Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Later the plague came hesitantly, as though just passing-through, but still later it occupied the city and took my drinking companions and buxom lasses. Only young Agnes was left to serve as my kitchenmaid. She watched me growing older with my drinker's liver until that Opitz fellow came along, and then she cooked for him, too, and got at-

tached to him in other ways as well. In 1639, when the plague caught up with the poet, who was sickly to begin with, I died with him; Agnes left me without so much as looking behind her, as though I, the allegorical painter Moller, had gone to the plague pit with that long-winded, vale-of-tears Opitz. Actually it was senile decay. I still liked my drink, but I'd long been as good as dead. It didn't take any plague to carry me off.

They were all immune. Neither Dorothea, nor Fat Gret, nor Agnes, not a single one of the cooks was stricken by God or his diabolical partner with buboes, black spots, or any of the more recent epidemics. And when, after the second partition of Poland, Amanda Woyke helped to popularize the Prussian potato, she truly believed (and wrote as much to her pen pal, the widely traveled Count Rumford) that in potato flour she had found a safeguard against cholera; for after the Seven Years' War, when several crop failures made starvation universal among the lower classes, and rats, cooked up into emergency soups, sold for a good price, cholera (along with other plagues) ran rampant.

On the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, not only the hired hands, maids, journeymen, cottagers, and old folks, but the administration as well, took the precaution of rubbing their whole bodies with potato flour in accordance with Amanda's instructions. As long as the epidemic lasted, the death wagons made the rounds of Danzig and Dirschau twice a day. There were cases in Karthaus, too. Here in Zuckau the death knell was no busier than usual. We rubbed ourselves with flour and believed in it. Let the city gentlemen smile. Count Rumford, in his ever-so-rational letters, also doubted the medicinal and preventive properties of distillate of potato juice.

Later on, Amanda rubbed in potato flour for everything conceivable, applied it as a poultice, ladled in into sacks that she hung up in the cupboards, and strewed it over thresholds. If the cows didn't want to calve, funneled-in potato flour made them. Daubed on fences, it frightened ghosts away. And when, in accordance with Amanda's prescription, I put a little sack of potato flour under the pillow of my Ilsebill, whose pregnant cantankerousness is dragging into the fifth month, and mixed a level teaspoonful into her powder box, she

treated me most amiably for a whole week, had next to no wishes, was astonishingly free from migraine, and even sang silly songs while loading the dishwasher: "Lott is dead, Lott is dead, and Yul is gonna die soon. . "

A good deal has been written about storytelling. People want to hear the truth. But when truth is told, they say, "Anyway, it's all made up." Or, with a laugh, "What that man won't think up next!"

And after a long story about the effectiveness of old wives' remedies in cases of toothache, lovesickness, constipation, gout, and Asiatic cholera, which I had told while the potato soup was being spooned up to the point of couldn't-eat-another-bite (and even Ilsebill enjoyed it a little), one of the guests said, "Such things can't be invented. A character like that — your farm cook, I mean — wouldn't come to you out of the clear blue. Was there really such a person? Really and truly, I mean? Or is it just something that might have happened?" And Ilsebill said, "Tell that to the Marines. Not to me."

But retold, Amanda's potato peelings are the winding road to do-you-still-remember, late memories of my umbilical cord, which, uncoiled, leads to her as she sits at her kitchen table. Her potato knife knew how the story would go on. I could see by her peelings, and still can, what curling, thinly peeled tale would slide over her thumb: a tale about the hunger of the peasants in the sandy Tuchel Stolp Dirschau region, when earthworms became food and babies crawled back into the earth like worms. Of the seven daughters I had begotten upon her during the war (between campaigns), three died and became abysmally sad stories named Stine Trude Lovise, and all ended up with the sweet Lord in heaven.

For making soup she preferred sprouting winter potatoes. The peelings kept falling, always meaningfully and

always in a different way. And when I decided to leave, to clear out of that dump and go to Saxony or still farther, Amanda, who had wanted to go with me, turned around with her pack basket by the potato-top fires and said, "I'd better stay with the spuds." That way, whenever I came back, each time downer at heel, she could tell me over her potato knife about all the things that had gone to pot in the meantime.

She herself had had few adventures (and those without traveling). Amanda Woyke, born a serf in 1734 at Zuckau-the-Cloisters when it was still Polish, died in Preussisch-Zuckau, a serf of the state farm, in 1806. But adventures came to her: I with my seven war years, nine scars, and twenty-three battles; the crazy Count Rumford, who couldn't stick it anywhere for long and always had to invent something useful. Bent with gout, the aged king came to Zuckau and (like me, his old campaigner and inspector) listened to her while she peeled potatoes. For Amanda knew that stories can never end, that there will always be a thief running across the fields with the stolen church silver, that tales about the last plague of mice will be told during the next one, that the Premonstratensian nun who died years ago will search the flour bin for her string-mended spectacles forever and ever, that the Swedes or Cossacks will come around time and again with their goatees and mustaches, that calves will always talk on Saint John's Day, and that stories will demand to be told as long as there are plenty of potatoes in the basket.

Mestwina had no potatoes. She told stories while making flour by pounding acorns (previously soaked in lime water) in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle. We stretched our bread dough by mixing in pea and acorn flour.

Margarete Rusch the cooking nun told stories while plucking geese under the beech tree, under the lime tree, in the convent yard, or in the barn. She would pluck nine or eleven geese in one afternoon for a guild banquet.

While pounding, while plucking. Mestwina knew tales about Awa: how Awa brought fire from the sky, how Awa invented the eel trap, how Awa was eaten by her starving children and so became a goddess. Mother Rusch told funny stories: how a merchant's son who lusted for her flesh was

fobbed off with a sow that had been slaughtered the day before; what she stuffed the sheep's head in the pig's head with; or how she had helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall when he was obliged to run away from the Catholics. And other stories that did not feed on myth like Mestwina's, but drew their substance from the earth.

During the winter Mestwina pounded acorns into flour, which she mixed with barley groats and baked into flat-bread. Abbess Rusch plucked geese from Saint Martin's Day to Epiphany. In the spring and summer no stories were told. But after the farm cook Amanda Woyke had succeeded in making potato growing a Prussian virtue, she peeled potatoes all year long. Even in the spring and fall, when potatoes were served unpeeled with whey, she peeled old potatoes for her all-year-round, inexhaustible, at all times warm potato soup; how else could she have filled the farm hands' bellies?

Actually I had no intention of telling stories (to my guests and Ilsebill); I'd been meaning to cite figures and at long last drain the swamps of Kashubian legend with statistics — how many peasants were made serfs after the Thirty Years' War; how much corvee labor was performed in West Prussia before and after the partitions of Poland; at how early an age the children of serfs were put to work; how the mismanaged lands of the Zuckau Convent became profitable under the Prussians; by what devices the East Elbian landowners (and the managers of the state farms as well) flouted the decrees and made a sport of seizing the peasants' lands; how the Prussian landed gentry treated their serfs as chattels, won or lost them at cards, and swapped them at will; why in Holland and Flanders crops were already being rotated and fallow fields sown with clover and rape, while in our region the strict enforcement of the three-field system admitted of no innovation; why rural life was praised in treatises on agronomy and bucolic idylls, though the peasants and their cattle were both reduced to starvation when the millet ran out in March; at what date people began to smoke English tobacco, drink coffee from the colonies, and eat off plates with knives and forks in the cities of Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, and Dirschau, while in the country time stood still on one leg. But for all the figures I line up — showing yield per acre,