High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  He didn’t get to think about it any longer, you have to go now, said one of the employees with a scarred upper lip, the bird’s not allowed, and he stood there, thin in his red T-shirt with the logo of a fast-food chain, and Waclaw nodded, perhaps they recognized each other for a moment, he’d seen many like him. He stood up, then they went to the Fiorino without a word, the tall man with the basket last, as if it held provisions for a final long journey.

  In the truck he turned on the light. The place where the two old people wanted to head lay west of the area his map showed. He wasn’t sure whether they were breaking off their trip or whether it was there they had wanted to go from the beginning. He started the engine and they only stopped around midday in a bit of woodland. They’d seen many cable cars going up the mountain, they caught the light and it flashed down off the panes; the land gradually grew flatter. He slept for two hours, and when they drove on, fall collections sparkled in the display windows of the small cities they drove through, it made him think of Zaran, whose daughter worked in a Salzburg boutique, those afternoons he’d spent with her on cast-iron chairs under the chestnuts, while at home in Tuzla the men would never be finished clearing up the rubble.

  The old people still looked around restlessly, and they soon started to give Waclaw directions, little churches, apple trees, plots of farmland that grew bigger and bigger, and he drove, the pigeon slept on the passenger side, as if everything were sleeping, everything that lay behind him and everything that lay before them, and Mátyás slept, and the smokestacks slept too. With the two old people, Waclaw got the feeling that he, too, was driving toward something, as if he just had to drop them off, and then continue, with the pigeon, that she would show him the way, like the basket with the emblem.

  But the night was big and wide, and the old man had begun to hum again, a song like the one from the tunnel, as if the fear might open up under the asphalt again.

  At one point Waclaw walked along the edge of a big field behind a rest stop, and he breathed the cool night air, different than it had been in the mountains that lay behind them, but then he walked quickly back, as if there were a current over the harvested wheat, sucking out toward the dark open field, and he thought of Darya and the night over the harbor, how she’d crouch on the roof and under the distant stars as if she’d simply forgotten to take in the laundry, as if that were the only reason for her to be up there alone.

  You tell the girl. Ahmad had looked at him, perplexed. You didn’t tell her? No. Go to Darya, please. They’d stood there helplessly, and there was the strong smell of coffee. These sentences, like gloves that were far too big, with which they were trying to catch hold of a world that had already slipped away.

  The two old people waited in the truck, and they laughed as Waclaw walked across the asphalt with big loud steps to get the heavy mud and dirt from his soles. The man drummed his fingers on the basket, they drove on until morning, the woman whispered the names of the villages and seemed to hold her breath as they came to a stop in front of a stone wall, barely taller than the hood of the truck, before a low house with leafless vines on the walls.

  They got out, and the sound of the truck door was the only thing around them. They took their things, the coats and bags, and set them down in front of the door. Waclaw stayed in the Fiorino until they beckoned him in. Then they sat for a long time at a round, worm-eaten table, they drank schnapps that smelled strongly of pears out of tiny clay cups, and they kept filling the cups, and the intoxication was clear and good, while it grew slowly light outside the window. When the woman had gone to bed, the man thanked him. Waclaw nodded. He had feed for four more days, and he had to hurry, he said, but it sounded as if he were talking about someone else. The walls of the house were made of loam, and they were mended in many places, like a sculpture made by a child’s hands, and around midday he lay awake and listened and couldn’t make up his mind to get up. Through the window he saw a little telephone booth on the corner next to the property, the glass and the silver cord like a signpost with no words on it. Only static.

  The pigeon basket stood on the table where they’d eaten that evening. The pigeon had been fed, and the basket took up almost the whole surface; behind it the woman stood bent over the sideboard. She moved slowly and jerkily, like a music box, she held a big dull knife at hip height, and it cracked against the wood as she cut the potatoes. She smiled briefly when she noticed him. Steam came from a pot, he saw a chicken foot jutting out of the broth, a few feathers drifted light and white over the muck when he went out, and the old man was driving straw out of a low barn that smelled of ammonia, a few goats thronged curiously around a burst bale of hay.

