Gunter Grass - The Flounder

And yet, despite all the playfulness — a few young women wore necklaces of (sprouting) winter potatoes — the earnestness of the original intention was maintained: working groups discussed the nutritive value of the basic foodstuffs, the protein-rich soybean, millet, rice, the exemplary character of the farm kitchen, the necessity of combating hunger on a global scale, the ultimate goal, the Chinese world food solution, and over and over again the Great Leap, which was

said to have already begun. We are already in mid-Leap. Seen dialectically, the Great Leap is not a precipitate action, but a continuous process, unfolding in several phases. A Permanent Leap.

I shouldn't, when Ilsebill was taking her run, have cried out, "Don't! Don't jump! Please! Don't! Don't jump!" because then she had to jump and so prove herself in the light of the, to me, unfathomable law that governs her actions— to prove herself if only for the time of a quick leap, which to me, when I suddenly saw her and her arching belly in a state of weightlessness, seemed to stretch into several leap-phases. I saw my Ilsebill after the takeoff, while my cry of "Don't jump!" was still quivering in the air, saw how she detached herself miraculously from the heavy, wet soil, saw her rise a scant two feet, then, propelled by her momentum, cover forty inches without loss of altitude, and finally, after a distinct downward bend, drop. She just made it over the ditch.

But before I concern myself with Ilsebill's fall, I would like for an extended moment to celebrate her at the zenith of her leap. She was beautiful, though her leap accentuated the awkwardness, not to say ungainliness of her condition. Her defiant goat face, as if the whole world had offended her. I'd have liked to engrave her in copper as a leaping Melencolia (freely adapted from Durer). In Knossos the Minoan maidens (in honor of Hera and to spite Zeus) jumped over a charging bull. And when Awa our mother discovered her shadow and wanted to get rid of it, she jumped over the rivulet Radune — just as Dorothea, on our return home from the pilgrimage, crossed the river Elbe by jumping from ice floe to ice floe. For at the sight of Ilsebill leaping, I carried myself backward, I saw Awa, I saw Dorothea in mid-leap, I fled to the late eighteenth century, where Amanda Woyke, a serf bonded to the state of Prussia, was sitting with her whole sedentary being beside the stove in the farm kitchen, serenely peeling potatoes, and a hundred years later I visited Lena Stubbe's working-class lodge (at Brabank 5), where I found immemorial poverty entrenched as a social problem. Only then did I attend the congress at Bievres, on the outskirts of Paris, which tried to do something about the future of democratic socialism.

Some Czechoslovak refugees had invited me. A French Communist, risking expulsion from the party, met me at the Orly airport. I had hardly checked into the hotel when I bought a postcard to send to my Ilsebill, scribbled full of sentences such as: "Take care of yourself! Please don't overdo it. Your condition permits of no leaps. The congress promises to be interesting. About a hundred revisionists. ."

They sit at a long table and have that refugee look. Sparse beards matted with vestiges of the last and next-to-last revolutions, which have become part of them in the meantime. In among the veterans sit young, inexperienced beards, in which the future nests, giving hope of hope.

This congress at Bievres (it seems there used to be beavers here) has been well prepared, with reports that go on and on and leave no historical aspect untouched. Mimeographed copies of the speeches in French translation are made available. Each orator addresses the toiling masses as though speaking to a large crowd, as once he did on public squares, in factory halls, at the now celebrated party congress. Words listen to words with approval. Stalinism condemned in absentia. Determination to remain a socialist, come what may. Appeals to reason. The lament of the enlightened.

Those not speaking draw box constructions or hairy twats. In the translators' booths emancipated women confidently translate the speeches of errant men into English, German, Czech, and Italian. Outside the windows that can't be opened, February claims to be March. They've come from everywhere. (Only the comrades from Chile haven't come.) An old Trotzkyist marked by four party splits takes the minutes (in Spanish): his posthumous papers.

Cover your eyes and forehead with your palm and your joined fingers until emptiness sets in: a new promise. Now that reason and the potato have triumphed over superstition, it must be possible to. . Now that we know so much, at least the most glaring hunger must be… If we, the whole lot of us, are not to perish, then at last the Great Leap must. .

All of a sudden I want to be sittting outside in my overcoat on a bench for old folks and sparrows, eating cheese

off my knife and drinking red wine out of a liter bottle, until I'm too demoralized to withstand the claims of time and absolutely without hope, or until I meet some of the other veterans I sat with in Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen, discussing every battle from Kolin to Burkersdorf back and forth over potatoes with caraway seed and Glumse.

The next man has the floor. Off to one side a resolution is born. On a motion by the Italians. About the Prague Spring: it doesn't want to be over.

(No no no! I mean it. That was foolish. Even if we were lucky.) By twisting her belly to one side as she fell and landing on her elbow, she got off lightly — once again. Dutifully I leaped after her. But for quite some time, while I was saying my little sentences—"You were lucky, damn it. But what an irresponsible thing to do!" — the veterans' meal in Amanda's farm kitchen dragged on (and the congress of European revisionists stuck to the agenda point for point). For right after the Peace of Hubertusburg I was made inspector of crown lands on the strength of my services. My comrades of the regiment found some sort of livelihood, mainly in the school system. And Amanda had no objection if once a year, after the farm hands had been fed, we sat around the much-too-long table and drank potato schnapps until we were drowning in blissful battle memories: "Ah, comrade, when I think of Torgau. . Remember the time we found all that tobacco and chocolate in the Saxon baggage train…" (And during the intervals between conferences in Bievres, a few political jokes that were new to me were told: Brezhnev and Nixon meet Hitler in hell. .) And after her fall I said to my Ilsebill, "It could have turned out worse, my dear. When Amanda was pregnant with her youngest daughter, Annchen, the one Romeike made her after the Battle of Burkersdorf just before the end of the war, she jumped across a brook while gathering mushrooms in the woods and fell on some mica rocks, which brought on labor pains prematurely."

Annchen got born all the same. And her daughter Sophie got to be cook later on for Napoleon's Governor Rapp. And when we former corporals celebrated our reunions, little Sophie served potatoes in their jackets with Glumse and

caraway seed (with linseed oil), which are today coming into fashion again.

Recently, when last the spirit carried me off to Berlin— Ilsebill's sprained ankle had mended in the meantime — Ruth Simoneit took me along. We managed to talk Sieglinde Huntscha, who just on principle says the Barn is "shitty," into coming with us. We sat at a table with Ulla Witzlaff. After the manner of restaurant owners, Osslieb sat down with us now and then for a brief chat. Considering I was the only man in the place, I wasn't treated too badly. Ulla Witzlaff was knitting (knit one, purl one) a man's sweater. (The girls are better natured than they put on.) When I talked about my hopeless socialist congress, they actually listened. Only Ruth Simoneit, who had ordered a double potato schnapps the moment she arrived, bristled: "Licking your wounds, eh? That's the one thing you men are good at. When you're not brutes, you're crybabies."