Dog Years by Gunter Grass

Author:Gunter Grass [Grass, Gunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-09-05T11:21:05+00:00

Dear Tulla:

with one of these Jenny letters I tried to strike a bridge: to you. We ran into each other in the stair well of our apartment house, and I made no attempt to dispel the usual blush: "Look, Jenny's written me again. You interested? It's pretty funny, the stuff she writes about love and all that. If you feel like a laugh, you ought to read the stuff she writes. Now she calls herself Angustri like the ring, and pretty soon she's going on tour with the troupe."

I held out the letter as if it were something unimportant and mildly amusing. Tulla flipped the paper with one finger: "You really ought to get some sense into you and stop coming around all the time with the same old applesauce and ballet rubbish."

Tulla wore her hair loose, mustard-brown, shoulder-length, and stringy. There were still faint signs of a permanent wave that the sailor from Putzig had treated her to. A strand of hair hung down over her left eye. With a mechanical movement -- Haseloff's figure couldn't have done anything more mechanical -- she pushed back the strand of hair with a contemptuous expulsion of breath, and with a shrug of her bony shoulders sent it back down over the same eye. But she wasn't wearing make-up yet. By the time the Hitler-Youth patrol caught her in the railroad station after midnight and then on a bench in Uphagenpark with an ensign from the Neuschottland Naval Training School, she wore make-up all over.

She was kicked out of school. My father spoke of money thrown out the window. To the principal of the Gudrun School, who despite the report of the patrol service wanted to give Tulla another chance, Tulla was said to have said: "Never mind, ma'am, go ahead and throw me out. I've got the joint up to here anyway. What I want is to have a baby by somebody, just to get a little action around here."

Why did you want a baby? Because! -- Tulla was thrown out but didn't get a baby. In the daytime she sat home listening to the radio, after supper she went out. Once she brought home six yards of the best Navy serge for herself and her mother. Once she came home with a fox fur from the Arctic front. Once her loot was a bolt of parachute silk. She and her mother wore underthings from all over Europe. When somebody came from the Labor Office and wanted to put her to work in the power plant, she had Dr. Hollatz make out a certificate of poor health: anemia and a shadow on her lung. Tulla obtained extra food tickets and a sick benefit, but not much.

When Felsner-Imbs moved to Berlin with hourglass, porcelain ballerina, goldfish, stacks of music, and faded photographs -- Haseloff had engaged him as pianist for the ballet -- Tulla gave him a letter to take with him: for Jenny. I have never been able to find out

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