Just when Vasco da Gama the Portuguese viceroy was dying of plague, yellow fever, or Dominican poison in Cochin in southern India, Ferber was deposed as mayor. Led by blacksmith Rusch, Hegge's increasing following had risen up and taken over the city government, though for only a short time. The following year King Sigismund of Poland marched against the city with eight thousand men and occupied it without a fight. The "Statuta Sigismundi" were posted. Ferber was restored to power. A trial was held.
Before her father was executed, the abbess Margret Rusch cooked his favorite dish for him; then she moved in with the embittered Eberhard Ferber, who, no sooner reinstated as mayor, retired to his next-to-last dwelling place in Dirschau. Three years later — Fat Gret was still cooking for him — he died, leaving several pieces of Old City real estate, his sheep farm in Praust, and various properties on the Island to her convent. Altogether, the cooking nun Margret added so much to the wealth of the Brigittine order with her free-ranging outside cookery that she soon gained the stature of a true abbess, both respected and feared, even though she was widely reputed to keep a houseful of bedworthy kitchen boys and to be an out-and-out slut.
Because I was always with her. She took me in — me or one of the little Franciscan monks who kept running away from Holy Trinity — buried me in her flesh, and resurrected me, acclimated me to the warmth of the stable, covered me with her fat like a meat pasty, kept me as contented as a well-fed baby, and in quickly changing seasons wore me out. Whether the Reformers were on top in the outside world
or whether the Dominican Counter Reformation was turning every poor sinner's words inside out, Margret's box bed preserved a sultry vapor that the Flounder, addressing the Women's Tribunal, characterized as "strictly pagan."
"If it is permissible," he said, "to call a revolution cozy, then one may say that the revolutionary doings in the bed of Abbess Margarete Rusch took place in cozily warmed areas of freedom." And I, too, proved to my Ilsebill that in those days only nuns could possibly pass for emancipated women, free from irksome conjugal duties, free from the state of childishness induced by male domination, never made fools of by fashion, always protected by sisterly solidarity based on their betrothal to the heavenly bridegroom, deluded by no earthly love, secure through economic power, feared even by the Dominicans, always cheerful and well informed. Mother Rusch was an enlightened woman and, in addition, so fat that her pregnancies went almost unnoticed.
She bore two daughters. While traveling, on the road, as it were. Some barn was always available for her confinements. But never was I permitted to speak of fatherhood, father's duties, or father's rights. "There's only one father," she said, breaking into a shattering laugh, "and that's our sweet Lord, who's supposed to be up there in heaven."
And she didn't care a bit if strait-laced Protestants or Catholics thought the two girls, both of whom were brought up in the Wicker Bastion by Fat Gret's sisters, showed a resemblance sometimes to Preacher Hegge, sometimes to the patrician Ferber, and sometimes even to a no-good Franciscan monk. As far as she was concerned, fathers were all ridiculous. She called the married women in their bourgeois stables "dressed-up mares" who had to hold still for their stallions, whereas she could make use of her little pouch as she saw fit. Moreover, Fat Gret did not hold still, but jounced so heavily on her soon exhausted bed companion that she often knocked my wind out. She really crushed me. When it was over, I lay there as white as chalk, like a corpse. She had to rub me with vinegar water to revive me.
She may well have stopped the autocratic Eberhard Fer-ber's breath the same way, smothered the old goat under her bed weight. For she was not content just to cook for her sue-
cession of males. She also had to have her fun, her play and entertainment, all of which may strike a puritanical mind as obscene.
And so Abbess Margarete Rusch solved the bitterly earnest question of the century, the question of how to serve up the bread and wine, the Lord's Supper, in her own way, to wit, bedwise, by acrobatically moving her twat into the vertical and offering it as a chalice, which was then filled with red wine. Bread demanded to be dipped. Or consecrated wafers. Here the question-is this really flesh and blood, or only its sign and symbol-did not arise. The paper quarrel of the theologians became irrelevant. Ambiguities were over and done with. Never did I take Communion more devoutly. How simple Margret made the oblation and transubstantia-tion for me. With what childlike faith I immersed myself in the great mystery. Luckily no Dominican eye ever spied on our bed masses.
Ah, if only this home custom had become practical religion for papists and Lutherans, Mennonites and Calvinists! But, torn by discord, they cut one another down. They let their quarrel over the right table arrangements cost them long-drawn-out military campaigns, pillage, rapine, and the devastation of lovely countrysides. But to this day they have gone on fighting and gouging one another, living without mutual affection, and with morose morality condemning Fat Gret's chalice as sinful. Yet Margret was pious. Even for the most fleeting pleasure she thanked God with a prayer.
Two years after the Peace of Augsburg, when His Polish Majesty Sigismund Augustus also proved willing at least to tolerate Communion in both kinds, the majority of the burghers of Danzig decided in favor of Luther's table arrangements, and from then on quarreled only with the Calvinists and Mennonites. Thereupon, after ruling for twenty-seven years, Abbess Rusch declared herself weary of office and asked her sisters of the Brigittine Order for leave to retire as abbess and once again to make herself useful outside the convent as a cooking nun.
So much humility was interpreted as contrition. The truth is that the old woman, vigorous within her fat, wished to regain her old political mobility. From then on she was always a step ahead of the vicissitudes of history. Under the
veil of Catholicism she worked for the Protestant cause. She was no longer interested in the Eucharist but still and once again in the rights that were denied the guilds. After all, she had grown up in the Wicker Bastion. What had cost her rebellious father, blacksmith Peter Rusch, his head — democratic grumbling and incendiary speeches in every guildhall — now became the daughter's stock in trade, but she spoke softly, over simmered cod liver, hasenpfeffer, and thrushes, which she barded with bacon and stuffed with juniper berries.
In 1567, when Stanislaw Karnkowski became bishop of Leslau and under his aegis a second Counter Reformation began looking for appropriate table arrangements, the elderly nun was cooking for Abbot Jeschke, whose monastery at Oliva had always been a place of contemplative reaction. There, after milky fish soup, Fat Gret served either hasenpfeffer or beef hearts stuffed with prunes or peppered pork roast with white beans and turnips, which last dish induced eminently political farts in the conspiring clerics.
The cooking nun believed in the liberating power of the fart. With what unabashed gusto she let her intestinal winds blow! Whether cooking for friend or foe — in the midst of her mumbled table talk, she would let loose a merry succession of farts, usually setting a full stop or following a question as its answer, but sometimes also parenthetically. Echoes of receding storms. Solemnly spaced gun salutes. Dry broadsides. Or mingled with her laughter, because nature had given her cheerful disposition a twofold, double-mouthed expression: as once when she brought King Stephen Batory the key of the besieged city as the stuffing of a sheep's head stuffed into a pig's head, and subsequently made the king's startled dignity laugh and fart so hard that His Polish Majesty and retinue were carried away, as though dissolved in laughter and soothed by their nether winds. The king had no choice but to impose mild conditions on the city and turn a blind eye to the cooking nun's offense. For it was Margret who on February 15, 1577, incited the lower trades to rebel and (very much her father's daughter) put them up to setting the Oliva Monastery on fire.