The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

  For the moment, industry backed away from the rivers. It started asking for woodlands for wind turbines and fracking as an alternative to lignite coal. Birke had won.

  It was nearly impossible for me to see Olaf. When he came to Berlin, he was in meetings all day, and in the evenings he was expected at home. I didn’t have money to go lurking around Bonn for a week, waiting for his wife to give him a minute off. Stephen and I were so broke I was buying food at the flea market, fruits and vegetables of no known provenance and noodles that dissolved when the water boiled.

  Olaf and I had coffee downtown in absurdly public venues like the Sony Center. He put his dates with me on his expense account as meetings with Global Rivers Alliance, the only way he could account to anyone for the lost time. He tried to schedule another evening talk that would keep him in Berlin overnight, but all the relevant club meetings were booked a year in advance. He told me not to worry my little head about pumped storage hydro-electric, because solar had a habit of delivering energy at peak demand.

  I was in love. I thought about him constantly. I was terrified my animal cravings would die down before I got a chance to fuck him again, and all that good horniness would go to waste.

  Olaf said his feelings were similar, and having taken months to consider tactics, decided on a dinner date to talk strategy with a locally prominent radical priest in the middle of Saxony-Anhalt. It seemed like an odd choice, but it would (a) keep him away overnight, since his wife could hardly demand he drive home from Saxony-Anhalt, (b) involve a priest, further contributing to her disorientation, and (c) give me a chance to see the Elbe, that meandering canal whose neatly scalloped banks, lined with Wilhelminian hunting lodges, Birke so readily compared to those of the Amazon. The priest would meet us for dinner in Breitenhagen, a village distinguished by its possession of a motel.

  We had dinner in the motel bar. Olaf and Gernot, the high-church Anglican pastor of Wittenberg, talked shop. They seemed to know each other well. The conversation was over my head, mostly involving those government agencies I can never keep straight. Even in a single German state (there are sixteen) there will be a ministry of the environment, transportation and reactor safety, known until two years ago by some completely different name, coexisting happily with a department of energy and the environment, an institute for transportation and consumer protection, and a bureau of renewable energy, agriculture and forestry. Olaf paid attention to more than one state at a time, plus the federal government and the counties.

  And so did the radical priest. It was somehow part of his work as a fisher of men. He conducted it with regal seriousness while picking daintily at macaroni and cheese.

  He was not the person I was expecting to be presented to as somebody’s slam piece. I based this assessment on his table manners and the quality of his suit. I felt reduced to my lowest common denominator, as if I hadn’t been reduced enough already. So the only thing about their conversation that really stuck in my mind was how often they said the names of other women. They called them “colleagues,” and I was jealous. I’d seen enough German lady environmentalists to know that most of them could be my lesbian grandmother, but I felt inferior to them all. They were colleagues, and what was I? They were out there somewhere being taken seriously for doing serious work, saving nature from whatever, while I studiously fucked not only their husbands but even my own as though miming reproductive acts were my sole aim in life. I could be defined as an irrelevant distraction even for Stephen, who was obviously fonder of Birke. I was the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Unless sex is worth something. I mean, if Marx was right—if sex is work and marriage involves sex—then I was creating value added. Otherwise, I was a distraction. Olaf could have ordered schnitzel or a penniless Ukrainian instead.

  That train of thought may have been inspired by his choice of “sausage salad,” a salad made almost entirely of bologna and raw onions drizzled with vinegar. He piled it on to slices of bread with a knife and ate it in a way that was hard to watch. I had forgotten all about men with simple tastes. When a guy sets you on a life list with blatantly aspirational qualities, you feel exclusive, but maybe all you did was say yes the way the bottle of Chateau Lafite says yes when he takes it down from the rack. The longer Olaf talked to Gernot, the more challenging and purposeful his work seemed. Maybe he had taken me on for contrast.

  The sordidness of my reflections was dragging my mood through the cocoa powder, as the Germans say, and I recalled that the author of Philosophy in the Boudoir did not come to a good end, so I joined in the conversation. “I like birds,” I said.

  “I will never understand the attention paid to birds,” Olaf promptly replied. “They are by far the most exhaustively researched vertebrate group. They are conspicuous, diurnal, and enjoy a high level of general acceptance. Far more vulnerable now are the small mammals.” He touched my hand (Germans eat with their hands on the table) when he said “small mammals.”

  “Birds without small mammals would get hungry,” Gernot agreed.

  I laughed nervously. Sad to say, I inferred at the time that Gernot was thinking: Why is this delightful demimondaine dating a plebeian? Shouldn’t she be with me? But I know now that no one on Earth, or at least no one outside the grounds of the Playboy Mansion, is as venal as I am, and that he was entertaining thoughts so radiant and lofty that I couldn’t begin to conceive of them: That since the church runs most day care centers, it would have to take the lead in hazel dormouse monitoring. You can’t count dormice without an army of very short people to look for empty hazelnuts. My preoccupation with my internal monologue—the sort of thing it is always better to write down than to indulge in at dinner—had blinded me to competing subtexts.

  Olaf nodded and voiced his agreement. “Birds are key indicators of intact ecosystems, but small mammals are the staff of life.”

