Gunter Grass - The Flounder

What cannot be found in the minutes is that immediately after this session several members of the public seem to have applied for jobs as abbesses. The Tribunal adjourned.

Yes, yes, Ilsebill, suppose it happened; suppose first in ten, then in a hundred, then in a thousand places from Swabia to Holstein, feminist convents sprang up, in which, say, five hundred thousand organized women rejected marriage and with it male-organized sexual intercourse; and suppose that in these convents you women were able to liberate yourselves in this respect and shake off your thousand-year-old dependence on male property rights and patriarchal customs, on the whims of the pecker, on household money, fashion trends, and in general on male high pressure; and suppose you succeeded, before you knew it, in creating economic power centers, either by building up a feminist consumer-goods industry or by gaining control of the consumer-goods market, which (though perhaps unwittingly) is bound to be woman-dominated in any case, wouldn't a first phase of the Flounder's project of setting up convents on the model exemplified by Margarete Rusch, abbess of Saint Bridget's, as counterpoles to the dominant male groups of today, have been realized?

For suppose, Ilsebill, that feminine solidarity should become the rule in more and more feminist convents and conventual workshops, so that woman can no longer be played off against woman in accordance with the rites of sexual competition or on the basis of a usually doll-like ideal of beauty such as men keep dreaming up in their need to cloak the unchanging dependency of women in ever-new disguises; suppose, Ilsebill, there were feminist convents all over the world and that these convents wielded economic power; suppose that traditional patriarchal marriage were observed only by a vanishing minority of the population, that children engendered by free choice but without obligation or paternity claims grew to adulthood in these convents, and that female reason, possibly abetted by a male intelligence aware of its own inadequacy, ushered in a new, nunnish matriarchy, and consequently that male-dated history would stop happening, that there would be no more wars, that male ambition and progress mania would stop sending rockets and super-rockets

out into mindless cosmic space, that commodities would stop terrorizing mankind, that people would lose their fear of being inferior to one another, that from this time on no one would want to possess anyone, that the battle of the sexes, that time-honored drama, would lose its audience, that only tenderness would increase, that there would be no victors in bed, that the very meaning of victory would be forgotten, and that time would no longer be counted; suppose, Ilsebill, that all this were possible, calculable, and demonstrable; suppose computers (superfluous at a later stage) could be programmed to spit out this New Order; suppose the Women's Tribunal gave its wholehearted support to the Flounder who was only yesterday in the dock, and took his fish-mouthed advice; suppose, I repeat, that feminist convents, memorials to the abbess Margarete Rusch, sprang up on every hand, and that you (though more than two months pregnant — by me) were to enter such a convent tomorrow in order to be free, liberated, no longer subjugated or possessed by me or anyone else, would you then — supposing all this came to pass — let me, simply as a man, drop in on you for a little while?

I ran and ran.

At cross-purposes with the signposts, driven by hunger.

Down the hill of history I ran, slid, rolled,

flattening what was flat to begin with,

a messenger in the wrong direction.

Chewed-over wars,

The Seven and the Thirty,

the Norse hundred I took in my stride.

Stragglers who looked back out of habit

saw me vanish and double back.

And those who wanted to warn me — Magdeburg is burning!

— did not suspect that laughing I would run through the still (but not for long) intact city.

Following no thread but only the incline.

Some, dismembered, put themselves together, some leaped from plague wagons, some from the wheel, and witches, escaped from collapsing pyres, hobbled a bit of the way with me.

Ah, the thirsty reaches of year-long councils,

the hunger for dates,

until, breathless and ravaged, I ran to her.

She lifted the lid off the pot and stirred.

"What's cooking? What's cooking?"

"Hasenpfeffer, what else. I guessed you were coming."

Something stuffed, for instance. We're living in a state of expectation. Winter refuses to come. The fog moves everything too close, and already a family Christmas threatens.

"Our quarrel," says Ilsebill, "lies tender and juicy on our plates. We like the taste, but we don't know why, or what it's all about."

My last attempt to inject meaning is beef heart stuffed with prunes in beer sauce, such as Mother Rusch cooked for me, the runaway monk, without inquiring about my reasons. But our guests — two architects, a pastor — look for deeper meaning in everything that comes along.

The chambers of the heart lend themselves to stuffing and demand it. Buy the whole heart, slitted on one side only. Remove the clotted blood, cut out the web of sinews, make room, lift off the envelope of fat. Politely our guests let one another finish speaking.

"Soak the prunes in warm water," says Ilsebill, talking in Mother Rusch's footsteps, "but don't pit them." And suppose there were a meaning, what good would it do us?

For browning we use the diced heart fat. "But there has to be a meaning," says the pastor tolerantly, "if only a negative one. How can we be expected to live from hand to mouth, without meaning?"

The heart, which has been stuffed and tied with white string, is browned on all sides over a high flame; then beer

is added to cover. ("That, Reverend, must be obvious to a theologian.")

But the architects keep coming up with their pure Bauhaus theory. Simmer for a good hour, then add nutmeg and pepper, but less than Mother Rusch, in her time-phase and mine, thought expedient. Christmas means two more paid holidays for us. Though no meaning has been supplied, the pastor is desperately cheerful. And sour cream, which is not stirred in but forms meditative little islands: in those days, Ilsebill, when Vasco da Gama in quest of God. .

Maybe the Scandinavian high-pressure zone will bring in a belated winter after all and create meaning. Serve it with boiled potatoes, says Ilsebill, and be sure to warm the plates, because beef fat, like mutton fat, tends to form a film.

There were once forty-seven lambs which, along with eight hundred and sixty-three sheep and innumerable other lambkins, grazed on the Scharpau, a lush marsh owned and managed by Eberhard Ferber the future mayor. The only world these lambs knew was their pasture as far as the flat horizon, seen through the legs of the mother sheep. The taste of these meadows gave no indication of their owner's identity.

Up until 1498, when the sea route to India was discovered and the future abbess Rusch was born, Councilor Anger-miinde owned the Scharpau and gouged his tenant fishermen, peasants, and shepherds; but when, after a long-winded intrigue, the betrothal of Moritz Ferber to the daughter of the patrician Angermunde was called off, even though community of property had been stipulated by contract, the Ferber brothers became bishop of Ermland and mayor of Danzig. Both were pushed by the clergy and under obligation to the nobility.

Neither the sheep on the Scharpau nor the peasant serfs noticed much difference when the Ferber brothers succeeded in forcing the Angermundes out of the Scharpau and the Dirschau starosty. Shearing and slaughtering, rent gouging and corvee labor went on just the same. In 1521, however, though the sheep and peasants continued unprotesting, the trades of the Old City and Charter City, as well as the un-guilded artisans of the Wicker Bastion, rose up against