Fat Gret, the Flounder said to me, was a woman after his wide-mouthed taste: she let the men get on with their deadly serious trade in wheat, toll collecting, guild fees, and indulgences, let them find more and more elaborate ways of slicing or pulverizing one another, or interpreting the Scriptures, and improved her health laughing at the murderous entertainment they offered. "If she had wanted to," said the Flounder, "she could have won back Awa's power at any time."
The sixth cook inside me — they're pushing to get out, and there are nine or more of them, each with a name — also plucked geese, but she didn't laugh. An oat-fattened goose when the Swedes, with fire behind them, withdrew. When the Swedes came back (punctually on Saint Martin's Day), nothing was left of all her geese but a bowlful of stirred blood, to which she added roots and sliced pears to make a sour black sauce for the boiled giblets — neck, heart, gizzard, and wings.
Directly behind the barn, under the apple tree, from which later dangled heads with upturned beaks, Agnes plucked the geese and sang little songs: weary wind-blown words that put the wretched Swedish occupation into rhyme and hovered in mid-air with the goose down for the length of a November day. O vale of tears!
That was when Agnes was still childlike and Kashubian. Later, when she became a city dweller and cooked for Moller
the town painter, the Swedes with their Gustavus Adolphus were already somewhere else. Instead, four years after the Battle of Lutzen, the poet and diplomat Martin Opitz, embittered by the long-lasting war, came to Danzig.
"Agnes," said the talking Flounder-though I'm not sure whether it was as painter Moller or as poet Opitz that I questioned the wise old fish-"your Agnes," he said, "is one of those women who can only love comprehensively. The man she cooks for she loves; and since she cooks tenderly for both of you, one for his swollen liver, the other for his embittered gall, you are obliged to sit down to table with what you take to be her divided-and what I call her doubled-love, and listen as the bed creaks."
To painter Moller she bore a little girl; and as for me, when the plague baked me and sweated me, she stuffed the pillow of my deathbed full to bursting with goose down. That's how kindhearted she was. But I never managed to turn out a poem to her kindness. Only courtly flattery and lamentations of various kinds. No mouth-filling Agnes-rhyme to chicken broth, calf's sweetbreads, manna grits, and suchlike delicacies. I hope to make up for it later on.
The seventh cook inside me bore the name of Amanda Woyke, and when I let the whole lot of them and their daughters babble together, comparing the prices at different epochs, she's the one who stands out most clearly in my mind. I'd never be able to say straight out, "This, just this is what Agnes looked like," because Agnes always looked melancholy but in different ways, and always seemed torn between Moller and Opitz; for Amanda's looks, on the other hand, I easily find an image: she had a potato face. Or, to be more specific, in her face the full beauty of the potato could be admired every day of the week. It wasn't just the bulbousness; no, her whole skin had that earthy sheen, that glow of palpable happiness, that can be seen on stored potatoes. And since the potato is first of all grand, sweeping form, her eyes were small and lay, unaccented by heavy brows, embedded in roundness. Her lips, not fleshy red but the color of the sandy soil of Kashubia, were one of nature's happy caprices: two bulges always prepared to utter such words as Bulwe, Wruke, Runkel* To be
* Pomeranian dialect for "potato, rutabaga, mangel-wurzel."-TRANs.
kissed by Amanda was to receive from the earth, or, rather, from that dry potato soil that has made Kashubia famous, a smack that was not ephemeral but filled you up, just as potatoes boiled in their jackets fill you up.
When Mestwina smiled, you beheld the sheen of willow branches in March; Dorothea of Montau's smile froze the snot in children's noses to icicles; my Agnes's smile, tinged with a yearning for death, made death tasty to my palate; but when Amanda smiled at me, the story of the triumph of the potato over millet could be spun on and on, a story as sinuous as Amanda's potato peelings — for when her storytelling took hold of her, she peeled away from the thumb. As cook at the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, she had to prepare food each day for seventy, for farm hands and house servants, for day laborers, cottagers, and retired old folks.
"She deserves a monument," said the Flounder, "because without Amanda Woyke the introduction of the potato into Prussia after the second partition of Poland, when famine was raging far and wide and acorns brought a good price, would not have been possible. Though only a woman, she made history. Isn't it amazing? Yes, amazing!"
The eighth cook inside me absolutely wanted to be a man and, in keeping with her revolutionary times, mount the barricades with militant breast; yet all her life Sophie Rotzoll, close as many men (including me) came to her, remained a virgin under seven seals. The only man she ever loved was Friedrich Bartholdy, the stammering schoolboy who was condemned to death for Jacobin conspiracy. He was seventeen and Sophie fourteen; in view of his youth, Queen Luise of Prussia commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. It was not until forty years later, when her Fritz was released from the fortress of Graudenz in failing health, that Sophie, by then an old woman, or, rather, an aging spinster, saw him again. Calf's head in herb vinegar, hog belly with chanterelles, hare stewed in red wine; regardless of what she cooked for him, of all her attempts to fire his spirit, of all the lofty goals she held up to him and mankind, Bartholdy had had enough; all he wanted was to puff away at his pipe.
I knew her well. As a boy I went gathering mushrooms with Sophie in every acre of woods around Zuckau. She knew
them all by name: the honey tuft, the poisonous sulfur tuft, the anise agaric, which liked to grow in a magic circle on beds of pine needles. The cep stood solitary. The word "stink-horn" took on meaning for me. Hopelessly as Sophie had ruined her eyes reading revolutionary books, she could identify any mushroom at a glance.
Later, when she cooked for Pastor Blech, the chief pastor at Saint Mary's, and still later, when she cooked, first enthusiastically, then conspiratorially, for General Rapp, Napoleon's governor, I was successively Blech, the pastor she ran away from, and Rapp, the governor she tried to depose with a dish of special mushrooms.
Sophie could fire with enthusiasm. In the cellar, on every flight of stairs, and in the kitchen she sang "Trois jeunes tambours." Her voice was always in the vanguard: saberthrust, whipcrack freedomthirst deathkiss. As though Dorothea of Montau were trying to discharge her heavenly high pressure on earth. "Ever since Sophie," said the talking Flounder, "the kitchen has been in a turmoil. Always revolution." (And my Ilsebill also has this demanding look.)
The ninth cook inside me was born in the fall of '49, when Sophie Rotzoll, the eighth, died. One might almost suppose she had wanted to pass the banner of revolution on to Lena Stubbe; and it seems equally possible that Lena, who as a young widow ran a public soup kitchen (her husband, an anchor maker, whom she had married when very young, was killed before Paris in the Franco-Prussian War), dished out her soup in silence but harbored secret socialist hopes. But Lena's voice didn't carry. As an agitator she was a failure. She was never really carried away by enthusiasm. For all her intensive reading of Bebel, her spirit never rose above the gray commonplace.
When Lena Stubbe remarried she was already a mature woman; I, like her first husband an anchor maker, was no spring chicken myself, though ten years younger than she, and was, admittedly, a drinker.