Gunter Grass - The Flounder

After Helga Paasch (with Iron Age arguments) had uncovered this aspect of my existence, Griselde Dubertin — at variance with Witzlaff, who had said, "So what!" — disposed of me once and for all: "In any case, just about everything in his character can be laid to his extreme mother fixation. Just look at him. He's getting wrinkles, but he's still the same breast-fed baby."

Ulla Witzlaff, supported by Osslieb and Helga Paasch (and wasn't Ms. Schonherr also at the table?), pointed out that my undeniable talent necessitated a neurotic hang-up of this kind. Bettina von Carnow listed artists with similar complexes: "The great Leonardo was suckled by a goat!" Ruth Simoneit babbled, "Aren't we all sucking babes?" But Ilsebill and Sieglinde Huntscha cried, "He's still attached to his umbilical cord! It's got to be cut!"

And then this Griselde Dubertin, in whom I had foolishly looked for my Sophie, blabbed what I (like an idiot) had said to her in confidence: "Him? He'll never go to a psychiatrist. He told me so last week. He was foaming at the mouth: 'He'll never get me on his couch. Nobody but me is going to cash in on my mother complex! I'm going to put that in my will. I mean to die uncured. And on my tombstone they can write: Here lies So-and-so with his mother complex!' "

Everybody at the table laughed at me. Typical, said Use-

bill. Witzlaff smiled because she knew more. Dubertin said, "Why not, if that's what he wants." And Ms. Schonherr, who, I'm sure, was also enjoying my special jellied calf's head, spoke for the lot of them (I know, because Osslieb and Witzlaff nodded) when she said, "A common case of arrested development."

Then I spoke up. The Devil in the form of fly agaric must have got into me, for suddenly I broke the silence that had been imposed on me and said, more to Ms. Schonherr than to Griselde Dubertin, though I was thinking of Witzlaff, even if I looked my Ilsebill square in the eye (and under the table fished for Ruth Simoneit with my left foot, to which Osslieb responded): "Actually, dearest Ilsebill, Sophie Rot-zoll, to whom I am indebted for our jellied calf's head, never gave up. Year after year, whenever she could get permission, she went to Graudenz and pleaded with her Fritz to stick it out. She sent gingerbread and honey cake with love letters baked in. She sent petitions to Queen Luise. She pleaded on bended knee, she did everything in her power, until at last he was free. And then she cared for me and went mushrooming with me, as in our early youth, when I still had an idea. . "

I don't believe the far too many women at the table were listening. Still laughing at me—"There is something lovable about his childishness" — they confirmed one another in their opinions: He's always kidding himself; his dread of conflict keeps him from working out his conflicts; that's why his stomach is starting to rumble again; he's always making part payments, never the whole amount; now the poor fellow has again bitten off more than he can chew (Griselde); he can't bear to lose anything or any one of them (not even Ruth Simoneit), he wants to keep them all, even Helga Paasch, same as those glasses he collects; in short, he's impossible, a typical male.

Then, as sisterly as could be, they drank my health and, this time mentioning the cook by name, praised my jellied calf's head; it was really something special, they agreed.

By way of enriching the potato-fixated Amanda cult, Therese Osslieb promised to add jellied calf's head a la Sophie

to the menu of her restaurant. At that Ilsebill asked the assembled associate judges of the Women's Tribunal for the latest news of the Sophie Rotzoll case: "He only tells me the parts he figures in. Couldn't you give me a little inside dope? I'm so curious. Tell me, Griselde, will the Flounder get his comeuppance this time?"

Although she has children by her husband, from whom she lives separated by the distance between two different neighborhoods of the same city, and although she has had a succession of short-term affairs with other men, there is something virginal about her. That's why I felt called upon to look for Sophie in her, not the childlike Sophie (grave face under mushroom hat), but the slightly wrinkled kitchenmaid after her return to the parsonage. Sophie was then in her early thirties, unhinged by her experiences of the French period; there was often a look of dread in her eyes, as though she kept seeing horrible things, and in that she resembled Griselde Dubertin, pharmacist and associate judge of the Women's Tribunal, who had also been terrified (by some private experience), for which reason she often lost the thread and now fed Ilsebill's hunger for information with contradictory statements, which were interrupted by Helga Paasch and Ruth Simoneit.

She was talking about the poisonous sulfur tuft and the deadly amanita. On the one hand she firmly rejected political murder by toxins as a means of female emancipation; then, in the next breath, she recommended a politically effective mushroom dish as an instrument of feminine self-liberation. "But not in the hands of a bungler like Rotzoll," Sieglinde Huntscha carped. And Ruth Simoneit snarled, "I'm for firearms. Out in the open! Bang bang!"

When Paasch called Sophie a silly goose with nothing in her head but her Fritz, Griselde stared at me as though seeing me in the governor's uniform and cried, "Poison's the only way! If I had a Fritz in prison, I'd take up mushroom lore myself. But I wouldn't bungle!" And then she protested that despite this Sophie's patent servitude, her act had advanced the cause of freedom. "Why, even the Flounder doesn't deny that; in fact, he takes all the blame on himself. The rotter!"

To avoid worse disasters, he had caused the Jacobin Club on Beutlergasse to be raided. "The traitor!" And at his instigation, Pastor Blech had informed the town constables.

"There you have it," Paasch put in. "He hates childish playing at revolution."

Possibly Bettina von Carnow thought she was distributing good cheer when she said, "But after forty years of fidelity our dear Sophie got her Fritz, all the same."

Before Griselde could resort to violence, Witzlaff appeased the rising tumult. "Not a word against Sophie and Fritz. Think of those two old folks waddling out to gather mushrooms. What a touching pair they must have been!"

You kept tugging at my sleeve. But our time was past. True, the mushrooms seemed to be growing for us alone, but the idea, our idea, had gone by, or it had a different name; it no longer stood on one leg but was mounted — there was talk of the Weltgeist on horseback. We never met him in the woods. Only ourselves. That's why we gathered fly agaric. They're special. They make for images. They pay back time. Without removing the skin or stems, you cut them into slices and pound them into a powder that you stir into soups, cake dough, or meat jelly. Or you don't pound anything into a powder, but keep the tough, leathery, fingernail-sized slivers, take one from time to time in the morning or evening, and chew it until images come, until time pays itself back, until Sophie and I go gathering mushrooms again like children, go gathering mushrooms deep in the woods and get an idea.

Old Fraulein Rotzoll and I made a living from the mushrooms we gathered, dried, pounded to powder, and pickled in vinegar. Not far from Hawkers' Gate, where Sophie had sold flounders as a child, we were authorized to keep a stand twice a week. Strings of greenies and dried morels found purchasers all year round. From nettle cloth left by Sophie's grandmother, I made little sacks (I had learned to sew in Graudenz) in which to sell dried ceps and orange agaric. And from early summer until November, we picked baskets full of table and soup mushrooms and sold them. We did all right financially, for we had mushrooms to offer at all times, either fresh or dried. Our clientele — students at the gymnasium, lieutenants