High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  It was a fog that had silently settled over whole valleys, over every country he’d known, and even Milena’s calls seemed unreal, as if from another time. Only in the nights had he heard the chirping. Her chirping, as she’d greeted the crows that strutted over the furrows like pitch-black cows.

  Once he reached the highway he walked for a long time in the grass. A tanker truck passed him without slowing, and it seemed gigantic and as if out of another era. Nothing lay beyond this road.

  When the truck stopped, he felt tiny. He had to walk a short distance up to it: the driver had seen him too late. The taillights gleamed like two huge red eyes in the darkness, and a tarp was spread over the flatbed, dirty and old. As he climbed up the three steps and opened the door, he was met with warm air. It smelled sour. The cab was hung with printed beach towels, most of them displaying women. They lay naked, in front of palm trees. The driver said he was going far north, and asked how far Waclaw wanted to go. Waclaw named the city, he said, toward Parma, and the man asked whether he was homeless. What he was doing on the road at four in the morning. Waclaw said that he didn’t know the time, and that he was in a hurry, and had no time to sleep. Everyone has to go his own way, the driver said, but he didn’t think people had much of a choice in the matter. God created the world anew every day, and to understand that, they’d been given the gift of night. What was he planning?

  Famiglia, Waclaw said.

  He was going to visit an uncle, and the uncle was old, and he hadn’t seen him in a long time. The driver said that the dead weep for the living, who have no time for one another. They drove for a long time, and on the wide, soft passenger seat, he felt how tired he was. His eyes fell shut, and he didn’t understand everything the man said. To their left rose the Apennines, and the man named mountains that sounded big and powerful. Waclaw hadn’t expected him to keep talking.

  That he always drove the same route. That around him things changed, and he watched. That he saw more and more people on foot. That he was enclosed in his cab with radio stations in foreign languages. Everything he knew he’d learned on this road. That he let himself be read.

  The women know my body, he said. They can read it. Waclaw looked at him questioningly. The man was gaunt and wore a light blue jean jacket. There was nothing striking about him. What do they read? Everything that I no longer am. He said they could see it: all the missed opportunities. He said that was long ago. That he’d come to terms with it. Life passed before his eyes. That not everyone was granted the grace to participate in it. That the night was like a curtain that opened and closed, but he was no longer allowed entrance.

  Waclaw’s eyes closed. The motor droned, long and even, and the gray, early land with its distant mountains lay before their high seats. What kind of grace was it that he was talking about? The driver said he didn’t know much about it, but that man was capable of things for which he could never forgive himself. Then he was silent. After a while he asked whether Waclaw didn’t have something to say to that, and Waclaw said no, that he knew nothing of such things. The driver said that these were the questions that haunt men in the night. That he could hear them, as if they floated above all the sleeping houses.

  Il paese. The land, he said, is not ruled by men.

  When Waclaw asked him where he lived, he raised his outstretched arm and pointed in front of and behind him. Then he laughed.

  He had a brother in Bergamo who sold tires.

  Could he spare a blanket. A blanket?

  He had one in the back, to secure the freight.

  Waclaw said he could pay for it.

  That won’t be necessary, the driver said.

  Waclaw let himself be dropped off in a town that seemed to consist only of a few houses. He passed a sad campanile and came to a square. He sat there awhile. From the edge, he could look down at a valley, with a city of red brick, he could hear motors, and a stoplight shone in the distance. Ti amo sempre scratched into the rust of the railing. When the sun was already higher in the sky, a few boys came to the square, walked to a little water fountain, filled their mouths with water, and tried to squirt it at one another. Then they walked away, snorting.

  A while later the long line stood in the same place, washing himself. He went to a small shop. Bread, dry sausage, coffee, a small pot, sugar.

  A dog was tied up in front of the store, and it whimpered when it saw him. The dog was old, a white shadow in one eye. He stood there awhile and looked at it. The light fur. The feeling that no one was coming.

