The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

Accordingly, Stephen insisted we move there. He said Berlin was where he’d always wanted to live. Berne had just been a way of getting to Europe. He had met more interesting people in four weeks in Berlin than in three years in Berne.

  Given that so far as I knew he liked nothing better than electronic dance music and shore birds, I had to believe him.

  He said the company had a device in development in Berlin, a little pump that had potential as an artificial pancreas, spleen, gallbladder, pituitary gland or anything else you care to name. He said my visa wouldn’t let me stay in Switzerland without him unless I got a job all my own, which I would have to apply for from outside the country. Stephen held the keys to my heart.

  But wanting to move to Berlin and actually being transferred there are two different things, even for an executive, and Stephen was a researcher.

  At home in Berne, I went out to shop for food (a fun thing to do, because you can stroll down the arcades buying one vegetable from each stand) one evening and saw Stephen in a café, poring over papers, sitting next to a strikingly pretty girl with blonde ringlets. I started over, but when I saw she had tousled her hair with mousse to cover bald patches, I backed up and kept on down the arcade trying to find truly fresh radicchio, which is never easy. She looked like a cancer patient, maybe someone Stephen met at a clinical test of the pump, which ought to work for chemo—I had it all mapped out.

  When Stephen got home I asked who she was, and he said, “Miss Mangy Dread.” That night at the club he had told her she looked like the alien in Alien, and the next time he passed the ad agency, the carpet was gone. He went inside to say hello. Her roots had suffered a bit, but she was confident her hair would grow back.

  The most conspicuous thing in the shop, he said, was a poster: Wasserkraft Nein Danke. Hydroelectric power, no thanks. It was based on the perennial anti-nuclear campaign. But hydroelectric? And there Miss Mangy Dread, whose name was Birke, explained to him that the upper Rhine, since the 1950s, had been “massacred” with a canal and ten “dam steps” all the way from Basel to Iffezheim. The fertile floodplains, gone! High water into the cities of the Ruhr! Basins for holding back the water, but no wet meadows, no frogs, no storks, no life, and why? Because the power companies are taking a license to print money, earning themselves silly on this river! All the consequences carries the public, the taxpayer: flood protection for the cities, because now there are floods, since they build the dams. The loss of biodiversity, of the landscape, of the beauty of the countryside. It is no more a river, only a chain of lakes, and all emitting methane in tremendous quantities! Carbon dioxide is nothing, who cares about carbon dioxide? Methane is seventy, a hundred times worst! And the companies pay the turbines and the dam, nothing else! And they want to build five more steps, from Iffezheim to Mannheim! And all these dams together, they make only so much electricity like one modern gas electric plant!

  Stephen resolved at that moment to become an environmental activist. Which of course had to involve getting information from Birke.

  Stephen opined that Wasserkraft Nein Danke was mostly a way to draw attention to the ad agency. “Her boss is a marketer’s marketer. He’s good. He showed me a project they did where they got tattoo artists to offer this laundry detergent logo and thousands of people got the tattoo.”

  “That’s pitiful,” I said.

  “It’s out there,” Stephen said, “but I have to admit this selling stuff that doesn’t sell itself is interesting to me. With a medical device, all you need is an indication and some terminally ill hostages to lay back and let the money wash over you. Selling the idea that the Rhine should be looking like the Yukon is an actual challenge.”

  “It’s man’s work,” I said. “It’s like you’re growing up and want to get a real job.”

  “It’s not just the Rhine. There are all these stupid community initiatives advocating energy independence, wanting to put in little hydro plants. It’s not like you could even run a milk bottling plant off one of these things, but they chop up the streams into lakes with no way of getting from one to the other. The fish can’t get upstream or down. Did you know most fish ladders are dys-functional, and a huge number of fish die in turbines?”

  I was starting to sense that Stephen found me uninteresting relative to Birke.

  “I thought fish ladders work,” I said. “I mean, I saw one on the Columbia where people were lining up three deep to watch these huge salmon and steelhead leaping up the stairs.” I spread my arms to express the immensity of the salmon and trout I had seen.

