by Günter Grass
But when I listed all the daughters of the cooks inside me to Ilsebill, mentioned a few daughters’ daughters, reeled off the story of Sophie the exception, reported the Flounder’s suggestion as my own, and called it “at least arguable,” she countered with an assurance rooted in her pregnancy: “I still say it’ll be a boy this time.”
Continuous generation
A thought depopulates.
Ratless it rolls
off to one side.
The counterwitness appears.
Bottom wants to be top.
Not no order.; no, the other order.
The mushroom stands
umbrellawise,
lays bare its root.
For when the final lopping off?
Yet you, too, remain
astounded and open.
Beget—bite off.
But so far
it’s only a dangerous game.
The Seventh Month
With Ilsebill, too
YOU CAN GO through fire and water. Now in her seventh month and conspicuously pregnant, she wants to prove it, even if you’re not in the mood to go through fire or water. “I’m your best pal, somebody you can count on if the going gets tough.”
She longs for emergencies. She provokes emergencies. A pioneer woman on a wide screen, dreaming of danger on horseback. Go west! Danger on the prairies. Wind in her skirts. Wind-blown hair. Unblinking eyes take possession of new lands.
But we aren’t new settlers. The house is threatened neither by Indians nor by desperadoes. Not even by mortgages. (Yes, yes, the recent flood, when the dike gates were closed and the ferry didn’t run. But the waters subsided, and the insurance covered the storm damage—a couple of broken windows.)
But my Ilsebill can’t live without danger, which she faces or averts or invents. Since the oil crisis made everything more expensive, she has been saying first thing in the morning, “It doesn’t scare me. We’ll just have to stick together, stick together.”
She always wants to go through thick and thin with somebody, with you, with me, come what may. She protects you against undesirable relatives, but also against your best friends, whom she qualifies succinctly as “bad company”; in fact, she’ll protect you against life and all its horseflies. “Those crooks, those spongers! All they want is your money; anyway, they’ve got something up their sleeve.”
Ilsebill lies vigilantly across the threshold, scaring all temptations away with her bark. If you’re in a sweat, she casts a spacious shadow around you. Whenever you climb into seven-storied abstractions, she stands watch. When garishly painted, wildly tattooed doubts start creeping up on you, she lets out a warning whistle. She lets her golden hair down into deep dungeons to save you. When you torture her curiosity, she keeps quiet. She never betrays the fact that you’ve been betraying her for quite a while. She keeps her mouth shut, closely shut: no view allowed into imaginary distance.
She never complains. My heroine suffers in silence and is painted in heroic stance against a black sky (the children to the right and left of her). Woman amid ruins. The Gleaner. The Always Pregnant One. Dame Care. Filching coal. Bartering the last of the family silver for beet syrup. Staunchly at her post when all is lost. By sheer force of will compelling sick people to live, and no back talk. She makes you sick so she can sacrifice herself in caring for you. Once you’re sick, she perks up. If you wanted to die, she’d play the whore with death to get a postponement and still another postponement. Nothing can hold her back. If necessary, she’ll run through all your money, just to show you that poverty brings out the best in her. She’ll let you fall off a precipice just for the pleasure of teaching you, ever so gently, to walk again (on crutches). It’s only when you’re suffering—and she’ll help you do that, too—that you’ll appreciate the full measure of her sympathetic love. (“Can I help you? Isn’t there something I can do? You’re sure to need my help someday. Desperately. And then it may be too late.”) When she puts your eyes out, you can be sure she’ll guide you (even through heavy traffic).
In a word—you can rely on Ilsebill. She has perjured herself for me. When I was caught running out on the check, she ransomed me. She transfigured my leavings, many little piles of dirt. She always saw to it that my picture hung straight and dustless over the sofa. Thanks to Ilsebill, I am remembered: “Otto, oh yes, he was really a great guy.” Otto was my name at the time. And my Ilsebill, who protected my reputation so fiercely, was called Lena.
Lena Stubbe had me twice as a husband. And it took enemy action to free her from both marriages. In the Franco-Prussian War, after I had been shooting my big mouth off for twenty-eight years, French shrapnel put an end to my bragging. And when in the winter of 1914 the Landsturm was called up to stop the Russian invaders, I died a second soldier’s death at Tannenberg after fifty-five years of uninterrupted boozing. Lena put up with me throughout the one and the other marriage and would have survived me a third time.
Lighthouse, bulwark, haven, the thick-and-thin woman. How she put up with my beatings in silence, knowing them to be bungled caresses. How with her kindly encouragement she helped me, ordinarily a failure in bed, to achieve little weekend successes. How when I robbed the strike fund, she made good my theft by working as a toilet attendant at the Hotel Kaiserhof. How she translated my socialist Sunday talk into workaday action. How, when they were going to expel me from the party, she spoke to the comrades and wouldn’t let them speak any harm of “her Otto.” How she went to the police station for me. And all the times she washed my vomit off the floor. And took a knife and cut me down from the nail where I was dangling. You could always rely on Lena. You could go through fire and water with Lena. Same as you could with Ilsebill.
