The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  The kitchen was the warmest place. The water pump in the yard was intended for the use of both tenants. It would never have occurred to either the Lewandowskis or the Stubbes to convert the little-used parlor into a bedroom for the children. So the three small children from Lena’s second marriage slept in two cots alongside the big marriage bed, at the foot of which was placed a narrow bed where Lisbeth, Lena’s daughter by her first marriage, slept until she was eighteen, when, thoroughly instructed in the ways of matrimony, she married a worker in the railroad-car factory, became pregnant, and moved to Troyl, whereupon the narrow bed was taken over by twelve-year-old Luise. Lisbeth, Luise, Ernestine, and Martha experienced Otto and Lena Stubbe night after night: their snoring, creaking, groaning, farting, weeping, their sudden silence, their talking in their sleep. The children learned in the darkness and forgot nothing.

  The parlor remained a place of mystery, virtually unused except on the high holidays, until 1886, when, shortly after the strike at the Klawitter Shipyard and her husband’s attempted suicide, Lena began setting a Saturday table in the kitchen–living room for possible suicides and, since a few of her guests belonged to the upper classes, took in considerable extra money, a good part of which she spent on books and subscriptions to magazines. The parlor then became Lena’s study. If she hadn’t mislaid her spectacles in the kitchen, they were sure to be under a sheaf of papers in the parlor. There Lena read Die Neue Zeit (The New Age) and Das Neue Frauenleben (The Modern Woman); there she lined up recipe after recipe for her “Proletarian Cook Book,” and there in her Sunday handwriting she wrote the party chairman two letters full of questions about his book Woman and Socialism. An answer came in which he soft-pedaled his utopian ideas on free choice of profession, unsaid a little of his “state as educator” program, and, taking an interest in Lena’s class-conscious cookery, announced his visit.

  In Kiel with shop stewards: “Look, fellow worker. Why do you write such complicated stuff? It’s no good for us workers because only the privileged bourgeoisie can understand it.” A turner (today we call them lathe operators) speaking. “It’s too highfalutin for us. When we get home from work, we’re all in, no good for anything but the tube. If you want to talk to us, it’s got to be simple and exciting—like a crime thriller.”

  As if sleep-work-goggle-at-the-tube were a smooth-running process. As if the lathe were ever switched off and you didn’t have quiz flicks running through your sleep. As if the rationalized work process weren’t interspersed with reels of film, films run in reverse, protests from the back benches, and cost-efficiency figures, so that the lathe shavings get inextricably mixed with private refuse and suchlike nonsense. As if the workshop didn’t have veto power while the quiz master varies his jokes. As if there were no other film uncoiling, running on, breaking off, starting up again, repeating itself, flowing right on from your dream through the early work shift, through your shop contacts, even while your wife, that permanent stranger, is taking up so much room—a film running on without intermission or time clock, as if there were no such thing as a wage scale, only hit music in the ear, warmed-up red cabbage, and the whole thing, even the black-and-white parts, in color.

  “But fellow workers, that’s just what I do. I write compressed time, I write what is, while something else, overlapped by something else, is or seems to be next to something else, while, unnoticed, something that didn’t seem to be there any more, but was hidden and for that reason ridiculously long-lasting, is now exclusively present: fear, for instance.”

  “That’s it, fellow worker. That’s the way it is. We can’t turn it off. And usually there’s something else running at cross-purposes. And the kids who won’t ever keep quiet. And always something else besides. Not exactly fear. Just a kind of feeling. But your long sentences, fellow worker, are no help. By the time you’re through, you’ve lost me. Can’t you make it simple?”

  “I can, fellow worker. I can.”

