Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Quite otherwise, among the associate judges towers the sitting giant Helga Paasch. Here we have a person in her middle forties who, unconcerned about her frame, wears two-piece suits that overemphasize the squareness of her build. She can't open her mouth—"Man, are you finicky!" — without sweeping invisible objects off the table.

Equally stately, though delicately proportioned and clad in a maidenly small-flower print, sits Griselde Duber-tin, as straight as an exclamation point. Sometimes in culottes. The sharpness of her interruptions. The bitterness of her random comments. Always ready to pounce, always disagreeing and expressing herself too forcefully, she offers a contrast to Therese Osslieb, whose soulful phlegmatism communicates itself without needing words and appeases sudden squalls (quarrels with the Advisory Council).

Osslieb wears jumpers, wraparound skirts, and lace-trimmed, ancestral hand-me-downs. And yet she droops as tragically as her friend Ruth Simoneit, who, when not staggering drunkenly about on the podium, wishing everything (and herself) underground, is a pleasure to behold in her

firm, sculptured beauty, from which, along with amber, too much Asiatic, African, Indian, or other exotic jewelry is always dangling.

Beside her the social worker Erika Nottke has a hard time of it. Overworked as she is, worry has clothed her in fat, which as a rule billows most unbecomingly gray on gray in sweaters and expands pleated skirts. Though she is the youngest of the associate judges, she nevertheless speaks like Dame Care. Her piping voice keeps her professional jargon—"reso-cialized integration" — from sounding authoritative. No one listens to her. Her overlong tirades are drowned out by Griselde Dubertin's interruptions or Paasch's heckling or the protracted outcries of the public, although Erika Nottke, more than any other member of the Advisory Council, tries to stick to the point.

A very different matter is Ulla Witzlaff, who for every historical incident finds private parallels, which are always listened to: "Back home, on a little island by the name of Oehe, there was an old woman who kept sheep…" Ulla is the handsomest of the lot, though no part of her is pretty. You could fall in love with her hair. Usually she wears long, shabby skirts, and then, when you least expect it, she'll make an entrance as a lady, in a black evening dress. The public applauds. The presiding judge is obliged to demonstrate (imperceptibly) her authority.

Ms. Schonherr is believed to be in her mid-fifties. But since this recognized ethnologist dresses timelessly (in good sports clothes or Scotch plaids), one never gives a thought to her age. She emanates serenity. She never shows partisanship. Even when passing judgment she remains ironically ambiguous. All the associate judges — whether they belong to the Flounder Party or to the opposition — are convinced that Ursula Schonherr is on their side. Even the Revolutionary Advisory Council keeps quiet when she demands, nay, commands feminine solidarity.

For nine months she has guided the Women's Tribunal over all trip wires and has so worn herself out with loving care that in the always correctly dressed Ursula Schonherr I feel justified in surmising my neolithic Awa, as she cuts across my dreams.

Awa, however, was corpulent — no, fat, positively ungainly. Her ass hung down to her knees, but that fell in with the neolithic ideal of beauty, which like everything else in those days was decided by women. Thus the cult of short-leggedness determined the original form of the vase, for Awa's head was relatively small, perched on great rounded shoulders that left little room for a neck. Flesh overflowed its banks. Everywhere richly upholstered nests, nooks, and crannies that seemed ready to grow moss. Where today the tyranny of sports imposes a boring tautness on the female thigh, Awa's thighs, which between knee and vulva allowed themselves a fabulous wealth of bulges and swellings, were correspondingly rich in dimples, the hallmarks of primordial beauty. Dimples all over. And where the back resolved itself into a rump, densely populated fields of conglobation were discernible.

If Awa's proportions were repeated anywhere, it was in the abbess Rusch, who cultivated her envelope of fat — possibly for the sake of the warmth she liked to dispense, possibly to provide an adequate sounding board for her laughter. It will be worth our while to list all the parts of Fat Gret that wobbled and formed folds whenever her sudden laughter erupted, gurgled, bubbled, and uphove her vast body: her four-times-vaulted chin, her primary, secondary, and tertiary cheeks, her breasts that reached out like mighty bastions and merged with her dorsal cushions of fat, her belly, which as though perpetually pregnant burst the seams of any cloth, her downy-blond forearms, each of which was as thick as the High Gothic waist of Dorothea of Montau.

But before I compare Dorothea with Sophie — the one as though blown of glass, the other scrawny and flat, but both equally tough — let me recall that Amanda Woyke was in every respect close to the potato: bulbous, firm of flesh, conveniently sized. Likewise compact but smaller in stature was Mestwina, while Wigga at an early age gave in to her powerful bone structure and set more store by the frame than by the flesh. Lena Stubbe, on the other hand, who started out as fresh as an apple, remained true to herself; at a high old age she still made one think of an apple — a shriveled one, to be sure.

Dorothea was weightless. Lighter than air. A sad case,

because her beauty was so objectless. She was so meagerly endowed with flesh that she had the spectral look of a goat in March when the winter feed runs out. While cushions of fat can be palpably described, the only way I can resurrect the scant flesh of Dorothea of Montau is to measure the spaces it occupied. Her ample garments that magnified every movement. The costumes she borrowed from the lepers — many's the time she came home from Corpus Christi Hospital in rags or cloaked in sweat-drenched winding sheets. But though her flesh was weightless, not so her hair. Pale-blond, it hung down to her knees. Wind in her clothes and wind in her hair, she took up space, strode through emptying streets, shook with ecstasy, lay, a quivering bundle of sackcloth overflowed by hair, with the beggars of Saint Mary's, or spooked through the ground fog outside the city gates, lusting for visions.

Even where for other reasons no man could have lost himself, Sophie was narrow. Flat, angular, charmingly boyish, with legs made for hopping and skipping, a tough, supple, but also cutting willow switch. Sophie's measurements. Apart from her voice, which required space, only her springy step, always ahead of itself, counted. And when she became an old spinster, there was very little of her, though enough, in concentrated charge, to blow the kitchen sky-high and make good the still-current demand for the women's rights that were lost long, long ago.

And Agnes? She didn't weigh. She didn't look. She could be seen only in the pictures that painter Moller painted and destroyed. She seems (Opitz intimated as much) to have been curly-haired. I remember her bare feet. Sometimes, when the door opens softly, I hope it's Agnes — but it's always Use-bill, bringing herself along.

Now she fills my mock-up, which is in low country. A plate with the sky over it. Low rain clouds and suchlike slumgullion. My eyes roll from edge to edge. Since Agnes evades my grasp, I lay the hugely pregnant Ilsebill down on the Island between Kasemark and Neuteich, where the Vistula and the sky are conducive to aerial photography, or here, between Brokdorf and Wewelsfleth, on the walled-in Wilster Marsh.

There lies my Ilsebill, always with the river behind her.

Sluggish jetsam with feminine proportions. Her dimple-strewn flesh supported by her right hip, so that her upended pelvis blocks off the sky. Her crooked elbow rests on the exact spot where men with brief cases full of experts' reports have planned to build the nuclear power plant. She obstructs all their plans. One of her breasts hangs over the dike. Her right foot plays with the Stor, a tributary of the Elbe. Bedded with all her weight, as though forever. Below her, at the bend of her left leg, high-tension pylons traverse the country in long strides: whispering power, the old rumors, the amber legend, once upon a time.