The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  What is history? No one knows exactly when our common cabbage (Brassica oleracea), as important an innovation as buckwheat, millet, potatoes, rutabaga, was first planted on a large scale; for as far back as Mestwina’s time the Pomorshians gathered the seeds of the early, wild varieties. Undoubtedly the Ems Dispatch set a good deal in motion, but the sugar beet far more. If Prince Hamlet (as ghost) had invited Swantopolk and Fortinbras, the Kashubians and the Norwegians, to a meal of flatulent pork and cabbage, history would have taken an entirely different course. I said as much to Jan. But when, in the following year, shortly before Christmas, a rise in the prices of staple foods was announced in Poland, when all along the Baltic coast the workers went on strike, there was plenty of pork and cabbage at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard, yet history did not take a different course, but the usual bad one.

  They shot Jan in the belly. On December 18, 1970, they shot Jan in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. The police of the People’s Republic of Poland shot, along with other workers, the naval construction engineer, employee of the publicity department, trade-union and Communist League member Jan Ludkowski, aged forty-three, in his belly, then full of the pork and carawayed cabbage that had been dished out to upward of two thousand striking workers in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. Just in time, just before the shipyard was cordoned off by the police, Maria Kuczorra, who was in charge of provisioning the shipyard canteen, had managed to divert to the shipyard a truckload of cabbage intended for the army. Deep-frozen pork ribs were already on hand. And there has never been any shortage of caraway seed in Poland. He died instantly.

  With Jan you could sit and talk. About mouth-blown glasses. About poems. Even about trees. We talked about Gryphius and Opitz, just as they may have talked about heaven knows what. About the burden of an evil day. How things were bad and sometimes got a little better. About iambic hexameter and internal rhymes. About politics, too, in the wider and narrower sense. Once we drove into the hills of Kashubia in Jan’s old Skoda and sat down beside a water hole. Crayfish skittered away and hid under the rocks. A brimstone butterfly. Larks over the fields. It was so still that Jan was frightened after he said, “I’ve given up hope.” And once we went down to the beach, looking for amber. We found a few crumbs. Sometimes Maria was with us. It was nice when she disturbed us. Of course we each saw Maria differently. I saw her more distinctly. The three of us went to the movies. I held Maria’s other hand. In the film, Polish cavalry rode to their death against tanks. One horse was called Lotna. Maria cried. Afterward we went to the Rathauskeller. There Maria laughed again. She was pregnant when Jan was shot in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. And once, when I had told him about the Flounder—that was in March, and the sea was whipping up foam—Jan said softly, “I know him. I know him well… .” And Jan also knew the story about Ilsebill.

  Ah, Flounder! Where have you swum off to? It’s so still, and nothing is decided. What’s to become of us? We’re worn out, our quarrel has dozed off, it’s only talking in its sleep. Little words hang on. Apples of discord roll across the table. You have. You are. I want. I will. Our child will. Your daughter already has. What I’m entitled to. What I haven’t got. My needs. Your interests. The second residence. The additional insurance. Travel folders. Wish for this. Wish for that. Go ahead, it’s all right with me. It’s perfectly all right with me. But it’s expensive. Expensive and nothing else. So beat it. So why don’t you beat it.

  Ah, Flounder! Your story has a dismal ending.

  Three months after the birth of our daughter, when she had begun to smile—“Look, she’s smiling!”—and the sweet peas on the fence were still in bloom and the swallows were flying high and the summer lingering on and Ilsebill’s belly was whole again and everything had been paid for (and nothing more had been heard of the Flounder), I said to my Ilsebill, who was slender and again full of unrest: “Pork and cabbage! That’s something you can’t understand. Just plain pork and cabbage. In his bellyful of pork and cabbage. I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to go back there again. That’s where I came from. That’s where it all began. That’s where my umbilical cord was cut. We’re shooting a film there. No. No actors or actresses. Just a documentary for TV. About the reconstruction. How the Poles have gone about it. All the streets and churches. All the Gothic claptrap. More authentic than before. And how much it cost. What do you mean, pleasure trip! Of course I want to see her. Naturally. Why not, we’re related… .”

  After saying that (and still more) to Ilsebill, who wanted to go somewhere entirely different (Lesser Antilles), I took an Interflight plane from East Berlin across Kashubia to Gdańsk, where the Third Program television team was already inspecting shooting sites and storing up cutting copy, had already been to see the municipal conservator, had had a little trouble with customs (about their equipment), and were waiting for me with an old Pharus map of the Hanseatic Free City of Danzig.

  The Charter City was now called Glowne Miasto, the Long Market Dlugi Targ, Brotbänkengasse Chlebnicka, and Jopengasse, its extension, Piwna. We shot on Hawkers’ Street (Straganiarska) and in the ruins of Saint John’s. From Warehouse Island (Spichlerze) we shot the reconstructed line of narrow-chested houses and brick-red gates along the Mottlau (Motlawa). We shot up or down Long Street (Dluga), according to the position of the sun. In the Charter City Rathaus we shot Anton Möller’s painting The Tribute Money. Pan Chomicz, the conservator, recited his explanations, which disregarded costs. Suddenly the current went off. While we were waiting for the house electrician, Prince Philip of England paid a semiofficial visit to the Rathaus. And other incidents. And constant sushine. Perfect shooting weather. Tourists. And sometimes when we stopped to rest, I sat down on the perron of the Gothic, gabled Writer’s Club building on Frauengasse (now called Mariacka), because I had often sat there with Jan, talking of this and that; after a while Maria Kuczorra came by with her plastic shopping bag.

