The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Sieglinde said, “At last! Finished shooting the shit? He’s a shrewd article, all right. But I’ll put him down yet.”

  I revealed nothing but called the attention of my friend Siggie (honestly, Ilsebill, it’s not a relationship to be taken seriously) to the absence of security measures. “There’s every reason for your Tribunal to go on. You haven’t half exhausted the case of Dorothea of Montau. But what will you do if somebody walks off with the Flounder?”

  As she was double-locking the former movie house from outside, Sieglinde promised to do something about it. “You men think of everything,” she said.

  Like at the movies

  A woman who strokes her hair

  or leafs quickly through her loves

  and can’t remember.

  She’d like to be a redhead for a while

  or slightly dead or play a minor part

  in some other film.

  Now she disintegrates into fabrics and cutouts.

  A woman’s leg taken by itself.

  She doesn’t want to be—but to be made—happy.

  She wants to know what he’s thinking now.

  And she wants to cut the other woman,

  if there is one, right out of the film: snippety-snip.

  The action proceeds: body damage, rain,

  suspicion in the trunk.

  Weekends leave imprints of men’s shorts.

  Hairy—hairless. Limbs limbs limbs.

  A slap in the face promises something that later sounds real.

  Now she wants to get dressed again,

  but first be born out of foam

  and stop smelling outlandish.

  Skinny from eating too much yogurt,

  Ilsebill weeps in the shower.

  Scania herring

  The dignitaries had invited themselves. On master swordmaker Albrecht Slichting’s return home from a pilgrimage of more than three years with his wife, Dorothea, and his last remaining daughter, Gertrud, their marriage relapsed into a daily domestic hell, and members of the congregation found more and more grounds for complaint: Dorothea’s spells of ecstasy during Mass were becoming too frequent and tumultuous, and that wasn’t all. She was making a mockery of the Eucharist with her giggling and guffawing. The uses to which she put the word Jesus were ambiguous, to say the least. She wore wreaths of henbane on Candlemas. She collected the scabs and pus of the lepers in little bottles. She had a cross-eyed look, and if she wasn’t possessed she had probably made a pact with Belial, for how else was one to account for the feverish twitching of her limbs and her hours-long spells of rigidity.

  At first these accusations were uttered in private, but then they began to be aired more and more openly. Everyone sympathized with her old and ailing husband. It seemed that the once prosperous swordmaker was faced with destitution, for his wife had squandered his hard-earned fortune on frivolous handouts to riffraff from God knows where. His apprentices kept running out on him. Unable to sleep at night, the bewitched woman ran about the streets. She had been heard screaming for the Lord Jesus in a tone described as more lascivious than devout. Though her Dominican confessor spoke appeasingly of hard trials imposed on her by marks of divine favor, it was widely held that Father Christian Roze, who was also a doctor of canon law, ought finally to initiate proceedings against her. Sin was shamelessly masquerading as penance. Small wonder, with such goings-on, that the plague hung on and on. And despite last year’s potential harvest the prices of rye, barley, and oats were going up again.

  Urged not only by the burghers of the Old City but also by his congregation at Saint Mary’s in the Charter City, Roze first spoke to the Dominicans, then consulted Abbot Johannes Marienwerder and Walrabe von Scharfenberg, the district commander of the Teutonic Knights. The dignitaries decided to pay a visit to the Old City swordmaker, who enjoyed the esteem of the patrician council since, far from participating in the insurrectionary folly of the guilds, he had exerted a moderating influence.

  Because political events (the marriage of the Polish Jadwiga to the Lithuanian Jagello) required the commander to absent himself for a short while, the visit, though announced in March, could not take place until the end of April. Though the four dignitaries came on a Thursday, and though it was well past Lent, Dorothea—after they had questioned her and listened to her husband—served them Scania herring, which were to be had cheap at the fish market, because the city of Danzig had a Vitte, or trading post, in Falsterbo in the Scania district of Sweden.

  The Dominican Nikolaus wore cowl and cord. Abbot Johannes Marienwerder came in travel dress. The massive commander Walrabe wore the white mantle of the order with the black Teutonic cross and did not take it off until he sat down at table. Roze’s ample gown and velvet cap made him look more like a scholar than a priest.

