The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  No, Ilsebill! It’s got to be bare. My meadows, your rolling hills. Our fields. I worship it, God’s rounded idea. Yes, yes, ever since the partly cloudy Neolithic, when Awa’s dimples were still unnumbered, the heavens for me have been restooned with asses. And when Margarete Rusch, the cooking nun, first let her sun rise for the runaway Franciscan monk—for me, in other words—I achieved an unveiled understanding of Saint Francis’s hymn: devotion, jubilation, industry. Forget no dimple. Stop to rest beside country lanes. The hills ask to be gently grazed. Deep in dialogue. Entrance and exit exchange greetings. Where does the food go? Who’s kissing whom? Insight gained. Soon I will know every bit of you. Ah, Ilsebill, now that you’re pregnant and burgeoning all over, you ought, you ought to … Come on, it’s high time, come on! Because it’s Sunday and all week we’ve done nothing but talk around it and discuss the anal phase of infancy much too seriously.

  When Fat Gret let a fart because I’d been licking her too meticulously, we both relished the breeze. After all, as usual on Wednesday, we had eaten beans with turnips and peppered pork chops; and anyone who is repelled by his sweetheart’s farts has no business talking about love… . All right, laugh. Get that stuffy look off your face. Have a heart. It’s funny, isn’t it? Let me tell you about white beans and nuns’ farts. How they argued about bread and wine and wine and bread, the right order in which to take the Eucharist; a quarrelsome century. Margret, Fat Gret, laughed herself healthy over it.

  To cheer my Ilsebill, now in the third month of pregnancy, up a little—but she remained stony-faced and said I was “vulgar”—I had cooked white beans down to a purée and served them with roast pork and pepper sauce. We also had Teltow turnips, and the whole meal corresponded to the peppery menu which, in the spring of 1569, Mother Margarete Rusch served up to Abbot Jeschke, Johannes Kostra, the Danzig commandant, and Stanislaw Karnkowski, bishop of Leslau at the Oliva Monastery. The three dignitaries had met to straighten out some senseless discrepancies in a sheaf of Counter Reformation decrees. For though King Sigismund Augustus used the “Statuta Karnkowiana” as an instrument of the Counter Reformation, their actual purpose was to curtail the economic power of the city of Danzig, and incidentally to incite the politically impotent guilds against the patrician council. And because this idea, embedded in blood-curdling antiheresy provisions, had sprung not from the heads of Jeschke, Kostra, and Karnkowski but from that of the cooking nun, I told my Ilsebill the story of Margarete Rusch; for Fat Gret is still imprisoned inside me, and now at last I mean to set her free.

  In the year 1498 after the incarnation of our Lord, when, thanks to an Arab helmsman’s knowledge of the winds and ocean currents, the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama finally sighted land and put ashore in Calicut, thus opening the sea route to India with all its still-tangled skein of consequences, a girl child was born in the Wicker Bastion, the erstwhile Pomorshian settlement, by then a part of the Old City of Danzig, to the blacksmith Peter Rusch by his wife, Kristin, who then promptly died. The little girl was born on Saint Martin’s Day, for which reason whole flocks of geese later grew cold under Fat Gret’s plucking fingers.

  Beginning at the age of twelve, Margret stood in the kitchen of Saint Bridget’s Convent in the Old City, cleaning turnips, scaling carp, husking rye, and cutting tripe into finger-long strips, for the Flounder had advised blacksmith Rusch (or, in my then time-phase, me) to put this superfluous girl into a convent as soon as possible; for which reason the Women’s Tribunal has asked the overbearing flatfish questions that he will answer elsewhere. In any case Margarete became a novice at the age of sixteen and took her solemn vows in the very year when, with sturdy hammer, the monk Luther nailed up his theses.

