High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  22

  An Artificial Sun

  Alois found Waclaw early in the morning at the edge of the field, sunflowers with heavy brown heads, most of the meadows already mown. He found him next to his own vomit, pale and sleeping, wrapped in a mangled suit jacket. Like something that had fallen from far above.

  Alois squatted next to him without touching him.

  He saw that Waclaw’s hair had grown thin at the temples.

  My boy, he said softly.

  He half-carried him back, the long man, propped on his shoulders, with only the even throbbing of an electric fence beside them.

  He lay for days in the little room by the slope. Now and then Alois came to the door, left him hot soup or some bread, he didn’t ask any questions.

  Behind the curtains there was the noise of the streets, everything came back: the engines, the honking, the call of the muezzin. The night was not dark. It glowed as under a gas flare. As under an artificial sun. Words rose in him, his father’s words, he could hear him: come back home, my boy. Waclaw could see him. Tomasz, grown old, kneeling, pod twoją obronę, the prayer to Mary, the medallion he wore around his neck when he went underground. The low kneeler in the hallway, the prayer at mealtimes, the smell of boiled beets. Pod twoją obronę uciekamy się—We fly to Thy protection. The black Madonna and child was embossed on the silver, Polish miners, their societies, his father’s cough, he wore the amulet around his neck. Waclaw could hear these snippets, shadows passed between slats of the shutters, and only after a while did he understand that they were pigeons. He drank water, he lay in the cool, shadowy room by the slope.

  Once, Elena stood in the door.

  Where were you? she asked. Alois said you just wanted to go back.

  Yes.

  Waclaw closed his eyes. The room spun.

  Where did you get the stuff?

  He was silent.

  Alois told me about the pigeon, Elena said. That you might do it, take her with you.

  He closed his eyes. The room spun.

  And what the hell do you want from me, he said.

  Then it was quiet again.

  And while Alois set bottles of water by the door, while the shadows of the birds passed by the window, while his back ached and he suddenly knew that he wasn’t just refueling to get his strength back, but that something of this exhaustion would remain, he thought of Rotterdam, of the big oil tanks and the shipyards where they built the rigs, repaired steel rudders and propellers, and that that was the only place where he would be sure to find work. Waclaw, they’d said to him after the accident, go home, take a break. As if it were just a discrete distance with an alpha and an omega, that he could travel back. The wind pressed against the cabins. Maybe he would have given up back then if he hadn’t met Mátyás. But maybe he, too—and this thought was like a sharp stone—maybe Mátyás, too, had grown tired, and no longer knew what he was looking for in all those mountains he only ever talked about.

  Some managed to stop after a few years. They set aside what they’d earned. Built houses—they returned to those worlds that had lined the insides of their lockers for years, dog-eared children’s curls and playground slides, worn photos. Paper that you could take out and look at. Paper that sometimes said nothing other than that time didn’t stand still. Not for a picture. Not for Andrej. Not for Pippo. Not for him. Others drifted away. Without knowing where the tide was carrying them. Without knowing. In all of it, Mátyás was one of the few who seemed to swim under his own power: a needle, an inner compass.

  When Waclaw awoke, he saw the animal on the windowsill. He knew that outside the September quiet was spreading out from Alois’s village. He saw the soapstone and he thought of beaches made of dead coral and huts made of pandanus, but none of it made any sense.

  Now and then a car drove by, or he heard the melody of the radio that played softly in Alois’s kitchen. Otherwise, it was quiet. They would have cleared out the barn and carried the dead out of the chapel, the gymnasts would have packed up their rings and the men wiped down their bocce balls, no dust from that day. Alois asked him nothing. Waclaw lay in the room by the slope, whitewashed walls, the smell of lavender, the large heavy cupboard, he was in no hurry to get up anytime soon.

