by Günter Grass
Of course we gathered other wild grasses in times of famine, wild millet (Milium effusum), for instance, or the red cowwheat (Melampyrnum arvense), from which a rather bitter but wholesome bread could be baked. And when the harvest was poor, lyme grass was used to stretch our supply of cultivated grain. But of all the wild grains that helped us to get through the winters, our favorite was manna grass, or “Prussian manna.” And that was why, when Wigga wanted to get rid of the Goths, she served them a “Gothic mash” of manna grits—plenty of them, with nothing much added. Only a few sunflower seeds were mixed with the grain before it was crushed in a mortar.
The Goths didn’t care for our manna. Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger were meat eaters. They would eat fried fish in a pinch, but as a rule resigned themselves to porridge only as a filler. True, they shoveled it in from the deep bowl that Wigga had set down in their midst, but the prospect of living a whole winter and more on grits (and woody mangel-wurzels) took their appetites away. My friend Ludger looked as if he had been asked to eat toads. To make matters worse, Wigga, in her instructive lecture about the difficulty of gathering the seeds (definitely man’s work), mentioned our meager Pomorshian stocks but made it clear that the place where they were stored was secret and inaccessible.
It was my friend Ludger who humbly (all the hauteur had gone out of him) asked for advice. Luderich and Ludnot also asked what was to be done. Finally, when Wigga remained silent, Prince Ludolf, a handsome, monumental man who not only was the father of Ludger, Luderich, and Ludnot but also was thought to have begotten Wigga, asked simply and directly what this foggy marshland between rivers had to offer the Goths, apart from not enough manna grits.
“Nothing,” said Wigga. And, rather harshly, “You’ll just have to shove off. Either to the north, where you came from. Or to the south, where everything is supposed to be better.” And she proceeded to vaunt the southland to her guests: Every day spitted bullocks and sheep. Mead awaited them in never empty pitchers. Never a foggy day. The rivers were never clogged with ice. You were never snowed in for weeks on end. And to top it all, the south promised the brave victory, honor, and posthumous fame. If people wanted to make history, she went on, there was no point in their settling down as if the beet culture were the only possible advance; no, they must indefatigably conquer new horizons. “So pack your stuff and beat it!” she cried, pointing her long arm southward.
Thereupon Ludolf, Luderich, Ludnot, and my friend Ludger shoveled in the rest of the grits to fortify themselves for the next day. As Wigga had advised them, they shoved off southward and started on their migration. The outcome is known to every schoolboy. It’s true, they went far.
In our country, on the other hand, centuries went by without noticeable change. Only the weather varied. Until Bishop Adalbert arrived with the cross.
Demeter
With open eyes
the goddess sees
how blind the heavens are.
Petrified eyelashes cast shadows all around.
No lid consents to fall and bring sleep.
Always horror
ever since she saw the god
here in the fallow field
where the plowshare was engendered.
Willingly the mule goes round and round over his barley.
That hasn’t changed.
We who have fallen out of the cycle
take an overexposed
photograph.
What a cast-iron spoon is good for
Adalbert came from Bohemia. All his books (as well as his crosier) had stayed in Prague. Because he was at the end of his scholastic wisdom, he decided to abandon theory for practice, that is, to convert the heathen and spread the one true faith in our country, the region of the Vistula estuary. (Today they call it “working with the masses.”)
Wladislaw, king of Poland, had signed him on as a propagandist. He arrived with a Bohemian retinue under Polish protection. His actual purpose was to indoctrinate the Prussians, because the king of Poland wanted to extend his power to the east bank of the Vistula. But since the Prussians had a reputation for ferocity, his Bohemian retinue advised him to start by practicing on us, the rather dull-witted but good-natured Pomorshians. (Build up experience, inspire confidence, do good, get acquainted with the foreign economy, said the prelate Ludewig.)
They camped near our settlement. They had brought provisions in oxcarts. But before they had even launched their missionary activity, their Polish cook died on them. After preliminary talks—with both parties exchanging what they had—our cook (and hence priestess), Mestwina, offered to cook for the bishop and his retinue. Our contribution consisted of mangel-wurzels, Glumse, mutton, grits, mushrooms, honey, and fish.
