And when the little girls, pale, blue, and gnarled with hunger, cranky old women in arms-just born, barely weaned, and Lovise would have been wanting to walk soon — were laid in a box, nailed shut, and shoveled over, Amanda complained aloud,
sustained a tone that was something more than a whimper, a trembling wail,
a long-threaded sound somewhere between euhhh and euiihh, yet admitting of sentences (such things as people say in grief): More than a body can bear; The devil himself could weep; Who'll speak of justice now; How can the sweet Lord stand it; I'll scream and yell forever; There is no sweet Lord, no matter what the Book says. .
Three whole bright-blustery days in March she screamed,
till, finely sifted, her plaint reduced itself to eeeee.
(And in other cottages
in Zuckau, Ramkau, Kokoschken,
the mourners screamed eeeee. .)
Nobody paid attention.
As if nothing were wrong, the elders burst into bud.
Buckwheat and oats filled out.
Plenty of plums to dry.
Gathering mushrooms was worthwhile.
And leading a cow on a rope, the twirly man came back
from winter quarters, this time as usual invalided.
Since Zorndorf he'd had two fingers less,
after Torgau he'd come home one-eyed, laughing.
Now after Hochkirch there was a scar on his crown
that made him dopier than ever.
But all the same, because she lay still,
he readied his tool
to make her — nothing to it — baby girls
who were named Lisbeth, Annchen, Martha, and Ernestine,
and lived.
So that the sweet Lord was good for a prayer again:
He must have had His reasons for so much suffering.
He had His cross to bear forever and ever.
He rewarded toil
and had so much love, heavenly flour bins full of it. .
There was lots of kingdom and power in it,
later a handy rhyme for potato flower—
and just a grain of hope
that Stine Trude Lovise were angels by now, and
getting plenty to eat.
Ole Fritz
Patata, potato, tartuffel, pomme de terre, spud. . Raleigh or Drake is supposed to have brought them to Europe. But since they come from Peru, it must actually have been Spanish contemporaries of the abbess Margarete Rusch. Shakespeare must have known them as objects of religious awe, for he makes Falstaff say, "Let the skie raine Potatoes!" — though here it needs to be pointed out that Shakespeare was thinking of the sweet potato, a delicacy that was already being sold for high prices when our common potato, like all exotic Solanaceae (tomato, eggplant, et cetera), was still under suspicion, put to the question by the Inquisition, condemned, burned at the stake, and even despised as cattle feed.
First to plant them were the starving Irish. Parmentier
gave them to France, whereupon Queen Marie Antoinette decked herself out with potato blossoms. Count Rumford taught the Bavarians to grow them. And who helped us Prussians?
Today we eat mealy boiled potatoes, grated raw potatoes, parsley potatoes, or plain potatoes in their jackets with cottage cheese. We know steamed potatoes with onions or in mustard sauce, buttered potatoes, potatoes au gratin, mashed potatoes, potatoes boiled in milk, baked in aluminum foil, old potatoes, new potatoes. Or potatoes in green sauce; or mashed potatoes with poached eggs. Or Thuringia, Vogtland, or Henneberg potato dumplings in cream sauce, with bread crumbs. Or sprinkled with cheese in flameproof-glass pannikins, or, as the Nostiz brothers made them, dotted with crayfish butter and baked. Or (in wartime) potato marzipan, potato cake, potato pudding. Or potato schnapps. Or my Amanda's mutton with potatoes, when (on holidays) she browned flank of mutton in kidney fat, added quartered potatoes, filled the kettle with water, simmered until the broth was soaked up, and only then moistened with dark beer. Or her potato soup, which the domestics of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau spooned up evening after evening, as the sky poured forth its ink and the forest moved closer and closer.
That was after the second partition of Poland. The farm was expected to become different in every way, more orderly, more profitable, in short, Prussian. The mismanaged conventual estate (founded in 1217 by Mestwina's daughter Damroka) had been secularized and turned into a state farm. This was termed progress, and progress had to be inspected and supervised — by Him in person.
When He came to Zuckau, it was raining. It had been raining for days, so that the potatoes had to be got out of the ground. The royal farm hands chopped, dug, gathered the potatoes in baskets, carried the dripping baskets on their backs to the edge of the field — sad giant crows, among whom common crows sought their share, while the king's clay-encrusted, springless four-horse carriage, though ready for retirement and already a legend, was nevertheless approaching. This time it came on the highway from Karthaus, limped
over potholes, turned off to the right, stumbled along the cart track leading to Zuckau, where the farm hands were stretching their limbs in the rain-soaked fields as the royal vehicle appeared between the birches, vanished in a sunken lane, reappeared looking bigger-an event! — and stopped in a chain of mud puddles. Behind the steaming horses the right-hand door of the carriage was opened from within, and, preceded by his hat, which everyone knew, feared, and saluted, the old king, Frederick II, Fredericus Rex, His Majesty, Ole Fritz, with his cane hung on his coat, as he would later be painted in oils, alit and plodded into the potato field; his aide-de-camp and I, August Romeike, veteran of his wars and therefore his inspector, plodded behind him.
As everywhere, he came to Zuckau unannounced. He kept his visits secret to avoid petitions, garlands, maids of honor, and the representatives of the provincial estates. He didn't care for fuss and bother. He had his legend to live up to. And so, though racked with gout, he plodded across the fields with his cane, enjoined the farm hands with short barking noises not to gape but to go on digging and piling, and did not stop until he reached the baskets full of spuds. His first words: observations about the sandy soil of Kashubia, which he compared to the soil of eastern Pomerania. Instructive stuff, gleaned from informative treatises on crop rotation and the benefits of clover that had been translated (for him) into French from the English and Dutch. The aide-decamp took notes in the rain. I, the inspector, was obliged to reel off yields per acre. He wanted to hear precise figures that would demonstrate the increasing trade in seed potatoes. When I didn't know how many gulden-pfennigs more the Dutch varieties (among them the ancestors of the present-day "bintje") cost at the Hanover market, he hit me with his cane. That, too, became an anecdote, though later on a different reason was given for the royal beating.
Then, glistening under the Kashubian rain, he asked for a certain woman who had set the new Prussian provinces an example with her pioneer work in potato culture, whereby she had demonstrated not only the hunger-stilling power of the potato but its tastiness as well.
I led him to Amanda. She was sitting as usual on the stove bench in the farm kitchen, peeling potatoes for the
daily soup. Not in the least surprised, she said, "So here's Ole Fritz after all."
By then she had invented home-fried potatoes. Potato pancakes were also Amanda's invention. And she seems to have made the first potato salad, into which she mixed cucumber, onions, finely chopped lovage, and sunflower oil — food for the gods. She imparted diversity to the daily potato, lending it more and more new tastes with caraway seed, dill, mustard seed, marjoram, and parsley. But fundamentally Amanda's potato soup with bacon rinds remained true to itself, for she kept peeling and adding day after day; the pot was never empty.