  That evening he watched the coffee slowly come to a boil in the little pot. He’d walked far out, and between the hills and a few gnarled trees he’d found a tree trunk with a patch of softer sand in front of it. He looked for wood in the bushes, he looked for wood for the night. The coffee was very sweet and strong. Bats hunted among the trees in the twilight.

  Only the embers were still warm when he awoke. He spat in the ashes. He ran his finger through them. It made him think of Patrícia. He drew his finger over the tree trunk. The ashes left a dark streak. He turned on his telephone, but there was no service. The land was green and soft and inviting. He rubbed ashes on his mosquito bites. Then he rolled his bundle together and left. He avoided the roads. The paths ran along fields, and the fields were thirsty. He had to buy water, a chorizo. He asked about maps, but the shop with the maps was closed. He asked about a direction, and the woman answered him and looked at his boots and his dusty trousers. She talked with her hands and feet. Finally she beckoned him behind the counter with the cash register and showed him a map on a flickering screen, and on the map, the way. Then she offered him a cigarette. They went outside the shop and sat on a plastic bench and smoked. It was his first cigarette in years. The smoke bit into his lungs.

  The woman pointed to the sun and said that he should wear a hat. This light is different. He asked if she had something to eat; she said yes and led him into a small tiled room. There was nothing but a table with two chairs, and a small fan buzzed. The potatoes were cold and turning dark in spots. She asked if he had money. He shrugged. She watched him eat in silence.

  He felt his weight and the weight of his things and that there was no weight that could still keep him anywhere. When he walked through suburbs in the evening, they smelled like garbage, and he could hear the clicking of the car hoods as they cooled. Once he heard music that seemed familiar, but he didn’t dare stop, nor did he dare go to it. He heard voices resounding through the darkness, and he knew that they weren’t voices he recognized. He simply walked on, until the houses and the streetlights ended, and the cars turned on their brights when they spotted him in the darkness, and the rows of vineyards surfaced in the first light, long and even like typescript. You’re in the whole world and I’m in a village, that won’t work, Milena had said.

  That evening he lay in the darkness on a hill, looking at the highway in the distance. He must have walked far. During the day he’d taken off the jacket and trousers of the suit to spare them, but he’d felt naked, and his body was thin and white in the sun. Now he lay in his battered T-shirt, and the sand beneath him was still warm. The air quickly lost its temperature. The lights hurtled after one another in both directions through the land. He made a large fire in a hollow, he’d gathered wood and stones. He placed the stones in the embers.

  He waited. Then he used a stick to push the stones back into the sand. He laid them in two rows on his T-shirt, some were black from the fire, sooty. He wrapped the fabric around them, and felt the heat through the cloth. Then he pulled the tarp over and lay on it facedown. He pulled the cloth to the level of his buttocks and tried to line the stones up along his spine. It didn’t work, they were crooked, a few stones slipped to the side. But it was hot. And it was good.

  Mátyás had gone over the dark circles on his back as over the fields in a board game. It had helped, at first. Waclaw liked the sound of the flames being lit, the suction of the cups. The bamboo huts and the feeling that Mátyás was waiting for him. He wanted
them to be together in this warm and humid climate, all the plants around them with unpronounceable names.

  The Caribbean, too, was salty, and for a while they’d rented a bungalow on an island two hours away by speedboat. On the way they passed natives who had to drive hard against the waves, they left them behind. The trees were big, the heat indescribable, the cocktails so cold that they steamed in the heat. He lay in a hammock next to Mátyás; three times a day, a bell called them to eat. The man at the bar wore glaring white socks and a shirt to match. Most people there shoveled down their food, their heads just above the table. Mátyás undertook little energetic hikes over the island, as if he wasn’t ready to give up, under the lianas and coconut palms and the tousled network of the mangroves. He usually came back covered in bug bites. They were close to each other only in the exhaustion of evening.

  The refineries grew in wide intervals on these shores, the white tanks like bad jokes over cream cakes. The gas flares in all the heat made no sense, but they forgot that they could forget them.

