by Günter Grass
When Jan found his Maria again in the crowd, she said, “Come on. We’ll go to the shipyard now. There we’ll be safe. They’ve got everything. So we’ll wait. No matter how long it goes on. So the wedding will be after Christmas, and just as much fun.”
It was only when the crowd began to disperse that there was fighting with the police. Some of the railroad-station windows were smashed. Some newspaper stands went up in flames. Later the party building was set on fire. Morale, in the main, was high. The workers had seen what a big crowd they were. Some were arrested, whereupon a part of the crowd marched to the Schiessstange Prison, where gasoline was thrown in through the windows. A boy was run over by a tank. But so far there was no shooting.
It wasn’t until the next day—when the workers of the Lenin Shipyard withdrew to the shipyard grounds, posted guards at the gates, and, in case the army occupied the shipyard, made preparations to blow up essential installations and send several unfinished ships down the ways; when units of the People’s Army came rolling from Warsaw, and the police closed its ring around the shipyard area; when pork and cabbage with caraway seed was cooked for more than two thousand men in the shipyard canteen; when outside the main entrance to the shipyard a few young workers tried to start a discussion with the police, and Jan Ludkowski, speaking through a megaphone, first outlined the historical background of the strike, from the uprisings of the medieval guilds to the insurrection of the sailors and workers of Petrograd for the Soviet system and against the party bureaucracy to the present rise in prices and the strike committee’s demands for worker management of the factories; when finally Jan quoted from the Communist Manifesto and raised his full, mellifluous male voice, to which only the cause lent a note of harshness, till it carried as far as the Old City—that the police fired, wounding several workers. Five fatally. Among them Jan.
There was also shooting in Gdynia, Szczecin, and Elblag. The most numerous fatalities (over fifty) seem to have occured in Gdynia, where the police lobbed mortar shells into the crowd and fired machine guns from helicopters. Then, in Warsaw, Gomulka was toppled. The new man’s name was Gierek. He rescinded the price increases on staple foods. The workers thought they had won and called off their strike, although their demand for worker management of the factories had remained unanswered.
When Jan was shot by the police, he was hit in the belly, which was full of boiled pork and cabbage, and not, as he had wished in poems (after Maiakovsky), in the forehead. In midsentence he was dead. Maria couldn’t help when the dead and wounded were carried into the shipyard grounds. Just then she was taking delivery of a load of canned fish, which had been donated by the crews of two Soviet freighters then in drydock. Later she threw herself on the dead man, whose mouth was still open, and shook him as if in anger: “Say something just this once. Say it’s right and logical. Say the facts speak for themselves. Say history proves. Say Marx foresaw. Say the future will. Say something, say …”
After Jan’s death, Maria didn’t stop working at the shipyard canteen. As long as the workers were negotiating with Gierek, the new man—an agreement of sorts was arrived at—plenty of supplies were delivered. The dead were buried quickly and quietly at various cemeteries in Emaus, Praust, and Ohra. The families were not admitted. Jan is thought to lie in Emaus. The other four dead were Upper Silesians, whom no one really knew. Their families in Katowice and Bytom were notified much too late. That brought protest. Regret was expressed in high places.
But such deaths don’t really amount to much. Traffic accidents account for more. And the social services take better and better care of the widows and orphans. All were shot in the abdomen. The police had aimed low. Though this was recorded for later reference, none of the guilty parties was mentioned at any trial. It’s perfectly true: life goes on.
The actual funeral service was held between Christmas and New Year’s on the shipyard grounds, in the open, because the canteen was too small. A cold, windless day. Maria sat in black beside other women in black, facing the speaker’s desk, the flowers, the flags, the music, the oil flame. The speakers (nearly all the members of the strike committee) repeated that these dead would not be forgotten. They said solidarity had brought victory, though all the workers’ demands had not yet been met. Two ships were on the slips nearby, manned only by gulls. (Big orders for Sweden. They’d have been sent down the ways unfinished if the police had stormed the shipyard.) Jan had been working on prospectuses in which progress was illustrated by photographs of ships’ hulls. One of the speakers mentioned Jan’s work, which he called imaginative. (Not mentioned was Jan’s loudly and frequently repeated suggestion that newly built passenger vessels should be given Pomorshian names such as Swantopolk or Damroka. After all, Stephen Batory hadn’t been a Pole but a Hungarian from Transylvania, and a ship had been proudly named after him.)
