My Ilsebill, who sends you her regards, doesn’t believe all this. Every day she cries out, “You with your historical excuses and your stories that are all lies!” Ilsebill only believes what she reads in the paper. You and I, however, know that stories can’t help being true, but never twice in the same way. As my Latin teacher, you were a failure, but you infected me for good with the Dorothean poison. And so I write to you, in esteem and bitter doubt. After all, neither of us knows what Dorothea wanted… .
Surplus value
Or frozen jubilation
that I’ve collected, collected to look at.
The glasses on my shelf
like side light; all are not Bohemian.
Two each day are special.
So much love, ready for the dustbin.
Breath from afar, that hasn’t shattered.
Thus, nameless, survive
air and its surplus value:
glass blowers, we read, did not grow old.
* * *
1 “I have kissed.”—TRANS.
2 Smerte: “pain,” “sorrow.”—TRANS.
The Third Month
How the Flounder was protected against aggression
WHEN THE WOMEN’S Tribunal met for the first time, four working women rolled the Flounder into the courtroom in a flat, roughly five-by-seven-foot tub. He was illumined by an overhead light. It was the kind of tub that might just as well have kept carp alive from Christmas to New Year’s Day.
While the bill of indictment was being read, the Flounder lay motionless on the bottom of the tub, as though the accusation—that he had served the male cause in an advisory capacity since the late Neolithic, well knowing that his advice redounded to the detriment of the female sex—did not concern him. It was not until Ms. Ursula Schönherr, the presiding judge, asked him if he wished to comment on the indictment that his voice was heard over the loudspeaker, and then only to say that he would say nothing as long as he was obliged to lie in Baltic Sea water, which, in addition to being disgustingly stale, was polluted with mercury. Ignoring his court-appointed counsel, the Flounder declared, “This borders on the only-too-notorious methods of torture practiced by the modern system of class justice, which it is incumbent on all, including the feminist movement, to combat. And moreover,” he added, “this overhead light is an instrument of discrimination; I demand that it be switched off immediately.”
The court was obliged to adjourn. From then on canisters of fresh North Sea water were flown in daily via British Airways. The changes of water were supervised by Beate Hagedorn, one of the associate judges, who was employed as a marine biologist by the aquarium of the Berlin Zoo.
No longer illumined from above, the Flounder became cooperative. But before the court had finished debating the neolithic phase of the legendary fish and the three breasts of the reigning goddess Awa, the defendant in his zinc tub lodged a new protest—accustomed as he was to lying flat, he declared the zinc floor of his tub to be prejudicial to his health and well-being. It so happened that his soft and sensitive underside was allergic to zinc. How, under these circumstances, could he be expected to concentrate on the proceedings? Water was not his only element. He needed sand to bed himself in, and specifically, Baltic Sea sand. “That and no other,” he concluded. “Until I am provided with an environment compatible with my needs, I cannot cooperate in this otherwise epoch-making trial. I regard the conditions of my detention as unacceptable. Is this a fascist court martial?”
Another adjournment. Baltic Sea sand was flown in. But during the next phase of the trial, from the Bronze and Iron Ages down to the advent of Christianity—the Wigga and Mestwina cases—the defendant had a further complaint: he was sick of being fed dried flies and prepared fish food like a goldfish, and “How do I know that I’m not being shamefully and criminally drugged? I need fresh food. If this is beyond the powers of our esteemed marine biologist, why not enlist the help of the fishery school in Cuxhaven or Kiel?” And he wound up, “I am asking no more than my rights.”
Once the suggested contacts had been established, the Flounder was provided with algae, insects, and similar fresh food, and the trial went along smoothly until the case of the Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau was nearing its summation.
The probable reason for the agitation in the hall was that the defendant had managed to bring in certain particulars which, taken in conjunction with certain acknowledged facts, added up to a historical picture that mitigated his guilt (Dorothea’s services as a spy for the Dominicans). In any event, some member of the public threw a fist-sized stone, which missed the zinc tub but might have hit it. The public was excluded from the hall. With the Flounder’s consent, workmen (males) covered his tub with fine-meshed wire. The optical effect was unfortunate. The defendant could hardly be seen. The word “cage” kept cropping up in the news stories.
