Slowly the movie house with its challenging smell grew into an empty speech-balloon. I was on the point of leaving, no, taking flight. Then spake the Flounder.
Without modifying his position of repose in his bed of sand, he moved his crooked mouth. "I can't help you, my son. I can't even offer you mild regrets. You have misused all the power I gave you. Instead of turning the rights bestowed upon you to caring, charitable use, you have let hegemony degenerate into repression and power become an end in itself. For centuries I did my best to hush up your defeats, to interpret your wretched failure as progress, to hide your now obvious ruin behind big buildings, drown it out with symphonies, beautify it in panel paintings on a golden background, or talk it away in books, sometimes humorously,
sometimes elegiacally, and sometimes, as a last resort, only intelligently. To prop up your superstructure I have even, in my desire to be helpful, invented gods, from Zeus to Marx. Even in the modern age — which for me is only a second in world history — I am obliged, as long as this all in all entertaining Tribunal goes on, to season your masterful absurdities with wit and squeeze some meaning out of your bankruptcy. That is hard work, my son. Even for the much-invoked Weltgeist, there's not much fun in it. On the other hand, I'm coming more and more to like these ladies who are judging me. It never bores me to listen to Ms. Huntscha, my esteemed prosecutor. In retrospect I recognize — acknowledging my error in this point — Dorothea's solitary greatness. Ah, how she cried, "Flunder, cum oute, ich wol kisse thy snoute." What could she do but get rid of you? What but religious exaltation could have raised her above the monotony of marriage? Another baby, and still another! And what you tell me about your Ilsebill, how she puts you down and shakes you up, I like it, yes, I like it. She's amazing. All that untapped will to power — it gives me food for thought. Give her my regards. No, my erring son, you can't expect any comfort from me. Your account is overdrawn. Slowly, a little late perhaps, I have discovered my daughters."
I sat there for another short while. I probably said something; confessions, promises to reform, the usual male self-pity. But not another word out of the Flounder. He seemed — if that is possible — to be asleep. Groping like someone who walks out in the middle of a film, I left the former movie house and its smell.
Sieglinde said, "At last! Finished shooting the shit? He's a shrewd article, all right. But I'll put him down yet."
I revealed nothing but called the attention of my friend Siggie (honestly, Ilsebill, it's not a relationship to be taken seriously) to the absence of security measures. "There's every reason for your Tribunal to go on. You haven't half exhausted the case of Dorothea of Montau. But what will you do if somebody walks off with the Flounder?"
As she was double-locking the former movie house from outside, Sieglinde promised to do something about it. "You men think of everything," she said.
Like at the movies
A woman who strokes her hair
or leafs quickly through her loves
and can't remember.
She'd like to be a redhead for a while
or slightly dead or play a minor part
in some other film.
Now she disintegrates into fabrics and cutouts.
A woman's leg taken by itself.
She doesn't want to be — but to be made — happy.
She wants to know what he's thinking now.
And she wants to cut the other woman,
if there is one, right out of the film: snippety-snip.
The action proceeds: body damage, rain,
suspicion in the trunk.
Weekends leave imprints of men's shorts.
Hairy — hairless. Limbs limbs limbs.
A slap in the face promises something that later sounds real.
Now she wants to get dressed again, but first be born out of foam and stop smelling outlandish. Skinny from eating too much yogurt, Ilsebill weeps in the shower.
Scania herring
The dignitaries had invited themselves. On master sword-maker Albrecht Slichting's return home from a pilgrimage of more than three years with his wife, Dorothea, and his last remaining daughter, Gertrud, their marriage relapsed into a daily domestic hell, and members of the congregation found more and more grounds for complaint: Dorothea's spells of ecstasy during Mass were becoming too frequent and tumultuous, and that wasn't all. She was making a mock-
ery of the Eucharist with her giggling and guffawing. The uses to which she put the word Jesus were ambiguous, to say the least. She wore wreaths of henbane on Candlemas. She collected the scabs and pus of the lepers in little bottles. She had a cross-eyed look, and if she wasn't possessed she had probably made a pact with Belial, for how else was one to account for the feverish twitching of her limbs and her hours-long spells of rigidity.
At first these accusations were uttered in private, but then they began to be aired more and more openly. Everyone sympathized with her old and ailing husband. It seemed that the once prosperous swordmaker was faced with destitution, for his wife had squandered his hard-earned fortune on frivolous handouts to riffraff from God knows where. His apprentices kept running out on him. Unable to sleep at night, the bewitched woman ran about the streets. She had been heard screaming for the Lord Jesus in a tone described as more lascivious than devout. Though her Dominican confessor spoke appeasingly of hard trials imposed on her by marks of divine favor, it was widely held that Father Christian Roze, who was also a doctor of canon law, ought finally to initiate proceedings against her. Sin was shamelessly masquerading as penance. Small wonder, with such goings-on, that the plague hung on and on. And despite last year's potential harvest the prices of rye, barley, and oats were going up again.
Urged not only by the burghers of the Old City but also by his congregation at Saint Mary's in the Charter City, Roze first spoke to the Dominicans, then consulted Abbot Johannes Marienwerder and Walrabe von Scharfenberg, the district commander of the Teutonic Knights. The dignitaries decided to pay a visit to the Old City swordmaker, who enjoyed the esteem of the patrician council since, far from participating in the insurrectionary folly of the guilds, he had exerted a moderating influence.
Because political events (the marriage of the Polish Jadwiga to the Lithuanian Jagello) required the commander to absent himself for a short while, the visit, though announced in March, could not take place until the end of April. Though the four dignitaries came on a Thursday, and though it was well past Lent, Dorothea — after they had
questioned her and listened to her husband — served them Scania herring, which were to be had cheap at the fish market, because the city of Danzig had a Vitte, or trading post, in Falsterbo in the Scania district of Sweden.
The Dominican Nikolaus wore cowl and cord. Abbot Johannes Marienwerder came in travel dress. The massive commander Walrabe wore the white mantle of the order with the black Teutonic cross and did not take it off until he sat down at table. Roze's ample gown and velvet cap made him look more like a scholar than a priest.
Before the meal, the swordmaker confirmed the gentlemen in their knowledge that when a ninth child had been born, after three had been carried away by the plague and five more had died from one cause or another, he, Albrecht Slichting, on his wife's demand and in the presence of the Dominican prior, had pledged himself in writing never again to share the bed of his wife, Dorothea, whereupon she had been granted the special privilege of partaking once weekly of the Lord's body.
After a detailed report on their pilgrimage of the preceding year to Aachen and to Einsiedeln in Switzerland — he pushed back his woolen shirt to show them a scar on his right shoulder as evidence of an attack by bandits — Slichting testified to, and Roze noted, Dorothea's desire for a separation; she had wished to remain in Einsiedeln and formally sever relations with her husband and eight-year-old daughter, so as to be free for, and wholly available to, the Lord Jesus. Despite the widespread disturbances before and after the Battle of Sempach, she had thought Einsiedeln a "forecourt of paradise." In him, on the other hand, the rasping dialect and self-righteous bickering of the Swiss had instilled a gnawing homesickness. He could never have borne the thought of dying and being buried in the mountains. And so, when she kept demanding her freedom day in, day out, he had decided to give in. After signing a statement, to which his age — he was sixty-six at the time — lent credibility, that their life together was without sin, they had declared their willingness to separate. But before the chapel altar, when they were asked to confirm, he his wish to be separated and Dorothea her renunciation of the eight-year-old Gertrud, he,