by Günter Grass
“There you have it,” Paasch put in. “He hates childish playing at revolution.”
Possibly Bettina von Carnow thought she was distributing good cheer when she said, “But after forty years of fidelity our dear Sophie got her Fritz, all the same.”
Before Griselde could resort to violence, Witzlaff appeased the rising tumult. “Not a word against Sophie and Fritz. Think of those two old folks waddling out to gather mushrooms. What a touching pair they must have been!”
You kept tugging at my sleeve. But our time was past. True, the mushrooms seemed to be growing for us alone, but the idea, our idea, had gone by, or it had a different name; it no longer stood on one leg but was mounted—there was talk of the Weltgeist on horseback. We never met him in the woods. Only ourselves. That’s why we gathered fly agaric. They’re special. They make for images. They pay back time. Without removing the skin or stems, you cut them into slices and pound them into a powder that you stir into soups, cake dough, or meat jelly. Or you don’t pound anything into a powder, but keep the tough, leathery, fingernail-sized slivers, take one from time to time in the morning or evening, and chew it until images come, until time pays itself back, until Sophie and I go gathering mushrooms again like children, go gathering mushrooms deep in the woods and get an idea.
Old Fräulein Rotzoll and I made a living from the mushrooms we gathered, dried, pounded to powder, and pickled in vinegar. Not far from Hawkers’ Gate, where Sophie had sold flounders as a child, we were authorized to keep a stand twice a week. Strings of greenies and dried morels found purchasers all year round. From nettle cloth left by Sophie’s grandmother, I made little sacks (I had learned to sew in Graudenz) in which to sell dried ceps and orange agaric. And from early summer until November, we picked baskets full of table and soup mushrooms and sold them. We did all right financially, for we had mushrooms to offer at all times, either fresh or dried. Our clientele—students at the gymnasium, lieutenants of the Body Hussars, and liberal schoolteachers—were lovers of travel and fireside escapism. And of course there were also shriveled old people, like Sophie and me, who took some of our fly agaric—which also had its beauty—because they wanted their time paid back in images.
Then, as three of us (but along with many more) ate my jellied calf’s head, Griselde Dubertin (and the other associate judges) reported the day-to-day happenings at the Women’s Tribunal. Tales of the feminist movement’s internal tensions were told out of school. The Flounder Party was vilified, and increasing collusion, possibly a conspiracy, between the accused Flounder and Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor, was hinted at. Once again strife was in the cards. At issue (between Griselde and Osslieb) was the Flounder’s assertion that Sophie Rotzoll and her friend Friedrich Bartholdy had all their lives been addicted to fly agaric, and moreover that Sophie had done a thriving trade—even by mail and through middlemen—in powdered fly agaric.
This assertion had provoked a tumult at the Tribunal. The Flounder’s testimony about Sophie’s “trips” had been corroborated by a special affidavit on “The Stimulating Effects of Fly Agaric”; and this affidavit would have been publicly read but for the objection of Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge. “Schönherr was perfectly right,” cried Griselde. “Fly-agaric trips might have become fashionable. The bourgeois press is just waiting for us to lay ourselves open. And I’m sure Sophie would have been against it, too.”
Then they all got together and concentrated on me. They agreed that I’d been neither Sophie’s Fritz, nor Pastor Blech, nor Governor Rapp; no, I—“the shit!”—had actually been Sophie’s father, an itinerant schnapps dealer, who had cheated the poor Kashubian countryfolk and in passing, so to speak, knocked up Amanda Woyke’s youngest daughter. “The heel!” I was the one and only villain. “Hateful! Worth-less! Lousy! Superfluous!” And Dubertin shouted, “Let’s show him! Let’s show the bastard!”
Already the girls were assuming menacing postures. Already I was invaded by fear. Already all escape was barred. Already I was expecting to be drawn and quartered. Pins and needles in the groin. (Didn’t Simoneit cry out, “Quick, the carving knife!”?) And then I was saved by fly agaric.
