Gunter Grass - The Flounder

My fellow guildsmen made fun of me, and the sword-maker's wife was the neighborhood laughingstock. When we joined with the Charter City goldsmiths to form a brotherhood and installed our little chapel in Saint John's, right next to the mason's altar, I had to supply my guild brothers with ritual vessels of silver before they would admit me. If only Dorothea had been put on trial! I'd have testified against the witch: "Yes, my dear Deacon Roze, doctor of canon law. She let our children, every one of them except Gertrud, perish miserably…"

Little Kathrin liked to play with spoons and saucepans, mortars and pestles in the kitchen. She would look into all the pots, and the maids had to keep an eye on her. Not so her mother, who in the period after Ash Wednesday and on all Fridays cooked her penitential Lenten soup, made from codfish heads and root vegetables and thickened with barley. As long as the fish heads and mangels were foaming in the big kettle, she knelt with her back to the low hearth, her tender knees resting on dried peas. Her wide eyes glued to the crucifix, her fingers knotted bloodless, she saw nothing, and no maternal instinct gave her a hint when her second daughter, who must have been three and a half at the time and had been baptized at Saint Catherine's, also knelt down on a footstool, this one beside the kettle, but, far from being immobilized by religious fervor, fished with a big wooden spoon for the round white eyes in the disintegrating codfish heads, in the course of which operation — to make a long story

short — little Kathrin fell into the great family-sized kettle. All the child could manage was one shrill scream, not loud enough to tear her mother, immersed as she was in her Jesus, away from the penitential peas. If the maid hadn't missed the child, she might have been boiled away completely without disturbing her mother's fervor long enough for a Hail Mary.

And so the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting lost his second eldest after his third youngest daughter. When the mother stood seemingly unmoved before the steaming bundle, I struck my wife, Dorothea, several times with my sword-maker's hand.

No, Ilsebill or Maria, or whoever else may be listening to me, Dorothea did not strike back. Quiet and frail, she endured my blows; her capacity for contrition was boundless.

The next day we shot Saint Mary's from all sides. High-towering from Long Street through the shaft of Beutlergasse. From the Holy Ghost Street end of the Long Bridge across the Mottlau, the cameraman was able to squeeze the whole Gothic-brick mother hen into the picture. In two other long shots, from the Old City Ditch and across the dam, the Royal Polish Chapel leans against Saint Mary's and enhances its proportions. And in still another, taken at the corner of Outer City Ditch and Frog Pond, the colossal church steeple and the slender Rathaus tower, rising behind the gabled roofs of Dog Street, seem to be wedded forever. Of course we also shot the familiar postcard views from Jopengasse or the shady Frauengasse, depending on the position of the sun. And next day, when we visited the state workshops on the marshy flats between Werder Gate and the Vistula, our team set up its equipment on the roof of the wrought-iron works and captured the silhouette of the distant city. "This in itself," I said to the conservator, "makes it worthwhile. The expense, I mean."

In the evening I met Maria again. I called for her at the shipyard gate. The new canteen is right behind the entrance, where in Lena Stubbe's early-socialist days the workers' kitchen already had a way with stews. Maria appeared in sweater and jeans, in roughly the spot where a few years before her voluble Jan had been shot in mid-sentence. She

had no desire to stop and briefly honor his memory. "But Maria," I said, "he was so gloriously mad. To this day no one has disproved his thesis that right after the final curtain of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Fortinbras led his troops to Kashu-bia and was defeated by Swantopolk!"

But Maria said only, "Today it was pork and cabbage." She was carrying a dinner pail along with her vinyl handbag. We went to the central station and took the streetcar to Heubude. There wasn't much doing on the beach. We headed eastward and made barefoot tracks. The usual halfhearted waves. I found a few crumbs of amber in the seaweed. Then we sat down in the dunes and spooned up the lukewarm pork and cabbage. Like the rest of the shipyard workers, Jan had this same dish, cooked as usual with caraway seed, in his belly when, on December 18, 1970, the police shot him square in the belly.

"Those idiots," said Maria, "thought they could raise the food prices before Christmas." She showed me a photo of her girls, Damroka and Mestwina: pretty. Then we fell silent, each on a different subject, until Maria suddenly stood up, ran across the beach to the Baltic Sea, and three times shouted the same Kashubian word, whereupon the Flounder jumped out of the smooth sea and landed on her outspread palms. .

Because the dog, no, the cat

or because the children (yours and mine)

are unhousebroken, making them the scapegoats,

because visitors have left too early

or peace gone on too long

and all the raisins tend to be. .

Words that are wedged into drawers

and are hooks and eyes for Ilsebill.

She wishes for something, wishes for something.

Now I am going.

Making the rounds of the house.

Boiled beef is stringy between the teeth. Sky Night Air.

Someone far away, who is also making the rounds of the house. Again.

Only the pensioner and his wife who live in the pisspot next door have gone to sleep without a word too many.

Ah, Flounder! Your story has a dismal ending.

My glasses are afraid of Ilsebill. When, for no reason at all, or because the weather had changed, or because I had emptied her pickle vinegar, which she sopped up as if she was hooked, down the toilet, when suddenly something snapped and sent her into a cold, jellied rage — how she trembled and what an aftertremor went through her when it was over— and with furious hand, no, with a dry dishcloth, swept my whole collection of glasses off the shelves, or because I had said, "The trip to the West Indies is off," because it so happens that pregnant women are entitled to drink pickle vinegar and a case of migraine was brought on by a Scandinavian high-pressure zone, I, the collector, looked calmly on as more and more of my glasses, including special favorites, were dashed to splinters, for Ilsebill had stopped sweeping away the entire fine-blown contents of a shelf at one stroke with a rag, and instead, while the slanting rays of the afternoon sun played over the shards, was picky-choosily smashing one glass at a time, because, to spare my sensitive glassware, I had said an unequivocal no to a Bosch or Miele dishwasher with six control knobs and a guarantee of minimal noise. "Not in my house!" I had cried.

One more example of how firmness persists (until it is heroically abandoned). More and more serenely I watched Ilsebill. Because I was liberated at last from my collector's obsession, I slipped into a speculative mood and wondered

whether apart from obvious causes — the pickle vinegar, the trip to the West Indies, the Scandinavian high-pressure zone, the dishwasher — there might not be other, more obscure reasons for this clean sweep, this heroic housecleaning, for it seemed possible that Ilsebill's rage was High Gothic in origin and had been storing up ever since I exchanged her little silver scourge — a fine piece of swordmaker's craftsmanship — for a Venetian (Murano) goblet. This beautifully blown piece, which would have cost a fortune today, was the last to be shattered by Ilsebill.

"Trying to make a witch or a saint out of me, whatever serves your purpose at the moment. This isn't the Middle Ages!" she cried as she hurled. She was as terrifying as that Dorothea who has been pressing against my gall bladder since the fourteenth century, and it's high time for her to come out, the bitch!