  Of course she’s more beautiful than ever. But she doesn’t laugh any more. And right after her daughters were born, she cut off her corkscrew curls. She still works hard at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. She’s saving up for a car. She has sold Jan’s old Skoda.

  With short-cropped curls, in sweater and jeans, Maria came by as I was sitting on the Frauengasse perron, drinking my gritty coffee, and (inwardly rich in figures) waiting for Agnes Kurbiella or fearing Dorothea Swarze, who at this time of day (vespers) often had her visions at Saint Mary’s.

  I called her—“Marysia!”—as Jan would have called her. She didn’t want to join me for coffee; she wanted to get away, to go somewhere else. I paid and gathered up my papers. Notes on Opitz. What Hegge brought from Wittenberg. Extracts from the Klug Hymnal: “Oh, God in heaven, now look down… .” Extracts from the regulations of the Scania mariners’ guild. The names of Napoleonic generals at the time when the Republic of Danzig was being besieged by the Russians and Prussians …

  We made our way between perrons to Our Lady’s Gate and the Mottlau. Frauengasse is a street that takes a lifetime to walk down. I’d have liked to buy Maria an amber necklace in one of the many shops on the perrons. She said she didn’t wear jewelry any more. We went to an old barge tied up near the Long Bridge (Dlugie Pobrzeże) that operated as a snack bar and, standing at narrow little tables, ate fried codfish from paper plates. I asked to know more of Maria’s daughters than just their names. The girls, she told me, were staying with Jan’s mother. She had pictures on her. When she asked the name of my daughter, I lied and said Agnes. I had no pictures on me. Maria went to get paper napkins. There’d been a dollop of ketchup with the codfish. The Mottlau smelled stronger than the fried fish. Not a word about Jan. But when we had left and were arranging to meet the next day, Maria said suddenly, “He came from Warsaw. His name is Kociolek. He gave the order. So then they fired. He’s out of the country now. In Belgium. In charge of the embassy there.”

  At last it was all confirmed. Fairy tales only stop for a time, or they start up again after the end. The truth is
told, in a different way each time.

  Next day we shot Saint Bridget’s, the Radaune, a muddy little river, the Big Mill, and the pinnacles sitting on blocks and waiting to be mounted on Saint Catherine’s. For forty seconds I spoke sentences to end the film with.

  In the late afternoon I called for Maria at the shipyard gate. In her plastic bag she had a dinner pail full of pork and cabbage. It was still warm, she said. She had also brought spoons. They rattled. The square outside the shipyard showed no sign of anything. In passing, Maria pointed to an undistinguished part of the asphalt roadway: “That’s where he lay, over there.”

  We took the streetcar to Heubude, a fishing village now called Stogi that is still a popular bathing beach, equipped with bathhouses. We rode along the Outer City Ditch, across the Old Mottlau, Warehouse Island, the New Mottlau, through the Lower City, turned off to the left after Island Gate, crossed the Dead Vistula, and didn’t say one word until we got to Heubude.

  Of course that sentence isn’t true. Heubude was the last stop. We walked through the shore woods on sandy paths. It was one of those early-September days when the light becomes ambiguous. We walked side by side, then in single file, first Maria, then me. From then on, her back: unfriendly, round.

  Once out of the woods, Maria took her shoes off. I took mine off, too, and my socks. That was something I knew—walking barefoot through beach grass in the dunes. We heard faint waves lapping against the beach. To the west, you could see the installations of the new oil port. On the last dune, which sloped gently down to the shore, Maria stood still. The beach was deserted except for a few figures receding in the distance. Maria let herself slip down into a hollow and took off her jeans and panties. I dropped my trousers. She helped me until my member stood erect. I don’t know how long I took, or whether she finished. She didn’t want any kissing, just the one thing, quickly. As soon as I came, she tipped me out and pulled on her panties and jeans. The distant figures on the beach had receded still farther.

  After that we took the tin spoons and ate the lukewarm pork and cabbage out of the dinner pail. Maria chattered about her daughters and about the car she’d made a down payment on, a Fiat. The pork and cabbage reminded me. When the dinner pail was empty, Maria jumped up and ran across the beach to the sea. I stayed behind and saw her running: her back again.

  The sea lay smooth, licking the beach. Maria went in up to her knees in her jeans. After standing there a while, she shouted a Kashubian word three times and held out her arms like a bowl. And then the Flounder, the flat, age-old, dark, wrinkled, pebbly-skinned Flounder, no, my Flounder no longer, her Flounder, leaped as though brand-new out of the sea and into her arms.

  I heard them talking. I heard them both talking. They talked a long time, she questioning with strident emphasis, he fatherly and reassuring. Maria laughed. I understood nothing. Time and time again the Flounder. I could guess at those categorical finalities. She who never laughed was laughing, laughing up to her knees in water. How deserted the beach was. How far away I was sitting. Good that she was able to laugh again. About what? About whom? I sat beside the empty dinner pail. Fallen out of history. With an aftertaste of pork and cabbage.

  It was starting to get dark when Maria finished talking with the Flounder. And when she had given him back to the sea, the evening breeze ruffled the Baltic. She stood for a while, showing me her back. Then slowly she came to meet her footprints. But it wasn’t Maria who came back. It must be Dorothea, I thought with alarm. As step by step she grew larger, I began to hope for Agnes. That’s not Sophie’s walk. Is Billy, my poor Sibylle, coming back?

  Ilsebill came. She overlooked me, overstepped me. Already she had passed me by. I ran after her.

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  VINTAGE

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  Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © 1997 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied

  Translation copyright © 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc

  Günter Grass has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in 1978 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

  Minerva edition 1997

  Published by Vintage 1999

  Originally published in German under the title Der Butt

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library