The time it takes. Those are the best hours. When the tough has to be made tender, but can't be hurried. How often Mother Rusch and I, while the billowing tripe kept the kitchen stable-warm, sat at the table pushing checkers over the board, discovering the sea route to India, or catching flies on the smooth-polished table top, and telling each other about the tripe of olden times, when we were Pomor-shian and still heathen. And about older than olden times, when elk cows were the only source of meat.
Later on, after the daughter had cooked her father's last dish of tripe, she cooked for rich coopers at guild banquets, for Hanseatic merchants who cared about nothing but Ore-sund tolls, for fat abbots and King Stephen Batory, who wanted his tripe sour and Polish. Still later Amanda Woyke, in her farm kitchen, cooked up tripe with turnips and potatoes into a soup that she seasoned with lovage. And still later Lena Stubbe taught the patrons of the Danzig-Ohra soup kitchen to enjoy proletarian cabbage soups made with (cut-rate) tripe. And to this very day Maria Kuczorra, canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, makes a thick soup once a week out of kaldauny (tripe).
When you are feeling cold inside — try the walls of the cow's second stomach. When you are sad, cast out by all nature, sad unto death, try tripe, which cheers us and gives meaning to life. Or in the company of witty friends, godless enough to sit in the seat of the scornful, spoon up caraway-seasoned tripe out of deep dishes. Or cooked with tomatoes, Andalusian-style with chickpeas, or a la Portugaise with kidney beans and bacon. Or if love needs an appetizer, precook tripe in white wine, then steam it with diced celery root. On cold, dry days, when the east wind is banging at the window-panes and driving your Ilsebill up the wall, tripe thickened with sour cream and served with potatoes in their jackets will help. Or if we must part, briefly or forever, like the time I was a prisoner in the Stockturm and my daughter served me a last meal of peppered tripe.
Because the execution was to take place next day in the Long Market, in the presence of the king of Poland, of the seated and standing councils, of the aldermen and various prelates and abbots, the abbess of Saint Bridget's had invited the guests to her father's dungeon for an early evening meal. Torches on the walls provided light. A basin of coals under the barred window hole kept the pot of tripe warm. Mar-garete Rusch tasted for seasoning, and after that she didn't touch another mouthful. She said grace, appending a prayer for the condemned blacksmith, then served her father and his guests. But while the men were spooning up their tripe out of earthenware bowls, and while she was pouring black beer into mugs, she spoke. She spoke and her words passed over the autocratic head of the patrician, over the sleek, round head of the abbot, over the bald pate of the executioner, and over her father's head, which he had lowered into his bowl. She spoke without paragraphs or punctuation of any kind.
Margarete Rusch was known for that. When the soup was too hot, while the men were gnawing at goose drumsticks, before fish was served on Friday (mackerel bedded on leeks), but also over tables eaten bare, the abbess spoke to all those she cooked for, with a broad accent that brooked no interruption. She could reel off several stories (or instructive disquisitions) at once without dropping a thread. From
sheep raising on the Island, from the sewage sludge in the Mottlau, she would ramble on to Councilor Angermunde's daughters, but without failing to bring in price increases that the Danes had clapped on Scania herring, to get the latest joke about Preacher Hegge off her chest, to mention the continued interest of the Brigittine nuns in certain Old City real estate; yet with it all she found breath to spin out her favorite topic — larded with pious invocations of all the archangels from Ariel to Zedekiel — namely, the necessity of establishing a pepper depot in Lisbon (with a warehouse on the Malabar Coast of India), spinning out every detail of the commercial law involved.
Regardless of whom she cooked for, her table talk was thrown in — a subliminal mumbling with subplots as intricate as the politics of her time. She spoke as if to herself, but loud enough for the bishop of Leslau, who was dipping his bread into Margarete's hasenpfeffer, or for Councilors Angermunde and Feldstadt, who were shoveling in her beef hock with millet, to detect the purpose behind her chatter, although it was never certain whether Mother Rusch favored the patrician council or the lower trades, whether she was agitating for the Hanseatic League and against the Polish crown, and whether or not she was outwardly Catholic but contaminated through and through with Lutheranism. And yet her table speeches captured all ears with their ambiguities. They put this one in the right, injected that one with doubt, supplied tactical pointers, and in the long run brought benefit only to the Abbey of Saint Bridget, which obtained profitable fishing rights (Lake Ottomin), indentured leases (the Schar-pau, the sheep farms of Schiedlitz and Praust), and property in the Old City (on the Rahm, in Peppertown), and an episcopal letter safeguarding the abbey against Dominican snooping.
And so, when the abbess Margarete Rusch served up the last dish of tripe to her father and his guests, her tongue wagged as usual. That was her way. Always, along with her cookery, she apportioned her subtly balanced interests.
At first the men at the table sat silent. The only sound was the jangling of Peter Rusch's irons, for the blacksmith ate in fetters. And outside the barred window hole, the tower
pigeons clamored. Guzzling and gulping. The executioner's Adam's apple bobbed up and down.
Yet it was not at all certain that the king of Poland had intended so harsh a sentence. Jeschke and Ferber had worked on the judge and on the aldermen. Ferber, who spoke first, admitted as much; law and order, he said, must be manifested visibly. True, the abbot conceded, the blacksmith might have been spared (and merely blinded) if Hegge, that minion of Luther, had not escaped. He had a pretty good idea, said the wealthy Ferber, bending over his tripe in his fur-trimmed broadcloth, who had helped Hegge escape from the blocked-off city. That, said the abbot, all the while plying his spoon, was known to all, though no one could prove it. Executioner Ladewig gave assurance that the scrawny neck of the escaped Dominican would have been far more welcome to him in the morning than that of a blacksmith. When Peter Rusch lifted his head out of the bowl and said, more in resignation than in protest, that he, too, was not unaware who had helped Preacher Hegge, spiritual head of the burghers' uprising, to escape from the beadles of the patrician order, Ferber said harshly, while holding out his bowl to the abbess to refill, "Then you also know whom you can thank for your death sentence." "Yes, indeed," said Jeschke. "Things have come to a pretty pass when a father can expect no mercy from his child. That's what happens when the pulpit is opened up to heresy." Here he threw in a bit of information, namely, that Hegge had apparently escaped to Greifswald and was going right on with his preaching.
Then Mother Rusch laughed so resoundingly, with every ounce of her flesh, that the walls expanded, and, pouring black beer, said casually: Yes, yes, she supposed all these insinuations were aimed at her. And maybe there was some truth in them. For one night in April, after it had pleased His Polish Majesty to occupy the city, she had seen a man in woman's skirts clinging to the town wall, in a place where it's low, not far from Jacob's Gate. Trying to climb over it, but he didn't have the strength. His misery had cried out for help, and she had helped. She had reached under his skirts, and when all her pushing and puffing had gone for nothing, had bitten off his left or right testicle. After that he had literally flown over the wall. Maybe the man had been