The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Only a few heard Ms. von Carnow’s anachronistic plaint: “But is it not fitting and proper for a woman to be an artist’s Muse, his cracked glass, his bed of moss, his primal form? Haven’t all great things come into being in this and only this way, through the quiet influence of inspiring women? Are we women to walk out on this magnificent job and seal off the wellsprings of the arts? Is devotion not the best proof of womanly strength? Do we want to harden ourselves to the point of insensibility? And what, I ask you, what is to become of the Eternal Womanly?”

  “OK, OK!” the Flounder interrupted. “Your little questions move even me to tears. But my dear lady, you’re behind the times, and nothing worse can happen to a woman. I’m afraid you would even be capable, like little Agnes, whose case is here under discussion, of giving your love unconditionally. Good Lord! Nobody could put up with that in this day and age.”

  (Then I, too, walked out, much as Bettina von Carnow attracted me by awakening memories.) Oh, Agnes! Your boiled fish. Your meaningless smile. Your bare feet. Your sleepy hands. Your soporific voice. Your never-to-be-filled emptiness. There was always fresh dill in the house: your love, which always and always grew back… .

  Late

  I know nature

  only insofar as

  it shows itself.

  With groping fingers

  I see it in fragments,

  never,

  or only when luck strikes me,

  as a whole.

  What so much beauty, manifested

  bright and early in my feces,

  signifies or intends,

  I do not know.

  Therefore I go to bed reluctantly,

  for dreams give objects fluidity

  and talk meaning into them.

  I try to stay awake.

  Maybe the stone will move

  or Agnes come,

  bringing me what makes me sleep:

  caraway seeds and dill.

  Fishily on love and poetry

  He talked us men into it (and prescribed it for all Ilsebills as a pacemaker). For in the beginning, when Awa ruled, when all women were called Awa and all men Edek, we didn’t have love. It wouldn’t have entered our heads to single out any particular Awa as something special. We had no chosen one, though we did have the Superawa, who was later worshiped as a mother goddess and who, because I was able to scratch figures with her proportions in the sand or knead them in clay, always favored me just a little. But crazy, mad about, in love with each other we were not.

  By the same token there was no hatred. In the customary life of the horde no one was pushed aside, except perhaps the poor devils who were individually excluded and driven into the swamps, for infringing on some taboo. Taboo, for instance, were garrulous group eating and solitary shitting. And undoubtedly our Superawa would have sternly tabooed love between two individuals—if such madness had ever cropped up among us—and banished the offending pair. Such things are believed to have happened—somewhere else.

  Not among us. To us the individual meant nothing. One Awa was as fat as another. And we Edeks were taken wherever we fitted in. Of course there were differences. Of course there were little preferences. Don’t go thinking we were a shapeless neolithic mass. Not only age groups but also groupings based on the division of labor determined the sociological makeup of our horde. Some of the women gathered mushrooms; in the beech woods they came into contact with the male group that had specialized in hunting bear but mostly speared badgers. Since I was numbered among the fishermen—though I preferred to fish by myself, which was not taboo—the women who plaited eel traps made more use of me than did the mushroom gatherers. But this had nothing to do with love, not even with group love. Still, we were buoyed by a strong feeling, which might have been called tender loving care.

  When, no sooner had I caught him and set him free, the Flounder questioned me about my life in the horde, he was curious to know what three-breasted Stone Age woman liked me best, whose pussy I serviced with Stakhanovite enthusiasm, which basket plaiter or otherwise occupied Ilsebill I tried to madden with love: “So tell me, my son, which of these women’s heads have you turned?”

  By way of an answer, I explained our system of horde care. “We care first for our mothers and mothers’ mothers. Then we care for their daughters and daughters’ daughters. Then, if any of our men have been eliminated by work accidents, for our mothers’ sisters and their daughters and daughters’ daughters. The products of our care—game, fish, elk cow’s milk, honeycomb, nuts, berries, et cetera—are distributed by the mothers’ mothers in accordance with the Superawa’s instructions. So the products of our care-work revert to us in the end, for the old men are served first.”