When at the end a party representative spoke, he apportioned blame but mentioned no names. Someone in the standing crowd of shipyard workers cried out, “Kociolek!” Maria didn’t cry, because something was stuck in her throat. The other women in black cried. Between speeches they cried louder. Some of the men cried, too.
After the speeches the shipyard band played first solemn, then militant music. The gulls rose from the tankers on the slips and settled down again. After that an actor recited a poem that Jan had written about death. True, the poet who “lived himself to death” in this poem was the Baroque poet and court historian Martin Opitz, but in the setting of the funeral, and thanks to the actor’s interpretive emphasis, the line “And with his halted blood his words, too, ceased to flow” related exclusively to Jan. This line was repeated in every stanza.
After the poem, Maria, who had something in her throat, threw up. Two men from the workers’ guard led the still-retching woman in black past the speakers, flowers, and flags, past the oil flame and the band, to a place between two sheds, where she finished vomiting. Before the funeral, Maria had gone to the hairdresser’s.
Later, in the canteen, after drinking tea, she was taken with a craving for dill pickles. But there weren’t any left. And as the families of the slain were sitting over tea in the canteen, one of the weeping women, Jan’s mother, who had come from Konitz, said to the other weeping women in black, “That’s from my son. They were going to get married. Maybe it’ll be a boy.”
But two girls were christened with the names of Mestwina and Damroka. They will soon be three, and they are acquainted with a photograph of Jan. It’s standing on the living-room cabinet next to a historically faithful cog in full sail. But Maria, to whom I am related and who gave me that piece of amber from the potato field with the fly enclosed in it, Maria, who had a reputation for laughing—at the cooperative, in the shipyard canteen, everywhere—Maria turned to stone. A harshness has come into her speech.
Vestimentary preoccupations, feminine proportions, last visions
They refuse to say anything about Maria. Divided among themselves like the Advisory Council behind them, but agreed on this one point. There they sit, cooking up a Last Judgment. When the Flounder also declined responsibility for the cases of Sibylle Miehlau and Maria Kuczorra, housewife Elisabeth Güllen and biochemist Beate Hagedorn walked out of the former movie house in protest. On conclusion of the Lena Stubbe case, Ms. Hagedorn had cried out: “Fuck the past. Repression is going on today. Everywhere. In Poland, for instance, even if it is some kind of Communism they’ve got there. It wasn’t just the rise in prices that made them strike. It wasn’t the usual household worries. No, it was something more. And it’s still going on. What we need is action, something big. Get out on the streets and yell. And refuse our services. Not just in bed. Total noncooperation! Till everything stops. Till the men come crawling. And we take over.”
The verdict is expected soon. All through May, while the last evidence was being heard and the worst was being once again recorded, the Flounder was undergoing a visible change. Whenever he left his sand bed, he struck us and the representatives of the press, who were
on the lookout for indications that prolonged confinement had impaired his health, as more and more transparent, more and more glassy. A while ago you could trace his bone structure. Now his digestive tract is discernible. You can identify his milt, the proof of his masculinity.
This is no doubt why the Advisory Council has been urging the court to finish up, to pronounce a sentence and carry it out. The Advisory Council (without Hagedorn and Güllen) has set a definite time limit. Once again I consider them all, consider them with love, hate, or indifference, as (from the public benches) I see them. Sieglinde Huntscha, for instance: always in jeans and frayed leather jacket. Built, I would say, like a sportswoman, if I didn’t know that she has flat feet, for which reason the prosecutor hardly paces at all, but mostly stands still while pleading (with a slight Saxon accent): “Since in the case of Lena Stubbe as in those preceding it the Flounder’s guilt can hardly be contested …”
Likewise slender but with ballooning bosom, the court-appointed defense counsel wears embroidered blouses, which she likes to fasten with bows. Although Bettina von Carnow hunches her back when sitting and never quite knows how to turn her overlong neck, she reveals the proportions of a model as soon as she stands up or risks a step or two.