  Now and then he saw before him the dark wood of the pier. And he often thought back to that summer day when they’d crouched so long at the edge of the woods, Milena next to him, in the shade under the trees. The light from the lake flickered in the leaves and sent restless stripes down the trunks. They saw the muscles of the snake slowly, rhythmically moving down its body in a pumping motion. The new skin was dark and fresh. And why, he thought later, shouldn’t they sit by a lake, watching an adder shedding its skin there in the thicket, why did everything seem wrong when there was no money for a car or gas or a bus ticket or the newspaper. What could be wrong about that light?

  It was much later when she called him on the platform. Milena told him that she’d started brushing her teeth as soon as she finished her coffee, so the enamel wouldn’t turn brown—she told him such things. Far away, he tried to imagine her, but he had no feeling for her mouth, or for the place where they’d woken up together every morning. As if a glass wall had slipped between them, without a sound. As if a toothbrush could change anything. They spoke for a long time, and when the sentences broke off, they listened to the distance in the connection, which seemed to have a life of its own, setting itself up between their words.

  The winter evenings were cold and dark when he came back, and they sat in front of the stove in the little house, they looked into the night as if waiting for something. When he left after two weeks, he had a feeling again for the place he was leaving, even if this place, this world, didn’t need him. The other countries, on the other hand, were exciting, the schnapps was exhilarating, the dance and the music didn’t need the slow rhythm that pressed the seasons upon the countryside and between the fence pickets. It was the other side of the Atlantic. There wasn’t the damn war in their heads, there wasn’t the rearmament or the fucking mine, none of it. The men sat with their full glasses and awaited the future. They worked their asses off for it. The continents drifted, the oil was millions of years old, the winter was dark in the village. He stroked her belly as he drove.

  Later he often thought back on it. It was a touch that happened in passing. It was a touch that then no longer happened. No boy, no girl, but I’m healthy. Her letter reached him two weeks later on the West Aquarius, he worked, sick, days, nights, he let his ticket expire, the cities were fast and lonely, don’t come anymore, he tore up the letter, he would later regret that, too. He sat on foreign coastlines, watched the fishermen throwing the last leftovers in their nets to the seabirds, he saw the birds, always that same hunger. The tired waves on the beach. The bartenders, their white shirts. Don’t come anymore.

  He lay in the twilight and saw the animal, its frog’s feet and lion’s mouth, then he fell back asleep. In the stillness he heard the harsh noise of the needle gun that they used to strip rust off the deck.

  The wind drove the clouds that had gathered that morning. It was the first heavy rain since he’d been on the road. The crags were wet, and when Waclaw got to the fork in the road, he had trouble wedging the metal sheet between the rocks, the flow was twice as strong, he felt the pressure on his shoulders.

  The water was cold. It splashed against the rocks, the moss gleamed where the little rivulet came down the mountain. He smelled the sweat of the last days on his body, and everything seemed far away. The festival. The damned grass in the vastness of Hungary. The green plastic in Alois’s loft. The morning was still milky and dismal and he shivered as he took the metal out of the rocks. He didn’t know if it was only the cold. Far below lay the house, lay Alois with his old dreams. Take her north with you.

  He rubbed his skin with a narrow towel. When he bent over, he felt his back. The third, the fourth vertebrae. He stood on the rocks and waited, while the sun gradually rose higher; he dressed slow
ly. He could trace the ripped cloth of the suit with his finger and stand with his bare feet in his own boots like a guest.

  He looked down to the green beans, the landscape had changed color with the rain. And he walked, Waclaw, with stiff steps, past the low canopy under which Alois sat—he saw his fragile hands and the concentration with which he peeled an apple in thin strips. There you are. Alois tried to smile.

  That afternoon Waclaw stood at the window and looked out at the loft. The rain had returned, and he watched the pigeon.

  In the morning he was already waiting for Alois when he came out of the house. Waclaw saw him coming in his slippers, and he could hear that Alois was out of breath from the few steps up the slope.

  Alois sat down in the big folding chair where he always sat. It was patterned with stripes like something out of an old ad for a VW Beetle.

  There you are, he said softly.

  Yes, Waclaw said.

