The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  At that blacksmith Rusch and the bald-headed Ladewig laughed. Then, apart from the chains, nothing could be heard but the spoons in the bowls, the sound of chewing and swallowing, and the pigeons in the window hole. And when she saw the men so deeply immersed in their tripe, Mother Rusch started in again with her ambiguous mumbling; for the abbess spoke freely and frankly only in the refectory of Saint Bridget’s, where at vespers and in the evening hours the nuns and novices forgathered around the long oak table.

  In troubled times—everywhere monks and nuns were escaping from their cloisters to risk the perils of secular life—it was often difficult to hold pious girls to their vows. They fidgeted, they wanted out, they wanted a man in breeches, wanted to be married, to bear children by the dozen, to walk in silk and satin and try to keep up with the town fashions.

  And so, while the sweet millet porridge diminished on the long table, the abbess told her little nuns, whose asses were itching for life, what life is and how quickly it crumbles away. She listed the freedoms of the nunnery and, in the debit column, the arduous duties of the married woman. While buckwheat piroshki filled with bacon and spinach were being enjoyed on both sides of the long table, the abbess explained the male build to her man-crazy women with the help of the vegetable course, buttered (and parsleyed) carrots, which with their varied shapes provided a graphic illustration of what a man is good for. How deeply penetrating he can be and how knobby. How soon he gives out and starts drooping pathetically. How brutal he becomes when he can’t get it up. How unprofitable this quick fucking is to women. How all he wants is children, especially sons. How soon he looks for variety in other beds. But how his spouse must never wander, never lust for other carrots. How hard his hand strikes. How suddenly he withdraws his favor and gets his carrot cooked soft away from home.

  But when the nuns, and especially the novices, kept squirming on their stools and persisted in seeing harder and more lasting promise in their buttered carrots, the abbess gave them permission to receive visitors through the back door of the convent, and also to range freely outside the cloister, thus acquainting them with the pleasures of the flesh and making them better able to resist the seductions of married life.

  Before saying grace and dismissing her charges, the abbess gave them further bits of advice: Let no quarrel over a codpiece ever disturb their monastic tranquillity. Let them always remain good sisters to one another. Let them not content themselves with holding still, but ride with and against. A man’s thanks should always be weighable in silver. And never, never, never, must they succumb to weepy, gushy love.

  Though not yet thirty, Mother Rusch had been abbess of Saint Bridget’s for over a year, having, as nun in charge of the kitchen, shown accomplishments of many kinds. And the accomplished abbess succeeded in holding her nuns, whereas the monks and nuns of the Dominican, Beguin, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders were running away to Luther. The consequence was unrest, uprisings of the guilds, iconoclast riots, alarums, and excursions, followed by little change or at the most by Royal Polish punitive expeditions. Preacher Hegge, to be sure, had managed to escape, but blacksmith Rusch and five other artisans, all poor devils, members of the lower trades, were condemned to death. And that is why a daughter served her father his last dish of tripe, which, since beginning to feel pregnant—most likely the work of Hegge shortly before his flight—she had taken to peppering excessively.

  And after she had filled her guests’ bowls for the third time, pepper kept cropping up in her talk.

  That was her obsession. Fat Gret had a thing about pepper. It sharpened her wit, she thought, it did wonders. It tormented her to think that all the new sea-borne pepper—the overland pepper that traders had been bringing in from Venice as long as anyone could remember was so fearfully expensive—passed through Lisbon. True, the Augsburgers maintained a depot there, where they hoarded pepper to keep the price up, but the Hanseatic towns let the trade slip through their fingers. Which explains why for some years Mother Rusch was impelled, by political ambition as well as the normal concerns of the kitchen, to take a hand in international politics. Much as she hated the patrician Ferber, she was determined to harness the experienced merchant and still actively seafaring admiral to her plans.