  One Monday in 1885, when the workers of the Klawitter Shipyard were on strike and Lena Stubbe, one of the many cooks who are inside me and want to come out, was running the soup kitchen that fed the whole lot of them and their families and taking charge of the strike fund, she noticed that seven hundred and forty-five marks were missing from the fund, but she said nothing to her Otto, who always started clobbering the moment he was caught at anything, and kept her peace when Otto beat first the girls, who all wore pigtails, and then her, his Lena, with the heavy hand of a father, husband, socialist, and anchor maker, until he was exhausted and reduced to tears, because Otto didn’t want to be as I’ve described him in another overlong sentence, and would rather have been a class-conscious model of working-class solidarity. For only recently Otto Stubbe, addressing the comrades at Adler’s Beer Hall, had inveighed against the beating of proletarian children and early-worn-out wives: “As Bebel says, we don’t want to bring up no subjects, but independent-minded Germans.”

  And the comrades of those days all nodded and said “Right!”—just as you, too, fellow workers of the Kiel local group, nod and say “Right!” when I try to explain why complicated sentences are short and simple ones are long. Now here, for instance, is a short sentence: The spy in the chancellor’s office is said to have been an eminently reliable Social Democrat in the daytime. But you refuse to read my short and long sentences, because a few leftist sons of rightist families have written you off as underprivileged illiterates, stigmatized you as stupid vulgarians, wife-beating Ottos. But the cook Lena Stubbe in her day knew several books that helped to shape the history of her times. After cooking pigs’ feet until tender for the comrades, who were often at loggerheads, to gnaw at, she read sentences and paragraphs from the already classical work Woman and Socialism aloud, while the men munched.

  And when the chairman of the Social Democratic Party came to Danzig in ’96 to reconcile the warring factions among the comrades—even then the point at issue was revisionism—she discussed the proletarian cook book, which was still both lacking and needed, at length with her party chairman. They were sitting in the parlor. At first Otto Stubbe was there, too. The children in the adjoining room could be heard trying to be quiet. The Lewandowski children in the apartment next door were noisier. Outside it was May, lilacs were blooming between the houses. Otto had suggested killing a rabbit in Bebel’s honor. But Lena Stubbe cooked pork kidneys in mustard sauce. They, my dear fellow workers, tasted good.

  When August Bebel stepped into the Stubbe family’s apartment in the workers’ house at Brabank 5, Lena led him into the parlor, whose furnishings, unlike those of other parlors, included a desk with many drawers and, on top, several piles of books with slips of paper inserted in them. Also on the desk, next to a small ebony box in which Lena kept a wrought-iron nail, stood a framed picture of Bebel, standing up to Bismarck in the Reichstag. And now the famous man with so much past behind him was actually present, standing frail and most respectably dressed beside the sofa. Yet he stood there as though absent, at a loss for a first sentence. He sniffed: “Ah, so we’re having something pungent?” For crossing the corridor from the kitchen–living room and seeping through the door of the parlor, an unmistakable smell announced the pissy, not yet attenuated bouquet of the main course.

  Only recently Lena had said to her Otto, “We’re through, I tell you, through!” after he hadn’t just beaten her as on every Friday. “Go on like this and we’re through for good.”

  But this announcement, that she might be through with him one of these days—and for good!—was not provoked by the usual clobbering. The most she said about that was “You’re only hitting yourself in the face.” Far worse, he’d been turning up his nose at her pea soup of late, and all he had to say about her pork kidneys in mustard sauce was that they tasted pissy. “Then you’ll see who’s willing to cook for a shit like you. And it’ll be too late when you start sniveling that Lena’s kidneys were the best. You’ll go down on your knees, but it won’t do you no good. A hundred times I’ve said: He can’
t help it. Always has to make a big noise and bang his fist on the table. Afterward he’s sorry. Gets all weepy. Well, I ain’t going to say it no more. All right, cook him a couple of kidneys cut up small so they give up their juices, that’s what he likes. And put in mustard at the end. ’Cause that’s the way he likes them. Aw, go on, he dribbles. Make some more kidneys in sauce. ’Cause when they’re done, I put in pepper, I grate fresh horseradish into them, and put in five tablespoons of mustard, and I stir and I stir over a low flame so it doesn’t boil. But that’s all over now. I’m through. Always talking about solidarity with his big mouth. All right, if he’s got to clobber, let him. It doesn’t bother me. Even if he gives me black eyes. But I don’t let nobody run down my kidneys. Why should I cook and slave for him! And boiled potatoes to go with the sauce. And a couple of allspice berries for seasoning. But it’s not good enough for him. I ‘spose he’d like me to soak them in water or milk to get rid of the piss. As if you could get any taste back into them after that. That’ll do, I say. That’ll do. He can go somewhere else. Maybe he’ll find somebody that’ll soak them in water or make them all mushy with milk. But they still won’t be right for him. And he’ll pine and sigh for Lena’s nice kidneys. But then it’ll be too late.”