Quite otherwise, among the associate judges towers the sitting giant Helga Paasch. Here we have a person in her middle forties who, unconcerned about her frame, wears two-piece suits that overemphasize the squareness of her build. She can’t open her mouth—“Man, are you finicky!”—without sweeping invisible objects off the table.
Equally stately, though delicately proportioned and clad in a maidenly small-flower print, sits Griselde Dubertin, as straight as an exclamation point. Sometimes in culottes. The sharpness of her interruptions. The bitterness of her random comments. Always ready to pounce, always disagreeing and expressing herself too forcefully, she offers a contrast to Therese Osslieb, whose soulful phlegmatism communicates itself without needing words and appeases sudden squalls (quarrels with the Advisory Council).
Osslieb wears jumpers, wraparound skirts, and lace-trimmed, ancestral hand-me-downs. And yet she droops as tragically as her friend Ruth Simoneit, who, when not staggering drunkenly about on the podium, wishing everything (and herself) underground, is a pleasure to behold in her firm, sculptured beauty, from which, along with amber, too much Asiatic, African, Indian, or other exotic jewelry is always dangling.
Beside her the social worker Erika Nöttke has a hard time of it. Overworked as she is, worry has clothed her in fat, which as a rule billows most unbecomingly gray on gray in sweaters and expands pleated skirts. Though she is the youngest of the associate judges, she nevertheless speaks like Dame Care. Her piping voice keeps her professional jargon—“resocialized integration”—from sounding authoritative. No one listens to her. Her overlong tirades are drowned out by Griselde Dubertin’s interruptions or Paasch’s heckling or the protracted outcries of the public, although Erika Nöttke, more than any other member of the Advisory Council, tries to stick to the point.
A very different matter is Ulla Witzlaff, who for every historical incident finds private parallels, which are always listened to: “Back home, on a little island by the name of Oehe, there was an old woman who kept sheep… .” Ulla is the handsomest of the lot, though no part of her is pretty. You could fall in love with her hair. Usually she wears long, shabby skirts, and then, when you least expect it, she’ll make an entrance as a lady, in a black evening dress. The public applauds. The presiding judge is obliged to demonstrate (imperceptibly) her authority.
Ms. Schönherr is believed to be in her mid-fifties. But since this recognized ethnologist dresses timelessly (in good sports clothes or Scotch plaids), one never gives a thought to her age. She emanates serenity. She never shows partisanship. Even when passing judgment she remains ironically ambiguous. All the associate judges—whether they belong to the Flounder Party or to the opposition—are convinced that Ursula Schönherr is on their side. Even the Revolutionary Advisory Council keeps quiet when she demands, nay, commands feminine solidarity.
For nine months she has guided the Women’s Tribunal over all trip wires and has so worn herself out with loving care that in the always correctly dressed Ursula Schönherr I feel justified in surmising my neolithic Awa, as she cuts across my dreams.
Awa, however, was corpulent—no, fat, positively ungainly. Her ass hung down to her knees, but that fell in with the neolithic ideal of beauty, which like everything else in those days was decided by women. Thus the cult of short-leggedness determined the original form of the vase, for Awa’s head was relatively small, perched on great rounded shoulders that left little room for a neck. Flesh overflowed its banks. Everywhere richly upholstered nests, nooks, and crannies that seemed ready to grow moss. Where today the tyranny of sports imposes a boring tautness on the female thigh, Awa’s thighs, which between knee and vulva allowed themselves a fabulous wealth of bulges and swellings, were correspondingly rich in dimples, the hallmarks of primordial beauty. Dimples all over. And where the back resolved itself into a rump, densely populated fields of conglobation were discernible.
If Awa’s proportions were repeated anywhere, it was in the abbess Rusch, who cultivated her envelope of fat—possibly for the sake of the warmth she liked to dispense, possibly to provide an adequate sounding board for her laughter. It will be worth our while to list all the parts of Fat Gret that wobbled and formed folds whenever her sudden laughter erupted, gurgled, bubbled, and uphove her vast body: her four-times-vaulted chin, her primary, secondary, and tertiary cheeks, her breasts that reached out like mighty bastions and merged with her dorsal cushions of fat, her belly, which as though perpetually pregnant burst the seams of any cloth, her downy-blond forearms, each of which was as thick as the High Gothic waist of Dorothea of Montau.
