The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  (When, after a brief shower of rain, she finally took fire, nothing political could be gleaned from her mumblings, only bland-diet poetry; whereupon Axel Ludström, the Swedish ambassador to the tsar’s court, sent instruction to Stockholm to close the Kurbiella file.)

  What about you, Ilsebill? Would you prefer birchwood to the beech logs customary in those days? I’d get you ready for the fire. I’d be the gentle Dominican father Hyazind, who came from Cracow with his special instruments in tool chests with silver fittings. I’d approach you, closer and closer, with the flexible iron rods. Carefully, forgetting no limb, I’d make your ball joints jump out of the sockets where they were imprisoned; they’d be beside themselves. So much skin, from the shoulders down, all along the blond back. Ah, the thoughts! Uttered at last. My embarrassing questions cloaked in kindness. Your naked confession. For it’s to loosen your tongue that I’ve come from far away. This is something we want to hear. Softly murmured. Read from the lips curled in pain: Yes, I did. Yes, several times. No, not alone. With another Ilsebill. And later a third one joined us in the fog. We did. Yes, at night, but every day, too. At the new moon and on Saint John’s Day. With our menstrual blood. Made little marks on objects and name plates. On the abutments of bridges and industrial installations, in the field where they’re planning to put up a nuclear plant, on freshly programmed computers and several typewriters. Yes, we made the mark on yours, too. Inside, under the “I” key …

  When at last my Ilsebill burned, but to the very end refused to relinquish her beauty, I wept under my hood. I was sorry, Flounder, to have given her that freedom.

  Immortal

  Having in all directions.

  pushed open the promised windows,

  I was certain that once

  dead I would see nothing.

  But gazing over the flat,

  neatly settled countryside

  and across the street into open windows

  with old men and women looking out of them,

  and at the partly cloudy sky,

  I saw starlings in the pears,

  schoolchildren the bus had brought,

  the savings-bank building,

  and the church with its clock:

  it was half past one.

  An answer came to my complaint:

  such afterlife was usual

  and would soon stop.

  Already my old neighbors are greeting me.

  They claim to have really

  seen me from all those windows.

  And there, overloaded, comes Ilsebill,

  back from her shopping.

  Tomorrow is Sunday.

  The Fifth Month

  What potato flour is good for (and against)

  WHEN, EARLY IN February, the Women’s Tribunal took up the case of the farm cook Amanda Woyke, the Flounder immediately launched into a lecture (based as usual on affidavits) about the relations between famines, army movements, and epidemics, quoted relevant literature—the plague in London, the plague in Venice—and pointed out that we owe the Decameron and its form, the elaborate frame narrative, to the plague in Florence. For the first time, he accepted the help of his court-appointed counsel, Ms. von Carnow, who quoted, “It began, both in men and in women, with lumps in the groin or armpits, varying in number, some attaining the size of a common apple, others that of an egg; they came to be known as buboes.” Then the Flounder went on to speak instructively of leprosy, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, and the venereal diseases. Pictures were flashed on the screen.

  Ever since 1332, when the plague trickled into Europe from India by way of Venice, it had been a frequent visitor to my part of the country. In no time at all, it carried off three of my daughters by Dorothea. The maid who left Danzig with me and little Gertrud died in Konitz of spotted pulmonary plague, which is also called the Black Death because the skin takes on a bluish color; whereas my little daughter’s skin remained as fair as ever, and she still had a long while to live. But one of her daughters, Birgit, was laid low by the pestilence that traversed the length and breadth of the country with the Hussites—like them a scourge of God.

  And when, in 1523, Abbess Margarete Rusch rescued me from Trinity Church (next door to the Franciscan monastery) during the Vespers service, she transferred me just in the nick of time from my little group of officiating monks to the safety of her box bed; for in the following year all the other brothers and the abbot as well were carried off by the bubonic plague.

