The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  It seems, however, that when the Flounder of Mestwina’s story heard of Awa’s death, he turned himself back into a ferocious Wolf and brought war into the land with forged iron. For which reason Amanda Woyke always concluded her stories about Swedes Pandours Cossacks or Polacks with the words “They were like wolves. They wouldn’t leave anything in one piece. They even ripped up the children.”

  (But the text of the story that the Flounder communicated to the painter Runge, the poets Arnim and Brentano, and the Grimm brothers had already been established and made ready for the printer, whereas the unpublished storyteller always has the next, entirely different, very latest version in mind.)

  While pounding acorns into flour or letting potato peelings grow over their thumbs, Mestwina and Amanda told tales of the old days, but always as if they had been there: how men pierced the body of Awa, the primal mother, with iron spears, how the Swedes raided Kashubia from their base in Putzig and were so intent on searching for silver gulden that they even cut open the bellies of expectant mothers.

  Only Margarete Rusch never told of remote times, but always of herself and her life as a nun. How, on April 17, 1526, His Polish Majesty decreed an end to all heresy, occupied the city, closed all the gates, threw all the rebels (including her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch) into the Stockturm, ordered a trial, and had the “Statuta Sigismundi” posted on the doors of all seven parish churches. How Preacher Hegge, in a lamentable state, sought refuge with the Brigittines, and the nuns had their pleasure of him by turns until Fat Gret took pity, dressed him most laughably in a woman’s skirts, dragged him out of the convent in the dead of night under an eighth of a moon, through the sludge and ditchwater and squeaking rats of Paradise Street to the cesspit behind Jacob’s Hospital, where the pallets of the dead smoldered day and night, and tried to lift him over the city wall, which is low at that point. But heave and push as she might, Hegge couldn’t summon up that last saving burst of vigor. Maybe the sisters at Saint Bridget’s had been too hard on him. He hung down the wall like a sack. The Royal Polish watch were making their rounds; already they could be heard approaching from nearby Peppertown, jangling their iron weapons and singing hymns to Our Lady in their drunkenness. Thereupon Fat Gret reached under the skirts of the once so hurried preacher and mangy goat, lifted him up by the thighs, higher, still higher, until his balls were dancing right under her nose—for he had nothing on under his skirts—and cried out, “C’mon, pull, you mangy goat, pull!” He managed to grab the top of the wall, appealed to every devil from Ashmodai to Zadek, and gave vent to two farts and any number of sighs, but not even the approach of the bawling litany of the royal watch sufficed to drive him over. Already the sliver of moon was throwing glints of light on reeling helmets. And then Fat Gret, after calling him a shit and a flabbycock, concentrated her rage and concern, snapped at the preacher’s scrotum, and bit off his left ball.

  It’s true, Ilsebill. Men are terrified of being bitten that way. There are theories to the effect that all women have a secret wish to bite off the balls of all men—their cocks, too. “Snapping Cunt” and “Penis Envy” are chapter headings in avidly devoured books. The vagina dentalis is a well-known symbol. There are more men running around with one ball than show up in the statistics: emasculated heroes, pipsqueaks, hypersensitive eunuchs, village idiots, and obese tomcats. The female of the praying mantis, who slowly devours her mate right after the sexual act, might well be the heraldic animal of all Ilsebills. How cuttingly they smile, how they show their teeth, eager to nibble something more than carrots. “Fear for your lives, men!” cried the Flounder before the Women’s Tribunal. “You’re all at their mercy. Since prehistoric times they’ve been lusting for vengeance. Verily I say unto you: when I questioned the black widow, a rare specimen among the exotic spiders, about her husband, she, dangling from a long thread, spoke of his vices, which, so she said, had consumed him, consumed him entirely… .”

  Abbess Margarete Rusch, however, was free from atavistic lust for vengeance or any secret desire to castrate, even though she tried to encourage but perhaps only frightened poor Hegge and other runaway monks with cries such as, “I just feel like biting something off you!” It was only necessity and desperate concern, because the danger was coming closer and closer, that made her bite down and off, whereupon Preacher Hegge was over the wall before you could say Jack Robinson, screaming for all he was worth as he ran through the New City woods. (He ran as far as Greifswald, where he preached again and attracted a new following.)

  Sometimes, when Margret told this story while plucking geese, the feathers flew so merrily that she offered a supplement. A moment later, it seems, the Royal Polish watch broke off their litany and addressed her roughly, demanding an explanation for the screams on the other side of the wall. The drunken louts would have killed her if she hadn’t answered. So what could she do but swallow the preacher’s left testicle?

  The many geese, incidentally, that Fat Gret had to pluck from Saint Martin’s Day to Epiphany were for the guild banquets of the coopers and anchor makers, for the patricians of Saint George’s Bank, or for dinners given at the Artushof by the town council in honor of Hanseatic delegations or of the visiting bishops of Gnesen, Frauenburg, or Leslau. And while they lived, she also plucked geese for Ferber’s son Konstantin and for Jeschke at the Three Pigs’ Heads manor and at Oliva Monastery, and always had stories to tell while doing so. How she filched fifty-three sacks of powder from a Brandenburg gunner, leaving fifty-three sacks of poppy seed in their place—and this the day before the storming of the city. How for the sake of better seasoning she arranged for a musketeer to shoot grainy black pepper, which her daughter had sent from India, into some marinated haunches of venison. How on a bet with the Dominicans she rolled down the Hagelsberg (laughing) in a barrel. And time and again, how with a bold snap of the jaws she helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall.