  They didn’t speak while Alois opened the hatch and let them out, one after another. They circled the loft once before making their large loops. Here was the whooshing of their wings, here was the silence over the miners’ estate, and within it, the soft murmur of prayers. His mother, the aunts, the rosaries. Always, the fear that it wouldn’t be enough. A wind howled in their faces, even when they sat in the warmth making lace bedspreads. He thought of the Filipinos who sought out services in their native tongue in every port.

  Alois had both arms on the arms of his chair. His breath gradually grew calmer.

  How far is it? Waclaw asked.

  Alois turned to him slowly. His eyes looked small behind the angular frame of his glasses. He watched Waclaw for a while in silence as if trying to read something. Then a smile came over his face. My boy, he said.

  But Waclaw opened his hand, as if expecting an advance payment.

  I checked, he said. It’s over six hundred. Plus the headwinds. Plus the mountains. Plus the night. Are you sure?

  Alois looked at him. Come, come, he said.

  He told Alois he didn’t need a car.

  How else are you planning to take her?

  A friend of Alois’s with long, thin forearms and a homemade concrete pit, whose edges were crooked and irregular and full of oil stains, took care of it. Flavio grimaced when they pushed the pickup into the yard. An old white Fiat Fiorino; the bed had once transported straw and silage.

  Over the course of days, Waclaw could see his arms in the gap between the pit and the underside of the car, a restless lamp, sometimes he heard Flavio curse.

  Alois showed him the feed, the bird’s papers. And of course he’d trained her. Marcello, a cousin of Elena’s who drove a tractor-trailer nearly weekly to Brescia and Bergamo, had taken her with him and let her out high over the Brenner Pass. Everyone who’d ever seen Alois when the pigeons returned knew why Marcello always did it for him. She’s used to the mountain air, Alois said.

  Waclaw walked to the village. He bought little cakes and pastries for Enni at the bakery, took the dusty road and went up the lane with the hawthorns to the house. He saw the light shimmering uneasily under the feathery leaves, and while they sat on the terrace with cake and lemonade from the lemon trees, they looked toward the mountains a few times, and Elena asked how long he was going to stay and when he was going to set out, and for how long, and Waclaw said: I don’t know.

  But why are you two doing this thing with the pigeon? Elena looked at him. He smoothed the paper on which the cakes had stood. It was coated with gold.

  You know, he said, when you’ve been out there for a long time, you think about what you’re going to eat when you get back to land, and where, and with whom, and you wait for the mail from the mainland, even when you know there won’t be anything. A ship docks, or they fly in the mail when new workers come. There’s a kind of cult around the mail sacks. You have no reception and no personal telephone. And when something comes, no matter what it is, it becomes incredibly precious. You don’t read a letter only once, and when they send you something—a little cake like this one, maybe—these huge guys stand there like it’s Christmas. Or Jeff gets a Matchbox car from his four-year-old son. For his birthday. He carries it with him all week, and puts it next to his plate when he eats. It’s the worst when there’s nothing to do. When the bit’s stuck. Then a fear rises in you. And then you just want to wait for the mail and think about what there will be to eat.

  He smoothed his trousers.

  Alois was up there almost twenty years.

  Enni bit into a cookie with red filling. She looked at Waclaw under the brim of her sun hat.

  Do you know what she calls you? Elena asked.

  Calls me?

  Elena grinned. Waccio, she said.

  Big Waccio.

  Waclaw swallowed. Then he took a sip of lemonade. He could see the cherry trees. He could hear them: children calling his name, sitting hidden up there in the treetops. For a moment they both looked at the girl.

  After three days Flavio emerged from the pit and from under the hood. The real Flavio, with a head and neck and a face, emaciated like dry white bread but more angular and oily. He thumped the metal with the flat of his hand. It’s ready. Alois raised his eyebrows.

  Then you’ll be off soon, my boy. Before fall comes. Do you know how quickly it gets cold up there?

  Waclaw nodded.