But I don’t want to go through fire and water. I don’t want to be saved. I like being led into temptation. And most of all, I like going astray. No sense in her sacrificing herself for me, no matter where; it doesn’t pay. Tomorrow, in a pinch, as a favor to Ilsebill, I could be a little sick, weak, fragile, pathetic, a sad case, just barely rescuable. I could lie still and cry “Mama” in my sleep. But if Lena hadn’t mothered me so mercilessly, hadn’t maintained me so deliberately in infancy with her mumbling of “Now, now, it’s all right; you’ll be better soon,” I’d never have become a soldier and (out of sheer fear) a hero.
Lena dishes out soup
Out of deep kettles
with limp cabbage or barley floating in them
or potatoes and rutabaga cooked to a mash
and the barest rumor of meat—
unless some tripe had come her way
or a horse had passed on and the price was right—
Lena ladled mealy peas
boiled down to the husks
and gristle and small bones
which had once been a pig’s foot,
and which now in the kettle, when Lena stirred deep, clinked
as those standing in line before the kettle
clinked with their tin bowls.
Never blindly, or fishing about with her ladle.
Her way of dishing out soup was famous.
And when she stood upraised behind her kettle,
with her left hand lining up tally marks on the blackboard,
with her right hand stirring, then ladling exactly half a liter
into bowl after bowl
and out of her wrinkled winter-apple face looking
not into the kettle,
but, as though seeing something, into the future,
one might have hoped, hoped for something or other.
At the same time she saw behind her,
saw herself ladling past soups,
before, after, and during wars,
and lastly she saw herself young beside the kettle.
But the bourgeois,
as they stood off to one side in their overcoats
and saw Lena upraised,
were afraid of her enduring beauty.
They therefore decided
to
give poverty a higher meaning:
there lay the answer to the social problem.
A simple woman
As the Flounder testified before the Women’s Tribunal: “Often as this Lena Pipka, whose married name was Stobbe and whose remarried name was Stubbe, found herself at the center of regional events, she was and remained a simple, though not simple-minded woman. If the High Court regards the career of Lena Stubbe as exemplary and therefore resolves to examine it here in the presence of a select public, my share in this proletarian destiny will prove to be slight; for since the Great Revolution, history has confronted me with gigantic tasks, transcending all regional boundaries; the era of world politics has dawned. Controversial issues, whichever way you look. Freedom, equality, and so on. Because my services have been everywhere in demand, I’ve been able to give the Baltic region only routine attention. Since my recent promotion to the rank of Weltgeist, the demands made on me have sometimes overtaxed me as a Flounder (and principle). I seldom find time to examine individual cases like the one now under discussion as carefully as they deserve. Still, it will give me pleasure to answer the knowledgeable questions of the esteemed prosecution, all the more so as Lena Stubbe, perhaps by reason of her very simplicity, was a significant woman: the early history of the German Socialist Movement would be unthinkable without her, though her name is nowhere recorded, though no street, avenue, or obscure square has been named after her.”
When the presiding judge read the biographical data of Lena Stubbe, née Pipka, the impression made was one of long-drawn-out monotony, for apart from her conversation with August Bebel in May 1896 and a train trip to Zurich, the only noteworthy feature seemed to be her biblical age—she lived to be ninety-three. Twice married. One child by her first marriage. Three children by her second marriage. And yet the events of her life just happen to run parallel to the history of the working-class movement. Third daughter of a brickyard worker, born the year after the Revolution of 1848 in Kokoschken, Karthaus district, found work at the age of sixteen at the Danzig-Ohra soup kitchen, married the anchor maker Friedrich Otto Stobbe a year later, soon became, like him, a member of the German Workers’ Association, joined the Social Democrats after the so-called unification congress at Eisenach, was widowed for the first time in 1870 at the very start of the Franco-Prussian War, ran the soup kitchen on Wallgasse for ten years, married the anchor maker Otto Friedrich Stubbe soon after the promulgation of the Socialist Laws, took charge of the strike fund when the workers struck the Klawitter Shipyard in the fall of 1885, supplemented her earnings by serving meals on Saturdays, received a visit from her party chairman a few years after the abrogation of the Socialist Laws but found no publisher for her “Proletarian Cook Book,” exhausted her savings on a trip to Zurich in the summer of 1913, was widowed for the second time at the very start of the war that broke out in the following year, worked in various soup kitchens all through the war, after the war at Workers’ Aid kitchens, then in a settlement-house kitchen, then in a Winter Aid kitchen, then in an emergency kitchen set up by the Jewish community, and, lastly, ladled out soup in the kitchen of the Stutthof concentration camp. She outlived not only her husbands, but her four daughters as well.
