It was at that Good Friday meal that Mayor Ferber decided to sail against Denmark with six men-of-war. He further decided that on his victorious return he would, with the help of his richly rewarded sailors, crack down on the guilds and on all those town councilors who had been infected
by Lutheranism. Nothing came of his plan. The ships returned in the autumn without spoils. It was announced that the costs of the war would be defrayed by new taxes. That led to unrest. Even the sailors deserted Ferber.
But once she had devised her Good Friday dish, the kitchen nun and later abbess Margarete Rusch stuck to it. Year after year she served her nuns and novices sweet-and-sour lamb's lung with lentils as an appetizer, a custom further encouraged by the fact that from 1529 on, the shepherds, peasants, and fishermen of the Scharpau were obliged to pay rent to the Convent of Saint Bridget, to drive Easter lambs into the convent kitchen, and deliver live eels in baskets.
Chemicals in the rivers have driven them away. Soapy wastes have put reddish spots on their light-colored bellies, dorsal and tail fins, injured the mucus that protects them. The eel traps that can be seen at low tide on both banks of the Elbe are mere reminders. We pay high prices for eels from foreign waters; deep-frozen eels from Scotland are thawed out here and spring miraculously to life.
I know stories, Ilsebilclass="underline" Spitted on branches they lashed my back. They were in all my thoughts. They slithered like me under cows' udders. They're as old as the Flounder.
"Why," says Ilsebill, "shouldn't the children see you kill eels and cut them in pieces? It'll be educational, as long as I don't have to watch."
Buy the eels alive. "No, children, they're really dead. Those are the nerves in each piece. That's what makes them thrash around. The head piece wants to go on living and sucks itself fast."
Now the children know what they're eating. Boiled au bleu in vinegar and rolled in flour, the pieces are sprinkled with sage. A neighbor sharpened the knives yesterday.
The sage bush used to grow in a garden, since destroyed by dredges, near the mouth of the Stor, where they are now building a dam equipped with locks and a big bascule bridge, which is supposed to change the course of the river and seal it off from the Elbe at times of spring tide.
We place piece after piece in hot oil and salt them lightly. There's still a bit of life in them; that's why they wriggle in the pan. Now the sage bush is growing in our garden. Our neighbor who helped with the transplanting is a free-lance
slaughterer and still slaughters on Mondays for the village butcher. He fertilized the bush with hog's blood, muttering meanwhile in his coastal dialect.
The sage-sprinkled pieces are fried over low heat until crisp- they provide an appetizer that should be followed by a light main course. Let's hope the sage bush lives through
the winter.
If anybody wants advice: don't buy big, fat eels; buy
slim ones.
A crosswise incision just below the head is supposed to block off the nerves. We do not pull the skin off. I advise you, in cleaning eels, to watch out for the gall. If harmed, it will spill, make them bitter, depress us, and give us, wheresoever we turn, a fore- and aftertaste of sin and corruption-like Preacher Hegge.
Hegge! His sermons reduced me to silence. Nothing could stop his mouth. Nothing came easier to him than making words. Only Fat Gret could sling such a syllable stew. When he excoriated, "Hell's brew! Sin broth!" she spewed right back, "Inksquirt! Tongue-happy fizzlecock!" To all the ducks, quail, snipe, and wood pigeons she stuffed and spit-roasted she gave the names of angels: Uriel, Ophaniel, Gabriel, Borbiel, Ariel; he, on the other hand, knew a devil s name for every sensual indulgence: there was wheedling Stauffax, bucking Bles, musty Haamiach, tit-loving Asmo-daeus, silvery Mammon, and rutting Beelzebub. And while the cook glorified a wild goose stuffed with prunes and pork sausage as the angel Zedekiel, the goateed Hegge looked upon all pleasure of the palate as Belial's slobber.
At the very start of the Reformation, this Hegge, whom Abbess Rusch generally referred to as "the mangy goat," introduced the language of Protestant pedantry to Danzig. His father, a tailor, had come from the shores of Lake Constance. But his mother was said to have been a native of the Wicker Bastion, brackish, fishy, crooked-mouthed, with scales (or was it dandruff?) in her hair. In Jakob Hegge the garrulous waves of the Baltic mingled with the jibber-jabber of the Lake Constance Swabians. His verbiage made sins of thumb-sucking and even lesser pleasures. The alarmed burghers sent him to Wittenberg for six months. They wanted to be good
Protestants all right, but Hegge's Calvinist zealotry threatened to throw too gray a pall over their life style. The guilds paid for his journey.
In Wittenberg Dr. Luther seems to have advised him to concentrate on the thirst of tormented mankind for consolations firmly grounded in the Bible, and to have his congregation sing hymns: "In Thy mercy grant us peace. . "
But Hegge didn't want to stop ranting and railing. In his heart the runaway Dominican monk was locked in a strange struggle with his paternal inheritance: Swabian cleanup compulsion. For all Luther's urging that he leave the good burghers a few colorful pictures and the familiar scrollwork, he wanted to create bare walls wherever he went. He may have brought a few of Dr. Luther's practical maxims back with him, but as soon as he was preaching again to his swelling congregation in the graveyard of Saint Gertrude's, the expletives burst out of him, swarming like maggots freshly expelled from the Devil's asshole, though Jakob Hegge never doubted for a moment that he was teaching the pure word of God. True, the effect was slightly attenuated by the shade of the graveyard lindens.
So it came about that soon after his return he thundered from the pulpit of Danzig's Saint Mary's Church, which offered plenty of room for a populace intent on murder, "The gray monks wear cords around their waists. Better if they wore them around their necks."
Words easily transposed into action: the next day several Dominicans were dangling from their cords. And Hegge let further phrases escape him, for fume as he might against all images, he knew the power of imagery. "I want," he cried, "to see all these churches cleared and whitewashed." And again the populace took him at his word, cleaned up Saint Mary's, Saint Catherine's, and Saint John's most radically smashed pictures, statues, and carvings, disposed of altars as useless encumbrances, and, still not content, set out to clean up the Old City Church of Saint Bridget.
By way of tranposing one of Hegge's favorite phrases-
To the pillory with him!"_into action, some soapmakers
had already dragged the wooden statue of Saint Nicholas out
of Saint Bridget's, with the intention of placing the brightly
painted saint in the town pillory, when Abbess Margarete
intervened with her twenty-seven nuns and novices. The sisters fought with a will. Saint Nicholas was rescued. Hegge was seized and led away to the nearby Convent of Saint Bridget amid the laughter of his fickle following.
What happened to him during the night I don t know. The usual, I suppose. In the daytime, at all events he was punished in accordance with the rules of Fat Grets kitchen^ Three hundred and eleven little cakes, which she herself had baked from lard dough, were coated with colored frosting and shaped into a Saint Nicholas closely resembling the wood carving, and the preacher was obliged to chew, rechew and swallow him, from the wafer-thin halo to the bread-dough pedestal To top it all, the nuns had filled this pastry Saint Nicholas with peppery blood sausages and tripe sausages, every last one of which had to be eaten.