out into mindless cosmic space, that commodities would stop terrorizing mankind, that people would lose their fear of being inferior to one another, that from this time on no one would want to possess anyone, that the battle of the sexes, that time-honored drama, would lose its audience, that only tenderness would increase, that there would be no victors in bed, that the very meaning of victory would be forgotten, and that time would no longer be counted; suppose, Ilsebill, that all this were possible, calculable, and demonstrable; suppose computers (superfluous at a later stage) could be programmed to spit out this New Order; suppose the Women's Tribunal gave its wholehearted support to the Flounder who was only yesterday in the dock, and took his fish-mouthed advice; suppose, I repeat, that feminist convents, memorials to the abbess Margarete Rusch, sprang up on every hand, and that you (though more than two months pregnant — by me) were to enter such a convent tomorrow in order to be free, liberated, no longer subjugated or possessed by me or anyone else, would you then — supposing all this came to pass — let me, simply as a man, drop in on you for a little while?
Hasenpfeffer
I ran and ran.
At cross-purposes with the signposts, driven by hunger.
Down the hill of history I ran, slid, rolled,
flattening what was flat to begin with,
a messenger in the wrong direction.
Chewed-over wars,
The Seven and the Thirty,
the Norse hundred I took in my stride.
Stragglers who looked back out of habit
saw me vanish and double back.
And those who wanted to warn me — Magdeburg is burning!
— did not suspect that laughing I would run through the still (but not for long) intact city.
Following no thread but only the incline.
Some, dismembered, put themselves together, some leaped from plague wagons, some from the wheel, and witches, escaped from collapsing pyres, hobbled a bit of the way with me.
Ah, the thirsty reaches of year-long councils,
the hunger for dates,
until, breathless and ravaged, I ran to her.
She lifted the lid off the pot and stirred.
"What's cooking? What's cooking?"
"Hasenpfeffer, what else. I guessed you were coming."
Whoever wants to cook in her footsteps
Something stuffed, for instance. We're living in a state of expectation. Winter refuses to come. The fog moves everything too close, and already a family Christmas threatens.
"Our quarrel," says Ilsebill, "lies tender and juicy on our plates. We like the taste, but we don't know why, or what it's all about."
My last attempt to inject meaning is beef heart stuffed with prunes in beer sauce, such as Mother Rusch cooked for me, the runaway monk, without inquiring about my reasons. But our guests — two architects, a pastor — look for deeper meaning in everything that comes along.
The chambers of the heart lend themselves to stuffing and demand it. Buy the whole heart, slitted on one side only. Remove the clotted blood, cut out the web of sinews, make room, lift off the envelope of fat. Politely our guests let one another finish speaking.
"Soak the prunes in warm water," says Ilsebill, talking in Mother Rusch's footsteps, "but don't pit them." And suppose there were a meaning, what good would it do us?
For browning we use the diced heart fat. "But there has to be a meaning," says the pastor tolerantly, "if only a negative one. How can we be expected to live from hand to mouth, without meaning?"
The heart, which has been stuffed and tied with white string, is browned on all sides over a high flame; then beer
is added to cover. ("That, Reverend, must be obvious to a theologian.")
But the architects keep coming up with their pure Bauhaus theory. Simmer for a good hour, then add nutmeg and pepper, but less than Mother Rusch, in her time-phase and mine, thought expedient. Christmas means two more paid holidays for us. Though no meaning has been supplied, the pastor is desperately cheerful. And sour cream, which is not stirred in but forms meditative little islands: in those days, Ilsebill, when Vasco da Gama in quest of God. .
Maybe the Scandinavian high-pressure zone will bring in a belated winter after all and create meaning. Serve it with boiled potatoes, says Ilsebill, and be sure to warm the plates, because beef fat, like mutton fat, tends to form a film.
There were once forty-seven lambs which, along with eight hundred and sixty-three sheep and innumerable other lambkins, grazed on the Scharpau, a lush marsh owned and managed by Eberhard Ferber the future mayor. The only world these lambs knew was their pasture as far as the flat horizon, seen through the legs of the mother sheep. The taste of these meadows gave no indication of their owner's identity.
Up until 1498, when the sea route to India was discovered and the future abbess Rusch was born, Councilor Anger-miinde owned the Scharpau and gouged his tenant fishermen, peasants, and shepherds; but when, after a long-winded intrigue, the betrothal of Moritz Ferber to the daughter of the patrician Angermunde was called off, even though community of property had been stipulated by contract, the Ferber brothers became bishop of Ermland and mayor of Danzig. Both were pushed by the clergy and under obligation to the nobility.
Neither the sheep on the Scharpau nor the peasant serfs noticed much difference when the Ferber brothers succeeded in forcing the Angermundes out of the Scharpau and the Dirschau starosty. Shearing and slaughtering, rent gouging and corvee labor went on just the same. In 1521, however, though the sheep and peasants continued unprotesting, the trades of the Old City and Charter City, as well as the un-guilded artisans of the Wicker Bastion, rose up against
Ferber and his Church Mafia. Candles were doused in the churches. Stones hit priests and Dominicans. Leaflets smelled of printer's ink. Songs likening drapers and tailors to Ferber's sheep went hobbling through the streets on one-legged rhymes, and angry men stamped out their rhythms in the guildhalls. In addition the zealot Hegge had begun to inveigh against priests and papism.
But on the Scharpau, in Tiegenort, Kalte Herberge, Fischer Babke, and in other spots where peasants were treated worse than sheep, lambs were unsuspectingly and hence peacefully putting on flesh for Easter. In honor of the bishop of Ermland, forty-seven of them were to be slaughtered and roasted over basins filled with glowing charcoal on the country estate of the patrician Ferber family. The kitchen nun of the Brigittine Order had obtained permission from the bishop of Ermland to cook the lungs and hearts of the Easter lambs in sweet-and-sour sauce for Good Friday.
Fat Gret had had no trouble convincing the episcopal palate that the innocent creatures' innards could hardly be characterized as meat, that lamb's lung preserved in all its purity the scent of the thyme that grew on the Scharpau pastures, and that the Lord Jesus Christ would be pleased to see the hearts and lungs of Easter lambs exalted to the rank of Good Friday fare. The kitchen nun, you see, was determined to give a liberal interpretation of the fast rules. "These little lambs," she said, "have never sinned. They've never been bucked by desire. How can you call that meat? Especially the innards." After cooking the whole lungs and halved hearts of the forty-seven lambs in a large kettle with anise and pepper until tender, Fat Gret had let them cool and chopped them up. Next she had boiled a sackful of lentils in the remaining broth but without reducing them to a puree, added vinegar to the chopped innards, bound the mixture with buckwheat flour, and stirred in raisins and prunes— for everything that came out of her kitchen required plenty of peppercorns, raisins, or prunes.