But Awa didn't want it. She had no desire to make myths. With three suckling breasts, she was sufficient unto herself (and unto us as well). She flew into a neolithic rage when I (urged by the Flounder) attempted with prurient stimulus words to arouse her interest in the bull. No, she cried, no, thus inventing a word with a future. All my pottery elk pizzles had to be smashed. (That's why our region has yielded no phallic idols.) And for punishment I was tied to the rear end of a tame elk cow — we had domestic animals by then.
For the whole of a neolithic day I tried to prove myself. But I didn't accomplish anything. I don't remember begetting any monsters. I have no desire to recall the disgrace that followed, but I have to, because I am writing and must therefore write that Awa and her women made an annual spring festival out of my shameful ride on the elk cow. Under the full moon she and her companions (borrowing from my sartorial art) dressed in the hides of elk cows. We Edeks had to deck ourselves out with the palmed antlers of elk bulls. We were required to emit a sound resembling an authentic mat-
ing cry. The tails of elk cows were tied to the women, and under those uplifted tails they offered themselves. Can you imagine anything more bestial?
"These loathsome fertility rites!" cried the Flounder. "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves? All this mating without father right. At this rate you'll never produce a masculine myth, a Jovian head-birth."
Then he went on about the refinements of Minoan culture. He spoke of palaces with many rooms, of open staircases with dimensions appropriate to royal dignity, of water pipes and steam baths. And while he was at it, he reported the birth of the young hero Heracles. As though in passing, he deplored the fact that a seaquake (or the wrath of Poseidon) had recently destroyed the capital city of Knossos—"But King Minos was miraculously saved!" — and raved about hand-sized bronze statuettes representing men with bulls' heads and marketed as far afield as Egypt and Asia Minor.
"That, my son, is what I call lasting influence! Way back at the beginning of the first palace period, Queen Pasiphae's offspring was bumped off by a certain Theseus. Not without the help of the artist Daedalus. Only the other day I told you the story of the ball of wool and the tragic sequel. What was the poor girl's name again? Was she left to rot on some island? Nobody remembers. But those Minoan bronzes and charming terra cottas, all with the same motif— they were paradigmatic; they set a style."
And he made me a present of a clay figurine the size of a little finger, which like his other gifts he toted unimpaired through the seas in his branchial sac. The little man with the bull's head: one more item in my growing art collection, which I kept hidden in an abandoned badger's burrow, until it was stolen by my friend Lud and hauled away God knows where. Then the Flounder persuaded me to make figurines of comparable mythical import and to perpetrate a pious fraud as a way of keeping my disgrace out of history.
And so I did. I molded seven or nine hand-sized little men surmounted by elk heads with palmed antlers, baked them secretly, and buried them near the suburb of Schidlitz, where in the twentieth century more or less fortuitous excavations were to produce neolithic finds. Unfortunately the archaeologists, two dilettantish schoolteachers, were not as care-
ful as they should have been. All the palmed antlers, which had previously fallen off, were dug under, so that the art historians never took them into account. Misinterpretations followed. Talk of neolithic pig-men. West Prussian Folklore magazine spoke of surprisingly early domestication of pigs in the marshes of the Vistula estuary. Experts argued over shards that were unique in the Baltic region, for on the Flounder's advice I had made the figurines hollow, molding them around my left middle finger in the Minoan manner.
But my terra cottas did not transmit a myth. Nothing came of them but controversial footnotes and a doctoral dissertation which in the year 1936 propounded the thesis that my "pig-men" were early Slavic testimony to the existence of an inferior, degenerate, worthless race.
The odd part of it is that later on (though the Flounder doesn't know it) Awa did let herself be mounted by an elk bull. In the moonlight. Without the disguise I had tailored. All three breasts bared. Down on her knees she offered herself. Her fat rump glittered as she wagged it. Playfully he approached. A young bull with a white hide. He didn't assault her violently; his approach was more on the timid, experimental side. His light-catching palmed antlers. His hoofs on her shoulders. Affectionately at first, nuzzling at the back of her neck. Then everything fitted, nothing was impossible, it happened naturally and didn't take long. Hidden in the willows, I looked on. Heard Awa cry out as never before. I wanted to preserve the image, her three breasts hanging down into the cranberries. But I forgot, swept memory rubble (other stories) over it. I didn't want to remember, because when, after the usual length of time, no god with palmed antlers but a girl was born, she resembled Awa all right but showed indications of four breasts, the equipment of an elk cow, whereupon she was killed forthwith with a stone ax.
"No!" cried Awa and wielded the ax. "This is going too far. Let's not overdo it. Three are enough. Who knows what the little wench would do later on. No crimes against nature, if you please. We don't want tongues to wag."
And she ordered us to hunt and spear the white elk bull. We ate the young flesh crisp-roasted with mashed cranberries, as though nothing had happened. But now at last I was enlightened and started looking for a word for "father."
That, by the Flounder's time reckoning, was shortly after the Argonauts embarked on their voyage and two years before the Seven marched against Thebes. But in our country the women kept their power. Whether Awa or Wigga or later Mestwina, they prevented legendary voyages and campaigns. They survived without special emblems of power, and when we tried to make history (or trouble) they stymied us with their womanhood. Wrath gave way to quietness. They made us tread lightly. Smiling injustice triumphed. The caprice of the mighty prevailed. Enslaved by their mild forgiveness, we remained domesticated. (I stop in my flight to sue for peace over the phone. "Sure, sure," says Ilsebill. "It's all right. So you want to come home? If you behave, you can be the father. Let's forget all about it. Get a good night's sleep. Then we'll see.")
The things I can't help: drought, killing frost, rainy spells, cattle plagues, times of famine when nothing but manna grits was available and not enough of them. What I would like to distract people's attention with: how I developed the charcoal industry and invented Baltic bricks. What I could not for a long time bring myself to say, but the Flounder said: You must. What I don't want to remember: how I marched southward up the river with the Goths, leaving Wigga, who kept our horde on short rations, alone with her pots.
My first flight. (Typical male escape syndrome, still common to this day: beat it quick around the corner for a cigarette or two and never come back; gone forever.) We pushed off in May. In other parts of the world the calendar said 211. Everything was in flux. Germanic restlessness. The first migrations. Marcomans, Herulians, and our Goths with their inborn wanderlust pushed off, invaded new lands, made history. I, too, was sick of being Wigga's charcoal burner, also condemned of late to farm work, beet raising. Like the red-haired fire-eaters whose god Wotan the Flounder had taught me to worship in secret, I wanted to sit in a manly circle deliberating, to strike my shield in assent, to lower my shield in dissent, I wanted to be a man: A man consulted, a man with rights and a voice, with sons to come after him. A man exempt from daily chores and hungry for distant places. I wanted