The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  The four dignitaries had hardly finished discussing the possibilities and possible setbacks—What if she’s caught practicing witchcraft?—when Dorothea, now properly setting one foot in front of the other on the floor boards, entered carrying the Scania herrings on a platter.

  They can be used fresh, salted, smoked, or marinated. They can be boiled, baked, fried, steamed, filleted, boned and stuffed, rolled around gherkins, or placed in oil, vinegar, white wine, and sour cream. Boiled with onions in salt water, they went well with Amanda Woyke’s potatoes in their jackets. Sophie Rotzoll laid them on strips of bacon, sprinkled them with bread crumbs, and popped them into the oven. Margarete Rusch, the cooking nun, liked to steam sauerkraut with juniper berries and throw in small, boned Baltic herrings toward the end. Agnes Kurbiella served tender fillets steamed in white wine as diet fare. Lena Stubbe rolled herrings in flour, fried them, and set them before her second husband. But when Dorothea had the four dignitaries at her table, she prepared Scania herrings salted down and shipped in crates from the Danzig trading post in Falsterbo—for which reason the crate makers and the sailors of the Scania fleet, though belonging to separate guilds, had joined forces to provide Saint John’s with a Lady altar and silver utensils—in accordance with her usual Lenten rules. After carefully washing them in fresh water, she bedded twelve Scania herrings on ashes strewn over the coals, so that without oil, spices, or condiment of any kind, their eyes whitened and they took on the taste of cooked fish. Before setting the herrings down on the platter—side by side, alternating head and tail—she blew the bulk of the ashes off each one, but a silvery-gray film remained, so that no sooner had Dorothea left the room than the four gentlemen could not help asking what kind of wood the Lenten cook had burned to ashes.

  After a short prayer, spoken at Johannes’s request by Dorothea’s Dominican confessor, the four gentlemen hesitated briefly and fell to. All agreed that Scania herring prepared in this way was singularly tasty. Not one of them wished to look more deeply into the origin of the ashes. All four, even the refined Roze, propped their elbows on the table, held their herrings by the head and tail, and ate them—the monk Nikolaus with rotting teeth—off both sides of the backbones, which they then set down in the original order, head beside tail, whereupon each one took his second and then his third herring off the platter. Only Commander Walrabe bit the crispy tips off his herring tails. Abbot Johannes ceded his third herring to the Dominican monk. As long as they were eating, all four were silent, except that the vicar of Saint Mary’s muttered something in Latin between the first and second and the second and third herrings.

  When at last the twelve backbones lay neatly side by side, the abbot, the commander, the doctor of canon law, and the Dominican returned to their subject. It was decided that on the occasion of the next jubilee—which Pope Boniface was not to proclaim until 1390—Dorothea would be provided with the pilgrim’s pence and dispatched to Rome under the escort of Frau Martha Quademosse, a Dominican agent. Then they would wait and see whether the pilgrim survived the rigors of the journey and the unaccustomed climate. Frau Quademosse would send reports.

  Dorothea did indeed fall seriously ill when shown the Veil of Veronica, the famous relic preserved at Saint Peter’s in Rome, but she recovered miraculously in spite of Frau Quademosse’s ministrations and was in the pink of health when, along with other pilgrims, she entered Danzig through Jacob’s Gate on the Sunday after the Ascension.

  With her aged husband’s consent, the four dignitaries had decided that in the event of her returning alive they would announce his death and let it be known that the child Gertrud had been entrusted to the care of the Benedictine nuns in Culm. The house on Bucket Makers’ Court had belonged to the Dominicans since Dorothea’s pilgrimage, and the indebted swordmaker had to pay rent to the monks.

  This, too, was done. Pronounced dead (an empty coffin was buried in the graveyard of Saint Catherine’s), swordmaker Slichting was glad to be relieved of his debts and free at last from the cross of his marriage. Three days before Dorothea, surrounded by the throng of pilgrims announced by Frau Quademosse, paid her first visit to the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary, father and daughter moved secretly, with the help of the Dominicans, to Konitz, where Slichting joined the guild under another name and, since a war was on, became a wealthy man again, married Gertrud to a swordmaker, and lived to a ripe old age, old enough to take cognizance of the fulfillment of Dorothea’s prediction that the Teutonic Knights would be defeated at Tannenberg.

