by Günter Grass
In the Flounder’s opinion, so much undeviating love was just another form of domination and not at all what he had suggested. Agnes Kurbiella’s unrequited love, he maintained, hadn’t caused her so much as an hour’s unhappiness. Never had she chewed a handkerchief to bits; on the contrary, she had radiated unclouded joy, and it would be no exaggeration to say that, far from making her dependent or servile, love had given her strength and blown her up to more than life size. “Even if this kitchenmaid’s triumph wasn’t what I originally intended,” said the accused flatfish, “I can’t deny that I respect her: so much indulgence, devotion, resignation.”
And at the Women’s Tribunal, when the prosecution at last took up his theory of love, the Flounder declared in self-defense: “Easy does it, my dear ladies. I have already owned that early on, when men were maintained in a state of dependency and one might reasonably have termed them ‘oppressed,’ I conceived of love as a counterforce which, by way of compensation, would make for male privilege and female dependency. But then, by following the example of Agnes Kurbiella, quite a few women succeeded in transforming my—to cite the prosecution—so craftily devised instrument of oppression into a symbol of eternal womanly greatness: What self-conquest! What selflessness! What fortitude! What overflowing, uncontainable feeling! What fidelity! Think of all the great loving women! What would literature be without them? Without a Juliet, Romeo would be a nobody. To whom, if not to his Diotima, could Hölderlin in his hymns have poured forth his soul? Ah, how moved we still are by the love of Käthchen von Heilbronn! Or by the death of Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities.
“Our Agnes’s love had this quiet, sometimes melancholy, always effective, but never aggressive strength. Of course I can’t help seeing that the ladies of this esteemed Tribunal choose to be different and have to keep step with the times, that Ms. Huntscha, for instance, undoubtedly has feelings but makes sure to rationalize them before putting them into words, but I nevertheless beg you to show just a little sisterly comprehension for a poor child surrendered, by me I admit, to the mercies of two worn-out wrecks. I have spoken of Agnes’s talents as a Muse but have been unable to convince the High Court of the existence and dignity of this exclusively feminine quality. But perhaps Agnes, sparing as she was of words, succeeded in speaking for me. By transforming my dirty trick, the love that enslaves, into pure feeling, she enabled womanly love to win out in the end and to make men small, so small.”
In conclusion, the Flounder pleaded with the presiding judge, the associate judges, the prosecutor, and the entire Revolutionary Advisory Council of the Women’s Tribunal to harden their hearts no longer, but to follow the example of Agnes Kurbiella and let their whole being reduce itself to love: “That and that alone is your true strength. No man has it. Not your intelligence—shrewdly as it has seen through me, exposed, refuted, and discredited me—no, it is the power of your love that will someday change the world. Already I can see the beginnings of a new tenderness, a new sympathy embracing every man and every woman. Love will glorify the whole world with its radiance. Millions of wishless Ilsebills. Shamed by so much meekness, men will renounce their power and their glory. Love alone will remain. As far as the eye can see …”
At this point the Flounder was interrupted. The intercom in his bulletproof-glass house was cut off. Even though Ms. von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, burst into tears in protest and the Revolutionary Advisory Council (once again) split—it was then that the faction later known as the Flounder Party first made its appearance—the Women’s Tribunal nevertheless refused to acknowledge the love of Agnes the kitchenmaid as a contribution to the emancipation of women. The court was adjourned. Affidavits—counter-affidavits. Factional struggles.
But the subject of love was often discussed after that, if only as a marginal topic. When, in the course of the trial, the case of Amanda Woyke was argued and her letters to Count Rumford were qualified as love letters even though both sides of the correspondence dealt with nothing more romantic than potato growing, slow-combustion stoves, soup kitchens, and Rumford soup for the poor. As for the cook Sophie Rotzoll, though the Tribunal evaluated her life as a revolutionary experiment, the Flounder held that it was marked from first to last by tragic love. Had she not been obliged at the age of fourteen to surrender her passionately beloved Fritz—condemned to life imprisonment for membership in a secret society—to the fortress of Graudenz? Had she not resisted all male temptation for forty years? For then at last he had returned, in pretty bad shape. “Yes, my dear ladies,” said the Flounder. “This you must recognize as love. Love worthy of Agnes.”
