Gunter Grass - The Flounder

In Sophie's eyes Fritz was a proclamation of freedom if not freedom itself — in gangling, freckle-faced form. Hopelessly as the boy stuttered at the family board, he read revolutionary proclamations with loud abandon to his little group of conspirators and cited Danton or Marat with perfect fluency. Sophie's presence oiled his vocal cords.

For Fritz and his group she sewed rosettes of tricolor ribbon. For the Jacobin Club she stole four pistols from the old arsenal at Leege Gate. For her Fritz Sophie would have done more; she'd have done anything. But fortunately, April 17, 1797, when the conspirators were arrested on Beutlergasse, was a market day; Sophie was selling smelts.

The elder Bartholdys did not long survive the conviction of their only son. Divested of his citizenship, the mer-

chant moved to Hamburg, where he and his wife soon died of cholera. Fritz Bartholdy, the corporal, four sailors, three longshoremen, and two Polish raftsmen were sentenced to death for seditious conspiracy; but only the sentences of the corporal and the two raftsmen were carried out to the full. Pastor Blech, the deacon of Saint Mary's, appealed to the highest authorities, and the sentences of Fritz and the others were commuted to life imprisonment. The sailors and longshoremen died in prison or perished as cannon fodder, for when Napoleon's forces besieged the fortress of Graudenz, they were posted to the outermost communications trenches. As for Friedrich Bartholdy, however, it was as an inmate of the fortress that he experienced the defeat of Prussia, which gave him hope, Napoleon's rise and fall, which he as a patriot suffered and celebrated, the Congress of Vienna, and the Carlsbad Decrees, whereby his sentence of life imprisonment was confirmed. Finally, after thirty-eight years in the fortress, he was released. Sophie had never stopped petitioning the successive rulers for his pardon.

It was a morose man who returned home in wooden shoes, bringing a bad cough with him. He had kept his stutter. Fritz Bartholdy could no longer be fired with enthusiasm for anything but pot roast and red cabbage. But since he lived for another ten years, and with old Fraulein Rotzoll to cook for him recovered his strength, the two of them could often, in the early fall, be seen leaving their cottage in the sand pit at the foot of the Bischofsberg and setting out with baskets over their arms to gather mushrooms. The neighborhood children shouted mocking jingles after the mushroom woman and her wood goblin. (Wasn't it strange, if not suspicious, that the two old people brought specimens of the useless fly agaric home with them along with the edible varieties?)

I've long refused to have been Friedrich Bartholdy, Sophie's Fritz, and yet I see myself, old and burnt out, on the other side of Schiedlitz, where there were still woods at the time, gathering mushrooms because Sophie wanted us to. There under the beeches, in the mixed forest, on a floor of moss and pine needles, time hadn't happened. The milk caps and egg mushrooms were still the same. And the

imperial mushrooms still stood solitary and beyond compare, as though the idea lived on in undiminished beauty. Hopefully as she questioned me, I never, not even in the woods, spoke to Sophie of my years in the fortress. She kept looking for something in me that I seem to have been when we were young and went gathering mushrooms and played at getting lost. To her the imperial mushroom was still an idea. And when she wanted to remember freedom, to experience freedom, the otherwise useless fly agaric helped her; it grows where the imperial mushroom is often to be found.

Sophie Rotzoll, who got off scot free at the trial of the Jacobin conspirators of Beutlergasse, liked to sing. That may have helped to predispose her in favor of the Revolution, which gave birth to so many new songs. Even when Fritz Bartholdy stayed and stayed in the fortress, she kept faith with the Revolution and its songs, which soon became kitchen songs. Since the Year One she had been cook and housekeeper to Pastor Blech, who not only preached at Saint Mary's, but also taught history at the Royal Gymnasium. There he had instructed young Bartholdy and, with historical examples, aroused his enthusiasm for the Republic and the virtues of Reason.

