Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Witzlaff laughed encouragingly. Erika Nottke begged me to make it short. The old lady on my right turned the hearing-aid button behind her left ear. When I tapped my glass with my fish knife, the young schoolteacher hissed, "Some nerve!" But Ms. Schonherr, from the center of the horseshoe-shaped table, nodded a friendly permission.

I first thanked the assembled ladies for the honor of letting me attend. I praised the culinary art of restaurant owner and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb. A little joke about Helga Paasch's expense-saving connections with the wholesale market. Then I came to the point.

In owning that the Flounder's admission of guilt and antiwar speech had moved me deeply, I gained my first opportunity to introduce myself in my changing time-phases. "As early as the Neolithic…" I said. "When we were finally converted to Christianity. ." "There can be no doubt, to cite Friedell, that some good came of the plague…" I quoted myself as Opitz from his "Poem of Consolation Amidst the Horrors of War." I was at Kolin, Leuthen, Hochkirch. I opened the door when Comrade Bebel came to see me and my good Lena on Brabank. To spare Sieglinde Huntscha, I made only the barest allusion to the Father's Day death of poor Billy. Then I went into current politics: "Even now it's as if the canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk had been turned to stone. They shot Jan in the belly. Yes, the police fired on the workers. And that in a Communist state. Yes, wherever men have their fingers on triggers. And that's how it has always been. The language of arms. Mechanized warfare. Attack to defend. Scorched earth. The Flounder did that. His advice was: Kill! His word sig-

naled violence. He was the source of evil. We are gathered here to punish him. Here, Flounder! Here! Look and see what's left of you. You dealer of death, you enemy of life!"

I lifted up a bare backbone with the ravaged head attached and showed it to the Flounder in his glass tank. Whereupon Griselde Dubertin and Ruth Simoneit, Hunt-scha and Paasch, but also Elisabeth Giillen and Beate Hage-dorn, who had hitherto been silent, obstinately silent, each grabbed a backbone, and other women grabbed the remaining bones, heads, tail fins, and showed them to the Flounder, so that he was forced to see. And several women cried, "You're mortal!" Others went further. "The fact is, you're dead!"

I was overcome with rage. I went to him and threw a backbone down on the platform in front of his tank. "There!" Without delay the women threw down the remaining bones, heads, and fins, until all eleven carcasses lay in a heap and the Flounder was forced to see what was left of his fellows. "There! There!" And we all wiped our fingers and tossed our paper napkins onto the pile. And we all spat on the bony garbage, in which crooked mouths gaped in sightless heads.

But the pallid Flounder, who seemed to have been blown from glass, remained in his hovering position and did not take refuge in his sand bed. Ah, how grievously he suffered. Ah, how right it served him.

Then Ms. Schonherr said: "Punishment has now been dealt. The day after tomorrow the Flounder will be set free to expiate his guilt. All arrangements have been made for transportation. The Womenal is therefore disbanded. Sisters, I thank you."

With that the dinner party broke up.

When the sentence had been announced, it was arranged that Associate Judge Ulla Witzlaff should take charge of its implementation. Even before completing his long peroration on the warlike character of men and on women's capacity for

suffering, the Flounder, because someone, Ruth Simoneit, I think, was talking some sort of rubbish about the end of the world, had illustrated with examples how prone to catastrophe the earth was and dated the next ice age as "any day now." But while still engaged in spiriting ten thousand years away in a twinkling, he could be heard, in an aside, expressing the wish that he, the evildoer, conscious of his guilt and bowing to his sentence, might, to enable him to expiate most usefully, be set free in his favorite body of water, namely, the western Baltic. There, he informed the court, he knew an island the east coast of which consisted of steep chalk cliffs, from the top of which on a clear day one could with the naked eye see the similarly shaped island where the tale of "The Fisherman and His Wife" was put into circulation. "Two picturesque spots that are connected geologically and in other ways as well," said the Flounder, and explained that immediately after the last glacial age—"which really wasn't so long ago!" — the floor of the Baltic had formed between these islands. Flint could be found at the foot of the cliffs and interesting petrifactions as well, such as sea urchins and the tentacles of octopuses: "For the space of a cosmic half hour, the young Baltic was characterized by a Mediterranean warmth." That was where he wished to be set free. With that as a base he would get on with his new duties — for the advancement of the female cause.

"He means the island of M0n," said Ulla Witzlaff to her fellow associate judge Helga Paasch, who was sitting beside her. Ulla had spent her childhood on Rugen and attended the School of Church Music in Greifswald before crossing over to the West when the Wall was built in Berlin. Thus she was eminently suited to carry out the Womenal's sentence and set the Flounder free in the place he had chosen, particularly since Ulla was able to assure the court that the mercury content of the Baltic Sea was minimal at that spot.

Because the authorities of the German Democratic Republic refused permission to cross its territory by train or Volkswagen bus to Rostock-Warnemunde, whence a ferry ran to Gedser in Denmark (the officials never mentioned the Flounder by name, but merely designated him as a "subver-

sive element" or "reactionary individual," for the republic of workers and peasants lived in fear of the flatfish), it was necessary to fly the condemned Flounder to Hamburg in the strictest secrecy and under close guard, to forestall terrorist acts by Griselde Dubertin's radical group.

From there he was taken to Travemunde by car. From there the party crossed over to Gedser by the regularly scheduled ferry. There Danish feminists took charge, and the party traveled via Vordingborg to Kalvehave and thence across the bridge to the island of M0n. As it was late afternoon when they arrived, the party stopped for the night at an inn not far from the chalk cliffs.

The Flounder in his special traveling tank had come through the journey in good shape. As though in anticipation of the joyous event, he had lost some of his transparency. His pebbly skin had got back some of its color. Yet despite his cheerful fin play, he remained mute.

And I was there. (Naturally Ilsebill was furious at my wanting to prolong my absence so soon before her confinement. "You don't give a hoot about the child!" she screamed when I asked for permission over the phone.)

After Ulla Witzlaff, Therese Osslieb, and Helga Paasch had approved my request to travel with them, I was accepted as a helper. In addition to the women already mentioned, our party included Erika Nottke (the gray mouse) and Ms. von Carnow, the Flounder's court-appointed counsel (all in sky-blue silk). Allegedly Sieglinde hadn't wanted to come. Ms. Schonherr thought her presence at the execution of sentence not absolutely called for.

We had good reason to ask the Danish delegation to take security measures that night and the next day, for Ruth Simoneit had joined Griselde Dubertin's radical opposition group, and both of them had spoken up (before the verdict) in favor of the death penalty, so that obstructive action if not actual violence was to be feared during the release of the Flounder. The seventh and eighth associate judges of the Womenal, the full-blown housewife Elisabeth Giillen and the biochemist Beate Hagedorn, who reminded me remotely of my Sibylle and Maria Kuczorra, were thought to be radical