by Günter Grass
Sieglinde Huntscha, who for a time responded to no other name than Siggie, Susanne Maxen, known as Maxie, and Franziska Ludkowiak, Frankie for short, had rented a sailboat for a few hours in the coastal village of Cismar and, more often becalmed than bebreezed, were boring one another stiff with their jargon. Three hard-boiled females in their thirties (about your age, Ilsebill), Maxie in her early, Frankie in her late ones, who when speaking invariably spit contemptuously after every few sentences, who describe just about everything as shit, shitty, or at the very least crappy.
Probably because, for reasons hard to define, Siggie, Maxie, and Frankie thought of themselves as lesbians and consequently belonged to a women’s liberation group, whose first commandment was radical rejection of male penetration, Siggie had taken her walking stick—a common masculine article covered with souvenir plaques—into the boat with her. This stick served as a fishing pole. A piece of plain string had been fastened to it. The hook was a pair of sexless nail scissors. Frankie busied herself folding bits of newspaper into little boats. They, too, floated motionless. Not the slightest breeze consented to rise.
Siggie wasn’t even telling fishermen’s jokes. They knew nothing about sailing and just drifted this way and that, meanwhile needling one another in the extravagant terms of the long-dead student movement. Everything—including Siggie’s fishing—struck them as pretty shitty. “What we really need,” said Frankie while folding a boat, “is an ideologically acceptable prop for our superegos.” And then the Flounder bit.
So help me, Ilsebill! Deliberately taking his cue. (Later on, in court, he testified that it hadn’t been so easy to get speared by that sharp but unsteady nail-scissor blade. He had had to ram it through his upper lip twice.)
It was Maxie who managed to utter the traditional cry of “Got him!” To which she added: “Pull, Siggie! Pull him. in! Boy oh boy!”
And the millennial “Ah!” And the anticipation: will it be the extraordinary, the rare, no, unique and legendary fish of the ages, or only a soggy old shoe? Fisherman’s luck. You just have to keep patiently quiet. Timelessly suck your tongue. Think of nothing or the opposite. Cancel yourself out until you might just as well be somebody else. Or say the magic word. Or be hook and bait yourself. The writhing little worm.
But, though bare, the scissors-hook had aroused the Flounder’s appetite. The flatfish lay flat on the bottom of the boat. His upper lip didn’t start bleeding until Siggie cautiously, but with what can only be termed manly courage, pulled the hook out of the bulge. The size of him! Never (except once upon a time) had so imposing a specimen been caught in the Baltic. I’m almost inclined to think that my neolithic catch was less impressive. He has grown since then. More pebbles lump and wrinkle his skin. Can it be that he, too, ages with time? That he’s mortal?
In spite of his size, it was still an ordinary fish that called forth the females’ amazement. Frankie called him a nifty flounder and suggested simmering him in white wine. She had seen fresh dill, so she said, in one of the many food stores that make the beach resort of Scharbeutz a shoppers’ Mecca. Siggie wanted to oil him on both sides, sprinkle him with basil, and bake him for half an hour in a moderate oven.
The three lived in a farm hand’s hovel rented out as a holiday cottage. Since Maxie refused to eat any fish that could be recognized as such—Ugh!—Frankie suggested filleting the Flounder, cutting him into strips, rolling him in egg, and deep-frying him, because then he would no longer be recognizable as fish.
Siggie said, “Damn it! Our Billy should have been here. She’d have sautéed this flounder in tarragon butter or maybe flamed him in cognac.” And Frankie chimed in with, “How about it, Maxie? If our Billy served up the flounder with all the trimmings. What do you say? Would it still be ‘ugh’?”
But Maxie didn’t want any fish, no matter how it was cooked, not even à la Billy. No sooner had Siggie pulled the nail scissors out of the bulge in the Flounder’s upper lip than Maxie wanted to throw him back into the murky Baltic. “That shifty, vicious look. Bound to bring bad luck. His blood is so red and human-looking. That’s not what we wanted to catch. That’s no fish; it only looks like one.” Then spake the Flounder.
Not in a loud voice, more in a conversational tone, he said, “What an odd happenstance!” He could just as well have said, “What time is it?” Or, “Who’s leading in the Federal League?”