  Amanda Woyke, on the other hand, who never spoke of herself as an outstanding woman casting shadows in all directions, but only spoke of others and their hardships, knew stories that drew threads from earliest times but were nonetheless found as big as walnuts in the potato fields of the Royal Prussian State Farm in Zuckau. For when those fields were plowed (still with wooden plows to which, for lack of oxen, Polish day laborers were harnessed), the plows uncovered pieces of amber so cloudlessly pellucid as to suggest that in the beginning, long before Awa, the Baltic Sea had devoured the Kashubian forests, leaving only these tears of resin, which in time had become amber.

  Actually a much later date could have been assigned to these astonishing finds. As the potato peelings piled up imperturbably, Amanda told how, and exactly when, amber had suddenly found its way to the hills of Kashubia. On April 12 of the year 997 after the incarnation of our Lord, a Bohemian executioner avenged the murder of Adalbert, bishop of Prague, by beheading the Pomorshian fisherwoman Mestwina. His sword stroke not only separated her head from her trunk, but also cut the thin waxed string around Mestwina’s neck, whereupon all the threaded pieces of amber fell off and flew inland from the scene of execution, where the Radaune empties into the Mottlau; for when Mestwina asked leave (since the day was drawing to a close) to kneel facing westward, her request aroused no suspicion on the part of the executioner or of the other Christian converters.

  Amanda related all this not in the Kashubian tongue, which I did not understand, but in the broad Low German of the coast. It seems that even as the pieces of amber were flying over the hills of the Baltic Ridge, the holes in them had closed of their own accord, out of grief for Mestwina.

  Every time Amanda Woyke set forth her historical explanation for the amber found in the potato fields of Zuckau, one of her daughters had to go and get the bright-colored cardboard box which I had brought her filled with Saxon candy after the capitulation at Pirna, and in which the pieces of amber with their insect enclosures now lay bedded on cotton.

  One spring day, much later, when Amanda had grown so deaf that she could no
longer hear the potatoes bubbling in the big cook pot, when potato bugs invaded us for the first time, bringing crop failure and a new famine, the cardboard box was empty. While Amanda was telling about earlier famines in comparison with the present one, she threw out little hints which gave us to understand that she had taken the pieces of amber back to the potato fields and dug them in. And true enough, the plague of potato bugs let up for a while.

  A good deal has been written about storytelling and narrative style. There are scholars who measure the length of sentences, pin down leitmotifs like butterflies, cultivate word fields, excavate language formations as if they were strata of the earth’s crust, and take psychological soundings of subordinate clauses. They are suspicious of all fiction and at pains to expose all tales of the past as escapism, flight from reality. But speaking of my Mestwina’s evocations, of Fat Gret’s undammed flow of speech, and of Amanda Woyke’s mumblings, I must insist that in every case (for all their reprehensible attachment to the past), the style was determined by work being done in the present.

  For example, the act of pounding acorns in a stone mortar imposed its rhythm on Mestwina’s delivery and so made her couch her mythical evocations of Awa in succinct, telegraphic sentences. Breathlessly she reported the uprising of the men against the matriarchy: “Spears tipped with iron. Sharp sharp sharp. Light on metal—gives them a kick. The din of their forges. Dance to the jangling of their weapons. Cut holes in air, clouds, prospective enemy. Stand planted on hills. Looking for a target. Awa presents herself: All strike at once. Straight to the heart. Cut her open, disembowel her, divide her up, eat her raw, catch her blood in cup-deep wolf skulls, drink it down! Prove manhood by murdering mother!”

  With Margarete Rusch it was very different. Her plucking of geese gave her an airy, feather-light style. “Hmm, I thought, so the fellow thinks he can stick his money-grubbing fingers in my pussy without forking over his twelve Scania talers, his stinking herring silver. He takes me for a sow in a pig sty, and that’s just what he’ll get, I says to myself, the one that was slaughtered yesterday. So I fill her up with hot bricks, dress her in my nightgown. And there she was all ready for him when he hopped into bed with his cock at the ready!”

  And on the lips of the goose-plucking Gret, the horror of the young merchant Moritz Ferber when he discovered that he had poured his seed not into the nun’s flesh but into a warmed-up sow, became a narrative blowing of feathers. “So he screamed and yelled and broke out in pimples between the legs and jumped out of bed like a bee had stung him. And that wasn’t the end of it. He could never quite get his patrician pecker up after that. It just hung its head. So after a while he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, renounced the flesh, and was rewarded for his piety with the fat benefices of Erland bishopric—the sow’s bridegroom!”

