Gunter Grass - The Flounder

They comforted the swordmaker — the mad Derby would surely be back — and told anecdotes about the young earl, who took as much pleasure in the annual winter campaigns against the Lithuanians as in fox hunting back home in England. Then there was talk of founding — the matter had been under discussion for years — a Brigittine convent on the Swedish model. The body of Saint Birgitta, or Bridget, had lain in state in a chapel beside Saint Catherine's in Danzig, before being moved to the Wadstena Convent in Sweden. But Abbot Johannes Marienwerder held that what the country needed more than another convent was a saint born here, between rivers, nurtured in this flat farming country, and of proved piety. It wouldn't do to have all the miracles happening in Poland.

Then Albrecht Slichting was allowed to leave, and his wife was called into the long, narrow room, with its two tall windows looking across Bucket Makers' Court to the half-timbered cottages and mud huts of Carp Pond on the other side of the Radaune.

Clad in a coarse hair shirt, Dorothea of Montau entered the room. She was forty-one at the time and still beautiful in a way that can only — and not for want of a better word — be termed indescribable. Be that as it may, the room was transfigured by her entrance, and the four gentlemen corrected their posture as though taken by surprise. They pulled their hands with the gnawed fingernails — even Abbot Johannes nibbled — back into their sleeves and sat up stiffly, with

their backs to the two windows. In front of them stood a massive table, empty except for Dr. Roze's writing materials.

Dorothea declined to be seated in the gentlemen's presence. Her tall frame tilted slightly forward, she stood looking with this eye and that eye out of this and that window, as though the April sky, which had been overcast for days, were clear and open. Then she gave the commander a compelling look and, speaking quickly, without emphasis, employing a strange word order, prognosticated woe. She knew the exact date of the battle the Teutonic Knights would wage at Tannenberg, and she knew of their defeat. Perhaps because the date was in the following century, the four gentlemen took refuge in manly laughter. After that the din of the bucket makers could be heard more clearly.

Breaking in roughly, Christian Roze made light of the dire prophecy and went on to castigate her outrageous conduct: What had got into her, giggling during Holy Mass and wagging her tongue in her open mouth like a lewd whore? If she burned moldy coffin wood, then why not the horns of the He-goat? What lover was waiting for her when she ran, laughing raucously, through the streets of the Old City to the Wicker Bastion? Was it true that she could hover two hands' breadth above the ground and walk over water? Is that how she had saved herself from the ice floe on the river Elbe? And to whom had she sold her soul in return for these gifts?

Her mouth twisting slightly and turning upward like that of a fish, Dorothea replied in chains of words that did not always form sentences, but with their end rhymes suggested poetic method.

"When Jesu cumeth for my mouth to kisse,

Our tongues meten in the orifice."

"Swet Jesus pain doth shrood my hed

And nary ash of coffin wud."

"When dark descendeth, than luv min hert rendeth

My Jesu swet I go to mete

His body is my soles delete."

"Always I rise" from the glomby earth

When Jesu sucketh me with his swet mouth."

"My sol I yelde up to Jesu dere

Alwhan he cometh att me with his spere. So lordlings, to your dishes. Ichab ykookt four fishes, Frish herrings for the bord Of Jesu Christ, our Lord."

Abbot and commander, Dominican confessor and doctor of canon law — all were moved by her answers. Surely it could not be Satan who spoke so charmingly out of the poor thing's mouth. That little tongue, which sometimes — yes indeed, to be sure — fluttered rather provocatively, must have been loosed by the Lord God. True, the boundary between carnal lust and spiritual rejoicing was not always clear in this all-rhyming Dorothea's word combinations, but her love for the Lord and Saviour could not be doubted, as the abbot, who was of Alemannic origin, observed with a distinctly Swiss intonation that lent charm to his flat Low German. The scholarly Johannes Marienwerder cited examples of Christian mysticism and likened the words he had heard from Dorothea's lips to the legends of the nun Hrosvita and the poems of Mechthild of Magdeburg. And considering that there is no incompatibility between mystical experience and canon law, provided no heresy is involved, Dr. Roze made it clear that he had no fault to find. The vicar of Saint Mary's agreed, but for safety's sake went on to inquire about one thing and another — the bottled lepers' pus, for instance.

Whereupon Dorothea again set her mouth on the bias and established a connection between her "brestkins twain" and "Jesues body of pain." As for the pus she had taken from the lepers of Corpus Christi Hospital, she called it "honey from Jesues iniurees," which just happened to rhyme with "heavens littul bees." She dissociated herself from Satan, whom she reviled as "the Lord of Lies," which she rhymed with a reference to the shifty look of a tasty flatfish—"the Flunderes skemy eyes."

In the end the doctor of canon law declared himself satisfied. Commander Walrabe von Scharfenberg, a man disinclined to open his mouth, sent Dorothea off to the kitchen to prepare (at last) the promised and so charmingly rhymed Scania herrings.

As Dorothea of Montau withdrew her eyes from one and

the other window, turned, and walked the length of the room to the door, the four dignitaries behind the table had the impression that she was gliding along two hands' breadth above the floor.

Alone again, they relaxed in their chairs. Roze, fired with enthusiasm, was first to say the word: "A saint. She is a saint." The others agreed. But the considerations that suddenly made Commander Walrabe eloquent were of a more practical character. Though perhaps a shade too somber — he began — the prophecy of the politically ignorant Dorothea would be fulfilled, but not to the disadvantage of the Teutonic Order. War with the now united kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland was imminent. Just because the Polish Jadwiga had succeeded in converting the pagan Jagello and metamorphosing him into the Christian Wladislaw, the people, even in Teutonic territory, were calling this power-hungry female a saint. Countermeasures were imperative. Dangerous, dangerous, the way those Polacks kept turning out picturesque miracles, whereas the piety of the honest, simplehearted Germans was too dull for words, and as for the Hanseatic shopkeepers, before they'd buy a miracle they'd count up the costs. "In short," he concluded, "I, Walrabe von Scharfenberg, will bear witness to this woman's holiness and pledge the support of the Teutonic Order, which rules this territory in the name of the Blessed Virgin. We must act quickly. War is hard upon us. In addition to arms and supplies, our imperiled country needs the protection of a tutelary saint. What's more, the man whose sword is guided by such wheaten-haired beauty will fight better."

Johannes Marienwerder sighed and threw up his hands. Though for less warlike motives, the abbot agreed with the commander, but how were canonization proceedings to be initiated? The dignitaries could see no way, for there was one little difficulty: Dorothea was alive. And despite the many hardships endured on her pilgrimages, despite her racking penitential exercises, convulsive ecstasies, other kinds of absence, migraines, and protracted periods of insomnia, she was in excellent health; her strength was in no wise impaired by her frequent nosebleeds, which on the contrary seemed to purify her humors.