Ophelia in the Kitchen

OPHELIA IN THE KITCHEN ILZA VEITH* A few weeks ago our neighborhood theater brought back Olivier's controversial movie ofShakespeare's Hamlet. I had missed the film during its original showing, about ten or twelve years ago, and was happy to attend its rerun. For awhile Iwas entirely engrossed in Olivier'sstrange interpretation ofthe play, but my absorption was suddenly and irretrievably interrupted during Jean Simmons's touching portrayal of Ophelia in the pathetic mad scene. Surprisingly, I found myselfthinking ofa girl named Hella. This trick ofmemory leapedan ocean, more than three decades, and several social categories, for Hella was a cook who entered my family's service in the early 1920s in my German hometown on the Rhine. Time and distance had dimmed my recollection ofher, when some familiarity in Ophelia's long, blonde, loosely streaming hair pulled my memory into focus and, for a moment, deceived me into seeing on the screen the image ofour former cook. The circumstances require some explanation. Although postwar shortages and inflation troubled the daily lives ofmy parents, like everyone else in Germany after World War I, our family yet employed a cook, a chauffeur-handyman, and a maid. Fritz, the chauffeur , and Rosa, the maid, were man and wife and belonged to that nearly extinct race ofretainers who stay all their lives with one family; but for some reason or other, until Hella's arrival, we were seldom able to keep a cook very long. The loyalty ofFritz and Rosa leads me to believe that the fault lay in our cooks andnot in our family, and when today I summon my recollections ofthe odd series ofcooks that came and went during those years, I realize that some ofthem were indeed choice specimens. For example, there was Rosel. Rosel's real name was Rosa, but since our maid had that name by prior right, we tacked the diminutive on it * Professor, Departments of the History of Health Sciences and Psychiatry, University of California , San Francisco. 613 and made it do for the cook. Never was a diminutive worse applied. Rosel was huge and angular; her flat chest, sharp shoulders, and wide girth at the hips gave her a pyramidal appearance that pushed her humanity, so to speak, into the background. Perhaps I was a self-centered little girl, but I never thought ofRosel as a woman. The only thing I admired about her was her magnificent set of buck teeth, which to me at that time represented the height ofbeauty. Even our postman, whose reputation among the kitchen element of our community was scandalous, never winked at Rosel as he did at other maids but simply handed her the mail with a polite touch to his cap. Rosel's face was large and sad, and her thoughts always seemed to be elsewhere. She spoke very seldom. When I recall her now, the image that arises is that ofher mournful face turned vacantly to my mother, like a sunflower to the sun, half-listening as my mother reprimanded her for having forgotten her instructions. My father never spoke to her. She made him nervous. Rosel's predecessor had quit when the lack offuel obliged my parents to close our house in the suburbs and move into a spacious apartment in a new development. After our lovely country house the gray stone apartment house seemed bleak. But in the spring the little bushes in the courtyard were suddenly festooned with bright yellow flowers, and the fountain , which had been boarded over during the cold weather, was turned on. In spite of the fact that our kitchen porch over the courtyard faced similar kitchen porches ofthe development, it became pleasant to sit there after dinner and to watch the play ofthe fountain. Rosel, too, found the porch to her liking and took to sitting there evenings after thedishes were done, knitting one ofherperennial black shawls. It was then that we discovered that Rosel had a soul. Sitting in the semidarkness ofthe spring twilight, her hands moving automatically about the thin line of black yarn, her deep sad eyes gazing unseeingly before her, Rosel would begin to sing, while the fountain splashed in the courtyard and the...