by Günter Grass
While cries—most likely of “Treason!”—came down from above, Paasch and Osslieb cursed back like fishwives. Meanwhile Ulla Witzlaff took off her shoes and stockings, opened the Flounder’s tank with the key that had been entrusted to her care, reached under the white belly side of the flatfish with both hands, lifted him out of the tank, showed him to us, to the photographers, to the television camera, and to the cursing, catapulting women on the chalk cliff, then carried him step by step across the sandy beach until she stood knee-deep in water. Then she proclaimed in her singing voice, “I hereby carry out the sentence pronounced by the Women’s Tribunal upon the Flounder. Henceforth he shall be available to us alone. We shall call him! We’ll call him, all right!” Then she put him in the water, and all was still. Only the clicking of the photographers and the whirring of the television camera.
Witzlaff reported that he had swum straight out to sea. Then we had to attend to the injured Erika Nöttke. In the meantime the radical opposition had evacuated the cliff. It was a hard climb, but Ms. Nöttke declined to be carried. She was still holding her bunch of flowers. Helga Paasch threw away her collection of flints. I’d have liked to spend a few days on Møn with Witzlaff, but at the hotel there was a telegram for me: RETURN IMPERATIVE. BABY IMMINENT. NO EXCUSES PLEASE. ILSEBILL. I made it home just in time.
Conversation
In the first month we were not sure,
and only the oviduct knew.
In the second month we argued about
what we had wanted and not wanted,
said and not said.
In the third month the belly changed palpably,
but our words only repeated themselves.
When in the fourth month the new year began,
only the year was new; our words were still tired.
Exhausted but still in the right,
we wrote off the fifth, the sixth month:
It’s moving, we said unmoved.
When in the seventh month we bought roomy dresses,
we were still cramped and quarreled
about the third month, the one we’d missed out on.
Only when a leap over a ditch
became a fall—
Don’t jump! No! Wait. No. Pon’t jump!—
did we begin to worry: stammering and whispering.
In the eighth month we were sad,
because the words spoken in the second and fourth
were still being paid for.
When in the ninth month we were defeated
and the child, quite unconcerned, was born,
we had no words left.
Congratulations came over the phone.
What we wish for
A she or a he. If it’s a girl, we’ll name her after my mother; if it’s a boy, he will, like me, gather from garbage dumps the feathers the sky loses and raise them lightly, barely breathing, then blowing, then with gusts of wind, and hold them in suspense, falling, reeling, and then another updraft. It’s flying, flying! we hear Emmanuel calling… .
One more child screamed at 10:15 A.M., and, no sooner had the umbilical cord been cut, was given its name, which had never been open to argument. Sex, length, weight. It already looks like, will soon, will later on, being Ilsebill’s daughter, but with a different walk, prouder, more self-assured, walk straight ahead and take what’s there, so that no further wishes are left hanging, never aired, in the closet, till the moths get them. One more girl with a crack that stayed open when our beautiful view was nailed shut.
To the wish stated before the Womenal in the form of a demand—“Why always us! Let the men for a change open their legs, conceive, and bear!”—the Flounder had known an answer. “Look, my dear ladies: even the moon lies mirror-reversed in a pond. How are we going to straighten that out? How, I ask you, how?”
When Ilsebill was delivered, her daughter came as a disappointment. Just another cunt, another twat, the goal of all men who are homeless and unsheltered and want to get rid of themselves, over and over again. (And the mother hissed at me, “You cracksman!”)
Not all Ilsebill’s wishes consent to come true. Since I was allowed to be present at the birth of our daughter, I tried (in a green coverall, gauze mask, and sterile shoes) to console her. “Honest, Ilsebill. Girls are much better off nowadays. In former times, when I stupidly believed in the right of inheritance, I always wished for a boy. But Dorothea, Agnes, Amanda, Lena—not one of them gave me anything but daughters; and even the abbess Rusch bore only girls. But when canteen cook Maria Kuczorra gave birth to twin girls—their names are Damroka and Mestwina—the workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, seeing that Maria’s Jan was dead, gave her a double baby carriage and two pink pisspots to avoid any complexes later on… .”
