Gunter Grass - The Flounder

But then things picked up. Helga Paasch joined us with a big hello. Osslieb served potato soup. Ulla Witzlaff filled the deep dishes to the brim. Until late into the night the future was evoked: the great crisis and the collapse of all (masculine) systems. Everyone looked forward to the impending Chinese world food solution. I treated them to a few rounds of potato schnapps. "Here's to the standardized swill of the future!" Then Paasch treated. Naturally Ruth Simoneit was plastered. Witzlaff sang, "Our Flounder is a Maoist! Our Flounder is a Maoist!" And Sieglinde Huntscha tried to make a pass at Osslieb. They were getting really chummy.

Too bad my Ilsebill wasn't there. But she just had to jump over that ditch. I could beg, I could plead—"Don't jump! Don't! Please don't jump!" — she jumped all the same; she wanted to fall. There she lay in the mud. I jumped after her. She was lying on her ass. I yelled at her. She yelled back, "It's my belly, and I'll jump when and where I please with it!"

"It's not just your child; it's going to be our child!"

"I refuse to let you tell me when to jump and when not to jump."

"You should have thought about it sooner if you don't want the child."

"Shitty ditch! I'll never do it again." "Swear to me, Ilsebill, that you'll never again." But forswear the Great Leap, promise never to leap again — no, not my Ilsebill.

Me and the cook inside me — we spare each other nothing. Ilsebill, for instance, has a cook inside her — that must be me— and fights him. Our quarrel from the start: who sits like a complex, plump or lean, inside of whom, inspiring new dishes or old ones that have come back into style, since we started cooking with historic awareness.

Now, while five pounds of beef shank simmer over low heat and I helpfully and haphazardly clean vegetables, she is reading a book with lots of foonotes, dealing with, among other things, millet as poor man's food, festive fare, fairy-tale motif, ^and chicken feed.

I keep quiet, thinking up story after story that may have sweetened the porridge of the Zuckau farm hands in the days of serfdom: when the flour bin was empty and the heavens rained millet grains as big as peas, and everybody was miraculously replenished. .

Her voice passing over my fairy tale and cutting through it, Ilsebill says: "The author has just plain forgotten about us. It's always the males. When it's the women's doing that beginning in 1800 the surface planted with millet dropped from 53,000 to 14,877 hectares, thanks to the rapid expansion of potato culture, especially in Prussia. Nowadays you'll only find millet in health shops, along with pine nuts, couscous, and soybeans. If you spoke of 'a bad millet year,' nobody would even know what you were talking about."

I say: "And long ago, before the potato defeated millet in Prussia and elsewhere, a bride had to cook a brimming potful of millet in milk the morning after her wedding night, to make sure the seed took inside her. She'd smack a helping of this millet porridge into the hands of the poor weavers' children with a wooden paddle; they'd shout for joy and pass the blob from hand to hand, until it was cool enough to be tasted."

"You and your stories," says Ilsebill. "They only take people's minds off reality. Trying to talk me deaf and blind." She slaps the book with historical footnotes shut. "In the old days millet made us women stupid. And today? What about today?"

I lapse into a timorous silence. She's right, damn it, right. (And yet Amanda Woyke, the farm cook, learned so well how to write, from watching Inspector of Crown Lands Romeike, that she could soon correspond more intelligently than he with the famous Count Rumford and was able to read to the farm hands out of the latest gazette what Mira-beau had said about the price of bread and the principles of the revolution.)

The cook whom Ilsebill keeps inside her, if only to fight with, obeys her implicitly. She decides that no potatoes (which are getting more expensive) will be peeled today, that instead historical millet will be scalded in a good quart of bouillon and placed in a covered pot on top of the kettle with the simmering beef; and now the millet swells as tradition demands, while I continue to clean vegetables.

"Don't cut up the carrots! And keep the salsify whole, too. Typical man! Wants to boil everything together until nothing tastes like itself."

While I try to take flight down the stairs of history, she screams, "Oatmeal gruel! Barley grits! Millet porridge! That's what you've kept us down with for centuries. But from now on it won't wash, hear? Now it's your turn. So get to work and stop dreaming."

Obediently I halve the cabbage and celery root. I leave the carrots, onions, salsify, kohlrabi, and three cloves of garlic whole. Ah, to be condemned to see what beauty a cabbage displays in cross section: what structures, what system, so labyrinthine, the endless line. .)

"How about the rutabaga?" she says from inside herself, not I from inside her. And instead of boiling the hell out of them as a typical male would, Ilsebill puts all the vegetables I've cleaned, plus a fist-sized chunk of rutabaga, to simmer with the meat that will soon be done, under the swelling millet.

Then our guests came. They praised our historically aware dish and asked for more; and more and more.

When the guests had gone and I had loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, later, much later, I lay beside Ilsebill and dreamed: A mountain, and I have to eat my way through it. But when at last I have the millet behind me, there's a mountain of boiled, still-steaming potatoes ahead. I've begun to munch my way through them as resolutely as can be, I've already gone halfway, when I'm overcome with fear that beyond the sweet millet and the steaming boiled potatoes there will be a high-piled mountain of raw rutabaga between me and the Promised Land.

He doesn't say my, he says the wife.

The wife doesn't like it.

I'll have to talk that over with the wife.

Fear tied into a knotted necktie.

Fear of going home.

Fear of admitting.

Frightened, they (both) belong to each other.

Love complains and makes its claims.

And then the usual little kiss.

Only memory counts.

Both live on bones of contention.

(The children notice something through the keyhole

and decide on the opposite for later.)

But, says he, without the wife I wouldn't have so much.

But, says she, he does what he can and then some.

A blessing, a curse, and when the curses become law.

A law that becomes more and more welfare-minded.

Between built-in closets paid for in installments

hate forms

knots in the carpet: hard to keep clean.

When sufficiently

estranged, they discover

each other only at the movies.

Going into her sixth month of pregnancy, she'd had enough of compressing her belly, lacing it in, forcing it into an ideal mold; she stopped covering the mirrors, stopped outraging her nature with pills, and, while looking for the ignition key, finding senseless pretexts for a fight. Because the child, now under her navel, was knocking in protest, she began taking things more calmly and presenting her belly, wherever she went, as an object worth admiring. No more irresponsible leaps. Rare outbreaks of primally bubbling man-hatred. Moments of gentle cow-eyedness. First acquisition of baby clothes. And after the leap over the ditch, when everything could have gone wrong, she made herself a so-called maternity dress, some sort of shit-brown smock that I termed impossible.

So we went to one of those Indian boutiques which in Hamburg and elsewhere are cheap and crammed full from floor to ceiling. Streets of dresses and avenues of blouses. So much to choose from. You only had to reach out.