Gunter Grass - The Flounder

amounts of salt tax and other taxes levied, the horrific infant mortality rates, the disastrous exodus from the rural districts, the corresponding increase in uncultivated acreage, and the ravages first of the plague, then of typhoid and cholera-conscientiously as I comb the eighteenth century for facts and figures, they still don't add up to a convincing picture of the times. I am obliged to sit as though spellbound beside Amanda's basket and watch her potato knife as I did then. "In the old days," she said, "there was nothing but grits, and when there warn't no grits, we had nothing at all. Then Ole Fritz sent us this dragoon with potatoes, and we started growing spuds. . "

"I want to know all about it," says Ilsebill. "How much farm produce requisitioned? How much corvee labor? How was the Prussian Chamber of Crown Lands organized?"

But stories live longer than figures. Passed from mouth to mouth. Mestwina's great-granddaughter Hedwig, while weaving baskets, still told of the forced baptism in the river Radaune, just as her great-granddaughter Martha, while baking bricks for Oliva Monastery, told of Saint Adalbert's death, so that after her great-grandchild Damroka had married swordmaker Kunrad Slichting and moved to the city, she was able, over her spinning, to tell her grandchildren how Adalbert had been struck dead, the Pomorshians baptized, the fishermen of the Wicker Bastion compelled to bake bricks for the Cistercian monks, how the wars went on and on and the Prussian raids never stopped, one damn thing after another, but there were miracles, too, that fiery apparition in the marshes, the Mother of God telling stories as she picked cranberries, for which reason, as the Lenten cook Dorothea later told her children while picking over peas, the Parish Church of Saint Mary was built on that very spot. And the story of the Flounder was handed down in the same way. A true story told differently each time. First the fisherman wanted to have him cooked and eat him, but the fisherman's wife, Ilsebill, said, "Let him talk." Then Ilsebill wanted to put him in the pot, but the fisherman wanted to ask him a few more questions. Another time, the Flounder wanted to be stewed-"liberated," as he put it-but the fisherman and his wife kept having more wishes.

And once when Mestwina, while pounding acorns, told the story of the Flounder, she came close to the truth. "That," she said in Pomorshian, "was when Awa lived here and only her word counted. The Sky Wolf was angry, because Awa had stolen the fire from him and made herself powerful. The men were all devoted to her. They all wanted to sacrifice to the Elk Cow, and not one of them to the Wolf. So the old Sky Wolf turned himself into a fish. He looked like a common flounder, but he could talk. One day when a young fisherman threw out his line, the Wolf in the Flounder bit. Lying in the sand, he made himself known as the old wolf god. The fisherman was afraid, so he promised to do whatever the Flounder commanded. Thereupon the Wolf said from inside the Flounder, 'Your Awa stole my fire, and the wolves have had to eat their meat raw ever since. Because Awa has won power over all men with fire, you must give a masculine nature to the fire that people use to cook and warm themselves and bake clay pots. The hard must be melted and grow hard again when it cools.' The fisherman relayed all this to the other men, and they began to break rocks of a special kind. When they heated the lumps of ore in the fire, the iron in them melted and made the men into mighty smiths. Because the Wolf in the Flounder so commanded, they pierced their Awa with their spearheads. And I, too," said Mestwina whenever she pounded acorns to flour in her mortar, "will be killed by a sword forged in fire."

It seems, however, that when the Flounder of Mest-wina's story heard of Awa's death, he turned himself back into a ferocious Wolf and brought war into the land with forged iron. For which reason Amanda Woyke always concluded her stories about Swedes Pandours Cossacks or Polacks with the words "They were like wolves. They wouldn't leave anything m one piece. They even ripped up the children." (But the text of the story that the Flounder communicated to the painter Runge, the poets Arnim and Brentano, and the Grimm brothers had already been established and made ready for the printer, whereas the unpublished storyteller always has the next, entirely different, very latest version in mind.)

While pounding acorns into flour or letting potato peelings grow over their thumbs, Mestwina and Amanda told tales of the old days, but always as if they had been there: how men pierced the body of Awa, the primal mother, with iron spears, how the Swedes raided Kashubia from their base in Putzig and were so intent on searching for silver gulden that they even cut open the bellies of expectant mothers.

Only Margarete Rusch never told of remote times, but always of herself and her life as a nun. How, on April 17, 1526, His Polish Majesty decreed an end to all heresy, occupied the city, closed all the gates, threw all the rebels (including her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch) into the Stock-turm, ordered a trial, and had the "Statuta Sigismundi" posted on the doors of all seven parish churches. How Preacher Hegge, in a lamentable state, sought refuge with the Brigittines, and the nuns had their pleasure of him by turns until Fat Gret took pity, dressed him most laughably in a woman's skirts, dragged him out of the convent in the dead of night under an eighth of a moon, through the sludge and ditchwater and squeaking rats of Paradise Street to the cesspit behind Jacob's Hospital, where the pallets of the dead smoldered day and night, and tried to lift him over the city wall, which is low at that point. But heave and push as she might, Hegge couldn't summon up that last saving burst of vigor. Maybe the sisters at Saint Bridget's had been too hard on him. He hung down the wall like a sack. The Royal Polish watch were making their rounds; already they could be heard approaching from nearby Peppertown, jangling their iron weapons and singing hymns to Our Lady in their drunkenness. Thereupon Fat Gret reached under the skirts of the once so hurried preacher and mangy goat, lifted him up by the thighs, higher, still higher, until his balls were dancing right under her nose-for he had nothing on under his skirts-and cried out, "C'mon, pull, you mangy goat, pull!" He managed to grab the top of the wall, appealed to every devil from Ashmodai to Zadek, and gave vent to two farts and any number of sighs, but not even the approach of the bawling litany of the royal watch sufficed to drive him over. Already the sliver of moon was throwing glints of light on reeling helmets. And then Fat Gret, after calling

him a shit and a flabbycock, concentrated her rage and concern, snapped at the preacher's scrotum, and bit off his left ball.

It's true, Ilsebill. Men are terrified of being bitten that way. There are theories to the effect that all women have a secret wish to bite off the balls of all men-their cocks, too. "Snapping Cunt" and "Penis Envy" are chapter headings in avidly devoured books. The vagina dentalis is a well-known symbol. There are more men running around with one ball than show up in the statistics: emasculated heroes, pipsqueaks, hypersensitive eunuchs, village idiots, and obese tomcats. The female of the praying mantis, who slowly devours her mate right after the sexual act, might well be the heraldic animal of all Ilsebills. How cuttingly they smile, how they show their teeth, eager to nibble something more than carrots. "Fear for your lives, men!" cried the Flounder before the Women's Tribunal. "You're all at their mercy. Since prehistoric times they've been lusting for vengeance. Verily I say unto you: when I questioned the black widow, a rare specimen among the exotic spiders, about her husband, she, dangling from a long thread, spoke of his vices, which, so she said, had consumed him, consumed him entirely. . "