Authors: Nell Zink
“Olaf?” I said tentatively.
Gernot looked grim.
“Olaf!” I added, realizing that Olaf could have lied.
On Christmas I talked with Stephen on the phone. He said Macedonia was cold, but not as bad as Kamchatka (meaning Breitenhagen).
On New Year’s I went up to Berlin to check up on our apartment. It was fine. Stephen’s scholarship kept paying out, and we had set up our bank account to pay the rent and utilities automatically, so it was actually turning a small profit.
I only spent two nights. It was dark and freezing. Neighbors I’d never seen before were setting off bottle rockets in the courtyard.
And thus it was that I acquired red cheeks and pit-pony-like endurance and became inured to physical pain. I spent every thaw heaving rocks into the river from its steep banks, trying not to be dragged in myself by their weight. I hammered on stubborn seams with tears of frustration in my eyes, slowly coming to understand
The Gulag Archipelago
and
The House of the Dead.
I spent entire days commuting between the bed and the bathtub, convalescing.
By mid-February, the gap in the cladding of the banks really was fair size. Most of the rocks were at the bottom of the river, having who knows what effect on it—speeding its flow (bad), slowing its erosion (good), one or the other, depending on whether you listened to Olaf or Gernot.
I experienced the transition from winter to early spring. I saw the moss turn green. Really green, from bottle green to kelly green, with long silky feelers and fur. I heard birds throw themselves into relentless singing the moment they felt the approach of dawn. I saw robins kick rival robins when they were down. Life surged into the trees from below, reddening their twigs. I saw the first bugs on their first forays. All around me, frost was turning to slime. I was looking muscular and outdoorsy and more like a birdwatcher’s dream date (the sort of biologist who spends months alone in tern colonies) than ever before. Except for occasional phone calls from Stephen, I hadn’t spoken to anyone but Gernot for months, and my German was getting good.
In late March the snow melted in the Czech Republic, and the river rose. Shipping started up again. The bank from which I had removed the granite facing slumped a bit, but no water entered the forest.
I started working on gap number two, though the plan seemed more trivial than ever. The enduring influence of Olaf. He had worked on the dike relocation at The Evil Place, which took years and cost millions, and was an adviser to the Federal Foundation for the Environment, which made NABU and the BUND look like Global Rivers Alliance. And he had parted from me seething, as if I had committed some idiotic stunt like dropping car keys off a boat and would never be a whole person in his eyes again.
Gernot, his hands folded on the table, explained to me that freelance environmentalists had been gravitating toward Germany’s northeast corner for twenty years. In the four months between the first free elections and the hostile takeover by the forces of capitalism, East German activists, working feverishly, had established wildlife sanctuaries that were exceptionally large by German standards. But their trusting ways, inexperience with money, confidence that the meek would inherit the earth, etc. left them disqualified to manage their own conquests, rolling out the mat for carpetbaggers like Olaf.
I decided the two men weren’t very fond of each other.
I stopped working in mid-April and took up the sweet life. I rode Gernot’s bike to all the lakes and checked out every bar in every village.
I missed Berne, but I was not one to hang my harp on the willows and weep. I could easily imagine living in Breitenhagen forever, as long as no one expected me to earn a living. The tap water was delicious, and Gernot kept me in rabbit lettuce, rolled oats, and assorted tubers.
One highlight of the springtime was the annual Elbe Conference in Magdeburg. I got to see Gernot in full effect as a clergyman, which involved eyebrows drawn into a high inverted V. It was a look of deep concern for all mankind, or in this particular case for taxpayers naïve enough to be suckered into shoring up the sagging banks of the forever wild Elbe. The presenters were a mixed bag, from lobbyists and businessmen to a Czech diplomat and the head of the WSA. The Czech attaché cited the Congress of Vienna. The civil engineer said he was just following orders. A BUND activist argued that the Elbe corridor already had perfectly serviceable rail lines, and a soda ash magnate countered that his transportation costs might be marginally lower if the railroad had competition from a canal that would require an initial public investment of only a hundred and fifty million euros. A guy from the railroad wondered aloud what they thought they were talking about, since the soda ash magnate had his own fleet of trucks and the existing rail line was slated to be scrapped. And so it went on, everyone contradicting everyone else with conflicting incontrovertible facts.
