The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  It was only after discussion of the Mestwina case that the Advisory Council had begun to call itself “revolutionary,” because the murder of Bishop Adalbert of Prague suggested parallels down to our own day. Since the thirty-three members of the Advisory Council represented groupings separated by only the haziest of dividing lines, ad hoc coalitions were frequent. Throwing ideological scruples to the winds, the left-wing majority, consisting of four different factions, had suddenly (and only because the Flounder had three times used the word “evolution”) allied itself with the radical-democratic Federation of Women, and voted in favor not only of prefixing the title “Advisory Council” with the word “revolutionary” (which decision was carried by a bare majority) but also of the proposed new seating arrangements. They no longer wished to sit at the front of the pit, where they had to crane their necks; they wanted to be up on the stage, to the right and left of the judge and the eight associate judges, and arrange themselves in accordance with the results of the last vote. The Flounder commented, “New vote, new seating arrangement. Marvelous! That will keep the ladies moving.”

  And so it did. Accordingly as the Revolutionary Advisory Council voted, the chairs to the left or right increased or decreased. And since even during the Tribunal’s regular proceedings new political conflicts kept arising, the public often took more interest in the factional infighting of the feminist movement than in the cases of Awa, Wigga, and Mestwina, which are also my case or cases; after all, it was I who buried the cast-iron cooking spoon a good three feet deep.

  Despite the Flounder’s annoyance, he was ignored amid the passions aroused by these procedural debates. When the first two rows were evacuated by the Revolutionary Advisory Council and thrown open to the public, he protested and threatened to withdraw from the proceedings. “This is intolerable,” he cried. “I can’t have the public so near me. There have already been several menacing incidents. I, too, am entitled to security. Reserve the first two rows for experts. I’m expecting several gentlemen and a lady whose publications have established them as authorities in the field of archaeology or of medieval canon law. They, too, must be seated. And for myself I demand security guards.”

  His pleas were granted. From then on the first and second rows were occupied by various experts, two female security guards, and witnesses for the prosecution—all women who, whether destitute, divorced, working, disadvantaged, deserted, battered, or oversupplied with children, had in some way been victimized by the institution of marriage. Stammering, whispering, voiceless, or shrill, now on the brink of tears, now with malignant laughter, they gave expression to the misery of oppressed womanhood: But after my fifth child … Sleeping with my head next to the radiator … But he just wouldn’t stop… . He even threatened my mother… . And the relief checks stopped coming… . So I took those pills… . But nothing helped… .

  Whatever sufferings the witnesses for the prosecution invoked, men were always to blame. I felt guilty at every turn. But the Flounder remained on a high plane and stuck to facts. He knew everything and the opposite. He was even up on canon law. That was why he waived his right to defense witnesses, including me, who after all was the man most intimately involved. By and large I was mentioned only in passing. Tried anonymously, I was a mere member of the public. Silent, often bored, because the factional struggles were again drowning out the case of Awa, Wigga, or Mestwina, I, in my place in the eleventh row, drew parallels.

  True, I found no Awa among the judges—except perhaps for the always serene Ms. Schönherr—but I had discovered my morose Wigga in the form of Ms. Helga Paasch the nursery-garden owner. And Mestwina, too, sat facing me among the associate judges: how beautifully round everything about her was! The small head, framed in strictly ordered hair. The round, columnar neck with—really, Ilsebill—an amber necklace on it. The gently sloping shoulders. And the latter-day Mestwina—this, too, must be mentioned—also had the glazed and empty look that had betrayed my then Mestwina when she had sopped up too much fermented mare’s milk.

  Ms. Ruth Simoneit is obviously an alcoholic. On several occasions she disturbed the discussion of the Mestwina episode with babbling, compulsive headshaking and intermittent swigs from her private flask, and finally, when Mestwina’s decapitation was brought up, with tragic sobs and loud howls, with the result that Ms. Schönherr was obliged to escort the besotted and hypersensitive associate judge out of the movie house with motherly firmness. (And later on I myself took a certain interest in the poor, unfortunate spinster.) She started before noon on Rémy Martin. And she never ate properly. And the record player was always running in her two-and-a-half-room apartment: tragic tear-jerkers, professional screamers. But she wants to become a teacher. Incidentally, Ruth is the only one of the eight associate judges who, though drunk at the time, inquired about me: “And what became of the shitass who buried the cast-iron spoon?”

