Gunter Grass - The Flounder

It was more difficult to bring wild mushrooms into the besieged city. The midsummer floods helped. Since the Russians were still allowing fugitives from the flooded Island to pass through their lines into the Lower City, Sophie was able to make an arrangement with the Kashubian raftsmen. Coming from Petershagen by raft, the fugitives had to pay five Prussian ducats each, half of which went to the Russian outposts, while the French commander of the Gertrud Bastion demanded one ducat a head. In return for the governor's written authorization of this refugee trade, the (in principle) neutral Kashubians supplied, for money or confiscated English cloth, what the cook Sophie Rotzoll required: in the early fall, partridges, hares, deer that had been shot in the woods between the lakes for the governor's table, little baskets of cranberries, plums, and edible mushrooms. Until one day Sophie, having made her plan, sent her cousin Lovise

at the Oliva forester's lodge a secret message, asking for special mushrooms. The usual shopping list — fresh butter, pullets' eggs, Glumse, sorrel, and dill — included certain old Kashubian words.

Eighteen thirteen. A mushroom year. Like Sophie, her cousin knew all the edible, unpalatable, and poisonous varieties. She knew where they grew on moss or pine needles, in clearings or in underbrush, singly or in magic circles. As children we had often gone mushrooming, with Sophie in the lead. When her grandmother Amanda Woyke was still alive. Out on the front porch she taught Sophie and Lovise to recite the names of all the mushrooms.

This is the dark horn of plenty. It grows under beeches and tastes good. This is the broad-brimmed hawk mushroom; it loses its bitter taste when blanched, and it's very good for you. This is a greenie, but it has other names. These are tree mushrooms; the trunks of alders and poplars are sometimes full of them, and they're good for flavoring soups. This is the cep, also known as the imperial mushroom. It stands alone. And it's good luck to find one. (The fly agaric shows you where to look.) This thin one is anise agaric; Grandmother used to pickle them in vinegar for the inspector of crown lands. This is orange agaric. They have crumbly, hollow stems, they grow under young pines, and they taste like veal. This beauty is a parasol mushroom. Everybody knows them. Fairy tales happen under their umbrellas. They protect you from the evil eye. If you eat them raw, they taste like nuts. This is the honey tuft; they grow in clusters. They don't come up until late fall, and they don't agree with everybody. Ink caps (very tasty) grow in the rubble along the monastery wall. Greenies are sandy and need to be washed thoroughly. And these here are morels; we string them like beads or spit them on thorny branches to dry, and then we flavor our winter soups with them. And these are the political mushrooms: the names are sulfur tuft, panther cap, destroying angel, and deadly amanita.

Autumn 1813. Sophie knew the time had come. For years she had been including revenge for her imprisoned Fritz in her evening prayers, just before the amen, but it took her a long time to decide what special ingredients she should add to the mushroom stuffing of her calf's head to

be sure of the effect. The panther cap wrecks the nervous system, often with fatal results. The sulfur tuft contains the poison muscarine, and so does the destroying angel, but in stronger concentration. The deadly amanita, which has a faint, sweetish smell and tends to grow under oak trees, destroys the blood corpuscles, but not until twenty-four hours later, when it has long been digested, or so one would suppose.

Sophie decided to use them all. Along with a basket of magnificent, almost maggotless imperial mushrooms, her cousin Lovise at the forester's lodge sent her the requested varieties wrapped in a knotted cloth. And because fly agaric acts as a stimulant, she put in two young, still bulb-shaped specimens. In addition, the Kashubian raftsmen, who were still carrying fugitives from the flooded Island to the besieged city, brought a basket of otherwise unobtainable sorrel and fresh parsley. As for the Westphalian calf's head, the kitchen squad had requisitioned it the day before. (All the butter, eggs, and Glumse had been taken by the Russians.) The calendar read September 26.

During the day the Prussian batteries in Aschbude and Schellmuhle had set the Dominican monastery on fire with red-hot cannon balls and Congreve rockets. Advancing from Ohra amid light musket fire, the Russians had attacked the outworks of the star redoubt. But Major Le Gros, who was one of the invited dinner guests, had thrown the Russians back with canister shot before they could reach the palisades.

Always when Sophie prepared a calf's head for Governor Rapp and his guests, either to be stuffed or to be served in sour herb jelly, she obtained as a by-product soup for her special boarders. Behind the governor's house on the Long Garden, standing white in the late summer shade of lindens and maples, beyond range of the allied batteries, the hungry children of the Wicker Bastion came crawling through the bushes, rattling their bowls.

After removing the cushions of skin, the fat cheeks, the embedded eyes, the ears, and the soft mouth from the bone with a short, sharp knife, after detaching the tongue, spooning the brains out of the split skull, stuffing the boned calf's-head casing with the precooked tongue, the brains, the

chopped onion, and the mushrooms cut in slices, and sewing it up, Sophie boiled the removed bones, in other words, the calf's upper and lower jaws, with barley and lovage until the bones were bare and the flat, deep-rooted molars as well as the long front teeth of the lower jaw were easily pulled. They looked nice. And with the thick barley soup, which she poured over the fence into tin bowls, Sophie gave the Wicker Bastion children long, fat calves' teeth, which were good for earache, gave you sweet dreams, protected you from flying lead, gave strength to your first, second, and third wish at the time of the full moon, and in general made for happiness.

Many years later, when old Fraulein Rotzoll was buried in the graveyard of Saint Barbara's, the mourners included several sedate ladies and gentlemen who still carried those calves' teeth as good-luck charms in their handbags or tobacco pouches. During the siege, they said — though none of the children wanted to hear about the siege — when hunger had settled in every neighborhood, when after the dogs the rats were eaten, when even human flesh (Cossacks who had gone astray on patrol) was sold in the market as pork goulash, a pound for twelve groschen, while horse meat was selling for eleven groschen, an angel — yes, an angel, though the city women called her "Rapp's whore" — saved us from starvation with her thick soups.

Sophie never gave the governor or his guests any calves' teeth. Every day Rapp had guests at table, sometimes few, sometimes many. In the years before the siege he received quite a few celebrities, such as Murat, Berthier, Talleyrand, the future prince Bernadotte. But he also invited selected city notables, to whom, after dinner, he served up the bill for their "contribution." On several occasions Pastor Blech had been the governor's sole guest. The two men got along nicely as long as the conversation revolved around the ifs and buts of the revolutionary years, Sophie's cookery, or most knowledgeably, the growing of roses.

After dinner Blech always submitted a petition for the pardon of his former pupil Friedrich Bartholdy, who by then was well into his second decade as a prisoner in the fortress of Graudenz. But Rapp rejected all petitions, alleging that

Europe must first be at perfect peace. As long as England failed to knuckle under, as long as Schill's bands were fomenting insurrection, as long as the emperor was being defied in the mountains of Spain and elsewhere, a pardon was not to be expected, for law and order must be demonstrated incontrovertibly. Rapp also gave the pastor to understand that the virginal pride of his cook, Sophie — since it was on her behalf that the pastor wrote his petitions — forced him to be hard. Yes, yes, why not admit it, he was mad about the obstinate creature; no fort had ever resisted him like Sophie. He didn't expect her to love him as she loved her imprisoned Fritz. But a man of his stamp couldn't be warmed by her everlasting "no." If she wanted her man back, she should just open up a bit for him, the governor. What he asked was only natural and would be fun for both parties.