The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  I have nothing against rutabaga, but here I’m thinking of its primal form, which was long and firm, covered with wrinkles and grimaces, with protuberances all around it. It tapered to a point amid curling root threads, or else a few wisps dangled from its rounded head. Where the roots grew too close together in the glacial rubble, they clutched one another with many fingers. We ate them as we found them, straight or crooked. Except when the ground was covered with snow and everything looked alike, we pulled up roots day in, day out; believe it or not, they were as long as your arm. They tasted best raw. It was the women’s privilege to bite off the tip; we Edeks were given what they left, but we, too, had a privilege, however questionable: we were allowed to sample dubious mushrooms first.

  Awa made a ritual out of root biting, as she did of everything that allowed of comparisons. In the sacrificial month, the women held the mangels suggestively in front of their faces. They screamed furiously as a warning to us Edeks, and then their teeth crashed down on the roots. Bundles of roots were placed in the bleaching skulls of bull elks as sacrificial offerings. Roots were used for healing. Our wishing beets ran wild. Beet lore was passed on… .

  Once, after three hours of effort in which eleven women displayed their strength, Awa and her companions pulled a man-sized mangel out of a moraine that ran all the way down to the beach. (When at last the mangel emerged, the image of the women, knotted together and tangled in greens, had engraved itself on my mind; later on I cut it into birch bark and colored it with the juices of plants.) And the man-sized, ecstatically convulsed mangel cut so paradigmatic a figure in the eyes of the marveling horde that a mangel god (Ram)—some of the women were on the point of blurting out a name—was almost born to us. But Awa straddled the presumptive divine phallus and made her Edeks carry her around in triumph. She tolerated nothing outside of herself. The old wolf god, from whom she had stolen fire, already had claim enough to an accessory cult. (And the Edeks—so it was rumored—were trying to think up a fish god.)

  As it happened, the monstrosity had a woody taste and rotted after a while. Not even the water buffaloes wanted what was left of it. But the biting of beets remained a favorite amusement among the women and inspires primordial terrors in us men to this day. To Dorothea of Montau beets were still vicarious food, as though sweet Jesus manifested himself to her in that form. And likewise for the abbess Margarete Rusch and her nuns, carrots were more than a vegetable. Agnes Kurbiella was the first to cook carrots until soft, add a bit of fat, and serve them up without religious implications. But today, with the cultivation of macrobiotic garden vegetables, guaranteed free of chemicals, the root cult is on the rise again. Wherever you go, raw carrots are eaten in public. Loudly and to the terror of men, young girls bite off the ends. The advertising industry has registered the trend in large color plates: radishes and raw carrots flanked by assorted cheeses, ham, sausage, and pumpernickel. Obviously that means something, something more than affectionate nibbling. Root vegetables are still being bitten off vicariously. But fear is on the rise… .

  During a recess in the trial—the Flounder had suffered another attack of faintness while the Iron Age Wigga was under discussion—I saw the prosecutor, Sieglinde Huntscha, biting into a radish with large, slightly yellow incisors. When I greeted her in passing—we had known each other before the trial—she took another bite, and only then, still chewing, replied: “Well, well. So they’ve finally let you in? You have me to thank for it. What do you say? We’re making it pretty hot for the Flounder, aren’t we? But never mind, he wasn’t born yesterday. He’ll talk himself out of anything, and if I do manage to corner him, he’ll feel faint again. Like the other day when he was trying to tell us that women had a natural aptitude for farm work. From the mangel-wurzel to the red beet: that’s his idea of progress. Significant contribution to the development of human nutrition. Woman’s historical achievement and so on. So I sent out to the market for a bunch of radishes. Want some?”

  She gave me what was left. I nibbled like a rabbit that can’t help itself. Then the debate on the Wigga case was resumed. The Flounder had apparently recovered. And finally, thanks to Siggie’s recommendation, I was able to count myself among the public.

