The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  She took charge of the strike fund and tried to guard it against my depredations. She endured my blows, and she comforted me when I was bowed with remorse because I had beaten her again. Lena survived me, for in 1914, when I was sent to East Prussia with the Landsturm, she was widowed a second time.

  After that she did nothing but dish out soup: barley, cabbage, pea, and potato soups. In soup kitchens, in settlement houses, in field kitchens during the Spanish-flu winter of 1917, then at the Workers’ Aid. When the Nazis came in with their Winter Aid and one-dish Sundays, she was as old as the hills and still active with the soup ladle.

  As a boy—back again and still driven by curiosity—I saw Lena. Her white hair, parted in the middle. Her special way of dishing out soup. A grave woman who seemed to practice compassion as a trade. The Flounder thinks Lena Stubbe was basically apolitical, except for her “Proletarian Cook Book,” which circulated in manuscript after the abrogation of Bismarck’s Socialist Laws but never found a publisher.

  “You see,” said the Flounder, “that might have brought about a change of consciousness and created something new. True, there were any number of ‘bourgeois’2 cook books at the time, but not a single proletarian one. That’s why the working class, impoverished or not, went in for bourgeois cookery. Before you ‘invent’ a tenth, let alone an eleventh cook, why don’t you quote from the posthumous papers of Lena Stubbe? You’re a Social Democrat, aren’t you?”

  The tenth and eleventh cooks inside me are still fuzzy of outline, because I came to know them both too well. Only their names are present on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: I lost Billy (whose real name was Sibylle) in the sixties, on an Ascension Day, which is celebrated with great hullabaloo in Berlin and elsewhere as Father’s Day; Maria, who works at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk (formerly the Schichau Shipyard in Danzig), is a relative of mine.

  I admit it: Billy and Maria are pressing to get out. But since the Flounder advises me to observe chronological order and since I have so many cooks inside me, I shall take the liberty—especially as my present Ilsebill is kind of urging me—of making Awa’s three breasts more palpable before taking up the Father’s Day celebration—exclusively a men’s affair—that was held in June 1963 in Grunewald, in Tegel Forest, in Spandau, in Britz, and on the shores of the Wannsee. A man clogged with so much past who finally sees a chance of relieving his constipation can’t help being in a hurry to speak of Mestwina’s amber necklace, even if the uprising of the shipyard workers in the Polish seaports, as recorded by the world press in December 1970, ought to be closer to him.

  Old yarns. The story of millet. What did the peasant serf have left to eat? According to what menu did Fat Gret fatten conventual abbots for the slaughter? What happened when the price of pepper fell? Rumford soup for the poor. How the deadly amanita gave promise of becoming political. When the invention of pea sausage gave the Prussian army new strength. Why the proletariat was drawn to bourgeois cookery. What it means to go hungry. “But perhaps,” said the Flounder didactically out of his crooked mouth, “history can teach us what role women played in historical events, in the triumph of the potato, for instance.”

  Awa

  And if I were faced with three breasts

  and were not divided between the one and the other tit

  and if I were not double because of the usual split

  and did not have to choose between

  and were never again confronted by an either/or

  and bore the twin no grudge,

  and harbored no other wish …

  But I have only another choice

  and am attached to another set of tits.

  I envy the twin.

  My other wish is as usual split.

  Even whole, I am only half and half.

  My choice always falls in between.

  Only in pottery (vaguely dated) does Awa

  (supposedly) exist: the goddess

  with the triune font,

  one of which (always the third) knows

  what the first promises and the second withholds.

  Who expunged you, making us poor?

  Who said: Two are enough?

  Diet and rationing ever since.

