They sit at a long table and have that refugee look. Sparse beards matted with vestiges of the last and next-to-last revolutions, which have become part of them in the meantime. In among the veterans sit young, inexperienced beards, in which the future nests, giving hope of hope.
This congress at Bievres (it seems there used to be beavers here) has been well prepared, with reports that go on and on and leave no historical aspect untouched. Mimeographed copies of the speeches in French translation are made available. Each orator addresses the toiling masses as though speaking to a large crowd, as once he did on public squares, in factory halls, at the now celebrated party congress. Words listen to words with approval. Stalinism condemned in absentia. Determination to remain a socialist, come what may. Appeals to reason. The lament of the enlightened.
Those not speaking draw box constructions or hairy twats. In the translators' booths emancipated women confidently translate the speeches of errant men into English, German, Czech, and Italian. Outside the windows that can't be opened, February claims to be March. They've come from everywhere. (Only the comrades from Chile haven't come.) An old Trotzkyist marked by four party splits takes the minutes (in Spanish): his posthumous papers.
Cover your eyes and forehead with your palm and your joined fingers until emptiness sets in: a new promise. Now that reason and the potato have triumphed over superstition, it must be possible to. . Now that we know so much, at least the most glaring hunger must be… If we, the whole lot of us, are not to perish, then at last the Great Leap must. .
All of a sudden I want to be sittting outside in my overcoat on a bench for old folks and sparrows, eating cheese
off my knife and drinking red wine out of a liter bottle, until I'm too demoralized to withstand the claims of time and absolutely without hope, or until I meet some of the other veterans I sat with in Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen, discussing every battle from Kolin to Burkersdorf back and forth over potatoes with caraway seed and Glumse.
The next man has the floor. Off to one side a resolution is born. On a motion by the Italians. About the Prague Spring: it doesn't want to be over.
(No no no! I mean it. That was foolish. Even if we were lucky.) By twisting her belly to one side as she fell and landing on her elbow, she got off lightly — once again. Dutifully I leaped after her. But for quite some time, while I was saying my little sentences—"You were lucky, damn it. But what an irresponsible thing to do!" — the veterans' meal in Amanda's farm kitchen dragged on (and the congress of European revisionists stuck to the agenda point for point). For right after the Peace of Hubertusburg I was made inspector of crown lands on the strength of my services. My comrades of the regiment found some sort of livelihood, mainly in the school system. And Amanda had no objection if once a year, after the farm hands had been fed, we sat around the much-too-long table and drank potato schnapps until we were drowning in blissful battle memories: "Ah, comrade, when I think of Torgau. . Remember the time we found all that tobacco and chocolate in the Saxon baggage train…" (And during the intervals between conferences in Bievres, a few political jokes that were new to me were told: Brezhnev and Nixon meet Hitler in hell. .) And after her fall I said to my Ilsebill, "It could have turned out worse, my dear. When Amanda was pregnant with her youngest daughter, Annchen, the one Romeike made her after the Battle of Burkersdorf just before the end of the war, she jumped across a brook while gathering mushrooms in the woods and fell on some mica rocks, which brought on labor pains prematurely."
Annchen got born all the same. And her daughter Sophie got to be cook later on for Napoleon's Governor Rapp. And when we former corporals celebrated our reunions, little Sophie served potatoes in their jackets with Glumse and
caraway seed (with linseed oil), which are today coming into fashion again.
Recently, when last the spirit carried me off to Berlin— Ilsebill's sprained ankle had mended in the meantime — Ruth Simoneit took me along. We managed to talk Sieglinde Huntscha, who just on principle says the Barn is "shitty," into coming with us. We sat at a table with Ulla Witzlaff. After the manner of restaurant owners, Osslieb sat down with us now and then for a brief chat. Considering I was the only man in the place, I wasn't treated too badly. Ulla Witzlaff was knitting (knit one, purl one) a man's sweater. (The girls are better natured than they put on.) When I talked about my hopeless socialist congress, they actually listened. Only Ruth Simoneit, who had ordered a double potato schnapps the moment she arrived, bristled: "Licking your wounds, eh? That's the one thing you men are good at. When you're not brutes, you're crybabies."
But then things picked up. Helga Paasch joined us with a big hello. Osslieb served potato soup. Ulla Witzlaff filled the deep dishes to the brim. Until late into the night the future was evoked: the great crisis and the collapse of all (masculine) systems. Everyone looked forward to the impending Chinese world food solution. I treated them to a few rounds of potato schnapps. "Here's to the standardized swill of the future!" Then Paasch treated. Naturally Ruth Simoneit was plastered. Witzlaff sang, "Our Flounder is a Maoist! Our Flounder is a Maoist!" And Sieglinde Huntscha tried to make a pass at Osslieb. They were getting really chummy.
Too bad my Ilsebill wasn't there. But she just had to jump over that ditch. I could beg, I could plead—"Don't jump! Don't! Please don't jump!" — she jumped all the same; she wanted to fall. There she lay in the mud. I jumped after her. She was lying on her ass. I yelled at her. She yelled back, "It's my belly, and I'll jump when and where I please with it!"
"It's not just your child; it's going to be our child!"
"I refuse to let you tell me when to jump and when not to jump."
"You should have thought about it sooner if you don't want the child."
"Shitty ditch! I'll never do it again." "Swear to me, Ilsebill, that you'll never again." But forswear the Great Leap, promise never to leap again — no, not my Ilsebill.
Boiled beef and historical millet
Me and the cook inside me — we spare each other nothing. Ilsebill, for instance, has a cook inside her — that must be me— and fights him. Our quarrel from the start: who sits like a complex, plump or lean, inside of whom, inspiring new dishes or old ones that have come back into style, since we started cooking with historic awareness.
Now, while five pounds of beef shank simmer over low heat and I helpfully and haphazardly clean vegetables, she is reading a book with lots of foonotes, dealing with, among other things, millet as poor man's food, festive fare, fairy-tale motif, ^and chicken feed.
I keep quiet, thinking up story after story that may have sweetened the porridge of the Zuckau farm hands in the days of serfdom: when the flour bin was empty and the heavens rained millet grains as big as peas, and everybody was miraculously replenished. .
Her voice passing over my fairy tale and cutting through it, Ilsebill says: "The author has just plain forgotten about us. It's always the males. When it's the women's doing that beginning in 1800 the surface planted with millet dropped from 53,000 to 14,877 hectares, thanks to the rapid expansion of potato culture, especially in Prussia. Nowadays you'll only find millet in health shops, along with pine nuts, couscous, and soybeans. If you spoke of 'a bad millet year,' nobody would even know what you were talking about."
I say: "And long ago, before the potato defeated millet in Prussia and elsewhere, a bride had to cook a brimming potful of millet in milk the morning after her wedding night, to make sure the seed took inside her. She'd smack a helping of this millet porridge into the hands of the poor weavers' children with a wooden paddle; they'd shout for joy and pass the blob from hand to hand, until it was cool enough to be tasted."