Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Freed from my glasses, I considered the purchase of a dishwasher with a Super-55 control panel. After twenty washings the supply of special soap must be renewed. Atlantic low-pressure fronts countered the migraine effect of the Scandinavian high-pressure zone. All you have to do is load and unload. Not even the Bosch company can guarantee that the purchase of a dishwasher will put an end to our dishwashing problem. Who's going to load and unload? I? Me?

Certain kinds of glass (hand-blown) are likely to cloud after three washings. Never again, as long as my Ilsebill is pregnant, will I throw pickle vinegar down the toilet. I put all the shards — Bohemian, Venetian, lots of English Regency — back on the shelves. As for our trip to the West Indies, travel folders came into the house: White, unpolluted beaches. Coconut palms. Ice-cold fruit juice. Dark-skinned people and their carefree laughter. Happiness included in the purchase price. And there's Ilsebill stepping out of a charter plane, and blondly she moves about in the range finder of an adman's movie camera that is blind to anything but blond.

Actually my glasses are still beautiful as shards. Even broken they are sounder than we are. And to Ilsebill I said: "This Dorothea — if you care to remember — owned a scourge plaited from silver wire, which, when she was still a child, was given to her by the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting.

Probably on the Flounder's advice, because at the Women's Tribunal this High Gothic utensil, with which Dorothea approached her Lord Jesus in times of migraine, has been repeatedly characterized as an instrument of oppression invented by men and therefore typical. Do you, too — tell me frankly, Ilsebill — sometimes feel like inflicting, let's say, moderate pain on yourself with a little silver scourge? Or does smashing glasses satisfy you? You seemed really liberated when you were through. Free, yet affectionate. We can buy new ones any time. I saw two Baroque, ostensibly Danish glasses in Hamburg — sinfully expensive, but what does it matter? They were related like you and me, irregular in different ways but harmonious. What do you say?"

No, says Ilsebill, meaning yes. Both glasses are still harmoniously safe and sound. It will be some time before the next Scandinavian high-pressure zone comes around. Sour pickles are no longer in demand. At the moment it's sauerkraut, raw, and plenty of it. The extreme humidity in the West Indies is said to keep migraine away. But the claim that the dishwasher — there it is at last, running full tilt-makes next to no noise is a swindle, Ilsebill, a pure swindle. And our dishwashing problem, the sum of all problems since Dorothea, remains unsolved. Your turn and my turn refuse to become our turn.

"No, friend Flounder," I said later, "that Dorothea I saddled myself with in the year 1356 was an ill-tempered bitch, and her way of doing me in is still in force; for my Ilsebill, now in her second month of pregnancy, is still capable of the same infectious moods. When angry she has only to pass an open bowl of milk and it turns. She casts her shadow, and good, solid glassware cracks. Stands mutely behind our guests, whose laughter has been bouncing around the circle as gaily as a ball, and the merriment seeps away, the ball springs a leak, the children are gathered up, in a muffled, time-to-go-home atmosphere someone starts looking for the ignition key, a dispirited voice says, 'OK, we'll be seeing you.'

"Our guests are gone. Nothing is left but that bilious look. The windows cloud over. The last fly, that last bit of summer joy, drops from the wall. A Central European mi-

graine becomes a social event. And that's how it was — believe me, friend Flounder — when on your advice—'Marriage will multiply your possessions'—I married the High Gothic Dorothea of Montau."

According to custom the wedding should have gone on for three days. Not only had the members of the sword-makers' and goldsmiths' guilds donned their finery; also, the still-rich Island peasants had driven from Montau and Kase-mark, in carriages drawn by two or more horses, although they knew that even on so joyful an occasion Dorothea would serve up an Ash Wednesday menu; from her childhood on, she had been repelled by meat dishes.

To make matters worse, Dorothea had also invited several patricians, a few Teutonic Knights, and her Dominican confessor and seated them at separate tables. Trouble was inevitable. The guildsmen were offended, and not just because of the meager fare — fish, leek soup, a bit of dried meat, lots of manna grits, and no fatted steers, suckling pigs, or stuffed goose with milky millet porridge. Still, the platters had an appetizing look, for they were garnished with sorrel leaves and raw beets. There were bowls of herring roe mixed with curds and dill. Glumse could be dipped in linseed oil. Anyone who wished to could sweeten his manna grits with plum butter.

But the atmosphere was homicidal from the start. The Teutonic Knights boasted of how many Lithuanians they had driven into the marshes in their last two winter campaigns! The Dominican monk deplored that the peasants of the Montau region in the Vistula loop were still enjoying their rich lands in sinful freedom from tithes. The patricians told the swordmakers to their faces that in other cities the authorities kept a tight rein on the guilds and cracked down at the slightest murmur. At first my fellow guildsmen put up with the insults; then their eyes bugged out with anger; then angry words flew from table to table. And immediately after the brawl that started when a Teutonic Knight crudely tossed a radish into the lap of the patrician Schonbart's smartly dressed daughter, the wedding party broke up. Only the peasants, who understood very little of what had happened, stayed on. Thoroughly embarrassed, I cleared the table. Dorothea laughed.

"I assure you, friend Flounder, it was no happy guffawing, but a tinny bleating, as if she had escaped from Satan's goat barn, that my Dorothea served up to the bewildered remnants of the wedding party for dessert. And later on they wanted to make a saint of that cold-blooded bitch. What a laugh!"

Here the Flounder tried to comfort me. Yes, the price was high, but not really too high, and it had to be paid. Only with the help of the Christian religion had it been possible to end matriarchal absolutism, and the whole basis of the Christian religion was alternate fasting and feasting. This had made it necessary to accept the bad part, the rule of the Dorotheas over household and kitchen.

"Yes, yes," said the Flounder. "Her eternal Lenten soups are not exactly inviting, but as a guildsman you can catch up at morning get-togethers and other social functions, where nothing prevents your stuffing and swilling till your liver swells up. Besides, your Dorothea is beautiful with a beauty that calls for something more than adulation. And healthy to boot, not nearly so frail as her inner visions and heavenly copulations would suggest."

"But that's just it, friend Flounder. Her health is crushing me. When I — all it takes is a sudden change in the weather — come down with a splitting headache and fits of tears, she, even in sultry weather, stays malignantly serene and keeps her mind clear for ascetic speculations. She can fast till she's as thin as a rail; her peace of mind doesn't lose an ounce. She paralyzes my wit. She cuts down my thoughts. She undermines my health. I can't stand the daylight any more. I can't bear noise — the croaking of toads, for instance. Ever since I married Dorothea, I've been ailing. My head, impervious to the din of the most infernal smithy, threatens to burst as soon as I hear or even suspect her light step, that witchlike shuffle. And when she speaks to me in her cold, long-suffering voice and forces me into a joyless system with her ascetic rules, I'm afraid to contradict her. I'm afraid of her compulsive rhymes that connect everything under the sun with her sweet Jesus." And I quote from my Dorothea's verses: "When Jesu swet my viol boweth, ah, what pleasur he bestoweth. . "