Gunter Grass - The Flounder

women from top to bottom. "And besides," you say, "we need a noiseless dishwasher and an apartment in town. Gourd-vine arbor? Why not say 'pisspot,' like in the fairy tale? I'd sooner have an abortion — in London, for instance— than let you twine me in out here. It's the old male-chauvinist trick. The gilded-cage routine. What's wrong with you? Tired?"

Yes, Ilsebill. A little. Tired of the times we live in. But if you say so, I'll book a charter flight. Maybe to the Lesser Antilles. And the dishwasher goes without saying. Same for the interesting people in London and Paris. About the apartment in town, well, I'll think it over. You're right, right again. Obviously the liberation of women cannot be properly discussed in a gourd-vine arbor. Just an idea of mine, because back in the seventeenth century my friend Simon Dach. . And because you, too, Ilsebill have always longed for a little more security.

Men who with that well-known expression think things to the end and have always thought them to the end; men for whom not possibly possible goals but the ultimate goal — a society free from care-has pitched its tent beyond mass graves; men who from the sum of dated defeats draw only one conclusion: smoke-veiled ultimate victory over radically scorched earth; men who at one of those conferences held daily since the worst proved to be technically feasible resolve with masculine realism on the final solution; men with perspective, men goaded by importance, great exalted men, whom no one and no warm slippers can hold, men with precipitous ideas followed by flat deeds-have we finally — we wonder — seen the last of them?

The word too many, rancid fat, the headless trunk: Mest-wina. The way to Einsiedeln and back: the stone in my fist, in my pocket. That Friday, March 4, when my hand dipped into the strike fund. Frost flowers (yours) and my breath. Myself as I ran: away from the pots and down the slope of history. That Father's-Ascension Day not so long ago; naturally I was there. Shards while washing dishes, substituted meat, the Swedes on Hela Peninsula, the moon over Zuckau, the man behind the gorse bush, silence, the deaf man's yes. The fat and the stone, the meat and the clutching hand, silly stories like this one. .

One prehistoric day, after the usual mythological chitchat, the Flounder, to enlighten me at last, told me about King Minos's wife, how she lusted for her husband's white bull and how a certain Daedalus, known for his ingenuity, made her a disguise of cowhides, whereupon she was mightily mounted — a happening which, as we know, resulted in the Minotaur and other myths. And in conclusion the Flounder said: "This must not be taken as an incident of purely local importance. Others can learn a useful lesson from it. The whole continent is concerned. Don't forget that Zeus in person took the offended King Minos (in the form of a bull) to the maiden Europa. So that Queen Pasiphae's faux pas contributed to the fall from power of the Cretan women. The Zeus principle, the male seed, the pure idea triumphed. Because the bull-headed monster was a living illustration of matriarchal profligacy. The same demonstration might be made in the Baltic bogs. It doesn't always have to be a bovine; it can just as well be a white elk bull. Supposing a robust young specimen goes roaring through the bogs night after

night as if he had had his fill of cranberries and willow shoots and never wanted to mount a normal elk cow again, but had made up his mind to engender a Baltic myth instead. Now here's what you must do to stimulate the three-breasted Awa. Mold clay into arm-long elk pizzles, bake them as you would pots, set them up in a circle where she can't help seeing them, and let them take their effect."

I did just as he said. The erect ceramic pizzles amused Awa and her companions. When the sun was shining, they cast wandering shadows. A new cult began with a game: the women aimed quoits plaited from willow twigs. Soon the pizzles were adorned with wreaths of flowers. Jumping over them with outspread legs became a women's sport. (How obscenely they screamed. How gross were their jokes even then. What fun they got out of my modest attempts at sculpture.)

The Flounder called me the Baltic Daedalus. On his instructions I made a convincing disguise of elk skins cut to Awa's measure. I steamed elk calves' sweetbreads for Awa. And as though under contract to the Flounder, the white elk bull roared night after night in the Radune bogs nearby.

But Awa didn't want it. She had no desire to make myths. With three suckling breasts, she was sufficient unto herself (and unto us as well). She flew into a neolithic rage when I (urged by the Flounder) attempted with prurient stimulus words to arouse her interest in the bull. No, she cried, no, thus inventing a word with a future. All my pottery elk pizzles had to be smashed. (That's why our region has yielded no phallic idols.) And for punishment I was tied to the rear end of a tame elk cow — we had domestic animals by then.

For the whole of a neolithic day I tried to prove myself. But I didn't accomplish anything. I don't remember begetting any monsters. I have no desire to recall the disgrace that followed, but I have to, because I am writing and must therefore write that Awa and her women made an annual spring festival out of my shameful ride on the elk cow. Under the full moon she and her companions (borrowing from my sartorial art) dressed in the hides of elk cows. We Edeks had to deck ourselves out with the palmed antlers of elk bulls. We were required to emit a sound resembling an authentic mat-

ing cry. The tails of elk cows were tied to the women, and under those uplifted tails they offered themselves. Can you imagine anything more bestial?

"These loathsome fertility rites!" cried the Flounder. "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves? All this mating without father right. At this rate you'll never produce a masculine myth, a Jovian head-birth."

Then he went on about the refinements of Minoan culture. He spoke of palaces with many rooms, of open staircases with dimensions appropriate to royal dignity, of water pipes and steam baths. And while he was at it, he reported the birth of the young hero Heracles. As though in passing, he deplored the fact that a seaquake (or the wrath of Poseidon) had recently destroyed the capital city of Knossos—"But King Minos was miraculously saved!" — and raved about hand-sized bronze statuettes representing men with bulls' heads and marketed as far afield as Egypt and Asia Minor.

"That, my son, is what I call lasting influence! Way back at the beginning of the first palace period, Queen Pasiphae's offspring was bumped off by a certain Theseus. Not without the help of the artist Daedalus. Only the other day I told you the story of the ball of wool and the tragic sequel. What was the poor girl's name again? Was she left to rot on some island? Nobody remembers. But those Minoan bronzes and charming terra cottas, all with the same motif— they were paradigmatic; they set a style."

And he made me a present of a clay figurine the size of a little finger, which like his other gifts he toted unimpaired through the seas in his branchial sac. The little man with the bull's head: one more item in my growing art collection, which I kept hidden in an abandoned badger's burrow, until it was stolen by my friend Lud and hauled away God knows where. Then the Flounder persuaded me to make figurines of comparable mythical import and to perpetrate a pious fraud as a way of keeping my disgrace out of history.

And so I did. I molded seven or nine hand-sized little men surmounted by elk heads with palmed antlers, baked them secretly, and buried them near the suburb of Schidlitz, where in the twentieth century more or less fortuitous excavations were to produce neolithic finds. Unfortunately the archaeologists, two dilettantish schoolteachers, were not as care-