Gunter Grass - The Flounder

The dignitaries had invited themselves. On master sword-maker Albrecht Slichting's return home from a pilgrimage of more than three years with his wife, Dorothea, and his last remaining daughter, Gertrud, their marriage relapsed into a daily domestic hell, and members of the congregation found more and more grounds for complaint: Dorothea's spells of ecstasy during Mass were becoming too frequent and tumultuous, and that wasn't all. She was making a mock-

ery of the Eucharist with her giggling and guffawing. The uses to which she put the word Jesus were ambiguous, to say the least. She wore wreaths of henbane on Candlemas. She collected the scabs and pus of the lepers in little bottles. She had a cross-eyed look, and if she wasn't possessed she had probably made a pact with Belial, for how else was one to account for the feverish twitching of her limbs and her hours-long spells of rigidity.

At first these accusations were uttered in private, but then they began to be aired more and more openly. Everyone sympathized with her old and ailing husband. It seemed that the once prosperous swordmaker was faced with destitution, for his wife had squandered his hard-earned fortune on frivolous handouts to riffraff from God knows where. His apprentices kept running out on him. Unable to sleep at night, the bewitched woman ran about the streets. She had been heard screaming for the Lord Jesus in a tone described as more lascivious than devout. Though her Dominican confessor spoke appeasingly of hard trials imposed on her by marks of divine favor, it was widely held that Father Christian Roze, who was also a doctor of canon law, ought finally to initiate proceedings against her. Sin was shamelessly masquerading as penance. Small wonder, with such goings-on, that the plague hung on and on. And despite last year's potential harvest the prices of rye, barley, and oats were going up again.

Urged not only by the burghers of the Old City but also by his congregation at Saint Mary's in the Charter City, Roze first spoke to the Dominicans, then consulted Abbot Johannes Marienwerder and Walrabe von Scharfenberg, the district commander of the Teutonic Knights. The dignitaries decided to pay a visit to the Old City swordmaker, who enjoyed the esteem of the patrician council since, far from participating in the insurrectionary folly of the guilds, he had exerted a moderating influence.

Because political events (the marriage of the Polish Jadwiga to the Lithuanian Jagello) required the commander to absent himself for a short while, the visit, though announced in March, could not take place until the end of April. Though the four dignitaries came on a Thursday, and though it was well past Lent, Dorothea — after they had

questioned her and listened to her husband — served them Scania herring, which were to be had cheap at the fish market, because the city of Danzig had a Vitte, or trading post, in Falsterbo in the Scania district of Sweden.

The Dominican Nikolaus wore cowl and cord. Abbot Johannes Marienwerder came in travel dress. The massive commander Walrabe wore the white mantle of the order with the black Teutonic cross and did not take it off until he sat down at table. Roze's ample gown and velvet cap made him look more like a scholar than a priest.

Before the meal, the swordmaker confirmed the gentlemen in their knowledge that when a ninth child had been born, after three had been carried away by the plague and five more had died from one cause or another, he, Albrecht Slichting, on his wife's demand and in the presence of the Dominican prior, had pledged himself in writing never again to share the bed of his wife, Dorothea, whereupon she had been granted the special privilege of partaking once weekly of the Lord's body.

After a detailed report on their pilgrimage of the preceding year to Aachen and to Einsiedeln in Switzerland — he pushed back his woolen shirt to show them a scar on his right shoulder as evidence of an attack by bandits — Slichting testified to, and Roze noted, Dorothea's desire for a separation; she had wished to remain in Einsiedeln and formally sever relations with her husband and eight-year-old daughter, so as to be free for, and wholly available to, the Lord Jesus. Despite the widespread disturbances before and after the Battle of Sempach, she had thought Einsiedeln a "forecourt of paradise." In him, on the other hand, the rasping dialect and self-righteous bickering of the Swiss had instilled a gnawing homesickness. He could never have borne the thought of dying and being buried in the mountains. And so, when she kept demanding her freedom day in, day out, he had decided to give in. After signing a statement, to which his age — he was sixty-six at the time — lent credibility, that their life together was without sin, they had declared their willingness to separate. But before the chapel altar, when they were asked to confirm, he his wish to be separated and Dorothea her renunciation of the eight-year-old Gertrud, he,

Albrecht Slichting, had several times uttered a loud "no," which, he was well aware, gave them every reason to call him a fool complete with cap and bells. Then the three of them had left Einsiedeln, although it was midwinter and most of the passes were closed.

Then Dr. Roze and Dorothea's confessor cross-examined him about the particulars of the hard journey home: Was it true that he and his daughter, Gertrud, had ridden long distances on horseback, whereas his wife walked the icy roads in paper-thin shoes? Why, when the ice began to break up as they were crossing the Elbe, had he instantly reached out to save his daughter, but — laughing scornfully, what's more! — let his wife be carried away on an ice floe, so that she was saved only by God's help? Could he testify that during the sea voyage from Liibeck to Danzig, Dorothea had several times committed acts of lewdness with a carved wooden figure of Jesus? Had he, on the journey homeward or since their return, noticed anything to suggest that his wife was engaged in witchcraft? And more of the same.

In defense of his riding while she walked every day for four weeks, Slichting cited his age and Dorothea's indestructible good health. He confessed to the laughter, but attributed it to his own terror and to his fear for his wife when he saw her swept away on the ice floe. As for the acts of lewdness with the wooden Saviour, he denied them but owned that the sailors on shipboard had talked and made jokes on the subject. Nor could he supply any evidence that his wife had engaged in witchcraft. True, she stirred the ashes of burnt coffin wood into her Lenten soups, but this she did as a reminder of man's frailty before the Lord God. And when, as happened now and then, she seemed to be worshiping her little bottles of pus, she was undoubtedly praying the Lord to intercede in favor of the lepers at the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals.

The commander said nothing. As though in passing, Abbot Johannes Marienwerder asked Slichting about his affairs. When the swordmaker groaned, the abbot, with a glance at the commander, held out the likelihood of new orders. Now that the Lithuanian Jagello was king of Poland, it would be necessary to prepare for war. Then he asked Slichting as though in jest whether, if another opportunity

for a separation from Dorothea should offer itself, he would again be fool enough to cry "no." At this the swordmaker made no bones about calling his marriage a hell, his wife a sanctimonious bitch, and the possibility of getting rid of her the last hope of his declining years.

The dignitaries, including the commander, smiled. At their request, the impoverished Slichting displayed what products of his craft he still had on hand: an enchased dagger in a silver scabbard, two swords of different lengths with gem-studded handles and bird's-head pommels, and a crossbow covered with gold leaf, which the English nobleman Henry Derby had ordered on his way through but neither called nor paid for.