The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  But the female public protested loudly; all were unwilling to give up their powdered milk. The Revolutionary Advisory Council came out strongly in favor of prepared baby foods in vacuum-sealed jars. Was the Flounder nuts? Advising mothers of all people to cut down on consumption! Especially working mothers. Anything that lightened the housework was a force for emancipation. Solidarity, yes, but some things you can’t do without. They’d send telegrams of solidarity to Africa. Of course what the company was doing there was unspeakable. (And a resolution was voted by an overwhelming majority, given weight by the signatures of the public, and cabled out into the world… .)

  Soon after the death of her child, Agnes wanted another. But not by painter Möller, who had refused her the wet nurse.

  When Martin Opitz, who also called himself von Boberfeld, entered the Royal Polish service and took up lodgings in Danzig, he was not yet forty, while painter Möller was over sixty. Soon after his arrival the poet fell in love with a girl of patrician family who could recite Latin poems but was already engaged to the son of a local merchant. Agnes, who, thanks to the good offices of Pastor Niclassius, was now cooking for Opitz as well, obliterated the silly thing—her name was Ursula—with her mute, barefooted presence. And yet he sighed for Ursula and probably couched his sighs in Latin verses.

  More subterfuges. He never made it—not for any length of time. Agnes was the first woman who regularly slept with him. His father, the butcher, after the early death of his first wife, took a second, third, and fourth, and got all four with child after child. So there wasn’t much left for his son to do. Just little flirtations, mostly at one court or another. One or two intrigues with burgher women in Breslau, bringing pecuniary consequences, whereupon he took flight again. When he was a young tutor in the service of Prince Bethlen Gabor, a Dacian servant girl seems to have horrified him by really showing him how it was done. Even the war, which lasted all his life, didn’t give him what it gave every Swedish cavalryman (Ensign Axel). Always over books and parchment, alone and ugly on straw pallets or in bed: his receding chin. Nothing but poems and epistles of thanks to successive princes. And so, when little Ursula was not to be had, Opitz, weary and drained, fell to Agnes Kurbiella and her apron.

  Agnes, who had plenty, didn’t want to have anything, but only to give. For three years she sheltered him with her warmth. But assiduously as he wrote his agent’s letters hither and thither for double pay, all he was able to put on paper in the way of poetry was rhetorical flourishes and inky speculations; even the new quill pens that Agnes brought him when she had plucked a goose for Möller were no help, whereas I can always think of something to say about my Ilsebill; she has only to state her wishes, as in the fairy tale. Ilsebill wants this. Ilsebill wants that.

  Luckily, I’ve been able to write her into her sickbed. (I can do that.) Behind my back the door to the next room has been left ajar. From there her cough comes to me, demanding to be heard and put down in line drawings. Choker knots and softly outlined nests (around the shoe) form settlements on my paper. The rubbing lotion contains 60 mg of camphor. The wind is blowing from the west. And light heating oil is getting more and more expensive. (Let her cough this thing out of her, damn it!) For even in weather like this, Agnes turns up and brings herself along.

  We and the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, said the Flounder, were a classical triangle—all corners taken. So it’s conceivable—or true—that as Anton Möller I painted the pregnant, by me impregnated, Agnes, although (somewhat later) I was the Opitz who tried in vain—shortly before my miserable death—to transpose the same Agnes into Baroque language. After her child had wasted away, I was obliged, as the Flounder ordered, to prove my mettle: between unsuccessful stanzas I knocked Agnes up without asking who she was thinking about at the time; it seems his name was Axel.

  The painter, the poet. They didn’t like each other. Opitz thought Möller crude; Opitz, in Möller’s eyes, was all spindly-legged theory. But Agnes had to think up a menu for both of them, dishes good for Opitz’s delicate stomach and the drinker’s swollen liver. I wanted to be painter and poet at once; casually wielding red chalk, pedantically counting iambic measures.

  What drew us to Agnes was her allegorical emptiness. You could read whatever you pleased into her; she admitted of any meaning. (Her features were indistinct; she could look more or less like.)

  And every day there was millet cooked in milk, sweetened with honey, and made wholesome for both of them with hazelnuts. Agnes knew what was equally inoffensive to the innards of poet and painter: broth made from beef bones with spinach-stuffed dough pouches floating in it, breasts of chicken with green peas, or beer soups seasoned with nutmeg and cinnamon.