  Because, to tell the truth, Ilsebill, the action always revolved around me. I made messes and squirmed out of trouble with lies. I repressed and forgot. How gladly, there in the presence of Ms. Schönherr, or Helga Paasch, or Ruth Simoneit, I’d have confessed that I was to blame for everything: I did that. And that. Chalk Mestwina up to me. I and I alone am responsible. I still take the blame. Here I stand, yes, here I stand, a man, though damaged and since then intimidated by history… .

  How I see myself

  In mirror reversal, more obviously crooked.

  The upper lids beginning already to sag.

  The one eye tired, drooping, the other crafty, awake.

  So much insight and inwardness

  after all my loud and repeated

  barking at power and those who wield it.

  (We will! It shall! It must!)

  Look at the pores in the cheeks.

  I am still or again good at blowing feathers,

  and like to make definite statements about matters that are still up in the air.

  The chin would like to know when at last it will be allowed to tremble.

  The forehead holds firm; what the whole thing lacks is an idea.

  Where, when the ear is covered

  or committed to other images,

  do crumbs of laughter nestle?

  The whole is shaded, darkened with experience.

  I have put my glasses aside.

  Only from habit does my nose sniff.

  On the lips

  that are still blowing feathers

  I read thirst.

  Under the udder of the black-and-white cow

  I see myself drinking

  or snuggled against you, O cook,

  after your bosom hung

  dripping over the fish stew;

  you think I’m handsome.

  Oh, Ilsebill

  Now that you’re burgeoning. Though there’s still nothing to see. But even now my mouth is filled with intimation. I have a foretaste. We might, you and I, that is—for I am burgeoning with you—two gourds—make plans. A future for three and more. Wishes. Who hasn’t got wishes? You need a noiseless dishwasher. Good. I’ll buy you one. And travels, of course. Why not? To the West Indies, like it says in the folder. And right after the event—end of June, you say—fluttery dresses, the kind that wrinkle and don’t drip dry, outrageous pants, sexy sweaters. Everything you want. No more dishwashing problems. And in the garden (next to the graveyard) I’ll grow a gourd-vine arbor for us, like the one that throve for three summers during the Thirty Years’ War on Königsberg’s Pregel Island, across the way from the tavern. In it sat my friend Simon Dach when he wrote to me (Opitz von Boberfeld) in delicate rhymed verses, “Here let me live at ease amid the beans and peas. Breathing fresh air I lie. Peering through vines, as clouds pass swiftly by …”

  A gourd-vine arbor would give us and our little boy when he gets here a place to think in without having to travel, because a gourd-vine arbor would be just perfect for you and me. And they grow quickly. And I with a kitchen knife will—as Simon Dach wrote, “I used to carve my sweethear
t into the gourd”—scratch your fairy-tale name in a still-tiny (but soon, with you, to burgeon, Ilsebill) gourd. There in the twining arbor we shall read the papers to see what a mess the world is making of itself: on the Golan Heights, in the Mekong Delta, and now, too, in Chile, where there was a glimmer of hope. Thus camouflaged with gourd leaves and biblically secure, I could commit my lamentations about the rising price of copper and the Yom Kippur War to writing; just as my friend Dach wept aloud in his gourd-vine arbor when Field Marshal Tilly broke all records in the field of Catholic atrocities: “O Magdeburg, shall I keep silent now! Of all thy splendor what remains to show?” If the truth be known, the Thirty Years’ War—as seen from a gourd-vine arbor—has never stopped, because a gourd-vine arbor, though—as the prophet Jonah found out—it doesn’t amount to much, is nevertheless a fit place from which to see the world as a whole with all its changing horrors. That lovely vale of tears.