Nor was the Flounder inclined to minimize the love factor in the cases of Lena Stubbe, who cooked for the poor, and of Sibylle Miehlau, Billy for short, who wanted so tragically to be different, and of the still-unconcluded case of Maria, the cook at the shipyard canteen. At every turn, love broke through. It pulled strings. It outlasted hunger, plague, and wars. It refuted cost accounting and all economics. It ravaged and, in the case of Lena Stubbe, was a silent torment. Captive to love, Sophie remained a spinster down to her delicately wrinkled old age and never stopped hoping. Billy looked for it elsewhere. Amanda encoded it in letters. And most likely, since love can also harden, Maria will slowly turn to stone.
“No!” cried the Flounder, wholly embedded in sand as he addressed the Women’s Tribunal. “I regret nothing. Without love there’d be nothing left but toothache. Without love, life—and this I say deliberately, speaking as a fish—wouldn’t even be beastly. None of our Ilsebills could get along without love. And if I may briefly return to the cook Agnes: by cooking with devotion for painter Möller’s swollen liver and poet Opitz’s delicate stomach, she imparted tender meaning to the silly proverb ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’ Ah, her oatmeal gruel! Ah, her soup chicken!
“Hard-boiled ladies, if you will lend me your ears for just another moment, I should like to conclude with a few lines from one of Opitz’s lost poems:
“‘Is love to be all passion, a flaming, blazing hell?
Ah, dearest, let us hasten, or else the bland, white fish
Thou hast in milk transfigured will cool off in the dish.
Is’t not for love thou wishest the fish to make me well?’”
Agnes remembered over boiled fish
Upon the codfish which today
I simmered in white wine
while musing about the days
when codfish was still cheap,
I laid—when his eyes had turned milky
and white fisheyes were rolling over
the feverish Opitz’s blank paper—
strips of fresh cucumber
and then, removing the broth from the heat, added dill to it.
Over the boiled fish I strewed shrimps’ tails,
which our guests—two men who didn’t know each other—
had toyed with, conversationally
concerned with the future, while
the fish was cooking.
Ah, cook, you watch me
as with a flat spoon
I help the tender flesh: willingly it gives up its bones
and wants to be reminded, Agnes, reminded.
By then the gentlemen knew each other better.
At our age, I told them, Opitz died of the plague.
We talked about the arts and about prices.
No political excitement.
Afterward sour cherry soup.
Pits from the old days got counted, too:
when we played rich man poor man beggarman thief… .
It seems his name was Axel
No, no, Ilsebill, it’s not like that at all. Love isn’t just something the fairy-tale Flounder dreamed up. No, it exists, the same as rain exists. It can’t be turned off, it doesn’t smell of fish, it’s playing in all the movie houses, it finds opportunities that don’t always make much sense. For instance: somebody likes buttermilk; funny, so do I, and there you have it.
> And here you are in your fourth month of pregnancy, because we were looking for a way of expressing love. So something palpable has to come of it. It can’t just be an era in itself! But love is more spacious than a double bed and grows without regard to time: everywhere it languishes, utterly dispersed, divided, and yet whole.
