The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  When I think of myself today as Rapp, I cannot help agreeing with what I, as Pastor Blech, said about him. Oh, how that generous and at the same time rapacious man, now playfully gallant, now bestially lecherous, tortured poor Sophie over the years with his constantly reiterated promises to help the imprisoned Fritz; how often his love, rather touching in itself and made more so by his awkwardness and bashfulness, became brutal and importunate; and how often his cynical abuse of power and contempt for the common man’s aspiration to freedom offended Sophie’s still-childlike faith in the beautiful idea, with the result that, as the French occupation went on, she began first to suspect, then to dislike, and finally to detest everything connected with Napoleon.

  And when, after five and a half years, history went into reverse and the Grand Army was decimated in Russia, when Rapp, who on the emperor’s order had taken part in the campaign, tried to compensate with ill humor for the frost damage he had incurred, Sophie had grown up to be his enemy who, when gathering mushrooms, considered not only the edible varieties but also those that can be politically effective.

  In January 1813, hard pressed by Cossacks, the Grandjean, Heudelet, Marchand, and Cavaignac divisions took refuge behind the city walls. The garrison was reinforced by Polish legionaries, Westphalians from the Rhenish Confederation, a regiment of Bavarians, three regiments of Neapolitans, and a certain number of French chasseurs and cuirassiers. By the time the warehouses on Warehouse Island were freshly stocked with provisions, the bastions were equipped with additional cannon, and the Russo-Prussian siege army had at last closed the ring around the city, Sophie’s plan was ready; but then, at the beginning of March, there were no suitable mushrooms.

  After daily skirmishes and foraging expeditions up to Schiedlitz and onto the Island, after the first utilization of Congreve rockets, after extensive fires and epidemics, when, after six months of unremitting hunger, the midsummer floods surpassed all bounds, because heavy rainfall had so swollen the Vistula that the dikes from Schwetz to Montau Point burst in seven places and the lowlands were under water as far as the city bastions, that all the outworks, Fort Napoleon, and Fort Desaix were cut off, that palisades went drifting through the flooded streets along with household wares, and fish could easily be caught in large quantities by anyone with a net—a miracle that fed the whole population—when, in short, the midsummer floods had completely fouled the military plans of besieged and besieger alike, and peasants fleeing from the Island managed to pass through the siege ring and into the city by water, foodstuffs that had become rare, such as fruit, vegetables, eggs, and Glumse, reappeared in the half-starved city; and early in September Sophie began to hope that certain mushrooms she had ordered would be delivered. Her hate had boiled down to a recipe.

  Yes, Ilsebill. We, too, know that. When we wear love with the lining on the outside. When at last we cut holes in, and therefore see through each other. When everything and its opposite narrow down to a single point. When we—repairing to the woods again—look no longer for the incomparably beautiful idea but for its opposite, which also has its beauty—hate disguised as a mushroom stands on a moss floor and under oaks—quite unmistakable.

  And incidentally the Flounder, called by Rapp when the midsummer floods reached the city, is believed to have warned the governor of the dying Republic of Danzig, “My son! Careful at the table. All calf’s-head stuffing is not equally wholesome.”

  Searching for similar mushrooms

  A litter of puffballs

  successfully found,

  close by.

  When I was proved right,

  I gave up everything else

  for lost.

  This hat fits

  a head shorter

  to a T.

  Take it diffusely;

  even the light

  will swindle its way through.

  True, they are puffballs,

  but the wrong ones

  exactly.

  Hidden under sorrel

  One March evening, though a northwesterly wind, blowing in squalls of up to hurricane force, was battering at the house, we had invited guests, failing to suspect that the ferry service across the Stör might be suspended. Only when the village siren reminded us of wartime and we saw the volunteer firemen bucking the wind, when the openings in the dikes, including the big gate leading to the ferry, were closed, when the old-timers in Kröger’s store said high tide might bring something as bad as in ‘62, when under low-racing clouds the village cowered behind the dikes, because the wind squalls were rising to hurricane force, making the light flicker and cutting the electric stove off for minutes at a time, only when one of the young birches in the garden snapped, did my Ilsebill realize that we had put on three plates too many.

