The Death of a Much Travelled Woman

by Barbara Wilson

  “I like the DNA spiral up her arm,” I admitted, and Elke smiled.

  “Well, Astrid did tell me she thought you looked intriguing.”

  “What about those two men in the leather jackets, Tall and Round?”

  “I know them pretty well,” Elke said. “The tall one, Peter, I worked with long ago on anti-nuclear issues. He was quite combative then. Sometimes I’ve wondered if Peter is trying to push our group into a stronger and more aggressive stance. At other times, I think he is very clear-sighted about our difficulties, and that’s good.”

  “And the round one?”

  “Until now Kurt hasn’t been very politically active. I think he just follows Peter’s lead. But he is quite sincere in his interest in birds. He is a very enthusiastic volunteer.”

  “What about Karin?”

  “Karin used to be a heavy-duty politico, but all that’s changed now that she’s with Helmut. He was never involved in anything during the seventies and eighties, though how that’s possible, I don’t know.”

  “Karin said he’s nervous about the demonstration.”

  “I can’t imagine him strangling a seagull,” Elke said. “He’s not that type.”

  “Could any of them have written those letters?” I persisted. “And why?”

  Elke shook her head. “Anyone could have done it. Why, I don’t know. Maybe someone wants to create a feeling of threat. So that our group will feel more isolated, more fearful, and be easier to manipulate. It’s happened before.”

  I was going to press her further, but the door swung open and Marianne, arms full of papers, books, and groceries, burst in. “Tonight I’m going to make Chilean food,” she said radiantly and gave both of us kisses. You really couldn’t dislike her. Even though you knew she was going to keep you up half the night.

  A week passed, two. I began to suspect that Marianne did not sleep, for I rarely saw her working. She was forever in my room or catching me in long conversations when I was on my way to the bathroom. I wrote to Lucinda that perhaps one should make a new vow: never to stay with strangers just to use their washer-dryers. I wrote to Nicola, hinting that I might be willing to return to London sooner than expected. I wrote to my editor Simon saying the translation was going a little more slowly than I’d planned. On the other hand, my German was improving.

  The night watches at The Juliette seemed to be having their effect. There had been no more incidents and only one letter, which the birdwatchers had promptly turned over to the press. The media had become quite involved, and everyone was expecting a great deal of publicity for the demonstration on Saturday. All Friday was taken up with preparations, sign-making, phone calls, photocopying of fact sheets.

  Friday evening, when Karin called to say that Sappho was under the weather and she wouldn’t be able to spend the night on The Juliette, I saw my chance. Elke had asked Astrid to substitute. I’d been wanting to see where that DNA spiral ended up.

  “Why don’t I come too?” I offered.

  “What a good idea,” said Marianne instantly. “Astrid, Elke, Cassandra, me, we’ll all spend the night there. It will be fun, like a party.”

  We arrived about eleven, Elke in black leather, Marianne in a big quilted jacket and a dozen scarves, and me in some scavenged warm clothes. Astrid was planning to meet us there. There was a thick fog over the river and a smell of oil and fish. The docks were lit, with weak, eerie yellow lamps, but there were few people about. Water slapped against the docks, and intermittently came the hollow blast of a fog horn, lonely and yet warning of danger.

  The Juliette looked normal, untampered with, as we unrolled our sleeping bags and lit the lantern. Elke poured us some tea from a Thermos and Marianne chattered.

  “Last night I translated the story about the married woman and the servant boy, Cassandra. Isn’t it a good one?”

  “Is that the one where they couple frenetically or where they frenetically couple?” I said.

  Elke laughed and then turned it into a cough.

  “I admit,” said Marianne without blushing, “that there is a certain amount of heterosexual romance in the stories, but…”

  “Romance!” said Elke. “It’s nothing but soft pornography in the tropics!”

  “It’s not! It’s beautiful writing. Help me, Cassandra. Help me defend Gloria from my unromantic girlfriend.”

  “It’s not beautiful,” I mumbled, thinking, Now I have to leave Hamburg by the morning train. I’m glad my clothes are all washed.

