The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Hasenpfeffer

  I ran and ran.

  At cross-purposes with the signposts, driven by hunger.

  Down the hill of history I ran, slid, rolled,

  flattening what was flat to begin with,

  a messenger in the wrong direction.

  Chewed-over wars,

  The Seven and the Thirty,

  the Norse hundred I took in my stride.

  Stragglers who looked back out of habit

  saw me vanish and double back.

  And those who wanted to warn me—Magdeburg is burning!—did not suspect

  that laughing I would run through

  the still (but not for long) intact city.

  Following no thread but only the incline.

  Some, dismembered, put themselves together,

  some leaped from plague wagons, some from the wheel,

  and witches, escaped from collapsing pyres,

  hobbled a bit of the way with me.

  Ah, the thirsty reaches of year-long councils,

  the hunger for dates,

  until, breathless and ravaged, I ran to her.

  She lifted the lid off the pot and stirred.

  “What’s cooking? What’s cooking?”

  “Hasenpfeffer, what else. I guessed you were coming.”

  Whoever wants to cook in her footsteps

  Something stuffed, for instance. We’re living in a state of expectation. Winter refuses to come. The fog moves everything too close, and already a family Christmas threatens.

  “Our quarrel,” says Ilsebill, “lies tender and juicy on our plates. We like the taste, but we don’t know why, or what it’s all about.”

  My last attempt to inject meaning is beef heart stuffed with prunes in beer sauce, such as Mother Rusch cooked for me, the runaway monk, without inquiring about my reasons. But our guests—two architects, a pastor—look for deeper meaning in everything that comes along.

  The chambers of the heart lend themselves to stuffing and demand it. Buy the whole heart, slitted on one side only. Remove the clotted blood, cut out the web of sinews, make room, lift off the envelope of fat. Politely our guests let one another finish speaking.

  “Soak the prunes in warm water,” says Ilsebill, talking in Mother Rusch’s footsteps, “but don’t pit them.” And suppose there were a meaning, what good would it do us?

  For browning we use the diced heart fat. “But there has to be a meaning,” says the pastor tolerantly, “if only a negative one. How can we be expected to live from hand to mouth, without meaning?”

  The heart, which has been stuffed and tied with white string, is browned on all sides over a high flame; then beer is added to cover. (“That, Reverend, must be obvious to a theologian.”)

  But the architects keep coming up with their pure Bauhaus theory. Simmer for a good hour, then add nutmeg and pepper, but less than Mother Rusch, in her time-phase and mine, thought expedient. Christmas means two more paid holidays for us. Though no meaning has been supplied, the pastor is desperately cheerful. And sour cream, which is not stirred in but forms meditative little islands: in those days, Ilsebill, when Vasco da Gama in quest of God …

  Maybe the Scandinavian high-pressure zone will bring in a belated winter after all and create meaning. Serve it with boiled potatoes, says Ilsebill, and be sure to warm the plates, because beef fat, like mutton fat, tends to form a film.

  There were once forty-seven lambs which, along with eight hundred and sixty-three sheep and innumerable other lambkins, grazed on the Scharpau, a lush marsh owned and managed by Eberhard Ferber the future mayor. The only world these lambs knew was their pasture as far as the flat horizon, seen through the legs of the mother sheep. The taste of these meadows gave no indication of their owner’s identity.

  Up until 1498, when the sea route to India was discovered and the future abbess Rusch was born, Councilor Angermünde owned the Scharpau and gouged his tenant fishermen, peasants, and shepherds; but when, after a long-winded intrigue, the betrothal of Moritz Ferber to the daughter of the patrician Angermünde was called off, even though community of property had been stipulated by contract, the Ferber brothers became bishop of Ermland and mayor of Danzig. Both were pushed by the clergy and under obligation to the nobility.

