Gunter Grass - The Flounder

When we set up our camera in the ruins, the municipal conservator told us how much it had cost to reinforce the pillars, which though damaged by fire still support the vault, with concrete: eight thousand zlotys apiece. The price of tradition. History must be paid for. I stood amid unsorted fragments of facades and perrons, beside one of those pillars that had sunk so expensively. "Shooting. Twelve seven. Statement: Ruins of the Church of Saint John."

On orders from the conservator, two construction workers quickly gathered up the human bones that were lying about in the rubble. "Too macabre for the television audience," he said. Might give them the wrong idea. These bones hadn't belonged to German soldiers in the recent war, but to people in the Middle Ages, whose last rest had been disturbed when bombs had shattered the stone floor of the church. The dust particles dancing in the obliquely falling light, the flut-

tering of frightened pigeons, the grimaces of fragmented sculptures, gave the interior of the church atmosphere enough. Hadn't Andrzey Wajda shot several scenes of his world-famous Ashes and Diamonds inside Saint John's? And really you don't need bones in a documentary.

Yet it seemed distinctly possible that the bones of my swordmaker father, Kunrad Slichting, were here in this heap with those of other once prosperous burghers. For, with characteristic stubbornness, the old man had bought a burial plot in the Charter City. Who lies where: Opitz, dead of the plague, in Saint Mary's, his name incised in sandstone. In Holy Trinity worshipers and tourists are standing on the slab that covers the bones of Anton Moller the town painter. So many dead. Names of town councilors whom we hated at the time of our rebellion: Paul Tiergart, Peter Czan, Gottschalk Nase, Pape, Godesknecht, Maczkow, Hildebrand Munzer. . And hardly sweeter to our ears were the names of the Teutonic Knights who lived during my High Gothic time-phase: Hinrich Dusemer, Ludwig von Wolkenburg, Walrabe von Scharfenberg. . And when, in December 1970, units of the police and army fired on workers in Gdynia and Gdansk, the name of the commanding general was Korczynski. The order to fire is said to have been given by a party secretary named Kliszko. One Stanislaw Kociolek, a member of the Politburo, arrived from Warsaw and demanded drastic measures, because of which it became necessary to transfer him. Though the Communist Party of Belgium lodged a protest with the king, Kociolek was accredited as Polish ambassador to that country. An attempt was made to convert General Korczynski into a military attache in Algeria. Shortly afterward he shot himself in the head. Only Kliszko kept his old job. The Lenin Shipyard is still called the Lenin Shipyard. Maria, who had lost her Jan, had her daughter baptized under the name of Damroka. And the priest of Saint Mary's who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, wanted to put my wife, Dorothea, with her mania for penance and flagellation, on trial for witchcraft, bore the name of Christian Roze. But Dorothea was not destined for the pyre.

Next the camera turned to a Charter City artist. In his

attic studio a graphic artist, one Richard Strya, showed our camera some many-layered etchings, meanwhile speaking much too softly of Vilna, the place he had left to settle in Gdansk. His etchings, dry points, and aquatints mingle gable and tower motifs with medieval flagellants and penitents. Groups struggling with the temptations of the flesh. Ecstasy in the midst of apocalyptic beasts. Lepers whose second sight is peeling along with their skin. Knights dominant in black iron. The miraculous in diagonal composition. Twilight apparitions. A wedding while the bells are advertising the plague. And in the crowded street, amid the early revolutionary tumult, my Dorothea over and over again, in rags, twined with snakes, maddened with fever, riding naked on a sword, etched into the plumage of the griffin, woven into latticework, open, vitreous, suspended from whirling strings, kissing the Flounder, and finally immured, cadaverous, already holy, worshiping, horrible.

In speaking, Strya concealed more than he explained. While the film technicians spent their time rearranging props, preparing cutting copy, and lighting the set, we, with the help of modest sips out of water glasses, drank ourselves back to the past. Strya and I can do that. We are contemporary only for the time being. No date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place simultaneously.

While I was sitting on the perron of the Polish Writers' Club on Frauengasse, drinking my gritty coffee, and waiting for Dorothea in the shadow of Saint Mary's, Maria came by with her shopping bag. I paid for my coffee and joined her. Yes, she said, she was still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. We mingled with the tourists. I told her something about our television film. Maria said nothing. The chimes from the Rathaus tower sounded a heroic theme. Amber ornaments were on sale in the shops on the perrons. Maria didn't want a necklace or a polished pendant. We passed through Our Lady's Gate and stood irresolutely on the Long Bridge. Fried fish was being sold on a barge that had tied up between Holy Ghost Gate and Crane Gate. You could stand at narrow tables; the fish were served on paper plates, and you picked them up in your fingers. For a small extra charge

they would toss a dollop of Bulgarian ketchup on your plate. Behind the counter, women powdered with flour got portions of cod and mackerel and small Baltic herrings ready for the frying pan. The Mottlau smelled stronger than the frying fish. Gulls overhead. The ferryboat-restaurant was roofed with a ragged fish net. Tired from plodding through streets and looking for subjects to photograph, the tourists ate in silence. Maria wanted cod. We ate a portion each. Foretaste of rancid fat. She had had her corkscrew curls cut off. Just tell me this, Maria. But she didn't want to talk (not even under her breath) about the shipyard workers' uprising. That was over and done with. Talking wouldn't bring Jan back to life. Yes, the apparatchik from Warsaw had been called Kociolek. Once the price increase was rescinded and their wages raised, the men had calmed down. The one thing that made them gripe was a beer shortage — there'd been one recently. The girls were doing fine. A dead father was no drawback. The shipyard canteen had been renovated. No, nobody liked the food, but it filled you up. Oh well, who can laugh these days?

And because Maria clammed up after that, I told her about Dorothea. Maybe she listened.

By Gothic standards she was beautiful. Her strength of will defeated the laws of nature. What she wished for materialized, happened, came to pass. She could walk barefoot on the frozen Vistula; when in the heat of passion I came close to her in our warm bed, she was and remained a lump of frozen meat. For our nine little children, all but one of whom died young, she had hardly a glance; yet she could scratch the scabs of the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital with fervor. My troubles didn't interest her in the least, yet how quick she was to uplift the soul of every no-good tramp who appealed for her sympathy (and my money); oh, how sensitive, how warm-hearted and wise she was when it came to appeasing the cares of total strangers!

At first we attended guild dinners and the weddings of the young master craftsmen together. We were present in our Sunday best when Saint Dominic's Market was blessed. But she in her beauty held aloof from my guild brothers, repelled by their robust, laical merriment, vexed because her sweet

Jesus wasn't always first in everyone's thoughts — when the suckling lambs were being carved, for instance. Later she refused to take part in my social life; the boasting of the men, the finery of the women turned her stomach; she preferred to clothe herself in rags and mingle with the flagellants and penitents outside Saint Catherine's, where her girlish laughter could be heard above the din of the nearby Big Mill. In the midst of this riffraff she could be silly and giggly, merry, relaxed, free. But free from what? From me, from conjugal duties, from the need to care for her dying and oncoming brood. She was unfit for marriage. What else could she do but look for compensations, and become a saint if not a witch.