The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Ilsebill found hers at the edge of a clearing, while on a bed of pine needles some distance away I found, clustered close together, enough orange agaric for a whole meal. (Fried in butter, they taste like meat.) Gathering mushrooms is worthwhile. True, you lose time—how often Sophie and I strayed farther and farther apart while calling each other—but some, not all, of the years lost in this way will be found again as long as there are forests. Ilsebill wouldn’t believe me when I told her that. She thinks every mushroom she finds is the first and last. That there’s never been anything comparable. And that never again will an imperial mushroom stand singly on such a stem, so luxuriantly hatted, in a bed of moss, and—while the hand still hesitates—make someone happy, incomparably happy.

  For seven years, while beyond the woods the Revolution was going on and the guillotine was being celebrated as humane and progressive, we gathered mushrooms and had a beautiful idea. We lay under parasol mushrooms. Uprooted, the stinkhorn with the lacquer-green head ran after us. Anise agaric stood in a magic circle. We didn’t know yet what fly agaric can do in addition to shining red. Sophie wore a funnel-shaped miller mushroom as a hat; its imposing stem rose heavenward, looking like my father’s cock when with open breeches he climbed the stairs to my mother’s room to beget me, his son Fritz.

  Much later, when Ilsebill sat still for me under the miller mushroom and I with a soft pencil drew a picture out of which Sophie peered gravely, she no longer looked like a child. By then she knew everything. No more curiosity. That’s why she never let Governor Rapp, imperiously as he wanted to, bury his stinkhorn in her moss. Sophie stayed closed.

  Of course we were never really lost. A jay screamed, showing the way. Ants were our pacemakers. Across clearings, through chest-high ferns, between smooth beech trees we went down and down until we came to the river Radaune, which flowed to Zuckau, where Sophie’s grandmother would be sitting on the front porch, reading the latest news of the Revolution to Inspector of Crown Lands Romeike; those terrifying words: September murders. When she had finished, Amanda Woyke the farm cook would inspect our haul, mushroom by mushroom, and tell us about the imperial mushrooms she had found in the woods around Zuckau in times of famine, when there were no potatoes yet.

  Max, who gathered mushrooms with us, emigrated to America later on. Gottlieb Kutschorra, who came from Viereck, married Sophie’s cousin Lovise, who also gathered mushrooms with us. He became a woodsman, and she kept house in the Oliva forester’s lodge. And later on, because Sophie’s mother, Anna, had married a city man after Danzig became Prussian, Sophie Rotzoll, who took her name from her stepfather, a journeyman brewer, came into daily contact with the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy, who was making his final preparations in his father’s house on Beutlergasse.

  When, with a few sailors and raftsmen, some longshoremen, and a corporal of the former city watch, which four years before, on Holy Thursday 1793, had tried with disorganized rifle fire to stop the Prussians from occupying the city, gymnasium student Bartholdy founded a Jacobin club and, taking an example from France, decided to proclaim the Revolution and with it the Republic of Danzig, Sophie Rotzoll, who since the brewer’s death had been selling flounders, smelts, and lampreys at Hawkers’ Gate with her mother, was fourteen, and because she was in love with the seventeen-year-old gymnasium student, she was also wild about all things revolutionary. She had known Fritz since they were children, for his mother was a staunch believer in family excursions to the country. Fritz and Sophie were both to be seen with the Zuckau children at raspberry-picking time; they had caught crayfish in the Radaune, helped with the potato harvest, and gathered mushrooms in the fall.

  In Sophie’s eyes Fritz was a proclamation of freedom if not freedom itself—in gangling, freckle-faced form. Hopelessly as the boy stuttered at the family board, he read revolutionary proclamations with loud abandon to his little group of conspirators and cited Danton or Marat with perfect fluency. Sophie’s presence oiled his vocal cords.

  For Fritz and his group she sewed rosettes of tricolor ribbon. For the Jacobin Club she stole four pistols from the old arsenal at Leege Gate. For her Fritz Sophie would have done more; she’d have done anything. But fortunately, April 17, 1797, when the conspirators were arrested on Beutlergasse, was a market day; Sophie was selling smelts.

