Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Then, full fed, the guests left. Ferber said nothing. Jeschke delivered himself of a Latin blessing. Ladewig took the five emptied bowls with him. The pigeons in the window hole were silent. The torches had almost burned down in their holders. Peter Rusch sat in his chains and shed a few tears for his last supper. Laden right and left with the kettle and the empty beer keg, his daughter resumed her mumbling on her way out: "You'll soon be out of your misery now. You'll soon be a lot better off. They'll give you a nice cozy place in the heavenly guildhall. And you'll always have plenty of tripe. So stop worrying. Your Gret will settle up with them. It may take time, but I'll fix them good."

Then Mother Rusch admonished her father to hold his curly gray head erect the next day and not to fling curses at anyone whomsoever. He should kneel unbowed before the executioner. He could rely on her vengeance. The taste of it would linger in her mouth like Indian pepper. She wouldn't forget. No, she wouldn't forget.

Peter Rusch did as his daughter had bidden. He must have had a goodly portion of tripe half digested in his innards when, next day in the Long Market, facing the Artushof, where the patricians and prelates stood as though painted around Sigismund, king of Poland, he (fourth of the six candidates) silently let his head be severed from his shoulders. No bungling. You could count on executioner Ladewig. The abbess looked on. A sudden shower of rain made her face glisten. And addressing the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder

said, "In short, dear ladies, vigorously as Margarete Rusch pursued her aims, perseveringly as she raked in her gains, slow as she was in settling her account — on June 26, 1526, when blacksmith Peter Rusch was executed along with the other ringleaders, a daughter wept for her father."

She only liked me plucked. Feathers — I write about fights between gulls and against time.

Or how a boy with his breath wafts the down over fences to nowhere.

Down — that means sleep and geese, priced by the pound.

To every bed its burden.

While she plucked between her stupid knees

and the feathers, as the saying goes, flew,

the ordained power slept downy-softly.

Poultry for whom?

But I blew, kept feathers in suspense.

That is traditional faith;

doubts tarred and feathered.

Not long ago, I found

some quills and

cut them for my use.

First monks, later town clerks,

today secretaries keep the lies flowing.

was as big as two collective farms. And if you sexual sociologists, deep in worry blubber from counting flies' legs, had

been asked in as witnesses when, as she liked me to do on Wednesdays, I came at her from behind but first, to make it all soft and as wet as wept on, licked her asshole and environs like a goat (hungry for salt), which was easy to do when Fat Gret offered her double treasure for worship, you would have seen the archetype of Christian charity, our partner-oriented fervor; but my Ilsebill — who is sometimes adventurous on Thursdays — has never, no matter how devoutly I get down on my knees to her, licked my ass, because she's afraid her tongue would drop off with her last shred of modesty.

She's much too prim, always worried about disgracing herself. Sexy, yes, but so coy about it. And because she's perpetually forming the word "dignity" with curling lips, she has puritanical lockjaw.

Yet Ilsebill reads books of all sizes in which the overcoming of inhibitions is said to be the first requirement for a free society. Never fear, I'll knock or teach these late-bourgeois refusal mechanisms—"Somehow," she says, "I don't dare, I still don't dare" — out of her, and I'll do it the way it says in her women's lib books, with partner-oriented conflicting-roles games, until on one of these Catholic Fridays — Believe me, holy father! — she and her little tongue will see how nice it is. For it can't be bought and paid for. It's within reach of all. It has nothing to do with class. Old Man Marx didn't know anything about it. It's a foretaste of beauty. As every dog knows. Oh, to sniff at, lick, taste, and smell one another!

But when I say to my Ilsebill, "Tomorrow is Saturday. I'll take a thorough bath, I'll smell of lavender all over," she says, "So what!" Because we've lost the habit. Because we only read about it. Because if we mention it at all we mean it symbolically. Because we've discussed it, chewed the whole thing over too often. Because we don't suspect what expectant rosebud lips an asshole is always making — all week long.

For our playing fields — yours, Ilsebill, and mine — have just the right proportions — no speculator, no concrete-crazed developer can divide up your meadow, no flaming-red party boss can grab my ass away from you (or yours from me). The ass is one thing that ideology is afraid to touch. Can't gets its claws on it. Can't read any idea into it. Therefore disparages it. Only gays are supposed to make use of it. A kick in the ass is nevertheless permissible, linguistically speaking. And with deplorable bad taste the asshole has been transformed into a term of opprobrium. Ass licking is looked down on, though the capitalist developer and the flaming-red party boss lick each other's asses, but without pleasure, for whether officially or unofficially they do it in trousers, their taste running to flannel, fifty percent worsted and fifty percent synthetic fiber.

No, Ilsebill! It's got to be bare. My meadows, your rolling hills. Our fields. I worship it, God's rounded idea. Yes, yes, ever since the partly cloudy Neolithic, when Awa's dimples were still unnumbered, the heavens for me have been festooned with asses. And when Margarete Rusch, the cooking nun, first let her sun rise for the runaway Franciscan monk — for me, in other words — I achieved an unveiled understanding of Saint Francis's hymn: devotion, jubilation, industry. Forget no dimple. Stop to rest beside country lanes. The hills ask to be gently grazed. Deep in dialogue. Entrance and exit exchange greetings. Where does the food go? Who's kissing whom? Insight gained. Soon I will know every bit of you. Ah, Ilsebill, now that you're pregnant and burgeoning all over, you ought, you ought to. . Come on, it's high time, come on! Because it's Sunday and all week we've done nothing but talk around it and discuss the anal phase of infancy much too seriously.

When Fat Gret let a fart because I'd been licking her too meticulously, we both relished the breeze. After all, as usual on Wednesday, we had eaten beans with turnips and peppered pork chops; and anyone who is repelled by his sweetheart's farts has no business talking about love. . All right, laugh. Get that stuffy look off your face. Have a heart. It's funny, isn't it? Let me tell you about white beans and nuns' farts. How they argued about bread and wine and wine and bread, the right order in which to take the Eucharist; a quarrelsome century. Margret, Fat Gret, laughed herself healthy over it.

To cheer my Ilsebill, now in the third month of pregnancy, up a little — but she remained stony-faced and said I was "vulgar" — I had cooked white beans down to a pur£e and served them with roast pork and pepper sauce. We also had Teltow turnips, and the whole meal corresponded to the

peppery menu which, in the spring of 1569, Mother Mar-garete Rusch served up to Abbot Jeschke, Johannes Kostra, the Danzig commandant, and Stanislaw Karnkowski, bishop of Leslau at the Oliva Monastery. The three dignitaries had met to straighten out some senseless discrepancies in a sheaf of Counter Reformation decrees. For though King Sigismund Augustus used the "Statuta Karnkowiana" as an instrument of the Counter Reformation, their actual purpose was to curtail the economic power of the city of Danzig, and incidentally to incite the politically impotent guilds against the patrician council. And because this idea, embedded in bloodcurdling antiheresy provisions, had sprung not from the heads of Jeschke, Kostra, and Karnkowski but from that of the cooking nun, I told my Ilsebill the story of Margarete Rusch; for Fat Gret is still imprisoned inside me, and now at last I mean to set her free.