by Günter Grass
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.”
“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 Mirabeau 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 b
osom, 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.
“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 fly-agaric-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 recommended 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 Brentano, 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 Königsberg 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 Jérôme Bonaparte at Schloss Wilhelmshöhe 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 Rügen, 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 Loyise, 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 whi
ch 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 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 material: “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.)
