The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  It had been the same with Friedrich Otto Stobbe, her first husband. Stobbe, who barely had time to get her with child (Lisbeth) before enlisting in the Fifth Danzig Grenadiers to fight against the French (in the Franco-Prussian War) and falling at Mars-la-Tour, also, like Otto Friedrich Stubbe after him, drank rotgut and beat his Lena every Friday. Stobbe, too, was a weepy type, needful of consolation. Lena had a penchant for strong men with weak characters.

  At the time when she was being beaten regularly once a week by Otto Stubbe, who like her first husband was an anchor maker, and obliged to comfort him afterward, she was in her mid-thirties, he in his mid-twenties. Consequently it wasn’t hard for Lena to be the young man’s always willing wife and all-forgiving mother. Never, during either the whopping or the comforting, was the robbed strike fund mentioned. The weekly ritual was more on the silent side, if we choose to disregard Lena’s motherly mumblings—“Now it’s all right; you’ll feel better soon”—and Otto’s invariable announcement of “I’m going to hang myself. I’m going to hang myself.” People say those things without thinking. Lena was familiar with such talk from her first husband. And yet Friedrich Otto Stobbe had died quite normally of a bullet in the belly. So all Lena could say was “Oh, Otto, you wouldn’t go doing yourself a harm for nothing.”

  But one day, a good year after the strike was called off—Lena was pregnant again, the stolen money had been repaid—Otto Friedrich Stubbe was hanging from a nail over the doorway in the rabbit hutch behind the house—in his socks, for his wooden shoes had fallen off. Lena, who was sweeping the yard because it was Saturday, heard the crashing of the stool and the wooden shoes, heard the drumming of the terrified rabbits, dropped her broom, thought of Stobbe and Stubbe both at once—also probably of apples I had eaten with her to test our love—put all the blame on the accursed potato schnapps, thought no more of the beatings than if they had never happened, grabbed the knife she used to kill rabbits with, and cut the dangling Otto down from the nail in the lintel. The ordinarily dashing anchor maker soon regained consciousness, but for a good week he had to wear the collar of his blue shirt turned up.

  Men with neatly parted hair are standing all about, and they mean me when they ask “Why?” To the question why, when there’s so little time, I spend such an extravagant amount of it drawing hand-forged nails with a soft pencil or an English steel pen, I, who collect odds and ends out of pure passion, knew no answers; for the three bent nails mean enough, have left purpose behind them, no longer recall their occasions or the wood they were driven into once upon a time, when each nail stood straight and may have made some sense.

  But since the question why is still standing at order arms, and since nothing but stories can fatigue the stern questioner and his voice that always goes straight to the point, I tell dispersed stories in which the cooking nun Margret has hung just-killed and still-warm geese on the first nail to drip into a bowl for black pudding, while on the second nail Sophie’s dried mushrooms (greenies, morels, ceps, and milk caps) hung in linen sacks. But on the third nail (the most recent in my hatchwork drawing) I hanged myself, because social conditions were what they were, because I dealt blows when drunk, because I’d got drunk on potato schnapps, because I was a brute, because I’d never done more than threaten to hang myself, because nothing could undo my assault on the strike fund, because I couldn’t stand Lena’s pity, her way of understanding everything and putting up with it in silence, because I couldn’t stand the knowledge she kept to herself, all that merciless kindness and selfless forbearance any more, because my last vestige of pride, my cock, refused to bestir itself, and because I’d been constipated for days; in vain I pushed, in vain I gulped down castor oil; nothing came out. So I took a calf’s tether. And I already knew about the nail in the lintel. The only thing that worried me was my rabbits. Maybe it would scare them if I did it in the doorway of the rabbit hutch… . But Lena, who kept having to save me, who was never without hope, who knew recipes for and against everything, who was reliable. hellishly reliable, cut me down in time. Oh, God! When will it all end?

  Then she made me a soup out of beef bones, in which she boiled the nail and the rope, noose and all, for an hour. At the end she stirred an egg into the broth and didn’t ask “Why?” as, with slight pain in swallowing, I spooned up the soup.

  Never again did Otto Friedrich Stubbe hang himself. But that soup, made from beef bones, a blacksmith’s nail, and a calf’s tether, with an egg stirred into it for strength, which Lena from then on served up every Saturday as a preventive, soon acquired a reputation among the suicide-prone. Potential dangling men would knock at her door, shyly introduce themselves, and invite themselves to dinner. They got used to the faint taste of hemp. They came again and again. And Lena didn’t ask “Why?” but cooked a family-sized potful of nail-and-rope soup for her Saturday table, and got pretty well paid for it.

