Gunter Grass - The Flounder

feeling, she enabled womanly love to win out in the end and to make men small, so small."

In conclusion, the Flounder pleaded with the presiding judge, the associate judges, the prosecutor, and the entire Revolutionary Advisory Council of the Women's Tribunal to harden their hearts no longer, but to follow the example of Agnes Kurbiella and let their whole being reduce itself to love: "That and that alone is your true strength. No man has it. Not your intelligence — shrewdly as it has seen through me, exposed, refuted, and discredited me — no, it is the power of your love that will someday change the world. Already I can see the beginnings of a new tenderness, a new sympathy embracing every man and every woman. Love will glorify the whole world with its radiance. Millions of wishless Use-bills. Shamed by so much meekness, men will renounce their power and their glory. Love alone will remain. As far as the eye can see. ."

At this point the Flounder was interrupted. The intercom in his bulletproof-glass house was cut off. Even though Ms. von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, burst into tears in protest and the Revolutionary Advisory Council (once again) split — it was then that the faction later known as the Flounder Party first made its appearance — the Women's Tribunal nevertheless refused to acknowledge the love of Agnes the kitchenmaid as a contribution to the emancipation of women. The court was adjourned. Affidavits — counter-affidavits. Factional struggles.

But the subject of love was often discussed after that, if only as a marginal topic. When, in the course of the trial, the case of Amanda Woyke was argued and her letters to Count Rumford were qualified as love letters even though both sides of the correspondence dealt with nothing more romantic than potato growing, slow-combustion stoves, soup kitchens, and Rumford soup for the poor. As for the cook Sophie Rotzoll, though the Tribunal evaluated her life as a revolutionary experiment, the Flounder held that it was marked from first to last by tragic love. Had she not been obliged at the age of fourteen to surrender her passionately beloved Fritz — condemned to life imprisonment for member-

ship in a secret society — to the fortress of Graudenz? Had she not resisted all male temptation for forty years? For then at last he had returned, in pretty bad shape. "Yes, my dear ladies," said the Flounder. "This you must recognize as love. Love worthy of Agnes."

Nor was the Flounder inclined to minimize the love factor in the cases of Lena Stubbe, who cooked for the poor, and of Sibylle Miehlau, Billy for short, who wanted so tragically to be different, and of the still-unconcluded case of Maria, the cook at the shipyard canteen. At every turn, love broke through. It pulled strings. It outlasted hunger, plague, and wars. It refuted cost accounting and all economics. It ravaged and, in the case of Lena Stubbe, was a silent torment. Captive to love, Sophie remained a spinster down to her delicately wrinkled old age and never stopped hoping. Billy looked for it elsewhere. Amanda encoded it in letters. And most likely, since love can also harden, Maria will slowly turn to stone.

"No!" cried the Flounder, wholly embedded in sand as he addressed the Women's Tribunal. "I regret nothing. Without love there'd be nothing left but toothache. Without love, life — and this I say deliberately, speaking as a fish— wouldn't even be beastly. None of our Ilsebills could get along without love. And if I may briefly return to the cook Agnes: by cooking with devotion for painter Moller's swollen liver and poet Opitz's delicate stomach, she imparted tender meaning to the silly proverb 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.' Ah, her oatmeal gruel! Ah, her soup chicken!

"Hard-boiled ladies, if you will lend me your ears for just another moment, I should like to conclude with a few lines from one of Opitz's lost poems:

" 'Is love to be all passion, a flaming, blazing hell? Ah, dearest, let us hasten, or else the bland, white

fish Thou hast in milk transfigured will cool off in the dish. Is't not for love thou wishest the fish to make me

well?' "

Upon the codfish which today I simmered in white wine while musing about the days when codfish was still cheap, I laid — when his eyes had turned milky and white fisheyes were rolling over the feverish Opitz's blank paper-strips of fresh cucumber and then, removing the broth from the heat, added dill to it.

Over the boiled fish I strewed shrimps' tails, which our guests — two men who didn't know each other-had toyed with, conversationally concerned with the future, while the fish was cooking.

Ah, cook, you watch me

as with a flat spoon

I help the tender flesh: willingly it gives up its bones

and wants to be reminded, Agnes, reminded.

By then the gentlemen knew each other better. At our age, I told them, Opitz died of the plague. We talked about the arts and about prices. No political excitement.

Afterward sour cherry soup.

Pits from the old days got counted, too:

when we played rich man poor man beggarman thief. .

No, no, Ilsebill, it's not like that at all. Love isn't just something the fairy-tale Flounder dreamed up. No, it exists, the same as rain exists. It can't be turned off, it doesn't smell

of fish, it's playing in all the movie houses, it finds opportunities that don't always make much sense. For instance: somebody likes buttermilk; funny, so do I, and there you have it.

And here you are in your fourth month of pregnancy, because we were looking for a way of expressing love. So something palpable has to come of it. It can't just be an era in itself! But love is more spacious than a double bed and grows without regard to time: everywhere it languishes, utterly dispersed, divided, and yet whole.

So it wasn't hard for Agnes to make soup for Opitz by adding fresh dill to the boiled fish that Moller had left over. And you, too, if I left leftovers, would put them to tasty use somewhere on the outside, where there's no phone to come between us. Why wouldn't we be able to meet in reverse motion, at the Green Gate, for instance, which in Dorothea's day was called Koggen Gate? Agnes is just coming from the market; she has bought an unplucked chicken for painter Moller, while I (engaged in negotiations with King Wladi-slaw), am inwardly rich in figures and quotations from other authors. She's pregnant, and the scene is wintry. She's plodding through the slushy snow. Her waddling gait. She turns onto Beutlergasse. Let's hope she doesn't fall. . "All a lot of subterfuges!" you say, looking sternly out of the window into the present January. But how do you expect us to live without subterfuges! You yourself are a subterfuge. That's why Agnes never closed doors. Always left them ajar. No hesitations between her comings and goings. Often she was there, but I noticed only myself, whereas someone else (Moller) noticed her even though she was with me. Her love was placeless. That's why I was never able to perceive her presence: what I missed was there. And even the Flounder, for whom everything, like his backbone, tapers down logically to a tail fin, couldn't understand that what she never ran out of was dill. He thought love must work like a mousetrap and that she must have fallen for Moller and me. Actually it was one of the four or five Swedes whose regiment was occupying Putzig, and they'd only wanted to go for a ride and hunt rabbits in the dunes, where they came across Agnes, who was sitting curly-haired in the beach grass. She was tending her geese, and all of a sudden she had all four on top of her,

one after another, it didn't take long. But only the first really counted. He was closer to her than Moller and Opitz later on. It seems his name was Axel. And it seems his downy boyish beard was blond. And his brittle, commanding voice lingered on. He never came back, and he was always near her while I, sitting over blank paper as Agnes passed through the room, traveled to Zlatna, where in my days as a young teacher in Transylvania I was surprised on a straw pallet by a kitchenmaid who never cooked for me — just as you always listen when I'm with you to see if someone else is coming. When actually I've been gone for ages and I'm just smoking. My subterfuges — yours. I suggest that we meet where the Striessbach flows into the Radaune and the Radaune flows into the Mottlau and the Mottlau flows into the Vistula and all these rivers empty into the Baltic Sea. And there I will tell you how it was with Agnes, whom I also have in mind when I come to you and absent-mindedly — which always makes for a fight — call you Agnes.