  Once the preparations decided on at table were complete, Abbot Johannes declared that he was now prepared to have the widowed Dorothea immured under her maiden name of Swarze in Marienwerder Cathedral.

  This was done, after some delay (resulting perhaps from Polish intrigues) in obtaining the bishop’s consent. In a solemn ceremony, the pious penitent was removed from the world on May 2, 1393, in the presence of the four forward-thinking dignitaries, and lodged under the southern staircase, which led to the choir loft. Each brick was blessed. The wool of the divine lamb was mixed into the mortar. At last Dorothea had won her freedom. Only one small opening remained, through which she could breathe, receive small amounts of Lenten fare, pass out her meager feces, follow the Mass in the cathedral, take daily Communion, and confess her holy progress to Johannes Marienwerder, who proceeded to write her life story in Church Latin; but there was no possibility of publishing it until 1492, when it was printed by Jakob Karweysse, Danzig’s first book printer.

  The four dignitaries also swore over the platter where the backbones of twelve Scania herrings lay alternating head and tail in their original order, that in case Dorothea Swarze, known as Dorothea of Montau, should be immured, they would institute canonization proceedings immediately after her death—they gave her six months.

  This, too, was done. But the immured woman lasted longer than expected. She died on June 25, 1394. Whereupon her cell, after numerous believers in miracles had looked in through the opening and gazed for a moment at the corpse stretched out on the floor, was sealed up tight. True enough, canonization proceedings were initiated without further delay, and Grand Master von Jungingen of the Teutonic Order communicated his special interest in a Prussian saint to the canonization commission. But unfortunately the disorders attendant on the Great Schism obliged the postulator to transfer the file to Bologna for safekeeping, and there it was lost. So nothing came of the proceedings. The Teutonic Knights didn’t get their saint. And if, on the basis of the sparse evidence now available, the canonization proceedings resumed in 1955 should be carried to a successful conclusion, I doubt if anyone will derive real pleasure from this late triumph of Catholic infallibility except my onetime Latin teacher, Monsignor Stachnik, who has always taken a pious interest in Dorothea.

  The four dignitaries soon left the swordmaker’s house. No more work sounds rose up from Bucket Makers’ Court. Now the swift-flowing Radaune could be heard. A Baltic twilight was falling. The four were of good cheer, for they felt sure that their manly good sense had led them to plan wisely. Roze expressed his conviction that the canonization of Dorothea would swell the collections for additions to Saint Mary’s. Only Commander Walrabe von Scharfenberg expressed concern lest with Satan’s help this woman, who might be a witch after all, live longer in her immurement than they had so carefully planned.

  When on their way out the four dignitaries cast a last glance into the smoky kitchen, they saw the child Gertrud playing with moldy graveyard wood. Old Slichting sat by the fire as though forgotten. Dorothea was kneeling as usual on dried peas, which she was planning to cook, thus softened, the next day. They heard her praying:

  “What blissful pain thy spere

  Doth giv me, Jesus dere …”

  To Ilsebill

  Dinner is getting cold.

  I’m not punctual any more.

  No “Hello, here I am!” pushes the accustomed door.

  Trying to approach you indirectly,

  I’ve gone astray—up tr
ees, down mushroomy slopes,

  into remote word fields, garbage dumps.

  Don’t wait. You’ll have to look.

  I could keep warm in rot.

  My hiding places have three exits.

  I am more real in my stories

  and in October, our birthday time,

  when the sunflowers stand beheaded.

  Since we are unable to live

  today’s day and the bit of night

  I offer you centuries,

  the fourteenth, for instance.

  We are pilgrims on our way to Aachen,

  feeding on pilgrim’s pence.

  We’ve left the plague at home.

  This on the Flounder’s advice.