  Already she was making a face as though behind closed shutters. Already, as a feminine answer to nature’s apocalyptic mood, a house-filling migraine, a shattering of glasses, seemed to be in the offing. New, hair-thin cracks in the plaster. Our guests phoned to say they couldn’t come. Storm warnings on the radio. Road cut off at Wedel. Damn shame. They’d been looking forward.

  We’d been going to have potatoes and rutabaga with flank of mutton, a dish into which Amanda Woyke (and later Lena Stubbe) liked to stir diced sweet-and-sour squash at the end. Crushed pepper, allspice, fresh marjoram, and three cloves of garlic go into this one-dish meal for damp, cold days.

  Already feeling very lonely among the gleaming plates I consoled myself—or was it the Flounder who spoke to me “Come on,” he said. “Stormy weather and migraine are only half the story. How often the Vistula used to flood. Why shouldn’t the Elbe and the Stör? Let your Ilsebill lie in a half-darkened chamber and shroud herself in gloom. Even without ferry service, guests come from afar. In Awa’s day the women of the neighborhood came with honeycombs and dried morels. When Wigga cooked manna grits for the Goitches, as you used to call the Goths, until they were fed up and shoved off on their so-called migration. And when the Bohemian prelates and Polish knights were treated to wild boar with cranberries. When Dorothea served Scania herring to the four dignitaries, though it wasn’t Friday. When Sophie seasoned the meal she prepared for the governor’s guest with political mushrooms: what a feast! Not one of the guests left as he had come. Just keep open house, my son, for new guests will come, even if the ferry isn’t running. Stiff-legged, with creaking sound effects, they are leaving mass graves, archives, and altars. Pleasantly hungry they are, and fat with stories. Mother Rusch has just roasted seventy-nine Easter lambs from the sheep farms of Schiedlitz and Scharpau over charcoal for Ferber the rich patrician, who has invited abbots, Polish nobles, and others. You’d better warm the plates, because mutton fat leaves a film in cooling. But quietly, so as not to disturb your Ilsebill in her torture chamber …”

  He talks in pious adages. “Guests,” he says, “are nothing more than stretched soups, spice of sorts, the unavoidable extra helping; it’s the stupider ones who come too late.”

  Thinking up guests: historical, contemporary, future. When Agnes cooked for Opitz, and the Silesian refugees sat starved at his table, babbling vale-of-tears poetry. One time Amanda cooked a mountain of mashed potatoes for me and my last remaining war comrades and sprinkled bits of bacon out of the pan over them: a meal for old soldiers. And one day (without exactly consulting Ilsebill) I will invite Associate Judge Griselde Dubertin of the Women’s Tribunal for a mushroom dish. And in our present situation the manna grits of famine days might come in …

  Outside, the hurricane squalls began to lose heart. The wind shifted to the west. March rain. Warm with schnapps, the volunteer firemen came from the dike gates. My Ilsebill doffed her migraine, clothed herself festively in fly-agaric red, and said: “Let’s eat by ourselves. What do we need guests for? Can’t we manage, just you and me? Does there always have to be a big crowd, followed by two full dishwashers? Those neurotic city slickers. With their everlasting marriage and tax problems. Let ’em stay in Hamburg. I’d rather you told me abou
t Sophie.”

  This was her plan: to serve up a calf’s head stuffed with mushrooms. She was famous for her stuffed calf’s head. And over the years Governor Rapp’s regular guests had come to trust the dishes she made with honey tufts, millers, egg mushrooms, milk caps, and imperial mushrooms. Unsuspectingly they spooned up dark mushroom soups with rabbits’ innards and even abandoned the precaution—after all, they were deep in enemy territory—of having the domestics taste their food for them.

  Sophie got the calf’s head from the allied Westphalian troops, whose stables were situated in Kneipab, beyond range of the Prussian batteries and protected by the Bear and Renegade bastions. The quartermasters never protested, for the governor’s kitchen squad was entitled to requisition from army units as well as from the civilian population. After all, Westphalian and Polish officers were among the regularly invited guests.

