Free Dog Years by Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim

holds the uther croocked” is not a preliminary study but was sketched after completion with all sorts of crayons, brown cinnabar lavender pea-green Prussian-blue, which, however, never reveal their tonality in pure strokes but are laid on in superimposed strata bearing witness to the transience of worn-out clothing. The actual construction sketch, tossed off in a few black lines and still fresh today, is startling when compared to this crayon drawing: the position “what stands on one legg…” is suggested by a slightly inclined ladder lacking two rungs; the position “and holds the uther croocked” must be that pole which tries to posture by inclining dancerlike at an angle of forty-five degrees to the middle of the ladder, while the ladder leans slightly to the left. Especially the construction sketch, but the ex post facto crayon drawing as well, suggested a dancer tightly clad in the late reflected splendor of a uniform worn by the musketeers of the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau Infantry Regiment at the battle of Liegnitz.
    To come right out with it: Amsel’s diary teems with uniformed scarecrows : here a grenadier of the Third Guards Battalion is storming Leuthen cemetery; the Poor Man of Toggenburg appears in the Itzenplitz Infantry Regiment; a Belling hussar capitulates at Maxen; blue and white Natzmer uhlans and Schorlem dragoons battle on foot; blue with red lining, a fusilier of the Baron de La Motte-Fouqué’s regiment lives on; in short, just about everybody who for seven years and even earlier had frequented the battlefields of Bohemia and Saxony, Silesia and Pomerania, had escaped at Mollwitz, lost his tobacco pouch at Katholisch-Hennersdorf, sworn allegiance to Fritz in Pirna, deserted to the enemy at Kolin, and achieved sudden fame at Rossbach, came to life under Amsel’s hands, though what it was their duty to disperse was no longer a motley Imperial Army, but the birds of the Vistula delta. Whereas Sevdlitz was under orders to chase Hildburghausen—”… voilà au moins mon martyre est fini…” —to the Main via Weimar, Erfurt, and Saalfeld, the peasants Lickfett, Mommsen, Beister, Folchert, and Karweise were quite satisfied if the scarecrows itemized in Amsel’s diary chased the birds of the Vistula delta from beardless Epp wheat to chestnut trees, willows, alders, and scrub pines.

SIXTEENTH MORNING SHIFT
    He acknowledges by phone. The call, it goes without saying, is collect and goes on for a good seven minutes: the money has come, he’s beginning to feel better, the crisis is past, his flu is clearing up, tomorrow or at latest the day after he’ll be back at his typewriter; yes, unfortunately he has to write directly on the machine, for he is unable to read his own handwriting; but excellent ideas had come to him during his spell of flu… As though ideas fostered by fever ever looked like ideas when your temperature was back to normal. My actor friend doesn’t think so much of double-entry bookkeeping, even though Brauxel, after years of reckoning up scrupulous accounts, has helped him to achieve a scrupulous credit balance.
    It may be that Amsel learned the habit of bookkeeping not only from Kriwe’s log but also from his mother, who sat up into the wee hours moaning over her books while her gifted son learned by looking on: conceivably he helped her to order, to file, and to check her accounts.
    Despite the economic difficulties of the postwar years, Lottchen Amsel née Tiede managed to keep the firm of A. Amsel afloat and even to reorganize and expand the business—a risk her late husband would never have taken in times of crisis. She began to deal in cutters, some fresh from the Klawitter shipyard, others secondhand, which she had overhauled in Strohdeich, and in outboard motors. She sold the cutters or—as was more profitable—rented them to young fishermen who had just set up housekeeping.
    Although Eduard’s filial piety never permitted him to fashion even a remote likeness of