Free Dog Years by Günter Grass Page A

was under orders to chase Hildburghausen -- ". . . voil à 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 n é e 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 his mother as a scarecrow, he had no inhibitions whatever, from the age of seven on, about copying her business practices: if she rented out fishing cutters, he rented out extra-stable scarecrows, made expressly for rental. Several pages of the diary show how often and to whom scarecrows were rented. In a steep column Brauxel has added up roughly what they netted him with their scaring: a tidy little sum. Here we shall be able to mention only one rental scarecrow which, though the fees it commanded were nothing out of the ordinary, played an illuminating part in the plot of our story and consequently in the history of scarecrows.
    After the above-mentioned study of willows by the brook, after Amsel had built and sold a scarecrow featuring the milk-drinking eels motif, he devised a model revealing on the one hand the proportions of a three headed willow tree and on the other hand commemorating the spoon-swinging and teeth-grinding Grandmother Matern; it too left its trace in Amsel's diary; but beside the preliminary sketch stood a brief sentence which distinguished this product from all its fellows: "Have to smash it up today, cause Kriwe says it just makes trouble."
    Max Folchert, who had it in for the Matern family, had rented the scarecrow, half willow half grandmother, from Amsel and set it up beside the fence of his garden, which bordered the Stutthof highway and faced the Matern vegetable garden. It soon became evident that this rented scarecrow not only drove away birds, but also made horses shy and run off in a shower of sparks. Cows on the way to the barn dispersed as soon as the spoon-swinging willow cast its shadow. The bewildered farm animals were joined by poor Lorchen of the curly hair, who had her daily cross to bear with the real spoon-swinging grandmother. Now she was so terrified and beset by an additional grandmother, who to make matters worse had three heads and was disguised as a willow, that she