Gunter Grass - The Flounder

ful as they should have been. All the palmed antlers, which had previously fallen off, were dug under, so that the art historians never took them into account. Misinterpretations followed. Talk of neolithic pig-men. West Prussian Folklore magazine spoke of surprisingly early domestication of pigs in the marshes of the Vistula estuary. Experts argued over shards that were unique in the Baltic region, for on the Flounder's advice I had made the figurines hollow, molding them around my left middle finger in the Minoan manner.

But my terra cottas did not transmit a myth. Nothing came of them but controversial footnotes and a doctoral dissertation which in the year 1936 propounded the thesis that my "pig-men" were early Slavic testimony to the existence of an inferior, degenerate, worthless race.

The odd part of it is that later on (though the Flounder doesn't know it) Awa did let herself be mounted by an elk bull. In the moonlight. Without the disguise I had tailored. All three breasts bared. Down on her knees she offered herself. Her fat rump glittered as she wagged it. Playfully he approached. A young bull with a white hide. He didn't assault her violently; his approach was more on the timid, experimental side. His light-catching palmed antlers. His hoofs on her shoulders. Affectionately at first, nuzzling at the back of her neck. Then everything fitted, nothing was impossible, it happened naturally and didn't take long. Hidden in the willows, I looked on. Heard Awa cry out as never before. I wanted to preserve the image, her three breasts hanging down into the cranberries. But I forgot, swept memory rubble (other stories) over it. I didn't want to remember, because when, after the usual length of time, no god with palmed antlers but a girl was born, she resembled Awa all right but showed indications of four breasts, the equipment of an elk cow, whereupon she was killed forthwith with a stone ax.

"No!" cried Awa and wielded the ax. "This is going too far. Let's not overdo it. Three are enough. Who knows what the little wench would do later on. No crimes against nature, if you please. We don't want tongues to wag."

And she ordered us to hunt and spear the white elk bull. We ate the young flesh crisp-roasted with mashed cranberries, as though nothing had happened. But now at last I was enlightened and started looking for a word for "father."

That, by the Flounder's time reckoning, was shortly after the Argonauts embarked on their voyage and two years before the Seven marched against Thebes. But in our country the women kept their power. Whether Awa or Wigga or later Mestwina, they prevented legendary voyages and campaigns. They survived without special emblems of power, and when we tried to make history (or trouble) they stymied us with their womanhood. Wrath gave way to quietness. They made us tread lightly. Smiling injustice triumphed. The caprice of the mighty prevailed. Enslaved by their mild forgiveness, we remained domesticated. (I stop in my flight to sue for peace over the phone. "Sure, sure," says Ilsebill. "It's all right. So you want to come home? If you behave, you can be the father. Let's forget all about it. Get a good night's sleep. Then we'll see.")

The things I can't help: drought, killing frost, rainy spells, cattle plagues, times of famine when nothing but manna grits was available and not enough of them. What I would like to distract people's attention with: how I developed the charcoal industry and invented Baltic bricks. What I could not for a long time bring myself to say, but the Flounder said: You must. What I don't want to remember: how I marched southward up the river with the Goths, leaving Wigga, who kept our horde on short rations, alone with her pots.

My first flight. (Typical male escape syndrome, still common to this day: beat it quick around the corner for a cigarette or two and never come back; gone forever.) We pushed off in May. In other parts of the world the calendar said 211. Everything was in flux. Germanic restlessness. The first migrations. Marcomans, Herulians, and our Goths with their inborn wanderlust pushed off, invaded new lands, made history. I, too, was sick of being Wigga's charcoal burner, also condemned of late to farm work, beet raising. Like the red-haired fire-eaters whose god Wotan the Flounder had taught me to worship in secret, I wanted to sit in a manly circle deliberating, to strike my shield in assent, to lower my shield in dissent, I wanted to be a man: A man consulted, a man with rights and a voice, with sons to come after him. A man exempt from daily chores and hungry for distant places. I wanted

to be gone, to quit the trivia of daily life. I wanted to live dangerously, to discover, prove, fulfill myself. Weaned at last, I wanted to know the meaning of honor victory death.

"Clear out," said Wigga. She sat — a giant when seated— under the willow-withe arbor, molding small dumplings of herring roe, herring milt, and oatmeal, and dropping them into foaming fish broth. "Clear out!" She'd have no trouble replacing me as her charcoal burner and in my other functions as well. She rolled the dumplings on her flat, hard thighs, two at a time, clockwise and counterclockwise. Just as Ilsebill can say, "Have it your way," so Wigga, not even contemptuously, said, "Just clear out."

But I didn't get very far, only three days' journey up the river. There, where later, much later, the town of Dirschau (Tczew) with its railroad bridge across the Vistula was supposed to be strategically important, I already had blisters on my feet, the uncouth Goths frightened me, I cast longing looks homeward and cursed the Flounder who had advised me to shove off. (To make matters worse, my friend Ludger treated me like a groom, with beastly condescension.)

I often wept while cooling my feet in the river. Without a roof over my head I felt sorry for myself. We Pomor-shians were not admitted to the meeting of their Thing. I had to curry their horses, scour their short-swords with ashes, comb out their women's matted hair, and put up with their arrogant sulking after bouts of mead drinking. When they had chewed too much fly agaric soaked in mare's milk, they became murderously aggressive and thrashed us in place of enemies who had not yet materialized. Once I heard them deliberating under a solitary oak tree when and how they would sacrifice me and a few other Pomorshians who had run off with them to their hammer god, Thor: spitted on lances.

And when, in the place on the east bank where later Graudenz (the fortress) was to be situated, I was kicked by a horse, cut in the thumb by a short-sword, reviled by Gothic women as a "Pomorshian swamp rat," and buggered in broad daylight behind a gorse bush by a Goth (during which operation he didn't even remove his boar's-tusk helmet) who was always drunk or under the influence of fly agaric and had so few teeth that I had to chew his dried meat for him, I beat it,

I lit out for home, limping and weeping, heard myself and the river and the screech owls crying "Wigga," and more and more desperately, "Wigga!"

In short, I soon proved unequal to history. They could smash up Rome without me; Wigga's dumplings of herring roe and herring milt meant more to me. I was only too glad to be her charcoal burner again and take care of her brats, a few of whom were plainly by me. Let the Flounder call me a milksop; I went back mouthing apologies: Never again, a lesson to me, sincerely regret, just punishment, I'll be good, I'll never. . But Wigga didn't scold. If she had only scolded, punished me, sent me out to the beet fields with a hoe. Her vengeance was no brief outburst, but long-lived, though after each of my public self-criticism sessions she would say, like Ilsebill the other day on the telephone, "Let's forget all about it. Water under the bridge."

For in the presence of the assembled clan — we were not yet a tribe — I had to confess my crimes: I had been unforgivably bored with charcoal burning. I had taken a treasonable pleasure in mocking the sedentary Pomorshians to the Goths. I had bartered Pomorshian charcoal much too cheaply to the Gothic armorers. Seduced by my friend, I had become addicted to fly agaric as a substitute for the prohibited and eradicated dream root. And I had betrayed Pomorshian secrets (the instructions for making Glumse) to this same Ludger.