A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  As with Andrea, the Allies had dropped a bomb on Greta’s family home. The four-year-old had crawled under the basement table with her mother, terrified, and while they’d survived, the house didn’t. The community rebuilt their home brick by brick, but no one could breathe life back into her father’s dead body – not a victim of the Allies’ bombs, but of the Nazis. As a Jehovah’s Witness and conscientious objector, he’d refused to go to war, stating with firmness it was against his religious beliefs. Sentenced to death, tiny Greta watched her father depart by train for prison, not knowing she’d never see him again.

  Now, sitting on the terrace of the Lorelei restaurant, I sang the words quietly to myself:

  Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,

  und ruhig fließt der Rhein;

  Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt,

  im Abendsonnenschein.

  (‘The air is cool and it’s growing dark, and the Rhine flows quietly by; the mountain peak gleams in the evening sunshine.’)

  Decades went by and Greta still didn’t know what the Nazis had done with her father’s body. She assumed they had buried him in an unmarked grave – until some seventy years later a letter arrived in the post, informing her of her father’s resting place, a picture of his headstone enclosed.

  Greta was a beautiful woman, a Brigitte Bardot who perilously drew the wrong kind of men – until she met her third husband. It was as if she was intent on punishing herself with a survivor’s guilt. She was Lorelei in reverse; Lorelei, who’d sat aloft the rock combing her golden hair and luring unsuspecting boatmen to their deaths with her beauty and mesmerising melody. Eyes fixed on the cliff, the boatman had paid no attention to the current and underlying rocks, until he realised his boat had struck them and the waves were taking him under.

  The Lorelei could also have been a premonition of 1930s Germany – the beautiful woman now a preposterous man who could magically weave poisonous words into a seductive song; leading his people astray and taking them under with him. It was a fairy-tale gone wrong, a Grimm tale that haunted the minds of its victims more than half a century later. Greta and my father, struggling with the darkness of their minds, were just two of them.

  8. Cycling through Vineyards

  When English friends, Richard and Chris, heard we were cycling the Rhine, they offered their holiday house in Ungstein.

  ‘Is it far from the river?’ I asked Chris.

  ‘Not much more than a dozen miles from Ludwigshafen,’ she reassured me.

  ‘And what about hills?’

  ‘Flat. No problem.’

  It was an offer I couldn’t resist, and we looked forward to a couple of days on our own, where we could spread out across an entire house and relax.

  When we studied the map in Bingen, however, it seemed easier to cut due south to Ungstein rather than follow the Rhine through the ugly industrial development around Mainz before turning west again. Wouldn’t it be quicker and more picturesque to cut over the vineyards to join the Weinstrasse, the picturesque ‘Wine Road’? The German word for vineyard is Weinberg, literally ‘wine mountain’. The clue was in the word: it should have been a warning.

  It was still early when we headed out of Bingen, alongside the Nahe river, looking not much more than a stream after the mighty Rhine. The road hugged the riverbank initially, the cycling pleasant on the flat floodplains. As I looked down this slow-flowing subsidiary of the Rhine, I caught a flash of blue, low on the water. A kingfisher! I stopped my bike, but it had gone, now hidden somewhere deep within the riverside vegetation.

  Back in the 1970s, at the beginning of the Troubles, my father bought the first edition of the Reader’s Digest AA Book of British Birds. Had his interest in birds arisen during World War Two? Perhaps they had been an escape from the horrors he’d witnessed in Belfast – a healing even, along with his devotional meditations. And then the birds and their songs may have continued to soothe him through a new civil war, a return to the death and injury he must have imagined we’d left behind on our island.

  When the narrow hardback arrived, I leafed through it with excitement, nosing the fresh-print smell of its glossy pages and delighting in the romantically named sections: ‘Seacliff and Rocky Islands’, ‘Broadleaf Woodlands’ and ‘Parks and Gardens’. Each page had a large illustration of the bird at the top and sidebars with maps showing the distribution of the birds and their migratory patterns, with notes at the bottom describing their appearance, nesting and feeding habits. The picture of the evil-eyed sparrowhawk, pupils and razor-sharp claws the colour of mustard gas, appealed to my inner world and fuelled my imagination. But it was the page with the absurdly bright-coloured kingfisher that I returned to again and again. How I longed to see one of those beautiful river-birds with its orange-red breast and shimmering steel-blue head and back. I read that the kingfisher had transparent eyelids, enabling it to see its prey when diving under water. A magical bird!

