Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Lud knew all that. He was always present as a sculptor, or simply as the man carrying a bull calf. The neolithic Lud and his hand-sized fertility idols. Those big Pomorshian mother goddesses, hewn from glacial boulders, that were dug up by Polish archaeologists near Oxhoft are all the work of his hands. When Lud became Christian at an early date (converted by Saint Augustine), he never portrayed the suffering of Christ on the cross, but always the triune principle.

And when the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting visited him on his building site (next to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul), where he had carved a terrifying wooden Madonna after a likeness of my Dorothea, Lud cooked sheep's kidneys in their envelopes of fat over a bed of coals.

Afterward, with tallow-coated tongues, we talked about everything and nothing. He was dissatisfied. At odds with the times. He gnashed his teeth. He could easily, as sculptor Schrieber did later, have felled one or more of these shits with his famous edgewise chop. When shortly thereafter the guilds rose up against the patricians, Ludwig Skriever the wood carver was with them. First it was about beer from Wismar, then about the rights of the guilds. Naturally the uprising was crushed. Lud escaped and was outlawed. I didn't see him again until two centuries later, when they started the big clean-up of the churches.

Though a coppersmith by trade, Lud, who now called himself Ladewik, got bored with art. It wasn't for Calvin, but entirely to suit himself that he became an iconoclast, one of Hegge's crew. With his own hands he smashed a copper baptismal font that he had (allegedly) fashioned in the dimensions of Mother Rusch and elaborately enchased. And then he lost interest again, became executioner in the Stock-turm, and was obliged to behead me, his friend.

What was Lud against? He was against curlicues and filigree, against colorful donors' altars, against pomp and circumstance, against all images, against the word, against himself. With a heavy hammer, with well-aimed edgewise chop, with the executioner's sword. That was Lud: violent. Slash and thrust. Primordial phonemes in his roar. Couldn't help crushing the Devil in every petty Nazi.

But after Ensign Axel Ludstrom came to the Hela Peninsula with other cavalrymen of the Oxenstierna regiment and assaulted the still-childlike Agnes, she long remembered his voice. It went through and through her. It was arch-angelic, no longer earthly. For when, steeped in all the horrors of war, Colonel Ludstrom, along with Thorstenson's cavalry, wrought Swedish-style havoc in Saxony, he helped out by singing the tenor part—"Naked came I out from my mother's womb" — when, on February 4, 1636, a Requiem Mass was sung for Count Heinrich von Reuss; the long-

drawn-out war had left Court Kapellmeister Schiitz few musicians or singers.

As a Swede, Lud was a handsome man. His gentle earnestness. His cool zeal. His sternness, his anger. But when we met again at the start of the war in the next century, Lud had come down in the world. Now he was known as Lud-richkait (His Slovenliness). Everybody laughed at him. Except me. We always had a supply of brandy. War makes for comradeship. Through thick and thin. For seven years. We were at Leuthen and Hochkirch together. Toward the end, he lost a leg at Burkersdorf. But he always hobbled back to Zuckau, where the good Amanda always had Glumse with potatoes in their jackets and linseed oil to spare for us veterans.

It may have been Lud who as a Bavarian captain under Napoleon's Governor Rapp was downright heroic when, during the siege of Danzig, the Cossacks caught Sophie Rot-zoll foraging, and with her in tow he hacked his way through. I didn't know Fahrenholz. (I was at Graudenz under fortress arrest.) But beyond a doubt my good old Lud was the revolutionary socialist shipyard worker who proclaimed the strike at Klawitter Shipyard and the Germania Bread Factory, in the timber port, and at the Kafemann Print Shop. Ludwig Skrover and Otto Stubbe were friends. Many a time, the two of them, unbeknownst to Lena, cooked a rabbit over the fire in the Saspe woods. Later the strike fund was robbed. After receiving an expulsion order, Skrover, with family, bag, and baggage, took a ship to New York. No letter came, only a postcard. He is thought to have been active as an anarchist in Chicago.

Up and down. Time and again. Lud was never humbled. In time of need, Lud would turn up. When there was a tricky job to be done, Lud knew how. Without Lud nothing worked. Even when in his present time-phase he became a teacher at an art school and began where he had left off in the Middle Ages (as an iconoclast), Lud was a center. People met at Lud's. Getting drunk with Lud. The legend of Saint Lud. For though he was sometimes harsh and sometimes brutal, he was always pious, especially when drunk. No one could stare at an empty glass like him, at the same time singing (with what was left of his archangelic voice) some-

thing Catholic and looking back through the bottom of his glass to where, as a Bohemian prelate and (soon after Adalbert's death) bishop of Pomerania, he ordered the forced baptism of all Pomorshians. As a self-portrait in bronze suggests, he saw himself as a prince of the Church or an abbot or a martyr: unapproachable, withdrawn, legendary, and soon to be canonized.

Describe him? Lud looked like a man buffeting a strong wind. Bent grimly forward when entering a closed room, such as his studio full of pupils. Prominent forehead and cheekbones, but all finely modeled. Hair light-colored and soft. Eyes red, bceause the wind was always contrary. Delicate mouth and nostrils. As chaste as his pencil sketches.

I miss Lud. How I miss Lud! And even when we quarreled. . Even when with our fists. . Lud and I — a strenuous friendship. .

As during my friendship with Ludek, when Awa and Ewa swapped us back and forth. And when Ludger took me with him on the migration, his horse kicked me. The prelate Ludewig tolerated my little three-breasted Madonnas. I don't know if Dorothea sat for Skriever the woodcarver; some of my daughters were by him. Before executing me, Ladewik praised my sturdy neck. When the plague snatched me away from this vale of tears, Colonel Ludstrom, in the name of the Swedish crown (and with the help of Agnes the kitchenmaid) carefully sorted my papers. With Ludrich-kait I drank away my money (and my soul). I'm not sure Sophie thanked the Bavarian captain with only a kiss. When the strike fund was robbed, I'd have been glad to go fifty-fifty with Ludwig Skrover. It's only about Frankie the old wagoner that I choose to say nothing. And when I went to Berlin with Lud. .

That leaves only Jan. Yes, Jan Ludkowski, with whom I was friends, who like me had a way with words, Jan, who belonged to Maria, is dead as Lud. Jan was different. So was Lud. With Jan you could talk over bread, cheese, nuts, and wine. With Lud, too. We sang until late into the night and were desperate. We clung fast to our dream. Men are like that; they can stay friends. Ilsebill can't understand it.

Ilsebill's out. I am not here.

Actually I'd been expecting Agnes. Whatever else is going on — the clatter of plates-belongs to Amanda: her daily dishwashing.

Lena has been here.

Maybe we just forgot

to appoint an exact time.

I met Sophie while the bells

of all the churches were ringing for vespers.

We kissed like at the movies.

Cold stand the leftovers, chicken and so on.

A sentence, begun, hangs fire.

Even the strangest things don't smell new any more.

In the wardrobe a dress is missing, the one with big flowers,

intended for feast days with Dorothea,

who always went in rags.

As long as there was music,

we, together, could hear the same thing differently.

Or love, a snapshot: Billy and I