  And when, in the year 1602 after the incarnation of our Lord, the straw death pallets of 16,919 sons and daughters of man were burned in the streets of the rich city of Danzig, the plague took many of the models that I, the town painter, needed for my mural of the Last Judgment, which was to adorn the Artushof of the niggardly patricians and merchants and, both as an admonition and as an offering, serve to ward off the constantly recurring pestilence.

  The picture was quite successful, and yet I lost more models twenty years later when the plague returned, stayed a few months, went away, and came back as if it had forgotten something, carrying off nine thousand people the first year and seven thousand the second. Though the Dominican market and the Corpus Christi procession were prohibited, though the beer and brandy cellars were closed, corpses were carted from houses in every street and buried in big holes behind the Hagelsberg.

  Later the plague came hesitantly, as though just passing through, but still later it occupied the city and took my drinking companions and buxom lasses. Only young Agnes was left to serve as my kitchenmaid. She watched me growing older with my drinker’s liver until that Opitz fellow came along, and then she cooked for him, too, and got attached to him in other ways as well. In 1639, when the plague caught up with the poet, who was sickly to begin with, I died with him; Agnes left me without so much as looking behind her, as though I, the allegorical painter Möller, had gone to the plague pit with that long-winded, vale-of-tears Opitz. Actually it was senile decay. I still liked my drink, but I’d long been as good as dead. It didn’t take any plague to carry me off.

  They were all immune. Neither Dorothea, nor Fat Gret, nor Agnes, not a single one of the cooks was stricken by God or his diabolical partner with buboes, black spots, or any of the more recent epidemics. And when, after the second partition of Poland, Amanda Woyke helped to popularize the Prussian potato, she truly believed (and wrote as much to her pen pal, the widely traveled Count Rumford) that in potato flour she had found a safeguard against cholera; for after the Seven Years’ War, when several crop failures made starvation universal among the lower classes, and rats, cooked up into emergency soups, sold for a good price, cholera (along with other plagues) ran rampant.

  On the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, not only the hired hands, maids, journeymen, cottagers, and old folks, but the administration as well, took the precaution of rubbing their whole bodies with potato flour in accordance with Amanda’s instructions. As long as the epidemic lasted, the death wagons made the rounds of Danzig and Dirschau twice a day. There were cases in Karthaus, too. Here in Zuckau the death knell was no busier than usual. We rubbed ourselves with flour and believed in it. Let the city gentlemen smile. Count Rumford, in his ever-so-rational letters, also doubted the medicinal and preventive properties of distillate of potato juice.

  Later on, Amanda rubbed in potato flour for everything conceivable, applied it as a poultice, ladled in into sacks that she hung up in the cupboards, and strewed it over thresholds. If the cows didn’t want to calve, funneled-in potato flour made them. Daubed on fences, it frightened ghosts away. And when, in accordance with Amanda’s prescription, I put a little sack of potato flour under the pillow of my Ilsebill, whose pregnant cantankerousness is dragging into the fifth month, and mixed a level teaspoonful into her powder box, she treated me most amiably for a whole week, had next to no wishes, was astonishingly free from migraine, and even sang silly songs while loading the dishwasher: “Lott is dead, Lott is dead, and Yul is gonna die soon… .”

  To
ld while pounding acorns, plucking geese, peeling potatoes

  A good deal has been written about storytelling. People want to hear the truth. But when truth is told, they say, “Anyway, it’s all made up.” Or, with a laugh, “What that man won’t think up next!”

  And after a long story about the effectiveness of old wives’ remedies in cases of toothache, lovesickness, constipation, gout, and Asiatic cholera, which I had told while the potato soup was being spooned up to the point of couldn’t-eat-another-bite (and even Ilsebill enjoyed it a little), one of the guests said, “Such things can’t be invented. A character like that—your farm cook, I mean—wouldn’t come to you out of the clear blue. Was there really such a person? Really and truly, I mean? Or is it just something that might have happened?” And Ilsebill said, “Tell that to the Marines. Not to me.”

