Gunter Grass - The Flounder

A nun from Wattenscheid, belonging to the Order of Mother Theresa, takes Vasco to a lepers' bustee. A child is lying there, half dead. With her white hand, the nun shoos the flies away from the half-dead child. Vultures are perched on the tile roofs of the stinking slaughterhouse across the way. All you can do is walk through, step across, look away.

Vasco no longer knows where he is or has been. Now in a day nursery — so affectionate, these two-year-olds. Now in a school, where the children sing something Catholic with closed eyes. Now in a foundling home — a childless Brahman couple adopt the newborn son of an untouchable mother. Vasco wishes them well. Now milk is being distributed outside a dispensary — all so inadequate. A resolute nun keeps the crowd in order. Sister Ananda tells me what Mother Theresa says about the problems of Calcutta. "Maybe we're only a drop of water in the ocean," she says, "but the ocean wouldn't be full without us."

No, don't look. Step across. Stop your ears with lead. Practice glassy-eyed indifference. Leave pity in your suitcase with your shirts and socks, or stick a bank note in your guidebook at the place where it says "Calcutta." Or look. Stop. Listen. Feel moved and ashamed. Show your red tongue, because pity is small change and quickly dispensed.

Now in Kalighat, where the ragged bundles that are picked up off the street at night are (for once) given ample helpings of rice at Mother Theresa's home for the dying. Next door (at last) the temple of the goddess Kali. A priest explains, and Vasco pays him five rupees. In the sacrificial area blood covered with flies recalls the goats that were sac-

rificed this morning. Young women scratch little good-luck symbols in the blood-drenched clay. Close by there's a tree for mothers who wish for children, lots of children, another child, more children, more and more children, a child (or two or three) year in, year out. The mothers hang wishing stones on the tree. The tree is full of wishing stones, all signifying children, more children. Wherever Vasco looks, flowery madness and Catholic-type Hindu kitsch. The black Kali is hidden behind the crush of the faithful.

Vasco stands to one side. He wants to know why she sticks out her red tongue. The priest explains that after Kali had killed all the demons (and other counterrevolutionaries) she couldn't stop killing and only came to her senses after setting her foot on the chest of her recumbent male aspect, Shiva. Then Kali was ashamed, and for shame she stuck out her tongue. Sticking out the tongue has been regarded as a sign of being ashamed ever since. Nowhere has Vasco seen a minister, governor, Brahman, or lisping poet stick out his tongue. He has seen the pale tongues of cows grazing gently in garbage. He has seen how undernourishment turns children blond. He has seen mothers dipping their whining babies' pacifiers in brackish sugar water. He has seen flies on everything under the sun. He has seen life before death.

Vasco takes refuge in the newspaper. Side by side with a story about the strike of the food truckers he reads the latest about the table-tennis matches. The members of the Swedish team have the runs. After a short stroll around town they flee back to their hotel in horror. Now they talk of leaving ahead of time. And Vasco writes his Ilsebill, now in her third month of pregnancy, horrified half sentences on a postcard showing a glossy picture of the black Kali: "This place defies understanding. Reason won't get you anywhere. The lepers are worse than I thought. I've met a nun who believes with all her might and is always cheerful. The heat is something. Leaving tomorrow. Flying to the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama landed. ."

Send a postcard with regards from Calcutta. See Calcutta and go on living. Meet your Damascus in Calcutta. As alive as Calcutta. Chop off your cock in Calcutta (in the temple of Kali, where young goats are sacrificed and a tree is hung

with wishing stones that cry out for children, more and more children). In Calcutta, encoffined in mosquito netting, dream of Calcutta. Get lost in Calcutta. On an uninhabited island write a book about Calcutta. At a party call Calcutta an example (of something). Rethink the Frankfurt/Mannheim area as Calcutta. Misbehaved children, women like Ilsebill who are never satisfied, and men who live for schedules-curse them, wish them all in Calcutta. Recommend Calcutta to a young couple as a good place to visit on their honeymoon. Write a poem called "Calcutta" and stop taking planes to far-off places. Get a composer to set all the projects for cleaning up Calcutta to music and have the resulting oratorio (sung by a Bach society) open in Calcutta. Develop a new dialectic from Calcutta's contradictions. Transfer the UN to Calcutta.

When Vasco da Gama, hardly able to remember his first landing, returned reborn to Calcutta, he decided to level the city with ten thousand bulldozers and rebuild it by computer. Thereupon the computer vomited up three thousand sixteen-story bustees, another vast slum, only deep-frozen and much lonelier, beyond hope of disaster and totally isolated, since all noise had been absorbed. And then Calcutta died, though the living standard had been raised just above the destitution level. Very little was lacking, only the things that matter. People who multiply as a form of self-assertion. All the same, says Vasco to himself, infant mortality has dropped. Or perhaps if all the existing statistical charts and tables were pulped, a new study could be financed on the proceeds. Let's not waste another word on Calcutta. Delete Calcutta from all guidebooks. In Calcutta, Vasco gained four and a half pounds.

How,

where horror should cast us in lead,

can I laugh,

even at breakfast laugh?

How,

where garbage and only garbage grows,

am I to speak of Ilsebill because she is beautiful,

and speak of beauty?

How,

where the hand in the photo

remains forever riceless,

shall I write about the cook

and how she stuffs fattened geese?

The sated are going on a hunger strike.

O beautiful garbage!

It's enough to make you die laughing.

I'm trying to find a word for shame.

Between the holidays as soon as it's late and quiet enough, I read Orwell's Utopian novel, 1984, which I read for the first time in 1949 in a very different frame of mind.

To one side, next to the nutcracker and the package of tobacco, lies a book of statistics, the figures that maximize-minimize the world's population — according to how it will be fed or not fed up to the year 2000. In pauses,

when I reach for my tobacco or crack a hazelnut, I am overtaken by difficulties which in comparison with Big Brother and the world-wide protein shortage are slight but refuse to stop snickering in private.

Now I am reading about interrogation methods in the near

future. Now I am trying to remember figures, present infant-mortality patterns in southern Asia. Now I'm unraveling on the edges, because, before the holidays, ebbed quarrels were tied up in little packages: Ilsebill's wishes. .

The ash tray is half full of nutshells. Too much of everything. Something has to be deleted: India or Oligarchic Collectivism or the family Christmas.

Commuted to lentils.

Drown in a sea of lentils.

On my lentil-stuffed cushion.

Hope springs like lentils.

And what the prophets have always wanted is

a miraculous multiplication of lentils.

And when he arose on the third day his hunger for lentils was great.

Beginning at breakfast. Thickened till the spoon stands erect. With marjoram-seasoned shoulder of mutton. Or remembered lentils: once when King Stephen Batory returned to camp from the hunt