  As a full-fledged nun who soon presided over the convent kitchen, Margret (known at an early age as Fat Gret) began to cook outside the house as soon as the widely ramified affairs of the Brigittine nuns called for her kitchen diplomacy. When Jakob Hegge preached Lutheranism on the Hagelsberg, she, at the foot of the hill, cooked Counter Reformation tripe and fish soups for the crowds that gathered there. And when I, the runaway Franciscan monk, became her kitchen boy and, when she so pleased, bed companion, we cooked for that archenemy of the guilds, Mayor Eberhard Ferber, sometimes in his patrician house on Long Street, sometimes on his Island farm, and sometimes in his starosty at Dirschau, where he took refuge, for so hated was Ferber by the coopers, drapers, dockers, and butchers that he often had to flee the city.

  Just when Vasco da Gama the Portuguese viceroy was dying of plague, yellow fever, or Dominican poison in Cochin in southern India, Ferber was deposed as mayor. Led by blacksmith Rusch, Hegge’s increasing following had risen up and taken over the city government, though for only a short time. The following year King Sigismund of Poland marched against the city with eight thousand men and occupied it without a fight. The “Statuta Sigismundi” were posted. Ferber was restored to power. A trial was held.

  Before her father was executed, the abbess Margret Rusch cooked his favorite dish for him; then she moved in with the embittered Eberhard Ferber, who, no sooner reinstated as mayor, retired to his next-to-last dwelling place in Dirschau. Three years later—Fat Gret was still cooking for him—he died, leaving several pieces of Old City real estate, his sheep farm in Praust, and various properties on the Island to her convent. Altogether, the cooking nun Margret added so much to the wealth of the Brigittine order with her free-ranging outside cookery that she soon gained the stature of a true abbess, both respected and feared, even though she was widely reputed to keep a houseful of bedworthy kitchen boys and to be an out-and-out slut.

  Because I was always with her. She took me in—me or one of the little Franciscan monks who kept running away from Holy Trinity—buried me in her flesh, and resurrected me, acclimated me to the warmth of the stable, covered me with her fat like a meat pasty, kept me as contented as a well-fed baby, and in quickly changing seasons wore me out. Whether the Reformers were on top in the outside world or whether the Dominican Counter Reformation was turning every poor sinner’s words inside out, Margret’s box bed preserved a sultry vapor that the Flounder, addressing the Women’s Tribunal, characterized as “strictly pagan.”

  “If it is permissible,” he said, “to call a revolution cozy, then one may say that the revolutionary doings in the bed of Abbess Margarete Rusch took place in cozily warmed areas of freedom.” And I, too, proved to my Ilsebill that in those days only nuns could possibly pass for emancipated women, free from irksome conjugal duties, free from the state of childishness induced by male domination, never made fools of by fashion, always protected by sisterly solidarity based on their betrothal to the heavenly bridegroom, deluded by no earthly love, secure through economic power, feared even by the Dominicans, always cheerful and well informed. Mother Rusch was an enlightened woman and, in addition, so fat that her pregnancies went almost unnoticed.

  She bore two daughters. While traveling, on the road, as it were. Some barn was always available for her confinements. But never was I permitted to speak of fatherhood, father’s duties, or father’s rights. “There’s only one father,” she said, breaking into a shattering laugh, “and that’s our sweet Lord, who’s supposed to be up there in heaven.”

  And she didn’t care a bit if strait-laced Protestants or Catholics thought the two girls, both of whom were brought up in the Wicker Bastion by Fat Gret’s sisters, showed a resemblance sometimes to Preacher Hegge, sometimes to the patrician Ferber, and sometimes even to a no-good Franciscan monk. As far as she was concerned, fathers were all ridiculous. She called the married women in their bourgeois stables “dressed-up mares” who had to hold still for their stallions, whereas she could make use of her little pouch as she saw fit. Moreover, Fat Gret did not hold still, but jounced so heavily on her soon exhausted bed companion that she often knocked my wind out. She really crushed me. When it was over, I lay there as white as chalk, like a corpse. She had to rub me with vinegar water to revive me.

  She may well h
ave stopped the autocratic Eberhard Ferber’s breath the same way, smothered the old goat under her bed weight. For she was not content just to cook for her succession of males. She also had to have her fun, her play and entertainment, all of which may strike a puritanical mind as obscene.