  He lay there like that for a long while. Wind brushed over his arms. He could taste the fire, the smoke hung over the hollow. As the stones cooled, he imagined hands feeling along his back, carefully touching the spots. As if something were broken.

  The sky was just turning gray when he got up and raked sand over the fire and continued on in the direction that the woman had shown him. No one travels on foot anymore, she’d said. Maybe you could take a bus, Signore. He’d thanked her for the cigarette and shook his head. Grazie. Five days, she’d said, but she didn’t know exactly.

  The land grew more lush, and between the hills lay large estates with sprinklered grass, which he gave a wide berth. When he came through the villages, he looked for the farm stands and left coins. He bought honey. That night he drank strong black coffee with honey. He dunked cookies in it and scalded his mouth. He tried to keep his fires small. He thought that this land must belong to someone. He started awake in the night when a dog barked in the distance, he heard motorcycles. He rolled himself tight in his tarp and listened out into the night for a long time.

  The powerful tolling of the bell in a village on whose low houses the stucco was old and water-damaged, the pinkish gray, yellowish gray, the rusty balconies. Tiled roofs grown tired under the weight of many summers, after hills full of barbed wire, roads with barren estates.

  He heard the tolling of the bells like a long-forgotten language. He saw chickens running over a harvested field far beyond a farmyard and he found their eggs in the furrows of the field, and when he cracked them, they were black and rotten.

  He lost his way. He walked for days.

  When he passed through villages, the old women watched him out of the windows and the men looked up at him out of the depths of their gray garages. There were grocers with cracked and blackened hands, men in suits with linen scarves and crests of white hair who surveyed him with interest, but then avoided his eyes. Once a boy followed him and asked if he could be his friend, but Waclaw said he had enough friends in the world, and went into a shop with him and watched as he drank a bottle of vanilla milk and ate the sweet bread that the woman put on the table for him. He reminded Waclaw of other boys, of a day in Bucharest in the spring; the magnolias bore huge buds, the land was warming up, and they’d lain in the shade of old subway stations clutching their baggies; they dragged themselves there and could hardly get up. Waclaw was in the city alone; he’d found a park with jungle gyms and a lake encased in concrete, he’d gone to the opera and couldn’t make anything of it, he’d walked through the dilapidated villas of the embassy district. This was the time after Milena, and he couldn’t tell her or anyone, he never went back. The boy said he had no friends but he had grandparents, and Waclaw said that grandparents were better than many friends, but that he couldn’t understand that yet. The boy said that he was bored. Waclaw said that no one could take this boredom away, and that he shouldn’t believe anyone who said they could. The boy asked how big the world was. Waclaw said he didn’t know. On some days it was bigger, and on other days it was as if it didn’t exist at all, even when you flew around it in an airplane. He said he had to find out for himself. But that the world wasn’t the globe they showed him in school. The world he would live in one day would smell different and have different colors that the people at school didn’t know anything about. Waclaw said he should go with his grandparents, and mustn’t think badly of them when he was older. The boy was thin, his favorite color was red. They parted behind the only ice cream parlor. He wanted to accompany Waclaw to the highway, but Waclaw said no and left without turning around. When the city was far behind him, he looked back and there was no one there.

  He tried to avoid the fences. The night was cloudy, and in the morning it rained. He rolled his clothes together and sat under a large willow and felt the drops hit his shoulders. He found fruit on the path and boiled coffee in the pot until it foamed brown. He was tired from walking and thought of Alois. He didn’t want to think.

  And as he lay there, he looked over the meadows as they slowly grew dark, and against the soft black of the hills he saw Mátyás before him, sitting before him and moving, a black body, filled with shadows, and yet it seemed he could still turn to him and speak. But the shadow had no body. He saw how Mátyás trembled.

