She took charge of the strike fund and tried to guard it against my depredations. She endured my blows, and she comforted me when I was bowed with remorse because I had beaten her again. Lena survived me, for in 1914, when I was
sent to East Prussia with the Landsturm, she was widowed a second time.
After that she did nothing but dish out soup: barley, cabbage, pea, and potato soups. In soup kitchens, in settlement houses, in field kitchens during the Spanish-flu winter of 1917, then at the Workers' Aid. When the Nazis came in with their Winter Aid and one-dish Sundays, she was as old as the hills and still active with the soup ladle.
As a boy — back again and still driven by curiosity — I saw Lena. Her white hair, parted in the middle. Her special way of dishing out soup. A grave woman who seemed to practice compassion as a trade. The Flounder thinks Lena Stubbe was basically apolitical, except for her "Proletarian Cook Book," which circulated in manuscript after the abrogation of Bismarck's Socialist Laws but never found a publisher.
"You see," said the Flounder, "that might have brought about a change of consciousness and created something new. True, there were any number of 'bourgeois' * cook books at the time, but not a single proletarian one. That's why the working class, impoverished or not, went in for bourgeois cookery. Before you 'invent' a tenth, let alone an eleventh cook, why don't you quote from the posthumous papers of Lena Stubbe? You're a Social Democrat, aren't you?"
The tenth and eleventh cooks inside me are still fuzzy of outline, because I came to know them both too well. Only their names are present on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: I lost Billy (whose real name was Sibylle) in the sixties, on an Ascension Day, which is celebrated with great hullabaloo in Berlin and elsewhere as Father's Day; Maria, who works at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (formerly the Schichau Shipyard in Danzig), is a relative of mine.
I admit it: Billy and Maria are pressing to get out. But since the Flounder advises me to observe chronological order and since I have so many cooks inside me, I shall take the liberty — especially as my present Ilsebill is kind of urging me — of making Awa's three breasts more palpable before taking up the Father's Day celebration — exclusively a men's affair — that was held in June 1963 in Grunewald, in Tegel
• Burgerliche Kiiche (literally "bourgeois cookery"): "simple home cooking."
— TRANS.
Forest, in Spandau, in Britz, and on the shores of the Wann-see. A man clogged with so much past who finally sees a chance of relieving his constipation can't help being in a hurry to speak of Mestwina's amber necklace, even if the uprising of the shipyard workers in the Polish seaports, as recorded by the world press in December 1970, ought to be closer to him.
Old yarns. The story of millet. What did the peasant serf have left to eat? According to what menu did Fat Gret fatten conventual abbots for the slaughter? What happened when the price of pepper fell? Rumford soup for the poor. How the deadly amanita gave promise of becoming political. When the invention of pea sausage gave the Prussian army new strength. Why the proletariat was drawn to bourgeois cookery. What it means to go hungry. "But perhaps," said the Flounder didactically out of his crooked mouth, "history can teach us what role women played in historical events, in the triumph of the potato, for instance."
Awa
And if I were faced with three breasts
and were not divided between the one and the other tit
and if I were not double because of the usual split
and did not have to choose between
and were never again confronted by an either/or
and bore the twin no grudge,
and harbored no other wish. .
But I have only another choice
and am attached to another set of tits.
I envy the twin.
My other wish is as usual split.
Even whole, I am only half and half.
My choice always falls in between.
Only in pottery (vaguely dated) does Awa (supposedly) exist: the goddess with the triune font,
one of which (always the third) knows
what the first promises and the second withholds.
Who expunged you, making us poor? Who said: Two are enough? Diet and rationing ever since.
How the Flounder was caught
No, no, Ilsebill. Of course I'm not going to tell you that phony fairy tale all over again. Of course I'm going to write the other truth that Philipp Otto Runge took down, even if I have to pick it word for word out of the ashes. For the old woman's additional babblings into the painter's ear in the summer of 1805 were burned under the full moon between woodland pond and deer meadow. It was done in defense of the patriarchal order. Which explains why the Grimm brothers only threw one Runge transcript—"The Fisherman and His Wife" — on the fairy-tale market. The fisherman's wife Ilsebill has been proverbial ever since: a quarrelsome bitch who keeps wanting to have, to possess, to command more and more. And the Flounder the fisherman catches and sets free has to keep on delivering: the larger cottage, the stone house, the palace royal, the might of empire, the Holy See. In the end Ilsebill wants God's power to make the sun rise and set, whereupon the greedy woman and her good-natured husband are punished and sent back to their wretched hovel, their "pisspot," to live. Really, an insatiable virago. Can't ever get enough. Always wants something more. That's the Ilsebill of the story.
My Ilsebill is the living refutation, which I hereby make known. And even the Flounder thought it was high time to publish the original version of his legend, to rehabilitate all Ilsebills, and to confute the misogynistic propaganda tale that he himself had so treacherously disseminated. That's right. Pulling no punches. Nothing but the truth. Believe me, dearest, there's no point in starting a
fight. You're right, right as usual. Before we even start fighting, you win.
It was toward the end of the Stone Age. A day unnumbered. We hadn't begun yet to make lines and notches. When we saw the moon lose weight or put on fat, our only thought was fear. No prefigured event happened on time. No dates. Never did anyone or anything come too late.
On a timeless, partly cloudy day, I caught the Flounder. In the place where the river Vistulla mingles in a constantly shifting bed with the open sea, I had set out my basket traps in hope of eels. We had no nets. And baited hooks hadn't come in yet. As far back as I can think — the last ice age sets a limit to my memory — we hunted fish in the arms of the river, first with sharpened branches, later with bow and arrow: bass, pike, perch, eels, lampreys, and, on their way down the river, salmon. There where the Baltic Sea laved wandering dunes, we speared the flatfish that like to lie bedded in the sand at the bottom of the warm, shallow water: turbot, sole, flounder.
It was only after Awa taught us to plait baskets from willow withes that chance helped us to discover that baskets could also serve as fish traps. An idea seldom came to us men. It was Awa — always Awa — who sank a basket full of gnawed elk bones in the rushes by the bank of a tributary that was later called the Radune and much later still the Radaune, so that the water might soak away the last fibers and bits of sinew; for Awa used elk and reindeer bones as kitchen utensils and for ritual purposes.
When after sufficient time we hauled the basket out of the river, several eels barely escaped, but along with some small fry, five arm-long customers remained in the wicker-work, lashing and thrashing amid the smooth bones. The operation was repeated. Improvements were made. Awa invented the fish trap, just as exactly two centuries later she developed the first fishhooks from the wishbones of swamp birds. According to her instructions, and under her supervision, which seemed to have been imposed on us by fate, we plaited those baskets tapered on the open end, to which later, on our own incentive — for we were not to require