The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Still, tongues were loosed. Men unburdened themselves. The misery of the centuries—just among men, after all—was avowed. (“Be honest for once, old boy. Why pretend? Out with the truth, the whole, unvarnished truth. It’s the only way.”) All the defeats, historical and present, notched on a long pole. Coiled omissions that, when uncoiled, yield thread enough to embroider a shroud for the male and his categorical greatness.

  “The truth,” said Siggie, “is that we’re through. Completely washed up and useless. We men just don’t want to admit it. From the standpoint of history, the one thing men were good for, we’ve failed. Or politically speaking, all we are these days is custodians of bankruptcy, trying to postpone the crisis and prevent the worst. The atomic deterrent. And what about the Wall? It stinks. Everything stinks!”

  And Frankie’s analysis—“Since the end of the Stone Age, when the future started with copper, bronze, and iron, we men have done nothing but build shit!”—rose up into the air like skywriting. “Failures! We’re failures!” Even Maxie confessed that she’d come to the end of her masculine rope. “Sometimes I wonder if it was right to take full responsibility for everything, for every little problem. The strain has been too great. Down through the years. On every man jack of us. Why shouldn’t the women, once in a while? They’ll see what it is to have to take the rap for everything. Anyway, I’m sick of it. No more ideas. I could use a rest. I wouldn’t mind being dependent for five or six centuries, as long as I’m taken care of. Has its points, playing the little woman and nothing else. Nothing to do but flicker my eyelashes and hold out my cunt. Get a kid now and then. Look forward to Mother’s Day. Read trashy novels and run the dishwasher when I’m in the mood. Wouldn’t that be a ball!”

  “All right, Maxie,” said Billy. “You can start right in. Complaining won’t get us anywhere. The dishes are still lying around unwashed. OK, get going. With sand and lake water. Ugh, they’re all full of ants. Never mind, I’ll give you a hand. I’ll dry.” Billy had even (with tender loving care) put a checked kitchen towel into the food basket.

  But Maxie wasn’t in the mood for anything. And certainly not for dishwashing. Or not yet. Not in this century. “Leave the ants be. They’ll do it. They’ve cleaned bigger dishes than these. Besides, I’ve got to think. Well, about this and that and the meaning of it all.”

  But when Billy insisted on the dishwashing and said, “You can think later, my son,” Frankie awoke from well-deep melancholy and said with a certainty grounded in equal depths, “What do you mean, ‘my son’? If any of us is Maxie’s father, it’s me. And to make myself perfectly clear, let me add: my son does not wash dishes. And certainly not on Father’s Day.”

  “Exactly,” said Maxie to Billy. “My daddy’s name is Frankie, and you’re just a femme. So get going! Wash up the shit yourself. And don’t bother us.”

  “But,” said Billy, again on the verge of tears, “you can’t push me around all the time and treat me like a maid. I cook and clean and slave. But why only me? I’m not your dishrag. I demand equal rights. I have my pride, too.”

  Here Siggie broke in. “Like women. Fighting just like women. I thought we’d left all that behind us. It’s either all four of us or none. I say, let’s celebrate Father’s Day. In peace. Get me?”

  “Exactly,” said Frankie sternly to Maxie. “Hear that, my son?”

  “But then you have no right to treat me like a femme,” cried Billy, sobbing.

  “But that’s what you are. A femme and a weeping willow,” cried Maxie. “Sob sob! Drip drip!”

  “You’re hopeless,” said Siggie, giving Maxie a swift one-two in the face. Whereupon Frankie bellowed, “Nobody clouts my son but me, nobody!” and kicked Siggie in the shins. Whereupon Maxie—while Siggie was aiming a straight right at Frankie—spat in Billy’s tear-stained face. Whereupon Billy dug both hands into Maxie’s crew cut. And already the melee was exactly the same as long years ago when, after the Saxons capitulated at Pirna, the spoils were being divided and Frankie fought with Siggie over a box of sweets in which the farm cook Amanda Woyke was later to keep her correspondence with Count Rumford—the nut. (And on another historic occasion—at the very start of the migrations—there had been another argument over nothing, until only fists …)

