The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  So when Ascension-Father’s Day came around, Sibylle Miehlau also wanted to celebrate. Dead set on it! Her friends, whose names were Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie, called her Billy or Bill. All four considered themselves a different breed, though as I well know, all four could be quite different from different, for in the early fifties Sibylle and I had wanted to get married. Big plans, we were engaged. There are photographs of us on the Piazza San Marco, us at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, us atop the chalk cliffs of the isle of Rügen. Cheek to cheek. Hand in hand. We were just right for each other. In every situation. And our child …

  Billy—I still say so—was a remarkable woman. She had her law degree. Men were crazy about her. She passed as a vamp and wore stiletto heels. She slept around. That’s why nothing came of our projected marriage, which we regretted, for Sibylle had a domestic side, which later, when she decided to be different, was actively indulged. She took Maxie (with her duffel bag full of old junk) to live in her apartment, which, with its children’s room and a double bed, was actually our apartment.

  Maxie looked like a menstruating boy, flat and frail, while Sibylle had the proportions of an all-American pinup. Siggie and Frankie also lived together, but their relationship was flexible; they were both as restless as three-year-old stallions and always looking around. For all their male affectations—always in trousers, their voices dropped to cellar pitch—they were four intelligent and normally high-strung girls, who fled to their own sex after too much experience with idiotic boys or boring men (like me). Now they wanted to be different, different at all costs. Though all of them would have done it with me. And on the whole Sibylle and I were great in bed. My sexual relations with the cool Siggie were perfectly normal, and as far as I know she never complained. And I took a shot at Maxie, too, when she started up with Billy. Only Frankie, who had the soul of an old wagoner, never appealed to me.

  One day, in any case, all four of them began to act crazy. “No more of that stuff. It makes us sick. It’s so crude; we won’t take it any more. Our way of loving is entirely different. All you want is in and out and finished. Love ’em and leave ’em. That won’t go down with us, not any more. Get someone else to service you. We just happen to be different. Well, all right, we didn’t use to be, but we are now. What happened before doesn’t count. Something we had to get behind us, definitely. A phase. But we can still be friends. Drop in now and then, for a schnapps or something.”

  They drank schnapps, all right, and beer straight out of the bottle. And there were two bottles of schnapps rattling around in an ice bucket and two cases of beer in Frankie’s open (fifth-hand) three-wheeler, when all four of them, Siggie in the driver’s seat, drove up Hundekehle and Clayallee, meaning to celebrate Ascension-Father’s Day by the Grunewaldsee along with ten thousand, no, a hundred thousand men.

  Billy was wearing a top hat, Frankie a derby. Siggie had put on her Hell’s Angel cap. An oversized, shapeless fedora was pulled down over Maxie’s ears, and she had to hold on to it in the wind. Figures in a film where hats defined roles. (Later they exchanged lids. And Billy’s top hat was tragically abandoned.)

  And the ten thousand men bound for the open spaces had also, according to their own roles, hatted themselves in peaked caps, straw hats (known as circular saws), paper helmets, and genuine steel helmets, some spiked and dating from the First World War. And someone had covered his bald head with a small checked handkerchief, knotted at the corners.

  All for the hell of it. Ordinarily they went bareheaded and seldom or never wore hats or caps. Now that she was through with being a vamp, Sibylle’s curls had been hacked into a boyish bob. Frankie had always gone in for a man’s haircut, died blue-black. Siggie’s ash-blond hair hung down in a shoulder-length pageboy. One Sunday when there was nothing else to do, Billy had given Maxie a crew cut; it stood up crisp and stiff as a brush.

  And true to the movie, Frankie smoked a pipe, Siggie chomped morosely on a cigar stub, Billy had a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her lower lip, and Maxie chewed gum while all four rumbled toward the Grunewaldsee in a three-wheeler decorated with paper rosettes and surmounted by a yellow-and-blue garden umbrella. Wedged between an open Mercedes full of simpering fraternity students in full regalia and a one-horse carriage bearing three elderly gentlemen who never seemed to tire of singing “In Grunewald, in Grunewald, they’re auctioning off the woods… .”

