Gunter Grass - The Flounder

mothers, who once rowed a boat from the small island of Oehe to Schaprode, is believed to have told the painter Philipp Otto Runge the tale of the talking Flounder in Low German. Ulla also speaks the Low German of the coast. Slender as she is, I can see her in Fat Gret's clothes. "I'm bored," she says, for after twelve years of Protestant church services, the Sunday-after-Sunday hypocrisy stinks, so she says, all the way up to the organ pipes. She's fed up with the parish blackskirts, one of whom rants and wears a goatee like Hegge.

The other day, I fled, as I do now and then, from Ilsebill and her wishes, which renew themselves like chives — Christmas is coming-and escorted Ulla Witzlaff to her Sunday service in some Neo-Gothic church. After Ulla had played the prelude, the Kyrie had been sung, and the pathetic congregation had struck up the hymn "Open, O Lord, the door of my heart," we sat on the organ bench in the choir loft, talking in an undertone about the Flounder and his activities in the days of the abbess Margarete Rusch, for down below the latter-day Hegge had embarked on his sermon. Ulla was knitting something long and plain and woolly, while the ranting goatee poured forth his latest spiritual awakening for the benefit of seventeen old women and two pietistically inclined teen-age maidens: "Beloved congregation, the other day I was riding in an overcrowded subway train. People were pushing and shoving. Dear God! cried my inner voice. What has become of Thy love? And then of a sudden the Lord Jesus spoke to me. . "

At which point, Ulla said without preamble, "I wouldn't be surprised if Mother Rusch in her convent had used a hymnbook with a preface by Luther."

I confirmed her suspicion: "On his return from Wittenberg in 1525, Jakob Hegge brought back a volume of the first edition of the Klug Hymnal and gave it to Fat Gret. Possibly on the advice of the Flounder, who always kept posted on the latest printed matter. And every evening after that Mother Rusch would sing with her nuns, 'Rejoice, dear Christians all, and let us jump for joy.

And Ulla said, "Maybe Mother Rusch had an organ, if only one with a single manual, maybe in Saint Bridget's or possibly in the convent chapel." Whereupon she dropped her knitting, moved over on the bench, pressed buttons, manipu-

lated levers, pulled all the stops, and, playing with both hands and feet, made the organ literally thunder. Without regard for the struggling preacher down below and his interminable outpourings, she gave me a demonstration of the Klug Hymnal and its importance for the development of sixteenth-century music, at the same time letting-as Mother Rusch had done beneath her Catholic veil-her blaring, jubilant voice ring out with Luther's translations and Luther's original hymns. First: "With peace and joy I came." Then: "As we journey through this life." Then: "Salvation unto us is come." And finally, in the old setting, every verse of "A Mighty Fortress is our God," down to "And the Word shall stand forever…"

By that time Ulla's jubilation had emptied the church, for it was more than either the latter-day Hegge or his faithful could bear. After a frightened "Amen" and a hurried blessing, the pastor, followed by his ladies in their chamberpot hats, hurried out into the cold December air.

Oh, bliss of empty churches! For a short hour Ulla Witz-laff played the organ and sang for me alone. With musical examples she showed how Abbess Rusch and her Brigittine nuns had been Catholic on the one hand and devoutly Lutheran on the other. While she was at it, she gave me a bit of elementary instruction in liturgy and hymnology.

When, after a concluding "Come, Holy Ghost," the organ breathed its last, the organist threw her arms around me. I wanted to respond right there on the narrow organ bench, but Ulla, perhaps in memory of Mother Rusch's stable-warm box bed, said, "Save it for later. We might as well be comfortable."

As it is written, we were one flesh. And we laughed and laughed over the sixteenth-century Hegge and the latter-day Hegge. And afterward Ulla served me leftover lentils and island stories with the Flounder out of the fairy tale swimming through them.

When she opens her mouth that would sooner hum than sing

and shapes it into a funnel for sticky porridge, mealy

dumplings, or with teeth created for this very purpose she bites off a chunk of tender sheep's neck or a goose's left breast and passes it on — rolled in her spittle— to me with a thrust of her tongue.

Stringy meat prechewed.

Or if too tough, run through the grinder.

Her kiss is food.

So trout cheeks, olives,

nuts, the kernels of plum pits she

has cracked with her molars,

black bread afloat in beer,

a peppercorn intact

and crumbled cheese—

with a kiss she shares them all.

Broken in health, propped on cushions,

ravaged by fever, disgust, and thoughts,

I was revived (time and again) by her kisses,

which never came empty-handed and were never just kisses.

And I gave back

oysters, calves' brains, chicken hearts, bacon.

Once we ate a pike with our fingers, I hers, she mine. Once we exchanged squabs down to the delicate little bones.

Once (and time and again) we kissed each other full of beans. Once, after always the same quarrel (because I'd drunk up the rent money), a radish reconciled us after a turnip estrangement. And once we had fun with the caraway seeds in the sauerkraut, and kept exchanging them, hungry for more.

When Agnes the cook

kissed Opitz the dying poet,

he took a little asparagus tip with him on his last journey.

In the fourth month of her pregnancy (and therefore suddenly wild about hazelnuts), Ilsebill, who doesn't want to have been my kitchenmaid, whose thinking is strictly rectilinear, and who could easily be one of the Flounder's accusers, lost an upper-right molar made valuable by a gold crown and, taking fright as if a male toad were creeping up on her, swallowed it. All she spat out was the shell of the hazelnut, which, irony of ironies, had been empty.

"Well?" I said next morning. "Did you look for it? It's gold, after all."

But she refused to inspect her morning stools, let alone prod them with a washable fork. And I was forbidden to root around in her "excrement," as she contemptuously

called it.

"That's because you were brought up unwisely and too well," I said. For our fecal matter should be important to us and not repel us. It's not a foreign body. It has our

warmth. Nowadays it's being described again in books, shown in films, and painted in still lifes. It had been forgotten, that's all. Because as far as I can think back and look behind me, all the cooks (inside me) have inspected their feces and — in all my time-phases — mine as well. I was always under strict supervision.

During her years as an abbess, for instance, Fat Gret made all the novices bring her their chamber pots, and every kitchen boy who came to her for employment had first to demonstrate his fitnesss by showing healthy stools.

And even when, as Albrecht the swordmaker, I was plagued with daily Lenten fare, I was subjected to ex posteriori inspections. So unyieldingly fanatical was my wife and meatless cook, Dorothea, about her ascetic way of life that, not content with setting a meatless and fatless table, she checked on my intake at other people's tables by poking through my feces for undigested bits of sinew or traces of bacon rind or tripe fiber, and compared my deposit with her own High Gothic and penitential stools, which were always dry and transcendental in their pallor, whereas I had sinned — at guild banquets, when suckling pigs stuffed with milky millet were carved for the smiths and swordmakers; or when, sometimes in the woods and sometimes at the lodge of the stonemasons then working on Saint Peter's in the Outer City, I cooked in secret with my friend Lud the wood carver: sheep's kidneys and fat sheep's tails grilled over an open fire. Nothing could be concealed from Dorothea. Many a time I gave myself away by swallowing cartilage or small bones, which came out the other end intact.