  From a certain distance—a stone’s throw—the students in full regalia were watching. And two black-leathered scouts on motorcycles were again within earshot. Maxie’s nose was genuinely bloody. Siggie gave Frankie a shiner. Frankie twisted Siggie’s arm out of joint. But it was Billy who took the most punishment, for when Siggie, Frankie, and Maxie had made up and were wiping one another’s noses, putting the arm back in joint, and cooling the shiner, the butterball was still weeping for all she was worth, and the news was carried around the lake by the two motorcycle scouts. (As the police reported the next day, harmless roughhouses but also serious fights were taking place in other spots, wherever Father’s Day was being celebrated: a hundred and twelve calls went out to police cars. Property was damaged. Eighty-seven injuries were enumerated, among them nineteen serious cases and one death… .)

  Oh, ye warriors for the cause. Ye dreamers, dreaming of the great day. Ye heroes always ready to antedate your death. Ye battlers for justice. Ye victors over life. Attackers and defenders. Ye death-despising men.

  And then a great weariness descended on the warriors. And elsewhere as well, the ten, the hundred thousand men thought they’d take a little nap because they’d pretty well knocked themselves out. Frankie was snoring first. Then, lying on her belly, all four limbs outstretched, Siggie fell asleep. But when Billy couldn’t stop sobbing, Maxie sat down beside her and said: “All right, butterball, just go to sleep. We mussed you up pretty bad, didn’t we? Why did you start in with that stupid dishwashing business? You should have brought paper plates. But really, there’s nothing to cry about. Oh my, oh my. Still a few tears. Just go to sleep. Or say: They can kiss my … Or think of something pleasant. Or I’ll tell you a story to put you to sleep. A story about prehistoric times when all the women had three tits. Or something else. The story of the Flounder, for instance …

  “There was once a butterball. Her name was—hey, what was her name?—Ilsebill. She had a man, and his name was Max. She sat home all the time, painting her nails with green polish. He always went fishing on weekends, off the harbor mole. And while Max fished and fished, his butterball wife would paint her fingernails green, and then she’d lie all alone in her pisspot, wishing this, that, and some other guy into her bed.

  “So one afternoon when Max was fishing off the mole, a Flounder bit. That’s a flatfish. His popeyes are out of line with his blubbery mouth. He happens in a fairy tale, so naturally he could talk, and he said to Max, ‘Set me free and you can make a wish.’

  “So Max took the Flounder off the hook, threw him back into the sea with a splash, and said: ‘Oh, Flounder. My Ilsebill is just a cuddly little wife; all she wants to do is kiss and cuddle, fuck and be fucked, by this one and that one and that one and this one. With me she’s never satisfied. She always wants to be banged by some guy that’s not me. She thinks my stinkhorn stinks. What should I do, oh, what should I do?’

  “So what kind of a guy does she want to do it with?’ asked the Flounder, giving him a crooked look from the water.

  “‘Well, with a fire chief in uniform, for instance,’ said the fisherman, looking out over the smooth sea, ’cause he was fishing in the Baltic.

  “‘You’re a fire chief already, with braid and buttons,’ said the Flounder and dove under.

  “So Max in uniform climbed into bed with his Ilsebill and fucked her so hard that his buttons popped. And he kept it up until Ilsebill had enough of the fire chief and her legs went stiff and she started to fidget and moan, ‘Oh, if only I could have a judge in there.’

  “So then Max called the Flounder out of the slightly ruffled sea, and the Flounder turned Max into a judge in robes and horn-rimmed glasses and a black barret. And when Ilsebill was fed up with h
is stinkhorn and wanted an extra-neurotic anarchist between the sheets, the Flounder put Max the Terrorist into her bed with stocking mask, ticking bomb, and all. By that time the Baltic was making little short-winded waves.

  “That was a big success for a whole week, because Ilsebill found this character ‘terribly interesting.’ But when she finally realized that even anarchists have only two balls, she said: ‘What’s so remarkable about him, I’d like to know. Right in the middle he starts thinking about something else and shoots his mouth off about politics. What I want now is a stinking-rich bank president, just to tide me over while I’m shaking off the habit.’