  Before the meal, the swordmaker confirmed the gentlemen in their knowledge that when a ninth child had been born, after three had been carried away by the plague and five more had died from one cause or another, he, Albrecht Slichting, on his wife’s demand and in the presence of the Dominican prior, had pledged himself in writing never again to share the bed of his wife, Dorothea, whereupon she had been granted the special privilege of partaking once weekly of the Lord’s body.

  After a detailed report on their pilgrimage of the preceding year to Aachen and to Einsiedeln in Switzerland—he pushed back his woolen shirt to show them a scar on his right shoulder as evidence of an attack by bandits—Slichting testified to, and Roze noted, Dorothea’s desire for a separation; she had wished to remain in Einsiedeln and formally sever relations with her husband and eight-year-old daughter, so as to be free for, and wholly available to, the Lord Jesus. Despite the widespread disturbances before and after the Battle of Sempach, she had thought Einsiedeln a “forecourt of paradise.” In him, on the other hand, the rasping dialect and self-righteous bickering of the Swiss had instilled a gnawing homesickness. He could never have borne the thought of dying and being buried in the mountains. And so, when she kept demanding her freedom day in, day out, he had decided to give in. After signing a statement, to which his age—he was sixty-six at the time—lent credibility, that their life together was without sin, they had declared their willingness to separate. But before the chapel altar, when they were asked to confirm, he his wish to be separated and Dorothea her renunciation of the eight-year-old Gertrud, he, Albrecht Slichting, had several times uttered a loud “no,” which, he was well aware, gave them every reason to call him a fool complete with cap and bells. Then the three of them had left Einsiedeln, although it was midwinter and most of the passes were closed.

  Then Dr. Roze and Dorothea’s confessor cross-examined him about the particulars of the hard journey home: Was it true that he and his daughter, Gertrud, had ridden long distances on horseback, whereas his wife walked the icy roads in paper-thin shoes? Why, when the ice began to break up as they were crossing the Elbe, had he instantly reached out to save his daughter, but—laughing scornfully, what’s more!—let his wife be carried away on an ice floe, so that she was saved only by God’s help? Could he testify that during the sea voyage from Lübeck to Danzig, Dorothea had several times committed acts of lewdness with a carved wooden figure of Jesus? Had he, on the journey homeward or since their return, noticed anything to suggest that his wife was engaged in witchcraft? And more of the same.

  In defense of his riding while she walked every day for four weeks, Slichting cited his age and Dorothea’s indestructible good health. He confessed to the laughter, but attributed it to his own terror and to his fear for his wife when he saw her swept away on the ice floe. As for the acts of lewdness with the wooden Saviour, he denied them but owned that the sailors on shipboard had talked and made jokes on the subject. Nor could he supply any evidence that his wife had engaged in witchcraft. True, she stirred the ashes of burnt coffin wood into her Lenten soups, but this she did as a reminder of man’s frailty before the Lord God. And when, as happened now and then, she seemed to be worshiping her little
bottles of pus, she was undoubtedly praying the Lord to intercede in favor of the lepers at the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals.

  The commander said nothing. As though in passing, Abbot Johannes Marienwerder asked Slichting about his affairs. When the swordmaker groaned, the abbot, with a glance at the commander, held out the likelihood of new orders. Now that the Lithuanian Jagello was king of Poland, it would be necessary to prepare for war. Then he asked Slichting as though in jest whether, if another opportunity for a separation from Dorothea should offer itself, he would again be fool enough to cry “no.” At this the swordmaker made no bones about calling his marriage a hell, his wife a sanctimonious bitch, and the possibility of getting rid of her the last hope of his declining years.

  The dignitaries, including the commander, smiled. At their request, the impoverished Slichting displayed what products of his craft he still had on hand: an enchased dagger in a silver scabbard, two swords of different lengths with gem-studded handles and bird’s-head pommels, and a crossbow covered with gold leaf, which the English nobleman Henry Derby had ordered on his way through but neither called nor paid for.

