The Flounder Page 2

  Meat, raw and cooked,

  goes limp, shreds, shrinks, and falls apart.

  The daily porridge

  and other warmed-over fare: dated history,

  the slaughter at Tannenberg Wittstock Kolin.

  I make a note of what’s left:

  bones, husks, innards, and sausage.

  About nausea brought on by a heaped plate,

  about good taste,

  about milk (how it curdles),

  about turnips, cabbage, the triumph of the potato

  I will write tomorrow

  or after yesterday’s leftovers

  have become today’s petrifaction.

  What I write about: about the egg.

  About overeating through sorrow, consuming love, the nail and the rope,

  about quarrels over the hair and the word too many in the soup.

  Deep freezers and what became of them

  when the current gave out.

  I will write about us all at a table eaten bare,

  and about you and me and the fishbones in our throats.

  Nine and more cooks

  The first cook inside me—for I can speak only of cooks who are inside me and want to come out—was named Awa, and she had three breasts. That was in the Stone Age. We men had little say, because Awa had filched fire for us from the Sky Wolf, three glowing little pieces of charcoal, and hidden them somewhere, possibly under her tongue. Next Awa, as though in passing, invented the roasting spit and taught us to distinguish raw food from cooked food. Awa’s rule was mild: after suckling their babies, the women of the Stone Age suckled their men until they sweated out their obsessions, stopped fidgeting, and became sleepily still, available for just about anything.

  And so we were all of us sated. Never again, never in the future that dawned later on, were we so sated. We were suckled and suckled. Always superabundance was flowing into us. Never any question of enough is enough or let’s not overdo it. Never were we given a pacifier and told to be reasonable. It was always suckling time.

  Because Awa prescribed a mash of ground acorns, sturgeon roe, and the mammary glands of the elk cow for all mothers, milk gushed into Stone Age mothers even when there were no infants to suckle. That made us all peaceful and created time intervals. So punctually fed, even our toothless old men preserved their vigor, and the consequence was rather a surplus of males; the women wore out more quickly and died younger. We had little to do between feeding times: hunting, fishing, the manufacture of stone axes; and when in accordance with a strict rule our turn came, we were allowed to mount the women, who ruled by tender loving care.

  It might interest you to know that Stone Age mothers already said “la la” to their babies and that the men, when called to take a look at them, said “na na.” There were no fathers. Matriarchy held sway.

  It was a pleasantly historyless age. A pity that someone, a man of course, suddenly decided to smelt metal out of ore and pour it into sand molds. God knows that wasn’t what Awa had stolen fire for. But threaten as she would to withhold the breast, the Bronze Age and the masculine cruelties that came after it could not be prevented, but only delayed a little.

  The second cook inside me who wants to emerge with a name was called Wigga and no longer had three breasts. That was in the Iron Age, but Wigga, who forbade us to leave the swamps with their plentiful fish and join in the history making of the Germanic hordes who were then passing through, still kept us in a state of immaturity. The one thing she allowed us to copy from the Germans was their coiling pottery. And Wigga made us gather the iron pots they threw away in their haste, because Wigga ruled by cookery, and she needed flameproof pots.

  For all the men, who were all fishermen—because elk and water buffalo were becoming rare—she boiled codfish and sturgeon, pike-perch and salmon, roasted roaches, lampreys, finger-length sprats, and those small, tasty Baltic herrings on the iron grill that we had learned to fashion from Germanic scrap. Making a thick, strong broth by boiling the hell out of shifty-eyed codfish heads, Wigga invented a fish soup into which, because millet was still unknown to us, she stirred the crushed seeds of swamp grasses. Possibly in memory of Awa, whose image had come down to us as a three-breasted goddess, Wigga, always nursing an infant or two, added milk from her own breasts to her fish soups.

  We unsuckled men were jumpy, as though infected with Germanic unrest. Wanderlust raised its head. We climbed tall trees, stood on high dunes, narrowed our eyes to sight slits, and searched the horizon to see if something was coming, if something new was coming. Because of this wanderlust—and because I refused to be Wigga’s charcoal burner and peat cutter forever—I went off with the Germanic Goitches, as we called the Goths. But I didn’t get very far. Trouble with my feet. Or maybe I turned back in time because I missed Wigga’s mammary fish soup.