  Neither the sheep on the Scharpau nor the peasant serfs noticed much difference when the Ferber brothers succeeded in forcing the Angermundes out of the Scharpau and the Dirschau starosty. Shearing and slaughtering, rent gouging and corvee labor went on just the same. In 1521, however, though the sheep and peasants continued unprotesting, the trades of the Old City and Charter City, as well as the unguilded artisans of the Wicker Bastion, rose up against Ferber and his Church Mafia. Candles were doused in the churches. Stones hit priests and Dominicans. Leaflets smelled of printer’s ink. Songs likening drapers and tailors to Ferber’s sheep went hobbling through the streets on one-legged rhymes, and angry men stamped out their rhythms in the guildhalls. In addition the zealot Hegge had begun to inveigh against priests and papism.

  But on the Scharpau, in Tiegenort, Kalte Herberge, Fischer Babke, and in other spots where peasants were treated worse than sheep, lambs were unsuspectingly and hence peacefully putting on flesh for Easter. In honor of the bishop of Ermland, forty-seven of them were to be slaughtered and roasted over basins filled with glowing charcoal on the country estate of the patrician Ferber family. The kitchen nun of the Brigittine Order had obtained permission from the bishop of Ermland to cook the lungs and hearts of the Easter lambs in sweet-and-sour sauce for Good Friday.

  Fat Gret had had no trouble convincing the episcopal palate that the innocent creatures’ innards could hardly be characterized as meat, that lamb’s lung preserved in all its purity the scent of the thyme that grew on the Scharpau pastures, and that the Lord Jesus Christ would be pleased to see the hearts and lungs of Easter lambs exalted to the rank of Good Friday fare. The kitchen nun, you see, was determined to give a liberal interpretation of the fast rules, “These little lambs,” she said, “have never sinned. They’ve never been bucked by desire. How can you call that meat? Especially the innards.” After cooking the whole lungs and halved hearts of the forty-seven lambs in a large kettle with anise and pepper until tender, Fat Gret had let them cool and chopped them up. Next she had boiled a sackful of lentils in the remaining broth but without reducing them to a puree, added vinegar to the chopped innards, bound the mixture with buckwheat flour, and stirred in raisins and prunes—for everything that came out of her kitchen required plenty of peppercorns, raisins, or prunes.

  It was at that Good Friday meal that Mayor Ferber decided to sail against Denmark with six men-of-war. He further decided that on his victorious return he would, with the help of his richly rewarded sailors, crack down on the guilds and on all those town councilors who had been infected by Lutheranism. Nothing came of his plan. The ships returned in the autumn without spoils. It was announced that the costs of the war would be defrayed by new taxes. That led to unrest. Even the sailors deserted Ferber.

  But once she had devised her Good Friday dish, the kitchen nun and later abbess Margarete Rusch stuck to it. Year after year she served her nuns and novices sweet-and-sour lamb’s lung with lentils as an appetizer, a custom further encouraged by the fact that from 1529 on, the shepherds, peasants, and fishermen of the Scharpau were obliged to pay rent to the Convent of Saint Bridget, to drive Easter lambs into the convent kitchen, and deliver live eels in baskets.

  Chemicals in the rivers have driven them away. Soapy wastes have put reddish spots on their light-colored bellies, dorsal and tail fins, injured the mucus that protects them. The eel traps that can be seen at low tide on both banks of the Elbe are mere reminders. We pay high prices for eels from foreign waters; deep-frozen eels from Scotland are thawed out here and spring miraculously to life.

  I know stories, Ilsebill: Spitted on branches they lashed my back. They were in all my thoughts. They slithered like me under cows’ udders. They’re as old as the Flounder
.

  “Why,” says Ilsebill, “shouldn’t the children see you kill eels and cut them in pieces? It’ll be educational, as long as I don’t have to watch.”

  Buy the eels alive. “No, children, they’re really dead. Those are the nerves in each piece. That’s what makes them thrash around. The head piece wants to go on living and sucks itself fast.”

  Now the children know what they’re eating. Boiled au bleu in vinegar and rolled in flour, the pieces are sprinkled with sage. A neighbor sharpened the knives yesterday.

