hot August days it was carried to the fields and dished out to them cold.
In any case the Goths despised us as root eaters, while we called them fire-eaters, for the Goths, like those other Germanic tribes that Tacitus observed, were too lazy to bend over for roots. They preferred to dream of faraway places.
We always liked to nibble roots. I remember juicy wild roots that brought tears to the eyes and, though tough, could be softened by long chewing. In Awa's time only the women were allowed to grow them. And after Wigga's first attempts to breed root plants, which did not bring results until Mest-wina's time (the radish), Dorothea of Montau in her Lenten garden, the nun Margarete Rusch in the garden of Saint Bridget's Abbey, and Agnes Kurbiella in her diet garden raised a root plant related to our carrots, celery, and those delicate little Teltow turnips. Still later rutabaga, bred from rape, came to us from Bavaria by mail. Amanda Woyke gave it the apt name of Wruke, and Lena Stubbe, in times of early capitalist famine, cooked tons of it in soup kitchens (her response to the social question). The war and influenza year 1917 bequeathed us the expression "rutabaga winter."
I have nothing against rutabaga, but here I'm thinking of its primal form, which was long and firm, covered with wrinkles and grimaces, with protuberances all around it. It tapered to a point amid curling root threads, or else a few wisps dangled from its rounded head. Where the roots grew too close together in the glacial rubble, they clutched one another with many fingers. We ate them as we found them, straight or crooked. Except when the ground was covered with snow and everything looked alike, we pulled up roots day in, day out; believe it or not, they were as long as your arm. They tasted best raw. It was the women's privilege to bite off the tip; we Edeks were given what they left, but we, too, had a privilege, however questionable: we were allowed to sample dubious mushrooms first.
Awa made a ritual out of root biting, as she did of everything that allowed of comparisons. In the sacrificial month, the women held the mangels suggestively in front of their faces. They screamed furiously as a warning to us Edeks, and then their teeth crashed down on the roots. Bundles of roots were placed in the bleaching skulls of bull elks as sacrificial
offerings. Roots were used for healing. Our wishing beets ran wild. Beet lore was passed on. .
Once, after three hours of effort in which eleven women displayed their strength, Awa and her companions pulled a man-sized mangel out of a moraine that ran all the way down to the beach. (When at last the mangel emerged, the image of the women, knotted together and tangled in greens, had engraved itself on my mind; later on I cut it into birch bark and colored it with the juices of plants.) And the man-sized, ecstatically convulsed mangel cut so paradigmatic a figure in the eyes of the marveling horde that a mangel god (Ram) — some of the women were on the point of blurting out a name — was almost born to us. But Awa straddled the presumptive divine phallus and made her Edeks carry her around in triumph. She tolerated nothing outside of herself. The old wolf god, from whom she had stolen fire, already had claim enough to an accessory cult. (And the Edeks — so it was rumored — were trying to think up a fish god.)
As it happened, the monstrosity had a woody taste and rotted after a while. Not even the water buffaloes wanted what was left of it. But the biting of beets remained a favorite amusement among the women and inspires primordial terrors in us men to this day. To Dorothea of Montau beets were still vicarious food, as though sweet Jesus manifested himself to her in that form. And likewise for the abbess Margarete Rusch and her nuns, carrots were more than a vegetable. Agnes Kurbiella was the first to cook carrots until soft, add a bit of fat, and serve them up without religious implications. But today, with the cultivation of macrobiotic garden vegetables, guaranteed free of chemicals, the root cult is on the rise again. Wherever you go, raw carrots are eaten in public. Loudly and to the terror of men, young girls bite off the ends. The advertising industry has registered the trend in large color plates: radishes and raw carrots flanked by assorted cheeses, ham, sausage, and pumpernickel. Obviously that means something, something more than affectionate nibbling. Root vegetables are still being bitten off vicariously. But fear is on the rise. .
During a recess in the trial — the Flounder had suffered
another attack of faintness while the Iron Age Wigga was under discussion-I saw the prosecutor, Sieglinde Huntscha, biting into a radish with large, slightly yellow incisors. When I greeted her in passing-we had known each other before the trial-she took another bite, and only then, still chewing, replied: "Well, well. So they've finally let you in? You have me to thank for it. What do you say? We're making it pretty hot for the Flounder, aren't we? But never mind, he wasn't born yesterday. He'll talk himself out of anything, and if I do manage to corner him, he'll feel faint again. Like the other day when he was trying to tell us that women had a natural aptitude for farm work. From the mangel-wurzel to the red beet: that's his idea of progress. Significant contribution to the development of human nutrition. Woman's historical achievement and so on. So I sent out to the market for a bunch of radishes. Want some?"
She gave me what was left. I nibbled like a rabbit that can't help itself. Then the debate on the Wigga case was resumed. The Flounder had apparently recovered. And finally, thanks to Siggie's recommendation, I was able to count myself among the public.
Really, Ilsebill, they'd been unjust. At first they didn't even want to let me in. My contention, supported by documentary evidence, that from neolithic times to the present I had lived in a relation of intimacy with Awa, Wigga, Mest-wina, the High Gothic Dorothea, the fat Gret, the gentle Agnes, and so on, was not corroborated by the Flounder-"Men," he said, "have at all times been interchangeable"-and was ridiculed by the associate judges: "Anybody can make such claims. What is he, anyway? A writer looking for material. Trying to ingratiate himself, to latch on, to grind literature out of his complexes, maybe talk us into settling for special allotments to housewives and suchlike appeasements. But here we are not concerned with petty reforms; here we are concerned with the Flounder as a principle. The private lives and alleged sufferings of individual men leave us cold. That kind of crap is coming out of our ears."
My right to testify was contested. Some four thousand years of my past were expunged (as if I weren't still suffering from injuries incurred in the Neolithic). The proceedings
were supposedly open to the public, but the public was carefully screened: ten women to each man. And even the few men who were admitted had to show affidavits from their working wives, attesting that they did their share of the housework (cooking cleaning taking-care-of-baby). ("He washes the dishes regularly.")
Finally, when I applied for the third time and enclosed two Xeroxed letters in which you express your conviction that not only my domestic virtues but also my impaired manhood were the foundation of our relationship, I was notified that my dossier was under favorable consideration. (Thanks, Ilsebill.)
Maybe I ought to admit that I nevertheless attended the trial from the very start. An electrician who from the operator's room of the former movie house regulated the lighting, the infrared lamp over the Flounder, the PA system, and the projector for documents and statistical charts, let me look into the hall through a little square window and listen in with earphones. Call it male-chauvinist solidarity. Anyway, he let me stay, though the only comment on the Women's Tribunal that occurred to him was "Wouldn't you like to be a Flounder? Some show those dames are putting on."