The flounder by Grass Günter

Author:Grass, Günter [Grass, Günter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published: 1978-08-14T22:00:00+00:00

daily working mothers. Anything that lightened the housework was a force for emancipation. Solidarity, yes, but some things you can't do without. They'd send telegrams of solidarity to Africa. Of course what the company was doing there was unspeakable. (And a resolution was voted by an overwhelming majority, given weight by the signatures of the public, and cabled out into the world. . . .)

Soon after the death of her child, Agnes wanted another. But not by painter Moller, who had refused her the wet nurse.

When Martin Opitz, who also called himself von Bober-feld, entered the Royal Polish service and took up lodgings in Danzig, he was not yet forty, while painter Moller was over sixty. Soon after his arrival the poet fell in love with a girl of patrician family who could recite Latin poems but was already engaged to the son of a local merchant. Agnes, who, thanks to the good offices of Pastor Niclassius, was now cooking for Opitz as well, obliterated the silly thing—her name was Ursula—with her mute, barefooted presence. And yet he sighed for Ursula and probably couched his sighs in Latin verses.

More subterfuges. He never made it—not for any length of time. Agnes was the first woman who regularly slept with him. His father, the butcher, after the early death of his first wife, took a second, third, and fourth, and got all four with child after child. So there wasn't much left for his son to do. Just little flirtations, mostly at one court or another. One or two intrigues with burgher women in Breslau, bringing pecuniary consequences, whereupon he took flight again. When he was a young tutor in the service of Prince Bethlen Gabor, a Dacian servant girl seems to have horrified him by really showing him how it was done. Even the war, which lasted all his life, didn't give him what it gave every Swedish cavalryman (Ensign Axel). Always over books and parchment, alone and ugly on straw pallets or in bed: his receding chin. Nothing but poems and epistles of thanks to successive princes. And so, when little Ursula was not to be had, Opitz, weary and drained, fell to Agnes Kurbiella and her apron.

Agnes, who had plenty, didn't want to have anything, but only to give. For three years she sheltered him with her

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