In any event, seven ringleaders of the artisans' uprising were executed in May 1378, among them an Old City miller; whereas the strike and uprising of the shipyard workers in December 1970 resulted not in the arrest of the strike committee of the Lenin Shipyard, but in the dismissal of Go-mulka and several minor officials and in the annulment of the projected increase in the prices of staple foods. The shipyard workers' threat to send several large ships down the ways unfinished, if not to blow up the shipyard, was heard as far away as Warsaw: state power recognized worker power. The state gave in, made some changes in personnel, and announced one more "new policy." But if we consider the workers shot in Gdansk and Gdynia in a political light, along with the executed ringleaders of the medieval artisans' uprising, then as now little was achieved: true, the Danzig patricians dropped their plan of importing beer from Wismar, but they granted the guilds no voice in the city council or court of aldermen; and the demand of the shipyard workers for worker management went equally unheard. All the same, one thing has changed in Danzig or Gdansk since 1378; today the patricians have a different name.
We panned a couple of times in the direction of the New City and the shipyards: high-rise buildings, low-cost housing under construction, the air pollution that goes with progress the world over. While Max and Klaus were packing their tin suitcases and unwieldy equipment, I looked for traces of my High Gothic wife, Dorothea, near one of the side doors of Saint Catherine's. All I could see to remind me of her Lenten fare was nettles and dandelions. When she betrayed the projected uprising of the guilds to the Dominicans, I struck her narrow face with my swordmaker's hand, though I, too, had my misgivings about the uprising and took no part in it.
Actually Dorothea's betrayal had no effect, for the Dominicans were at odds with the patricians because the town councilors, with the help of their Culm charter, had confiscated all the grasping monks' landed property and turned the Dominicans into mendicants.
When we rose up, even the Teutonic Knights kept their peace. Feeling threatened by the power of the patrician mer-
chants and by the Charter City's ties with the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Order, on the advice of the aged grand master Kniprode, founded — to the north of the Charter City and the Old City — a New City, "juvenile oppidum," with its own charter and, much to the irritation of the Charter City, its own port and maritime laws. Dorothea knew nothing of that. There was no politics in her piety. After the death of my mother, Damroka, I would have liked to establish myself in the Charter City, but instead, thanks to the Knights, who paid me well, built a new home in the jagged triangle formed by Brabank, Bucket Makers' Court, and the Lime Quarry, where the canalized Radaune follows Carp Pond, roughly between the Wicker Bastion and the castle of the Teutonic Knights, within convenient distance of the New City warehouses, to take the place of our old timber-frame house. We made liberal use of brick, which even in the Charter City only the patrician merchants and a few coopers and drapers could afford. Until the city ordinance of 1451 prohibited wooden buildings, even the main streets of the competing townships of Danzig were lined with thatched frame houses, and frequent fires encouraged new construction. The quarters adjoining the Mottlau long remained swampy and almost impassable; the main pillars of Saint John's (near Hawkers' Gate), which was built on marshy, unstable ground, are still sinking.
When we set up our camera in the ruins, the municipal conservator told us how much it had cost to reinforce the pillars, which though damaged by fire still support the vault, with concrete: eight thousand zlotys apiece. The price of tradition. History must be paid for. I stood amid unsorted fragments of facades and perrons, beside one of those pillars that had sunk so expensively. "Shooting. Twelve seven. Statement: Ruins of the Church of Saint John."
On orders from the conservator, two construction workers quickly gathered up the human bones that were lying about in the rubble. "Too macabre for the television audience," he said. Might give them the wrong idea. These bones hadn't belonged to German soldiers in the recent war, but to people in the Middle Ages, whose last rest had been disturbed when bombs had shattered the stone floor of the church. The dust particles dancing in the obliquely falling light, the flut-
tering of frightened pigeons, the grimaces of fragmented sculptures, gave the interior of the church atmosphere enough. Hadn't Andrzey Wajda shot several scenes of his world-famous Ashes and Diamonds inside Saint John's? And really you don't need bones in a documentary.
Yet it seemed distinctly possible that the bones of my swordmaker father, Kunrad Slichting, were here in this heap with those of other once prosperous burghers. For, with characteristic stubbornness, the old man had bought a burial plot in the Charter City. Who lies where: Opitz, dead of the plague, in Saint Mary's, his name incised in sandstone. In Holy Trinity worshipers and tourists are standing on the slab that covers the bones of Anton Moller the town painter. So many dead. Names of town councilors whom we hated at the time of our rebellion: Paul Tiergart, Peter Czan, Gottschalk Nase, Pape, Godesknecht, Maczkow, Hildebrand Munzer. . And hardly sweeter to our ears were the names of the Teutonic Knights who lived during my High Gothic time-phase: Hinrich Dusemer, Ludwig von Wolkenburg, Walrabe von Scharfenberg. . And when, in December 1970, units of the police and army fired on workers in Gdynia and Gdansk, the name of the commanding general was Korczynski. The order to fire is said to have been given by a party secretary named Kliszko. One Stanislaw Kociolek, a member of the Politburo, arrived from Warsaw and demanded drastic measures, because of which it became necessary to transfer him. Though the Communist Party of Belgium lodged a protest with the king, Kociolek was accredited as Polish ambassador to that country. An attempt was made to convert General Korczynski into a military attache in Algeria. Shortly afterward he shot himself in the head. Only Kliszko kept his old job. The Lenin Shipyard is still called the Lenin Shipyard. Maria, who had lost her Jan, had her daughter baptized under the name of Damroka. And the priest of Saint Mary's who, toward the end of the fourteenth century, wanted to put my wife, Dorothea, with her mania for penance and flagellation, on trial for witchcraft, bore the name of Christian Roze. But Dorothea was not destined for the pyre.
Next the camera turned to a Charter City artist. In his
attic studio a graphic artist, one Richard Strya, showed our camera some many-layered etchings, meanwhile speaking much too softly of Vilna, the place he had left to settle in Gdansk. His etchings, dry points, and aquatints mingle gable and tower motifs with medieval flagellants and penitents. Groups struggling with the temptations of the flesh. Ecstasy in the midst of apocalyptic beasts. Lepers whose second sight is peeling along with their skin. Knights dominant in black iron. The miraculous in diagonal composition. Twilight apparitions. A wedding while the bells are advertising the plague. And in the crowded street, amid the early revolutionary tumult, my Dorothea over and over again, in rags, twined with snakes, maddened with fever, riding naked on a sword, etched into the plumage of the griffin, woven into latticework, open, vitreous, suspended from whirling strings, kissing the Flounder, and finally immured, cadaverous, already holy, worshiping, horrible.