Gernot nursed a look of heartfelt sympathy throughout. His task was to contribute spiritual gravitas. There were pads and pens lying around, so I made note of a couple of things he said. “Energy
sufficiency
, not
efficiency
, is the best means of preserving God’s creation.” “The Water Framework Directive prescribes explicit process protection for the
morphological dynamism
of God’s creation.” He said it all in a soft, affectless voice while looking devout, even sheepish. Where was cynical, commanding, slightly loony Gernot? I started to think his job might be tying his hands.
I was hoping to join Stephen in the Balkans, but he didn’t want to have me. He said he was free and alone and seeing birds as he had never seen them before. Often seeing every other conceivable thing but birds before realizing what bird belonged where, then applying his new knowledge to identify potentially bird-infested locations and sitting down to wait. Birding at night. Learning new plant communities, new calls, new birds. Talking with friendly Macedonians in no language at all, attending their weddings, riding their ponies.
I objected that it’s not safe to ride a pony in sneakers (your feet can slip through the stirrups) and that he’s too big for a pony, but he said he had boots and the ponies in Macedonia are called horses. I found the boots troubling, as well as his willingness to believe untruths about animals he was sitting on, but he sounded so happy.
He called me from phone booths. The smartphone with the birdcall apps was gone by day ten, about the time he maxed out his car rental budget, so he recorded his birds on paper. He went native. The way he painted it, he was walking day and night like Robert Walser or De Quincey, crisscrossing the Baba range on scraps of funding mysteriously channeled from Swiss petroleum derivative heirs to Euronatur to a BirdLife partner organization that consisted of a veterinary student named Trajco to him, fit as a fiddle and happy as a grig, leading his feisty pack “horse” up fans of scree until his boots wore out. A confirmed career birder, prospecting for rarities that would be worth their weight in eminent domain once Macedonia joined the E.U., a hero-in-waiting who would shield future UNESCO heritage sites from hydropower with the magic of the Flora-Fauna-Habitats Directive.
Then it was June and he came home to go cold turkey on our couch in Berlin.
Which reminds me of something I maybe ought to point out about Macedonia. It’s a major opium producer, which I can imagine being a major attraction for Stephen. He had never mentioned it on the phone, but why would he.
I was sorry to leave Breitenhagen. The village sits on a knoll above a narrow bit of floodplain. Huge oaks shade the wetlands. The sun sets when it sets and not a minute sooner. That is, the same sun that slips behind mountains in Berne still white, and behind buildings in Berlin while fading to yellow, there rages orange and pink through the trees and melts to the horizon like a sun going down over the sea. The mist rises off the river, the already silvery willows and poplars go into silver overdrive, the wall of leaves shimmers, and the magenta sun proclaims, LSD Is A Crutch.
In August my sister was supposed to show up in Berlin, but I ended up visiting her in Tukwila. It happened because I went to Albania with Stephen in July. He said that with me to look over his shoulder he’d think twice about even ordering a beer.
There are only two ornithologists in Albania, so prospectors are welcome. You can get a feel for what’s out there by checking the market stalls in Shkodër, assuming you can identify birds without hearing their calls or songs, or seeing them stand up, or fly, or with their feathers on.
Organizing the hunters might have helped save habitats. But in Albania only the foreign investors were organized. The Moraca Gorge, for instance, was slated for destruction, with hydroelectric turbines that would theoretically (or rather: impossibly) churn through more water than is in all of Lake Scutari’s tributaries combined. Birke would have been ranting a blue streak. But Stephen just sat there, motionless by the river for days, counting birds on feeding flights. Then he sat by the lake and counted birds in the littoral zone the dam project will eliminate. Fighting entropy the only way he knew how, with tick marks in a notebook.
Now, day trips to the Berner Oberland are one thing, and long weeks of inaction in the piping hot hills of Albania quite another. Nothing against birds, but I had gotten used to moving around a lot. I couldn’t do lazy anymore. Even the helpmeet act was getting old. And Stephen didn’t need my help carrying stuff if he never moved.