So it wasn’t hard for Agnes to make soup for Opitz by adding fresh dill to the boiled fish that Möller had left over. And you, too, if I left leftovers, would put them to tasty use somewhere on the outside, where there’s no phone to come between us. Why wouldn’t we be able to meet in reverse motion, at the Green Gate, for instance, which in Dorothea’s day was called Koggen Gate? Agnes is just coming from the market; she has bought an unplucked chicken for painter Möller, while I (engaged in negotiations with King Wladislaw), am inwardly rich in figures and quotations from other authors. She’s pregnant, and the scene is wintry. She’s plodding through the slushy snow. Her waddling gait. She turns onto Beutlergasse. Let’s hope she doesn’t fall… . “All a lot of subterfuges!” you say, looking sternly out of the window into the present January. But how do you expect us to live without subterfuges! You yourself are a subterfuge. That’s why Agnes never closed doors. Always left them ajar. No hesitations between her comings and goings. Often she was there, but I noticed only myself, whereas someone else (Möller) noticed her even though she was with me. Her love was placeless. That’s why I was never able to perceive her presence: what I missed was there. And even the Flounder, for whom everything, like his backbone, tapers down logically to a tail fin, couldn’t understand that what she never ran out of was dill. He thought love must work like a mousetrap and that she must have fallen for Möller and me. Actually it was one of the four or five Swedes whose regiment was occupying Putzig, and they’d only wanted to go for a ride and hunt rabbits in the dunes, where they came across Agnes, who was sitting curly-haired in the beach grass. She was tending her geese, and all of a sudden she had all four on top of her, one after another, it didn’t take long. But only the first really counted. He was closer to her than Möller and Opitz later on. It seems his name was Axel. And it seems his downy boyish beard was blond. And his brittle, commanding voice lingered on. He never came back, and he was always near her while I, sitting over blank paper as Agnes passed through the room, traveled to Zlatna, where in my days as a young teacher in Transylvania I was surprised on a straw pallet by a kitchenmaid who never cooked for me—just as you always listen when I’m with you to see if someone else is coming. When actually I’ve been gone for ages and I’m just smoking.
My subterfuges—yours. I suggest that we meet where the Striessbach flows into the Radaune and the Radaune flows into the Mottlau and the Mottlau flows into the Vistula and all these rivers empty into the Baltic Sea. And there I will tell you how it was with Agnes, whom I also have in mind when I come to you and absent-mindedly—which always makes for a fight—call you Agnes.
When Agnes Kurbiella came to the city from the Hela Peninsula, where the Swedish occupation troops were garrisoned, Möller, the aged painter who had taken to drink years before, saw her playing like a child with sea shells, the only things she had brought with her from the Hela beaches. The Swedes had taken her father, her mother, and all her geese. (Later she could never say exactly whom or what first.) Struck by her way of carrying her head—tilted as though in thought—Möller took her to his home on Carp Pond, where she put herself to work in the kitchen.
After Agnes had posed for the town painter for three years as a market girl, as a grave-faced braid maker, or as a dressed-up burgher’s daughter and (despite his fondness for fat) cooked light food for him, the hem of her apron began to rise; she became a pregnant model.
After quite a few competent red-chalk sketches, Möller, shortly before her confinement, as though to confirm his impending fatherhood, portrayed himself in colored chalk on the rounded belly of his kitchenmaid: a mobile likeness, for whenever the unborn child modified its position or tried its limbs, some part of the presumptive father’s taut image would bulge. He had the look of a peasant with laughing eyes, a goodly number of puffy cheeks, and a reddish beard around his mouth.
Next Möller did an oil painting that faithfully portrayed the ultrapregnant Agnes carrying his healthy physiognomy before her, but left an empty space on the right side of the canvas. Immediately after the confinement—the little girl died when less than a year old—he first sketched himself in chalk on the young mother’s sunken belly, then, taking up his oils, transferred Agnes with his bilious countenance to the empty space on the canvas, beside the hopeful belly (with his joker’s face on it): chubby-cheeked father and peevish father.
Painter Möller saw himself in double. To him everything was an allegory. A pity that the successful picture, appealing for all its mannerism, has not come down to us; for after little Jadwiga’s death Möller is thought to have scratched, punched, and cut the canvas to pieces, murdering it—as far as he was concerned—twice over.
Along with other horrors-turned-paper, statistics tell us that European infants, with their specially prepared food, consume nine times as much protein, carbohydrates, and calories (or barely peck at them and let the rest spoil) as is left for the infants of India. Agnes Kurbiella knew nothing of protein or vitamins. True, Erasmus of Rotterdam had strongly recommended (in Latin) that all mothers suckle their own babies, but since after a few days her milk dried up and Möller was unwilling to pay a wet nurse, she fed the already sickly child first on diluted cow’s milk, then on oatmeal gruel, and finally on such prechewed foods as chicken with millet, calves’ brains with turnips, herring roe with spinach, lambs’ tongues in purée of lentils. Painter Möller’s leavings.