  High good humor. The weather was magnificent and promised to remain so. Midmorning, shortly after ten o’clock. The political situation tense, as usual. The Wall had been finished for a year. West Berlin was an island, but inhabitable. Real-estate prices were falling, but the economic situation wasn’t too bad. Frankie, in particular, had nothing to complain about: lots of people were moving, the trucking business was thriving. And Billy’s law office had plenty of divorces to handle. “Dumb clucks, they go right on hoping and they get the short end every time.” In Sieglinde’s kennels, pedigreed shepherds were reproducing and little lap-and-lick dogs were selling like hot cakes; Sieglinde had studied law to the dry and bitter end, but then she’d lost interest. (Ten years were to pass before she would manage, in the course of a public trial, to make use of her hard-crammed legal knowledge: “I accuse.”)

  Typically of the times, they all worked for a living, except Maxie, who was still studying (at Billy’s expense): ecstatic barefoot dancing and classical ballet. Anyway, they were competent, full of life, and not without ambition. Doing men’s work, though not to be confused with those lousy males who masturbate even when they’re fucking. Or those silly females with their day and night creams, their permanent waves, their fourteen pairs of shoes, their artificial pearls, their slip covers, squeeze-out tears, porcelain collections, handbags full of junk, and mortal terror of getting fat. No, not just of pregnancy. Of hanging bosoms and spare tires. That scream before the mirror because wrinkles snicker, veins are blue, and Mother’s tendency to a double chin is breaking through. The dread of becoming old, no longer desired, felt up, kneaded, clutched, invaded in every hole by a man’s asparagus tip; because that’s what it’s all about—that worn-out chunk of feel-up flesh with a hole in the middle—extra big for somebody’s hard-on. “So don’t bother me with this soul-mate, partnership stuff!” cried Billy, when I ventured a word about Sunday.

  No, not with us. Nothing doing. Free-wheeling fathers, that’s us. Always on the road. Unattached. Natural-born hunters. Childless and happy. It’s true that Frankie (under the name of Franziska Ludkowiak) has two little girls from her earlier married and cookstove life, whom she ceded along with her share in the construction business to her former husband, the perpetually worried daddy, and their new mommy, who never has a thought for herself. But that doesn’t count. And Billy’s long-discarded daughter (by me) was growing up with her grandmother.

  Down with diapers! Shitty brats! We don’t give each other any. And as for our chicks—because Maxie, too, insists on having her private life—we don’t knock them up; we have other ways of making them dependent. As if we didn’t have our crises and domestic worries. Our constant jealousy and where were you yesterday? All so petty and nerve-racking. Having to make up lies for every fart. As if there were no bigger, higher, why not say it, more spiritual problems, the kind that challenge a man’s very existence and make him productive. Oh no, just perpetual scenes and petty quarrels. Siggie’s chick has attempted suicide twice. Frankie has to maintain discipline with her fists. Billy, to tell the honest truth, is disappointed: she’d thought Maxie was entirely different, more stable and reliable, but Maxie does it with men off and on or lets men watch while she’s doing it with some chick. They’re all pretty mixed up. Their tragic pasts. They’ve all had ghastly experiences. Siggie claims her father felt her up when she was twelve. Billy talks about early imprinting because she was only fourteen, though already plump and fully developed, when the Russians came, so three, sometimes she says five, Russians raped her, one after the other. Frankie says her mother was a bareback rider (or a
ventriloquist) with a circus. And Maxie never wanted to play with dolls but was made to. (And so many other possibilities: the milk that was too hot, the ghoulish uncle, Grandpa’s mustache holder, and a cousin from Stolp who could piss his name into the snow …)

