When August Bebel stepped into the Stubbe family's apartment in the workers' house at Brabank 5, Lena led him into the parlor, whose furnishings, unlike those of other parlors, included a desk with many drawers and, on top, several piles of books with slips of paper inserted in them. Also on the desk, next to a small ebony box in which Lena kept a wrought-iron nail, stood a framed picture of Bebel, standing up to Bismarck in the Reichstag. And now the famous man with so much past behind him was actually present, standing frail and most respectably dressed beside the sofa. Yet he stood there as though absent, at a loss for a first sentence. He sniffed: "Ah, so we're having something pungent?" For crossing the corridor from the kitchen-living room and seeping through the door of the parlor, an unmistakable smell announced the pissy, not yet attenuated bouquet of the main course.
Only recently Lena had said to her Otto, "We're through, I tell you, through!" after he hadn't just beaten her as on every Friday. "Go on like this and we're through for good."
But this announcement, that she might be through with him one of these days — and for good! — was not provoked by
the usual clobbering. The most she said about that was "You're only hitting yourself in the face." Far worse, he'd been turning up his nose at her pea soup of late, and all he had to say about her pork kidneys in mustard sauce was that they tasted pissy. "Then you'll see who's willing to cook for a shit like you. And it'll be too late when you start sniveling that Lena's kidneys were the best. You'll go down on your knees, but it won't do you no good. A hundred times I've said: He can't help it. Always has to make a big noise and bang his fist on the table. Afterward he's sorry. Gets all weepy. Well, I ain't going to say it no more. All right, cook him a couple of kidneys cut up small so they give up their juices, that's what he likes. And put in mustard at the end. 'Cause that's the way he likes them. Aw, go on, he dribbles. Make some more kidneys in sauce. 'Cause when they're done, I put in pepper, I grate fresh horseradish into them, and put in five tablespoons of mustard, and I stir and I stir over a low flame so it doesn't boil. But that's all over now. I'm through. Always talking about solidarity with his big mouth. All right, if he's got to clobber, let him. It doesn't bother me. Even if he gives me black eyes. But I don't let nobody run down my kidneys. Why should I cook and slave for him! And boiled potatoes to go with the sauce. And a couple of allspice berries for seasoning. But it's not good enough for him. I 'spose he'd like me to soak them in water or milk to get rid of the piss. As if you could get any taste back into them after that. That'll do, I say. That'll do. He can go somewhere else. Maybe he'll find somebody that'll soak them in water or make them all mushy with milk. But they still won't be right for him. And he'll pine and sigh for Lena's nice kidneys. But then it'll be too late."
Lena Stubbe said all this time and again, and from then on she soaked her pork kidneys in water for half a day before cooking them until they were first hard, then soft. But in her cook book she wrote something entirely different. And for the master turner, commercial traveler, agitator, party chairman, street-corner orator, and Reichstag deputy, she soaked her kidneys neither in water nor in milk, for which reason the smell penetrated to the parlor.
After the beef-bone soup (with one or two special in-
gredients), Comrade Bebel relaxed a bit. At first he seemed depressed, or perhaps only tired from the relentless obligations that went with his functions. More to Lena than to Otto Stubbe he lamented, though with manly self-possession: how many friends he had lost in the course of these last embattled years, what staunch discipline the party had shown in spite, or perhaps because, of the burdensome Socialist Laws, and how flabby yet quarrelsome the party membership had become with increasing success; how difficult it was to accustom the party to legality without letting it succumb to the compromises encouraged by this indispensable development, how far the Socialist Movement still was from the goal despite its increasing success at Reichstag elections, and how, now that victory was within reach, the goal seemed hazier than ever before.
Bebel expressed doubts and spoke corrosively of himself: he had been too cocksure in predicting the revolution and the downfall of the capitalist system; how often he had aroused false hopes by going so far as to date the impending collapse of the state. True, he had been misled by Marx's prognoses, which had been wrong even with regard to England. As to the pauperization of the masses, Bernstein had been right. It had to be admitted that capitalism was capable of adapting itself and not devoid of ideas. On the other hand, the concept of socialism would be lifeless without the hope that a radical transformation would soon usher in a new society. And actually there was good reason to believe that the present system, with its exploitation and mismanagement, would soon collapse. Revolution was a distinct possibility, though one shouldn't say so out loud, because the party advocated the strictest legality.
While Lena Stubbe waited serenely (confident in her special ingredients) for her beef broth to take effect on the profoundly depressed man, and as long as Bebel, overcast with doubts, was postponing the revolution to a hazy future, Otto Stubbe squirmed restlessly in his chair; but as soon as the chairman, thanks to Lena's beef broth, perked up and flashed signals for the future out of bright, commanding eyes, the easily swayed anchor maker was fired with enthusiasm. Boldly he delivered himself of revolutionary phrases with anarchistic overtones and took on such a now-or-never
expression that Bebel was obliged to remind him of the decisions reached by the Erfurt party congress and firmly, though without severity, call him to order.
By that time Lena was serving her pork kidneys in mustard sauce with boiled potatoes. A glass water pitcher full of dark beer, which the Stubbes' daughter Luise had brought from the tavern on Bucket Makers' Court, was already on the table. During the meal, the Lewandowski children made so much noise they seemed to be right there in the room, while the Stubbes' own little ones, though only a few feet away, were hardly audible. Bebel praised the simple yet so tasty dish. Lena told him about her daughter Lisbeth, whose consumptive husband probably didn't have long to live. Now at his ease, taking a warm interest in the details of their family life, the chairman stopped pulling out his gold pocket watch (as he had done frequently at first). Thus encouraged, Lena, no sooner had the dessert, her famous cinnamon-flavored Boskop applesauce, been spooned up, sent her Otto, who was getting too obstreperous anyway, out of the parlor with a mere glance (backed up by her battered authority). Otto explained dutifully that the children seemed restless and in need of attention, and that perhaps Lena and Comrade Bebel had best be left alone, since he knew nothing about the political implications of cookery. Of course he was able to appreciate good plain food, but the theory of it was beyond him. That was Lena's department. But once things started up, on the barricades and so forth, he'd come running. Comrade Bebel could bank on that.
When Otto Stubbe had gone, there was silence in the parlor. It went on for a while. There weren't even any flies. The chairman lit a cigar and remarked that it was one of a lot inherited from Engels. Then a bit of a joke: yes, old Friedrich had been first and foremost a manufacturer to the end, but in the last years of his life, possibly because he was no longer under pressure from Marx, he had developed into a useful Social Democrat. Then more silence. Lena looked for her specs, found them, and without a word set her neatly written manuscript before the cigar-puffing chairman. Here reading, there skipping, Bebel leafed through the "Proletarian Cook Book."