  And so Abbess Margarete Rusch solved the bitterly earnest question of the century, the question of how to serve up the bread and wine, the Lord’s Supper, in her own way, to wit, bedwise, by acrobatically moving her twat into the vertical and offering it as a chalice, which was then filled with red wine. Bread demanded to be dipped. Or consecrated wafers. Here the question—is this really flesh and blood, or only its sign and symbol—did not arise. The paper quarrel of the theologians became irrelevant. Ambiguities were over and done with. Never did I take Communion more devoutly. How simple Margret made the oblation and transubstantiation for me. With what childlike faith I immersed myself in the great mystery. Luckily no Dominican eye ever spied on our bed masses.

  Ah, if only this home custom had become practical religion for papists and Lutherans, Mennonites and Calvinists! But, torn by discord, they cut one another down. They let their quarrel over the right table arrangements cost them long-drawn-out military campaigns, pillage, rapine, and the devastation of lovely countrysides. But to this day they have gone on fighting and gouging one another, living without mutual affection, and with morose morality condemning Fat Gret’s chalice as sinful. Yet Margret was pious. Even for the most fleeting pleasure she thanked God with a prayer.

  Two years after the Peace of Augsburg, when His Polish Majesty Sigismund Augustus also proved willing at least to tolerate Communion in both kinds, the majority of the burghers of Danzig decided in favor of Luther’s table arrangements, and from then on quarreled only with the Calvinists and Mennonites. Thereupon, after ruling for twenty-seven years, Abbess Rusch declared herself weary of office and asked her sisters of the Brigittine Order for leave to retire as abbess and once again to make herself useful outside the convent as a cooking nun.

  So much humility was interpreted as contrition. The truth is that the old woman, vigorous within her fat, wished to regain her old political mobility. From then on she was always a step ahead of the vicissitudes of history. Under the veil of Catholicism she worked for the Protestant cause. She was no longer interested in the Eucharist but still and once again in the rights that were denied the guilds. After all, she had grown up in the Wicker Bastion. What had cost her rebellious father, blacksmith Peter Rusch, his head—democratic grumbling and incendiary speeches in every guildhall—now became the daughter’s stock in trade, but she spoke softly, over simmered cod liver, hasenpfeffer, and thrushes, which she barded with bacon and stuffed with juniper berries.

  In 1567, when Stanislaw Karnkowski became bishop of Leslau and under his aegis a second Counter Reformation began looking for appropriate table arrangements, the elderly nun was cooking for Abbot Jeschke, whose monastery at Oliva had always been a place of contemplative reaction. There, after milky fish soup, Fat Gret served either hasenpfeffer or beef hearts stuffed with prunes or peppered pork roast with white beans and turnips, which last dish induced eminently political farts in the conspiring clerics.

  The cooking nun believed in the liberating power of the fart. With what unabashed gusto she let her intestinal winds blow! Whether cooking for friend or foe—in the midst of her mumbled table talk, she would let loose a merry succession of farts, usually setting a full stop or following a question as its answer, but sometimes also parenthetically. Echoes of receding storms. Solemnly spaced gun salutes. Dry broadsides. Or mingled with her laughter, because nature had given her cheerful disposition a twofold, double-mouthed expression: as once when she brought King Stephen Batory the key of the besieged city as the stuffing of a sheep’s head stuffed into a pig’s head, and subsequently made the king’s startled dignity laugh and fart so hard that His Polish Majesty and retinue were carried away, as though dissolved in laughter and soothed by their nether winds. The king had no choice but to impose mild conditions on the city and turn a blind eye to the cooking nun’s offense. For it was Margret who on February 15, 1577, incited the lower trades to rebel and (very much her father’s daughter) put them up to setting the Oliva Monastery on fire.

  When, immediately after the solemn Peace, Abbot Jeschke returned to the burned monastery to oversee the corvee of the peasants who were rebuilding it, he insisted—much as he knew she hated him—that Sister Margret take charge of his kitchen. Never had she cooked under duress. For her cookery had always been a labor of love. For three years she clothed her vengeance in stewed breast of beef, stuffed goose, sour aspics, or suckling pig, which she stuffed with shredded cabbage, apples, and raisins, never sparing the pepper.