  “So with the wind blowing at gale force five-to-six, Max called the Flounder, and the Flounder made him president of the Bundesbank, and he pulled up at Ilsebill’s in a silver-blue Mercedes. This bank president’s hair was graying all over, even around his cock. So when Ilsebill, in her cuddle-some way, had finished off capitalism, she wanted, after only a brief interlude, to be screwed by a beer-assed trade-union functionary and then—by this time squalls were making the Baltic dangerous—at last, at long last, by a wiry movie star, and what’s more she wanted the cameras shooting and bright lights.

  “When he heard that—the wind was blowing at gale force ten—the Flounder cried, ‘Looks to me like your Ilsebill will never get her hole full. It’s always morel More and more!’ All the same, though without much enthusiasm, he turned the trade-union boss into a regular Belmondo, who, while the camera hummed, leaped (from the wardrobe) into our Ilsebill’s bed, where he immediately performed terrific disrobe-bite-fuck scenes with fade-ins of similar scenes from other films.

  “But when Ilsebill had milked him so dry he was really comical, she wanted still more and cried out, ‘Now I want an orchestra conductor with his baton in there!’ And she trumpeted the destiny motif.

  “So, leaning against the hurricane, Max called the Flounder, who heaved a sigh but turned him one-two-three into a top-flight maestro who could conduct anything under the sun without a score. But when, after three encores, Ilsebill had finished him off, too, our butterball wept several big tears and moaned, ‘Always interpreters. Never an original creator. Everything second hand. Now I want ole Beethoven to fiddle me front and back.’

  “But when the exhausted Max reported to the Flounder, the flatfish cried from out of his unleashed element, ‘Enough is enough. Now she’s going too far. Hands off our classics! From now on and forevermore, like it or not, she’ll have to make do with her Max. Every Saturday after fishing.’

  “Then and there the storm stopped. In half a sec the sea lay smooth and calm. And big feather-bed clouds went sailing across the sky.

  “So Ilsebill had to content herself with Max. From then on she lived entirely on memories. But they were pleasant… .”

  That was the story Maxie told Billy, who under his words fell asleep. Her tears had left a little salt train behind them. Frankie was still snoring like a Canadian logger. Fallen—a fallen angel—Siggie lay prone. Maxie cuddled up to the luscious butterball and, just before dropping off to sleep, decided, “I’m going to make her a baby, make her a baby, make her a baby… .”

  On the sand hill between Prussian pines, two black-leather boys sat astride their motorcycles, looking gravely down at the peaceful scene.

  What thumps in deep sleep. Dreams in the dragnet. Everything is surreal and all action is delayed. Only recently I dreamed I was a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who outside the main portal, just under the towers of Cologne Cathedral, in the afternoon rush hour, gives birth to a little girl—my Ilsebill—who is also pregnant—and right after me gives birth (a difficult breech presentation) to a little boy, who, however, has the head of a Flounder, crooked-mouthed, exophthalmic, and slant-eyed. People with shopping bags approach on High Street and from the railroad station, form a circle around our double birth, and cry: A miracle! A Catholic miracle! Whereupon my daughter’s Flounder-headed son speaks from out of me to the people. He explains the meaning of life, the world political situation, the fluctuations in the prices of staple foods, and the need for tax reform. “In short,” he says, “we are living at the expense of …”

  Frankie woke up; it was Maxie’s cry—“I will beget a son!”—that had shaken first Frankie and an instant later Siggie out of their Father’s Day naps; for Siggie and Frankie, like Maxie, had dreamed the great, the unmistakable dream of procreation, which crowds out all subplots and holds the stage alone, which thumps more deeply than anyone can imagine, and whose abysmally stupid power erects itself where nature planned nothing.

  But oblivious of their constitution as were all three in their dreams, it was only from Maxie that the outcry for a son to be begotten emerged from sleep into the afternoon light. As Frankie and Siggie awoke, they cried out in their procreative frenzy, “Yes! Yes!,” while Maxie woke himself up with his strident trumpet blast. Yet Billy, the cuddly-soft angel, continued to slumber unsuspecting, though all three, Frankie the wagoner, Siggie the hero, and Maxie the steel spring, wanted to be fathers by her: she was the nurturing soil. Her ringlet-shrouded cunt was to be thrice entered, her flesh overshadowed. It was the butterball they had in view. It was in Billy they wanted to invest their capital. To multiply in her. Upon her body was founded threefold hope for a son: yes yes yes.