  “What?” said Marianne. “Wie bitte? I didn’t hear you.”

  “What’s that noise?” said Elke, sitting bolt upright.

  “Where?”

  “On the dock, coming down the dock. Is it footsteps?”

  “It’s just Astrid,” said Marianne. “Astrid,” she called out, but there was no answer.

  The footsteps stopped, not far away. They didn’t move away again.

  “You’d better call some of the others on the cellular phone,” I said.

  “Yes.” But Elke searched and could not find it. “We must have forgotten it.” She took the flashlight and shone it out on the dock. There was not a sound.

  “Probably just rats,” said Marianne determinedly. “Now, Cassandra, tell me what you were saying. I didn’t hear it…about Gloria.”

  “I’m going out to investigate,” Elke said.

  “No, Elke,” said Marianne, but Elke slipped up the short ladder and on to the dock. We saw her light flicker down the dock and then disappear.

  “Elke!” Marianne shouted. There was only the sound of the fog horn.

  “I’ll go see what’s happening.” I said.

  “Don’t leave me alone, Cassandra!”

  “I’ll be back in a second.”

  I crawled out of the boat on my hands and knees, keeping my flashlight extinguished. I made my way over to the harbor wall and inched along it in the direction that Elke had disappeared. The cement was cold and clammy. The fog was by this time so thick I could see almost nothing. Not even the boat I’d just left.

  My nerves were wound to the highest degree, so that when I heard the thump of someone leaping onto the boat, and Marianne’s shriek, cut off, I froze and couldn’t move. Who was more important for me to save, Elke or Marianne? Let me rephrase that: Who, given the fact that my feet seemed to be stuck to the wet wooden planks of the dock, could I save?

  The question soon became more than academic. There was nothing more to be heard from Marianne, except some banging on wood. Had he—she?—shoved her in the tiny water closet? After a few minutes, the boat’s engine started. Was he planning to steal the boat with Marianne on it? Was he planning to dump her into the river somewhere?

  Adrenaline finally unlocked my knees. I fell forward and started creeping back on my belly over the dock to The Juliette. Whoever was driving the boat didn’t seem terribly practiced; he maneuvered clumsily away from the berth, knocking against the pilings. As the boat began to pull away, I jumped as quietly as I could into the stern, which was open and had a table and built in seats. I barked my knee sharply on one of the seats.

  Limping and crawling, I made my way to the door that connected the back of the boat with the middle sleeping cabin. It was locked. I would have to squeeze around the side of the boat to the pilot’s cabin in front. But the boat was hardly stable enough at the moment for any tricky maneuvers. I hung on as the unknown pilot made an ungainly turn away from the other berths, putting us in the direction of the river. I thought of those huge container ships out there somewhere in the fog. This idiot hadn’t even put on any lights.

  Very faintly, from the dock that had completely disappeared in the thick white mist, I heard feet running and a thin cry, “Marianne! Cassandra!” Well, at least Elke was safe and could get help. Preferably before we sank or were involved in a major collision.

  For we were heading out of the inner harbor into the huge, invisible river.

  Now it was time to move. I inched as slowly and carefully as I could a
long the right side of the boat, trying not to look down into what seemed awfully black, cold-looking water. Forward, forward, I thought. Just think forward. Around us there seemed to be nothing but a damp brackish cloud. Finally I squeezed to the right-hand door. How could I possibly get in without being seen? I peeked through the window. No sign of Marianne. At the wheel on the other side of the cabin was a figure all in black, with a ski mask, not exactly a sight to inspire confidence. I thought it was a he, but couldn’t tell much more in the shadows. Was it Tall or Round? Was it Astrid?

  A fog horn went off somewhere close-by, and I almost lost my balance and toppled into the water. I grabbed the door handle, and it turned and gave, propelling me into the little cabin and straight at the figure at the wheel.

  “You will pay for this,” I unexpectedly said in German (Wie Bitte?’s lesson on future tense maybe?), and grabbed the wheel and gave it a sharp turn. The boat made an abrupt change of direction and the momentum knocked the figure to the other side of the boat, out through the left door, which had swung open in the turn.

