The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  “Don’t let her develop a logic of her own,” said the Flounder. “What she doesn’t understand will always be beyond her understanding. As a woman, you see, she’s not really entitled to logic. Devise—I know you can do it—an edifice with many rooms but reduced dimensions, in which one thing follows from another and the next from the next. If she contradicts you, or says her instinct tells her that your projected edifice lacks an entrance or an exit, you have only to reply: My edifice is logical because the rules of thought have been correctly applied, and contrariwise. And if your Dorothea continues to argue, or if she goes so far as to oppose your system with sweet-Jesus jingles, then put on your friendliest voice and say: You mustn’t overtax yourself, wife. This kind of thing is too much for you. Leave the general ideas to me. You look pale, tired. Your eyelids are fluttering. There are beads of sweat on your Madonna forehead, which doesn’t get its beauty from thinking. Let me apply cold compresses. Let me draw the curtains. Everyone will pad about in stocking feet. Not a single fly will be left uncaught. Because you need absolute quiet. Because you’ve been under a strain. Because you’re sick, my dearest, and I’m worried about you.”

  Thus transformed into a Scholastic and master of hair-splitting by the Flounder in several courses of lectures, I went to my wife, Dorothea, and, when she couldn’t follow my logic, talked until my so-called migraine transferred itself to her. After that, of course, I was less responsive to the weather and seldom suffered from headaches and weeping fits. But whether my loss of migraine—the last of men’s prehistoric prerogatives to have survived—brought me any relief, I venture to doubt. And answering to the Women’s Tribunal, the Flounder, after the usual evasive replies (in which he quoted the Church Fathers in Latin), admitted that while his advice that I should talk High Gothic women into regarding migraine as a female prerogative may have enhanced their beauty, it hardly advanced the male cause.

  In any case Dorothea, before or after her attacks of migraine, put me through a severe grilling. True, she spoke in rhymes and images, but if they had been translated into prose (the language of my Ilsebill) she might have said, “Now where did you get that? Don’t tell me it came out of your thick skull. Talking me blind with your shitty logic. Who told you that stuff, and where?”

  Thus cornered, I finally confessed, and betrayed the Flounder to Dorothea. True, I was able to warn him in time—“Watch your step, friend Flounder! She’ll be coming to see you, and she’ll want something”—but his feelings were hurt, and to this day he hasn’t forgiven my betrayal; “breach of trust,” he called it.

  “Look at all I’ve done for you, my son! Weaned you from your Awa. Taught you to smelt metals, to mint coins, to piece together philosophical systems, to think logically. I have set your rational patriarchy above purely instinctual matriarchy. For the benefit of you men I invented the division of labor. I advised you to marry, and marriage multiplied your possessions. Most recently I relieved you of your chronic headache, whereupon, sorry to say, you turned into a jughead, garrulous and unreliable. You gave me away, betrayed my trust, told our secret to a chatterbox. From this time on marriage will be a yoke to you. From this time on the dominant male will have to pay tribute to his domestic battle-ax, if only in the kitchen, when it’s time to wash the dishes. From now on, in any case, I shall advise you only in extramarital matters. Let her come, this Dorothea of yours with her Madonna face. I won’t tell her a thing, not even if she kisses me.”

  It must have been just two years after our marriage. I wasn’t present. The particulars didn’t come out until the Flounder’s trial, when he himself disclosed them to the Women’s Tribunal. As it happens, the prosecutor bears a frightening resemblance to my Ilsebill, and not only to my Ilsebill. Both are sisters of Dorothea of Montau: that compelling look, that strength of will, which pinpoints everything, which can move mountains even when there aren’t any. They are appallingly blond (all three of them), dedicated to strict morality, and possessed by the brand of courage that always barges straight ahead, come what may.

  So Dorothea went to see the Flounder. She took with her all her beauty and untarnished youth. One Friday, after simmering Scania herrings in onion broth. She was wearing her long (penitential) gown of nettles, and her hair was unbound.

