Gunter Grass - The Flounder

was sitting when Amanda, with Ole Fritz and Rumford harnessed to her flour bin, caught sight of me and started right in chewing me out: "You stupid, scurvy no-good!" But she was pleased with the rescued seed potatoes and a few little bags of seeds, among them chervil, mustard, caraway, parsley, and marjoram, that I'd happened to have in my pocket. And Ole Fritz and Rumford also exclaimed, "Superb 1" and "Splendid!" I had to heave the sack into the flour bin, taking care not to hurt the meal worms Stine Trude Lovise or the tin soldiers, and most especially not to damage the diminutive hell-fire utilization machine. Then, between king and count, I was harnessed to the vehicle, and off we went with a terrible din. Now there was no need for Amanda to push.

And so we looked for the sweet Lord throughout the halls of heaven, until we came to a body of water that made little waves like the Baltic and smelled the same, too.

"Sweet Lord! Sweet Lord!" cried Amanda over the Baltic-green sea. "Where ya hiding. Come on out! Come on out!"

But the sweet Lord didn't show himself, for he didn't exist. Only a flatfish jumped out of the sea and gave them a slanting look. It was the Flounder out of the fairy tale, and he said with his crooked mouth, "Since the sweet Lord doesn't exist, I can't very well be your sweet Lord. But I'll be glad to help if something's wrong. What's wrong?"

And then, before the three men harnessed to the flour bin could speak, Amanda told the Flounder first her earthly, then her heavenly woes: how she had put up with everything and in spite of plague, famine, hunger, war, and long-lasting injustice always stood by the sweet Lord, how she'd been looking for him in heaven, but all she'd found was King Ole Fritz, his dopey inspector, and her old pen pal, the well-known inventor of the slow-combustion stove, and she'd harnessed them to an empty flour bin in which were assembled her meal worms Stine Trude Lovise, the king's tin soldiers and peppercorns, the dopey inspector's sack of potatoes, a few little bags of seeds such as marjoram, chervil, mustard, caraway, and parsley, and the pen pal's hell-fire utilization machine along with some heat tablets: "So what's

to happen now? If you can't be our sweet Lord, then be our sweet Flounder, and help us."

Thus flattered, the Flounder said, "What you could not do on earth, you shall do here in heaven. Your sweet Flounder will provide as if he were the sweet Lord."

Thereupon he vanished into the Baltic-green sea. Instantly the halls of heaven were transformed into proper Kashubian sandy acres — gently rolling, already fertilized and plowed, hedged around with gorse and blackberry bushes. Out of the flour bin jumped King Ole Fritz's tin soldiers, and they began to till the soil like peasants, planted the seed potatoes out of the dopey inspector's sack, and put in an herb garden off to one side. And Count Rumford set to work building for Amanda an enormous heavenly kitchen to feed the world's hungry. As fuel he used the compressed heat tablets, three of which were spat out each second by the hell-fire utilization machine.

In the meantime the meal worms Stine Trude Lovise were growing up to be dear little girls, as pretty as pictures and so clever besides that Ole Fritz didn't have to govern any more, or Count Rumford to invent, and the dopey inspector didn't have to bully anybody, for there in the heavenly Kashubia Amanda and her three laughing daughters took care of everything. Each day there was plenty of potato soup, for herbs and turnips were soon growing, pigs were grunting miraculously, and even onions were taking heavenly root. While peeling potatoes, Amanda told her old sweet-Lord stories, but now they'd become sweet-Flounder stories. And the children weren't the only ones who knew Amanda's sayings by heart. For instance: "Marjoram and parsily, good for the whole family"; or "Equal as the spuds we be — only the kingdom of heaven is free."

So day after day they all spooned up the same soup, and only King Ole Fritz's peppercorns lay around unused and dangerous, for they were as big as cannon balls, until one heavenly day Amanda rolled them down to hell, whereupon the fires burned even better than before.

But the Flounder, who told this fairy tale before the Women's Tribunal by way of exculpating himself, said in conclusion, "In short, dear ladies, I took the liberty, in

heaven at least, of creating Kashubian Maoist conditions. I won't say yes and I won't say no, but if you choose to conjecture that I am Amanda Woyke's sweet Lord, go right ahead."

Always the flour bin has spoken

words of consolation out of an empty stomach

and snow has fallen as if in corroboration.

If starvation were limited to Holy Week,

fasting would be a pleasure, eating

flatbread with nothing on it;

but starvation covers my region like a pall

all winter until March,

while elsewhere the granaries are sly

and the markets glutted.

Much has been written in defense of hunger.

What beauty it confers.

How free from slag its concept.

What dullness comes of three square meals.

And always there have been Swiss

doing good in the eyes of God

(or someone else): only

the indispensable has been lacking.

But when at last there was enough,

And Amanda Woyke went out to the potato fields

with basket, hoe, and daughters, some gentlemen somewhere

else were sitting around a table, worrying about the falling price

of millet. Ultimately, said Professor Burlimann, everything's governed by demand, and he smiled a liberal smile.

and the Chinese world food solution

Toward the end of February, after buttered potatoes in their jackets with cottage cheese and caraway seed, in the course of one of the few after-dinner walks Ilsebill has brought herself to take since she became pregnant-I had just come back from a congress at which the future of socialism was discussed point for point-on a clear, sunny day with a foretaste of spring (shortly after 2 p.m.), my Ilsebill leaped, despite my shouts of "Please, please, don't jump! Don't, don't!" across one of the many ditches known as Wettern that serve to drain the lush Wilster Marsh, the pasture land between the Elbe and the Geest. Despite her bulk she managed to clear the roughly five-foot ditch but landed on her face, though on soft ground, to be sure.

Later, the question of guilt came up: I had allegedly provoked her leap with my obsessive insistence on slow, gradual, deliberately procrastinating change.

As we crossed the marshy meadows, there had been talk of the socialist congress and its resolutions. (What might have been if the opposite hadn't happened.) When I said: "The Prague Spring probably came too suddenly and seems, in the days preceding the Soviet occupation, to have had a certain erratic character, a failure to take account of the overall development in the Eastern bloc or of the premature expectations of the West, with the result that one more long overdue, but nevertheless ill-timed attempt to reform state Communism came to grief because it took the form of a Great Leap Forward, the immediate consequence being the all-too-familiar limping lag. ."-after, more to myself in mulling over the congress than with any intention of provoking Ilsebill, I had said these words, she replied: "Go on» You with your snail philosophy. How's there going to be any progress if we have to crawl all the time. Look at Mao and China. They weren't afraid to take a Great Leap Forward They're ahead of us. They're over the hump "

Already my Ilsebill had her eye on that ditch. She took

a run; a concept had hurried on ahead and she leaped after it. Despite my shouts of "Don't!" she, by then close to five months gone, leaped. In defiance of all reason she leaped and, turning her belly to one side, fell on the rain-softened ground. I jumped after her, no distance at all, and said, "Hurt yourself? Why can't you listen? What a childish thing to do. In your condition."