Gunter Grass - The Flounder

daily working mothers. Anything that lightened the housework was a force for emancipation. Solidarity, yes, but some things you can't do without. They'd send telegrams of solidarity to Africa. Of course what the company was doing there was unspeakable. (And a resolution was voted by an overwhelming majority, given weight by the signatures of the public, and cabled out into the world. .)

Soon after the death of her child, Agnes wanted another. But not by painter Moller, who had refused her the wet nurse.

When Martin Opitz, who also called himself von Bober-feld, entered the Royal Polish service and took up lodgings in Danzig, he was not yet forty, while painter Moller was over sixty. Soon after his arrival the poet fell in love with a girl of patrician family who could recite Latin poems but was already engaged to the son of a local merchant. Agnes, who, thanks to the good offices of Pastor Niclassius, was now cooking for Opitz as well, obliterated the silly thing — her name was Ursula — with her mute, barefooted presence. And yet he sighed for Ursula and probably couched his sighs in Latin verses.

More subterfuges. He never made it — not for any length of time. Agnes was the first woman who regularly slept with him. His father, the butcher, after the early death of his first wife, took a second, third, and fourth, and got all four with child after child. So there wasn't much left for his son to do. Just little flirtations, mostly at one court or another. One or two intrigues with burgher women in Breslau, bringing pecuniary consequences, whereupon he took flight again. When he was a young tutor in the service of Prince Bethlen Gabor, a Dacian servant girl seems to have horrified him by really showing him how it was done. Even the war, which lasted all his life, didn't give him what it gave every Swedish cavalryman (Ensign Axel). Always over books and parchment, alone and ugly on straw pallets or in bed: his receding chin. Nothing but poems and epistles of thanks to successive princes. And so, when little Ursula was not to be had, Opitz, weary and drained, fell to Agnes Kurbiella and her apron.

Agnes, who had plenty, didn't want to have anything, but only to give. For three years she sheltered him with her

warmth. But assiduously as he wrote his agent's letters hither and thither for double pay, all he was able to put on paper in the way of poetry was rhetorical flourishes and inky speculations; even the new quill pens that Agnes brought him when she had plucked a goose for Moller were no help, whereas I can always think of something to say about my Ilsebill; she has only to state her wishes, as in the fairy tale. Ilsebill wants this. Ilsebill wants that.

Luckily, I've been able to write her into her sickbed. (I can do that.) Behind my back the door to the next room has been left ajar. From there her cough comes to me, demanding to be heard and put down in line drawings. Choker knots and softly outlined nests (around the shoe) form settlements on my paper. The rubbing lotion contains 60 mg of camphor. The wind is blowing from the west. And light heating oil is getting more and more expensive. (Let her cough this thing out of her, damn it!) For even in weather like this, Agnes turns up and brings herself along.

We and the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, said the Flounder, were a classical triangle — all corners taken. So it's conceivable-or true-that as Anton Moller I painted the pregnant, by me impregnated, Agnes, although (somewhat later) I was the Opitz who tried in vain-shortly before my miserable death-to transpose the same Agnes into Baroque language. After her child had wasted away, I was obliged, as the Flounder ordered, to prove my mettle: between unsuccessful stanzas I knocked Agnes up without asking who she was thinking about at the time; it seems his name was Axel.

The painter, the poet. They didn't like each other. Opitz thought Moller crude; Opitz, in Moller's eyes, was all spindly-legged theory. But Agnes had to think up a menu for both of them, dishes good for Opitz's delicate stomach and the drinker's swollen liver. I wanted to be painter and poet at once; casually wielding red chalk, pedantically counting iambic measures.

What drew us to Agnes was her allegorical emptiness. You could read whatever you pleased into her; she admitted of any meaning. (Her features were indistinct; she could look more or less like.)

And every day there was millet cooked in milk, sweetened with honey, and made wholesome for both of them with hazelnuts. Agnes knew what was equally inoffensive to the innards of poet and painter: broth made from beef bones with spinach-stuffed dough pouches floating in it, breasts of chicken with green peas, or beer soups seasoned with nutmeg and cinnamon.

But Moller demanded, insisted on, clamored for smoked bacon and fat mutton rinds. And Opitz nibbled caraway seeds. He became addicted to them, for too many caraway seeds act as a drug: hopeful daydreams, in which the vale of tears became livable, a place inhabited by nymphs and Muses singing verses that had never been written, where peace and peace alone was always victorious.

Agnes let them both make wrecks of themselves, the one with his rich food, the other with his addiction to caraway seeds, until the one's stomach turned inside out and the other's liver swelled to the size of a fist. Then her diet fare was again in demand: boiled fish that fell off the bone, millet cooked in milk, buckwheat cakes. The drunken Moller, the peevish Opitz: carefully as Agnes cooked for both of them, they looked for a very different taste, and found it with deadly certainty.

The door is still holding. But when it crashes, you will bring me war or make me look for coins with your question "Got two mark-pieces for a slot machine?" But then the door opened gently and Agnes came in, bent over me and my scribble-scrabble, and said play words.

I can think of nothing better than to endure this fear or hope and — while the door still holds — draw my little men. Here I can be found, though never entirely. And you, too, come in only briefly, and you're gone before you've come. Once upon a time and long ago, earlier still and earlier than early, you came and stayed for a short lifetime; neither of us knows why.

And once you came — it was probably Agnes — and wanted to hear me scribble for just a little while. Think back. My name was Martin. I came from Bunzlau. The man with the rules of poetics. But you didn't want to know why I'd stayed on so long in the Catholic service and never again collab-

orated on secular operas with the pious Schiitz. All you wanted was to hear me scribble. But I wanted to die and escape from the vale of tears, as naked as I came.

If only I knew whether you died of the fever after me, in giving birth to your daughter — Ursula was her name, Ursel for short. It was another plague year, and all sorts of things were possible with so many people passing away.

As I lay dying because in my niggardliness I had made a beggar give me change for a silver gulden, no one opened the door. Only Niclassius, the preacher at Saint Peter's, was there. Later on he bowdlerized my deathbed in Latin verses. Or can it be that you came and I didn't hear the door open?

In the summer of the year 1639, after Martin Opitz gave a silver gulden to a beggar who held out his hand at the door of Saint Catherine's, and, stingy by nature, demanded copper in return, he acquired the Black Death along with the change. Before he became incapable of doing anything, he wrote letters to Oxenstierna, the Swedish chancellor, and to Wladi-mir, king of Poland, and ate a little of the codfish that his kitchenmaid served him in dill sauce. (Agnes shook out his pillow. Agnes daubed away his sweat. Agnes changed his bed sheet when he shat black in it. Agnes heard him breathe his last.)

Immediately after his death, before the straw he had died on could be burned and the house fumigated, someone broke in and robbed the poet's room. Some of his papers are missing (to this day), including the Dacian material and all the political correspondence. A Swedish colonel accompanied by two mercenaries is believed to have seized the depositions of Generals Baner and Torstenson, Oxenstierna's letters, and the Polish letters acknowledging Opitz's reports, and secreted them in a safe place. We do not know the colonel's name, but kitchenmaid Kurbiella was long suspected of being an agent of the Swedish crown, of having been in contact with this officer, and of having made off with documents on previous occasions. But nothing was ever proved against Agnes. And before the Women's Tribunal the Flounder had only his usual obscurities to offer. "My dear ladies who always want precise information: we know too little. True, the rape of the thirteen-year-old Agnes Kurbiella by cavalrymen of the Oxen-