Читать книгу Back where I came from - A. J. Liebling - Страница 10

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“Fish is brain food,” Fritz Strohschneider, a waiter and a friend of mine told me, “but around cities they is brainier. It is just like people, the city fish is more slicker as the country fish.

“I don’t go fishing more,” he went on without encouragement, “since they exploded Heinrich Heine.”^[1]

“In the old days it was so nice on Sunday to fish for tommys from the docks. Tommys and eelses. On 96th Street dock we used to sit, me and my friend Jake Poppberger, with a case of beer and our clarinets. It was the most convenient fishing.

“Each one would have four, five lines. The lines are tied to wires and on each wire there is a bell. When a fish bites, the bell rings, like an elevator. You pull him up and it is sport.

“So one Sunday we was sitting on the dock, and we had eight lines out. Suddenly, along comes Heinrich Heine.

“It seems between those bells was musical gradations, by chance of the length of the wires, and as I am sitting tuning my clarinet, so I hear played wonder good on the bells the scale. ‘Do, re, mi, fa, sol,’ and the rest of it. ‘My God, Jake,’ I says, ‘what is this for a fish?’

“Back it comes the other way the scale—being a fish the scale was its specialty—and then ‘dingle, dingle,’—it was trying to pick out ‘Annie Laurie.’

“Jake wanted to pull up the line, but I said, ‘What, you would murder a musician?’

“We looked down it shouldn’t be boys in a boat under the pier, but there was nothing. The next Sunday we came to the same spot. We set the lines and soon it gave ‘Ich Weiss Nicht Was Soll Es Bedeuten.’ Then I named the fish Heinrich Heine. So we played on our clarinets and Heinrich Heine would accompany us.

“Every Sunday new tunes we were teaching him, and sometimes he even offered for us original compositions. So nice it was in the sunset to sit there with a case of empty beer bottles and play ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song.’ ”

Fritz sighed. He flicked listlessly at an imaginary speck of dust with his towel.

“I never saw Heinrich Heine,” he said. “I don’t know whether he was a tommy or whether an eel. But in a way I helped kill him. Among the tunes we taught him was ‘Die Wacht Am Rhein.’ We didn’t mean no harm. It was before America went in the war. Scotchers, Englishers, Irishers used to come down to the pier. It made them mad to hear the fish play so nice the German antler.

“But when this country went in the war a battleship came in the river. A bright Sunday morning Heinrich Heine commenced to play. ‘Ta-tum-tee-um-tee-um-Die Wacht Am Rhein.’ The battleship shot a torpedo and exploded Heinrich Heine. Since then I go no more fishing.”

[1]	All German dialect in this book, except in the story “Frau Weinmann and the Third Reich,” was written before 1933. The fish’s name used to be Beethoven, but the author changed it to Heinrich Heine so “Back Where I Came From” would not become a best-seller in Germany.