  I waited for the splash and looked around frantically for the life preserver. Some lighted shape, a buoy I hoped, appeared and disappeared, but not before we ran into it. I struggled to recall my very brief lesson in river piloting from Marianne.

  Yes, Marianne. I had to get her out of the toilet, but I was afraid to let go of the wheel. In fact my hands were now frozen fast to the wheel. And meanwhile, where was that life preserver? Where was, in fact, that splash of a human body hitting water?

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shape clinging to the side of the boat. He—for now he was not just provisionally but actually masculine—had managed not to fall, but to hold on to the left side just as I had on to the right. I couldn’t see him well, still, and was afraid to turn my eyes from the window in front of me, though I could see very little in that direction either. He was shouting to me in German.

  “Speak English!” I shouted back.

  But if he could, his brain was as jammed as mine was, and it wouldn’t come out.

  I forced myself to remember some basic conversation. “What’s your name, please?”

  “Helmut.”

  “Helmut. The father of Sappho?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  But I couldn’t understand his response. “Wie bitte?” I shouted back, seeing something boat-shaped on the right, and jerking the wheel so that we missed it by inches.

  “I only wanted. Only wanted to scare Karin. Not to go to the demonstration. I hate violence.”

  “What about that seagull?”

  “A mistake. I’m sorry.”

  Should I believe him? My mind said yes, but my instincts were still all wrapped up with that damned television program, once forgotten in my memory bank, now resurrected and imposing itself on reality.

  There was the harbor at night. There was a murderer on the loose. There was a boat and a man overboard. There was a chase. There were a lot of people crying, “Halt! Polizei!” There was a big crash, and just before the crash had been the Imperative. Watch out for that boat up ahead. Turn! Turn!

  What the hell was he saying now? I could barely hear for the banging on the w.c. door behind me. “Hold on, Marianne!” I called, and then to Helmut, “Wie bitte?”

  “Turn!” he was suddenly screaming in English.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I wrenched the wheel around, but not quite quick enough. And that’s all I remember for a while.

  I had a mild concussion, but the doctor said I didn’t have to stay in the hospital long. Bed rest for a week or two and then I should be able to return to normal. Marianne was of course pleased to nurse me. She came into my lovely guestroom every half hour to see how I was doing and to chat. Helmut had been taken into custody but had been released. After his wild ride on the side of the boat, he was only too happy to confess to the officers on the police boat that had caught up with us and that, in fact, I seemed to have run straight into. He’d been worried about Karin as he said. He’d told her he wouldn’t be home in time for her to go stay on The Juliette with Elke. He thought only Elke would be on the boat and that if he lured her off, he could take The Juliette up the river and then sink her somewhere. Not very nice, but it could have been worse. For him, of course, it was worse, because they wanted to charge him with kidnapping and reckless endangerment of life. But the birdwatchers refused to press charges. Their demonstration had gone off splendidly, with only a little healthy bashing here and there, and there was hope for the future that the Elbe wetlands might be saved.

  “Of course Karin is not speaking to him at the moment,” Marianne reported. “But in the end she’ll probably forgive him.” She looked wistfully at me from the side of the bed. “If only I hadn’t been locked in the toilet. I could have helped you, Cassandra. I could have steered us to safety.”

  I had been let off with only a very stern warning never never ever to attempt to pilot a boat in the Hamburg harbor again.

  My punishment was to lie in bed at Marianne’s and have her read Gloria de los Angeles to me, first in Spanish, and then, to improve my German, in her translated version. When I got better, however, Astrid took me out one day to the banks of the Elbe and showed me how to identify the birds that lived on the river and in the marshes. I tried to get her to show me the full extent of her tattoos, and finally, in reluctance and pleasure, she did. But the next time I saw her she was with Karin, who had not made up with Helmut after all. They planned to struggle for the ecological revolution and to bring up little Sappho together.

  I forgot the difference between a robin and a sparrow.

