Gunter Grass - The Flounder

When, full of fish and millet but also replete with sadness, young Gryphius had finally left, Agnes the kitchenmaid lit two candles, laid out paper, and placed a freshly cut goose quill beside it. Then, within easy reach, she put down a small dish of caraway seeds, which Opitz liked to nibble while writing letters. He picked them up with a moistened fingertip. Caraway seeds were his little vice.

He wrote to the Swedish chancellor, imploring him at long last to set Torstenson's troops and the Scottish regiments in motion. To judge by the information he, Opitz, had gathered in this seaport town—"for Dantzik is the meeting place of all manner of agents and couriers" — it was necessary to move quickly and defeat the Saxons in Brandenburg before they could join forces with the imperial army. Both the distress of Silesia and the military situation made a decision imperative.

(In response to which, a month later, on October 4, 1636, the imperial troops were cut off from those of Saxony, and on a battlefield between forest and marshland near Witt-stock on the Dosse, a tributary of the Havel, defeated by the Swedes under Marshal Baner, an engagement in which the Scottish regiments of Lesley and King played a decisive part. After uncounted losses on both sides, captured banners, cannon, and provender were counted. No more.)

After sealing his letter to Oxenstierna, Opitz sat quietly for a while by the candles, chewed the remaining caraway seeds, and far from all sound waited for Agnes the kitchen-maid, who soon came in and made up to him for all, or nearly all, his sorrows.

In November,

when the dishwater has been emptied,

the last colors wiped out

and the geese plucked,

just in time for Saint Martin's Day,

Agnes, who always knew

what to cook when, cooked

the neck in its limp skin, the gizzard and heart

and both wings: Ganseklein

with turnips and diced squash,

cooked them slowly over low heat, deep in thought

about a Swedish ensign, whose name was Axel

and who had promised to return:

soon, in November.

Into it went

a handful of barley, caraway seed, marjoram,

and a little henbane to ward off the plague.

All this — the gizzard was chewed, the wing gnawed,

the neck bones sucked by painter Moller

whom Agnes served while poet Opitz

spooned up the mild broth, the soft turnips,

spooned and found no words—

though everywhere in November

and in the cloudy soup there floated

a goose heart looking for something to be compared with.

When the Women's Tribunal took up the case of Agnes Kurbiella, it was thought that adequate provision had been made for the accused Flounder's security, though some at-

tempt at aggression (e.g., kidnapping, poisoning) was to be expected. In his tank of bulletproof glass, the flatfish spent most of the time buried in Baltic sand, so that his breathing could only be surmised: nothing but his bulging eyes and crooked mouth was discernible. But when the prosecutor moved that in view of the enormous quantities of material before the court, the discussion be limited to what she termed Agnes Kurbiella's "more relevant relationship" with the court historian Martin Opitz, the Flounder agitated his fins and stirred up his sand bed in protest.

"High Female Court! Such supposed time-saving would halve and thereby destroy all understanding, for young Agnes did not merely carry on a dual relationship; she was truly split, though not at all to her detriment. So spacious was her nature that she was able, as cook and mistress first to painter Moller, then to poet Opitz, and finally to both of them, to keep house for them, warm their beds, and — how shall I put it? — rekindle their stoves. I must own at the very outset that I advised both Moller and Opitz. They both called me out of the Baltic Sea at the usual place. I heard and helped. That day a land breeze was blowing from the northeast. But if the esteemed prosecutor is determined to save time at all costs — that is, to questionable advantage-then let her halve me along with Agnes. I suppose ruthless decisions of this sort are fashionable these days. Let us for once be unfashionable."

Ms. von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, who cut a pathetic figure because the Flounder consistently ignored her, supported his countermotion. In a piping little voice she said, "If such things are done to save time, people might get the idea that this is a show trial, with the verdict decided in advance. Women must never resort to such contemptible, typically masculine methods."

