Gunter Grass - The Flounder

And, facing the Women's Tribunal, he said to Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor: "But, my good woman, of course I was aware of the risk! Wasn't I running a still-greater risk when I voluntarily fastened myself to your ridiculous hook? I've always been attracted to ghastly blond hair like yours or Dorothea's. I can't resist it. Strong-willed women like Dorothea and yourself — may I call you Sieglinde? — have always made me-what's the expression now? — lovesick. Though within reasonable limits. You see what I mean — my fishy nature."

When Dorothea went back to the Flounder, she took a kitchen knife. "Flunder, cum oute!" she cried. The Flounder jumped. They kissed. But when he again neglected to answer

• "I have kissed." — trans.

her questions, she, in housewifely manner, cut off his head with a single stroke direcly behind the pectoral fin. She smacked the quivering flat body down on the sand, spitted the head on her vertically held knife, and, her mouth made crooked by Flounder kissing, cried wildly, "All right, Flounder. You going to talk now? Answer me, Flounder! Answer my question: do you love me, Flounder?"

Before the Flounder speaks from the vertically positioned knife, I'd better remind you how he, my omniscient, too-too-clever adviser, had persuaded me to sublimate the purely instinctual relationship between man and woman in a higher sentiment, love, because love and its corollary marriage gave rise to a dependence that was most becoming to women: "Aren't they always wanting to be told whether and how much they are loved, whether love is holding its own or on the increase, whether there's a threat of love for some outsider, whether love is sure to last." Consequently, Dorothea's question, which up until then she had addressed only to her sweet Jesus and never to me, was a dependent question; for which reason the Women's Tribunal not unreasonably denounced the "institution of love" as an instrument of male oppression (although in the turn of phrase "catch oneself a man" the bait is tossed in the other direction).

In any case the severed Flounder head spoke gruesomely from the vertically positioned knife: "Aha! Snick-snack! That's the way! Most professional! But no one can cut me apart. I'll find myself again. I will always be one. I don't care for your snick-snack love. And let me tell you this: because you want everything or nothing, because my kiss that makes you beautiful is not enough and never will be enough for you, because you demand love but refuse to give love unquestioningly, because you have perverted the sublime Jesus principle into the pleasure principle, and finally because you give your husband, Albrecht the kindly sword-maker, who loves loves loves you, nothing but your cold flesh, you shall have all of me, Dorothea, and right now. For a day and a night."

So saying, the Flounder jumped off the knife, joined himself to his flat body and tail, grew before Dorothea's horrified eyes into a giant flounder, lashed her with his fins and

tail across the beach into the sea, deeper and deeper; as promised, he took her in with him.

Just like that. And in his testimony to the Tribunal the Flounder made himself perfectly clear: "In short, I took her in with me." "Typically masculine," said the women in disapproval, whereas the Flounder, addressing the selfsame court, had called Dorothea's "Do you love me?" typically feminine. He furthermore admitted that with his punitive action he had wished to provide an early formulation of his fairy tale, "The Fisherman and His Wife," later interpreted as misog-ynistic. But what happened under water he refused to tell. "Fact is, I'm the old-fashioned sort. A woman's reputation, don't you know."

When the smooth sea released Dorothea next day, I was waiting on the beach, worried and by then quite willing to forgive and forget. Slowly she rose from the sea and made tracks past me. In horror the gulls kept their distance. It didn't surprise me that her gown of nettles and her wheatlike hair had stayed dry. Yet she had changed again. Her eyes, too, were slightly out of kilter and at an angle to her crooked mouth. She came back fish-eyed, and that is how I shall sketch her when Ilsebill sits for me.

As she passed by, Dorothea said she now knew all there was to know but would reveal nothing. And since the Flounder also kept a tight lip before the Tribunal, it has never been divulged what happened at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in the early summer of 1358 to make my Dorothea omniscient. Nevertheless, Sieglinde Huntscha, the esteemed prosecutor, displays the exact same knowing, foreknowing smile with which Dorothea from that day on descended stairs, knelt on peas, and trod the streets — once again lost in her Jesus and very nearly a saint.

The household was a shambles after that. For the first time a maid walked out on us. Unwashed dishes piled up, attracted flies, brought rats into the house, stank. Ever since Dorothea, the dishwashing problem has been with us.

No, Ilsebill, even earlier, with the kneading and molding of clay, with the baking of the first bowls, jugs, and pots, in Awa's day, when she first developed ceramics, dishwashing

began to be a problem. Though the timeless question "Who's going to wash the dishes?" received a clear and simple answer: the men. Naturally that arrangement didn't last. At some time or other (shortly after Mestwina), we just dropped the nasty, greasy things. It was beneath our dignity. The male cause was getting ahead.

Obviously to have the woman standing at the sink from morning to night is no solution. In this light your dishwasher, which we men invented, which you wished for, which you (absolutely) insisted on having, can be regarded as progress on the installment plan, with a year's guarantee. Maybe it will emancipate us all. From what? From blobs of mustard on the edges of dishes? From crumbling mutton fat? From desiccated leftovers? From disgust in general?

And so we delegate our dishwashing. Never again will an Agnes caress our daily cares away with her dishpan hands. Never again will Sophie sing her rabble-rousing revolutionary songs over heaped-up cups and dishes. There will only be your next-to-noiseless dishwasher. If only such a thing had existed after the Flounder released Dorothea and she made me wear myself out over a mountain of dishes.

Sits in the cleft of a tree

and reacts to the weather over plucked—

tweaser-plucked — eyebrows.

When the weather changes

when high pressure brings blue sky

her silken thread snaps.

We all dread the change,

flit past on stocking feet, curtain the light.

It's said to be a pinched nerve — here or here or here,

something askew inside, no, still deeper.

An ailment that began with the last ice age,

when nature went through another shift.

(And besides: when the angel came clanking

too close to her, the Virgin, so it seems,

dotted her temples with her fingertips.)

Since then doctors have been making money.

Since then faith has been practiced by autogenic training.

That cry which everyone claims to have heard—

even old people remember their horror

when mother lay silent in the darkness.

The pain known only to those who have it.

Again it threatens,

cup strikes loud on saucer,

a fly perishes,

too close together, the glasses stand shivering,

the bird of paradise squawks.

"Elaine Migraine," sing the children outside the window.

We — who have no idea — feel sorry from a distance.

But she, behind lowered blinds, has entered the torture

chamber. Attached to her whirring wire, she grows more and more

beautiful.

Between separate beds

at shouting distance