But before I compare Dorothea with Sophie — the one as though blown of glass, the other scrawny and flat, but both equally tough — let me recall that Amanda Woyke was in every respect close to the potato: bulbous, firm of flesh, conveniently sized. Likewise compact but smaller in stature was Mestwina, while Wigga at an early age gave in to her powerful bone structure and set more store by the frame than by the flesh. Lena Stubbe, on the other hand, who started out as fresh as an apple, remained true to herself; at a high old age she still made one think of an apple — a shriveled one, to be sure.
Dorothea was weightless. Lighter than air. A sad case,
because her beauty was so objectless. She was so meagerly endowed with flesh that she had the spectral look of a goat in March when the winter feed runs out. While cushions of fat can be palpably described, the only way I can resurrect the scant flesh of Dorothea of Montau is to measure the spaces it occupied. Her ample garments that magnified every movement. The costumes she borrowed from the lepers — many's the time she came home from Corpus Christi Hospital in rags or cloaked in sweat-drenched winding sheets. But though her flesh was weightless, not so her hair. Pale-blond, it hung down to her knees. Wind in her clothes and wind in her hair, she took up space, strode through emptying streets, shook with ecstasy, lay, a quivering bundle of sackcloth overflowed by hair, with the beggars of Saint Mary's, or spooked through the ground fog outside the city gates, lusting for visions.
Even where for other reasons no man could have lost himself, Sophie was narrow. Flat, angular, charmingly boyish, with legs made for hopping and skipping, a tough, supple, but also cutting willow switch. Sophie's measurements. Apart from her voice, which required space, only her springy step, always ahead of itself, counted. And when she became an old spinster, there was very little of her, though enough, in concentrated charge, to blow the kitchen sky-high and make good the still-current demand for the women's rights that were lost long, long ago.
And Agnes? She didn't weigh. She didn't look. She could be seen only in the pictures that painter Moller painted and destroyed. She seems (Opitz intimated as much) to have been curly-haired. I remember her bare feet. Sometimes, when the door opens softly, I hope it's Agnes — but it's always Use-bill, bringing herself along.
Now she fills my mock-up, which is in low country. A plate with the sky over it. Low rain clouds and suchlike slumgullion. My eyes roll from edge to edge. Since Agnes evades my grasp, I lay the hugely pregnant Ilsebill down on the Island between Kasemark and Neuteich, where the Vistula and the sky are conducive to aerial photography, or here, between Brokdorf and Wewelsfleth, on the walled-in Wilster Marsh.
There lies my Ilsebill, always with the river behind her.
Sluggish jetsam with feminine proportions. Her dimple-strewn flesh supported by her right hip, so that her upended pelvis blocks off the sky. Her crooked elbow rests on the exact spot where men with brief cases full of experts' reports have planned to build the nuclear power plant. She obstructs all their plans. One of her breasts hangs over the dike. Her right foot plays with the Stor, a tributary of the Elbe. Bedded with all her weight, as though forever. Below her, at the bend of her left leg, high-tension pylons traverse the country in long strides: whispering power, the old rumors, the amber legend, once upon a time.
Around Ilsebill scurry the stick men who have planned, developed, sanitized, welfared everything to death. Above her, jet-propelled in oblique flight, local NATO maneuvers, which never stop rehearsing the real thing. So she lies, fallen from all time. Where the Vistula and the Elbe flow, or try to flow, into the sea. Her wandering shadow: history that has never been written but is enduringly there. Roads that are supposed to pass around her. Screens to shelter her from sight. Warning signs that deny her existence. A double-meshed fence to protect her. Leaping males all about. Measured brevity. Achievement trying to catch Ilsebill's eye. To strike her dumb with wonder. But when the mood takes her, she rolls her flesh to the other side. We call that exercise. With her dimensions she confutes male-administered power. Already Ilsebill has become landscape, closed to all interpretation. Let me in! I want to crawl into you. To disappear completely and recover my reason. I'm sick of running away; it's warmth I want. .
But when I tried to enter my Ilsebill, she said: "It won't be long now. It's starting to tug. It's going to be a boy. He shall be called Emmanuel. What else do you want? Always the same thing. I don't need it any more. Beat it! Beat it, I say. Or tell me what the Flounder is up to. . "
The Womenal
That's what the Flounder called the Women's Tribunal during the last session of his trial. He stopped saying, "But my
dear and esteemed ladies!" No patriarch tried to ingratiate himself with "You are my beloved daughters, after all." Never again did he try to establish superiority with irony, by speaking of "assembled Ilsebills," or to ridicule with mock pathos the "High Long-haired Court." Instead, he reduced the assembly that was trying him to the one word "Wom-enal." Let the Womenal judge. Let the verdict be what it may, only the Womenal can decide. Other than the Womenal he recognized no superior authority.
Since, during his long captivity, he had grown transparent and lost all color from head to tail fin, it was in glassy terms that the Flounder formulated his admission of guilt, which, however, was also a program, opening up new horizons: "The punishment you are about to impose will put me under obligation to the Womenal for all time." To make his meaning clearer and amplify his neologism, he spoke of the "Last Womenal," and for that (so unsure of themselves were these emancipated women to the very end of their confrontation with the flatfish) he was once again suspected of irony.
And yet, what injustice! What had these bitches done to my Flounder! How pale he was! And could that be his voice? No fatherly advice was poured into his son's ear. No gripes, threats, commands. Where had his scintillating arrogance run off to? No longer did any Ilsebill, no longer did anyone call forth his cynical comments. Gone the cavernous laughter that had stirred up his sand bed and the bottommost depths of the psyche.
Whereas at the beginning of the trial, when Awa Wigga Mestwina were on the agenda, he had whispered primordial phonemes and taken refuge in mythological chitchat, involving the god Poseidon, among others, whenever the prosecution had become too captious for his liking, now he simply laid himself bare: "Just look at me. I am transparent. See through me. Let nothing remain hidden from you."
And whereas, while the cases of Dorothea Swarze, Mar-garete Rusch, and Agnes Kurbiella were being debated, every historical fact — the Council of Constance, the Battle of Witt-stock, or whatever — had opened up to him an escape route into further facts, he now abandoned all prevarication and, conscious of his guilt, spoke to the point. No Dominican
prior (in the shape of a Flounder) wanted to spout canon law. Never again would he be heard quoting nasally from the charters of the medieval guilds. No more inquisitorial showing of instruments. Not a word from the Malleus malefica-rum. No vale-of-tears tone, transposing plague, hunger, the long-drawn-out war and my Baroque time-phase into iambics, was audible when the Flounder now spoke: "I did… I am. . Never again… In the future I will… It serves me right."