  “That’s it,” Stephen said. “You see anything smaller? You see any worms going up the fish ladder? Or even a young fish? Fish go where the current is strongest. Most of them don’t find the ladders, and on their way back down, they get mangled.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m not sure you do,” he said. “People regard these bodies of water as rivers because they’re damp underfoot, but they have nothing to do with rivers!”

  “All right!” I said. “I get the point!”

  Birke was printing up posters one at a time on the agency’s gigantic photo printer, not sure what to do with them.

  Stephen had definite notions. Trumpeting the message of defiance from bus shelters on main roads in every town along the Rhine from Basel to Rotterdam—that’s where the posters belonged. It would just take a little money, money that he and Birke would be happy to raise for her boss’s new charitable foundation, Global Rivers Alliance.

  His first stop would be the bird-related organizations where he was a member. “They’re all loaded federal retirees,” he explained, “and it’s not like they need new optics every year.”

  “But they’re geeks, and Birke’s campaign is with-it and happening.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “The campaign is styled to look cool, but de facto the only people willing to espouse unpopular positions are geeks. It’s stealth geekdom.”

  I recalled that Stephen’s first appraisal of Birke had included the word mange.

  Birke taught me to use the gigantic printer. It was slow, so it was fortunate they had a volunteer with a lot of time on her hands.

  She told me about the Isar in Munich. It had been a straight, narrow nineteenth-century shipping channel until birders got together and secretly pushed through a very unpopular plan to dismantle the smooth green banks and let the river snake around at random. The stakeholders all hated the idea, mostly because you can’t hold a stake in something you’ve never seen. Then the river was restored, and everybody in the city went down to it and spread out a towel on a broad gravel bank and lay down in the sunshine. In the winter the birds fed and rested, and the fish romped and frolicked, and everybody loved the Isar now and had already forgotten that it was ever a ditch. Someday, she said, people will forget that the Rhine was ever a ditch, just as they will one day lose their selfish enthusiasm for the gravel banks of the Isar and leave them to the plovers.

  I immediately saw the overlap between Stephen’s theory of geek supremacy and her anti-democratic, anti-participatory elitism.

  And the arc linking them both to club music, the collective solitary trance.

  Stephen’s plan of hitting up birdwatchers for money hit a snag. The bird geeks were pissed off at him. He hadn’t given them notice before he ditched the waterbird census, and he appeared to be implicated in the unfavorable outcome of their research into wallcreeper vagrancy. They insisted that the Aare—their river, the Rhine’s largest tributary, with its own share of bulkheads and methane bombs—ought to be a higher priority, since the Rhine was, qua river, a collective delusion.

  Plus Stephen’s aesthetics were not persuasive to them at all one bit. He repeatedly asked Birke to design campaigns around slogans he had come up with, things like “Hydropower: Satan Meets Moloch Uptown” or “Fucked Without a Kiss” (in his view an utterly apt description of the Rhine), reaping nothing but the side-long look post-punks are always getting from Young People 2.0 that means, “You are
so unprofessional.”

  The movement was bankrolled by Birke’s boss, George, a princeling with a mane of wavy hair. To his mind, the electronics, chemicals, and paper he needed for his work were ethereal substances as abstract as the gas in his car. Just another form of energy. He was deeply committed, emotionally, to solar power and hydrogen fuel cells. He didn’t like wind power. Too oafish. Big masts and turbines plunked down in the landscape, whistling. Under his regime, the planet would lower its top and fly through space, converting sunlight into energy through the medium of the creativity of its passengers, who would all be his friends.

  He hit on me, but I ignored him. He would stand behind me and guide my little hands with his big hands as I tugged huge sheets of paperboard out of the machine, whispering into my ear that I worked beautifully. Birke said he had been washed in all the waters, a German expression meaning he had been around the block as well as there and back. Stephen said he was related to a famous and aristocratic publishing family, but Birke said that was his marketing backstory and he came from a sawmill town in the Bavarian Forest and was older than he looked.

