Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Then I had to make a public statement abjuring the frivolous emotion of wanderlust. Then I had to swear to the female council of the clan that I would never again aspire to conquer or die, that is, to make history. Then I had to renounce something that I had bombastically termed "paternity rights." Then I had to report how many blisters I'd had on my feet at the beginning of the migrations, why the hair of the Gothic women is always matted, in whose honor I and other Pomorshians were to be spitted on lance heads, how young Ludger's stallion had given my left knee such a kick as to stiffen it for all time; and I had to exhibit the scar on my right thumb all around the circle. (It was my forced renunciation of the fungus poison muscarine that introduced the fly-agaric habit among our people.)

The one thing that I concealed repressed forgot was what

that stammering Goth who never took off his boar's-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush. The disgrace of it. The gap in my narrative. The empty speech-balloon. What I didn't want to remember: how he manhandled, chewed, and licked me, rubbed me with rancid fat, and then ripped in with his old man's war club, so deep. .

But Wigga knew. When I ran away from her, she sent two swift-running girls after us, and by the time I came hobbling back, they had told her the whole story in every detail. That was probably why, later on, when I lay with her, in her, armed and legged around, she would often say, "Well? Isn't this better? Isn't it a lot better this way?"

Ilsebill will soon be in her second month. Her time interval, which makes her difficult, is the only thing that counts. I (her charcoal burner) stand beside her or flee downstairs through the centuries until the Flounder, as though he were still talking to me, catches me up: "There's nothing you can do about that, my son. It's her nature, which is stronger and always right. Your fatherhood holds you tethered. The women will always have you there. As your Ilsebill knows."

Then he advises me to buy more paper. Once you put it in writing, he says, everything looks normal. "Only written matter," he pontificates, "can stand up against nature. The written law wins out almost every time. And what you don't want to remember, what you don't even want to think of again-because of the disgrace-will be as good as forgotten once you get your story in print." And, clearly wishing to be quoted, he concludes, "Men survive only in the written word."

All right. I admit it, I betrayed Mestwina, my Mestwina. But there was more ambiguity in what I did than a simple sentence reveals. For, you see, I was her (and the tribe's) head shepherd, and at the same time I was Bishop Adalbert, who had come to convert us heathen. As a shepherd I supplied her kitchen, and as an ascetic I spurned her cookery. It was I who stole the cast-iron spoon from the supply hut of the Bohemian baggage train; and it was I, the later canonized bishop, whom Mestwina slew with the cast iron. If I remember right, I was too cowardly to cut the bothersome missionary's

throat with my razor, though Mestwina asked me time and time again to do her the favor. But as a bishop with a desperate craving for blows, I let myself be murdered without resistance, for even as a choirboy I had often confessed the wish to die a martyr's death and be canonized later on.

Shepherd and bishop — for the first time I sojourned doubly; I was split, and yet wholly the pagan shepherd and wholly the Christian zealot. Life was no longer as simple as under Awa's care or in Wigga's shadow. Never again, except in relation to Dorothea or to Amanda Woyke the farm cook, neither of whom allowed of ambiguities, have I been able to wear myself out so completely at one with myself: unsplit and for life. For my time with Billy doesn't count. And in Maria's eyes I'm nobody.

Maybe my present Ilsebill will pin me down, cure me of my ambiguity. "No nonsense," she says. "The kid's got to know who his father is. What do you mean, a fiction? No subterfuges, if you please!"

Anyway, I was dead as a bishop when I took my sheep smell to the main Bohemian tent and betrayed my Mestwina.

But why? It was all so well hidden. After the murder, which had gone off smoothly, with no other sound than the gentlest of sighs, she and I threw the cold, stiff, and later to be canonized Adalbert (in other words, myself!) into the swift-flowing Radune. Far downstream, on a sandbank in the ramified estuary of the Vistulla, a region often raided by our hostile Prussian neighbors, the holy man's bloated corpse was washed ashore and found by Polish mercenaries who had been looking for him for the last five days. I craftily buried the cast-iron cooking spoon. It seemed reasonable to assume that the heathen Prussians had murdered Adalbert. A courier was already on his way to report the event to the king of Poland. The date given was April 12, 997. The whole episode scratched into history: one more saint.

And I like a fool had to go and testify to the truth. The Flounder advised me to expose the fraud. "My son, it's your duty to speak out. I know how devoted you are to your Mestwina, but you will have to sacrifice her. For the first time you lazy, unconscious Pomorshians, who have never done anything to prove you existed, have really taken action; with a political murder you enter history, you set a classical

date — what eloquent ambiguity: he was killed on a Good Friday! — and already you're trying to wriggle back into a state of Stone Age innocence. You stand idly by while the glory goes to those barbarian bandits the Prussians. Too cowardly to confess like men. Go to them and say aloud: Yes, you Christian knights! It was one of us, Mestwina, our queen. He desired her, he lusted after her. She killed him to make our people conscious of their historic role. Make a saint of Adalbert, if you will, but we of Mestwina's tribe stand unbowed, like men. We don't want the cross. Our goddess is Awa. She is related to Demeter, Frigga, Cybele, Semele. Great figures, every one of them. Every one of them throve long before your cute little Mother of God. In short, we've got religion already!"

I spoke to the Bohemian prelate and the Polish knights as steadfastly as the Flounder had counseled, but without the provocative vocabulary. I can't remember asking Mestwina for her approval of my history-charged confession. She might have been generous enough to consent. But more probably she would have laughed at me, called me a fool, thrashed me when I talked back, and to get me out of the way sent me under guard to far-off beaches to look for amber.

Secretly I went to the Bohemian knights. They listened impassively but recorded only Mestwina's blasphemies against the crucified God and that part of my confession which showed her to be a still-active priestess of Awa. That fitted in with her drunkenness. And it fitted in with her habit of chewing fly agaric both raw and dried. After all, she had killed Adalbert, while drunk or on a muscarine trip.

The next day the Bohemian knights, presided over by the prelate Ludewig, condemned Mestwina to death by beheading. For us they ordered immediate forced baptism, but continued (undeterred by my confession) to maintain that Adalbert had been killed by the heathen Prussians. It would have been difficult if not impossible to canonize the bishop if he had been murdered by a woman, for according to the papal canonization bull, no one can become a martyr through the act of a woman. After all, the bishop's Bohemian retinue knew that Adalbert had tried several times to mortify his carnal lust inside Mestwina. The Polish knights whispered jokes about the pious Bohemian's penetrating technique of

conversion. If so much as a suggestion of Adalbert's pleasures on the bed of leaves had found its way into the canonization file, we can rest assured that there would have been one saint the fewer.