  I had instructed her, “You must go into the sea. When you are up to your knees, call him several times, give him my regards. Then he’ll come, and perhaps if you kiss him he’ll tell you something. Wish for something; wish for something.”

  So Dorothea went straight down the beach, making tracks with her bare feet, to the shallows where the halfhearted Baltic waves petered out. Then she gathered her gown of nettles. Up to her knees she stood in the lazy water, and her cry smelled of herring as she cried, “Flounder, cum oute, ich wol kisse thy snoute.”

  Then she introduced herself as Dorothea of Montau, who belonged to no man, not even to her Albrecht the swordmaker, but only to the Lord Jesus, her heavenly bridegroom. And if, she went on, she kissed the Flounder, she would not be kissing him but her sweet Jesus in the guise of a flounder.

  And just as, in all my time-phases, the Flounder jumped up onto the palms of my hands, so now he jumped into my Dorothea’s arms. She was so frightened she let a fart, which along with other particulars was cited before the Women’s Tribunal and duly entered in the minutes.

  The Flounder said nothing but offered Dorothea his crooked mouth. Her lips were chapped from the sea wind. With her long, ascetic fingers she held his white underside and his pebbly top side. It was a long kiss. A sucking kiss. They kissed without closing their eyes. (“Upon my lips the Flunder’s kisse hath ravishèd my soul from heavenly blisse,” ran a later Dorothean rhyme.)

  That kiss changed her. Her mouth was twisted, though just perceptibly, out of shape. It wasn’t her sweet Jesus who had kissed her. With a slightly crooked mouth she immediately asked the Flounder how many other women he had kissed before her. And whether his kiss had tasted the same to those other women. And what made his mouth crooked. And how she could explain all this to her dear Jesus.

  But the Flounder gave no answer, and she thought him strange and terrifying. So she threw him back into the sea and called after him, “Flunder, ichab ykist1 enow, telle me then, where sitteth thy plow.”

  When Dorothea came home, I saw that her mouth was twisted and no longer ran parallel to the axis of her eyes. From then on she had a sardonic expression, which enhanced her beauty, though the street urchins took to calling her Flounderface.

  Next day, when I went to him for an interim report—Dorothea wouldn’t say a word, but spent her time kneeling contritely on unshelled peas—the Flounder said, “Your breach of trust will have dire consequences; I liked your little woman, though, even if she did smell of herring. I like the hysterical flutter of her tongue. Her way of wanting more and more. Only her questions got on my nerves.”

  I warned the Flounder that Dorothea would be back, but he remained unruffled: why should that frighten him? Naturally she had something up her sleeve. Women always had a compulsion to avenge their defeats—that was their nature—but no skirt was going to hook him.

  And, facing the Women’s Tribunal, he said to Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor: “But, my good woman, of course I was aware of the risk! Wasn’t I running a still-greater risk when I voluntarily fastened myself to your ridiculous hook? I’ve always been attracted to ghastly blond hair like yours or Dorothea’s. I can’t resist it. Strong-willed women like Dorothea and yourself—may I call you Sieglinde?—have always made me—what’s the expression now?—lovesick. Though within reasonable limits. You see what I mean—my fishy nature.”

  When Dorothea went back to the Flounder, she took a kitchen knife. “Flunder, cum oute!” she cried. The Flounder jumped. They kissed. But when he again neglected to answer her questions, she, in housewifely manner, cut off his head with a single stroke direcly behind the pectoral fin. She smacked the quivering flat body down on the sand, spitted the head on her vertically held knife,
and, her mouth made crooked by Flounder kissing, cried wildly, “All right. Flounder. You going to talk now? Answer me, Flounder! Answer my question: do you love me, Flounder?”

  Before the Flounder speaks from the vertically positioned knife, I’d better remind you how he, my omniscient, too-too-clever adviser, had persuaded me to sublimate the purely instinctual relationship between man and woman in a higher sentiment, love, because love and its corollary marriage gave rise to a dependence that was most becoming to women: “Aren’t they always wanting to be told whether and how much they are loved, whether love is holding its own or on the increase, whether there’s a threat of love for some outsider, whether love is sure to last.” Consequently, Dorothea’s question, which up until then she had addressed only to her sweet Jesus and never to me, was a dependent question; for which reason the Women’s Tribunal not unreasonably denounced the “institution of love” as an instrument of male oppression (although in the turn of phrase “catch oneself a man” the bait is tossed in the other direction).