  After dishing out a third helping of tripe for her father and his guests, she let her table talk drift overseas. It wouldn’t do to leave the New World to the Portuguese and Spaniards. The Dutch and English were already coming in on a large scale. The only bankers engaged in the pepper trade were the Fuggers. But the Hanseatic League was short-sightedly confining its operations to the lesser seas, squabbling to no effect (as it had done only last year) with the Danes over Öresund tolls and herring silver, spitefully competing with one another (witness Lübeck and Danzig), sticking to wood, cloth, grain, dried codfish, and salt, refusing to take over the pepper trade, and neglecting to fit out ships for the longer voyage, too small-minded to establish a trading post on the pepper coast of India, as the Portuguese had done in Goa and Cochin, and preferring to engage in divisive religious quarrels and chop off the heads of good men like her father.

  She went on to discuss the principal pepper varieties most knowledgeably, their moist and dry weight, how stored and marketed; undertook, if an overseas expedition should be organized, to lure certain Arab helmsmen away from the Portuguese caravels; predicted spice wars between Spain and England; and even professed her eagerness—provided Jeschke would come along—to embark her own full weight on a vessel bound for India, there to propagate the Catholic faith, if only Ferber would consent to throw off his weariness, stop toadying to the Polish court, and at last start commissioning navigation charts.

  But Ferber remained indifferent over his tripe. Jeschke only sighed: pleasing as such a mission would be to God, he feared the Indian climate. Blacksmith Rusch said nothing. Executioner Ladewig had other dreams. And when the patrician leaned back, after spooning up the last bowl of tripe, his answering speech was uncompromising.

  He knew the world. He was a humanist and spoke five languages. Everywhere things were the same as in the Baltic area. Trading posts and warehouses in distant places could never be maintained for long; great losses were a certainty. Novgorod was giving them trouble enough. Falsterbo cost more than it brought in. Goa! It would cost the Portuguese dearly one of these days. As for the English, they seemed to have no inkling of what a burden India might well become to them. Trading posts in India. Ridiculous. Now, after last year’s futile war, did we want to pay the Danes pepper fees along with their herring silver? Hamburg in a pinch could afford such an undertaking. To maintain colonies you need an open coast. Danzig’s motto remained: Moderation in all things. No, he had no use for adventures. And speaking of his weariness: despite the ingratitude of the local rabble, he had earned the right to rest. Immediately after the morrow’s execution, he would divest himself of his chain of office and retire to his starosty for a quiet old age. Yes indeed! He would collect paintings from Antwerp. Musicians would play the lute for him and sing Italian songs. If the abbess wished, she could follow him to Dirschau, but not—by God!—to India. What was to keep him from financing a branch of the pious Brigittines in Dirschau? There’d always be plenty of pepper for her kitchen.

  Thereupon Mother Rusch, for the fourth time, filled first her father’s bowl, then the bowls of the guests with tripe. Even as she wielded the ladle, she cursed men for hopeless stay-at-homes. Then she fell silent, and the executioner spoke his mind. Ladewig complained about the wretchedness of his job. Luckily horse flaying brought in a little extra money. They wouldn’t pay him to kill stray dogs. And the city was drowning in shit and piss.

  Ladewig, whose meticulous, unhurried methods in the torture chamber allowed of no premature confessions, outlined an exemplary system of sanitation for the walled city, but only the blacksmith was listening. Here again Ferber was shortsighted, or he might have commissioned the executioner to keep the city clean, catch ownerless dogs, take measures against the plague, and
, for suitable fees, clean out the sludge boxes of all premises adjoining the Mottlau (thereby anticipating the “Newly Revised Ordinance” of 1761 by a good two centuries).

  Sensibly as Ladewig spoke and hard as he tried to win the patrician’s approval, Ferber’s mind, as he spooned up tripe, was already on his retirement in Dirschau. Still deeply immersed in his tripe, Abbot Jeschke dreamed himself and his benefices into a perfect world, undarkened by heresy. But though reacting with resolute silence to the cleansing of the city, Mother Rusch would not desist from Indian pepper. And because she was pregnant, her hope grew and grew.

  It will be a girl! And a girl it was. She was named Hedwig, brought up by Fat Gret’s aunts in the Wicker Bastion, and seventeen years later married the merchant Rodrigues d’Evora, a Ximines of the big Portuguese spice-trading family, who opened a trading post in Cochin on the Malabar Coast of India. Twice a year, for the feasts of Saint John and Saint Martin, the son-in-law honored the marriage contract (for Hedwig’s body was beautiful, in a Baltic sort of way) by sending a keg of ginger, two bales of cinnamon, a ship’s pound of saffron, two crates of bitter orange peel, a sack of almonds, a sack of grated coconut, specified amounts of cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg, five barrels containing Mother Rusch’s weight (at the time of the marriage contract) in black and white pepper, and one barrel of moist green pepper.

