The Flounder

by Günter Grass

But if you want to surprise your guests as Fat Gret surprised Stephen Batory, king of Poland, on December 12, 1577, when inside a pig’s head she served him a sheep’s head from which, when it was cut open, fell the intricately webbed key of the besieged city, which had now surrendered, then take a short knife, bone a pig’s head and then a sheep’s head without injuring the fatty casing, sprinkle the inside of the pig’s head with fresh marjoram, and insert the sheep’s head. Your guests will get a good surprise if the incision has been carefully sewed up. When after an hour and a half the pig’s head with the sheep’s head in it emerges from the oven and is cut open, the guests must be expected to exclaim “Ah!,” because something will shimmer and fall out, something strange, beautiful, hard, miraculous, and ambivalent, that may signify happiness and may signify something else—for instance, a little gilded box containing, folded small, a savings and loan association’s home-construction loan, or whatever else my Ilsebill’s heart may desire.

  And if you still want to cook in Fat Gret’s footsteps and have a reason such as she had when I, her bed companion at the time, became listless, lost all desire to partake of her flesh, and lounged about with my cock dangling, good for nothing but world-weary questions about the meaning of it all—then try the following recipe:

  Take twelve to seventeen cockscombs, soak them in warm milk until the skin can be easily removed, wash them in cold water until the red pales to a surprising white, sprinkle them with lemon juice (Margret used pickling liquor), roll the cockscombs in beaten egg, fry them briefly on both sides, and serve them, on rounds of celery root previously sautéed in butter, to any male who, as I did then, has trouble getting and keeping it up and displaying a cocky virility even when he has good reason to hang his head. For it wasn’t easy living in her shadow. That cook had no use for a lazybones. Time and time again, Fat Gret revived my bludgeon. You’ll find it worth your while to cook in her footsteps.

  That no doubt explains why, while the case of Margarete Rusch was being debated before the Women’s Tribunal, I saw members of the public diligently taking down recipes. When tripe and chopped lung came up in the proceedings, only Associate Judge Ulla Witzlaff laughed, laughed all over as only Fat Gret could laugh, and pronounced a warning against excessive use of pepper, which, so she said, gave promise of more ardor than the ingester could supply and should have been left growing where it grows, for far from bringing out flavors it shouts them down, frazzles the nerves, and causes people, especially women, to be in too much of a hurry… .

  An organist by profession, Ulla Witzlaff is as imperturbable as Mother Rusch. She comes from the island of Rügen and knows lots of island tales. One of her great-grandmothers, who once rowed a boat from the small island of Oehe to Schaprode, is believed to have told the painter Philipp Otto Runge the tale of the talking Flounder in Low German. Ulla also speaks the Low German of the coast. Slender as she is, I can see her in Fat Gret’s clothes. “I’m bored,” she says, for after twelve years of Protestant church services, the Sunday-after-Sunday hypocrisy stinks, so she says, all the way up to the organ pipes. She’s fed up with the parish blackskirts, one of whom rants and wears a goatee like Hegge.

  The other day, I fled, as I do now and then, from Ilsebill and her wishes, which renew themselves like chives—Christmas is coming—and escorted Ulla Witzlaff to her Sunday service in some Neo-Gothic church. After Ulla had played the prelude, the Kyrie had been sung, and the pathetic congregation had struck up the hymn “Open, O Lord, the door of my heart,” we sat on the organ bench in the choir loft, talking in an undertone about the Flounder and his activities in the days of the abbess Margarete Rusch, for down below the latter-day Hegge had embarked on his sermon. Ulla was knitting something long and plain and woolly, while the ranting goatee poured forth his latest spiritual awakening for the benefit of seventeen old women and two pietistically inclined teen-age maidens: “Beloved congregation, the other day I was riding in an overcrowded subway train. People were pushing and shoving. Dear God! cried my inner voice. What has become of Thy love? And then of a sudden the Lord Jesus spoke to me …”

  At which point, Ulla said without preamble, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mother Rusch in her convent had used a hymnbook with a preface by Luther.”