At first Pastor Blech had spoken up for the Revolution, though coded in Old Testament terms. When Queen Marie-Antoinette was guillotined, the ideal of liberty and equality lost an in principle Enlightened champion. Nevertheless, and because he had recently welcomed First Consul Napoleon as a force for order, he tolerated Sophie's rousing kitchen songs. He gave the young lady a few French lessons, which made her singing more expressive, but for the most part Sophie sang in the seaport dialect which she stylized for the sake of the rhymes and enriched with her new parsonage culture.

Sophie kept pace with the times. She, too, celebrated the savior of the Revolution, and in her songs rhymed putrid aristocrats with pickled sprats, the Republic with princes in aspic, equality with mushroom fricassee, triumphant cannonade with pepper marinade, and (it goes without saying) the latest hero Napoleon with Revolution. To her Fritz, Ian-

guishing in the fortress, she sent calves'-liver sausage made in accordance with a recipe of her own and honey cake into which, besides a certain special ingredient, she had baked encouraging little slips of paper inscribed with her rhymed barricade songs. In the dismal light the prisoner read:

"Mushroom soup in the harvest moon, Napoleeon will spring you soon. Orange agaric we mince, head and neck has many a prince. Kings are trembling, cannons booming, soon, dear Fritz, we'll go mushrooming.

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I saw an imperial mushroom today. Let freedom come, la liberte!"

And when Fritz had eaten of Sophie's honey cake, he recovered a little and scarcely felt the damp cold of his dungeon.

Meanwhile Sophie went to the woods alone and was not afraid. There, too, she sang, and rhymed what went into her basket. Nearsighted as she was, she always found what she wanted. Or else honey tufts, egg mushrooms, butter fungus, and broad-topped parasol mushrooms ran after her.

And just as she did while gathering mushrooms, so Pastor Blech's cook also sang while stirring, rolling, beating egg whites, washing dishes, or stuffing thickened blood or chopped calves' liver into sausage skins. Some of her dishes that were served up at the parsonage were given the names of Napoleon's victories: cabbage with Gdnseklein a la Marengo, for instance. But when Sophie named her ragout of veal after the double disaster of Jena and Auerstedt, Deacon Blech remonstrated. "My dear child," he said, "though it may look as if only the king had lost these two battles, this war and its miseries will soon overtake us all, just and unjust alike. Already Stettin has capitulated. Already our forces here in Danzig are putting up palisades around the bastions. Already, after a brief stay in our threatened city, the royal family have again taken flight and established themselves in distant Konigsberg. And already the garrison here is being reinforced. Two field regiments and two grenadier battalions arrived yesterday. Some fusiliers are due tomorrow. Even

Cossacks are expected. You just have no idea, my child, what this means. After all the sieges our city has undergone, sieges in which Teutonic Knights, Brandenburgers, Hussites, King Stephen Batory of Poland, Russians, Saxons, and time and time again Poles and Swedes have distinguished themselves, the French are about to give us a demonstration of their skill as besiegers. This is no time to be singing sans-culottish hymns to freedom or indulging your kitchen wit."

It was then that Pastor Blech, who was me in my Napoleonic time-phase, began to write his chronicle, which later appeared in two volumes under the title History of Danzig's Seven-Year Sufferings and met with a divided reception. Blech did not spare the collaborationists among his fellow citizens. (But concerning Sophie's dual role I confined myself to hints.) At any rate Sophie stopped singing in the kitchen, in the stairwell, or over the crinkled parsley in the parsonage garden. She dispatched her housekeeping duties in sullen silence. Day after day she served bread-and-beer soups with dumplings, though the woods were full of green-ies and honey tufts and one could hope to find a last few solitary imperial mushrooms. No more searching for happiness. Only bad news brought Sophie cheer. In mid-November the suburbs were evacuated. The hamlet of Neugarten was razed. The Church of Saint Barbara became a hay barn, then an emergency hospital. Already the Kashubian countryside was infested with Polish insurgents. In the new year, to be sure, successful engagements, especially the victory at Preussisch-Eylau, gave new hope; in mid-February a solemn Te Deum was sung at Saint Mary's, but then Dirschau fell, and on March 7, Praust.