  Lena Stubbe said all this time and again, and from then on she soaked her pork kidneys in water for half a day before cooking them until they were first hard, then soft. But in her cook book she wrote something entirely different. And for the master turner, commercial traveler, agitator, party chairman, street-corner orator, and Reichstag deputy, she soaked her kidneys neither in water nor in milk, for which reason the smell penetrated to the parlor.

  After the beef-bone soup (with one or two special ingredients), Comrade Bebel relaxed a bit. At first he seemed depressed, or perhaps only tired from the relentless obligations that went with his functions. More to Lena than to Otto Stubbe he lamented, though with manly self-possession: how many friends he had lost in the course of these last embattled years, what staunch discipline the party had shown in spite, or perhaps because, of the burdensome Socialist Laws, and how flabby yet quarrelsome the party membership had become with increasing success; how difficult it was to accustom the party to legality without letting it succumb to the compromises encouraged by this indispensable development, how far the Socialist Movement still was from the goal despite its increasing success at Reichstag elections, and how, now that victory was within reach, the goal seemed hazier than ever before.

  Bebel expressed doubts and spoke corrosively of himself: he had been too cocksure in predicting the revolution and the downfall of the capitalist system; how often he had aroused false hopes by going so far as to date the impending collapse of the state. True, he had been misled by Marx’s prognoses, which had been wrong even with regard to England. As to the pauperization of the masses, Bernstein had been right. It had to be admitted that capitalism was capable of adapting itself and not devoid of ideas. On the other hand, the concept of socialism would be lifeless without the hope that a radical transformation would soon usher in a new society. And actually there was good reason to believe that the present system, with its exploitation and mismanagement, would soon collapse. Revolution was a distinct possibility, though one shouldn’t say so out loud, because the party advocated the strictest legality.

  While Lena Stubbe waited serenely (confident in her special ingredients) for her beef broth to take effect on the profoundly depressed man, and as long as Bebel, overcast with doubts, was postponing the revolution to a hazy future, Otto Stubbe squirmed restlessly in his chair; but as soon as the chairman, thanks to Lena’s beef broth, perked up and flashed signals for the future out of bright, commanding eyes, the easily swayed anchor maker was fired with enthusiasm. Boldly he delivered himself of revolutionary phrases with anarchistic overtones and took on such a now-or-never expression that Bebel was obliged to remind him of the decisions reached by the Erfurt party congress and firmly, though without severity, call him to order.

  By that time Lena was serving her pork kidneys in mustard sauce with boiled potatoes. A glass water pitcher full of dark beer, which the Stubbes’ daughter Luise had brought from the tavern on Bucket Makers’ Court, was already on the table. During the meal, the Lewandowski children made so much noise they seemed to be right there in the room, while the Stubbes’ own little ones, though only a few feet away, were hardly audible. Bebel praised the simple yet so tasty dish. Lena told him about her daughter Lisbeth, whose consumptive husband probably didn’t have long to live. Now at his ease, taking a warm interest in the details of their family life, the chairman stopped pulling out his gold pocket watch (as he had done frequently at first). Thus encouraged, Lena, no sooner had the dessert, her famous cinnamon-flavored Boskop applesauce, been spooned up, sent her Otto, who was getting too obstreperous anyway, out of the parlor with a mere glance (backed up by her battered authority). Otto explained dutifully that the children seemed restless and in need of attention, and that perhaps Lena and Comrade Bebel had best be left alone, since he knew nothing about the political implications of cookery. Of course he was able to appreciate good plain food, but the theory of it was beyond him. That was Lena’s department. But once things started up, on the barricades and so forth, he’d come running. Comrade Bebel could bank on that.