  After merchant d’Evora, his wife, and four of his daughters died of the fever in Cochin, the one surviving daughter, who later married the Spanish pepper magnate Pedro de Malvenda, is believed to have kept up the pepper shipments to Mother Rusch as long as she lived. Isabel de Malvenda lived in Burgos, then in Antwerp, from where, after her husband’s death, she corresponded with Martin Enzesperger, the Fuggers’ pepper agent, and established her contractors as far afield as Venice.

  By then London and Antwerp had taken a hand in the trade. Hamburg, which like all the Hanseatic towns was hostile to anything foreign, maintained a pepper trading post for only a few years. Several spice wars contributed dates to history, and in one of them Spain lost its Armada.

  Even when the bowls were empty for the fourth time, the blacksmith and his guests had not yet spooned up sufficient peppered and caraway-seeded tripe. Accordingly Mother Rusch ladled fifth helpings out of her deep kettle and poured black beer into mugs. She also went on mumbling her table talk: hints smothered in local gossip, threats stirred into her usual nunnish chatter. But if patrician Ferber and Abbot Jeschke had not been too stuffed to listen, they might have had something to think about, for Mother Rusch quite transparently detailed her plans for settling accounts with both of them. Which plans she also carried out, for three years later she smothered the rich Eberhard Ferber in bed under her double hundredweight; and fifty years later—for Fat Gret lived to a ripe old age for her vengeance—she fattened Abbot Jeschke to death: he died over a bowl of tripe.

  Blacksmith Rusch may have gathered the gist of his daughter’s projects from her table talk and understood how she meant to avenge his death, for the poor devil grinned broadly over his empty bowl. Indeed, something more than the warm feeling of having filled his belly one last time may have accounted for his satisfaction. He sang his daughter’s praises, and there his talk became rather confused, for he brought in a fish, whom he referred to as the “Flounder in the sea,” and thanked him for having advised him, at a time when his hair was still brown, to send his youngest daughter, whose mother was dying of the fever, to a convent, for there, so the Flounder had assured him, she would become shrewd and crafty, so as to manage her female flesh independently and have hot soup in daily readiness for her father in his old age.

  Then he, too, fell silent, replete with tripe. After that, belches were accompanied only by an occasional word or half sentence. Ferber dreamed of his life in the country; far from all strife, he would live in the midst of his art collection, culling wisdom from books. After eating so much tripe, Abbot Jeschke could think only of the tripe he hoped to spoon up in the future, peppered just the way the abbess did it. But by then Lutheranism would—by drastic measures if necessary—have been eradicated from the world. Executioner Ladewig anticipated several articles of the “Newly Revised Ordinance.” He would have liked to place with the local coopers an order for the barrels needed to clean up the city. For every barrel emptied he would charge only ten groschen. Blacksmith Rusch, on the other hand, predicted that the patrician council would be faced forever and ever with unrest and insurrectionary demands on the part of the guilds and lower trades, and his prophecy came true in December 1970. The lower orders have never ceased to rebel against patrician authoritarianism and to risk their necks for a little more civil rights.

  Then, full fed, the guests left. Ferber said nothing. Jeschke delivered himself of a Latin blessing. Ladewig took the five emptied bowls with him. The pigeons in the window hole were silent. The torches had almost burned down in their holders. Peter Rusch sat in his chains and shed a few tears for his last supper. Laden right and left with the kettle and the empty beer keg, his daughter resumed her mumbling on her way out: “You’ll soon be out of your misery now. You’ll soon be a lot better off. They’ll give you a nice cozy place in the heavenly guildhall. And you’ll always have plenty of tripe. So stop worrying. Your Gret will settle up with them. It may take time, but I’ll fix them good.”