  The elder Bartholdys did not long survive the conviction of their only son. Divested of his citizenship, the merchant moved to Hamburg, where he and his wife soon died of cholera. Fritz Bartholdy, the corporal, four sailors, three longshoremen, and two Polish raftsmen were sentenced to death for seditious conspiracy; but only the sentences of the corporal and the two raftsmen were carried out to the full. Pastor Blech, the deacon of Saint Mary’s, appealed to the highest authorities, and the sentences of Fritz and the others were commuted to life imprisonment. The sailors and longshoremen died in prison or perished as cannon fodder, for when Napoleon’s forces besieged the fortress of Graudenz, they were posted to the outermost communications trenches. As for Friedrich Bartholdy, however, it was as an inmate of the fortress that he experienced the defeat of Prussia, which gave him hope, Napoleon’s rise and fall, which he as a patriot suffered and celebrated, the Congress of Vienna, and the Carlsbad Decrees, whereby his sentence of life imprisonment was confirmed. Finally, after thirty-eight years in the fortress, he was released. Sophie had never stopped petitioning the successive rulers for his pardon.

  It was a morose man who returned home in wooden shoes, bringing a bad cough with him. He had kept his stutter. Fritz Bartholdy could no longer be fired with enthusiasm for anything but pot roast and red cabbage. But since he lived for another ten years, and with old Fräulein Rotzoll to cook for him recovered his strength, the two of them could often, in the early fall, be seen leaving their cottage in the sand pit at the foot of the Bischofsberg and setting out with baskets over their arms to gather mushrooms. The neighborhood children shouted mocking jingles after the mushroom woman and her wood goblin. (Wasn’t it strange, if not suspicious, that the two old people brought specimens of the useless fly agaric home with them along with the edible varieties?)

  I’ve long refused to have been Friedrich Bartholdy, Sophie’s Fritz, and yet I see myself, old and burnt out, on the other side of Schiedlitz, where there were still woods at the time, gathering mushrooms because Sophie wanted us to. There under the beeches, in the mixed forest, on a floor of moss and pine needles, time hadn’t happened. The milk caps and egg mushrooms were still the same. And the imperial mushrooms still stood solitary and beyond compare, as though the idea lived on in undiminished beauty.

  Hopefully as she questioned me, I never, not even in the woods, spoke to Sophie of my years in the fortress. She kept looking for something in me that I seem to have been when we were young and went gathering mushrooms and played at getting lost. To her the imperial mushroom was still an idea. And when she wanted to remember freedom, to experience freedom, the otherwise useless fly agaric helped her; it grows where the imperial mushroom is often to be found.

  Sophie Rotzoll, who got off scot free at the trial of the Jacobin conspirators of Beutlergasse, liked to sing. That may have helped to predispose her in favor of the Revolution, which gave birth to so many new songs. Even when Fritz Bartholdy stayed and stayed in the fortress, she kept faith with the Revolution and its songs, which soon became kitchen songs. Since the Year One she had been cook and housekeeper to Pastor Blech, who not only preached at Saint Mary’s, but also taught history at the Royal Gymnasium. There he had instructed young Bartholdy and, with historical examples, aroused his enthusiasm for the Republic and the virtues of Reason.

  At first Pastor Blech had spoken up for the Revolution, though coded in Old Testament terms. When Queen Marie-Antoinette was guillotined, the ideal of liberty and equality lost an in principle Enlightened champion. Nevertheless, and because he had recently welcomed First Consul Napoleon as a force for order, he tolerated Sophie’s rousing kitchen songs. He gave the young lady a few French lessons, wh
ich made her singing more expressive, but for the most part Sophie sang in the seaport dialect which she stylized for the sake of the rhymes and enriched with her new parsonage culture.

  Sophie kept pace with the times. She, too, celebrated the savior of the Revolution, and in her songs rhymed putrid aristocrats with pickled sprats, the Republic with princes in aspic, equality with mushroom fricassee, triumphant cannonade with pepper marinade, and (it goes without saying) the latest hero Napoleón with Revolutión. To her Fritz, languishing in the fortress, she sent calves’-liver sausage made in accordance with a recipe of her own and honey cake into which, besides a certain special ingredient, she had baked encouraging little slips of paper inscribed with her rhymed barricade songs. In the dismal light the prisoner read:

  “Mushroom soup in the harvest moon,

  Napoleeon will spring you soon.

  Orange agaric we mince,

  head and neck has many a prince.

  Kings are trembling, cannons booming,

  soon, dear Fritz, we’ll go mushrooming.

  I saw an imperial mushroom today.

  Let freedom come, la liberté!”

  And when Fritz had eaten of Sophie’s honey cake, he recovered a little and scarcely felt the damp cold of his dungeon.