Ordinarily it would have been a difficult delivery, because the breech presentation makes for complications. So we decided on a Caesarean, which is guaranteed painless because everything up to the navel is anesthetized. The size and position of the baby were first checked by ultrasonic means, but the coarse-grained picture didn’t show the sex.
The obstetrician made an oblique incision in Ilsebill’s abdomen where it arched above the shaved groin; he cut through the skin, the fatty envelope, the muscular tissue, and the peritoneum, all of which Ilsebill, whose head lay far in the distance, behind a screen, did not see.
I saw, because it’s supposed to be good for fathers to see the womb laid bare in the gaping belly and opened with a scalpel. The obstetrician tore the amnion to let out the fluid. Watery blood. Absorbent cloths stuffed into the cavities. Veins clamped. Then he reached in with his gloved hands, and, ass first, our daughter emerged into the world, showing—hallelujah!—her little Parker House roll, while in the delivery room of the municipal hospital soft music from hidden loudspeakers made the whole affair pleasant, inoffensive, friendly, entertaining, and absolutely banal. The up-to-date hospital director, who is open to all reasonable innovations, does not want his young interns engaging during the Caesarean (because they have nothing else to do) in private conversations with the Korean student nurses about cars, politics, weekend delights, so depriving the mother, whose hearing, since she feels no pain, is particularly acute, of important small experiences; that is why he has decreed that, apart from the sound of the instruments and the obstetrician’s soft-spoken instructions—“Clamp, please. Swabs, please”—only sweet music should be heard.
“And this,” said the obstetrician through his mask for my edification, “is the Fallopian tube… .” (I also saw how yellow, like chicken fat, Ilsebill’s belly fat is. A piece of it crumbled off and I could have fried two eggs in it.)
After being shown to her mother, our daughter (whose umbilical cord had already been cut) was screaming on the other side of the room, where she was weighed, measured, and secured against mistaken identity by a tag on the wrist or ankle. Ah, my babykins, my bawling chickabiddy, my lambkin, my daughter …
When Ilsebill’s womb, which immediately contracted, and her belly had been sewed up again, and the scalpels, clamps, swabs, and absorbent cloths had concurrently been counted on a side table, one metal clamp was missing. They were going to undo the stitches and search the abdominal cavity, but luckily the clamp was found in the bucket with the afterbirth, where it didn’t belong. But what I, the father, who was watching, wished into Ilsebill’s belly stayed there, was sewed in; namely, big stones, and I’m not giving them away.
Oh, my secret thoughts! As though I found nothing worth wishing for. As though a quickly twining gourd-vine arbor or a wing chair to deafen me to the sufferings of the world were everything. As though my longings—“Yes yes, Maria, I’m coming; I’m coming soon”—were nothing but easy ways out, loopholes that ought to be plugged up. Oh, how I need rest, distant places, new wallpaper, a plane ticket to a better time-phase. Ah, how I need a far-off century. Ah, how I thirst for death and eternity.
But my wishes have never counted. It’s always hers, damn it, that I … And take all the responsibili
ty, oh yes! And pay and pay! And feel guilty for everything and nothing.
What fault (after all) is it of mine that it’s turned out to be a girl again. I’m not a slot machine that spits what you pick. At least, on the day when my daughter was born, the representatives of the one and the other German state signed a treaty extending the privileges of the Lübeck fishermen, which have been in force since the emperor Barbarossa’s writ of 1188, to the territorial waters of the German Democratic Republic; and that, you’ll agree, was long overdue.
At a snack bar around the corner from the municipal hospital, when I first took a schnapps or two with my beer, then ordered one, then another Bockwurst with bread and mustard, they were running the quarter finals on television. Poland was leading. Chile had been eliminated. And it kept on raining. The world-championship soccer matches transformed me into an onlooker among other male onlookers, who like me drank schnapps, dipped Bockwurst in mustard, took bites, washed them down with beer, had that absorbed look, and may well have all been fathers, worried about their daughters.