  Really, Ilsebill, they’d been unjust. At first they didn’t even want to let me in. My contention, supported by documentary evidence, that from neolithic times to the present I had lived in a relation of intimacy with Awa, Wigga, Mestwina, the High Gothic Dorothea, the fat Gret, the gentle Agnes, and so on, was not corroborated by the Flounder—“Men,” he said, “have at all times been interchangeable”—and was ridiculed by the associate judges: “Anybody can make such claims. What is he, anyway? A writer looking for material. Trying to ingratiate himself, to latch on, to grind literature out of his complexes, maybe talk us into settling for special allotments to housewives and suchlike appeasements. But here we are not concerned with petty reforms: here we are concerned with the Flounder as a principle. The private lives and alleged sufferings of individual men leave us cold. That kind of crap is coming out of our ears.”

  My right to testify was contested. Some four thousand years of my past were expunged (as if I weren’t still suffering from injuries incurred in the Neolithic). The proceedings were supposedly open to the public, but the public was carefully screened: ten women to each man. And even the few men who were admitted had to show affidavits from their working wives, attesting that they did their share of the housework (cooking cleaning taking-care-of-baby). (“He washes the dishes regularly.”)

  Finally, when I applied for the third time and enclosed two Xeroxed letters in which you express your conviction that not only my domestic virtues but also my impaired manhood were the foundation of our relationship, I was notified that my dossier was under favorable consideration. (Thanks, Ilsebill.)

  Maybe I ought to admit that I nevertheless attended the trial from the very start. An electrician who from the operator’s room of the former movie house regulated the lighting, the infrared lamp over the Flounder, the PA system, and the projector for documents and statistical charts, let me look into the hall through a little square window and listen in with earphones. Call it male-chauvinist solidarity. Anyway, he let me stay, though the only comment on the Women’s Tribunal that occurred to him was “Wouldn’t you like to be a Flounder? Some show those dames are putting on.”

  Then at last I was an acknowledged member of the public. While Wigga, the primordial root, the first cultivation of beets, my monotonous existence as a charcoal burner, our neighboring horde, the parasitic Goths, and my brief participation in the migration were being debated, I occupied a burgundy-upholstered seat in the eleventh row of the movie house. On my left sat an old woman with a bitter laugh. On my right a young women’s libber, who was knitting an extremely long screaming-green muffler. Though I proffered greetings to the right and left, I was not acknowledged as a male or as anything else.

  Before his attack of faintness—during which he floated around in his tub with his white underside up—the Flounder, to distract attention from his advisory role, had verbosely and with bold figures of speech praised the Iron Age Wigga as the goddess of roots, as the culture heroine of the beet fields, as a great woman and mangel mother. When interrupted by the prosecution in mid-flow, he was stricken with faintness, and it was necessary to call a recess. It was then that Sieglinde Huntscha sent out for the radishes, bit the tip off one of them, gave me the rest, and yakked away until a bell signal called us back into the hall.

  There, since there was nothing more to be got out of beets, the debate turned to the Germanic conception of freedom, especially that of the Gothic males. Accused of instigating the migrations and persuading the Pomorshians to participate, the Flounder not only defended himself with glibly recited alliterative lines from Nordic epics, but also leapt to the attack. “Ladies, what justification have you for putting me down as a vile seducer? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that the matriarchal regime, which became increasingly opp
ressive after Awa, was bound to make even the easygoing Pomorshian males receptive to the free, one might almost say popular-democratic, attitudes of the Gothic men? For servile they were not. The sessions of their Thing went on for hours on end. Everyone contradicted everyone else. Even old Gothic crones were allowed to contribute words of advice from the edge of the circle and whisper maxims arrived at by casting runes. So you see, the women were not excluded. And don’t forget German monogamy. Fathers and mothers had something to say to each other, while with the Pomorshians polyandry without father right was still the rule. Objects of use and soon used up, the men lost their last spark of desire. Everything that might have amused them—thinking games, dueling, the acquisition of honors, organizations—was taboo. Small wonder, in short, that the free though barbaric life of the Germani, of whose primitive vigor Tacitus had warned the Romans, attracted the unfortunate males of the coastal horde, especially when you consider the disappearance (regardless of its cause) of the third breast, which might have slaked a male’s thirst for freedom, appeased his wanderlust, and quieted his urge to act for action’s sake. The only hope was to push off. Into the wide world. Into history. It’s true that they soon crawled back home, these Pomorshian men, but that’s another story.”

