The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  At that she spread her legs and stood over the primal fire. Holding two fingers under her pouch to make sure nothing would fall out of it, she pissed into the primal fire until it went out. And the old Sky Wolf wept, for that spelled the end of crispy brown roasts; he’d just have to gulp everything down raw. That, it seems, is what made earthly wolves murderous and misanthropic.

  Just in time the woman climbed back down to earth over the paling rainbow. She returned to her horde, screaming, because her pouch was dry by then and the glowing charcoal was burning her. “Awa! Awa!” she screamed, and those primordial sounds became her name. In a later day the scar at the entrance to her pouch, which the Sky Wolf had prophesied, came to be known as the clitoris or tickler, but it remains an object of controversy among scientists investigating the origin of the orgasm.

  From then on we had fire. It never died out. Where there were people there was always a wisp of smoke. But because a woman had brought us fire, the woman kept us pouchless men in a state of dependency. We were no longer allowed to sacrifice to the Sky Wolf, but only to the Heavenly Elk. For many, many years the function and origin of the itching scar were unknown to us. For when the returning Awa had finished screaming, she told us ever so casually that the old Wolf had been kind to her, that he had roasted a hare for her over the primal fire, that roast hare is perfectly delicious, and that she now knew how to cook. She further told us that she had complained to the Wolf about how cold and dark it was down here, that of all sacrifices in his honor he preferred elk calves, that she had washed his left hind paw—which was infected—and dressed it with the medicinal herbs she never went anywhere without, that he, poor fellow, had been so grateful to her for curing his limp that he had given her three glowing coals out of the primal fire, and finally that—male superstition to the contrary notwithstanding—the Sky Wolf was a female.

  That was all Awa told us. And I myself wouldn’t have known a thing if I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to that teensy-weensy scar and examined Ilsebill’s tickler in the light of other myths. I told the Flounder, but he wouldn’t believe it. He believed only in his reason.

  What we lack

  Forward? We’re tried that before.

  Why not regress, quickly

  and without stopovers?

  Everyone can bring something along, something or other.

  We have begun to develop—

  blinking to left and right—backward.

  A few fall by the wayside:

  Wallenstein musters regiments.

  Just to be fashionable, someone deserts in Gothic ecstasy

  and is overtaken (clad in brabant) by a plague year.

  While the migration worries along,

  a certain group (as everyone knows) splits off from the Goths.

  Those who had sought their future as late Marxists

  want now to be Early Christians or Greeks

  before or after the Doric purge.

  At last all dates are effaced.

  No more talk of succession.

  We are back in the Stone Age, blank and uninscribed.

  But I’ve brought my typewriter along

  and I tear giant leek leaves into legal-sized sheets.

  Hand-ax technology, fire myths,

  the horde as the first commune (how it settled conflicts)

  and the unwritten law of matriarchy—

  all want to be described,

  and right this minute, though time is standing still.

  I type on leek leaves: The Stone Age is beautiful.

  Sitting around the fire, so cozy-comfy.

  Because a woman has brought fire down from the sky,

  women rule bearably.

  What (the one thing) we lack is a handy utopia.

  Today—but there is no today—

  someone, a man, has made an ax from bronze.

  Now—but there is no now—

  the horde is discussing the question: is bronze progress or not?

  Because history has started with a bang,

  an amateur, coming like me from the present

  and bringing his fish-eyed camera,

  wants to hand us down to posterity

  in color or black and white.

  Hospitably from horde to horde

  In any case, enlightenment was late in coming to us. If, when I took the Flounder out of the eel trap, he had said right away, “My son! Wouldn’t you like to know where all those children come from? Not to mention the elk calves? And how the bees and the marsh marigolds are fertilized and reproduce?”—I’d have said, “Yes, indeed, friend Flounder, tell me how it’s done. Awa keeps saying that she and the elk cows do it all by themselves. With maybe a little help from the full-ripened moon. She says we Edeks and elk bulls have nothing to do with it.”