  And potato peeling, that work process interrupted only by the digging out of eyes, also fosters a style, an even flow—interrupted by compassionate exclamations like “It would break your heart!”—of country tales, stories in which plagues of mice, drought, and hailstorms reduce the peasantry to chewing tree bark, in which pillaging Swedes are always followed by the plague and marauding Poles by cholera, and which always end (provisionally, for Amanda’s stories go on and on like potato peeling) with the ultimate triumph over the lifelong hunger of the peasant serfs: “When King Ole Fritz’s dragoons brought us a few sacks of potatoes, nobody knew what to do. And I said to myself: Into the ground with them. And when they came up and flowered, but yielded nothing better than bitter little apples, I said to myself: Oh my, oh my, now what? But when the bad weather came in October and the boars came out of the woods in Ramkau and rooted around in the plants, I said to myself and Erna and Stine and Annchen and Lisbeth: Now go look at the spuds. And there were plenty. And they lasted through the winter. And they tasted good, too. And the sweet Lord be praised.”

  Later on, when Amanda Woyke entered into correspondence with Count Rumford, inventor of the slow-combustion stove and of the poor man’s soup that bears his name, a change occurred—not in her style, for she still told all her stories while peeling potatoes, but in her tenses, for now she anticipated the future. She told of giant kitchens that would feed the whole world. From the reality of the farm kitchen she derived a utopian West Prussian potato soup that would be dispensed the world over. In her giant kitchen there would always be enough. Her pots would always have room for seconds. She would drive hunger from the world. She spoke with loving concern of well-fed “Moors and Mamelukes.” Her giant kitchen would be just the thing even for Eskimos and the savages of Tierra del Fuego. And with the earnestness of the technician—here the influence of the inventive Rumford was discernible—she detailed the qualities of the future potato-peeling machine: “Won’t be nothing to it. You’ll empty a basket like this in no time flat.”

  But what will become of remember-the-time-when and one-fine-spring-day? Our guests, who had enjoyed Amanda’s potato soup until the pot was empty, shared my opinion that work norms and conveyor belts do not admit of storytelling. Even if Mestwina were semiautomatically packaging wheat flour, even if Fat Gret were employed in a poultry-processing factory, vacuuming the last feathers off scalded, hormone-fed geese while the hooked conveyor belt carried them past, even if Amanda Woyke were alive today, deftly imprisoning (at union scale) uniformly peeled potatoes in tin cans, there wouldn’t be time during packaging, vacuuming, canning, to tell the necessary stories in all their length and breadth, not even to relay the latest gossip (and anyway, to whom?).

  “That’s true!” said Ilsebill. “But we women will never again consent to pound acorns into flour. I prefer to buy my geese already plucked. And the few potatoes we eat are no trouble at all to peel; I can even smoke. You’d like to see us sitting at spinning wheels, wouldn’t you? Nostalgic for the treadle sewing machine, aren’t you? I guess you’re tired; I guess you miss the old stove bench.”

  At that she fell into a resolute silence. And I wandered off into the next story.

  Plaint and prayer of the farm cook Amanda Woyke

  When all three of her babies—

  their names were Stine Trude Lovise—

  died on her because

  the stalks had been rotted by rain, battered by hail,

  gnawed by drought and mice,

  so that nothing was left after threshing,

  no millet grained, no gruel stuck to palates,

  no porridge was sweetened nor flatbread soured.

  Before two March dusks had fallen

  they died all three. Also because the goat

  had run afoul of a Cossack’s knife,

  the cow had been led away by foraging Prussians,

  no chickens scratched the yard, of the pigeons

  nothing remained but pigeon droppings,

  and on top of it all the man with the twirly mustache,

  who with his tool had made her—nothing to it—

  those little babies Stine Trude Lovise

  because Amanda spread her legs for him every time,

  was gone again for the enlistment bounty

  to Saxony, Bohemia, Hochkirch

  because the king, the king had called.

  So when the three rag dolls

  named Stine, Trude, Lovise

  went limp in her arms,

  Amanda wouldn’t believe it

  and wouldn’t let go.

  And when the little girls,

  pale, blue, and gnarled with hunger,

  cranky old women in arms—

  just born, barely weaned, and Lovise would

  have been wanting to walk soon—were laid in a box,

  nailed shut, and shoveled over,

  Amanda complained aloud,

  sustained a tone that was something more than a whimper,

  a trembling wail,

  a long-threaded sound somewhere between euhhh and euühh,

  yet admitting of sentences

  (such things as people say in grief):

  More than
a body can bear;

  The devil himself could weep;

  Who’ll speak of justice now;

  How can the sweet Lord stand it;

  I’ll scream and yell forever;

  There is no sweet Lord,

  no matter what the Book says… .

  Three whole bright-blustery days in March she screamed,

  till, finely sifted, her plaint reduced itself to eeeee.

  (And in other cottages

  in Zuckau, Ramkau, Kokoschken,

  the mourners screamed eeeee… .)

  Nobody paid attention.

  As if nothing were wrong, the elders burst into bud.

  Buckwheat and oats filled out.