  The sage bush used to grow in a garden, since destroyed by dredges, near the mouth of the Stör, where they are now building a dam equipped with locks and a big bascule bridge, which is supposed to change the course of the river and seal it off from the Elbe at times of spring tide.

  We place piece after piece in hot oil and salt them lightly. There’s still a bit of life in them; that’s why they wriggle in the pan. Now the sage bush is growing in our garden. Our neighbor who helped with the transplanting is a free-lance slaughterer and still slaughters on Mondays for the village butcher. He fertilized the bush with hog’s blood, muttering meanwhile in his coastal dialect.

  The sage-sprinkled pieces are fried over low heat until crisp; they provide an appetizer that should be followed by a light main course. Let’s hope the sage bush lives through the winter.

  If anybody wants advice: don’t buy big, fat eels; buy slim ones.

  A crosswise incision just below the head is supposed to block off the nerves. We do not pull the skin off. I advise you, in cleaning eels, to watch out for the gall. If harmed, it will spill, make them bitter, depress us, and give us, wheresoever we turn, a fore- and aftertaste of sin and corruption—like Preacher Hegge.

  Hegge! His sermons reduced me to silence. Nothing could stop his mouth. Nothing came easier to him than making words. Only Fat Gret could sling such a syllable stew. When he excoriated, “Hell’s brew! Sin broth!,” she spewed right back, “Inksquirt! Tongue-happy fizzlecock!” To all the ducks, quail, snipe, and wood pigeons she stuffed and spit-roasted she gave the names of angels: Uriel, Ophaniel, Gabriel, Borbiel, Ariel; he, on the other hand, knew a devil’s name for every sensual indulgence: there was wheedling Stauffax, bucking Bles, musty Haamiach, tit-loving Asmodaeus, silvery Mammon, and rutting Beelzebub. And while the cook glorified a wild goose stuffed with prunes and pork sausage as the angel Zedekiel, the goateed Hegge looked upon all pleasure of the palate as Belial’s slobber.

  At the very start of the Reformation, this Hegge, whom Abbess Rusch generally referred to as “the mangy goat,” introduced the language of Protestant pedantry to Danzig. His father, a tailor, had come from the shores of Lake Constance. But his mother was said to have been a native of the Wicker Bastion, brackish, fishy, crooked-mouthed, with scales (or was it dandruff?) in her hair. In Jakob Hegge the garrulous waves of the Baltic mingled with the jibber-jabber of the Lake Constance Swabians. His verbiage made sins of thumb-sucking and even lesser pleasures. The alarmed burghers sent him to Wittenberg for six months. They wanted to be good Protestants all right, but Hegge’s Calvinist zealotry threatened to throw too gray a pall over their life style. The guilds paid for his journey.

  In Wittenberg Dr. Luther seems to have advised him to concentrate on the thirst of tormented mankind for consolations firmly grounded in the Bible, and to have his congregation sing hymns: “In Thy mercy grant us peace …”

  But Hegge didn’t want to stop ranting and railing. In his heart the runaway Dominican monk was locked in a strange struggle with his paternal inheritance: Swabian clean-up compulsion. For all Luther’s urging that he leave the good burghers a few colorful pictures and the familiar scroll-work, he wanted to create bare walls wherever he went. He may have brought a few of Dr. Luther’s practical maxims back with him, but as soon as he was preaching again to his swelling congregation in the graveyard of Saint Gertrude’s, the expletives burst out of him, swarming like maggots freshly expelled from the Devil’s asshole, though Jakob Hegge never doubted for a moment that he was teaching the pure word of God. True, the effect was slightly attenuated by the shade of the graveyard lindens.

  So it came about that soon after his return he thundered from the pulpit of Danzig’s Saint Mary’s Church, which offered plenty of room for a populace intent on murder, “The gray monks wear cords around their waists. Better if they wore them around their necks.”