  No, Ilsebill, no need to travel. We can stay right here and, as soon as I’ve bought gourd seeds at Kröger’s next door and planted them in mid-April as per instructions, bring the whole world into our arbor and think it over thoroughly. The soft facts and the dreams hewn in stone.

  Even the past will cast shadows as the plant shoots up, so that, while you are burgeoning along with the gourds, I shall be able to tell you about Awa Wigga Mestwina, with whom, though the gourd was then unknown in our country, I often sat in similar twining arbors: with Awa under giant ferns tied together to form a sunshade (how I counted and re-counted her hundred and eleven dimples), with Wigga under a roof plaited from willow withes (how I had to tell her over and over again about my brief participation in the Gothic migrations). And when I visited my Mestwina in her little kitchen garden, we sat among broad beans whose tendrils entwined lasciviously above us. We drank fermented mare’s milk with Glumse, and ate flatbread and smoked codfish roe. And Simon Dach lived in much the same way with his friends Albert, Fauljoch, Blum, and Roberthin in the gourd-vine arbor on Pregel Island: “Good Lord, how oft we sat up late eating choice morsels off a plate, drinking and singing… .”

  Let’s do just that, Ilsebill: eat Wilster Marsh cheese off our knives, wash down the dry rye bread with red Palatinate wine, as night falls and I squeeze a swelling gourd with my right hand and with my left hand your body. Later on I could sing to our little fellow, if it’s a boy, “Pray, baby, pray, the Swedes are due today.” And never again would I run out on you in the stupid way men have; no, never, because there’ll be no more quarreling and no dishwashing problem, but only loving kindness creeping up the latticework. Happiness as fragile as the prophet’s gourd, which God—it might also have been the Flounder—caused to be gnawed by a worm. Our happiness, Ilsebill, will last all summer. And the summer after. And every summer: we with the little fellow—he’ll soon be walking—happy, at peace, shaded by the past, far from the world, and therefore seeing it as a whole with its horrors and counterhorrors, as friend Dach saw Magdeburg—the defoliated Mekong Delta, the empty shoes in the Sinai desert, the daily terror in Chile; but grateful, because the fragility of the gourd-vine arbor protects us, and because you can safely bear the fruit that is rounding out your belly.

  But you don’t want to be twined with me, hedged in by me. “You and your shitty idyll!” you say. “You and your fancy subterfuges. Wouldn’t it just suit you! To grab me out of the nest like a bird’s egg whenever you need me. And expect me to be fascinated by your eternal contemplation of your navel. Have I,” you say, “studied like mad so I could live out here in the country with kids and cooking in a gourd-vine arbor, even if it does amuse me once in a while to shake out your pillow? No!” you say. You want to travel. The Lesser Antilles and other travel folders. Visit London and Paris and meet interesting people who have met interesting people in Milan and San Francisco. Discuss the liberation of women from top to bottom. “And besides,” you say, “we need a noiseless dishwasher and an apartment in town. Gourd-vine arbor? Why not say ‘pisspot,’ like in the fairy tale? I’d sooner have an abortion—in London, for instance—than let you twine me in out here. It’s the old male-chauvinist trick. The gilded-cage routine. What’s wrong with you? Tired?”

  Yes, Ilsebill. A little. Tired of the times we live in. But if you say so, I’ll book a charter flight. Maybe to the Lesser Antilles. And the dishwasher goes without saying. Same for the interesting people in London and Paris. About the apartment in town, well, I’ll think it over. You’re right, right again. Obviously the liberation of women cannot be properly discussed in a gourd-vine arbor. Just an idea of mine, because back in the seventeenth century my friend Simon Dach … And because you, too, Ilsebill have always longed for a little more security.

