Gunter Grass - The Flounder

In the slum Vasco speaks with women from Uttar Pradesh, who have six or eight children but do not know how many rupees their husbands earn as sweepers at the power plant next door. This slum is reputedly clean. Vasco finds a doctor who, however, has never crossed the street to visit the WHO, just as the WHO has never called on the doctor. Of course we have cases of smallpox, he says. I report them. But they always vaccinate too late. I'm only a volunteer. I have no counterpart in other slum sections. The people here think I'm a fool to be doing this. This doctor doesn't speak English. In translation everything sounds plausible. Maybe he's only a medical orderly. Vasco puts a rupee on the table of the mud-hut dispensary for medicines. As he was leaving home, Vasco's children said: Don't go bringing us any presents. None of that crazy stuff. Give somebody the

money. And on this occasion Ilsebill had no particular wishes, either.

Vasco goes to Fatehpur Sikri to see the sights from his Mogul days. Today he smiles to think how he tried to be tolerant in his spacious fortress apartments by including not only a Mohammedan but also a Hindu woman and a Christian lady from Portuguese Goa in his marriage contract. Only the Hindu woman bore him a son (who turned out badly). Nothing remains but fragments of carved red sandstone. Each column cut differently. But the desert said no. When the water ran out, the city had to be abandoned. All that tolerance for nothing. (When Vasco died in Cochin in 1524, Margarete Rusch, cook and nun, became abbess of Saint Bridget's, after which, as her fancy bade her, she took Protestant, Catholic, and seafaring men into her bed, and runaway monks as well. So tolerant she was, so spacious.)

Still in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Vasco visits a village school, built of clay like the huts and walls round about. Everything is mud-brown — the hard-stamped village street, the cows, the bicycles, the children, the sky. Only the women's saris are colorful, though faded. Once again poverty indulges in beauty. The teacher has light-brown eyes. He shows Vasco schoolbooks. In one little book, which tells the history of India in Hindi script, Vasco sees himself portrayed in simple lines, bearded under a velvet cap. In some wrinkle of his traveler's existence he is proud or touched, but he is also somewhat put out because he has made school history and become textbook material. (What do they actually know about me? About my restlessness. Always looking for goals beyond the horizons. Using my nautical skill as a means of reaching God. And my lifelong fear of Dominican poison. Everything has died away. But I'm still inwardly rich in figures. .)

Because it's expected of him, Vasco asks questions. The teacher complains about social workers who come to the village and use pictures without written commentaries as propaganda for family planning, as though addressing themselves to illiterates. And yet forty-five percent of the children attend school off and on. To prove it, the school-

children read aloud from the book in which Vasco has become textbook material.

In the left-hand niche of the temple the goddess dances, this time in her gentle Durga aspect. The right-hand niche discloses a monkey god. The cawing of the crows, the laughter of the children. The peasants' complaints about the price of wheat, which has suddenly doubled, are translated for Vasco's benefit. Most have sold too cheap. A third of the peasants are landless. Many move to the city. A rich peasant rents out his tractor. For fear of abduction (a common occurrence in the days of the Moguls) the women cover their faces as Vasco passes. In the midst of the dust an old man, who is chewing betel, gives him a carrot. Next day Vasco has diarrhea and has to take Enterovioform — three tablets daily. After a while it helps. But his shit is still mustard-blond and liquid. Bubbles in the soup. He looks for worms and feels disappointed because his stools refuse to turn black like those of the poet Opitz, who was carried off by the plague. That was in the days when the earth was a vale of tears. Opitz's cook was named Agnes. In his book Vasco gives her credit for feelings that she served up to the poet as diet fare. The plague, it was thought, had been brought in from India by the sea route.

While viewing the remains of his Mogul period in Sikri and visiting his tomb, he, like other tourists, ties a cotton wishing string (for which he has paid a rupee) to the battered filigree of his mortuary chapel. But he doesn't know what to wish for. Good God! This absurd joie de vivre. This splendid splendor. This screwed-up planning, O Lord! Why has thou piloted me to this place? (It was an Arab helmsman, who knew the way and knew the monsoon winds. Ahmed ibn Majid was in the habit of celebrating his nautical feats in verse.)

At the airport a wreath of flowers is thrown over Vasco's head. Flags everywhere (not on his account). The world-championship table-tennis matches, now being held in Calcutta, are viewed as a political event. The International Table Tennis Association has excluded South Africa and Israel, but the Palestinians have been invited. Only Holland protests. The Brazilian contestants lack a few inoculations

and are quarantined. It has taken only four weeks to build the modern table-tennis stadium. The city government of Calcutta, with its three thousand slum districts, here called bustees, is proud of the achievement. Because of the table-tennis tournament all the hotels are full, so Vasco is housed in the guest apartments of the former viceroy's palace, since independence the residence of the provincial governor. Vas-co's room is twenty feet high; the bed, under its canopy of mosquito netting, is in the middle. Two ventilators and three electric fans keep the air in motion. On the writing desk, two inkwells from Queen Victoria's day. Vasco jots down notes about the farm cook Amanda Woyke. Her correspondence with Count Rumford. Both wanted to combat world hunger with giant kitchens, she with her West Prussian potato soup, he with his Rumford soup for the poor. Vasco writes: But the Kashubians couldn't get used to potatoes, just as semolina is repellent to the rice-eating Ben-galese, even when they are starving. So the Kashubians continued for a long time to eat too little millet, until at last they consented to fill up on potatoes.

The governor's palace is known as Raj Bhavan. On every side, quietly moving servants in slitted red coats under white turbans. They fold their hands when they greet Vasco. The soldiers in the corridors salute. The cook has been in the house for thirty-six years. He has cooked for Englishmen and their guests. At table four servants wait on Vasco. The aged cook calls his cooking European. At breakfast (ham and eggs), Vasco is served the newspaper with the latest word of the table-tennis matches. Through an aide the governor requests the honor of Vasco's company at luncheon. Vasco dreads the meal with the governor. (Good God! What am I doing here!) He wants to go home to his Ilsebill.

But Calcutta, this crumbling, scabby, swarming city, this city that eats its own excrement, has decided to be cheerful. It wants its misery — and misery can be photographed wherever you go — to be terrifyingly beautiful: the decay plastered with advertising posters, the cracked pavement, the beads of sweat adding up to nine million souls. People pour out of railroad stations which, like Vasco only yesterday, have daily diarrhea: white-shirted maggots in a shitpile with

Victorian excrescences, a shitpile that dreams up new curlicues every minute. And on top of everything betel-reddened spittle.

On foot across the Hooghly Bridge and back. On the left side junk for sale: worn-out shoes, coconut fiber, school slates, faded shirts, primitive tools, kitsch from Hong Kong, native kitsch. The right-hand sidewalk is bordered by groups of peasants from the surrounding villages selling purple onions, yellow, sand-gray, or bright-red lentils, ginger root, sugar cane, molasses pressed into cakes, unhusked rice, coarse-ground wheat, chapatty. The bridge, which has no central support, vibrates under the two-way traffic of bare feet, trucks, rickshas, and oxcarts. Suddenly, in the midst of the crowd, Vasco is overcome with joy. He, too, wants to chew betel. But when he looks down from either bridgehead, there is nothing but misery; he is aghast at the sight of hol-lowed-out women and old men with shrunken heads, upon whom death has set its mark.