  Words easily transposed into action: the next day several Dominicans were dangling from their cords. And Hegge let further phrases escape him, for fume as he might against all images, he knew the power of imagery. “I want,” he cried, “to see all these churches cleared and whitewashed.” And again the populace took him at his word, cleaned up Saint Mary’s, Saint Catherine’s, and Saint John’s most radically, smashed pictures, statues, and carvings, disposed of altars as useless encumbrances, and, still not content, set out to clean up the Old City Church of Saint Bridget.

  By way of tranposing one of Hegge’s favorite phrases—“To the pillory with him!”—into action, some soapmakers had already dragged the wooden statue of Saint Nicholas out of Saint Bridget’s, with the intention of placing the brightly painted saint in the town pillory, when Abbess Margarete intervened with her twenty-seven nuns and novices. The sisters fought with a will. Saint Nicholas was rescued. Hegge was seized and led away to the nearby Convent of Saint Bridget amid the laughter of his fickle following.

  What happened to him during the night I don’t know. The usual, I suppose. In the daytime, at all events, he was punished in accordance with the rules of Fat Gret’s kitchen. Three hundred and eleven little cakes, which she herself had baked from lard dough, were coated with colored frosting and shaped into a Saint Nicholas closely resembling the wood carving, and the preacher was obliged to chew, rechew, and swallow him, from the wafer-thin halo to the bread-dough pedestal. To top it all, the nuns had filled this pastry Saint Nicholas with peppery blood sausages and tripe sausages, every last one of which had to be eaten.

  For three whole days Hegge munched. He washed the pepper down with water. He rammed the little cakes down with raisin-flavored blood sausages and shoved in more little cakes after the marjoram-spiced tripe sausage. At first he seems to have listed all the devils from Ashomath to Zaroe. Then the battler with words fell silent. Later, his insides thoroughly greased and peppered, he seems to have shat in his pants. The blood sausages and tripe sausages, it was reported, came out unchewed, after which he invoked hell and the Devil with only moderate gusto.

  The following year, when King Sigismund of Poland occupied the rebellious city with eight thousand men and ordered the rebels punished, Jakob Hegge fled, disguised in a woman’s skirts. Abbess Margarete Rusch seems to have helped him get away. Hegge was thought to have found a haven in Greifswald and there to have lived a life of pure contemplation.

  Every sixth of December since then, however, the people, both Catholic and Protestant, have baked up Saint Nicholas in plenty of lard—though smaller, much smaller, and without sausage filling—and in general Mother Rusch’s cookery was adopted by the whole population both of the city and of the Kashubian countryside.

  If you want to cook in her footsteps today, to cook field-fare—for instance, the thrush with the ash-gray head—then bard the little birds with thin strips of lard, stuff them with the tiny livers and plenty of juniper berries, and roast half a dozen of them on a spit over glowing charcoal. But don’t invite any bird lovers to dinner. I myself, the runaway Franciscan monk, felt sorry for the succulent little birds when Fat Gret stuffed them as an appetizer for King Sigismund’s banquet, all the while imitating bird calls: the bleating of the snipes, for instance, because of which these swamp birds are also known as sky-goats.

  But if you are counting on guests with an ear for tall tales, then brown the feet, halved heads, ribs, lungs, and liver of a hare in lean bacon, as Fat Gret did, throw in a handful of previously soaked raisins, and simmer briefly. Heat the whole with crushed black pepper, deg
laze the pan with red wine, bring to a boil, and let the hasenpfeffer simmer for an hour over medium heat—or longer, if your guests are late, as happened once upon a time when on his way back to Oliva the bishop of Leslau lost his way in the trackless beech forest and was frightened by an apparition, of which he spoke with easy good humor afterward. Humming into the air but inwardly rich in figures, he had been riding through the forest when a hare had peered out of a cleft tree and, speaking in flawless Latin though with a Kashubian accent, had prophesied that before the day was out the bishop would meet a second hare, who would be steeped in wine. “Give him my regards! Do give him my regards!” the Latinizing hare had said, and to this request the bishop of Leslau acceded, before the prelates, over the steaming stew, embarked on their discussion of the grave political situation.