  But this is Father’s Day. Today all chicks and imprinting episodes from the past have been left home. All by ourselves, we’re off on a trip. Surrounded by a hundred thousand faceless men, we four voluntary, conscious, and therefore supernatural men are purposefully on our way: we’re doing fine without the appendage, we’re free, the new sex. Nature has taken us to her bosom. In every Prussianly sign-boarded forest, around trash cans on every lake shore, at every sylvan snack bar, we stop off, take a leak, settle down, and call one another from group to group: Hi, fellows! Cheers! It’s good for us to be here. Let us here make tabernacles. Out here we’re by ourselves, with no one to bother us. Blessed peace. No women quarreling and wishing for things. No Ilsebills far and wide. Nothing needs to stand at attention. Relax, friends. And let’s have a drink. To what? To fathers. To all tired, broken-down, floppycock fathers. To all of us under Prussian pine trees, at scrubbed beer tables, in among the lake-shore garbage. Whichever way you’ve come: on foot, on bicycles, in carriages or cars. That’s right, a nation of brothers, as it says in the song, all men together. On this Ascension Day let all men celebrate the Father on high, the Father who has exceeded all norms. And you guys on the gleaming motorcycles—“That’s right, you over there on the opposite shore!”—who don’t know yet what to do with your strength, who’ve wrapped yourselves in leather, black, rivet-studded angels, with your easy, springy stride and unerring flair, film figures all. Lanky, lurking wolves. And one who has brought a trumpet blows aggressive signals. Yes, let us celebrate Father’s Day, celebrate Father’s Day… .

  On the shore of the Grunewaldsee, in a place where the forest has been thinned, under, a clump of pale mottled pines, on a floor of sand, pine needles, quaking grass, Frankie and Siggie put down the cases of beer and the ice bucket with the schnapps. Maxie carried the food basket with the steaks and lamb kidneys. When they had unloaded the spade, the poker, and the iron grill, Billy hauled two stones from nearby and set them down as a fireplace. As though at the end of a long journey, of mythogenic wanderings, she said, “This place is fabulous. This is where we cook.”

  (Long years ago, on our retreat. Dispersed in the Masurian marshes. And after the Battle of Wittstock, when with the help of Torstenson’s cavalry and the Scottish Lesley and King regiments we had defeated the imperial troops and stopped to roast twelve spitted oxen over …) Make a fire. Gather wood. Dead wood, washed ashore and now as hard as bone. Break branches over knees. Crate slats. Once contained sprats from Kiel. Snap brittle branches off bushes for which it is still winter. Pick up gnarled pine cones that burn like mad. And what else? Your feelings and suchlike kindling. My crumpled papers with their iambic meshes of hate. All ideas are born of flame. We who rub together and take fire. The old quarrel that heats the house. My arguments burn better than yours. Your love only smolders and dies away. Your morality has never yet struck a spark. It leaves us cold! Cold cold cold!

  “No, Maxie. Oh, why didn’t we leave you home!” said Billy as she piled kindling on crumpled paper between two stones. “These hordes of men—it’s just no good for little girls like you. You and your begging; I could kick myself for giving in, giving in once again. Oh, please take me, oh, please let me come. I’ll never forgive myself. What if those vulgar boys over there notice who’s here! What I’m talking about? You’re not going to stand there and tell me you’re not a little girl any more. Don’t make me laugh. Hear that, Frankie? Little Maxie doesn’t want to be Papa’s darling any more, she wants to be a he-man like us. No more feminine frills, everything simple and straightforward between men. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous?”

  By then the wee little flame was rising voraciously. No one laughed. Only a few gnats from the lake. And more to herself than to Siggie, Frankie said: “Our Billy doesn’t realize that when you come right down to it she’s our darling butterball; that’s why Maxie gave her an oversized bra for her tits on Mother’s Day. Actually our Billy should have stayed home like a cozy housewife, doing crossword puzzles or darning Maxie’s socks. I could have sent my Bettina and a couple of Siggie’s chicks to chat with her and nibble pretzels. Our butterball is completely out of place here, don’t you agree?”

