The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  (Ah, Ilsebill, if only that metal had stayed in the mountains!) While allegedly hunting in the hills that later became known as the Ziganken Mountains—and we did actually spear a wild boar—we found confirmation of the ore specimen the Flounder had brought me. Soon we had a copper ax, some blades, and a few metal spearheads, which we boastfully exhibited. The women shuddered and giggled as they touched the new material. I started taking orders for ornaments. But then Awa put her foot down.

  She flew into a rage and threatened to withhold her breast. We Edeks were subjected to niggling interrogations. How had we, who had never before conceived a useful idea, come by this sudden knowledge? It was up to her, the supreme Awa, and nobody else, to decide what uses fire could be put to. Not that she questioned the utility of the new metal objects—among them my own creation, the first kitchen knife—but this sudden independence was too much of a good thing.

  All her suspicions came to rest on me, because the other Edeks had mentioned me in their confessions. I invented accidental occurrences and didn’t betray the Flounder. The women, the whole lot of them, punished me by denying me their breasts and cozy comforts for the duration of the hard winter. Metal was strictly prohibited. It was forbidden to divert fire from its proper purposes. After a stamping round-dance centered on Awa’s three breasts, which I had drawn in the sand and incrusted with shells, the copper ax and the few blades and spearheads were thrown into the Radune River amid screams of abjuration. (Believe me, Ilsebill, having to go back to the hand ax was no joke.)

  But when in my despair I summoned the Flounder out of the sea, he shouted above the seething, churning waves: “Nothing to get so excited about. Has it escaped your notice, my son, that despite her autocratic condemnation of all metal, your Awa, your three-breasted paragon of historyless femininity, your all-devouring megacunt, in short your mother goddess, has hidden the copper kitchen knife, which you forged, tempered, and sharpened for her pleasure, in with the elk bones she uses as kitchen utensils? She uses it in secret. Just as you, despite the prohibition, secretly draw my picture in the sand. She’s a shrewd article, your loving-caring Awa! It’s time for you men to cut loose! How? With the kitchen knife. Kill her, my son. Kill her!”

  (No, Ilsebill. I didn’t do it. She was struck down later on, but not by me. I’ve always been faithful to Awa; I still am.)

  She stopped the passage of time. She was the sum of our knowledge. Indefatigably she thought up new ritualistic pretexts for solemn processions in consecration of things as they were, and the dimensions of her body determined the form of our neolithic religion. Apart from Awa, we sacrificed only to the Sky Wolf, from whom a woman of our primordial horde—the ur-Awa—had stolen three little pieces of glowing charcoal. Everything came from her, not just the eel trap and the fishhook.

  Perhaps to deter us Edeks from further abuse of fire, or perhaps only to improve her cooking, Awa established the potter’s craft in our territory. It began with her wrapping swamp birds and their feathers or hedgehogs and their quills in a thick layer of clay, and setting them down thus protected in coals and hot ashes. It seems conceivable that when the clay envelopes, with feathers or quills still embedded in them, were broken open, the possibility of using them as receptacles was recognized. In any event, Awa taught me to knead clay and to build an oven from glacial rubble. Heaping up glowing coals around its protective walls, I baked not only bowls and pots in it but also primitive little artworks. This was the origin of the three-breasted idols that have today become museum pieces.

  When I told the Flounder about all this, he must have noticed the pleasure I took in modeling Awa’s flesh, her bulges and dimples, in clay. “Well then,” he asked me, “how many dimples has she got?”

  So then the Flounder taught me to count. Not days, weeks, or months, not lampreys, snipe, elk, or reindeer, but Awa’s dimples, which took me up to a hundred and eleven. I fashioned a three-breasted clay idol with a hundred and eleven dimples, and our Awa, who thereupon learned to count up to a hundred and eleven, really liked that idol—all the more so since the other women (counting became a favorite pastime of our horde) never got anywhere near a hundred. Awa (like yourself, Ilsebill) had the most dimples in her winter pillow, her buttocks, thirty-three of them.