Siggie, Frankie, and Maxie were, in a manner of speaking, dumbstruck. It wasn’t until later, when the Flounder started spouting, that Maxie managed to squeeze out, sotto voce, such exclamations as “This is a howler! Incredible! Boy oh boy! If only our Billy coulda been here!”
But Frankie and Siggie were silent. Their two minds went to work on this Sunday-afternoon episode, determined to confute the Flounder’s allegation of chance, to anchor the irrational occurrence in reason and discover the rational underpinning of its innocent fairy-tale logic—for the Flounder had introduced himself as follows: “Surely, dear ladies, you are familiar with the fairy tale of ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’?” These were the questions to be resolved: Who was speaking here and for what purpose? What would they have to explain first? The fact that the Flounder could talk or the substance of what he was saying? Was this a late reactionary attempt on the part of medieval Scholasticism to prove that evil could take the form of a fish? Was this Flounder a personification of capitalism? Or—an even greater contradiction—might he be an embodiment of Hegel’s Weltgeist?
“Who are you?” cried Franziska Ludkowiak, commonly known as Frankie, breaking into one of the Flounder’s involved periods and seizing Siggie’s now idle fishing pole, the metal-ringed walking stick, with the evident intention of disinviting the uninvited guest. He reminded her of the films in which slightly distorted madmen peered out of cracked mirrors; she felt sure he had come from the shadow realm of the unconscious and would induce schizophrenia. (Much as she liked Maxie to tell her fortune with cards, Frankie detested all irrationality.)
The question “Who are you?” has been asked on many such astonishing occasions. Most often it has been answered in a cryptic whisper or not at all. But the Flounder didn’t go in for mystery. First he asked them to pour water over him from time to time—Siggie obliged with an empty tin can—then he asked them to dab his still-bleeding upper lip with Kleenex—which Siggie did. Then at last he explained himself without ifs or buts.
After a brief account of the neolithic situation and an objective picture of the fatherless matriarchate, he introduced me, the ignorant fisherman, and set forth his reasons for squeezing into my eel trap and contracting to serve as my adviser.
He termed me a neolithic dolt and mediocrity, incapable, because of the state of dependence in which I was kept, of seeing through the system of total care at the base of the matriarchate, let alone destroying it. “Only his artistic gift,” so the Flounder went on, “only his obsessive urge to scratch signs, ornaments, and figures in the sand led me to hope that with my advice he might lay the groundwork for a gradual”—“evolutionary” was the word he actually used—“liberation of men from the rule of women. It happened, too, though in the Vistula region, with a delay of two thousand years. But even then I had my troubles with him. In all his time-phases, during the High Gothic period, in the century of the Enlightenment, he was a failure. Passionately and single-mindedly as I have devoted myself to the male cause, I now feel that there’s nothing more to be gained from it. But that’s the way I am; I always have to experiment. Creation cannot be regarded as complete; on that score I’m in full agreement with Ernst Bloch, the old heretic.” (Here he threw in a quotation from the philosopher: “I am. But I do not have myself. Therefore we are still in the process of becoming.”) “Now you will surely understand—by the way, just call me Flounder—why I’ve decided to usher in a new phase in human development. The male cause is washed up. A world crisis will soon signal the end of male domination. The guys are bankrupt. Abuse of power has exhausted them. They’ve run out of inspiration, and
now they’re trying to rescue capitalism by means of socialism, which is absurd. From now on I’m only going to help the female sex. Not that I mean to stay on land. Water, after all, is my element. But I feel certain that three ladies who have become hopelessly bored with the stupid old man-woman relationship will appreciate my elementary needs.
“In short,” said the Flounder in conclusion, “you, dear ladies, set me free; and I shall advise you on every situation as it comes up, but also on overall policy. Let this day mark the beginning of a new era. Let power change its sex—that is my fundamental principle. Let the women take over. There’s no other way of giving the world, our poor world, which has lost all hope and become the plaything of enfeebled and degenerate males, a new direction—why not say it?—a feminine direction. All is not lost.”