  Wigga forgave me. She knew that history is forgotten between hunger and hunger. “The Germanic peoples,” she said, “won’t listen to their women; that’s why they will always get themselves wiped out.”

  For Wigga, incidentally, I filed a comb from fishbone, because a talking flounder had shrewdly advised me to. Back in Awa’s days, I had fished this flatfish out of the shallow water and let him go again. The talking flounder is a story by himself. Since he has been advising me, the male cause has progressed.

  The third cook inside me was called Mestwina, and she, too, ruled in the region where Awa and Wigga had kept us in a state of infancy with their ever-loving care: in the swamps of the Vistula estuary, in the beech forests of the Baltic Ridge, amid sand dunes wandering and stationary. Po Morze—country by the sea—for which reason Mestwina’s tribe of fishermen, who had begun to grow root plants, were known among the neighboring Prussians as “Pomorshians” or Pomeranians.

  They lived in a Wicker Bastion, so called because of the fence they had plaited from willow withes as a defense against Prussian raiders. Because she was a cook, Mestwina was also a priestess. She raised the cult of Awa to perfection. And when it came time for us all to be baptized, she brewed up paganism and Christianity into a Catholic mixture.

  For Mestwina I was at once a shepherd, supplying her with loins of mutton, and a bishop, for whom she cooked. It was I who picked up pieces of amber on the beach, pierced them with red-hot wire, and threaded them, while muttering appropriate spells, to fashion the necklace that came apart as she bent over her fish broth; and as Bishop Adalbert I spooned up that same codfish-head soup, into which, because a necklace had come apart, seven pieces of amber had melted, whereupon I became as horny as a goat from Ashmodai’s stable.

  Later on they canonized Bishop Adalbert of Prague, who was me at the time. But here I’m speaking of Mestwina, who, in striking me dead without a qualm, was merely doing a job that is ordinarily done by men. And when I told the Flounder about this incident of April 997, he scolded as follows: “That was supererogation! Look, you’ve more or less turned yourselves into warriors, haven’t you? That killing should have been done by a man. Indisputably. Don’t let them wrest the absolute solutions out of your hands. No relapse into the Stone Age, if you please. Women should devote themselves to a more inward religion. The kitchen is dominion enough for them.”

  The fourth cook inside me inspires fear, so I’m glad to get rid of her. No longer a Pomorshian fisherwoman ruling mildly in the Wicker Bastion, this one, now that the city has been founded, is an artisan’s wife, known as Dorothea of Montau, because she was born in Montau, a village on the Vistula.

  I don’t want to slander her, but the talking Flounder’s advice that after so much historyless, matriarchal ever-loving care I should devote myself with masculine high pressure to men’s business and leave not the Church but religion to women as a second prerogative after rule over the kitchen, made a big hit with my High Gothic Dorothea. To say that though revered as a saint by the populace she was more like a witch and Satan’s bedfellow is a mild enough observation in connection with a period when the plague was carrying people away right and left,
and when witches as often as not doubled as saints.

  Typical as Dorothea may have been of the fourteenth century, her contribution to the cuisine of an epoch noted for its revolting gluttony was quite one-sided, for Dorothea ruled by extending Lenten fare to the whole year, not excluding Saint Martin’s Day, Saint John’s Day, Candlemas, and the high holidays. The barley in her pot never saw fat. She boiled her millet in water, never in milk. When she cooked lentils or dried peas, no bone was ever allowed to contribute its bit of marrow. The closest thing to meat that she tolerated was fish, which she simmered with turnips, leeks, sorrel, and lettuce. We shall have something to say of her spices later on. How she had visions and baked the Sacred Heart in bread dough. What penance she found sweet and how she softened peas with her penitent knees. What she hungered for and how she enhanced her beauty. What advice the Flounder gave me. But no advice could help me; she was a witch, and she destroyed me.

  The fifth cook inside me is Margarete Rusch, also known as Fat Gret. Nobody ever laughed like her: so totally. While holding a freshly killed goose, still warm and dripping, between her round knees, plucking it so strenuously that she was soon sitting in a cloud of feathers, she drowned the pope and Luther in her laughter. She laughed at the Holy Roman Empire and at the German nation as well, at Poland’s crown and the embattled guilds, at the Hanseatic lords and the abbot of Oliva, at peasant louts and lousy knights—in short, at all those who in baggy breeches, in doublets, cowls, or armor, fought for what they held to be the true faith. She laughed at her century.

