The Death of a Much Travelled Woman

by Barbara Wilson

  “I hope this is all right,” Marianne said anxiously.

  “It’s wonderful!”

  “And the best thing is, at night, after you are finished translating your Gloria and I am finished translating my Gloria, we will have long evenings to discuss her.”

  But today there was to be no work. Today Marianne had decided to show me the city of Hamburg. She drove me by the university and through parks with lakes and parks with statues. She bought me an expensive lunch at a restaurant just off the Rathaus Square and told me everything she knew about Hamburg’s history, which was quite a lot.

  The stories she told me were reflected in the layers of the city: the few timbered buildings with a medieval touch, the tall, narrow buildings along Dutch-looking canals, squeezed in among modern offices in the international style. The city had a grandeur that was more in its substantialness than in any great elegance. It looked like a city where business was done and had always been done. It looked solid, commercial, successful. And yet this air of solidity and permanence was illusory too. For since the Middle Ages, the city had been destroyed over and over by fire, and during the last war the Allied bombings had flattened huge swathes of the city.

  The harbor, the heart of Hamburg, where Marianne was taking me now, had been practically destroyed in those bombings. You would not guess it now. Huge container ships from around the world snaked slowly by, escorted by pilot boats. Around them, smaller working and pleasure boats churned up the river water that, on this bright fall day and from this distance, looked blue-green and sparkling. We strolled along the promenade and came to the inner harbor, where Marianne said she had a surprise for me.

  “It’s funny,” I said, looking around me at the huge brick warehouses and the multitude of wooden docks. “I’ve never been here, and yet it seems familiar.”

  “A dream?”

  “No,” I said, suddenly remembering, “It was…it was a language course, on British television, many years ago, when I was first in London. It wasn’t an ordinary language course; it had a continuing plot, and it took place in Hamburg, around the red-light district and the harbor.”

  “So you do know German!”

  “Wie Bitte?” That was the name of the program, which translated as simply, “Please?” or “How’s That Again?”

  I admitted, “Actually, I didn’t progress very far with the lessons. I would usually get too caught up in the plot to remember that I was supposed to be listening for grammatical constructs. So then, after fifteen minutes of action, there would be questions—‘What was Peter doing in the red-light district that evening?’ ‘What did Astrid say when the killer pulled out his gun and shoved her in the back of the boat?’—I could never answer them.”

  “But your German will come back if we practice it,” said Marianne, as she marched me down a flight of metal stairs to a wooden dock alongside one of the harbor walls. “Here it is.” She stopped in front of a boat called The Juliette. “It’s Elke’s boat. Actually, Elke owns it with some others, all of whom work for the bird-watching society. It’s become the official ship of their movement. They take it out on the Elbe with banners and invite journalists and TV stations.”

  We stepped down onto the boat and Marianne unlocked the cabin. It was a beautiful old cruiser, roomy enough for ten or twelve people, with a small sleeping area and a minuscule toilet behind the pilot’s cabin.

  “I wish the others who used the boat would pick up after themselves a bit better,” said Marianne, reaching for a bucket and rope that had been left in the middle of the captain’s room. “Elke always leaves it spotless.”

  “Oh no,” she said, when she saw the contents of the bucket. It was a seagull with its neck twisted by a metal coil. A piece of paper was attached to the metal, but its message was so wet with blood it was hardly decipherable.

  Marianne turned the color of her hair. “This is really the limit. I don’t think they should be trying to keep this quiet anymore. They should call the media right away.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Yes, them too. Not that I trust them to be helpful.”

  I watched as Marianne put the bucket on the dock. I expected that we would follow it and that she would start looking for the nearest phone booth. But instead she turned the key in the engine, which started up with a promising rumble.

  “If they think they’re going to destroy my pleasure in showing my friend the harbor and the river, they’re mistaken. We’ll deal with this when we return.”

  It was an amazing thing to be out on the river among all the other boats. The container ships towered above us like apartment buildings, and even the tugboats seemed five times as large. The water, close now, was pale green, slightly dirty, with a smell that was more river than salt. We cruised past the promenade above and the port of Hamburg buildings, very grand and rounded, and then past the city, in the direction of the faraway sea, and Marianne pointed out restaurants and villas, beaches where there had once been swimming, and the large, brightly painted asylum ships that held foreigners who had come to Germany hoping for refuge or economic opportunity.

  Outward bound, Marianne was in determinedly high spirits, telling stories of the river and trips they’d made, relating political problems with gusto and anger, and turning the subject again and again back to Gloria de los Angeles and her large talent.

  “I tell you,” she said over the roar of the engine, “I have very little patience for some of these fiction writers who are deliberately obscure. I grew up in a very political family, my father was friends with Neruda, and I have always believed that writing should serve the people and be very accessible. There’s another Latin American woman writer, for example, whom some people rave about, but who I have absolutely no time for. They have asked me to translate her books, and I tell them, Why bother? She is self-indulgent and obtuse for no reason. I hope she never gets translated into German. We have enough of those kinds of writers already.”

  “You don’t mean Luisa Montiflores?”

  “Exactly! You know her?”

