The Flounder
Page 12
“These loathsome fertility rites!” cried the Flounder. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? All this mating without father right. At this rate you’ll never produce a masculine myth, a Jovian head-birth.”
Then he went on about the refinements of Minoan culture. He spoke of palaces with many rooms, of open staircases with dimensions appropriate to royal dignity, of water pipes and steam baths. And while he was at it, he reported the birth of the young hero Heracles. As though in passing, he deplored the fact that a seaquake (or the wrath of Poseidon) had recently destroyed the capital city of Knossos—“But King Minos was miraculously saved!”—and raved about hand-sized bronze statuettes representing men with bulls’ heads and marketed as far afield as Egypt and Asia Minor.
“That, my son, is what I call lasting influence! Way back at the beginning of the first palace period, Queen Pasiphaë’s offspring was bumped off by a certain Theseus. Not without the help of the artist Daedalus. Only the other day I told you the story of the ball of wool and the tragic sequel. What was the poor girl’s name again? Was she left to rot on some island? Nobody remembers. But those Minoan bronzes and charming terra cottas, all with the same motif—they were paradigmatic; they set a style.”
And he made me a present of a clay figurine the size of a little finger, which like his other gifts he toted unimpaired through the seas in his branchial sac. The little man with the bull’s head: one more item in my growing art collection, which I kept hidden in an abandoned badger’s burrow, until it was stolen by my friend Lud and hauled away God knows where. Then the Flounder persuaded me to make figurines of comparable mythical import and to perpetrate a pious fraud as a way of keeping my disgrace out of history.
And so I did. I molded seven or nine hand-sized little men surmounted by elk heads with palmed antlers, baked them secretly, and buried them near the suburb of Schidlitz, where in the twentieth century more or less fortuitous excavations were to produce neolithic finds. Unfortunately the archaeologists, two dilettantish schoolteachers, were not as careful as they should have been. All the palmed antlers, which had previously fallen off, were dug under, so that the art historians never took them into account. Misinterpretations followed. Talk of neolithic pig-men. West Prussian Folklore magazine spoke of surprisingly early domestication of pigs in the marshes of the Vistula estuary. Experts argued over shards that were unique in the Baltic region, for on the Flounder’s advice I had made the figurines hollow, molding them around my left middle finger in the Minoan manner.
But my terra cottas did not transmit a myth. Nothing came of them but controversial footnotes and a doctoral dissertation which in the year 1936 propounded the thesis that my “pig-men” were early Slavic testimony to the existence of an inferior, degenerate, worthless race.
The odd part of it is that later on (though the Flounder doesn’t know it) Awa did let herself be mounted by an elk bull. In the moonlight. Without the disguise I had tailored. All three breasts bared. Down on her knees she offered herself. Her fat rump glittered as she wagged it. Playfully he approached. A young bull with a white hide. He didn’t assault her violently; his approach was more on the timid, experimental side. His light-catching palmed antlers. His hoofs on her shoulders. Affectionately at first, nuzzling at the back of her neck. Then everything fitted, nothing was impossible, it happened naturally and didn’t take long. Hidden in the willows, I looked on. Heard Awa cry out as never before. I wanted to preserve the image, her three breasts hanging down into the cranberries. But I forgot, swept memory rubble (other stories) over it. I didn’t want to remember, because when, after the usual length of time, no god with palmed antlers but a girl was born, she resembled Awa all right but showed indications of four breasts, the equipment of an elk cow, whereupon she was killed forthwith with a stone ax.
“No!” cried Awa and wielded the ax. “This is going too far. Let’s not overdo it. Three are enough. Who knows what the little wench would do later on. No crimes against nature, if you please. We don’t want tongues to wag.”
And she ordered us to hunt and spear the white elk bull. We ate the young flesh crisp-roasted with mashed cranberries, as though nothing had happened. But now at last I was enlightened and started looking for a word for “father.”