  In flight again.

  But once—I remember—

  in the middle of a story that was headed

  for some entirely different place, across the ice to Lithuania,

  you found me with you: you, too, a hiding place.

  My dear Dr. Stachnik

  One who remembers Dorothea and sets out to record her Lenten soups, or even to oppose a diabolical or High Gothic antitype to the sublimity of the (still-uncanonized) saint, is bound to come up against your more pious than secure erudition, can be certain of your criticism, and will have to reckon with your Catholic indignation; for you have appropriated Dorothea, every bit of her.

  When you were still (with small success) my Latin teacher and I a dull-witted Hitler Youth, you were already specializing in Dorothea of Montau and the fourteenth century, although the times (the war years) offered small opportunity for escapism. After all, you had been the local chairman of the Center Party (until it was prohibited in 1937) and its deputy in the Danzig Volkstag. As a tacit opponent of National Socialism, you had to be careful. And yet Nazi persecution followed you even to our musty schoolroom, though it hardly made a dent in the thick heads of your students.

  With your Latin rigor you remained a stranger to us students, a freak who—let Stalingrad fall or Tobruk be lost—didn’t really care about anything but grammar. Only when you indulged in a bit of naïve Catholicism, only when you spoke (with discernible affection) of the blessed Dorothea and her impending canonization, were you able to win my heart and stir my imagination; at the age of thirteen, in any case, I had a crush on a little girl who must have resembled Dorothea—I remember blue veins in white temples. Of course I had no tangible success. She had black hair. But you and I are certain that Dorothea of Montau’s hair was the color of wheat. Maybe we also agree that her beauty had no use value. And I join you in the belief that she was unfit for marriage, though you insist in your writings that Dorothea tried to be a good housekeeper and wife to swordmaker Albrecht Slichting. (You point out, for example, that she often washed the dishes when unable to sleep at night.)

  In your last letter you write, “If I have come out strongly for our home saint, the patron saint of Prussia, and am still working in her behalf, it is because, as I am sure you recognize, Dorothea was an extraordinary creature. I regard her as intellectually, morally, and spiritually the most outstanding woman of Prussia during the period of the Teutonic Knights.” Here I cannot follow you, for while I agree that Dorothea was extraordinary, I can find no trace of saintliness in her makeup.

  In your letter you refer to testimonies presented to the canonization commission of the time. You cite Jungingen and other such ruffians from among the Teutonic Knights, build your case in part on Dorothea’s biographer, Johannes Marienwerder, and recommend the study of his great trilogy, Vita venerabilis dominae Dorotheae. But it is not only my scant knowledge of Latin that turns me away from the onetime Prague professor of theology and later dean of Marienwerder Cathedral. Johannes was too deeply involved, too intent on producing a saint for the Teutonic Order. I prefer to rely—since I, like you, my dear Herr Stachnik, am at home in imaginary worlds—on my personal memories, on my own painful experience with Dorothea, for before, during, and after the Black Death, I was the swordmaker Albrecht, eight out of nine of whose children died, whose bit of hard-earned prosperity was dissipated by Dorothea’s openhandedness at church doors, who was the laughingstock of the gold- and coppersmiths, of whom, in short, she (the pious bitch) made a fool. Oh, if I had only consented to a separation in Einsiedeln, when she wanted to throw me and her last child overboard like ballast.

  Perhaps you will argue: what do my domestic troubles and years of sexual privation (because she stopped doing it, she wouldn’t let me in) amount to, measured against Dorothea’s ecstasies and illuminations; how insignificant was my squandered fortune weighed against what Dorothea gained each day by pleasing God with her (bloody) flagellation; what did the loss of eight children (at a time of high infant mortality) signify if through the Lord Jesus (with whom she communed daily) she became a true child of God; and how could I think of demanding retribution for earthly trouble now that after almost five hundred years’ patience the heavenly reward was at last on the point of being paid out—any day now!