  They comforted the swordmaker—the mad Derby would surely be back—and told anecdotes about the young earl, who took as much pleasure in the annual winter campaigns against the Lithuanians as in fox hunting back home in England. Then there was talk of founding—the matter had been under discussion for years—a Brigittine convent on the Swedish model. The body of Saint Birgitta, or Bridget, had lain in state in a chapel beside Saint Catherine’s in Danzig, before being moved to the Wadstena Convent in Sweden. But Abbot Johannes Marienwerder held that what the country needed more than another convent was a saint born here, between rivers, nurtured in this flat farming country, and of proved piety. It wouldn’t do to have all the miracles happening in Poland.

  Then Albrecht Slichting was allowed to leave, and his wife was called into the long, narrow room, with its two tall windows looking across Bucket Makers’ Court to the half-timbered cottages and mud huts of Carp Pond on the other side of the Radaune.

  Clad in a coarse hair shirt, Dorothea of Montau entered the room. She was forty-one at the time and still beautiful in a way that can only—and not for want of a better word—be termed indescribable. Be that as it may, the room was transfigured by her entrance, and the four gentlemen corrected their posture as though taken by surprise. They pulled their hands with the gnawed fingernails—even Abbot Johannes nibbled—back into their sleeves and sat up stiffly, with their backs to the two windows. In front of them stood a massive table, empty except for Dr. Roze’s writing materials.

  Dorothea declined to be seated in the gentlemen’s presence. Her tall frame tilted slightly forward, she stood looking with this eye and that eye out of this and that window, as though the April sky, which had been overcast for days, were clear and open. Then she gave the commander a compelling look and, speaking quickly, without emphasis, employing a strange word order, prognosticated woe. She knew the exact date of the battle the Teutonic Knights would wage at Tannenberg, and she knew of their defeat. Perhaps because the date was in the following century, the four gentlemen took refuge in manly laughter. After that the din of the bucket makers could be heard more clearly.

  Breaking in roughly, Christian Roze made light of the dire prophecy and went on to castigate her outrageous conduct: What had got into her, giggling during Holy Mass and wagging her tongue in her open mouth like a lewd whore? If she burned moldy coffin wood, then why not the horns of the He-goat? What lover was waiting for her when she ran, laughing raucously, through the streets of the Old City to the Wicker Bastion? Was it true that she could hover two hands’ breadth above the ground and walk over water? Is that how she had saved herself from the ice floe on the river Elbe? And to whom had she sold her soul in return for these gifts?

  Her mouth twisting slightly and turning upward like that of a fish, Dorothea replied in chains of words that did not always form sentences, but with their end rhymes suggested poetic method.

  “When Jesu cumeth for my mouth to kisse,

  Our tongués meten in the orifice.”

  “Swet Jesus pain doth shrood my hed

  And nary ash of coffin wud.”

  “When dark descendeth, than luv min hert rendeth

  My Jesu swet I go to mete

  His body is my soles delete.”

  “Always I risé from the glomby earth

  When Jesu sucketh me with his swet mouth.”

  “My sol I yelde up to Jesu dere

  Alwhan he cometh att me with his spere.

  So lordlings, to your dishes.

  Ichab ykookt four fishes,

  Frish herrings for the bord

  Of Jesu Christ, our Lord.”

  Abbot and commander, Dominican confessor and doctor of canon law—all were moved by her answers. Surely it could not be Satan who spoke so charmingly out of the poor thing’s mouth. That little tongue, which sometimes—yes indeed, to be sure—fluttered rather provocatively, must have been loosed by the Lord God. True, the boundary between carnal lust and spiritual rejoicing was not always clear in this all-rhyming Dorothea’s word combinations, but her love for the Lord and Saviour could not be doubted, as the abbot, who was of Alemannic origin, observed with a distinctly Swiss intonation that lent charm to his flat Low German. The scholarly Johannes Marienwerder cited examples of Christian mysticism and likened the words he had heard from Dorothea’s lips to the legends of the nun Hrosvita and the poems of Mechthild of Magdeburg. And considering that there is no incompatibility between mystical experience and canon law, provided no heresy is involved, Dr. Roze made it clear that he had no fault to find. The vicar of Saint Mary’s agreed, but for safety’s sake went on to inquire about one thing and another—the bottled lepers’ pus, for instance.