  In accordance with this principle, no Awa or Edek is preferred, though our Superawa always pampered me a bit at the night feeding. If we loved anyone, it was her. And our horde supplied a clear and unmistakable answer to the Flounder’s question “Look, isn’t there somebody you love best if only symbolically, some person you love so much you could eat that person?” For when one day our Superawa died, we, each for himself, ate her up. Not for love, but because in dying she commanded us, not as was the custom to lower her into the swamp in a squatting position, but to eat every bit of her. She even (caringly) left us a recipe: she wanted to be cleaned (by me, incidentally), then stuffed with her heart and liver to which mushrooms and juniper berries had been added, wrapped in a thumb’s thickness of clay, bedded on coals strewn with ashes, and covered over with ashes and coals. Thus indeed did we roast Awa, and toward evening she was done. The burnt clay was struck off, and then, after caringly dividing her into portions, we ate her. I got a piece of the neck, the forefinger of her left hand, a bit of liver, and the barest morsel of her middle breast. She didn’t taste especially good. Like a superannuated cow.

  No, friend Flounder, we didn’t eat her for love. A long, hard winter had covered the rivers and sea with ice, buried the mangels under the snow, and driven away the badgers, boars, and elks. We were all out of manna grits. Starving. Chewing birch bark. The women who suckled us were on their last legs. Only the old ones were holding out. That was when Awa offered herself. Not until later, much later, did it become the custom, even without a famine, to roast each deceased Superawa according to the traditional recipe and eat her. Call it cannibalism if you will. Maybe it was, friend Flounder, but we never ate one another for love, requited or unrequited, never because we were lovelorn or love-crazed.

  Even in the days of Wigga, or much later of Mestwina, love did not transfigure us, we didn’t blush or turn pale at the sight of each other. True, I was and remained Wigga’s charcoal burner, and Mestwina seldom exchanged me for a fisherman or a plaiter of baskets, but grandiose emotions that tightened or expanded the chest, the quickened heartbeat, the desire to embrace the world or at least the nearest tree, to give ourselves wholly, to fuse with each other, to become each other’s thing possession chattel, to gnaw on the same little bone, the absurd desire to die in each other’s arms—this whole giddy, warbling romanza was alien to us, and I don’t believe we hankered after it in secret, either.

  Not that we were altogether lukewarm. Though Wigga ruled us men with a sternness carried over from the Stone Age, she could be affectionate when we bedded down, and even playful after cooking pike dumplings. And when we were old and knotted with gout, and flesh no longer tempted us, we often sat in silence outside our hut, watching the sun set behind the forest. Maybe after all we had a kind of old folks’ love, that trembling holding of hands and muttering of do-you-remember.

  I’d have liked to live the same way with Mestwina. We didn’t own each other, and when spring came she took to lying where she listed, but we had got into the habit of wintering together. Since love had never smitten us, we were not smitten with jealousy. When March came, she didn’t begrudge me my capers, nor I her cavortings.

  All this changed when Bishop Adalbert turned up with the cross. In any event, the Flounder claims that when Mest
wina started cooking for the holy man and, soon thereafter, sharing his ascetic bed of leaves, her gaze clouded over and she often showed a drawn, melancholy smile.

  “Believe me, my son,” he said after the saint’s death, “she loved him even if she did strike him dead. Or she hit him with the cast iron because she loved him and he wouldn’t give up his love of the Lord God. It was unrequited love that drove her to drink—mead and fermented mare’s milk. In any case, love seems to divert women from their natural supremacy. They humble themselves, they want to be humbled, they come crawling, and their love turns to homicidal frenzy only when their offer of unconditional servitude is rejected, or, as in the case of Saint Adalbert of Prague, misinterpreted as satanic temptation. In short, love is an instrument that demands to be handled with care. We will practice that, my son.”

  And then the Flounder developed his theory of love as a means of putting an end to the domination of women. Love would unleash feelings. It would set a standard that no one could live up to. It would suckle but never appease a lasting dissatisfaction. It would invent a language of sighs, the poetry which at once illuminates and obscures. It would go into partnership with falling leaves, swirling mists, the worm in the woodwork, the melting snow, and the lusting little leaves of spring. It would give rise to supernaturally colorful dreams. It would paint the world in rosy colors. It would beguile women into compensating for their lost power by voraciously escalating their demands. It would become the everlasting plaint of every Ilsebill.

