Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Absurd, this jealousy about everything and nothing. A pathetic lot we'd be without projections and Utopias! I'd even be forbidden to let pencil stray over white paper in three curved lines. Art would have to say "Yes" and "Have it your way" all the time. I beg you, Ilsebill, be just a little reasonable. Think of the whole thing as an idea with an inherent contradiction which, it is hoped, will give the female breast the dimensions it now lacks and produce some sort of superbosom. You must learn to take a dialectical view. Think of the Roman she-wolf, for instance. Think of expressions such as "nature's bosom." Or, with regard to the number, the triune God. Or the three wishes in fairy tales. What do you mean, given myself away? You think I'm wishing? Well, well. You really do?

All right. Admitted that when I grab at empty space, I'm always after the third breast. In which I'm certainly not alone. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts, as if we'd all been weaned too soon. It must be you

women's fault. It could be your fault. Because you attach so much, too much importance to whether or not they sag a little more, each day a little more. Let them sag, to hell with them. No. Not yours. But they will, they're bound to, in time. Amanda's sagged. Lena's sagged from the start. But I loved her and loved her and loved her. It's not always a bit of bosom more or less that matters. If I wanted to, for instance, I could find your ass with all its little dimples just as beautiful. And I certainly wouldn't want it in three parts. Or something else that's smooth and round. Now that your belly will soon start ballooning, a symbol for everything that's roomy. Maybe we've simply forgotten that there's still more. A third something. In other respects as well, politically for instance, as possibility.

Anyway, Awa had three. My three-breasted Awa. And you, too, had one more back in the Neolithic. Think back, Ilsebill: to how our story began.

Even if it seems convenient to presume that they, the cooks inside me (nine or eleven of them), are nothing more than a full-blown complex, an extreme case of banal mother fixation, ripe for the couch and hardly worthy of suspending time in kitchen tales, I must nevertheless insist on the rights of my subtenants. All nine or eleven of them want to come out and to be called by name from the very start; because they have too long been nameless old settlers, or, collectively, a complex without name or history; because too often in mute passivity and too seldom with ready words (I say: dominant nevertheless; Ilsebill says: exploited and oppressed) they cooked and performed various other services for shopkeepers and Teutonic Knights, abbots and inspectors, for men in armor or cowls, in baggy breeches or gaiters, for men in high boots or men with snapping suspenders; and because they want their revenge, revenge against everyone; want at last to be out of me — or, as Ilsebill says, emancipated.

Let them! Let them reduce us all, including the cook inside them— who would doubtless be me — to sex objects. Perhaps from exhausted daddies they will build a man who, untainted by power and privilege, will be sticky and new; for without him it can't be done.

"Not yet, unfortunately," said Ilsebill as we were spoon-

ing up our fish soup. And after the shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, she gave me nine months' time to deliver myself of my cooks. When it comes to deadlines, we have equal rights. Whatever I may have cooked, the cook inside me adds salt.

About food and its aftertaste.

Then about guests who came

uninvited or just a century late.

About the mackerel's longing for lemon juice.

Among fishes I write mostly about the flounder.

I write about superabundance.

About fasting and why gluttons invented it.

About crusts from the tables of the rich and their food value.

About fat and excrement and salt and penury.

In the midst of a mound of millet

I will relate instructively

how the spirit became bitter as gall

and the belly went insane.

I write about breasts.

About Ilsebill's pregnancy (her craving for sour pickles)

I will write as long as it lasts.

About the last bite shared,

the hour spent with a friend

over bread, cheese, nuts, and wine.

(Munching, we talked about this, that, and the other

and about gluttony, which is only a form of fear.)

I write about hunger, how it is described and disseminated by the written word. About spices (when Vasco da Gama and I made pepper cheaper) I will write on my way to Calcutta.

Meat, raw and cooked,

goes limp, shreds, shrinks, and falls apart.

The daily porridge

and other warmed-over fare: dated history,

the slaughter at Tannenberg Wittstock Kolin.

I make a note of what's left:

bones, husks, innards, and sausage.

About nausea brought on by a heaped plate,

about good taste,

about milk (how it curdles),

about turnips, cabbage, the triumph of the potato

I will write tomorrow

or after yesterday's leftovers

have become today's petrifaction.

What I write about: about the egg.

About overeating through sorrow, consuming love, the nail

and the rope, about quarrels over the hair and the word too many in the

soup. Deep freezers and what became of them when the current gave out. I will write about us all at a table eaten bare, and about you and me and the fishbones in our throats.

The first cook inside me — for I can speak only of cooks who are inside me and want to come out — was named Awa, and she had three breasts. That was in the Stone Age. We men had little say, because Awa had filched fire for us from the Sky Wolf, three glowing little pieces of charcoal, and hidden them somewhere, possibly under her tongue. Next Awa, as though in passing, invented the roasting spit and taught us to distinguish raw food from cooked food. Awa's rule was mild: after suckling their babies, the women of the Stone Age suckled their men until they sweated out their obsessions, stopped fidgeting, and became sleepily still, available for just about anything.

And so we were all of us sated. Never again, never in

the future that dawned later on, were we so sated. We were suckled and suckled. Always superabundance was flowing into us. Never any question of enough is enough or let's not overdo it. Never were we given a pacifier and told to be reasonable. It was always suckling time.

Because Awa prescribed a mash of ground acorns, sturgeon roe, and the mammary glands of the elk cow for all mothers, milk gushed into Stone Age mothers even when there were no infants to suckle. That made us all peaceful and created time intervals. So punctually fed, even our toothless old men preserved their vigor, and the consequence was rather a surplus of males; the women wore out more quickly and died younger. We had little to do between feeding times: hunting, fishing, the manufacture of stone axes; and when in accordance with a strict rule our turn came, we were allowed to mount the women, who ruled by tender loving care.

It might interest you to know that Stone Age mothers already said "la la" to their babies and that the men, when called to take a look at them, said "na na." There were no fathers. Matriarchy held sway.

It was a pleasantly historyless age. A pity that someone, a man of course, suddenly decided to smelt metal out of ore and pour it into sand molds. God knows that wasn't what Awa had stolen fire for. But threaten as she would to withhold the breast, the Bronze Age and the masculine cruelties that came after it could not be prevented, but only delayed a little.

The second cook inside me who wants to emerge with a name was called Wigga and no longer had three breasts. That was in the Iron Age, but Wigga, who forbade us to leave the swamps with their plentiful fish and join in the history making of the Germanic hordes who were then passing through, still kept us in a state of immaturity. The one thing she allowed us to copy from the Germans was their coiling pottery. And Wigga made us gather the iron pots they threw away in their haste, because Wigga ruled by cookery, and she needed flameproof pots.