Neither Fat Gret nor Amanda Woyke was the first to fold her bare fuzz-blond arms below her bosom and survey the table with a stern to benevolent look. In this same attitude my Mestwina watched Bishop Adalbert after serving up his dinner. She held her head slightly tilted, and her expression was one of expectancy. But Adalbert did not praise the dishes he liked; he ate as though tormented by disgust. He poked listlessly about, he chewed with distaste, as though every bite were at once a temptation and a harbinger of hell’s torments. Not that he found fault with anything in particular or, confronted with Pomorshian cookery, missed his Bohemian cuisine; his disgust was universal. (You can’t imagine, Ilsebill, what a repulsive sourpuss I was toward the end of the tenth century A.D. Because in principle I was this Adalbert of Prague, who gagged on his food and seemed to have been born without a palate.)
And yet Mestwina had fallen for the gaunt missionary. She, too, wanted to convert. When she looked over her folded arms and saw him chewing, her face flushed, and the flush rose to the part in her hair. For she hoped that her heathen cookery might give him a foretaste, perhaps not of her conversion to Catholicism but at least of her love, for love him she did—with a love that ran hot and cold.
For Adalbert she baked bacon flatbread. For Adalbert she stirred honey into millet porridge. For him there was sheep’s-milk cheese with smoked cod liver. For and against Adalbert she cooked (after singeing the bristles) a whole boned boar’s head with roots and morels. Then Mestwina put the head in a bowl and covered it with its broth. In the January frost the broth soon hardened into jelly. (The bishop’s mercenaries had speared the wild boar in the endless wooded hills of the interior.)
And toward noon, when the bishop wished to partake of a simple meal with the envoys of the king of Poland—Wladislaw was pressing for the conversion of the Prussians—Mestwina, for and against Adalbert, overturned the bowl and dumped the boar’s head on the table in such a way that though surrounded by jelly it could be seen for what it was. The famished envoys delivered it from the quivering jelly. But because Mestwina was looking on in her expectant attitude (over folded arms), Adalbert had to put a pious interpretation on their greediness: “One would think Satan in person had got into that jelly!” So the five of them vanquished Satan, and the bishop, as the standing Mestwina could see, had difficulty in displaying his usual disgust. The prelate Ludewig was encouraged to crack a joke or two about Satan’s excellent flavor; but Adalbert did not laugh.
By then the zealous missionary had been with us for weeks. We Pomorshians were still heathen, though I, during my time as a shepherd, carved linden wood into handy little Blessed Virgins—who, to be sure, had three breasts under their drapery. (Take my word for it, Ilsebill; even as a missionary on the one hand and a shepherd on the other, I remained an artist.)
And once when Mestwina, who lived with us in the Wicker Bastion on Fisherman’s Island in the middle of the Mottlava, was making fish soup for the bishop from five pop-eyed codfish heads, her necklace of uncut amber tore just as she was taking the heads, which were about to disintegrate, out of the broth. As she bent over the steaming kettle, the waxed string came open and slid unaided over the rounded nape of her neck. Though Mestwina raised her hand quickly and tried to catch hold of the open string, nevertheless
nine or seven pieces of amber, pierced (by me) with hot wire, slipped into the pot, where they dissolved in the foaming soup and gave the Christian Lenten fare the pagan strength which has resided in amber since the earliest times. Its effect so transformed, nay, revolutionized, the chaste Adalbert that no sooner had he spooned up the soup than he clutched my Mestwina like a madman and kept at it all that night (which had already begun to fall) and the following day. Time and time again the ascetic penetrated her flesh with his by now utterly unrepentant gimlet. Just as a Pomorshian might have done, but with more religious zeal and dialectical contradiction, he exhausted himself inside her, all the while mumbling his Church Latin, as though he had discovered a new way of pouring out the Holy Spirit. For we of the Wicker Bastion had not yet been baptized.
That brought dependence. From then on the bishop ordered Mestwina’s amber-seasoned fish soup once a week. No wish could have been easier to satisfy. Never, even in the winter, was there any shortage of fish. Along with oatmeal, barley and manna porridge, root vegetables, and mutton, fish was the staple food of the Pomorshians. That was why we had recently taken to worshiping a certain fish along with the traditional earth goddess Awa. And Mestwina—as cook and priestess—sacrificed to the god Ryb, who was flat of body, flat of head, and crooked of mouth; in other words, he looked very much like the talking Flounder.
