The Dog King by Christoph Ransmayr

Author:Christoph Ransmayr [Ransmayr, Christoph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-55568-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1997-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

TOYS, BREAKDOWN, AND HAVOC

EARLY IN AUTUMN OF THAT SAME YEAR, during the sugar-beet harvest in October, what few machines there were in the lake country began to break down; some suddenly just stopped altogether. Gear teeth locked, flywheels, camshafts, and piston rings broke, even the hands on the big clock at the steamer dock fell clattering from the face one morning and sank into the lake; wear and tear devoured the simplest cotter pins, pipe clips, regulator screws, and hoop irons. Again and again, at a sawmill, a sugar-beet factory, or a gravel pit, some presumably irreplaceable truck had to be replaced for days, weeks, or forever by a team of oxen, a conveyor belt ready for the junkyard replaced by shovels, wheelbarrows, and bare hands.

Machines! With each passing year, you could depend less and less on machines, people said at the Dock Inn, in the offices of Moor’s secretary, in any room where this breakdown and the passage of time were discussed. Those who tried to plow with tractors and harvest with steam-driven threshers would soon have nothing but stones to eat. Better a nag in a horse collar and mud up to your ankles than the most powerful tractor and no fuel or parts….

The great expectations bolstered by the christening of the Sleeping Greek Maid in the spring had not been fulfilled. The Crow kept by the Dog King was the only, the last limousine to bounce along Moor’s gravel roads. In the garages of once-grand summer villas, mules and goats stood beside derelict convertibles, and the people along the shore and all those forced to live their lives in the shadow of the Stony Sea still obtained most of their engines and spare parts from the army’s junkyards or from iron gardens like the one sinking deeper and deeper into the weed-grown earth of Forge Hill.

Along the lake, what was and remained new was always old—every piece of scrap iron, no matter how bent and rust-eaten, had to be laid in an oil bath, brushed, polished, filed, and hammered into shape, and used over and over until wear and tear finally ended its usefulness, leaving nothing but junk for the smelter. Gardens of scrap iron may have kept piling higher and higher around houses and farmsteads, but the number of useful spare parts in them kept dwindling; and the smelter at Haag, the only one in the lake country, supplied only substandard metal that lost quality and durability with each new smelting.

But service and repair—and, ultimately, transformation of junk into a fiery liquid to be poured into new forms—required skills and tools still at the command of only a few craftsmen. Each of them was supposed to be blacksmith, mechanic, locksmith, and iron-founder all in one and in some hamlets was already revered as a shaman, who by simply repairing a diesel generator could lift a farmstead into a present illuminated by electric light—or, then again, let it sink back into the darkness of the past.

The

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