Gunter Grass - The Flounder

their fragrance, which mingled with the resinous Grune-wald air and the musty smell of the lake.

Billy was as busy as Cleaver the Cook in the Swedish camp, as busy as if she'd been called upon to tend twelve spitted oxen at once. "Cooking over an open fire is man's business. You can't tell me different. It's a primordial instinct. Nature wanted it that way."

After turning the steaks and halved kidneys, Billy thrust the strips of green pepper between the pieces of meat, which, though shrunken, retained their juice. Only the fluid from the kidneys was dripping into the fire. When Maxie, supported by Frankie, gave a repeat performance of the hunger song—"One two three!" — Billy shouted, "Just a minute, you pigs. It's almost ready."

Four women eating. But if you saw them chewing their oversized bites, their teeth not nibblingly concealed but brazenly bared, you'd have said it was four men eating.

"Hm," said Frankie, chewing. "That was before the Battle of Wittstock. A bouncing lass; she was wearing women's clothes when we caught her, but there was a young boy underneath. We'd have to put him to the question. But already the bloody battle was. ."

"They couldn't keep watch over me in the confusion," said Maxie, chewing, "so in the first alarm I escaped up a tree. And there I read line after line of a book I'd swiped from the provost. And that book told me in pictures and in words exactly what was happening on the battlefield."

"That's how it is with reality," said the chewing Siggie from between terrifying incisors. "Whatever is, has already been written. And us sitting here chewing steak, that, too, has happened before; it happened right after the battle, after we'd driven the imperial troops across the Dosse and into the swamps. Am I right, Billy?"

"Right," said Billy, chewing. "That's when I was the cook in the Scottish Lesley regiment. And we didn't have steaks; we had spitted oxen. And when the slashing and gouging were over, our Maxie, whom we'd caught somewhere in women's clothes, climbed down from the tree with her book in which everything had been written beforehand, and we gave the kid a chunk of beef because he was so skinny, but he was lively and talked in phrases plucked from

the lips of the people — a little scamp from the baggage train, a simple fool, as it says in the book. Always putting on an act. Gets ideas while standing on his head. Why, the kid has ears like funnels."

I've told you how it was. Maxie drove me out. That skinny kid, inappropriately christened with the gentle name of Susanne. The skinny kid whom nothing, no pork cracklings, no boiled beef, no roast goose, no greasy, hot mutton could fatten. Nothing could upholster her collarbone, cushion her spinal column. Now that Maxie was moving away from ecstatic interpretive dancing and concentrating on classical ballet drill, we called her body emaciated and her soul bulimic.

That's why Sibylle drove me, who had the gall to be a man, out of our shared apartment. No, it was Maxie who drove me out, took my place, took my desk and my well-worn chair. As for my bed — the bars of which had been affixed as though for all time to the frame of Sibylle's bed-she sawed it off, snip-snap, with a metal saw.

I was present. Ostentatiously amputated. Severed from board and bed. My bed was thrust aside, reviled, cursed, and spat upon. Pillow, feather bed, sheets, bolster, springs, and mattress were handed, along with a tip, to the garbage man: "Throw the bastard out! What do we need him for? Anything he can do I can do with my little finger."

Only then did Maxie send for some metal workers, who from the skeleton of my orphaned bed fashioned a long, round bar, the ends of which were bent into handles and sunk in the masonry. The remains of my bed had become Maxie's ballet barre. Converted to an ascetic function. Divested of all memory of Sibylle as we lay (when times were good) in our double bed and were one flesh. Nothing left but severe discipline. Classical beauty. Sweat-raising exercise. Maxie wanted to go on the stage and do solo or at least group dancing. Susanne Maxen, known as Maxie, was thought to be talented.

And Billy, too (my Sibylle), thought herself destined, if not to play other roles, then at least to portray herself. Often after meals, and so likewise when Father's Day was being celebrated all around them, and the steaks, still red

within and salted only before serving, as well as the juicy sheep kidneys, had been done away with — there was unbuffered black bread with the meat and sheep's-milk cheese afterward — Billy said, "My whole life is a movie."

For which reason the Grunewald Father's Day, which Billy and Frankie, Siggie and Maxie celebrated to the gruesome end in the midst of a hundred thousand men, forming on the lake shore a group among other groups, must now be viewed from varying perspectives: prone in the trampled grass, from the branches of climbable Grunewald pine trees, from bushes, from the unruffled lake. And let there also be cameramen with the other ninety thousand and more men in Spandau, Britz, and Tegel Forest, at beer tables and around other lakes, and keep at it, keep at it. Everywhere camouflaged microphones, lest any talk be lost. Now! Now! During the noonday break. .

After replete belching a few words are said. (We'll keep them in reserve and cut them in later on.) By the Grieb-nitzsee, a bank clerk in his mid-forties announces over a schnitzel that isn't there any more, "But life is like that." At a gathering of the Harmonia Choral Society under beech trees in Britz, a pensioned schoolteacher says to his fellow members after jellied pig's knuckle with cabbage and puree of peas, "Song is the only pleasure left." Immediately after the third Bockwurst on the banks of the Teltow Canal, a foreman bricklayer sums up the situation: "Now the world is OK again." And one of the black-leather boys who are keeping their motorcycles ready to take off — his name is Herby — says (after the bags of French fries have been emptied), "A day like this with no fucking is a total loss." While, almost simultaneously, Billy contributes her significant sentence: "My whole life is a movie."

After that, bemused by the buzzing midday stillness, they pursue their own thoughts. The hour of Pan. A few high-pitched gnats. Hats and caps put aside. Billy, Frankie, Siggie, Maxie lie, each by herself — Billy on a camel's-hair blanket — smoking, chewing blades of grass, with Maxie trying, as thousands are trying in Spandau and Tegel, to wear out a piece of chewing gum. The thoughts the four of them are pursuing this midday are thoughts of the kind that lead, in a classical Western, to conflict between heroes.

Maybe Siggie, maybe Frankie, anyway, one against

many. Maybe Billy, maybe Maxie: back to back they shoot their way out of the trap. Quadriune thoughts unite the four of them — the victorious four. They caress the loneliness that goes with superiority. They despise the crowd. Their indolent, self-assured gait. For in thoughts they're always quicker on the draw. They cross the dusty square. Their eyes narrow; the saloon empties at their approach. All four at the bar. That thirsty ride. Weighted down with the saddles of dead horses. The way they shoot the heels off the corrupt sheriff's boots. The way they shoot, period. In any position. Even funny ones. The way Siggie (after a long ride through the alkali desert) sits in the bathtub with soapsuds up to her neck, yet through the towel takes care of the lurking enemy bang bang.

And always there's a milk-faced boy who makes trouble, who's in the way, who stands dreamy-dopey in the field of fire and whom Billy has to rescue, though the Smith Brothers (Frankie and Siggie) have already tightened the noose around the trembling kid's (Maxie's) neck. But in thoughts and films that never tear, the rescued kid always turns into the scrawny, stubborn, and comically angular girl in pants. This comes out in thought and fact when the gunshot wound has to be cauterized, or the arrowhead extracted: small breasts under the gooseflesh. Our Maxie's name is Susanne. But Billy staunchly forgoes a fuck in the bushes. The leave-taking is gruffly affectionate, no more, a good-natured smack on the boy-in-girl's taut ass: "So long, Susie. Take care of yourself."