"I feel entirely different now," she said. "No, not Indian, of course not. Just somehow different."
I said, "We owe it all to Vasco da Gama and his successors. He brought down the price of more things than pepper."
We promised the salesgirls to come again in the eighth month. "By that time," said the long-suffering cashier with the blue eye shadow, "our summer collection will be in. Really delicious stuff."
In paying, I put one mark ten into the "Bread for the World" collection box. Outside, in spite of a halfhearted March sun, it was too cold for the red bunting, which changed color in the daylight: Ilsebill shivered in her flyagaric-red acquisition. I helped her on with her coat.
Sophie
We seek
and think we find;
but it has a different name
and belongs to a different family.
Once we found one
that didn't exist.
My spectacles clouded over.
A jay screamed,
we ran away.
It seems that in the woods around Saskoschin they looked each other over. And because the egg mushrooms were still recognizable the others laughed at them.
Mushrooms mean something. It's not just the edible ones that stand on one leg at attention for metaphors.
Sophie, who later became a cook and political as well, knew them all by name.
The other truth
In the fall of 1807—the farm cook Amanda Woyke was dead, French troops were billeted all over the place, Sophie, Amanda's granddaughter, still in a revolutionary frame of mind, was beginning to cook for Napoleon's governor, and mushrooms were plentiful in all the forests — the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm met the poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim at the Oliva forester's lodge, to discuss a publishing venture and exchange ideas.
In the previous year von Arnim and Brentano had published a collection of rare and precious folk songs and folk poetry under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). Since the general misery brought on by the war increased people's need for sweet-sounding words, and since fear sought refuge in fairy tales, they had come to this quiet spot, far from the city's bustle and from the political quarrels that had become the stuff of daily life, to compile a second and third volume from their still-unsorted hoard of rare treasures, hoping at long last, after so much cold Enlightenment and classical rigor, to give their people some consolation, if only the consolation of escape.
Two days later, the painter Philipp Otto Runge and Clemens Brentano's sister arrived, he from Hamburg via Stettin, she from Berlin. The forester's lodge had been recom-
mended to the friends by Pastor Blech, deacon of Saint Mary's Church in Danzig, through Friedrich Karl von Savigny, with whom he corresponded; and besides, the young people were drawn to secret meeting places in the heart of nature. Only the old forester and a Kashubian woodsman with his wife and four children lived in the wooden house, situated, as though outside of time, between woodland pool and deer meadow.
The friends found the silence hard to bear. When Bren-tano, whose wife had died and whose second marriage, concluded a few months before, was off to an unhappy start, wasn't sulking, he was offending the others, especially the sensitive Wilhelm Grimm, with his strained wit. His sister was still full of her travel experiences; that spring she had actually met Goethe, with whose mother she corresponded. The dialogue between the two women was to lead quite naturally to a book of jottings about the great man's childhood.
Jakob Grimm and von Arnim, who had moved to Konigs-berg immediately after the disaster of Jena and Auerstedt, spoke bitterly of the recently concluded Peace of Tilsit, which they termed a shameful Diktat. Von Arnim had decided by then to confine his activities to the management of his estates. Jakob Grimm was trying to decide whether to accept the post of private librarian to the detested upstart king Jerome Bonaparte at Schloss Wilhelmshohe near Kassel. (He did.) Wilhelm, who had just completed his study of law, decided that in such evil times it would suit him best to be an independent scholar. All spoke of their hopes and plans. Only painter Runge remained silent (though full of inner discourse) and aloof from the happenings of the day. He had come from Hamburg, stopping on his way at his native city of Wolgast and the nearby island of Riigen, where, some years before, he had heard an old woman, now dead, speaking in the Low German dialect of the coast, tell a number of tales, a few of which he had written down. A man with side whiskers, bulging eyes, and a constantly worried forehead, who in another three years would die of consumption, cut down, as they say, in his prime.
The forester's lodge was a good hour's walk from Oliva,
and though its attic rooms, in which the friends dreamed away their happiness and slept away their sorrows, were narrow and low-ceilinged, the kitchen, with its long table on a floor of beaten earth, offered room enough for agitated pacing, impassioned harangues, rebounding laughter, and far too many sheets of neatly penned manuscript or correspondence with publishers. The brick stove, at which the forester's wife, who answered to the name of Lovise, was permanently busy, maintained a pleasant warmth. There was always a pot of hot malt-coffee on the stove, and in the breadbasket a big loaf of rye bread from which the friends broke off chunks because it was fresh-baked and made them ravenous. Only seldom was a whimper heard from one of the four children, all of whom, from the six-month-old infant to the six-year-old Amanda, were 1 fed from Lovise's breast. This the friends saw with surprise and some misgiving. Only Bettina was delighted. "That's life!" she cried. "Simple and authentic!"
Then they remembered their work. The next volume of The Boy's Magic Horn must be even more splendid than the first. For the moment they disagreed only on the guiding-principle. While Arnim wanted to preserve German folk poetry by presenting it in its original form, unfalsified, as it welled from the mouths of the people-"For when treasures have endured this long, we have no business taking a file and trying to polish them"-Brentano wanted to improve on the old songs, tales, and fables, and teach the voice of the people to speak more artistically: "The artist's hand is needed to ennoble the crude stone, magnificent as we find it uncut." Jakob Grimm was more scientific in his enthusiasm; he wished to proceed with method and put order into the superabundant materiaclass="underline" "We are dealing with a linguistic river; like other rivers it has its source, which we will search for and question with regard to origins." Only the sensitive Wilhelm thought they should listen in all humility but with meticulous ear to everything said or sung around the hearth or spinning wheel, and preserve it by taking it down without embellishment. "That alone would be enough for me," he said. (And later on, to be sure, he patiently collected folk tales and gave them to the world as a household treasure.)
Violently as they argued, Fraulein Bettina managed, strangely enough, in her childlike yet precocious way, to agree
with all of them. She favored unfalsified folk poetry, the art fairy tale, the search for the sources of language, and the humble transcription of fireside stories. And when painter Runge spoke haltingly and obscurely of primordial forces, of unformed matter, of the breath of chance, of gossamer and transience, all of which he held to be the very texture of life, and proceeded from image to image, Bettina agreed with him, too; in her eyes the friends were all splendid. Each one was right. There was room enough for all their ideas. That's the way nature was in its beautiful disorder: spacious. All these thoughts could be set before the reader in their wild luxuriance; little order was needed. The reader would know what to do with them. "And then," she cried, "you can go on with your research!"