But no wood was piled for her. Not Dorothea and not Margarete Rusch, but gentle Agnes was destined to burn. True, I prefer to believe that soon after the plague carried me away, Agnes, still in the bloom of her youth, died in childbirth, but the Flounder has testified that she didn't die until fifty years later, by then an old hag, and moreover that she went up in flames.
No, I'm not going to tell you how the wind suddenly died down, a cloud sprang a leak, rain fell, and a miracle almost came to pass. As we all know, the Women's Tribunal accepted the Flounder's version, according to which Agnes
Kurbiella, long after the poet Opitz died of the plague, went running through the streets talking dementedly to Ursel, her likewise demented daughter, and quoting the dead poet's works in both Latin and German, until, early in the summer of 1689, she met another poet, Quirinus Kuhlmann, the so-called Cool Monarch.
Kuhlmann was also introduced to the Women's Tribunal in affidavits by Baroque specialists. The Flounder called him a precursor of Expressionism. But the prosecution had no use for his eccentric genius. Kuhlmann, it was pointed out, had unscrupulously fed Agnes Kurbiella's confusion with his speculations, day after day indoctrinating her with his hubris. He, too, had exploited her as a Muse. He had manifested dangerous phantasms and gone to his death, drawing the old woman with him.
The accusing feminists were only too pleased to hear how Agnes Kurbiella fell a victim to male exaltation, how she followed Kuhlmann from Danzig via Riga across the vastnesses of Russia to Moscow, how she became his handmaiden and served as his medium at seances of the Boehmen-ist community, how on trial and under torture she still went on mumbling Opitzian rhymes and Kuhlmannian verbal cascades, how she was burned along with her mad Ursel while Kuhlmann and two other male heretics were burned at nearby stakes for blasphemy and political conspiracy against the tsar's rule. The statistics show that men, too, were acceptable to the flames. And yet, in the opinion of the Women's Tribunal, the Inquisition and its witch trials were typical instruments of male domination, calculated to crush women's persistent strivings for freedom. The prosecutor's exact words were "The so-called witch was a male fiction, at once a wish dream and a projection of fear."
Maybe so. Yet Agnes, who did not want freedom, was nevertheless sent to the flames as a witch, whereas Dorothea of Montau and Margarete Rusch, both of whom strove for freedom and took liberties, were not elevated on pyres. It was the slight poetic confusion of her brain that equipped Agnes for activity as a Muse; only persons hostile or indifferent to the Muses called Agnes crazy, possessed, bewitched, Belial-ridden. Even her little dill garden was under suspicion, and that as early as Moller's, as Opitz's day. They had to
protect the poor child from Catholics and Lutherans alike, for when it came to burning witches, the zealots of both religions joined forces in less time than it takes to pile up faggots and logs.
And even Amanda Woyke, who knew recipes, and definitely Sophie Rotzoll, who was familiar with every variety of mushroom, would have met the Christian gentlemen's requirements for fuel. But by Amanda's day and Sophie's, the revolutionary housecleaners had thought up other victims-so-called counterrevolutionaries, who were guillotined in the name of reason.
The Flounder, who seemed to be hovering in mid-water above his bed of sand, said to his judges: "As a fish whose tasty relatives are stewed and fried, I know whereof I speak when the purifying power of fire is under discussion. Thank your stars, my dear ladies, that nowadays witchcraft is more likely to be subsidized than punished. Modern man longs for a telekinetic dimension. But what if you had lived in one of those time-phases, my dear ladies? I don't know! I don't knowl When I let my eyes rest on you and look you over as you sit there on your dais, judging me — so much concentrated earnestness, so much power-generating intensity — I hear a spiritistic rustling. Now forceful, now soothing glances strike my pebbly skin. And yet, each face taken individually has a beauty of its own. Eleven defiant egos. Fleeting, twisted smiles. Twinkling connivance — at what? Eleven heads of hair — mown to stubble, Afro-crinkled, or witchily wind-blown and easily ignited. In short, I see you all burning. The esteemed presiding judge, the chorus of associate judges, you, too, my dear Ms. Paasch, I see you all penned into knackers' carts, forced into nettle shirts, while the medieval populace gape, the monks mumble their Latin, and the children pick their noses. On expertly constructed pyres, I see you, too, beautiful Ms. Simoneit, and next to you Ms. Witzlaff in all the splendor of the flesh, first swathed in smoke, then clad in flames. Those whispered screams! That clustered ecstasy! Elevenfold desire stilled and freedom at last. Even Ms. von Carnow, my court-appointed defense counsel, so well meaning and yet so helpless, would like to go up in poetic flames,
though she's as innocent as the dill in kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella's garden. I see you all burning, the whole lot of you. And the majority of the Revolutionary Advisory Council are fit for the fire, too. But not Ms. Huntscha — not my prosecutor, who shows too sisterly a resemblance to the Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau. She in her supernatural beauty and pallor was too mystically world-removed, too emaciated to require such physical purification as poor Agnes. . "
(When, after a brief shower of rain, she finally took fire, nothing political could be gleaned from her mumblings, only bland-diet poetry; whereupon Axel Ludstrom, the Swedish ambassador to the tsar's court, sent instruction to Stockholm to close the Kurbiella file.)
What about you, Ilsebill? Would you prefer birchwood to the beech logs customary in those days? I'd get you ready for the fire. I'd be the gentle Dominican father Hyazind, who came from Cracow with his special instruments in tool chests with silver fittings. I'd approach you, closer and closer, with the flexible iron rods. Carefully, forgetting no limb, I'd make your ball joints jump out of the sockets where they were imprisoned; they'd be beside themselves. So much skin, from the shoulders down, all along the blond back. Ah, the thoughts! Uttered at last. My embarrassing questions cloaked in kindness. Your naked confession. For it's to loosen your tongue that I've come from far away. This is something we want to hear. Softly murmured. Read from the lips curled in pain: Yes, I did. Yes, several times. No, not alone. With another Ilsebill. And later a third one joined us in the fog. We did. Yes, at night, but every day, too. At the new moon and on Saint John's Day. With our menstrual blood. Made little marks on objects and name plates. On the abutments of bridges and industrial installations, in the field where they're planning to put up a nuclear plant, on freshly programmed computers and several typewriters. Yes, we made the mark on yours, too. Inside, under the "I" key. .
When at last my Ilsebill burned, but to the very end refused to relinquish her beauty, I wept under my hood. I was sorry, Flounder, to have given her that freedom.
Immortal
Having in all directions.
pushed open the promised windows,
I was certain that once
dead I would see nothing.
But gazing over the flat,
neatly settled countryside
and across the street into open windows
with old men and women looking out of them,
and at the partly cloudy sky,
I saw starlings in the pears,
schoolchildren the bus had brought,
the savings-bank building,
and the church with its clock:
it was half past one.
An answer came to my complaint: such afterlife was usual and would soon stop.
Already my old neighbors are greeting me. They claim to have really seen me from all those windows. And there, overloaded, comes Ilsebill, back from her shopping. Tomorrow is Sunday.