That, by the Flounder’s time reckoning, was shortly after the Argonauts embarked on their voyage and two years before the Seven marched against Thebes. But in our country the women kept their power. Whether Awa or Wigga or later Mestwina, they prevented legendary voyages and campaigns. They survived without special emblems of power, and when we tried to make history (or trouble) they stymied us with their womanhood. Wrath gave way to quietness. They made us tread lightly. Smiling injustice triumphed. The caprice of the mighty prevailed. Enslaved by their mild forgiveness, we remained domesticated. (I stop in my flight to sue for peace over the phone. “Sure, sure,” says Ilsebill. “It’s all right. So you want to come home? If you behave, you can be the father. Let’s forget all about it. Get a good night’s sleep. Then we’ll see.”)
The things I can’t help: drought, killing frost, rainy spells, cattle plagues, times of famine when nothing but manna grits was available and not enough of them. What I would like to distract people’s attention with: how I developed the charcoal industry and invented Baltic bricks. What I could not for a long time bring myself to say, but the Flounder said: You must. What I don’t want to remember:’ how I marched southward up the river with the Goths, leaving Wigga, who kept our horde on short rations, alone with her pots.
My first flight. (Typical male escape syndrome, still common to this day: beat it quick around the corner for a cigarette or two and never come back; gone forever.) We pushed off in May. In other parts of the world the calendar said 211. Everything was in flux. Germanic restlessness. The first migrations. Marcomans, Herulians, and our Goths with their inborn wanderlust pushed off, invaded new lands, made history. I, too, was sick of being Wigga’s charcoal burner, also condemned of late to farm work, beet raising. Like the red-haired fire-eaters whose god Wotan the Flounder had taught me to worship in secret, I wanted to sit in a manly circle deliberating, to strike my shield in assent, to lower my shield in dissent, I wanted to be a man: A man consulted, a man with rights and a voice, with sons to come after him. A man exempt from daily chores and hungry for distant places. I wanted to be gone, to quit the trivia of daily life. I wanted to live dangerously, to discover, prove, fulfill myself. Weaned at last, I wanted to know the meaning of honor victory death.
“Clear out,” said Wigga. She sat—a giant when seated—under the willow-withe arbor, molding small dumplings of herring roe, herring milt, and oatmeal, and dropping them into foaming fish broth. “Clear out!” She’d have no trouble replacing me as her charcoal burner and in my other functions as well. She rolled the dumplings on her flat, hard thighs, two at a time, clockwise and counterclockwise. Just as Ilsebill can say, “Have it your way,” so Wigga, not even contemptuously, said, “Just clear out.”
But I didn’t get very far, only three days’ journey up the river. There, where later, much later, the town of Dirschau (Tczew) with its railroad bridge across the Vistula was supposed to be strategically important, I already had blisters on my feet, the uncouth Goths frightened me, I cast longing looks homeward and cursed the Flounder who had advised me to shove off. (To make matters worse, my friend Ludger treated me like a groom, with beastly condescension.)
I often wept while cooling my feet in the river. Without a roof over my head I felt sorry for myself. We Pomorshians were not admitted to the meeting of their Thing. I had to curry their horses, scour their short-swords with ashes, comb out their women’s matted hair, and put up with their arrogant sulking after bouts of mead drinking. When they had chewed too much fly agaric soaked in mare’s milk, they became murderously aggressive and thrashed us in place of enemies who had not yet materialized. Once I heard them deliberating under a solitary oak tree when and how they would sacrifice me and a few other Pomorshians who had run off
with them to their hammer god, Thor: spitted on lances.
And when, in the place on the east bank where later Graudenz (the fortress) was to be situated, I was kicked by a horse, cut in the thumb by a short-sword, reviled by Gothic women as a “Pomorshian swamp rat,” and buggered in broad daylight behind a gorse bush by a Goth (during which operation he didn’t even remove his boar’s-tusk helmet) who was always drunk or under the influence of fly agaric and had so few teeth that I had to chew his dried meat for him, I beat it, I lit out for home, limping and weeping, heard myself and the river and the screech owls crying “Wigga,” and more and more desperately, “Wigga!”
