Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Once the suggested contacts had been established, the Flounder was provided with algae, insects, and similar fresh food, and the trial went along smoothly until the case of the Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau was nearing its summation.

The probable reason for the agitation in the hall was that the defendant had managed to bring in certain particulars which, taken in conjunction with certain acknowledged facts, added up to a historical picture that mitigated his guilt (Dorothea's services as a spy for the Dominicans). In any event, some member of the public threw a fist-sized stone, which missed the zinc tub but might have hit it. The public was excluded from the hall. With the Flounder's consent, workmen (males) covered his tub with fine-meshed wire. The optical effect was unfortunate. The defendant could hardly be seen. The word "cage" kept cropping up in the news stories.

When the public was readmitted, further assaults were made. The public consisted mostly of young women, and when the Flounder set forth his cynical migraine theory in speaking of Dorothea of Montau, one of these young women threw a small bottle, which landed on the protective wire. The Flounder demanded to be informed of the contents, but refrained from any comment derogatory to the women's movement when the words "potassium cyanide" were pronounced.

Again the trial was adjourned; again the public was excluded. Specialists (male) required a whole week, first to seal off the zinc tub with a pane of bulletproof glass, second to equip the tub with an oxygen tank, and third to install an intercom system. When the trial started up again, the Flounder sounded weird, very much (to High German ears) as in the fairy tale that made him a popular legend: "Vot does she vont now?" He was evidently aware of the acoustic effect, for he occasionally sprinkled his usual exaggeratedly involved and old-fashioned sentences with Low German flourishes, charmingly vulgar expletives, and puns on the name Ilsebill. The intercom system seemed to amuse him.

But at the very start of the debate on the case of Mar-garete Rusch, when the Flounder had just admitted to the Tribunal that it was he who had advised putting little Margret in a convent, or, more exactly, right after the accused fish had illustrated convent life with a few anecdotes, and had imitated Fat Gret's nun's farts with a remarkable vocal virtuosity, someone in the public took aim at the Flounder and fired. The bullet — fired as it later turned out

by an old lady, a librarian by trade — struck the hind end of the zinc tub. She had fired standing in the eleventh row. The bullet passed clean through the metal and came to rest in the Baltic Sea sand. But the hole was large enough to provide passage for a finger-thick stream of North Sea water. The prosecutor herself, Ms. Sieglinde Huntscha, tried to stop the hole with a Kleenex. The marine biologist was in despair. A plumber was called. The Flounder could be heard laughing raucously over the loudspeaker: "Hey, there, that's a new way to fart. That must have been a cowboy and no Ilsebill. Going after the poor Flounder with a Colt. Why not a cannon?"

Only a four-day adjournment was needed for the installation of a man-high tank of bulletproof glass, as long and wide as the retired zinc tub but filled to half its height with Baltic Sea sand. It goes without saying that the glass house was provided with the necessary technical equipment. The Flounder could now be seen much more clearly. One could even distinguish his archaic stony protuberances, except when he buried his whole flat body in the sand, showing only his crooked mouth and slanting eyes. But now no one could endanger his life by aiming stones or bullets at him or pouring poison in his water. His security had been provided for.

He was also safe from kidnapping (thanks to an alarm system). (Only a short while before, anonymous, presumably male threats had been made known: "They want to swipe him on us. Those male chauvinists stop at nothing.") The Flounder was pleased with the bulletproof-glass box. On request, he generously admitted photographers. Even a television crew was permitted, during a recess, to transmit his protected beauty to millions of tubes. The discussion of the cooking nun continued — almost without a hitch.

The gleaming copper pan.

Her early morning voice. Here! I cried. Here!

and ran to her, as often as I tried to run away from her pots.

At Easter I skinned lambs' tongues — Protestant and Catholic — and my sinful soul as well. And when she plucked geese in November, I blew feathers, blew the down, to keep the day in suspense.

She had the dimensions of Saint Mary's Church,

but there was never a mystical draft,

it was never cool inside her.

Ah, her box bed

that smelled of goat's milk

that flies had fallen into.

Captive in her stable smell.

Her womb was a cradle.

When was that?

Under her nun's habit — she was an abbess-time did not stand still, history was enacted, the controversy over flesh and blood and bread and wine was decided without a word. As long as I was her kitchen boy, I was never cold and never ashamed.

Fat Gret: a half pumpkin

laughs and spits out seeds.

I seldom saw her

stir beer into bread soup,

but then she peppered heavily: her grief

had no aftertaste.

Who else, Flounder! Who else! Blacksmith Rusch, Franciscan monk Stanislaus. Preacher Hegge, rich man Ferber, and Abbot Jeschke. If during the lifetime of the abbess Mar-garete I was one and the other and successively this one and

that one — her father, her kitchen boy, her opponents and victims — why would it not be conceivable that far away from her but wishing to help her by making pepper cheaper, I opened up the sea route to India to Portuguese caravels? Consider that the Sao Rafael dropped anchor off Calicut on March 28, 1498, at which time Kristin Rusch, an inhabitant of the Wicker Bastion, was pregnant with Fat Gret.

At first I merely toyed with this question along with my usual worries (Ilsebill), but then, when I'd started on my trip, it became an obsession. Possibly it was fear of the foreign surroundings that made me look for a role. (How was I to exist in Calcutta without one?) Or cursory readings in Hinduism beguiled me into extending my Eastern European rebirths to the Indian subcontinent; but I didn't want to have been Lord Curzon or Kipling. I finally said to myself: the abbess Margarete Rusch must have had some reason for marrying her elder daughter, Hedwig, to a Portuguese merchant, whose intention of opening a trading post on the Malabar Coast in southern India was explicitly mentioned in the marriage contract. It was decided that with the viceroy's permission the couple would take up residence at Cochin, and from there, as stipulated in the marriage contract, ship suitable amounts of pepper twice a year, for the feasts of Saint Martin and Saint John. The rule dating from the days of Vasco and of Affonso d'Albuquerque that prohibited the entry of Christian women seems to have been relaxed, and the family struck root.

They settled in Cochin, where the merchant Rodrigues d'Evora and his wife, Hedwig, soon made a fortune in the spice trade — pepper, cloves, ginger, and cardamom — but the climate was too much for them. Along with four of their five children, they died before Margret Rusch, who, thanks to the stipulated spice shipments, was able to give Indian spices currency in Danzig and environs: tripe with ginger, millet curry, gingerbread, hare in pepper sauce, pepper with anything and everything. And because my travel schedule included a visit to the seaport town of Cochin in the Indian state of Kerala, I decided to travel unofficially as Vasco da Gama. While still at the Frankfurt airport, though with my seat belt already fastened, I wrote in my sketchbook: Vasco returns.