  Meanwhile Sophie went to the woods alone and was not afraid. There, too, she sang, and rhymed what went into her basket. Nearsighted as she was, she always found what she wanted. Or else honey tufts, egg mushrooms, butter fungus, and broad-topped parasol mushrooms ran after her.

  And just as she did while gathering mushrooms, so Pastor Blech’s cook also sang while stirring, rolling, beating egg whites, washing dishes, or stuffing thickened blood or chopped calves’ liver into sausage skins. Some of her dishes that were served up at the parsonage were given the names of Napoleon’s victories: cabbage with Gänseklein à la Marengo, for instance. But when Sophie named her ragout of veal after the double disaster of Jena and Auerstedt, Deacon Blech remonstrated. “My dear child,” he said, “though it may look as if only the king had lost these two battles, this war and its miseries will soon overtake us all, just and unjust alike. Already Stettin has capitulated. Already our forces here in Danzig are putting up palisades around the bastions. Already, after a brief stay in our threatened city, the royal family have again taken flight and established themselves in distant Königsberg. And already the garrison here is being reinforced. Two field regiments and two grenadier battalions arrived yesterday. Some fusiliers are due tomorrow. Even Cossacks are expected. You just have no idea, my child, what this means. After all the sieges our city has undergone, sieges in which Teutonic Knights, Brandenburgers, Hussites, King Stephen Batory of Poland, Russians, Saxons, and time and time again Poles and Swedes have distinguished themselves, the French are about to give us a demonstration of their skill as besiegers. This is no time to be singing sans-culottish hymns to freedom or indulging your kitchen wit.”

  It was then that Pastor Blech, who was me in my Napoleonic time-phase, began to write his chronicle, which later appeared in two volumes under the title History of Danzig’s Seven-Year Sufferings and met with a divided reception. Blech did not spare the collaborationists among his fellow citizens. (But concerning Sophie’s dual role I confined myself to hints.) At any rate Sophie stopped singing in the kitchen, in the stairwell, or over the crinkled parsley in the parsonage garden. She dispatched her housekeeping duties in sullen silence. Day after day she served bread-and-beer soups with dumplings, though the woods were full of greenies and honey tufts and one could hope to find a last few solitary imperial mushrooms. No more searching for happiness. Only bad news brought Sophie cheer. In mid-November the suburbs were evacuated. The hamlet of Neugarten was razed. The Church of Saint Barbara became a hay barn, then an emergency hospital. Already the Kashubian countryside was infested with Polish insurgents. In the new year, to be sure, successful engagements, especially the victory at Preussisch-Eylau, gave new hope; in mid-February a solemn Te Deum was sung at Saint Mary’s, but then Dirschau fell, and on March 7, Praust.

  Two days later the French under Marshal Lefebvre, the Poles under Prince Radziwill, and the Badeners commanded by the hereditary prince were firmly established in Sankt Albrecht, Wonneberg, Ohra, and Wotzlaff on the perimeter of the city. The ring around the city had only one opening, across the sand spit at the mouth of the Vistula, and here Count Kalckreuth, the newly appointed commander of the garrison, was able to make his entrance. At length the Cossacks arrived and were much gaped at.

  All that was no help. The sand spit was sealed off; the ring was drawn steadily tighter. The Russians lost the Holm. An English corvette bringing in ammunition was lost. Thereupon, after heavy losses on both sides, a first parley was held at Oliva Gate. The capitulation of March 24 provided for the honorable withdrawal of the garrison, but the local population had once again to put up with unwanted guests: Marshal Lefebvre marched in with the French regiments, Saxon and Badener troops, and Polish uhlans. Homes had to be evacuated wholly or in part. The parsonage was soon short of space. But Sophie sang once more in the kitchen, in the stairwell, and in the herb garden, for she thought freedom had been billeted on the parsonage.

  In June the one-time general, then consul, now emperor Napoleon Bonaparte rode through the High Gate under a braidless hat, trotted across the Long Market reviewing his victorious troops, then moved into Allmond House on the Long Garden, which had been requisitioned for his use. And when, on the following day, he imposed a “contribution” of twenty million francs on the merchants and town councilors who had been summoned to pay their respects, Sophie, along with several other kitchenmaids, was called in to serve at the reception.

