Toward evening the willow branches with the heads on them were planted like a fence in the road of logs leading to Fisherman's Island. Screaming, the children of the Wicker Bastion ran away. The gulls dove down. As far as the road they had followed the procession with shrill cries but remained at a distance. Now they fell to, starting on the eyes, and battled one another until the willow branches were bare. And once in the spring, I recall, a porpoise, a small member of the whale family, was thrown up on the beach. Its head
was placed in a leather holder fastened to the end of a long pole, which two young fellows took turns carrying in the middle of the procession, right after the effigy of Saint Barbara. And later, much later, when the Old City was founded in accordance with Culm law and the Charter City in accordance with Liibeck law, and I as a swordmaker was at last admitted to a guild, the children of the Wicker Bastion — among them my daughters by Dorothea — made fish heads of colored paper, put lamps inside them, and carried them around on poles. A pleasant sight in the evening, though it always made me rather sad — yes indeed, Ilsebill— because Mestwina was no longer with us.
And because of those fish heads, which boisterous children carried along the log road and into the Christian-Bohemian camp, Bishop Adalbert, who was later to be numbered among the martyrs, flew into a rage and waxed obscene in Latin. With holy water he armed himself against the devil's artifices. The innocent codfish heads made hellish faces at him. Especially the slant-eyed Flounder, as seen by the bishop, had Satan's ironic, disruptive look. Against that look he raised the cross aloft. With a wave of his hand he commanded his mercenaries to behead the fish heads once again. Snick-snack, it was done, and that infuriated Mestwina, for from her priestess's point of view, more was hacked off those willow branches than the ascetic dreamed of. What could he know of Awa and the recent male deity who went by the name of Ryb?
Mestwina knew. She knew and suffered. Small and round as she was, she grew a little. But she said nothing. She stored it all up, Pomorshian-style. Later she drank fermented mare's milk in tiny sips. It was almost evening before she had worked herself into the right state. And by the time the ascetic came as usual to visit Mestwina on her bed of leaves, her fury had taken on body and purpose.
Her hut was walled with plaited willow withes, plastered with mud thrown from outside. A comfortable room. Adalbert came in with a pious greeting, but he also brought his dialectical contradiction. Though carnal lust lifted his cowl like a mighty tent pole, Mestwina did not appease him on
a short-term basis, but for all time. He didn't even get a chance to discharge. Promptly and vigorously she bashed him again and again on his Bohemian head with a cast-iron cooking spoon, and in her fury avenged the cod and the sturgeon, the perch, the pike, the silvery salmon, the reddish bass, and repeatedly the flounder god of the Pomorshian fisherfolk.
The only sound out of Adalbert was a brief sigh. But his adversary stood unbowed, stood valiantly for its own sake. Even when the bishop was already dead and a martyr, it refused to bow down.
After Mestwina had slain the subsequently canonized Adalbert of Prague, I buried the cast-iron spoon, for we had reason to fear that if found it would be elevated to the status of a Christian relic. As for the body, we threw it into the river. A little later all of us in the Wicker Bastion (and with us Mestwina) were driven by Polish mercenaries into a shallow stretch of the Radune, where Adalbert's successor, the prelate Ludewig, subjected us to forced baptism. This Ludewig, incidentally, had a feeling for art and was devoted to me. He liked my little carved Madonnas. He even put up with the Virgin's third breast (under the drapery). The honey-colored amber eyes I had fitted into the linden wood gave the Mother of God a magically compelling gaze, but that, too, he interpreted in the light of triumphant Catholicism. Perhaps it was because of my useful talent that I went scot free when Mestwina was condemned to death; as an artist, one is welcomed by all religions. And besides, as you know, Ilsebill, I haven't got the makings of a martyr.
It was in April of the year 997 that Adalbert was slain by the drunken Mestwina, that we Pomorshians were baptized and the spoon buried. I buried it not far from the future settlement of Sankt Albrecht. And there, in the exact same place, it was dug up in the fall of 1889 by Dr. Ernst Paulig, sometime rector of the Sankt Johann Gymnasium, who donated it to the Museum of the City of Danzig. "Pomeranian cooking utensil," said the little tag. Actually the spoon was of Bohemian origin. Actually Adalbert had brought it to
convert the heathen with. Mestwina used it only to ladle out the mare's milk fermented for her own use; for cooking she used wooden spoons.
What else happened when Mestwina, shortly after the forced baptism, was condemned to death and beheaded by a Polish executioner will be told later on: who betrayed her, what signs and wonders befell as the sword descended, and what absurdities schoolbook history has handed down to us.
"Only with Mestwina," said the accused Flounder before the Women's Tribunal, "did Awa's rule come to an end. From then on, the male cause alone counted." But the women weren't listening. They had other preoccupations. The case of Mestwina had become secondary. Strife was the order of the day. The feminist cause threatened to lose itself in resolutions.
But one day, after prolonged tergiversation, in the course of which the opposing or tactically allied groups expressed themselves in urgent motions, the Tribunal finally arrived at its seating order, for it was not always the accused Flounder who forced recesses and adjournments. Along with the judge and her eight associate judges, the prosecutor, and the court-appointed defense counsel, all of whom had, and wished to preserve, their symmetrical seating order — the judge and associate judges upraised, before them in the pit the Flounder in his tub, and to the left and right of him the prosecution and the defense — there was a further group, which was also part and parcel of the Tribunal, namely, an Advisory Council consisting of thirty-three women who were supposed to have been seated in the first two rows of the former movie house, but were so divided among themselves that they had thus far brought forth only two resolutions:
(1) that the current proceedings should be recessed, or else
(2) that the Tribunal should be adjourned. The Flounder had frequent occasion for irony at their expense: "If the esteemed Advisory Council of the High Court, which has recently taken, so I hear, to calling itself 'revolutionary,' has no objection, I, as the accused, should prefer to carry on with the proceedings, because, you see, I want very much to treat of the pre-Christian episodes of Awa, Wigga, and Mestwina together, as part of a larger context, the decline
of the matriarchy. That, too, was development. Or-if you pref er — revolu tion!''
It was only after discussion of the Mestwina case that the Advisory Council had begun to call itself "revolutionary," because the murder of Bishop Adalbert of Prague suggested parallels down to our own day. Since the thirty-three members of the Advisory Council represented groupings separated by only the haziest of dividing lines, ad hoc coalitions were frequent. Throwing ideological scruples to the winds, the left-wing majority, consisting of four different factions, had suddenly (and only because the Flounder had three times used the word "evolution") allied itself with the radical-democratic Federation of Women, and voted in favor not only of prefixing the title "Advisory Council" with the word "revolutionary" (which decision was carried by a bare majority) but also of the proposed new seating arrangements. They no longer wished to sit at the front of the pit, where they had to crane their necks; they wanted to be up on the stage, to the right and left of the judge and the eight associate judges, and arrange themselves in accordance with the results of the last vote. The Flounder commented, "New vote, new seating arrangement. Marvelous! That will keep the ladies moving."