Dog Years (81 page)

Matern suspects there's something behind all this and bores deep holes that are meant to get to the bottom of the enigma: "And what about the symbolism of it?"

"Nonsense! A common ordinary story. Just think, my good friend: two boys, a pocketknife, and a river. That's a story you can find in every German schoolbook. Edifying and easy to remember."

Even though the story oppresses him less since he has decided to call it symbolic, Matern can't help arguing some more: "You very much overestimate the quality of German schoolbooks. Still the same old rubbish as before. Nothing to enlighten the young people about the past and all that. Lies! Nothing but lies!"

Goldmouth smiles all around his cigarette: "My dear good friend, my story, too, though extremely edifying and easy to remember, is a lie. Just look. The end of my fable goes: The boy threw the pocketknife in the river. And it was gone forever -- But what have I here? Examine it closely. It's lost its sparkle after all these years. Well, what do you say?"

In the flat of his hand lies, as though conjured out of the air, a rusty pocketknife. The street lamp, under which Matern, the dog, and Goldmouth are standing, bends over the object: used to have three blades, a corkscrew, a saw, and a leather punch.

"And you think it's the same one as in your story?"

Gaily and always glad to do tricks with his ebony cane, Goldmouth replies in the affirmative: "That's the pocket-knife out of my lying schoolbook story. You really oughtn't to make derogatory remarks about German schoolbooks. They're not so bad. If they mostly omit the point, as in the case of the knife that was found again, it's because the truth is too unbearable and might be harmful to a child's innocent mind. But German schoolbooks smell good, the stories are edifying and easy to remember."

Already the Hermitage is opening its arms to the trio, already Goldmouth is about to give the recovered pocketknife back to the air, his spacious prop room, already the hasty imagination sees the trio standing at the bar or sitting in the Green Room, already the Hermitage is snapping its jaws at them with no intention of disgorging them before dawn -- for none of the bars around the Church of the Apostles has a stomach better able to hold its guests -- when a magnanimous mood carries the smoker away.

As they cross the street and, turning off to the right, succumb to the compulsion of Potsdamer Strasse, Goldmouth's gift-endowment-bequest is formulated: "Listen, my dear friend: the night -- almost cloudless and extravagantly supplied with moonlight -- has put me in a generous mood: take it. Of course we're neither of us boys any more, and with rusty blades such as these it would be dangerous to score arms, to swear blood brotherhood, but take it just the same. It comes from the heart."

Late in the night -- the month of May has populated all the drives and cemeteries, the Tiergarten and Kleist Park -- Matern, who has already acquired a rejuvenated dog, receives a present of a heavy and, as he soon discovers, unopenable pocketknife. He thanks Goldmouth kindly but in return, as it were, can't refrain from expressing his sincere concern over Goldmouth's extreme hoarseness: "As a favor to me. I'm not a monster and I won't ask the impossible, but couldn't you skip every third cigarette? I've only known you a few hours, but even so. Maybe you think I should mind my own business. But I'm really worried."

What good can it do for the smoker to keep harping on the true source of his chronic hoarseness, that January frost which suddenly turned to a thaw; Matern continues to put the blame on cigarettes, which Goldmouth persists in terming harmless and a vital necessity: "Not tonight, my dear friend. Your company stimulates me. But tomorrow, yes tomorrow, we shall live abstinently. And so, let us stop in here. I have to admit that a hot lemonade would do me and my throat good. Here, this wooden shed, temporary premises to be sure, will be glad to receive us and the dog. You shall have your beer and your
petits verres;
to me the usual will be served; and our good Pluto will be fed meatballs or weenies, hard-boiled eggs or a cutlet in aspic -- ah, the world is so rich!"

What a set! In the background menaces the Sports Palace, a barn whose wheat was threshed years before; the foreground is occupied, with gaps in between, by wooden booths employed for various trades. One promises bargains. The second, amid undying curry aroma, provides shashlik and fried sausages. In the third, ladies can have ladders in their stockings picked up at any hour of the day. The fourth booth awakens hope of tombola winnings. And the seventh shed, hammered together from remnants of other sheds and bearing the name of Chez Jenny, will provide the trio with their next environment.

But before they go in, a question jells within Matern, a question that doesn't want to emerge in the seventh shanty, but to unfold in the balmy spring air: "Tell me this: This knife -- it's mine now -- where'd you get it? Because I can't really believe it's the same one as the little boy -- the one in the story, I mean -- is supposed to have thrown in the river."

