The motion was overruled. (The Flounder faction in the Revolutionary Advisory Council had already become a
powerful enough minority to force majority decisions.) Then the Women's Tribunal adjourned, because the Flounder claimed to be, or really was, feeling faint; in any case he left his sand bed, showed how his steering mechanism had failed and cast him helplessly adrift, reeled, threatened to capsize and float belly up, and just under the surface of the water whispered over the intercom system: "What deplorable, what painful suggestions! So much injustice almost strikes me dumb. When what I really wanted — ah, me! — if I hadn't been so gallingly insulted, was to elucidate Count Rumford's ideology by the example of the Chinese Tower in Munich's English Gardens. But — ah, me! — all I get is vilification, and I'm too weak to insist on my right of rebuttal and on further quotations from the letters. Ah, me! Ah, me! Has it ever occurred to this feminine and therefore stern court that I, too, the Flounder, the detested male principle, might be mortal?"
Don't worry, Ilsebill. Naturally the flatfish recovered. And the trial took its course. Further quotations from letters were admitted in evidence. The recipe for Rumford soup for the poor was read: "Dried peas, barley, and potatoes are boiled for two and a half hours until they form a mash; then soured beer is stirred in; then diced stale bread is fried crisp in beef fat and added; then the whole is seasoned with salt." Amanda's violent reaction to this mushy perversion of her potato soup was quoted: "I wouldn't feed such pap to the Devil himself."
After Rumford's embittered departure from Munich, his activities in London, his move to Paris and marriage had been discussed rather briefly, and the father's conflict with Sally, his daughter beyond the seas, had been allowed to flare up in quotations from letters, Rumford's political creed, his belief in Chinese beneficence from above, complemented by Amanda's concern for her Kashubian farm hands, became the storm center of the court proceedings.
A single sentence of the Flounder's — or, rather, his rhetorical question "Is it not clear that with their Utopian descriptions of cultural mass movements and of community kitchens feeding entire populations, Count Rumford and Amanda Woyke foreshadowed Maoism?" — unleashed a tu-
mult and would have broken up the Tribunal if Ms. Schon-herr, the presiding judge, had not found words of appeasement. "Defendant!" she shouted into the rising storm. "I assume that by your conjectures you have merely meant to say that the ideas of the great Mao Tse-tung have long lain dormant in the minds of the peoples, but have often, as in Rumford's case, been absurdly misunderstood and, as in Woyke's case, been too narrowly confined to the agrarian sector to move the masses to revolution, and that consequently they did not find relevant expression until the present period."
The Flounder hastened to corroborate the presiding judge's assumption. Quickly he cited pertinent passages from the letters. "Listen, if you please, to what Amanda has to say about it: 'And someday there won't be nothing but farm hands and farm hands' kitchens.' And listen to Rumford: 'Just as today the sons of peasants are impressed into military idleness, no later than tomorrow armies of peasants will be in a position to till and at the same time defend the fields.' They both had quite a gift of prophecy, though they could hardly foresee that this High Court would for the first time attach to their letters the importance that I, too, for all the skepticism of which I am capable, believe to be their due."
Who would have thought it possible. The Flounder Party in the Revolutionary Advisory Council gained new support. (You too, Ilsebill, are hesitating.) Those clever girls let the Flounder sell them an image of Rumford as a "restlessly questing spirit" and of my good-as-gold Amanda as a "sand-colored potato heroine." Even the prosecutor withheld her barbs as the discussion of the Amanda Woyke case neared its positively touching conclusion. There were stirrings of pity for Rumford, whose beastly wife, widow of the guillotined physicist Lavoisier, drove him half mad with her turbulent social life; yet even Amanda's purple-inked warnings—"a quarrelsome devil she is for sure, a living Ilsebill, a powder-puffy bitch" — had been powerless to talk him out of the rich match. Even Rumford's opportunism met with the prosecutor's understanding; his move from menaced England to Napoleonic France was justified as evidence of scientific neutrality, though Amanda expressed herself on the subject in
no uncertain terms: "And speaking of Napolyon, I wouldn't keep no soup warm for that man."
After the controversial condemnation of the Flounder in the case of Agnes Kurbiella, the Women's Tribunal had resolved to make a show of objectivity. It was conceded that the accused had meant to serve the cause of the Enlightenment. The count and the farm cook, for example, were termed pioneers in the field of equal rights; the final summation even made mention of the "pre-Maoist component" in their thinking, and no objection was raised to the fable woven by the Flounder as a funeral wreath for Amanda. Immediately after the disastrous battles of Jena and Auerstedt, so his story went, Count Rumford, seized with foreboding, had left Paris and traveled to West Prussia via Munich. He had had the good fortune to reach the Kashubian hamlet of Zuckau before the arrival of Napoleon's marauding army (and the siege of Danzig). And before dying in his arms, the desperately weary Amanda had been able to tell one last time her dream of community kitchens that would conquer hunger the world over. The dying cook seems even to have forgiven the count for his repulsive, stomach-gluing Rumford soup. Not a blessed word about me, the one-man funeral procession who buried Amanda in the former convent graveyard after my hurried return from Tuchel. Only a touching holding of hands up to the reason-transfigured end.
The next day the Tagesspiegel commented on the atmosphere in the courtroom. The Women's Tribunal, according to that worthy organ, had shown indications of deep emotion. The gaze of the usually cold-eyed prosecutor had clouded over. The public, consisting for the most part of women itching to mount the barricades, had actually sobbed. More solemnly than triumphantly, a small group, later joined by the majority, had intoned "We Shall Overcome." But then the Flounder, though deeply embedded in sand, had sent up a last speech balloon: "After Amanda's death darkness descended on Europe."