  Then the Flounder ordained that love be made to provide an ideational superstructure under whose sheltering canopy practical marriage as guarantor of property might develop. For marriage has nothing in common with love. Marriage makes for security; love makes only for suffering. Not only would this be demonstrated in moving poems; unfortunately, it would also result in crimes. How many times would “the other woman” be poisoned, strangled, punctured with knitting needles!

  On the other hand, the Flounder went on, love could be so distilled, spun so fine as to implicate third and fourth persons, as to take up three or four exciting acts in a play, to be set to music or filmed, and, just incidentally, to show women the way to complicated psychological disorders. (Here the Flounder listed all the disorders, from loss of appetite to migraine and raving madness, that have since been honored by medical insurance as bona fide afflictions.)

  His disquisition, which was bolstered by quotations of poetry from the troubadours to the Beatles and anticipated the latest in pop songs and advertising slogans, concluded with the programmatic sentence: “Only if we succeed in persuading woman by subtle suggestion that love is a saving power and the certainty of being loved the supreme happiness, and if concomitantly man, even though loved to the point of adulation, steadfastly refuses to love or to guarantee the longevity of his little love affairs, so that the woman’s dependence on the never-attained certainty that he loves her, still loves her, loves her and nobody else, becomes a lifelong anxiety, a humiliating torment, and an oppressive servitude—then alone will matriarchy be defeated, will the conquering phallic symbol overturn all vulvar idols, will man illuminate the prehistoric darkness of the womb and perpetuate himself forever and ever as father and as master.”

  Yes, Ilsebill. A lot of women were indignant when the Flounder began to shoot his mouth off in court recently. At the very start of the proceedings, the prosecutor had considered bringing up the Flounder’s theory of love in connection with Dorothea of Montau, but because Dorothea did not love and worship the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, but on the contrary I, fool that I was, in defiance of the fishy theory of love, fell in love with the witch, the prosecution reserved this hybrid topic until the case of Agnes Kurbiella should be debated.

  In any case, love brought me no freedom, but only long-haired misery. True, the Flounder had advised me never to marry a woman I was capable of loving, but I married my pale-faced bride of Christ, and if I’d been brought up at court I’d have written love songs to her in the chivalric fashion of the day: “Ah, lady swet beyond compare …” For the pining and sighing of the troubadours dragged on into my High Gothic time-phase. Disgusting slobber that turned our otherwise cold-blooded Teutonic Knights into moaning, lisping mollycoddles. Even the most buxom peasant girl was seen as a little Madonna. Our good old mating games degenerated into sinful fornication. Only what was forbidden turned people on. Ballad-making love—“for all min lyfe is luv”—promised eternal chastity, but then two stanzas farther on, once the key to the chastity belt had been found, the poet wallowed in the usual meat salad. Yet our ladies—my Dorothea in the lead—kept sanctimoniously aloof, casting down their eyes if anyone so much as mentioned a codpiece. And we men dangled from the string with which, on the advice of a loquacious fish, we had tried to bind our women to the marriage bed.

  Dorothea! Lord, what didn’t I do to coax a little love from that cold-blooded bitch. But even when she made her body available, she withheld it. I could whimper, I could babble, I could turn somersaults like the queen’s dwarf—she turned away in boredom and went on with her elaborate penitential exercises; only heavenly love could get a rise out of her. Enslaved to her sweet Jesus, she crushed me, reduced me to a miserable rag. That, Ilsebill, is what love did to me. That, Mr. Flounder, was your contribution to the emancipation of men. If things had only stopped with Awa Wigga Mestwina and their loving-caring rule—all that unvarying warmth and bedding down, all that moist mossy bottom. Awa and her priestesses never destroyed us with love.