Already the smoker has hooked the ivory crook of his cane into the door handle -- he has opened the doors of all the joints in this way: Anna Helene Barfuss' place, Lauffersberger's White Moor, Paul's Taproom, and the Billow Hermitage almost -- already Jenny, the proprietress of the place that is not called Chez Jenny for nothing, is anticipating the arrival of new customers -- she suspects who is coming and is starting to squeeze lemons -- when Goldmouth's sandpapered vocal cords bring forth words of explanation: "Try to follow me, my good friend. We have been talking about a pocket-knife. In the beginning every pocketknife is new. Then every pocketknife is used for what it is and ought to be, or it is alienated from its proper function and utilized as a paper weight, a counterweight, or -- for lack of stone missiles -- as a missile. Every pocketknife gets lost someday. It is stolen, forgotten, confiscated, or thrown away. Now, half of all the existing pocketknives in this world are found knives. These in turn may be be subdivided into common and preferred pocketknives. It is undoubtedly to the preferred class that we must assign the one I found in order to return it to you, its original owner. Or would you, here on the corner of Pallasstrasse and Potsdamer, here in the presence of the historical and actual Sports Palace, here, before this shed engulfs us, claim you never owned one, secondly that you never lost one, forgot one, or threw one away, and finally, that you haven't just recovered one? -- And believe me, I had my troubles arranging this little reunion. My schoolbook story says: The pocketknife fell into a river and was gone forever. Forever is a lie. For there are fish that eat pocket-knives and end, made manifest, on a kitchen table; what's more, there are dredges which bring everything to light, including pocketknives that have been thrown away; in addition there is chance, but that doesn't enter into the present case. -- For years, just to give you an idea of the pains I've taken, for years and shunning no expense, I sent in petition after petition, I went so far as to bribe high officials of various flood-control commissions. Finally, and thanks to the complaisance of Polish officialdom, I obtained the desired permit: in the Vistula estuary -- for as you and I know, the knife was thrown into the Vistula -- a dredge, put to work especially for me by a high-level bureau in Warsaw, brought the object to light approximately where it had taken leave of the light in March or April 1926: between the villages of Nickelswalde Schiewenhorst, but nearer the Nickelswalde dike. No doubt was possible. And to think that I'd been having the Gulf of Bothnia and the southern coast of Sweden dredged for years, that the alluvial deposits off Hela Peninsula had been dug over any number of times at my expense and under my supervision. And so, to wind up our discussion of lost and found objects, there seems to be every reason to conclude that it's absurd to throw pocketknives into rivers. Every river gives back pocketknives without asking anything in return. And not only pocketknives! It was equally silly to sink the so-called Hoard of the Nibelungs in the Rhine. For if someone should come along who is seriously interested in the treasures hoarded by that restless race -- as I, for instance, was in the fate of the pocketknife -- the Hoard of the Nibelungs would come to light and, unlike the pocketknife whose rightful owner is still in the land of the living, find its way to a provincial museum. -- But enough of this chatting in doorways. Don't thank me! Just bear with me and accept a little piece of advice: take better care of your newly found property. Don't throw it in the Spree as you once threw it in the Vistula; although the Spree surrenders pocketknives with less resistance than the Vistula, where you grew up -- your accent still shows it."

And once more Matern stands at a bar, with dog at heel, anchored to a beer glass on the left and a double-decker schnapps on the right. While he ponders: How does he know all this, where did he. . . Goldmouth and the woman in charge of the otherwise empty bar play out a reunion scene, in which titles such as "Jennyofmyheart," "Jennymyconsolation," "dearest Jenny," show that the withered person behind the bar means more to Goldmouth than four plank walls can hold. While the faded spinster in the limp knitted jacket is squeezing the juice from lemon halves, Matern is told that this Jenny is among other things a silver Jenny and a Snow Queen to boot: "But we won't call her Angustri, though it's her real name, because that puts her in a melancholy frame of mind and reminds her of Bidandengero, in case you've heard of him."

Matern, who in his innermost soul is still arguing with the pocketknife, refuses to burden his memory with unpronounceable Gypsy names and to appraise a silver ring that has been worn thin. As far as he is concerned, this fulsomely praised Jenny -- a single glance is enough -- is some shopworn dancing girl; an acute observation that is confirmed by the decor of the shanty: while Paul's Taproom is graced with the photographs of flatnosed boxers and wrestlers, Jenny has decorated her joint with a
corps de ballet
of dance-worn ballet slippers: from the low ceiling they dangle pale-pink, once-silvery, and Swan Lake-white. Of course there are also pictures of various Giselles. With well-informed finger Goldmouth points to attitudes and arabesques: "That's la Deege at the lower left. Always lyrical, always lyrical. There's Svea K
ö
ller, la Skorik, Maria Fris in her first big part, as Dulcinea. And there, next to the ill-starred Leclerq, our Jenny Angustri with her partner Marcel, whose real name in those days, when Jenny was dancing the gardener's daughter, was just plain Fenchel."

A dancers' hangout. After the show you drop in for a moment Chez Jenny, and if you're in luck you'll meet little Bredow or Reinholm, the Vesco sisters, Klauschen Geitel, or Rama the ballet photographer, who has retouched most of the photographs here displayed, for no neck must show strain and every instep wants to be the highest.

Ah, what ambition and ephemeral beauty these ballet slippers have danced away! And now the place, for all its tap beer, in spite of Mampe's Schnapps and Stobbe's Juniper, persists in smelling of chalk, sweat, and sour jersey. And that careworn goat face behind the bar, which, Goldmouth claims, is capable of making him the best and most soothing hot lemonade in the world. Even now, after the first greedy gulps, so the smoker assures us in his enthusiasm, relief is suffusing his throat, and his voice -- as a boy, he informs me, he was able to sing steeple-high -- is beginning to remember the most high-climbing of Mozart arias, and soon -- only a few more glasses of Jennyhot Jennylemonade -- he'll be able to awaken the angel within him and let him sing for joy.

