Gunter Grass - The Flounder

protect the poor child from Catholics and Lutherans alike, for when it came to burning witches, the zealots of both religions joined forces in less time than it takes to pile up faggots and logs.

And even Amanda Woyke, who knew recipes, and definitely Sophie Rotzoll, who was familiar with every variety of mushroom, would have met the Christian gentlemen's requirements for fuel. But by Amanda's day and Sophie's, the revolutionary housecleaners had thought up other victims-so-called counterrevolutionaries, who were guillotined in the name of reason.

The Flounder, who seemed to be hovering in mid-water above his bed of sand, said to his judges: "As a fish whose tasty relatives are stewed and fried, I know whereof I speak when the purifying power of fire is under discussion. Thank your stars, my dear ladies, that nowadays witchcraft is more likely to be subsidized than punished. Modern man longs for a telekinetic dimension. But what if you had lived in one of those time-phases, my dear ladies? I don't know! I don't knowl When I let my eyes rest on you and look you over as you sit there on your dais, judging me — so much concentrated earnestness, so much power-generating intensity — I hear a spiritistic rustling. Now forceful, now soothing glances strike my pebbly skin. And yet, each face taken individually has a beauty of its own. Eleven defiant egos. Fleeting, twisted smiles. Twinkling connivance — at what? Eleven heads of hair — mown to stubble, Afro-crinkled, or witchily wind-blown and easily ignited. In short, I see you all burning. The esteemed presiding judge, the chorus of associate judges, you, too, my dear Ms. Paasch, I see you all penned into knackers' carts, forced into nettle shirts, while the medieval populace gape, the monks mumble their Latin, and the children pick their noses. On expertly constructed pyres, I see you, too, beautiful Ms. Simoneit, and next to you Ms. Witzlaff in all the splendor of the flesh, first swathed in smoke, then clad in flames. Those whispered screams! That clustered ecstasy! Elevenfold desire stilled and freedom at last. Even Ms. von Carnow, my court-appointed defense counsel, so well meaning and yet so helpless, would like to go up in poetic flames,

though she's as innocent as the dill in kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella's garden. I see you all burning, the whole lot of you. And the majority of the Revolutionary Advisory Council are fit for the fire, too. But not Ms. Huntscha — not my prosecutor, who shows too sisterly a resemblance to the Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau. She in her supernatural beauty and pallor was too mystically world-removed, too emaciated to require such physical purification as poor Agnes. . "

(When, after a brief shower of rain, she finally took fire, nothing political could be gleaned from her mumblings, only bland-diet poetry; whereupon Axel Ludstrom, the Swedish ambassador to the tsar's court, sent instruction to Stockholm to close the Kurbiella file.)

What about you, Ilsebill? Would you prefer birchwood to the beech logs customary in those days? I'd get you ready for the fire. I'd be the gentle Dominican father Hyazind, who came from Cracow with his special instruments in tool chests with silver fittings. I'd approach you, closer and closer, with the flexible iron rods. Carefully, forgetting no limb, I'd make your ball joints jump out of the sockets where they were imprisoned; they'd be beside themselves. So much skin, from the shoulders down, all along the blond back. Ah, the thoughts! Uttered at last. My embarrassing questions cloaked in kindness. Your naked confession. For it's to loosen your tongue that I've come from far away. This is something we want to hear. Softly murmured. Read from the lips curled in pain: Yes, I did. Yes, several times. No, not alone. With another Ilsebill. And later a third one joined us in the fog. We did. Yes, at night, but every day, too. At the new moon and on Saint John's Day. With our menstrual blood. Made little marks on objects and name plates. On the abutments of bridges and industrial installations, in the field where they're planning to put up a nuclear plant, on freshly programmed computers and several typewriters. Yes, we made the mark on yours, too. Inside, under the "I" key. .

When at last my Ilsebill burned, but to the very end refused to relinquish her beauty, I wept under my hood. I was sorry, Flounder, to have given her that freedom.

Immortal

Having in all directions.

pushed open the promised windows,

I was certain that once

dead I would see nothing.

But gazing over the flat,

neatly settled countryside

and across the street into open windows

with old men and women looking out of them,

and at the partly cloudy sky,

I saw starlings in the pears,

schoolchildren the bus had brought,

the savings-bank building,

and the church with its clock:

it was half past one.

An answer came to my complaint: such afterlife was usual and would soon stop.

Already my old neighbors are greeting me. They claim to have really seen me from all those windows. And there, overloaded, comes Ilsebill, back from her shopping. Tomorrow is Sunday.

When early in February, the Women's Tribunal took up the case of the farm cook Amanda Woyke, the Flounder immediately launched into a lecture (based as usual on affidavits) about the relations between famines, army movements and epidemics, quoted relevant literature-the plague in London, the plague in Venice-and pointed out that we owe the Decameron and its form, the elaborate frame narrative to the plague in Florence. For the first time, he accepted the help of his court-appointed counsel, Ms. von Carnow, who quoted, "It began, both in men and in women, with lumps in the groin or armpits, varying in number, some attaining the size of a common apple, others that of an egg; they came to be known as buboes." Then the Flounder went on to speak instructively of leprosy, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, and the venereal diseases. Pictures were flashed on the screen.

Ever since 1332, when the plague trickled into Europe

from India by way of Venice, it had been a frequent visitor to my part of the country. In no time at all, it carried off three of my daughters by Dorothea. The maid who left Danzig with me and little Gertrud died in Konitz of spotted pulmonary plague, which is also called the Black Death because the skin takes on a bluish color; whereas my little daughter's skin remained as fair as ever, and she still had a long while to live. But one of her daughters, Birgit, was laid low by the pestilence that traversed the length and breadth of the country with the Hussites — like them a scourge of God.

And when, in 1523, Abbess Margarete Rusch rescued me from Trinity Church (next door to the Franciscan monastery) during the Vespers service, she transferred me just in the nick of time from my little group of officiating monks to the safety of her box bed; for in the following year all the other brothers and the abbot as well were carried off by the bubonic plague.

And when, in the year 1602 after the incarnation of our Lord, the straw death pallets of 16,919 sons and daughters of man were burned in the streets of the rich city of Danzig, the plague took many of the models that I, the town painter, needed for my mural of the Last Judgment, which was to adorn the Artushof of the niggardly patricians and merchants and, both as an admonition and as an offering, serve to ward off the constantly recurring pestilence.

The picture was quite successful, and yet I lost more models twenty years later when the plague returned, stayed a few months, went away, and came back as if it had forgotten something, carrying off nine thousand people the first year and seven thousand the second. Though the Dominican market and the Corpus Christi procession were prohibited, though the beer and brandy cellars were closed, corpses were carted from houses in every street and buried in big holes behind the Hagelsberg.