High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  On the way back, they’d spoken of the deep sea and of the black smokers. Mátyás had told her that in the future they’d look for gold down there.

  Not yet, Mátyás had said, it was still too expensive.

  Then she stopped.

  Is it true? she asked. Hands on her hips, her face: narrow, serious. Maybe he found something. In one of the rock samples, maybe—

  Waclaw could hear the shaker screens. In the middle of the vastness he saw the mud, and the workers in the mud, and the winter and the steam on the standpipes. Mátyás, standing there as if bewitched, the crude oil was hot in the pipes, then finally their voices, which sounded curiously clear when they came on land on a winter’s night, standing at a crossroads, and for long moments not knowing which way.

  He wanted to go, but Patrícia held his arm.

  What is it? she asked. Whether he knew anything about it. She asked about nuggets, and he thought of the clay he’d dug in as a child, a dirty stream in the meadows, but all he’d found were leeches, they slid over his hand.

  Nuggets? What did this woman want to hear?

  He shook his head.

  We never found anything down there, he said softly. Nur Schlamm. Just mud.

  But now the narrow crack of light from the refrigerator was the only light, and where it stopped there was no shore for a long time, they were on a raft and the world had forgotten them. They were no prospectors, they’d found nothing out there. They floated on a very wide river, but unlike the heroes of his childhood adventure books they could fall, and those who fell did not come back.

  9

  The Station

  He saw the dirty feet of the boys in their sandals above him, he followed them up the ladders. The wood was sun-bleached and covered with droppings, and they carried the heavy sacks of corn to the brightly painted lofts: turquoise, yellow, the colors gleamed high above the rooftops of Cairo. In the streets far below, cars honked: a perpetual rush hour, dust and garbage on the roofs around them, the endless satellite dishes. And the way the sky broke open as they let the pigeons out of the coops, and the birds flew their easy circles, far above the rooftops and the smog. The dumps in the distance, so many people in this city, even out there. It wasn’t long since Waclaw’s accident; he’d discovered the lofts one afternoon and had since then come again and again. He bought feed for the boys and they asked him nothing, and it was as if something different mattered up here, and he felt almost at home when he saw the boys pressing their birds’ feathers to their cheeks—

  Patrícia honked three times, the motor was running, she seemed to be in a hurry. He didn’t ask where they were going. The landscape repeated itself: houses with iron fences, chickens in the gardens, one-story bungalows. The plains gaping beyond. Cairo was far away. He considered when he’d last been there. The morning when the boys knocked on his door, the dog they’d freed with wire cutters, half starved, the ribs under its fur. In the evening, Farangis’s dress that left only her ankles showing.

  She stopped the Honda in front of a sand-colored building. Rendőrség. The police station. As if somewhere there were an eye watching them after all. Inside it was cool, and they sat on long benches against the wall. A clock ticked. Patrícia rubbed her arms. They waited. He saw the chill on her skin, she pressed her legs together. The linoleum, the wooden bench. It smelled of floor polish. Dust wafted over the waiting room floor whenever the doors opened. Mátyás wouldn’t have willingly spent a single second here, Waclaw could think that but not say it: his temples protesting, the bluish veins he knew so well. After a while an official came through the door, he looked flesh-colored, short and stocky. Patrícia jumped up, she spoke quickly and gesticulated with her arms.

  Is it urgent, she translated, and turned to Waclaw as if expecting an answer from him, her eyes moist, Waclaw, is it urgent, as if he hadn’t asked himself the same question for a week already, next to the window with sickly Mr. Jány, on the stool that threatened to cave in under him.

  The official let his gaze wander between them, and Patrícia explained to each of the buttons of his uniform. Mátyás Pásztor, she said, over and over, until the official asked her to come in, behind the door, to the marine-blue uniforms. She turned around once more: Waclaw. He sat erect, hands on his knees, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

  He saw the door close behind her, voices, clacking walls. He thought of Jány. His family probably won’t believe it was an accident. Waclaw hadn’t known what Jány meant. He’d just stared at this spot inside himself that he’d discovered while sitting on the stool, a large, numb spot like a glass flask that was fogged up inside. He went to the foyer, breathed in the heaviness emanating from the polished stairs: old brown wood, banisters that seemed made for no one, treads shining as if they were made only of light. Quiet and dusty.

