"Our guests are gone. Nothing is left but that bilious look. The windows cloud over. The last fly, that last bit of summer joy, drops from the wall. A Central European mi-
graine becomes a social event. And that's how it was — believe me, friend Flounder — when on your advice—'Marriage will multiply your possessions'—I married the High Gothic Dorothea of Montau."
According to custom the wedding should have gone on for three days. Not only had the members of the sword-makers' and goldsmiths' guilds donned their finery; also, the still-rich Island peasants had driven from Montau and Kase-mark, in carriages drawn by two or more horses, although they knew that even on so joyful an occasion Dorothea would serve up an Ash Wednesday menu; from her childhood on, she had been repelled by meat dishes.
To make matters worse, Dorothea had also invited several patricians, a few Teutonic Knights, and her Dominican confessor and seated them at separate tables. Trouble was inevitable. The guildsmen were offended, and not just because of the meager fare — fish, leek soup, a bit of dried meat, lots of manna grits, and no fatted steers, suckling pigs, or stuffed goose with milky millet porridge. Still, the platters had an appetizing look, for they were garnished with sorrel leaves and raw beets. There were bowls of herring roe mixed with curds and dill. Glumse could be dipped in linseed oil. Anyone who wished to could sweeten his manna grits with plum butter.
But the atmosphere was homicidal from the start. The Teutonic Knights boasted of how many Lithuanians they had driven into the marshes in their last two winter campaigns! The Dominican monk deplored that the peasants of the Montau region in the Vistula loop were still enjoying their rich lands in sinful freedom from tithes. The patricians told the swordmakers to their faces that in other cities the authorities kept a tight rein on the guilds and cracked down at the slightest murmur. At first my fellow guildsmen put up with the insults; then their eyes bugged out with anger; then angry words flew from table to table. And immediately after the brawl that started when a Teutonic Knight crudely tossed a radish into the lap of the patrician Schonbart's smartly dressed daughter, the wedding party broke up. Only the peasants, who understood very little of what had happened, stayed on. Thoroughly embarrassed, I cleared the table. Dorothea laughed.
"I assure you, friend Flounder, it was no happy guffawing, but a tinny bleating, as if she had escaped from Satan's goat barn, that my Dorothea served up to the bewildered remnants of the wedding party for dessert. And later on they wanted to make a saint of that cold-blooded bitch. What a laugh!"
Here the Flounder tried to comfort me. Yes, the price was high, but not really too high, and it had to be paid. Only with the help of the Christian religion had it been possible to end matriarchal absolutism, and the whole basis of the Christian religion was alternate fasting and feasting. This had made it necessary to accept the bad part, the rule of the Dorotheas over household and kitchen.
"Yes, yes," said the Flounder. "Her eternal Lenten soups are not exactly inviting, but as a guildsman you can catch up at morning get-togethers and other social functions, where nothing prevents your stuffing and swilling till your liver swells up. Besides, your Dorothea is beautiful with a beauty that calls for something more than adulation. And healthy to boot, not nearly so frail as her inner visions and heavenly copulations would suggest."
"But that's just it, friend Flounder. Her health is crushing me. When I — all it takes is a sudden change in the weather — come down with a splitting headache and fits of tears, she, even in sultry weather, stays malignantly serene and keeps her mind clear for ascetic speculations. She can fast till she's as thin as a rail; her peace of mind doesn't lose an ounce. She paralyzes my wit. She cuts down my thoughts. She undermines my health. I can't stand the daylight any more. I can't bear noise — the croaking of toads, for instance. Ever since I married Dorothea, I've been ailing. My head, impervious to the din of the most infernal smithy, threatens to burst as soon as I hear or even suspect her light step, that witchlike shuffle. And when she speaks to me in her cold, long-suffering voice and forces me into a joyless system with her ascetic rules, I'm afraid to contradict her. I'm afraid of her compulsive rhymes that connect everything under the sun with her sweet Jesus." And I quote from my Dorothea's verses: "When Jesu swet my viol boweth, ah, what pleasur he bestoweth. . "
At that point the Flounder, my adviser and foster father, stuffed me full of medieval Scholasticism. He gave me lessons and taught me how to interpret crooked as straight, a pile of shards as sound glassware, darkness as an edifice of light, and constraint as Christian freedom. He expected me, thus educated and never again at a loss for an answer, to force my Dorothea into the Procrustean bed of my dialectic whenever in her robust way she became insufferable.
"Don't let her develop a logic of her own," said the Flounder. "What she doesn't understand will always be beyond her understanding. As a woman, you see, she's not really entitled to logic. Devise — I know you can do it — an edifice with many rooms but reduced dimensions, in which one thing follows from another and the next from the next. If she contradicts you, or says her instinct tells her that your projected edifice lacks an entrance or an exit, you have only to reply: My edifice is logical because the rules of thought have been correctly applied, and contrariwise. And if your Dorothea continues to argue, or if she goes so far as to oppose your system with sweet-Jesus jingles, then put on your friendliest voice and say: You mustn't overtax yourself, wife. This kind of thing is too much for you. Leave the general ideas to me. You look pale, tired. Your eyelids are fluttering. There are beads of sweat on your Madonna forehead, which doesn't get its beauty from thinking. Let me apply cold compresses. Let me draw the curtains. Everyone will pad about in stocking feet. Not a single fly will be left uncaught. Because you need absolute quiet. Because you've been under a strain. Because you're sick, my dearest, and I'm worried about you."
Thus transformed into a Scholastic and master of hairsplitting by the Flounder in several courses of lectures, I went to my wife, Dorothea, and, when she couldn't follow my logic, talked until my so-called migraine transferred itself to her. After that, of course, I was less responsive to the weather and seldom suffered from headaches and weeping fits. But whether my loss of migraine — the last of men's prehistoric prerogatives to have survived — brought me any relief, I venture to doubt. And answering to the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder, after the usual evasive replies (in which he quoted the Church Fathers in Latin), admitted that while his advice that I should talk High Gothic women into re-
garding migraine as a female prerogative may have enhanced their beauty, it hardly advanced the male cause.
In any case Dorothea, before or after her attacks of migraine, put me through a severe grilling. True, she spoke m rhymes and images, but if they had been translated into prose (the language of my Ilsebill) she might have said, "Now where did you get that? Don't tell me it came out of your thick skull. Talking me blind with your shitty logic. Who told you that stuff, and where?"
Thus cornered, I finally confessed, and betrayed the Flounder to Dorothea. True, I was able to warn him in time-"Watch your step, friend Flounder! She'll be coming to see you, and she'll want something"-but his feelings were hurt, and to this day he hasn't forgiven my betrayal; "breach of trust," he called it.
"Look at all I've done for you, my son! Weaned you from your Awa. Taught you to smelt metals, to mint coins, to piece together philosophical systems, to think logically! I have set your rational patriarchy above purely instinctual matriarchy. For the benefit of you men I invented the division of labor. I advised you to marry, and marriage multiplied your possessions. Most recently I relieved you of your chronic headache, whereupon, sorry to say, you turned into a jughead, garrulous and unreliable. You gave me away betrayed my trust, told our secret to a chatterbox. Fromthis time on marriage will be a yoke to you. From this time on the dominant male will have to pay tribute to his domestic battle-ax, if only in the kitchen, when it's time to wash the dishes. From now on, in any case, I shall advise you only m extramarital matters. Let her come, this Dorothea of yours with her Madonna face. I won't tell her a thing, not even if she kisses me."