Gunter Grass - The Flounder

cans. Maxie went to Eutin and bought a book of instructions for keeping ocean fish in aquariums. Meanwhile Siggie, after jotting down all the particulars, went to the village post office and made phone calls to Berlin, Stockholm, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and New York. It cost her a pretty penny, even though for the most important conversation she had the main office call her back. Naturally women's libbers of all countries were delighted to hear about the talking Flounder and his phenomenal confession, for one thing because the misogynistic fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife" had parallels as far afield as Africa and India.

"Wanna make a bet?" said Siggie to Frankie. "They'll set up a tribunal, and what's more — count on me for that— they'll hold it in Berlin. This thing is meaningful!"

With her nose in her manual, Maxie declared, "It's a common flounder. Found in the Atlantic, the North Sea, and only rarely in the Baltic. Eats algae, insects, et cetera."

His upper lip had stopped bleeding. He lay flat on the bottom of the tub. Siggie kept a tape recorder in readiness. But the Flounder was silently resting.

What about you, Ilsebill? Would you have voted for the Tribunal, for a public accounting?

Ilsebill said, "Of course not, dearest. If you must know, I'd have let the Flounder go and wished for something sensational, like in the fairy tale: a completely automatic dishwasher, for instance, and much more; and more and more."

Careful, I say. Careful!

The weather is breaking up and our bit of reason down.

Even now this somehow feeling:

somehow funny, somehow spooky.

Words that behaved and carried meaning

have turned their coats.

Changing times. Itinerant prophets.

Someone somewhere claims to have seen signs in the sky, runelike, Cyrillic. Felt-tip pens — single or collective — cry out on the scribbled walls of subway stations: Believe me O believe!

Someone — who can also be a collective — has a will that no one has considered.

And those who fear him batten him with their fear. And those who have preserved their bit of reason turn down their lamps. Outbursts of cozy comfort. Group-dynamic attempts at contact. We huddle together: still with some intimation of one another.

Something, a force that has not yet been named

because no word is adequate, pushes, displaces.

Public opinion thinks it has

several times and pleasantly anticipated this slipping

(admittedly, we're slipping)

in dreams: going up! We're going up again.

But a child — children, too, can be part of a collective-cries out: I don't want to go down. I don't want to. But he must and everyone cajoles him: sensibly.

It was August when they fished him out of Liibeck Bay. He was flown to Berlin via British Airways. Early in September they rented an abandoned movie house in Steglitz, which had formerly been called the Stella and was later maliciously termed the Pisspot by the press. It took five weeks of wrangling to choose a judge and eight associate judges from among the seven (nine, after two splits) women's groups. The Tribunal met only in the afternoon and on occasional weekends, because the judges, all except the housewife Elisabeth Giillen, had jobs.

A prosecutor was quickly chosen. And since the accused waived his right to counsel of his choice, the court was unanimous in appointing a smartly dressed young person to defend him. Siggie, Frankie, and Maxie had fallen out in the course of factional squabbles, and the only one of them to take part in the trial was Sieglinde Huntscha, the fisherwoman.

The former movie house, with its burgundy-covered folding seats, had a capacity of 311. There was no balcony. All sorts of technical devices had to be built in, and no money was left for renovating the hall, which, thanks in part to the seaweed-green wallpaper, preserved something of its cozy, neighborhood-movie-house atmosphere.

Of course there was a certain amount of disorder at first, but honestly, Ilsebill, I have no intention of harping on trifles — we men aren't always so brilliantly organized, either. I'll come right to the point. In mid-October, shortly after we ate mutton with beans and pears, begot, and conceived, the bill of indictment was read; but please don't expect me to give you a formal record of the trial; in the first place I've had no legal training, and in the second place I was a party to the proceedings (despite my vacillations). Maybe I didn't make the headlines, but I was on trial along with the Flounder all the same.

There was once a Flounder. He was just like the one in the fairy tale. When one day some women who had caught him haled him before a tribunal, he resolved not to say a word, but only to lie flat, mute, much-wrinkled, and old as the hills in his zinc tub. But after a while his thunderous silence bored him, and he began to play with his pectoral fins. And when Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor, came straight to the point and asked him whether he had deliberately circulated the Low German fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife" as a means of minimizing the importance of the advisory activity that he had demonstrably been carrying on since the Neolithic era, by maliciously and tendentiously distorting the truth at the expense of the fisherman's wife Ilsebill, his crooked mouth couldn't help opening and pouring out speech.

The Flounder replied that he had only couched a centuries-long and hence complex historical development, which all in all, despite occasional abuses, had redounded to the

benefit of mankind, in simple words appropriate to the popular tradition; that the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge had taken down this same text, but also the history-charged original version, from the narrative of a little old woman. "Can I help it," cried the Flounder, "if the Grimm brothers, in an excess of fear, burned the painter's historically faithful record in the presence of the writers Arnim and Brentano? That's why their fairy tales are the only source of my legend. Even so the story can still be and still is quoted. Take, for instance, 'My wife — her name is Ilsebill — has got a will that's not my will.'"

But when the Flounder let his philological fancies run away with him and began to reel off Hessian, Flemish, Alsatian, and Silesian variants of the story—"and oh yes, I forgot to mention an extremely interesting Latvian version" — the prosecuter interrupted him. "Why, defendant Flounder, did you give the popular version of this tale such a misogynis-tic twist? Why did you permit this slander of the woman Ilsebill, which time and time again has provided the propagandists of the patriarchate with a talking point? One need only quote the defamatory jingle. Ever since it was first concocted, the cliche^ about the eternally discontented woman who keeps wanting more and more has been rammed down our throats. The relentless consumer. Just one more fur coat. Her craving for that allegedly noiseless dishwasher. The hard-as-nails career woman, lusting after higher and higher positions. The man-killing vamp. The poisoner. In books, films, plays, we have been treated to luxury dolls, who keep their diamonds cool in safe-deposit vaults while their poor husbands pour out their life blood and age before their time. Who, I ask, has cast us Ilsebills in all these roles?"

"High Female Courtl" cried the Flounder. "When during the last phase of the Neolithic a fisherman, comparable to the fisherman in the tale, caught me in an eel trap and gave me back my freedom, it seemed to me that the young man's magnanimity put me under obligation to help him with my advice. Lord, how stupid he was! Yes, there was something terrifying about the ignorance of Stone Age men. They seldom acted, and when they did, their motive was nothing better than vague feeling. Sniveling, garrulous creatures, in dread of the cold, they wanted above all to feel