  And like in a funhouse, the weeks at sea stretched and distorted into something gigantic, then shrank immediately back into something incredibly small. He thought of the ornithologist with his turquoise leggings, the Finn whose arm had been torn off, the Bulgarian whose back was scorched by a gas flare explosion, the jokes, always a bit too loud, and then again the pigeons over Cairo. It was like an optical illusion, in which he and Mátyás did not appear. There was just something that stretched, a hand that led him groping through the darkness without grasping anything. It was quiet. He heard the distant rolling of a desk chair, and something—a cabinet or a drawer—was closed. Closed, he thought.

  When the door opened, he saw Patrícia’s hot face, the cheeks red like those of a young girl’s after playing in the snow. What is it, he said flatly. And he put his arms around her as if he’d always done so, and led her out and drove the red Honda against the glassiness of her eyes, against the silence and the unambiguousness of the police station, against the endlessness of these roads, which were followed by other roads, through the dust, to the calming noise of the stones hitting the bottom of the car, sudden and strong.

  Who could they charge anyway, she said. There’s no one.

  Where is he registered? Malta? Malta?

  But what had she expected from the short, pig-eyed man? He stopped at a restaurant: a main road, plastic flowers on the table, come, eat, Waclaw said, do me a favor and drink, two glasses, two more.

  He was awake early and looked at the unfamiliar body. The long slits in her earlobes. They’d left the Honda there and had gone on foot through the night, and Patrícia had first cursed the policeman, then forgotten him, and then she had turned on Waclaw. Just mud, she yelled, for some fucking mud? He couldn’t hold her fists, and it hardly hurt when she hit him, though she was strong. Then he felt a tug between his legs, her voice grew harsh, and he realized that he wanted her, nothing else, just this short, hard rhythm, not her skin or her smell, not even for her to lean against his shoulder as they walked, and then he still did when they reached the farm. Her body was like a capsule: first something hard, her hands were rough and her knees dry, but when he came to her, she was like a small animal and pressed against him, and her rough voice, too, was gone.

  She stayed lying next to him for a long time; it was growing light when she finally left. He heard her steps on the stairs, then he lay by the empty window, and the smoke of her cigarette floated up to him from below.

  Then he lay there and waited for the sound of the motor, but it remained quiet. It would be a hellish day. The sun, though only just risen, shone hot over the land.

  It was as if the whole plain had been emptied out.

  He waited till midday. He thought of Sharam, and that he would have liked the story about the gold. That they all wanted something from him. And that Mátyás wasn’t out here. Before he knew Mátyás, he’d sat for days on the shore, the Curonian Spit, it was the end of the year, only the pines were still green; a wind that rolled past and he didn’t know where it was going. He’d lived with an ornithologist in a log cabin that was too small for two men who didn’t get along. While working, the ornithologist liked to wear nylon pants tha
t hugged his legs: turquoise and violet. And when Waclaw stomped through the yellow dunes, looking at a horizon where amber and washed-up phosphorus were the same color, it was years that lay before him, which crashed and crashed against the shore. It was the first weeks after Milena. He’d go early, before the banding, as it was growing light, through the finely woven nets. That was the hardest part, catching the birds in a swift motion without hurting them. He could do that. He felt the racing of their little hearts in his hand, though it was hard for him, since his arm was still a bit numb from the accident.

  You’re a different person, Milena had said to him. The water sparkling over the weir, the yellowish afternoon sun. The way she suddenly pulled her legs up to her body and started to cry. Weeks later he got her letter. The sea spray that followed him. That pursued him, like beaten egg whites, like something huge and ragged that he was growing more and more to resemble.

