"You and your stories," says Ilsebill. "They only take people's minds off reality. Trying to talk me deaf and blind." She slaps the book with historical footnotes shut. "In the old days millet made us women stupid. And today? What about today?"
I lapse into a timorous silence. She's right, damn it, right. (And yet Amanda Woyke, the farm cook, learned so well how to write, from watching Inspector of Crown Lands Romeike, that she could soon correspond more intelligently than he with the famous Count Rumford and was able to read to the farm hands out of the latest gazette what Mira-beau had said about the price of bread and the principles of the revolution.)
The cook whom Ilsebill keeps inside her, if only to fight with, obeys her implicitly. She decides that no potatoes (which are getting more expensive) will be peeled today, that instead historical millet will be scalded in a good quart of bouillon and placed in a covered pot on top of the kettle with the simmering beef; and now the millet swells as tradition demands, while I continue to clean vegetables.
"Don't cut up the carrots! And keep the salsify whole, too. Typical man! Wants to boil everything together until nothing tastes like itself."
While I try to take flight down the stairs of history, she screams, "Oatmeal gruel! Barley grits! Millet porridge! That's what you've kept us down with for centuries. But from now on it won't wash, hear? Now it's your turn. So get to work and stop dreaming."
Obediently I halve the cabbage and celery root. I leave the carrots, onions, salsify, kohlrabi, and three cloves of garlic whole. Ah, to be condemned to see what beauty a cabbage displays in cross section: what structures, what system, so labyrinthine, the endless line. .)
"How about the rutabaga?" she says from inside herself, not I from inside her. And instead of boiling the hell out of them as a typical male would, Ilsebill puts all the vegetables I've cleaned, plus a fist-sized chunk of rutabaga, to simmer with the meat that will soon be done, under the swelling millet.
Then our guests came. They praised our historically aware dish and asked for more; and more and more.
When the guests had gone and I had loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, later, much later, I lay beside Ilsebill and dreamed: A mountain, and I have to eat my way through it. But when at last I have the millet behind me, there's a mountain of boiled, still-steaming potatoes ahead. I've begun to munch my way through them as resolutely as can be, I've already gone halfway, when I'm overcome with fear that beyond the sweet millet and the steaming boiled potatoes there will be a high-piled mountain of raw rutabaga between me and the Promised Land.
Both
He doesn't say my, he says the wife.
The wife doesn't like it.
I'll have to talk that over with the wife.
Fear tied into a knotted necktie.
Fear of going home.
Fear of admitting.
Frightened, they (both) belong to each other.
Love complains and makes its claims.
And then the usual little kiss.
Only memory counts.
Both live on bones of contention.
(The children notice something through the keyhole
and decide on the opposite for later.)
But, says he, without the wife I wouldn't have so much.
But, says she, he does what he can and then some.
A blessing, a curse, and when the curses become law.
A law that becomes more and more welfare-minded.
Between built-in closets paid for in installments
hate forms
knots in the carpet: hard to keep clean.
When sufficiently
estranged, they discover
each other only at the movies.
The Sixth Month
Dresses from India
Going into her sixth month of pregnancy, she'd had enough of compressing her belly, lacing it in, forcing it into an ideal mold; she stopped covering the mirrors, stopped outraging her nature with pills, and, while looking for the ignition key, finding senseless pretexts for a fight. Because the child, now under her navel, was knocking in protest, she began taking things more calmly and presenting her belly, wherever she went, as an object worth admiring. No more irresponsible leaps. Rare outbreaks of primally bubbling man-hatred. Moments of gentle cow-eyedness. First acquisition of baby clothes. And after the leap over the ditch, when everything could have gone wrong, she made herself a so-called maternity dress, some sort of shit-brown smock that I termed impossible.
So we went to one of those Indian boutiques which in Hamburg and elsewhere are cheap and crammed full from floor to ceiling. Streets of dresses and avenues of blouses. So much to choose from. You only had to reach out.
Taking, no, grabbing five or seven dresses — roomy at the waist, laced under the bosom, and more or less simply cut — Ilsebill escaped with her prey into one of the little curtained-off dressing rooms. Then at brief intervals she appeared five or seven times in Indian cotton or silk: embroidered, decorated with little mirrors around the swollen bosom, or corn-yellow and mystic-green, or all of red bunting.
A show just for me. I nodded, expressed misgivings, praised what I disliked, carped at what I wanted to see her wearing, stuck to my role, and considered myself halfway victorious when she finally decided, if not on the wide-sleeved corn-yellow one or, despite a moment's hesitation, on the mystic-green silk one, at least on the simple, roomy one all of red bunting, with red embroidery only over the bosom. A floor-length dress with spacious sleeves. The ample folds, just the thing for the swelling belly, festive yet casual. A bargain at eighty-five ninety, no problems up to the eighth month, and possible to wear even after the delivery. Already I saw her slender, with company at parties, in discussion groups, traveling.
"It's not so bad here in the West," said Ilsebill. "I mean rummaging, trying on, not wanting to buy, being free to pick and choose." Guilty conscience expressed itself only in an aside: "Of course the things are so cheap there's got to be exploitation. That cheap labor in Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, and so on." In red bunting, she flung these words of accusation in my face. As her husband, I have to answer for every male misdeed perpetrated in historical times or the present. "Can you tell me, for instance, what the fat bosses down there pay their seamstresses? Take a look at this. All hand-sewn!"
During her five or seven Indian acts, I was surrounded by women who rummaged, briefly tried on, rejected, or selected. A few of them were also pregnant. Or may have been. Asian kitsch in glasses, on straw dishes, in brightly colored cardboard boxes. Unneeded for moments at a time, I relapsed into my obsessive daydream of having been Vasco da Gama and discovered the sea route to India: all of a sudden, the Malabar Coast — palm trees, everywhere palm trees — lies ahead of us, palpably close. We send a convict ashore to see what will happen, and he comes back unharmed,
telling of wonders. Napoleon, in whose time lived Sophie Rotzoll, the prettiest of all cooks, is thought to have had military designs on India. But when I was still Vasco da Gama, full of unrest and inwardly rich in figures. .
The smell of musk did it. Bittersweet smoke arose from several little bowls. Music from somewhere, packed in cotton batting, made everything still cheaper. The salesgirls, though all of the Hamburg build, moved like temple dancers in their first year of training. Soft-spoken empathy. "The pale-blue one with the white braid is also being worn a good deal." Ilsebill settled on the red bunting.