  The fence around the property was made of old boards, and behind it stood lilacs that no longer bloomed, and an old brown horse whose hooves were so long that they curved upward. A rusty trailer with a trough. After a while Waclaw went back to the Fiorino in front of the house, and he kicked the tires, though he had tested them only yesterday, and then he sat on the truck bed and took Jány’s jacket and smoothed it, as if he were going to need it again now. As if there were poplar pollen around him again, beginning to circle, not around him, not around the middle of some image. The soup was cooking. It was cooking for him and for the bird and for the journey onward. He closed his eyes.

  It was the Curonian Spit, endless beaches where amber and washed-up phosphorus were the same color. The nets for the birds, the time just after Milena. He was supposed to count the flocks passing by, but he just stared into the gaps in their formations. That the lines were something he had to construct in his mind out of separate fragile points. That these lines didn’t exist, and the beaches told a different story. The munitions rusted underwater as if the ocean had one foot in another time. That summer Waclaw had collected buttons, little metal badges from various vacation destinations, he pinned them on his baseball cap. Weeks later he threw it away in disgust. He went back to work, he went back to land, always a different land, he was tired, so tired that it soon caught up with him, the accident, he didn’t care, his arm was still numb, healthy, zdrowy, he wasn’t that, but he could claim to be, healthy, zdrowy, yes, it continued, the cities were fast and lonely, no one asked about it.

  The sun shone on his face, and he heard the woman pushing open the door and coming out to him on the truck bed. She smiled when she saw him, still nervous in front of the stranger. Her hair was damp and she’d exchanged her layers of wool for a long brown dress with a few traces of flour on it. For a moment she looked in the direction Waclaw had been looking, but there was nothing there.

  He burned his mouth. The broth was hot and good, and she’d cut the meat off the chicken, and she gave him several portions, though he wasn’t hungry. She gave him a loaf of bread that was still warm, and socks made of coarse wool, and he pressed the pigeon to his chest while the man went out to clean the basket for him, and the woman ran a finger over the feathers. Only when they set the pigeon basket next to him on the seat and the Fiorino sputtered did he think of Alois, and that he had nothing he could have given him, nothing to bring with him. Somewhere someone had stuck a pin in this map, a distance, a bird, he was the driver, he drove.

  It was quiet without the couple, even though they’d barely spoken. The land grew flatter, and it was easier for him here than it had been in the mountains to imagine a bird keeping a steady line. As a boy he’d sometimes gotten angry at his pigeons, always coming back, as if they couldn’t fly in some other direction, far beyond the Esse.

  Now the land lay before him, and he drove all day and all night, highways, a few times he asked for directions, and the women at the gas stations had deep voices and they made jokes in a southern dialect, and he just nodded or shook his head when they asked him something in German. The moon had waxed, and the night wasn’t cold. Villages flashed along the roads, and small towns, church towers illuminated like strict teachers in the middle of a much larger night, and he drank coffee and Coke, and at some point he stopped the truck and l
ooked out the cracked window into the moonlight, bright and hollow, just a hunk of rock far in the distance. Just before it was light he took his telephone from the glove compartment and turned it back on, but he didn’t listen to the messages that it indicated were waiting, only Sharam’s number flashed briefly. It took a long time to get away from the highway, and then he sat on the truck bed and stared at a hill whose grass was so even that in the moonlight it looked like snow. The pigeon next to him, the emblem on its basket, like an alibi, like an identifying mark, a song whose melody he no longer knew. He was twenty-three the last time he’d been there, when he packed his things, with Milena, and steered the shipping company’s van carefully around the corners.

  He slept, he got stuck in traffic that meant nothing to him, what do you do when you come home, you wash your car, you’ve made a fortune, the driller comes out of the doghouse, rounds per minute, the penetration rate, the cement silos, heavy spar and sample cylinders, there were crates, a library of drill cores, migmatite, red-black rocks, the hydrochloric acid they used to test the samples for limestone, the drill collar and the noise of the mixer, there were the directional drillers, there was Anderson, there were the puffed-up engineers, what does the facility cost per day, what’s coming out, hire & fire, there were the daughters who got used to farewells, though they couldn’t, there were the slips around the drill hole, which kept the pipe from plunging into the deep.