  When Otto Stubbe had gone, there was silence in the parlor. It went on for a while. There weren’t even any flies. The chairman lit a cigar and remarked that it was one of a lot inherited from Engels. Then a bit of a joke: yes, old Friedrich had been first and foremost a manufacturer to the end, but in the last years of his life, possibly because he was no longer under pressure from Marx, he had developed into a useful Social Democrat. Then more silence. Lena looked for her specs, found them, and without a word set her neatly written manuscript before the cigar-puffing chairman. Here reading, there skipping, Bebel leafed through the “Proletarian Cook Book.”

  Some of the cooks inside me would be unionized today. Amanda Woyke undoubtedly. Possibly Fat Gret. Sophie Rotzoll with her militant left-wing orientation. But most certainly Lena Stubbe.

  At a congress of the food and hostelry workers recently held in Cologne, delegate Lena Stubbe addressed canteen cooks, cooks of the Vienna Woods restaurant chain, cooks for the canning industry, and others. Naturally there were also waiters, waitresses, butchers, industrial bakers, et cetera, in the hall. At the beginning of her short speech on “The Cookery of the Oppressed Classes,” Lena said, more in fun than provocatively, “Fellow workers, what’s the sense in quick cooking? To hell with convenience food. Even if it saves time, I ask you: time for what and whom?”

  She got only a sprinkling of applause. And the few cooks who supported her attack on the frozen-food industry, peppered with examples of poor quality, were those stigmatized as “élitist” because they worked in luxury hotels (Rheinischer Hof, Hilton, Steigenberger, et cetera), where they were faced with supposedly international demands: breast of pheasant on sauerkraut with pineapple. The majority were loud in praise of frozen foods—“That way the common man can afford beef tongue in Madeira sauce”—and one delegate went so far as to speak of “progress in a spirit of trade-union solidarity.”

  “In that case,” cried Lena Stubbe, “you should also sing the praises of pea sausage. Remember that just before the War of 1870, one of our fellow workers, a Berlin cook, reinforced the Prussian army by inventing pea sausage.” (Applause, laughter.) “And why not give honorary membership to Count Rumford, who early in the nineteenth century tried to solve the social problem by inventing a stomach pap that was named after him, Rumford soup for the poor. It consisted of water, potatoes, barley, peas, beef fat, stale bread, salt, and flat beer, cooked until it was so sticky that it didn’t fall off the spoon.” (More applause and laughter among the delegates.)

  But when, drawing on early socialist experience, the former cook of the Wallgasse and Danzig-Ohra soup kitchens larded her brief exposé with historical references, when she insisted that the pro
letarian cook book, the need for which was felt even then, remained a necessity here and now, when Lena Stubbe tried to prove that for lack of class-conscious cook books the working women of the early capitalist era had turned to worthless bourgeois books—Henriette Davidi’s and worse—thus becoming alienated from their own class and infected with petit-bourgeois cravings—“Your beef tongue in Madeira, for instance!”—when Lena maintained that the labor movement and within it the unions had neglected to teach the young female industrial workers class-conscious cookery—“They just shut their eyes and reach for a can!”—the majority of the delegates protested. “What’s the matter with quality canned goods!” and “Sounds like the old class-struggle crap!” And somebody shouted, “Leftist ravings!”