  It wasn’t until Fat Gret started cooking for us that the pressure let up. In the meantime the custom of property-securing marriage had become so engrained that women, weary perhaps of chivalric effusions and threadbare chastity games, were positively dying to get married; power over household, keys, and kitchen was power enough for them. They were faithful and cozily devoted to their husbands. And because housewifely infidelity was severely punished, by whip, pillory, or casting off, husbands and fathers could rely on their women to bring up the children. At last the Flounder’s fishy theory of love was reflected in home-grown practice: how stingily the ladies pinched pennies, how neighborly they clucked, gossiped, made matches, quarreled, and gradually developed into hags or matrons. Only whores and nuns refused to join in—and first of all Fat Gret, who could have run a whorehouse if she hadn’t been an abbess.

  Whereas Dorothea rebelled against marriage by daily opening the back door of her Lenten kitchen to her heavenly bridegroom, Margarete kept clear of agonizing situations from the start. As a nun she was betrothed in heaven, but the solid flesh demanded earthly love. Thus as an abbess she taught her young nuns to let no man—be he monk or straying paterfamilias—bamboozle their hearts. Just as the Flounder had taught us men to make women pant for love but never—or only away from home and with due caution—to lose our heads over love, so Fat Gret advised her free-ranging Brigittines to believe no man’s whisperings. “Don’t aggravate me,” she would say. “You’re married already.” Yet two or three nuns ran away from Saint Bridget’s (because the Reformation was on) and succumbed to the unrelieved misery of married life.

  Mestwina may have worshiped Saint Adalbert; and possibly Ilsebill has me in mind when she looks for her ignition key. Fat Gret—I’m certain—loved no man, caringly as she cooked for her dozen men. At the most she gave me, the runaway Franciscan monk, something on the order of mother love. Margret was a vigorous thirty at the time, and I a seventeen-year-old novice. With me she had no need to disguise her feelings. I hardly counted. Her constantly changing kitchen boys. There were so many uprooted monks running around, looking for shelter and warmth, her motherly sheltering fat. Margarete Rusch had plenty of that. And she gave to everyone she fancied. A few men (I, for instance) may have mistaken that for love.

  Agnes, the gentle, barefooted diet cook, was the first grandly loving woman, a type that the Flounder may well, with fishy calculation, have thought up. For Agnes Kurbiella loved me without reserve, me Möller the town painter and
me Opitz the poet and diplomat in the service of the king of Poland, loved me so thoroughly in accordance with the rules of the Flounder’s theory that her love can be qualified by all those epithets and phrases that later became clichés: devoted, self-sacrificing, humble and uncomplaining, with all her heart, beyond the grave, unselfish, unquestioning, uncomplaining. And withal, she was not loved. Opitz was too wrapped up in himself and his stomach trouble, too much involved in too many political intrigues to be capable of concentrated feeling; painter Möller loved only food and drink. But Agnes loved us without asking to be loved in return. She was our handmaiden. She was the bucket into which we vomited our misery. She was the cloth that absorbed the sweat of our anguish. She was the hole we crawled into. Our pillow of moss, our hot-water bottle, our sleeping potion, our evening prayer.

  Maybe she loved Opitz a little more than Möller, though for six years, without so much as turning up her nose, she changed Möller’s breeches every time he shat in them. All the same, stingy as the poet was with his money and feelings, she was more deeply attached to him. When the plague carried him off, she clung to the straw he had died on and his sweat-soaked bed sheet. The constables had to beat her to make her let go. She loved totally. When Hoffmannswaldau, another poet from Silesia, came to Danzig for the deceased Opitz’s posthumous papers (and quarreled over them with Herr Roberthin, whom Simon Dach had sent from Königsberg), Agnes Kurbiella appears to have fed the kitchen stove with the final version of the Psalms translation, a whole sheaf of poems in rough draft, the unfinished manuscript of the Dacia antiqua, which Opitz had been working on intermittently ever since his years as a young teacher in Rumanian Transylvania, and his correspondence over a period of many years with the Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna. She wouldn’t even give Hoffmannswaldau Opitz’s goose quills. (Would you, Ilsebill, be capable of oiling and dusting my old portable typewriter someday and holding it more or less sacred?)