Gunter Grass - The Flounder

aboard the white steamship, which was named Margarete

and sent up black smoke between the beach resorts.

Of course I'm behindhand.

But Maria wouldn't wait.

Now the Flounder tells her what time it is.

I'm related to Maria. Her father is my mother's cousin. As early as Amanda Woyke's day, there were Kuczorras in Kokoschken, Ramkau, and Zuckau. And one of her grand-

children, Lovise Pipka (Sophie's cousin), married a Kut-schorra, who came from Viereck (today Firoga). So Maria's descent can be traced back to Lena Stubbe, whose maiden name was Pipka, and to Amanda Woyke, while the fact that my maternal grandmother was by birth a Kuczorra (though her mother started life as a Bach) indicates that (like Maria) I, too, am related to Amanda and Lena. Since there are several Kurbiellas or Korbiellas in Maria's maternal line, since my mother had an uncle Korbiella (who emigrated to America), and since poor Sibylle Miehlau remembered a great-aunt Korbiella (the sister of her maternal grandmother) who seems to have sold darning cotton, buttons, and Giiter-man's sewing silk in Karthaus, I could easily conjure up a kinship with Agnes, the diet-fare cook, especially as there is reason to believe that Agnes's mother, who like her father was killed by the Swedes on the Hela Peninsula, was by birth a Woyke or a Gnoyke. (It also seems worth mentioning that Katharina, the younger daughter of the abbess Rusch, married a butcher by the name of Kurbjuhn, and that the mother of Dorothea Swarze, commonly known as Dorothea of Montau, was by birth a Woikat.)

After all, we Kashubians are all related by way of a country lane or two. There was only the Goldkrug Forest near Bissau, the raspberry bushes outside of Zuckau, the road to Karthaus, the Vistula River, the rivulet Radaune, and four, five centuries between us: the time before and after the potato, history that passed over us. Maria knew nothing of all that.

She's blond. Before she learned to be a salesgirl at the cooperative store, her curls fell as they pleased. Then her girl friend went to hairdressing school. Except for one of my uncle's brothers, who moved to the West in '45, the Ku-czorras live either in Gdynia or in Wrzeszcz, a suburb of Danzig that used to be called Langfuhr. They live with Maria's two younger sisters in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Ulica Lelewela, which used to be called Labesweg. (They still own a one-and-a-half-acre plot of potato and garden land in Kokoschken.)

In 1958, when I obtained a visa for the first time and went back with out-of-focus memories, Maria was nine years old and laughed when she saw me in my Western clothes.

And so she remained: blond, giggly, wild about dancing, quick at mental arithmetic, an efficient salesgirl, rather boisterous in the company of boys, never knowing more than what was going on at the moment. I was the uncle from the West, who turned up every few years, brought records (the Beatles), and could speak neither Polish nor Kashubian, and concerning whom she formed a picture both lovely and mistaken.

But I also formed a picture of Maria. (That's what comes of forgetting your language.) What happened then was worse than anything I had imagined. I should have made up a different story for Maria. A happy story with a little sorrow around the edges and a nice wedding present. But the times were against it. Maria did not remain a salesgirl at the cooperative. A job became available elsewhere. She was bent on getting ahead. Yet Maria wasn't cut out to be a cook. (She could have sold costume jewelry at a souvenir shop on Frauengasse, and worn it; it would have gone well with her hair.)

Pomorshian currency. The small change of the coast. Long beaches. Rich. The dowry of wandering dunes. What the Baltic Sea paid back. The Phoenicians came sailing first from Sidon, then from Carthage by way of Cornwall, where they bartered purple cloth for tin, fist-sized ingots of which they traded to us for seed (barley and spelt). And when Mestwina was beheaded, the amber of her necklace scattered far into the back country. And when Maria gave me a piece of amber as big as a walnut, I recognized it, the old story began all over again, I saw Maria in a new light, a different Maria became possible.

