Gunter Grass - The Flounder

We didn't get beyond the first act of our sequel to Hamlet. Maria came in from the kitchen and said, "Shooting the shit again?" Coming in with her corkscrew curls, she was Mestwina's daughter Damroka. And it occurred to me that Jan loved her both in her historical and in her present time-phase. Stocky, round of head and belly, he became slender when he said "Marysia." But when the canteen cook of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk wasn't laughing (from inside, over nothing), she liked best to talk about prices and bottle-

necks in the supply system: "All we need is a cabbage shortage. Want some more pork and cabbage? There's plenty." Jan and I wanted. Maria brought and left. And there was fresh lumpy buttermilk in our glasses. But we had no further ideas about Swantopolk and Fortinbras.

What is history? No one knows exactly when our common cabbage (Brassica oleracea), as important an innovation as buckwheat, millet, potatoes, rutabaga, was first planted on a large scale; for as far back as Mestwina's time the Po-morshians gathered the seeds of the early, wild varieties. Undoubtedly the Ems Dispatch set a good deal in motion, but the sugar beet far more. If Prince Hamlet (as ghost) had invited Swantopolk and Fortinbras, the Kashubians and the Norwegians, to a meal of flatulent pork and cabbage, history would have taken an entirely different course. I said as much to Jan. But when, in the following year, shortly before Christmas, a rise in the prices of staple foods was announced in Poland, when all along the Baltic coast the workers went on strike, there was plenty of pork and cabbage at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard, yet history did not take a different course, but the usual bad one.

They shot Jan in the belly. On December 18, 1970, they shot Jan in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. The police of the People's Republic of Poland shot, along with other workers, the naval construction engineer, employee of the publicity department, trade-union and Communist League member Jan Ludkowski, aged forty-three, in his belly, then full of the pork and carawayed cabbage that had been dished out to upward of two thousand striking workers in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. Just in time, just before the shipyard was cordoned off by the police, Maria Kuczorra, who was in charge of provisioning the shipyard canteen, had managed to divert to the shipyard a truckload of cabbage intended for the army. Deep-frozen pork ribs were already on hand. And there has never been any shortage of caraway seed in Poland. He died instantly.

With Jan you could sit and talk. About mouth-blown glasses. About poems. Even about trees. We talked about

Gryphius and Opitz, just as they may have talked about heaven knows what. About the burden of an evil day. How things were bad and sometimes got a little better. About iambic hexameter and internal rhymes. About politics, too, in the wider and narrower sense. Once we drove into the hills of Kashubia in Jan's old Skoda and sat down beside a water hole. Crayfish skittered away and hid under the rocks. A brimstone butterfly. Larks over the fields. It was so still that Jan was frightened after he said, "I've given up hope." And once we went down to the beach, looking for amber. We found a few crumbs. Sometimes Maria was with us. It was nice when she disturbed us. Of course we each saw Maria differently. I saw her more distinctly. The three of us went to the movies. I held Maria's other hand. In the film, Polish cavalry rode to their death against tanks. One horse was called Lotna. Maria cried. Afterward we went to the Rathauskeller. There Maria laughed again. She was pregnant when Jan was shot in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. And once, when I had told him about the Flounder — that was in March, and the sea was whipping up foam — Jan said softly, "I know him. I know him well. . " And Jan also knew the story about Ilsebill.

Ah, Flounder! Where have you swum off to? It's so still, and nothing is decided. What's to become of us? We're worn out, our quarrel has dozed off, it's only talking in its sleep. Little words hang on. Apples of discord roll across the table. You have. You are. I want. I will. Our child will. Your daughter already has. What I'm entitled to. What I haven't got. My needs. Your interests. The second residence. The additional insurance. Travel folders. Wish for this. Wish for that. Go ahead, it's all right with me. It's perfectly all right with me. But it's expensive. Expensive and nothing else. So beat it. So why don't you beat it.

Ah, Flounder! Your story has a dismal ending.

Three months after the birth of our daughter, when she had begun to smile—"Look, she's smiling!" — and the sweet peas on the fence were still in bloom and the swallows were flying high and the summer lingering on and Ilsebill's belly was whole again and everything had been paid for (and

nothing more had been heard of the Flounder), I said to my Ilsebill, who was slender and again full of unrest: "Pork and cabbage! That's something you can't understand. Just plain pork and cabbage. In his bellyful of pork and cabbage. I've got to go back. I've got to go back there again. That's where I came from. That's where it all began. That's where my umbilical cord was cut. We're shooting a film there. No. No actors or actresses. Just a documentary for TV. About the reconstruction. How the Poles have gone about it. All the streets and churches. All the Gothic claptrap. More authentic than before. And how much it cost. What do you mean, pleasure trip! Of course I want to see her. Naturally. Why not, we're related. . "

After saying that (and still more) to Ilsebill, who wanted to go somewhere entirely different (Lesser Antilles), I took an Interflight plane from East Berlin across Kashubia to Gdansk, where the Third Program television team was already inspecting shooting sites and storing up cutting copy, had already been to see the municipal conservator, had had a little trouble with customs (about their equipment), and were waiting for me with an old Pharus map of the Hanseatic Free City of Danzig.

The Charter City was now called Glowne Miasto, the Long Market Dlugi Targ, Brotbankengasse Chlebnicka, and Jopengasse, its extension, Piwna. We shot on Hawkers' Street (Straganiarska) and in the ruins of Saint John's. From Warehouse Island (Spichlerze) we shot the reconstructed line of narrow-chested houses and brick-red gates along the Mottlau (Motlawa). We shot up or down Long Street (Dluga), according to the position of the sun. In the Charter City Rathaus we shot Anton Moller's painting The Tribute Money. Pan Chomicz, the conservator, recited his explanations, which disregarded costs. Suddenly the current went off. While we were waiting for the house electrician, Prince Philip of England paid a semiofficial visit to the Rathaus. And other incidents. And constant sushine. Perfect shooting weather. Tourists. And sometimes when we stopped to rest, I sat down on the perron of the Gothic, gabled Writer's Club building on Frau-engasse (now called Mariacka), because I had often sat there with Jan, talking of this and that; after a while Maria Ku-czorra came by with her plastic shopping bag.

Of course she's more beautiful than ever. But she doesn't laugh any more. And right after her daughters were born, she cut off her corkscrew curls. She still works hard at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. She's saving up for a car. She has sold Jan's old Skoda.

With short-cropped curls, in sweater and jeans, Maria came by as I was sitting on the Frauengasse perron, drinking my gritty coffee, and (inwardly rich in figures) waiting for Agnes Kurbiella or fearing Dorothea Swarze, who at this time of day (vespers) often had her visions at Saint Mary's.

I called her—"Marysia!" — as Jan would have called her. She didn't want to join me for coffee; she wanted to get away, to go somewhere else. I paid and gathered up my papers. Notes on Opitz. What Hegge brought from Wittenberg. Extracts from the Klug Hymnal: "Oh, God in heaven, now look down…" Extracts from the regulations of the Scania mariners' guild. The names of Napoleonic generals at the time when the Republic of Danzig was being besieged by the Russians and Prussians. .