Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Then Amanda spoke again of hailstorms and plagues of mice and told again how three out of seven of her children — all of whom Romeike had pumped into her quick-quick between glorious battles, when she was still a stupid girl-had died on her and the Lord had shown no mercy. Because in those days there'd been no spuds, just too little millet and not enough buckwheat.

Finally, when the basket was almost empty and the potato peelings formed a pile as jumbled as my cerebellum, when Amanda's daughter Lisbeth (begotten after the Battle of Burkersdorf) had cut the washed potatoes into the big, gently boiling kettle on the kitchen stove, when Annchen (begotten after the Battle of Leuthen), now pregnant by an itinerant schnapps dealer with the future Sophie Rotzoll, began to fry chopped onions glassy in beef fat, and Marthchen (begotten after Hochkirch) rubbed marjoram off its stems into the soup, while Ernestine (begotten between the capitulation of Saxony at Pirna and the Battle of Kolin) scrubbed the long farm-hands' table, when finally and meanwhile the king's clothes had dried, for he was sitting close to the stove, Amanda called on Ole Fritz to fight no battles but potato battles from then on. She mapped out a country of the future, extending from the March of Brandenburg through Pomer-ania and Kashubia to Masuria, all planted with potatoes and promising from harvest to harvest to supply community kitchens after Amanda's heart: "There won't be any more hunger then. Everybody will be full, and the sweet Lord will love Ole Fritz." (If Amanda had known more than the know-it-alls of her day thought they knew, she would have talked to the king about carbohydrates, protein, vitamins ABC, and about the minerals sodium, potassium, calcium,

phosphorus, and iron, all of which are contained in the potato.)

It is not true, as was later bruited about in anecdotes, that the old king wept when the farm cook told him he had fought enough bloody battles and he should finally conquer hunger. It is true, however, that after the last potato had been peeled, diced, and dropped into the big soup kettle, she commiserated with him over his loveless childhood: "and nobody to pet and mother the poor little tyke." With an all-understanding glance she appraised the drenched king, now drying in her kitchen. With genuine tenderness she called him "my little Ole Fritz" and "my little tyke," for Amanda was a good head taller than His Shrunken Majesty.

A king who kept taking snuff, as though in response to an order from within. With dripping, watery eyes he sat listening to her warmhearted words of cheer. We heard her whisper to him as to a child, "You'll feel better soon. Don't you worry. Come on, Ole Fritz, you'll get some nice hot soup. It's good. It'll cheer you up."

For a good Kashubian hour (which in terms of normal time is more than an hour and a half) she mothered him as the soup kettle bubbled. She even removed a few snuff spots from his coat with cold malt-coffee. Maybe he dozed off for a while as she was chopping parsley, toward the end. The old cottagers along the walls and in the adjoining feed kitchen whispered among themselves, aware that this was a historical hour. Each was holding his spoon. And with their tin spoons they knocked softly on the wood of the kitchen table. The soup basins were ready on the long farm-hands' table, seven dishes to a bowl, one bowl to every seven farm hands.

Then the king spooned up Amanda's potato soup with all of us — for at nightfall the hands had come in from the fields. A dish of his own was set before him. He sat beside Amanda, a prematurely aged man who trembled and splattered himself with soup. From time to time he transformed his reddened, dripping eyes into big blue king's eyes (recorded in later portraits). Since everybody slurped, his slurping attracted no attention.

I was sitting too far away to hear what the two of them

were mumbling between spoonful and spoonful. Supposedly he complained to Amanda of the Prussian landed gentry, who weren't carrying out his edicts. At the very least, he is supposed to have said, serfdom should not be hereditary. They should stop grabbing the peasants' lands. How could you keep an army in decent shape when the country people were treated like cattle? For Prussia had many enemies and needed to be always in arms, always on its guard.

In reality — as Amanda told us later while peeling potatoes, and also wrote to her pen pal, Rumford — Ole Fritz merely wanted the recipe for her potato soup, which was wholesome, he said, and soothed his gouty bones, though he wished it could have been peppered to his taste. That couldn't be done. The farm kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau was without pepper, either crushed or in grains. Amanda seasoned her food with mustard seed and caraway seed, and with herbs such as marjoram or parsley. (Of course sausage can be boiled with the soup or bits of fried bacon stirred in. Sometimes Amanda cooked carrots in the soup, or leeks and celery for seasoning. In the winter she put in dried mushrooms, or a few handfuls of greenies and morels.)

When the king rode away in his springless carriage, it was still raining. I, Inspector Romeike, was given no snuffbox. Amanda found no ducats in her apron. No hand was laid on the heads of daughters Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine. No chorale was sung by the still-drenched farm hands. No spontaneous edict did away with serfdom. No miracle of enlightenment occurred under absolute rule. Nevertheless, the date of the historic encounter was handed down by the aide-de-camp. On October 16, 1778, immediately after the king's departure from rain-drenched Zuckau, an edict was promulgated declaring Amanda Woyke's potato soup to be the king's mainstay, whereupon it became a universal stand-by far beyond the confines of West Prussia.

And because the case of Amanda Woyke was taken up at carnival time, the Women's Tribunal, instead of the usual Women's Mardi Gras, staged a special women's celebration in costumes of Amanda Woyke's day, and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb, who might well have directed a farm kitchen, cooked Amanda's potato soup in her pots, which were more accustomed to Czech seasonings. Everybody, in-

eluding the whole Revolutionary Advisory Council and even the court-appointed defense counsel, was invited to the Osslieb tavern, rechristened "Ilsebill's Barn" for the occasion. Not we men, of course. It seemed that Helga Paasch dressed up as Ole Fritz. Ruth Simoneit came as August Romeike. Ms. Witzlaff wore a wreath of marjoram and parsley. Naturally Therese Osslieb was done up in potato color as Amanda. And after the soup, the women seem to have danced the polka with one another.

All of a sudden nobody wants the right of way. Where are we going, anyway, and what's the hurry? It's only in the rear — but where is the rear? — that they're still pushing.

Is it the right thing to prevent those many people in distant places who are starving but otherwise attract little attention from starving? The question is often asked in conversations. Nature — the Third Program will tell you as much-will find a way out.

Be realistic.

There's so much to be done at home.

All these broken marriages.

Systems decreeing that two times two is four.

In a pinch something about the civil-service law.

At day's end we note with indignation that the weather forecast was wrong, too.

I found them in the bright-colored cardboard box which, along with other loot, I had brought home filled with Saxon

sweets after the capitulation of Pima. Later the box contained pieces of amber from the sandy fields of Kashubia. And later still, after the amber had been dug back into the fields to combat a plague of potato bugs, Amanda Woyke put Count Rumford's letters into the box and laid her spectacles on top of them. Then she died, while I was in Tuchel on a tour of inspection.