For in the meantime, thanks to the special ingredient, our meal for three had taken on a new dimension. Not only were the complete Flounder Party—so it seemed to me—and Schönherr, the personified authority of the Women’s Tribunal, sitting at the table along with Paasch, Osslieb, and Witzlaff; in addition, Agnes Kurbiella and Amanda Woyke, Mother Rusch, Saint Dorothea, and Sophie Rotzoll had escaped from their time-phases. The morose Wigga sat facing Paasch. My Mestwina was comforting Ruth Simoneit. All had their doubles and vice versa. The table had grown. And, miraculously multiplied, my jellied calf’s head filled several bowls. And always there was more. Time-suspending talk. Witzlaff’s laugh mingled with Mother Rusch’s laughter. And somewhere, no, everywhere, was Awa, the three-breasted principle, just as Ms. Schönherr was everywhere with her tender loving care. It was she who saw to it that no harm befell me. She allowed no quarrel to rise among the women, though the air still crackled alarmingly where Huntscha and Dorothea were sitting side by side. Only a moment before, Sophie or Griselde had been about to assault if not me, then gentle Agnes or poor Bettina von Carnow. Hadn’t I seen scratch marks? Weren’t there tufts of hair—blond, peat-brown, curly, waved—lying between the half-empty plates? (Witzlaff and Mother Rusch stood there like flaming Furies, determined to protect me.)
But then, after a few tears had flowed, female solidarity won out. Sisterly chitchat about potato prices in one epoch or another. They bemoaned the high price of Scania herring and the perpetual shortage of millet. And they tested their wit on me, the kindly paterfamilias, the dope, the provider, the eternal braggart. And suddenly an organ, or better still a kitchen-living room harmonium, was there beside the table. And Witzlaff was pulling the stops while Mother Rusch sang with Agnes and Sophie, “King of heaven, we welcome Thee.” My Mestwina was passing amber charms around. And the Flounder was there, too. Splashing in the kitchen sink, beside the dishwasher. Nasally pontificating: “In short, dear ladies, before male hegemony, which has seen its day, is replaced by female management …”
Time paid itself back. Images flowed free. Awa bowed down. And I, the male, the priceless individual, was sheltered in loving care. I lay in the bosom of my pregnant Ilsebill and sucked at her big breasts; sated, at peace, safe, happy, wishless as never before… .
But when the fly agaric withdrew its effects, when happiness had lost its afterglow, when from our respective time-phases we relapsed into the flat present, when we sat shivering in the real world and all our dreams were spent, nothing was left of the jellied calf’s head. In a bad humor again, my Ilsebill (in red) wanted nothing but a hot bath. Griselde Dubertin (in green) looked severe and spinsterish. Again they talked past me as if I’d been nothing, though they were referring to me when they said, “He’s thought it all out, but he’s got another think coming. He wants to cook us all up in jelly. We’ll have to keep a tight rein on him. A little reminder, that’s what he needs. We’ll make him pay for all this. And no shilly-shallying. The first of every month.”
When I tried to conclude the meal with a little conciliatory speech—“My dear sisters of one century after another, I’ve really enjoyed cooking my special calf’s head for you and …”—Ilsebill coldly cut my thread: “If cooking gives you such fiendish pleasure, you can load the dishwasher, too.”
So I loaded the dishwasher. There were more than three plates. More than a dozen knives and forks. No end of dishes. And thirteen glasses with small amounts of cider swishing around in them. Griselde gave me token help. The dishwasher was almost full. (Incidentally, I died before Sophie, in the revolutionary year 1848, without knowing which freedom it was all about that time.)
Nothing but daughters
When, toward the end of the debate on the case of Sophie Rotzoll, because Associate Judge Griselde Dubertin had maintained that Sophie had died a virgin, the Flounder was
questioned by Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge, more in jest than in serious quest of information, concerning the difference between the sexes, the flatfish, without stirring from his sand bed, replied at length:
“It’s an old story, dear ladies. Women conceive, bear, suckle, rear, see one out of six children die, get stuck with a new one before they know it, bear it with the usual pain, suckle it with this breast and that breast, teach it to say ‘Mama’ and to walk. Then after a while the girls—and for the moment I’m thinking only of the daughters—spread their legs for some man and as always conceive something that only a mother can bring into the world.
“How poorly men are equipped by comparison. All they can conceive is absurd ideas. And all they can bear is arms. The fruits of their labor are things like the Strassburg Cathedral, the diesel engine, the theory of relativity, Liebig’s bouillon cubes, the gas mask, the Schlieffen Plan. Thousands of these famous achievements are known to us. Nothing has been impossible for their lordships. The north wall of the Eiger had to be conquered, the sea route to India discovered, the sound barrier broken, the atom split, the tin can and the breach-loading rifle invented, the ruins of Troy and Knòssos excavated, and nine symphonies finished. Because men cannot conceive and bear naturally, because even their blind and frenzied acts of impregnation spring from a dubious momentary caprice, they have to do clever little tricks, climb icy north walls, break sound barriers, pile up pyramids, dig Panama Canals, dam up valleys, experiment obsessively until everything on earth is synthetic, have to keep asking about the ego, about being, meaning, the why, whither, and wherefore in images, words, and tones, have to run themselves ragged on the treadmill known as history to make it spit out certified male products such as dated victories and defeats, church schisms, partitions of Poland, records, and monuments. Mark my words, dear ladies: Mr. Nixon will have to resign soon. A little man by the name of Guillaume made history the day before yesterday. And in Portugal generals keep deposing one another.