  He folded things as he had learned to fold things, quickly and precisely, as if they were things that belonged to someone else. He left the duffel in the room and went out. The thought that Patrícia was watching him hastened his steps. Villages connected by a single street, a black band, few trees, this light. He had no name for this kind of vastness. Much later he saw a gas station in the distance with two vans in front of it; the markings on the asphalt were bleached from the sun.

  The man reached behind him when Waclaw pointed to the cheap schnapps, staring straight at him as if he didn’t have a stitch on, as if he could look right through him, at the ribs that stood out under his skin. Waclaw paid with a bill; he didn’t wait for the change. A little later he reached a flat stream behind a shady cluster of trees. He saw fish, keeping still against the current, but they disappeared when he came close. He walked along the sandy bank and stuck the bottles of schnapps into the ground. The water flowed slowly, it would cool nothing. He just stood there. No one saw him, no one needed to see him, everything drifted past.

  The crickets did not sing.

  And this dry ground. As if they had given everything, what had they given, what lost, why had they seen each other cry, why the exhaustion, nights, by the bright windows of another chain hotel, why the ashtray next to the bed, and why did Mátyás ask him almost fearfully what he said in his sleep, as if there might still be something on his lips of what he shared with other men and women. Why this Thoroughbred with its prancing elegance that he’d never told Waclaw of? They’d seen the training tracks, the animals’ steaming necks, their panting, their shadows in the morning, as if they’d come directly out of the night. They’d gone to the great races: Ascot, Baden-Baden. Now it seemed to him as if he’d only been seeing the front side of a picture.

  The water was warm. And the stream didn’t move, and the sun stood still. When he’d drunk the bottles, he could see the dust washing out of his clothing in clouds; he could stand there naked, looking down at himself, long and pale. A wind passed through the trees, and a slight dizziness through his head.

  He didn’t want to think of the coal dust, of the mine. His mother grew cacti on the windowsill: desert plants that pricked, needled, and bloomed, while his father descended underground, hacked ore in the darkness, bit into his Kniffte for lunch, all the way down to the soft whimpering of the trainees, who started to realize after the first weeks where it was they’d ended up. They lived five or six to a tract home with blackened windowsills, amid the cries of newborns and the green beans they grew themselves on the estate. The coal dust was as conspicuous as the peach fuzz on the babies’ heads. Something told him that it was no different here. The same narrowness. And he could hear Mátyás running away, over and over.

  He stumbled through the dry grass; his clothes were wet. He saw the gambling tables where they’d watched this plain of Bács-Kiskun turning away from them, this land and the land of the mines, and every promise of quietness, of morning love with a woman whose smell was still so familiar to him after all this time. The flickering black and white, as if it released them; Mátyás sniffed the stuff, a long leg with a high heel across his lap, and this was the whole stake: two men in shirts, dim lamps, and the secret feeling that there was nothing to lose, nothing that could really be taken away from them. That they were invulnerable. While Mátyás turned away to kiss Yala, her gap-teeth for a few nights, and then they were alone again. A little life to stuff in their lockers while storms with names like Ivan and Katrina laid waste to countless platforms. But they stayed, they endured it. It was years later, after the accident with the fisherman and the explosion in the Mississippi Delta, before they went back. Suddenly everyone was talking about oil. They saw the flames over the Macondo oil field, dark orange like the eternal fire temple of the Zoroastrians, black clouds, the growling of ancient powers. And then Europe, and the silence of Europe, where everyone was just watching a wedding: white veils, Westminster Abbey, the English royal family. It took them weeks to really arrive, as if something about this old continent had become unreal to them.

  He didn’t come back until dark.

  He leaned on the sink and cooled his arm. The last bits of intoxication were throbbing in his head, and he was glad to be alone in the kitchen, the water felt good. The arm looked like it had just come out of an oven. Coke, he thought. Freshly fired coke. The water on it.

  Then he heard steps behind him. She stood there for a while and watched him.

  You can stay, you know.

  He said nothing, and kept cooling his arm. The water was loud in the sink.