  At that Billy, who had once been my Sibylle, kept silent like a man (obstinately, sullenly) and busied herself with the fire. By then it was sending up proper flame symbols. And at other cooking sites in Grunewald and Spandau Forest, in clearings between the trees of Tegel, wherever it was forbidden to cook, light matches, play with fire, men had piled wood between stones like consummate Boy Scouts and were cheering the rising flames. The mounted police patrols could hardly ignore them. “We haven’t seen a thing,” they said. “But be careful, guys, even if it is Father’s Day.”

  This is what distinguishes the male. Wherever he goes and describes his circle, he will set up a fireplace, test the wind, gauge the situation, and comply with the regulations. This he knows from the beginning, the moment he starts out. His passage is marked by traces of fire. That is how men give evidence of history.

  They took the spade and dug a ditch around their campfire. “Didn’t you ever hear of forest fires?” Siggie watched the flying sparks. Frankie stared at the flames as if to read messages in their secret script. Maxie jumped three or four times over the fire, which was gradually burning down to a bed of embers. Only Billy kept a purpose in view; off to one side, where she had deposited spices, pepper mill, and other accessories, she smacked the foot-long, inch-thick steaks down on a breadboard. She rubbed bacon rind over the four-legged iron grate, which showed signs of encounters with numerous beds of coals. Then she cut green peppers into strips. Sleeves rolled up. Sturdy forearms. Cleaver the Cook, to whom all things are hamburger. Then she cut the kidneys open, releasing their pissy smell.

  Close to the fire, Billy’s face was shining. All that stupid talk; she tried hard not to listen. You shits! What do you know! Cooking over an open fire has always been man’s business. Ever since the Stone Age. And later, those spitted oxen. It was the men who scoffed at pots and pans and made steaks and sheep kidneys sizzle over naked coals. On winter campaigns through the swamps of Lithuania. On the still-burning timbers of razed convents, I roasted piglets, lambs, and young geese… . When the Hussites got as far as Oliva … And after the Battle of Wittstock …

  But Frankie continued to despise all cookery as woman’s work. “What delicious tidbit is Mommy going to make for us now? Tattooed bulls’ balls? Little boys’ peckers? Ah, what would we do without our mommy. We guys just stand around like dopes, talking about the nuclear deterrent and the grave political situation, but she takes care of us, she works and slaves without a question or thought for herself. Nothing’s too good for us.”

  Maxie only said, “Don’t mind her. You’re OK, Billy. We appreciate you.”

  But that’s something my Sibylle never knew. When I took up with her in May 1950, she had just come over from the freshly baked Democratic Republic, specifically from Hoyerswerder, where her parents, refugees from Danzig—West Prussia, had settled and whence they regularly sent their only child plum butter and crumb cake. In those days Billy was a curly-blond law student, voluptuously rounded, sometimes hard-working, sometimes moodily lazy, who had really wanted to study something entirely different, I don’t remember what.

  We considered ourselves engaged. And during the first four semesters she actually did things my way. Then she suddenly and deliberately turned vamp, and I was only allowed to fuck her before or after. Intermittent fits of weeping. That early imprinting. Five or seven Russians. In the cellar. On empty potato sacks. Made her want to give up her studies. And do something entirely different, something normal, start a chicken farm or just be a housewife, have children (five or six) or emigrate to Australia and start f
rom scratch.

  While casually preparing for her exams, she drained and dropped at least a dozen men, including two or three exotic types. I stayed within reach and said my little piece: “Look here, what do you really want? Look here, can’t you finally make up your mind? Look here, must you always go on wanting something different? Look here, how many wishes have you got left?”

  So quick as a flash, because I thought it would help, I made her a child. But the kid was in the way and got turned over to its grandparents quick as a flash. Motherhood nauseated Sibylle. And her vamp phase was petering out. She lost weight, began to look like a skinny old maid. She wouldn’t let me or anyone else near her. Just talked about existentialism, that kind of thing. And when she’d finished clerking and opened her own office in Schmargendorf, she started making friends with divorcees whose cases she had argued successfully in court; one of them was Frankie.