  In addition to her Otto—who was unable, after the usual whopping and whimpering, to drop his Friday announcement of “I’ll hang myself one of these days!”—Herr Eichhorn, a Royal Prussian department head, Herr Levin, sole owner of a flourishing sugar refinery, Götz von Putlitz, a lieutenant in the first regiment of Body Hussars, and Karlchen Klawitter, the shipyard owner’s son, would be sitting at her kitchen table.

  Besides these habitués, there were casuals from all walks of life. Occasionally even Herr Wendt, one of the elders of the Sankt Jakob Church congregation, would attend. And there were some whom Lena served free of charge, poor devils like Kabrun the porter and a hypertense young man by the name of Paul Scheerbart who dreamed of a crystal world of perfect transparency.

  Good cheer prevailed at her table. Even political arguments ended in backslapping and brotherhood. Hanging and bullets through the brain were seldom mentioned, and then in jest, as, for example, when Herr Levin told the story of how, after looking in vain for a suitable rope, he had finally, to punish his unfaithful Klothilde, tied several of her pearl necklaces together. But when he kicked the chair away, the high-priced rope snapped in several places. “For two solid hours I picked and threaded before the damage was repaired. Because you can’t fool with my wife.”

  Yes, along with its aftertaste of hemp, there was something about Lena’s soup that lifted people’s spirits. From then on the lieutenant bore his major-size debts more lightly; later on, he left the Body Hussars to look after his run-down family estate in eastern Pomerania. The Prussian department head replaced his first wife, who had died young, with a second wife, who some years later left him again a widower; but thanks to Lena’s nail-and-rope soup, he also managed to survive his ailing and short-lived third wife and to enjoy himself after working hours. Even Karlchen Klawitter succeeded (while spooning up three dishes of soup) in seeing his father, the stern shipyard owner (who, after all, had launched the first Prussian steam-powered corvette), in perspective, as a ridiculously little man. When, later on, Hermann Levin strangled his unfaithful wife with a pearl-embroidered silk scarf, he refused to have his murder represented in court as an act of despair (which might have given him the benefit of extenuating circumstances) and spoke instead of liberation. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he wrote Lena affectionate letters from prison, all the more so because for many years (until the time of his death in 1909) she brought him a dinner pail of her life-affirming soup on visiting days at Schiessstange Prison. Its heartening substance remained unchanged, but the flavor-contributing ingredients varied.

  Lena Stubbe knew how to provide her free and paying guests with variety. True, she always cooked the same original nail, consecrated by her Otto, which she had bent slightly in pulling it out of the frame, but which if straightened would have been as long as a good-sized human pizzle. She also stuck to calves’ tethers, which she bought cheap in lots of sixty from a dealer in farm produce on Milchkannengasse; Otto had to tie each one of them expertly into a noose before it was lowered into the foaming broth. But Lena’s menu was not limited to beef-bone soup with an egg stirred in at the end. Sh
e cooked (with the above-mentioned additions) neck of mutton with beans, smoked spareribs with caraway-flavored sauerkraut, Gänseklein with rutabaga, even tripe cut from a cow’s paunch and boiled for four hours, sour dumplings, West Prussian potato soup with garlic sausage, pigs’ feet, dried peas with salt pork; and on festive occasions (at a small extra charge) she cooked nail and rope with tender calves’ tongues, which she flavored with white wine, garnished with cooked turnips, and served with mayonnaise made of sunflower oil and egg yolks. Or she would stuff a suckling pig with rope, nail, and prunes.

  It was at a festive meal which took place on January 18, 1891, that Herr Levin, who was to strangle his wife shortly thereafter, joined department head Eichhorn in toasting the twentieth anniversary of the German Empire, while Otto Stubbe and Karlchen Klawitter, the radical-minded son of shipyard owner Klawitter, drank to the recent abrogation of the Socialist Laws and to Bismarck’s dismissal as well. But the hypertense Paul Scheerbart was deep in his vitreous visions of the future. While the ex-lieutenant and by then rural Junker Götz von Putlitz, wishing for liberal and therefore vague reasons to celebrate neither the foundation of the German Empire nor the belated triumph of the socialists, lauded the recent establishment of the Schichau Shipyard as a great economic achievement that would prove beneficial both to the Empire and to the simple worker, for without economic progress—as sugar manufacturer Levin and anchor maker Stubbe must realize—there could be neither capital gains nor social progress. He then pointed out that he had always been opposed to Bismarck’s policy of protective tariffs, whereas the Sozis in the Reichstag had supported them on several occasions.