The owner knew his clientele. The name of his bar was The Happy Father. He said, “No boy again? Don’t let it get you down. Girls are cheaper now that they’ve done away with dowries. They’re all emancipated nowadays. Nowadays they wish for entirely different things.”
Yes, I assure you. You’ll have everything. Your father will provide. Your father will attend to it. Your father is still something of a stranger to you, because he has no womb. Give him time for a schnapps or two and a walk around the block. Your father has his share of the restlessness that makes the world go round. Your father is on the track of something. Your father has to go away for a while, to see where he came from. Where it all began. There’s a Maria up there whom he’s related to. She gave him a piece of amber with a fly caught in it. Don’t be afraid. Your father will be back. He’ll come back and tell you stories in which feathers are blown and children who go looking for mushrooms manage to get lost and flies spend the winter in pieces of amber. And I’ll tell you about the Flounder, too, when I get back… .
Man oh man
Stop it, will you.
Cut it out.
You’re finished, man, still horny but that’s all.
Say once again: Will do.
Once again press buttons and make puppets dance.
Once again show your will and its flaws.
Once again pound the table and say: That’s mine.
Once again list how often you and whose.
Once again be hard, so it sinks in.
Prove to yourself once again your great, your proven,
your all-embracing ever-loving care.
Man oh man.
There you stand, present and soon to be present.
Men don’t weep, man.
Your dreams, which were typically masculine, have all been filmed.
Your victories dated and listed.
Your progress caught up with and measured.
Your mourning and those who enact it weary the playbills.
Your jokes are too often varied; Radio Yerevan has gone off the air.
Enormous (even now), your power cancels itself out.
Man oh man.
Once again say “I.”
Once again think penetratingly.
Once again look through.
Once again be right.
Once again be profoundly silent.
Stand or fall just once more.
No need to clean up, man; just leave it all be.
By your own rules you’re washed up,
dismissed from your own history.
And only the baby boy in you
has leave to play with building blocks for another short while.
What, man oh man, will your wife say to that?
Three meals of pork and cabbage
Maria took two tin spoons and a full dinner pail with her when we rode out to Heubude on the streetcar to sit in the dunes in view of the sea.
It can be proved that as early a cook as Amanda Woyke was acquainted with our common cabbage, which she shredded, stored in barrels, and made into sauerkraut, or cooked into a thick mash with potatoes and pork ribs and served to the farm hands on holidays. Since cabbage bloats, it seems unlikely that Agnes Kurbiella set potted or stuffed cabbage, let alone pork and cabbage, before painter Möller or poet Opitz; our easily digestible cauliflower didn’t exist yet. It had to wait for progress. I have no recollection of Abbess Rusch preparing our present-day varieties of cabbage, but Chinese cabbage (pe-tsai) was occasionally imported in her day. It wasn’t until later that kitchens smelled of Wirsing and Kapuster, as we called the common cabbage. Lena Stubbe saw us through the winter with rutabaga and cabbage. Since Dorothea of Montau did not know the green cabbage that is common today, she seems on Holy Thursday to have cooked the wild varieties, such as colewort or the slightly bitter sea kale, with nothing else. And just as Dorothea put up sorrel in a wooden barrel, so Amanda Woyke and Lena Stubbe shredded cabbage heads (after cutting out the cores) with a cabbage shredder, piled the shreds in barrels with cabbage leaves at the bottom, poured on salt, pounded the shredded cabbage with a pestle until there was juice to cover it, spread more cabbage leaves on top, and fitted the barrel with a wooden lid that had to be weighed down with a large stone.
And in time it fermented, so that pork and cabbage, such as Maria brought to the dunes in a dinner pail, could be made not only with fresh cabbage, but also sweet and sour with sauerkraut, caraway seed, and juniper berries. Pork ribs are suitable, or smoked spareribs, if you prefer.
