Gunter Grass - The Flounder

And when Maria Kuczorra had been purchasing fresh vegetables, canned goods, and (illegally, to be sure) bananas and oranges for the Lenin Shipyard canteen for a year, when asked by her boy friend, whom she still loved and who (evenings in the dark movie house, whispering in her ear while dancing) called her Damroka, when, finally, because Jan so desired, she stopped taking her curly hair to the hairdresser's, when autumn came and the newspapers were full

of treaties ready to be signed, when in Warsaw Gomulka and Brandt affixed their names for Poland and Germany, so — as people said — making history, when winter came and preparations for Christmas got under way, Maria, seeing there was too much talk about the priority of national tasks, said it was time to buy provisions in a hurry. The newspapers were stuffed with sublimities about the great historical hour. Not a word about consumer goods. That was a bad sign. "They're going to raise the prices," said Maria to Jan. Which is just what happened. By decree. Sugar, flour, meat, butter, and fish. On December 11. And they'd been planning to marry on the fourth Sunday of Advent.

There were good economic arguments for it. Everything can't be subsidized. Even a Communist government can't afford it. If the market doesn't regulate prices, government regulation comes too late. But when prices get out of hand, so do other things, and sometimes the whole shebang.

When the prices of staple goods were raised between thirty and fifty percent on Friday — they had thought it was clever to take account of the weekend — Jan said it was a historical fact that on several occasions the rise in the price of Scania herring and the importation of cheap beer from Wismar had united the quarreling guilds and incited them to rebel against the patricians. Then he speculated at length on the drop in the price of pepper during the Reformation and the simultaneous meat shortage in Central Europe, due to a falling off in the marketing of cattle.

Maria said, "Maybe you have to expect such things under capitalism, but they shouldn't happen in a Communist state. Why, we learned that in school. And if the union doesn't do anything, we'll take action without the union. And if the men have no spunk, the women will just have to wake them up." No, she was in no mood for the movies. He, Jan, should go and organize. She, Maria, would go and see the women at the cooperative and talk things over. She knew them. They knew all about prices, too. They'd smelled a rat long ago. And you could count on them.

And because all the women had steamed up their men (as Maria had steamed up Jan)—"And don't show your face in my kitchen until the prices are back down again!" — the

harbor and shipyard workers of the Baltic coast, of Gdansk and Gdynia, of Szczecin and Elblag went on strike the following day. The railroad workers and others, even the girls in the Baltic Chocolate Factory, joined in. Since the local trade-union leadership held aloof, strike committees formed spontaneously, and workers' councils were elected. They demanded not only the rescinding of the price increases but also worker management of the factories-the old, deep-rooted, foolish, beautiful, indestructible dream of self-determination.

At the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, new supplies were brought in before the police could start checking. It was done at night. Next morning workers and housewives came in from the suburbs, from Ohra and Troyl, Langfuhr and Neufahrwasser, maybe fifty thousand strong. They marched past the Central Station and assembled outside the Communist Party headquarters. There, since there wasn't much to make speeches about, they sang the Internationale a number of times. What discussion there was centered on Jan (who had been swept away from Maria in the crush), for Jan was overflowing with historical comparisons that he couldn't keep to himself. As usual, he began with the early Pomorshians, Sambor, Mestwin, Swanto-polk, and Damroka of the beautiful hair. At that point the shipyard workers were still listening, but when Jan got long-winded, lost himself in the labyrinth of medieval guild regulations, and compared the demands of the trades for seats and voices in the seated and standing councils with present demands for worker management of the factories, the workers turned a deaf ear.

Then the crowd sang the Internationale again. Only Maria, who had been pushed to one side, saw her Jan agi-tating-historically aware, without listeners, imprisoned in a balloon. She held her head slightly tilted, her lips moving slightly, on the verge of a smile.

They've all tilted their heads that way, just a bit frightened, but at the same time amused at so much talk and virile enthusiasm. Thus, but already poised for mockery, Abbess Margarete Rusch watched, and listened to, Preacher Hegge when on the Hagelsberg he conjured up eternal dam-

nation and all the devils from Ashmodai to Zaroe. Thus alarmed, but with a smile bordering on melancholy, the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella looked over the poet Opitz's shoulder as, wordless, but inwardly rich in figures, he sat over blank paper. It was with just such an expression that Wigga, the Iron Age wurzel mother, received me when, sore of foot, I came limping home from the migration. And Lena Stubbe looked at me with similarly tilted head on Fridays, when I'd whopped her again with my razor strop and as on every such occasion looked for the rope and failed to find the nail. Dorothea smiled and tilted her head differently, scornfully, when I started talking guild business or counting up small change. Sophie, on the other hand, was full of tender concern as she tied up a package of gingerbread into which she had baked stimulating fly agaric, finely ground, for her Fritz, who was under fortress arrest. And my Mest-wina smiled in the same way when she saw Bishop Adalbert spooning up her fish soup. And after giving me (the stupid lummox) my extra feeding, Awa tilted her head, grave with ever-loving care, yet smiling in the certainty that there would never be enough, that hunger springs eternal and there would always be grounds for care.

Maria tilted her head when she saw her Jan wedged in the crowd but agitating unheard. For she said to herself: In a minute he'll feel cold, all alone with his talk. In a minute he'll look for me, to unload on. Because when I'm not with him, it's only fear that makes him talk. In a minute I'll say: Jan, you're right. We must take a historic view of this. It never stops. Not even under Communism. It's always the bottom against the top. In those days the bosses were called patricians. They made Scania herring expensive. They raised the price of pepper, though there was plenty of it. They kept saying: The Danes are to blame. They've raised the Oresund tolls. Everything is going up. That's the way it is. You've got to accept it. The party says so. And the party is right, always right. And the party says it's too soon for freedom.

When Jan found his Maria again in the crowd, she said, "Come on. We'll go to the shipyard now. There we'll be safe. They've got everything. So we'll wait. No matter how long it goes on. So the wedding will be after Christmas, and just as much fun."

It was only when the crowd began to disperse that there was fighting with the police. Some of the railroad-station windows were smashed. Some newspaper stands went up in flames. Later the party building was set on fire. Morale, in the main, was high. The workers had seen what a big crowd they were. Some were arrested, whereupon a part of the crowd marched to the Schiessstange Prison, where gasoline was thrown in through the windows. A boy was run over by a tank. But so far there was no shooting.

It wasn't until the next day — when the workers of the Lenin Shipyard withdrew to the shipyard grounds, posted guards at the gates, and, in case the army occupied the shipyard, made preparations to blow up essential installations and send several unfinished ships down the ways; when units of the People's Army came rolling from Warsaw, and the police closed its ring around the shipyard area; when pork and cabbage with caraway seed was cooked for more than two thousand men in the shipyard canteen; when outside the main entrance to the shipyard a few young workers tried to start a discussion with the police, and Jan Ludkowski, speaking through a megaphone, first outlined the historical background of the strike, from the uprisings of the medieval guilds to the insurrection of the sailors and workers of Petro-grad for the Soviet system and against the party bureaucracy to the present rise in prices and the strike committee's demands for worker management of the factories; when finally Jan quoted from the Communist Manifesto and raised his full, mellifluous male voice, to which only the cause lent a note of harshness, till it carried as far as the Old City — that the police fired, wounding several workers. Five fatally. Among them Jan.