He was also safe from kidnapping (thanks to an alarm system). (Only a short while before, anonymous, presumably male threats had been made known: "They want to swipe him on us. Those male chauvinists stop at nothing.") The Flounder was pleased with the bulletproof-glass box. On request, he generously admitted photographers. Even a television crew was permitted, during a recess, to transmit his protected beauty to millions of tubes. The discussion of the cooking nun continued — almost without a hitch.
When I was her kitchen boy
The gleaming copper pan.
Her early morning voice. Here! I cried. Here!
and ran to her, as often as I tried to run away from her pots.
At Easter I skinned lambs' tongues — Protestant and Catholic — and my sinful soul as well. And when she plucked geese in November, I blew feathers, blew the down, to keep the day in suspense.
She had the dimensions of Saint Mary's Church,
but there was never a mystical draft,
it was never cool inside her.
Ah, her box bed
that smelled of goat's milk
that flies had fallen into.
Captive in her stable smell.
Her womb was a cradle.
When was that?
Under her nun's habit — she was an abbess-time did not stand still, history was enacted, the controversy over flesh and blood and bread and wine was decided without a word. As long as I was her kitchen boy, I was never cold and never ashamed.
Fat Gret: a half pumpkin
laughs and spits out seeds.
I seldom saw her
stir beer into bread soup,
but then she peppered heavily: her grief
had no aftertaste.
Vasco returns
Who else, Flounder! Who else! Blacksmith Rusch, Franciscan monk Stanislaus. Preacher Hegge, rich man Ferber, and Abbot Jeschke. If during the lifetime of the abbess Mar-garete I was one and the other and successively this one and
that one — her father, her kitchen boy, her opponents and victims — why would it not be conceivable that far away from her but wishing to help her by making pepper cheaper, I opened up the sea route to India to Portuguese caravels? Consider that the Sao Rafael dropped anchor off Calicut on March 28, 1498, at which time Kristin Rusch, an inhabitant of the Wicker Bastion, was pregnant with Fat Gret.
At first I merely toyed with this question along with my usual worries (Ilsebill), but then, when I'd started on my trip, it became an obsession. Possibly it was fear of the foreign surroundings that made me look for a role. (How was I to exist in Calcutta without one?) Or cursory readings in Hinduism beguiled me into extending my Eastern European rebirths to the Indian subcontinent; but I didn't want to have been Lord Curzon or Kipling. I finally said to myself: the abbess Margarete Rusch must have had some reason for marrying her elder daughter, Hedwig, to a Portuguese merchant, whose intention of opening a trading post on the Malabar Coast in southern India was explicitly mentioned in the marriage contract. It was decided that with the viceroy's permission the couple would take up residence at Cochin, and from there, as stipulated in the marriage contract, ship suitable amounts of pepper twice a year, for the feasts of Saint Martin and Saint John. The rule dating from the days of Vasco and of Affonso d'Albuquerque that prohibited the entry of Christian women seems to have been relaxed, and the family struck root.
They settled in Cochin, where the merchant Rodrigues d'Evora and his wife, Hedwig, soon made a fortune in the spice trade — pepper, cloves, ginger, and cardamom — but the climate was too much for them. Along with four of their five children, they died before Margret Rusch, who, thanks to the stipulated spice shipments, was able to give Indian spices currency in Danzig and environs: tripe with ginger, millet curry, gingerbread, hare in pepper sauce, pepper with anything and everything. And because my travel schedule included a visit to the seaport town of Cochin in the Indian state of Kerala, I decided to travel unofficially as Vasco da Gama. While still at the Frankfurt airport, though with my seat belt already fastened, I wrote in my sketchbook: Vasco returns.
He arrives in a jumbo jet. Actually all he wants to do is visit the black Kali and see her stick out her red tongue.
Vasco has read all the statistics. Vasco knows what the president of the World Bank thinks about Calcutta. Vasco is supposed to deliver a lecture. As a precaution he has already written it down, in long and short sentences. "By a rough estimate…" says his speech. Well fed, Vasco suffers under the problem of world hunger. After many rebirths, Vasco is now a writer. He is writing a book in which he exists down through the ages: the Stone Age, the Early Christian, High Gothic, Reformation, and Baroque eras, the age of the Enlightenment, et cetera.
Immediately after the takeoff he quotes himself: Somebody ought to write a report on hunger down through the ages, comparing past, present, and future hunger. The famine of 1317, when there was nothing to eat but manna grits. The meat shortage of 1520, when dumplings of many kinds were invented. Hunger in Prussia before the introduction of the potato, and hunger in Bangladesh. The gestures and language of hunger are in need of study. Behavior patterns induced by the anticipation of hunger. Evocation of past famines: the rutabaga winter of 1917; the soggy corn bread of '45. What it really means to be starving. We need a catalogue of hunger quotations, says Vasco to himself, toying listlessly with refrigerated and therefore tasteless Air India pate.
The goddess Kali is looked upon as the female aspect of the god Shiva. Her power destroys. When in the mood she demolishes man's precarious structures. We are living in her era. (Vasco thinks in passing of his wife, Ilsebill, who likes to smash glasses and is a great hand at wishing.)
Even before the fueling stop at Kuwait his eyeglasses get broken. But he is not unprovided for. Because of the humidity in Calcutta, Vasco has bought cotton trousers, shirts, and socks in a tropical-outfitting store in Hamburg. Vasco is supplied with Enterovioform. Vasco has had cholera and yellow-fever shots. Vasco has thrice swallowed colored antityphoid capsules on an empty stomach. Vasco is carrying five pounds of statistics in his luggage. Vasco is the guest of the Indian government. This is known on board the
jumbo jet. Vasco is really someone else and is known under a different name.
He ought to have spoken to his wool-gathering audience in Delhi about Kali and how she sticks out her red tongue, instead of citing roughly estimated figures replete with zeros, standing for protein deficiency, excess population, and mortality rates: abstract quantities worshiped only in footnotes, whereas the unfathomable Kali can be understood everywhere, but especially in Calcutta, on the Hooghly River. She who is hung with garlands of skulls and chopped-off hands. She, the playful, commanding, terrible, Dravidian Kali. (She can also be called Durga, Parvati, Uma, Sati, or Tadma.)
Still aboard the jumbo jet (without sleep), Vasco tries to construct a kinship between the neolithic goddess Awa, remarkable for her three breasts, and Kali, the four-armed strangler. He thinks up an uprising: oppresed by matriarchy, the men in the swamplands of the Vistula estuary band together. In a frenzy of procreative activity (advised by the Flounder), they try to introduce the patriarchate. But Awa wins out and has a hundred and eleven men emasculated with stone axes. From then on she wears their dried penises strung on a chain around her vast pelvis, just as the Indian Kali decks herself out with chopped-off hands and skulls.
The moment he gets there, Vasco starts writing postcards. "Dear Ilsebill, everything here is strange. . " Then, wishing to gain a visual impression of the strange country, he has his glasses made whole.