Later, in the canteen, after drinking tea, she was taken with a craving for dill pickles. But there weren't any left. And as the families of the slain were sitting over tea in the canteen, one of the weeping women, Jan's mother, who had come from Konitz, said to the other weeping women in black, "That's from my son. They were going to get married. Maybe it'll be a boy."
But two girls were christened with the names of Mest-wina and Damroka. They will soon be three, and they are acquainted with a photograph of Jan. It's standing on the living-room cabinet next to a historically faithful cog in full sail. But Maria, to whom I am related and who gave me that piece of amber from the potato field with the fly enclosed in it, Maria, who had a reputation for laughing — at the cooperative, in the shipyard canteen, everywhere — Maria turned to stone. A harshness has come into her speech.
Vestimentary preoccupations, feminine proportions, last visions
They refuse to say anything about Maria. Divided among themselves like the Advisory Council behind them, but agreed on this one point. There they sit, cooking up a Last Judgment. When the Flounder also declined responsibility for the cases of Sibylle Miehlau and Maria Kuczorra, housewife Elisabeth Giillen and biochemist Beate Hagedorn walked out of the former movie house in protest. On conclusion of the Lena Stubbe case, Ms. Hagedorn had cried out: "Fuck the past. Repression is going on today. Everywhere. In Poland, for instance, even if it is some kind of Communism they've got there. It wasn't just the rise in prices that made them strike. It wasn't the usual household worries. No, it was something more. And it's still going on. What we need is action, something big. Get out on the streets and yell. And refuse our services. Not just in bed. Total noncooperation! Till everything stops. Till the men come crawling. And we take over."
The verdict is expected soon. All through May, while the last evidence was being heard and the worst was being once again recorded, the Flounder was undergoing a visible change. Whenever he left his sand bed, he struck us and the representatives of the press, who were on the lookout for indications that prolonged confinement had impaired his health, as more and more transparent, more and more glassy. A while ago you could trace his bone structure. Now his
digestive tract is discernible. You can identify his milt, the proof of his masculinity.
This is no doubt why the Advisory Council has been urging the court to finish up, to pronounce a sentence and carry it out. The Advisory Council (without Hagedorn and Giillen) has set a definite time limit. Once again I consider them all, consider them with love, hate, or indifference, as (from the public benches) I see them. Sieglinde Huntscha, for instance: always in jeans and frayed leather jacket. Built, I would say, like a sportswoman, if I didn't know that she has flat feet, for which reason the prosecutor hardly paces at all, but mostly stands still while pleading (with a slight Saxon accent): "Since in the case of Lena Stubbe as in those preceding it the Flounder's guilt can hardly be contested. ."
Likewise slender but with ballooning bosom, the court-appointed defense counsel wears embroidered blouses, which she likes to fasten with bows. Although Bettina von Carnow hunches her back when sitting and never quite knows how to turn her overlong neck, she reveals the proportions of a model as soon as she stands up or risks a step or two.
Quite otherwise, among the associate judges towers the sitting giant Helga Paasch. Here we have a person in her middle forties who, unconcerned about her frame, wears two-piece suits that overemphasize the squareness of her build. She can't open her mouth—"Man, are you finicky!" — without sweeping invisible objects off the table.
Equally stately, though delicately proportioned and clad in a maidenly small-flower print, sits Griselde Duber-tin, as straight as an exclamation point. Sometimes in culottes. The sharpness of her interruptions. The bitterness of her random comments. Always ready to pounce, always disagreeing and expressing herself too forcefully, she offers a contrast to Therese Osslieb, whose soulful phlegmatism communicates itself without needing words and appeases sudden squalls (quarrels with the Advisory Council).
Osslieb wears jumpers, wraparound skirts, and lace-trimmed, ancestral hand-me-downs. And yet she droops as tragically as her friend Ruth Simoneit, who, when not staggering drunkenly about on the podium, wishing everything (and herself) underground, is a pleasure to behold in her
firm, sculptured beauty, from which, along with amber, too much Asiatic, African, Indian, or other exotic jewelry is always dangling.
Beside her the social worker Erika Nottke has a hard time of it. Overworked as she is, worry has clothed her in fat, which as a rule billows most unbecomingly gray on gray in sweaters and expands pleated skirts. Though she is the youngest of the associate judges, she nevertheless speaks like Dame Care. Her piping voice keeps her professional jargon—"reso-cialized integration" — from sounding authoritative. No one listens to her. Her overlong tirades are drowned out by Griselde Dubertin's interruptions or Paasch's heckling or the protracted outcries of the public, although Erika Nottke, more than any other member of the Advisory Council, tries to stick to the point.
A very different matter is Ulla Witzlaff, who for every historical incident finds private parallels, which are always listened to: "Back home, on a little island by the name of Oehe, there was an old woman who kept sheep…" Ulla is the handsomest of the lot, though no part of her is pretty. You could fall in love with her hair. Usually she wears long, shabby skirts, and then, when you least expect it, she'll make an entrance as a lady, in a black evening dress. The public applauds. The presiding judge is obliged to demonstrate (imperceptibly) her authority.
Ms. Schonherr is believed to be in her mid-fifties. But since this recognized ethnologist dresses timelessly (in good sports clothes or Scotch plaids), one never gives a thought to her age. She emanates serenity. She never shows partisanship. Even when passing judgment she remains ironically ambiguous. All the associate judges — whether they belong to the Flounder Party or to the opposition — are convinced that Ursula Schonherr is on their side. Even the Revolutionary Advisory Council keeps quiet when she demands, nay, commands feminine solidarity.
For nine months she has guided the Women's Tribunal over all trip wires and has so worn herself out with loving care that in the always correctly dressed Ursula Schonherr I feel justified in surmising my neolithic Awa, as she cuts across my dreams.
Awa, however, was corpulent — no, fat, positively ungainly. Her ass hung down to her knees, but that fell in with the neolithic ideal of beauty, which like everything else in those days was decided by women. Thus the cult of short-leggedness determined the original form of the vase, for Awa's head was relatively small, perched on great rounded shoulders that left little room for a neck. Flesh overflowed its banks. Everywhere richly upholstered nests, nooks, and crannies that seemed ready to grow moss. Where today the tyranny of sports imposes a boring tautness on the female thigh, Awa's thighs, which between knee and vulva allowed themselves a fabulous wealth of bulges and swellings, were correspondingly rich in dimples, the hallmarks of primordial beauty. Dimples all over. And where the back resolved itself into a rump, densely populated fields of conglobation were discernible.
If Awa's proportions were repeated anywhere, it was in the abbess Rusch, who cultivated her envelope of fat — possibly for the sake of the warmth she liked to dispense, possibly to provide an adequate sounding board for her laughter. It will be worth our while to list all the parts of Fat Gret that wobbled and formed folds whenever her sudden laughter erupted, gurgled, bubbled, and uphove her vast body: her four-times-vaulted chin, her primary, secondary, and tertiary cheeks, her breasts that reached out like mighty bastions and merged with her dorsal cushions of fat, her belly, which as though perpetually pregnant burst the seams of any cloth, her downy-blond forearms, each of which was as thick as the High Gothic waist of Dorothea of Montau.