  But the Flounder didn’t enlighten us in time. True, he went on and on about the father right that we still didn’t have, but that our pestles were fraught with consequences, that the sticky snot we and the elk bulls discharged, blindly but with unerring aim, was called sperm and had the power of fertilizing, that it made women and cows swell up and led ultimately to childbirth, so making us men, if not individually, then at least collectively and in principle, into fathers—of all this he didn’t breathe a single word to us for many centuries.

  Was he ashamed? Was he himself in the dark? He didn’t even regale me with a little lecture about the milt and roe of the Baltic herring, things that were quite familiar to us fishermen. Instead, he brought me news of far-off cultures and abstract drivel about patriarchal property rights.

  He had progress on the brain, and did he chew my ear off! “On Crete, my son, where King Minos and his brothers rule”—actually the women ruled in secret—“the bronze double-edged ax is being perfected; no haphazardly plaited huts of willow withes, but solidly built, many-storied palaces; household accounts are being kept on clay tablets; horde and clan have given way to an organized city-state. Only recently an artist and engineer by the name of Daedalus …” But what was that to me? That kind of thing cut no ice in the marshes of the Vistula estuary. (You know me, Ilsebill, I can’t eat butter without bread.)

  The one bit of lore I was able to pass on to Awa was something the Flounder treated as a mere incidental, the Minoan method of making hand-molded cheese. Of course we had neither cattle, goats, nor sheep at the time. They were brought in much later by the Scythians, those great travelers from the depths of the Russian land mass, where no Flounder propagated culture, and barbarism was never assailed by doubts.

  Our cheese was extracted from elk and reindeer milk. Casually I passed the tip on to Awa, who soon learned to let the milk stand in clay bowls made by me, to let it sour, curdle, and discharge the whey under pressure, to mold the cheeses with her hands, wrap them in lettuce leaves, tie them up, and hang them on wind-twisted willow trees.

  Awa took this as home-grown procedure. No whiff of King Minos and the first European high culture had reached her. And when, later, the Iron Age Wigga mixed curdled goat’s and sheep’s milk with codfish roe before it turned into cheese, she had without Cretan influence invented a dish that the Cretans still sell for a few drachmas and serve as an appetizer.

  It was not until Mestwina’s time that cow’s milk and sheep’s milk were processed along with mare’s milk. We called our local cheese Glumse. Milk glumsed, became glumsy. A shepherd at the time, I became Mestwina’s “Glumser.” “Glums-head” is still a term of affectionate disparagement. In good times and bad, cool cellared Glumse was always in demand.

  For Dorothea of Montau, who refused to touch so much as a shred of meat, Glumse, beaten with roasted barley grits, provided a High Gothic Lenten dish that she served on such holidays as Candlemas. She also crumbled Glumse into her leek soups.

  And when, a little later, it became necessary to starve the Teutonic Knights out of their fortress not far from the Wicker Bastion, the townspeople gave body to their mockery by tossing handy little balls of Glumse into the besieged stronghol
d. That demoralized the Teutonic Knights, and they surrendered.

  The abbess Margarete Rusch stuffed quail and snipe with well-pressed Glumse and cranberries before aligning the little birds on the spit, a procedure that was said to have earned her, after guild banquets, the lucrative favor of the beer brewers, coopers, and wealthy drapers.

  And the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella also served the poet Martin Opitz Glumse, flavored with caraway seeds (of which he was inordinately fond), in the belief that it was good for his nervous stomach. (But the word Glumse never found its way into his iambics—no adequate rhyme for Glumse.)

  On Sundays, Amanda Woyke, who cooked for the help at the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, served the day laborers and serfs Glumse and a negligible quantity of sunflower oil along with their boiled potatoes, while on weekdays she gave them bowls of dry, fatless curds, sometimes adding a few onion rings.

  When Danzig became a Napoleonic republic and was consequently besieged by the Russians and Prussians, the French governor learned to prize his cook Sophie Rotzoll’s brilliant idea of stirring, at the last minute, a sweet-and-sour mixture of Glumse and raisins into her stewed horsemeat, cut from the flanks of his Polish uhlans’ expired stallions.