  But Möller demanded, insisted on, clamored for smoked bacon and fat mutton rinds. And Opitz nibbled caraway seeds. He became addicted to them, for too many caraway seeds act as a drug: hopeful daydreams, in which the vale of tears became livable, a place inhabited by nymphs and Muses singing verses that had never been written, where peace and peace alone was always victorious.

  Agnes let them both make wrecks of themselves, the one with his rich food, the other with his addiction to caraway seeds, until the one’s stomach turned inside out and the other’s liver swelled to the size of a fist. Then her diet fare was again in demand: boiled fish that fell off the bone, millet cooked in milk, buckwheat cakes. The drunken Möller, the peevish Opitz: carefully as Agnes cooked for both of them, they looked for a very different taste, and found it with deadly certainty.

  The door is still holding. But when it crashes, you will bring me war or make me look for coins with your question “Got two mark-pieces for a slot machine?” But then the door opened gently and Agnes came in, bent over me and my scribble-scrabble, and said play words.

  I can think of nothing better than to endure this fear or hope and—while the door still holds—draw my little men. Here I can be found, though never entirely. And you, too, come in only briefly, and you’re gone before you’ve come. Once upon a time and long ago, earlier still and earlier than early, you came and stayed for a short lifetime; neither of us knows why.

  And once you came—it was probably Agnes—and wanted to hear me scribble for just a little while. Think back. My name was Martin. I came from Bunzlau. The man with the rules of poetics. But you didn’t want to know why I’d stayed on so long in the Catholic service and never again collaborated on secular operas with the pious Schütz. All you wanted was to hear me scribble. But I wanted to die and escape from the vale of tears, as naked as I came.

  If only I knew whether you died of the fever after me, in giving birth to your daughter—Ursula was her name, Ursel for short. It was another plague year, and all sorts of things were possible with so many people passing away.

  As I lay dying because in my niggardliness I had made a beggar give me change for a silver gulden, no one opened the door. Only Niclassius, the preacher at Saint Peter’s, was there. Later on he bowdlerized my deathbed in Latin verses. Or can it be that you came and I didn’t hear the door open?

  In the summer of the year 1639, after Martin Opitz gave a silver gulden to a beggar who held out his hand at the door of Saint Catherine’s, and, stingy by nature, demanded copper in return, he acquired the Black Death along with the change. Before he became incapable of doing anything, he wrote letters to Oxenstierna, the Swedish chancellor, and to Wladimir, king of Poland, and ate a little of the codfish that his kitchenmaid served him in dill sauce. (Agnes shook out his pillow. Agnes daubed away his sweat. Agnes changed his bed sheet when he shat black in it. Agnes heard him breathe his last.)

  Immediately after his death, before the straw he had died on could be burned and the house fumigated, someone broke in and robbed the poet’s room. Some of his papers are missing (to this day), including the Dacian material and all the political correspondence. A Swedish colonel accompanied by two mercenaries is believed to have seized the depositions of Generals Banér and Torstenson, Oxenstierna’s letters, and the Polish lett
ers acknowledging Opitz’s reports, and secreted them in a safe place. We do not know the colonel’s name, but kitchenmaid Kurbiella was long suspected of being an agent of the Swedish crown, of having been in contact with this officer, and of having made off with documents on previous occasions. But nothing was ever proved against Agnes. And before the Women’s Tribunal the Flounder had only his usual obscurities to offer. “My dear ladies who always want precise information: we know too little. True, the rape of the thirteen-year-old Agnes Kurbiella by cavalrymen of the Oxenstierna regiment may have imprinted her at an early age, leaving her with an undying attachment for one of the four debauchees—it seems his name was Axel—but the circumstances attending the poet’s death nevertheless show neither rhyme nor reason. The one thing we know for sure is that his kitchenmaid gave birth to a daughter soon afterward, and that both lived for many years to come.”

  Excrement rhymed

  Steams, is examined.

  Does not smell strange, wants to be seen,

  to be known by name.

  Excrement. Metabolism or bowel movement.

  Shit: what settles in a ring.

  Make little sausages! the mothers cry.

  Early modeling clay, knots of shame

  and leftover fear: what has gone into the pants.

  Recognition: undigested peas, cherry pits,

  the tooth that was swallowed.

  We look at one another in amazement.

  We have something to say to one another.

  My waste—closer to me than God or you or you.

  Why do we part behind a bolted door

  instead of admitting the guests

  with whom, sitting noisily at the table the day before,

  we predestined beans and bacon?

