Gunter Grass - The Flounder

So much humility was interpreted as contrition. The truth is that the old woman, vigorous within her fat, wished to regain her old political mobility. From then on she was always a step ahead of the vicissitudes of history. Under the

veil of Catholicism she worked for the Protestant cause. She was no longer interested in the Eucharist but still and once again in the rights that were denied the guilds. After all, she had grown up in the Wicker Bastion. What had cost her rebellious father, blacksmith Peter Rusch, his head — democratic grumbling and incendiary speeches in every guildhall — now became the daughter's stock in trade, but she spoke softly, over simmered cod liver, hasenpfeffer, and thrushes, which she barded with bacon and stuffed with juniper berries.

In 1567, when Stanislaw Karnkowski became bishop of Leslau and under his aegis a second Counter Reformation began looking for appropriate table arrangements, the elderly nun was cooking for Abbot Jeschke, whose monastery at Oliva had always been a place of contemplative reaction. There, after milky fish soup, Fat Gret served either hasenpfeffer or beef hearts stuffed with prunes or peppered pork roast with white beans and turnips, which last dish induced eminently political farts in the conspiring clerics.

The cooking nun believed in the liberating power of the fart. With what unabashed gusto she let her intestinal winds blow! Whether cooking for friend or foe — in the midst of her mumbled table talk, she would let loose a merry succession of farts, usually setting a full stop or following a question as its answer, but sometimes also parenthetically. Echoes of receding storms. Solemnly spaced gun salutes. Dry broadsides. Or mingled with her laughter, because nature had given her cheerful disposition a twofold, double-mouthed expression: as once when she brought King Stephen Batory the key of the besieged city as the stuffing of a sheep's head stuffed into a pig's head, and subsequently made the king's startled dignity laugh and fart so hard that His Polish Majesty and retinue were carried away, as though dissolved in laughter and soothed by their nether winds. The king had no choice but to impose mild conditions on the city and turn a blind eye to the cooking nun's offense. For it was Margret who on February 15, 1577, incited the lower trades to rebel and (very much her father's daughter) put them up to setting the Oliva Monastery on fire.

When, immediately after the solemn Peace, Abbot Jeschke returned to the burned monastery to oversee the

corvee of the peasants who were rebuilding it, he insisted— much as he knew she hated him — that Sister Margret take charge of his kitchen. Never had she cooked under duress. For her cookery had always been a labor of love. For three years she clothed her vengeance in stewed breast of beef, stuffed goose, sour aspics, or suckling pig, which she stuffed with shredded cabbage, apples, and raisins, never sparing the pepper.

What that man managed to shovel in. How long and hard his jaws labored. Why he couldn't leave anything over. How many had to go hungry to keep him belching-full. At last, by the summer of the year 1581, she had fattened Abbot Kaspar Jeschke to death. He died at table. More precisely: his sleek monk's head, with cheeks that had glowed with Catholic power for decades, fell into a bowl of the very dish that a lifetime before Fat Gret had cooked for her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch: peppered tripe. The cooking nun had forgotten nothing. And the Flounder also thinks that though stuffing an abbot to death is rather a drastic use to make of the culinary art, it was quite in keeping with the life style of the deceased.

Margarete Rusch died in 1585 from swallowing a pike bone, in the presence of King Stephen Batory, who by the recent peace treaty had confirmed not only the city of Danzig's rights to carry on trade and collect customs duties but the privileges of the patricians as well. Once again the guilds, the lower trades, and the sailors came off empty-handed. Patricians and courtiers feasted for days. More than a fishbone must have stuck in the aged nun's craw.

All of a sudden, when only leftovers remained of the roast pork with beans and turnips, my Ilsebill, with the stubborn persistence typical of pregnant women, wanted to know what, apart from the fact that she was born in 1498, the year of the landing in Calicut, Fat Gret had to do with Vasco da Gama. When I tried to answer with nunnish tales — how Abbess Margarete Rusch had traded her elder daughter to a Portuguese spice merchant for annual shipments of pepper from the Malabar Coast — Ilsebill got up from the table and said, "Aren't you clever! Or did the Flounder think that up? Trading her daughter for pepper! It's just too typical."

A pinch of Redeemer salt. Another delay when my question — which century are we playing now? — was answered kitchenwise: when the price of pepper fell. .

Nine times she sneezed over the bowl

where lay the hare giblets in their broth.

She refused to remember

that I was her kitchen boy.

Darkly she gazed at the fly in the beer

and wanted (no more delay)

to be rid of me no matter what. .

Soups in which the grit wins out.

When she praised hunger as if it were something to eat,

when she laughed quintessentially and not about turnips,

when at the kitchen table

she persuaded Death with dried peas

to grant a delay. .

And so she sits inside me and writes her story. .

Possibly because I don't rightly know under whose name I was connected with the abbess Margarete Rusch, and because I remember my neolithic time-phase rather more clearly than the confused circumstances of the Reformation period, the Flounder's statements before the Women's Tribunal have been termed contradictory. He claims to have advised me first as little Margret's father, then as the patrician Ferber, and later as the sleek abbot Jeschke. (He also hinted at far-reaching political responsibilities in other parts of the world. Allegedly he wanted to bring the price of pepper down, and for that reason sent a certain Vasco da Gama to India by the sea route.) But the Flounder left no one in doubt about his

support of Margarete. Three days after the little girl's birth, blacksmith Rusch called him out of the stormy November sea: What was he to do with the brat? The mother had died of fever. Had to be fed goat's milk. Warm, direct from the teat. A plump little lass she'd be. O Lord, O Lord, would the Flounder please tell him what to do.

The blacksmith's desperation will be understood more readily if we recall that Peter Rusch belonged not to any guild but to the lower trades. The Flounder, in any case, introduced me to the Tribunal as a social phenomenon of the Middle Ages, a victim of the self-seeking policies of the guilds. "This Peter Rusch," he declared, "belonged to the lumpen proletariat of his day. Admitted to no guildhall, despised by the guild members among the journeymen, though they had no more political rights than he did and were just as much at the mercy of patrician highhandedness, and to top it all he was cursed with seven children. And as if that were not enough, no sooner had his wife, Kristin, given birth to his daughter Margarete than she died on him. And besides, he was in debt. In short, a natural-born rebel. Quick to draw his knife. Not very bright, but unswerving in his quest for justice. A poor devil who wanted my advice."

So this is supposedly who I was. And not the recurring runaway monk, kitchen boy, and bed companion? The Flounder must know. And if Margret hadn't on every posssible occasion reacted to any mention of fathers and fatherhood with scornful farts, I'd gladly have been her father, I'd have been proud of my prodigious daughter, though all she ever gave me was pity and tripe soup. Anyway, the Flounder advised me to leave her with the pious nuns at Saint Bridget's as soon as she was weaned from the goat. He did it to help me. But when questioned in court, he gave other reasons.