Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Taking, no, grabbing five or seven dresses — roomy at the waist, laced under the bosom, and more or less simply cut — Ilsebill escaped with her prey into one of the little curtained-off dressing rooms. Then at brief intervals she appeared five or seven times in Indian cotton or silk: embroidered, decorated with little mirrors around the swollen bosom, or corn-yellow and mystic-green, or all of red bunting.

A show just for me. I nodded, expressed misgivings, praised what I disliked, carped at what I wanted to see her wearing, stuck to my role, and considered myself halfway victorious when she finally decided, if not on the wide-sleeved corn-yellow one or, despite a moment's hesitation, on the mystic-green silk one, at least on the simple, roomy one all of red bunting, with red embroidery only over the bosom. A floor-length dress with spacious sleeves. The ample folds, just the thing for the swelling belly, festive yet casual. A bargain at eighty-five ninety, no problems up to the eighth month, and possible to wear even after the delivery. Already I saw her slender, with company at parties, in discussion groups, traveling.

"It's not so bad here in the West," said Ilsebill. "I mean rummaging, trying on, not wanting to buy, being free to pick and choose." Guilty conscience expressed itself only in an aside: "Of course the things are so cheap there's got to be exploitation. That cheap labor in Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, and so on." In red bunting, she flung these words of accusation in my face. As her husband, I have to answer for every male misdeed perpetrated in historical times or the present. "Can you tell me, for instance, what the fat bosses down there pay their seamstresses? Take a look at this. All hand-sewn!"

During her five or seven Indian acts, I was surrounded by women who rummaged, briefly tried on, rejected, or selected. A few of them were also pregnant. Or may have been. Asian kitsch in glasses, on straw dishes, in brightly colored cardboard boxes. Unneeded for moments at a time, I relapsed into my obsessive daydream of having been Vasco da Gama and discovered the sea route to India: all of a sudden, the Malabar Coast — palm trees, everywhere palm trees — lies ahead of us, palpably close. We send a convict ashore to see what will happen, and he comes back unharmed,

telling of wonders. Napoleon, in whose time lived Sophie Rotzoll, the prettiest of all cooks, is thought to have had military designs on India. But when I was still Vasco da Gama, full of unrest and inwardly rich in figures. .

The smell of musk did it. Bittersweet smoke arose from several little bowls. Music from somewhere, packed in cotton batting, made everything still cheaper. The salesgirls, though all of the Hamburg build, moved like temple dancers in their first year of training. Soft-spoken empathy. "The pale-blue one with the white braid is also being worn a good deal." Ilsebill settled on the red bunting.

"I feel entirely different now," she said. "No, not Indian, of course not. Just somehow different."

I said, "We owe it all to Vasco da Gama and his successors. He brought down the price of more things than pepper."

We promised the salesgirls to come again in the eighth month. "By that time," said the long-suffering cashier with the blue eye shadow, "our summer collection will be in. Really delicious stuff."

In paying, I put one mark ten into the "Bread for the World" collection box. Outside, in spite of a halfhearted March sun, it was too cold for the red bunting, which changed color in the daylight: Ilsebill shivered in her flyagaric-red acquisition. I helped her on with her coat.

We seek

and think we find;

but it has a different name

and belongs to a different family.

Once we found one

that didn't exist.

My spectacles clouded over.

A jay screamed,

we ran away.

It seems that in the woods around Saskoschin they looked each other over. And because the egg mushrooms were still recognizable the others laughed at them.

Mushrooms mean something. It's not just the edible ones that stand on one leg at attention for metaphors.

Sophie, who later became a cook and political as well, knew them all by name.

In the fall of 1807—the farm cook Amanda Woyke was dead, French troops were billeted all over the place, Sophie, Amanda's granddaughter, still in a revolutionary frame of mind, was beginning to cook for Napoleon's governor, and mushrooms were plentiful in all the forests — the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm met the poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim at the Oliva forester's lodge, to discuss a publishing venture and exchange ideas.

In the previous year von Arnim and Brentano had published a collection of rare and precious folk songs and folk poetry under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). Since the general misery brought on by the war increased people's need for sweet-sounding words, and since fear sought refuge in fairy tales, they had come to this quiet spot, far from the city's bustle and from the political quarrels that had become the stuff of daily life, to compile a second and third volume from their still-unsorted hoard of rare treasures, hoping at long last, after so much cold Enlightenment and classical rigor, to give their people some consolation, if only the consolation of escape.

Two days later, the painter Philipp Otto Runge and Clemens Brentano's sister arrived, he from Hamburg via Stettin, she from Berlin. The forester's lodge had been recom-

mended to the friends by Pastor Blech, deacon of Saint Mary's Church in Danzig, through Friedrich Karl von Savigny, with whom he corresponded; and besides, the young people were drawn to secret meeting places in the heart of nature. Only the old forester and a Kashubian woodsman with his wife and four children lived in the wooden house, situated, as though outside of time, between woodland pool and deer meadow.

The friends found the silence hard to bear. When Bren-tano, whose wife had died and whose second marriage, concluded a few months before, was off to an unhappy start, wasn't sulking, he was offending the others, especially the sensitive Wilhelm Grimm, with his strained wit. His sister was still full of her travel experiences; that spring she had actually met Goethe, with whose mother she corresponded. The dialogue between the two women was to lead quite naturally to a book of jottings about the great man's childhood.

Jakob Grimm and von Arnim, who had moved to Konigs-berg immediately after the disaster of Jena and Auerstedt, spoke bitterly of the recently concluded Peace of Tilsit, which they termed a shameful Diktat. Von Arnim had decided by then to confine his activities to the management of his estates. Jakob Grimm was trying to decide whether to accept the post of private librarian to the detested upstart king Jerome Bonaparte at Schloss Wilhelmshohe near Kassel. (He did.) Wilhelm, who had just completed his study of law, decided that in such evil times it would suit him best to be an independent scholar. All spoke of their hopes and plans. Only painter Runge remained silent (though full of inner discourse) and aloof from the happenings of the day. He had come from Hamburg, stopping on his way at his native city of Wolgast and the nearby island of Riigen, where, some years before, he had heard an old woman, now dead, speaking in the Low German dialect of the coast, tell a number of tales, a few of which he had written down. A man with side whiskers, bulging eyes, and a constantly worried forehead, who in another three years would die of consumption, cut down, as they say, in his prime.

The forester's lodge was a good hour's walk from Oliva,

and though its attic rooms, in which the friends dreamed away their happiness and slept away their sorrows, were narrow and low-ceilinged, the kitchen, with its long table on a floor of beaten earth, offered room enough for agitated pacing, impassioned harangues, rebounding laughter, and far too many sheets of neatly penned manuscript or correspondence with publishers. The brick stove, at which the forester's wife, who answered to the name of Lovise, was permanently busy, maintained a pleasant warmth. There was always a pot of hot malt-coffee on the stove, and in the breadbasket a big loaf of rye bread from which the friends broke off chunks because it was fresh-baked and made them ravenous. Only seldom was a whimper heard from one of the four children, all of whom, from the six-month-old infant to the six-year-old Amanda, were 1 fed from Lovise's breast. This the friends saw with surprise and some misgiving. Only Bettina was delighted. "That's life!" she cried. "Simple and authentic!"