  “I hope that’s large mammal,” I said, pointing at the bologna salad.

  Olaf began to aver that vegetarianism misses the mark in a country where grazing has helped maintain biodiversity for thousands of years, but before he could tell me anything else I already knew, his phone vibrated.

  He excused himself and walked out into the stairwell.

  I pulled his plate toward me and arranged several strips of marinated bologna on a slice of gray sourdough. I said, “Olaf knows all about birds.”

  “He is an expert,” the priest said. “But you have not been in Europe for long. You will find that almost anyone can show you many things, even a little child.”

  “My husband knows all about birds,” I said, offended. “I don’t need a child to tell me about birds.”

  “Birds are not indicators,” he said. “They are ends in themselves. But now is not a good season for birds. I can show you nuts, berries, and roots. Would you like to come into the forest tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll be busy with Olaf,” I said. “Perhaps another time.”

  “You should come again in the spring,” he said. “I would very much like to show the birds and amphibians to someone as sensitive as you are.”

  He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed that I was neither aging nor androgynous. His soft preacher eyes rested on mine as if to say, Do me now, thou tramp.

  I should say in my own defense that German girls, even very respectable ones, call the procedure for getting an educated man into bed “aufreißen.” You rip him open, like a bag of chips. Otherwise he just sits there, giving you to understand through a series of guarded observations that sex is not entirely comme il faut. I.e., every word Gernot said gave him plausible deniability.

  I thought, Like all educated Germans, this man treats feminine wiles like fresh chewing gum on the sidewalk and dispenses compliments as if he had been hired as middle management by God, yet unlike the others he is uninterested in forcing me into the kind of serious conversation I am incapable of having. He wants to show me berries!

  Or was he kidding, making a joke that would have been understood by someone capable
of subtlety?

  I didn’t know. All I could do was feel his eyes on mine and give it a sexual interpretation. I was to be pitied, although I liked him very much.

  “Do you know the Holy Roman Empress Tiffany?” he asked. “She came here from Byzantium to marry Otto the second and was demonized for taking baths and eating with a fork.”

  I had my unambiguous offer. I glanced away from his eyes momentarily to take in the rest of him.

  And there I saw that he was on the old side. Fifty at the absolute minimum. What’s more, he knew it, and he was treating me like a kid. Not the mindless whore I naïvely accused myself of being, but a bright and pretty child, one he rather liked. And all at once I recognized him. He had been in Lenzen, at the bar in a clerical collar, discoursing to the drunken masses on how frogs find love.

  I awoke from my democratic slumber—my stubborn conviction that everyone regards me as an equal—and ran upstairs to find Olaf. He and his little shoulder bag were gone. I could have gone out earlier to see what he was up to, instead of sitting there mulling over the notion of trading him for a guy old enough to have potency issues. Like any sexual partner, Olaf was unable to compete with the allure of novelty. But that was not, strictly speaking, his fault. I had forgotten his existence almost as a thought experiment. And now he was gone, and I was stuck in the boondocks with a twit who made fun of me to my face. The bus only runs on weekday mornings to take kids to school, and hitchhiking was out of the question, given the traffic density.

  I decided to run faster than Olaf could drive. People do it in movies all the time. I skittered back downstairs from the room, took the front stoop in a flying leap, and ran the cobblestones the length of the village, down the middle where they were sort of halfway smooth. And there he was, idling at a bus stop around the corner, talking on the phone. I slowed to a walk. He saw me and waved me away.

  I stood next to the driver’s side window, raised my fist to knock, and thought better of it. I looked around. A nearby house lowered its blinds. Presumably Breitenhagen had not witnessed a public scene on this order in a while, not since its last unhappy wife raised her voice in mild complaint in 1805. It was that kind of idyllic place.

  Olaf finished his conversation. He rolled the car window down and said, “I can’t see you right now. I need my space.”

  “I need you here,” I said.

  “I need to get home,” he said firmly.

  He put the car in gear and accelerated, speeding away past a field of geese and what had once been winter wheat. The geese rose in a single chaotic clump, honking and shoving, and flew off across the river as if somebody had slapped them, flying at least half a mile before each one managed to find a slot behind another and form the customary Vs against the pale western sky.

  I turned and walked back toward the motel. Then I veered to the left, down the knoll into the frost-dusted fields, my eyes smarting with heat and cold.

  I was headed toward the river, I don’t know why. But I didn’t get very far. In a buckthorn hedge, I saw a family of long-tailed tits. The white-headed, Scandinavian kind. Fluffy, spherical, high on carotene. Like the water snakes, but way cuter as they flowed through the twigs looking for a place to sleep. I stood as though rooted to the ground, or rather as though connected to everything around me by guy-wires in three dimensions. As though I, they, and the earth were all integral parts of an indispensable scenery.

  Space, as any Kantian can tell you, is not forever. A struggling lover can demand his space and then want to see you again in two minutes.

  And that’s how it was. I snuck past the restaurant to our room and washed my face. Olaf came back, still in his space. The chasm that separated us was no impediment to anything in particular. After all, it had been there the first time we jumped on each other like bugs. The difference was that now we knew about it.

