Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Pounded manna seeds were so popular that in the eighteenth century (before the introduction of the potato) they figured among the region's exports. Even the serfs had to supply manna grits to their owners, along with other produce. And before cheap Carolina rice appeared on the market in the nineteenth century, sweet manna porridge cooked in milk and seasoned with cinnamon was served at peasant weddings instead of the usual wedding millet. Because of their digestibility, manna grits were prized as food for the aged, and West Prussian cottagers, on retiring, stipulated a certain measure of manna grits as part of their reserved rights.

Of course we gathered other wild grasses in times of famine, wild millet {Milium effusum), for instance, or the red cowwheat (Melampyrnum arvense), from which a rather bitter but wholesome bread could be baked. And when the harvest

was poor, lyme grass was used to stretch our supply of cultivated grain. But of all the wild grains that helped us to get through the winters, our favorite was manna grass, or "Prussian manna." And that was why, when Wigga wanted to get rid of the Goths, she served them a "Gothic mash" of manna grits — plenty of them, with nothing much added. Only a few sunflower seeds were mixed with the grain before it was crushed in a mortar.

The Goths didn't care for our manna. Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger were meat eaters. They would eat fried fish in a pinch, but as a rule resigned themselves to porridge only as a filler. True, they shoveled it in from the deep bowl that Wigga had set down in their midst, but the prospect of living a whole winter and more on grits (and woody mangel-wurzels) took their appetites away. My friend Ludger looked as if he had been asked to eat toads. To make matters worse, Wigga, in her instructive lecture about the difficulty of gathering the seeds (definitely man's work), mentioned our meager Pomorshian stocks but made it clear that the place where they were stored was secret and inaccessible.

It was my friend Ludger who humbly (all the hauteur had gone out of him) asked for advice. Luderich and Ludnot also asked what was to be done. Finally, when Wigga remained silent, Prince Ludolf, a handsome, monumental man who not only was the father of Ludger, Luderich, and Ludnot but also was thought to have begotten Wigga, asked simply and directly what this foggy marshland between rivers had to offer the Goths, apart from not enough manna grits.

"Nothing," said Wigga. And, rather harshly, "You'll just have to shove off. Either to the north, where you came from. Or to the south, where everything is supposed to be better." And she proceeded to vaunt the southland to her guests: Every day spitted bullocks and sheep. Mead awaited them in never empty pitchers. Never a foggy day. The rivers were never clogged with ice. You were never snowed in for weeks on end. And to top it all, the south promised the brave victory, honor, and posthumous fame. If people wanted to make history, she went on, there was no point in their settling down as if the beet culture were the only possible advance; no, they

must indefatigably conquer new horizons. "So pack your stuff and beat it!" she cried, pointing her long arm southward.

Thereupon Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger shoveled in the rest of the grits to fortify themselves for the next day. As Wigga had advised them, they shoved off southward and started on their migration. The outcome is known to every schoolboy. It's true, they went far.

In our country, on the other hand, centuries went by without noticeable change. Only the weather varied. Until Bishop Adalbert arrived with the cross.

With open eyes the goddess sees how blind the heavens are.

Petrified eyelashes cast shadows all around. No lid consents to fall and bring sleep.

Always horror

ever since she saw the god

here in the fallow field

where the plowshare was engendered.

Willingly the mule goes round and round over his barley. That hasn't changed.

We who have fallen out of the cycle take an overexposed photograph.

Adalbert came from Bohemia. All his books (as well as his crosier) had stayed in Prague. Because he was at the end of

his scholastic wisdom, he decided to abandon theory for practice, that is, to convert the heathen and spread the one true faith in our country, the region of the Vistula estuary. (Today they call it "working with the masses.")

Wladislaw, king of Poland, had signed him on as a propagandist. He arrived with a Bohemian retinue under Polish protection. His actual purpose was to indoctrinate the Prussians, because the king of Poland wanted to extend his power to the east bank of the Vistula. But since the Prussians had a reputation for ferocity, his Bohemian retinue advised him to start by practicing on us, the rather dull-witted but good-natured Pomorshians. (Build up experience, inspire confidence, do good, get acquainted with the foreign economy, said the prelate Ludewig.)

They camped near our settlement. They had brought provisions in oxcarts. But before they had even launched their missionary activity, their Polish cook died on them. After preliminary talks — with both parties exchanging what they had — our cook (and hence priestess), Mestwina, offered to cook for the bishop and his retinue. Our contribution consisted of mangel-wurzels, Glumse, mutton, grits, mushrooms, honey, and fish.

Neither Fat Gret nor Amanda Woyke was the first to fold her bare fuzz-blond arms below her bosom and survey the table with a stern to benevolent look. In this same attitude my Mestwina watched Bishop Adalbert after serving up his dinner. She held her head slightly tilted, and her expression was one of expectancy. But Adalbert did not praise the dishes he liked; he ate as though tormented by disgust. He poked listlessly about, he chewed with distaste, as though every bite were at once a temptation and a harbinger of hell's torments. Not that he found fault with anything in particular or, confronted with Pomorshian cookery, missed his Bohemian cuisine; his disgust was universal. (You can't imagine, Ilsebill, what a repulsive sourpuss I was toward the end of the tenth century a.d. Because in principle I was this Adalbert of Prague, who gagged on his food and seemed to have been born without a palate.)

And yet Mestwina had fallen for the gaunt missionary. She, too, wanted to convert. When she looked over her folded

arms and saw him chewing, her face flushed, and the flush rose to the part in her hair. For she hoped that her heathen cookery might give him a foretaste, perhaps not of her conversion to Catholicism but at least of her love, for love him she did — with a love that ran hot and cold.

For Adalbert she baked bacon flatbread. For Adalbert she stirred honey into millet porridge. For him there was sheep's-milk cheese with smoked cod liver. For and against Adalbert she cooked (after singeing the bristles) a whole boned boar's head with roots and morels. Then Mestwina put the head in a bowl and covered it with its broth. In the January frost the broth soon hardened into jelly. (The bishop's mercenaries had speared the wild boar in the endless wooded hills of the interior.)

And toward noon, when the bishop wished to partake of a simple meal with the envoys of the king of Poland-Wladis-law was pressing for the conversion of the Prussians-Mest-wina, for and against Adalbert, overturned the bowl and dumped the boar's head on the table in such a way that though surrounded by jelly it could be seen for what it was. The famished envoys delivered it from the quivering jelly. But because Mestwina was looking on in her expectant attitude (over folded arms), Adalbert had to put a pious interpretation on their greediness: "One would think Satan in person had got into that jelly!" So the five of them vanquished Satan, and the bishop, as the standing Mestwina could see, had difficulty in displaying his usual disgust. The prelate Ludewig was encouraged to crack a joke or two about Satan's excellent flavor; but Adalbert did not laugh.