  What that man managed to shovel in. How long and hard his jaws labored. Why he couldn’t leave anything over. How many had to go hungry to keep him belching-full. At last, by the summer of the year 1581, she had fattened Abbot Kaspar Jeschke to death. He died at table. More precisely: his sleek monk’s head, with cheeks that had glowed with Catholic power for decades, fell into a bowl of the very dish that a lifetime before Fat Gret had cooked for her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch: peppered tripe. The cooking nun had forgotten nothing. And the Flounder also thinks that though stuffing an abbot to death is rather a drastic use to make of the culinary art, it was quite in keeping with the life style of the deceased.

  Margarete Rusch died in 1585 from swallowing a pike bone, in the presence of King Stephen Batory, who by the recent peace treaty had confirmed not only the city of Danzig’s rights to carry on trade and collect customs duties but the privileges of the patricians as well. Once again the guilds, the lower trades, and the sailors came off empty-handed. Patricians and courtiers feasted for days. More than a fishbone must have stuck in the aged nun’s craw.

  All of a sudden, when only leftovers remained of the roast pork with beans and turnips, my Ilsebill, with the stubborn persistence typical of pregnant women, wanted to know what, apart from the fact that she was born in 1498, the year of the landing in Calicut, Fat Gret had to do with Vasco da Gama. When I tried to answer with nunnish tales—how Abbess Margarete Rusch had traded her elder daughter to a Portuguese spice merchant for annual shipments of pepper from the Malabar Coast—Ilsebill got up from the table and said, “Aren’t you clever! Or did the Flounder think that up? Trading her daughter for pepper! It’s just too typical.”

  Delay

  A pinch of Redeemer salt.

  Another delay when my question—which

  century are we playing now?—was answered

  kitchenwise: when the price of pepper fell …

  Nine times she sneezed over the bowl

  where lay the hare giblets in their broth.

  She refused to remember

  that I was her kitchen boy.

  Darkly she gazed at the fly in the beer

  and wanted (no more delay)

  to be rid of me no matter what… .

  Soups in which the grit wins out.

  When she praised hunger as if it were something to eat,

  when she laughed quintessentially and not about turnips,

  when at the kitchen table

  she persuaded Death with dried peas

  to grant a delay …

  And so she sits inside me and writes her story… .

  The Flounder’s ideas about nunnish life

  Possibly because I don’t rightly know under whose name I was connected with the abbess Margarete Rusch, and because I remember my neolithic time-phase rather more clearly than the confused circumstances of the Reformation period, the Flounder’s statements before the Women’s Tribunal have been termed contradictory. He claims to have advised me first as little Margret’s father, then as the patrician Ferber, and later as the sleek abbot Jeschke. (He also hinted at far-reaching political responsibilities in other parts of the world. Allegedly he wanted to bring the price of pepper down, and for that reason sent a certain Vasco da Gama to India by the s
ea route.) But the Flounder left no one in doubt about his support of Margarete. Three days after the little girl’s birth, blacksmith Rusch called him out of the stormy November sea: What was he to do with the brat? The mother had died of fever. Had to be fed goat’s milk. Warm, direct from the teat. A plump little lass she’d be. O Lord, O Lord, would the Flounder please tell him what to do.

  The blacksmith’s desperation will be understood more readily if we recall that Peter Rusch belonged not to any guild but to the lower trades. The Flounder, in any case; introduced me to the Tribunal as a social phenomenon of the Middle Ages, a victim of the self-seeking policies of the guilds. “This Peter Rusch,” he declared, “belonged to the lumpen proletariat of his day. Admitted to no guildhall, despised by the guild members among the journeymen, though they had no more political rights than he did and were just as much at the mercy of patrician highhandedness, and to top it all he was cursed with seven children. And as if that were not enough, no sooner had his wife, Kristin, given birth to his daughter Margarete than she died on him. And besides, he was in debt. In short, a natural-born rebel. Quick to draw his knife. Not very bright, but unswerving in his quest for justice. A poor devil who wanted my advice.”