  Maxie had been first to cry out, and of course wanted to be first. And while the two belated yes-criers were still arguing with Maxie about who should have priority in the great procreative act (and while in every forest and on every lake roundabout Berlin men were winding up their naps and waking from deep-thumping dreams of procreation), Billy went on sleeping like an angel and dreaming on feather-bed clouds of a volunteer fire chief with a conductor’s baton, of a black-robed judge with a terrorist inside him, of Beethoven making a flying leap into her bed, of more and more quickly going and coming gentlemen visitors, of the very latest attractions, of wishes that all came true.

  Frankie and Siggie let Maxie have the first thrust. “Give the kid a chance. He’s got to sow his wild oats.”

  While the two fathers, waiting their turn, cast their shadows, the young would-be father—“Take it easy, my son,” Frankie admonished—peeled the jeans and panties off Billy’s deeply sleeping flesh, so diffusing a pentecostal fragrance.

  Oh, stupid omission of nature! When the jeans of the first procreation-frenzied father were dropped and nothing made manifest, Maxie was obliged to gird herself with plastic. Oh yes, everything was within reach. Vaseline and all. That’s what distinguishes man (or woman) from the beasts. For everything that’s lacking under the sun we find a substitute. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

  Billy lay on her camel’s-hair blanket ringed around by bushes, and breathed in dream rhythm. None of the bespectacled or unbespectacled fraternity brothers saw a thing. They were much too drooping-drunk in their regalia to take an interest. The sole witnesses were the black-leather boys on their motorcycles. Looking down from the sand hill, they saw will and faith enact a first procreation inside of Billy.

  How tenderly the young stallion did it. How easily nature lets itself be fooled. What vast possibilities an open-air theater offers. You improvise a little and imagine the rest. True, our existence is full of holes, but with wonder-working ideas you can plug them. By force of faith and without batting an eyelash, you can give reality to what has none. For if a wafer can be the flesh and a swig of undistinguished wine the blood of our Lord Jesus, then an artfully conceived stopper (much more nobly shaped than the usual stinkhorn) can bring salvation or at least a bit of redemption. Ah, ye rams bulls stallions, how stupid nature has made you! Ye drakes and cocks, what one-tracked minds you have. Ah, ye natural fathers! What, when you shoot your jism, do you know of that surreal act of procreation that requires only the barest intimation of nature?

  After Maxie had proved herself in the abstract, it was Siggie’s turn. And Billy still clung to her dream. Looking down from the sand hill, the black-leather boys continued to etch o
n their minds what they saw: this act of unprecedented, monumental swinishness. This artificial fuck. This insult to all Mr. Cleans on this Father’s Day of days; for when Siggie invaded the sleeping Billy, both boys took alarm for the chrome-pure innocence of their motorcycles and covered the twice three headlights of the 500-cc machines with their leather jackets. Similarly shamed, the crows on the nearest pine tree moved to the next to nearest. Such doings were bad enough unseen.

  So neither the crows nor the motorcycles saw Frankie drop his trousers and gird himself with the imposing plastic organ. But this time the sacrament didn’t work; no sooner was it introduced than Billy woke up. Gone was her dream, and the reality was Frankie. She tried to shake him off. But he went on bucking. Billy didn’t want him. “No! No!” she screamed. Siggie and Maxie had to hold her left and right and crucify her a bit. Because to stop in the middle wouldn’t have been fair to Frankie—the old wagoner.

  “Shut up!” cried Maxie. “It won’t be long now!” Siggie assured her. And after a few more thrusts, beneath which Billy whimpered softly, Frankie felt he’d begotten the super-son. He went limp for a moment and then, getting down off Billy, said, “That does it. What’s all the noise about? That little fuck sure gives me a lift.”

  Naturally Billy cried after what they’d done to her. She wept to herself, and she didn’t want any tears wiped away by Maxie. “Vile,” she said. “You’re vile. My God, how vile you are.”

  Sobbing, she pulled on her panties and jeans and zipped the zipper. The crows came back. The two boys on the sand hill unveiled the headlights of their motorcycles and were all in leather again. An evening breeze blew up from the lake. Now there were plenty of gnats.