Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Weak, the way I stood beside her or made faces in her shadow, the way, still fastened to her umbilical cord, I kept escaping, weak though rebelling against her flesh, rich in excuses when I was caught, open-handed at her expense, always in her debt, always confident that she'd see me through when I hit rock bottom, hit rock bottom again, weak the way she wanted me and made me, the way she found me right for her love, though she didn't rule, but, strong as she was, bent down over the weak man, anticipating my failings and enveloping me in loving care. She led me where she wanted, she helped me into my trousers and out of my shoes, she always knew where I'd passed out, what crowd I'd got stuck in again; and as for my dreary love affairs — even the neighborhood women were mad about me — she just stirred them into her soup, mumbling the while, "Oh well, oh well. I know you don't mean no harm. You've promised so often. Sure, it would be nice. But go ahead, don't mind me. I wonder. ."

It was only when she caught me in the kitchen necking with Lisbeth, her eldest daughter (the one by Stobbe), who was barely fifteen, that Lena, who had just come in with the dustcloth, flew off the handle, the same as today Ilsebill gets mad over the telephone when (exhausted by her) I've cleared out for a while: "Just don't do it again. You've really got to stop this childishness. Running off without a word. When will you ever grow up? What? A social worker from Wedding. An associate judge at the Tribunal? Erika? Don't make me laugh. Just for the weekend. A little trip to Paris! You ought to be ashamed. That's right. This minute. No, take

the next plane. I'll meet you in Hamburg." And when I went off to Berlin with a waitress from the Hotel Kaiserhof and we ran out of money, Lena wrote in her fine Sunday handwriting: "Dear Otto, I am sending you your return ticket. I had better not send any cash money. Just come home and get some sleep. Then we will talk it over. I will make you soup with dumplings, that has always helped. And don't do anything foolish. You know what I mean. Take the 12:03. I will meet you at the station."

So she kept after me, and I clung to her. The fortitude with which she endured my infidelities and brutalities had its equal only in the weakness that obliged me to prove myself by beating her. I wasn't sure of myself as I am now, when my Ilsebill or Sieglinde Huntscha can try all day to provoke me with women's lib slogans and I still don't take a poke at them. I prefer to roll myself a cigarette and say, "No, Siggie. It's no go. I am not going to hit you. You'd like me to, wouldn't you? You think we'd have more fun in bed afterward. So you can call me a 'typical male.' Try it on the Flounder some time. He dotes on silly slogans."

Over the intercom system of the Women's Tribunal— which for the past week had been giving its attention to the case of Lena Stubbe, to her special achievement, the "Proletarian Cook Book," and the brutality of her two husbands — the Flounder said: "Esteemed High Court, here's the way it was. Lena ruled. Her husbands were nothing but jumping jacks. Both with their everlasting love affairs. Dragging their incapacity from bed to bed. And by contrast Lena's inexhaustible love, which resembled the never-empty soup pot in her kitchen-living room, because Lena never let the beef broth she made from cheap bones run out or get cold, for she was always making provision for even poorer days. While her Friedrich Otto and Otto Friedrich spent and squandered until nothing was left, empty husks both of them, flabbycocks, barely good enough to shout hurrah. No use my giving them any advice.

"The most I could do was turn contemporary history to Lena's advantage by making use of first one war, then the other. When the French war started up in 1870, Friedrich Otto Stobbe, a strapping young fellow with a twirly mus-

tache, ran down to the Baltic Sea at East Neufahr and shouted: 'War! Hey, Flounder, heard the news? War! At last things are moving! No more woolen socks home-fried potatoes sewing box apron strings. The First and Second Body Hussars have moved out. So have the West Prussian Field Artillery. Only the Fifth Grenadiers are still here, on garrison duty. Flounder, what should I do? Go on being an anchor maker and keeping my Lena warm? That can't be the whole story. That's not enough to fill a life. I'm still

young.'

"So I advised him to go with the Fifth Grenadiers, whereupon he promptly-after two or three acts of bravery-died a soldier's death at Mars-la-Tour.

"In 1914, when the First World War, that masterpiece of European manhood, began simultaneously on several fronts, Otto Friedrich Stubbe, who at fifty-four thought of himself as a still-vigorous man, came running to the harbor mole in Neufahrwasser and shouted over the Baltic Sea: 'Flounder! The Russians are coming! They've invaded Ma-suria. Murdering and burning. The fatherland is in danger. Every manly hand is needed. What use am I here? A foreman in the anchor shop. They're recruiting for the Land-sturm. We socialists have no right to stand aside. At a time like this the kaiser knows no parties. Should I, Flounder? Should I go and fight the Russians?'

"And him, too, High Court, him, too, I encouraged. At Tannenberg, where German arms triumphed under Hin-denburg, he, quite logically, died for the fatherland. Two exemplary men.

"Ah, High Court, how sick I was of the male cause even then! How fed up with this incorrigible forward-mentality. What was I to do when every male folly was so quick to involve international complications. Participating more with negative than with positive advice, I soon became aware that the male principle was manifesting itself more and more incompetently in bed and more and more monstrously on the stage of history. And so, at the turn of the century, when women-Lady Pankhurst and her daughters-took to the streets for the first time, I was favorably disposed toward them and tried to make contact. Unsuccessfully, I regret to say. The suffragettes rebuffed me. My offer came too soon.

Time would be needed. Male madness hadn't yet reached its apogee. I could only look on as it rose to unprecedented heights. But it will not have escaped the High Court that I at least succeeded in liberating our Lena Stubbe from her increasingly useless husbands. After the heroic death of her second husband, she was an emancipated woman; in the war winter of 1917 Lena Stubbe spoke loudly, while ladling out cabbage soup at the Wallgasse soup kitchen, against the war credits, and was far to the left in all other questions as well."

Is that right, Flounder? Is that why you twice sent me to the firing line? Had I been written off so soon? Had you begun even then to change sides, to turn traitor?

When the Tribunal was adjourned — affidavits were needed concerning proletarian cookery in the nineteenth century — I went out (in a strictly private capacity) for a beer with Sieglinde Huntscha. Then she (as usual) led me up four flights to her attic apartment, where we first talked about the Tribunal in general and then picked Ms. Schon-herr and all the associate judges to pieces. When that was done, Siggie directed her attention to me. "You know what, you may not think so, but you've got a Stobbe or Stubbe inside you. You'd like to, but you don't dare. You know what I mean, slap batter punch. Poke me or your Ilsebill in the jaw. And say, wasn't the little Nottke girl looking kind of weepy yesterday? Your doing, I bet. Playing the he-man. Bim-bam. Keep women in their place. All right! Go ahead. I need it. I need it, I tell you. So let loose, and don't stand there like a hypocrite."

But I refused (on principle) to deliver blows. I never wanted to be Stobbe or Stubbe again. "Look here, Siggie. That's all over and done with. We can make love without it. You just want me to react typically again. But you don't need it. We don't need it."