The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  By then no one spoke aloud of the sixteen Swenzases and ten thousand massacred Pomorshians, for one thing because a papal commission of inquiry had set its seal on the report of the Teutonic Knights’ procurator. Don’t forget that all the people involved were Catholics. Just as the strike and uprising of the longshoremen and shipyard workers of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Elblag, and Szczecin and the order to fire given the police and the People’s Army were all of the Communist persuasion. In any case, the municipal conservator kept thoroughly silent about the events of December 1970, all the more so because no striking shipyard workers interfered with the reconstruction of the Charter City (in accordance with the plans of the Teutonic Knights).

  When our lamps were functioning again, the conservator spoke into his clip-on microphone, informing the public that in the Old City only the churches had thus far been rebuilt, most recently Saint Bridget’s, but that the Charter City, with all its principal streets, had been reconstructed as a self-contained unit inside the city wall built in 1343: it was bounded by the Old City Ditch on the north and the Outer City Ditch on the south, on the east by the stretch of the Mottlau extending from Cows’ Gate to Hawkers’ Gate, and by the reconstructed city wall to the left and right of Long Street Gate on the west.

  The director of the television crew made an announcement in TV jargon: “Cut statement in front of Möller painting. Tomorrow nine o’clock sharp Saint Catherine’s spires, statement. Followed by Saint John’s, Hawkers’ Street, artists from Vilna, and so on …”

  I went to look at some more shooting sites and couldn’t remember for sure whether the brick house of the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, built in 1353, was on Smith Street in the Old City or on Ankersmith Street in the Charter City. When construction on the Late Gothic house was begun (most probably in the Old City, come to think of it), Dorothea of Montau, the daughter of Wilhelm Swarze, a peasant recently arrived from Lower Saxony, was just six years old. (You see, Ilsebill, I have a better memory for flights of stairs, kitchen smells, winding sheets hung out of windows, and personal defeats than for places.) Be that as it may, after bubonic plague had paid its first visit to all our streets, thus lowering the price of city lots at a time when the price of everything else was going up, I, then a swordmaker, started building my house. We stayed in the Old City, and the amiable conservator, who is rebuilding only the Charter City on the most orthodox lines, was unable to help me locate my Old City building site.

  I often went to Montau on my way to the Marienburg through the country between the Nogat and the Vistula, which had been freshly diked in (after the famine years). My father, the swordmaker Kunrad Slichting, who refused to die and kept me, his eldest, on short rations, not only supplied the Danzig headquarters of the Teutonic Order in the by then rebuilt Pomeranian castle; the grand master’s chancellery, whose red-brick buildings were spreading out farther and farther along the east bank of the Nogat, also preferred to give its orders to Old City smiths and swordmakers, and the orders were ample, thanks to the losses incurred during the annual winter forays into the Samland Peninsula and across the frozen swamps of Lithuania.

  Bearing richly ornamented hilts for the notorious two-handers, enchased scabbards, and silver-plated sword belts, I made the journey by way of Montau, the new village on the Island. There I saw how boiling-hot water was spilled on little Dorothea, seventh of the peasant Swarze’s nine children, on Candlemas of the year ’53 and how she nevertheless (as though by a miracle!) retained her fine skin and blue-veined transparency, while the careless kitchenmaid got perfectly normal burns on both feet.

  I fell in love with the child Dorothea then and there. Thirty years of age and not yet a full-fledged master craftsman. I should have set up a household of my own in the Charter City long before. But not only were we closely watched by the Teutonic Knights; we were also under the thumb of my grandmother, who put pressure on her daughter Damroka to stay near the Wicker Bastion, the original settlement, which kept rising from its ashes. My father, you see, had married into a Pomorshian clan. Women have always kept me on a short lead. I’ve always tied myself to some Ilsebill’s apron strings. And when I fell madly in love with Dorothea, whom the boiling water had left unscathed, it was no different.

