No, Ilsebill, no need to travel. We can stay right here and, as soon as I've bought gourd seeds at Kroger's next door and planted them in mid-April as per instructions, bring the whole world into our arbor and think it over thoroughly. The soft facts and the dreams hewn in stone.
Even the past will cast shadows as the plant shoots up, so that, while you are burgeoning along with the gourds, I shall be able to tell you about Awa Wigga Mestwina, with whom, though the gourd was then unknown in our country, I often sat in similar twining arbors: with Awa under giant ferns tied together to form a sunshade (how I counted and re-counted her hundred and eleven dimples), with Wigga under a roof plaited from willow withes (how I had to tell her over and over again about my brief participation in the Gothic migrations). And when I visited my Mestwina in her little kitchen garden, we sat among broad beans whose ten-
drils entwined lasciviously above us. We drank fermented mare's milk with Glumse, and ate flatbread and smoked codfish roe. And Simon Dach lived in much the same way with his friends Albert, Fauljoch, Blum, and Roberthin in the gourd-vine arbor on Pregel Island: "Good Lord, how oft we sat up late eating choice morsels off a plate, drinking and singing. . "
Let's do just that, Ilsebilclass="underline" eat Wilster Marsh cheese off our knives, wash down the dry rye bread with red Palatinate wine, as night falls and I squeeze a swelling gourd with my right hand and with my left hand your body. Later on I could sing to our little fellow, if it's a boy, "Pray, baby, pray, the Swedes are due today." And never again would I run out on you in the stupid way men have; no, never, because there'll be no more quarreling and no dishwashing problem, but only loving kindness creeping up the latticework. Happiness as fragile as the prophet's gourd, which God — it might also have been the Flounder — caused to be gnawed by a worm. Our happiness, Ilsebill, will last all summer. And the summer after. And every summer: we with the little fellow — he'll soon be walking — happy, at peace, shaded by the past, far from the world, and therefore seeing it as a whole with its horrors and counterhorrors, as friend Dach saw Magdeburg — the defoliated Mekong Delta, the empty shoes in the Sinai desert, the daily terror in Chile; but grateful, because the fragility of the gourd-vine arbor protects us, and because you can safely bear the fruit that is rounding out your belly.
But you don't want to be twined with me, hedged in by me. "You and your shitty idyll!" you say. "You and your fancy subterfuges. Wouldn't it just suit you! To grab me out of the nest like a bird's egg whenever you need me. And expect me to be fascinated by your eternal contemplation of your navel. Have I," you say, "studied like mad so I could live out here in the country with kids and cooking in a gourd-vine arbor, even if it does amuse me once in a while to shake out your pillow? No!" you say. You want to travel. The Lesser Antilles and other travel folders. Visit London and Paris and meet interesting people who have met interesting people in Milan and San Francisco. Discuss the liberation of
women from top to bottom. "And besides," you say, "we need a noiseless dishwasher and an apartment in town. Gourd-vine arbor? Why not say 'pisspot,' like in the fairy tale? I'd sooner have an abortion — in London, for instance— than let you twine me in out here. It's the old male-chauvinist trick. The gilded-cage routine. What's wrong with you? Tired?"
Yes, Ilsebill. A little. Tired of the times we live in. But if you say so, I'll book a charter flight. Maybe to the Lesser Antilles. And the dishwasher goes without saying. Same for the interesting people in London and Paris. About the apartment in town, well, I'll think it over. You're right, right again. Obviously the liberation of women cannot be properly discussed in a gourd-vine arbor. Just an idea of mine, because back in the seventeenth century my friend Simon Dach. . And because you, too, Ilsebill have always longed for a little more security.
At the end
Men who with that well-known expression think things to the end and have always thought them to the end; men for whom not possibly possible goals but the ultimate goal — a society free from care-has pitched its tent beyond mass graves; men who from the sum of dated defeats draw only one conclusion: smoke-veiled ultimate victory over radically scorched earth; men who at one of those conferences held daily since the worst proved to be technically feasible resolve with masculine realism on the final solution; men with perspective, men goaded by importance, great exalted men, whom no one and no warm slippers can hold, men with precipitous ideas followed by flat deeds-have we finally — we wonder — seen the last of them?
What I don't want to remember
The word too many, rancid fat, the headless trunk: Mest-wina. The way to Einsiedeln and back: the stone in my fist, in my pocket. That Friday, March 4, when my hand dipped into the strike fund. Frost flowers (yours) and my breath. Myself as I ran: away from the pots and down the slope of history. That Father's-Ascension Day not so long ago; naturally I was there. Shards while washing dishes, substituted meat, the Swedes on Hela Peninsula, the moon over Zuckau, the man behind the gorse bush, silence, the deaf man's yes. The fat and the stone, the meat and the clutching hand, silly stories like this one. .
One prehistoric day, after the usual mythological chitchat, the Flounder, to enlighten me at last, told me about King Minos's wife, how she lusted for her husband's white bull and how a certain Daedalus, known for his ingenuity, made her a disguise of cowhides, whereupon she was mightily mounted — a happening which, as we know, resulted in the Minotaur and other myths. And in conclusion the Flounder said: "This must not be taken as an incident of purely local importance. Others can learn a useful lesson from it. The whole continent is concerned. Don't forget that Zeus in person took the offended King Minos (in the form of a bull) to the maiden Europa. So that Queen Pasiphae's faux pas contributed to the fall from power of the Cretan women. The Zeus principle, the male seed, the pure idea triumphed. Because the bull-headed monster was a living illustration of matriarchal profligacy. The same demonstration might be made in the Baltic bogs. It doesn't always have to be a bovine; it can just as well be a white elk bull. Supposing a robust young specimen goes roaring through the bogs night after
night as if he had had his fill of cranberries and willow shoots and never wanted to mount a normal elk cow again, but had made up his mind to engender a Baltic myth instead. Now here's what you must do to stimulate the three-breasted Awa. Mold clay into arm-long elk pizzles, bake them as you would pots, set them up in a circle where she can't help seeing them, and let them take their effect."
I did just as he said. The erect ceramic pizzles amused Awa and her companions. When the sun was shining, they cast wandering shadows. A new cult began with a game: the women aimed quoits plaited from willow twigs. Soon the pizzles were adorned with wreaths of flowers. Jumping over them with outspread legs became a women's sport. (How obscenely they screamed. How gross were their jokes even then. What fun they got out of my modest attempts at sculpture.)
The Flounder called me the Baltic Daedalus. On his instructions I made a convincing disguise of elk skins cut to Awa's measure. I steamed elk calves' sweetbreads for Awa. And as though under contract to the Flounder, the white elk bull roared night after night in the Radune bogs nearby.