The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

  When we couldn’t take the mountains anymore, we gave Brighty to a single mother who promised to feed her, and caught the bus headed for Pustec. Just inches from the lumpy rock, there’s a smooth, modern road. We flew down—that’s how it felt after all that time without wheels, like gliding—and alighted on Lake Prespa in the evening.

  We got off at a lonely bus stop in front of an empty hotel. Walking felt cumbersome, like when you take off your skates after hours at an ice rink. We crossed the wide, flat plain of scrub where the lake had once been until we reached the shoreline. The transparent water was so smooth it seemed like a blob of mercury resting in a spoon. The orange sun dyed our shadows on the water blue.

  It was clear and cold. Stephen got in as far as his thighs and stood there being a wimp. He started walking forward again and lost his balance. He splashed around for a bit on his knees. He asked, “Is this necessary?” in a tone of irritation and was suddenly underwater.

  I thought of sinkholes and underground rivers. He tried to pull himself back to his feet by using the surface of the water as a banister. He went under again. I reached him and pulled his shoulders up. He looked at me, demanding answers. I dragged him back to the flats and nestled his head in gravel. I ran toward the road and back again. I did CPR, which I had learned on a rubber dummy in school, but it was pretty much a joke, since he was mostly in the water, with water in his lungs. And at some point after that he was dead. Of a heart attack, I think, but nobody really knows.

  A hunter helped me carry Stephen onto the grass. He called an ambulance while I put on my clothes.

  I’m calling him a hunter because he had a rifle, but actually he was just a guy out riding around on a moped. It’s not like you’d call every Yemeni with an AK-47 a paramilitary. I mean, obviously he would have shot us if we hadn’t been human. That’s why you could go for months without seeing any animal other than a bird. Birds are braver than the other animals, because they have an ace up their sleeve: flight. Maybe Europe had flightless birds once, but nobody ever saw them because they hid instead of fleeing. And then they were gone, like the lavender in the book that was never opened. The marbled teal is almost gone. It doesn’t hide. It flies away, low and slow and in a straight line.

  All in all, I have nothing non-symbolic to say about Stephen’s death and will stop now, almost. I had known that dying turns people into an incoherent jumble of meaningless forces that gets rolled round in earth’s diurnal course like rocks and stones and trees, because I read it in The Education of Henry Adams. Henry’s sister dies of tetanus after an accident, and he makes it abundantly clear that nothing could have been more pointless. I hadn’t known about ghosts and zombies. I thought they were pop-culture pseudo-folklore that turns up in B-movies because all you need is makeup. But Stephen kept breathing long after he was dead. Even his feet breathed. And after he was gone, he became a ghost. I would realize he was dead, and feel I’d seen a ghost.

  Maybe if Henry Adams had written more about his wife.

  Some nice nurse found Trajco’s number in Stephen’s wallet. Trajco, the amateur ornithologist with a thing for beaches. He arrived a day later. I was sitting in the hospital lobby staring at nothing. Thinking it might help me commune with Stephen, who had become nothing.

  Trajco hustled me to a hotel. He more or less sat on me for a day and a night. He assured everyone I would be fine once I was back with my sister in Berlin.

  Constance flew out to pick me up in Skopje. Her presence calmed me instantly. She had seen me in worse crises, like spankings for lying to protect her. She had that steadying family influence. So soothing, yet always unpleasant in one way or another. In her case the problem was intimacy and easy familiarity. She confessed that she felt seriously guilty for sleeping with Stephen. I said, Please don’t! He really enjoyed it! At which point she got all sanctimonious because whatever else her flaws, she wasn’t a swinger, plus she had been really attracted to him, unlike me. At the time it blew my mind that anybody could feel guilty about anything unless he had personally murdered Stephen. But she wanted to feel something; and regarding his existence as over, she went mining for feelings in their shared past and came up with not being sorry she’d fucked his brains out.

  By the time we got to Berlin, I decided I’d had enough steadying and wanted to go home. But when I tried to turn the key in the door to our apartment, it kept slipping out from between my thumb and forefinger. I literally couldn’t get inside. I went back to Prenzlauer Berg and waited for Constance in a café.

  She promised to deal with all the paperwork and so on related to the proper disposal of Stephen’s body. And she did. It took weeks. She became my hero.

  Omar called. He said, after swearing me to secrecy, that the pump was an artificial heart and Stephen wanted to work on it and that’s why he was so desperate to get a transfer to Berlin.

  At the funeral, I finally met Stephen’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.

  Stephen turned out to have a major life insurance policy he had let lapse. If I had liquidated the Tiff Foundation to pay our bills in Berlin, I would have been a millionaire.

