Gunter Grass - The Flounder

After an interval, during which Agnes the kitchenmaid passed through the room and set pewter plates on the table and the daily life of the seaport town went on outside— barrels were rolled — the elder man said to the younger, "Yes, yes, that's somewhere near the truth." He had indeed wasted his energies in the tangled business of war, always in harness, always traveling from place to place with petitions, appeals for help; Breslau's daughters had given him more fatigue than pleasure; true, he had been obliged to fear the Jesuits and curry favor with princes, and yet, like the eminently learned Grotius, with whom he had sat face to face in Paris "just as we are sitting now," he chose to regard himself as an irenicist, a man of peace, motivated by allegiance to no

one party, but by a desire for universal tolerance, and that was why, though weary of struggle, he was still writing letters in the hope of persuading Chancellor Oxenstierna, now that the emperor was weak, to reinforce the army of Marshal Baner and enable him, with the help of Torstenson's cavalry and the Scottish regiments of Lesley and King, to prevent a junction of the imperial troops with the Saxon renegades; and indeed, seeing that the royal child was being brought up on perfectly insane principles by her mother in the castle at Stockholm, he was trying to bring about an alliance between Sweden and Wladislaw of Poland against the Habs-burgs all the more so since the king of Poland was still hoping to mount the throne of Sweden, for which reason he, Opitz, had only last year written a poem in praise of His Polish Majesty, in which to be sure he had lauded the king s love of peace and wise suspension of hostilities-'That thou O Wladislaw, forsakest war for peace"-and yet he would always, to the detriment of poetics, grieve over the misery of Silesia, even though he had made his home in an unseated city in the hope that he might still turn out some worthwhile verses. For, he said as though in conclusion, that was the one thing he really cared about. And then, looking Gryphius full in the face, he favored him with a little lesson. "Every verse is either iambic or trochaic; not that we take account of specific syllabic quantities in the manner of the Greeks and Romans; rather, we recognize by the accents and the intonation which syllable is to be considered strong and

which weak."

Then before Gryphius could discharge his thunders, the kitchenmaid, perpetually smiling but only around the corners of her mouth, brought in a boiled codfish on a silver platter. And now Agnes spoke across the table. In God s name, she pleaded, the young gentleman should stop quarreling and let her dear master, whose stomach was easily unsettled, enjoy the fish-which she had boiled in milk and seasoned with dill-in peace. With a little jingle, which she recited with her broad country pronunciation and misplaced accents-"To fight over cod is displeasing to God"-she obtained silence, for before falling gently off the bone, the fish, too, looked white-eyed at no one.

That wasn't their only reason for eating in silence. There was no more offending to be done. Only half words were left dangling. Everything had been said. Young Gryphius stuffed himself ravenously, holding his left hand under his chin, while Opitz poked about rather listlessly with a fork, the new-fangled table tool he had brought back from Paris years before. Gryphius sucked the larger bones and lapped up the jelly from the eye sockets. The two sightless orbs lay off to one side. Opitz ate none of the honeysweet millet porridge with candied elderberry blossoms, which Agnes served when nothing was left of the codfish but the clean backbone, the well-licked tail and dorsal fins, and the plundered head bones; but so early fatherless, so young and despairing, so homeless and Silesianly starved was young Gryphius that he proceeded as though braving a stupendous task, as in the fairy tale, to eat his way through the steaming mountain of millet.

At first only the smacking lips of the poet, who would soon be famous for his eloquent death-yearning and renunciation of all earthly joys, could be heard, then other sounds, the bubbling, gurgling, belching of Opitz's nervous and acid stomach, upset no doubt by the guest's presence. Behind drooping eyelids Opitz bore his misery. Only from time to time did he pluck at the Swedish-style goatee designed to give strength to his weak chin.

When the millet mountain had at last been razed, the young man injected a question into the silence: what was the master doing, what planning, what great work had he conceived, and, now that he had translated Sophocles so ably, what hopes did he nourish for a German tragedy? Opitz smiled, or, rather, he allowed the morose wrinkles of his ugliness to unfold into a grimace, and assured his visitor that his inner fire was spent and that no dense smoke could be expected. No use poking about for embers in a cold stove. He doubted if he would ever produce a well-turned essay on ancient Dacia, for that idea, conceived in his youth, was by now choked with weeds. As for a German tragedy, only someone still in his prime like Gryphius could hope to write one. He was planning, however, to translate the Psalms of David with the utmost care, for which task he would have to

study the Hebrew scriptures under learned guidance. Then he thought he would render Greek and Latin epigrams "into our tongue and have them printed here." He further harbored the intention of bringing certain Breslau treasures to light and acquainting the world once more with the long-forgotten Annolied, in order that it might endure. No more.

As though to justify himself, Opitz waved a hand in the direction of the depleted table and said, "Surely no one will take it amiss if we devote the time that many spend in overeating, futile babbling, and bickering, to the charms of study, and close our minds to things that the poor often have and the rich cannot buy."

With these words he may have been tacitly enjoining the young man to say no more, but to go home and study in the quiet of his room. In any case Gryphius stood up, showing by the look of horror on his face how pitifully drained he had found the still-revered master. And when Opitz — no sooner had the strange kitchenmaid, now humming in a monotone, cleared away the empty dishes — confided with an ugly leer that Agnes's warm flesh, though he was obliged to share it with the local town painter, had revived his affections of late, given him new life, and, belatedly to be sure and with only partial success, rekindled his desires, Gryphius, quite revolted, buttoned his jacket. He would go now. He would disturb the master no longer. He thanked the master for his instruction. He had stayed too long.

Already in the doorway, the young poet nevertheless had a request to make. Without any hemming and hawing, he asked Opitz to find him a suitable publisher. Though well aware of the vanity of publishing books and striving for posthumous fame, he would nevertheless like to see the sonnets he had written in this city of false glitter and illusory happiness printed, precisely because they excoriated such vanity. Opitz listened, reflected for a moment, and then promised to do what he could to dispose a publisher in the young man's favor.

Suddenly Opitz switched to scholarly Latin and, with the help of quotations, moved into an area of humanistic remoteness (after which Gryphius, too, switched to Latin). Finally, after a Seneca quotation of some length, the older man explained that he knew an imperial councilor who for

reasons of ill health had retired into contemplative seclusion and took an interest in the arts. He hoped that the imperial title would not trouble Gryphius. Not everyone in the imperial party was evil. He would write a letter of introduction. (And so he soon did. Gryphius moved to the estate of a certain Herr Schonborner, won his favor, instructed his sons, and in the following year, financed by the imperial councilor, had his sonnets printed in Lissa, that they might live after him.)