  But retold, Amanda’s potato peelings are the winding road to do-you-still-remember, late memories of my umbilical cord, which, uncoiled, leads to her as she sits at her kitchen table. Her potato knife knew how the story would go on. I could see by her peelings, and still can, what curling, thinly peeled tale would slide over her thumb: a tale about the hunger of the peasants in the sandy Tuchel Stolp Dirschau region, when earthworms became food and babies crawled back into the earth like worms. Of the seven daughters I had begotten upon her during the war (between campaigns), three died and became abysmally sad stories named Stine Trude Lovise, and all ended up with the sweet Lord in heaven.

  For making soup she preferred sprouting winter potatoes. The peelings kept falling, always meaningfully and always in a different way. And when I decided to leave, to clear out of that dump and go to Saxony or still farther, Amanda, who had wanted to go with me, turned around with her pack basket by the potato-top fires and said, “I’d better stay with the spuds.” That way, whenever I came back, each time downer at heel, she could tell me over her potato knife about all the things that had gone to pot in the meantime.

  She herself had had few adventures (and those without traveling). Amanda Woyke, born a serf in 1734 at Zuckau-the-Cloisters when it was still Polish, died in Preussisch-Zuckau, a serf of the state farm, in 1806. But adventures came to her: I with my seven war years, nine scars, and twenty-three battles; the crazy Count Rumford, who couldn’t stick it anywhere for long and always had to invent something useful. Bent with gout, the aged king came to Zuckau and (like me, his old campaigner and inspector) listened to her while she peeled potatoes. For Amanda knew that stories can never end, that there will always be a thief running across the fields with the stolen church silver, that tales about the last plague of mice will be told during the next one, that the Premonstratensian nun who died years ago will search the flour bin for her string-mended spectacles forever and ever, that the Swedes or Cossacks will come around time and again with their goatees and mustaches, that calves will always talk on Saint John’s Day, and that stories will demand to be told as long as there are plenty of potatoes in the basket.

  Mestwina had no potatoes. She told stories while making flour by pounding acorns (previously soaked in lime water) in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle. We stretched our bread dough by mixing in pea and acorn flour.

  Margarete Rusch the cooking nun told stories while plucking geese under the beech tree, under the lime tree, in the convent yard, or in the barn. She would pluck nine or eleven geese in one afternoon for a guild banquet.

  While pounding, while plucking. Mestwina knew tales about Awa: how Awa brought fire from the sky, how Awa invented the eel trap, how Awa was eaten by her starving children and so became a goddess. Mother Rusch told funny stories: how a merchant’s son who lusted for her flesh was fobbed off with a sow that had been slaughtered the day before; what she stuffed the sheep’s head in the pig’s head with; or how she had helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall when he was obliged to run away from the Catholics. And other stories that did not feed on myth like Mestwina’s, but drew their substance from the earth.

  During the winter Mestwina pounded acorns into flour, which she mixed with barley groats and baked into flatbread. Abbess Rusch plucked geese from Saint Martin’s Day to Epiphany. In the spring and summer no stories were told. But after the farm cook Amanda Woyke had succeeded in making potato growing a Prussian virtue, she peeled potatoes all year long. Even in the spring and fall, when potatoes were served unpeeled with whey, she peeled old potatoes for her all-year-round, inexhaustible, at all times warm potato soup; how else could she have filled the farm hands’ bellies?

