Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Dorothea! Lord, what didn't I do to coax a little love from that cold-blooded bitch. But even when she made her body available, she withheld it. I could whimper, I could babble, I could turn somersaults like the queen's dwarf — she turned away in boredom and went on with her elaborate penitential exercises; only heavenly love could get a rise out of her. Enslaved to her sweet Jesus, she crushed me, reduced me to a miserable rag. That, Ilsebill, is what love did to me. That, Mr. Flounder, was your contribution to the emancipation of men. If things had only stopped with Awa Wigga Mestwina and their loving-caring rule — all that unvarying warmth and bedding down, all that moist mossy bottom. Awa and her priestesses never destroyed us with love.

It wasn't until Fat Gret started cooking for us that the pressure let up. In the meantime the custom of property-securing marriage had become so engrained that women, weary perhaps of chivalric effusions and threadbare chastity games, were positively dying to get married; power over household, keys, and kitchen was power enough for them. They were faithful and cozily devoted to their husbands. And

because housewifely infidelity was severely punished, by whip, pillory, or casting off, husbands and fathers could rely on their women to bring up the children. At last the Flounder's fishy theory of love was reflected in home-grown practice: how stingily the ladies pinched pennies, how neighborly they clucked, gossiped, made matches, quarreled, and gradually developed into hags or matrons. Only whores and nuns refused to join in — and first of all Fat Gret, who could have run a whorehouse if she hadn't been an abbess.

Whereas Dorothea rebelled against marriage by daily opening the back door of her Lenten kitchen to her heavenly bridegroom, Margarete kept clear of agonizing situations from the start. As a nun she was betrothed in heaven, but the solid flesh demanded earthly love. Thus as an abbess she taught her young nuns to let no man — be he monk or straying paterfamilias — bamboozle their hearts. Just as the Flounder had taught us men to make women pant for love but never — or only away from home and with due caution-to lose our heads over love, so Fat Gret advised her free-ranging Brigittines to believe no man's whisperings. "Don't aggravate me," she would say. "You're married already." Yet two or three nuns ran away from Saint Bridget's (because the Reformation was on) and succumbed to the unrelieved misery of married life.

Mestwina may have worshiped Saint Adalbert; and possibly Ilsebill has me in mind when she looks for her ignition key. Fat Gret — I'm certain — loved no man, caringly as she cooked for her dozen men. At the most she gave me, the runaway Franciscan monk, something on the order of mother love. Margret was a vigorous thirty at the time, and I a seventeen-year-old novice. With me she had no need to disguise her feelings. I hardly counted. Her constantly changing kitchen boys. There were so many uprooted monks running around, looking for shelter and warmth, her motherly sheltering fat. Margarete Rusch had plenty of that. And she gave to everyone she fancied. A few men (I, for instance) may have mistaken that for love.

Agnes, the gentle, barefooted diet cook, was the first grandly loving woman, a type that the Flounder may well, with fishy calculation, have thought up. For Agnes Kurbiella loved me without reserve, me Moller the town painter and

me Opitz the poet and diplomat in the service of the king of Poland, loved me so thoroughly in accordance with the rules of the Flounder's theory that her love can be qualified by all those epithets and phrases that later became cliches: devoted, self-sacrificing, humble and uncomplaining, with all her heart, beyond the grave, unselfish, unquestioning, uncomplaining. And withal, she was not loved. Opitz was too wrapped up in himself and his stomach trouble, too. much involved in too many political intrigues to be capable of concentrated feeling; painter Moller loved only food and drink. But Agnes loved us without asking to be loved in return. She was our handmaiden. She was the bucket into which we vomited our misery. She was the cloth that absorbed the sweat of our anguish. She was the hole we crawled into. Our pillow of moss, our hot-water bottle, our sleeping potion, our evening prayer.

Maybe she loved Opitz a little more than Moller, though for six years, without so much as turning up her nose, she changed Moller's breeches every time he shat in them. All the same, stingy as the poet was with his money and feelings, she was more deeply attached to him. When the plague carried him off, she clung to the straw he had died on and his sweat-soaked bed sheet. The constables had to beat her to make her let go. She loved totally. When Hoffmanns-waldau, another poet from Silesia, came to Danzig for the deceased Opitz's posthumous papers (and quarreled over them with Herr Roberthin, whom Simon Dach had sent from Konigsberg), Agnes Kurbiella appears to have fed the kitchen stove with the final version of the Psalms translation, a whole sheaf of poems in rough draft, the unfinished manuscript of the Dacia antiqua, which Opitz had been working on intermittently ever since his years as a young teacher in Rumanian Transylvania, and his correspondence over a period of many years with the Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna. She wouldn't even give Hoffmannswaldau Opitz's goose quills. (Would you, Ilsebill, be capable of oiling and dusting my old portable typewriter someday and holding it more or less sacred?)

In the Flounder's opinion, so much undeviating love was just another form of domination and not at all what he had suggested. Agnes Kurbiella's unrequited love, he maintained,

hadn't caused her so much as an hour's unhappiness. Never had she chewed a handkerchief to bits; on the contrary, she had radiated unclouded joy, and it would be no exaggeration to say that, far from making her dependent or servile, love had given her strength and blown her up to more than life size. "Even if this kitchenmaid's triumph wasn't what I originally intended," said the accused flatfish, "I can't deny that I respect her: so much indulgence, devotion, resignation."

And at the Women's Tribunal, when the prosecution at last took up his theory of love, the Flounder declared in self-defense: "Easy does it, my dear ladies. I have already owned that early on, when men were maintained in a state of dependency and one might reasonably have termed them 'oppressed,' I conceived of love as a counterforce which, by way of compensation, would make for male privilege and female dependency. But then, by following the example of Agnes Kurbiella, quite a few women succeeded in transforming my — to cite the prosecution — so craftily devised instrument of oppression into a symbol of eternal womanly greatness: What self-conquest! What selflessness! What fortitude! What overflowing, uncontainable feeling! What fidelity! Think of all the great loving women! What would literature be without them? Without a Juliet, Romeo would be a nobody. To whom, if not to his Diotima, could Holder-lin in his hymns have poured forth his soul? Ah, how moved we still are by the love of Kathchen von Heilbronn! Or by the death of Ottilie in Goethe's Elective Affinities.

"Our Agnes's love had this quiet, sometimes melancholy, always effective, but never aggressive strength. Of course I can't help seeing that the ladies of this esteemed Tribunal choose to be different and have to keep step with the times, that Ms. Huntscha, for instance, undoubtedly has feelings but makes sure to rationalize them before putting them into words, but I nevertheless beg you to show just a little sisterly comprehension for a poor child surrendered, by me I admit, to the mercies of two worn-out wrecks. I have spoken of Agnes's talents as a Muse but have been unable to convince the High Court of the existence and dignity of this exclusively feminine quality. But perhaps Agnes, sparing as she was of words, succeeded in speaking for me. By transforming my dirty trick, the love that enslaves, into pure