Down — that means sleep and geese, priced by the pound.
To every bed its burden.
While she plucked between her stupid knees
and the feathers, as the saying goes, flew,
the ordained power slept downy-softly.
Poultry for whom?
But I blew, kept feathers in suspense.
That is traditional faith;
doubts tarred and feathered.
Not long ago, I found
some quills and
cut them for my use.
First monks, later town clerks,
today secretaries keep the lies flowing.
Fat Gret's ass
was as big as two collective farms. And if you sexual sociologists, deep in worry blubber from counting flies' legs, had
been asked in as witnesses when, as she liked me to do on Wednesdays, I came at her from behind but first, to make it all soft and as wet as wept on, licked her asshole and environs like a goat (hungry for salt), which was easy to do when Fat Gret offered her double treasure for worship, you would have seen the archetype of Christian charity, our partner-oriented fervor; but my Ilsebill — who is sometimes adventurous on Thursdays — has never, no matter how devoutly I get down on my knees to her, licked my ass, because she's afraid her tongue would drop off with her last shred of modesty.
She's much too prim, always worried about disgracing herself. Sexy, yes, but so coy about it. And because she's perpetually forming the word "dignity" with curling lips, she has puritanical lockjaw.
Yet Ilsebill reads books of all sizes in which the overcoming of inhibitions is said to be the first requirement for a free society. Never fear, I'll knock or teach these late-bourgeois refusal mechanisms—"Somehow," she says, "I don't dare, I still don't dare" — out of her, and I'll do it the way it says in her women's lib books, with partner-oriented conflicting-roles games, until on one of these Catholic Fridays — Believe me, holy father! — she and her little tongue will see how nice it is. For it can't be bought and paid for. It's within reach of all. It has nothing to do with class. Old Man Marx didn't know anything about it. It's a foretaste of beauty. As every dog knows. Oh, to sniff at, lick, taste, and smell one another!
But when I say to my Ilsebill, "Tomorrow is Saturday. I'll take a thorough bath, I'll smell of lavender all over," she says, "So what!" Because we've lost the habit. Because we only read about it. Because if we mention it at all we mean it symbolically. Because we've discussed it, chewed the whole thing over too often. Because we don't suspect what expectant rosebud lips an asshole is always making — all week long.
For our playing fields — yours, Ilsebill, and mine — have just the right proportions — no speculator, no concrete-crazed developer can divide up your meadow, no flaming-red party boss can grab my ass away from you (or yours from me). The ass is one thing that ideology is afraid to touch. Can't gets its claws on it. Can't read any idea into it. Therefore disparages it. Only gays are supposed to make use of it. A kick in the ass is nevertheless permissible, linguistically speaking. And with deplorable bad taste the asshole has been transformed into a term of opprobrium. Ass licking is looked down on, though the capitalist developer and the flaming-red party boss lick each other's asses, but without pleasure, for whether officially or unofficially they do it in trousers, their taste running to flannel, fifty percent worsted and fifty percent synthetic fiber.
No, Ilsebill! It's got to be bare. My meadows, your rolling hills. Our fields. I worship it, God's rounded idea. Yes, yes, ever since the partly cloudy Neolithic, when Awa's dimples were still unnumbered, the heavens for me have been festooned with asses. And when Margarete Rusch, the cooking nun, first let her sun rise for the runaway Franciscan monk — for me, in other words — I achieved an unveiled understanding of Saint Francis's hymn: devotion, jubilation, industry. Forget no dimple. Stop to rest beside country lanes. The hills ask to be gently grazed. Deep in dialogue. Entrance and exit exchange greetings. Where does the food go? Who's kissing whom? Insight gained. Soon I will know every bit of you. Ah, Ilsebill, now that you're pregnant and burgeoning all over, you ought, you ought to. . Come on, it's high time, come on! Because it's Sunday and all week we've done nothing but talk around it and discuss the anal phase of infancy much too seriously.
When Fat Gret let a fart because I'd been licking her too meticulously, we both relished the breeze. After all, as usual on Wednesday, we had eaten beans with turnips and peppered pork chops; and anyone who is repelled by his sweetheart's farts has no business talking about love. . All right, laugh. Get that stuffy look off your face. Have a heart. It's funny, isn't it? Let me tell you about white beans and nuns' farts. How they argued about bread and wine and wine and bread, the right order in which to take the Eucharist; a quarrelsome century. Margret, Fat Gret, laughed herself healthy over it.
To cheer my Ilsebill, now in the third month of pregnancy, up a little — but she remained stony-faced and said I was "vulgar" — I had cooked white beans down to a pur£e and served them with roast pork and pepper sauce. We also had Teltow turnips, and the whole meal corresponded to the
peppery menu which, in the spring of 1569, Mother Mar-garete Rusch served up to Abbot Jeschke, Johannes Kostra, the Danzig commandant, and Stanislaw Karnkowski, bishop of Leslau at the Oliva Monastery. The three dignitaries had met to straighten out some senseless discrepancies in a sheaf of Counter Reformation decrees. For though King Sigismund Augustus used the "Statuta Karnkowiana" as an instrument of the Counter Reformation, their actual purpose was to curtail the economic power of the city of Danzig, and incidentally to incite the politically impotent guilds against the patrician council. And because this idea, embedded in bloodcurdling antiheresy provisions, had sprung not from the heads of Jeschke, Kostra, and Karnkowski but from that of the cooking nun, I told my Ilsebill the story of Margarete Rusch; for Fat Gret is still imprisoned inside me, and now at last I mean to set her free.
In the year 1498 after the incarnation of our Lord, when, thanks to an Arab helmsman's knowledge of the winds and ocean currents, the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama finally sighted land and put ashore in Calicut, thus opening the sea route to India with all its still-tangled skein of consequences, a girl child was born in the Wicker Bastion, the erstwhile Pomorshian settlement, by then a part of the Old City of Danzig, to the blacksmith Peter Rusch by his wife, Kristin, who then promptly died. The little girl was born on Saint Martin's Day, for which reason whole flocks of geese later grew cold under Fat Gret's plucking fingers.
Beginning at the age of twelve, Margret stood in the kitchen of Saint Bridget's Convent in the Old City, cleaning turnips, scaling carp, husking rye, and cutting tripe into finger-long strips, for the Flounder had advised blacksmith Rusch (or, in my then time-phase, me) to put this superfluous girl into a convent as soon as possible; for which reason the Women's Tribunal has asked the overbearing flatfish questions that he will answer elsewhere. In any case Margarete became a novice at the age of sixteen and took her solemn vows in the very year when, with sturdy hammer, the monk Luther nailed up his theses.
As a full-fledged nun who soon presided over the convent kitchen, Margret (known at an early age as Fat Gret) began
to cook outside the house as soon as the widely ramified affairs of the Brigittine nuns called for her kitchen diplomacy. When Jakob Hegge preached Lutheranism on the Hagels-berg, she, at the foot of the hill, cooked Counter Reformation tripe and fish soups for the crowds that gathered there. And when I, the runaway Franciscan monk, became her kitchen boy and, when she so pleased, bed companion, we cooked for that archenemy of the guilds, Mayor Eberhard Ferber, sometimes in his patrician house on Long Street, sometimes on his Island farm, and sometimes in his starosty at Dirschau, where he took refuge, for so hated was Ferber by the coopers, drapers, dockers, and butchers that he often had to flee the city.