Gunter Grass - The Flounder

In accordance with this principle, no Awa or Edek is preferred, though our Superawa always pampered me a bit at the night feeding. If we loved anyone, it was her. And our horde supplied a clear and unmistakable answer to the Flounder's question "Look, isn't there somebody you love best if only symbolically, some person you love so much you could eat that person?" For when one day our Superawa died, we, each for himself, ate her up. Not for love, but because in dying she commanded us, not as was the custom to lower her into the swamp in a squatting position, but to eat every bit of her. She even (caringly) left us a recipe: she wanted to be cleaned (by me, incidentally), then stuffed with her heart and liver to which mushrooms and juniper berries had been added, wrapped in a thumb's thickness of clay, bedded on coals strewn with ashes, and covered over with ashes and coals. Thus indeed did we roast Awa, and

toward evening she was done. The burnt clay was struck off, and then, after caringly dividing her into portions, we ate her. I got a piece of the neck, the forefinger of her left hand, a bit of liver, and the barest morsel of her middle breast. She didn't taste especially good. Like a superannuated cow. No, friend Flounder, we didn't eat her for love. A long, hard winter had covered the rivers and sea with ice, buried the mangels under the snow, and driven away the badgers, boars, and elks. We were all out of manna grits. Starving. Chewing birch bark. The women who suckled us were on their last legs. Only the old ones were holding out. That was when Awa offered herself. Not until later, much later, did it become the custom, even without a famine, to roast each deceased Superawa according to the traditional recipe and eat her. Call it cannibalism if you will. Maybe it was, friend Flounder, but we never ate one another for love, requited or unrequited, never because we were lovelorn or love-crazed.

Even in the days of Wigga, or much later of Mestwina, love did not transfigure us, we didn't blush or turn pale at the sight of each other. True, I was and remained Wigga's charcoal burner, and Mestwina seldom exchanged me for a fisherman or a plaiter of baskets, but grandiose emotions that tightened or expanded the chest, the quickened heartbeat, the desire to embrace the world or at least the nearest tree, to give ourselves wholly, to fuse with each other, to become each other's thing possession chattel, to gnaw on the same little bone, the absurd desire to die in each other's arms-this whole giddy, warbling romanza was alien to us, and I don't believe we hankered after it in secret, either. Not that we were altogether lukewarm. Though Wigga ruled us men with a sternness carried over from the Stone Age, she could be affectionate when we bedded down, and even playful after cooking pike dumplings. And when we were old and knotted with gout, and flesh no longer tempted us, we often sat in silence outside our hut, watching the sun set behind the forest. Maybe after all we had a kind of old folks' love, that trembling holding of hands and muttering of do-you-remember.

I'd have liked to live the same way with Mestwina. We

didn't own each other, and when spring came she took to lying where she listed, but we had got into the habit of wintering together. Since love had never smitten us, we were not smitten with jealousy. When March came, she didn't begrudge me my capers, nor I her cavortings.

All this changed when Bishop Adalbert turned up with the cross. In any event, the Flounder claims that when Mestwina started cooking for the holy man and, soon thereafter, sharing his ascetic bed of leaves, her gaze clouded over and she often showed a drawn, melancholy smile.

"Believe me, my son," he said after the saint's death, "she loved him even if she did strike him dead. Or she hit him with the cast iron because she loved him and he wouldn't give up his love of the Lord God. It was unrequited love that drove her to drink — mead and fermented mare's milk. In any case, love seems to divert women from their natural supremacy. They humble themselves, they want to be humbled, they come crawling, and their love turns to homicidal frenzy only when their offer of unconditional servitude is rejected, or, as in the case of Saint Adalbert of Prague, misinterpreted as satanic temptation. In short, love is an instrument that demands to be handled with care. We will practice that, my son."

And then the Flounder developed his theory of love as a means of putting an end to the domination of women. Love would unleash feelings. It would set a standard that no one could live up to. It would suckle but never appease a lasting dissatisfaction. It would invent a language of sighs, the poetry which at once illuminates and obscures. It would go into partnership with falling leaves, swirling mists, the worm in the woodwork, the melting snow, and the lusting little leaves of spring. It would give rise to supernaturally colorful dreams. It would paint the world in rosy colors. It would beguile women into compensating for their lost power by voraciously escalating their demands. It would become the everlasting plaint of every Ilsebill.

Then the Flounder ordained that love be made to provide an ideational superstructure under whose sheltering canopy practical marriage as guarantor of property might develop. For marriage has nothing in common with love. Mar-

riage makes for security; love makes only for suffering. Not only would this be demonstrated in moving poems; unfortunately, it would also result in crimes. How many times would "the other woman" be poisoned, strangled, punctured with knitting needles!

On the other hand, the Flounder went on, love could be so distilled, spun so fine as to implicate third and fourth persons, as to take up three or four exciting acts in a play, to be set to music or filmed, and, just incidentally, to show women the way to complicated psychological disorders. (Here the Flounder listed all the disorders, from loss of appetite to migraine and raving madness, that have since been honored by medical insurance as bona fide afflictions.)

His disquisition, which was bolstered by quotations of poetry from the troubadours to the Beatles and anticipated the latest in pop songs and advertising slogans, concluded with the programmatic sentence: "Only if we succeed in persuading woman by subtle suggestion that love is a saving power and the certainty of being loved the supreme happiness, and if concomitantly man, even though loved to the point of adulation, steadfastly refuses to love or to guarantee the longevity of his little love affairs, so that the woman's dependence on the never-attained certainty that he loves her, still loves her, loves her and nobody else, becomes a lifelong anxiety, a humiliating torment, and an oppressive servitude — then alone will matriarchy be defeated, will the conquering phallic symbol overturn all vulvar idols, will man illuminate the prehistoric darkness of the womb and perpetuate himself forever and ever as father and as master."

Yes, Ilsebill. A lot of women were indignant when the Flounder began to shoot his mouth off in court recently. At the very start of the proceedings, the prosecutor had considered bringing up the Flounder's theory of love in connection with Dorothea of Montau, but because Dorothea did not love and worship the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, but on the contrary I, fool that I was, in defiance of the fishy theory of love, fell in love with the witch, the prosecution reserved this hybrid topic until the case of Agnes Kurbiella should be debated.

In any case, love brought me no freedom, but only long-

haired misery. True, the Flounder had advised me never to marry a woman I was capable of loving, but I married my pale-faced bride of Christ, and if I'd been brought up at court I'd have written love songs to her in the chivalric fashion of the day: "Ah, lady swet beyond compare. ." For the pining and sighing of the troubadours dragged on into my High Gothic time-phase. Disgusting slobber that turned our otherwise cold-blooded Teutonic Knights into moaning, lisping mollycoddles. Even the most buxom peasant girl was seen as a little Madonna. Our good old mating games degenerated into sinful fornication. Only what was forbidden turned people on. Ballad-making love— "for all min lyfe is luv" — promised eternal chastity, but then two stanzas farther on, once the key to the chastity belt had been found, the poet wallowed in the usual meat salad. Yet our ladies — my Dorothea in the lead — kept sanctimoniously aloof, casting down their eyes if anyone so much as mentioned a codpiece. And we men dangled from the string with which, on the advice of a loquacious fish, we had tried to bind our women to the marriage bed.