  Lord, what qualities I saw in that slender child, who seemed to have been cut from silver leaf. Yet her graceful little questions—Had the Lord Jesus sent me? Had I brought her a message from sweet Jesus?—should have aroused my suspicions. And when the child (grown to the age of ten by that time) wheedled me into giving her a seven-chained scourge with a silver handle (inlaid with mother-of-pearl and amber tears) to play with (it had been ordered by the abbot of Marienwerder), my only feeling was one of affectionate amusement; for how was I to guess that Dorothea drew blood night after night by flaying herself through her hair shirt. And her first verses—“Jesu, guide my litel chaine, for my flesh hath chosen paine”—struck me as nothing more than fashionable babble. Only when at sixteen she was married to me yet did not become my wife, did I, in temporary possession of her utterly indifferent flesh, feel the scars on her back and the festering, still-open wounds.

  In those days flagellation was pretty much what pot smoking is today. Especially the High Gothic youth, among whom I could no longer number myself, sought out the warming stench of the bands of flagellants, the percussion rhythms that went with their litany, their terrifying descents into hell, group ecstasies, and collective illuminations.

  When in the year ’63 Dorothea became my wife and went to live in town, the enormous building site that was to become the Charter City was often clogged with flagellants. Quivering female penitents who had come from Gnesen (Gniezno) lay exhausted amid the rising brick walls of Saint Mary’s and Saint John’s, and outside the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals. For some years after the Teutonic Knights had built their Big Mill on the recently dug Radaune Canal, which circled the Charter City, fights were frequent between the millworkers and the obstreperous flagellants, more and more of whom took to camping between Saint Catherine’s and the Big Mill. When I was looking for my Dorothea, I could always find her with the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital or with the flagellants outside Saint Catherine’s. Tramps and spongers, that’s what they were! Who do you thing brought us the plague!

  The mill is standing there again, the interior broken up into offices while pigeons nest in its skylight. Today the Radaune Canal is no more than a stinking gutter; too many of the Kashubian water holes have been dammed up and made into reservoirs.

  Max had set up the camera across from the Big Mill, behind the hoarding of the Saint Catherine building site. There stood four pinnacles ready to be mounted, and the central bulb-shaped steeple. All expensively covered with copper, which, as no precautions were taken against air pollution, had already put on an attractive verdigris color, because fumes from the sulfur wharves not only corrode the reconstructed sandstone façades, but also blacken the copper roofing of the church towers.

  The director sat me down (in a “natural” pose) beside a pile of scaffolding. At a signal from him, the concrete mixer some twenty steps away was set in motion. Pan from the spireless stump of the Old City Church tower to the boarded-up towers and verdigris-green central steeple. Then I came into the picture, pronouncing the concluding words of the documentary. As soon as the big crane arrived, I said, the day’s work would begin. With the Big Mill of the Teutonic Knights and behind it the churches of Saint Catherine and Saint Bridget, an architectural unit dating from the fourteenth century had been reconstructed in the Old City, adjacent to the self-contained Charter City complex. This, I declared, was a noteworthy achievement. Poland had not disavowed its history. But now an appeal to the Hanseatic spirit of the people of Lübeck was in order, for the famous chimes of Saint Catherine’s were hanging in Lübeck’s Church of Saint Mary but belonged here in Danzig. The cause of German-Polish reconciliation would be well served by generosity on the part of the people of Lübeck. And so forth and so on.

  Wha
t I did not communicate to the tube: that when I looked over the hoarding into the sixteenth century, over there in the spot where today only the barest fragments of the convent remain standing beside the Church of Saint Bridget, the abbess Margarete Rusch had survived the hair-splitting of the Reformation with her free-ranging Brigittine nuns and was putting more pepper into her cookery than ever; that right next door, though a century later, the poet and court historian Martin Opitz von Boberfeld was living in the so-called preachers’ houses, until the plague carried him away; that here, outside the Charter City wall, the millers of the Big Mill joined forces with the rebellious brewers, coopers, and other guildsmen against the patrician order, though only the brewers of Jopengasse and Dog Street had serious reason to rebel, in so far as they were injured by the importation of beer from Wismar.