  Whereupon Dorothea again set her mouth on the bias and established a connection between her “brestkins twain” and “Jesues body of pain.” As for the pus she had taken from the lepers of Corpus Christi Hospital, she called it “honey from Jesues iniurees,” which just happened to rhyme with “heavens littul bees.” She dissociated herself from Satan, whom she reviled as “the Lord of Lies,” which she rhymed with a reference to the shifty look of a tasty flatfish—“the Flunderes skemy eyes.”

  In the end the doctor of canon law declared himself satisfied. Commander Walrabe von Scharfenberg, a man disinclined to open his mouth, sent Dorothea off to the kitchen to prepare (at last) the promised and so charmingly rhymed Scania herrings.

  As Dorothea of Montau withdrew her eyes from one and the other window, turned, and walked the length of the room to the door, the four dignitaries behind the table had the impression that she was gliding along two hands’ breadth above the floor.

  Alone again, they relaxed in their chairs. Roze, fired with enthusiasm, was first to say the word: “A saint. She is a saint.” The others agreed. But the considerations that suddenly made Commander Walrabe eloquent were of a more practical character. Though perhaps a shade too somber—he began—the prophecy of the politically ignorant Dorothea would be fulfilled, but not to the disadvantage of the Teutonic Order. War with the now united kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland was imminent. Just because the Polish Jadwiga had succeeded in converting the pagan Jagello and metamorphosing him into the Christian Wladislaw, the people, even in Teutonic territory, were calling this power-hungry female a saint. Countermeasures were imperative. Dangerous, dangerous, the way those Polacks kept turning out picturesque miracles, whereas the piety of the honest, simplehearted Germans was too dull for words, and as for the Hanseatic shopkeepers, before they’d buy a miracle they’d count up the costs. “In short,” he concluded, “I, Walrabe von Scharfenberg, will bear witness to this woman’s holiness and pledge the support of the Teutonic Order, which rules this territory in the name of the Blessed Virgin. We must act quickly. War is hard upon us. In addition to arms and supplies, our imperiled country needs the protection of a tutelary saint. What’s more, the man
whose sword is guided by such wheaten-haired beauty will fight better.”

  Johannes Marienwerder sighed and threw up his hands. Though for less warlike motives, the abbot agreed with the commander, but how were canonization proceedings to be initiated? The dignitaries could see no way, for there was one little difficulty: Dorothea was alive. And despite the many hardships endured on her pilgrimages, despite her racking penitential exercises, convulsive ecstasies, other kinds of absence, migraines, and protracted periods of insomnia, she was in excellent health; her strength was in no wise impaired by her frequent nosebleeds, which on the contrary seemed to purify her humors.

  When Walrabe termed Dorothea’s demise conducive to the welfare of the Teutonic Order and therefore a necessity, and offered in hardly veiled language to promote said demise, possibly with Dominican help, the monk Nikolaus managed a show of indignation: No no no! Out of the question! In a pinch Dorothea could be sent on a pilgrimage to Rome, where the Swedish Birgitta had met her death and been promptly canonized. The soil of the Eternal City, drenched as it was with martyrs’ blood, and the unhealthy climate both gave ground for hope. And besides, the papal canonization commission tended to be favorably impressed when prospective saints chose Rome as their last dwelling place. Of course it would be necessary to wait for a jubilee year. And as far as the Dominican knew, there mightn’t be one for some time.

  The commander refused to be put off. Apparently, he remarked, the monk had no objection to being ruled by Polacks. The war, in any case, would not wait. And what if this indestructible Dorothea went to Rome and survived the feverish climate? No, not at all. He didn’t suspect the Dominican brothers’ loyalty to the Teutonic Order. Not for the moment, at least.

  After a long enough pause to conjure up a more favorable view of the commander’s project—the tin-jangling bucket makers could be heard again—Abbot Johannes promised to do his utmost. Since, as they all knew, Dorothea desired a hermit’s existence and looked upon withdrawal from the world as freedom, it might, he thought, be possible to accommodate her in Marienwerder Cathedral. True, it was not the custom of the country to immure pious hermits and lady penitents, and elsewhere as well the custom was falling more and more into disuse, but with the support of the bishop it would no doubt be possible to make an exception. And once immured, her mortal envelope was bound to dissolve soon enough.