Gunter Grass - The Flounder

For all the men, who were all fishermen — because elk and water buffalo were becoming rare — she boiled codfish

and sturgeon, pike-perch and salmon, roasted roaches, lampreys, finger-length sprats, and those small, tasty Baltic herrings on the iron grill that we had learned to fashion from Germanic scrap. Making a thick, strong broth by boiling the hell out of shifty-eyed codfish heads, Wigga invented a fish soup into which, because millet was still unknown to us, she stirred the crushed seeds of swamp grasses. Possibly in memory of Awa, whose image had come down to us as a three-breasted goddess, Wigga, always nursing an infant or two, added milk from her own breasts to her fish soups.

We unsuckled men were jumpy, as though infected with Germanic unrest. Wanderlust raised its head. We climbed tall trees, stood on high dunes, narrowed our eyes to sight slits, and searched the horizon to see if something was coming, if something new was coming. Because of this wanderlust — and because I refused to be Wigga's charcoal burner and peat cutter forever — I went off with the Germanic Goitches, as we called the Goths. But I didn't get very far. Trouble with my feet. Or maybe I turned back in time because I missed Wigga's mammary fish soup.

Wigga forgave me. She knew that history is forgotten between hunger and hunger. "The Germanic peoples," she said, "won't listen to their women; that's why they will always get themselves wiped out."

For Wigga, incidentally, I filed a comb from fishbone, because a talking flounder had shrewdly advised me to. Back in Awa's days, I had fished this flatfish out of the shallow water and let him go again. The talking flounder is a story by himself. Since he has been advising me, the male cause has progressed.

The third cook inside me was called Mestwina, and she, too, ruled in the region where Awa and Wigga had kept us in a state of infancy with their ever-loving care: in the swamps of the Vistula estuary, in the beech forests of the Baltic Ridge, amid sand dunes wandering and stationary. Po Morze — country by the sea — for which reason Mestwina's tribe of fishermen, who had begun to grow root plants, were known among the neighboring Prussians as "Pomorshians" or Pomeranians.

They lived in a Wicker Bastion, so called because of the

fence they had plaited from willow withes as a defense against Prussian raiders. Because she was a cook, Mestwina was also a priestess. She raised the cult of Awa to perfection. And when it came time for us all to be baptized, she brewed up paganism and Christianity into a Catholic mixture.

For Mestwina I was at once a shepherd, supplying her with loins of mutton, and a bishop, for whom she cooked. It was I who picked up pieces of amber on the beach, pierced them with red-hot wire, and threaded them, while muttering appropriate spells, to fashion the necklace that came apart as she bent over her fish broth; and as Bishop Adalbert I spooned up that same codfish-head soup, into which, because a necklace had come apart, seven pieces of amber had melted, whereupon I became as horny as a goat from Ashmodai's stable.

Later on they canonized Bishop Adalbert of Prague, who was me at the time. But here I'm speaking of Mestwina, who, in striking me dead without a qualm, was merely doing a job that is ordinarily done by men. And when I told the Flounder about this incident of April 997, he scolded as follows: "That was supererogation! Look, you've more or less turned yourselves into warriors, haven't you? That killing should have been done by a man. Indisputably. Don't let them wrest the absolute solutions out of your hands. No relapse into the Stone Age, if you please. Women should devote themselves to a more inward religion. The kitchen is dominion enough for them."

The fourth cook inside me inspires fear, so I'm glad to get rid of her. No longer a Pomorshian fisherwoman ruling mildly in the Wicker Bastion, this one, now that the city has been founded, is an artisan's wife, known as Dorothea of Montau, because she was born in Montau, a village on the Vistula.

I don't want to slander her, but the talking Flounder's advice that after so much historyless, matriarchal ever-loving care I should devote myself with masculine high pressure to men's business and leave not the Church but religion to women as a second prerogative after rule over the kitchen, made a big hit with my High Gothic Dorothea. To say that though revered as a saint by the populace she was more like

a witch and Satan's bedfellow is a mild enough observation in connection with a period when the plague was carrying people away right and left, and when witches as often as not doubled as saints.

Typical as Dorothea may have been of the fourteenth century, her contribution to the cuisine of an epoch noted for its revolting gluttony was quite one-sided, for Dorothea ruled by extending Lenten fare to the whole year, not excluding Saint Martin's Day, Saint John's Day, Candlemas, and the high holidays. The barley in her pot never saw fat. She boiled her millet in water, never in milk. When she cooked lentils or dried peas, no bone was ever allowed to contribute its bit of marrow. The closest thing to meat that she tolerated was fish, which she simmered with turnips, leeks, sorrel, and lettuce. We shall have something to say of her spices later on. How she had visions and baked the Sacred Heart in bread dough. What penance she found sweet and how she softened peas with her penitent knees. What she hungered for and how she enhanced her beauty. What advice the Flounder gave me. But no advice could help me; she was a witch, and she destroyed me.

The fifth cook inside me is Margarete Rusch, also known as Fat Gret. Nobody ever laughed like her: so totally. While holding a freshly killed goose, still warm and dripping, between her round knees, plucking it so strenuously that she was soon sitting in a cloud of feathers, she drowned the pope and Luther in her laughter. She laughed at the Holy Roman Empire and at the German nation as well, at Poland's crown and the embattled guilds, at the Hanseatic lords and the abbot of Oliva, at peasant louts and lousy knights — in short, at all those who in baggy breeches, in doublets, cowls, or armor, fought for what they held to be the true faith. She laughed at her century.

As she belly-laughed and plucked eleven successive geese, I, her kitchen boy and the target of her angry spoon, kept the down in the air with my blowing; I've always had a knack for blowing feathers and keeping them hovering in mid-air.

The goose-plucking cook was the abbess of Saint Bridget's, a free and easy nun who helped herself to every man she could fit into her box bed. She had abducted me, a little

Franciscan monk, from Trinity Church during vespers. Fat Gret was so spacious a woman that many a noble lord got lost inside her. To her the young sons of patrician families were an appetizer: tender asparagus tips. She fattened the abbot of Oliva to death. She was said to have bitten off Preacher Hegge's left testicle. After that we went to work for Ferber the patrician, who wanted to stay Catholic and not to forgo Mar-gret's peppery lamb tongues with broad beans. Then we went back to the Protestants and cooked for one guild or another on holidays. When King Stephen Batory besieged the city, we decided we would be safer outside the walls, cooking for the Poles. In her bed I found warmth. In her bed I found peace. She kept me under lock and key. She sheltered me with her fat.

Fat Gret, the Flounder said to me, was a woman after his wide-mouthed taste: she let the men get on with their deadly serious trade in wheat, toll collecting, guild fees, and indulgences, let them find more and more elaborate ways of slicing or pulverizing one another, or interpreting the Scriptures, and improved her health laughing at the murderous entertainment they offered. "If she had wanted to," said the Flounder, "she could have won back Awa's power at any time."