  My father was also taken with the kingfisher. In a diary he’d written a few years before he became ill, he recorded his sightings of the bird: Saw the blue flash of a kingfisher, and, two days later, on my birthday, he got lucky again and wrote, Praise thee. Saw a kingfisher, delighting in his glimpses of this shy and elusive bird.

  As I cycled alongside the Nahe, I wondered about the German word for the kingfisher: Eisvogel, or ‘icebird’. ‘Kingfisher’ seemed a much more apt description, but on learning that Eis comes from the old German eisan – and therefore related to ‘iron’ – I realised the name more likely referred to the bird’s gleaming metallic and iridescent steel-blue feathers. Which is equally apt for this mesmerising creature.

  *

  We left the river behind and cycled through villages of cobbled courtyards draped in vines and dotted with tables and chairs, half-hidden behind the heavy oak gateways of the Weingüter – the wineries. I longed to stop for a glass of wine, or two, but knew we had to push on: there were close to fifty miles ahead, and I needed to stay upright on my bicycle.

  After Sprendlingen, Jamie abandoned the roads that linked village with village, seeking out the vineyard lanes that ran through a patchwork of green corduroy. Still early in the growing season, there was no one to be seen except a winegrower, putt-putting through fields of vines on a miniature tractor. Soon we came to a crossroads. Above us, the Via Vinea climbed through the vineyards to a powder sky. Jamie studied the map on his phone, then, to my relief, took the route that skirted the base of the ‘wine mountain’. We plunged down into Gau-Blickelheim. It was our first proper freewheel since we’d reached the Rhine.

  His Rhine cycle book no longer of use to him in this hinterland of vineyards, Jamie was dependent on the Google maps on his phone. The warp and weft of country lane was more difficult to navigate than the linear riverside route with its well-signed pathways, but Jamie seemed to translate the three-dimensional topography of land and road, reduced to the wriggle of white threads on the tiny screen of his mobile, with relative ease.

  At Flonheim we had no choice but to take the road that rose out of the village, forcing us to push our bikes on tip-toes. At the top, Jamie mounted his bike and pushed off, only to feel the back tyre give. There was a short, quiet hiss. He looked down to see a telltale trail of green below his wheel – the slime we’d filled our inners with before leaving England. He’d had his first puncture. Fortuitously, we found ourselves outside a wildlife centre with outside tables. I ate my Butterbrot of salami and cheese, and watched Jamie take off the back wheel, and then the inner, feeling for the source of the puncture. It was a pointless exercise, but at least he was getting to grips with the mechanics of his bike. Wheel on again, he pumped up the tyre, the slime inside the inner solidifying to seal the hole like glue, and we set off once more.

  The way climbed again. My calf muscles began to throb and my lungs wheezed like clapped-out bagpipes, and with each rise we conquered, another rose beyond it. Having, at last, approached the highest point above Alzey, I looked forward to the long freewheel into t
he town, only to find the track had disintegrated to rough stone. I sighed, dismounted from my bike, and began to walk towards the settlement far below us in the valley.

  In a town-centre café, the waitress refilled our water bottles, assuring us the road to Ungstein was not hilly. But inclines, invisible to car drivers, are painfully obvious to cyclists. The road unfurled like a whipped-out ribbon, taking the bikes ever higher across the land until I thought my legs would crumble. We refuelled with apple strudel slices at the supermarket on the edge of Flomborn, where Jamie, determined to find every farm track that criss-crossed the Rheinpfalz, careered off-piste again.

