Free Dog Years by Günter Grass

sententious utterances at irregular intervals separated by years of silence.
    Today Brauxel, whose books are kept by an office manager and seven clerks, owns the touching little notebook wrapped in scraps of oilcloth. Not that he uses the fragile original as a prop to his memory! It is stowed away in his safe along with contracts, securities, patents, and essential business secrets, while a photostatic copy of the diary lies between his well-filled ash tray and his cup of lukewarm morning coffee and serves him as work material. The first page of the notebook is wholly taken up by the sentence, more painted than written: "Scarecrows made and sold by Eduard Heinrich Amsel."
    Underneath, undated and painted in smaller letters, a kind of motto: "Began at Easter because I shouldn't forget anything. Kriwe said so the other day."
    Brauksel holds that there isn't much point in reproducing here the broad Island idiom written by Eduard Amsel as an eight-year-old schoolboy; in the present narrative it will be possible at most to record in direct discourse the charms of this language, which will soon die out with the refugees' associations and once dead may prove to be of interest to science in very much the same way as Latin. Only when Amsel, his friend Walter, Kriwe, or Grandma Matern open their mouths in the Island dialect, will Brauchsel's pen follow suit. But since in his opinion the value of the diary is to be sought, not in the schoolboy's adventurous spelling but in his early and resolute efforts in behalf of scarecrow development, Eduard's village schoolboy idiom will be reproduced only in a stylized form, halfway between the Island brogue and the literary language. For example: "Today after milking recieved anuther gulden for scarcro what stands on one legg and holds the uther croocked Wilhelm Ledwormer tuk it. Throo in a Ulan's helmet and a peece of lining what uset to be a gote."
    Brauksel will make a more serious attempt to describe the sketch that accompanies this entry: The scarecrow "what stands on one legg and 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-Fouqu é '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