The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  And because Maria clammed up after that, I told her about Dorothea. Maybe she listened.

  By Gothic standards she was beautiful. Her strength of will defeated the laws of nature. What she wished for materialized, happened, came to pass. She could walk barefoot on the frozen Vistula; when in the heat of passion I came close to her in our warm bed, she was and remained a lump of frozen meat. For our nine little children, all but one of whom died young, she had hardly a glance; yet she could scratch the scabs of the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital with fervor. My troubles didn’t interest her in the least, yet how quick she was to uplift the soul of every no-good tramp who appealed for her sympathy (and my money); oh, how sensitive, how warm-hearted and wise she was when it came to appeasing the cares of total strangers!

  At first we attended guild dinners and the weddings of the young master craftsmen together. We were present in our Sunday best when Saint Dominic’s Market was blessed. But she in her beauty held aloof from my guild brothers, repelled by their robust, laical merriment, vexed because her sweet Jesus wasn’t always first in everyone’s thoughts—when the suckling lambs were being carved, for instance. Later she refused to take part in my social life; the boasting of the men, the finery of the women turned her stomach; she preferred to clothe herself in rags and mingle with the flagellants and penitents outside Saint Catherine’s, where her girlish laughter could be heard above the din of the nearby Big Mill. In the midst of this riffraff she could be silly and giggly, merry, relaxed, free. But free from what? From me, from conjugal duties, from the need to care for her dying and oncoming brood. She was unfit for marriage. What else could she do but look for compensations, and become a saint if not a witch.

  My fellow guildsmen made fun of me, and the swordmaker’s wife was the neighborhood laughingstock. When we joined with the Charter City goldsmiths to form a brotherhood and installed our little chapel in Saint John’s, right next to the mason’s altar, I had to supply my guild brothers with ritual vessels of silver before they would admit me. If only Dorothea had been put on trial! I’d have testified against the witch: “Yes, my dear Deacon Roze, doctor of canon law. She let our children, every one of them except Gertrud, perish miserably… .”

  Little Kathrin liked to play with spoons and saucepans, mortars and pestles in the kitchen. She would look into all the pots, and the maids had to keep an eye on her. Not so her mother, who in the period after Ash Wednesday and on all Fridays cooked her penitential Lenten soup, made from codfish heads and root vegetables and thickened with barley. As long as the fish heads and mangels were foaming in the big kettle, she knelt with her back to the low hearth, her tender knees resting on dried peas. Her wide eyes glued to the crucifix, her fingers knotted bloodless, she saw nothing, and no maternal instinct gave her a hint when her second daughter, who must have been three and a half at the time and had been baptized at Saint Catherine’s, also knelt down on a footstool, this one beside the kettle, but, far from being immobilized by religious fervor, fished with a big wooden spoon for the round white eyes in the disintegrating codfish heads, in the course of which operation—to make a long story short—little Kathrin fell into the great family-sized kettle. All the child could manage was one shrill scream, not loud enough to tear her mother, immersed as she was in her Jesus, away from the penitential peas. If the maid hadn’t missed the child, she might have been boiled away completely without disturbing her mother’s fervor long enough for a Hail Mary.

  And so the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting lost his second eldest after his third youngest daughter. When the mother stood seemingly unmoved before the steaming bundle, I struck my wife, Dorothea, several times with my swordmaker’s hand.

  No, Ilsebill or Maria, or whoever else may be listening to me, Dorothea did not strike back. Quiet and frail, she endured my blows; her capacity for contrition was boundless.

  The next day we shot Saint Mary’s from all sides. High-towering from Long Street through the shaft of Beutlergasse. From the Holy Ghost Street end of the Long Bridge across the Mottlau, the cameraman was able to squeeze the whole Gothic-brick mother hen into the picture. In two other long shots, from the Old City Ditch and across the dam, the Royal Polish Chapel leans against Saint Mary’s and enhances its proportions. And in still another, taken at the corner of Outer City Ditch and Frog Pond, the colossal church steeple and the slender Rathaus tower, rising behind the gabled roofs of Dog Street, seem to be wedded forever. Of course we also shot the familiar postcard views from Jopengasse or the shady Frauengasse, depending on the position of the sun. And next day, when we visited the state workshops on the marshy flats between Werder Gate and the Vistula, our team set up its equipment on the roof of the wrought-iron works and captured the silhouette of the distant city. “This in itself,” I said to the conservator, “makes it worthwhile. The expense, I mean.”