  I paid little or no attention to George. Still, he took me swimming once. He put our clothes in one of those buoyant water-tight knapsacks the Bernese have, and pushed me into the Aare at a campground miles upstream. The river whisked us to the free public pool complex in Marzili. George saw me bearing right and hauled me out by force. There’s a dam with a power station downtown, and people who miss the stairway in Marzili die.

  Again, I cannot explain why being clasped in his arms and swum across the powerful river did not turn me on, except that it was George. He was not unknowable. No mysteries. Not even a lie. He was bubbly. He shopped for superficial new experiences and shared them. He lacked an event horizon.

  Stephen and Birke were always running off to international conferences together. They never claimed they missed me. But when it came time for the BUND Nature Protection Days in Lenzen, they specifically asked me to go along.

  I think the idea was that they could work more effectively if Birke appeared to be single, or if Stephen appeared to be married, or something.

  The BUND facilities in Lenzen differ from your typical convention center. They’re basically a room in a hotel, near the Elbe but not on it, halfway between Berlin and Hamburg, and hard to get to from either.

  The benefits that might accrue to Stephen and Birke from going to Lenzen were obvious. BUND has half a million members. Maybe forty of them go to Lenzen. There’s an annual event of the same name in Radolfzell on the Swiss border in January that draws twelve hundred. So if you want to make a splash with the BUND movers and shakers, you’d be better off in Lenzen in September, where they make up a quarter of the attendees.

  At first I couldn’t figure out how Global Rivers Alliance got invited. But Stephen assured me that just about anybody can give a talk if he’s willing to (important) go to Lenzen.

  And Global Rivers Alliance had been a player from the word go. Ordinary organizations in the German-speaking world have names that tout their modest ambitions: Society for the Preservation of Natural Treasures in Strunz, Strunz Committee on Woodland Bats, Citizens’ Initiative for the Strunz Wilderness Playground. Not even “Friends of the Strunz Wilderness Playground,” so that you might be tempted to think you could donate ten euros without being enlisted to run a day camp.

  Global Rivers Alliance was different. It was modeled on Green-peace and the WWF. You could donate without ever being asked to do anything but donate.

  Prince Kropotkin based his entire theory of anarchism on the German habit of founding and running collectives with strictly limited aims, so we should all be grateful to the twenty-seven competing organizations in Strunz, yet somehow instead they were grateful to organizations like Global Rivers Alliance for lending them a higher purpose.

  Birke had reserved a room for Stephen and me in Lenzen castle where the meeting hall was. She took a cheap room in the gun club at the other end of town. Stephen came back to the hotel for breakfast, to keep up appearances, or maybe because at the gun club he wasn’t entitled to breakfast. I don’t know. The whole weekend, we didn’t talk much.

  I decided to rent a bike instead of attending the opening session, because someone at breakfast expressed surprise that I had no bicycle. On the Elbe, everybody has a bicycle. I was doing my best to fit in and be inconspicuous, so I decided to rent one on the spot.

  The hotel reception told me the shop was right around the corner. I walked the streets of picturesque downtown Lenzen for twenty minutes reading signs, but I never did find the street where the bike shop was supposed to be. In the end I stopped into a hunting and fishing supply next door to the castle to ask.

  Everyone there was familiar with the bike shop. One guy said it was on his way and he would give me a ride. He had a nice convertible. He pulled away from the curb, chatting amiably about birds. He knew what attracted women to Lenzen. Out in the open, the trees by the road flashed down on us in a pattern of golden light and green shade. The enormous meadows stretched to distant solitary oaks. After several miles he pulled over into a large gas station, the size of a small truck stop, behind which was an enormous bike shop like something in an American suburb.

  No, not that big. More the size of a 7–11. Berne will skew your sense of scale. The man behind the counter said it was his mother who rented. We drove back into town, landing three doors down from the hunting and fishing supply in an old livery stable with an elderly woman who looked like she’d never been on a bicycle in her life and a few broken-down one-speeds with coaster brakes.