But before I compare Dorothea with Sophie—the one as though blown of glass, the other scrawny and flat, but both equally tough—let me recall that Amanda Woyke was in every respect close to the potato: bulbous, firm of flesh, conveniently sized. Likewise compact but smaller in stature was Mestwina, while Wigga at an early age gave in to her powerful bone structure and set more store by the frame than by the flesh. Lena Stubbe, on the other hand, who started out as fresh as an apple, remained true to herself; at a high old age she still made one think of an apple—a shriveled one, to be sure.
Dorothea was weightless. Lighter than air. A sad case, because her beauty was so objectless. She was so meagerly endowed with flesh that she had the spectral look of a goat in March when the winter feed runs out. While cushions of fat can be palpably described, the only way I can resurrect the scant flesh of Dorothea of Montau is to measure the spaces it occupied. Her ample garments that magnified every movement. The costumes she borrowed from the lepers—many’s the time she came home from Corpus Christi Hospital in rags or cloaked in sweat-drenched winding sheets. But though her flesh was weightless, not so her hair. Pale-blond, it hung down to her knees. Wind in her clothes and wind in her hair, she took up space, strode through emptying streets, shook with ecstasy, lay, a quivering bundle of sackcloth overflowed by hair, with the beggars of Saint Mary’s, or spooked through the ground fog outside the city gates, lusting for visions.
Even where for other reasons no man could have lost himself, Sophie was narrow. Flat, angular, charmingly boyish, with legs made for hopping and skipping, a tough, supple, but also cutting willow switch. Sophie’s measurements. Apart from her voice, which required space, only her springy step, always ahead of itself, counted. And when she became an old spinster, there was very little of her, though enough, in concentrated charge, to blow the kitchen sky-high and make good the still-current demand for the women’s rights that were lost long, long ago.
And Agnes? She didn’t weigh. She didn’t look. She could be seen only in the pictures that painter Möller painted and destroyed. She seems (Opitz intimated as much) to have been curly-haired. I remember her bare feet. Sometimes, when the door opens softly, I hope i
t’s Agnes—but it’s always Ilsebill, bringing herself along.
Now she fills my mock-up, which is in low country. A plate with the sky over it. Low rain clouds and suchlike slumgullion. My eyes roll from edge to edge. Since Agnes evades my grasp, I lay the hugely pregnant Ilsebill down on the Island between Käsemark and Neuteich, where the Vistula and the sky are conducive to aerial photography, or here, between Brokdorf and Wewelsfleth, on the walled-in Wilster Marsh.
There lies my Ilsebill, always with the river behind her. Sluggish jetsam with feminine proportions. Her dimple-strewn flesh supported by her right hip, so that her upended pelvis blocks off the sky. Her crooked elbow rests on the exact spot where men with brief cases full of experts’ reports have planned to build the nuclear power plant. She obstructs all their plans. One of her breasts hangs over the dike. Her right foot plays with the Stör, a tributary of the Elbe. Bedded with all her weight, as though forever. Below her, at the bend of her left leg, high-tension pylons traverse the country in long strides: whispering power, the old rumors, the amber legend, once upon a time.
Around Ilsebill scurry the stick men who have planned, developed, sanitized, welfared everything to death. Above her, jet-propelled in oblique flight, local NATO maneuvers, which never stop rehearsing the real thing. So she lies, fallen from all time. Where the Vistula and the Elbe flow, or try to flow, into the sea. Her wandering shadow: history that has never been written but is enduringly there. Roads that are supposed to pass around her. Screens to shelter her from sight. Warning signs that deny her existence. A double-meshed fence to protect her. Leaping males all about. Measured brevity. Achievement trying to catch Ilsebill’s eye. To strike her dumb with wonder. But when the mood takes her, she rolls her flesh to the other side. We call that exercise. With her dimensions she confutes male-administered power. Already Ilsebill has become landscape, closed to all interpretation. Let me in! I want to crawl into you. To disappear completely and recover my reason. I’m sick of running away; it’s warmth I want… .