She herself had had few adventures (and those without traveling). Amanda Woyke, born a serf in 1734 at Zuckau-the-Cloisters when it was still Polish, died in Preussisch-Zuckau, a serf of the state farm, in 1806. But adventures came to her: I with my seven war years, nine scars, and twenty-three battles; the crazy Count Rumford, who couldn't stick it anywhere for long and always had to invent something useful. Bent with gout, the aged king came to Zuckau and (like me, his old campaigner and inspector) listened to her while she peeled potatoes. For Amanda knew that stories can never end, that there will always be a thief running across the fields with the stolen church silver, that tales about the last plague of mice will be told during the next one, that the Premonstratensian nun who died years ago will search the flour bin for her string-mended spectacles forever and ever, that the Swedes or Cossacks will come around time and again with their goatees and mustaches, that calves will always talk on Saint John's Day, and that stories will demand to be told as long as there are plenty of potatoes in the basket.
Mestwina had no potatoes. She told stories while making flour by pounding acorns (previously soaked in lime water) in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle. We stretched our bread dough by mixing in pea and acorn flour.
Margarete Rusch the cooking nun told stories while plucking geese under the beech tree, under the lime tree, in the convent yard, or in the barn. She would pluck nine or eleven geese in one afternoon for a guild banquet.
While pounding, while plucking. Mestwina knew tales about Awa: how Awa brought fire from the sky, how Awa invented the eel trap, how Awa was eaten by her starving children and so became a goddess. Mother Rusch told funny stories: how a merchant's son who lusted for her flesh was
fobbed off with a sow that had been slaughtered the day before; what she stuffed the sheep's head in the pig's head with; or how she had helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall when he was obliged to run away from the Catholics. And other stories that did not feed on myth like Mestwina's, but drew their substance from the earth.
During the winter Mestwina pounded acorns into flour, which she mixed with barley groats and baked into flat-bread. Abbess Rusch plucked geese from Saint Martin's Day to Epiphany. In the spring and summer no stories were told. But after the farm cook Amanda Woyke had succeeded in making potato growing a Prussian virtue, she peeled potatoes all year long. Even in the spring and fall, when potatoes were served unpeeled with whey, she peeled old potatoes for her all-year-round, inexhaustible, at all times warm potato soup; how else could she have filled the farm hands' bellies?
Actually I had no intention of telling stories (to my guests and Ilsebill); I'd been meaning to cite figures and at long last drain the swamps of Kashubian legend with statistics — how many peasants were made serfs after the Thirty Years' War; how much corvee labor was performed in West Prussia before and after the partitions of Poland; at how early an age the children of serfs were put to work; how the mismanaged lands of the Zuckau Convent became profitable under the Prussians; by what devices the East Elbian landowners (and the managers of the state farms as well) flouted the decrees and made a sport of seizing the peasants' lands; how the Prussian landed gentry treated their serfs as chattels, won or lost them at cards, and swapped them at will; why in Holland and Flanders crops were already being rotated and fallow fields sown with clover and rape, while in our region the strict enforcement of the three-field system admitted of no innovation; why rural life was praised in treatises on agronomy and bucolic idylls, though the peasants and their cattle were both reduced to starvation when the millet ran out in March; at what date people began to smoke English tobacco, drink coffee from the colonies, and eat off plates with knives and forks in the cities of Danzig, Thorn, Elbing, and Dirschau, while in the country time stood still on one leg. But for all the figures I line up — showing yield per acre,
amounts of salt tax and other taxes levied, the horrific infant mortality rates, the disastrous exodus from the rural districts, the corresponding increase in uncultivated acreage, and the ravages first of the plague, then of typhoid and cholera-conscientiously as I comb the eighteenth century for facts and figures, they still don't add up to a convincing picture of the times. I am obliged to sit as though spellbound beside Amanda's basket and watch her potato knife as I did then. "In the old days," she said, "there was nothing but grits, and when there warn't no grits, we had nothing at all. Then Ole Fritz sent us this dragoon with potatoes, and we started growing spuds. . "
"I want to know all about it," says Ilsebill. "How much farm produce requisitioned? How much corvee labor? How was the Prussian Chamber of Crown Lands organized?"
But stories live longer than figures. Passed from mouth to mouth. Mestwina's great-granddaughter Hedwig, while weaving baskets, still told of the forced baptism in the river Radaune, just as her great-granddaughter Martha, while baking bricks for Oliva Monastery, told of Saint Adalbert's death, so that after her great-grandchild Damroka had married swordmaker Kunrad Slichting and moved to the city, she was able, over her spinning, to tell her grandchildren how Adalbert had been struck dead, the Pomorshians baptized, the fishermen of the Wicker Bastion compelled to bake bricks for the Cistercian monks, how the wars went on and on and the Prussian raids never stopped, one damn thing after another, but there were miracles, too, that fiery apparition in the marshes, the Mother of God telling stories as she picked cranberries, for which reason, as the Lenten cook Dorothea later told her children while picking over peas, the Parish Church of Saint Mary was built on that very spot. And the story of the Flounder was handed down in the same way. A true story told differently each time. First the fisherman wanted to have him cooked and eat him, but the fisherman's wife, Ilsebill, said, "Let him talk." Then Ilsebill wanted to put him in the pot, but the fisherman wanted to ask him a few more questions. Another time, the Flounder wanted to be stewed-"liberated," as he put it-but the fisherman and his wife kept having more wishes.
And once when Mestwina, while pounding acorns, told the story of the Flounder, she came close to the truth. "That," she said in Pomorshian, "was when Awa lived here and only her word counted. The Sky Wolf was angry, because Awa had stolen the fire from him and made herself powerful. The men were all devoted to her. They all wanted to sacrifice to the Elk Cow, and not one of them to the Wolf. So the old Sky Wolf turned himself into a fish. He looked like a common flounder, but he could talk. One day when a young fisherman threw out his line, the Wolf in the Flounder bit. Lying in the sand, he made himself known as the old wolf god. The fisherman was afraid, so he promised to do whatever the Flounder commanded. Thereupon the Wolf said from inside the Flounder, 'Your Awa stole my fire, and the wolves have had to eat their meat raw ever since. Because Awa has won power over all men with fire, you must give a masculine nature to the fire that people use to cook and warm themselves and bake clay pots. The hard must be melted and grow hard again when it cools.' The fisherman relayed all this to the other men, and they began to break rocks of a special kind. When they heated the lumps of ore in the fire, the iron in them melted and made the men into mighty smiths. Because the Wolf in the Flounder so commanded, they pierced their Awa with their spearheads. And I, too," said Mestwina whenever she pounded acorns to flour in her mortar, "will be killed by a sword forged in fire."
It seems, however, that when the Flounder of Mest-wina's story heard of Awa's death, he turned himself back into a ferocious Wolf and brought war into the land with forged iron. For which reason Amanda Woyke always concluded her stories about Swedes Pandours Cossacks or Polacks with the words "They were like wolves. They wouldn't leave anything m one piece. They even ripped up the children." (But the text of the story that the Flounder communicated to the painter Runge, the poets Arnim and Brentano, and the Grimm brothers had already been established and made ready for the printer, whereas the unpublished storyteller always has the next, entirely different, very latest version in mind.)