It must have been just two years after our marriage I wasn't present. The particulars didn't come out until the Flounder's trial, when he himself disclosed them to the Women's Tribunal. As it happens, the prosecutor bears a frightening resemblance to my Ilsebill, and not only to my Ilsebill. Both are sisters of Dorothea of Montau: that compelling look, that strength of will, which pinpoints every-
thing, which can move mountains even when there aren't any. They are appallingly blond (all three of them), dedicated to strict morality, and possessed by the brand of courage that always barges straight ahead, come what may.
So Dorothea went to see the Flounder. She took with her all her beauty and untarnished youth. One Friday, after simmering Scania herrings in onion broth. She was wearing her long (penitential) gown of nettles, and her hair was unbound.
I had instructed her, "You must go into the sea. When you are up to your knees, call him several times, give him my regards. Then he'll come, and perhaps if you kiss him he'll tell you something. Wish for something; wish for something."
So Dorothea went straight down the beach, making tracks with her bare feet, to the shallows where the halfhearted Baltic waves petered out. Then she gathered her gown of nettles. Up to her knees she stood in the lazy water, and her cry smelled of herring as she cried, "Flounder, cum oute, ich wol kisse thy snoute."
Then she introduced herself as Dorothea of Montau, who belonged to no man, not even to her Albrecht the sword-maker, but only to the Lord Jesus, her heavenly bridegroom. And if, she went on, she kissed the Flounder, she would not be kissing him but her sweet Jesus in the guise of a flounder.
And just as, in all my time-phases, the Flounder jumped up onto the palms of my hands, so now he jumped into my Dorothea's arms. She was so frightened she let a fart, which along with other particulars was cited before the Women's Tribunal and duly entered in the minutes.
The Flounder said nothing but offered Dorothea his crooked mouth. Her lips were chapped from the sea wind. With her long, ascetic fingers she held his white underside and his pebbly top side. It was a long kiss. A sucking kiss. They kissed without closing their eyes. ("Upon my lips the Flunder's kisse hath ravished my soul from heavenly blisse," ran a later Dorothean rhyme.)
That kiss changed her. Her mouth was twisted, though just perceptibly, out of shape. It wasn't her sweet Jesus who had kissed her. With a slightly crooked mouth she immediately asked the Flounder how many other women he had
kissed before her. And whether his kiss had tasted the same to those other women. And what made his mouth crooked. And how she could explain all this to her dear Jesus.
But the Flounder gave no answer, and she thought him strange and terrifying. So she threw him back into the sea and called after him, "Flunder, ichab ykist* enow, telle me then, where sitteth thy plow."
When Dorothea came home, I saw that her mouth was twisted and no longer ran parallel to the axis of her eyes. From then on she had a sardonic expression, which enhanced her beauty, though the street urchins took to calling her Flounderface.
Next day, when I went to him for an interim report-Dorothea wouldn't say a word, but spent her time kneeling contritely on unshelled peas — the Flounder said, "Your breach of trust will have dire consequences; I liked your little woman, though, even if she did smell of herring. I like the hysterical flutter of her tongue. Her way of wanting more and more. Only her questions got on my nerves."
I warned the Flounder that Dorothea would be back, but he remained unruffled: why should that frighten him? Naturally she had something up her sleeve. Women always had a compulsion to avenge their defeats — that was their nature — but no skirt was going to hook him.
And, facing the Women's Tribunal, he said to Sieglinde Huntscha, the prosecutor: "But, my good woman, of course I was aware of the risk! Wasn't I running a still-greater risk when I voluntarily fastened myself to your ridiculous hook? I've always been attracted to ghastly blond hair like yours or Dorothea's. I can't resist it. Strong-willed women like Dorothea and yourself — may I call you Sieglinde? — have always made me-what's the expression now? — lovesick. Though within reasonable limits. You see what I mean — my fishy nature."
When Dorothea went back to the Flounder, she took a kitchen knife. "Flunder, cum oute!" she cried. The Flounder jumped. They kissed. But when he again neglected to answer
• "I have kissed." — trans.
her questions, she, in housewifely manner, cut off his head with a single stroke direcly behind the pectoral fin. She smacked the quivering flat body down on the sand, spitted the head on her vertically held knife, and, her mouth made crooked by Flounder kissing, cried wildly, "All right, Flounder. You going to talk now? Answer me, Flounder! Answer my question: do you love me, Flounder?"
Before the Flounder speaks from the vertically positioned knife, I'd better remind you how he, my omniscient, too-too-clever adviser, had persuaded me to sublimate the purely instinctual relationship between man and woman in a higher sentiment, love, because love and its corollary marriage gave rise to a dependence that was most becoming to women: "Aren't they always wanting to be told whether and how much they are loved, whether love is holding its own or on the increase, whether there's a threat of love for some outsider, whether love is sure to last." Consequently, Dorothea's question, which up until then she had addressed only to her sweet Jesus and never to me, was a dependent question; for which reason the Women's Tribunal not unreasonably denounced the "institution of love" as an instrument of male oppression (although in the turn of phrase "catch oneself a man" the bait is tossed in the other direction).
In any case the severed Flounder head spoke gruesomely from the vertically positioned knife: "Aha! Snick-snack! That's the way! Most professional! But no one can cut me apart. I'll find myself again. I will always be one. I don't care for your snick-snack love. And let me tell you this: because you want everything or nothing, because my kiss that makes you beautiful is not enough and never will be enough for you, because you demand love but refuse to give love unquestioningly, because you have perverted the sublime Jesus principle into the pleasure principle, and finally because you give your husband, Albrecht the kindly sword-maker, who loves loves loves you, nothing but your cold flesh, you shall have all of me, Dorothea, and right now. For a day and a night."
So saying, the Flounder jumped off the knife, joined himself to his flat body and tail, grew before Dorothea's horrified eyes into a giant flounder, lashed her with his fins and
tail across the beach into the sea, deeper and deeper; as promised, he took her in with him.
Just like that. And in his testimony to the Tribunal the Flounder made himself perfectly clear: "In short, I took her in with me." "Typically masculine," said the women in disapproval, whereas the Flounder, addressing the selfsame court, had called Dorothea's "Do you love me?" typically feminine. He furthermore admitted that with his punitive action he had wished to provide an early formulation of his fairy tale, "The Fisherman and His Wife," later interpreted as misog-ynistic. But what happened under water he refused to tell. "Fact is, I'm the old-fashioned sort. A woman's reputation, don't you know."