Gunter Grass - The Flounder

There was also shooting in Gdynia, Szczecin, and Elb-lag. The most numerous fatalities (over fifty) seem to have occured in Gdynia, where the police lobbed mortar shells into the crowd and fired machine guns from helicopters. Then, in Warsaw, Gomulka was toppled. The new man's name was Gierek. He rescinded the price increases on staple foods. The workers thought they had won and called off their strike, although their demand for worker management of the factories had remained unanswered.

When Jan was shot by the police, he was hit in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage, and not, as he had wished in poems (after Maiakovsky), in the forehead. In midsentence he was dead. Maria couldn't help when the dead and wounded were carried into the shipyard grounds. Just then she was taking delivery of a load of canned fish, which had been donated by the crews of two Soviet freighters then in drydock. Later she threw herself on the dead man, whose mouth was still open, and shook him as if in anger: "Say something just this once. Say it's right and logical. Say the facts speak for themselves. Say history proves. Say Marx foresaw. Say the future will. Say something, say…"

After Jan's death, Maria didn't stop working at the shipyard canteen. As long as the workers were negotiating with Gierek, the new man — an agreement of sorts was arrived at — plenty of supplies were delivered. The dead were buried quickly and quietly at various cemeteries in Emaus, Praust, and Ohra. The families were not admitted. Jan is thought to lie in Emaus. The other four dead were Upper Silesians, whom no one really knew. Their families in Katowice and Bytom were notified much too late. That brought protest. Regret was expressed in high places.

But such deaths don't really amount to much. Traffic accidents account for more. And the social services take better and better care of the widows and orphans. All were shot in the abdomen. The police had aimed low. Though this was recorded for later reference, none of the guilty parties was mentioned at any trial. It's perfectly true: life goes on.

The actual funeral service was held between Christmas and New Year's on the shipyard grounds, in the open, because the canteen was too small. A cold, windless day. Maria sat in black beside other women in black, facing the speaker's desk, the flowers, the flags, the music, the oil flame. The speakers (nearly all the members of the strike committee) repeated that these dead would not be forgotten. They said solidarity had brought victory, though all the workers' demands had not yet been met. Two ships were on the slips

nearby, manned only by gulls. (Big orders for Sweden. They'd have been sent down the ways unfinished if the police had stormed the shipyard.) Jan had been working on prospectuses in which progress was illustrated by photographs of ships' hulls. One of the speakers mentioned Jan's work, which he called imaginative. (Not mentioned was Jan's loudly and frequently repeated suggestion that newly built passenger vessels should be given Pomorshian names such as Swantopolk or Damroka. After all, Stephen Batory hadn't been a Pole but a Hungarian from Transylvania, and a ship had been proudly named after him.)

When at the end a party representative spoke, he apportioned blame but mentioned no names. Someone in the standing crowd of shipyard workers cried out, "Kociolek!" Maria didn't cry, because something was stuck in her throat. The other women in black cried. Between speeches they cried louder. Some of the men cried, too.

After the speeches the shipyard band played first solemn, then militant music. The gulls rose from the tankers on the slips and settled down again. After that an actor recited a poem that Jan had written about death. True, the poet who "lived himself to death" in this poem was the Baroque poet and court historian Martin Opitz, but in the setting of the funeral, and thanks to the actor's interpretive emphasis, the line "And with his halted blood his words, too, ceased to flow" related exclusively to Jan. This line was repeated in every stanza.

After the poem, Maria, who had something in her throat, threw up. Two men from the workers' guard led the still-retching woman in black past the speakers, flowers, and flags, past the oil flame and the band, to a place between two sheds, where she finished vomiting. Before the funeral, Maria had gone to the hairdresser's.

Later, in the canteen, after drinking tea, she was taken with a craving for dill pickles. But there weren't any left. And as the families of the slain were sitting over tea in the canteen, one of the weeping women, Jan's mother, who had come from Konitz, said to the other weeping women in black, "That's from my son. They were going to get married. Maybe it'll be a boy."

But two girls were christened with the names of Mest-wina and Damroka. They will soon be three, and they are acquainted with a photograph of Jan. It's standing on the living-room cabinet next to a historically faithful cog in full sail. But Maria, to whom I am related and who gave me that piece of amber from the potato field with the fly enclosed in it, Maria, who had a reputation for laughing — at the cooperative, in the shipyard canteen, everywhere — Maria turned to stone. A harshness has come into her speech.

They refuse to say anything about Maria. Divided among themselves like the Advisory Council behind them, but agreed on this one point. There they sit, cooking up a Last Judgment. When the Flounder also declined responsibility for the cases of Sibylle Miehlau and Maria Kuczorra, housewife Elisabeth Giillen and biochemist Beate Hagedorn walked out of the former movie house in protest. On conclusion of the Lena Stubbe case, Ms. Hagedorn had cried out: "Fuck the past. Repression is going on today. Everywhere. In Poland, for instance, even if it is some kind of Communism they've got there. It wasn't just the rise in prices that made them strike. It wasn't the usual household worries. No, it was something more. And it's still going on. What we need is action, something big. Get out on the streets and yell. And refuse our services. Not just in bed. Total noncooperation! Till everything stops. Till the men come crawling. And we take over."

The verdict is expected soon. All through May, while the last evidence was being heard and the worst was being once again recorded, the Flounder was undergoing a visible change. Whenever he left his sand bed, he struck us and the representatives of the press, who were on the lookout for indications that prolonged confinement had impaired his health, as more and more transparent, more and more glassy. A while ago you could trace his bone structure. Now his

digestive tract is discernible. You can identify his milt, the proof of his masculinity.

This is no doubt why the Advisory Council has been urging the court to finish up, to pronounce a sentence and carry it out. The Advisory Council (without Hagedorn and Giillen) has set a definite time limit. Once again I consider them all, consider them with love, hate, or indifference, as (from the public benches) I see them. Sieglinde Huntscha, for instance: always in jeans and frayed leather jacket. Built, I would say, like a sportswoman, if I didn't know that she has flat feet, for which reason the prosecutor hardly paces at all, but mostly stands still while pleading (with a slight Saxon accent): "Since in the case of Lena Stubbe as in those preceding it the Flounder's guilt can hardly be contested. ."

Likewise slender but with ballooning bosom, the court-appointed defense counsel wears embroidered blouses, which she likes to fasten with bows. Although Bettina von Carnow hunches her back when sitting and never quite knows how to turn her overlong neck, she reveals the proportions of a model as soon as she stands up or risks a step or two.