  Lena Stubbe embellished her watery cabbage soups, which derived what little taste they had and an eye or two of fat from an occasional beef bone, with crumbled Glumse. Or she would make sour-milk soups and add cubes of stale bread or slices of cucumber that some charitable soul had donated to the Ohra soup kitchen. Her “Proletarian Cook Book” included a recipe for pickled herring in Glumse.

  When Billy celebrated Father’s Day with her girl friends and the world still seemed to be a cheerful kind of place, barbecued steaks and lamb kidneys were followed by Bulgarian sheep’s-milk cheese, which is related to our native, Minoan-influenced Glumse.

  And Maria Kuczorra, who as canteen cook of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk keeps an eye on food and food prices, also eats Polish Glumse off her knife as she stares silently into space.

  Just as my Ilsebill, now that she is pregnant (by me), has developed a craving for curds, kefir, kumiss, and yogurt, all relatives of Glumse. But the Flounder told me next to nothing about the further development of our Minoan-influenced cheese industry. And he won’t admit that he enlightened us too late. On the contrary, he contends, in his testimony before the Tribunal, that Awa and the other women suspected if they didn’t actually know what and who kept impregnating them, and that they needed outside help to be mothers. But, he goes on, Awa didn’t find it convenient to divulge this suspicion or half-knowledge, which would have lent support to the principle of paternity, if not to any individual fatherhood.

  Is that right, Ilsebill? Did you know the facts and conceal them? Was it your neolithic system to keep us men in the dark? Did you exchange winks? Were you women a conspiracy even then?

  I’d rather not believe the Flounder. He’s always griping. Always running everything down. How unwilling we Edeks, we lazy Pomorshians, were to assert claims of fatherhood, to found families, to hand down property, to create dynasties that would bloom, proliferate, and degenerate. “Why, there’s nothing to prove you ever were fathers. You never even thought of giving the handles of your clay pots obscene shapes, of documenting your culture with so much as a stone phallus. Pure waste of time, my telling you about the Minoan bull. Sure. You were as potent as rabbits, but culturally speaking, because you were unaware of your procreative power, you couldn’t get it up.”

  That’s unjust, Ilsebill. He ignores the fact that we were influenced at a relatively early date by the Minoan method of milk processing. As if Glumse production were not a cultural activity! As if paternity were all that mattered! As if we hadn’t transmitted our Glumse hospitably from horde to horde.

  Just as we invite people to dinner—my eggplant sprinkled with grated cheese and baked, your crisp salad—and have reason to fear return invitations to mushy hormone-fed chicken in curry sauce, so in the late days of my neolithic time-phase we also had guests. Then as now: we can’t always eat stingily by ourselves, even if the nice couple next door with their eternal marriage problems aren’t exactly our dream, for man is by definition a social animal.

  The Flounder, you see, had already deplored our isolation and advised me to make contact with the neighboring horde, which, he assured me, had for centuries been living only a short distance inland—“Get out of these marshes, my son! Shake a leg. If you refuse to borrow anything from the Minoan high culture, if you think your Glumse is achievement enough, then at least make comparisons with other hordes here in your home country, so that one day you may become a clan, a tribe, and finally a nation. And if your Awa wants you to go on believing that there’s nothing in the whole world but her and you, you’d better be guided by my knowledge; there’s more world beyond the mountains, my son; there are people busy multiplying. You are not alone.”

  So I persuaded a few hunters in our horde not just to hunt elk and water buffalo in the nearby bogs, but to follow the Radune upstream and explore the woods along its banks. My fisherman’s opinion—that if the eels came from up there and swam downstream in quest of the Mottlava, the Vistula, and the open sea, there must be something else up there and not just nothing—met with hesitant approval. Fear had to be cowed: “What can happen to us? We’ll stay near the river. And if it gets too scary, we’ll turn back.”

  Of course we knew the fringes of the woods from gathering mushrooms and roots and cautiously hunting the badger and wild boar, but we had never ventured deep into the dark forest; our courage extended only to the swamps and moors. But to make a long story short, as the Flounder would say, we started out. Unbeknownst to Awa, six hunters and I crept through the rolling beech and oak forests into the wooded, pond-studded section of the Baltic Ridge that later came to be known as Kashubia; and as we crept, we whistled. At that early date we learned to purse our lips and resort to the now traditional remedy for fear.

