Free Dog Years by Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim Page B

monument should be erected to miller Matern in the course of this morning shift. Such a monument, he feels, is his affair. Brauksel, who fears for the cohesion of his literary consortium, has abandoned the sweeping portrait he was planning, but must insist on mirroring that aspect of the miller which had already cast its reflected splendor on Amsel’s diary.
    Though the eight-year-old was especially given to combing the battlefields of Prussia for ownerless uniforms, there was nonetheless a model, the above-mentioned miller Matern, who was portrayed directly, without Prussian trappings, but with his flour sack over his shoulder.
    The result was a lopsided scarecrow, because the miller was an extremely lopsided man. Because he carried his sacks of grain and flour over his right shoulder, this shoulder was a hand’s breadth broader, so that all who looked upon miller Matern full face had to fight down a strong temptation to seize the miller’s head in both hands and straighten it out. Since neither his work smock nor his Sunday clothes were made to order, every one of his jackets, smocks, or overcoats looked twisted, formed wrinkles around the neck, was too short in the right sleeve, and had permanently burst seams. He was always screwing up his right eye. On the same side of his face, even when there was no hundred weight sack bent over his right shoulder, something tugged the corner of his mouth upward. His nose went along with the movement. Finally—and this is why the present portrait is being drawn—his right ear, for many years subjected to the lateral pressure of thousands of hundredweight, lay creased and flattened against his head, while contrastingly his left ear protruded mightily in pursuit of its natural bent. Seen in front view, the miller had only one ear; but the ear that was missing or discernible only in relief was the more significant of the two.
    Though not in a class with poor Lorchen, the miller was not exactly made for this world. The gossip of several villages had it that Grandma Matern had corrected him too freely with her cooking spoon in his childhood. The worst of the Matern family’s oddities were traced back to Materna, the medieval robber and incendiary, who had ended up in the Stockturm with his companion in crime. The Mennonites, both rough and refined, exchanged winks, and Simon Beister, the rough, pocketless Mennonite, maintained that Catholicism had done the Materns no good, that there was certainly some Catholic deviltry in the way the brat, who was always prowling around with the tubby Amsel kid from over yonder, gnashed his teeth; and just take a look at their dog, eternal damnation could be no blacker. Yet miller Matern was of rather a gentle disposition and—like poor Lorchen—he had few if any enemies in the villages round about, though there were many who made fun of him.
    The miller’s ear—and when mention is made of the miller’s ear, it is always the right flattened one, pressed down by flour sacks, that is meant—the miller’s ear, then, is worth mentioning for two reasons: first, because in a scarecrow, the blue print of which found its way into his diary, Amsel daringly omitted it, and secondly, because this miller’s ear, though deaf to all ordinary sounds, such as coughing talking preaching, the singing of hymns, the tinkling of cowbells, the forging of horseshoes, the barking of dogs, the singing of birds, the chirping of crickets, was endowed with the most sensitive understanding for everything down to the slightest whispers, murmurs, and hush-hush revelations that transpired inside a sack of grain or flour. Whether beardless wheat or the bearded variety that was seldom grown on the Island; whether threshed from tough or brittle ears; whether in tended for brewing, for baking, for the making of semolina, noodles, or starch, whether vitreous, semivitreous, or mealy, the miller’s otherwise deaf ear had the faculty of distinguishing exactly what percentage of