One spring day, much later, when Amanda had grown so deaf that she could no longer hear the potatoes bubbling in the big cook pot, when potato bugs invaded us for the first time, bringing crop failure and a new famine, the cardboard box was empty. While Amanda was telling about earlier famines in comparison with the present one, she threw out little hints which gave us to understand that she had taken the pieces of amber back to the potato fields and dug them in. And true enough, the plague of potato bugs let up for a while.
A good deal has been written about storytelling and narrative style. There are scholars who measure the length of sentences, pin down leitmotifs like butterflies, cultivate word fields, excavate language formations as if they were strata of the earth's crust, and take psychological soundings of subordinate clauses. They are suspicious of all fiction and at pains to expose all tales of the past as escapism, flight from reality. But speaking of my Mestwina's evocations, of
Fat Gret's undammed flow of speech, and of Amanda Woyke's mumblings, I must insist that in every case (for all their reprehensible attachment to the past), the style was determined by work being done in the present.
For example, the act of pounding acorns in a stone mortar imposed its rhythm on Mestwina's delivery and so made her couch her mythical evocations of Awa in succinct, telegraphic sentences. Breathlessly she reported the uprising of the men against the matriarchy: "Spears tipped with iron. Sharp sharp sharp. Light on metal — gives them a kick. The din of their forges. Dance to the jangling of their weapons. Cut holes in air, clouds, prospective enemy. Stand planted on hills. Looking for a target. Awa presents herself: All strike at once. Straight to the heart. Cut her open, disembowel her, divide her up, eat her raw, catch her blood in cup-deep wolf skulls, drink it down! Prove manhood by murdering mother!"
With Margarete Rusch it was very different. Her plucking of geese gave her an airy, feather-light style. "Hmm, I thought, so the fellow thinks he can stick his money-grubbing fingers in my pussy without forking over his twelve Scania talers, his stinking herring silver. He takes me for a sow in a pig sty, and that's just what he'll get, I says to myself, the one that was slaughtered yesterday. So I fill her up with hot bricks, dress her in my nightgown. And there she was all ready for him when he hopped into bed with his cock at the ready!"
And on the lips of the goose-plucking Gret, the horror of the young merchant Moritz Ferber when he discovered that he had poured his seed not into the nun's flesh but into a warmed-up sow, became a narrative blowing of feathers. "So he screamed and yelled and broke out in pimples between the legs and jumped out of bed like a bee had stung him. And that wasn't the end of it. He could never quite get his patrician pecker up after that. It just hung its head. So after a while he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, renounced the flesh, and was rewarded for his piety with the fat benefices of Erland bishopric — the sow's bridegroom!"
And potato peeling, that work process interrupted only by the digging out of eyes, also fosters a style, an even flow — interrupted by compassionate exclamations like "It would
break your heart!" — of country tales, stories in which plagues of mice, drought, and hailstorms reduce the peasantry to chewing tree bark, in which pillaging Swedes are always followed by the plague and marauding Poles by cholera, and which always end (provisionally, for Amanda's stories go on and on like potato peeling) with the ultimate triumph over the lifelong hunger of the peasant serfs: "When King Ole Fritz's dragoons brought us a few sacks of potatoes, nobody knew what to do. And I said to myself: Into the ground with them. And when they came up and flowered, but yielded nothing better than bitter little apples, I said to myself: Oh my, oh my, now what? But when the bad weather came in October and the boars came out of the woods in Ramkau and rooted around in the plants, I said to myself and Erna and Stine and Annchen and Lisbeth: Now go look at the spuds. And there were plenty. And they lasted through the winter. And they tasted good, too. And the sweet Lord be praised."
Later on, when Amanda Woyke entered into correspondence with Count Rumford, inventor of the slow-combustion stove and of the poor man's soup that bears his name, a change occurred — not in her style, for she still told all her stories while peeling potatoes, but in her tenses, for now she anticipated the future. She told of giant kitchens that would feed the whole world. From the reality of the farm kitchen she derived a Utopian West Prussian potato soup that would be dispensed the world over. In her giant kitchen there would always be enough. Her pots would always have room for seconds. She would drive hunger from the world. She spoke with loving concern of well-fed "Moors and Mamelukes." Her giant kitchen would be just the thing even for Eskimos and the savages of Tierra del Fuego. And with the earnestness of the technician — here the influence of the inventive Rumford was discernible — she detailed the qualities of the future potato-peeling machine: "Won't be nothing to it. You'll empty a basket like this in no time flat."
But what will become of remember-the-time-when and one-fine-spring-day? Our guests, who had enjoyed Amanda's potato soup until the pot was empty, shared my opinion that
work norms and conveyor belts do not admit of storytelling. Even if Mestwina were semiautomatically packaging wheat flour, even if Fat Gret were employed in a poultry-processing factory, vacuuming the last feathers off scalded, hormone-fed geese while the hooked conveyor belt carried them past, even if Amanda Woyke were alive today, deftly imprisoning (at union scale) uniformly peeled potatoes in tin cans, there wouldn't be time during packaging, vacuuming, canning, to tell the necessary stories in all their length and breadth, not even to relay the latest gossip (and anyway, to whom?).
"That's true!" said Ilsebill. "But we women will never again consent to pound acorns into flour. I prefer to buy my geese already plucked. And the few potatoes we eat are no trouble at all to peel; I can even smoke. You'd like to see us sitting at spinning wheels, wouldn't you? Nostalgic for the treadle sewing machine, aren't you? I guess you're tired; I guess you miss the old stove bench."
At that she fell into a resolute silence. And I wandered off into the next story.
Plaint and prayer of the farm cook Amanda Woyke
When all three of her babies—
their names were Stine Trude Lovise—
died on her because
the stalks had been rotted by rain, battered by hail,
gnawed by drought and mice,
so that nothing was left after threshing,
no millet grained, no gruel stuck to palates,
no porridge was sweetened nor flatbread soured.
Before two March dusks had fallen
they died all three. Also because the goat
had run afoul of a Cossack's knife,
the cow had been led away by foraging Prussians,
no chickens scratched the yard, of the pigeons
nothing remained but pigeon droppings,
and on top of it all the man with the twirly mustache,
who with his tool had made her — nothing to it—
those little babies Stine Trude Lovise
because Amanda spread her legs for him every time,
was gone again for the enlistment bounty
to Saxony, Bohemia, Hochkirch
because the king, the king had called.
So when the three rag dolls
named Stine, Trude, Lovise
went limp in her arms,
Amanda wouldn't believe it
and wouldn't let go.