  Otto Stubbe and Karlchen Klawitter proceeded to argue without bitterness, more for the fun of it, about the true road to socialism. Lena Stubbe tried to reconcile them with quotations from Bebel. The debate revolved around sordid practice and sublime principle. And thus, attenuated to be sure by the nail and rope sewn up in the suckling pig, the revisionist controversy of the late nineties was prefigured on a festive occasion. Karlchen Klawitter represented the revolutionary wing. Otto Stubbe had misgivings on the one hand and intimations on the other. Both cited Engels; only Karlchen cited Marx, and none too often. Meanwhile, unmoved, Paul Scheerbart dreamed his glass-blown utopia. And while serving the dessert—stewed Boskop apples with whipped cream—Lena Stubbe, who did not sit at the table but waited on the men as a simple matter of course, quoted from her favorite book, Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. In conclusion she said, “All you men do is talk. But there’s got to be action, too.”

  In any case the party ended happily with effusions of brotherly feeling. Karlchen Klawitter and the ex-lieutenant fell into each other’s arms. The department head, Otto Stubbe, and the manufacturer Levin sang “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” and “Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation!” Lena patted the bemused Scheerbart and was happy because nothing was left of the suckling pig. In among prune pits and gnawed bones the slightly bent blacksmith’s nail and the calf’s tether in noose formation lay grease-coated and shiny. For all their exuberance, the guests, before taking their leave and drinking a last toast of cider in water glasses to friendship, progress, and life, did not neglect to cast a thoughtful glance at the rope and nail, each in his own way assuming a meditative attitude. (Afterward the well-boiled rope went into the garbage; the nail, however, was washed, dipped in linseed oil to keep it from rusting, and enshrined and locked in an ebony casket, which porter Kabrun had made with his own hands and donated in token of his gratitude for free meals, there to remain until the following Saturday.)

  And so it went for many years, for Stubbe—now an anchor maker at the Schichau Shipyard and up to his neck in the (to this day unabated) revisionism controversy since the Erfurt party congress, where he as a delegate had voted now against Kautsky and now against Bernstein—was still a risk, as were all the other men, regardless of class. Under his Lena’s consolations, Otto Friedrich never ceased to mumble: “I’ll take a rope. I’ll find me a nail. And that’ll be the end. And this one won’t break. Through with the whole business. Too much for one man. All by myself it’s out of the question. What do you mean, why? Ain’t it enough? No no no. I refuse to be mothered. I’ll do it if it kills me. Wash my neck first, that’s it. With a calf’s tether I’ll do it. And I know a good reliable nail. No later than tomorrow, if not …”

  Against which, as we know, Lena Stubbe had a recipe. And when, shortly before Chairman August Bebel came to Danzig—that was in May 1898—she finished collecting the recipes that would make up her “Proletarian Cook Book,” she had clearly described the preparation of all her dishes and accompanied them with class-conscious commentaries (omitting the nail and the rope, however), for Lena was opposed to bourgeois cookery and its “take-a-dozen-eggs” ideology. In her introduction she wrote, “Such pretentious extravagance confuses the cooking workingman’s wife, encourages her to live beyond her means, and alienates her from her class.” Her reason for not including her nail-and-rope soup in her collection of proletarian recipes was probably that this dish was dedicated to the desperate of all classes and walks of life.

  But on the day when she received Comrade Bebel in the parlor and submitted her class-conscious cook book to him in manuscript after her proletarian festive meal—pork kidneys in mustard sauce—she served him, before the main dish, a broth made from beef bones, in which she had (secretly) boiled the bent nail and the rope with a noose at the end, for at that time a rumor was going around that the chairman of the Social Democratic Party was feeling tired. People were saying that his never-ending struggle for just a little more justice had exhausted his store of hope, that he no longer had an answer to the question why, that he was profoundly depressed by the inner-party conflict between the reformist and revolutionary wings, that he often stared unseeing or muttered fatalistic words. That doubt was becoming a principle with him. And that, short of a miracle, the worst was to be feared …

  Home-fried potatoes

  Mine with lard.