  Perhaps, Ilsebill, you should know that our region was then relatively new. It hadn’t come into being until after what we like to think of as the last ice age, when, as the waters receded, the Baltic coast took on its present contours. Before that, in the Riss-Würm interglacial era, there was nothing, only time and glacier. It was only after the Würm period, when elsewhere idols were being carved and cave drawings scratched, that our paleolithic ancestors followed the receding ice. They found an inhospitable region. For in their advance and withdrawal the glaciers had planed the tops off the Kashubian mountains. Their line of flight was marked by glacial rubble and deep Eocene valleys.

  On our way, we seven whistling plainsmen found crudely hewn hand axes, bearing witness to the existence of the primordial horde at a time when the Sky Wolf still kept guard over his fire, when raw food was eaten day after day and our Awa had not yet come into her own; what’s more (I’m pretty sure) there was no Flounder at that time, either.

  After the provisional withdrawal of the glaciers (they will come again, they always do) our region seems to have consisted exclusively of windy steppe, hills covered with glacial rubble, gurgling swamps, and restless rivers that kept seeking new beds. Only as the climate grew warmer did the forests start to grow. The reindeer, elk, and water buffalo retreated to the river deltas, which remained primordial swamp country. But in the wooded hills, apart from wolves and bears, which we knew and avoided, there were new animals to frighten us—wild horses, lynxes, and hoot owls, for instance. We stayed as close as possible to our homeward-flowing Radune and whistled more and more intricate tunes to ward off fear. Thus and thus alone, pursing his lips in response to fear, did man invent music, though the Flounder insists on the spiritual source of all the arts.

  After the third day of our forbidden journey, we seven hunters of swamp and moor found ourselves confronting, a stone’s throw away in the ferns, seven forest hunters. Between us: smooth beech trees; mushrooms singly or in magic circles; a busy anthill; filtered, obliquely falling light.

  Believe m
e, Ilsebill, they were as scared as we were. (You could have heard the strangers whistling softly between their teeth, just like us.) Naturally the first thing we did as we approached one another was to compare their stone axes, spears, and arrowheads with our own equipment. We favored pieces of flint, which we picked up on a stretch of steep shore bordered with chalk cliffs, later known as Adlershorst. The forest hunters had no flint and made do with quartzite and touchstone. Though the sharpness of our flint blades seemed at first glance to give us an edge, we soon saw that the forest hunters carried heavy stone axes which were not only hewn but also polished, with handles that were fitted into a bored hole—but how had they bored those holes? We still tied our axes and hatchets to their forked handles. Quite possibly our tapering flint arrowheads aroused the curiosity of the forest hunters in equal measure. In any case we showed each other our equipment and made menacing gestures but took no action, because in the absence of Awa no decision was possible. Although the impulse to bludgeon and pierce literally made our muscles quiver, we kept our distance; and our opposite numbers also fidgeted indecisively.

  Well, Ilsebill, I was known as a fast runner, so my companions sent me to the coast to consult Awa, and one of the seven woodsmen was sent into the bush. As though pursued by demons, I ran through the terrifying woods, where lived not only the lynx and the hoot owl, but the fabulous unicorn as well. My adventures on the way—two wolves strangled with my bare hands, a brown bear spitted through and through with my spear, a lynx struck with an arrow between its glittering eyes (at night, what’s more!), the unicorn fooled, made to ram his horn into a beech, elm, maple, no, an oak—all that is irrelevant, beside the point, for only my mission mattered.

  Toward the end I jumped onto the back of a wild horse and rode the last stretch of the way. I enjoyed riding. Only when the woods thinned as I was crossing our flat country and approaching the mouths of the Radune Mottlava Vistula, the always hazy moors, the ridge of dunes, the white beeches, and the Baltic, did the mare throw me. For two days and a night I ran and rode, toward the end singing at the top of my lungs because I was on horseback, exultant.