She should just go on peeling, was the king's order, and he made himself at home on the footstool beside the potato basket. He was dripping wet, and a puddle formed at his feet. Amanda's daughter Ernestine lit tallow candles, for it was already getting dark in the farm kitchen. Amanda wore her spectacles while peeling potatoes. First Ole Fritz examined the peelings for thickness and apparently found the waste minimal. Then, while his clothes dripped and Amanda's daughters, Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine, gaped, he tilted his old man's head and listened, for, setting her knife in motion, Amanda began to tell of former days, when there had been nothing but too little millet and buckwheat, and her stories were as long and circular as the potato peelings that curled over her knife blade.
First the old hunger stories. She lamented the death from starvation of her babies Stine Trude Lovise. After listing means of combating potato bugs (amber dug into the fields, et cetera) and claiming that rubbed-in potato flour helped to keep cholera away, she addressed the king directly: good that he'd finally come, too bad about the rain, but that was part of it, would he like a pair of dry socks? Then she came to the point. He'd done right, she said, in confiscating the run-down convent — she herself as a girl had been made to embroider chasubles with tulip patterns, and there'd only been four, five nuns left, no use to anybody, and they'd have died soon anyway — and turning it into a decent state farm; but what she couldn't understand was why Ole Fritz had let the inspector, the dope, take the last bit of land the
peasants owned as well as the fields they had leased from the convent, all of which had lain fallow ever since and were overgrown with nettles. So naturally the peasants weren't going to work for nothing; they'd gone off to Elbing and Danzig and waited for the administration and this prize dope that called himself an inspector to get some sense into their heads. So then (but not before) they'd taken her advice— for she, Amanda, knew what was wrong — and divided up the land around the cottages and given it to the serfs at a low rental in return for a written promise to grow only potatoes on their lots, same as on the state farm, which they tilled for nothing. And indeed they'd grown nothing but spuds for the last four harvests, except for a bit of oats and barley for porridge. But unfortunately this lout, who had the gall to call himself an inspector — here she pointed her potato knife at me — had thought up a rotten scheme, and Ole Fritz had better hear about it, because they were doing it all in his name. The inspector and the rest of the so-called farm administration, especially the old colonel in his armchair who couldn't get warm even in August, had decided to join all the lots together again, because that way the land could be administered more efficiently. That's why the peasants had been expressly forbidden to grow anything on their own. That's why there were no more self-supporting peasants in Zuckau, but only bonded serfs. And to make matters worse, hereditary serfs. Surely that couldn't have been what Ole Fritz wanted. Yes, she cooked for the whole lot of them. Not just for the Polish day laborers and brickmakers. For the children, too, and the old folks and the old colonel in his armchair. Seventy-eight mouths. Which also had its advantages, because, as Ole Fritz must know, a big kitchen like that saved fuel; she could reckon up the exact amount of peat consumed and the exact saving in cordwood, if he wanted her to.
The king listened and signaled his aide-de-camp, by glancing at him in his own special way, to make a note of certain remarks relating to the savings at the farm kitchen and the possibilities of community kitchens in general. Amanda's method of making potato flour was recorded, and the aide also put his pen to work when Amanda made a laughingstock of me (and even more of the king) by referring
to "the inspector's carcass" as a picture book in which all the battles the king had fought for his glory were inscribed in the form of scars. For in addition to the eye he had lost at Kolin, the inspector had contributed a finger or two on either hand to the treasury of Prussian history, with the result that, no longer able to pick his nose and meditate, he was getting stupider than ever, for which reason he tormented the poor and made dopey speeches. He could distill potato schnapps for his cronies, and that was about all he was good for.
Then Amanda spoke again of hailstorms and plagues of mice and told again how three out of seven of her children — all of whom Romeike had pumped into her quick-quick between glorious battles, when she was still a stupid girl-had died on her and the Lord had shown no mercy. Because in those days there'd been no spuds, just too little millet and not enough buckwheat.
Finally, when the basket was almost empty and the potato peelings formed a pile as jumbled as my cerebellum, when Amanda's daughter Lisbeth (begotten after the Battle of Burkersdorf) had cut the washed potatoes into the big, gently boiling kettle on the kitchen stove, when Annchen (begotten after the Battle of Leuthen), now pregnant by an itinerant schnapps dealer with the future Sophie Rotzoll, began to fry chopped onions glassy in beef fat, and Marthchen (begotten after Hochkirch) rubbed marjoram off its stems into the soup, while Ernestine (begotten between the capitulation of Saxony at Pirna and the Battle of Kolin) scrubbed the long farm-hands' table, when finally and meanwhile the king's clothes had dried, for he was sitting close to the stove, Amanda called on Ole Fritz to fight no battles but potato battles from then on. She mapped out a country of the future, extending from the March of Brandenburg through Pomer-ania and Kashubia to Masuria, all planted with potatoes and promising from harvest to harvest to supply community kitchens after Amanda's heart: "There won't be any more hunger then. Everybody will be full, and the sweet Lord will love Ole Fritz." (If Amanda had known more than the know-it-alls of her day thought they knew, she would have talked to the king about carbohydrates, protein, vitamins ABC, and about the minerals sodium, potassium, calcium,
phosphorus, and iron, all of which are contained in the potato.)
It is not true, as was later bruited about in anecdotes, that the old king wept when the farm cook told him he had fought enough bloody battles and he should finally conquer hunger. It is true, however, that after the last potato had been peeled, diced, and dropped into the big soup kettle, she commiserated with him over his loveless childhood: "and nobody to pet and mother the poor little tyke." With an all-understanding glance she appraised the drenched king, now drying in her kitchen. With genuine tenderness she called him "my little Ole Fritz" and "my little tyke," for Amanda was a good head taller than His Shrunken Majesty.
A king who kept taking snuff, as though in response to an order from within. With dripping, watery eyes he sat listening to her warmhearted words of cheer. We heard her whisper to him as to a child, "You'll feel better soon. Don't you worry. Come on, Ole Fritz, you'll get some nice hot soup. It's good. It'll cheer you up."
For a good Kashubian hour (which in terms of normal time is more than an hour and a half) she mothered him as the soup kettle bubbled. She even removed a few snuff spots from his coat with cold malt-coffee. Maybe he dozed off for a while as she was chopping parsley, toward the end. The old cottagers along the walls and in the adjoining feed kitchen whispered among themselves, aware that this was a historical hour. Each was holding his spoon. And with their tin spoons they knocked softly on the wood of the kitchen table. The soup basins were ready on the long farm-hands' table, seven dishes to a bowl, one bowl to every seven farm hands.
Then the king spooned up Amanda's potato soup with all of us — for at nightfall the hands had come in from the fields. A dish of his own was set before him. He sat beside Amanda, a prematurely aged man who trembled and splattered himself with soup. From time to time he transformed his reddened, dripping eyes into big blue king's eyes (recorded in later portraits). Since everybody slurped, his slurping attracted no attention.