  While the Flounder was speaking and while his speech was being torn to shreds by the prosecutor, exposed as male-chauvinist rubbish, and while the Flounder—for having praised the Germanic concept of freedom—was once termed prefascist and twice postfascist, I, at last admitted to the audience, had my eye on the second to the left of the eight associate judges who, four to the left and four to the right of Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge, maintained the symmetry of the long, raised table.

  There she sat. Every bit my Wigga. Gigantic and unwieldy, she never modified her posture. Her crossed arms forming a rampart in front of her bosom. Her radish-colored hair, as though she were determined to overtower at all costs, piled high and held in place with a hairpin, which might, however, have been one of those rusty nails that the Goths, when they finally started southward, left behind as scrap. Wigga! Her father—so it was rumored among us—had been a Goth. Hence her name, a variant of Frigga, the Germanic goddess. Hence her unwieldiness, her morose impassiveness, her calm severity. My Wigga, a Pomorshian Valkyrie, then presiding over us as the wurzel mother, today over me as associate judge of the Women’s Tribunal.

  Impassive, she listened to the Flounder, to the prosecutor. With that same gaze full of nothing, she might have been looking out over the Baltic Sea. Only once, when the Flounder in his carping way spoke of Wigga’s attempts to raise beets as deserving but none too successful, she abandoned the rampart posture of her forearms, stopped looking out over the smooth Baltic, slowly, very slowly, with her right hand pulled the endlessly long hairpin or Gothic nail out of the tower of her hair, and (bending her wrist) scratched her back with it. Believe me, Ilsebill, just like Wigga, when I told her how I’d joined the migration. (Her father, by the way, was said to have been the Gothic district chief Ludolf, from whom my always truculent Gothic friend Ludger was descended.)

  I didn’t get to hear my contemporary Wigga until the associate judges cast their final vote. Seated in her large-checked two-piece outfit, Ms. Helga Paasch, sole owner of a large nursery garden in Berlin-Britz, declared: “Well, if you ask me, this Mr. Flounder is guilty. For putting ideas into the guys’ heads. All this nonsense about history. Promising them heaven knows what, palm trees, cypresses, olives, lemons. Globe-trotting passed off as progress. Freedom, he called it. But all his incitement went for nothing. The Pomorshians came back. Pretty quick, too, with their tails between their legs. After which they had to plow again and grow beets. Because he was unsuccessful I say: extenuating circumstances for Mr. Flounder this time.”

  The old lady on my left laughed bitterly while, overcome with rage, the women’s libber on my right dropped several stitches and bit into her screaming-green choker. I sat very still; I hardly breathed. But after ironically terming the mild verdict “astonishingly fair,” the Flounder merely concluded, “After that bit of bungled history, nothing of interest happened among the Pomorshians for seven centuries; their only progress was in beet production.”

  Not a word about the dream root, our wishing wurzel. Yet it was important and explains more than the Flounder concealed. (Or can it be that he really doesn’t know?) In any event, not so much as a syllable about our primordial drug came to the ears of the Tribunal. No attempt to explain the disappearance of the third breast. All of a sudden it was gone, and that was that. When as a matter of fact it owed its very existence to the wishing wurzel.

  The crossbreeds attempted today—the bean tree, the tomato-potato, quota-exceeding rye-wheat—wouldn’t have held a candle to our wishing wurzel. Its pointed bluish root with the faintly almondlike taste sent up a luxuriant bush from which, when it reached maturity, hung edible pods full of protein-rich beans; the leaves, rolled into plugs, were chewed by us Edeks. Pods and beans nourished us, the root was our dessert, but the leaves kept us quiet, made the third breast a reality for us, emptied our heads, fulfilled our wishes, and gave us dreams: boundless, heroically exalted, immortal, exciting daydreams.

