Gunter Grass - The Flounder

When Agnes Kurbiella came to the city from the Hela Peninsula, where the Swedish occupation troops were garrisoned, Moller, the aged painter who had taken to drink years before, saw her playing like a child with sea shells, the only things she had brought with her from the Hela beaches. The Swedes had taken her father, her mother, and all her geese. (Later she could never say exactly whom or what first.) Struck by her way of carrying her head — tilted as though in thought — Moller took her to his home on Carp Pond, where she put herself to work in the kitchen.

After Agnes had posed for the town painter for three years as a market girl, as a grave-faced braid maker, or as a dressed-up burgher's daughter and (despite his fondness for fat) cooked light food for him, the hem of her apron began to rise; she became a pregnant model.

After quite a few competent red-chalk sketches, Moller, shortly before her confinement, as though to confirm his impending fatherhood, portrayed himself in colored chalk on the rounded belly of his kitchenmaid: a mobile likeness, for whenever the unborn child modified its position or tried its limbs, some part of the presumptive father's taut image would bulge. He had the look of a peasant with laughing

eyes, a goodly number of puffy cheeks, and a reddish beard around his mouth.

Next Moller did an oil painting that faithfully portrayed the ultrapregnant Agnes carrying his healthy physiognomy before her, but left an empty space on the right side of the canvas. Immediately after the confinement — the little girl died when less than a year old — he first sketched himself in chalk on the young mother's sunken belly, then, taking up his oils, transferred Agnes with his bilious countenance to the empty space on the canvas, beside the hopeful belly (with his joker's face on it): chubby-cheeked father and peevish father.

Painter Moller saw himself in double. To him everything was an allegory. A pity that the successful picture, appealing for all its mannerism, has not come down to us; for after little Jadwiga's death Moller is thought to have scratched, punched, and cut the canvas to pieces, murdering it — as far as he was concerned — twice over.

Along with other horrors-turned-paper, statistics tell us that European infants, with their specially prepared food, consume nine times as much protein, carbohydrates, and calories (or barely peck at them and let the rest spoil) as is left for the infants of India. Agnes Kurbiella knew nothing of protein or vitamins. True, Erasmus of Rotterdam had strongly recommended (in Latin) that all mothers suckle their own babies, but since after a few days her milk dried up and Moller was unwilling to pay a wet nurse, she fed the already sickly child first on diluted cow's milk, then on oatmeal gruel, and finally on such prechewed foods as chicken with millet, calves' brains with turnips, herring roe with spinach, lambs' tongues in puree of lentils. Painter Moller's leavings.

And in a later day, when my Ilsebill went off on a trip (the Lesser Antilles), I, too, fed our child prechewed food-out of labeled jars, costing 1.50 to 1.80 marks apiece, with vacuum caps that go pop when you open them. Also boiled beef with egg noodles in tomato sauce. This dish contained 3.7 % of protein, 3.0 % of fat, 7.5 % of carbohydrates, 82 calories per 100 grams. Net weight of jar 220 g; meat content 28 g.

In the course of the week's program — creamed spinach with fresh eggs and potatoes, turkey with rice, ham with mixed vegetables and egg noodles — the figures varied in such a way as to produce a balanced diet. The label of the codfish in herb sauce with potatoes indicated 5.4 % protein and 93 calories. The fish content came to 49 g. In addition, as long as my Ilsebill was away (strolling across white beaches, blond among dark-skinned people, as in the travel folder) I daily dissolved instant semolina out of a sealed package in boiled water. This preparation contained milk, vegetable fat, durum-wheat semolina, honey, and sugar. It was (as the package assured me) enriched with vitamins. At 6:30 a.m and at 12:00 noon I also gave our child a bottle containing enriched powdered milk dissolved in water (by me), having first, in accordance with Ilsebill's instructions, sterilized the nipple in boiling water. (Ah, if only I had paid Frau Zenlein next door to suckle my Agnes's baby!)

Taking care of baby is no longer a problem for the grass widower, because everything is right there: absorbent disposable diapers all ready to use, salves and powders, sedative suppositories when needed, and for emergencies telephone numbers that give promise of a male or female doctor. There are also paperbacks with instructions and diagrams showing you how to do everything you might possibly have to do. You'll soon be able to rely on a man. Soon he'll be able to manage by himself. Soon he'll have learned to husband his warmth. Soon he'll be more motherly than he was designed to be. .

"You needn't worry. Why, it's child's play. It won't take me any time at all. Why shouldn't a man be able to manage by himself? What makes you think that only a woman can? Have a good flight, Ilsebill. And don't forget us. And love me a little off and on. And take care of yourself. There are supposed to be sharks down there. And drop us a line from your island. We'll get along fine."

When Dorothea went off on pilgrimages to Finsterwalde and Aachen, leaving me with our remaining four children, including the twin girls who were not yet a year old, things were more difficult. In Calcutta I saw mothers who pre-chewed as I did when Dorothea High Gothically left me at

home, as Agnes chewed turnips and breast of chicken for her daughter Jadwiga. (Moller, who stingily refused her a wet nurse, made sketches of her chewing.) But the baby didn't want it, took less and less, couldn't keep it down, shat hard balls, shat undigested liquid, whined and whimpered, aged fast, and languished — fed to death.

That's how it was in those days, as retrospective statistics have calculated: everywhere, except among the Outer City tanners and the peasant serfs. Teensy-weensy Martha or Anna, pocket-sized Gundel. Stine, Trude, Lovise. So many of my children by Dorothea, Agnes, Amanda, died on me, I had so much suffering behind me, that when I gave our baby its sterile bottle or opened the popping vacuum jars with their precisely measured contents, or when I dissolved instant semolina in boiled water and saw the well-digested results-how well fed they smelled! — in the disposable diapers, I became positively euphoric and sang paeans of praise to the Central European baby-food industry, though well I knew that our child and millions of other sweet little babies eat so much every day as to deprive the infants of southern Asia of the barest essentials. And worse: it is now known that our vitamin-enriched powdered milk is positively fatal to many infants in the less industrialized countries, so that the advertising of a leading concern that is trying to develop a market for powdered milk in Africa can only be termed criminal. (Undermining the African mother's faith in her own milk.) For which reason the Flounder, when infant nutrition was being discussed at the Women's Tribunal, could say with profound, mellifluous concern, "At this point, my dear ladies, I would recommend a little female solidarity. If you must persist in your disposable wastefulness, then at least do something to help your sisters in Africa, for instance, by boycotting the handsomely packaged products of a certain company. After all, you wouldn't want to solve the problem of overpopulation by increasing infant mortality. Or would you?"

But the female public protested loudly; all were unwilling to give up their powdered milk. The Revolutionary Advisory Council came out strongly in favor of prepared baby foods in vacuum-sealed jars. Was the Flounder nuts? Advising mothers of all people to cut down on consumption! Espe-