  The Flounder was triumphant: “Splendid, my son. Even if we haven’t succeeded just yet in ringing in the Bronze or even the Copper Age, the hour of algebra has struck. From now on there will be counting. Counting leads to calculation. And calculation leads to planning. Look at the Minoans, who have recently taken to scratching their household accounts on clay tablets. Practice your figures in secret and the women won’t be able to outreckon you later on. Soon you’ll be able to measure time and to date events. Soon you’ll be exchanging counted things for counted things. Tomorrow or the day after you’ll get paid, and you in turn will pay, pay, pay. First with shells but then, in spite of Awa, though perhaps long after Awa, with metal coins. Here’s one. Attic silver, still in circulation. I found it on board a ship that had run aground off the coast of Crete after a seaquake. But why am I telling you about Crete and sailing ships? What do you know of King Minos? You lummoxes cling to your women’s tits as if you’d been bewitched and let your Awa with her hundred and eleven dimples make fools of you.”

  It must have been centuries after my first little arithmetical tricks that the Flounder gave me the coin. Possibly a drachma, but I’m not sure. More likely an offertory coin from Asia Minor, without currency value. One thousand B.C. seems a likely date. But what were a thousand years more or less in the light of our minimal development in the swamps of the Vistula estuary. Anyway, at some time or other the Flounder brought me a metallic coin in his branchial sac, just as earlier and later he brought me Minoan, archaic Greek, Attic, and Egyptian artifacts—gems, seals, figurines, and filigree knickknacks. Naturally, stupid as I was, I gave Awa the Greek drachma. Though the handy little silver piece amused her, she wouldn’t listen to any talk about counting games that might lead no one knew where, about buying or selling. She declared a hundred and eleven to be the highest and absolute number, the definitive Awa number. Of this she was the living proof, and anyone who wasn’t convinced could count her dimples. As long as exploring fingers could find no more than a hundred and eleven on any woman of the horde, a hundred and eleven remained the absolute number. Any calculation that led beyond it was unnatural and therefore contrary to practical reason. All speculation, she declared, would be punished; irrationality must be nipped in the bud. And then she ordered me to prop a hundred and eleven elk skulls on a hundred and eleven poles and place them in a circle measuring a hundred and eleven paces, so marking off a new sacrificial area—all this before the onset of winter!

  You’ll admit, Ilsebill, that so much ur-motherly loving care, even if it kept me warm and in innocence, was bound to become oppressive in the long run. Because there the matter rested. For uncounted centuries we were only allowed to count up to a hundred and eleven. True, some time in the last millennium before the incarnation of our Lord, we began to trade amber to the Phoenicians, who came sailing along in their ships as though the Flounder had piloted them to our remote shores. But at first we gave away fist-sized nuggets of our amber, and we had a hard time learning to barter. We were hornswoggled every time.

  When I called the Flounder out of the sea, he griped and totted up our losses. “You’re all a lot of Stone Age simpletons! Are you going to play the fool forever? With your amber you could supply a hundred and eleven hordes, as large and fatherless as your own, with all the bronze implements they need. Plus silver gewgaws and purple cloth for the women. If she won’t let you mint coins, try at least to get it through your heads that in Sidon and Tyre your amber is as valuable as gold. I’m getting sick of you. You’ll never be really men. Milksops, that’s what you are!”

  Just as the tale of the fisherman and his wife speaks only of the flounder or flatfish, without further identification—“And the flounder said to him … Then the flounder c
ame swimming and said …”—so I, too, speak of the Flounder, as though there were only this one omniscient Flounder who advised, taught, and indoctrinated me, who raised me to manhood and told me in no uncertain terms how to keep the womenfolk supinely bed-warm and teach them how to suffer in cheerful silence. Actually the word “flounder,” as consecrated by the fairy tale, is only a popular designation for the flatfish family, including the brill, the sole, the halibut, the plaice, the turbot, and, of course, the flounder. To tell the truth, my own flatfish was a turbot, closely resembling the brill except for the bony, pebblelike bumps under his skin.