When the public was readmitted, further assaults were made. The public consisted mostly of young women, and when the Flounder set forth his cynical migraine theory in speaking of Dorothea of Montau, one of these young women threw a small bottle, which landed on the protective wire. The Flounder demanded to be informed of the contents, but refrained from any comment derogatory to the women’s movement when the words “potassium cyanide” were pronounced.
Again the trial was adjourned; again the public was excluded. Specialists (male) required a whole week, first to seal off the zinc tub with a pane of bulletproof glass, second to equip the tub with an oxygen tank, and third to install an intercom system. When the trial started up again, the Flounder sounded weird, very much (to High German ears) as in the fairy tale that made him a popular legend: “Vot does she vont now?” He was evidently aware of the acoustic effect, for he occasionally sprinkled his usual exaggeratedly involved and old-fashioned sentences with Low German flourishes, charmingly vulgar expletives, and puns on the name Ilsebill. The intercom system seemed to amuse him.
But at the very start of the debate on the case of Margarete Rusch, when the Flounder had just admitted to the Tribunal that it was he who had advised putting little Margret in a convent, or, more exactly, right after the accused fish had illustrated convent life with a few anecdotes, and had imitated Fat Gret’s nun’s farts with a remarkable vocal virtuosity, someone in the public took aim at the Flounder and fired. The bullet—fired as it later turned out by an old lady, a librarian by trade—struck the hind end of the zinc tub. She had fired standing in the eleventh row. The bullet passed clean through the metal and came to rest in the Baltic Sea sand. But the hole was large enough to provide passage for a finger-thick stream of North Sea water. The prosecutor herself, Ms. Sieglinde Huntscha, tried to stop the hole with a Kleenex. The marine biologist was in despair. A plumber was called. The Flounder could be heard laughing raucously over the loudspeaker: “Hey, there, that’s a new way to fart. That must have been a cowboy and no Ilsebill. Going after the poor Flounder with a Colt. Why not a cannon?”
Only a four-day adjournment was needed for the installation of a man-high tank of bulletproof glass, as long and wide as the retired zinc tub but filled to half its height with Baltic Sea sand. It goes without saying that the glass house was provided with the necessary technical equipment. The Flounder could now be seen much more clearly. One could even distinguish his archaic stony protuberances, except when he buried his whole flat body in the sand, showing only his crooked mouth and slanting eyes. But now no one could endanger his life by aiming stones or bullets at him or pouring poison in his water. His security had been provided for.
He was also safe from kidnapping (thanks to an alarm system). (Only a short while before, anonymous, presumably male threats had been made known: “They want to swipe him on us. Those male chauvinists stop at’nothing.”) The Flounder was pleased with the bulletproof-glass box. On request, he generously admitted photographers. Even a television crew was permitted, during a recess, to transmit his protected beauty to millions of tubes. The discussion of the cooking nun continued—almost without a hitch.
When I was her kitchen boy
The gleaming copper pan.
Her early morning voice. Here! I cried. Here!
and ran to her, as often as I tried
to run away from her pots.
At Easter I skinned lambs’ tongues—Protestant
and Catholic—and my sinful soul as well.
And when she plucked geese in November,
I blew feathers, blew the down,
to keep the day in suspense.
She had the dimensions of Saint Mary’s Church,
but there was never a mystical draft,
it was never cool inside her.
Ah, her box bed
that smelled of goat’s milk
that flies had fallen into.
Captive in her stable smell.
Her womb was a cradle.
When was that?
Under her nun’s habit—she was an abbess—
time did not stand still,
history was enacted,
the controversy over flesh and blood
and bread and wine was decided without a word.
As long as I was her kitchen boy,
I was never cold and never ashamed.
Fat Gret: a half pumpkin
laughs and spits out seeds.
I seldom saw her
stir beer into bread soup,
but then she peppered heavily: her grief
had no aftertaste.