After reading this bare summary and praising Lena Stubbe as a passive, but for her time exemplary heroine, the presiding judge of the Women’s Tribunal called on all those present to rise in her honor; the Flounder, too, left his sand bed and with a gentle motion of his fins kept himself for one minute hovering in mid-water.
Then the prosecutor spoke. She reproached the Flounder for having, in his (to be sure, more and more neglected) capacity as adviser to the male cause, failed to keep either Friedrich Otto Stobbe or Otto Friedrich Stubbe from beating Lena when drunk. Perhaps, she intimated, he had even recommended beatings. One could easily imagine the male Zeitgeist of the nineteenth century speaking out of his mouth: his pertinent quotations from Nietzsche, his master-of-the-household attitude. His ironic references to the weaker sex. His pedagogic jokes. The male folk-belief that women thrive on beatings.
“Only the other day,” said Sieglinde Huntscha, “a man had the gall to sing that song to me. Listen to what the swine said: ‘You want me to sock you, don’t you? I can tell by looking at you. Square in the face. Maybe you’d like me to give you a black eye to show around. Well, I’m not going to. Not if you beg me on bended knee. You want me to act like a typical male, that’s what. You need it for your emancipation crap—the incorrigible male brute.’ And this fine gentleman—I’m not mentioning any names—is sitting right here in the courtroom, putting all his trust in the Flounder: ‘He’ll talk us men out of this. He knows that beatings have always been necessary. He has always been in favor of striking arguments. We can count on the Flounder.’ And the guy calls himself a liberal.”
After the public had let off steam with shouts of “Boo!” and glared at the few men in the hall (including me) with knowing hostility, the Flounder, now back on his sand bed, spoke. “Esteemed prosecutor, you know as well as I do that corporal punishment has always been an expression of male weakness. Disappointing as your personal experience may be—you speak of a man steadfastly refusing to give you a beating you had provoked—at that time, in Lena Stubbe’s day, the female sex was maltreated with an abysmal lack of restraint. In all classes. Not excepting the nobility and the bourgeoisie. But working-class women were beaten more regularly, every Friday to be exact, because the workers knew of no other way to bolster up their insecure egos on payday. Yes, yes, even the organized workers, even the members of the Socialist Party laid it on with a heavy hand every Friday. So it needn’t surprise you that Friedrich Otto Stobbe and Otto Friedrich Stubbe beat their Lena, especially if you bear in mind that, rousing agitators though they both were, their vigor and dash were all on the outside; around the house, in their suspenders, they didn’t amount to much. Lena, the punctually beaten Lena, was always, even when suffering in silence, the stronger. She’d have worn out ten strongmen. She accepted beatings in the dismal knowledge that a man’s tenderness often goes too far. She never defended herself, with the poker, for instance. She knew that when it was over her Friedrich Otto or Otto Friedrich would be an exhausted, humiliated little man, contrite and tearful. And if, esteemed Ms. Huntscha, this anonymous gentleman in the audience who recently refused you a beating had lived in Stobbe’s or Stubbe’s time, he would undoubtedly have laid it on with a heavy hand. I know the gentleman and his pathetic demonstrations of love.”
Weak, the way I stood beside her or made faces in her shadow, the way, still fastened to her umbilical cord, I kept escaping, weak though rebelling against her flesh, rich in excuses when I was caught, open-handed at her expense, always in her debt, always confident that she’d see me through when I hit rock bottom, hit rock bottom again, weak the way she wanted me and made me, the way she found me right for her love, though she didn’t rule, but, strong as she was, bent down over the weak man, anticipating my failings and enveloping me in loving care. She led me where she wanted, she helped me into my trousers and out of my shoes, she always knew where I’d passed out, what crowd I’d got stuck in again; and as for my dreary love affairs—even the neighborhood women were mad about me—she just stirred them into her soup, mumbling the while, “Oh well, oh well. I know you don’t mean no harm. You’ve promised so often. Sure, it would be nice. But go ahead, don’t mind me. I wonder …”
It was only when she caught me in the kitchen necking with Lisbeth, her eldest daughter (the one by Stobbe), who was barely fifteen, that Lena, who had just come in with the dustcloth, flew off the handle, the same as today Ilsebill gets mad over the telephone when (exhausted by her) I’ve cleared out for a while: “Just don’t do it again. You’ve really got to stop this childishness. Running off without a word. When will you ever grow up? What? A social worker from Wedding. An associate judge at the Tribunal? Erika? Don’t make me laugh. Just for the weekend. A little trip to Paris! You ought to be ashamed. That’s right. This minute. No,
take the next plane. I’ll meet you in Hamburg.” And when I went off to Berlin with a waitress from the Hotel Kaiserhof and we ran out of money, Lena wrote in her fine Sunday handwriting: “Dear Otto, I am sending you your return ticket. I had better not send any cash money. Just come home and get some sleep. Then we will talk it over. I will make you soup with dumplings, that has always helped. And don’t do anything foolish. You know what I mean. Take the 12:03. I will meet you at the station.”