And in a later day, when my Ilsebill went off on a trip (the Lesser Antilles), I, too, fed our child prechewed food—out of labeled jars, costing 1.50 to 1.80 marks apiece, with vacuum caps that go pop when you open them. Also boiled beef with egg noodles in tomato sauce. This dish contained 3.7% of protein, 3.0% of fat, 7.5% of carbohydrates, 82 calories per 100 grams. Net weight of jar 220 g; meat content 28 g.
In the course of the week’s program—creamed spinach with fresh eggs and potatoes, turkey with rice, ham with mixed vegetables and egg noodles—the figures varied in such a way as to produce a balanced diet. The label of the codfish in herb sauce with potatoes indicated 5.4% protein and 93 calories. The fish content came to 49 g. In addition, as long as my Ilsebill was away (strolling across white beaches, blond among dark-skinned people, as in the travel folder) I daily dissolved instant semolina out of a sealed package in boiled water. This preparation contained milk, vegetable fat, durum-wheat semolina, honey, and sugar. It was (as the package assured me) enriched with vitamins. At 6:30 A.M and at 12:00 noon I also gave our child a bottle containing enriched powdered milk dissolved in water (by me), having first, in accordance with Ilsebill’s instructions, sterilized the nipple in boiling water. (Ah, if only I had paid Frau Zenlein next door to suckle my Agnes’s baby!)
Taking care of baby is no longer a problem for the grass widower, because everything is right there: absorbent disposable diapers all ready to use, salves and powders, sedative suppositories when needed, and for emergencies telephone numbers that give promise of a male or female doctor. There are also paperbacks with instructions and diagrams showing you how to do everything you might possibly have to do. You’ll soon be able to rely on a man. Soon he’ll be able to manage by himself. Soon he’ll have learned to husband his warmth. Soon he’ll be more motherly than he was designed to be… .
“You needn’t worry. Why, it’s child’s play. It won’t take me any time at all. Why shouldn’t a man be able to manage by himself? What makes you think that only a woman can? Have a good flight, Ilsebill. And don’t forget us. And love me a little off and on. And take care of yourself. There are supposed to be sharks down there. And drop us a line from your island. We’ll get along fine.”
When Dorothea went off on pilgrimages to Finsterwalde and Aachen, leaving me wit
h our remaining four children, including the twin girls who were not yet a year old, things were more difficult. In Calcutta I saw mothers who prechewed as I did when Dorothea High Gothically left me at home, as Agnes chewed turnips and breast of chicken for her daughter Jadwiga. (Möller, who stingily refused her a wet nurse, made sketches of her chewing.) But the baby didn’t want it, took less and less, couldn’t keep it down, shat hard balls, shat undigested liquid, whined and whimpered, aged fast, and languished—fed to death.
That’s how it was in those days, as retrospective statistics have calculated: everywhere, except among the Outer City tanners and the peasant serfs. Teensy-weensy Martha or Anna, pocket-sized Gundel. Stine, Trude, Lovise. So many of my children by Dorothea, Agnes, Amanda, died on me, I had so much suffering behind me, that when I gave our baby its sterile bottle or opened the popping vacuum jars with their precisely measured contents, or when I dissolved instant semolina in boiled water and saw the well-digested results—how well fed they smelled!—in the disposable diapers, I became positively euphoric and sang paeans of praise to the Central European baby-food industry, though well I knew that our child and millions of other sweet little babies eat so much every day as to deprive the infants of southern Asia of the barest essentials. And worse: it is now known that our vitamin-enriched powdered milk is positively fatal to many infants in the less industrialized countries, so that the advertising of a leading concern that is trying to develop a market for powdered milk in Africa can only be termed criminal. (Undermining the African mother’s faith in her own milk.) For which reason the Flounder, when infant nutrition was being discussed at the Women’s Tribunal, could say with profound, mellifluous concern, “At this point, my dear ladies, I would recommend a little female solidarity. If you must persist in your disposable wastefulness, then at least do something to help your sisters in Africa, for instance, by boycotting the handsomely packaged products of a certain company. After all, you wouldn’t want to solve the problem of overpopulation by increasing infant mortality. Or would you?”