  It’s got to be old ones with curling sprouts

  that have wintered on a dry wooden rack

  in a cellar where the light

  is never more than a far-off promise.

  Long ago, in the century of suspenders,

  when Lena was almost six months gone and still

  carrying the strike fund under her apron.

  With onions and remembered marjoram I

  would like to make a silent movie in which Grandfather,

  I mean the Sozi who fell at Tannenberg,

  curses before bending over his plate

  and cracks each one of his finger joints.

  But only with lard and in cast iron.

  Home-fried potatoes with

  black pudding and suchlike myths.

  Herrings that roll themselves in flour

  or quivering meat jelly in which diced gherkins

  keep their natural beauty.

  For breakfast, before he went on

  the morning shift at the shipyard,

  Grandfather Stubbe ate a whole plateful.

  The sparrows outside the casement curtains

  were class-conscious proletarians even then.

  Bebel’s visit

  Not another word of table eloquence. No argument, no counterargument. Never again disruptive, irrelevant talk over the heads of the stiffly attentive comrades. Because the pigs’ feet in the big kettle, with every little bone still embedded, have boiled for two hours in their broth with bay leaves, cloves, and crushed black pepper, with onions (but without nail and rope), because they are done at present and reduce us all, who have talked everything and the future as well to tatters, to silence.

  In deep soup dishes, broth that has been seasoned at the end with vinegar. For each guest a halved pig’s foot split between the toes and up to the cartilage of the hock. On the edge of the plate a dab of mustard. Rye bread to dip in the sauce. No knife, no fork. With soon jellied fingers, with teeth that remember long and still longer ago
, that remember Lena Stubbe’s special pigs’ feet, we sit between and across from strangers, the old comrades, who quarreled and talked themselves apart until nothing was left but faded, blue-tinged hope, and who are now gnawing bone after bone bare, biting into the cartilage, tugging at sinews, lapping up marrow, chewing away on the soft, rubbery skin, and are needful of a second, a third half pig’s foot. Without a word, each for himself as though alone at the table, eyes narrowed to sight slits between propped elbows, everything taken back, until, united by sounds, we are restored to our old solidarity.

  Pigs’ feet have always been cheap. Right now three pounds for one fifty. Now we’re full, holding our beer glasses with sticky fingers. The silence is fenced around with sighs. We’re sitting in jelly. Sucking gaps between teeth. Belches rise up and the first fuzzy words: “Hey, that wasn’t bad. Brings back the old days.” We chat, we agree with one another. Determined to be reasonable, for a change. And to stop snarling. A simple meal, all it takes to bring peace. We see one another with friendly eyes. Great piles of bones. Ah yes, there were dill pickles on the side. Someone—probably me—wants to make a speech and praise the socialist cook Lena Stubbe, who silenced all the contentious comrades of her day with a kettle full of pigs’ feet, defeated them for the time of a brief kindness, for which reason she included “halved pigs’ feet with rye bread and dill pickles” in the “Proletarian Cook Book,” which she submitted to the unforgettable Comrade Bebel when party business brought him to our part of the country and he called on Lena one afternoon in person.

  On the northern edge of the city, not far from the port and shipyard area, where the Old City merged with the New City and poverty put its stamp on children, there was a row of workers’ houses, one-storied structures of unfaced brick with tarpaper roofs. They belonged to the Schichau (formerly the Klawitter) Shipyard, and each house had always been occupied by two shipyard workers’ families. The Stubbes had long lived next door to the Skrövers, until Ludwig Skröver and his family had been served with expulsion notices and emigrated to America. Ship’s carpenter Heinz Lewandowski and his wife and four children then moved into the Skrövers’ dwelling, the door of which, side by side with the Stubbes’ door in the center of the elongated house, was painted in the same green. The hallway led to the kitchen–living room with its window and French door, which opened onto the adjoining yard, outhouse, and garden. The parlor with its two front-facing windows branched off from the passageway on the right (on the left at the Lewandowskis’). Likewise to the right and left, but smaller than the parlors, the bedrooms adjoined the kitchen—living rooms of the Stubbes and Lewandowskis. There was no room for closets under the flat tarpaper roof. In the backyard there were rabbit hutches leaning against the house. The tile stoves had to be stoked in the parlors, but through the partition walls they also heated the bedrooms of both families.