Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Even the Flounder, who had advised us to develop along these lines, became more and more horrified and ultimately took refuge — that was in Napoleon's time — in the Low German fairy tale. By then he was giving only minor advice. Then for a long while he said nothing. It's only recently that he's become approachable again. Now he advises me to help Ilsebill with the dishes and — in view of her pregnancy — to sign up for a course in infant care. "Lots of women," he says, "are quite capable of doing a man's work. Like your able Ilsebill. That deserves recognition, my son, and it has been our benevolent intention to recognize it from the very start, ever since I voluntarily forced my way into your eel trap." ♦

And just imagine, Ilsebill, just recently the Flounder told me he means to answer those women and their indict-

ment any day now. And he condemned the Grimms' distortion of his legend. "That fairy story," he said, "has got to go!"

We — two roles.

You and I keep — you the soup warm,

I the spirits cold.

Some time, long before Charlemagne,

I became self-aware

whereas you have only perpetuated yourself.

You are — I became.

You are still wanting — I'm reaching out again.

You secure your small province—

I venture my vast project.

You keep peace in the house — I hurry forth.

Division of labor.

Come, hold the ladder while I climb.

Your whimpering won't help; in that case I'd rather cool the

champagne. Just hold steady while I come at you from behind.

My brave little Ilsebill,

on whom I can utterly rely,

of whom, to tell the truth, I would like to be proud,

who with a few deft strokes fixes everything shipshape,

whom I worship worship

while she, through inner recycling,

becomes entirely different, differently strange and self-aware.

May I still give you a light?

I've already told you: one neolithic day he squeezed into my eel trap. In those days women kept the lid on everything that might have been controversial. Our pact is known: I let him

go. He helped me through the ages with his Floundery advice. Through the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age. Through the Early Christian, High Gothic, Evangelical, and Baroque periods; through enlightened absolutism, socialism, and capitalism. The Flounder anticipated every historic change, every shift of fashion, every revolution and relapse, every latest truth or progress. In short, he deliberately helped to promote the male cause. We, we at last, had our hand on the throttle.

Until yesterday. Now he won't speak to me. Imploringly and repeatedly I cry out "Flounder, Flounder," but no familiar "What is it, my son?" comes in answer. Women sit at a long table judging him. He has already started to confess in a dilatory sort of way. (And I, too, confess, to the reasons why the Flounder has been disgusted with me and the male cause for quite some time.)

When, a few months before the oil crisis, I called him out of the sea (for advice on my income-tax problems), he denounced our agreement: "Nothing can be expected of you daddies any more. Nothing but dodges and gimmicks. Now," he said as though in leave-taking, "I'll just have to pay a little attention to the Ilsebills."

Naturally it was in the murky Baltic that he got himself hooked. Tradition means a lot to him. If not in the Bay of Danzig, then at least in Liibeck Bay, in the slop that laves the eastern coast of Holstein, between the lighthouses of Cismar and Scharbeutz, barely a sea mile from the tarry fringe of the bathing beaches, he consciously consented and — as he later confessed in court—"voluntarily gave the three bored ladies a bit of fisherman's luck."

Sieglinde Huntscha, who for a time responded to no other name than Siggie, Susanne Maxen, known as Maxie, and Franziska Ludkowiak, Frankie for short, had rented a sailboat for a few hours in the coastal village of Cismar and, more often becalmed than bebreezed, were boring one another stiff with their jargon. Three hard-boiled females in their thirties (about your age, Ilsebill), Maxie in her early, Frankie in her late ones, who when speaking invariably spit contemptuously after every few sentences, who describe just about everything as shit, shitty, or at the very least crappy.

Probably because, for reasons hard to define, Siggie, Maxie, and Frankie thought of themselves as lesbians and consequently belonged to a women's liberation group, whose first commandment was radical rejection of male penetration, Siggie had taken her walking stick — a common masculine article covered with souvenir plaques — into the boat with her. This stick served as a fishing pole. A piece of plain string had been fastened to it. The hook was a pair of sexless nail scissors. Frankie busied herself folding bits of newspaper into little boats. They, too, floated motionless. Not the slightest breeze consented to rise.

Siggie wasn't even telling fishermen's jokes. They knew nothing about sailing and just drifted this way and that, meanwhile needling one another in the extravagant terms of the long-dead student movement. Everything — including Sig-gie's fishing — struck them as pretty shitty. "What we really need," said Frankie while folding a boat, "is an ideologically acceptable prop for our superegos." And then the Flounder bit.

So help me, Ilsebill! Deliberately taking his cue. (Later on, in court, he testified that it hadn't been so easy to get speared by that sharp but unsteady nail-scissor blade. He had had to ram it through his upper lip twice.)

It was Maxie who managed to utter the traditional cry of "Got him!" To which she added: "Pull, Siggie! Pull him in! Boy oh boy!"

And the millennial "Ah!" And the anticipation: will it be the extraordinary, the rare, no, unique and legendary fish of the ages, or only a soggy old shoe? Fisherman's luck. You just have to keep patiently quiet. Timelessly suck your tongue. Think of nothing or the opposite. Cancel yourself out until you might just as well be somebody else. Or say the magic word. Or be hook and bait yourself. The writhing little worm.

But, though bare, the scissors-hook had aroused the Flounder's appetite. The flatfish lay flat on the bottom of the boat. His upper lip didn't start bleeding until Siggie cautiously, but with what can only be termed manly courage, pulled the hook out of the bulge. The size of him! Never (except once upon a time) had so imposing a specimen been caught in the Baltic. I'm almost inclined to think that my

neolithic catch was less impressive. He has grown since then. More pebbles lump and wrinkle his skin. Can it be that he, too, ages with time? That he's mortal?

In spite of his size, it was still an ordinary fish that called forth the females' amazement. Frankie called him a nifty flounder and suggested simmering him in white wine. She had seen fresh dill, so she said, in one of the many food stores that make the beach resort of Scharbeutz a shoppers' Mecca. Siggie wanted to oil him on both sides, sprinkle him with basil, and bake him for half an hour in a moderate oven.

The three lived in a farm hand's hovel rented out as a holiday cottage. Since Maxie refused to eat any fish that could be recognized as such — Ugh! — Frankie suggested filleting the Flounder, cutting him into strips, rolling him in egg, and deep-frying him, because then he would no longer be recognizable as fish.

Siggie said, "Damn it! Our Billy should have been here. She'd have sauteed this flounder in tarragon butter or maybe flamed him in cognac." And Frankie chimed in with, "How about it, Maxie? If our Billy served up the flounder with all the trimmings. What do you say? Would it still be 'ugh'?"