  How the Flounder was caught

  No, no, Ilsebill. Of course I’m not going to tell you that phony fairy tale all over again. Of course I’m going to write the other truth that Philipp Otto Runge took down, even if I have to pick it word for word out of the ashes. For the old woman’s additional babblings into the painter’s ear in the summer of 1805 were burned under the full moon between woodland pond and deer meadow. It was done in defense of the patriarchal order. Which explains why the Grimm brothers only threw one Runge transcript—“The Fisherman and His Wife”—on the fairy-tale market. The fisherman’s wife Ilsebill has been proverbial ever since: a quarrelsome bitch who keeps wanting to have, to possess, to command more and more. And the Flounder the fisherman catches and sets free has to keep on delivering: the larger cottage, the stone house, the palace royal, the might of empire, the Holy See. In the end Ilsebill wants God’s power to make the sun rise and set, whereupon the greedy woman and her good-natured husband are punished and sent back to their wretched hovel, their “pisspot,” to live. Really, an insatiable virago. Can’t ever get enough. Always wants something more. That’s the Ilsebill of the story.

  My Ilsebill is the living refutation, which I hereby make known. And even the Flounder thought it was high time to publish the original version of his legend, to rehabilitate all Ilsebills, and to confute the misogynistic propaganda tale that he himself had so treacherously disseminated. That’s right. Pulling no punches. Nothing but the truth. Believe me, dearest, there’s no point in starting a fight. You’re right, right as usual. Before we even start fighting, you win.

  It was toward the end of the Stone Age. A day unnumbered. We hadn’t begun yet to make lines and notches. When we saw the moon lose weight or put on fat, our only thought was fear. No prefigured event happened on time. No dates. Never did anyone or anything come too late.

  On a timeless, partly cloudy day, I caught the Flounder. In the place where the river Vistulla mingles in a constantly shifting bed with the open sea, I had set out my basket traps in hope of eels. We had no nets. And baited hooks hadn’t come in yet. As far back as I can think—the last ice age sets a limit to my memory—we hunted fish in the arms of the river, first with sharpened branches, later with bow and arrow: bass, pike, perch, eels, lampreys, and, on their way down the river, salmon. There where the Baltic Sea laved wandering dunes, we speared the flatfish that like to lie bedded in the sand at the bottom of the warm, shallow water: turbot, sole, flounder.

  It was only after Awa taught us to plait baskets from willow withes that chance helped us to discover that baskets could also serve as fish traps. An idea seldom came to us men. It was Awa—always Awa—who sank a basket full of gnawed elk bones in the rushes by the bank of a tributary that was later called the Radune and much later still the Radaune, so that the water might soak away the last fibers and bits of sinew; for Awa used elk and reindeer bones as kitchen utensils and for ritual purposes.

  When after sufficient time we hauled the basket out of the river, several eels barely escaped, but along with some small fry, five arm-long customers remained in the wickerwork, lashing and thrashing amid the smooth bones. The operation was repeated. Improvements were made. Awa invented the fish trap, just as exactly two centuries later she developed the first fishhooks from the wishbones of swamp birds. According to her instructions, and under her supervision, which seemed to have been imposed on us by fate, we plaited those baskets tapered on the open end, to which later, on our own incentive—for we were not to require Awa’s tutelage forever—we fitted a second and then a third basket, so as to make it harder for the eels to escape. Long, supple willow withes forced into a complicated mesh: an early craft. Something that could be done without Awa.

  Good catches ever after. More than we needed.
First attempt at smoking in hollow willow trees. The words “eel” and “trap” became a hallowed pair, which I, with my obsessive drive to leave my marks wherever. I went, converted into an image. Before leaving the beach after setting the traps, for instance, I would draw in the wet sand, with the sharp edge of a shell, a picture of wriggling eels behind intricate wickerwork. If instead of being flat and swampy, our region had been mountainous and honeycombed with caves, I would undoubtedly have bequeathed a cave painting of a trapped eel to posterity. In his mid-twentieth-century time-phase the Flounder would pontificate, “Neolithic graffiti originating in northeastern European fish culture, related to the southern Scandinavian Maglemose drawings on bones and amber.” The Flounder has always been hooked on culture.

