Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Our cheese was extracted from elk and reindeer milk. Casually I passed the tip on to Awa, who soon learned to let the milk stand in clay bowls made by me, to let it sour, curdle, and discharge the whey under pressure, to mold the cheeses with her hands, wrap them in lettuce leaves, tie them up, and hang them on wind-twisted willow trees.

Awa took this as home-grown procedure. No whiff of King Minos and the first European high culture had reached her. And when, later, the Iron Age Wigga mixed curdled goat's and sheep's milk with codfish roe before it turned into cheese, she had without Cretan influence invented a dish that the Cretans still sell for a few drachmas and serve as an appetizer.

It was not until Mestwina's time that cow's milk and sheep's milk were processed along with mare's milk. We called our local cheese Glumse. Milk glumsed, became

glumsy. A shepherd at the time, I became Mestwina's "Glum-ser." "Glums-head" is still a term of affectionate disparagement. In good times and bad, cool cellared Glumse was always in demand.

For Dorothea of Montau, who refused to touch so much as a shred of meat, Glumse, beaten with roasted barley grits, provided a High Gothic Lenten dish that she served on such holidays as Candlemas. She also crumbled Glumse into her leek soups.

And when, a little later, it became necessary to starve the Teutonic Knights out of their fortress not far from the Wicker Bastion, the townspeople gave body to their mockery by tossing handy little balls of Glumse into the besieged stronghold. That demoralized the Teutonic Knights, and they surrendered.

The abbess Margarete Rusch stuffed quail and snipe with well-pressed Glumse and cranberries before aligning the little birds on the spit, a procedure that was said to have earned her, after guild banquets, the lucrative favor of the beer brewers, coopers, and wealthy drapers.

And the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella also served the poet Martin Opitz Glumse, flavored with caraway seeds (of which he was inordinately fond), in the belief that it was good for his nervous stomach. (But the word Glumse never found its way into his iambics — no adequate rhyme for Glumse.)

On Sundays, Amanda Woyke, who cooked for the help at the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, served the day laborers and serfs Glumse and a negligible quantity of sunflower oil along with their boiled potatoes, while on weekdays she gave them bowls of dry, fatless curds, sometimes adding a few onion rings.

When Danzig became a Napoleonic republic and was consequently besieged by the Russians and Prussians, the French governor learned to prize his cook Sophie Rotzoll's brilliant idea of stirring, at the last minute, a sweet-and-sour mixture of Glumse and raisins into her stewed horsemeat, cut from the flanks of his Polish uhlans' expired stallions.

Lena Stubbe embellished her watery cabbage soups, which derived what little taste they had and an eye or two

of fat from an occasional beef bone, with crumbled Glumse. Or she would make sour-milk soups and add cubes of stale bread or slices of cucumber that some charitable soul had donated to the Ohra soup kitchen. Her "Proletarian Cook Book" included a recipe for pickled herring in Glumse.

When Billy celebrated Father's Day with her girl friends and the world still seemed to be a cheerful kind of place, barbecued steaks and lamb kidneys were followed by Bulgarian sheep's-milk cheese, which is related to our native, Minoan-influenced Glumse.

And Maria Kuczorra, who as canteen cook of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk keeps an eye on food and food prices, also eats Polish Glumse off her knife as she stares silently into space.

Just as my Ilsebill, now that she is pregnant (by me), has developed a craving for curds, kefir, kumiss, and yogurt, all relatives of Glumse. But the Flounder told me next to nothing about the further development of our Minoan-influenced cheese industry. And he won't admit that he enlightened us too late. On the contrary, he contends, in his testimony before the Tribunal, that Awa and the other women suspected if they didn't actually know what and who kept impregnating them, and that they needed outside help to be mothers. But, he goes on, Awa didn't find it convenient to divulge this suspicion or half-knowledge, which would have lent support to the principle of paternity, if not to any individual fatherhood.

Is that right, Ilsebill? Did you know the facts and conceal them? Was it your neolithic system to keep us men in the dark? Did you exchange winks? Were you women a conspiracy even then?

I'd rather not believe the Flounder. He's always griping. Always running everything down. How unwilling we Edeks, we lazy Pomorshians, were to assert claims of fatherhood, to found families, to hand down property, to create dynasties that would bloom, proliferate, and degenerate. "Why, there's nothing to prove you ever were fathers. You never even thought of giving the handles of your clay pots obscene shapes, of documenting your culture with so much as a stone phallus. Pure waste of time, my telling you about

the Minoan bull. Sure. You were as potent as rabbits, but culturally speaking, because you were unaware of your pro-creative power, you couldn't get it up."

That's unjust, Ilsebill. He ignores the fact that we were influenced at a relatively early date by the Minoan method of milk processing. As if Glumse production were not a cultural activity! As if paternity were all that mattered! As if we hadn't transmitted our Glumse hospitably from horde to horde.

Just as we invite people to dinner — my eggplant sprinkled with grated cheese and baked, your crisp salad — and have reason to fear return invitations to mushy hormone-fed chicken in curry sauce, so in the late days of my neolithic time-phase we also had guests. Then as now: we can't always eat stingily by ourselves, even if the nice couple next door with their eternal marriage problems aren't exactly our dream, for man is by definition a social animal.

The Flounder, you see, had already deplored our isolation and advised me to make contact with the neighboring horde, which, he assured me, had for centuries been living only a short distance inland—"Get out of these marshes, my son! Shake a leg. If you refuse to borrow anything from the Minoan high culture, if you think your Glumse is achievement enough, then at least make comparisons with other hordes here in your home country, so that one day you may become a clan, a tribe, and finally a nation. And if your Awa wants you to go on believing that there's nothing in the whole world but her and you, you'd better be guided by my knowledge; there's more world beyond the mountains, my son; there are people busy multiplying. You are not alone."

So I persuaded a few hunters in our horde not just to hunt elk and water buffalo in the nearby bogs, but to follow the Radune upstream and explore the woods along its banks. My fisherman's opinion — that if the eels came from up there and swam downstream in quest of the Mottlava, the Vistula, and the open sea, there must be something else up there and not just nothing — met with hesitant approval. Fear had to be cowed: "What can happen to us? We'll stay near the river. And if it gets too scary, we'll turn back."

Of course we knew the fringes of the woods from gath-

ering mushrooms and roots and cautiously hunting the badger and wild boar, but we had never ventured deep into the dark forest; our courage extended only to the swamps and moors. But to make a long story short, as the Flounder would say, we started out. Unbeknownst to Awa, six hunters and I crept through the rolling beech and oak forests into the wooded, pond-studded section of the Baltic Ridge that later came to be known as Kashubia; and as we crept, we whistled. At that early date we learned to purse our lips and resort to the now traditional remedy for fear.