  Patrícia walked past him out to the terrace, to a large, octopus-like plant. He heard her cutting in the darkness, heard the leaf snap. She came back; sap was oozing out of the edges of the leaf, small, clear drops.

  Take this, she said.

  She watched him rub the leaf on his arm. It was cool and good. He still stood with his face to the wall.

  You can stay if you want.

  She said it as if he hadn’t heard her.

  For now. I mean, where else will you go?

  He shook his head slowly. He rubbed the leaf over his arm.

  You’re burning, she said again.

  He heard her go out; the plant cracking again.

  There’s a house, it doesn’t belong just to me, he said.

  The water pattered in the sink in front of him. His own voice, suddenly familiar to him like a silo that one could draw grain from, big sacks of grain and corn.

  There was a place, there was a place once.

  Close by there’s a weir and a river. The river is named after a bird. In the winter the earth is heavy, and when you walk over the fields it clumps on your soles. Everything is wet, moist and heavy. Blackberries grow on the riverbank, and there’s frost on the leaves. And beyond it the water is as bright as the fucking sky. Like a promise.

  And there are these birds that dive.

  And when they dive, you never know if they’ll come up again.

  Maybe they don’t know themselves.

  You know, don’t you? Everyone knows.

  When they come up—the sky is the same, the bushes are the same, but the river is different—

  He spat in his hand, rubbed the spit over his burned forehead, then brushed back his hair.

  She stared at him. I don’t understand when you speak German.

  I know, he said, I know.

  His trousers were wet, he felt the cold of the seams on his ankles. He took the second leaf from her hand. She’d peeled the skin off. The inside was a transparent, shimmering mass, like the vitreous body of an eye. Like the cow’s eyes that he’d seen cut open once in the school in Wiórek, where he’d worked as a janitor. Slaughterhouse eyes: he’d found the clarity of the jelly strangely moving.

  I know, he said again.

  He left the leaf next to the sink, and went upstairs. She heard his steps. For a while she stood in the darkness, then she turned the water off.

  10

  Coral

  In the darkness of the room, he’d folded his things on the bed. He sat under
the tree, long before the sun was up. He heard the occasional stomping of the animals in the mist that covered the meadows. He walked over to the sleeping herd and spoke softly to them and stroked the neck of a bony old gray.

  The land was still dark. The horse stood there with its eyes half-closed; he laid his hand on its flat head, and an image drifted up to him from somewhere else, an image in which only the horse’s bones appeared. It was night, and the moon shone high and indifferent, just after the war. One of the men must have told him the story, back in the Birkeneck: Waclaw had earned his pocket money setting the pins back up. When they drank, the eras blurred, the long wooden planks of the bowling alley; the men seemed to roll their balls toward some other darkness. They watched the balls roll, and at the end the pins cracked, cracking bones, he soaked it all in, even when they said he shouldn’t listen—it’s nothing for you to be thinking about, son—but in his inner eye the bones grew, in the wide, empty farmland, like deep sea plants in the darkness.

  He’d walked back in the dawn, up Gladbecker Straße, turning onto Aegidistraße, he passed the newly built bungalow and thought of the night out of which the men had come. Something told him that the same thing awaited them down there, in Prosper, Rheinbaben, and Welheim, in the heat, six levels down, in the dust, through which the men came in their columns, strewing salt and limestone dust, as if they were afraid this darkness would rear up like a coal-dust steed made of infinite parts, ungraspable, like a huge, empty field. The gray stood still before him, he could smell the horse.

  He pumped water into the old tub at the edge of the paddock, he saw the herd approaching to drink, saw the water drip from their heavy jaws. He watched them beating off flies, tail hair long as tinsel on Christmas evenings, some dive or other, and they were hungry for other people’s stories. Mátyás, drunk, serious, what do you see out there, freight workers, officers, reports of a sea swept clean, huge expanses of filth, a white ocean, then the mirrored bars, the smell of their sweat-drenched shirts. Tequila, gin, who was going home over the next few days, no one, tequila, gin.