  In any case the severed Flounder head spoke gruesomely from the vertically positioned knife: “Aha! Snick-snack! That’s the way! Most professional! But no one can cut me apart. I’ll find myself again. I will always be one. I don’t care for your snick-snack love. And let me tell you this: because you want everything or nothing, because my kiss that makes you beautiful is not enough and never will be enough for you, because you demand love but refuse to give love unquestioningly, because you have perverted the sublime Jesus principle into the pleasure principle, and finally because you give your husband, Albrecht the kindly swordmaker, who loves loves loves you, nothing but your cold flesh, you shall have all of me, Dorothea, and right now. For a day and a night.”

  So saying, the Flounder jumped off the knife, joined himself to his flat body and tail, grew before Dorothea’s horrified eyes into a giant flounder, lashed her with his fins and tail across the beach into the sea, deeper and deeper; as promised, he took her in with him.

  Just like that. And in his testimony to the Tribunal the Flounder made himself perfectly clear: “In short, I took her in with me.” “Typically masculine,” said the women in disapproval, whereas the Flounder, addressing the selfsame court, had called Dorothea’s “Do you love me?” typically feminine. He furthermore admitted that with his punitive action he had wished to provide an early formulation of his fairy tale, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” later interpreted as misogynistic. But what happened under water he refused to tell. “Fact is, I’m the old-fashioned sort. A woman’s reputation, don’t you know.”

  When the smooth sea released Dorothea next day, I was waiting on the beach, worried and by then quite willing to forgive and forget. Slowly she rose from the sea and made tracks past me. In horror the gulls kept their distance. It didn’t surprise me that her gown of nettles and her wheat-like hair had stayed dry. Yet she had changed again. Her eyes, too, were slightly out of kilter and at an angle to her crooked mouth. She came back fish-eyed, and that is how I shall sketch her when Ilsebill sits for me.

  As she passed by, Dorothea said she now knew all there was to know but would reveal nothing. And since the Flounder also kept a tight lip before the Tribunal, it has never been divulged what happened at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in the early summer of 1358 to make my Dorothea omniscient. Nevertheless, Sieglinde Huntscha, the esteemed prosecutor, displays the exact same knowing, foreknowing smile with which Dorothea from that day on descended stairs, knelt on peas, and trod the streets—once again lost in her Jesus and very nearly a saint.

  The household was a shambles after that. For the first time a maid walked out on us. Unwashed dishes piled up, attracted flies, brought rats into the house, stank. Ever since Dorothea, the dishwashing problem has been with us.

  No, Ilsebill, even earlier, with the kneading and molding of clay, with the baking of the first bowls, jugs, and pots, in Awa’s day, when she first developed ceramics, dishwashing began to be a problem. Though the timeless question “Who’s going to wash the dishes?” received a clear and simple answer: the men. Naturally that arrangement didn’t last. At some time or other (shortly after Mestwina), we just dropped the nasty, greasy things. It was beneath our dignity. The male cause was getting ahead.

  Obviously to have the woman standing at the sink from morning to night is no solution. In this light your dishwasher, which we men invented, which you wished for, which you (absolutely) insisted on having, can be regarded as progress on the installment plan, with a year’s guarantee. Maybe it will emancipate us all. From what? From blobs of mustard on the edges of dishes? From crumbling mutton fat? From desiccated leftovers? From disgust in general?

  And so we delegate our dishwashing. Never again will an Agnes caress our daily cares away with her dishpan hands. Never again will Sophie sing her rabble-rousing revolutionary songs over heaped-up cups and dishes. There will only be your next-to-noiseless dishwasher. If only such a thing had existed after the Flounder released Dorothea and she made me wear myself out over a mountain of dishes.

  Elaine Migraine

  Sits in the cleft of a tree

  and reacts to the weather over plucked—

  tweaser-plucked—eyebrows.

