Then at last I was an acknowledged member of the public. While Wigga, the primordial root, the first cultivation of beets, my monotonous existence as a charcoal burner, our neighboring horde, the parasitic Goths, and my brief participation in the migration were being debated, I occupied a burgundy-upholstered seat in the eleventh row of the movie house. On my left sat an old woman with a bitter laugh. On my right a young women's libber, who was knitting an extremely long screaming-green muffler. Though I proffered greetings to the right and left, I was not acknowledged as a male or as anything else.
Before his attack of faintness — during which he floated around in his tub with his white underside up — the Flounder, to distract attention from his advisory role, had verbosely and with bold figures of speech praised the Iron Age Wigga as the goddess of roots, as the culture heroine of the beet fields, as a great woman and mangel mother. When inter-
rupted by the prosecution in mid-flow, he was stricken with faintness, and it was necessary to call a recess. It was then that Sieglinde Huntscha sent out for the radishes, bit the tip off one of them, gave me the rest, and yakked away until a bell signal called us back into the hall.
There, since there was nothing more to be got out of beets, the debate turned to the Germanic conception of freedom, especially that of the Gothic males. Accused of instigating the migrations and persuading the Pomorshians to participate, the Flounder not only defended himself with glibly recited alliterative lines from Nordic epics, but also leapt to the attack. "Ladies, what justification have you for putting me down as a vile seducer? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that the matriarchal regime, which became increasingly oppressive after Awa, was bound to make even the easygoing Pomorshian males receptive to the free, one might almost say popular-democratic, attitudes of the Gothic men? For servile they were not. The sessions of their Thing went on for hours on end. Everyone contradicted everyone else. Even old Gothic crones were allowed to contribute words of advice from the edge of the circle and whisper maxims arrived at by casting runes. So you see, the women were not excluded. And don't forget German monogamy. Fathers and mothers had something to say to each other, while with the Pomorshians polyandry without father right was still the rule. Objects of use and soon used up, the men lost their last spark of desire. Everything that might have amused them — thinking games, dueling, the acquisition of honors, organizations — was taboo. Small wonder, in short, that the free though barbaric life of the Germani, of whose primitive vigor Tacitus had warned the Romans, attracted the unfortunate males of the coastal horde, especially when you consider the disappearance (regardless of its cause) of the third breast, which might have slaked a male's thirst for freedom, appeased his wanderlust, and quieted his urge to act for action's sake. The only hope was to push off. Into the wide world. Into history. It's true that they soon crawled back home, these Pomorshian men, but that's another story."
While the Flounder was speaking and while his speech was being torn to shreds by the prosecutor, exposed as male-
chauvinist rubbish, and while the Flounder — for having praised the Germanic concept of freedom — was once termed prefascist and twice postfascist, I, at last admitted to the audience, had my eye on the second to the left of the eight associate judges who, four to the left and four to the right of Ms. Schonherr, the presiding judge, maintained the symmetry of the long, raised table.
There she sat. Every bit my Wigga. Gigantic and unwieldy, she never modified her posture. Her crossed arms forming a rampart in front of her bosom. Her radish-colored hair, as though she were determined to overtower at all costs, piled high and held in place with a hairpin, which might, however, have been one of those rusty nails that the Goths, when they finally started southward, left behind as scrap. Wigga! Her father — so it was rumored among us — had been a Goth. Hence her name, a variant of Frigga, the Germanic goddess. Hence her unwieldiness, her morose impassiveness, her calm severity. My Wigga, a Pomorshian Valkyrie, then presiding over us as the wurzel mother, today over me as associate judge of the Women's Tribunal.
Impassive, she listened to the Flounder, to the prosecutor. With that same gaze full of nothing, she might have been looking out over the Baltic Sea. Only once, when the Flounder in his carping way spoke of Wigga's attempts to raise beets as deserving but none too successful, she abandoned the rampart posture of her forearms, stopped looking out over the smooth Baltic, slowly, very slowly, with her right hand pulled the endlessly long hairpin or Gothic nail out of the tower of her hair, and (bending her wrist) scratched her back with it. Believe me, Ilsebill, just like Wigga, when I told her how I'd joined the migration. (Her father, by the way, was said to have been the Gothic district chief Ludolf, from whom my always truculent Gothic friend Ludger was descended.)
I didn't get to hear my contemporary Wigga until the associate judges cast their final vote. Seated in her large-checked two-piece outfit, Ms. Helga Paasch, sole owner of a large nursery garden in Berlin-Britz, declared: "Well, if you ask me, this Mr. Flounder is guilty. For putting ideas into the guys' heads. All this nonsense about history. Promising them heaven knows what, palm trees, cypresses, olives, lemons.
Globe-trotting passed off as progress. Freedom, he called it. But all his incitement went for nothing. The Pomorshians came back. Pretty quick, too, with their tails between their legs. After which they had to plow again and grow beets. Because he was unsuccessful I say: extenuating circumstances for Mr. Flounder this time."
The old lady on my left laughed bitterly while, overcome with rage, the women's libber on my right dropped several stitches and bit into her screaming-green choker. I sat very still; I hardly breathed. But after ironically terming the mild verdict "astonishingly fair," the Flounder merely concluded, "After that bit of bungled history, nothing of interest happened among the Pomorshians for seven centuries; their only progress was in beet production."
Not a word about the dream root, our wishing wurzel. Yet it was important and explains more than the Flounder concealed. (Or can it be that he really doesn't know?) In any event, not so much as a syllable about our primordial drug came to the ears of the Tribunal. No attempt to explain the disappearance of the third breast. All of a sudden it was gone, and that was that. When as a matter of fact it owed its very existence to the wishing wurzel.
The crossbreeds attempted today — the bean tree, the tomato-potato, quota-exceeding rye-wheat — wouldn't have held a candle to our wishing wurzel. Its pointed bluish root with the faintly almondlike taste sent up a luxuriant bush from which, when it reached maturity, hung edible pods full of protein-rich beans; the leaves, rolled into plugs, were chewed by us Edeks. Pods and beans nourished us, the root was our dessert, but the leaves kept us quiet, made the third breast a reality for us, emptied our heads, fulfilled our wishes, and gave us dreams: boundless, heroically exalted, immortal, exciting daydreams.
It was not innate laziness but the wishing wurzel that stopped us from making history. And really, Ilsebill, it was Wigga's doing that we finally woke up a bit. In the course of several campaigns, she had the dream wurzel, which only in our marshy soil produced leaves and beans from pointed roots, radically exterminated. Oh yes, we protested feebly,
but she had the last word with her impassively stated argument that the poison kept us from becoming industrious tillers of the soil and growing normal beets. From then on no more dreams, no more wish fulfillment. Wet, cold agricultural reality. Periods of hunger. Slowly we came awake.
And the Goths, who with us had become addicted to the weed (as a substitute for travel), woke up at the same time, found our region a hopeless bore, and started on the travels they had been dreaming of, the so-called migrations.