I was sitting too far away to hear what the two of them
were mumbling between spoonful and spoonful. Supposedly he complained to Amanda of the Prussian landed gentry, who weren't carrying out his edicts. At the very least, he is supposed to have said, serfdom should not be hereditary. They should stop grabbing the peasants' lands. How could you keep an army in decent shape when the country people were treated like cattle? For Prussia had many enemies and needed to be always in arms, always on its guard.
In reality — as Amanda told us later while peeling potatoes, and also wrote to her pen pal, Rumford — Ole Fritz merely wanted the recipe for her potato soup, which was wholesome, he said, and soothed his gouty bones, though he wished it could have been peppered to his taste. That couldn't be done. The farm kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau was without pepper, either crushed or in grains. Amanda seasoned her food with mustard seed and caraway seed, and with herbs such as marjoram or parsley. (Of course sausage can be boiled with the soup or bits of fried bacon stirred in. Sometimes Amanda cooked carrots in the soup, or leeks and celery for seasoning. In the winter she put in dried mushrooms, or a few handfuls of greenies and morels.)
When the king rode away in his springless carriage, it was still raining. I, Inspector Romeike, was given no snuffbox. Amanda found no ducats in her apron. No hand was laid on the heads of daughters Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine. No chorale was sung by the still-drenched farm hands. No spontaneous edict did away with serfdom. No miracle of enlightenment occurred under absolute rule. Nevertheless, the date of the historic encounter was handed down by the aide-de-camp. On October 16, 1778, immediately after the king's departure from rain-drenched Zuckau, an edict was promulgated declaring Amanda Woyke's potato soup to be the king's mainstay, whereupon it became a universal stand-by far beyond the confines of West Prussia.
And because the case of Amanda Woyke was taken up at carnival time, the Women's Tribunal, instead of the usual Women's Mardi Gras, staged a special women's celebration in costumes of Amanda Woyke's day, and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb, who might well have directed a farm kitchen, cooked Amanda's potato soup in her pots, which were more accustomed to Czech seasonings. Everybody, in-
eluding the whole Revolutionary Advisory Council and even the court-appointed defense counsel, was invited to the Osslieb tavern, rechristened "Ilsebill's Barn" for the occasion. Not we men, of course. It seemed that Helga Paasch dressed up as Ole Fritz. Ruth Simoneit came as August Romeike. Ms. Witzlaff wore a wreath of marjoram and parsley. Naturally Therese Osslieb was done up in potato color as Amanda. And after the soup, the women seem to have danced the polka with one another.
Speaking off the weather
All of a sudden nobody wants the right of way. Where are we going, anyway, and what's the hurry? It's only in the rear — but where is the rear? — that they're still pushing.
Is it the right thing to prevent those many people in distant places who are starving but otherwise attract little attention from starving? The question is often asked in conversations. Nature — the Third Program will tell you as much-will find a way out.
Be realistic.
There's so much to be done at home.
All these broken marriages.
Systems decreeing that two times two is four.
In a pinch something about the civil-service law.
At day's end we note with indignation that the weather forecast was wrong, too.
How letters were quoted in court
I found them in the bright-colored cardboard box which, along with other loot, I had brought home filled with Saxon
sweets after the capitulation of Pima. Later the box contained pieces of amber from the sandy fields of Kashubia. And later still, after the amber had been dug back into the fields to combat a plague of potato bugs, Amanda Woyke put Count Rumford's letters into the box and laid her spectacles on top of them. Then she died, while I was in Tuchel on a tour of inspection.
The first letter was written in Munich on October 4, 1784. The last is dated Paris, September 12, 1806. Up to the summer of 1792 all the letters are signed "Your sincere friend, Benjamin Thompson"; thereafter, having been made a count of the Holy Roman Empire, he signed "Sincerely, Count Rumford."
In all I found twenty-nine letters in Amanda's cardboard box. And since exactly twenty-nine letters signed by Amanda in purple ink were discovered among the papers of Rum-ford's daughter Sally after her death, we may assume that not one thought was lost, especially as the letters connect up perfectly, each relating to the last. In the revolutionary year 1789, when Rumford (still under the name of Benjamin Thompson) wrote from Munich, giving a detailed account of the newly laid-out English Gardens and of the light-hearted atmosphere at the opening ceremonies, Amanda inquired in her answer how big the gardens were, and whether the soil was rich or clayey, and the ensuing letter cites the figure of 612 acres of unfilled land. "Good pasturage," Thompson wrote. "Here, apart from the public park, we shall breed bovines from Holstein, Flanders, and Switzerland on a model farm, thus improving the now wretched quality of Bavarian livestock and setting the whole world a veterinary example."
After my death as Romeike the correspondence was lost and has never come to light. No biography of Count Rumford mentions Amanda Woyke. And out of jealousy or stupidity, Sally Thompson also helped to suppress her father's exchange of ideas with a Kashubian cook, though Sally cites in her memoirs certain ideas her father imparted to Amanda, such as "registration forms to be filed with the police will help us to keep track of foreign visitors."
All this, Ilsebill, must now be revised, for the lost cor-
respondence has been found. In Amsterdam, where everything comes to light. A secondhand-book dealer unearthed it. At the very start of the trial, the Flounder made inquiries. (He has his agents, you know.) As a result, quotations from letters played a crucial role throughout the deliberations on the case of Amanda Woyke. I was mentioned only marginally, although, on the Flounder's advice, I had perpetuated serfdom on all the state farms under my supervision by interpreting the king's edicts and the liberalized provincial law in my own ingenious way, abolished hereditary serfdom only in rare cases, and preferred to issue new regulations that restored it in its older form. In short, I had been a hardhearted inspector, hated throughout Prussia. Even Amanda had died a serf.
The Flounder admitted in court that he had used me as an instrument of reaction. The East Elbian rural populations, he maintained, were not ripe for reforms; considering themselves members of a big family, the serfs felt sheltered, secure, and hence relatively happy. The Polish day laborers were a lot worse off, except in the harvest season, when if nothing else they had enough to eat in Zuckau and elsewhere. And the Tribunal could hardly deny that despite the lack of freedom characteristic of her times, the farm cook Amanda Woyke had been capable of grandiose ideas, which to be sure found their public expression in Munich, London, or Paris, that out of naive affection she had made use of a certain Benjamin Thompson as their channel. He, the Flounder, so he declared, knew more than was on public record or thought fit for schoolbooks. Therefore, with the help of the recovered letters, he wished to erect a monument not only to a certain Thompson, but also and in equal measure to the farm cook Amanda Woyke.