The ensuing disorder made it hard to determine where the public stood. After brief deliberation the judges decided to treat the case of Agnes Kurbiella in its dual aspect. Still, the Flounder was admonished to be brief and to abstain from prolix accounts of Moller's artistic travels and Opitz's diplomatic ventures, neither of which, it was pointed out, could be of much interest to the court. After all, town painter Anton Moller had been an old man of sixty-eight when he

reduced Agnes, then just fourteen, to a state of dependency, and Opitz had been at least in his late thirties when Agnes, who had turned eighteen in the meantime, became his willing slave.

"You've spared me the need for explanations," said the Flounder. "As you say, they were both old, though one could have been the other's son, and thoroughly plucked, exhausted, and burnt out. That's why I gave the poor devils my advice. I felt sorry for them when first one, then years later the other, stood in the shallow water near Weichsel-munde and cried out, 'Flounder, say something! My bed is always half empty. I'm cold inside and out. I'm clogged with slag and I smell of cold smoke.' My advice was, 'Take something young. Refresh yourself. Drink of the fountain of youth. Let the feminine principle warm you back to life.' For both Moller and Opitz needed inspiration, sensual encouragement, call it fire, in their cold stoves, if they were to wrest some late achievement, a last flare-up of youth, from their middling talents. Both of these moribund gentlemen were in need of spiritual mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The proverbial kiss of the Muse. Knowing full well that here, under the critical eye of a female assembly that takes pride in its cold reason, I am likely to be ridiculed as old-fashioned, I confess that I recommended gentle Agnes as a Muse to both the painter and the poet."

The public was not alone in laughing at the Flounder. "It's too kind of you," said Ms. Schonherr in her capacity as presiding judge, "to grant, perhaps not to women in general but at least to this particular Agnes, a further function, in addition to those of cook and bed warmer: so now she's entitled to serve as a Muse, to give little kisses, to fertilize the moist, warm soil, and, by bestowing higher inspiration, to help burnt-out artists to mediocre achievements. What a blessing to the aging geniuses of our own day if the custom were revived! Why, these Muses could be tax deductible! But joking aside, what came of this division of labor?"

"Not much, I'm afraid," said the Flounder. "A few insignificant though rather nice-looking portraits of the nude and pregnant Agnes; for old man Moller did manage to produce a home-grown testimonial to the virility of his old age.

But Opitz was unable to squeeze out a sonnet or an ode to Agnes. He couldn't even put her dill garden into iambics. He devoted himself rather peevishly to a new edition of his old poems. He kept himself busy correcting the proofs of successive new editions of Arcadia, a tear-jerker he had translated from the English. His translations of the Psalms of David were creditable but hardly inspired. The one thing he was really good at was commissions, the usual panegyrics to princes. Apparently, he didn't even succeed in impregnating Agnes, for when, three years after the death of her firstborn daughter, she burgeoned a second time, the restless Opitz had again been absent for quite a while, in Thorn, Konigsberg, Warsaw, and so on. Possibly painter Moller had managed once again to fan up a bit of flame from the ashes. No, esteemed Tribunal, neither Moller nor Opitz succeeded in producing an enduring work of art, a gift to the world, the real thing, a late-ripened panel painting — the long-planned crucifixion on the Hagelsberg with sinful Danzig in the background — or a shattering war, plague, and vale-of-tears allegory, comparable to Opitz's early poem about the plague in Bunzlau, although young Agnes, with her touching, always rather giddy-seeming charm, was well able to create the buzzing silence in which art can germinate. True, Opitz's eyes bugged out with visions when, looking as transparent as an astral body, Agnes stirred an egg into the chicken broth, but all that came of his visions was poetic first lines and hopeful stammerings that never settled into an iambic order. Quick sketches, yes, suggestive of grand designs, but never carried to completion. All in the realm of promise. In short, my well-meaning advice fired both painter and poet like tinder, but after a while both stoves went cold again." After a pause, during which the Flounder probably listened for the effect of his half confession (the sounds of the public part of the hall were channeled into his bulletproof compartment), he observed, once again in a piping falsetto: "I hear derisive laughter. You people never seem to tire of trying to be witty at my expense. And yet I'm quite willing to admit that I wasted young Agnes Kurbiella's gifts as a Muse. I was deceived by hope. I sincerely believed that a work of lasting value could be wrested from the talented Moller and from Opitz the brilliant theoretician. Moller was