  The turbot is found in the Mediterranean, throughout the North Sea, and in the Baltic. As in all flatfish, the axis of the eyes is not quite parallel to the crooked mouth, and that is what gives him his shrewd, malignant, I might say underhanded look: he squints in quick motion. (The Attic god Poseidon is said to have enlisted him in the struggle against Hera, the Pelasgian Athene, and related exponents of matriarchy—as a propagandist.) Turbot or not, tradition demands that I go on calling him a flounder.

  The whole flatfish family is tasty. The neolithic Awa roasted his fellows in moist leaves. Toward the end of the Bronze Age, Wigga rubbed them on both sides with white ashes and laid the white underside in ashes strewn over a bed of coals. After turning, she moistened the flatfish either in the neolithic manner, from her always overflowing breasts, or modern-style, with a dash of fermented mare’s milk. Mestwina, who already cooked in flameproof pots placed on an iron grating, simmered flounder with sorrel or in mead. Just before serving, she sprinkled the white-eyed fish with wild dill.

  He, the one and only, the talking Flounder, who has been stirring me up for centuries, knew all the recipes that had been used for cooking his fellows, first by the heathen and later as a Christian Lenten fish (and not only on Friday). With an air of detachment and a glint of irony in his slanting eyes, he could sing his praises as a delicacy: “Yes, my son, we happen to be one of the finer fishes. In the distant future, when you imbecilic men, you eternal babes in arms, will at last have minted coins, dated your history, and introduced the patriarchate, in short, shaken off your mothers’ breasts, when after six thousand years of ever-loving womanly care you will at last have emancipated yourselves, then my fellows and relatives, the sole, the brill, the plaice, will be simmered in white wine, seasoned with capers, framed in jelly, deliciously offset by sauces, and served on Dresden china. My fellows will be braised, glazed, poached, broiled, filleted, ennobled with truffles, flamed in cognac, and named after marshals, dukes, the prince of Wales, and the Hotel Bristol. Campaigns, conquests, land grabs! The East will trade with the West. The South will enrich the North. To you and to myself I predict olives, refinements of culture and taste, the lemon!”

  But that took time, Ilsebill. (You see how hard it is for you women to make men stop persecuting you with their ever-loving care.) Long after Awa and her hundred and eleven dimples and three breasts, women continued to rule, but they had a harder time of it. We men had tasted metal. And the Flounder kept us informed. I had only to call, and the swimming newspaper came. I heard about distant high cultures, about the Sumerians and the Minoan double-edged ax, about Mycenae and the invention of the sword, about wars in which men fought against men, because everywhere the history-hating matriarchate had been shattered and men were at last allowed to inscribe dates.

  The Flounder treated me to tedious lectures. About Mesopotamian palace architecture and the first palace in Knossos. About the growing of grain—amelcorn barley spelt millet—in the Danube basin. About the domestication of animals—goats and sheep—in the Near East and the possibility of domesticating reindeer in the Baltic area. About the spade, the hoe, and the revolutionary plow.

  The Flounder concluded every lecture with words of supplication: “It’s high time, my son. The Neolithic, as we call the late Stone Age, has entered upon its final phase. Fostered by male vigor, a high culture has spread from Mesopotamia by way of the Nile Delta to the island of Crete, where I’ve seen women tilling the fields and, once the grain is grown, grinding it in stone mortars. In those regions, famines are not a fatality. They keep herds of pigs and cattle, and meat is plentiful. Stocks are always on hand. Permanent dwellings are built. Hordes and clans join to form nations. Hero-kings rule. Empire borders on empire. The men bear arms. They know what they’re fighting for: inherited property. While you live in lewdness and fornication and don’t even know the meaning of fatherhood. Mother screws son. Sister doesn’t even know what brother is doing to her. Unsuspecting father lies with daughter. All in innocence! I know! Yes, yes, you want those tits. Can’t get enough of them. Breast-fed babies to the end of your days. But out in the world the future has started blazing trails. Nature is sick of being submitted to with womanish passivity; it wants to be mastered by men. Trace canals. Drain swamps. Fence in the land, plow it, take possession of it. Beget a son. Hand down property. Your suckling time has lasted two thousand years too long, two thousand years of waste and stagnation. My advice to you: away from the breast. Wean yourselves. That’s it, my son, at long last you must wean yourself!”