  As she belly-laughed and plucked eleven successive geese, I, her kitchen boy and the target of her angry spoon, kept the down in the air with my blowing; I’ve always had a knack for blowing feathers and keeping them hovering in mid-air.

  The goose-plucking cook was the abbess of Saint Bridget’s, a free and easy nun who helped herself to every man she could fit into her box bed. She had abducted me, a little Franciscan monk, from Trinity Church during vespers. Fat Gret was so spacious a woman that many a noble lord got lost inside her. To her the young sons of patrician families were an appetizer: tender asparagus tips. She fattened the abbot of Oliva to death. She was said to have bitten off Preacher Hegge’s left testicle. After that we went to work for Ferber the patrician, who wanted to stay Catholic and not to forgo Margret’s peppery lamb tongues with broad beans. Then we went back to the Protestants and cooked for one guild or another on holidays. When King Stephen Batory besieged the city, we decided we would be safer outside the walls, cooking for the Poles. In her bed I found warmth. In her bed I found peace. She kept me under lock and key. She sheltered me with her fat.

  Fat Gret, the Flounder said to me, was a woman after his wide-mouthed taste: she let the men get on with their deadly serious trade in wheat, toll collecting, guild fees, and indulgences, let them find more and more elaborate ways of slicing or pulverizing one another, or interpreting the Scriptures, and improved her health laughing at the murderous entertainment they offered. “If she had wanted to,” said the Flounder, “she could have won back Awa’s power at any time.”

  The sixth cook inside me—they’re pushing to get out, and there are nine or more of them, each with a name—also plucked geese, but she didn’t laugh. An oat-fattened goose when the Swedes, with fire behind them, withdrew. When the Swedes came back (punctually on Saint Martin’s Day), nothing was left of all her geese but a bowlful of stirred blood, to which she added roots and sliced pears to make a sour black sauce for the boiled giblets—neck, heart, gizzard, and wings.

  Directly behind the barn, under the apple tree, from which later dangled heads with upturned beaks, Agnes plucked the geese and sang little songs: weary wind-blown words that put the wretched Swedish occupation into rhyme and hovered in mid-air with the goose down for the length of a November day. O vale of tears!

  That was when Agnes was still childlike and Kashubian. Later, when she became a city dweller and cooked for Möller the town painter, the Swedes with their Gustavus Adolphus were already somewhere else. Instead, four years after the Battle of Lützen, the poet and diplomat Martin Opitz, embittered by the long-lasting war, came to Danzig.

  “Agnes,” said the talking Flounder—though I’m not sure whether it was as painter Möller or as poet Opitz that I questioned the wise old fish—“your Agnes,” he said, “is one of those women who can only love comprehensively. The man she cooks for she loves; and since she cooks tenderly for both of you, one for his swollen liver, the other for his embittered gall, you are obliged to sit down to table with what you take to be her divided—and what I call her doubled—love, and listen as the bed creaks.”

  To painter Möller she bore a little girl; and as for me, when the plague baked me and sweated me, she stuffed the pillow of my deathbed full to bursting with goose down. That’s how kindhearted she was. But I never managed to turn out a poem to her kindness. Only courtly flattery and lamentations of various kinds. No mouth-filling Agnes-rhyme to chicken broth, calf’s sweetbreads, manna grits, and suchlike delicacies. I hope to make up for it later on.

  The seventh cook inside me bore the name of Amanda Woyke, and when I let the whole lot of them and their daughters babble together, comparing the prices at different epochs, she’s the one who stands out most clearly in my mind. I’d never be able to say straight out, “This, just this is what Agnes looked like,” because Agnes always looked melancholy but in different ways, and always seemed torn between Möller and Opitz; for Amanda’s looks, on the other hand, I easily find an image: she had a potato face. Or, to be more specific, in her face the full beauty of the potato could be admired every day of the week. It wasn’t just the bulbousness; no, her whole skin had that earthy sheen, that glow of palpable happiness, that can be seen on stored potatoes. And since the potato is first of all grand, sweeping form, her eyes were small and lay, unaccented by heavy brows, embedded in roundness. Her lips, not fleshy red but the color of the sandy soil of Kashubia, were one of nature’s happy caprices: two bulges always prepared to utter such words as Bulwe, Wruke, Runkel.1 To be kissed by Amanda was to receive from the earth, or, rather, from that dry potato soil that has made Kashubia famous, a smack that was not ephemeral but filled you up, just as potatoes boiled in their jackets fill you up.

