And in time it fermented, so that pork and cabbage, such as Maria brought to the dunes in a dinner pail, could be made not only with fresh cabbage, but also sweet and
sour with sauerkraut, caraway seed, and juniper berries. Pork ribs are suitable, or smoked spareribs, if you prefer.
And once, after Maria had started buying for the shipyard kitchen, I ate pork and cabbage with Jan Ludkowski in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. I had obtained permission to visit a few of the workshops, the then unused drydock, and an unfinished ferryboat on the slips. Since what they showed me is illustrated and described in several languages in the prospectus, it's not worth the telling. The work sounds of a Communist shipyard are no different from the work noise of capitalist shipyards. I politely took notes, which were later abandoned unused at the Hotel Monopol; still, it was interesting to see what the Poles had made of the Schichau, Danziger, Klawitter Shipyard, which at the end of the war was partly destroyed, partly dismantled by the Russians. Jan said, "Our orders from the West. . That's where we get our hard currency. . Obviously, we have to sell to the Soviet Union at bargain prices, floating fish factories, for instance, that process the catch right there on the fishing grounds, the latest thing. . "
Lunch hour was over at the canteen. A flat-roofed two-story building, through the plate-glass front of which gulls could be seen stunt-flying. Only a few clerks in white smocks were still there, occupying two or three tables at the other end. For them, for us, there was leftover pork and cabbage, consisting of pork ribs, fresh carawayed cabbage, and potatoes, all cooked together. Our beverage was buttermilk. Jan, who generally looked after visitors to the shipyard, addressed me as if I had been a large delegation. Not to be turned off, he spouted production figures, boasted of large Swedish orders, and pickled his technocratic Communism, as one might pickle cabbage, with fatalistic salt: "That's the way we Poles are. . We know in our bones that something somehow will go wrong with our progress. . Regimentation just doesn't work with us. . But somehow we manage. . We know our history. . "
Still gnawing at his pork ribs, Jan Ludkowski was off on his thing. Since the ferryboat (which I had been authorized to visit) was to be named after some king of Poland (one of the Batorys or Wladislaws) and not after a Pomor-
shian prince (Sambor or Swantopolk), he, conscious of his Kashubian heritage, had submitted one petition after another — in vain, though anyone ought to recognize that Mest-wina and Damroka are attractive names for ships.
Jan saw historical episodes in detail, as if he had been there. And since I, too, had lived in several time-phases and left something lying around in ever)' century, we found no difficulty over pork and cabbage with lumpy buttermilk in re-enacting the decisive battle in which Duke Swantopolk not only trounced the Norwegians, but with his victory over General Fortinbras also provided a sequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Jan and I agreed to make a play out of it. Somewhere in the midst of the Kashubian water holes the armies stand facing each other. Swantopolk and Fortinbras taunt each other: Kashubian swine! Norwegian swine! And then Hamlet appears as a ghost between the armies and expresses himself in obscure, ambiguous pentameters about many controversial matters: naturally about Shakespeare and his doubles. Naturally about Communism and capitalism. And why not an allusion to the Flounder: how he treacherously advised the one and the other hero and sent them to their doom.
"Why not?" said Jan. "And maybe after the battle Hamlet's ghost could appear among the dead. . "
"Naturally," I said. "But what happens after the victory?"
"The victorious Swantopolk," said Jan, "might be assailed by self-doubt. He shillies and shallies. . "
"Until," said I, "the Teutonic Knights, who don't know the meaning of doubt, get there and clean up. Ruthlessly, inexorably."
We didn't get beyond the first act of our sequel to Hamlet. Maria came in from the kitchen and said, "Shooting the shit again?" Coming in with her corkscrew curls, she was Mestwina's daughter Damroka. And it occurred to me that Jan loved her both in her historical and in her present time-phase. Stocky, round of head and belly, he became slender when he said "Marysia." But when the canteen cook of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk wasn't laughing (from inside, over nothing), she liked best to talk about prices and bottle-
necks in the supply system: "All we need is a cabbage shortage. Want some more pork and cabbage? There's plenty." Jan and I wanted. Maria brought and left. And there was fresh lumpy buttermilk in our glasses. But we had no further ideas about Swantopolk and Fortinbras.
What is history? No one knows exactly when our common cabbage (Brassica oleracea), as important an innovation as buckwheat, millet, potatoes, rutabaga, was first planted on a large scale; for as far back as Mestwina's time the Po-morshians gathered the seeds of the early, wild varieties. Undoubtedly the Ems Dispatch set a good deal in motion, but the sugar beet far more. If Prince Hamlet (as ghost) had invited Swantopolk and Fortinbras, the Kashubians and the Norwegians, to a meal of flatulent pork and cabbage, history would have taken an entirely different course. I said as much to Jan. But when, in the following year, shortly before Christmas, a rise in the prices of staple foods was announced in Poland, when all along the Baltic coast the workers went on strike, there was plenty of pork and cabbage at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard, yet history did not take a different course, but the usual bad one.
They shot Jan in the belly. On December 18, 1970, they shot Jan in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. The police of the People's Republic of Poland shot, along with other workers, the naval construction engineer, employee of the publicity department, trade-union and Communist League member Jan Ludkowski, aged forty-three, in his belly, then full of the pork and carawayed cabbage that had been dished out to upward of two thousand striking workers in the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard. Just in time, just before the shipyard was cordoned off by the police, Maria Kuczorra, who was in charge of provisioning the shipyard canteen, had managed to divert to the shipyard a truckload of cabbage intended for the army. Deep-frozen pork ribs were already on hand. And there has never been any shortage of caraway seed in Poland. He died instantly.
With Jan you could sit and talk. About mouth-blown glasses. About poems. Even about trees. We talked about
Gryphius and Opitz, just as they may have talked about heaven knows what. About the burden of an evil day. How things were bad and sometimes got a little better. About iambic hexameter and internal rhymes. About politics, too, in the wider and narrower sense. Once we drove into the hills of Kashubia in Jan's old Skoda and sat down beside a water hole. Crayfish skittered away and hid under the rocks. A brimstone butterfly. Larks over the fields. It was so still that Jan was frightened after he said, "I've given up hope." And once we went down to the beach, looking for amber. We found a few crumbs. Sometimes Maria was with us. It was nice when she disturbed us. Of course we each saw Maria differently. I saw her more distinctly. The three of us went to the movies. I held Maria's other hand. In the film, Polish cavalry rode to their death against tanks. One horse was called Lotna. Maria cried. Afterward we went to the Rathauskeller. There Maria laughed again. She was pregnant when Jan was shot in his bellyful of pork and cabbage. And once, when I had told him about the Flounder — that was in March, and the sea was whipping up foam — Jan said softly, "I know him. I know him well. . " And Jan also knew the story about Ilsebill.