But since the question why is still standing at order arms, and since nothing but stories can fatigue the stern questioner and his voice that always goes straight to the point, I tell dispersed stories in which the cooking nun Margret has hung just-killed and still-warm geese on the first nail to drip into a bowl for black pudding, while on the second nail Sophie's dried mushrooms (greenies, morels, ceps, and milk caps) hung in linen sacks. But on the third nail (the most recent in my hatchwork drawing) I hanged myself, because social conditions were what they were, because I dealt blows when drunk, because I'd got drunk on potato schnapps, because I was a brute, because I'd never done more than threaten to hang myself, because nothing could undo my assault on the strike fund, because I couldn't stand Lena's pity, her way of understanding everything and putting up with it in silence, because I couldn't stand the knowledge she kept to herself, all that merciless kindness and selfless forbearance any more, because my last vestige of pride, my cock, refused to bestir itself, and because I'd been constipated for days; in vain I pushed, in vain I gulped down castor oil; nothing came out. So I took a calf's tether. And I already knew about the nail in the lintel. The only thing that worried me was my rabbits. Maybe it would scare them if I did it in the doorway of the rabbit hutch. . But Lena, who kept having to save me, who was never without hope, who knew recipes for and against everything, who was reliable,
hellishly reliable, cut me down in time. Oh. God! When will
it all end?
Then she made me a soup out of beef bones, in which she boiled the nail and the rope, noose and all, for an hour. At the end she stirred an egg into the broth and didn't ask "Why?" as. with slight pain in swallowing. I spooned up the soup.
Never again did Otto Friedrich Stubbe hang himself. But that soup, made from beef bones, a blacksmith's nail, and a calf's tether, with an e^g stirred into it for strength, which Lena from then on served up everv Saturday as a preventive, soon acquired a reputation among the suicide-prone. Potential dangling men would knock at her door, shylv introduce themselves, and invite themselves to dinner. They got used to the faint taste of hemp. Thev came again and again. And Lena didn't ask "Win?'' but cooked a familv-sized potful of nail-and-rope soup for her Saturdav table, and got pretty well paid for it.
In addition to her Otto — who was unable, after the usual whopping and whimpering, to drop his Fridav announcement of "I'll hang myself one of these davs! '-Herr Eich-horn, a Royal Prussian department head. Herr Levin, sole owner of a flourishing sugar refinerv. Gotz von Puthtz. a lieutenant in the first regiment of Bodv Hussars, and Karl-chen Klawitter. the shipyard owner's son. would be sitting at her kitchen table.
Besides these habitues, there were casuals from all walks of life. Occasionally even Herr Wendt, one of the elders of the Sankt Jakob Church congregation, would attend. And there were some whom Lena served free of charge, poor devils like Kabrun the porter and a hvpertense voung man bv the name of Paul Scheerbart who dreamed of a crystal world of perfect transparency.
Good cheer prevailed at her table. Even political arguments ended in backslapping and brotherhood. Hanging and bullets through the brain were seldom mentioned, and then in jest. as. for example, when Herr Levin told the storv of how, after looking in vain for a suitable rope, he had finally, to punish his unfaithful Klothilde. tied several of her pearl necklaces together. But when he kicked the chair away, the
high-priced rope snapped in several places. "For two solid hours I picked and threaded before the damage was repaired. Because you can't fool with my wife."
Yes, along with its aftertaste of hemp, there was something about Lena's soup that lifted people's spirits. From then on the lieutenant bore his major-size debts more lightly; later on, he left the Body Hussars to look after his run-down family estate in eastern Pomerania. The Prussian department head replaced his first wife, who had died young, with a second wife, who some years later left him again a widower; but thanks to Lena's nail-and-rope soup, he also managed to survive his ailing and short-lived third wife and to enjoy himself after working hours. Even Karlchen Klawit-ter succeeded (while spooning up three dishes of soup) in seeing his father, the stern shipyard owner (who, after all, had launched the first Prussian steam-powered corvette), in perspective, as a ridiculously little man. When, later on, Hermann Levin strangled his unfaithful wife with a pearl-embroidered silk scarf, he refused to have his murder represented in court as an act of despair (which might have given him the benefit of extenuating circumstances) and spoke instead of liberation. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he wrote Lena affectionate letters from prison, all the more so because for many years (until the time of his death in 1909) she brought him a dinner pail of her life-affirming soup on visiting days at Schiessstange Prison. Its heartening substance remained unchanged, but the flavor-contributing ingredients varied.
Lena Stubbe knew how to provide her free and paying guests with variety. True, she always cooked the same original nail, consecrated by her Otto, which she had bent slightly in pulling it out of the frame, but which if straightened would have been as long as a good-sized human pizzle. She also stuck to calves' tethers, which she bought cheap in lots of sixty from a dealer in farm produce on Milchkannen-gasse; Otto had to tie each one of them expertly into a noose before it was lowered into the foaming broth. But Lena's menu was not limited to beef-bone soup with an egg stirred in at the end. She cooked (with the above-mentioned additions) neck of mutton with beans, smoked spareribs with caraway-flavored sauerkraut, Ganseklein with rutabaga, even
tripe cut from a cow's paunch and boiled for four hours, sour dumplings, West Prussian potato soup with garlic sausage, pigs' feet, dried peas with salt pork; and on festive occasions (at a small extra charge) she cooked nail and rope with tender calves' tongues, which she flavored with white wine, garnished with cooked turnips, and served with mayonnaise made of sunflower oil and egg yolks. Or she would stuff a suckling pig with rope, nail, and prunes.
It was at a festive meal which took place on January 18, 1891, that Herr Levin, who was to strangle his wife shortly thereafter, joined department head Eichhorn in toasting the twentieth anniversary of the German Empire, while Otto Stubbe and Karlchen Klawitter, the radical-minded son of shipyard owner Klawitter, drank to the recent abrogation of the Socialist Laws and to Bismarck's dismissal as well. But the hypertense Paul Scheerbart was deep in his vitreous visions of the future. While the ex-lieutenant and by then rural Junker Gotz von Putlitz, wishing for liberal and therefore vague reasons to celebrate neither the foundation of the German Empire nor the belated triumph of the socialists, lauded the recent establishment of the Schichau Shipyard as a great economic achievement that would prove beneficial both to the Empire and to the simple worker, for without economic progress — as sugar manufacturer Levin and anchor maker Stubbe must realize — there could be neither capital gains nor social progress. He then pointed out that he had always been opposed to Bismarck's policy of protective tariffs, whereas the Sozis in the Reichstag had supported them on several occasions.
Otto Stubbe and Karlchen Klawitter proceeded to argue without bitterness, more for the fun of it, about the true road to socialism. Lena Stubbe tried to reconcile them with quotations from Bebel. The debate revolved around sordid practice and sublime principle. And thus, attenuated to be sure by the nail and rope sewn up in the suckling pig, the revisionist controversy of the late nineties was prefigured on a festive occasion. Karlchen Klawitter represented the revolutionary wing. Otto Stubbe had misgivings on the one hand and intimations on the other. Both cited Engels; only Karlchen cited Marx, and none too often. Meanwhile, unmoved, Paul Scheerbart dreamed his glass-blown Utopia. And while