  25

  Emblem

  This was West Germany: overpasses and numbered highway exits, fields with clear contours and houses with straight fences. He passed paper factories, smokestacks, clean-looking from the outside, with white smoke above a green that was new to him. Twilight fell, it lay on the trees and cars. The houses and cars were set up in long rows, as if people could withdraw behind this order, as if they weren’t even there.

  He stayed on the highway, now and then he ran his hand over the box. Once, tears came to his eyes, but he blamed it on hunger and weariness, and he thought of the coops in Cairo and the boys with their turquoise and yellow colors, all the warmth, their birds flying in high lines over the smog. He’d gone to the seaside with his mother one last time, she’d wrapped a ratty bright cloth around her head, and dropped down onto the sand, too quickly for her age. The dune grass bowed, little lights flashed in the sky, and he wanted to believe her that it had been dragons who had emitted the poisonous gases in the coal mines all those years, she saw the flashes, he knew it, and he wanted to stay, but it was soon too cold. As he drove, these memories popped up, there was no evidence, no photos, just him in his boots on a random highway where everything had frozen, like the gondolas of a Ferris wheel, in midair.

  White stucco row houses with black roofs, with red roofs, a soccer field, few players, spectators yelling something from the sidelines, a cinder track and more fences and the water-damaged stucco of a closed movie theater, the streets empty, like after a clearance sale.

  He drove back onto the highway, he saw the supermarket parking lots, hairdos as if time had stood still. And the fashions meant nothing to him, and the sneakers meant nothing to him, he drove, he thought of Alois, slaving away in the coking plant, and how his wife was always cold, even in all her fur coats, how she walked up and down under the streetlights, Aegidistraße, Velsenstraße, Rheinbabenstraße, and Waclaw could see himself, saw how these names came to him again, and she walked, Federica, her outline like a huge, listless animal that had learned to walk along a narrow curb, had learned that there is a world underground, and fixed times for lunch and dinner and church, and still the buzzards circled over the train station in the bright spring air.

  In the dusk the light fell on an old canal crossed by train tracks, next to it old factories, brick with blind windows and fire escapes. Behind them, a hulking office building from the seventies, penned in by the roaring of a train, tired passengers who didn’t see him down below, in the cab of the Fiorino, with the basket on his lap. The little light under the rearview mirror was on, and he felt the pigeon’s heartbeat in his hand. She was very calm. He saw the old smokestacks and he thought of the smog alert in the winter months, policemen with signaling discs at the side of the road in air so dirty that any light in it grew big and round like a balloon, false croup, a toneless whistling cough, the infants in the evenings, and visibility so poor that even the slag heaps disappeared. There were the tears in the eyes of the skat players drinking their shot and a beer, pilsner and grain alcohol, and the slapping of the cards like feathers, like a beat that would continue forever, and none of them knew that the whole district would lie there like the filament of a light bulb that suddenly burned out.

  He drove slowly. No one had welcomed him, it seemed only the stoplights had remained, hurriedly changing, so that whoever came could quickly continue on. He tried to think that he hadn’t expected anything else, and he knew it was a lie.

  It was a series of never-ending townships. Waclaw had taken the A40 in the dark, then turned north. He’d passed the miner’s guild hospital, a vague memory of a high-ceilinged room and a nurse who’d pressed a Band-Aid onto his arm like a medal after the vaccination. Then he’d driven on northward, past the narrow bridge over the Emscher, the sewage canals, the foul sludge they’d steered clear of. The stench was gone, and he took Gladbecker Straße until he could turn right onto Aegidistraße, the old trees along the road that had grown big, the workers’ houses—Vierspänner, fourplexes with little adornment, red brickwork, protruding plaster bases, and behind the narrow plots, long gardens, three concrete-block steps outside that he’d always taken as one. He stopped the Fiorino on the side of the road. Rheinbaben, the worker’s houses. The asphalt gleamed wet under the streetlights, otherwise all was dark. A few windows cracked open.

