The Fifth Month
What potato flour is good for (and against)
When early in February, the Women's Tribunal took up the case of the farm cook Amanda Woyke, the Flounder immediately launched into a lecture (based as usual on affidavits) about the relations between famines, army movements and epidemics, quoted relevant literature-the plague in London, the plague in Venice-and pointed out that we owe the Decameron and its form, the elaborate frame narrative to the plague in Florence. For the first time, he accepted the help of his court-appointed counsel, Ms. von Carnow, who quoted, "It began, both in men and in women, with lumps in the groin or armpits, varying in number, some attaining the size of a common apple, others that of an egg; they came to be known as buboes." Then the Flounder went on to speak instructively of leprosy, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, and the venereal diseases. Pictures were flashed on the screen.
Ever since 1332, when the plague trickled into Europe
from India by way of Venice, it had been a frequent visitor to my part of the country. In no time at all, it carried off three of my daughters by Dorothea. The maid who left Danzig with me and little Gertrud died in Konitz of spotted pulmonary plague, which is also called the Black Death because the skin takes on a bluish color; whereas my little daughter's skin remained as fair as ever, and she still had a long while to live. But one of her daughters, Birgit, was laid low by the pestilence that traversed the length and breadth of the country with the Hussites — like them a scourge of God.
And when, in 1523, Abbess Margarete Rusch rescued me from Trinity Church (next door to the Franciscan monastery) during the Vespers service, she transferred me just in the nick of time from my little group of officiating monks to the safety of her box bed; for in the following year all the other brothers and the abbot as well were carried off by the bubonic plague.
And when, in the year 1602 after the incarnation of our Lord, the straw death pallets of 16,919 sons and daughters of man were burned in the streets of the rich city of Danzig, the plague took many of the models that I, the town painter, needed for my mural of the Last Judgment, which was to adorn the Artushof of the niggardly patricians and merchants and, both as an admonition and as an offering, serve to ward off the constantly recurring pestilence.
The picture was quite successful, and yet I lost more models twenty years later when the plague returned, stayed a few months, went away, and came back as if it had forgotten something, carrying off nine thousand people the first year and seven thousand the second. Though the Dominican market and the Corpus Christi procession were prohibited, though the beer and brandy cellars were closed, corpses were carted from houses in every street and buried in big holes behind the Hagelsberg.
Later the plague came hesitantly, as though just passing-through, but still later it occupied the city and took my drinking companions and buxom lasses. Only young Agnes was left to serve as my kitchenmaid. She watched me growing older with my drinker's liver until that Opitz fellow came along, and then she cooked for him, too, and got at-
tached to him in other ways as well. In 1639, when the plague caught up with the poet, who was sickly to begin with, I died with him; Agnes left me without so much as looking behind her, as though I, the allegorical painter Moller, had gone to the plague pit with that long-winded, vale-of-tears Opitz. Actually it was senile decay. I still liked my drink, but I'd long been as good as dead. It didn't take any plague to carry me off.
They were all immune. Neither Dorothea, nor Fat Gret, nor Agnes, not a single one of the cooks was stricken by God or his diabolical partner with buboes, black spots, or any of the more recent epidemics. And when, after the second partition of Poland, Amanda Woyke helped to popularize the Prussian potato, she truly believed (and wrote as much to her pen pal, the widely traveled Count Rumford) that in potato flour she had found a safeguard against cholera; for after the Seven Years' War, when several crop failures made starvation universal among the lower classes, and rats, cooked up into emergency soups, sold for a good price, cholera (along with other plagues) ran rampant.
On the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, not only the hired hands, maids, journeymen, cottagers, and old folks, but the administration as well, took the precaution of rubbing their whole bodies with potato flour in accordance with Amanda's instructions. As long as the epidemic lasted, the death wagons made the rounds of Danzig and Dirschau twice a day. There were cases in Karthaus, too. Here in Zuckau the death knell was no busier than usual. We rubbed ourselves with flour and believed in it. Let the city gentlemen smile. Count Rumford, in his ever-so-rational letters, also doubted the medicinal and preventive properties of distillate of potato juice.
Later on, Amanda rubbed in potato flour for everything conceivable, applied it as a poultice, ladled in into sacks that she hung up in the cupboards, and strewed it over thresholds. If the cows didn't want to calve, funneled-in potato flour made them. Daubed on fences, it frightened ghosts away. And when, in accordance with Amanda's prescription, I put a little sack of potato flour under the pillow of my Ilsebill, whose pregnant cantankerousness is dragging into the fifth month, and mixed a level teaspoonful into her powder box, she
treated me most amiably for a whole week, had next to no wishes, was astonishingly free from migraine, and even sang silly songs while loading the dishwasher: "Lott is dead, Lott is dead, and Yul is gonna die soon. . "
Told while pounding acorns, plucking geese, peeling potatoes
A good deal has been written about storytelling. People want to hear the truth. But when truth is told, they say, "Anyway, it's all made up." Or, with a laugh, "What that man won't think up next!"
And after a long story about the effectiveness of old wives' remedies in cases of toothache, lovesickness, constipation, gout, and Asiatic cholera, which I had told while the potato soup was being spooned up to the point of couldn't-eat-another-bite (and even Ilsebill enjoyed it a little), one of the guests said, "Such things can't be invented. A character like that — your farm cook, I mean — wouldn't come to you out of the clear blue. Was there really such a person? Really and truly, I mean? Or is it just something that might have happened?" And Ilsebill said, "Tell that to the Marines. Not to me."
But retold, Amanda's potato peelings are the winding road to do-you-still-remember, late memories of my umbilical cord, which, uncoiled, leads to her as she sits at her kitchen table. Her potato knife knew how the story would go on. I could see by her peelings, and still can, what curling, thinly peeled tale would slide over her thumb: a tale about the hunger of the peasants in the sandy Tuchel Stolp Dirschau region, when earthworms became food and babies crawled back into the earth like worms. Of the seven daughters I had begotten upon her during the war (between campaigns), three died and became abysmally sad stories named Stine Trude Lovise, and all ended up with the sweet Lord in heaven.
For making soup she preferred sprouting winter potatoes. The peelings kept falling, always meaningfully and
always in a different way. And when I decided to leave, to clear out of that dump and go to Saxony or still farther, Amanda, who had wanted to go with me, turned around with her pack basket by the potato-top fires and said, "I'd better stay with the spuds." That way, whenever I came back, each time downer at heel, she could tell me over her potato knife about all the things that had gone to pot in the meantime.