  When the weather changes

  when high pressure brings blue sky

  her silken thread snaps.

  We all dread the change,

  flit past on stocking feet, curtain the light.

  It’s said to be a pinched nerve—here or here or here,

  something askew inside, no, still deeper.

  An ailment that began with the last ice age,

  when nature went through another shift.

  (And besides: when the angel came clanking

  too close to her, the Virgin, so it seems,

  dotted her temples with her fingertips.)

  Since then doctors have been making money.

  Since then faith has been practiced by autogenic training.

  That cry which everyone claims to have heard—

  even old people remember their horror

  when mother lay silent in the darkness.

  The pain known only to those who have it.

  Again it threatens,

  cup strikes loud on saucer,

  a fly perishes,

  too close together, the glasses stand shivering,

  the bird of paradise squawks.

  “Elaine Migraine,” sing the children outside the window.

  We—who have no idea—feel sorry from a distance.

  But she, behind lowered blinds, has entered the torture chamber.

  Attached to her whirring wire, she grows more and more beautiful.

  Libber, Libber

  Between separate beds

  at shouting distance

  the sexes are being discussed.

  Finish! Let me finish.

  You’ve had your say.

  You’ve been talking for centuries.

  We’ll simply cut off your sound.

  You’ve got no words.

  You aren’t even funny.

  Libber, Libber! the children call

  as the fairy-tale Ilsebill passes.

  She has smashed what is dear and precious.

  With a dull ax she has

  destroyed our bit of one-and-only.

  She wants to be independent, entirely on her own,

  no more joint bank account.

  And yet there used to be a we—you and I,

  with a double Yes in our glance.

  A shadow in which, exhausted,

  we were many-limbed, yet one sleep,

  and on a photograph true to each other.

  Hate forms sentences.

  How she settles accounts, does me in,

  grows out of her role, towers above me,

  and has the last word! Finish! Let me finish!

  And stop talking about Us and We.

  Libber, Libber! said the signs incised on clay tablets,

  Minoan finds (Knossos, first palace
period)

  which for long years were undeciphered,

  mistaken for household accounts

  or fertility formulas,

  matriarchal trivia.

  But from the very first (long before Ilsebill)

  the goddess was agitating.

  Like my Dorothea

  Whether I rub against Ilsebill until she is pregnant, or meet Sieglinde Huntscha after a trying day in court—once again the Flounder has been floating belly up in protest—for a beer and so on, or whether with the help of my portable typewriter I finally liberate myself from Dorothea, it is always the same type that makes me weak and fluttery, that I fall for, that reduces me to strictly nothing.

  The other day, while the Women’s Tribunal was discussing my questionable behavior in connection with the uprising of the guilds against the patricians, I took out a soft pencil and drew in my sketchbook pictures of the prosecutor, first in profile while she was accusing the Flounder of having stood foursquare behind the hegemony of the patricians, then in three-quarter view, and finally fullface, in order to provide myself with a portrait of Dorothea. But all my sketches insisted on looking like Ilsebill: always that terrifying narrow face, dominant and ineradicable, as though their fathers, instead of being an Island peasant, an engineer, and (like Gerhard Huntscha, who was killed in North Africa) a career officer, had all been diabolical he-goats from Ashmodai’s stable.

  And if among the associate judges of the Tribunal I recognized my morose Wigga in Ms. Helga Paasch, and in the always crocked Ruth Simoneit my mare’s-milk-guzzling Mestwina, then I can also be certain that the prosecution not only is being represented by Sieglinde Huntscha (and by you, Ilsebill), but is in addition giving my Dorothea certain advantages, which to be sure are counterbalanced by the eminently fair presiding judge, Ms. Schönherr. A mother figure with no smell of the stable about her. She who with few gestures transforms a madhouse, as the movie theater often becomes, into the best behaved of kindergartens reminds me time and again of my primal mother, Awa. In any event, she admonished the prosecution when Sieglinde Huntscha accused the Flounder of “playing the lackey to the ruling class of the moment.”