Vasco returns
Who else, Flounder! Who else! Blacksmith Rusch, Franciscan monk Stanislaus. Preacher Hegge, rich man Ferber, and Abbot Jeschke. If during the lifetime of the abbess Margarete I was one and the other and successively this one and that one—her father, her kitchen boy, her opponents and victims—why would it not be conceivable that far away from her but wishing to help her by making pepper cheaper, I opened up the sea route to India to Portuguese caravels? Consider that the São Rafael dropped anchor off Calicut on March 28, 1498, at which time Kristin Rusch, an inhabitant of the Wicker Bastion, was pregnant with Fat Gret.
At first I merely toyed with this question along with my usual worries (Ilsebill), but then, when I’d started on my trip, it became an obsession. ‘Possibly it was fear of the foreign surroundings that made me look for a role. (How was I to exist in Calcutta without one?) Or cursory readings in Hinduism beguiled me into extending my Eastern European rebirths to the Indian subcontinent; but I didn’t want to have been Lord Curzon or Kipling. I finally said to myself: the abbess Margarete Rusch must have had some reason for marrying her elder daughter, Hedwig, to a Portuguese merchant, whose intention of opening a trading post on the Malabar Coast in southern India was explicitly mentioned in the marriage contract. It was decided that with the viceroy’s permission the couple would take up residence at Cochin, and from there, as stipulated in the marriage contract, ship suitable amounts of pepper twice a year, for the feasts of Saint Martin and Saint John. The rule dating from the days of Vasco and of Affonso d’Albuquerque that prohibited the entry of Christian women seems to have been relaxed, and the family struck root.
They settled in Cochin, where the merchant Rodrigues d’Evora and his wife, Hedwig, soon made a fortune in the spice trade—pepper, cloves, ginger, and cardamom—but the climate was too much for them. Along with four of their five children, they died before Margret Rusch, who, thanks to the stipulated spice shipments, was able to give Indian spices currency in Danzig and environs: tripe with ginger, millet curry, gingerbread, hare in pepper sauce, pepper with anything and everything. And because my travel schedule included a visit to the seaport town of Cochin in the Indian state of Kerala, I decided to travel unofficially as Vasco da Gama. While still at the Frankfurt airport, though with my seat belt already fastened, I wrote in my sketchbook: Vasco returns.
He arrives in a jumbo jet. Actually all he wants to do is visit the black Kali and see her stick out her red tongue.
Vasco has read all the statistics. Vasco knows what the president of the World Bank thinks about Calcutta. Vasco is supposed to deliver a lecture. As a precaution he has already written it down, in long and short sentences. “By a rough estimate …” says his speech. Well fed, Vasco suffers under the problem of world hunger. After many rebirths, Vasco is now a writer. He is writing a book in which he exists down through the ages: the Stone Age, the Early Christian, High Gothic, Reformation, and Baroque eras, the age of the Enlightenment, et cetera.
Immediately after the takeoff he quotes himself: Somebody ought to write a report on hunger down through the ages, comparing past, present, and future hunger. The famine of 1317, when there was nothing to eat but manna grits. The meat shortage of 1520, when dumplings of many kinds were invented. Hunger in Prussia before the introduction of the potato, and hunger in Bangladesh. The gestures and language of hunger are in need of study. Behavior patterns induced by the anticipation of hunger. Evocation of past famines: the rutabaga winter of 1917; the soggy corn bread of ’45. What it really means to be starving. We need a catalogue of hunger quotations, says Vasco to himself, toying listlessly with refrigerated and therefore tasteless Air India pâté.
The goddess Kali is looked upon as the female aspect of the god Shiva. Her power destroys. When in the mood she demolishes man’s precarious structures. We are living in her era. (Vasco thinks in passing of his wife, Ilsebill, who likes to smash glasses and is a great hand at wishing.)
Even before the fueling stop at Kuwait his eyeglasses get broken. But he is not unprovided for. Because of the humidity in Calcutta, Vasco has bought cotton trousers, shirts, and socks in a tropical-outfitting store in Hamburg. Vasco is supplied with Enterovioform. Vasco has had cholera and yellow-fever shots. Vasco has thrice swallowed colored antityphoid capsules on an empty stomach. Vasco is carrying five pounds of statistics in his luggage. Vasco is the guest of the Indian government. This is known on board the jumbo jet. Vasco is really someone else and is known under a different name.