  One thing Awa couldn’t do was set signs, draw a likeness. She admired the pictures I scratched in the sand and found them useful for ritual purposes; she liked my palpable representations of herself and her three breasts; but when, just for the fun of it, I drew on the sandy beach a trap consisting of five tapered baskets, she instantly forbade both the drawing and the fivefold trap itself. The basic value, three, as established by Awa and her breasts, could not be exceeded. And again I was sharply called to order when I drew a picture of the Flounder, who had been caught in an eel trap. Awa exploded in mother-goddessly wrath: she had never seen such a thing, and because she had never seen such a thing, it couldn’t exist. It was mere invention and therefore untrue.

  Threatening punishment, Awa and the whole council of women forbade me ever again to draw pictures of a flounder caught in an eel trap. Nevertheless, I kept doing so in secret. For, much as I had learned to dread the withholding of the breast that suckled me thrice daily, the Flounder was stronger, especially since he spoke to me whenever I wished: I had only to cry out “Flounder, Flounder.” “All she wants,” he said, “is constant self-affirmation. Everything outside of her is ruled out. But art, my son, refuses to be ruled out.”

  Toward the end of the third millennium before the incarnation of our Lord (or, as a computer has computed, on May 3, 2211 B.C., a Friday, so it seems), on a neolithic day—east wind, loosely knit cloud formation—an event occurred which later, for reasons of patriarchal self-justification, was falsified, twisted into a fairy tale that still sends my Ilsebill up the wall.

  I was young but already bearded. Late in the afternoon I pulled in my thrice-tapered eel trap, which I had set out early in the morning before the day’s first suckling. (My favorite eel-catching spot was on or near the site of Heubude, the popular beach resort that long centuries later could conveniently be reached by streetcar number 9.) Because of my talent for drawing, Awa, in her ever-loving care, had favored me with an extra, out-of-turn suckling. Consequently, when I saw the Flounder in the eel trap, my first thought was: I’ll bring him to Awa. She’ll wrap him in moist lettuce leaves as usual and bake him in hot ashes.

  Then the Flounder spoke.

  I’m not sure that I was any more amazed at his crooked-mouthed speech than at the mere fact of having caught a broad-beamed flounder in an eel trap. In any event, I did not respond to the words “Good afternoon, my son!” with a question about his astonishing gift of speech. What I did ask was why he, a flatfish, had chosen to force his way, through all three narrowings, into a trap.

  The Flounder replied. From the very start his know-it-all superiority made him garrulous despite his categorical finalities, now nasally professorial, now infuriatingly paternal. His purpose, he said, had been to join conversation with me. He had been motivated not by foolish (or did he already say “feminine”?) curiosity, but by the well-matured decision of a masculine will. There existed, so he said, certain information pointing, beyond the neolithic horizon, and he, the sapient Flounder, wished to communicate this information to me, the dull-witted fisher, kept in a state of infantilism by total female care. To prepare himself, he had learned the dialect of the Baltic coast, a language of few words, a wretched stammering that named only the strictly necessary. In a relatively short time he had mastered the speech defect that broadened all our sounds. Language, he assured me, would be no obstacle in our dialogue. But in the long run he would feel cramped in this wicker basket.

  I had scarcely freed him from the tripartite trap and set him down on the sand when he said first, “Thank you, my son!” and then: “Of course I am aware of the dangers to which my decision exposes me. I know I taste good. I’ve heard about all the different ways your women, who rule through ever-loving care, have of grilling roaches on a willow spit, of baking eel, pike, perch, and hand-sized sole on well-heated stones, or of wrapping larger fish like myself in leaves and bedding us in hot ashes until we are cooked through, but still succulent. Bon appétit. It’s flattering to be considered tasty. All the same, I’m sure my offer to serve forever as an adviser to you, that is, to the male cause, outweighs my culinary value. In short, my son: set me free and I will come whenever you call me. Your magnanimity puts me under obligation to supply you with information gathered in every corner of the world. We flounders, you see—and related species—are at home in every ocean and on every coast. I know what kind of advice you need. Deprived as you are of every right, you Baltic men will need my encouragement. You, an artist, able in your affliction to set down signs and symbols, a man in quest of enduring, meaning-charged form, must realize that my timeless promise is worth more than a few mouthfuls of baked fish. And in case you doubt my trustworthiness, allow me, my son, to divulge my motto and first principle: ‘A man’s word is his bond!’”

