Gunter Grass - The Flounder

That would have provoked more quarreling at the long table if the sensitive Wilhelm hadn't suddenly said, "The moon! Look at the moon!" They all looked through the little windows and saw how the full moon shed its light on the pond where the swans were sleeping and the deer meadow where the deer were grazing.

So they went out in front of the forester's lodge. Only the forester stayed on the stove bench. But while they were all looking at the moon and thinking up pretty names to call it by, painter Runge returned to the house, came back with a brand he had taken out of the stove, and set fire to a sheet of paper with writing on both sides.

"All right, Mr. Flounder," said Runge when the manuscript was consumed. "There goes your other truth.'"

"Good Lord!" cried the younger Grimm. "I only hope you've done the right thing."

Then they all went back into the house. And now I must write and write.

What would I be without Ilsebill! the fisherman cried contentedly.

My wishes clothe themselves in hers. Those that come true don't count. Except for us everything's made up. Only the fairy tale is r§al. Always, when I call, the Flounder comes. I want, I want, I want to be like Ilsebill.

Higher, deeper, more golden, twice as much.

More beautiful than imagined.

Mirrored ad infinitum.

And because the concepts of life and death no longer.

And have a chance to invent the wheel once more.

Not long ago I dreamed riches: everything I could have wished for, bread, cheese, nuts, and wine, only I wasn't there to enjoy them. So then my wishes went off again and searched beyond the mountains for their double meaning: Ilsebill or me.

It was easier to tell us apart by our shoes, which were found later — those are Max's, those Gottlieb's, those Fritzchen's— than by our faces before; the three of us with our round heads could be confused as readily as the mushrooms in the woods around Zuckau and Kokoschken, where we went with Sophie, who, after we had once again managed to get lost, called all the mushrooms and us, too, by name.

That must have been in the fall of '89, because seven years later, when after a good many things had happened we found our way out of the woods, Fritz Bartholdy wanted to proclaim the republic right away; and Sophie, who brought home baskets full of chestnut mushrooms and lordly ceps, agreed with her Fritz.

That's how big the forests were in those days: if you got lost in them as a child, you were older by the time you got back. Almost grown up, and with his mouth full of determination, the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy declared, when we met in the attic of his father's town house at Beutlergasse 7, "Freedom must be won by violence!" Sometimes he quoted Danton, who was dead, and sometimes Marat or Robespierre, who were also dead. But because we'd been gathering mushrooms repeatedly and for so long, the idea had stuck with us. It was as beautiful as a solitary cep. And when Sophie read aloud what the latest gazette had to say about General Bonaparte, Fritz said, "Maybe this Napoleon is the idea for our time."

Since then I've gathered mushrooms time and time again with Sophie, Ilsebill, and whoever. Names I've shouted in the woods. My terror when no answer came. And sometimes I, too, have found, I, too, have been called, and I've answered too late.

Last fall, before we made the baby after mutton with beans and pears as though it were an idea, Ilsebill, while gathering mushrooms in Geest Forest near Itzehoe, found a solitary cep, which was so big that we long looked in vain for something to compare it with, until Sophie, in the adjoining forest but just two centuries earlier, found an even bigger one that was beyond compare. Like all mushroom forests, those I've gone into with Ilsebill, Sophie, and whoever are twined and matted with ferns and seamlessly upholstered with moss; I never knew who actually found the biggest cep — which in Sophie's day was known as the imperial mushroom — when or where.

Ilsebill found hers at the edge of a clearing, while on a bed of pine needles some distance away I found, clustered close together, enough orange agaric for a whole meal. (Fried in butter, they taste like meat.) Gathering mushrooms is worthwhile. True, you lose time — how often Sophie and I

strayed farther and farther apart while calling each other— but some, not all, of the years lost in this way will be found again as long as there are forests. Ilsebill wouldn't believe me when I told her that. She thinks every mushroom she finds is the first and last. That there's never been anything comparable. And that never again will an imperial mushroom stand singly on such a stem, so luxuriantly hatted, in a bed of moss, and — while the hand still hesitates — make someone happy, incomparably happy.

For seven years, while beyond the woods the Revolution was going on and the guillotine was being celebrated as humane and progressive, we gathered mushrooms and had a beautiful idea. We'lay under parasol mushrooms. Uprooted, the stinkhorn with the lacquer-green head ran after us. Anise agaric stood in a magic circle. We didn't know yet what fly agaric can do in addition to shining red. Sophie wore a funnel-shaped miller mushroom as a hat; its imposing stem rose heavenward, looking like my father's cock when with open breeches he climbed the stairs to my mother's room to beget me, his son Fritz.

Much later, when Ilsebill sat still for me under the miller mushroom and I with a soft pencil drew a picture out of which Sophie peered gravely, she no longer looked like a child. By then she knew everything. No more curiosity. That's why she never let Governor Rapp, imperiously as he wanted to, bury his stinkhorn in her moss. Sophie stayed closed.

Of course we were never really lost. A jay screamed, showing the way. Ants were our pacemakers. Across clearings, through chest-high ferns, between smooth beech trees we went down and down until we came to the river Ra-daune, which flowed to Zuckau, where Sophie's grandmother would be sitting on the front porch, reading the latest news of the Revolution to Inspector of Crown Lands Romeike; those terrifying words: September murders. When she had finished, Amanda Woyke the farm cook would inspect our haul, mushroom by mushroom, and tell us about the imperial mushrooms she had found in the woods around Zuckau in times of famine, when there were no potatoes yet.

Max, who gathered mushrooms with us, emigrated to America later on. Gottlieb Kutschorra, who came from Vier-

eck, married Sophie's cousin Lovise, who also gathered mushrooms with us. He became a woodsman, and she kept house in the Oliva forester's lodge. And later on, because Sophie's mother, Anna, had married a city man after Danzig became Prussian, Sophie Rotzoll, who took her name from her stepfather, a journeyman brewer, came into daily contact with the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy, who was making his final preparations in his father's house on Beutlergasse.

When, with a few sailors and raftsmen, some longshoremen, and a corporal of the former city watch, which four years before, on Holy Thursday 1793, had tried with disorganized rifle fire to stop the Prussians from occupying the city, gymnasium student Bartholdy founded a Jacobin club and, taking an example from France, decided to proclaim the Revolution and with it the Republic of Danzig, Sophie Rotzoll, who since the brewer's death had been selling flounders, smelts, and lampreys at Hawkers' Gate with her mother, was fourteen, and because she was in love with the seventeen-year-old gymnasium student, she was also wild about all things revolutionary. She had known Fritz since they were children, for his mother was a staunch believer in family excursions to the country. Fritz and Sophie were both to be seen with the Zuckau children at raspberry-picking time; they had caught crayfish in the Radaune, helped with the potato harvest, and gathered mushrooms in the fall.