  Actually I had no intention of telling stories (to my guests and Ilsebill); I’d been meaning to cite figures and at long last drain the swamps of Kashubian legend with statistics—how many peasants were made serfs after the Thirty Years’ War; how much corvee labor was performed in West Prussia before and after the partitions of Poland; at how early an age the children of serfs were put to work; how the mismanaged lands of the Zuckau Convent became profitable under the Prussians; by what devices the East Elbian landowners (and the managers of the state farms as well) flouted the decrees and made a sport of seizing the peasants’ lands; how the Prussian landed gentry treated their serfs as chattels, won or lost them at cards, and swapped them at will; why in Holland and Flanders crops were already being rotated and fallow fields sown with clover and rape, while in our region the strict enforcement of the three-field system admitted of no innovation; why rural life was praised in treatises on agronomy and bucolic idylls, though the peasants and their cattle were both reduced to starvation when the millet ran out in March; at what date people began to smoke English tobacco, drink coffee from the colonies, and eat off plates with knives and forks in the cities of Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, and Dirschau, while in the country time stood still on one leg. But for all the figures I line up—showing yield per acre, amounts of salt tax and other taxes levied, the horrific infant mortality rates, the disastrous exodus from the rural districts, the corresponding increase in uncultivated acreage, and the ravages first of the plague, then of typhoid and cholera—conscientiously as I comb the eighteenth century for facts and figures, they still don’t add up to a convincing picture of the times. I am obliged to sit as though spellbound beside Amanda’s basket and watch her potato knife as I did then. “In the old days,” she said, “there was nothing but grits, and when there warn’t no grits, we had nothing at all. Then Ole Fritz sent us this dragoon with potatoes, and we started growing spuds… .”

  “I want to know all about it,” says Ilsebill. “How much farm produce requisitioned? How much corvee labor? How was the Prussian Chamber of Crown Lands organized?”

  But stories live longer than figures. Passed from mouth to mouth. Mestwina’s great-granddaughter Hedwig, while weaving baskets, still told of the forced baptism in the river Radaune, just as her great-granddaughter Martha, while baking bricks for Oliva Monastery, told of Saint Adalbert’s death, so that after her great-grandchild Damroka had married swordmaker Kunrad Slichting and moved to the city, she was able, over her spinning, to tell her grandchildren how Adalbert had been struck dead, the Pomorshians baptized, the fishermen of the Wicker Bastion compelled to bake bricks for the Cistercian monks, how the wars went on and on and the Prussian raids never stopped, one damn thing after another, but there were miracles, too, that fiery apparition in the marshes, the Mother of God telling stories as she picked cranberries, for which reason, as the Lenten cook Dorothea later told her children while picking over peas, the Parish Church of Saint Mary was built on that very spot.

  And the story of the Flounder was handed down in the same way. A true story told differently each time. First the fisherman wanted to have him cooked and eat him, but the fisherman’s wife, Ilsebill, said, “Let him talk.” Then Ilsebill wanted to put him in the pot, but the fisherman wanted to ask him a few more questions. Another time, the Flounder wanted to be stewed—“liberated,” as he put it—but the fisherman and his wife kept having more wishes.

  And once when Mestwina, while pounding acorns, told the story of the Flou
nder, she came close to the truth. “That,” she said in Pomorshian, “was when Awa lived here and only her word counted. The Sky Wolf was angry, because Awa had stolen the fire from him and made herself powerful. The men were all devoted to her. They all wanted to sacrifice to the Elk Cow, and not one of them to the Wolf. So the old Sky Wolf turned himself into a fish. He looked like a common flounder, but he could talk. One day when a young fisherman threw out his line, the Wolf in the Flounder bit. Lying in the sand, he made himself known as the old wolf god. The fisherman was afraid, so he promised to do whatever the Flounder commanded. Thereupon the Wolf said from inside the Flounder, ‘Your Awa stole my fire, and the wolves have had to eat their meat raw ever since. Because Awa has won power over all men with fire, you must give a masculine nature to the fire that people use to cook and warm themselves and bake clay pots. The hard must be melted and grow hard again when it cools.’ The fisherman relayed all this to the other men, and they began to break rocks of a special kind. When they heated the lumps of ore in the fire, the iron in them melted and made the men into mighty smiths. Because the Wolf in the Flounder so commanded, they pierced their Awa with their spearheads. And I, too,” said Mestwina whenever she pounded acorns to flour in her mortar, “will be killed by a sword forged in fire.”