Obviously Siggie, Frankie, and Maxie did not simply cry out, “OK! Terrific! It’s a deal!” Because if the three of them had taken up the Flounder’s proposition without further ado, had put him back in the Baltic Sea and secured his advice with a handshake, the long story of my time-phases down through the millennia would have remained hidden; but because the Flounder, instead of being set free, had water poured on him, had his bleeding lip dabbed with Kleenex, and was finally brought ashore, everything came to light, the Vistula estuary became an exemplary place, and I an exemplary individual; because the Flounder was not set free I must make a clean breast, confess to Ilsebill, and write it all down.
Sieglinde Huntscha, who had a law degree, explained her position succinctly: “Your offer is interesting, but we can’t accept or reject it without consulting the executive committee of our organization. Didn’t you yourself just say that the days of masculine, in other words individual, decisions are over? You must be aware that your partial confession raises questions that can hardly be settled aboard a rented yawl. Consider yourself under arrest pending investigation. I personally guarantee that you will be well treated.” To which Frankie added, “Dontcha like our company?”
The Flounder replied coldly at first but then with a threatening note. “Dear ladies! I put myself in your power of my own free will. My loyal offer to stop promoting the male cause and to support the women’s movement from this moment on, to help the many desperately resolute, but also perplexed and still mommy-minded Ilsebills, stands. But should it be your intention to make a public example of my floundery existence, of an existence harking back to the primordial darkness, I shall know how to defend myself with, shall we say, masculine ruthlessness. I shall strike back without mercy. To have me as an adversary is no joke. If you decide to put me on trial, no sociological arguments or legalistic hairsplitting will get you anywhere. No human law relates to me. Yet you have every reason to fear me.”
Maxie was indeed rather frightened. “He means what he says.” But Siggie and Frankie stood firm, for they remembered the precepts of their organization: Don’t let them frighten you with threats. We know the song and dance. God the Father and that kind of stuff. Male arrogance, that’s what it is!
Now, as might have been expected, a fresh breeze came up. It blew them straight to Cismar, an East Holstein village with a monastery featured in the guidebooks. Back at their thatched farm hand’s hovel, Frankie lodged the Flounder in a zinc bathtub and hauled several loads of sea water in oil cans. Maxie went to Eutin and bought a book of instructions for keeping ocean fish in aquariums. Meanwhile Siggie, after jotting down all the particulars, went to the village post office and made phone calls to Berlin, Stockholm, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and New York. It cost her a pretty penny, even though for the most important conversation she had the main office call her back. Naturally women’s libbers of all countries were delighted to hear about the talking Flounder and his phenomenal confession, for one thing because the misogynistic fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” had parallels as far afield as Africa and India.
“Wanna make a bet?” said Siggie to Frankie. “They’ll set up a tribunal, and what’s more—count on me for that—they’ll hold it in Berlin. This thing is meaningful!”
With her nose in her manual, Maxie declared, “It’s a common flounder. Found in the Atlantic, the North Sea, and only rarely in the Baltic. Eats algae, insects, et cetera.”
His upper lip had stopped bleeding. He lay flat on the bottom of the tub. Siggie kept a tape recorder in readiness. But the Flounder was silently resting.
What about you, Ilsebill? Would you have voted for the Tribunal, for a public accounting?
Ilsebill said, “Of course not, dearest. If you must know, I’d have let the Flounder go and wished for something sensational, like in the fairy tale: a completely automatic dishwasher, for instance, and much more; and more and more.”
Dreaming ahead
Careful, I say. Careful!
The weather is breaking up and our bit of reason down.
Even now this somehow feeling:
somehow funny, somehow spooky.
Words that behaved and carried meaning
have turned their coats.
Changing times.
Itinerant prophets.
Someone somewhere claims to have seen
signs in the sky, runelike, Cyrillic.
Felt-tip pens—single or collective—cry out
on the scribbled walls of subway stations: Believe me O believe!
Someone—who can also be a collective—has a will
that no one has considered.
And those who fear him batten him with their fear.
And those who have preserved their bit of reason
turn down their lamps.
Outbursts of cozy comfort.
Group-dynamic attempts at contact.
We huddle together: still with some intimation of one another.
Something, a force that has not yet been named
because no word is adequate, pushes, displaces.