  Fact: I fell for him. His talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously. And yet—believe me, Ilsebill!—my doubts were far from dispelled. I’d have to put this talking Flounder, who had promised me so much, to the test. No sooner had I tossed him into the smooth water than I called after him: “Flounder! Come back! There’s something I’ve got to ask you.”

  In the exact place where I had dropped him, he jumped out of the Baltic Sea and landed on my two palms. “What is it, my son? Always at your service. Even, I might add, in surf and storm.”

  “But suppose,” I said to the Flounder, “suppose we’re not unhappy under Awa’s ever-loving care? Suppose we’re doing all right and have no complaints? I mean it! Because we get everything we need. Yes, indeed, we want for nothing. The breast is seldom withheld, only when we’re fractious. Three times a day we get suckled. Even doddering old men can count on it. It’s always been that way. Since paleolithic times. Anyway, since the end of the last ice age. Breast feeding is right for us. We feel contented and sheltered. We’re always kept warm. We never have to decide for or against anything. We live as we please, without responsibility. Yes, of course, we’re a bit restless now and then. We get to wondering where the river comes from. Or whether something’s going on behind the river where the sun rises. I’d also like to know if it’s possible to count higher than we’re allowed to. And then the question of meaning, that is, whether the things we do, which are always the same, might not point to something else in addition to what they are. Awa says they are what they are, and that’s that. Whenever we start fidgeting and doubting, she gives us the breast. Which is an excellent remedy … for what? Well, for restlessness and asking questions. Whereas you, friend Flounder, make me nervous. You’re so ambiguous. What is this information you speak of? Just tell me this: Where does the river come from? Is there some other place where people are allowed to make eel traps with more than three baskets? And do existing things also mean something else? Fire, for instance. All we know is that soon after the last ice age Awa brought three pieces of glowing charcoal down from the sky for us. She says fire is good for cooking meat, fish, roots, and mushrooms, or for keeping us warm when we sit around it chewing the fat. I ask you, friend Flounder: what else can fire do?”

  And the Flounder replied. He told me about hordes on both sides of the river who also had their Awa, even if they called her
Ewa or Eia. He told me about other rivers and about the ocean, which is much larger. Like a swimming newspaper he brought me news, reported all sorts of heroic and mythological gossip. A god named Poseidon had commented on some quotations from Zeus, and the Flounder now commented on the commentaries. He supplied glosses on female deities—one was called Hera. But even when he stuck to cold facts I didn’t understand very much. He told me for the first time about the metal that can be smelted out of rock with the help of fire and poured into sand molds to cool and harden. “Bear in mind, my son! Metal can be forged into spearheads and axes.”

  After his crooked mouth had proclaimed the end of the hand-ax era, he told me about the hilly region, a short way inland, that came to be known as the Baltic Ridge, and assured me that small amounts of metal-containing rock were to be found there. And three days later, when as agreed I called him again—“Flounder, Flounder in the sea”—he brought me, probably from Sweden, an ore specimen, tucked away in one of his branchial sacs.

  “Take heart!” cried the Flounder. “Smelt down this and more like it and you will have not only acquired copper but also given fire a new, progressive, incisive, decisive, and masculine significance. Fire is something more than warmth and cookery. In fire there are visions. Fire cleanses. From fire the sparks fly upward. Fire is idea and future. On the banks of other rivers, the future is already under way. Resolute men are making themselves masters of it, without so much as asking their Awas and Ewas. It’s only here that men are still letting themselves be suckled and lulled to sleep. Even your old men are babes in arms. Like Prometheus you must take possession of fire. Don’t content yourself with being a fisherman, my son; become a blacksmith.”