  In any event, seven ringleaders of the artisans’ uprising were executed in May 1378, among them an Old City miller; whereas the strike and uprising of the shipyard workers in December 1970 resulted not in the arrest of the strike committee of the Lenin Shipyard, but in the dismissal of Gomulka and several minor officials and in the annulment of the projected increase in the prices of staple foods. The shipyard workers’ threat to send several large ships down the ways unfinished, if not to blow up the shipyard, was heard as far away as Warsaw: state power recognized worker power. The state gave in, made some changes in personnel, and announced one more “new policy.” But if we consider the workers shot in Gdańsk and Gdynia in a political light, along with the executed ringleaders of the medieval artisans’ uprising, then as now little was achieved: true, the Danzig patricians dropped their plan of importing beer from Wismar, but they granted the guilds no voice in the city council or court of aldermen; and the demand of the shipyard workers for worker management went equally unheard. All the same, one thing has changed in Danzig or Gdańsk since 1378; today the patricians have a different name.

  We panned a couple of times in the direction of the New City and the shipyards: high-rise buildings, low-cost housing under construction, the air pollution that goes with progress the world over. While Max and Klaus were packing their tin suitcases and unwieldy equipment, I looked for traces of my High Gothic wife, Dorothea, near one of the side doors of Saint Catherine’s. All I could see to remind me of her Lenten fare was nettles and dandelions. When she betrayed the projected uprising of the guilds to the Dominicans, I struck her narrow face with my swordmaker’s hand, though I, too, had my misgivings about the uprising and took no part in it.

  Actually Dorothea’s betrayal had no effect, for the Dominicans were at odds with the patricians because the town councilors, with the help of their Culm charter, had confiscated all the grasping monks’ landed property and turned the Dominicans into mendicants.

  When we rose up, even the Teutonic Knights kept their peace. Feeling threatened by the power of the patrician merchants and by the Charter City’s ties with the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Order, on the advice of the aged grand master Kniprode, founded—to the north of the Charter City and the Old City—a New City, “juvenile oppidum,” with its own charter and, much to the irritation of the Charter City, its own port and maritime laws. Dorothea knew nothing of that. There was no politics in her piety. After the death of my mother, Damroka, I would have liked to establish myself in the Charter City, but instead, thanks to the Knights, who paid me well, built a new home in the jagged triangle formed by Brabank, Bucket Makers’ Court, and the Lime Quarry, where the canalized Radaune follows Carp Pond, roughly between the Wicker Bastion and the castle of the Teutonic Knights, within convenient distance of the New City warehouses, to take the place of our old timber-frame house. We made liberal use of brick, which even in the Charter City only the patrician merchants and a few coopers and drapers could afford. Until the city ordinance of 1451 prohibited wooden buildings, even the main streets of the competing townships of Danzig were lined with thatched frame houses, and frequent fires encouraged new construction. The quarters adjoining the Mottlau long remained swampy and almost impassable; the main pillars of Saint John’s (near Hawkers’ Gate), which was built on marshy, unstable ground, are still sinking.

  When we set up our camera in the ruins, the municipal conservator told us how much it had cost to reinforce the pillars, which though damaged by fire still support the vault, with concrete: eight thousand zlotys apiece. The price of tradition. History must be paid for. I stood amid unsorted fragments of façades and perrons, beside one of those pillars that had sunk so expensively. “Shooting. Twelve seven. Statement: Ruins of the Church of Saint John.”

  On orders from the conservator, two construction workers quickly gathered up the human bones that were lying about in the rubble. “Too macabre for the television audience,” he said. Might give them the wrong idea. These bones hadn’t belonged to German soldiers in the recent war, but to people in the Middle Ages, whose last rest had been disturbed when bombs had shattered the stone floor of the church. The dust particles dancing in the obliquely falling light, the fluttering of frightened pigeons, the grimaces of fragmented sculptures, gave the interior of the church atmosphere enough. Hadn’t Andrzey Wajda shot several scenes of his world-famous Ashes and Diamonds inside Saint John’s? And really you don’t need bones in a documentary.