  From this time on (per decision) we will each eat singly

  and shit together,

  thus neolithically fostering insight.

  All poems that prophesy and rhyme on death

  are excrement that has dropped from a constipated body

  in which blood meanders, worms survive;

  thus did Opitz the poet,

  whom the plague incorporated as an allegory,

  see his last diarrhea.

  Only one was burned as a witch

  And yet witchcraft was carried on in kitchens if anywhere, in all kitchens. All cooks knew and handed down recipes for purées, soups, and broths which were thick, ash-gray, or cloudy, one that bloated, a second that physicked, a third that induced numbness. From the very start (Awa), henbane had its uses, ergot was mixed into things, and fly agaric (dried), grated to a powder, steeped in milk, or imbibed with mare’s urine, was good for a journey into succubine transcendence. We men were as dependent on Wigga, who raised mandrakes along with other roots, as if she’d bewitched us. Mestwina ground amber into fish soups for us. (And Ilsebill, too, I’m sure, adds, mixes, stirs this into that.) I’ve always lived among witches. Don’t go thinking there weren’t any; it’s just that the wrong ones were burned. None of those shorn herb-women, virgins, and matrons on the quickly burning woodpiles were real witches, even if they confessed under torture to such abstruse rubbish as broomstick riding and misuse of church candles.

  Naturally there were no witches’ sabbaths, no goat-legged cavaliers, no Devil’s spot or evil eyes, but let’s not doubt the existence of witches’ kitchens and witches’ brews. Why, didn’t I see Dorothea fry slimy toads’ eggs in the fat of stillborn baby boys, which she got from Corpus Christi Hospital, moistening the mixture with holy water from Saint Catherine’s. Why, you could smell it all over the house when that pale witch, alone in the kitchen, burned the hoofs of a kid to ashes. Why, everybody knew that she stirred not only the ashes of rotten coffin wood into her Lenten soups but horn ash as well. It was rumored that she carried the dishwater from the pesthouses, where, with her pious airs, she came and went as she pleased, straight to our kitchen. It was rumored that she filled little bottles with lepers’ scabs and the sweat of women dying of childbed fever. And it was rumored that, before the Teutonic Knights went campaigning in Lithuania, she boiled their mail shirts in virgins’ piss. But only rumored. She was never put to the question. Others were burned: plain, dull-witted neighbor women who had always cooked dutifully for their husbands but had hairy birthmarks on their buttocks or breasts. (I am sure that Dorothea, whose body was without blemish, gave her Dominican confessor little hints, for poor women and patrician ladies came to her in shamefaced secrecy, asking for ointments against warts and moles. With maybe a magic spell or two thrown in.)

  And Fat Gret, too, knew witching recipes but wasn’t burned. Who doesn’t remember how, when Mayor Eberhard Ferber lost his manhood on laying down his chain of office, she perked him up again with herring milt and the semen of runaway Franciscan monks; how she fuddled the memory of the aged abbot Jeschke—who had too much political information—by taking a spoonful of his excrement, kneading it into a dough with peppercorns, poppy seed, wild honey, and buckwheat flour, and baking it into spicecakes for Advent; and how she bewitched me, too. I don’t know what with. For she mixed everything with everything. She never cooked for taste alone. She stirred raisins into goose blood, made beef hearts stuffed with prunes in beer sauce. When I turned up and became a long-term guest in her box bed, she often fed me carrots that she had anointed with her pussy. And what all else, without a shred of shame! Everyone knew she sent away to far-off places for more things than Indian spices. Everyone knew—though details remained in the dark—that witchcraft was practiced when she sat down at table with her nuns and that she offered up heathen sacrifices. She and her free-ranging Brigittines were said to have nibbled pastry figures (with an intimation of three breasts?) and sung from the Wittenberg hymnal, “The house that God hath never blest …”

  But no wood was piled for her. Not Dorothea and not Margarete Rusch, but gentle Agnes was destined to burn. True, I prefer to believe that soon after the plague carried me away, Agnes, still in the bloom of her youth, died in childbirth, but the Flounder has testified that she didn’t die until fifty years later, by then an old hag, and moreover that she went up in flames.

  No, I’m not going to tell you how the wind suddenly died down, a cloud sprang a leak, rain fell, and a miracle almost came to pass. As we all know, the Women’s Tribunal accepted the Flounder’s version, according to which Agnes Kurbiella, long after the poet Opitz died of the plague, went running through the streets talking dementedly to Ursel, her likewise demented daughter, and quoting the dead poet’s works in both Latin and German, until, early in the summer of 1689, she met another poet, Quirinus Kuhlmann, the socalled Cool Monarch.