Although Matern has ear enough to detect a few relatively smoothed-out notes in Goldmouth's voice, he can't help giving tongue once again to his concern: "It may be that the lemonade here is particularly good and, for my money, tasty as well. All the more reason why you should stick to soft drinks and give up that immoderate and, I might almost say, cynical smoking."

Back on the old subject: "Don't smoke too much or you'll smoke too much!" Whereupon the smoker with practiced fingernail tears open a fresh pack of Navy Cut, offers them neither to Matern nor to Jenny, helps himself, and dispenses with a match, brightening his fresh weed with the remnant of his veteran smoke-stick: flip! over his shoulder flies the butt, landing on boards, where it is permitted to burn on, to burn out, or to find nourishment -- who knows?

For this time no waiter creeps up behind Goldmouth, no heel worn to a slant grinds out the honored guest's afterglowing excrement; for that is what Goldmouth calls the cast-off butts he flips behind him: "They, my dear friend, are my existential bowel movements, so to speak. Which is not to disparage the term or, for that matter, the indispensable function it connotes. Offal offal! Aren't we all? Or won't we be? Don't we live on it? Look, but without horror I beg of you, upon this glass of hot lemonade. I'm going -- you won't mind, my dear Jenny? -- to let you in on a secret. For what makes this glass, full of the usual, into something special is not selected lemons and choice water: a pinch of mica, got from mica gneiss and mica granite, is mixed -- please observe the little silvery fishes! -- into the lemonade; then -- an old Gypsy recipe -- three drops of precious and delicious essence, which my Jenny holds in readiness for me at all times, give this favorite drink of mine a magic, make it flow down my throat like balm. You've guessed. You've got the ugly yet grandiose word on the tip of your tongue and suspect the presence of a similar essence in your yellow beer, you're about to turn away, disgust in both corners of your mouth, and to cry out in horror: urine! urine! woman's urine! -- but my Jenny and I are used to being suspected of operating an abominable witches' cauldron. No matter, you've already -- right, Jenny? -- been forgiven; already and once again harmony reigns between us under a sky of tired ballet slippers; already, and not for the last time, glasses are being filled; beer and clear grain spirits will suit my friend; meatballs will cheer the dog; and as for me, who smoke in order that the world may understand: Behold, he still lives, for he is still smoking! -- for me, whose voice was sandpapered one January afternoon by a sudden thaw; for me, whose genius for retrieving no pocket-knife can resist; for me, who have at my fingertips any number of schoolbook stories, such as the story of the burning christening goose or the one about the milk-drinking eels, the story of the twelve headless knights and the twelve headless nuns, not to mention the highly edifying tale about the scarecrows who were all created in man's image; for me, the surviving chain smoker, who tosses behind him what a moment before hung burning from his lips: excrement excrement! for me, Goldmouth, who as a child longed to wear two and thirty gold teeth in my mouth instead of my tiresome natural teeth; for me, then, the smoker with the gold teeth -- a friend helped me to acquire them by redeeming me from my natural-grown dentition -- for me, the redeemed one, let hot lemonade, to which biotite and muscovite have contributed a pinch of sparkling mica, let lemonade ennobled by Jenny's essence fill this glass, that we may drink -- to what? To friendship, to the Vistula that flows forevermore, to all windmills, whether turning or standing still, to a black buckled patent-leather shoe that belonged to the little daughter of the village mayor, to the sparrows -- sworraps! -- over far-billowing wheatfields, to the grenadiers of Frederick II of Prussia, who was overly fond of pepper, to the button off a French grenadier's uniform, which, deep down under the Church of the Trinity, bore witness to history, to jumping frogs and quivering salamander tails, to the German game of schlagball, no, to Germany in general, to Germany's destiny sauces and Germany's cloud dumplings, to primordial pudding and noodle inwardness, likewise to Adebar the stork, who brings the babies, to the reaper who invented the hour glass, but also to Adler's Beer Hall and to the zeppelin high over Heinrich Ehlers Field, to master carpenters and concert pianists, to cough drops and the bone-glue imp, to oak paneling and Singer sewing machines, to the Municipal Coffee Mill and a hundred slim paperbacks, pregnant with roles, to Heidegger's Being and Heidegger's Time, similarly to Weininger's standard work, in other words, to song and the pure idea, to simplicity, modesty, and dignity, to awe of and emotion over, to honor and the profound Eros, to mercy love humor, to faith, to the oak tree and the Siegfried motif, to the trumpet and SA Sturm Eighty-four; let us then drink to that January day's snow man, who released me that smoking I might survive: I smoke, therefore I am! Let us drink to me and to you, Walter! Yet, it's me, so let us drink. You say something's burning; let us drink all the same. You say we ought to call the fire department; let us drink without the fire department! You say my excrement, which you call cigarette butts, has set fire to this haven of exhausted ballet slippers, which you call a shack; I beg of you, let us finally drink, because I'm thirsty: hot lemonade, delicious hot lemonade!"