  In the evening I met Maria again. I called for her at the shipyard gate. The new canteen is right behind the entrance, where in Lena Stubbe’s early-socialist days the workers’ kitchen already had a way with stews. Maria appeared in sweater and jeans, in roughly the spot where a few years before her voluble Jan had been shot in mid-sentence. She had no desire to stop and briefly honor his memory. “But Maria,” I said, “he was so gloriously mad. To this day no one has disproved his thesis that right after the final curtain of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fortinbras led his troops to Kashubia and was defeated by Swantopolk!”

  But Maria said only, “Today it was pork and cabbage.” She was carrying a dinner pail along with her vinyl handbag. We went to the central station and took the streetcar to Heubude. There wasn’t much doing on the beach. We headed eastward and made barefoot tracks. The usual halfhearted waves. I found a few crumbs of amber in the seaweed. Then we sat down in the dunes and spooned up the lukewarm pork and cabbage. Like the rest of the shipyard workers, Jan had this same dish, cooked as usual with caraway seed, in his belly when, on December 18, 1970, the police shot him square in the belly.

  “Those idiots,” said Maria, “thought they could raise the food prices before Christmas.” She showed me a photo of her girls, Damroka and Mestwina: pretty. Then we fell silent, each on a different subject, until Maria suddenly stood up, ran across the beach to the Baltic Sea, and three times shouted the same Kashubian word, whereupon the Flounder jumped out of the smooth sea and landed on her outspread palms… .

  Quarrel

  Because the dog, no, the cat

  or because the children (yours and mine)

  are unhousebroken, making them the scapegoats,

  because visitors have left too early

  or peace gone on too long

  and all the raisins tend to be …

  Words that are wedged into drawers

  and are hooks and eyes for Ilsebill.

  She wishes for something, wishes for something.

  Now I am going.

  Making the rounds of the house.

  Boiled beef is stringy between the teeth.

  Sky Night Air.

  Someone far away, who is also making the rounds of the house. Again.

  Only the pensioner and his wife

  who live in the pisspot next door

  have gone to sleep without a word too many.

  Ah, Flounder! Your story has a dismal ending.

  Dishwashing

  My glasses are afraid of Ilsebill. When, for no reason at all, or because the weather had changed, or because I had emptied her pickle vinegar, which she sopped up as if she was hooked, down the toilet, when suddenly something snapped and sent her into a cold, jellied rage—how she trembled and what an aftertremor went through her when it was over—and with furious hand, no, with a dry dishcloth, swept my whole collection of glasses off the shelves, or because I had said, “The trip to the West Indies is off,” because it so happens that pregnant women are entitled to drink pickle vinegar and a case of migraine was brought on by a Scandinavian high-pressure zone, I, the collector, looked calmly on as more and more of my glasses, includin
g special favorites, were dashed to splinters, for Ilsebill had stopped sweeping away the entire fine-blown contents of a shelf at one stroke with a rag, and instead, while the slanting rays of the afternoon sun played over the shards, was picky-choosily smashing one glass at a time, because, to spare my sensitive glassware, I had said an unequivocal no to a Bosch or Miele dishwasher with six control knobs and a guarantee of minimal noise. “Not in my house!” I had cried.

  One more example of how firmness persists (until it is heroically abandoned). More and more serenely I watched Ilsebill. Because I was liberated at last from my collector’s obsession, I slipped into a speculative mood and wondered whether apart from obvious causes—the pickle vinegar, the trip to the West Indies, the Scandinavian high-pressure zone, the dishwasher—there might not be other, more obscure reasons for this clean sweep, this heroic housecleaning, for it seemed possible that Ilsebill’s rage was High Gothic in origin and had been storing up ever since I exchanged her little silver scourge—a fine piece of swordmaker’s craftsmanship—for a Venetian (Murano) goblet. This beautifully blown piece, which would have cost a fortune today, was the last to be shattered by Ilsebill.

