Gunter Grass - The Flounder

stierna regiment may have imprinted her at an early age, leaving her with an undying attachment for one of the four debauchees — it seems his name was Axel — but the circumstances attending the poet's death nevertheless show neither rhyme nor reason. The one thing we know for sure is that his kitchenmaid gave birth to a daughter soon afterward, and that both lived for many years to come."

Excrement rhymed

Steams, is examined.

Does not smell strange, wants to be seen,

to be known by name.

Excrement. Metabolism or bowel movement.

Shit: what settles in a ring.

Make little sausages! the mothers cry. Early modeling clay, knots of shame and leftover fear: what has gone into the pants.

Recognition: undigested peas, cherry pits,

the tooth that was swallowed.

We look at one another in amazement.

We have something to say to one another.

My waste — closer to me than God or you or you.

Why do we part behind a bolted door

instead of admitting the guests

with whom, sitting noisily at the table the day before,

we predestined beans and bacon?

From this time on (per decision) we will each eat singly

and shit together,

thus neolithically fostering insight.

All poems that prophesy and rhyme on death

are excrement that has dropped from a constipated body

in which blood meanders, worms survive;

thus did Opitz the poet,

whom the plague incorporated as an allegory,

see his last diarrhea.

Only one was burned as a witch

And yet witchcraft was carried on in kitchens if anywhere, in all kitchens. All cooks knew and handed down recipes for purees, soups, and broths which were thick, ash-gray, or cloudy, one that bloated, a second that physicked, a third that induced numbness. From the very start (Awa), henbane had its uses, ergot was mixed into things, and fly agaric (dried), grated to a powder, steeped in milk, or imbibed with mare's urine, was good for a journey into succubine transcendence. We men were as dependent on Wigga, who raised mandrakes along with other roots, as if she'd bewitched us. Mestwina ground amber into fish soups for us. (And Ilsebill, too, I'm sure, adds, mixes, stirs this into that.) I've always lived among witches. Don't go thinking there weren't any; it's just that the wrong ones were burned. None of those shorn herb-women, virgins, and matrons on the quickly burning woodpiles were real witches, even if they confessed under torture to such abstruse rubbish as broomstick riding and misuse of church candles.

Naturally there were no witches' sabbaths, no goat-legged cavaliers, no Devil's spot or evil eyes, but let's not doubt the existence of witches' kitchens and witches' brews. Why, didn't I see Dorothea fry slimy toads' eggs in the fat of stillborn baby boys, which she got from Corpus Christi Hospital, moistening the mixture with holy water from Saint Catherine's. Why, you could smell it all over the house when that pale witch, alone in the kitchen, burned the hoofs of a kid to ashes. Why, everybody knew that she stirred not only the ashes of rotten coffin wood into her Lenten soups but horn ash as well. It was rumored that she carried the dishwater from the pesthouses, where, with her pious airs, she came and went as she pleased, straight to our kitchen. It was rumored that she filled little bottles with lepers' scabs and the sweat of women dying of childbed fever. And it was rumored that, before the Teutonic Knights went campaigning in Lithuania, she boiled their mail shirts in virgins' piss. But only rumored. She was never put to the question. Others were burned:

plain, dull-witted neighbor women who had always cooked dutifully for their husbands but had hairy birthmarks on their buttocks or breasts. (I am sure that Dorothea, whose body was without blemish, gave her Dominican confessor little hints, for poor women and patrician ladies came to her in shamefaced secrecy, asking for ointments against warts and moles. With maybe a magic spell or two thrown in.)

And Fat Gret, too, knew witching recipes but wasn't burned. Who doesn't remember how, when Mayor Eberhard Ferber lost his manhood on laying down his chain of office, she perked him up again with herring milt and the semen of runaway Franciscan monks; how she fuddled the memory of the aged abbot Jeschke — who had too much political information — by taking a spoonful of his excrement, kneading it into a dough with peppercorns, poppy seed, wild honey, and buckwheat flour, and baking it into spicecakes for Advent; and how she bewitched me, too. I don't know what with. For she mixed everything with everything. She never cooked for taste alone. She stirred raisins into goose blood, made beef hearts stuffed with prunes in beer sauce. When I turned up and became a long-term guest in her box bed, she often fed me carrots that she had anointed with her pussy. And what all else, without a shred of shame! Everyone knew she sent away to far-off places for more things than Indian spices. Everyone knew — though details remained in the dark — that witchcraft was practiced when she sat down at table with her nuns and that she offered up heathen sacrifices. She and her free-ranging Brigittines were said to have nibbled pastry figures (with an intimation of three breasts?) and sung from the Wittenberg hymnal, "The house that God hath never blest. ."

But no wood was piled for her. Not Dorothea and not Margarete Rusch, but gentle Agnes was destined to burn. True, I prefer to believe that soon after the plague carried me away, Agnes, still in the bloom of her youth, died in childbirth, but the Flounder has testified that she didn't die until fifty years later, by then an old hag, and moreover that she went up in flames.

No, I'm not going to tell you how the wind suddenly died down, a cloud sprang a leak, rain fell, and a miracle almost came to pass. As we all know, the Women's Tribunal accepted the Flounder's version, according to which Agnes

Kurbiella, long after the poet Opitz died of the plague, went running through the streets talking dementedly to Ursel, her likewise demented daughter, and quoting the dead poet's works in both Latin and German, until, early in the summer of 1689, she met another poet, Quirinus Kuhlmann, the so-called Cool Monarch.

Kuhlmann was also introduced to the Women's Tribunal in affidavits by Baroque specialists. The Flounder called him a precursor of Expressionism. But the prosecution had no use for his eccentric genius. Kuhlmann, it was pointed out, had unscrupulously fed Agnes Kurbiella's confusion with his speculations, day after day indoctrinating her with his hubris. He, too, had exploited her as a Muse. He had manifested dangerous phantasms and gone to his death, drawing the old woman with him.

The accusing feminists were only too pleased to hear how Agnes Kurbiella fell a victim to male exaltation, how she followed Kuhlmann from Danzig via Riga across the vastnesses of Russia to Moscow, how she became his handmaiden and served as his medium at seances of the Boehmen-ist community, how on trial and under torture she still went on mumbling Opitzian rhymes and Kuhlmannian verbal cascades, how she was burned along with her mad Ursel while Kuhlmann and two other male heretics were burned at nearby stakes for blasphemy and political conspiracy against the tsar's rule. The statistics show that men, too, were acceptable to the flames. And yet, in the opinion of the Women's Tribunal, the Inquisition and its witch trials were typical instruments of male domination, calculated to crush women's persistent strivings for freedom. The prosecutor's exact words were "The so-called witch was a male fiction, at once a wish dream and a projection of fear."

Maybe so. Yet Agnes, who did not want freedom, was nevertheless sent to the flames as a witch, whereas Dorothea of Montau and Margarete Rusch, both of whom strove for freedom and took liberties, were not elevated on pyres. It was the slight poetic confusion of her brain that equipped Agnes for activity as a Muse; only persons hostile or indifferent to the Muses called Agnes crazy, possessed, bewitched, Belial-ridden. Even her little dill garden was under suspicion, and that as early as Moller's, as Opitz's day. They had to