Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"So Max in uniform climbed into bed with his Ilsebill and fucked her so hard that his buttons popped. And he kept it up until Ilsebill had enough of the fire chief and her legs went stiff and she started to fidget and moan, 'Oh, if only I could have a judge in there.'

"So then Max called the Flounder out of the slightly

ruffled sea, and the Flounder turned Max into a judge in robes and horn-rimmed glasses and a black barret. And when Ilsebill was fed up with his stinkhorn and wanted an extra-neurotic anarchist between the sheets, the Flounder put Max the Terrorist into her bed with stocking mask, ticking bomb, and all. By that time the Baltic was making little short-winded waves.

"That was a big success for a whole week, because Ilsebill found this character 'terribly interesting.' But when she finally realized that even anarchists have only two balls, she said: 'What's so remarkable about him, I'd like to know. Right in the middle he starts thinking about something else and shoots his mouth off about politics. What I want now is a stinking-rich bank president, just to tide me over while I'm shaking off the habit.'

"So with the wind blowing at gale force five-to-six, Max called the Flounder, and the Flounder made him president of the Bundesbank, and he pulled up at Ilsebill's in a silver-blue Mercedes. This bank president's hair was graying all over, even around his cock. So when Ilsebill, in her cuddle-some way, had finished off capitalism, she wanted, after only a brief interlude, to be screwed by a beer-assed trade-union functionary and then — by this time squalls were making the Baltic dangerous — at last, at long last, by a wiry movie star, and what's more she wanted the cameras shooting and bright lights.

"When he heard that — the wind was blowing at gale force ten — the Flounder cried, 'Looks to me like your Ilsebill will never get her hole full. It's always more! More and more!' All the same, though without much enthusiasm, he turned the trade-union boss into a regular Belmondo, who, while the camera hummed, leaped (from the wardrobe) into our Ilsebill's bed, where he immediately performed terrific disrobe-bite-fuck scenes with fade-ins of similar scenes from other films.

"But when Ilsebill had milked him so dry he was really comical, she wanted still more and cried out, 'Now I want an orchestra conductor with his baton in there!' And she trumpeted the destiny motif.

"So, leaning against the hurricane, Max called the Flounder, who heaved a sigh but turned him one-two-three

into a top-flight maestro who could conduct anything under the sun without a score. But when, after three encores, Use-bill had finished him off, too, our butterball wept several big tears and moaned, 'Always interpreters. Never an original creator. Everything second hand. Now I want ole Beethoven to fiddle me front and back.'

"But when the exhausted Max reported to the Flounder, the flatfish cried from out of his unleashed element, 'Enough is enough. Now she's going too far. Hands off our classics! From now on and forevermore, like it or not, she'll have to make do with her Max. Every Saturday after fishing.'

"Then and there the storm stopped. In half a sec the sea lay smooth and calm. And big feather-bed clouds went sailing across the sky.

"So Ilsebill had to content herself with Max. From then on she lived entirely on memories. But they were pleasant. . "

That was the story Maxie told Billy, who under his words fell asleep. Her tears had left a little salt train behind them. Frankie was still snoring like a Canadian logger. Fallen — a fallen angel — Siggie lay prone. Maxie cuddled up to the luscious butterball and, just before dropping off to sleep, decided, "I'm going to make her a baby, make her a baby, make her a baby. . "

On the sand hill between Prussian pines, two black-leather boys sat astride their motorcycles, looking gravely down at the peaceful scene.

What thumps in deep sleep. Dreams in the dragnet. Everything is surreal and all action is delayed. Only recently I dreamed I was a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who outside the main portal, just under the towers of Cologne Cathedral, in the afternoon rush hour, gives birth to a little girl — my Ilsebill — who is also pregnant — and right after me gives birth (a difficult breech presentation) to a little boy, who, however, has the head of a Flounder, crooked-mouthed, exophthalmic, and slant-eyed. People with shopping bags approach on High Street and from the railroad station, form a circle around our double birth, and cry: A miracle! A Catholic miracle! Whereupon my daughter's Flounder-headed son speaks from out of me to the people. He explains

the meaning of life, the world political situation, the fluctuations in the prices of staple foods, and the need for tax reform. "In short," he says, "we are living at the expense of. ."

Frankie woke up; it was Maxie's cry—"I will beget a son!" — that had shaken first Frankie and an instant later Siggie out of their Father's Day naps; for Siggie and Frankie, like Maxie, had dreamed the great, the unmistakable dream of procreation, which crowds out all subplots and holds the stage alone, which thumps more deeply than anyone can imagine, and whose abysmally stupid power erects itself where nature planned nothing.

But oblivious of their constitution as were all three in their dreams, it was only from Maxie that the outcry for a son to be begotten emerged from sleep into the afternoon light. As Frankie and Siggie awoke, they cried out in their procreative frenzy, "Yes! Yes!" while Maxie woke himself up with his strident trumpet blast. Yet Billy, the cuddly-soft angel, continued to slumber unsuspecting, though all three, Frankie the wagoner, Siggie the hero, and Maxie the steel spring, wanted to be fathers by her: she was the nurturing soil. Her ringlet-shrouded cunt was to be thrice entered, her flesh overshadowed. It was the butterball they had in view. It was in Billy they wanted to invest their capital. To multiply in her. Upon her body was founded threefold hope for a son: yes yes yes.

Maxie had been first to cry out, and of course wanted to be first. And while the two belated yes-criers were still arguing with Maxie about who should have priority in the great procreative act (and while in every forest and on every lake roundabout Berlin men were winding up their naps and waking from deep-thumping dreams of procreation), Billy went on sleeping like an angel and dreaming on feather-bed clouds of a volunteer fire chief with a conductor's baton, of a black-robed judge with a terrorist inside him, of Beethoven making a flying leap into her bed, of more and more quickly going and coming gentlemen visitors, of the very latest attractions, of wishes that all came true.

Frankie and Siggie let Maxie have the first thrust. "Give the kid a chance. He's got to sow his wild oats."

While the two fathers, waiting their turn, cast their shadows, the young would-be father—"Take it easy, my son," Frankie admonished — peeled the jeans and panties off Billy's deeply sleeping flesh, so diffusing a pentecostal fragrance.

Oh, stupid omission of nature! When the jeans of the first procreation-frenzied father were dropped and nothing made manifest, Maxie was obliged to gird herself with plastic. Oh yes, everything was within reach. Vaseline and all. That's what distinguishes man (or woman) from the beasts. For everything that's lacking under the sun we find a substitute. Where there's a will there's a way.

Billy lay on her camel's-hair blanket ringed around by bushes, and breathed in dream rhythm. None of the bespectacled or unbespectacled fraternity brothers saw a thing. They were much too drooping-drunk in their regalia to take an interest. The sole witnesses were the black-leather boys on their motorcycles. Looking down from the sand hill, they saw will and faith enact a first procreation inside of Billy.