  I confirmed her suspicion: “On his return from Wittenberg in 1525, Jakob Hegge brought back a volume of the first edition of the Klug Hymnal and gave it to Fat Gret. Possibly on the advice of the Flounder, who always kept posted on the latest printed matter. And every evening after that Mother Rusch would sing with her nuns, ‘Rejoice, dear Christians all, and let us jump for joy… .’”

  And Ulla said, “Maybe Mother Rusch had an organ, if only one with a single manual, maybe in Saint Bridget’s or possibly in the convent chapel.” Whereupon she dropped her knitting, moved over on the bench, pressed buttons, manipulated levers, pulled all the stops, and, playing with both hands and feet, made the organ literally thunder. Without regard for the struggling preacher down below and his interminable outpourings, she gave me a demonstration of the Klug Hymnal and its importance for the development of sixteenth-century music, at the same time letting—as Mother Rusch had done beneath her Catholic veil—her blaring, jubilant voice ring out with Luther’s translations and Luther’s original hymns. First: “With peace and joy I came.” Then: “As we journey through this life.” Then: “Salvation unto us is come.” And finally, in the old setting, every verse of “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” down to “And the Word shall stand forever… .”

  By that time Ulla’s jubilation had emptied the church, for it was more than either the latter-day Hegge or his faithful could bear. After a frightened “Amen” and a hurried blessing, the pastor, followed by his ladies in their chamberpot hats, hurried out into the cold December air.

  Oh, bliss of empty churches! For a short hour Ulla Witzlaff played the organ and sang for me alone. With musical examples she showed how Abbess Rusch and her Brigittine nuns had been Catholic on the one hand and devoutly Lutheran on the other. While she was at it, she gave me a bit of elementary instruction in liturgy and hymnology.

  When, after a concluding “Come, Holy Ghost,” the organ breathed its last, the organist threw her arms around me. I wanted to respond right there on the narrow organ bench, but Ulla, perhaps in memory of Mother Rusch’s stable-warm box bed, said, “Save it for later. We might as well be comfortable.”

  As it is written, we were one flesh. And we laughed and laughed over the sixteenth-century Hegge and the latter-day Hegge. And afterward Ulla served me leftover lentils and island stories with the Flounder out of the fairy tale swimming through them.

  The cook kisses

  When she opens her mouth

  that would sooner hum than sing

  and shapes it into a funnel for sticky porridge, mealy dumplings,

  or with teeth created for this very purpose she bites

  off a chunk of tender sheep’s neck or a goose’s left breast

  and passes it on—rolled in her spittle—

  to me with a thrust of her tongue.

  Stringy meat prechewed.

  Or if too tough, run through the grinder.

  Her kiss is food.

  So trout cheeks, olives,

  nuts, the kernels of plum pits she

  has cracked with her molars,

  black bread afloat in beer,

  a peppercorn intact.

  and crumbled cheese—crumbled

  with a kiss she shares them all.

  Broken in health, propped on cushions,

  ravaged by fever, disgust, and thoughts,

  I was revived (time and again) by her kisses,

  which never came empty-handed and were never just kisses.

  And I gave back

  oysters, calves’ brains, chicken hearts, bacon.

  Once we ate a pike with our fingers,

  I hers, she mine.

  Once we exchanged squabs

  down to the delicate little bones.

  Once (and t
ime and again) we kissed each other full of beans.

  Once, after always the same quarrel

  (because I’d drunk up the rent money),

  a radish reconciled us after a turnip estrangement.

  And once we had fun with the caraway seeds in the sauerkraut,

  and kept exchanging them, hungry for more.

  When Agnes the cook

  kissed Opitz the dying poet,

  he took a little asparagus tip with him on his last journey.

  The Fourth Month

  Inspection of feces

  IN THE FOURTH month of her pregnancy (and therefore suddenly wild about hazelnuts), Ilsebill, who doesn’t want to have been my kitchenmaid, whose thinking is strictly rectilinear, and who could easily be one of the Flounder’s accusers, lost an upper-right molar made valuable by a gold crown and, taking fright as if a male toad were creeping up on her, swallowed it. All she spat out was the shell of the hazelnut, which, irony of ironies, had been empty.