  “She…” Actually, I had received a letter from Luisa only a few days ago. She’d found out from Nicola that I was in Germany and was demanding my help in finding a German translator. “Since you’re there, you must have contacts,” she wrote.

  “Hey! Look out! Get out of our way! Whew. Now would you like a lesson in steering?”

  That took all our energy for a while, and in truth, I found it exhilarating, if a bit terrifying, piloting The Juliette along the huge waterway. But as we came back into the inner harbor, I could see that Marianne was brooding more and more about the bird with the broken neck.

  “Whoever these people are, they’re monsters,” she burst out finally.

  “Who is it who wants to develop that stretch of the Elbe?”

  “That’s just it. Many corporations, shippers, industrialists stand to gain from it. They’re so powerful anyway, why would they resort to such cheap, ugly tricks?”

  “They must be more afraid of Elke and her group than you realize.”

  “Well, I’m calling Elke and getting her to stage a press conference with that poor bird. As soon as we get back.”

  But when we returned to The Juliette’s berth, the bucket had vanished.

  That evening there was a meeting in Marianne and Elke’s flat, attended by eight of the core birdwatchers. Several were mild looking older people, and only one was under thirty—a quiet, bald-headed woman with astonishing tattoos. Two men came together, one very tall and one very round, and a middle-aged couple brought a new baby. They were the only two whose names I caught, Karin and Helmut. The baby was named Sappho, which seemed promising, though she did have an uncommonly pointed head. Marianne decided to take part in the meeting, but I retired to my room, so as not to be in the way, and was soon working on my translation under the light of the lamp at the beautiful desk.

  Maybe I was too much of an elitist. Gloria’s books had reached millions of people and given them a great
deal of enjoyment. Who was I to judge? Maybe my long years of association with Luisa Montiflores, who hated Gloria de los Angeles and everything she stood for with a terrible passion, had made it impossible for me to look at Gloria objectively. I reread the paragraph I was translating:

  “He took her passionately; she responded as if in a dream. They coupled frenetically, hour after hour, without eating, without drinking any more than each other’s torrid sweat. Days passed, weeks. One day he got up, as if an alarm clock had rung. He looked at his beard in the mirror, at his wasted feverish limbs. And he left.”

  It was sort of like a warm bath, scented with patchouli oil. But it was not great literature. I must hold my ground. Actually, I must state my true opinion before I could hold it. But I trembled.

  About an hour into the meeting, baby Sappho began crying, a noise that started far off down the hall in the living room and came closer, until it remained outside my closed door. In between the shrieks were the voices of her two parents, who started out trying to calm her down but seemed to move into another topic: problems with the way the birdwatchers’ meeting was going. Helmut, who had seemed sweet and eager to please when I met him, the very picture of a proud, forty-five-year-old father, sounded very aggrieved indeed, though it was hard, because of my limited German, to understand why. Karin seemed defensive. The only words I caught were “capitalists,” and “polizei.”

  Too bad I hadn’t paid more attention long ago to that Wie Bitte? series. Why not? I willed myself back many years, to Bayswater, to the small shabby parlor of the house where I’d been staying with a girlfriend and her mother (right from the beginning, no place of my own!). I’d met the girl in Madrid and had followed her to London. She was working as a translator, which I thought so fascinating that I decided to try it myself. She was actually quite a boring girl. Her idea of a good time was to sit at home watching language programs. My idea of a good time was to figure out how to get her mind off television. Her mother had eventually asked me to leave—when the series wasn’t even over yet!

  Sappho finally grew calm, and the pair went back to the meeting. Eventually everyone left, and it sounded like even Elke and Marianne had gone to bed. To my surprise, I ran into Elke on my way to the bathroom, and she was dressed to go out. It was almost midnight. She looked more like a Russian revolutionary than ever, in her black leather jacket, Palestinian scarf, and leather cap.

  “I’m going to sleep on the boat tonight with one of the others,” she explained. “We want to make sure that nothing happens to The Juliette. We’re planning a demonstration this weekend on the Elbe with several boats, and The Juliette is to lead them.”

  “What is the nature of the threatening letters?” I asked. “Has the group been able to come up with any ideas about who wrote them?”

  “Who actually wrote them and who they want us to think has written them might be two very different things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They seem to me to be written by an educated person trying to sound simple-minded. They’re in computer type, but with a few words misspelled. Come,” she said, and led me back into the comfortable living room where Marianne was listening to the stereo with earphones on and a pile of papers beside her. She looked like a large red bear in her dressing gown. “I’m reading student translations,” she shouted happily.

  Elke took up a folder from the coffee table and pulled out a computer-printed letter. “Here’s the first one: BIRD-LOVERS BEWAR. YOU CAN NEVER WIN AGAINST US. GIVE UP BEFORE YOU ARE SORRY.”

  She held up another. “And later on they write, IF YOU GO ON WITH THE PLANED DEMONSTRASION, YOU WILL REGRET IT.”

  “They do seem sort of fake, don’t they?” I agreed. “But how did he or she know about the demonstration?”

  “A good question, since we had at that point not made a public announcement. Still, it was no great secret.”

  “Could it be a spy or infiltrator?”

