to be gone, to quit the trivia of daily life. I wanted to live dangerously, to discover, prove, fulfill myself. Weaned at last, I wanted to know the meaning of honor victory death.
"Clear out," said Wigga. She sat — a giant when seated— under the willow-withe arbor, molding small dumplings of herring roe, herring milt, and oatmeal, and dropping them into foaming fish broth. "Clear out!" She'd have no trouble replacing me as her charcoal burner and in my other functions as well. She rolled the dumplings on her flat, hard thighs, two at a time, clockwise and counterclockwise. Just as Ilsebill can say, "Have it your way," so Wigga, not even contemptuously, said, "Just clear out."
But I didn't get very far, only three days' journey up the river. There, where later, much later, the town of Dirschau (Tczew) with its railroad bridge across the Vistula was supposed to be strategically important, I already had blisters on my feet, the uncouth Goths frightened me, I cast longing looks homeward and cursed the Flounder who had advised me to shove off. (To make matters worse, my friend Ludger treated me like a groom, with beastly condescension.)
I often wept while cooling my feet in the river. Without a roof over my head I felt sorry for myself. We Pomor-shians were not admitted to the meeting of their Thing. I had to curry their horses, scour their short-swords with ashes, comb out their women's matted hair, and put up with their arrogant sulking after bouts of mead drinking. When they had chewed too much fly agaric soaked in mare's milk, they became murderously aggressive and thrashed us in place of enemies who had not yet materialized. Once I heard them deliberating under a solitary oak tree when and how they would sacrifice me and a few other Pomorshians who had run off with them to their hammer god, Thor: spitted on lances.
And when, in the place on the east bank where later Graudenz (the fortress) was to be situated, I was kicked by a horse, cut in the thumb by a short-sword, reviled by Gothic women as a "Pomorshian swamp rat," and buggered in broad daylight behind a gorse bush by a Goth (during which operation he didn't even remove his boar's-tusk helmet) who was always drunk or under the influence of fly agaric and had so few teeth that I had to chew his dried meat for him, I beat it,
I lit out for home, limping and weeping, heard myself and the river and the screech owls crying "Wigga," and more and more desperately, "Wigga!"
In short, I soon proved unequal to history. They could smash up Rome without me; Wigga's dumplings of herring roe and herring milt meant more to me. I was only too glad to be her charcoal burner again and take care of her brats, a few of whom were plainly by me. Let the Flounder call me a milksop; I went back mouthing apologies: Never again, a lesson to me, sincerely regret, just punishment, I'll be good, I'll never. . But Wigga didn't scold. If she had only scolded, punished me, sent me out to the beet fields with a hoe. Her vengeance was no brief outburst, but long-lived, though after each of my public self-criticism sessions she would say, like Ilsebill the other day on the telephone, "Let's forget all about it. Water under the bridge."
For in the presence of the assembled clan — we were not yet a tribe — I had to confess my crimes: I had been unforgivably bored with charcoal burning. I had taken a treasonable pleasure in mocking the sedentary Pomorshians to the Goths. I had bartered Pomorshian charcoal much too cheaply to the Gothic armorers. Seduced by my friend, I had become addicted to fly agaric as a substitute for the prohibited and eradicated dream root. And I had betrayed Pomorshian secrets (the instructions for making Glumse) to this same Ludger.
Then I had to make a public statement abjuring the frivolous emotion of wanderlust. Then I had to swear to the female council of the clan that I would never again aspire to conquer or die, that is, to make history. Then I had to renounce something that I had bombastically termed "paternity rights." Then I had to report how many blisters I'd had on my feet at the beginning of the migrations, why the hair of the Gothic women is always matted, in whose honor I and other Pomorshians were to be spitted on lance heads, how young Ludger's stallion had given my left knee such a kick as to stiffen it for all time; and I had to exhibit the scar on my right thumb all around the circle. (It was my forced renunciation of the fungus poison muscarine that introduced the fly-agaric habit among our people.)
The one thing that I concealed repressed forgot was what
that stammering Goth who never took off his boar's-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush. The disgrace of it. The gap in my narrative. The empty speech-balloon. What I didn't want to remember: how he manhandled, chewed, and licked me, rubbed me with rancid fat, and then ripped in with his old man's war club, so deep. .
But Wigga knew. When I ran away from her, she sent two swift-running girls after us, and by the time I came hobbling back, they had told her the whole story in every detail. That was probably why, later on, when I lay with her, in her, armed and legged around, she would often say, "Well? Isn't this better? Isn't it a lot better this way?"
Ilsebill will soon be in her second month. Her time interval, which makes her difficult, is the only thing that counts. I (her charcoal burner) stand beside her or flee downstairs through the centuries until the Flounder, as though he were still talking to me, catches me up: "There's nothing you can do about that, my son. It's her nature, which is stronger and always right. Your fatherhood holds you tethered. The women will always have you there. As your Ilsebill knows."
Then he advises me to buy more paper. Once you put it in writing, he says, everything looks normal. "Only written matter," he pontificates, "can stand up against nature. The written law wins out almost every time. And what you don't want to remember, what you don't even want to think of again-because of the disgrace-will be as good as forgotten once you get your story in print." And, clearly wishing to be quoted, he concludes, "Men survive only in the written word."
All right. I admit it, I betrayed Mestwina, my Mestwina. But there was more ambiguity in what I did than a simple sentence reveals. For, you see, I was her (and the tribe's) head shepherd, and at the same time I was Bishop Adalbert, who had come to convert us heathen. As a shepherd I supplied her kitchen, and as an ascetic I spurned her cookery. It was I who stole the cast-iron spoon from the supply hut of the Bohemian baggage train; and it was I, the later canonized bishop, whom Mestwina slew with the cast iron. If I remember right, I was too cowardly to cut the bothersome missionary's
throat with my razor, though Mestwina asked me time and time again to do her the favor. But as a bishop with a desperate craving for blows, I let myself be murdered without resistance, for even as a choirboy I had often confessed the wish to die a martyr's death and be canonized later on.
Shepherd and bishop — for the first time I sojourned doubly; I was split, and yet wholly the pagan shepherd and wholly the Christian zealot. Life was no longer as simple as under Awa's care or in Wigga's shadow. Never again, except in relation to Dorothea or to Amanda Woyke the farm cook, neither of whom allowed of ambiguities, have I been able to wear myself out so completely at one with myself: unsplit and for life. For my time with Billy doesn't count. And in Maria's eyes I'm nobody.
Maybe my present Ilsebill will pin me down, cure me of my ambiguity. "No nonsense," she says. "The kid's got to know who his father is. What do you mean, a fiction? No subterfuges, if you please!"
Anyway, I was dead as a bishop when I took my sheep smell to the main Bohemian tent and betrayed my Mestwina.
But why? It was all so well hidden. After the murder, which had gone off smoothly, with no other sound than the gentlest of sighs, she and I threw the cold, stiff, and later to be canonized Adalbert (in other words, myself!) into the swift-flowing Radune. Far downstream, on a sandbank in the ramified estuary of the Vistulla, a region often raided by our hostile Prussian neighbors, the holy man's bloated corpse was washed ashore and found by Polish mercenaries who had been looking for him for the last five days. I craftily buried the cast-iron cooking spoon. It seemed reasonable to assume that the heathen Prussians had murdered Adalbert. A courier was already on his way to report the event to the king of Poland. The date given was April 12, 997. The whole episode scratched into history: one more saint.