  “Well?” I said next morning. “Did you look for it? It’s gold, after all.”

  But she refused to inspect her morning stools, let alone prod them with a washable fork. And I was forbidden to root around in her “excrement,” as she contemptuously called it.

  “That’s because you were brought up unwisely and too well,” I said. For our fecal matter should be important to us and not repel us. It’s not a foreign body. It has our warmth. Nowadays it’s being described again in books, shown in films, and painted in still lifes. It had been forgotten, that’s all. Because as far as I can think back and look behind me, all the cooks (inside me) have inspected their feces and—in all my time-phases—mine as well. I was always under strict supervision.

  During her years as an abbess, for instance, Fat Gret made all the novices bring her their chamber pots, and every kitchen boy who came to her for employment had first to demonstrate his fitnesss by showing healthy stools.

  And even when, as Albrecht the swordmaker, I was plagued with daily Lenten fare, I was subjected to ex posteriori inspections. So unyieldingly fanatical was my wife and meatless cook, Dorothea, about her ascetic way of life that, not content with setting a meatless and fatless table, she checked on my intake at other people’s tables by poking through my feces for undigested bits of sinew or traces of bacon rind or tripe fiber, and compared my deposit with her own High Gothic and penitential stools, which were always dry and transcendental in their pallor, whereas I had sinned—at guild banquets, when suckling pigs stuffed with milky millet were carved for the smiths and swordmakers; or when, sometimes in the woods and sometimes at the lodge of the stonemasons then working on Saint Peter’s in the Outer City, I cooked in secret with my friend Lud the wood carver: sheep’s kidneys and fat sheep’s tails grilled over an open fire. Nothing could be concealed from Dorothea. Many a time I gave myself away by swallowing cartilage or small bones, which came out the other end intact.

  And when I was General Rapp, Napoleon’s governor of the Republic of Danzig, it was the cook Sophie Rotzoll who, because I had disparaged her mushroom dishes as indigestible, spread my shit on a silver platter and served it up to me. I had a soldier’s sense of humor; I put up with her impudence. And she was right: not a shred of mushroom skin, not a single mushroom worm to be seen. My palate grew keener and keener, and soon I was calling morels, milk caps, and egg mushrooms delicate. My taste developed to the point where I wouldn’t even forgo the tasty though sandy Polish green agaric, although the sand would have shown up in my gubernatorial stools.

  But what my last Napoleonic shit would have looked like if I had partaken of the special mushrooms Sophie added to her stuffed calf’s head—which dispatched six of my guests, officers all, including three Polish officers and one officer from the Rhenish Confederation, into the other world—I hardly dare imagine, though the shattering effect of the poisonous sulfur tuft is well known.

  All my cooks, I say, have inspected feces, read the future in feces, and in prehistoric times even carried on a pagan dialogue with fecal matter. Wigga, for instance, examining the still-steaming shitpile of a Gothic captain who had been so ill-mannered as to relieve himself in the immediate vicinity of our Wicker Bastion settlement, read the inexorable destiny of the Goths, who were soon to embark on their migration. In our Old Pomorshian tongue (the precursor of present-day Kashubian), she oracled their division into Ostrogoths and Visigoths, into luminous Goths and sublime Goths: Ermanaric and the Huns, Alaric in Rome. How Belisarius would take King Vitiges prisoner. The Battle of Châlons. And so on and so on …

  In the Neolithic, on the other hand, when my primordial cook ruled, the inspection of feces was a feature of the cult. We neolithic folk had entirely different customs, and not just in regard to eating. Each of us ate singly, with his back to the horde, not shamed but silent and introverted, immersed in mastication, eyeless. But we shat together, squatting in a circle and exchanging shouts of encouragement.

  After the horde shit-together we felt collectively relieved and chatted happily, showing one another our finished products, drawing pithy comparisons with past performances, or teasing our constipated comrades, who were still squatting in vain.

