When our lamps were functioning again, the conservator spoke into his clip-on microphone, informing the public that in the Old City only the churches had thus far been rebuilt, most recently Saint Bridget's, but that the Charter City, with all its principal streets, had been reconstructed as a self-contained unit inside the city wall built in 1343: it was bounded by the Old City Ditch on the north and the Outer City Ditch on the south, on the east by the stretch of the Mottlau extending from Cows' Gate to Hawkers' Gate, and by the reconstructed city wall to the left and right of Long Street Gate on the west.
The director of the television crew made an announcement in TV jargon: "Cut statement in front of Moller painting. Tomorrow nine o'clock sharp Saint Catherine's spires, statement. Followed by Saint John's, Hawkers' Street, artists from Vilna, and so on. ."
I went to look at some more shooting sites and couldn't remember for sure whether the brick house of the sword-maker Albrecht Slichting, built in 1353, was on Smith Street in the Old City or on Ankersmith Street in the Charter City. When construction on the Late Gothic house was begun (most probably in the Old City, come to think of it), Dorothea of Montau, the daughter of Wilhelm Swarze, a peasant recently arrived from Lower Saxony, was just six years old. (You see, Ilsebill, I have a better memory for flights of stairs, kitchen smells, winding sheets hung out of windows, and personal defeats than for places.) Be that as it may, after bubonic plague had paid its first visit to all our streets, thus lowering the price of city lots at a time when the price of everything else was going up, I, then a swordmaker, started building my house. We stayed in the Old City, and the amiable conservator, who is rebuilding only the Charter City on the most orthodox lines, was unable to help me locate my Old City building site.
I often went to Montau on my way to the Marienburg through the country between the Nogat and the Vistula, which had been freshly diked in (after the famine years). My
father, the swordmaker Kunrad Slichting, who refused to die and kept me, his eldest, on short rations, not only supplied the Danzig headquarters of the Teutonic Order in the by then rebuilt Pomeranian castle; the grand master's chancellery, whose red-brick buildings were spreading out farther and farther along the east bank of the Nogat, also preferred to give its orders to Old City smiths and sword-makers, and the orders were ample, thanks to the losses incurred during the annual winter forays into the Samland Peninsula and across the frozen swamps of Lithuania.
Bearing richly ornamented hilts for the notorious two-handers, enchased scabbards, and silver-plated sword belts, I made the journey by way of Montau, the new village on the Island. There I saw how boiling-hot water was spilled on little Dorothea, seventh of the peasant Swarze's nine children, on Candlemas of the year '53 and how she nevertheless (as though by a miracle!) retained her fine skin and blue-veined transparency, while the careless kitchenmaid got perfectly normal burns on both feet.
I fell in love with the child Dorothea then and there. Thirty years of age and not yet a full-fledged master craftsman. I should have set up a household of my own in the Charter City long before. But not only were we closely watched by the Teutonic Knights; we were also under the thumb of my grandmother, who put pressure on her daughter Damroka to stay near the Wicker Bastion, the original settlement, which kept rising from its ashes. My father, you see, had married into a Pomorshian clan. Women have always kept me on a short lead. I've always tied myself to some Ilsebill's apron strings. And when I fell madly in love with Dorothea, whom the boiling water had left unscathed, it was no different.
Lord, what qualities I saw in that slender child, who seemed to have been cut from silver leaf. Yet her graceful little questions — Had the Lord Jesus sent me? Had I brought her a message from sweet Jesus? — should have aroused my suspicions. And when the child (grown to the age of ten by that time) wheedled me into giving her a seven-chained scourge with a silver handle (inlaid with mother-of-pearl and amber tears) to play with (it had been ordered by the abbot of Marienwerder), my only feeling was one of affectionate
amusement; for how was I to guess that Dorothea drew blood night after night by flaying herself through her hair shirt. And her first verses—"Jesu, guide my litel chaine, for my flesh hath chosen paine" — struck me as nothing more than fashionable babble. Only when at sixteen she was married to me yet did not become my wife, did I, in temporary possession of her utterly indifferent flesh, feel the scars on her back and the festering, still-open wounds.
In those days flagellation was pretty much what pot smoking is today. Especially the High Gothic youth, among whom I could no longer number myself, sought out the warming stench of the bands of flagellants, the percussion rhythms that went with their litany, their terrifying descents into hell, group ecstasies, and collective illuminations.
When in the year '63 Dorothea became my wife and went to live in town, the enormous building site that was to become the Charter City was often clogged with flagellants. Quivering female penitents who had come from Gnesen (Gniezno) lay exhausted amid the rising brick walls of Saint Mary's and Saint John's, and outside the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals. For some years after the Teutonic Knights had built their Big Mill on the recently dug Ra-daune Canal, which circled the Charter City, fights were frequent between the millworkers and the obstreperous flagellants, more and more of whom took to camping between Saint Catherine's and the Big Mill. When I was looking for my Dorothea, I could always find her with the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital or with the flagellants outside Saint Catherine's. Tramps and spongers, that's what they were! Who do you thing brought us the plague!
The mill is standing there again, the interior broken up into offices while pigeons nest in its skylight. Today the Radaune Canal is no more than a stinking gutter; too many of the Kashubian water holes have been dammed up and made into reservoirs.
Max had set up the camera across from the Big Mill, behind the hoarding of the Saint Catherine building site. There stood four pinnacles ready to be mounted, and the central bulb-shaped steeple. All expensively covered with copper, which, as no precautions were taken against air pol-
lution, had already put on an attractive verdigris color, because fumes from the sulfur wharves not only corrode the reconstructed sandstone facades, but also blacken the copper roofing of the church towers.
The director sat me down (in a "natural" pose) beside a pile of scaffolding. At a signal from him, the concrete mixer some twenty steps away was set in motion. Pan from the spireless stump of the Old City Church tower to the boarded-up towers and verdigris-green central steeple. Then I came into the picture, pronouncing the concluding words of the documentary. As soon as the big crane arrived, I said, the day's work would begin. With the Big Mill of the Teutonic Knights and behind it the churches of Saint Catherine and Saint Bridget, an architectural unit dating from the fourteenth century had been reconstructed in the Old City, adjacent to the self-contained Charter City complex. This, I declared, was a noteworthy achievement. Poland had not disavowed its history. But now an appeal to the Hanseatic spirit of the people of Liibeck was in order, for the famous chimes of Saint Catherine's were hanging in Liibeck's Church of Saint Mary but belonged here in Danzig. The cause of German-Polish reconciliation would be well served by generosity on the part of the people of Liibeck. And so forth and so on.
What I did not communicate to the tube: that when I looked over the hoarding into the sixteenth century, over there in the spot where today only the barest fragments of the convent remain standing beside the Church of Saint Bridget, the abbess Margarete Rusch had survived the hairsplitting of the Reformation with her free-ranging Brigittine nuns and was putting more pepper into her cookery than ever; that right next door, though a century later, the poet and court historian Martin Opitz von Boberfeld was living in the so-called preachers' houses, until the plague carried him away; that here, outside the Charter City wall, the millers of the Big Mill joined forces with the rebellious brewers, coopers, and other guildsmen against the patrician order, though only the brewers of Jopengasse and Dog Street had serious reason to rebel, in so far as they were injured by the importation of beer from Wismar.