In short, I soon proved unequal to history. They could smash up Rome without me; Wigga’s dumplings of herring roe and herring milt meant more to me. I was only too glad to be her charcoal burner again and take care of her brats, a few of whom were plainly by me. Let the Flounder call me a milksop; I went back mouthing apologies: Never again, a lesson to me, sincerely regret, just punishment, I’ll be good, I’ll never … But Wigga didn’t scold. If she had only scolded, punished me, sent me out to the beet fields with a hoe. Her vengeance was no brief outburst, but long-lived, though after each of my public self-criticism sessions she would say, like Ilsebill the other day on the telephone, “Let’s forget all about it. Water under the bridge.”
For in the presence of the assembled clan—we were not yet a tribe—I had to confess my crimes: I had been unforgivably bored with charcoal burning. I had taken a treasonable pleasure in mocking the sedentary Pomorshians to the Goths. I had bartered Pomorshian charcoal much too cheaply to the Gothic armorers. Seduced by my friend, I had become addicted to fly agaric as a substitute for the prohibited and eradicated dream root. And I had betrayed Pomorshian secrets (the instructions for making Glumse) to this same Ludger.
Then I had to make a public statement abjuring the frivolous emotion of wanderlust. Then I had to swear to the female council of the clan that I would never again aspire to conquer or die, that is, to make history. Then I had to renounce something that I had bombastically termed “paternity rights.” Then I had to report how many blisters I’d had on my feet at the beginning of the migrations, why the hair of the Gothic women is always matted, in whose honor I and other Pomorshians were to be spitted on lance heads, how young Ludger’s stallion had given my left knee such a kick as to stiffen it for all time; and I had to exhibit the scar on my right thumb all around the circle. (It was my forced renunciation of the fungus poison muscarine that introduced the fly-agaric habit among our people.)
The one thing that I concealed repressed forgot was what that stammering Goth who never took off his boar’s-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush. The disgrace of it. The gap in my narrative. The empty speech-balloon. What I didn’t want to remember: how he manhandled, chewed, and licked me, rubbed me with rancid fat, and then ripped in with his old man’s war club, so deep… .
But Wigga knew. When I ran away from her, she sent two swift-running girls after us, and by the time I came hobbling back, they had told her the whole story in every detail. That was probably why, later on, when I lay with her, in her, armed and legged around, she would often say, “Well? Isn’t this better? Isn’t it a lot better this way?”
Ilsebill will soon be in her second month. Her time interval, which makes her difficult, is the only thing that counts. I (her charcoal burner) stand beside her or flee downstairs through the centuries until the Flounder, as though he were still talking to me, catches me up: “There’s nothing you can do about that, my son. It’s her nature, which is stronger and always right. Your fatherhood holds you tethered. The women will always have you there. As your Ilsebill knows.”
Then he advises me to buy more paper. Once you put it in writing, he says, everything looks normal. “Only written matter,” he pontificates, “can stand up against nature. The written law wins out almost every time. And what you don’t want to remember, what you don’t even want to think of again—because of the disgrace—will be as good as forgotten once you get your story in print.” And, clearly wishing to be quoted, he concludes, “Men survive only in the written word.”
All right. I admit it, I betrayed Mestwina, my Mestwina. But there was more ambiguity in what I did than a simple sentence reveals. For, you see, I was her (and the tribe’s) head shepherd, and at the same time I was Bishop Adalbert, who had come to convert us heathen. As a shepherd I supplied her kitchen, and as an ascetic I spurned her cookery. It was I who stole the cast-iron spoon from the supply hut of the Bohemian baggage train; and it was I, the later canonized bishop, whom Mestwina slew with the cast iron. If I remember right, I was too cowardly to cut the bothersome missionary’s throat with my razor, though Mestwina asked me time and time again to do her the favor. But as a bishop with a desperate craving for blows, I let myself be murdered without resistance, for even as a choirboy I had often confessed the wish to die a martyr’s death and be canonized later on.