  Around Wachenheim, the sky darkened, tipping a bucket of rain on us; then the track ran out, forcing us out onto the busy 271. At Grünstadt, we found ourselves caught up in a motorway approach, the passing cars gathering speed in anticipation of the motorway. Their wheels flung up rainwater, and the rush of air from the too-close vehicles turned my already jelly-legs to fluid. I was miserable. With each new settlement, my heart lifted, but the signs never read Ungstein, and the Wine Road teasingly dipped in a brief respite before climbing again until my inner child screamed: Are we nearly there yet?

  Then, just as I was beginning to feel the road had no end, we dropped hard and fast into Ungstein. In retrospect, we sift the joy from the misery, holding on to the gold and discarding the rubble. It was only in the soft dimness of the cottage living room afterwards that I came to appreciate the cycle through the vineyards. I quickly forgot the slog of each rise, only remembering the pleasure of reaching the top with views extending across the Palatinate to red-roofed villages folded into blankets of green. I no longer remembered the aching calves and the tightness in my chest, just the exhilaration of tumbling off hillsides and the blast of cold air catching my face. I remembered the arches of vines that bridged the narrow streets of stone-built dwellings, not the noise and fumes of traffic. And I remembered the human contact of old men loitering in a sleepy village, their toothy smiles emerging from leathery faces as they shouted ‘Wohin?’ – ‘Where do you want to go?’

  *

  Before leaving England, Richard had emailed me a long list of useful instructions for the house. The last instruction, however, had puzzled me: Don’t forget to feed the hens! I was curious. It seemed odd to keep hens when Richard and Chris spent no more than a couple of months out of the whole year in Ungstein. Did they encourage an endless stream of visitors just to feed the hens and prevent them from starvation?

  Jamie soon found the street where Richard and Chris had their cottage. Our instructions told us to collect the key from some neighbours, Karlheinz and Ingrid. I rang the bell and a man with snow-white hair answered the door. His lips spread a welcoming smile under a thick handlebar moustache, curled up in Regency splendour to match his goatee beard.

  ‘Willkommen; willkommen in Ungstein!’

  Karlheinz led us down the street to a bright, whitewashed house that protruded onto the road at a right angle. He gave us a tour of the garden that Chris had so lovingly described before: the long strip of lawn with its tended flowerbeds that funnelled down to a wildflower meadow and orchard flanking the fields beyond. To one side of the garden, Chris’ vineyard striped the plot with vines of fresh green leaves.

  As we returned to the house, Karlheinz paused by the barn, with its yard piled high with rubble, old buckets and packing cases. Behind the broken mesh of the old hen house, my eye caught sight of the hens among the stones and buckets, sitting in a pile of hay with their brood of chicks.

  I burst out laughing: the hens were made of porcelain. It was then I remembered that Richard had once told us the story of the old woman they’d bought the house from – how she’d loved her hens and how Richard and Chris had installed the porcelain hens in her honour.

  While the house outside had a pristine German appearance, Richard and Chris had created on the inside a distinctively recognisable English interior of ornaments, sofas and armchairs. In the softness of that little house in Ungstein, I opened all the shutters and dropped into the sofa to watch the day dim to night. I breathed out, enjoying the stillness – happy in the knowledge that the next couple of days would bring the simple pleasure of sleeping in, wandering around the corner to the bakery for freshly baked croissants and rolls for a leisurely breakfast and lunch. We would read and sleep and explore nearby on foot, leaving our bicycles chained up by the barn.

  We finally forced ourselves out of the house late in the afternoon, walking out of the village and on through vineyards to a reconstructed Roman villa. The Romans had cleverly sussed out the potential for winemaking in this northern part of Europe, protected from the wind and rain in the shadow of the Haardt Mountains, and it was to the Romans that the Germans owed the pleasurable taste of white blossom, almond and grapefruit in the local Rieslings.

  As Jamie and I gazed out between the great Roman pillars, we followed the line of blood-red poppies through the vines to the ribbed waves of rolling vineyards below. Caught between the vineyards and forested hillside of the Palatinate, the valley stretched out level from the nearby town of Bad Dürkheim, held in a gentle glow of light-filled haze. I noted the flatness of the topography with satisfaction: we’d be heading out there in a couple of days, back to the Rhine.

