So day after day they all spooned up the same soup, and only King Ole Fritz's peppercorns lay around unused and dangerous, for they were as big as cannon balls, until one heavenly day Amanda rolled them down to hell, whereupon the fires burned even better than before.
But the Flounder, who told this fairy tale before the Women's Tribunal by way of exculpating himself, said in conclusion, "In short, dear ladies, I took the liberty, in
heaven at least, of creating Kashubian Maoist conditions. I won't say yes and I won't say no, but if you choose to conjecture that I am Amanda Woyke's sweet Lord, go right ahead."
Starvation
Always the flour bin has spoken
words of consolation out of an empty stomach
and snow has fallen as if in corroboration.
If starvation were limited to Holy Week,
fasting would be a pleasure, eating
flatbread with nothing on it;
but starvation covers my region like a pall
all winter until March,
while elsewhere the granaries are sly
and the markets glutted.
Much has been written in defense of hunger.
What beauty it confers.
How free from slag its concept.
What dullness comes of three square meals.
And always there have been Swiss
doing good in the eyes of God
(or someone else): only
the indispensable has been lacking.
But when at last there was enough,
And Amanda Woyke went out to the potato fields
with basket, hoe, and daughters, some gentlemen somewhere
else were sitting around a table, worrying about the falling price
of millet. Ultimately, said Professor Burlimann, everything's governed by demand, and he smiled a liberal smile.
The Great Leap Forward
and the Chinese world food solution
Toward the end of February, after buttered potatoes in their jackets with cottage cheese and caraway seed, in the course of one of the few after-dinner walks Ilsebill has brought herself to take since she became pregnant-I had just come back from a congress at which the future of socialism was discussed point for point-on a clear, sunny day with a foretaste of spring (shortly after 2 p.m.), my Ilsebill leaped, despite my shouts of "Please, please, don't jump! Don't, don't!" across one of the many ditches known as Wettern that serve to drain the lush Wilster Marsh, the pasture land between the Elbe and the Geest. Despite her bulk she managed to clear the roughly five-foot ditch but landed on her face, though on soft ground, to be sure.
Later, the question of guilt came up: I had allegedly provoked her leap with my obsessive insistence on slow, gradual, deliberately procrastinating change.
As we crossed the marshy meadows, there had been talk of the socialist congress and its resolutions. (What might have been if the opposite hadn't happened.) When I said: "The Prague Spring probably came too suddenly and seems, in the days preceding the Soviet occupation, to have had a certain erratic character, a failure to take account of the overall development in the Eastern bloc or of the premature expectations of the West, with the result that one more long overdue, but nevertheless ill-timed attempt to reform state Communism came to grief because it took the form of a Great Leap Forward, the immediate consequence being the all-too-familiar limping lag. ."-after, more to myself in mulling over the congress than with any intention of provoking Ilsebill, I had said these words, she replied: "Go on» You with your snail philosophy. How's there going to be any progress if we have to crawl all the time. Look at Mao and China. They weren't afraid to take a Great Leap Forward They're ahead of us. They're over the hump "
Already my Ilsebill had her eye on that ditch. She took
a run; a concept had hurried on ahead and she leaped after it. Despite my shouts of "Don't!" she, by then close to five months gone, leaped. In defiance of all reason she leaped and, turning her belly to one side, fell on the rain-softened ground. I jumped after her, no distance at all, and said, "Hurt yourself? Why can't you listen? What a childish thing to do. In your condition."
For the first time during a persistently contentious pregnancy we were worried about the baby. I palpated. I listened. But there was nothing wrong. She'd only turned her left ankle. In three shakes we were fighting again. ("You and your shitty snails!" "You and your shitty leaps!") Ilsebill had to lean on me, which she doesn't like to do. Step by step, I limped her home.
When we got there, I was still worried. I made vinegar compresses, listened again, palpated some more. The child in her womb—"My son!" as Ilsebill said — made knocking movements. "It could have been worse. What if a stone had been lying there. Or some other hard and pointed object. Besides, you're wrong when you attribute the achievements of the Chinese to Great Leaps. Look how they've bloodied their noses with their endless Cultural Revolution. These things can't be done in a hurry. Think of Amanda Woyke. It took years and years for potatoes to take the place of millet. And even longer to abolish serfdom. Always relapses. After Robespierre Napoleon, then Metternich…"
After that I told my Ilsebill — as she lay*there at my mercy — about the developments at the Tribunal. To cheer her up, I mimicked the Flounder's arrogantly curled lip when Amanda's Utopia, the world-wide farm kitchen, was being discussed. I ridiculed his trick of affecting benevolent understanding for everything, even the sheerest nonsense. Then I parodied his manner of speaking: " 'But my dear and gracious ladies! Of course I was glad my contention that the Rumford-Woyke world food center points the way to an egalitarian solution of the food problem has found supporters in your midst, but these things can't be done helter-skelter. It will first be necessary to set up working groups that will-thoroughly and knowledgeably-research the basic foodstuffs of the past and present. A number of questions arise. What role was played in times of famine by the manna
grits obtained from wild grasses? Or: what position shall we take on the protein shortage and hence on the soybean problem? Or: is the European millet shortage before the introduction of the potato comparable to the rice shortage in China before the onset of the Mao Tse-tung era? But if you wish to approach the Chinese world food solution on the basis of the Central European experience, then I must beg you to lose no time in advancing from theory to practice, in other words, to revive Amanda Woyke's West Prussian soup. To the best of my knowledge, Associate Judge Therese Osslieb operates a successful restaurant. Couldn't an experimental kitchen be installed there? Mightn't that be a good place in which, slowly, with deliberate procrastination and phase lag, in slow motion as it were, to initiate the Great Leap Forward?' "
"So then what?" asks my incapacitated Ilsebill. "Did the girls fall for that? Are aprons in demand again? Good God! Do they expect to emancipate themselves with cooking spoons?"
When the nunnish freedoms of the cooking abbess Margarete Rusch were under discussion and the Flounder (more or less playfully) suggested the establishment of feminist convents, first a loose, then a more structured group began to form, drawing its first members from the various factions of the Revolutionary Advisory Council, but then enlisting certain of the associate judges. While the case of Agnes Kurbiella was being debated, the group, far from gaining in definition, stagnated, but when Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen was held out as an example, it crystallized into a faction which was widely decried as revisionist and which, first in the press, then among the public at large, became known as the "Flounder Party." Restaurant owner and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb passed for its spokesperson. Ulla Witzlaff and Helga Paasch were members. Ruth Si-moneit supported it with reservations. Ms. Schonherr, the presiding judge, was said to have expressed herself in private as a sympathizer. And even Bettina von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, tried to ingratiate herself with the Flounder Party.