Dog Years by Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim

Author:Günter Grass & Ralph Manheim [Grass, Günter & Manheim, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1969-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

My darling Tulla,

Jenny could be awfully prim and boring when you sat facing her or walked beside her, but she could be very entertaining with her witty saucy letters. Seen from without, her eyes were silly under melancholy lashes; appraised from within, they had the gift of seeing things dryly and sharply etched, even things that stood on the tips of silver slippers and in stage lighting signified a dying swam.

Thus she described for my benefit a ballet class that Haseloff had given his little holes and stoppers. They were rehearsing a ballet that was going to be called Scarecrows or The Scarecrows or The Gardener and the Scarecrows.

And everything—at the bar and on the floor—went wrong. Felsner-Imbs sat with endlessly bowed back and repeated the bit of Chopin to no avail. In the rain outside the windows stood pine trees full of squirrels and the Prussian past. In the morning there had been an air-raid alarm and practice in the furnace room. Now the little holes in leotards were wilting on the long practice bar. Injected with cod-liver oil, the stoppers flapped their eyelashes until Haseloff with a tensing of his knees jumped up on the piano, an occurrence quite familiar to Felsner-Imbs and not at all harmful to the piano, for Haseloff was able, from a standing position, to make high, slow, and long leaps and land delicately on the brown piano lid without jolting the innards of the hard-tuned instrument. At this the holes and stoppers should have come to life, for they all knew perfectly well what Haseloff s rage-propelled leap to the piano meant and boded.

From aloft, not directly but into the big mirror that turned the front wall into a spy, Haseloff spoke warningly to the holes and stoppers: “Do you want my brush to show you how to dance? Haven’t you any joie de vivre? Do you want rats to bite the swans from underneath? Must Haseloff take out his bag of pepper?”

Once again he built up his notorious bar exercise: “Grand pIié—twice each in the first, second, and fifth position; eight slow dégagés and sixteen quick ones in the second position; eight petits battements dégagés, dabbed on the floor with the accent on the outside.” But only the holes put the accent on the outside and dabbed in the dot; as for the stoppers, neither the threatened bag of pepper nor Chopin in league with Felsner-Imbs could give them joie de vivre or a tidy plié: batter on a spoon, mayonnaise, Turkish honey make threads: so stretched the boys, or stoppers—Wolf, Marcel, Schmitt, Serge, Gotti, Eberhard, and Bastian. They fluttered their eyelashes, sighed a little between battements tendus on half-toe, in the rond de jambes à la seconde they twisted their necks like swans just before feeding, and waited in resignation, seven sleep-warm stoppers, for Haseloff’s second leap, which, on the occasion of the grand battement, was not long in coming.

Haseloff’s second leap also started from the standing position: from the piano

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