“The affairs and achievements of today: Calcutta. The Aswan Dam. The pill. Watergate. These are men’s ersatz babies. Some principle has got them with child. They are pregnant with the categorical imperative. At least the military art, which they alone master, enables them to antedate death as birth into the unknown. But what they give birth to—whether creation or monstrosity—will never learn to walk, never be able to say ‘Mama.’ Unsuckled, it will waste away or reproduce itself only on paper: children born of desk-ridden males. Culture? Yes, if you will. Or should we speak of a morgue? Dusty old books in libraries. Canned music. Crumbling Gothic brickwork. In air-conditioned museums art has forgotten its origins. And the secret archives in which the monstrosities born of men live on in sinister, softly rustling dossiers. Already there are data banks. Already human beings are computerized; terrifyingly, their punch cards can be pulled out at any time. In short, extraordinary things are being done. We speak of epoch-making achievements. We say: Even in failure he was great. We look with emotion upon tragic proofs of existence, but nature plays no part in them; how impoverished they are in comparison with nature, and, because they were achieved by unnatural effort, we are bound to evaluate them negatively. Women, on the other hand, even if they have studied, even if they have emancipated themselves, even if they have been able to perfect the computer, increase profits, modernize the armaments industry, and put their imprint on government, will always—even with the fanciest hairdos—be nature. They menstruate. They give life even when they draw nameless seed from sperm banks. Milk wells promptly from them and them alone. Yes, they are mothers in a fundamental sense, even if they are not, or are not yet, or possibly never will be, even if they remain virginal all their lives like Fräulein Rotzoll.
“Women have no need to worry about immortality, because they embody life; men, on the other hand, can only survive outside themselves, by building a house, planting a tree, doing a deed, falling gloriously in battle, but after first begetting babies. Persons who can’t give birth to children are at best presumptive fathers; nature has not done well by them.”
When the Flounder had finished saying all this and worse—for he predicted that women, along with increasing equality, would develop an increasing predisposition to male-type baldness—he left his sand bed (in apparent triumph) and disported himself with his fins, while the associate judges of the Women’s Tribunal condemned his differentiation of the sexes as “one-sidedly biological” and “hopelessly conservative.”
Griselde Dubertin shouted, “He is and remains a reactionary.” And before summing up the case for the prosecution, Sieglinde Huntscha quipped, “Those poor little menfolk. Not even allowed to have babies. My ass bleeds for them.” After what seemed like liberating laughter on the part of the female public, she said drily, “In any case the revolutionary Sophie Rotzoll died childless and unmarried.”
Except for her, they all bore me children, even Billy. In every case I was at least a possible begetter. But fervently as I’ve longed for sons ever since patriarchy was put through, much as I longed to see myself, my name, and my possessions perpetuated by sons, they all gave me nothing but daughters.
My friends made fun of me, called me a cracksman, recommended tinctures, pills made from mouse droppings, strenuous pilgrimages, but after every confinement I was shown the characteristic Parker House roll; no watering can ever consented to fill me with paternal pride. Even the Flounder didn’t know what to do. When Dorothea gave birth to her fourth daughter and I went to him with my trouble, he spoke darkly of maternal counterforces. The mother goddesses, he whispered, Demeter, Hera, Artemis, the Pelasgian Athene, the three-breasted Awa, had all been defeated, but continued to wield a subliminal power. He, the Flounder, could only attribute the failure of certain individuals to beget sons to the vengeance of the mother goddesses—that was the price we had to pay.
Every time I begot a child from then on, the Flounder’s suppositions were confirmed. Nothing but girls ever came of it. I’m not speaking of Awa, Wigga, or Mestwina. To them the concept of fatherhood was long unknown, and after that a mere joke. But when as a master swordmaker and member of the guild, with two journeymen in my employ and good hope of leaving a little something behind me, I got my Dorothea with child nine times, I think I might have been rewarded with at least one son. And even the fact that eight of the nine girls died (five of the plague) can hardly be regarded as a consolation, for Gertrud, the survivor, also had nothing but girls (four or five), among them Birgitta, who went off with the Hussites and came to a sad end at the siege of Bautzen.