  “No one wants to say so, but some of us believe it is someone in the group, maybe not the core group, but the larger one. Big corporations don’t send little notes saying, Drop this cause or you’ll be sorry. They have lawyers, and money to bribe the politicians. Why would they strangle a seagull and put it on our boat? It’s quite childish, really.”

  “Have you raised the issue in the core group? At the meeting tonight?”

  “No…”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is so much easier and more usual to see evil outside oneself. Everyone says we must be vigilant, and sooner or later the culprit will reveal himself.”

  That sounded like a line from Wie Bitte? And suddenly I had a dreamlike flash of disaster in a dark harbor, of someone being knocked on the head and thrown into the water. The lesson on indirect objects perhaps.

  But as Elke went out the door, I thought, If a child strangled a seagull we would not call it childish. We would find it most disturbing.

  The next days fell into a pattern. At seven every morning (Marianne was under the impression because I had arrived on the night train from Paris that I was an early riser, which is far from the truth), Marianne would give a crisp rap to my door and call out, “Breakfast, Cassandra,” or alternately, “Frühstuck, Cassandra.” Since hearing about Wie Bitte? she had begun playfully to test my knowledge of German by throwing words into our Spanish and English conversation. The more words I knew the more she threw. “By the end of your visit, we’ll be speaking German all the time.”

  In theory I had the days to myself, in my lovely peaceful room, but Marianne was always knocking and breaking into my thoughts, asking if I wanted more coffee, bringing in little trays with snacks, telling me she was going out shopping—did I want to come and choose my favorite foods, oh yes, it would be amusing, wouldn’t it, for me to visit one of the little Turkish shops in the neighborhood, and important too, to meet some Turks face to face, they were having such a hard time in this terrible place, she had experienced it herself, growing up in Santiago among free-spirited Communists and then coming to the university here and having to make her way, having to become more German than the Germans, but, oh, she really shouldn’t be interrupting me, and she closed the door softly and apologetically, tip-toeing away. Half an hour later she would be back, wanting to show me an interview with Gloria in a Berlin newspaper or an article in a Chilean journal or a photocopy of a speech Neruda gave from exile. Sometimes the flat would fill with music from her expensive CD player. Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring was a great favorite of hers.

  She was so good-natured and enthusiastic, so clearly pleased to have me as a visitor, that I felt churlish turning down her invitations or pretending I didn’t hear her calling me, or even fantasizing about locking my door. Still, when Elke asked me one day if I’d like to go on a local birdwatching expedition, I responded so willingly that she was taken aback. If my friend Lucy Hernandez had been there, she would have been quite surprised. She’d tried for years to put a pair of binoculars in my hands and to explain to me that a robin and a sparrow are not the same thing.

  “It’s not a serious trip,” Elke warned me. “But every month Karin takes a group to one or another of Hamburg’s parks and points out local birds and discusses some topic, like nest-building or migratory patterns. It’s nice for beginners and for parents with children.”

  “I’m dying to go,” I assured her.

  A few hours later I was sitting on a bench with Karin in a park thick with golden-leafed trees while she breast-fed baby Sappho. I had learned the difference between a robin and a sparrow, had even learned their German names. That would show Lucy. The rest of the small group was wandering around a small pond, staring at the ducks and, in the case of the children, feeding them.

  “Is Sappho your first?” I asked Karin. In the bright daylight, she looked older than she had at the evening meeting. Well over forty, with gray streaks in her dark hair.

  “Yes. Is it so obvious? I keep wanting to pretend to everyone that it’s dead easy, though cl
early it would have been much easier fifteen years ago! Helmut is even worse, of course. We’re trying to share childcare, in the progressive fashion. Which means that each of us is convinced the other doesn’t do it quite correctly.”

  She yawned. The autumn sunlight stopped pleasantly short of being hot, but it was still sleepy-making. “Just last night, in fact,” Karin said, “We were having a fight. We were up late discussing this whole business again of the threats to the group. Helmut takes it very seriously. He doesn’t want me to take the baby on the demonstration for fear of violence.”

  “Are you expecting violence?”

  “Oh, there’s always something with the police,” Karin said, shrugging. “I’ve been in demonstrations over the years where I narrowly escaped being beaten badly. But of course I plan to keep the baby well away from any of that. It’s important that we have babies and children at the demonstration. We want to show how destroying the wetlands and bird habitats will affect their future.”

  “How did the bird-watching go?” Elke asked when I returned. Marianne was mercifully at the university, no doubt lecturing her adoring students about Gloria de los Angeles. Elke poured me a glass of wine, and I sank into one of the huge leather sofas.

  “It was wonderful to be outside, out of the house,” I said. “Elke, are you expecting violence at the demonstration? A real confrontation with the police?”

  “We’re not going to instigate it. It may be provoked.” She sipped her wine thoughtfully, the sober Bolshevik.

  “By the police?”

  “Possibly. But to tell you the truth, I’m also a bit worried by a few people in the core group, not the older ones, but Astrid, for instance, that young woman with the tattoos who says so little. She is an environmental scientist and understands a tremendous amount about biological diversity, but other than that I don’t know much about her. She is a bit vague about her past.”