  Kuhlmann was also introduced to the Women’s Tribunal in affidavits by Baroque specialists. The Flounder called him a precursor of Expressionism. But the prosecution had no use for his eccentric genius. Kuhlmann, it was pointed out, had unscrupulously fed Agnes Kurbiella’s confusion with his speculations, day after day indoctrinating her with his hubris. He, too, had exploited her as a Muse. He had manifested dangerous phantasms and gone to his death, drawing the old woman with him.

  The accusing feminists were only too pleased to hear how Agnes Kurbiella fell a victim to male exaltation, how she followed Kuhlmann from Danzig via Riga across the vastnesses of Russia to Moscow, how she became his handmaiden and served as his medium at séances of the Boehmenist community, how on trial and under torture she still went on mumbling Opitzian rhymes and Kuhlmannian verbal cascades, how she was burned along with her mad Ursel while Kuhlmann and two other male heretics were burned at nearby stakes for blasphemy and political conspiracy against the tsar’s rule. The statistics show that men, too, were acceptable to the flames. And yet, in the opinion of the Women’s Tribunal, the Inquisition and its witch trials were typical instruments of male domination, calculated to crush women’s persistent strivings for freedom. The prosecutor’s exact words were “The so-called witch was a male fiction, at once a wish dream and a projection of fear.”

  May
be so. Yet Agnes, who did not want freedom, was nevertheless sent to the flames as a witch, whereas Dorothea of Montau and Margarete Rusch, both of whom strove for freedom and took liberties, were not elevated on pyres. It was the slight poetic confusion of her brain that equipped Agnes for activity as a Muse; only persons hostile or indifferent to the Muses called Agnes crazy, possessed, bewitched, Belial-ridden. Even her little dill garden was under suspicion, and that as early as Möller’s, as Opitz’s day. They had to protect the poor child from Catholics and Lutherans alike, for when it came to burning witches, the zealots of both religions joined forces in less time than it takes to pile up faggots and logs.

  And even Amanda Woyke, who knew recipes, and definitely Sophie Rotzoll, who was familiar with every variety of mushroom, would have met the Christian gentlemen’s requirements for fuel. But by Amanda’s day and Sophie’s, the revolutionary housecleaners had thought up other victims—so-called counterrevolutionaries, who were guillotined in the name of reason.

  The Flounder, who seemed to be hovering in mid-water above his bed of sand, said to his judges: “As a fish whose tasty relatives are stewed and fried, I know whereof I speak when the purifying power of fire is under discussion. Thank your stars, my dear ladies, that nowadays witchcraft is more likely to be subsidized than punished. Modern man longs for a telekinetic dimension. But what if you had lived in one of those time-phases, my dear ladies? I don’t know! I don’t know! When I let my eyes rest on you and look you over as you sit there on your dais, judging me—so much concentrated earnestness, so much power-generating intensity—I hear a spiritistic rustling. Now forceful, now soothing glances strike my pebbly skin. And yet, each face taken individually has a beauty of its own. Eleven defiant egos. Fleeting, twisted smiles. Twinkling connivance—at what? Eleven heads of hair—mown to stubble, Afro-crinkled, or witchily wind-blown and easily ignited. In short, I see you all burning. The esteemed presiding judge, the chorus of associate judges, you, too, my dear Ms. Paasch, I see you all penned into knackers’ carts, forced into nettle shirts, while the medieval populace gape, the monks mumble their Latin, and the children pick their noses. On expertly constructed pyres, I see you, too, beautiful Ms. Simoneit, and next to you Ms. Witzlaff in all the splendor of the flesh, first swathed in smoke, then clad in flames. Those whispered screams! That clustered ecstasy! Elevenfold desire stilled and freedom at last. Even Ms. von Carnow, my court-appointed defense counsel, so well meaning and yet so helpless, would like to go up in poetic flames, though she’s as innocent as the dill in kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella’s garden. I see you all burning, the whole lot of you. And the majority of the Revolutionary Advisory Council are fit for the fire, too. But not Ms. Huntscha—not my prosecutor, who shows too sisterly a resemblance to the Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau. She in her supernatural beauty and pallor was too mystically world-removed, too emaciated to require such physical purification as poor Agnes… .”