  And so it came about that she saw the emperor (standing as solitary as an imperial mushroom). He spoke in terse commands. His gestures wiped everything imaginary off the table. At every turn he had to create facts. Comical to see how he treated those little merchants. His knowledge of the city’s finances was staggering. His gaze, addressed to all, including Sophie. While serving the restless man—he ate standing up—canapes of smoked Vistula salmon, she curtseyed and begged mercy for her imprisoned Fritz, whereupon the emperor uttered a sharp command, and she was taken aside by General Rapp, his aide-de-camp.

  Rapp, who had just been appointed governor of the Republic of Danzig, gave Sophie his promise—he would look into the matter quickly. He tried his Alsatian wit on her, was pleased with her replies, salted as they were with seaport wit, and offered to put her in charge of his, the governor’s, kitchen. That, he intimated, would make it so much simpler to help her Fritz.

  From then on Sophie cooked not for Pastor Blech but only for Rapp (who, however, was also me) and for Rapp’s guests. And because Rapp was wild about mushrooms, she gathered mushrooms for Rapp alone when the summer egg mushrooms sprouted and later when the autumn chestnut mushrooms and greenies shot up in mounds and the imperial mushroom stood solitary. But in among beech trees or on the pine-needle floors where she found puffballs and orange agaric, Sophie thought fondly and exclusively of me, her Fritz.

  Our love, Ilsebill, all the things we’ve whispered with tightened throats, tucked away in letters, trumpeted down from towers or over the telephone, outroaring the sea or stiller than thought, our love, which we’ve fenced about so securely, packed up so secretly in hatboxes with all sorts of trifles, which was once as conspicuous as a missing button, and incised under varying names in the bark of every tree, it, our love, which only yesterday was palpable, an object of daily use, our all-purpose glue, our slogan, our bathroom motto, our flickering silent film, our evening prayer spoken as we shivered in our nightshirts, our love, a push button that would play our sweet pop song over and over again, our love, which ran barefoot through the quaking grass, our love, that (almost intact) brick in a ruined wall, our love, which we lost while housecleaning and looking for something else, and found among the usual justifications disguised as a pencil sharpener, our love, which never expected to die, is no more, Ilse
bill. Or it consents to be possible (or to exist) only under certain conditions. Or it still exists—but somewhere else. Or it never was and for that very reason is still thinkable. Or suppose, like Sophie and me, we go gathering mushrooms again and look for it deep in the woods. (But when an imperial mushroom stood solitary, beyond compare, and was found by you or you, you never had me in mind.)

  So much has been written about it. They say it hurts. They say it tinges everything blue. They say it’s the one thing that can’t be bought. Where it’s lacking, there’s a hole, a heart-shaped hole. No one can deliberately turn it on or off. It’s always undivided. But Agnes the kitchenmaid loved me and also me. And when Mother Rusch sapped Preacher Hegge’s strength, she seems to have had me, too, in mind. While Ilsebill recognizes herself in my High Gothic Dorothea or mistakes me for her wishes. But Sophie, whom I loved as Pastor Blech and as Governor Rapp, loved only and undividedly me, her Fritz, who spent his life in fortress arrest, faraway and unerodable, while Sophie went gathering mushrooms for others (first for Blech, then for Rapp), always with freedom, the beautiful idea, in mind when she found, announced or betrayed by fly agaric, the imperial mushroom standing solitary.

  From the early summer of 1807 to the fall of 1813, Sophie Rotzoll cooked for the governor of the Republic of Danzig and his numerous guests. (In the meantime her grandmother had died, and shortly thereafter her mother, of grief, so it was said, at hearing her daughter decried as the governor’s whore.)

  This is what Pastor Blech, deacon of Saint Mary’s, had to say of Jean Rapp, his rival for Sophie’s affections: “A young man of about thirty, a child of fortune who like his master had risen quickly from the obscure middle class to a high military rank, sporting several medals on the costly uniform of a general and an aide-de-camp, he almost led me, with his smiling face and not unfriendly gestures, to mistake him for a benevolent spirit. But just as his good qualities were not grounded in sound principles of virtue, so his faults did not emanate from an inherently evil nature; all his faults and all his virtues were, rather, those of an impetuous weakling, a plaything of circumstances and conditions, moods, fancies, and passions. Hence his easily wounded pride and his increasing love of ostentation; hence his tendency to lend ear to every wretched purveyor of gossip and make sudden decisions that have brought untold harm to many an innocent; hence the thoughtless mockery with which he often receives the most just complaints; hence the abandon that has often led him to make the most sacred promises and fail to keep them; hence, finally, his lechery, which he has not always shamed to display in public …”