The obstetrician made an oblique incision in Ilsebill's abdomen where it arched above the shaved groin; he cut through the skin, the fatty envelope, the muscular tissue, and the peritoneum, all of which Ilsebill, whose head lay far in the distance, behind a screen, did not see.
I saw, because it's supposed to be good for fathers to see the womb laid bare in the gaping belly and opened with a scalpel. The obstetrician tore the amnion to let out the fluid. Watery blood. Absorbent cloths stuffed into the cavities. Veins clamped. Then he reached in with his gloved hands, and, ass first, our daughter emerged into the world, showing — hallelujah! — her little Parker House roll, while in the delivery room of the municipal hospital soft music from hidden loudspeakers made the whole affair pleasant, inoffensive, friendly, entertaining, and absolutely banal. The up-to-date hospital director, who is open to all reasonable innovations, does not want his young interns engaging during the Caesarean (because they have nothing else to do) in private
conversations with the Korean student nurses about cars, politics, weekend delights, so depriving the mother, whose hearing, since she feels no pain, is particularly acute, of important small experiences; that is why he has decreed that, apart from the sound of the instruments and the obstetrician's soft-spoken instructions—"Clamp, please. Swabs, please" — only sweet music should be heard.
"And this," said the obstetrician through his mask for my edification, "is the Fallopian tube. . " (I also saw how yellow, like chicken fat, Ilsebill's belly fat is. A piece of it crumbled off and I could have fried two eggs in it.)
After being shown to her mother, our daughter (whose umbilical cord had already been cut) was screaming on the other side of the room, where she was weighed, measured, and secured against mistaken identity by a tag on the wrist or ankle. Ah, my babykins, my bawling chickabiddy, my lambkin, my daughter. .
When Ilsebill's womb, which immediately contracted, and her belly had been sewed up again, and the scalpels, clamps, swabs, and absorbent cloths had concurrently been counted on a side table, one metal clamp was missing. They were going to undo the stitches and search the abdominal cavity, but luckily the clamp was found in the bucket with the afterbirth, where it didn't belong. But what I, the father, who was watching, wished into Ilsebill's belly stayed there, was sewed in; namely, big stones, and I'm not giving them away.
Oh, my secret thoughts! As though I found nothing worth wishing for. As though a quickly twining gourd-vine arbor or a wing chair to deafen me to the sufferings of the world were everything. As though my longings—"Yes yes, Maria, I'm coming; I'm coming soon" — were nothing but easy ways out, loopholes that ought to be plugged up. Oh, how I need rest, distant places, new wallpaper, a plane ticket to a better time-phase. Ah, how I need a far-off century. Ah, how I thirst for death and eternity.
But my wishes have never counted. It's always hers, damn it, that I. . And take all the responsibility, oh yes! And pay and pay! And feel guilty for everything and nothing.
What fault (after all) is it of mine that it's turned out to be a girl again. I'm not a slot machine that spits what you pick. At least, on the day when my daughter was born, the representatives of the one and the other German state signed a treaty extending the privileges of the Liibeck fishermen, which have been in force since the emperor Barbarossa's writ of 1188, to the territorial waters of the German Democratic Republic; and that, you'll agree, was long overdue.
At a snack bar around the corner from the municipal hospital, when I first took a schnapps or two with my beer, then ordered one, then another Bockwurst with bread and mustard, they were running the quarter finals on television. Poland was leading. Chile had been eliminated. And it kept on raining. The world-championship soccer matches transformed me into an onlooker among other male onlookers, who like me drank schnapps, dipped Bockwurst in mustard, took bites, washed them down with beer, had that absorbed look, and may well have all been fathers, worried about their daughters.
The owner knew his clientele. The name of his bar was The Happy Father. He said, "No boy again? Don't let it get you down. Girls are cheaper now that they've done away with dowries. They're all emancipated nowadays. Nowadays they wish for entirely different things."
Yes, I assure you. You'll have everything. Your father will provide. Your father will attend to it. Your father is still something of a stranger to you, because he has no womb. Give him time for a schnapps or two and a walk around the block. Your father has his share of the restlessness that makes the world go round. Your father is on the track of something. Your father has to go away for a while, to see where he came from. Where it all began. There's a Maria up there whom he's related to. She gave him a piece of amber with a fly caught in it. Don't be afraid. Your father will be back. He'll come back and tell you stories in which feathers are blown and children who go looking for mushrooms manage to get lost and flies spend the winter in pieces of amber. And I'll tell you about the Flounder, too, when I get back. .
Man oh man
Stop it, will you.
Cut it out.
You're finished, man, still horny but that's all.
Say once again: Will do.
Once again press buttons and make puppets dance.
Once again show your will and its flaws.
Once again pound the table and say: That's mine.
Once again list how often you and whose.
Once again be hard, so it sinks in.
Prove to yourself once again your great, your proven,
your all-embracing ever-loving care.
Man oh man.
There you stand, present and soon to be present.
Men don't weep, man.
Your dreams, which were typically masculine, have all been
filmed. Your victories dated and listed. Your progress caught up with and measured. Your mourning and those who enact it weary the playbills. Your jokes are too often varied; Radio Yerevan has gone off
the air. Enormous (even now), your power cancels itself out.
Man oh man.
Once again say "I."
Once again think penetratingly.
Once again look through.
Once again be right.
Once again be profoundly silent.
Stand or fall just once more.
No need to clean up, man; just leave it all be. By your own rules you're washed up, dismissed from your own history. And only the baby boy in you
has leave to play with building blocks for another short
while. What, man oh man, will your wife say to that?
Three meals of pork and cabbage
Maria took two tin spoons and a full dinner pail with her when we rode out to Heubude on the streetcar to sit in the dunes in view of the sea.
It can be proved that as early a cook as Amanda Woyke was acquainted with our common cabbage, which she shredded, stored in barrels, and made into sauerkraut, or cooked into a thick mash with potatoes and pork ribs and served to the farm hands on holidays. Since cabbage bloats, it seems unlikely that Agnes Kurbiella set potted or stuffed cabbage, let alone pork and cabbage, before painter Moller or poet Opitz; our easily digestible cauliflower didn't exist yet. It had to wait for progress. I have no recollection of Abbess Rusch preparing our present-day varieties of cabbage, but Chinese cabbage (pe-tsai) was occasionally imported in her day. It wasn't until later that kitchens smelled of Wirsing and Kapuster, as we called the common cabbage. Lena Stubbe saw us through the winter with rutabaga and cabbage. Since Dorothea of Montau did not know the green cabbage that is common today, she seems on Holy Thursday to have cooked the wild varieties, such as colewort or the slightly bitter sea kale, with nothing else. And just as Dorothea put up sorrel in a wooden barrel, so Amanda Woyke and Lena Stubbe shredded cabbage heads (after cutting out the cores) with a cabbage shredder, piled the shreds in barrels with cabbage leaves at the bottom, poured on salt, pounded the shredded cabbage with a pestle until there was juice to cover it, spread more cabbage leaves on top, and fitted the barrel with a wooden lid that had to be weighed down with a large stone.