  That was easy for the Flounder to say. Too easy. We, in any case, needed a good millennium to become men in the Flounderian sense. But then we became men, all right, as the history books bear witness: men with leather caps, helmets, and gimlet eyes. Men of wide-ranging, horizon-searching gaze. Men stricken with procreative fury, who sublimated their stinkhorns into rivaling towers, torpedoes, and spaceships. Methodical men, banded together in male orders. Thunder-hurling hairsplitters. Discoverers in spite of themselves. Heroes who would never never under any circumstances have consented to die in bed. Hard-lipped men who sternly decreed freedom. Persevering, steadfast, unflinching, grandiosely exalted, tragic, bloody-but-unbowed, come-what-may men, determined to transcend themselves and attain ultimate goals, men with principles who invented their own enemies, loved honor for honor’s sake, and yet saw themselves in the mirror of irony.

  Even the Flounder, who had advised us to develop along these lines, became more and more horrified and ultimately took refuge—that was in Napoleon’s time—in the Low German fairy tale. By then he was giving only minor advice. Then for a long while he said nothing. It’s only recently that he’s become approachable again. Now he advises me to help Ilsebill with the dishes and—in view of her pregnancy—to sign up for a course in infant care. “Lots of women,” he says, “are quite capable of doing a man’s work. Like your able Ilsebill. That deserves recognition, my son, and it has been our benevolent intention to recognize it from the very start, ever since I voluntarily forced my way into your eel trap.”

  And just imagine, Ilsebill, just recently the Flounder told me he means to answer those women and their indictment any day now. And he condemned the Grimms’ distortion of his legend. “That fairy story,” he said, “has got to go!”

  Division of labor

  We—two roles.

  You and I keep—you the soup warm,

  I the spirits cold.

  Some time, long before Charlemagne,

  I became self-aware

  whereas you have only perpetuated yourself.

  You are—I became.

  You are still wanting—I’m reaching out again.

  You secure your small province—

  I venture my vast project.

  You keep peace in the house—I hurry forth.

  Division of labor.

  Come, hold the ladder while I climb.

  Your whimpering won’t help; in that case I’d rather cool the champagne.

  Just hold steady while I come at you from behind.

  My brave little Ilsebill,

  on whom I can utterly rely,

  of whom, to tell the truth, I would like to be proud,

  who with a few deft strokes fixes everything shipshape,

  whom I worship worship

  while she, through inner recycling,

  becomes entirely different, differently stran
ge and self-aware.

  May I still give you a light?

  How the Flounder was caught a second time

  I’ve already told you: one neolithic day he squeezed into my eel trap. In those days women kept the lid on everything that might have been controversial. Our pact is known: I let him go. He helped me through the ages with his Floundery advice. Through the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age. Through the Early Christian, High Gothic, Evangelical, and Baroque periods; through enlightened absolutism, socialism, and capitalism. The Flounder anticipated every historic change, every shift of fashion, every revolution and relapse, every latest truth or progress. In short, he deliberately helped to promote the male cause. We, we at last, had our hand on the throttle.

  Until yesterday. Now he won’t speak to me. Imploringly and repeatedly I cry out “Flounder, Flounder,” but no familiar “What is it, my son?” comes in answer. Women sit at a long table judging him. He has already started to confess in a dilatory sort of way. (And I, too, confess, to the reasons why the Flounder has been disgusted with me and the male cause for quite some time.)

  When, a few months before the oil crisis, I called him out of the sea (for advice on my income-tax problems), he denounced our agreement: “Nothing can be expected of you daddies any more. Nothing but dodges and gimmicks. Now,” he said as though in leave-taking, “I’ll just have to pay a little attention to the Ilsebills.”

  Naturally it was in the murky Baltic that he got himself hooked. Tradition means a lot to him. If not in the Bay of Danzig, then at least in Lübeck Bay, in the slop that laves the eastern coast of Holstein, between the lighthouses of Cismar and Scharbeutz, barely a sea mile from the tarry fringe of the bathing beaches, he consciously consented and—as he later confessed in court—“voluntarily gave the three bored ladies a bit of fisherman’s luck.”