Gunter Grass - The Flounder

said and not said.

In the third month the belly changed palpably,

but our words only repeated themselves.

When in the fourth month the new year began,

only the year was new; our words were still tired.

Exhausted but still in the right,

we wrote off the fifth, the sixth month:

It's moving, we said unmoved.

When in the seventh month we bought roomy dresses,

we were still cramped and quarreled

about the third month, the one we'd missed out on.

Only when a leap over a ditch

became a fall—

Don't jump! Nol Wait. No. Don't jump!—

did we begin to worry: stammering and whispering.

In the eighth month we were sad,

because the words spoken in the second and fourth

were still being paid for.

When in the ninth month we were defeated

and the child, quite unconcerned, was born,

we had no words left.

Congratulations came over the phone.

A she or a he. If it's a girl, we'll name her after my mother; if it's a boy, he will, like me, gather from garbage dumps the feathers the sky loses and raise them lightly, barely breathing, then blowing, then with gusts of wind, and hold them in suspense, falling, reeling, and then another updraft. It's flying, flying! we hear Emmanuel calling. .

One more child screamed at 10:15 a.m., and, no sooner had the umbilical cord been cut, was given its name, which had never been open to argument. Sex, length, weight. It already looks like, will soon, will later on, being Ilsebill's daughter, but with a different walk, prouder, more self-assured, walk straight ahead and take what's there, so that no further wishes are left hanging, never aired, in the closet, till the moths get them. One more girl with a crack that stayed open when our beautiful view was nailed shut.

To the wish stated before the Womenal in the form of a demand—"Why always us! Let the men for a change open their legs, conceive, and bear!" — the Flounder had known an answer. "Look, my dear ladies: even the moon lies mirror-reversed in a pond. How are we going to straighten that out? How, I ask you, how?"

When Ilsebill was delivered, her daughter came as a disappointment. Just another cunt, another twat, the goal

of all men who are homeless and unsheltered and want to get rid of themselves, over and over again. (And the mother hissed at me, "You cracksman!")

Not all Ilsebill's wishes consent to come true. Since I was allowed to be present at the birth of our daughter, I tried (in a green coverall, gauze mask, and sterile shoes) to console her. "Honest, Ilsebill. Girls are much better off nowadays. In former times, when I stupidly believed in the right of inheritance, I always wished for a boy. But Dorothea, Agnes, Amanda, Lena — not one of them gave me anything but daughters; and even the abbess Rusch bore only girls. But when canteen cook Maria Kuczorra gave birth to twin girls — their names are Damroka and Mestwina — the workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, seeing that Maria's Jan was dead, gave her a double baby carriage and two pink pisspots to avoid any complexes later on. . "

Ordinarily it would have been a difficult delivery, because the breech presentation makes for complications. So we decided on a Caesarean, which is guaranteed painless because everything up to the navel is anesthetized. The size and position of the baby were first checked by ultrasonic means, but the coarse-grained picture didn't show the sex.

The obstetrician made an oblique incision in Ilsebill's abdomen where it arched above the shaved groin; he cut through the skin, the fatty envelope, the muscular tissue, and the peritoneum, all of which Ilsebill, whose head lay far in the distance, behind a screen, did not see.

I saw, because it's supposed to be good for fathers to see the womb laid bare in the gaping belly and opened with a scalpel. The obstetrician tore the amnion to let out the fluid. Watery blood. Absorbent cloths stuffed into the cavities. Veins clamped. Then he reached in with his gloved hands, and, ass first, our daughter emerged into the world, showing — hallelujah! — her little Parker House roll, while in the delivery room of the municipal hospital soft music from hidden loudspeakers made the whole affair pleasant, inoffensive, friendly, entertaining, and absolutely banal. The up-to-date hospital director, who is open to all reasonable innovations, does not want his young interns engaging during the Caesarean (because they have nothing else to do) in private

conversations with the Korean student nurses about cars, politics, weekend delights, so depriving the mother, whose hearing, since she feels no pain, is particularly acute, of important small experiences; that is why he has decreed that, apart from the sound of the instruments and the obstetrician's soft-spoken instructions—"Clamp, please. Swabs, please" — only sweet music should be heard.

"And this," said the obstetrician through his mask for my edification, "is the Fallopian tube. . " (I also saw how yellow, like chicken fat, Ilsebill's belly fat is. A piece of it crumbled off and I could have fried two eggs in it.)

After being shown to her mother, our daughter (whose umbilical cord had already been cut) was screaming on the other side of the room, where she was weighed, measured, and secured against mistaken identity by a tag on the wrist or ankle. Ah, my babykins, my bawling chickabiddy, my lambkin, my daughter. .

When Ilsebill's womb, which immediately contracted, and her belly had been sewed up again, and the scalpels, clamps, swabs, and absorbent cloths had concurrently been counted on a side table, one metal clamp was missing. They were going to undo the stitches and search the abdominal cavity, but luckily the clamp was found in the bucket with the afterbirth, where it didn't belong. But what I, the father, who was watching, wished into Ilsebill's belly stayed there, was sewed in; namely, big stones, and I'm not giving them away.

Oh, my secret thoughts! As though I found nothing worth wishing for. As though a quickly twining gourd-vine arbor or a wing chair to deafen me to the sufferings of the world were everything. As though my longings—"Yes yes, Maria, I'm coming; I'm coming soon" — were nothing but easy ways out, loopholes that ought to be plugged up. Oh, how I need rest, distant places, new wallpaper, a plane ticket to a better time-phase. Ah, how I need a far-off century. Ah, how I thirst for death and eternity.

But my wishes have never counted. It's always hers, damn it, that I. . And take all the responsibility, oh yes! And pay and pay! And feel guilty for everything and nothing.

What fault (after all) is it of mine that it's turned out to be a girl again. I'm not a slot machine that spits what you pick. At least, on the day when my daughter was born, the representatives of the one and the other German state signed a treaty extending the privileges of the Liibeck fishermen, which have been in force since the emperor Barbarossa's writ of 1188, to the territorial waters of the German Democratic Republic; and that, you'll agree, was long overdue.

At a snack bar around the corner from the municipal hospital, when I first took a schnapps or two with my beer, then ordered one, then another Bockwurst with bread and mustard, they were running the quarter finals on television. Poland was leading. Chile had been eliminated. And it kept on raining. The world-championship soccer matches transformed me into an onlooker among other male onlookers, who like me drank schnapps, dipped Bockwurst in mustard, took bites, washed them down with beer, had that absorbed look, and may well have all been fathers, worried about their daughters.

The owner knew his clientele. The name of his bar was The Happy Father. He said, "No boy again? Don't let it get you down. Girls are cheaper now that they've done away with dowries. They're all emancipated nowadays. Nowadays they wish for entirely different things."