That's how it was in those days, as retrospective statistics have calculated: everywhere, except among the Outer City tanners and the peasant serfs. Teensy-weensy Martha or Anna, pocket-sized Gundel. Stine, Trude, Lovise. So many of my children by Dorothea, Agnes, Amanda, died on me, I had so much suffering behind me, that when I gave our baby its sterile bottle or opened the popping vacuum jars with their precisely measured contents, or when I dissolved instant semolina in boiled water and saw the well-digested results-how well fed they smelled! — in the disposable diapers, I became positively euphoric and sang paeans of praise to the Central European baby-food industry, though well I knew that our child and millions of other sweet little babies eat so much every day as to deprive the infants of southern Asia of the barest essentials. And worse: it is now known that our vitamin-enriched powdered milk is positively fatal to many infants in the less industrialized countries, so that the advertising of a leading concern that is trying to develop a market for powdered milk in Africa can only be termed criminal. (Undermining the African mother's faith in her own milk.) For which reason the Flounder, when infant nutrition was being discussed at the Women's Tribunal, could say with profound, mellifluous concern, "At this point, my dear ladies, I would recommend a little female solidarity. If you must persist in your disposable wastefulness, then at least do something to help your sisters in Africa, for instance, by boycotting the handsomely packaged products of a certain company. After all, you wouldn't want to solve the problem of overpopulation by increasing infant mortality. Or would you?"
But the female public protested loudly; all were unwilling to give up their powdered milk. The Revolutionary Advisory Council came out strongly in favor of prepared baby foods in vacuum-sealed jars. Was the Flounder nuts? Advising mothers of all people to cut down on consumption! Espe-
daily working mothers. Anything that lightened the housework was a force for emancipation. Solidarity, yes, but some things you can't do without. They'd send telegrams of solidarity to Africa. Of course what the company was doing there was unspeakable. (And a resolution was voted by an overwhelming majority, given weight by the signatures of the public, and cabled out into the world. .)
Soon after the death of her child, Agnes wanted another. But not by painter Moller, who had refused her the wet nurse.
When Martin Opitz, who also called himself von Bober-feld, entered the Royal Polish service and took up lodgings in Danzig, he was not yet forty, while painter Moller was over sixty. Soon after his arrival the poet fell in love with a girl of patrician family who could recite Latin poems but was already engaged to the son of a local merchant. Agnes, who, thanks to the good offices of Pastor Niclassius, was now cooking for Opitz as well, obliterated the silly thing — her name was Ursula — with her mute, barefooted presence. And yet he sighed for Ursula and probably couched his sighs in Latin verses.
More subterfuges. He never made it — not for any length of time. Agnes was the first woman who regularly slept with him. His father, the butcher, after the early death of his first wife, took a second, third, and fourth, and got all four with child after child. So there wasn't much left for his son to do. Just little flirtations, mostly at one court or another. One or two intrigues with burgher women in Breslau, bringing pecuniary consequences, whereupon he took flight again. When he was a young tutor in the service of Prince Bethlen Gabor, a Dacian servant girl seems to have horrified him by really showing him how it was done. Even the war, which lasted all his life, didn't give him what it gave every Swedish cavalryman (Ensign Axel). Always over books and parchment, alone and ugly on straw pallets or in bed: his receding chin. Nothing but poems and epistles of thanks to successive princes. And so, when little Ursula was not to be had, Opitz, weary and drained, fell to Agnes Kurbiella and her apron.
Agnes, who had plenty, didn't want to have anything, but only to give. For three years she sheltered him with her
warmth. But assiduously as he wrote his agent's letters hither and thither for double pay, all he was able to put on paper in the way of poetry was rhetorical flourishes and inky speculations; even the new quill pens that Agnes brought him when she had plucked a goose for Moller were no help, whereas I can always think of something to say about my Ilsebill; she has only to state her wishes, as in the fairy tale. Ilsebill wants this. Ilsebill wants that.
Luckily, I've been able to write her into her sickbed. (I can do that.) Behind my back the door to the next room has been left ajar. From there her cough comes to me, demanding to be heard and put down in line drawings. Choker knots and softly outlined nests (around the shoe) form settlements on my paper. The rubbing lotion contains 60 mg of camphor. The wind is blowing from the west. And light heating oil is getting more and more expensive. (Let her cough this thing out of her, damn it!) For even in weather like this, Agnes turns up and brings herself along.
We and the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, said the Flounder, were a classical triangle — all corners taken. So it's conceivable-or true-that as Anton Moller I painted the pregnant, by me impregnated, Agnes, although (somewhat later) I was the Opitz who tried in vain-shortly before my miserable death-to transpose the same Agnes into Baroque language. After her child had wasted away, I was obliged, as the Flounder ordered, to prove my mettle: between unsuccessful stanzas I knocked Agnes up without asking who she was thinking about at the time; it seems his name was Axel.
The painter, the poet. They didn't like each other. Opitz thought Moller crude; Opitz, in Moller's eyes, was all spindly-legged theory. But Agnes had to think up a menu for both of them, dishes good for Opitz's delicate stomach and the drinker's swollen liver. I wanted to be painter and poet at once; casually wielding red chalk, pedantically counting iambic measures.
What drew us to Agnes was her allegorical emptiness. You could read whatever you pleased into her; she admitted of any meaning. (Her features were indistinct; she could look more or less like.)
And every day there was millet cooked in milk, sweetened with honey, and made wholesome for both of them with hazelnuts. Agnes knew what was equally inoffensive to the innards of poet and painter: broth made from beef bones with spinach-stuffed dough pouches floating in it, breasts of chicken with green peas, or beer soups seasoned with nutmeg and cinnamon.
But Moller demanded, insisted on, clamored for smoked bacon and fat mutton rinds. And Opitz nibbled caraway seeds. He became addicted to them, for too many caraway seeds act as a drug: hopeful daydreams, in which the vale of tears became livable, a place inhabited by nymphs and Muses singing verses that had never been written, where peace and peace alone was always victorious.
Agnes let them both make wrecks of themselves, the one with his rich food, the other with his addiction to caraway seeds, until the one's stomach turned inside out and the other's liver swelled to the size of a fist. Then her diet fare was again in demand: boiled fish that fell off the bone, millet cooked in milk, buckwheat cakes. The drunken Moller, the peevish Opitz: carefully as Agnes cooked for both of them, they looked for a very different taste, and found it with deadly certainty.
The door is still holding. But when it crashes, you will bring me war or make me look for coins with your question "Got two mark-pieces for a slot machine?" But then the door opened gently and Agnes came in, bent over me and my scribble-scrabble, and said play words.
I can think of nothing better than to endure this fear or hope and — while the door still holds — draw my little men. Here I can be found, though never entirely. And you, too, come in only briefly, and you're gone before you've come. Once upon a time and long ago, earlier still and earlier than early, you came and stayed for a short lifetime; neither of us knows why.