  Yet it seemed distinctly possible that the bones of my swordmaker father, Kunrad Slichting, were here in this heap with those of other once prosperous burghers. For, with characteristic stubbornness, the old man had bought a burial plot in the Charter City. Who lies where: Opitz, dead of the plague, in Saint Mary’s, his name incised in sandstone. In Holy Trinity worshipers and tourists are standing on the slab that covers the bones of Anton Möller the town painter. So many dead. Names of town councilors whom we hated at the time of our rebellion: Paul Tiergart, Peter Czan, Gottschalk Nase, Pape, Godesknecht, Maczkow, Hildebrand Münzer … And hardly sweeter to our ears were the names of the Teutonic Knights who lived during my High Gothic time-phase: Hinrich Dusemer, Ludwig von Wolkenburg, Walrabe von Scharfenberg… . And when, in December 1970, units of the police and army fired on workers in Gdynia and Gdańsk, the name of the commanding general was Korczynski. The order to fire is said to have been given by a party secretary named Kliszko. One Stanislaw Kociolek, a member of the Politburo, arrived from Warsaw and demanded drastic measures, because of which it became necessary to transfer him. Though the Communist Party of Belgium lodged a protest with the king, Kociolek was accredited as Polish ambassador to that country. An attempt was made to convert General Korczynski into a military attaché in Algeria. Shortly afterward he shot himself in the head. Only Kliszko kept his old job. The Lenin Shipyard is still called the Lenin Shipyard. Maria, who had lost her Jan, had her daughter baptized under the name of Damroka. And the priest of Saint Mary’s who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, wanted to put my wife,’ Dorothea, with her mania for penance and flagellation, on trial for witchcraft, bore the name of Christian Roze. But Dorothea was not destined for the pyre.

  Next the camera turned to a Charter City artist. In his attic studio a graphic artist, one Richard Strya, showed our camera some many-layered etchings, meanwhile speaking much too softly of Vilna, the place he had left to settle in Gdańsk. His etchings, dry points, and aquatints mingle gable and tower motifs with medieval flagellants and penitents. Groups struggling with the temptations of the flesh. Ecstasy in the midst of apocalyptic beasts. Lepers whose second sight is peeling along with their skin. Knights dominant in black iron. The miraculous in diagonal composition. Twilight apparitions. A wedding while the bells are advertising the plague. And in the crowded street, amid the early revolutionary tumult, my Dorothea over and over again, in rags, twined with snakes, maddened with fever, riding naked on a sword, etched into the plumage of the griffin, woven into latticework, open, vitreous, suspended from whirling strings, kissing the Flounder, and finally immured, cadaverous, already holy, worshiping, horrible.

  In speaking, Strya concealed more than he explained. While the f
ilm technicians spent their time rearranging props, preparing cutting copy, and lighting the set, we, with the help of modest sips out of water glasses, drank ourselves back to the past. Strya and I can do that. We are contemporary only for the time being. No date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place simultaneously.

  While I was sitting on the perron of the Polish Writers’ Club on Frauengasse, drinking my gritty coffee, and waiting for Dorothea in the shadow of Saint Mary’s, Maria came by with her shopping bag. I paid for my coffee and joined her. Yes, she said, she was still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. We mingled with the tourists. I told her something about our television film. Maria said nothing. The chimes from the Rathaus tower sounded a heroic theme. Amber ornaments were on sale in the shops on the perrons. Maria didn’t want a necklace or a polished pendant. We passed through Our Lady’s Gate and stood irresolutely on the Long Bridge. Fried fish was being sold on a barge that had tied up between Holy Ghost Gate and Crane Gate. You could stand at narrow tables; the fish were served on paper plates, and you picked them up in your fingers. For a small extra charge they would toss a dollop of Bulgarian ketchup on your plate. Behind the counter, women powdered with flour got portions of cod and mackerel and small Baltic herrings ready for the frying pan. The Mottlau smelled stronger than the frying fish. Gulls overhead. The ferryboat-restaurant was roofed with a ragged fish net. Tired from plodding through streets and looking for subjects to photograph, the tourists ate in silence. Maria wanted cod. We ate a portion each. Foretaste of rancid fat. She had had her corkscrew curls cut off. Just tell me this, Maria. But she didn’t want to talk (not even under her breath) about the shipyard workers’ uprising. That was over and done with. Talking wouldn’t bring Jan back to life. Yes, the apparatchik from Warsaw had been called Kociolek. Once the price increase was rescinded and their wages raised, the men had calmed down. The one thing that made them gripe was a beer shortage—there’d been one recently. The girls were doing fine. A dead father was no drawback. The shipyard canteen had been renovated. No, nobody liked the food, but it filled you up. Oh well, who can laugh these days?