  Later that night he dreamed of a great hall that was connected by escalators with other floors, and it was neither day nor night in the artificial fog, in the spotlights, there was all this sweat on his forehead, they’d swallowed so much of the stuff. Mátyás’s steps were leaden, as if the world lay spread out beneath him, a pounding rhythm, the ears were all that remained, and who was this slim, rather wilted man who carried water after him and followed him, his pupils huge, black-light backdrops, his T-shirt sweaty, someone had to bring him water, lots of good, sweet water. And this man stood there, Waclaw, he sang, no one could hear him, the escalators kept bringing up ever more bodies, it was cramped and stuffy and Mátyás was gone, Glückauf, Waclaw sang, why this song of all things, und er hält sein helles Licht bei der Hand, he sang over a dull, very loud bass, it’s the sound of the neighbors’ houses, the miners’ estate, the well water, it’s the “Steigerleid.” Suddenly he feels an arm, someone is holding him, he turns and wants to say something and a blow hits his open mouth, a second one on his jaw, then it’s quiet.

  The shadow of the alder was big and calm.

  Far above, satellites with complicated lens systems traveled along their paths. Particles of space debris. It was no dream. Just a night in Antwerp; the next day Mátyás had hummed the melody to him, what was with you? But Waclaw pretended not to recognize the few bars that had emerged from his depths.

  He spent the day in the shade of a few trees. Tired wooden fences that ended under crags. Greenhouses that shimmered in the distance like some animal’s scaly back. Something sleeping, something big and old. He’d walked until midday and then stopped for a while in the shade under a high bridge. The concrete was cool and there was a wind, the joints of the bridge trembled under the weight of trucks. He leaned against the concrete base. His undershirt was sweaty and full of yellow streaks, he had a bad taste in his mouth, like grass. He walked through the night.

  The land grew more lush, and at dawn he came upon a large farm with cattle, perhaps eighty cows stood strewn over the hills. Around them was the green, and beyond it was nothing. Some lay and chewed on the grass that they then regurgitated. He saw a few calves pushing greedily at their mothers’ udders. As he came closer he saw that their heads were wet with milk.

  He walked along the perimeter fence and reached the farmyard.

  An old man was tinkering with a tractor.

  Waclaw asked if he needed help.

  Lavoro? Work?

  The man wiped his brow and considered.

  There are a few things, he said. But not for long.

  Every morning the woman fried eggs and placed a dish of warm flatbread that smelled of rosemary on the table i
n front of him, and she smiled as she did it and watched him eat, but she didn’t say a word. She topped up his coffee and put out a pair of her husband’s old gloves for him, black from sweat.

  During the days, she sometimes sat on a bench in the middle of the yard and watched from a distance as the clouds above pushed into one another and dispersed above him, while he stooped and stretched new wire for the fence.

  After a few days he pulled long boards over the grass, hefted them over the fence and let them fall on the bushes. The hedges held the weight so that he could walk over the little stream, only the scrub and the gurgling of the water under him, and he stretched up for the dark purple fruit and watched that evening as the figs were cooked with sugar in a huge pot, and the smell was sweet and warm, and like no place that he’d known in a long time.

  He asked her why she watched him and what made her so happy, and she said that in earlier generations there had been many like him, and they’d rambled and had known songs, and even when she was a child there had still been many who came to them and had even preferred it to the wretched life of a factory. She’d always liked that, and now people were lonely in the countryside and alone in the cities, and the same people were sent out all over the world. She said that she was old but that her memory didn’t play tricks on her, and some stories were older than their heroes, the stories really just repeated themselves, but they were now breaking off, and there was no one who could change that.

  The cover of the pot lifted, and he heard the hot, viscous mass bubbling underneath it, and she took a spoon and stirred the figs off the bottom of the pot. He said he’d worked before at the foot of the mountains as a fruit picker, but she made a dismissive hand motion and said that was another thing del tutto, which no longer made anyone happy. She said that war had mixed life up, but not so much after all. She looked at him. Non sei ancora pratico di qui, ma imparerei, she said. He said she had to speak more slowly so he could understand her.