After we had all enjoyed the splendid view for a while and posed for the television crew-fillers were needed-we started down through a wooden gully embedded in the chalk cliffs. For tourist use, yard-long logs provided natural steps. By holding my peddler's tray in both hands, I tried to spare the Flounder excessive jolting in my passage from step to step, but it was pretty bumpy even so. Seeing me bathed in sweat, Erika Nottke wanted to relieve me. Manfully I declined. (Damned if I let them take my Flounder away from me. He used to be my Flounder. I'll stick it out to the bitter end. I'll keep faith with my history.)
When we got to the bottom, there wasn't much time for a breather. A glance up the face of the cliffs revealed the grim reality, the danger we were in. Up top stood the bitches of the radical opposition-the Revolutionary Advi-
sory Council — clustered around Griselde Dubertin and Ruth Simoneit. I recognized Elisabeth Giillen and Beate Hage-dorn. "Christ!" cried Paasch. "Huntscha is with them!"
When the first stones were thrown down, I thought I recognized the court-appointed defense counsel among the infuriated women.
"Good God!" I cried. "Look who's gone over to the enemy!"
"Where is she?" Osslieb asked. "Where?"
"There!" I cried. "There!"
But Bettina von Carnow didn't show herself again. Besides, the hail of stones kept us from getting a good look at the traitor or snapping her picture. It was easy later on to make out Huntscha, Hagedorn, housewife Gtillen, and Griselde Dubertin in the newspaperwomen's numerous photos and in the pan shot taken by the Dutch television team, but not Ms. Carnow. I saw her though, the stupid bitch.
Most of the stones missed us. Poor Erika Nottke was hit on the head and bled profusely. There was flint all over the isle of M0n, and that's what they were throwing. Two members of the Danish delegation, an English newspaperwoman, and the Dutch camerawoman were slightly bruised. A piece of flint struck the Flounder's tank, but no damage was done. In trying to dodge a fist-sized stone (flung perhaps by Griselde Dubertin), I fell on the stony beach and cut my left knee through my trousers. Thank the Lord, I had put the Flounder and his tank down a moment before. Lying thus prone and slightly befuddled with pain, I found a tiny petrified sea urchin, so corroborating the Flounder's contention that the Baltic had been an almost tropical sea right after the last ice age. (I kept my find. I expect it to bring me luck and protect me from my Ilsebill. Who knows what the future may bring?)
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 Nottke. In the meantime the radical opposition had evacuated the cliff. It was a hard climb, but Ms. Nottke 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 M0n 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! Nol Wait. No. Don'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 Gdansk, 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.