eight -- twenty-four -- thirty-two-legged. Pluto draws up and leads the field of scarecrows. Evening sun edges silhouettes. The Twelfth Army surges toward Beelitz. Götterdämmerung. Structure of the end. If I only had a camera: cut cut. Spook close-up. Final victory close-up. Dog close-up. But you're not allowed to take pictures of the Peaceloving Camp from moving trains. Unfilmed, the Wenck combat team, disguised as an army of scarecrows, and a dog by the name of Perkun Senta Harras Prinz Pluto remain on a level with the teeth-grinding Walter Matern behind a sash window. Beat it, dog. Scram, dog. Get thee behind me,
kyon!

But only after Werder, near Potsdam, in among the vast expanse of lakes, do scarecrows and dog lose themselves in league with the land-engulfing darkness. Matern sticks to the plastic upholstery of his second-class seat and stares at the framed photograph across from him: in oblong the fissured landscape of the Elbsandstein Mountains advertises itself. Hikes through Saxon Switzerland. Something new for a change, especially as neither scarecrows nor Pluto are to be seen among the crags. Sturdy comfortable hiking shoes, if possible with double soles. Woolen stockings, undarned. Knapsack and map. Large deposits of granite, gneiss, and quartz. Brunies used to correspond with a geologist in Pirna and exchange specimens of mica gneiss and mica granite. Quantities of Elbe sandstone besides. That's the place for you. It's quieter. There nothing will sneak up on you from behind. With or without dog, you've never been there. In general people should only go to places where they've never: to Flurstein, for instance, and then up the trail and along the Ziegenrück road to Polenz View, a rock platform without a railing, offering a marvelous view of the Polenz Valley: then follow Amsel Valley to Amsel Falls and the Hockstein. Stop for the night at the Amsel Valley Hunting Lodge. I'm a stranger in these parts. Matern? Never heard of him. Why is Amsel Valley called Amsel Valley and Amsel Falls Amsel Falls? No connection with your friend by the same name. In addition we have here Amsel Gulch and Amsel Rock. We're not interested in your past. We have other, socialist worries. We're engaged in rebuilding the beautiful city of Dresden. The old Zwinger Palace with new Elbe sandstone. In people's quarries we're cutting house fronts for the Peaceloving Republic. Nobody grinds his teeth in these parts, and neither will you. So show your papers and turn in your pass. Steer clear of West Berlin, that bastion of capitalism. Go right on through to East Station, then come and see socialism being built in the Elbsandstein Mountains. Stay right in your seat when the train has to stop at the warmongers' and revanchists' station. Be patient until Friedrichstrasse Station bids you welcome. For God's sake don't get out at Zoological Gardens Station.

But shortly before the interzonal train stops at Zoolog ical Gardens Station, Matern remembers that he still has a fat chunk of his radio fee in his pocket. He decides to stop for a minute, exchange his West marks for East marks at the profitable capitalistic rate, one to four, and take the "L" to the Peaceloving Camp. Besides, he has to buy a razor and blades, two pairs of socks, and a change of shirts; who knows whether these vital necessities are available over there at the moment?