  It made sense. Why would locals know where to rent a bad bike? They only knew where to buy a good one.

  Renting a bicycle burned up nearly two hours. By the time I stairmastered my creaky bike up to the castle door, I had missed everything worth seeing. The BUND chairman had given a rousing speech, I was told, and the subsequent presentation on the fine points of Natura 2000 financing had been a nimble tour de force of understatement. But now it was lunchtime.

  I ordered something that sounded like grilled fish and turned out to be unimaginably gruesome (lukewarm pickled herring), let it lie, and walked around back to the terrace overlooking the gardens, where there was a frog calling from every tree and a redstart hopping around the fountain. This sucks out loud, I thought.

  A harmless-looking man followed me to the porch. He stood next to me, asking me what excursion I was going on that afternoon.

  I said, “Grünes Band,” the green ribbon—the DMZ where the wall used to be. He said it was a good choice and very interesting. We had a pleasant little conversation in passable English.

  Now, this guy was not what you’d call hot. But he was polite, and relative to the constant strain of life with Stephen and Birke, it felt like love-bombing from a cult recruiter. I instantly got a huge crush on him. I didn’t even care what he looked like. I wanted him to hold me in his arms, pat me on the head, and say, “There, there.”

  He said his name was Olaf. He reminded me not to miss the excursion to see cranes in the evening. I said I would try to make it. I made the excursion to see cranes.

  From the boondocks to the wilderness was a ten-minute bus ride. Someone had gotten to the observation tower before us, an old man with a telephoto lens like a howitzer. He glared at us for touching the balustrade. Instead of climbing up, the group continued down a dry, sandy road through woods and emerged into a clearing behind a windbreak.

  The harmless man stood beside me as the sun went down, but the situation was not conducive to romance. There were thirty other people there, shifting their feet in the tedium of waiting for cranes, asking each other to keep their kids quiet or move away from the trees or please put on dark jackets over their white shirts. We stared distractedly at the darkening fen, slapping at mosquitoes that bit us right through our clothes. An unknown woman joined the two of us and began talking about a controversial infrastructure project, encouraged by the harmless man’s civ
ility.

  At last I heard the cranes. They announced themselves loudly, like geese, but with gurgling trills at the end and no melancholy. First eleven of them—for so long that there was a general consensus that no more would come that night; the guide packed up his scope, and people started back up the road—and suddenly hundreds. They dropped from the sky in dollops, braked, and vanished into the faraway reeds. The woman kept talking to the harmless man about rail-versus-road. I walked to the edge of the marsh and raised my binoculars.

  If I hadn’t known what they looked like from books, I would never have guessed from seeing them at that distance. They were sock puppets with red heels poking over the reeds a mile away, dull gray in the dusk.

  After the cranes had landed, the geese passed overhead in so many Vs that they merged into Xs and covered the entire sky like a fishnet stocking. My eyes turned damp. The harmless man smiled tenderly.

  We returned by bus to the hotel, where I found Stephen and Birke in the lounge. They were chatting with a couple of new media types from Berlin who had designed a campaign to increase public acceptance of wild bees. The bees on their marketing materials were fuzzy, happy spheres—no thorax, no abdomen, no stinger, just a friendly ping-pong ball with tiger stripes. The people of Berlin had welcomed this animal with open arms.

  Stephen and Birke wanted to get in on the secret of big government grants. They acted like gossip columnists sucking up to movie stars.

  I drifted to the bar and listened to a long, one-sided discussion of tree frog courtship led by an aging softy in a clerical collar. Slain by half a glass of wine, I struggled upstairs to bed.

  I woke at six, alone, and went downstairs to my bicycle, intending to ride out to the river. I wanted to see where the levee had been moved away from the river to make room for birds. It had been one of the excursions the day before, when I was taking in the glories of life in the DMZ. It felt unjust to have missed it, since it had an explicit Global Rivers theme.