  When Mestwina smiled, you beheld the sheen of willow branches in March; Dorothea of Montau’s smile froze the snot in children’s noses to icicles; my Agnes’s smile, tinged with a yearning for death, made death tasty to my palate; but when Amanda smiled at me, the story of the triumph of the potato over millet could be spun on and on, a story as sinuous as Amanda’s potato peelings—for when her storytelling took hold of her, she peeled away from the thumb. As cook at the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, she had to prepare food each day for seventy, for farm hands and house servants, for day laborers, cottagers, and retired old folks.

  “She deserves a monument,” said the Flounder, “because without Amanda Woyke the introduction of the potato into Prussia after the second partition of Poland, when famine was raging far and wide and acorns brought a good price, would not have been possible. Though only a woman, she made history. Isn’t it amazing? Yes, amazing!”

  The eighth cook inside me absolutely wanted to be a man and, in keeping with her revolutionary times, mount the barricades with militant breast; yet all her life Sophie Rotzoll, close as many men (including me) came to her, remained a virgin under seven seals. The only man she ever loved was Friedrich Bartholdy, the stammering schoolboy who was condemned to death for Jacobin conspiracy. He was seventeen and Sophie fourteen; in view of his youth, Queen Luise of Prussia commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. It was not until forty years later, when her Fritz was released from the fortress of Graudenz in failing health, that Sophie, by then an old woman, or, rather, an aging spinster, saw him again. Calf’s head in herb vinegar, hog belly with chanterelles, hare stewed in red wine; regardless of what she cooked for him, of all her attempts to fire his spirit, of all the lofty goals she held u
p to him and mankind, Bartholdy had had enough; all he wanted was to puff away at his pipe.

  I knew her well. As a boy I went gathering mushrooms with Sophie in every acre of woods around Zuckau. She knew them all by name: the honey tuft, the poisonous sulfur tuft, the anise agaric, which liked to grow in a magic circle on beds of pine needles. The cep stood solitary. The word “stinkhorn” took on meaning for me. Hopelessly as Sophie had ruined her eyes reading revolutionary books, she could identify any mushroom at a glance.

  Later, when she cooked for Pastor Blech, the chief pastor at Saint Mary’s, and still later, when she cooked, first enthusiastically, then conspiratorially, for General Rapp, Napoleon’s governor, I was successively Blech, the pastor she ran away from, and Rapp, the governor she tried to depose with a dish of special mushrooms.

  Sophie could fire with enthusiasm. In the cellar, on every flight of stairs, and in the kitchen she sang “Trois jeunes tambours.” Her voice was always in the vanguard: saberthrust, whipcrack freedomthirst deathkiss. As though Dorothea of Montau were trying to discharge her heavenly high pressure on earth. “Ever since Sophie,” said the talking Flounder, “the kitchen has been in a turmoil. Always revolution.” (And my Ilsebill also has this demanding look.)

  The ninth cook inside me was born in the fall of ’49, when Sophie Rotzoll, the eighth, died. One might almost suppose she had wanted to pass the banner of revolution on to Lena Stubbe; and it seems equally possible that Lena, who as a young widow ran a public soup kitchen (her husband, an anchor maker, whom she had married when very young, was killed before Paris in the Franco-Prussian War), dished out her soup in silence but harbored secret socialist hopes. But Lena’s voice didn’t carry. As an agitator she was a failure. She was never really carried away by enthusiasm. For all her intensive reading of Bebel, her spirit never rose above the gray commonplace.

  When Lena Stubbe remarried she was already a mature woman; I, like her first husband an anchor maker, was no spring chicken myself, though ten years younger than she, and was, admittedly, a drinker.