Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Awa made a ritual out of root biting, as she did of everything that allowed of comparisons. In the sacrificial month, the women held the mangels suggestively in front of their faces. They screamed furiously as a warning to us Edeks, and then their teeth crashed down on the roots. Bundles of roots were placed in the bleaching skulls of bull elks as sacrificial

offerings. Roots were used for healing. Our wishing beets ran wild. Beet lore was passed on. .

Once, after three hours of effort in which eleven women displayed their strength, Awa and her companions pulled a man-sized mangel out of a moraine that ran all the way down to the beach. (When at last the mangel emerged, the image of the women, knotted together and tangled in greens, had engraved itself on my mind; later on I cut it into birch bark and colored it with the juices of plants.) And the man-sized, ecstatically convulsed mangel cut so paradigmatic a figure in the eyes of the marveling horde that a mangel god (Ram) — some of the women were on the point of blurting out a name — was almost born to us. But Awa straddled the presumptive divine phallus and made her Edeks carry her around in triumph. She tolerated nothing outside of herself. The old wolf god, from whom she had stolen fire, already had claim enough to an accessory cult. (And the Edeks — so it was rumored — were trying to think up a fish god.)

As it happened, the monstrosity had a woody taste and rotted after a while. Not even the water buffaloes wanted what was left of it. But the biting of beets remained a favorite amusement among the women and inspires primordial terrors in us men to this day. To Dorothea of Montau beets were still vicarious food, as though sweet Jesus manifested himself to her in that form. And likewise for the abbess Margarete Rusch and her nuns, carrots were more than a vegetable. Agnes Kurbiella was the first to cook carrots until soft, add a bit of fat, and serve them up without religious implications. But today, with the cultivation of macrobiotic garden vegetables, guaranteed free of chemicals, the root cult is on the rise again. Wherever you go, raw carrots are eaten in public. Loudly and to the terror of men, young girls bite off the ends. The advertising industry has registered the trend in large color plates: radishes and raw carrots flanked by assorted cheeses, ham, sausage, and pumpernickel. Obviously that means something, something more than affectionate nibbling. Root vegetables are still being bitten off vicariously. But fear is on the rise. .

During a recess in the trial — the Flounder had suffered

another attack of faintness while the Iron Age Wigga was under discussion-I saw the prosecutor, Sieglinde Huntscha, biting into a radish with large, slightly yellow incisors. When I greeted her in passing-we had known each other before the trial-she took another bite, and only then, still chewing, replied: "Well, well. So they've finally let you in? You have me to thank for it. What do you say? We're making it pretty hot for the Flounder, aren't we? But never mind, he wasn't born yesterday. He'll talk himself out of anything, and if I do manage to corner him, he'll feel faint again. Like the other day when he was trying to tell us that women had a natural aptitude for farm work. From the mangel-wurzel to the red beet: that's his idea of progress. Significant contribution to the development of human nutrition. Woman's historical achievement and so on. So I sent out to the market for a bunch of radishes. Want some?"

She gave me what was left. I nibbled like a rabbit that can't help itself. Then the debate on the Wigga case was resumed. The Flounder had apparently recovered. And finally, thanks to Siggie's recommendation, I was able to count myself among the public.

Really, Ilsebill, they'd been unjust. At first they didn't even want to let me in. My contention, supported by documentary evidence, that from neolithic times to the present I had lived in a relation of intimacy with Awa, Wigga, Mest-wina, the High Gothic Dorothea, the fat Gret, the gentle Agnes, and so on, was not corroborated by the Flounder-"Men," he said, "have at all times been interchangeable"-and was ridiculed by the associate judges: "Anybody can make such claims. What is he, anyway? A writer looking for material. Trying to ingratiate himself, to latch on, to grind literature out of his complexes, maybe talk us into settling for special allotments to housewives and suchlike appeasements. But here we are not concerned with petty reforms; here we are concerned with the Flounder as a principle. The private lives and alleged sufferings of individual men leave us cold. That kind of crap is coming out of our ears."

My right to testify was contested. Some four thousand years of my past were expunged (as if I weren't still suffering from injuries incurred in the Neolithic). The proceedings

were supposedly open to the public, but the public was carefully screened: ten women to each man. And even the few men who were admitted had to show affidavits from their working wives, attesting that they did their share of the housework (cooking cleaning taking-care-of-baby). ("He washes the dishes regularly.")

Finally, when I applied for the third time and enclosed two Xeroxed letters in which you express your conviction that not only my domestic virtues but also my impaired manhood were the foundation of our relationship, I was notified that my dossier was under favorable consideration. (Thanks, Ilsebill.)

Maybe I ought to admit that I nevertheless attended the trial from the very start. An electrician who from the operator's room of the former movie house regulated the lighting, the infrared lamp over the Flounder, the PA system, and the projector for documents and statistical charts, let me look into the hall through a little square window and listen in with earphones. Call it male-chauvinist solidarity. Anyway, he let me stay, though the only comment on the Women's Tribunal that occurred to him was "Wouldn't you like to be a Flounder? Some show those dames are putting on."

Then at last I was an acknowledged member of the public. While Wigga, the primordial root, the first cultivation of beets, my monotonous existence as a charcoal burner, our neighboring horde, the parasitic Goths, and my brief participation in the migration were being debated, I occupied a burgundy-upholstered seat in the eleventh row of the movie house. On my left sat an old woman with a bitter laugh. On my right a young women's libber, who was knitting an extremely long screaming-green muffler. Though I proffered greetings to the right and left, I was not acknowledged as a male or as anything else.

Before his attack of faintness — during which he floated around in his tub with his white underside up — the Flounder, to distract attention from his advisory role, had verbosely and with bold figures of speech praised the Iron Age Wigga as the goddess of roots, as the culture heroine of the beet fields, as a great woman and mangel mother. When inter-

rupted by the prosecution in mid-flow, he was stricken with faintness, and it was necessary to call a recess. It was then that Sieglinde Huntscha sent out for the radishes, bit the tip off one of them, gave me the rest, and yakked away until a bell signal called us back into the hall.

There, since there was nothing more to be got out of beets, the debate turned to the Germanic conception of freedom, especially that of the Gothic males. Accused of instigating the migrations and persuading the Pomorshians to participate, the Flounder not only defended himself with glibly recited alliterative lines from Nordic epics, but also leapt to the attack. "Ladies, what justification have you for putting me down as a vile seducer? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that the matriarchal regime, which became increasingly oppressive after Awa, was bound to make even the easygoing Pomorshian males receptive to the free, one might almost say popular-democratic, attitudes of the Gothic men? For servile they were not. The sessions of their Thing went on for hours on end. Everyone contradicted everyone else. Even old Gothic crones were allowed to contribute words of advice from the edge of the circle and whisper maxims arrived at by casting runes. So you see, the women were not excluded. And don't forget German monogamy. Fathers and mothers had something to say to each other, while with the Pomorshians polyandry without father right was still the rule. Objects of use and soon used up, the men lost their last spark of desire. Everything that might have amused them — thinking games, dueling, the acquisition of honors, organizations — was taboo. Small wonder, in short, that the free though barbaric life of the Germani, of whose primitive vigor Tacitus had warned the Romans, attracted the unfortunate males of the coastal horde, especially when you consider the disappearance (regardless of its cause) of the third breast, which might have slaked a male's thirst for freedom, appeased his wanderlust, and quieted his urge to act for action's sake. The only hope was to push off. Into the wide world. Into history. It's true that they soon crawled back home, these Pomorshian men, but that's another story."