Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Abbess Margarete Rusch, however, was free from atavistic lust for vengeance or any secret desire to castrate, even though she tried to encourage but perhaps only frightened poor Hegge and other runaway monks with cries such as, "I just feel like biting something off you!" It was only necessity and desperate concern, because the danger was coming closer and closer, that made her bite down and off, whereupon Preacher Hegge was over the wall before you could say Jack Robinson, screaming for all he was worth as he ran through the New City woods. (He ran as far as Greifswald, where he preached again and attracted a new following.)

Sometimes, when Margret told this story while plucking geese, the feathers flew so merrily that she offered a supplement. A moment later, it seems, the Royal Polish watch broke off their litany and addressed her roughly, demanding an explanation for the screams on the other side of the wall.

The drunken louts would have killed her if she hadn't answered. So what could she do but swallow the preacher's left

testicle?

The many geese, incidentally, that Fat Gret had to pluck from Saint Martin's Day to Epiphany were for the guild banquets of the coopers and anchor makers, for the patricians of Saint George's Bank, or for dinners given at the Artushof by the town council in honor of Hanseatic delegations or of the visiting bishops of Gnesen, Frauenburg, or Leslau. And while they lived, she also plucked geese for Ferber's son Konstantin and for Jeschke at the Three Pigs' Heads manor and at Oliva Monastery, and always had stories to tell while doing so. How she filched fifty-three sacks of powder from a Brandenburg gunner, leaving fifty-three sacks of poppy seed in their place — and this the day before the storming of the city. How for the sake of better seasoning she arranged for a musketeer to shoot grainy black pepper, which her daughter had sent from India, into some marinated haunches of venison. How on a bet with the Dominicans she rolled down the Hagelsberg (laughing) in a barrel. And time and again, how with a bold snap of the jaws she helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall.

Amanda Woyke, on the other hand, who never spoke of herself as an outstanding woman casting shadows in all directions, but only spoke of others and their hardships, knew stories that drew threads from earliest times but were nonetheless found as big as walnuts in the potato fields of the Royal Prussian State Farm in Zuckau. For when those fields were plowed (still with wooden plows to which, for lack of oxen, Polish day laborers were harnessed), the plows uncovered pieces of amber so cloudlessly pellucid as to suggest that in the beginning, long before Awa, the Baltic Sea had devoured the Kashubian forests, leaving only these tears of resin, which in time had become amber.

Actually a much later date could have been assigned to these astonishing finds. As the potato peelings piled up imperturbably, Amanda told how, and exactly when, amber had suddenly found its way to the hills of Kashubia. On April 12 of the year 997 after the incarnation of our Lord, a Bohemian executioner avenged the murder of Adalbert,

bishop of Prague, by beheading the Pomorshian fisherwoman Mestwina. His sword stroke not only separated her head from her trunk, but also cut the thin waxed string around Mestwina's neck, whereupon all the threaded pieces of amber fell off and flew inland from the scene of execution, where the Radaune empties into the Mottlau; for when Mestwina asked leave (since the day was drawing to a close) to kneel facing westward, her request aroused no suspicion on the part of the executioner or of the other Christian converters.

Amanda related all this not in the Kashubian tongue, which I did not understand, but in the broad Low German of the coast. It seems that even as the pieces of amber were flying over the hills of the Baltic Ridge, the holes in them had closed of their own accord, out of grief for Mestwina.

Every time Amanda Woyke set forth her historical explanation for the amber found in the potato fields of Zuckau, one of her daughters had to go and get the bright-colored cardboard box which I had brought her filled with Saxon candy after the capitulation at Pirna, and in which the pieces of amber with their insect enclosures now lay bedded on cotton.

One spring day, much later, when Amanda had grown so deaf that she could no longer hear the potatoes bubbling in the big cook pot, when potato bugs invaded us for the first time, bringing crop failure and a new famine, the cardboard box was empty. While Amanda was telling about earlier famines in comparison with the present one, she threw out little hints which gave us to understand that she had taken the pieces of amber back to the potato fields and dug them in. And true enough, the plague of potato bugs let up for a while.

A good deal has been written about storytelling and narrative style. There are scholars who measure the length of sentences, pin down leitmotifs like butterflies, cultivate word fields, excavate language formations as if they were strata of the earth's crust, and take psychological soundings of subordinate clauses. They are suspicious of all fiction and at pains to expose all tales of the past as escapism, flight from reality. But speaking of my Mestwina's evocations, of

Fat Gret's undammed flow of speech, and of Amanda Woyke's mumblings, I must insist that in every case (for all their reprehensible attachment to the past), the style was determined by work being done in the present.

For example, the act of pounding acorns in a stone mortar imposed its rhythm on Mestwina's delivery and so made her couch her mythical evocations of Awa in succinct, telegraphic sentences. Breathlessly she reported the uprising of the men against the matriarchy: "Spears tipped with iron. Sharp sharp sharp. Light on metal — gives them a kick. The din of their forges. Dance to the jangling of their weapons. Cut holes in air, clouds, prospective enemy. Stand planted on hills. Looking for a target. Awa presents herself: All strike at once. Straight to the heart. Cut her open, disembowel her, divide her up, eat her raw, catch her blood in cup-deep wolf skulls, drink it down! Prove manhood by murdering mother!"

With Margarete Rusch it was very different. Her plucking of geese gave her an airy, feather-light style. "Hmm, I thought, so the fellow thinks he can stick his money-grubbing fingers in my pussy without forking over his twelve Scania talers, his stinking herring silver. He takes me for a sow in a pig sty, and that's just what he'll get, I says to myself, the one that was slaughtered yesterday. So I fill her up with hot bricks, dress her in my nightgown. And there she was all ready for him when he hopped into bed with his cock at the ready!"

And on the lips of the goose-plucking Gret, the horror of the young merchant Moritz Ferber when he discovered that he had poured his seed not into the nun's flesh but into a warmed-up sow, became a narrative blowing of feathers. "So he screamed and yelled and broke out in pimples between the legs and jumped out of bed like a bee had stung him. And that wasn't the end of it. He could never quite get his patrician pecker up after that. It just hung its head. So after a while he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, renounced the flesh, and was rewarded for his piety with the fat benefices of Erland bishopric — the sow's bridegroom!"

And potato peeling, that work process interrupted only by the digging out of eyes, also fosters a style, an even flow — interrupted by compassionate exclamations like "It would

break your heart!" — of country tales, stories in which plagues of mice, drought, and hailstorms reduce the peasantry to chewing tree bark, in which pillaging Swedes are always followed by the plague and marauding Poles by cholera, and which always end (provisionally, for Amanda's stories go on and on like potato peeling) with the ultimate triumph over the lifelong hunger of the peasant serfs: "When King Ole Fritz's dragoons brought us a few sacks of potatoes, nobody knew what to do. And I said to myself: Into the ground with them. And when they came up and flowered, but yielded nothing better than bitter little apples, I said to myself: Oh my, oh my, now what? But when the bad weather came in October and the boars came out of the woods in Ramkau and rooted around in the plants, I said to myself and Erna and Stine and Annchen and Lisbeth: Now go look at the spuds. And there were plenty. And they lasted through the winter. And they tasted good, too. And the sweet Lord be praised."