  Gernot invited me to stay in Breitenhagen. Inside: peace and stillness, the cookie-sheet stove, his books. Outside the fields stretched to the horizon and laggard cranes plowed their heavy, slump-shouldered course through the sky, tootling as they went. The moon glazed the Elbe silver and I walked through the snow. Crunch, crunch. Physically, Breitenhagen was the anti-Berne. A world without end. To see a definite horizon, you had to go inside and pull the curtains.

  On Boxing Day, while Gernot was at church, Olaf came to see me. He brought flowers and a store-bought cake and set them on the table. He looked older, just like me.

  “I doubt you’re happy to see me,” he said. “I doubt you’re happy about anything.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “If I keep moving around, I’m fine, and if I wake up at night, I go out. Then I feel better.”

  He suggested we take a walk.

  I suggested we go to bed, occasioning a stricken look. I apologized.

  “Really, it’s my fault,” he said. “I should have left you alone to think things through.”

  “No,” I said. “Seeing you is a nice surprise.”

  “Are you really okay here by yourself?” he asked.

  I said, “It’s weird being alone. I thought I would be married to Stephen forever. It never crossed my mind that we’d ever split up. Not really. It’s like I was a part of him, and he was a part of me. We did that classic couples thing, where you delegate functions to each other and end up losing basic competencies, but we were always together, so it was no problem. Now I have to figure out what aspects of myself I let him adopt and represent, and what parts of me are actually him.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “That sounds like a load of pop-psychological bullshit.”

  “You have a wife,” I said. “You know what it’s like.”

  “Had a wife.”

  I acquired a stricken look of my own. The Olaf of my dreams was a married man and lived on the Rhine. This was the Elbe, and the day after Christmas. I looked down at the flowers. Pink roses. He clearly had something in mind.

  He looked at them, too, and remarked, “That was probably the first time in your life a man turned you down for sex.”

  “Not true,” I said. “Some guys can’t get it up after two drinks.”

  While he was demonstrating his sobriety with a rhetorically impressive account of various inner struggles surrounding his divorce, it crossed my mind that, Stephen’s being an incubus aside, and beyond his haunting my waking nightmares as a hairy mass of suet in a universe that resounded with screaming, he had abandoned me for Birke and found quite extraordinarily high praise for my sister, while I had respected his privacy so much that I let him outsource his health to a donkey and die slower than Anne Brontë in Mrs. Gaskell’s life of Charlotte—i.e., like a dog. When it came to relationships, I concl
uded, I could possibly take tips even from Olaf. I admitted that what I had just said about being part of Stephen had been a pack of lies.

  “That’s good,” Olaf said. “Because if I catch you being a part of me, I’ll give you somebody to be a part of.”

  It was a proposal of marriage and children. I smiled. My future spread before me like a picnic. I would marry Olaf and study to be an expert on woodlands. He would smile on me beneficently as I grew into the role of well-informed conversational partner and competent working mom. I was liberated from all doubts of my self-worth and said not a word.

  We had sex and went for a walk. I leaned my head on his scratchy tweed coat. A woodpecker bobbed up in front of us like an apparition, then tucked in its wings and fell away into the core zone.

  Olaf said, “By the way, I live near Berlin now.”

  I said, “That’s nice. I was always wondering when you’d figure out Bonn isn’t the capital anymore.”

  “I work for Global Rivers Alliance.”

  I couldn’t jump away. I pushed hard, but he kept his arm around my shoulder.

  “They got a huge grant,” he continued. “They have some important donors, defectors from the WWF. It’s going to be a powerful organization. Birke’s a competent fundraiser, but she needed somebody with liaison experience to do the actual work. You can’t just raise money for its own sake.”

  “No, I guess you can’t!”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Can we go home now?”

  “Sure.” He turned us around.

  “Are you sleeping with Birke the way everybody else is?” I asked.

  He sighed. “No. You have a one-track mind. You think Birke needs my help? She’s doing me a favor, not the other way around. Life is not fair. Listen, I came here to ask you to move in with me.”

  “I don’t think I can move to Berlin. For one, seeing that stupid twat get rich off Global Rivers Alliance would kill me.”

  “The GRA office is in Berlin, and my place is in Lehnin.”

  “Lenin?”

  “Kloster Lehnin. It’s south of Potsdam. I have bullfinches and wrens. I have squirrels. Come on, say yes. I always wanted a girlfriend with a one-track mind.”

  I stopped walking and stomped both feet in frustration. I actually hopped in place on the snow like an angry robin. I said, “I am through being people’s sex slave! I want to study organic forestry!”

  He backed away from me and said, “You really mean it.”