  Then Mother Rusch admonished her father to hold his curly gray head erect the next day and not to fling curses at anyone whomsoever. He should kneel unbowed before the executioner. He could rely on her vengeance. The taste of it would linger in her mouth like Indian pepper. She wouldn’t forget. No, she wouldn’t forget.

  Peter Rusch did as his daughter had bidden. He must have had a goodly portion of tripe half digested in his innards when, next day in the Long Market, facing the Artushof, where the patricians and prelates stood as though painted around Sigismund, king of Poland, he (fourth of the six candidates) silently let his head be severed from his shoulders. No bungling. You could count on executioner Ladewig. The abbess looked on. A sudden shower of rain made her face glisten. And addressing the Women’s Tribunal, the Flounder said, “In short, dear ladies, vigorously as Margarete Rusch pursued her aims, perseveringly as she raked in her gains, slow as she was in settling her account—on June 26, 1526, when blacksmith Peter Rusch was executed along with the other ringleaders, a daughter wept for her father.”

  Tarred and feathered

  She only liked me plucked.

  Feathers—I write

  about fights between gulls

  and against time.

  Or how a boy with his breath

  wafts the down over

  fences to nowhere.

  Down—that means sleep and geese, priced by the pound.

  To every bed its burden.

  While she plucked between her stupid knees

  and the feathers, as the saying goes, flew,

  the ordained power slept downy-softly.

  Poultry for whom?

  But I blew, kept feathers in suspense.

  That is traditional faith;

  doubts tarred and feathered.

  Not long ago, I found.

  some quills and

  cut them for my use.

  First monks, later town clerks,

  today secretaries keep the lies flowing.

  Fat Gret’s ass

  was as big as two collective farms. And if you sexual sociologists, deep in worry blubber from counting flies’ legs, had been asked in as witnesses when, as she liked me to do on Wednesdays, I came at her from behind but first, to make it all soft and as wet as wept on, licked her asshole and environs like a goat (hungry for salt), which was easy to do when Fat Gret offered her double treasure for worship, you would have seen the archetype of Christian charity, our partner-oriented fervor; but my Ilsebill—who is sometimes adventurous on Thursdays—has never, no matter how devoutly I get down on my knees to her, licked my ass, because she’s afraid her tongue would drop off with her last shred of modesty.

>   She’s much too prim, always worried about disgracing herself. Sexy, yes, but so coy about it. And because she’s perpetually forming the word “dignity” with curling lips, she has puritanical lockjaw.

  Yet Ilsebill reads books of all sizes in which the overcoming of inhibitions is said to be the first requirement for a free society. Never fear, I’ll knock or teach these late-bourgeois refusal mechanisms—“Somehow,” she says, “I don’t dare, I still don’t dare”—out of her, and I’ll do it the way it says in her women’s lib books, with partner-oriented conflicting-roles games, until on one of these Catholic Fridays—Believe me, holy father!—she and her little tongue will see how nice it is. For it can’t be bought and paid for. It’s within reach of all. It has nothing to do with class. Old Man Marx didn’t know anything about it. It’s a foretaste of beauty. As every dog knows. Oh, to sniff at, lick, taste, and smell one another!

  But when I say to my Ilsebill, “Tomorrow is Saturday. I’ll take a thorough bath, I’ll smell of lavender all over,” she says, “So what!” Because we’ve lost the habit. Because we only read about it. Because if we mention it at all we mean it symbolically. Because we’ve discussed it, chewed the whole thing over too often. Because we don’t suspect what expectant rosebud lips an asshole is always making—all week long.

  For our playing fields—yours, Ilsebill, and mine—have just the right proportions—no speculator, no concrete-crazed developer can divide up your meadow, no flaming-red party boss can grab my ass away from you (or yours from me). The ass is one thing that ideology is afraid to touch. Can’t gets its claws on it. Can’t read any idea into it. Therefore disparages it. Only gays are supposed to make use of it. A kick in the ass is nevertheless permissible, linguistically speaking. And with deplorable bad taste the asshole has been transformed into a term of opprobrium. Ass licking is looked down on, though the capitalist developer and the flaming-red party boss lick each other’s asses, but without pleasure, for whether officially or unofficially they do it in trousers, their taste running to flannel, fifty percent worsted and fifty percent synthetic fiber.