  “Trying to make a witch or a saint out of me, whatever serves your purpose at the moment. This isn’t the Middle Ages!” she cried as she hurled. She was as terrifying as that Dorothea who has been pressing against my gall bladder since the fourteenth century, and it’s high time for her to come out, the bitch!

  Freed from my glasses, I considered the purchase of a dishwasher with a Super-55 control panel. After twenty washings the supply of special soap must be renewed. Atlantic low-pressure fronts countered the migraine effect of the Scandinavian high-pressure zone. All you have to do is load and unload. Not even the Bosch company can guarantee that the purchase of a dishwasher will put an end to our dishwashing problem. Who’s going to load and unload? I? Me?

  Certain kinds of glass (hand-blown) are likely to cloud after three washings. Never again, as long as my Ilsebill is pregnant, will I throw pickle vinegar down the toilet. I put all the shards—Bohemian, Venetian, lots of English Regency—back on the shelves. As for our trip to the West Indies, travel folders came into the house: White, unpolluted beaches. Coconut palms. Ice-cold fruit juice. Darkskinned people and their carefree laughter. Happiness included in the purchase price. And there’s Ilsebill stepping out of a charter plane, and blondly she moves about in the range finder of an adman’s movie camera that is blind to anything but blond.

  Actually my glasses are still beautiful as shards. Even broken they are sounder than we are. And to Ilsebill I said: “This Dorothea—if you care to remember—owned a scourge plaited from silver wire, which, when she was still a child, was given to her by the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting. Probably on the Flounder’s advice, because at the Women’s Tribunal this High Gothic utensil, with which Dorothea approached her Lord Jesus in times of migraine, has been repeatedly characterized as an instrument of oppression invented by men and therefore typical. Do you, too—tell me frankly, Ilsebill—sometimes feel like inflicting, let’s say, moderate pain on yourself with a little silver scourge? Or does smashing glasses satisfy you? You seemed really liberated when you were through. Free, yet affectionate. We can buy new ones any time. I saw two Baroque, ostensibly Danish glasses in Hamburg—sinfully expensive, but what does it matter? They were related like you and me, irregular in different ways but harmonious. What do you say?”

  No, says Ilsebill, meaning yes. Both glasses are still harmoniously safe and sound. It will be some time before the next Scandinavian high-pressure zone comes around. Sour pickles are no longer in demand. At the moment it’s sauerkraut, raw, and plenty of it. The extreme humidity in the West Indies is said to keep migraine away. But the claim that the dishwasher—there it is at last, running full tilt—makes next to no noise is a swindle, Ilsebill, a pure swindle. And our dishwashing problem, the sum of all problems since Dorothea, remains unsolved. Your turn and my turn refuse to become our turn.

  “No, friend Flounder,” I said later, “that Dorothea I saddled myself with in the year 1356 was an ill-tempered bitch, and her way of doing me in is still in force; for my Ilsebill, now in her second month of pregnancy, is still capable of the same infectious moods. When angry she has only to pass an open bowl of milk and it turns. She casts her shadow, and good, solid glassware cracks. Stands mutely behind our guests, whose laughter has been bouncing around the circle as gaily as a ball, and the merriment seeps away, the ball springs a leak, the children are gathered up, in a muffled, time-to-go-home atmosphere someone starts looking for the ignition key, a dispirited voice says, ‘OK, we’ll be seeing you.’

  “Our guests are gone. Nothing is left but that bilious look. The windows cloud over. The last fly, that last bit of summer joy, drops from the wall. A Central European migraine becomes a social event. And that’s how it was—believe me, friend Flounder—when on your advice—’Marriage will multiply your possessions’—I married the High Gothic Dorothea of Montau.”