  It was more difficult to bring wild mushrooms into the besieged city. The midsummer floods helped. Since the Russians were still allowing fugitives from the flooded Island to pass through their lines into the Lower City, Sophie was able to make an arrangement with the Kashubian raftsmen. Coming from Petershagen by raft, the fugitives had to pay five Prussian ducats each, half of which went to the Russian outposts, while the French commander of the Gertrud Bastion demanded one ducat a head. In return for the governor’s written authorization of this refugee trade, the (in principle) neutral Kashubians supplied, for money or confiscated English cloth, what the cook Sophie Rotzoll required: in the early fall, partridges, hares, deer that had been shot in the woods between the lakes for the governor’s table, little baskets of cranberries, plums, and edible mushrooms. Until one day Sophie, having made her plan, sent her cousin Lovise at the Oliva forester’s lodge a secret message, asking for special mushrooms. The usual shopping list—fresh butter, pullets’ eggs, Glumse, sorrel, and dill—included certain old Kashubian words.

  Eighteen thirteen. A mushroom year. Like Sophie, her cousin knew all the edible, unpalatable, and poisonous varieties. She knew where they grew on moss or pine needles, in clearings or in underbrush, singly or in magic circles. As children we had often gone mushrooming, with Sophie in the lead. When her grandmother Amanda Woyke was still alive. Out on the front porch she taught Sophie and Lovise to recite the names of all the mushrooms.

  This is the dark horn of plenty. It grows under beeches and tastes good. This is the broad-brimmed hawk mushroom; it loses its bitter taste when blanched, and it’s very good for you. This is a greenie, but it has other names. These are tree mushrooms; the trunks of alders and poplars are sometimes full of them, and they’re good for flavoring soups. This is the cep, also known as the imperial mushroom. It stands alone. And it’s good luck to find one. (The fly agaric shows you where to look.) This thin one is anise agaric; Grandmother used to pickle them in vinegar for the inspector of crown lands. This is orange agaric. They have crumbly, hollow stems, they grow under young pines, and they taste like veal. This beauty is a parasol mushroom. Everybody knows them. Fairy tales happen under their umbrellas. They protect you from the evil eye. If you eat them raw, they taste like nuts. This is the honey tuft; they grow in clusters. They don’t come up until late fall, and they don’t agree with everybody. Ink caps (very tasty) grow in the rubble along the monastery wall. Greenies are sandy and need to be washed thoroughly. And these here are morels; we string them like beads or spit them on thorny branches to dry, and then we flavor our winter soups with them. And these are the political mushrooms: the names are sulfur tuft, panther cap, destroying angel, and deadly amanita.

  Autumn 1813. Sophie knew the time had come. For years she had been including revenge for her imprisoned Fritz in her evening prayers, just before the amen, but it took her a long time to decide what special ingredients she should add to the mushroom stuffing of her calf’s head to be sure of the effect. The panther cap wrecks the nervous system, often with fatal results. The sulfur tuft contains the poison muscarine, and so does the destroying angel, but in stronger concentration. The deadly amanita, which has a faint, sweetish smell and tends to grow under oak trees, destroys the blood corpuscles, but not until twenty-four hours later, when it has long been digested, or so one would suppose.

  Sophie decided to use them all. Along with a basket of magnificent, almost maggotless imperial mushrooms, her cousin Lovise at the forester’s lodge sent her the requested varieties wrapped in a knotted cloth. And because fly agaric acts as a stimulant, she put in two young, still bulb-shaped specimens. In addition, the Kashubian raftsmen, who were still carrying fugitives from the flooded Island to the besieged city, brought a basket of otherwise unobtainable sorrel and fresh parsley. As for the Westphalian calf’s head, the kitchen squad had requisitioned it the day before. (All the butter, eggs, and Glumse had been taken by the Russians.) The calendar read September 26.

  During the day the Prussian batteries in Aschbude and Schellmühle had set the Dominican monastery on fire with red-hot cannon balls and Congreve rockets. Advancing from Ohra amid light musket fire, the Russians had attacked the outworks of the star redoubt. But Major Le Gros, who was one of the invited dinner guests, had thrown the Russians back with canister shot before they could reach the palisades.