At that time she was still learning at the cooperative. She had found the amber while digging potatoes in the bit of land they had left in Kokoschken. A fine piece: from a crusty yellow edge of shell, the transparent drop shapes itself into a dark globe enveloping a fly.

You shouldn't have given me that amber. Now I'm going to tell the whole story. How you became more real in a different way. How you stopped laughing. How you turned to stone.

Starting in the summer of 1969, Maria Kuczorra, who had first been a salesgirl at the cooperative store and then a cashier, worked as a cook at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. There she made a hundred and twelve zlotys more than at the cooperative. Since she had no cooking experience, she only helped out at the kettles, but because of her knowledge of prices and quality she was charged with making wholesale purchases and inventorying the canned goods.

Her efficiency and cheerful disposition made for quick success. In her dealings with the bureaucracy, her experience at the cooperative helped her to obtain special authorizations. It was she, for instance, who acquired the big freezer. (And through black-market connections, she also traded spare tractor parts for fresh vegetables.) The menu at the shipyard canteen became more varied. But when Maria began to do some of her purchasing via the free port, and bananas and oranges suddenly made their appearance in the canteen, she found herself at odds with her friend Jan, a basically timid young man, despite his bold ideas, who worked in the publicity department of the shipyard, writing prospectuses for the export trade, and had helped Maria to obtain her job at the canteen.

Jan had studied shipbuilding, but his passion was early Pomorshian history. At night he wrote poetry. He had published in the Baltic Almanac an article on the love poetry of Wiclaw of Riigen. Along with some favorable criticism, his epic cycle on Prince Mestwin's daughter Damroka, first abbess of Zuckau Convent, had, because of its' numerous erotic metaphors, provoked a protest on the part of the Ka-shubian Cultural Association. Holding to the controversial thesis that the general who defeated and destroyed the Kashubian prince Swantopolk was Fortinbras, prince of Norway, who in the last scene of Hamlet claims to have just come from victories in Poland, Jan was projecting a sequel to Shakespeare's tragedy. But he never had time. By day he wrote publicity for the Polish shipbuilding industry, which was translated into English, Swedish, and German and thought to be effective; in the evening Maria would be waiting for him to take her dancing or to the movies.

He had met her at the cooperative. They quarreled from

the start. He had brought back a can of putrid peas and held it under the nose of cashier Kuczorra. When they met in the evening in the now public gardens of Oliva Monastery, Jan told Maria that with her corkscrew curls she reminded him of the Kashubian princess Damroka, a sister of his hero Swantopolk and cousin to Wiclaw of Riigen. This Damroka (Jan explained) had founded the Zuckau Convent on the banks of the Radaune because of the wild raspberries that grew there. And he quoted from his long poem. Jan's historical comparisons appealed to Maria. She let him call her Damroka. They were soon in love.

But what about me? I'm not Jan. I'm Maria's second cousin. But she calls me Uncle. She gave me a piece of amber, that's all. With an insect enclosure. I'm the enclosure. In case of doubt, I, late-enamored and kept in reserve. Beside me: I. Outside me: I. Foisted on me like a hoax, the obedient but grumbling I. Always escaping, fleeing the times, devious. Where a slat in history's fence is missing. Listen to me, Maria. It was when Mestwina wore a necklace of amber pierced by me. Sambor, Mestwin, Swantopolk, and Princess Damroka are descended from her daughters and daughters' daughters. No, it was I who caught the talking Flounder. I in the guildhall when the guilds rebelled. I in the Stockturm, spooning up my last tripe. And when the plague greeted me in passing. And when the potato triumphed over millet. The great cook who stirs all things stirred me at cross-purposes with time. How she (to this day) clarifies me with the skimmer, how fairly she dishes me out. How tender I am to her taste, once marinated. Lovage and caraway seed, marjoram and dill. Seasoned am I. I, Maria, am Jan, as per your recipe.