  Needless to say, the farting incidental to the rite was also a social affair. What today is said to stink and is crudely amalgamated with latrines and slit trenches—“It stinks like an army camp around here!”—was natural to us, because we identified with our feces. In smelling our turds, we smelled ourselves. These were no foreign bodies. If we needed food and enjoyed the taste, how could we fail to take pleasure in evacuating what remained of it? We looked upon each departing turd with gratitude, and with a certain sadness as well. Consequently, the horde shit-together, for which we assembled, nay, were obliged to assemble twice daily, was followed by a paean, a formula of thanksgiving, a hosanna or last tribute.

  Because she was the horde cook, our priestess, Awa, inspected our feces, which had cooled in the meantime. Though she never established a fixed order of sequence, she strode around the circle, finding an exegetic word for each of us, even the meagerest shitter, for which reason this most human of institutions must be recognized as primordially democratic. All squatted in equality, none exalted above his fellows, for we were all her children. Anyone who had squatted unsuccessfully was reprimanded, and if he remained constipated over a period of days, he was punished—as is still customary—by being made to shit alone. And if even then he failed to squeeze out so much as a hard and undersized sausage, toads’ eggs were funneled into him. Awa wielded the neolithic spoon, the ladlelike shoulder blade of an elk cow. That helped!

  In our humanistic modern age political criminals, or “enemies of the people,” are sometimes punished or tortured by being made to eat their own fascist, Communist, anarchist, or even liberal shit. We would not have felt humiliated by such treatment, because our attitude toward fecal matter was not only religious but practical as well: in times of famine we ate it, without pleasure but also without disgust. Today only babies have this natural attitude toward the end products of their digestion and toward the pleasurable process of metabolism, for which adults have devised such coy euphemisms: Number two. Big business. To go where even the kaiser must go on foot. To disappear for a moment.

  “You barbarians!” cried the Flounder when, more or less in passing, I told him about our maternally approved shit-togethers. “Pigs!” he screamed. “When in King Minos’s palace they’ve already got flush toilets.” He tried to talk me into a sense of shame. And soon, only two thousand years later, I developed one and shat alone like everyone else. The Flounder lectured me on culture and civilization. I listened, though I really never understood whether the individualization of the bowel movement was a cultural development or an advance in civilization. In the Neolithic, in any case, when we knew only the horde shit-together and our Awa twice daily struck up her vowel-rich paean, we were no strangers to hygiene: coltsfoot leaves. Never been beat.

  (Ah, if only we had a collective toilet, a tw
o-seater at least, if not the big family-size.) Tell me the truth, Ilsebill, even if you didn’t want to fish your gold tooth out of your excrement, and (like most people) you use the word “shit” exclusively and quite unjustifiably as an expletive. Admit it, Ilsebill, don’t use your pregnancy as an excuse, admit that you, too, look behind you, though diffidently and much too genteelly. You like to smell yourself as much as I do myself. And I would gladly smell you, and gladly be smelled by you. Love? That’s it.

  And so the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, who cooked diet fare for painter Möller and poet Opitz, inspected her lovers’ feces each day and honored them in verses. Salutary words always came to her. And when the Black Death struck Opitz, Agnes recognized by the shit in his breeches that he was doomed to die, and lamented softly:

  “The Lord hath meant to give me the alarm:

  where shytte is black, beset with many a worm,

  the shytter soon must come to grievous harm.”

  Empty and alone

  Pants down, hands joined as though in prayer,

  my eyes right on target:

  third tile from the top, sixth from the right.

  Diarrhea.

  I hear myself.

  Two thousand five hundred years of history,

  early insight and last thoughts

  lick and cancel each other out.

  It’s the usual infection.

  Brought on by red wine

  or by quarrels on the stairs with Ilsebill.

  Fear because time—the clock, I mean—

  has chronic trots.

  What afterdrips: breakfast problems.

  No compact turd takes form,

  love, too, flows thin and loose.

  So much emptiness

  is in itself a pleasure: in the crapper

  with my own specific ass.

  God state society family party …