  He left Enni in the car and stood next to the Fiorino for a while, undecided. A thin layer of leaves lay in the gutter, the streetlamps spaced far apart. He walked a bit. The lace curtains, same as back then. Some houses were newly painted: mint green with white roller blinds, while the other halves stood there looking naked in their old brownish gray with smooth plaster. The estate had even survived the damn war, when housing was scarce they’d renovated the attics, Vierspänner, miners for the country’s reconstruction, protests against rearmament, dismantling of the remaining industries, a 10,000-ton forging press on its way to Liverpool, but everyone kept on, the streetlamps, the sewer system, the residential districts, high rates of silicosis, a car of one’s own, steel girders for the Westfalenhalle, sports and horse races, grunts, unskilled workers, hammer and pick and the eternal Glückauf in the pubs, where the men drank standing, when no one could imagine that oil and gas from overseas would one day be cheaper than domestic coal. Alois had come when everything was still in full swing, he’d moved in not far away, on Rheinbabenstraße, which ran dead straight toward the mine, and was one of the few streets without trees. Waclaw walked slowly. The heels of his boots against the asphalt. The old houses for the functionaries on Nesselstraße, two stories, with wide front gardens. But their sheds were useless, Alois had said, too small for pigeons.

  He turned around. A few windows glowed with an unreal brightness behind the trees on the corner of Sydowstraße, as if this night shouldn’t exist, in which a man looked up out of the darkness, without expecting anyone to ask him what were you doing all this time.

  A bit later he stood under their old window. The splatter shield over the pan, the cutlets, and the pine bench, the dish towel on the shiny plates, the green of the frozen peas. He could even smell his sports jersey, drying on the heater in the winter, could hear his mother biting her nails as she leafed through the ads. And he heard the coughing. Brick walls, open windows, the men with their old pride, suddenly feeble, the dark coal field inside them. How they took slow walks in little groups, tiny dogs on leashes. But in the early gray, everything was still.

  Dawn found him rolled in Jány’s jacket under the tarp on the truck bed. The air was damp, and a light haze hung over everything; the first bir
ds hopped between the garbage cans lined up in a straight row. The Fiorino carried dust and mud in its wheel wells, and the neighborhood lay still and seemingly forgotten, while in the distance the engines began their roaring. Waclaw slept, and above him the day opened its eyes, the bells tolled, to the beat of old Stresemann suits, to the beat of old factory gates, like a metronome that no one listened to anymore, like a pulse deep inside a big, motionless animal.

  He drank from the water canister and washed himself and rubbed his temples, he should have gotten a room, his back said, and he folded the tarp and took one of the tins out of the glove compartment, the red band, he saw how Enni pecked at the nuts, and he looked down the street. That’s all, he said, and the bird understood not one word more than it had the day before.

  The woman who opened the door was much smaller than he remembered, and she seemed too tired to even lift her eyes, so that she was talking to his chest, to the dirty seam where he’d done and undone his buttons. She said, I’m not buying anything, before he could say a word. The entrance to the house on Aegidistraße was on the garden side, the door to the adjoining building was open a crack, Waclaw saw junk piled up to the ceiling. On the kitchen table behind the woman was an oilcloth cover, a plate of rice with brown sauce which wasn’t finished. Her eyebrows had grown colorless and her eyes looked for nothing. He said: Good morning, and she said: My husband is dead, you’ll have to ask my son.

  It sounded as if she herself hadn’t understood the words she spoke. A smell of carpet and cigarettes wafted from the back of the apartment; he could no longer imagine how six of them could have lived here together, his friend Rodlo, he’d always just picked him up and they’d gone to play outside, in summer as in winter. Waclaw gave his condolences, and the woman nodded without understanding that he’d known her husband, Rodlo’s father, who’d started in Mathias Stinnes after the war, shaft 2, nine levels, and that raving madness that Rodlo had told him about. This man who then sat in his shed, his sweaty brow, model airplanes, true to scale, British, French, the precise emblems on the finish, until perhaps his hands grew too shaky. All the tools, files, saws that he could no longer use. Waclaw had never particularly liked Rodlo’s father.