Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Yes, I assure you. You'll have everything. Your father will provide. Your father will attend to it. Your father is still something of a stranger to you, because he has no womb. Give him time for a schnapps or two and a walk around the block. Your father has his share of the restlessness that makes the world go round. Your father is on the track of something. Your father has to go away for a while, to see where he came from. Where it all began. There's a Maria up there whom he's related to. She gave him a piece of amber with a fly caught in it. Don't be afraid. Your father will be back. He'll come back and tell you stories in which feathers are blown and children who go looking for mushrooms manage to get lost and flies spend the winter in pieces of amber. And I'll tell you about the Flounder, too, when I get back. .

Stop it, will you.

Cut it out.

You're finished, man, still horny but that's all.

Say once again: Will do.

Once again press buttons and make puppets dance.

Once again show your will and its flaws.

Once again pound the table and say: That's mine.

Once again list how often you and whose.

Once again be hard, so it sinks in.

Prove to yourself once again your great, your proven,

your all-embracing ever-loving care.

Man oh man.

There you stand, present and soon to be present.

Men don't weep, man.

Your dreams, which were typically masculine, have all been

filmed. Your victories dated and listed. Your progress caught up with and measured. Your mourning and those who enact it weary the playbills. Your jokes are too often varied; Radio Yerevan has gone off

the air. Enormous (even now), your power cancels itself out.

Man oh man.

Once again say "I."

Once again think penetratingly.

Once again look through.

Once again be right.

Once again be profoundly silent.

Stand or fall just once more.

No need to clean up, man; just leave it all be. By your own rules you're washed up, dismissed from your own history. And only the baby boy in you

has leave to play with building blocks for another short

while. What, man oh man, will your wife say to that?

Maria took two tin spoons and a full dinner pail with her when we rode out to Heubude on the streetcar to sit in the dunes in view of the sea.

It can be proved that as early a cook as Amanda Woyke was acquainted with our common cabbage, which she shredded, stored in barrels, and made into sauerkraut, or cooked into a thick mash with potatoes and pork ribs and served to the farm hands on holidays. Since cabbage bloats, it seems unlikely that Agnes Kurbiella set potted or stuffed cabbage, let alone pork and cabbage, before painter Moller or poet Opitz; our easily digestible cauliflower didn't exist yet. It had to wait for progress. I have no recollection of Abbess Rusch preparing our present-day varieties of cabbage, but Chinese cabbage (pe-tsai) was occasionally imported in her day. It wasn't until later that kitchens smelled of Wirsing and Kapuster, as we called the common cabbage. Lena Stubbe saw us through the winter with rutabaga and cabbage. Since Dorothea of Montau did not know the green cabbage that is common today, she seems on Holy Thursday to have cooked the wild varieties, such as colewort or the slightly bitter sea kale, with nothing else. And just as Dorothea put up sorrel in a wooden barrel, so Amanda Woyke and Lena Stubbe shredded cabbage heads (after cutting out the cores) with a cabbage shredder, piled the shreds in barrels with cabbage leaves at the bottom, poured on salt, pounded the shredded cabbage with a pestle until there was juice to cover it, spread more cabbage leaves on top, and fitted the barrel with a wooden lid that had to be weighed down with a large stone.

And in time it fermented, so that pork and cabbage, such as Maria brought to the dunes in a dinner pail, could be made not only with fresh cabbage, but also sweet and

sour with sauerkraut, caraway seed, and juniper berries. Pork ribs are suitable, or smoked spareribs, if you prefer.

And once, after Maria had started buying for the shipyard kitchen, I ate pork and cabbage with Jan Ludkowski in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. I had obtained permission to visit a few of the workshops, the then unused drydock, and an unfinished ferryboat on the slips. Since what they showed me is illustrated and described in several languages in the prospectus, it's not worth the telling. The work sounds of a Communist shipyard are no different from the work noise of capitalist shipyards. I politely took notes, which were later abandoned unused at the Hotel Monopol; still, it was interesting to see what the Poles had made of the Schichau, Danziger, Klawitter Shipyard, which at the end of the war was partly destroyed, partly dismantled by the Russians. Jan said, "Our orders from the West. . That's where we get our hard currency. . Obviously, we have to sell to the Soviet Union at bargain prices, floating fish factories, for instance, that process the catch right there on the fishing grounds, the latest thing. . "

Lunch hour was over at the canteen. A flat-roofed two-story building, through the plate-glass front of which gulls could be seen stunt-flying. Only a few clerks in white smocks were still there, occupying two or three tables at the other end. For them, for us, there was leftover pork and cabbage, consisting of pork ribs, fresh carawayed cabbage, and potatoes, all cooked together. Our beverage was buttermilk. Jan, who generally looked after visitors to the shipyard, addressed me as if I had been a large delegation. Not to be turned off, he spouted production figures, boasted of large Swedish orders, and pickled his technocratic Communism, as one might pickle cabbage, with fatalistic salt: "That's the way we Poles are. . We know in our bones that something somehow will go wrong with our progress. . Regimentation just doesn't work with us. . But somehow we manage. . We know our history. . "

Still gnawing at his pork ribs, Jan Ludkowski was off on his thing. Since the ferryboat (which I had been authorized to visit) was to be named after some king of Poland (one of the Batorys or Wladislaws) and not after a Pomor-

shian prince (Sambor or Swantopolk), he, conscious of his Kashubian heritage, had submitted one petition after another — in vain, though anyone ought to recognize that Mest-wina and Damroka are attractive names for ships.

Jan saw historical episodes in detail, as if he had been there. And since I, too, had lived in several time-phases and left something lying around in ever)' century, we found no difficulty over pork and cabbage with lumpy buttermilk in re-enacting the decisive battle in which Duke Swantopolk not only trounced the Norwegians, but with his victory over General Fortinbras also provided a sequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Jan and I agreed to make a play out of it. Somewhere in the midst of the Kashubian water holes the armies stand facing each other. Swantopolk and Fortinbras taunt each other: Kashubian swine! Norwegian swine! And then Hamlet appears as a ghost between the armies and expresses himself in obscure, ambiguous pentameters about many controversial matters: naturally about Shakespeare and his doubles. Naturally about Communism and capitalism. And why not an allusion to the Flounder: how he treacherously advised the one and the other hero and sent them to their doom.

"Why not?" said Jan. "And maybe after the battle Hamlet's ghost could appear among the dead. . "

"Naturally," I said. "But what happens after the victory?"

"The victorious Swantopolk," said Jan, "might be assailed by self-doubt. He shillies and shallies. . "

"Until," said I, "the Teutonic Knights, who don't know the meaning of doubt, get there and clean up. Ruthlessly, inexorably."