  At the end

  Men who with that well-known expression

  think things to the end

  and have always thought them to the end;

  men for whom not possibly possible goals

  but the ultimate goal—a society free from care—

  has pitched its tent beyond mass graves;

  men who from the sum of dated defeats

  draw only one conclusion: smoke-veiled ultimate victory

  over radically scorched earth;

  men who at one of those conferences

  held daily since the worst proved to be technically feasible

  resolve with masculine realism on

  the final solution;

  men with perspective,

  men goaded by importance,

  great exalted men,

  whom no one and no warm slippers

  can hold,

  men with precipitous ideas followed by flat deeds—

  have we finally—we wonder—seen the last of them?

  What I don’t want to remember

  The word too many, rancid fat, the headless trunk: Mestwina. The way to Einsiedeln and back: the stone in my fist, in my pocket. That Friday, March 4, when my hand dipped into the strike fund. Frost flowers (yours) and my breath. Myself as I ran: away from the pots and down the slope of history. That Father’s-Ascension Day not so long ago; naturally I was there. Shards while washing dishes, substituted meat, the Swedes on Hela Peninsula, the moon over Zuckau, the man behind the gorse bush, silence, the deaf man’s yes. The fat and the stone, the meat and the clutching hand, silly stories like this one …

  One prehistoric day, after the usual mythological chitchat, the Flounder, to enlighten me at last, told me about King Minos’s wife, how she lusted for her husband’s white bull and how a certain Daedalus, known for his ingenuity, made her a disguise of cowhides, whereupon she was mightily mounted—a happening which, as we know, resulted in the Minotaur and other myths. And in conclusion the Flounder said: “This must not be taken as an incident of purely local importance. Others can learn a useful lesson from it. The whole continent is concerned. Don’t forget that Zeus in person took the offended King Minos (in the form of a bull) to the maiden Europa. So that Queen Pasiphaë’s faux pas contributed to the fall from power of the Cretan women. The Zeus principle, the male seed, the pure idea triumphed. Because the bull-headed monster was a living illustration of matriarchal profligacy. The same demonstration might be made in the Baltic bogs. It doesn’t always have to be a bovine; it can just as well be a white elk bull. Supposing a robust young specimen goes roaring through the bogs night after night as if he had had his fill of cranberries and willow shoots and never wanted to mount a normal elk cow again, but had made up his mind to engender a Baltic myth instead. Now here’s what you must do to stimulate the three-breasted Awa. Mold clay into arm-long elk pizzles, bake them as you would pots, set them up in a circle where she can’t help seeing them, and let them take their effect.”

  I did just as he said. The erect ceramic pizzles amused Awa and her companions. When the sun was shining, they cast wandering shadows. A new cult began with a game: the women aimed quoits plaited from willow twigs. Soon the pizzles were adorned with wreaths of flowers. Jumping over them with outspread legs became a women’s sport
. (How obscenely they screamed. How gross were their jokes even then. What fun they got out of my modest attempts at sculpture.)

  The Flounder called me the Baltic Daedalus. On his instructions I made a convincing disguise of elk skins cut to Awa’s measure. I steamed elk calves’ sweetbreads for Awa. And as though under contract to the Flounder, the white elk bull roared night after night in the Radune bogs nearby.

  But Awa didn’t want it. She had no desire to make myths. With three suckling breasts, she was sufficient unto herself (and unto us as well). She flew into a neolithic rage when I (urged by the Flounder) attempted with prurient stimulus words to arouse her interest in the bull. No, she cried, no, thus inventing a word with a future. All my pottery elk pizzles had to be smashed. (That’s why our region has yielded no phallic idols.) And for punishment I was tied to the rear end of a tame elk cow—we had domestic animals by then.

  For the whole of a neolithic day I tried to prove myself. But I didn’t accomplish anything. I don’t remember begetting any monsters. I have no desire to recall the disgrace that followed, but I have to, because I am writing and must therefore write that Awa and her women made an annual spring festival out of my shameful ride on the elk cow. Under the full moon she and her companions (borrowing from my sartorial art) dressed in the hides of elk cows. We Edeks had to deck ourselves out with the palmed antlers of elk bulls. We were required to emit a sound resembling an authentic mating cry. The tails of elk cows were tied to the women, and under those uplifted tails they offered themselves. Can you imagine anything more bestial?