And once, after Maria had started buying for the shipyard kitchen, I ate pork and cabbage with Jan Ludkowski in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. I had obtained permission to visit a few of the workshops, the then unused drydock, and an unfinished ferryboat on the slips. Since what they showed me is illustrated and described in several languages in the prospectus, it’s not worth the telling. The work sounds of a Communist shipyard are no different from the work noise of capitalist shipyards. I politely took notes, which were later abandoned unused at the Hotel Monopol; still, it was interesting to see what the Poles had made of the Schichau, Danziger, Klawitter Shipyard, which at the end of the war was partly destroyed, partly dismantled by the Russians. Jan said, “Our orders from the West … That’s where we get our hard currency… . Obviously, we have to sell to the Soviet Union at bargain prices, floating fish factories, for instance, that process the catch right there on the fishing grounds, the latest thing… .”
Lunch hour was over at the canteen. A flat-roofed two-story building, through the plate-glass front of which gulls could be seen stunt-flying. Only a few clerks in white smocks were still there, occupying two or three tables at the other end. For them, for us, there was leftover pork and cabbage, consisting of pork ribs, fresh carawayed cabbage, and potatoes, all cooked together. Our beverage was buttermilk. Jan, who generally looked after visitors to the shipyard, addressed me as if I had been a large delegation. Not to be turned off, he spouted production figures, boasted of large Swedish orders, and pickled his technocratic Communism, as one might pickle cabbage, with fatalistic salt: “That’s the way we Poles are… . We know in our bones that something somehow will go wrong with our progress… . Regimentation just doesn’t work with us… . But somehow we manage… . We know our history… .”
Still gnawing at his pork ribs, Jan Ludkowski was off on his thing. Since the ferryboat (which I had been authorized to visit) was to be named after some king of Poland (one of the Batorys or Wladislaws) and not after a Pomorshian prince (Sambor or Swantopolk), he, conscious of his Kashubian heritage, had submitted one petition after another—in vain, though anyone ought to recognize that Mestwina and Damroka are attractive names for ships.
Jan saw historical episodes in detail, as if he had been there. And since I, too, had lived in several time-phases and left something lying around in every century, we found no difficulty over pork and cabbage with lumpy buttermilk in re-enacting the de
cisive battle in which Duke Swantopolk not only trounced the Norwegians, but with his victory over General Fortinbras also provided a sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Jan and I agreed to make a play out of it. Somewhere in the midst of the Kashubian water holes the armies stand facing each other. Swantopolk and Fortinbras taunt each other: Kashubian swine! Norwegian swine! And then Hamlet appears as a ghost between the armies and expresses himself in obscure, ambiguous pentameters about many controversial matters: naturally about Shakespeare and his doubles. Naturally about Communism and capitalism. And why not an allusion to the Flounder: how he treacherously advised the one and the other hero and sent them to their doom.
“Why not?” said Jan. “And maybe after the battle Hamlet’s ghost could appear among the dead… .”
“Naturally,” I said. “But what happens after the victory?”
“The victorious Swantopolk,” said Jan, “might be assailed by self-doubt. He shillies and shallies… .”
“Until,” said I, “the Teutonic Knights, who don’t know the meaning of doubt, get there and clean up. Ruthlessly, inexorably.”
We didn’t get beyond the first act of our sequel to Hamlet. Maria came in from the kitchen and said, “Shooting the shit again?” Coming in with her corkscrew curls, she was Mestwina’s daughter Damroka. And it occurred to me that Jan loved her both in her historical and in her present time-phase. Stocky, round of head and belly, he became slender when he said “Marysia.” But when the canteen cook of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk wasn’t laughing (from inside, over nothing), she liked best to talk about prices and bottlenecks in the supply system: “All we need is a cabbage shortage. Want some more pork and cabbage? There’s plenty.”
Jan and I wanted. Maria brought and left. And there was fresh lumpy buttermilk in our glasses. But we had no further ideas about Swantopolk and Fortinbras.