  Days passed. Weeks. One day I got up, as if an alarm clock had rung. I looked in the mirror at my forehead, the bump now turning a mellow jonquil-plum color, and I saw my wasted limbs. And then I took the boat train to London.

  The Last Laugh

  “WE FINNS, WE ARE the most depressed people on earth,” said the man in the airplane seat next to me. “We are more depressed than the Scandinavians. We are more depressed than the Slavs. That is because Slav and Scandinavian blood runs in our veins together, so the depression is doubled.”

  “Are you depressed about anything in particular?” I inquired. He was a mere sketch of a man, pale eyes, pale hair, outbrillianced by the cobalt blue of his soccer T-shirt.

  “No,” he sighed, and looked even more morose. “Just depressed.”

  “Well,” said Luisa Montiflores. She was on my other side on the FinnAir flight from London to Helsinki that was taking us to a writers’ conference. “You can’t be more depressed than the Uruguayans. We are famous all over South America for our melancholia.”

  “But you at least have a reason in Uruguay,” the Finn argued. “Your politics, your economy, everything like that. While for us, so stable and well-off, it is the human condition in the morning when we wake up that hurts us.”

  “It’s not just a hangover?” I asked, for I recalled that the Finns were serious drinkers. The pale man ignored me. “We’re depressed just to wake up and still be alive!” he said.

  I got up to use the toilet, and when I returned Luisa had taken my middle seat and the two of them were relating stories of pathology and paralysis, phobia and frenzy, with voluptuous glee. Luisa turned to me only once during the rest of the flight. “But why have I not come to Finland before?” she demanded. “We are made for each other, me and the Finns!”

  I’d once had a similar thought years ago, when I spent a weekend in Finland with a young translator I’d met at a conference in St. Petersburg. Helga, who had an arrestingly unpronounceable last name, had invited me back to her family’s cabin somewhere north of Helsinki. We ate grilled reindeer steak and potatoes with sour cream, washed down with vodka, and spent most of our time in the wood-fired sauna. Helga could stay in forever, but I was always having to dash out into the snowy drifts. Occasionally she ran out too; she had the longest legs I’d ever seen, a
nd a jubilant laugh as she leapt into the snow. For a while afterward we’d written, but then I’d lost contact with her until a printed wedding announcement with no personal message came in the mail. That must have been eight years ago. I’d heard nothing of her until Luisa showed me the conference brochure. Helga was one of the main organizers.

  It was long-legged Helga who was at the gate to meet us, tall as ever and even more beautiful, though far more subdued. She held out her hand to me, but her cool blue eyes betrayed nothing, even though she said formally, “Pleasant to see you again, Cassandra.”

  “You already know each other?” asked Luisa.

  “Another conference years ago,” murmured Helga. “In what was then Leningrad. We’ll have to catch up sometime. But now we have to hurry. We’ll be getting to your hotel just in time to catch a bus with the other participants for the place where your conference is being held. It’s by a lovely lake north of the city.”

  This prestigious writers’ reunion had taken place every two years since the early sixties, when Finland had created it to establish dialogue between East and West. Once it had been famous for the drunken Russians speechifying about God and morality and their Western male counterparts trying to keep up with the toasts and saying that they wished someone in their country cared enough about their writing to put them in the Gulag. But with the end of the Cold War, the organizers had tried to bring in new blood. They cut back on the Bulgarians and invited the feminists, among them Luisa Montiflores and her translator (Luisa always asked for one, on principle, though her English, except in extreme moments, was quite good), Cassandra Reilly.

  Luisa loved a junket, but she had another motive for wanting to attend. She knew that the Venezuelan writer Gloria de los Angeles had been invited to the conference two years before, and since then she herself had been angling for an invitation. Her rivalry with Gloria was ludicrous, given that the Venezuelan’s magic realism novels had sold in the millions in twenty languages, while Luisa had only been translated into French and English and languished on the backlists of prestigious and impecunious literary publishers. It is the contrary nature, however, of those who write hermetic texts that only postmodern scholars can fully decipher, to long for an enthusiastic public response at the same time as they take pride in their obscurity.