While pounding acorns into flour or letting potato peelings grow over their thumbs, Mestwina and Amanda told tales of the old days, but always as if they had been there: how men pierced the body of Awa, the primal mother, with iron spears, how the Swedes raided Kashubia from their base in Putzig and were so intent on searching for silver gulden that they even cut open the bellies of expectant mothers.
Only Margarete Rusch never told of remote times, but always of herself and her life as a nun. How, on April 17, 1526, His Polish Majesty decreed an end to all heresy, occupied the city, closed all the gates, threw all the rebels (including her father, blacksmith Peter Rusch) into the Stock-turm, ordered a trial, and had the "Statuta Sigismundi" posted on the doors of all seven parish churches. How Preacher Hegge, in a lamentable state, sought refuge with the Brigittines, and the nuns had their pleasure of him by turns until Fat Gret took pity, dressed him most laughably in a woman's skirts, dragged him out of the convent in the dead of night under an eighth of a moon, through the sludge and ditchwater and squeaking rats of Paradise Street to the cesspit behind Jacob's Hospital, where the pallets of the dead smoldered day and night, and tried to lift him over the city wall, which is low at that point. But heave and push as she might, Hegge couldn't summon up that last saving burst of vigor. Maybe the sisters at Saint Bridget's had been too hard on him. He hung down the wall like a sack. The Royal Polish watch were making their rounds; already they could be heard approaching from nearby Peppertown, jangling their iron weapons and singing hymns to Our Lady in their drunkenness. Thereupon Fat Gret reached under the skirts of the once so hurried preacher and mangy goat, lifted him up by the thighs, higher, still higher, until his balls were dancing right under her nose-for he had nothing on under his skirts-and cried out, "C'mon, pull, you mangy goat, pull!" He managed to grab the top of the wall, appealed to every devil from Ashmodai to Zadek, and gave vent to two farts and any number of sighs, but not even the approach of the bawling litany of the royal watch sufficed to drive him over. Already the sliver of moon was throwing glints of light on reeling helmets. And then Fat Gret, after calling
him a shit and a flabbycock, concentrated her rage and concern, snapped at the preacher's scrotum, and bit off his left ball.
It's true, Ilsebill. Men are terrified of being bitten that way. There are theories to the effect that all women have a secret wish to bite off the balls of all men-their cocks, too. "Snapping Cunt" and "Penis Envy" are chapter headings in avidly devoured books. The vagina dentalis is a well-known symbol. There are more men running around with one ball than show up in the statistics: emasculated heroes, pipsqueaks, hypersensitive eunuchs, village idiots, and obese tomcats. The female of the praying mantis, who slowly devours her mate right after the sexual act, might well be the heraldic animal of all Ilsebills. How cuttingly they smile, how they show their teeth, eager to nibble something more than carrots. "Fear for your lives, men!" cried the Flounder before the Women's Tribunal. "You're all at their mercy. Since prehistoric times they've been lusting for vengeance. Verily I say unto you: when I questioned the black widow, a rare specimen among the exotic spiders, about her husband, she, dangling from a long thread, spoke of his vices, which, so she said, had consumed him, consumed him entirely. . "
Abbess Margarete Rusch, however, was free from atavistic lust for vengeance or any secret desire to castrate, even though she tried to encourage but perhaps only frightened poor Hegge and other runaway monks with cries such as, "I just feel like biting something off you!" It was only necessity and desperate concern, because the danger was coming closer and closer, that made her bite down and off, whereupon Preacher Hegge was over the wall before you could say Jack Robinson, screaming for all he was worth as he ran through the New City woods. (He ran as far as Greifswald, where he preached again and attracted a new following.)
Sometimes, when Margret told this story while plucking geese, the feathers flew so merrily that she offered a supplement. A moment later, it seems, the Royal Polish watch broke off their litany and addressed her roughly, demanding an explanation for the screams on the other side of the wall.
The drunken louts would have killed her if she hadn't answered. So what could she do but swallow the preacher's left
testicle?
The many geese, incidentally, that Fat Gret had to pluck from Saint Martin's Day to Epiphany were for the guild banquets of the coopers and anchor makers, for the patricians of Saint George's Bank, or for dinners given at the Artushof by the town council in honor of Hanseatic delegations or of the visiting bishops of Gnesen, Frauenburg, or Leslau. And while they lived, she also plucked geese for Ferber's son Konstantin and for Jeschke at the Three Pigs' Heads manor and at Oliva Monastery, and always had stories to tell while doing so. How she filched fifty-three sacks of powder from a Brandenburg gunner, leaving fifty-three sacks of poppy seed in their place — and this the day before the storming of the city. How for the sake of better seasoning she arranged for a musketeer to shoot grainy black pepper, which her daughter had sent from India, into some marinated haunches of venison. How on a bet with the Dominicans she rolled down the Hagelsberg (laughing) in a barrel. And time and again, how with a bold snap of the jaws she helped Preacher Hegge over the city wall.
Amanda Woyke, on the other hand, who never spoke of herself as an outstanding woman casting shadows in all directions, but only spoke of others and their hardships, knew stories that drew threads from earliest times but were nonetheless found as big as walnuts in the potato fields of the Royal Prussian State Farm in Zuckau. For when those fields were plowed (still with wooden plows to which, for lack of oxen, Polish day laborers were harnessed), the plows uncovered pieces of amber so cloudlessly pellucid as to suggest that in the beginning, long before Awa, the Baltic Sea had devoured the Kashubian forests, leaving only these tears of resin, which in time had become amber.
Actually a much later date could have been assigned to these astonishing finds. As the potato peelings piled up imperturbably, Amanda told how, and exactly when, amber had suddenly found its way to the hills of Kashubia. On April 12 of the year 997 after the incarnation of our Lord, a Bohemian executioner avenged the murder of Adalbert,
bishop of Prague, by beheading the Pomorshian fisherwoman Mestwina. His sword stroke not only separated her head from her trunk, but also cut the thin waxed string around Mestwina's neck, whereupon all the threaded pieces of amber fell off and flew inland from the scene of execution, where the Radaune empties into the Mottlau; for when Mestwina asked leave (since the day was drawing to a close) to kneel facing westward, her request aroused no suspicion on the part of the executioner or of the other Christian converters.
Amanda related all this not in the Kashubian tongue, which I did not understand, but in the broad Low German of the coast. It seems that even as the pieces of amber were flying over the hills of the Baltic Ridge, the holes in them had closed of their own accord, out of grief for Mestwina.
Every time Amanda Woyke set forth her historical explanation for the amber found in the potato fields of Zuckau, one of her daughters had to go and get the bright-colored cardboard box which I had brought her filled with Saxon candy after the capitulation at Pirna, and in which the pieces of amber with their insect enclosures now lay bedded on cotton.