Public opinion thinks it has
several times and pleasantly anticipated this slipping
(admittedly, we’re slipping)
in dreams: going up! We’re going up again.
But a child—children, too, can be part of a collective—
cries out: I don’t want to go down. I don’t want to.
But he must
and everyone cajoles him: sensibly.
How the Flounder was prosecuted by the Ilsebills
It was August when they fished him out of Lübeck Bay. He was flown to Berlin via British Airways. Early in September they rented an abandoned movie house in Steglitz, which had formerly been called the Stella and was later maliciously termed the Pisspot by the press. It took five weeks of wrangling to choose a judge and eight associate judges from among the seven (nine, after two splits) women’s groups. The Tribunal met only in the afternoon and on occasional weekends, because the judges, all except the housewife Elisabeth Güllen, had jobs.
A prosecutor was quickly chosen. And since the accused waived his right to counsel of his choice, the court was unanimous in appointing a smartly dressed young person to defend him. Siggie, Frankie, and Maxie had fallen out in the course of factional squabbles, and the only one of them to take part in the trial was Sieglinde Huntscha, the fisherwoman.
The former movie house, with its burgundy-covered folding seats, had a capacity of 311. There was no balcony. All sorts of technical devices had to be built in, and no money was left for renovating the hall, which, thanks in part to the seaweed-green wallpaper, preserved something of its cozy, neighborhood-movie-house atmosphere.
Of course there was a certain amount of disorder at first, but honestly, Ilsebill, I have no intention of harping on trifles—we men aren’t always so brilliantly organized, either. I’ll come right to the point. In mid-October, shortly after we ate mutton with beans and pears, begot, and conceived, the bill of indictment was read; but please don’t expect me to give you a formal record of the trial; in the first place I’ve had no legal training, and in the second place I was a party to the proceedings (despite my vacillations). Maybe I d
idn’t make the headlines, but I was on trial along with the Flounder all the same.
There was once a Flounder. He was just like the one in the fairy tale. When one day some women who had caught him haled him before a tribunal, he resolved not to say a word, but only to lie flat, mute, much-wrinkled, and old as the hills in his zinc tub. But after a while his thunderous silence bored him, and he began to play with his pectoral fins. And when Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor, came straight to the point and asked him whether he had deliberately circulated the Low German fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” as a means of minimizing the importance of the advisory activity that he had demonstrably been carrying on since the Neolithic era, by maliciously and tendentiously distorting the truth at the expense of the fisherman’s wife Ilsebill, his crooked mouth couldn’t help opening and pouring out speech.
The Flounder replied that he had only couched a centuries-long and hence complex historical development, which all in all, despite occasional abuses, had redounded to the benefit of mankind, in simple words appropriate to the popular tradition; that the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge had taken down this same text, but also the history-charged original version, from the narrative of a little old woman. “Can I help it,” cried the Flounder, “if the Grimm brothers, in an excess of fear, burned the painter’s historically faithful record in the presence of the writers Arnim and Brentano? That’s why their fairy tales are the only source of my legend. Even so the story can still be and still is quoted. Take, for instance, ‘My wife—her name is Ilsebill—has got a will that’s not my will.’”
But when the Flounder let his philological fancies run away with him and began to reel off Hessian, Flemish, Alsatian, and Silesian variants of the story—“and oh yes, I forgot to mention an extremely interesting Latvian version”—the prosecuter interrupted him. “Why, defendant Flounder, did you give the popular version of this tale such a misogynistic twist? Why did you permit this slander of the woman Ilsebill, which time and time again has provided the propagandists of the patriarchate with a talking point? One need only quote the defamatory jingle. Ever since it was first concocted, the cliché about the eternally discontented woman who keeps wanting more and more has been rammed down our throats. The relentless consumer. Just one more fur coat. Her craving for that allegedly noiseless dishwasher. The hard-as-nails career woman, lusting after higher and higher positions. The man-killing vamp. The poisoner. In books, films, plays, we have been treated to luxury dolls, who keep their diamonds cool in safe-deposit vaults while their poor husbands pour out their life blood and age before their time. Who, I ask, has cast us Ilsebills in all these roles?”