  It was not innate laziness but the wishing wurzel that stopped us from making history. And really, Ilsebill, it was Wigga’s doing that we finally woke up a bit. In the course of several campaigns, she had the dream wurzel, which only in our marshy soil produced leaves and beans from pointed roots, radically exterminated. Oh yes, we protested feebly, but she had the last word with her impassively stated argument that the poison kept us from becoming industrious tillers of the soil and growing normal beets. From then on no more dreams, no more wish fulfillment. Wet, cold agricultural reality. Periods of hunger. Slowly we came awake.

  And the Goths, who with us had become addicted to the weed (as a substitute for travel), woke up at the same time, found our region a hopeless bore, and started on the travels they had been dreaming of, the so-called migrations.

  Wigga invited the Gothic chieftains to a starvation meal and persuaded them to go.

  That was after an overlong winter and a rainy summer, when the barley rotted on the stalk and the only beets to be had were moldy. The herring and flounder had stayed away, too, and the fish perished in the rivers as if the country had been cursed: perch, bass, roach, and pike were seen drifting belly up. We would have come through the winter even so, but, accustomed as they were to sponging on others, our Gothic guests had nothing to fall back on when their cattle were carried away by a plague, so we were forced to slaughter our last remaining reindeer and water buffaloes. True, the Goitches still had horses (though they creaked at the joints), but their horses were sacred to them and were never slaughtered, not even in times of famine.

  So Wigga invited the Gothic chieftains to a special kind of noonday meal. She had decided to serve her guests the only food which we Pomorshians still had and which, though in short supply, we would continue to have throughout the coming winter. The guests were Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger, all of them hulking fellows with a studied truculent glare. For once all four were unarmed. Possibly they were so weak that the sheer weight of the iron would have been too much for them. It had rained all summer, and now in the fall it was still raining. So Wigga had invited the visitors to her hut, where it was smoky but cozy. They all sat on sheepskins, their watering blue eyes magnified by hunger. Luderich chewed his red beard. Ludnot gnawed his fingernails. Nevertheless Wigga, before bringing in the steaming bowl, delivered a brief but instructive lecture about the one dish she had provided, which later, after it had produced its effect, we named “Wigga’s Gothic mash.” She spoke about manna grass and manna grits.

  Now, sometimes because there was nothing else to eat and sometimes because of the pleasant taste, the seeds of manna grass (Glyceria fluitans L.), known in my part of the country as wild grass, have been gathered and ground from the earliest times down to the twentieth century—during the First W
orld War, for instance, or in 1945, the year of mass flight. This local grain has been called Schwade or wild millet or heaven’s bread, or by the Prussians simply manna.

  It was not easy to gather the manna grains, because when ripe they hung loosely from the stalks. For this reason we gathered the grain in the morning dew with the help of taut, flat bags that were fastened to the ends of sticks and moved through the grass. Later on we used manna-grass combs. And in the nineteenth century, when more and more of the land was cultivated and the wild grass was rarely seen outside of marshy areas, manna-grass sieves were attached to poles that were often as much as twelve feet long. (Perhaps I should tell you that manna grain was gathered almost exclusively by men, whereas the gathering of mushrooms, berries, wild sorrel, and roots has been women’s work since time immemorial. That’s why the Flounder actually tried to get the Women’s Tribunal to characterize the use of manna grits for emergency food as a male achievement.)

  Pounded manna seeds were so popular that in the eighteenth century (before the introduction of the potato) they figured among the region’s exports. Even the serfs had to supply manna grits to their owners, along with other produce. And before cheap Carolina rice appeared on the market in the nineteenth century, sweet manna porridge cooked in milk and seasoned with cinnamon was served at peasant weddings instead of the usual wedding millet. Because of their digestibility, manna grits were prized as food for the aged, and West Prussian cottagers, on retiring, stipulated a certain measure of manna grits as part of their reserved rights.