I repeat: daughters, nothing but daughters. Mother Rusch was delivered of daughters—twice. Never any mention of fathers. Hedwig, the first daughter, was married to a Portuguese merchant who set up a trading post on the Malabar Coast, and Katharina got a local butcher for a husband. Hedwig and her Portuguese died (along with three out of their four daughters) of Indian swamp fever; Katharina’s surviving daughters (three out of six) married local butchers, to whom they bore daughters, nothing but daughters. (And by the way, my Ilsebill has two sisters. Griselde Dubertin comes of a so-called three-girl family. And Witzlaff never speaks of any brothers, either.)
It was and remains a spooky business. Apart from the boy (by painter Möller) who wasted away, we know that Agnes Kurbiella gave birth to a little Ursula soon after the poet Opitz died of the plague. And the best Amanda Woyke could do for me was seven daughters. Stine Trude Lovise starved to death in infancy. The others lived out their lives as Kashubian serfs, all except Anna, the youngest daughter, who was bought free and went with her illegitimate child to live in the city, where she married the journeyman brewer Christian Rotzoll and was widowed when her daughter, Sophie, was nine years old. It only remains to be said that during her first and second marriages Lena Stubbe bore and nurtured four daughters, Billy’s daughter grew up with her grandparents, and Maria’s twin girls are now four years old.
One of the things I liked about Sophie was that she kept shut and even as an elderly sp
inster still had a virginal glow. When her case came up before the Women’s Tribunal, the fiendish pleasure she took in arousing men and letting them dangle and fret filled the public with enthusiasm. A color poster (closely resembling Associate Judge Dubertin) was made of her as she was presumed to look, or perhaps as she was sketchily described by the Flounder, and marketed as a feminist relic. It showed Sophie dressed as a Danzig market girl standing on a barricade. With her left hand she was clutching the Flounder by the tail fin and with her right brandishing a kitchen knife. Her narrow, scowling face. Her peat-brown hair, piled high and tied with a tricolor ribbon. Her small mouth, open and rounded, apparently singing something revolutionary. And at the foot of the barricade uprooted mushrooms, clearly suggesting that an unmanning massacre had taken place.
It is safe to assume that Sophie Rotzoll as political poster served, along with similar graphic works (for posters of Dorothea and Amanda were also on sale), to decorate the walls of rooms in old houses and new; and I, too, bought a freshly made print for five marks, because the Sophie I remember is all too split a personality.
It took the poster to simplify the prim spinster whose father I am supposed to have been. I had never seen her so explicitly—a daughter, never a mother. And, addressing the Women’s Tribunal, the Flounder maintained that Sophie’s virginity could be viewed as an essence, though the circumstance that her childhood friend the revolutionary schoolboy Friedrich Bartholdy spent a good forty years of his life in fortress arrest undoubtedly helped her to remain true to her essence.
When the verdict was announced, when the Flounder—thanks to the intervention of the Flounder Party—was declared only “ideationally” guilty and the Sophie cult had replaced the Amanda cult, the flatfish left his sand bed to speak a final word in honor of the revolutionary Sophie Rotzoll. As though to shame the predominantly female public, he cried: “This much is certain, dear ladies: Sophie let no one get near her! While Saint Dorothea of Montau conceived and bore nine times, while the abbess Rusch, in contravention of her vow of chastity, bore, it is true, only two children, but familiarized a good three dozen men of various religions with her flesh before, between, and after her confinements, Sophie Rotzoll kept closed without taking vows, even if it amused her to throw kisses at Polish uhlans, for which reason the burghers and burgheresses of Danzig regarded her as a whore. Ah, dear ladies, if only you, who sit so sternly in judgment and condemn the male cause, were closed like Sophie. If only each one of you were sealed up for good. Wouldn’t it be in your power to put an end to all conceiving and bearing? Isn’t it high time to give up intercourse, to dispense with sons and daughters, to stop having babies, and to grant humanity a thoughtful demise? I have statistics here that give me hope. They speak of two-child, then one-child, then zero-child marriages. No more history. No more growth rate. A gradual aging, then a quiet, uncomplaining fade-out. Nature would owe you a debt of thanks. Our planet would have a chance to regenerate. How soon the earth would be reclaimed by steppe forest wilderness. Once again, at long last, rivers would be allowed to overflow their banks. Once again the oceans would breathe easy. I’m saying this off the cuff, apart from my legend, speaking as a plain fish.”