  If you look at it that way, you are right—my High Gothic family-man troubles shrink to nothingness in the light of your joyful expectation. Triumphantly you write, “As the relator general of the canonization commission recently informed me, the ‘Confirmatio cultus Dorotheae Montoviesis, Beatae vel Sanctae nuncupatae’ will probably be announced before the year is out in an apostolic brief, so bringing the canonization proceedings to a successful conclusion.”

  That I am quite prepared to believe, for I am still Catholic enough to tremble at the power of the True Church to suspend time. I know that faith, however darkly it may err, outshines the pathetic lamp of reason. And yet I take the liberty of putting a different, more earthly interpretation on the impending canonization not only of your, but also of my Dorothea: Dorothea was the first woman (in our region) to rebel against the patriarchal tyranny of medieval marriage. Soon after her father’s death, her eldest brother, without consulting her (she was then sixteen), married her to an elderly man (me). What did I do? I made the frail child one brat after the other, dragged my expensively dressed Dorothea to boring guild dinners, showed her what a coward I was through my half-hearted participation in a ridiculous artisans’ uprising (what did I care about the interests of the brewers or coopers?), and beat her with my hard swordmaker’s hand or—as on the return journey from Einsiedeln—threw stones at her because I hated her and her witching ideas of freedom.

  Because that was all she wanted—to be set free. Free from the prison of marriage. Free from sexual duty. Free from domestic trivia. Free for what?

  You, my dear Herr Stachnik, will say: Free for God! Free for the love of God! But when the case of Dorothea of Montau was debated before the Women’s Tribunal in Berlin—you must have read about it in the papers—the presiding judge said: “Dorothea Swarze wanted freedom for herself. Religion and Jesus were only a means, the one permissible agency through which to press her demand for emancipation and escape the all-engulfing power of men. Since she had no other choice than to be burned as a witch or immured as a saint, she decided—for the sake of her freedom—to serve a halfway credible legend up to the dean of Marienwerder Cathedral. A case typical of the Middle Ages, but not without relevance to the present day. We women of today have every reason to look upon Dorothea Swarze as a precursor. Her attempt at self-liberation—bound as it was to end tragically—obliges us to take a sisterly view of her affliction, to evaluate her Godforsaken!—yes, Godforsaken!—failure as a call addressed to us, and to hold her name in honor.”

  I feel sure, my dear Monsignor Stachnik, that if all this feminist gush calls forth any reaction in you, it will be the stoical smile of the Latinist. And yet I beg you to consider my compromise proposal, halfway between the Catholic and the feminist positions.

  I will never again—though I could furnish proof—call Dorothea a witch; you for your part will stop harping—though she had the makings of a saint—on her impending canonization. We both agree that Dorothea Swarze was an unfortunate woman who su
ffered under the servitudes of her times—more foolish than clever, tormented by insomnia and migraine, a slovenly housekeeper, yet remarkably efficient when it came to organizing processions of flagellants, a woman of gaunt beauty and ruthlessly strong will, despite her hours of convulsive ecstasy unable to think up appealing miracles, endowed with a slight lyrical gift, sluggish in bed but energetic with the scourge, a good walker, hence adept at pilgrimages, cheerful only in the company of wandering penitents and other nuts, rich in extravagant desires, but practical and innovative in devising her ego-related Lenten cookery: it was really good! Ah, her manna grits with sorrel! Ah, her Scania herring! Ah, her dried peas! Ah, her codfish roe on buckwheat cakes! Ah, her Glumse with herbs!

  You have no doubt noticed, my dear Herr Stachnik, that like you (though without heavenly reward) I, too, loved Dorothea. But she kissed the Flounder, a matter on which her biographer, Johannes Marienwerder, wasted not so much as a word. To be sure, after that kiss (and her fornication with the fish, to be sure) her mouth slipped out of shape, but even crooked of mouth and slanting of eye she was still beautiful. The mass of her hair. Her scourged and bleeding flesh. I even liked her rhymes, her “herte” and “smerte.”2 And her habit of stirring ashes into all her soups. And she could really hover two feet above the ground—I saw her do it several times (and not only out of doors in the fog).