Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Ferber and his Church Mafia. Candles were doused in the churches. Stones hit priests and Dominicans. Leaflets smelled of printer's ink. Songs likening drapers and tailors to Ferber's sheep went hobbling through the streets on one-legged rhymes, and angry men stamped out their rhythms in the guildhalls. In addition the zealot Hegge had begun to inveigh against priests and papism.

But on the Scharpau, in Tiegenort, Kalte Herberge, Fischer Babke, and in other spots where peasants were treated worse than sheep, lambs were unsuspectingly and hence peacefully putting on flesh for Easter. In honor of the bishop of Ermland, forty-seven of them were to be slaughtered and roasted over basins filled with glowing charcoal on the country estate of the patrician Ferber family. The kitchen nun of the Brigittine Order had obtained permission from the bishop of Ermland to cook the lungs and hearts of the Easter lambs in sweet-and-sour sauce for Good Friday.

Fat Gret had had no trouble convincing the episcopal palate that the innocent creatures' innards could hardly be characterized as meat, that lamb's lung preserved in all its purity the scent of the thyme that grew on the Scharpau pastures, and that the Lord Jesus Christ would be pleased to see the hearts and lungs of Easter lambs exalted to the rank of Good Friday fare. The kitchen nun, you see, was determined to give a liberal interpretation of the fast rules. "These little lambs," she said, "have never sinned. They've never been bucked by desire. How can you call that meat? Especially the innards." After cooking the whole lungs and halved hearts of the forty-seven lambs in a large kettle with anise and pepper until tender, Fat Gret had let them cool and chopped them up. Next she had boiled a sackful of lentils in the remaining broth but without reducing them to a puree, added vinegar to the chopped innards, bound the mixture with buckwheat flour, and stirred in raisins and prunes— for everything that came out of her kitchen required plenty of peppercorns, raisins, or prunes.

It was at that Good Friday meal that Mayor Ferber decided to sail against Denmark with six men-of-war. He further decided that on his victorious return he would, with the help of his richly rewarded sailors, crack down on the guilds and on all those town councilors who had been infected

by Lutheranism. Nothing came of his plan. The ships returned in the autumn without spoils. It was announced that the costs of the war would be defrayed by new taxes. That led to unrest. Even the sailors deserted Ferber.

But once she had devised her Good Friday dish, the kitchen nun and later abbess Margarete Rusch stuck to it. Year after year she served her nuns and novices sweet-and-sour lamb's lung with lentils as an appetizer, a custom further encouraged by the fact that from 1529 on, the shepherds, peasants, and fishermen of the Scharpau were obliged to pay rent to the Convent of Saint Bridget, to drive Easter lambs into the convent kitchen, and deliver live eels in baskets.

Chemicals in the rivers have driven them away. Soapy wastes have put reddish spots on their light-colored bellies, dorsal and tail fins, injured the mucus that protects them. The eel traps that can be seen at low tide on both banks of the Elbe are mere reminders. We pay high prices for eels from foreign waters; deep-frozen eels from Scotland are thawed out here and spring miraculously to life.

I know stories, Ilsebill: Spitted on branches they lashed my back. They were in all my thoughts. They slithered like me under cows' udders. They're as old as the Flounder.

"Why," says Ilsebill, "shouldn't the children see you kill eels and cut them in pieces? It'll be educational, as long as I don't have to watch."

Buy the eels alive. "No, children, they're really dead. Those are the nerves in each piece. That's what makes them thrash around. The head piece wants to go on living and sucks itself fast."

Now the children know what they're eating. Boiled au bleu in vinegar and rolled in flour, the pieces are sprinkled with sage. A neighbor sharpened the knives yesterday.

The sage bush used to grow in a garden, since destroyed by dredges, near the mouth of the Stor, where they are now building a dam equipped with locks and a big bascule bridge, which is supposed to change the course of the river and seal it off from the Elbe at times of spring tide.

We place piece after piece in hot oil and salt them lightly. There's still a bit of life in them; that's why they wriggle in the pan. Now the sage bush is growing in our garden. Our neighbor who helped with the transplanting is a free-lance

slaughterer and still slaughters on Mondays for the village butcher. He fertilized the bush with hog's blood, muttering meanwhile in his coastal dialect.

The sage-sprinkled pieces are fried over low heat until crisp- they provide an appetizer that should be followed by a light main course. Let's hope the sage bush lives through

the winter.

If anybody wants advice: don't buy big, fat eels; buy

slim ones.

A crosswise incision just below the head is supposed to block off the nerves. We do not pull the skin off. I advise you, in cleaning eels, to watch out for the gall. If harmed, it will spill, make them bitter, depress us, and give us, wheresoever we turn, a fore- and aftertaste of sin and corruption-like Preacher Hegge.

Hegge! His sermons reduced me to silence. Nothing could stop his mouth. Nothing came easier to him than making words. Only Fat Gret could sling such a syllable stew. When he excoriated, "Hell's brew! Sin broth!" she spewed right back, "Inksquirt! Tongue-happy fizzlecock!" To all the ducks, quail, snipe, and wood pigeons she stuffed and spit-roasted she gave the names of angels: Uriel, Ophaniel, Gabriel, Borbiel, Ariel; he, on the other hand, knew a devil s name for every sensual indulgence: there was wheedling Stauffax, bucking Bles, musty Haamiach, tit-loving Asmo-daeus, silvery Mammon, and rutting Beelzebub. And while the cook glorified a wild goose stuffed with prunes and pork sausage as the angel Zedekiel, the goateed Hegge looked upon all pleasure of the palate as Belial's slobber.

At the very start of the Reformation, this Hegge, whom Abbess Rusch generally referred to as "the mangy goat," introduced the language of Protestant pedantry to Danzig. His father, a tailor, had come from the shores of Lake Constance. But his mother was said to have been a native of the Wicker Bastion, brackish, fishy, crooked-mouthed, with scales (or was it dandruff?) in her hair. In Jakob Hegge the garrulous waves of the Baltic mingled with the jibber-jabber of the Lake Constance Swabians. His verbiage made sins of thumb-sucking and even lesser pleasures. The alarmed burghers sent him to Wittenberg for six months. They wanted to be good

Protestants all right, but Hegge's Calvinist zealotry threatened to throw too gray a pall over their life style. The guilds paid for his journey.

In Wittenberg Dr. Luther seems to have advised him to concentrate on the thirst of tormented mankind for consolations firmly grounded in the Bible, and to have his congregation sing hymns: "In Thy mercy grant us peace. . "

But Hegge didn't want to stop ranting and railing. In his heart the runaway Dominican monk was locked in a strange struggle with his paternal inheritance: Swabian cleanup compulsion. For all Luther's urging that he leave the good burghers a few colorful pictures and the familiar scrollwork, he wanted to create bare walls wherever he went. He may have brought a few of Dr. Luther's practical maxims back with him, but as soon as he was preaching again to his swelling congregation in the graveyard of Saint Gertrude's, the expletives burst out of him, swarming like maggots freshly expelled from the Devil's asshole, though Jakob Hegge never doubted for a moment that he was teaching the pure word of God. True, the effect was slightly attenuated by the shade of the graveyard lindens.