Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Pastor Blech never came to dinner again after that. And Sophie, who wanted to keep her virginity for Fritz, stopped putting in her petitions. But it was only when Rapp had returned from Moscow and recovered from his frostbite, when the city was encircled and besieged by Prussians and Russians, when the people of the city were gouged, humiliated, exposed to the outrageous demands of the commissaires and (within plain sight of the still-banqueting French) to merciless hunger, that she made up her mind. In the early fall she wrote to her cousin Lovise and soon received, buried in sorrel, the desired ingredients: mushrooming hate.

Here's how we see her: still girlish, though, with her thirty years, old enough to be a matron. Head slightly tilted over the imperial mushrooms. Her peat-brown hair, plaited into a kind of bird's nest. Eyes close-set. Two vertical creases in her forehead underline her determination. An acute angle. Her nose. Her small mouth whistling kitchen songs. Now she cuts an imperial mushroom into slices from stem to cap. Not a one is discolored. How lovely they are. Silence in the kitchen. The whistling has stopped. Now she puts on her spectacles. Produces something from under the sorrel.

On September 26, when Sophie stuffed a boned calf's head with mushrooms in such a way that it resumed its full-rounded form, the guests were the heroic French major Le Gros, a Saxon merchant by the name of Zetsche, and three

Polish officers, one of them being a young uhlan, the son of General Wojczinski. The company was in high spirits and made a great fuss over Le Gros, whose cannoneers had repulsed a Russian attack on the star redoubt. The first course — in view of wartime shortages — was a simple sorrel soup with flour dumplings. Then Sophie served smoked Vistula salmon, which was always available because the midsummer floods had driven pike, salmon, and perch into the ditches and gutters of the besieged city. Then, emerging crisp from the oven, accompanied by the saffron rice with which the Neapolitan allies were constrained to supply the governor's table, came the calf's head, whose stuffing Sophie, by way of avenging the betrayed revolution, the years of tyranny, the insults to her virginal pride, and her imprisoned Fritz, had seasoned with four definitive arguments. (A small amount of fly-agaric juice may have been stirred into the sorrel soup as a stimulant.)

Actually she felt no loathing for Rapp. It would be more accurate to speak of indifference and vicarious hate. He wasn't the worst of them. He kept the looting within limits. He punished the depredations of drunken soldiers severely. For a few months — while Rapp was in Russia with Napoleon — the citizens had longed for his return. At least— and here Pastor Blech agreed — Rapp kept order. That he, too, confiscated a fortune, that he had a hand in the general profiteering and traded through middlemen (among them the merchant Zetsche) in confiscated English contraband (mostly cloth), that before the siege he had kept mistresses on country estates in Langfuhr and Oliva and beset the wives of leading citizens with his spicy Alsatian wit — all this would not have sufficed to decide Sophie in favor of her surefire calf's-head stuffing; something must have happened to release the catch.

Though he doesn't mention it in his journals of the French period, Pastor Blech later expressed the belief that shortly before the siege, when the road to Graudenz was still open, Sophie had crawled into the governor's bed in the hope of obtaining her Fritz's freedom. But Rapp hadn't been up to it. Couldn't convert his frantic desire into action. Couldn't bend nature to his will. The standard male calamity had struck. His private just wouldn't stand at attention.

Possibly it was Sophie's innocence that disarmed this eminently virile man. In any case, so the story went, she left the governor's couch still a virgin and doubly offended.

Rapp wouldn't admit his defeat; he put all the blame on Sophie (her heroic coldness) and was quite unwilling to compensate with an act of chivalry for the bit of pleasure he had missed. So Fritz remained a prisoner of the French. And when Graudenz fell into Prussian hands, a royal decree lost no time in confirming his status as prisoner. The systems changed without a hitch. Petition after petition — Pastor Blech remained indefatigable — failed to set the poor fellow free.

But maybe there's nothing in the whole story; probably Sophie never crawled into Rapp's French bed; conceivably there wasn't any male calamity, and what she did wasn't for Fritz at all but for the sake of something much bigger, of freedom itself, for, Jacobin as this kitchenmaid may have been in her younger days, the lasting presence of the French turned her into the most German of patriots, and when she'd been cooking a while for Rapp, Sophie's sans-culottish songs, after a brief period of Napoleonic enthusiasm, took on a fatherlandish tone. Maybe the four sure-fire mushrooms were dedicated to the variety of diffuse freedom that lasts only as long as a song in several stanzas supplies a cramped soul with air. In any event, the Flounder's "personalist" interpretation was contradicted before the Women's Tribunal. Sophie, as Associate Judge Griselde Dubertin, concurring with the prosecution, declared, acted not out of childish love, but for the sake of freedom. For reasons of principle.

After the soup the company was already in high spirits. Over the smoked salmon jokes passed around the table. The stuffed calf's head was easily cut in slices. Rapp served his guests. All ate; only the general held back. Ah, how beautiful life was! The Polish uhlan praised the stuffing. The Westphalian colonel asked for a second helping. Le Gros gobbled and for the third time related his morning victory over the Russians. Dressed in English cloth from top to toe, Zetsche the Saxon merchant talked and talked with his mouth full. Rapp didn't want to overtax his stomach at the

evening meal; after the soup and salmon, only a spoonful of saffron rice and the barest morsel of the crispy calf's muzzle. He encouraged his guests to eat their fill and join him in drinking to the emperor, to France, and to this bounteous mushroom year.

When Count Wojczinski pressed him to take a little something, he helped himself from the top of the dish to a calf's eye, a traditional delicacy. Vivats and flowery phrases followed. Already voices were rising. Merchant Zetsche praised the Continental Blockade as if a shrewd Saxon had thought it up. The Westphalian had started talking more than he meant to. The Poles had begun to sing. Le Gros was quoting himself and other heroes.

And knowing the governor's guests and their liking for riddles and charades, Sophie, before putting the stuffed calf's head in the oven, had incised the date of the Revolution, the present date, and, in tiny letters, the initials of her friend Fritz in each of the fat cheeks, and tinted the incisions with saffron. Crisp-roasted skin announced the date at which the youth of Europe had conceived hope. Some of the gentlemen, who knew Sophie's undiminished esteem for the heroes of the Revolution, joked, but within tactful limits. Young Count Wojczinski even delivered himself of an enthusiastic speech in praise of Mirabeau. Another of the Polish uhlans countered with sayings of Robespierre. Danton and Saint-Just were cited. Gironde and the Mountain, the Convention before and after the September murders, argued over minimum and maximum. And Marat proclaimed the despotism of freedom.

But while, stimulated by the fly agaric in the soup, they were still re-enacting the Revolution with argument, counterargument, and mimed reminiscences of the guillotine, at the same time trying to guess whom the initials F. B. incised in the calf's head might stand for — Rapp, who had a strong-suspicion, kept aloof from the conversation — muscarine, the mushroom poison specific to the sulfur tuft and the destroying angel, began to take effect. A slight twitching of the facial muscles. Dilated pupils. Outbreaks of sweat. Zetsche and the Westphalian had their eyes crossed. Fuddled hand movements. Glasses were knocked over. Le Gros's heroic