Gunter Grass - The Flounder

The friends, who were all stricken by the misfortune of their fatherland, agreed. Only Bettina would hear no slur

on the greatness of her undersized hero. Hadn't she heard Goethe in person, himself a great man, praise Napoleon in no uncertain terms? Whereupon Arnim poured abuse on Goethe and waxed loudly patriotic. (Later on, during the War of Liberation, he was to show bravery as captain in a Landsturm battalion.)

To all this Runge said nothing, though he had his own grounds for bitterness against the great man of Weimar, who, when viewing Runge's Achilles's Combat with the River Gods at a competitive exhibition, had thought it "not classical enough." Once, to be sure, though no one heard him, Runge informed his friends that the old woman had said both tales were true.

When Brentano*now declared the quarrelsome, greedy Ilsebill from the one tale to represent the very essence of womanhood, in support of which judgment he cited some revolting anecdotes drawn from his recent but already foundered marriage to a certain Auguste Busmann, Bettina (who after the Revolution of 1830 was to become a militant champion of women's rights) was furious with her outspoken brother: "Haven't we women been humiliated enough?" Then, with a glance at the silent Kashubian woman at the stove (and her frightened children), she put an end to the angry quarrel: "Friends, let's stop and think this over quietly. Our dear Lovise tells me the woods are full of mushrooms. Let's entrust ourselves to nature and gather into our baskets what it has to offer us. It's still early afternoon. The autumn sun will give us a golden light. Where, if not in the forest cathedral, will our quarrel give way to appeasement? And besides, our dear Lovise has announced her cousin's visit for this evening. She is the local governor's cook and moreover an expert on mushrooms."

So they went into the forest, which they saw in different ways. Each carried a basket. For fear of getting lost, they arranged to remain within calling distance of one another. Oliva Forest, consisting mostly of beeches, merged with Goldkrug Forest and the hilly woods of Kashubia farther inland. Brentano was soon overpowered (as though rehearsing his subsequent conversion to Catholicism) by a feeling

of profound yet exalted, all-embracing yet concentrated piety. Sobbing with Weltschmerz as, holding his empty basket, he leaned against a smooth beech trunk, he was found by the sensitive Wilhelm, whose consolations were so ineffectual that he, too, burst into tears; whereupon they threw their arms around each other, and so they remained until their sobs died down and, moving like blind men, they finally gathered a few mushrooms: for the most part inedible members of the agaric family, more sulfur cups than honey tufts.

Meanwhile Arnim and Bettina (who were to marry some years later and have eight children) had met as though by chance at the edge of a clearing by the side of a dark pond. They showed each other what they had gathered in their baskets: Arnim was proud of a few specimens of butter fungus and numerous chestnut mushrooms; the playful Bettina called attention to a few moss heads and begged indulgence for the fly agaric she had gathered. They were as beautiful as fairy tales, she said. They emanated enchantment. She knew that fly agaric, even if one ate only a little, induced dreams, suspended time, freed the self, and reconciled the most glaring contradictions. Thereupon she peeled the skin from the cap, broke off a morsel, took some for herself, ate a piece, and gave some to Arnim. Then they stood silent, waiting for the effect. It soon made itself felt. His fingers and hers wanted to play together. Standing eye to eye, they looked deep into each other's souls. They spoke words clad in purple that found their mirror image in every pool of water. Bettina compared the nearby pond to the sorrowful eye of an enchanted prince.

When the effect of the fly agaric wore off a little — the sky had already begun to darken — Arnim reached into his trouser pocket and found a peasant knife, which he had bought for next to nothing while on a trip to the Rhineland with his friend Brentano. With it he cut into a beech trunk, as smooth as the one Clemens and Wilhelm had wept by, the word "forever," and under it the letters "A" and "B." (Thus they made the clearing and the dark pond significant. Much later a stone was placed there, which remembered them with a hewn inscription.)

Meanwhile Jakob Grimm and Philipp Otto Runge had managed to carry on a serious conversation, though they had passed any number of honey tufts and a few ceps. Runge was not only a painter but also a theoretician; he wrote about colors, for which reason a work entitled "The Color Globe" was found among his posthumous papers; whereas Jakob Grimm studied the laws of phonetic change, the mythological background of all reality, and vast realms of words, for which reason we still refer to the dictionary that bears his name.

At length they got around to the two versions of the fairy tale about the Flounder. Jakob Grimm said he would be glad, at his next opportunity, to publish the first version, in which the greedy Ilsebill,is sent back to her pisspot. (And indeed, a year after Runge's death, the tale of "The Fisherman and His Wife" was included in the Grimm brothers' Kinder- und Hausmarchen. The other version, however — as Runge himself finally agreed — would have to be withheld, because of its apocalyptic tone. "It would seem," said the painter with some bitterness, "that we humans can tolerate the one truth and never the other."

The elder Grimm brother wondered if it might not be possible to rewrite the tale, stressing the ethical aspect, to convert it into a political attack on Napoleon, and so make it serve the unhappy fatherland. (And in 1814, to be sure, such an attack on the tyrant was published in High German; but by then Napoleon had already been defeated.)

And now, as dusk descended on Oliva Forest, the friends called out till they found one another, but they didn't know the way back. They were just beginning to be afraid — even Runge and the elder Grimm brother were troubled — when the forester appeared from the depths of the woods. He must have heard their cries. Without a word, as though there were nothing to say, he led them all home.

At the forester's lodge, beside the pond and the already dark deer meadow, the woodsman's Kashubian wife's cousin had by then arrived with fresh-baked bread from the governor's kitchen. Lovise called her cousin Sophie. And when the pretty but noisy young lady began to sort the mushrooms that had been gathered, saying, for instance, "This is a sulfur

tuft, it's poisonous," Brentano remembered sorrowfully that Sophie had been the name of his wife who had died a year before.

And Sophie Rotzoll — as the French governor's cook continued to be called — cleaned the good mushrooms and fried them in a big pan with bacon and onions till they gave off juice, which she peppered and at the end seasoned with parsley. The friends ate of the dish at the long table, and there was enough for Lovise and Sophie as well. The old forester and the Kashubian woodsman, whose name was Kutschorra, sat on the stove bench, dipping chunks of the bread Sophie had brought into bowls of beer soup left over from the day before. And the friends also broke off chunks of bread. In the bedroom beside the kitchen, Lovise's children were no doubt dreaming of spice cookies with anise baked into them.

How merrily the friends talked. How cleverly Sophie the cook answered their questions. When the conversation suddenly went back to the Flounder and his truths, Sophie and Lovise said that they, too, had heard such tales. But only the one truth was right. It was the men and no one else who wanted more and more and more. "They're to blame for all the trouble!" cried Sophie, slamming her fist down on the bread.