True, there was strife among the people of the Pomorshian coast when, flouting the women’s will, the fishermen put through the cult of the flounder-headed god, but Mestwina amalgamated the new cult with traditional rites. She knew of legends to the effect that every spring the flounder god shared a bed made half of rushes and half of forest leaves with the three-breasted Awa. True, said Mestwina, they often quarreled, but Awa wouldn’t mind if a small share in the cult were devoted to her fish bedfellow. After all, he had been useful in his way, providing for full nets and calm seas; it was he who appeased the Vistula in time of flood, and he who had endowed amber with certain powers.
This was why the children of the Wicker Bastion carried sturgeon and codfish heads, the head of the silvery Vistula salmon, and the venerable gray head of the sheatfish on long branches cut from the willows that grew along the banks of the Radune, in a procession that followed the banks of the dikeless river mouths to the sea. And in the lead they carried crooked-mouthed, slant-eyed flounder heads. The idea was for the fish—the pike and the perch, the bass and the cod—to see the rivers and the Baltic Sea once again, and for the young god Ryb to be worshiped and appeased in his flounder form. (Even then the legend was going around that the Flounder—one had only to call him—would grant wishes and give advice, that he was especially devoted to fishermen and most remarkably intelligent.) “Flounder, O Flounder!” cried the children of the Wicker Bastion, festooned with old nets and rotting fish traps. And even after Mestwina’s death, when they turned us into Christians, we continued to be good heathens. At Easter time—why not at Easter time?—after lashing ourselves with willow switches on the bank of the Radune, we showed the fish the rivers and the sea in a solemn procession, led by a priest with the cross and six choir boys with little bells. Incense was provided by ground amber, swung in bowls. Pomorshian prayers for a good catch were chanted. But also in evidence were the taut pigs’ bladders that the girls tied on, three each, in memory of Awa. Only the litany was Catholic. For the dead eyes of the fish glittered unbaptized. Congealed eyes raised heavenward. Mouths ready to bite. Pectoral fins spread-eagled.
Toward evening the willow branches with the heads on them were planted like a fence in the road of logs leading to Fisherman’s Island. Screaming, the children of the Wicker Bastion ran away. The gulls dove down. As far as the road they had followed the procession with shrill cries but remained at a distance. Now they fell to, starting on the eyes, and battled one another until the willow branches were bare. And once in the spring, I recall, a porpoise, a small member of the whale family, was thrown up on the beach. Its head was placed in a leather holder fastened to the end of a long pole, which two young fellows took turns carrying in the middle of the procession, right after the effigy of Saint Barbara. And later, much later, when the Old City was founded in accordance with Culm law and the Charter City in accordance with Lübeck law, and I as a swordmaker was at last admitted to a guild, the children of the Wicker Bastion—among them my daughters by Dorothea—made fish heads of colored paper, put lamps inside them, and carried them around on poles. A pleasant sight in the evening, though it always made me rather sad—yes indeed, Ilsebill—because Mestwina was no longer with us.
And because of those fish heads, which boisterous children carried along the log road and into the Christian-Bohemian camp, Bishop Adalbert, who was later to be numbered among the martyrs, flew into a rage and waxed obscene in Latin. With holy water he armed himself against the devil’s artifices. The innocent codfish heads made hellish faces at him. Especially the slant-eyed Flounder, as seen by the bishop, had Satan’s ironic, disruptive look. Against that look he raised the cross aloft. With a wave of his hand he commanded his mercenaries to behead the fish heads once again. Snick-snack, it was done, and that infuriated Mestwina, for from her priestess’s point of view, more was hacked off those willow branches than the ascetic dreamed of. What could he know of Awa and the recent male deity who went by the name of Ryb?
Mestwina knew. She knew and suffered. Small and round as she was, she grew a little. But she said nothing. She stored it all up, Pomorshian-style. Later she drank fermented mare’s milk in tiny sips. It was almost evening before she had worked herself into the right state. And by the time the ascetic came as usual to visit Mestwina on her bed of leaves, her fury had taken on body and purpose.
