Gunter Grass - The Flounder

While the Flounder was speaking and while his speech was being torn to shreds by the prosecutor, exposed as male-

chauvinist rubbish, and while the Flounder — for having praised the Germanic concept of freedom — was once termed prefascist and twice postfascist, I, at last admitted to the audience, had my eye on the second to the left of the eight associate judges who, four to the left and four to the right of Ms. Schonherr, the presiding judge, maintained the symmetry of the long, raised table.

There she sat. Every bit my Wigga. Gigantic and unwieldy, she never modified her posture. Her crossed arms forming a rampart in front of her bosom. Her radish-colored hair, as though she were determined to overtower at all costs, piled high and held in place with a hairpin, which might, however, have been one of those rusty nails that the Goths, when they finally started southward, left behind as scrap. Wigga! Her father — so it was rumored among us — had been a Goth. Hence her name, a variant of Frigga, the Germanic goddess. Hence her unwieldiness, her morose impassiveness, her calm severity. My Wigga, a Pomorshian Valkyrie, then presiding over us as the wurzel mother, today over me as associate judge of the Women's Tribunal.

Impassive, she listened to the Flounder, to the prosecutor. With that same gaze full of nothing, she might have been looking out over the Baltic Sea. Only once, when the Flounder in his carping way spoke of Wigga's attempts to raise beets as deserving but none too successful, she abandoned the rampart posture of her forearms, stopped looking out over the smooth Baltic, slowly, very slowly, with her right hand pulled the endlessly long hairpin or Gothic nail out of the tower of her hair, and (bending her wrist) scratched her back with it. Believe me, Ilsebill, just like Wigga, when I told her how I'd joined the migration. (Her father, by the way, was said to have been the Gothic district chief Ludolf, from whom my always truculent Gothic friend Ludger was descended.)

I didn't get to hear my contemporary Wigga until the associate judges cast their final vote. Seated in her large-checked two-piece outfit, Ms. Helga Paasch, sole owner of a large nursery garden in Berlin-Britz, declared: "Well, if you ask me, this Mr. Flounder is guilty. For putting ideas into the guys' heads. All this nonsense about history. Promising them heaven knows what, palm trees, cypresses, olives, lemons.

Globe-trotting passed off as progress. Freedom, he called it. But all his incitement went for nothing. The Pomorshians came back. Pretty quick, too, with their tails between their legs. After which they had to plow again and grow beets. Because he was unsuccessful I say: extenuating circumstances for Mr. Flounder this time."

The old lady on my left laughed bitterly while, overcome with rage, the women's libber on my right dropped several stitches and bit into her screaming-green choker. I sat very still; I hardly breathed. But after ironically terming the mild verdict "astonishingly fair," the Flounder merely concluded, "After that bit of bungled history, nothing of interest happened among the Pomorshians for seven centuries; their only progress was in beet production."

Not a word about the dream root, our wishing wurzel. Yet it was important and explains more than the Flounder concealed. (Or can it be that he really doesn't know?) In any event, not so much as a syllable about our primordial drug came to the ears of the Tribunal. No attempt to explain the disappearance of the third breast. All of a sudden it was gone, and that was that. When as a matter of fact it owed its very existence to the wishing wurzel.

The crossbreeds attempted today — the bean tree, the tomato-potato, quota-exceeding rye-wheat — wouldn't have held a candle to our wishing wurzel. Its pointed bluish root with the faintly almondlike taste sent up a luxuriant bush from which, when it reached maturity, hung edible pods full of protein-rich beans; the leaves, rolled into plugs, were chewed by us Edeks. Pods and beans nourished us, the root was our dessert, but the leaves kept us quiet, made the third breast a reality for us, emptied our heads, fulfilled our wishes, and gave us dreams: boundless, heroically exalted, immortal, exciting daydreams.

It was not innate laziness but the wishing wurzel that stopped us from making history. And really, Ilsebill, it was Wigga's doing that we finally woke up a bit. In the course of several campaigns, she had the dream wurzel, which only in our marshy soil produced leaves and beans from pointed roots, radically exterminated. Oh yes, we protested feebly,

but she had the last word with her impassively stated argument that the poison kept us from becoming industrious tillers of the soil and growing normal beets. From then on no more dreams, no more wish fulfillment. Wet, cold agricultural reality. Periods of hunger. Slowly we came awake.

And the Goths, who with us had become addicted to the weed (as a substitute for travel), woke up at the same time, found our region a hopeless bore, and started on the travels they had been dreaming of, the so-called migrations.

Wigga invited the Gothic chieftains to a starvation meal and persuaded them to go.

That was after an overlong winter and a rainy summer, when the barley rotted on the stalk and the only beets to be had were moldy. The herring and flounder had stayed away, too, and the fish perished in the rivers as if the country had been cursed: perch, bass, roach, and pike were seen drifting belly up. We would have come through the winter even so, but, accustomed as they were to sponging on others, our Gothic guests had nothing to fall back on when their cattle were carried away by a plague, so we were forced to slaughter our last remaining reindeer and water buffaloes. True, the Goitches still had horses (though they creaked at the joints), but their horses were sacred to them and were never slaughtered, not even in times of famine.

So Wigga invited the Gothic chieftains to a special kind of noonday meal. She had decided to serve her guests the only food which we Pomorshians still had and which, though in short supply, we would continue to have throughout the coming winter. The guests were Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger, all of them hulking fellows with a studied truculent glare. For once all four were unarmed. Possibly they were so weak that the sheer weight of the iron would have been too much for them. It had rained all summer, and now in the fall it was still raining. So Wigga had invited the visitors to her hut, where it was smoky but cozy. They all sat on sheepskins, their watering blue eyes magnified by hunger. Luderich chewed his red beard. Ludnot gnawed his fingernails. Nevertheless Wigga, before bringing in the steaming bowl, delivered a brief but instructive lecture about the one dish she had provided, which later, after it had

produced its effect, we named "Wigga's Gothic mash." She spoke about manna grass and manna grits.

Now, sometimes because there was nothing else to eat and sometimes because of the pleasant taste, the seeds of manna grass (Glyceria fluitans L.), known in my part of the country as wild grass, have been gathered and ground from the earliest times down to the twentieth century — during the First World War, for instance, or in 1945, the year of mass flight. This local grain has been called Schwade or wild millet or heaven's bread, or by the Prussians simply manna.

It was not easy to gather the manna grains, because when ripe they hung loosely from the stalks. For this reason we gathered the grain in the morning dew with the help of taut, flat bags that were fastened to the ends of sticks and moved through the grass. Later on we used manna-grass combs. And in the nineteenth century, when more and more of the land was cultivated and the wild grass was rarely seen outside of marshy areas, manna-grass sieves were attached to poles that were often as much as twelve feet long. (Perhaps I should tell you that manna grain was gathered almost exclusively by men, whereas the gathering of mushrooms, berries, wild sorrel, and roots has been women's work since time immemorial. That's why the Flounder actually tried to get the Women's Tribunal to characterize the use of manna grits for emergency food as a male achievement.)