Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"Those are Billy's," cried Frankie, Siggie, or Maxie. (Off to one side lay her blue-and-white-striped sweater and her bra.)

Alone and forsaken, she had gone off through the trees, deeper and deeper into the woods. Because at the lake, in the clearings, outside the refreshment stands, men shouted abuse: "Look at the chick!" "What's she doing here on Father's Day!" "I guess she's got the itch."

Just to be alone. And undo it all. She cocooned herself in loneliness. It, too, can warm you and keep you company. She felt (so she mumbled to herself) as if the scales had fallen from her eyes. "It took those bastards to buck some sense into me."

What a new feeling: to be a woman. Even if she was hopelessly alone. But her mind was made up. No going back. Burn bridges. Form forward-pointing sentences: "I come of a family of fugitives. All I went through even as a child. I know what it is to make a fresh start. Through with that stuff, through with it for good. Start again from scratch. From where I left off. I won't leave Heidi with her grandparents any longer — I'll go and get her and give her a real home. A child needs a mother's warmth and affection. I've got plenty of that. Ridiculous. As if I couldn't afford a dishwasher of my own. What do I need her for? Stupid mistakes

we all have to get behind us. But now I'll… A woman and nothing but. I'll. ."

Through mixed forest and bushes, on sand roads and paths, over pine needles and moss, deeper and deeper into the woods, Billy carried her beautiful Father's Day illumination. Loudly she offered the weaker sex. Jubilantly she cried, "I'm a woman, a woman, a woman!" Triumphantly she flung out the bait: "A butterball, a butterball!"

And they bit. They hadn't lost sight of her for a moment. Inveterate trackers. Advancing from treetop to tree-top, the crows helped. And the seven black-leather boys ran her to earth. Came jogging along over roads and paths on their still-unlit motorcycles. The motors hummed rather good-naturedly. Just a game, after all. The real thing for a change, just to see what it was like. Suddenly flashing light from three times seven headlights, they drove Billy, the woman, the cuddly butterball, the by now pretty-well-frightened rabbit, ahead of them, this way and that way, into sheltered hollows, where only sandwich papers and beer bottles still bore witness to Father's Day.

Billy still protested: "Hey, kids. Stop the nonsense. Come on, we'll have a couple of drinks at the Roseneck or someplace. . " But already the circle had closed. Snap! went the trap. The old, familiar script. In this movie there was no escape. The end was set in advance.

"Clothes off!" said one, very softly. The motors had stopped humming. As under a shower, Billy stood plump and cute and awkward in the converging beams, her hair falling resplendent over her shoulders. She did as she was told but kept on her panties, shoes, and socks. That was as far as she would go. ("You don't seriously think. .")

The rabbit broke loose. "You guys must be nuts!" she screamed and ran in zigzags when seven motors resumed their good-natured hum. She ran into a thicket, curved around tree trunks, broke crackling through underbrush, ran and ran until at last she fell on a soft bed of pine needles, with all seven around her again. "Please, boys, please. ."

They said nothing at all, or only "Slut! We'll show you, you slut!" or "You're going to get fucked, you slut!" Already they had their leather trousers open. One after another, as though by command, had a hard-on. And they lined up for

Communion. And found the whole thing perfectly normal. And one after another shot their gook into her, until she was overflowing. And kicked her with their big boots before they and after they: "Take that, you slut!"

And one of them, when they had all finished, shoved a jagged pine cone into the wound. "All right, you superslut, now you can run. Go on, run."

But Billy couldn't wouldn't. Tears were all she had left. And a gaping emptiness that opened like a last wish: Oh. With their throttled-down motorcycles they nudged, pushed, bumped Billy—"Go on! Get moving!" — until first one, then another gave full throttle and ran over her legs and belly. Then, because all seven were doing the same thing, they did it over and over again. With dead-serious thoroughness.

That was how Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie found their Billy, mangled, mashed, no longer human, on a bed of pine needles off to one side of the thicket. Beside her, broken, her glasses. Not the least shred of beauty left. All life had gone out of her. The one thing to do — and Frankie did it — was say "Shit!" Maxie vomited against a tree. Frankie hammered herself with her fists: "God damn it!" So Siggie had to keep cool. "We'll have to leave her here. And phone on the way back. There's nothing we can do right now."

So they drove their three-wheeler for quick deliveries and short removals out of the thicket over sand tracks and roads, leaving the dead Billy in the woods. Sharing Clayallee with the returning Father's Day traffic, they drove to the Roseneck, where Siggie got out and went to the phone booth by the bus stop. Frankie stayed at the wheel, cleaning her pipe. Maxie was out of chewing gum. Siggie said into the phone: "You turn right from the Clayallee, that's it, then right again, then left and again left, then another right turn into the thicket. Take fifty steps, turn left, take a few steps more, and there you'll find a naked woman. Dead. No, it's the truth. Right. You said it."

After that, life went on.

Capable of friendship — that's the way we men are. From Ludek to Ludger and the prelate Ludewik, from Ludwig Skriever the woodcarver to Ladewik the executioner and the Swede Axel Ludstrom, from my old crony Ludrichkait and Bavarian Captain Fahrenholz to Ludwik Skrover, who went to America, and Frankie Ludkowiak, the old wagoner— we stuck together through thick and thin. Friends! Blood brothers! Oh, yes, and Jan. Jan Ludkowski. They shot him in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage. I miss Lud. How I miss Lud!

My friend Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber died recently. Whether he was coaxing form from inert plaster or laying fillets of smoked fish on grilled rounds of celery root and topping the whole with scrambled eggs (for himself and me), or sitting silent behind his glass and dipping his little finger for a drop to cool his forehead with, or relating his war experiences, as unchanging and familiar as a litany ("On the

Arctic front, when the Ivans came creeping up in white parkas. ."), or gnashing his teeth in anger, or caressing an uncarved stone — Lud was always and unmistakably the same: man, boulder, bull, activist, angel fallen in sin.

And so it had always been. When he fashioned the hand ax into a symbol. When he was a prelate and came with the Bohemian Adalbert to bring us heathen the cross. Later, when he carved the (High Gothic) altar for the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, and, just for the fun of it, a cherry-wood Madonna who looked like my wife, Dorothea, and stared at a distant point with her inlaid amber eyes.

Usually he died after me. But now, while I'm telling the tale of "The Fisherman and His Wife" in an entirely different version and my Ilsebill is nearing her confinement, he has died on me. And so I must sing a memorial for Lud, my friend in every time-phase. And then Ludek the fisherman, whom the neighboring horde looked upon as their artist, sighed when he saw my ceramic knickknacks. And then Comrade Ludwig Skrover, who lived next door to us on Brabank and later, under the pressure of the Socialist Laws, had to emigrate to America, dragged driftwood out of the Dead Vistula with a long hook. And then Colonel Axel Ludstrom, who had served on Hela as an ensign with the Oxenstierna regiment, squeezed a lemon over the white-eyed codfish that Agnes, my kitchenmaid, served up to us. And then it so happened that Ladewik the executioner was obliged to sever the head of his friend the blacksmith Peter Rusch, whose last supper of tripe he had shared the night before. And then with one blow Frankie Ludkowiak hammered the nail into the table. And after scowling at his students' clay figures, the sculptor Schrieber, who died recently, spoke of himself and the Hittites, of Mycenae and of Minoan serenity, and with cool rigor of form.