  By evening, we’d unchained our bikes again – the need for food driving us to cycle into Bad Dürkheim, where a festival was being held. We wheeled our bikes through the narrow streets and squares of the old town, which were filled with colourful stalls, fairground rides and long trestle tables. Adults sipped on wine or beer while children with candyfloss ducked through the crowds. The smell of sausage, burger and fried onion permeated the air.

  The next morning, friends of Chris and Richard took us out sightseeing in their car, but I felt disorientated by the speed of our travel, with no time to gather the passing blur of landmarks into a coherent impression. As we returned to Ungstein, I realised the pace of modern life felt strange and unnatural now, and to my surprise, I found I was yearning for the slow and gentle rotation of my bicycle wheels on quiet Rhine-side paths.

  With our short sojourn in the vineyards of the Rhineland-Palatinate at an end, we handed the keys back to Karlheinz and Ingrid. They shook our hands and wrung theirs as they said goodbye.

  ‘Watch out,’ Ingrid said, gripping my hand again. ‘You are just a girl.’

  I laughed at Ingrid’s words – it had been a long time since someone had called me a girl.

  ‘No, seriously. Eastern Europe … it’s not like here. Please, be careful,’ she said, echoing the words of the Alsatian e-bikers.

  9. Cuckoos and Storks on the Upper Rhine

  The sudden storms of the Upper Rhine seemed far away and the day was filled with birds and mellow sunshine as we cycled away from Ungstein. Just north of Leopoldshafen, we caught sight of our first storks, a pale glow of white on the dark earth of the field that curved with the road. One lifted off, black-tipped wings pushing down in a powerful beat before surfing on a current of air. Jamie and I dismounted from our bikes and watched the bird in silent flight, mesmerised by our first experience of the Rhineland storks.

  From Karlsruhe, we had a short reunion with the Rhine, but soon the wetlands and backwaters of the Altrhein, the Old Rhine, pushed us back from the main body of water again. I realised the call of the cuckoos I’d first heard back in the Netherlands had followed us all the way along the river and was still with us here on the Upper Rhine. It was as if my father was persisting on staying by my side on the cycle. I heard his voice in the two-note flute of the cuckoo, even though he was trapped in a urine-stained armchair in his care home far away. It was the birds that glued us together. Even now.

  Birds had been the backdrop and soundtrack to our bound lives, roaming the damp earth of fields to tune into the sky, I, knee-high, thigh-high, then waist-high to my father. And I had followed him everywhere, rising early sometimes to walk with him into a dawn of milky light and sweet staccato notes.

  Lis
ten, my father said year on year, the first call of the cuckoo! And the long days of childhood and birdsong unfurled through the seasons like the pages of a picture book. The birds and their voices, he presented to me like gifts: the blackbirds’ early morning chitter-chatter; the lark high above the dunes; swallow-tails tipping pond-water; pale geese arrowed southward; the robin’s melancholy winter tune.

  Near the village of Elchesheim-Illingen, Jamie caught sight of a nest of storks from the corner of his eye as he cycled past. We stopped and craned our necks to watch a pair of scrawny adults with their gawky young high above us in an out-sized nest. It was precariously balanced on the stumpy fingers of sheered-off branches at the top of a poplar, the stripped trunk like the long arm of a waiter holding high a twiggy plate of wriggling fledglings. One of the adult pair fed its young, a grey-beaded eye fixed sternly on the chicks.

  An information board revealed the story of the Illingen storks: in 1999, as the Lothar cyclone swept across Europe, it had sliced off the crown of this poplar where the storks had nested year on year. Undeterred, the pair rebuilt their nest the following spring in the remaining branches, raising their young there until 2007. But then disaster struck: the trunk snapped and the nest was flung to the ground, the young crashing to the hard earth. The nest was destroyed, but the storks survived, and the villagers of Illingen, with the support of a local ornithologist, sprang into action. The stunned and injured storks were taken to a rescue centre and nursed back to health – but there was still the issue of the damaged trunk and the destroyed nest. Once again, the community rallied to create a manmade nest of steel lined with willow. Luckily, it was accepted by the storks.