Gunter Grass - The Flounder

At that point the Flounder, my adviser and foster father, stuffed me full of medieval Scholasticism. He gave me lessons and taught me how to interpret crooked as straight, a pile of shards as sound glassware, darkness as an edifice of light, and constraint as Christian freedom. He expected me, thus educated and never again at a loss for an answer, to force my Dorothea into the Procrustean bed of my dialectic whenever in her robust way she became insufferable.

"Don't let her develop a logic of her own," said the Flounder. "What she doesn't understand will always be beyond her understanding. As a woman, you see, she's not really entitled to logic. Devise — I know you can do it — an edifice with many rooms but reduced dimensions, in which one thing follows from another and the next from the next. If she contradicts you, or says her instinct tells her that your projected edifice lacks an entrance or an exit, you have only to reply: My edifice is logical because the rules of thought have been correctly applied, and contrariwise. And if your Dorothea continues to argue, or if she goes so far as to oppose your system with sweet-Jesus jingles, then put on your friendliest voice and say: You mustn't overtax yourself, wife. This kind of thing is too much for you. Leave the general ideas to me. You look pale, tired. Your eyelids are fluttering. There are beads of sweat on your Madonna forehead, which doesn't get its beauty from thinking. Let me apply cold compresses. Let me draw the curtains. Everyone will pad about in stocking feet. Not a single fly will be left uncaught. Because you need absolute quiet. Because you've been under a strain. Because you're sick, my dearest, and I'm worried about you."

Thus transformed into a Scholastic and master of hairsplitting by the Flounder in several courses of lectures, I went to my wife, Dorothea, and, when she couldn't follow my logic, talked until my so-called migraine transferred itself to her. After that, of course, I was less responsive to the weather and seldom suffered from headaches and weeping fits. But whether my loss of migraine — the last of men's prehistoric prerogatives to have survived — brought me any relief, I venture to doubt. And answering to the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder, after the usual evasive replies (in which he quoted the Church Fathers in Latin), admitted that while his advice that I should talk High Gothic women into re-

garding migraine as a female prerogative may have enhanced their beauty, it hardly advanced the male cause.

In any case Dorothea, before or after her attacks of migraine, put me through a severe grilling. True, she spoke m rhymes and images, but if they had been translated into prose (the language of my Ilsebill) she might have said, "Now where did you get that? Don't tell me it came out of your thick skull. Talking me blind with your shitty logic. Who told you that stuff, and where?"

Thus cornered, I finally confessed, and betrayed the Flounder to Dorothea. True, I was able to warn him in time-"Watch your step, friend Flounder! She'll be coming to see you, and she'll want something"-but his feelings were hurt, and to this day he hasn't forgiven my betrayal; "breach of trust," he called it.

"Look at all I've done for you, my son! Weaned you from your Awa. Taught you to smelt metals, to mint coins, to piece together philosophical systems, to think logically! I have set your rational patriarchy above purely instinctual matriarchy. For the benefit of you men I invented the division of labor. I advised you to marry, and marriage multiplied your possessions. Most recently I relieved you of your chronic headache, whereupon, sorry to say, you turned into a jughead, garrulous and unreliable. You gave me away betrayed my trust, told our secret to a chatterbox. Fromthis time on marriage will be a yoke to you. From this time on the dominant male will have to pay tribute to his domestic battle-ax, if only in the kitchen, when it's time to wash the dishes. From now on, in any case, I shall advise you only m extramarital matters. Let her come, this Dorothea of yours with her Madonna face. I won't tell her a thing, not even if she kisses me."

It must have been just two years after our marriage I wasn't present. The particulars didn't come out until the Flounder's trial, when he himself disclosed them to the Women's Tribunal. As it happens, the prosecutor bears a frightening resemblance to my Ilsebill, and not only to my Ilsebill. Both are sisters of Dorothea of Montau: that compelling look, that strength of will, which pinpoints every-

thing, which can move mountains even when there aren't any. They are appallingly blond (all three of them), dedicated to strict morality, and possessed by the brand of courage that always barges straight ahead, come what may.

So Dorothea went to see the Flounder. She took with her all her beauty and untarnished youth. One Friday, after simmering Scania herrings in onion broth. She was wearing her long (penitential) gown of nettles, and her hair was unbound.

I had instructed her, "You must go into the sea. When you are up to your knees, call him several times, give him my regards. Then he'll come, and perhaps if you kiss him he'll tell you something. Wish for something; wish for something."

So Dorothea went straight down the beach, making tracks with her bare feet, to the shallows where the halfhearted Baltic waves petered out. Then she gathered her gown of nettles. Up to her knees she stood in the lazy water, and her cry smelled of herring as she cried, "Flounder, cum oute, ich wol kisse thy snoute."

Then she introduced herself as Dorothea of Montau, who belonged to no man, not even to her Albrecht the sword-maker, but only to the Lord Jesus, her heavenly bridegroom. And if, she went on, she kissed the Flounder, she would not be kissing him but her sweet Jesus in the guise of a flounder.

And just as, in all my time-phases, the Flounder jumped up onto the palms of my hands, so now he jumped into my Dorothea's arms. She was so frightened she let a fart, which along with other particulars was cited before the Women's Tribunal and duly entered in the minutes.

The Flounder said nothing but offered Dorothea his crooked mouth. Her lips were chapped from the sea wind. With her long, ascetic fingers she held his white underside and his pebbly top side. It was a long kiss. A sucking kiss. They kissed without closing their eyes. ("Upon my lips the Flunder's kisse hath ravished my soul from heavenly blisse," ran a later Dorothean rhyme.)

That kiss changed her. Her mouth was twisted, though just perceptibly, out of shape. It wasn't her sweet Jesus who had kissed her. With a slightly crooked mouth she immediately asked the Flounder how many other women he had

kissed before her. And whether his kiss had tasted the same to those other women. And what made his mouth crooked. And how she could explain all this to her dear Jesus.

But the Flounder gave no answer, and she thought him strange and terrifying. So she threw him back into the sea and called after him, "Flunder, ichab ykist* enow, telle me then, where sitteth thy plow."

When Dorothea came home, I saw that her mouth was twisted and no longer ran parallel to the axis of her eyes. From then on she had a sardonic expression, which enhanced her beauty, though the street urchins took to calling her Flounderface.

Next day, when I went to him for an interim report-Dorothea wouldn't say a word, but spent her time kneeling contritely on unshelled peas — the Flounder said, "Your breach of trust will have dire consequences; I liked your little woman, though, even if she did smell of herring. I like the hysterical flutter of her tongue. Her way of wanting more and more. Only her questions got on my nerves."

I warned the Flounder that Dorothea would be back, but he remained unruffled: why should that frighten him? Naturally she had something up her sleeve. Women always had a compulsion to avenge their defeats — that was their nature — but no skirt was going to hook him.