  Always when Sophie prepared a calf’s head for Governor Rapp and his guests, either to be stuffed or to be served in sour herb jelly, she obtained as a by-product soup for her special boarders. Behind the governor’s house on the Long Garden, standing white in the late summer shade of lindens and maples, beyond range of the allied batteries, the hungry children of the Wicker Bastion came crawling through the bushes, rattling their bowls.

  After removing the cushions of skin, the fat cheeks, the embedded eyes, the ears, and the soft mouth from the bone with a short, sharp knife, after detaching the tongue, spooning the brains out of the split skull, stuffing the boned calf’s-head casing with the precooked tongue, the brains, the chopped onion, and the mushrooms cut in slices, and sewing it up, Sophie boiled the removed bones, in other words, the calf’s upper and lower jaws, with barley and lovage until the bones were bare and the flat, deep-rooted molars as well as the long front teeth of the lower jaw were easily pulled. They looked nice. And with the thick barley soup, which she poured over the fence into tin bowls, Sophie gave the Wicker Bastion children long, fat calves’ teeth, which were good for earache, gave you sweet dreams, protected you from flying lead, gave strength to your first, second, and third wish at the time of the full moon, and in general made for happiness.

  Many years later, when old Fräulein Rotzoll was buried in the graveyard of Saint Barbara’s, the mourners included several sedate ladies and gentlemen who still carried those calves’ teeth as good-luck charms in their handbags or tobacco pouches. During the siege, they said—though none of the children wanted to hear about the siege—when hunger had settled in every neighborhood, when after the dogs the rats were eaten, when even human flesh (Cossacks who had gone astray on patrol) was sold in the market as pork goulash, a pound for twelve groschen, while horse meat was selling for eleven groschen, an angel—yes, an angel, though the city women called her “Rapp’s whore”—saved us from starvation with her thick soups.

  Sophie never gave the governor or his guests any calves’ teeth. Every day Rapp had guests at table, sometimes few, sometimes many. In the years before the siege he received quite a few celebrities, such as Murat, Berthier, Talleyrand, the future prince Bernadotte. But he also invited selected city notables, to whom, after dinner, he served up the bill for their “contribution.” On several occasions Pastor Blech had been the governor’s sole guest. The two men got along nicely as long as the conversation revolved around the ifs and buts of the revolutionary years, Sophie’s cookery, or most knowledgeably, the growing of roses.

  After dinner Blech always submitted a petition for the pardon of his former pupil Friedrich Bartholdy, who by then was well into his second decade as a prisoner in the fortress of Graudenz. But Rapp rejected all petitions, alleging that Euro
pe must first be at perfect peace. As long as England failed to knuckle under, as long as Schill’s bands were fomenting insurrection, as long as the emperor was being defied in the mountains of Spain and elsewhere, a pardon was not to be expected, for law and order must be demonstrated incontrovertibly. Rapp also gave the pastor to understand that the virginal pride of his cook, Sophie—since it was on her behalf that the pastor wrote his petitions—forced him to be hard. Yes, yes, why not admit it, he was mad about the obstinate creature; no fort had ever resisted him like Sophie. He didn’t expect her to love him as she loved her imprisoned Fritz. But a man of his stamp couldn’t be warmed by her everlasting “no.” If she wanted her man back, she should just open up a bit for him, the governor. What he asked was only natural and would be fun for both parties.

  Pastor Blech never came to dinner again after that. And Sophie, who wanted to keep her virginity for Fritz, stopped putting in her petitions. But it was only when Rapp had returned from Moscow and recovered from his frostbite, when the city was encircled and besieged by Prussians and Russians, when the people of the city were gouged, humiliated, exposed to the outrageous demands of the commissaires and (within plain sight of the still-banqueting French) to merciless hunger, that she made up her mind. In the early fall she wrote to her cousin Lovise and soon received, buried in sorrel, the desired ingredients: mushrooming hate.