Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"Thou luminous shadow, we thank thee. . "

Since she had made the trip, Lena stayed on for another three days as the Losses' guest. But she saw the mountains only from a distance, in the foehn wind, from the shore of the Zurichsee. For Frieda Lewandowski, her neighbor on Brabank, she bought a cowbell. It was only on the last day that she grew sad and that everything seemed strange to her.

When Comrade Loss took her to the station, she gave her a round loaf of bread, a piece of Appenzeller cheese, and a small jug of light wine from the Herrliberg. In the express to Berlin she sat with strangers. But after a while she took her diary out of her carryall. She found her spectacles in a black silk bag, in with what money she had left, her passport, a few hair clips, and a tube of bicarbonate. She wrote down the recipes that Comrade Loss was accustomed to cook by, such as onion tart, deep-fried cheese balls, sliced liver with Roschti, and a soup made with browned flour. And so Lena

rode back to her Otto Friedrich, whom, when the war started taking its toll, she would soon survive.

Under potato peelings, in the flour bin, in among the bacon rinds that Amanda Woyke set aside for rubbing pans.

Any number of still lifes with spectacles: I could put Lena Stubbe's string-mended frames in front of the crooked nail and on top of the rope with a noose at the end.

While chopping onions and doing what all else, they didn't take off their specs. When picking over lentils, when my Ilsebill studs a leg of mutton with garlic, when sewing up the apple-stuffed Saint Martin's Day goose, over Lena Stubbe's spice box, in which marjoram was never lacking, when Sophie Rotzoll went gathering mushrooms.

Her lost specs would be found again in the flour bin, under potato peelings, and where all else: weeks later at the very bottom of the earthenware jar of goose fat, in the stuffed (also with prunes) beef heart that Margarete Rusch served up to the wicked Jeschke at Oliva Monastery; and the specs that Sophie lost while gathering mushrooms were found exactly a century later right beside the liver of a newly bought codfish when Lena Stubbe cut it open because it was Friday. How many pairs of specs did they wear, mislay, and sometimes find again? Thirteen. The last were broken on Father's Day 1962, when Sibylle Miehlau, Billy for short, and her glasses were run over by motorcycles.

Maria checks prices with the naked eye. Agnes, who could neither read nor write, didn't wear specs. After her immurement the Lenten cook Dorothea could have done with a pair of specs when scribbling her confessions of sins by the light of a tallow candle; her Dominican confessor had taught her High Gothic letters. The Flounder claims that Wigga and Mestwina were also nearsighted. But who — and not only because her image belongs to the Stone Age — can conceive of Awa in specs?

And so Sophie, who had once again mislaid her specs, sorted with clouded eyes the basket of mushrooms that had made its way to the city in spite of the siege, which had consequences, whereas Lena Stubbe, with no spectacles on her nose, cut her Otto down from the nail before it was too late.

They wiped their specs with woolen sleeves or whatever came to hand when their vision was obscured by cooking steam, grease spots, fog, or fly shit.

Mother Rusch, who had inherited her specs from the patrician Ferber, wiped them with the tail feathers of a duckling. Before addressing a fresh petition to the commandant of the Graudenz fortress, the elderly spinster Sophie Rotzoll took a hare's paw to clean her specs with. Billy borrowed my handkerchief. Amanda Woyke rubbed her misty lenses with a silk kerchief that Count Rumford had sent her from Munich, London, or Paris. And before sitting down at the writing desk in the parlor, Lena Stubbe, who like Amanda and Sophie had ruined her eyesight at an early age reading works of an educational, revolutionary, agitational, or strictly scientific character, wiped her specs with a red scarf that had once been worn by her dashing first husband.

Clever women, the whole lot of them, who inscribed their household accounts on slates and lined paper, in copybooks, or on slips cut out of blue sugar-bags, wrote letters, petitions, recipes, and careful footnotes. Before copying it out in her Sunday handwriting, Lena Stubbe wrote the first draft of her "Proletarian Cook Book" on the backs of old leaflets and strike proclamations.

They used their specs when immersed in the newspaper, in the almanac, in the Klug Hymnal, when searching children's scalps for lice — and where all else?

In the toilet, for inspecting their own feces, the diarrhea of their respective menfolk, and the children's little sausages; for reading aloud from the Bible, as Mother Rusch and Amanda Woyke did while lambs' tongues, tripe, pigs' feet foamed in their broth; for learning about me and my vicissitudes from the letters of their daughters and daughters' daughters — I wrote seldom, or only when in my flights I had once again got myself into trouble and debt.

To bone up on Bebel, Lena Stubbe put on her specs as she sat beside the bubbling kettles of the Ohra and Wall-

gasse soup kitchens or her own family pot. Here's how I see her: anxiously devoted to progress, which she viewed through nickel frames that kept slipping. But when dishing out soup-kitchen soups with her half-liter ladle, Lena took off her specs, and her light-blue eyes, rather watery in later life, peered into our future.

Some time or other, our Awa died. The story is that we ate her half raw and half cooked, because hunger drove us to it. Wigga died of blood poisoning. She who was always warning us against the Gothic fire eaters wounded herself with a rusty roasting spit, left behind by the Goths on the alluvial soil of the Vistula estuary.

Mestwina was first baptized by force, then beheaded, because she had killed Bishop Adalbert with a cast-iron spoon.

When Dorothea of Montau had herself immured in Marienwerder Cathedral, the space for the last brick was left open. To this gap in the masonry we owe closely scribbled papers, wildly ecstatic outpourings, sweet-Jesus rhymes, and coded messages in which, mingled with obscene prayers, shot through with screams for freedom, and connected by words of abject repentance, were inscribed recipes for the dishes that Dorothea wanted to be served to her in her cell, until the day when she ceased to accept food, ceased to evacuate even the scantiest waste, and lay stiff in her vestigial corporeity.

The ex-abbess Margarete Rusch choked on a fishbone on February 26, 1585, when King Stephen Batory of Poland concluded a peace treaty with the city of Danzig and celebrated the happy occasion over a fish dinner (pike) with the patricians.

When the poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, the merchant Nordermann, the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, and her somewhat crackbrained daughter, Ursula, were burned under the open sky in Moscow on October 4, 1689, the men as con-

spirators, the women as witches, Agnes, still in pursuit of a fish recipe (her pyre had already been kindled), was said to have quoted from the poems of Martin Opitz: "His dearest love am I for all eternity. For fish and pleasure he depends on none but me. Come, dearest, come, let us at table stay. In sumptuous repose and pass the time away."

And when Amanda Woyke expired peacefully in the arms of her enlightened pen pal, Count Rumford, she is believed to have beheld a vision of giant atomic-powered kitchens the world over and to have proclaimed the end of human hunger.

And Sophie Rotzoll, who lived so dangerously and kept death in the form of mushroom recipes in readiness for her enemies, died quite normally of old age in the fall of 1849. (Later on there was some argument as to whether her last words had been "Long live the Republic!" or "Venison in aspic!")