  He left again in an hour and said he would tell his wife it had been foggy.

  The next day the man of God showed up at breakfast and took me for a walk. The berries were dried on the stems, the nuts were acorns and a few dank walnuts, and the roots were slimy, but it was beautiful.

  Only a week later, the Reverend Gernot invited Stephen and me to his paternal home in Dessau to stay overnight. He fed us noodles in the dining room and opened three bottles of wine.

  His parents had lived in a thick-walled mansion. The yard had old tulip poplars and dawn redwoods standing in a wilderness of brambles and volunteer pines. A small circle had been mown with a scythe to make room for a bench that faced a mass of feral rhododendrons across a pond with a fountain. There was one rotting birdhouse, nailed to an aged apple tree that had never been pruned. We could see it all through the veranda doors. He talked about the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm, central Europe’s largest remaining contiguous riparian forest. How the river, channeled by inflexible banks of stone, was eating ever deeper into the substrate and taking the groundwater with it, leaving the oaks and alders dead. How sad that would be. He spoke of silvery white willows and plovers. How the riverbanks, left to themselves, would play host to swallow populations adequate to make a dent in the mosquitoes. How ironic it was that Global Rivers Alliance never mentioned the Elbe, simply because it went on for hundreds of miles without a single dam. How easy it would be to take down levees built in the middle ages. You wouldn’t need heavy equipment. Just a shovel.

  Ça veut dire, civil disobedience. Instead of blather in cyberspace, facts on the ground.

  For Stephen, the idea of direct action was like a cross between chocolate cake and the onset of mania. “Frat boys in Patagucci hoisting banners and calling it sabotage” he mocked. “Calling it direct action because it goes directly to the evening news. You know their big idea for the Elbe? A raft. Like they’re really gonna make it to the North Sea against the wind. These people embarrass me. But Gernot’s tear-down-that-wall thing, that is some serious shit. Respect!”

  And thus it came about that armed with free time, relative solitude, and a pickaxe, we quietly set about dismantling the stonework that separated the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm from the Elbe.

  Now, if you compare the stakeholders in the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm to the twenty billion denizens of cyberspace (that’s counting the duplicates), the potential audience for an act of sabotage looks vanishingly small. But Gernot had succeeded in weaving a fuzzy web of universal moral precepts that made even small-time vandalism stretch to the ends of time and space and beyond. I suppose that’s what theologians learn in school. For him, we must have been a refreshing change from activists who plan sit-ins in parks where it’s legal to sit and schedule vigils for Saturday nights. We didn’t pray for peace or play “Imagine” on the autoharp. We were the real deal. Birke could man the tables at the global car wash and bake sale.

  He put us up at his dacha in Breitenhagen. It was basically one room, with an entry and a pantry and a niche to sleep in. It was heated, but with a strange stove where you had to dump kerosene on a cookie sheet and drop a match on it. The electric stovetop didn’t quite work, but there was a new electric teakettle.

  Sabotage was hard labor in damp cold. Under the dirt, the dike was made of rocks the size of pomelos. I cleared detritus and yanked out grass by the roots, and Stephen wielded the pickaxe.

  I was good for a two-hour shift. Seeing Stephen heave rocks, I felt I was not of peasant stock. I had narrow little hands like a lemur. Even my opposable thumbs were a work in progress.

  After a week, our having hewn a gap in the dike wide enough to flood the neighboring swamp but with no outlet downstream, so that rather than saving the forest we might be replacing valuable wetlands with a lake, Stephen had had enough. He called me over to the bathtub.

  He had found, on a shelf, a report by the Macedonian Ecological Society on the avifauna of the FYROM, and had noted glaring omissions in the area of woodland birds. “Look at this list! There are only three hundred and ten species on it. It’s like a field guide to the beaches of Macedonia.”


  “Isn’t Macedonia landlocked?”

  He continued unerringly. “Reading this, you’d never know the place had trees. There could be anything in there. I’ve been thinking a lot about my involvement with GRA. I’m not a new-media person and I never will be. That whole holistic, we-are-the-world, network-of-nodes thing. Getting all keyed up about the interconnectedness. I don’t actually get it. My whole training was about last-ditch interventions for people with prognoses so bad you could get regulatory approval for a marlinspike and crazy glue. I was doing unskilled labor, on a meta level. Meta-unskilled work, like a Rube Goldberg mousetrap with five hundred moving parts. So the whole time with GRA I’m missing the fact that I have skills. There’s a kind of biologist I already am. Avian population ecologist!” He rolled over to face me, seizing the gunwale of the tub with both hands as he sought eye contact. “So I’m a bird-damaged fuck. So what? Bird damage is a good thing! Plenty of people out there can’t tell a willow warbler from a chiffchaff! Liking thousands of birds enough to be able to tell them apart is of indisputable value, whereas social networking is so repetitive I’m going to go fucking crazy, and it’s making me nearsighted, which is just what a birder needs. I was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from mousing even before we came to the bayous of Siberia.” He held up his right wrist. “My mom told me if you smoke weed you won’t get it, but it’s not working.”