The Rat by Grass Günter

Author:Grass, Günter [Grass, Günter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics
ISBN: 9780156758307
Amazon: 015675830X
Goodreads: 97606
Publisher: HarperVia
Published: 1986-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

spreads twelve or more medium-sized jellyfish out on the work surface, and hears what the helmswoman and engineer also hearnamely, a sound. No, a music emitted by the aurelias; it is lowerpitched than the singing over the water, but it swells to a choral song that can even be heard on deck, above the noise of the engine, for the Old Woman leaves her spaghetti in the galley, breaks the oath of silence imposed by me, and cries out, "Man, they're really singing!" After that all five women, last of all the oceanographer, believe what they hear in high and low register.

A urelia au rita, she of the graceful design, she whose flabby middle part is stigmatized by a bluish-violet four-leaf clover, can sing. These astral, transparent medusae, which breathe with the sea, which drift in swarms and are cursed as pests, which ordinarily are no sooner spread out on the table than they shrivel without a murmur and lose their radiance in contact with the formalin that is supposed to stop them from shriveling, are singing despite their flabby velar flanges: a swelling sound, trembling on the high notes, resounding organlike on the low ones, narrows the workroom of the former freight barge.

Never before, unless perhaps in the Biblical fiery furnace, has there been such fervid singing.

Even those willing to believe want proof. Damroka authorizes a second, a third haul with the shark. She gives the helmswoman the wheel and at the oceanographer's suggestion tapes the song of the medusae with the help of a device that has hitherto served for Bach cantatas and organ preludes, as though high tech offered the only hope of confirming the incredible or-as the women hope and secretly fear-confuting it by playing back not so much as a peep.

So they play the tape back, and since it reproduces the song of the medusae perfectly, the oceanographer takes the tape recorder out on deck. The recording harmonizes beautifully with the higher-pitched singsong over the water, as though technology and nature were for once inclined to make common cause.

Not until much later, when the jellyfish fields are past, does the original sound fade. But even then the women do not take to their hammocks. Over and over again, they run the tape and listen to what was recorded first in the workroom, then with a microphone suspended from a long fishing pole close to the water. While listening, the women speak little. The oceanographer says, "No one in the 1 8 8

Institute will believe me when I tell them what we've recorded live. "

Nevertheless, they smile when the Old Woman speaks of an inexplicable phenomenon. Speculation runs wild. The engineer, for instance, wonders whether the density of the jellyfish population can be inferred from the pitch of their song. "If so," she says, "we'd have no need of the shark and suchlike contraptions. "

Damroka calls the singing jellyfish fields "polychoral" and mentions choral works by Gesualdo. The oceanographer has data at her fingertips. "Yes, the swarm over Hoburg Banks was unusually large, but not so dense as the swarms in Kiel Bay.

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