When, immediately after the solemn Peace, Abbot Jeschke returned to the burned monastery to oversee the
corvee of the peasants who were rebuilding it, he insisted— much as he knew she hated him — that Sister Margret take charge of his kitchen. Never had she cooked under duress. For her cookery had always been a labor of love. For three years she clothed her vengeance in stewed breast of beef, stuffed goose, sour aspics, or suckling pig, which she stuffed with shredded cabbage, apples, and raisins, never sparing the pepper.
What that man managed to shovel in. How long and hard his jaws labored. Why he couldn't leave anything over. How many had to go hungry to keep him belching-full. At last, by the summer of the year 1581, she had fattened Abbot Kaspar Jeschke to death. He died at table. More precisely: his sleek monk's head, with cheeks that had glowed with Catholic power for decades, fell into a bowl of the very dish that a lifetime before Fat Gret had cooked for her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch: peppered tripe. The cooking nun had forgotten nothing. And the Flounder also thinks that though stuffing an abbot to death is rather a drastic use to make of the culinary art, it was quite in keeping with the life style of the deceased.
Margarete Rusch died in 1585 from swallowing a pike bone, in the presence of King Stephen Batory, who by the recent peace treaty had confirmed not only the city of Danzig's rights to carry on trade and collect customs duties but the privileges of the patricians as well. Once again the guilds, the lower trades, and the sailors came off empty-handed. Patricians and courtiers feasted for days. More than a fishbone must have stuck in the aged nun's craw.
All of a sudden, when only leftovers remained of the roast pork with beans and turnips, my Ilsebill, with the stubborn persistence typical of pregnant women, wanted to know what, apart from the fact that she was born in 1498, the year of the landing in Calicut, Fat Gret had to do with Vasco da Gama. When I tried to answer with nunnish tales — how Abbess Margarete Rusch had traded her elder daughter to a Portuguese spice merchant for annual shipments of pepper from the Malabar Coast — Ilsebill got up from the table and said, "Aren't you clever! Or did the Flounder think that up? Trading her daughter for pepper! It's just too typical."
Delay
A pinch of Redeemer salt. Another delay when my question — which century are we playing now? — was answered kitchenwise: when the price of pepper fell. .
Nine times she sneezed over the bowl
where lay the hare giblets in their broth.
She refused to remember
that I was her kitchen boy.
Darkly she gazed at the fly in the beer
and wanted (no more delay)
to be rid of me no matter what. .
Soups in which the grit wins out.
When she praised hunger as if it were something to eat,
when she laughed quintessentially and not about turnips,
when at the kitchen table
she persuaded Death with dried peas
to grant a delay. .
And so she sits inside me and writes her story. .
The Flounder's ideas about nunnish life
Possibly because I don't rightly know under whose name I was connected with the abbess Margarete Rusch, and because I remember my neolithic time-phase rather more clearly than the confused circumstances of the Reformation period, the Flounder's statements before the Women's Tribunal have been termed contradictory. He claims to have advised me first as little Margret's father, then as the patrician Ferber, and later as the sleek abbot Jeschke. (He also hinted at far-reaching political responsibilities in other parts of the world. Allegedly he wanted to bring the price of pepper down, and for that reason sent a certain Vasco da Gama to India by the sea route.) But the Flounder left no one in doubt about his
support of Margarete. Three days after the little girl's birth, blacksmith Rusch called him out of the stormy November sea: What was he to do with the brat? The mother had died of fever. Had to be fed goat's milk. Warm, direct from the teat. A plump little lass she'd be. O Lord, O Lord, would the Flounder please tell him what to do.
The blacksmith's desperation will be understood more readily if we recall that Peter Rusch belonged not to any guild but to the lower trades. The Flounder, in any case, introduced me to the Tribunal as a social phenomenon of the Middle Ages, a victim of the self-seeking policies of the guilds. "This Peter Rusch," he declared, "belonged to the lumpen proletariat of his day. Admitted to no guildhall, despised by the guild members among the journeymen, though they had no more political rights than he did and were just as much at the mercy of patrician highhandedness, and to top it all he was cursed with seven children. And as if that were not enough, no sooner had his wife, Kristin, given birth to his daughter Margarete than she died on him. And besides, he was in debt. In short, a natural-born rebel. Quick to draw his knife. Not very bright, but unswerving in his quest for justice. A poor devil who wanted my advice."
So this is supposedly who I was. And not the recurring runaway monk, kitchen boy, and bed companion? The Flounder must know. And if Margret hadn't on every posssible occasion reacted to any mention of fathers and fatherhood with scornful farts, I'd gladly have been her father, I'd have been proud of my prodigious daughter, though all she ever gave me was pity and tripe soup. Anyway, the Flounder advised me to leave her with the pious nuns at Saint Bridget's as soon as she was weaned from the goat. He did it to help me. But when questioned in court, he gave other reasons.
"But my esteemed prosecutor and judges, please, please! Mere social sentiment — the desire to help the poor devil-would never have led me to dispense a piece of advice so fraught with consequences. The truth is very different: I wanted to offer the little, but later so lusciously upholstered Margarete the best possible prospect of freedom by sheltering her in a convent. For what would have become of her other-
wise? She'd have had to marry some unguilded boilermaker. Doomed to four walls and child raising, she'd have pined away in the Wicker Bastion. The marriage bed would have given her no sensual pleasure but only a dismal push-push, no sooner begun than over. The usual fate in those days. Yes, women had a rough time of it in the so-called age of the Reformation, whether they had to put their pouches at the disposal of Catholic or of Protestant husbands. The only free women were nuns, and possibly the little whores in Pepper-town, because they had organized as efficiently as the nuns; in fact they elected their own abbess — later known disparagingly as 'the madame.' It wasn't the cantankerous married women, kept as they were in a perpetual state of jealousy, who practiced the solidarity which today is rightly demanded at feminist congresses and in feminist pamphlets; no, it was the nuns and whores. Without wishing to meddle in the affairs of the feminist movement, I must ask the High Court, before which I have the honor of being on trial, to concede that an astonishing degree of emancipation prevailed, if not in the brothels of the Middle Ages, then at least in the convents of the Middle Ages. As the career of the nun Margarete Rusch shows, my advice to an ignorant blacksmith gave the female sex access to areas of freedom from which at the present time — let's face it — it is still — or shall we say once again? — barred.