Gunter Grass - The Flounder

must be nipped in the bud. And then she ordered me to prop a hundred and eleven elk skulls on a hundred and eleven poles and place them in a circle measuring a hundred and eleven paces, so marking off a new sacrificial area — all this before the onset of winter!

You'll admit, Ilsebill, that so much ur-motherly loving care, even if it kept me warm and in innocence, was bound to become oppressive in the long run. Because there the matter rested. For uncounted centuries we were only allowed to count up to a hundred and eleven. True, some time in the last millennium before the incarnation of our Lord, we began to trade amber to the Phoenicians, who came sailing along in their ships as though the Flounder had piloted them to our remote shores. But at first we gave away fist-sized nuggets of our amber, and we had a hard time learning to barter. We were hornswoggled every time.

When I called the Flounder out of the sea, he griped and totted up our losses. "You're all a lot of Stone Age simpletons! Are you going to play the fool forever? With your amber you could supply a hundred and eleven hordes, as large and fatherless as your own, with all the bronze implements they need. Plus silver gewgaws and purple cloth for the women. If she won't let you mint coins, try at least to get it through your heads that in Sidon and Tyre your amber is as valuable as gold. I'm getting sick of you. You'll never be really men. Milksops, that's what you are!"

Just as the tale of the fisherman and his wife speaks only of the flounder or flatfish, without further identification— "And the flounder said to him. . Then the flounder came swimming and said. ." — so I, too, speak of the Flounder, as though there were only this one omniscient Flounder who advised, taught, and indoctrinated me, who raised me to manhood and told me in no uncertain terms how to keep the womenfolk supinely bed-warm and teach them how to suffer in cheerful silence. Actually the word "flounder," as consecrated by the fairy tale, is only a popular designation for the flatfish family, including the brill, the sole, the halibut, the plaice, the turbot, and, of course, the flounder. To tell the truth, my own flatfish was a turbot, closely resem-

bling the brill except for the bony, pebblelike bumps under his skin.

The turbot is found in the Mediterranean, throughout the North Sea, and in the Baltic. As in all flatfish, the axis of the eyes is not quite parallel to the crooked mouth, and that is what gives him his shrewd, malignant, I might say underhanded look: he squints in quick motion. (The Attic god Poseidon is said to have enlisted him in the struggle against Hera, the Pelasgian Athene, and related exponents of matriarchy — as a propagandist.) Turbot or not, tradition demands that I go on calling him a flounder.

The whole flatfish family is tasty. The neolithic Awa roasted his fellows in moist leaves. Toward the end of the Bronze Age, Wigga rubbed them on both sides with white ashes and laid the white underside in ashes strewn over a bed of coals. After turning, she moistened the flatfish either in the neolithic manner, from her always overflowing breasts, or modern-style, with a dash of fermented mare's milk. Mestwina, who already cooked in flameproof pots placed on an iron grating, simmered flounder with sorrel or in mead. Just before serving, she sprinkled the white-eyed fish with wild dill.

He, the one and only, the talking Flounder, who has been stirring me up for centuries, knew all the recipes that had been used for cooking his fellows, first by the heathen and later as a Christian Lenten fish (and not only on Friday). With an air of detachment and a glint of irony in his slanting eyes, he could sing his praises as a delicacy: "Yes, my son, we happen to be one of the finer fishes. In the distant future, when you imbecilic men, you eternal babes in arms, will at last have minted coins, dated your history, and introduced the patriarchate, in short, shaken off your mothers' breasts, when after six thousand years of ever-loving womanly care you will at last have emancipated yourselves, then my fellows and relatives, the sole, the brill, the plaice, will be simmered in white wine, seasoned with capers, framed in jelly, deliciously offset by sauces, and served on Dresden china. My fellows will be braised, glazed, poached, broiled, filleted, ennobled with truffles, flamed in cognac, and named after marshals, dukes, the prince of Wales, and the Hotel Bristol. Campaigns, conquests, land grabs! The East will

trade with the West. The South will enrich the North. To you and to myself I predict olives, refinements of culture and taste, the lemon!"

But that took time, Ilsebill. (You see how hard it is for you women to make men stop persecuting you with their ever-loving care.) Long after Awa and her hundred and eleven dimples and three breasts, women continued to rule, but they had a harder time of it. We men had tasted metal. And the Flounder kept us informed. I had only to call, and the swimming newspaper came. I heard about distant high cultures, about the Sumerians and the Minoan double-edged ax, about Mycenae and the invention of the sword, about wars in which men fought against men, because everywhere the history-hating matriarchate had been shattered and men were at last allowed to inscribe dates.

The Flounder treated me to tedious lectures. About Mesopotamian palace architecture and the first palace in Knossos. About the growing of grain — amelcorn barley spelt millet — in the Danube basin. About the domestication of animals — goats and sheep — in the Near East and the possibility of domesticating reindeer in the Baltic area. About the spade, the hoe, and the revolutionary plow.

The Flounder concluded every lecture with words of supplication: "It's high time, my son. The Neolithic, as we call the late Stone Age, has entered upon its final phase. Fostered by male vigor, a high culture has spread from Mesopotamia by way of the Nile Delta to the island of Crete, where I've seen women tilling the fields and, once the grain is grown, grinding it in stone mortars. In those regions, famines are not a fatality. They keep herds of pigs and cattle, and meat is plentiful. Stocks are always on hand. Permanent dwellings are built. Hordes and clans join to form nations. Hero-kings rule. Empire borders on empire. The men bear arms. They know what they're fighting for: inherited property. While you live in lewdness and fornication and don't even know the meaning of fatherhood. Mother screws son. Sister doesn't even know what brother is doing to her. Unsuspecting father lies with daughter. All in innocence! I know! Yes, yes, you want those tits. Can't get enough of them. Breast-fed babies to the end of your days. But out in the world the future has started blazing trails. Nature is sick

of being submitted to with womanish passivity; it wants to be mastered by men. Trace canals. Drain swamps. Fence in the land, plow it, take possession of it. Beget a son. Hand down property. Your suckling time has lasted two thousand years too long, two thousand years of waste and stagnation. My advice to you: away from the breast. Wean yourselves. That's it, my son, at long last you must wean yourself!"

That was easy for the Flounder to say. Too easy. We, in any case, needed a good millennium to become men in the Flounderian sense. But then we became men, all right, as the history books bear witness: men with leather caps, helmets, and gimlet eyes. Men of wide-ranging, horizon-searching gaze. Men stricken with procreative fury, who sublimated their stinkhorns into rivaling towers, torpedoes, and spaceships. Methodical men, banded together in male orders. Thunder-hurling hairsplitters. Discoverers in spite of themselves. Heroes who would never never under any circumstances have consented to die in bed. Hard-lipped men who sternly decreed freedom. Persevering, steadfast, unflinching, grandiosely exalted, tragic, bloody-but-unbowed, come-what-may men, determined to transcend themselves and attain ultimate goals, men with principles who invented their own enemies, loved honor for honor's sake, and yet saw themselves in the mirror of irony.