  The next day Alois sat in the dusty room with the feed sacks, busy filling old cans with corn and lentils and coarsely ground peanuts. The precision with which he let everything flow through his hands before filling the tins was reminiscent of a secret formula, calculated for all the paths and dangers of the journey. Waclaw leaned in the doorway, he saw the fabric of the folding chair stretched under Alois, the aluminum frame groaned slightly when he moved. The rims of Alois’s glasses shone chestnut brown, and it seemed like he had only put them on to underscore the precision of his process, while his hands found the right proportions blindly. Waclaw had watched quietly, and the word patient came to mind, though he wasn’t sure whether either of them could be patient, whether it wasn’t much more that they felt that something was at their heels, a vague haste, as if the winter that would come over the mountains, the winter that everyone just talked about, were something more than just winter. Maybe this snow simply made clear that there were edges, beyond which everything known threatened to break off, shrouded in huge, mighty whiteness.

  There were six old cans, feed, to strengthen her for the flight, the journey back, as if Alois had forgotten something up north. He bound them together with six-pack rings, the kind that often lay around on beaches. Animals could get tangled in them, Waclaw had seen once on a hotel television, near the beginning, and he’d fallen asleep late to the thought that sea animals could drown. Alois stowed a few cans in a special box, he’d wrapped them with a red band: these were feed for the evening just before the flight. Then he lifted the sacks back into the plastic barrel and screwed on the top. It made a soft snap, like a child that has to practice snapping its fingers, and he flopped back into the folding chair in the semi-gloom. He seemed twice as heavy as before.

  What did Elena say? he asked softly.

  He seemed to strain to see Waclaw in the bright doorway.

  Cos’ha detto? Alois asked again.

  She says it’s dangerous.

  A bit of air hissed through his teeth. Is she from animal welfare now?

  Waclaw shook his head.

  No, she means for you.

  She says that?

  Alois clenched his jaws.

  She must think I’m a pretty sentimental old codger. That I didn’t dare to let a single bird fly the whole way all these years, didn’t you wonder why? The Silesians, the Prussians, that’s all they did—long-distance flights from Königsberg or Danzig, and what did they care? This way I could always convince myself I was just a good plane ride away.

  Alois looked up.

  Last year I had mice in the feed. They could kill her. Or mold. But for the rest, she has her good
wings. One on each side. And her feathers are perfect. Now stop your nonsense and lend me a hand.

  Nuts and lots of fat and always clear water. Don’t take too long. He drummed it into Waclaw: to pay attention to the weather, to the airports with their strong radar, to the winds, to birds of prey in the skies. You know how important the release is, he said. Everything depends on it.

  Then Waclaw went to pick up the truck.

  Flavio sat on the edge of his pit and let his legs dangle. It was hard to guess how old he was. His dungarees were covered with stains, he was agile, but his teeth were bad and his skin lay thin over gradually receding muscles. Flavio looked at the Fiorino as if to go over it all once more, every wire. Waclaw saw that he’d washed the truck, or at least the windshield. A few pieces of baling twine still hung in the grille between the cab and the truck bed. Flavio saw him coming and slowly stood up. It was hard for him to show how proud he was, so he stood almost motionless, with a suppressed smile, listening to what Waclaw had to say while he walked around the pickup, marveling. They took it for a test drive, and Flavio let his elbow hang out the window. Then Waclaw asked about the price, and Flavio shook his head.

  Per Enzo, he said. And you came on foot.

  Waclaw protested, he just had to fetch the money.

  But Flavio shook his head again. He wouldn’t accept anything. He pounded the metal.

  You won’t need the heater, he said. Then he cleared his throat. He’d looked at the route on a map. He hadn’t known it was so far.

  Do you know how important this is to Enzo? he asked.

  Then he looked at his hands and spoke more softly.

  You could let her out earlier. You could wait a few days—get a room halfway.

  Waclaw looked at him.

  Why?

  What do you mean?

  Why should I do that?

  Flavio laughed.

  Sei esattamente come lui. You’re just like him.