Gunter Grass - The Flounder

But Frankie continued to despise all cookery as woman's work. "What delicious tidbit is Mommy going to make for us now? Tattooed bulls' balls? Little boys' peckers? Ah, what would we do without our mommy. We guys just stand around like dopes, talking about the nuclear deterrent and the grave political situation, but she takes care of us, she works and slaves without a question or thought for herself. Nothing's too good for us."

Maxie only said, "Don't mind her. You're OK, Billy. We appreciate you."

But that's something my Sibylle never knew. When I took up with her in May 1950, she had just come over from the freshly baked Democratic Republic, specifically from Hoyerswerder, where her parents, refugees from Danzig-West Prussia, had settled and whence they regularly sent their only child plum butter and crumb cake. In those days Billy was a curly-blond law student, voluptuously rounded, sometimes hard-working, sometimes moodily lazy, who had really wanted to study something entirely different, I don't remember what.

We considered ourselves engaged. And during the first four semesters she actually did things my way. Then she suddenly and deliberately turned vamp, and I was only allowed to fuck her before or after. Intermittent fits of weeping. That early imprinting. Five or seven Russians. In the cellar. On empty potato sacks. Made her want to give

up her studies. And do something entirely different, something normal, start a chicken farm or just be a housewife, have children (five or six) or emigrate to Australia and start from scratch.

While casually preparing for her exams, she drained and dropped at least a dozen men, including two or three exotic types. I stayed within reach and said my little piece: "Look here, what do you really want? Look here, can't you finally make up your mind? Look here, must you always go on wanting something different? Look here, how many wishes have you got left?"

So quick as a flash, because I thought it would help, I made her a child. But the kid was in the way and got turned over to its grandparents quick as a flash. Motherhood nauseated Sibylle. And her vamp phase was petering out. She lost weight, began to look like a skinny old maid. She wouldn't let me or anyone else near her. Just talked about existentialism, that kind of thing. And when she'd finished clerking and opened her own office in Schmargendorf, she started making friends with divorcees whose cases she had argued successfully in court; one of them was Frankie.

But once her decision—"I'm different and that's that" — was more or less definite, she let me in now and then. We got along much better than before. (You have to expect these contradictions.) Our daughter even got to visit the monkeys and seals with us once a month at the zoo: we looked (in photos) like real parents, a little family.

It wasn't until the summer of 1960—Sibylle had made a big thing of her thirtieth birthday-that I was definitely through. Maxie had come into the picture and refused to be satisfied with half the cake. ("You can go on being friends. But that's all.") At first I had thought or hoped that Maxie would be just another chick like the others. It's just an act, I thought. And Billy will gobble up this spindly-legged kid the same as she'd been gobbling up men, rare or well done. And for quite some time Billy did think she was wearing the pants. But meanwhile she was filling out and softening up; she'd gone crazy about keeping house, with a built-in kitchen and a dishwasher and fancy furniture from Knoll's. Her standard sentence (preceding a long speech about cookery) was "If I only had the cook book my great-grand-

mother wrote before the Nazis killed her in the concentration camp."

Oh well, she'd always liked to cook, and there was no change, either during her vamp phase or when she went different. (Her Rhenish sauerbraten, her Hungarian goulash, her saltimbocca, her coq au vin. .)

Anyway, it wasn't long before Maxie had the say. Maxie decided when and with whom they'd take vacations on Elba, Formentera, or this year on Gotland. Maxie decided which Godard film, what Beckett or Ionesco absolutely couldn't be missed. Maxie had the wall-to-wall carpeting ripped up. Maxie said, "The television set goes here." Maxie slept around. Maxie ran up debts, and Billy paid. And Maxie had said, "On Father's Day you'll kindly stay home."

What a scene. It took a two-hour crying jag, six broken champagne glasses, and a handkerchief chewed to pieces to bend Maxie's will. So when Siggie interceded with "And who'll do the cooking? Frankie, I suppose?" Maxie had said, "OK, let her come, just this once. But no scenes, see? None of your fuss and bother and bickering and wishing this and wishing that. I won't stand for it. I simply won't stand for it."

And when, all over Berlin, Father's Day began with a mass exodus, a painstaking search for suitable spots, and the ritual of fire making, Billy tried her level best not to behave like an offended crybaby or a moody femme. Taking care of the fire helped. And Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie were so Father's Day crazed and busy with themselves that Billy's state of cozy-warm inner conflict probably escaped them.

There was plenty to do. Like all the ten thousand, no, hundred thousand men on the lake shores, between the trees, outside refreshment stands, at scrubbed tables, Siggie (sprawled out), Frankie (standing), and Maxie (walking restlessly back and forth) were guzzling beer. The fifth and sixth bottles had already been sloshed down. When the pressure became overwhelming, the boyish Maxie did something terrific; instead of relieving her bladder in the usual squatting position, she unbuttoned the fly of her jeans, spread her legs, took out a pink pecker with a deftness suggesting long practice, brought it into a horizontal position,

and began, in time-honored male manner, to urinate against a pale mottled pine tree.

Evidently the appliance, made from some synthetic material, was efficiently fastened over the piss hole by a rubber suction cup, for Maxie pissed at length with deceptive verisimilitude (seen from a distance, of course) against the tree trunk. In so doing she looked past the tree and across the lake at the hordes of male Father's Day celebrants on the far shore. (If it had been winter, Maxie could easily have pissed a big M into the snow.)

Laughter and amazement. Frankie wanted a chance at the marvelous thing; she wanted to touch it, fasten it onto herself with the suction cup, and give it a try. "Boy oh boy! Where'd you get it? Denmark? Only nineteen marks eighty? I gotta have it. I gotta!"

Frankie stood like a man, her masculine gaze lost in hazy, faraway prairies. No more penis envy. Never again that humiliating female squat. Like thousands and thousands of men facing thousands and thousands of other pine trees, Frankie pissed erect, sending a gently slanting stream against upstanding Prussian trees. Yes sirree!

When it was Siggie's turn, she held a bottle of Schult-heiss to her lips up top while pissing down below — like a real man. Her Hell's Angel cap pushed back over the nape of her neck. "Father's Day! Father's Day!" she roared, and the stags of the neighboring male groups, among them fraternity students in full regalia, responded with rutting cries.

But when Billy left the fire and her growing bed of coals and said, "Me, too. Let me try it!" she got nothing but fatherly words. "You're going too far, child. Enough is enough. We can't just go on wishing all the time. Our little butterball promised to behave. How about something to eat?" Frankie bellowed, "I'm hungry!" And Maxie began to sing: "One two three! We are hungaree. . "

This left Billy, my poor insulted and so tragically imprinted Sibylle, no choice but to smooth out the accumulated coals with the poker, set the four-legged grate over them, dispose four enormous steaks previously rubbed with ground pepper, thyme, and oil, and six halved sheep kidneys into which she had pressed quartered cloves of garlic, close together on the grate, till they hissed, sizzled, and discharged