Finally we went down to Ulcinj in Montenegro, where he could do the start of fall migration (honey buzzards) in the salt works and I had English tourists to talk to. And there one of them got me pregnant—a slender, girlish thing of nineteen, funny and whimsical. It dawned on me too late that such things are not always masters of coitus interruptus. I suddenly missed the no-fault abortions of the land of the free. In Germany, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone for having the wrong father, so you have to whine about how childbirth would be mental cruelty. Even Albania makes you get counseling. I was hoping for the kind of clinic where you buy a ticket from the cashier and hand it to a nurse’s aide without saying a word.
I told Stephen flat out why I wanted to go to Tukwila. He said he didn’t care whose baby it was. But I cared, a lot. I flew from Podgorica to SeaTac, which took a while, involved layovers in Bucharest, London, and Atlanta, and was no fun. I got my period on an airplane toilet. I disembarked pale and limp, and that was that.
There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition. Tukwila is one of the former, a staunch bulwark of defiance against the forces of rationalization that would shred the fabric of the universe to lint. I caught the bus from the airport with a young woman whose hair was lacquered into a ponytail as hard and shiny as a shrimp. Her telephone conversation with her mother revolved around small change that had vanished from her pants pocket the last time her mother did laundry. In addition, her boyfriend owed her eleven dollars, which didn’t make her mother’s malfeasance any easier to take—au contraire!
You couldn’t call it poverty, not of the spirit, anyway. There was nothing slatternly about her. Her look had been designed and executed as precisely as any Caduveo matron’s. She chose every word with care, and eventually came to an understanding with her mother, who agreed to lift the disputed amount from the boyfriend’s wallet the next time he came around. Her fingernails were glossy claws. Her skin was nearly as shiny as her hair. Her voice had the same stentorian sheen. She may have been twelve. Coming from a subculture in which a pose of stubby-pawed, forthright naïveté is held to embody youthfulness right up to death from old age, I couldn’t tell.
My sister had been happily in love with a loaded doctor, but she was way too big a feminist to be a parasite like me. When they broke up because she wasn’t making enough money to go skiing in the Andes with him on weekends or help him buy a house on the sound, she ended up in a former motel on Eastlake. But the city had no jobs for classics majors, so she got a job in Tukwila. Eventually she moved there to save gas money.
Her apartment was on the ground floor, next to an access road. It had high, slot-like windows like a spotter’s tower, creating the impression (from inside) that she lived in a basement. It was for security, I think; but I could have kicked my way into her apartment, if I’d put on her platform boots. I mean right through the wall. It was paneling over styrofoam over paneling, with studs every three feet. It was no more solid than a yurt. The floor was moist carpet on a concrete slab. In winter she blasted the heat, and in August she blasted the air conditioning. It still took her outfits days to drip-dry.
Doing extra shifts at the strip club totally stressed her out. She was making enough money to think of visiting Berlin on her own, but she had to dance in a much more athletic manner and almost continually, and the guys were closer than they were in the coffeehouse. Right up in her face, as she put it.
Eventually I had to say something, although I am her little sister and not entitled. I said, “You just spent two entire minutes complaining about how your coworkers are bringing down the neighborhood by getting old. Do you have any idea how that sounds?”
“Give me a break, Riot Grrl,” she said. “The T&A industry is not about self-determination. It’s a market. I’m in direct competition with these old biddies, and we share responsibility for maintaining each other’s value. You have to remember that a stripper is a commodity fetish. You can’t have sex with me. I exist to be looked at. So the problem is my legs.”
“What about them?”
“Look at them.” She stuck her leg out at a high angle and waved it around near my head. “Look at my leg. What do you see?”
“It looks fine,” I said. “You have pretty legs. Look how little your kneecaps are. They’re almost concave.”
“You don’t get it,” she said. “On stage, you need long legs. Pretty works on video, but I don’t want to make videos. I want to make tips. But I can’t, because I’m short. Unless I make a video. Then I can be a headliner. My boss wants me to make a video.”