Gunter Grass - The Flounder

When the woman showed him her pouch, he said, "I'm old, I can't see any more. Lie down with me and let me test you."

The woman lay down with him, and he tested her pouch with his Wolf's member until he was all worn out and fell asleep on her flesh. After waiting a little while and another little while, she let his tester slip out of her pouch, tipped him — remember, he was lying on top of her — off to one side, sprang to her feet, and shook herself a little. Then she took three glowing bits of charcoal from the primal fire and hid them in her pouch, where they instantly seized on the Wolf sperm and made it hiss.

Thereupon the Wolf woke up, for he must have heard or sensed that the fire was consuming his seed in the woman's pouch. "I'm too exhausted," he said, "to take back what you've stolen. But let me tell you this: The primal fire will make its mark at the opening of your pouch, and the mark will leave a scar. Your scar will itch and itch. And because it

itches, you will wish for someone to come and take the itch away. And when it doesn't itch, you will wish for someone to come and make it itch."

The woman laughed, for her pouch was still moist and the glowing charcoal hadn't yet started to burn her. She laughed so hard she had to hold herself in. And, laughing, she said to the exhausted Wolf, "You old wreck. Don't make up stories about my pouch. I'll show you what else I can do. You'll be amazed."

At that she spread her legs and stood over the primal fire. Holding two fingers under her pouch to make sure nothing would fall out of it, she pissed into the primal fire until it went out. And the old Sky Wolf wept, for that spelled the end of crispy brown roasts; he'd just have to gulp everything down raw. That, it seems, is what made earthly wolves murderous and misanthropic.

Just in time the woman climbed back down to earth over the paling rainbow. She returned to her horde, screaming, because her pouch was dry by then and the glowing charcoal was burning her. "Awa! Awa!" she screamed, and those primordial sounds became her name. In a later day the scar at the entrance to her pouch, which the Sky Wolf had prophesied, came to be known as the clitoris or tickler, but it remains an object of controversy among scientists investigating the origin of the orgasm.

From then on we had fire. It never died out. Where there were people there was always a wisp of smoke. But because a woman had brought us fire, the woman kept us pouchless men in a state of dependency. We were no longer allowed to sacrifice to the Sky Wolf, but only to the Heavenly Elk. For many, many years the function and origin of the itching scar were unknown to us. For when the returning Awa had finished screaming, she told us ever so casually that the old Wolf had been kind to her, that he had roasted a hare for her over the primal fire, that roast hare is perfectly delicious, and that she now knew how to cook. She further told us that she had complained to the Wolf about how cold and dark it was down here, that of all sacrifices in his honor he preferred elk calves, that she had washed his left hind paw — which was infected-and dressed it with the medicinal herbs she never went anywhere without, that he, poor fellow, had

been so grateful to her for curing his limp that he had given her three glowing coals out of the primal fire, and finally that — male superstition to the contrary notwithstanding — the Sky Wolf was a female.

That was all Awa told us. And I myself wouldn't have known a thing if I hadn't given a great deal of thought to that teensy-weensy scar and examined Ilsebill's tickler in the light of other myths. I told the Flounder, but he wouldn't believe it. He believed only in his reason.

Forward? We're tried that before.

Why not regress, quickly

and without stopovers?

Everyone can bring something along, something or other.

We have begun to develop—

blinking to left and right — backward.

A few fall by the wayside:

Wallenstein musters regiments.

Just to be fashionable, someone deserts in Gothic ecstasy

and is overtaken (clad in brabant) by a plague year.

While the migration worries along,

a certain group (as everyone knows) splits off from the Goths.

Those who had sought their future as late Marxists

want now to be Early Christians or Greeks

before or after the Doric purge.

At last all dates are effaced. No more talk of succession.

We are back in the Stone Age, blank and uninscribed. But I've brought my typewriter along and I tear giant leek leaves into legal-sized sheets. Hand-ax technology, fire myths,

the horde as the first commune (how it settled conflicts) and the unwritten law of matriarchy-all want to be described, and right this minute, though time is standing still.

I type on leek leaves: The Stone Age is beautiful. Sitting around the fire, so cozy-comfy. Because a woman has brought fire down from the sky, women rule bearably.

What (the one thing) we lack is a handy Utopia. Today — but there is no today— someone, a man, has made an ax from bronze. Now — but there is no now—

the horde is discussing the question: is bronze progress or not?

Because history has started with a bang,

an amateur, coming like me from the present

and bringing his fish-eyed camera,

wants to hand us down to posterity

in color or black and white.

In any case, enlightenment was late in coming to us. If, when I took the Flounder out of the eel trap, he had said right away, "My son! Wouldn't you like to know where all those children come from? Not to mention the elk calves? And how the bees and the marsh marigolds are fertilized and reproduce?" — rd have said, "Yes, indeed, friend Flounder, tell me how it's done. Awa keeps saying that she and the elk cows do it all by themselves. With maybe a little help from the full-ripened moon. She says we Edeks and elk bulls have nothing to do with it."

But the Flounder didn't enlighten us in time. True, he went on and on about the father right that we still didn't have, but that our pestles were fraught with consequences, that the sticky snot we and the elk bulls discharged, blindly but with unerring aim, was called sperm and had the power of fertilizing, that it made women and cows swell up and led ultimately to childbirth, so making us men, if not individually, then at least collectively and in principle, into fathers-of all this he didn't breathe a single word to us for many centuries.

Was he ashamed? Was he himself in the dark? He didn't even regale me with a little lecture about the milt and roe of the Baltic herring, things that were quite familiar to us fishermen. Instead, he brought me news of far-off cultures and abstract drivel about patriarchal property rights.

He had progress on the brain, and did he chew my ear off! "On Crete, my son, where King Minos and his brothers rule" — actually the women ruled in secret—"the bronze double-edged ax is being perfected; no haphazardly plaited huts of willow withes, but solidly built, many-storied palaces; household accounts are being kept on clay tablets; horde and clan have given way to an organized city-state. Only recently an artist and engineer by the name of Daedalus. ." But what was that to me? That kind of thing cut no ice in the marshes of the Vistula estuary. (You know me, Ilsebill, I can't eat butter without bread.)

The one bit of lore I was able to pass on to Awa was something the Flounder treated as a mere incidental, the Minoan method of making hand-molded cheese. Of course we had neither cattle, goats, nor sheep at the time. They were brought in much later by the Scythians, those great travelers from the depths of the Russian land mass, where no Flounder propagated culture, and barbarism was never assailed by doubts.