When the smooth sea released Dorothea next day, I was waiting on the beach, worried and by then quite willing to forgive and forget. Slowly she rose from the sea and made tracks past me. In horror the gulls kept their distance. It didn't surprise me that her gown of nettles and her wheatlike hair had stayed dry. Yet she had changed again. Her eyes, too, were slightly out of kilter and at an angle to her crooked mouth. She came back fish-eyed, and that is how I shall sketch her when Ilsebill sits for me.
As she passed by, Dorothea said she now knew all there was to know but would reveal nothing. And since the Flounder also kept a tight lip before the Tribunal, it has never been divulged what happened at the bottom of the Baltic Sea in the early summer of 1358 to make my Dorothea omniscient. Nevertheless, Sieglinde Huntscha, the esteemed prosecutor, displays the exact same knowing, foreknowing smile with which Dorothea from that day on descended stairs, knelt on peas, and trod the streets — once again lost in her Jesus and very nearly a saint.
The household was a shambles after that. For the first time a maid walked out on us. Unwashed dishes piled up, attracted flies, brought rats into the house, stank. Ever since Dorothea, the dishwashing problem has been with us.
No, Ilsebill, even earlier, with the kneading and molding of clay, with the baking of the first bowls, jugs, and pots, in Awa's day, when she first developed ceramics, dishwashing
began to be a problem. Though the timeless question "Who's going to wash the dishes?" received a clear and simple answer: the men. Naturally that arrangement didn't last. At some time or other (shortly after Mestwina), we just dropped the nasty, greasy things. It was beneath our dignity. The male cause was getting ahead.
Obviously to have the woman standing at the sink from morning to night is no solution. In this light your dishwasher, which we men invented, which you wished for, which you (absolutely) insisted on having, can be regarded as progress on the installment plan, with a year's guarantee. Maybe it will emancipate us all. From what? From blobs of mustard on the edges of dishes? From crumbling mutton fat? From desiccated leftovers? From disgust in general?
And so we delegate our dishwashing. Never again will an Agnes caress our daily cares away with her dishpan hands. Never again will Sophie sing her rabble-rousing revolutionary songs over heaped-up cups and dishes. There will only be your next-to-noiseless dishwasher. If only such a thing had existed after the Flounder released Dorothea and she made me wear myself out over a mountain of dishes.
Elaine Migraine
Sits in the cleft of a tree
and reacts to the weather over plucked—
tweaser-plucked — eyebrows.
When the weather changes
when high pressure brings blue sky
her silken thread snaps.
We all dread the change,
flit past on stocking feet, curtain the light.
It's said to be a pinched nerve — here or here or here,
something askew inside, no, still deeper.
An ailment that began with the last ice age,
when nature went through another shift.
(And besides: when the angel came clanking
too close to her, the Virgin, so it seems,
dotted her temples with her fingertips.)
Since then doctors have been making money.
Since then faith has been practiced by autogenic training.
That cry which everyone claims to have heard—
even old people remember their horror
when mother lay silent in the darkness.
The pain known only to those who have it.
Again it threatens,
cup strikes loud on saucer,
a fly perishes,
too close together, the glasses stand shivering,
the bird of paradise squawks.
"Elaine Migraine," sing the children outside the window.
We — who have no idea — feel sorry from a distance.
But she, behind lowered blinds, has entered the torture
chamber. Attached to her whirring wire, she grows more and more
beautiful.
Libber, Libber
Between separate beds
at shouting distance
the sexes are being discussed.
Finish I Let me finish.
You've had your say.
You've been talking for centuries.
We'll simply cut off your sound.
You've got no words.
You aren't even funny.
Libber, Libber! the children call
as the fairy-tale Ilsebill passes.
She has smashed what is dear and precious.
With a dull ax she has
destroyed our bit of one-and-only.
She wants to be independent, entirely on her own,
no more joint bank account.
And yet there used to be a we — you and I,
with a double Yes in our glance.
A shadow in which, exhausted,
we were many-limbed, yet one sleep,
and on a photograph true to each other.
Hate forms sentences. How she settles accounts, does me in, grows out of her role, towers above me, and has the last word! Finish! Let me finish! And stop talking about Us and We.
Libber, Libber! said the signs incised on clay tablets,
Minoan finds (Knossos, first palace period)
which for long years were undeciphered,
mistaken for household accounts
or fertility formulas,
matriarchal trivia.
But from the very first (long before Ilsebill) the goddess was agitating.
Like my Dorothea
Whether I rub against Ilsebill until she is pregnant, or meet Sieglinde Huntscha after a trying day in court — once again the Flounder has been floating belly up in protest — for a beer and so on, or whether with the help of my portable typewriter I finally liberate myself from Dorothea, it is always the same type that makes me weak and fluttery, that I fall for, that reduces me to strictly nothing.
The other day, while the Women's Tribunal was discussing my questionable behavior in connection with the uprising of the guilds against the patricians, I took out a soft pencil and drew in my sketchbook pictures of the prosecutor, first in profile while she was accusing the Flounder of having stood foursquare behind the hegemony of the patricians, then in three-quarter view, and finally fullface, in order to provide myself with a portrait of Dorothea. But all my sketches insisted on looking like Ilsebilclass="underline" always that terrifying narrow
face, dominant and ineradicable, as though their fathers, instead of being an Island peasant, an engineer, and (like Gerhard Huntscha, who was killed in North Africa) a career officer, had all been diabolical he-goats from Ashmodai's stable.
And if among the associate judges of the Tribunal I recognized my morose Wigga in Ms. Helga Paasch, and in the always crocked Ruth Simoneit my mare's-milk-guzzling Mestwina, then I can also be certain that the prosecution not only is being represented by Sieglinde Huntscha (and by you, Ilsebill), but is in addition giving my Dorothea certain advantages, which to be sure are counterbalanced by the eminently fair presiding judge, Ms. Schonherr. A mother figure with no smell of the stable about her. She who with few gestures transforms a madhouse, as the movie theater often becomes, into the best behaved of kindergartens reminds me time and again of my primal mother, Awa. In any event, she admonished the prosecution when Sieglinde Huntscha accused the Flounder of "playing the lackey to the ruling class of the moment."
The prosecutor was of the opinion that the Flounder had made use of me, Albrecht Slichting the irresolute sword-maker, to sow discord in the ranks of the guilds after they had resolved to fight the patricians. According to her, it was I who at the Flounder's suggestion had termed the grievance about the importation of beer from Wismar a problem that could bother only the city brewers and, in a pinch, the coopers' guild.