  According to custom the wedding should have gone on for three days. Not only had the members of the swordmakers’ and goldsmiths’ guilds donned their finery; also, the still-rich Island peasants had driven from Montau and Käsemark, in carriages drawn by two or more horses, although they knew that even on so joyful an occasion Dorothea would serve up an Ash Wednesday menu; from her childhood on, she had been repelled by meat dishes.

  To make matters worse, Dorothea had also invited several patricians, a few Teutonic Knights, and her Dominican confessor and seated them at separate tables. Trouble was inevitable. The guildsmen were offended, and not just because of the meager fare—fish, leek soup, a bit of dried meat, lots of manna grits, and no fatted steers, suckling pigs, or stuffed goose with milky millet porridge. Still, the platters had an appetizing look, for they were garnished with sorrel leaves and raw beets. There were bowls of herring roe mixed with curds and dill. Glumse could be dipped in linseed oil. Anyone who wished to could sweeten his manna grits with plum butter.

  But the atmosphere was homicidal from the start. The Teutonic Knights boasted of how many Lithuanians they had driven into the marshes in their last two winter campaigns! The Dominican monk deplored that the peasants of the Montau region in the Vistula loop were still enjoying their rich lands in sinful freedom from tithes. The patricians told the swordmakers to their faces that in other cities the authorities kept a tight rein on the guilds and cracked down at the slightest murmur. At first my fellow guildsmen put up with the insults; then their eyes bugged out with anger; then angry words flew from table to table. And immediately after the brawl that started when a Teutonic Knight crudely tossed a radish into the lap of the patrician Schönbart’s smartly dressed daughter, the wedding party broke up. Only the peasants, who understood very little of what had happened, stayed on. Thoroughly embarrassed, I cleared the table. Dorothea laughed.

  “I assure you, friend Flounder, it was no happy guffawing, but a tinny bleating, as if she had escaped from Satan’s goat barn, that my Dorothea served up to the bewildered remnants of the wedding party for dessert. And later on they wanted to make a saint of that cold-blooded bitch. What a laugh!”

  Here the Flounder tried to comfort me. Yes, the price was high, but not really too high, and it had to be paid. Only with the help of the Christian religion had it been possible to end matriarchal absolutism, and the whole basis of the Christian religion was alternate fasting and feasting. This had made it necessary to accept the bad part, the rule of the Dorotheas over household and kitchen.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Flounder. “Her eternal Lenten soups are not exactly inviting, but as a guildsman you can catch up at morning get-togethers and other social functions, where nothing prevents your stuffing and swilling till your liver swells up. Besides, your Dorothea is beautiful with a beauty that calls for something more than adulation. And healthy to boot, not nearly so frail as her inner visions and heavenly copulations would suggest.”

  “But that�
�s just it, friend Flounder. Her health is crushing me. When I—all it takes is a sudden change in the weather—come down with a splitting headache and fits of tears, she, even in sultry weather, stays malignantly serene and keeps her mind clear for ascetic speculations. She can fast till she’s as thin as a rail; her peace of mind doesn’t lose an ounce. She paralyzes my wit. She cuts down my thoughts. She undermines my health. I can’t stand the daylight any more. I can’t bear noise—the croaking of toads, for instance. Ever since I married Dorothea, I’ve been ailing. My head, impervious to the din of the most infernal smithy, threatens to burst as soon as I hear or even suspect her light step, that witchlike shuffle. And when she speaks to me in her cold, long-suffering voice and forces me into a joyless system with her ascetic rules, I’m afraid to contradict her. I’m afraid of her compulsive rhymes that connect everything under the sun with her sweet Jesus.” And I quote from my Dorothea’s verses: “When Jesu swet my viol boweth, ah, what pleasur he bestoweth …”

  At that point the Flounder, my adviser and foster father, stuffed me full of medieval Scholasticism. He gave me lessons and taught me how to interpret crooked as straight, a pile of shards as sound glassware, darkness as an edifice of light, and constraint as Christian freedom. He expected me, thus educated and never again at a loss for an answer, to force my Dorothea into the Procrustean bed of my dialectic whenever in her robust way she became insufferable.