That's how big the forests were in those days: if you got lost in them as a child, you were older by the time you got back. Almost grown up, and with his mouth full of determination, the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy declared, when we met in the attic of his father's town house at Beutlergasse 7, "Freedom must be won by violence!" Sometimes he quoted Danton, who was dead, and sometimes Marat or Robespierre, who were also dead. But because we'd been gathering mushrooms repeatedly and for so long, the idea had stuck with us. It was as beautiful as a solitary cep. And when Sophie read aloud what the latest gazette had to say about General Bonaparte, Fritz said, "Maybe this Napoleon is the idea for our time."
Since then I've gathered mushrooms time and time again with Sophie, Ilsebill, and whoever. Names I've shouted in the woods. My terror when no answer came. And sometimes I, too, have found, I, too, have been called, and I've answered too late.
Last fall, before we made the baby after mutton with beans and pears as though it were an idea, Ilsebill, while gathering mushrooms in Geest Forest near Itzehoe, found a solitary cep, which was so big that we long looked in vain for something to compare it with, until Sophie, in the adjoining forest but just two centuries earlier, found an even bigger one that was beyond compare. Like all mushroom forests, those I've gone into with Ilsebill, Sophie, and whoever are twined and matted with ferns and seamlessly upholstered with moss; I never knew who actually found the biggest cep — which in Sophie's day was known as the imperial mushroom — when or where.
Ilsebill found hers at the edge of a clearing, while on a bed of pine needles some distance away I found, clustered close together, enough orange agaric for a whole meal. (Fried in butter, they taste like meat.) Gathering mushrooms is worthwhile. True, you lose time — how often Sophie and I
strayed farther and farther apart while calling each other— but some, not all, of the years lost in this way will be found again as long as there are forests. Ilsebill wouldn't believe me when I told her that. She thinks every mushroom she finds is the first and last. That there's never been anything comparable. And that never again will an imperial mushroom stand singly on such a stem, so luxuriantly hatted, in a bed of moss, and — while the hand still hesitates — make someone happy, incomparably happy.
For seven years, while beyond the woods the Revolution was going on and the guillotine was being celebrated as humane and progressive, we gathered mushrooms and had a beautiful idea. We'lay under parasol mushrooms. Uprooted, the stinkhorn with the lacquer-green head ran after us. Anise agaric stood in a magic circle. We didn't know yet what fly agaric can do in addition to shining red. Sophie wore a funnel-shaped miller mushroom as a hat; its imposing stem rose heavenward, looking like my father's cock when with open breeches he climbed the stairs to my mother's room to beget me, his son Fritz.
Much later, when Ilsebill sat still for me under the miller mushroom and I with a soft pencil drew a picture out of which Sophie peered gravely, she no longer looked like a child. By then she knew everything. No more curiosity. That's why she never let Governor Rapp, imperiously as he wanted to, bury his stinkhorn in her moss. Sophie stayed closed.
Of course we were never really lost. A jay screamed, showing the way. Ants were our pacemakers. Across clearings, through chest-high ferns, between smooth beech trees we went down and down until we came to the river Ra-daune, which flowed to Zuckau, where Sophie's grandmother would be sitting on the front porch, reading the latest news of the Revolution to Inspector of Crown Lands Romeike; those terrifying words: September murders. When she had finished, Amanda Woyke the farm cook would inspect our haul, mushroom by mushroom, and tell us about the imperial mushrooms she had found in the woods around Zuckau in times of famine, when there were no potatoes yet.
Max, who gathered mushrooms with us, emigrated to America later on. Gottlieb Kutschorra, who came from Vier-
eck, married Sophie's cousin Lovise, who also gathered mushrooms with us. He became a woodsman, and she kept house in the Oliva forester's lodge. And later on, because Sophie's mother, Anna, had married a city man after Danzig became Prussian, Sophie Rotzoll, who took her name from her stepfather, a journeyman brewer, came into daily contact with the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy, who was making his final preparations in his father's house on Beutlergasse.
When, with a few sailors and raftsmen, some longshoremen, and a corporal of the former city watch, which four years before, on Holy Thursday 1793, had tried with disorganized rifle fire to stop the Prussians from occupying the city, gymnasium student Bartholdy founded a Jacobin club and, taking an example from France, decided to proclaim the Revolution and with it the Republic of Danzig, Sophie Rotzoll, who since the brewer's death had been selling flounders, smelts, and lampreys at Hawkers' Gate with her mother, was fourteen, and because she was in love with the seventeen-year-old gymnasium student, she was also wild about all things revolutionary. She had known Fritz since they were children, for his mother was a staunch believer in family excursions to the country. Fritz and Sophie were both to be seen with the Zuckau children at raspberry-picking time; they had caught crayfish in the Radaune, helped with the potato harvest, and gathered mushrooms in the fall.
In Sophie's eyes Fritz was a proclamation of freedom if not freedom itself — in gangling, freckle-faced form. Hopelessly as the boy stuttered at the family board, he read revolutionary proclamations with loud abandon to his little group of conspirators and cited Danton or Marat with perfect fluency. Sophie's presence oiled his vocal cords.
For Fritz and his group she sewed rosettes of tricolor ribbon. For the Jacobin Club she stole four pistols from the old arsenal at Leege Gate. For her Fritz Sophie would have done more; she'd have done anything. But fortunately, April 17, 1797, when the conspirators were arrested on Beutlergasse, was a market day; Sophie was selling smelts.
The elder Bartholdys did not long survive the conviction of their only son. Divested of his citizenship, the mer-
chant moved to Hamburg, where he and his wife soon died of cholera. Fritz Bartholdy, the corporal, four sailors, three longshoremen, and two Polish raftsmen were sentenced to death for seditious conspiracy; but only the sentences of the corporal and the two raftsmen were carried out to the full. Pastor Blech, the deacon of Saint Mary's, appealed to the highest authorities, and the sentences of Fritz and the others were commuted to life imprisonment. The sailors and longshoremen died in prison or perished as cannon fodder, for when Napoleon's forces besieged the fortress of Graudenz, they were posted to the outermost communications trenches. As for Friedrich Bartholdy, however, it was as an inmate of the fortress that he experienced the defeat of Prussia, which gave him hope, Napoleon's rise and fall, which he as a patriot suffered and celebrated, the Congress of Vienna, and the Carlsbad Decrees, whereby his sentence of life imprisonment was confirmed. Finally, after thirty-eight years in the fortress, he was released. Sophie had never stopped petitioning the successive rulers for his pardon.
It was a morose man who returned home in wooden shoes, bringing a bad cough with him. He had kept his stutter. Fritz Bartholdy could no longer be fired with enthusiasm for anything but pot roast and red cabbage. But since he lived for another ten years, and with old Fraulein Rotzoll to cook for him recovered his strength, the two of them could often, in the early fall, be seen leaving their cottage in the sand pit at the foot of the Bischofsberg and setting out with baskets over their arms to gather mushrooms. The neighborhood children shouted mocking jingles after the mushroom woman and her wood goblin. (Wasn't it strange, if not suspicious, that the two old people brought specimens of the useless fly agaric home with them along with the edible varieties?)