Her hut was walled with plaited willow withes, plastered with mud thrown from outside. A comfortable room. Adalbert came in with a pious greeting, but he also brought his dialectical contradiction. Though carnal lust lifted his cowl like a mighty tent pole, Mestwina did not appease him on a short-term basis, but for all time. He didn’t even get a chance to discharge. Promptly and vigorously she bashed him again and again on his Bohemian head with a cast-iron cooking spoon, and in her fury avenged the cod and the sturgeon, the perch, the pike, the silvery salmon, the reddish bass, and repeatedly the flounder god of the Pomorshian fisherfolk.
The only sound out of Adalbert was a brief sigh. But his adversary stood unbowed, stood valiantly for its own sake. Even when the bishop was already dead and a martyr, it refused to bow down.
After Mestwina had slain the subsequently canonized Adalbert of Prague, I buried the cast-iron spoon, for we had reason to fear that if found it would be elevated to the status of a Christian relic. As for the body, we threw it into the river. A little later all of us in the Wicker Bastion (and with us Mestwina) were driven by Polish mercenaries into a shallow stretch of the Radune, where Adalbert’s successor, the prelate Ludewig, subjected us to forced baptism. This Ludewig, incidentally, had a feeling for art and was devoted to me. He liked my little carved Madonnas. He even put up with the Virgin’s third breast (under the drapery). The honey-colored amber eyes I had fitted into the linden wood gave the Mother of God a magically compelling gaze, but that, too, he interpreted in the light of triumphant Catholicism. Perhaps it was because of my useful talent that I went scot free when Mestwina was condemned to death; as an artist, one is welcomed by all religions. And besides, as you know, Ilsebill, I haven’t got the makings of a martyr.
It was in April of the year 997 that Adalbert was slain by the drunken Mestwina, that we Pomorshians were baptized and the spoon buried. I buried it not far from the future settlement of Sankt Albrecht. And there, in the exact same place, it was dug up in the fall of 1889 by Dr. Ernst Paulig, sometime rector of the Sankt Johann Gymnasium, who donated it to the Museum of the City of Danzig. “Pomeranian cooking utensil,” said the little tag. Actually the spoon was of Bohemian origin. Actually Adalbert had brought it to convert the heathen with. Mestwina used it only to ladle out the mare’s milk fermented for h
er own use; for cooking she used wooden spoons.
What else happened when Mestwina, shortly after the forced baptism, was condemned to death and beheaded by a Polish executioner will be told later on: who betrayed her, what signs and wonders befell as the sword descended, and what absurdities schoolbook history has handed down to us.
“Only with Mestwina,” said the accused Flounder before the Women’s Tribunal, “did Awa’s rule come to an end. From then on, the male cause alone counted.” But the women weren’t listening. They had other preoccupations. The case of Mestwina had become secondary. Strife was the order of the day. The feminist cause threatened to lose itself in resolutions.
But one day, after prolonged tergiversation, in the course of which the opposing or tactically allied groups expressed themselves in urgent motions, the Tribunal finally arrived at its seating order, for it was not always the accused Flounder who forced recesses and adjournments. Along with the judge and her eight associate judges, the prosecutor, and the court-appointed defense counsel, all of whom had, and wished to preserve, their symmetrical seating order—the judge and associate judges upraised, before them in the pit the Flounder in his tub, and to the left and right of him the prosecution and the defense—there was a further group, which was also part and parcel of the Tribunal, namely, an Advisory Council consisting of thirty-three women who were supposed to have been seated in the first two rows of the former movie house, but were so divided among themselves that they had thus far brought forth only two resolutions: (1) that the current proceedings should be recessed, or else (2) that the Tribunal should be adjourned. The Flounder had frequent occasion for irony at their expense: “If the esteemed Advisory Council of the High Court, which has recently taken, so I hear, to calling itself ‘revolutionary,’ has no objection, I, as the accused, should prefer to carry on with the proceedings, because, you see, I want very much to treat of the pre-Christian episodes of Awa, Wigga, and Mestwina together, as part of a larger context, the decline of the matriarchy. That, too, was development. Or—if you prefer—revolution!”