He ought to have spoken to his wool-gathering audience in Delhi about Kali and how she sticks out her red tongue, instead of citing roughly estimated figures replete with zeros, standing for protein deficiency, excess population, and mortality rates: abstract quantities worshiped only in footnotes, whereas the unfathomable Kali can be understood everywhere, but especially in Calcutta, on the Hooghly River. She who is hung with garlands of skulls and chopped-off hands. She, the playful, commanding, terrible, Dravidian Kali. (She can also be called Durga, Parvati, Uma, Sati, or Tadma.)
Still aboard the jumbo jet (without sleep), Vasco tries to construct a kinship between the neolithic goddess Awa, remarkable for her three breasts, and Kali, the four-armed strangler. He thinks up an uprising: oppresed by matriarchy, the men in the swamplands of the Vistula estuary band together. In a frenzy of procreative activity (advised by the Flounder), they try to introduce the patriarchate. But Awa wins out and has a hundred and eleven men emasculated with stone axes. From then on she wears their dried penises strung on a chain around her vast pelvis, just as the Indian Kali decks herself out with chopped-off hands and skulls.
The moment he gets there, Vasco starts writing postcards. “Dear Ilsebill, everything here is strange… .” Then, wishing to gain a visual impression of the strange country, he has his glasses made whole.
Fourteen ninety-eight: Vasco knows that he lied to himself then, just as he deceives himself now. Men are always rubbing up their aims to a high polish: For the glory of God … To save endangered humanity … When what actually impelled him to find a sea route to India, the land of spices, was nautical ambition. It was other people, the “peppersacks,” or shopkeepers, who made the big money.
At an evening reception (in his honor), some ladies who have studied in England question Vasco about the aims and motives of the women’s liberation movement. Vasco tells them about a women’s tribunal that is being held in Berlin but making headlines far beyond its confines. A captured Flounder, he tells them, is symbolically on trial; the Flounder embodies the principle of
male domination; he is being tried in a bulletproof tank. Then Vasco suggests to the ladies that the liberation of Indian women be placed under the high patronage of the goddess Kali. (Mightn’t Nehru’s daughter, Indira, be an embodiment of her terrible aspect?) While pine nuts are being nibbled, his suggestion arouses interest, although the ladies, daughters of prominent Brahman families, prefer Durga, the mild aspect of the goddess; Kali, it seems, is more popular with the lower castes.
The next day Vasco doesn’t feel like going to the museum; he wants to visit a slum. The slum dwellers look at him in amazement. He is intimidated by the cheerfulness of these poverty-stricken people and their unconquerable charm. The giggling of the ragged young girls who, because they have hips, show their hips. True, they beg with their hands and eyes, but they don’t complain. (They’re not starving, after all, just chronically undernourished.) It all looks so natural. As though that were how it had to be forever and ever. As though the growth of bigger and bigger slums were an organic process that shouldn’t be disturbed, but at the most cured of its worst abuses.
Vasco (the discoverer) asks questions about work, wages, number of children, school attendance, family planning, intestinal flora, latrines. The answers confirm the statistics in his possession, no more. Then he is obliged to visit a large fortress (dating from his Mogul days) in which some units of the Indian army are now quartered. Looking down from the battlements at midday, Vasco tries to engrave a picture on his mind: five hundred ragged bodies lying in a flat field (whose grass covering has been eaten away by cows), looking as dead as if English machine guns, firing from the fort’s embrasures, had mowed them down. Each bundle lies by itself. Dusty units. Corpses eager to rot. Their death-sleep warmed by the sun. Extras out of a colonial film, waiting for the next pan. A pity Vasco has left his 35-mm camera at the hotel. He makes a note of the word: death-sleepers. And I, he says, am supposed to have discovered this? In vain Vasco forbids himself to find these sleeping corpses, arranged by chance or some other law, beautiful. If he were tired and lay down among them, he would look awkwardly out of place.