In speaking, Strya concealed more than he explained. While the film technicians spent their time rearranging props, preparing cutting copy, and lighting the set, we, with the help of modest sips out of water glasses, drank ourselves back to the past. Strya and I can do that. We are contemporary only for the time being. No date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place simultaneously.
While I was sitting on the perron of the Polish Writers' Club on Frauengasse, drinking my gritty coffee, and waiting for Dorothea in the shadow of Saint Mary's, Maria came by with her shopping bag. I paid for my coffee and joined her. Yes, she said, she was still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. We mingled with the tourists. I told her something about our television film. Maria said nothing. The chimes from the Rathaus tower sounded a heroic theme. Amber ornaments were on sale in the shops on the perrons. Maria didn't want a necklace or a polished pendant. We passed through Our Lady's Gate and stood irresolutely on the Long Bridge. Fried fish was being sold on a barge that had tied up between Holy Ghost Gate and Crane Gate. You could stand at narrow tables; the fish were served on paper plates, and you picked them up in your fingers. For a small extra charge
they would toss a dollop of Bulgarian ketchup on your plate. Behind the counter, women powdered with flour got portions of cod and mackerel and small Baltic herrings ready for the frying pan. The Mottlau smelled stronger than the frying fish. Gulls overhead. The ferryboat-restaurant was roofed with a ragged fish net. Tired from plodding through streets and looking for subjects to photograph, the tourists ate in silence. Maria wanted cod. We ate a portion each. Foretaste of rancid fat. She had had her corkscrew curls cut off. Just tell me this, Maria. But she didn't want to talk (not even under her breath) about the shipyard workers' uprising. That was over and done with. Talking wouldn't bring Jan back to life. Yes, the apparatchik from Warsaw had been called Kociolek. Once the price increase was rescinded and their wages raised, the men had calmed down. The one thing that made them gripe was a beer shortage — there'd been one recently. The girls were doing fine. A dead father was no drawback. The shipyard canteen had been renovated. No, nobody liked the food, but it filled you up. Oh well, who can laugh these days?
And because Maria clammed up after that, I told her about Dorothea. Maybe she listened.
By Gothic standards she was beautiful. Her strength of will defeated the laws of nature. What she wished for materialized, happened, came to pass. She could walk barefoot on the frozen Vistula; when in the heat of passion I came close to her in our warm bed, she was and remained a lump of frozen meat. For our nine little children, all but one of whom died young, she had hardly a glance; yet she could scratch the scabs of the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital with fervor. My troubles didn't interest her in the least, yet how quick she was to uplift the soul of every no-good tramp who appealed for her sympathy (and my money); oh, how sensitive, how warm-hearted and wise she was when it came to appeasing the cares of total strangers!
At first we attended guild dinners and the weddings of the young master craftsmen together. We were present in our Sunday best when Saint Dominic's Market was blessed. But she in her beauty held aloof from my guild brothers, repelled by their robust, laical merriment, vexed because her sweet
Jesus wasn't always first in everyone's thoughts — when the suckling lambs were being carved, for instance. Later she refused to take part in my social life; the boasting of the men, the finery of the women turned her stomach; she preferred to clothe herself in rags and mingle with the flagellants and penitents outside Saint Catherine's, where her girlish laughter could be heard above the din of the nearby Big Mill. In the midst of this riffraff she could be silly and giggly, merry, relaxed, free. But free from what? From me, from conjugal duties, from the need to care for her dying and oncoming brood. She was unfit for marriage. What else could she do but look for compensations, and become a saint if not a witch.
My fellow guildsmen made fun of me, and the sword-maker's wife was the neighborhood laughingstock. When we joined with the Charter City goldsmiths to form a brotherhood and installed our little chapel in Saint John's, right next to the mason's altar, I had to supply my guild brothers with ritual vessels of silver before they would admit me. If only Dorothea had been put on trial! I'd have testified against the witch: "Yes, my dear Deacon Roze, doctor of canon law. She let our children, every one of them except Gertrud, perish miserably…"
Little Kathrin liked to play with spoons and saucepans, mortars and pestles in the kitchen. She would look into all the pots, and the maids had to keep an eye on her. Not so her mother, who in the period after Ash Wednesday and on all Fridays cooked her penitential Lenten soup, made from codfish heads and root vegetables and thickened with barley. As long as the fish heads and mangels were foaming in the big kettle, she knelt with her back to the low hearth, her tender knees resting on dried peas. Her wide eyes glued to the crucifix, her fingers knotted bloodless, she saw nothing, and no maternal instinct gave her a hint when her second daughter, who must have been three and a half at the time and had been baptized at Saint Catherine's, also knelt down on a footstool, this one beside the kettle, but, far from being immobilized by religious fervor, fished with a big wooden spoon for the round white eyes in the disintegrating codfish heads, in the course of which operation — to make a long story
short — little Kathrin fell into the great family-sized kettle. All the child could manage was one shrill scream, not loud enough to tear her mother, immersed as she was in her Jesus, away from the penitential peas. If the maid hadn't missed the child, she might have been boiled away completely without disturbing her mother's fervor long enough for a Hail Mary.
And so the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting lost his second eldest after his third youngest daughter. When the mother stood seemingly unmoved before the steaming bundle, I struck my wife, Dorothea, several times with my sword-maker's hand.
No, Ilsebill or Maria, or whoever else may be listening to me, Dorothea did not strike back. Quiet and frail, she endured my blows; her capacity for contrition was boundless.
The next day we shot Saint Mary's from all sides. High-towering from Long Street through the shaft of Beutlergasse. From the Holy Ghost Street end of the Long Bridge across the Mottlau, the cameraman was able to squeeze the whole Gothic-brick mother hen into the picture. In two other long shots, from the Old City Ditch and across the dam, the Royal Polish Chapel leans against Saint Mary's and enhances its proportions. And in still another, taken at the corner of Outer City Ditch and Frog Pond, the colossal church steeple and the slender Rathaus tower, rising behind the gabled roofs of Dog Street, seem to be wedded forever. Of course we also shot the familiar postcard views from Jopengasse or the shady Frauengasse, depending on the position of the sun. And next day, when we visited the state workshops on the marshy flats between Werder Gate and the Vistula, our team set up its equipment on the roof of the wrought-iron works and captured the silhouette of the distant city. "This in itself," I said to the conservator, "makes it worthwhile. The expense, I mean."
In the evening I met Maria again. I called for her at the shipyard gate. The new canteen is right behind the entrance, where in Lena Stubbe's early-socialist days the workers' kitchen already had a way with stews. Maria appeared in sweater and jeans, in roughly the spot where a few years before her voluble Jan had been shot in mid-sentence. She