Gunter Grass - The Flounder

When He came to Zuckau, it was raining. It had been raining for days, so that the potatoes had to be got out of the ground. The royal farm hands chopped, dug, gathered the potatoes in baskets, carried the dripping baskets on their backs to the edge of the field — sad giant crows, among whom common crows sought their share, while the king's clay-encrusted, springless four-horse carriage, though ready for retirement and already a legend, was nevertheless approaching. This time it came on the highway from Karthaus, limped

over potholes, turned off to the right, stumbled along the cart track leading to Zuckau, where the farm hands were stretching their limbs in the rain-soaked fields as the royal vehicle appeared between the birches, vanished in a sunken lane, reappeared looking bigger-an event! — and stopped in a chain of mud puddles. Behind the steaming horses the right-hand door of the carriage was opened from within, and, preceded by his hat, which everyone knew, feared, and saluted, the old king, Frederick II, Fredericus Rex, His Majesty, Ole Fritz, with his cane hung on his coat, as he would later be painted in oils, alit and plodded into the potato field; his aide-de-camp and I, August Romeike, veteran of his wars and therefore his inspector, plodded behind him.

As everywhere, he came to Zuckau unannounced. He kept his visits secret to avoid petitions, garlands, maids of honor, and the representatives of the provincial estates. He didn't care for fuss and bother. He had his legend to live up to. And so, though racked with gout, he plodded across the fields with his cane, enjoined the farm hands with short barking noises not to gape but to go on digging and piling, and did not stop until he reached the baskets full of spuds. His first words: observations about the sandy soil of Kashubia, which he compared to the soil of eastern Pomerania. Instructive stuff, gleaned from informative treatises on crop rotation and the benefits of clover that had been translated (for him) into French from the English and Dutch. The aide-decamp took notes in the rain. I, the inspector, was obliged to reel off yields per acre. He wanted to hear precise figures that would demonstrate the increasing trade in seed potatoes. When I didn't know how many gulden-pfennigs more the Dutch varieties (among them the ancestors of the present-day "bintje") cost at the Hanover market, he hit me with his cane. That, too, became an anecdote, though later on a different reason was given for the royal beating.

Then, glistening under the Kashubian rain, he asked for a certain woman who had set the new Prussian provinces an example with her pioneer work in potato culture, whereby she had demonstrated not only the hunger-stilling power of the potato but its tastiness as well.

I led him to Amanda. She was sitting as usual on the stove bench in the farm kitchen, peeling potatoes for the

daily soup. Not in the least surprised, she said, "So here's Ole Fritz after all."

By then she had invented home-fried potatoes. Potato pancakes were also Amanda's invention. And she seems to have made the first potato salad, into which she mixed cucumber, onions, finely chopped lovage, and sunflower oil — food for the gods. She imparted diversity to the daily potato, lending it more and more new tastes with caraway seed, dill, mustard seed, marjoram, and parsley. But fundamentally Amanda's potato soup with bacon rinds remained true to itself, for she kept peeling and adding day after day; the pot was never empty.

She should just go on peeling, was the king's order, and he made himself at home on the footstool beside the potato basket. He was dripping wet, and a puddle formed at his feet. Amanda's daughter Ernestine lit tallow candles, for it was already getting dark in the farm kitchen. Amanda wore her spectacles while peeling potatoes. First Ole Fritz examined the peelings for thickness and apparently found the waste minimal. Then, while his clothes dripped and Amanda's daughters, Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine, gaped, he tilted his old man's head and listened, for, setting her knife in motion, Amanda began to tell of former days, when there had been nothing but too little millet and buckwheat, and her stories were as long and circular as the potato peelings that curled over her knife blade.

First the old hunger stories. She lamented the death from starvation of her babies Stine Trude Lovise. After listing means of combating potato bugs (amber dug into the fields, et cetera) and claiming that rubbed-in potato flour helped to keep cholera away, she addressed the king directly: good that he'd finally come, too bad about the rain, but that was part of it, would he like a pair of dry socks? Then she came to the point. He'd done right, she said, in confiscating the run-down convent — she herself as a girl had been made to embroider chasubles with tulip patterns, and there'd only been four, five nuns left, no use to anybody, and they'd have died soon anyway — and turning it into a decent state farm; but what she couldn't understand was why Ole Fritz had let the inspector, the dope, take the last bit of land the

peasants owned as well as the fields they had leased from the convent, all of which had lain fallow ever since and were overgrown with nettles. So naturally the peasants weren't going to work for nothing; they'd gone off to Elbing and Danzig and waited for the administration and this prize dope that called himself an inspector to get some sense into their heads. So then (but not before) they'd taken her advice— for she, Amanda, knew what was wrong — and divided up the land around the cottages and given it to the serfs at a low rental in return for a written promise to grow only potatoes on their lots, same as on the state farm, which they tilled for nothing. And indeed they'd grown nothing but spuds for the last four harvests, except for a bit of oats and barley for porridge. But unfortunately this lout, who had the gall to call himself an inspector — here she pointed her potato knife at me — had thought up a rotten scheme, and Ole Fritz had better hear about it, because they were doing it all in his name. The inspector and the rest of the so-called farm administration, especially the old colonel in his armchair who couldn't get warm even in August, had decided to join all the lots together again, because that way the land could be administered more efficiently. That's why the peasants had been expressly forbidden to grow anything on their own. That's why there were no more self-supporting peasants in Zuckau, but only bonded serfs. And to make matters worse, hereditary serfs. Surely that couldn't have been what Ole Fritz wanted. Yes, she cooked for the whole lot of them. Not just for the Polish day laborers and brickmakers. For the children, too, and the old folks and the old colonel in his armchair. Seventy-eight mouths. Which also had its advantages, because, as Ole Fritz must know, a big kitchen like that saved fuel; she could reckon up the exact amount of peat consumed and the exact saving in cordwood, if he wanted her to.

The king listened and signaled his aide-de-camp, by glancing at him in his own special way, to make a note of certain remarks relating to the savings at the farm kitchen and the possibilities of community kitchens in general. Amanda's method of making potato flour was recorded, and the aide also put his pen to work when Amanda made a laughingstock of me (and even more of the king) by referring

to "the inspector's carcass" as a picture book in which all the battles the king had fought for his glory were inscribed in the form of scars. For in addition to the eye he had lost at Kolin, the inspector had contributed a finger or two on either hand to the treasury of Prussian history, with the result that, no longer able to pick his nose and meditate, he was getting stupider than ever, for which reason he tormented the poor and made dopey speeches. He could distill potato schnapps for his cronies, and that was about all he was good for.