Shepherd and bishop—for the first time I sojourned doubly; I was split, and yet wholly the pagan shepherd and wholly the Christian zealot. Life was no longer as simple as under Awa’s care or in Wigga’s shadow. Never again, except in relation to Dorothea or to Amanda Woyke the farm cook, neither of whom allowed of ambiguities, have I been able to wear myself out so completely at one with myself: unsplit and for life. For my time with Billy doesn’t count. And in Maria’s eyes I’m nobody.
Maybe my present Ilsebill will pin me down, cure me of my ambiguity. “No nonsense,” she says. “The kid’s got to know who his father is. What do you mean, a fiction? No subterfuges, if you please!”
Anyway, I was dead as a bishop when I took my sheep smell to the main Bohemian tent and betrayed my Mestwina.
But why? It was all so well hidden. After the murder, which had gone off smoothly, with no other sound than the gentlest of sighs, she and I threw the cold, stiff, and later to be canonized Adalbert (in other words, myself!) into the swift-flowing Radune. Far downstream, on a sandbank in the ramified estuary of the Vistulla, a region often raided by our hostile Prussian neighbors, the holy man’s bloated corpse was washed ashore and found by Polish mercenaries who had been looking for him for the last five days. I craftily buried the cast-iron cooking spoon. It seemed reasonable to assume that the heathen Prussians had murdered Adalbert. A courier was already on his way to report the event to the king of Poland. The date given was April 12, 997. The whole episode scratched into history: one more saint.
And I like a fool had to go and testify to the truth. The Flounder advised me to expose the fraud. “My son, it’s your duty to speak out. I know how devoted you are to your Mestwina, but you will have to sacrifice her. For the first time you lazy, unconscious Pomorshians, who have never done anything to prove you existed, have really taken action; with a political murder you enter history, you set a classical date—what eloquent ambiguity: he was killed on a Good Friday!—and already you’re trying to wriggle back into a state of Stone Age innocence. You stand idly by while the glory goes to those barbarian bandits the Prussians. Too cowardly to confess like men. Go to them and say aloud: Yes, you Christian knights! It was one of us, Mestwina, our queen. He desired her, he lusted after her. She killed him to make our people conscious of their historic role. Make a saint of Adalbert, if you will, but we of Mestwina’s tribe stand unbowed, like men. We don’t want the cross. Our goddess is Awa. She is related to Demeter, Frigga, Cybele, Semele. Great figures, every one of them. Every one of them throve long before your cute little Mother of God. In short, we’ve got religion already!”
I spoke to the Bohemian prelate and the Polish knights as steadfastly as the Flounder had counseled, but without the provocative vocabulary. I can’t remember asking Mestwina for her approval of my history-charged confession. She might have been generous enough to consent. But more probably she would have laughed at me, called me a fool, thrashed me when I talked back, and to get me out of the way sent me under guard to far-off beaches to look for amber.
The next day the Bohemian knights, presided over by the prelate Ludewig, condemned Mestwina to death by be-heading. For us they ordered immediate forced baptism, but continued (undeterred by my confession) to maintain that Adalbert had been killed by the heathen Prussians. It would have been difficult if not impossible to canonize the bishop if he had been murdered by a woman, for according to the papal canonization bull, no one can become a martyr through the act of a woman. After all, the bishop’s Bohemian retinue knew that Adalbert had tried several times to mortify his carnal lust inside Mestwina. The Polish knights whispered jokes about the pious Bohemian’s penetrating technique of conversion. If so much as a suggestion of Adalbert’s pleasures on the bed of leaves had found its way into the canonization file, we can rest assured that there would have been one saint the fewer.
In his testimony before the Women’s Tribunal, the Flounder justified his bad advice with neo-Scholastic eloquence. “It was quite in the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, dear ladies. I, too, regret deeply that in those days women were denied the right to produce martyrs. I said to myself: From a subjective point of view a certain Mestwina may have bashed the bishop’s head in with cast iron, but objectively, before the judgment seat of history, it had to be men, the heathen Prussians. And so, quite logically and only in apparent defiance of the facts, all the historical sources give the Prussians credit for making church history on this occasion.”