  “Birke majored in design. She wouldn’t know a river if it bit her on the butt. I don’t want to be that kind of activist. I want to be the kind that makes a difference! The kind with a policy job! I want an education! I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged” (here I used the term for the poor in spirit from the Sermon on the Mount), “but I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!”

  “The forest service is more hierarchical than the Vatican. They have two missions, to harvest trees and shoot deer. You wouldn’t last a week.”

  “Germany has freedom of conscience! I’ll take it to the European Court of Human Rights if I have to!”

  “What if I said I adore you? That I miss your fierce volubility every day?”

  “What’s ‘volubility’?” (The German was over my head.)

  “My life would be so much more fun if you lived in Lehnin. You can study something sensible in Potsdam. There are lakes everywhere up there. There’s a kayak in my shed. I have a big yard. Move in with me, you dingbat. It’s half an hour to Berlin. Nothing would remind you of Stephen. You wouldn’t even have to see your sister. Global Rivers Alliance is paying me serious money, at least for the first year.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  Gernot came to visit. He said he saw it coming. He said, “Olaf knows what he wants. That’s normal for a bird, but exceptional in a human being.”

  “Olaf just wants to breed and feed like everybody else,” I said.

  “You’re underestimating birds,” he said. “When he came to see you, did he eat or impregnate anything? False alarm. He came to sing his song.”

  “Um, you could be right,” I said.

  “When I tell my congregation there’s more to life than food and sex, I’m just singing my song. From over their heads, like a bird in the pulpit, and people respond. No information changes hands, but it doesn’t matter. Preaching really is like birdsong. If you find the melody, the fiction soars upward and joins the invisible truth. People respond to the truth in the lie. The way a bird responds when it hears its song. The males back off, and the females crouch down.”

  I frowned and said, “The females crouch down?”

  He continued, “Tiffany, you must try to understand that it takes conditions of artificial scarcity to make satisfying basic needs seem beautiful. Our society works hard to make food and sex as scarce as beauty and love.”

  “You’re up to your neck in food and sex!”

  “So what?” he said. “They can’t stop me from being afraid you’re leaving.”

  “I’m not leaving! I’m going to Potsdam. It’s like half an hour.”

  “Of course. And what about when GRA assigns Olaf to open an office in Brussels? I wouldn’t be surprised. Do you speak French?”

  “Brussels!” I said. “I always wanted to live there!”

  “My love, you have the attention span of a fish.”

  “But I’m going to improve it in school in Brussels. I bet they have international programs in English. In ten years I’ll be really educated and purposeful. I don’t mean with a one-track mind, like I have now, but a force to be reckoned with, like Olaf or Batman.”

  He shook his head and let go of my hands. “A butterfly among the birds,” he said.

  I sat up straight. “Do you mean I remind you of the wallcreeper?”

  “No. I meant Olaf is going to feed you to his young.”

  He picked out two walnuts from the bowl on the table and broke one against the other using both hands. He ate the weaker walnut, then tested the strength of the remaining walnut against a new walnut. It was something I’d seen him do dozens of times. At first I thought he was doing it to kill time in the silence, but after the same walnut won eight rounds I sort of got the picture.

  “The strong walnut is boring,” I said. “It might as well be a rock.”

  “It flatters itself that the nutcracker finds it especially attractive,” he said, reaching for the nutcracker.

  “You’re unhappy because I’m marrying Olaf,” I said pointedly.

  “I’m bitter,” he said. “All growing things are bitter.” He picked a thin lobe of grayish meat from the ruins of the especially hard nut, turning it this way and that, and set it down again. “Summertime is sour. What is mature turns sweet and falls, like your Stephen. You’re in love with endings now. And you believe that for Olaf, you’re the end.”

  “I don’t expect him to love me forever. Just long enough to raise a couple of kids.”

  “Aha. You admit openly that he loves you the most right now. Because you will never be younger, more playful, or more obedient. With luck, your children will supplant you and he will go on loving you for their sake. This is love as a deflationary spiral. A never-ending buyer’s market.”

  “You really are bitter,” I said.

  I went back to Berlin and gave notice to the landlord. I went through Stephen’s stuff. I took everything we owned (meaning almost everything but my clothes) down to the flea market by the Landwehr canal and priced it to sell. When evening came, I walked off and left it. I embarked on my new life.

  There’s a bird called a nutcracker, but it lives on pine nuts. When a bird wants to crack an actual nut, he drops it a long way on concrete.

  I.e., Olaf lost interest in sex the minute I moved in. He said it was me, and that being around a grieving widow was bringing him down. When I tried to strong-arm him into taking the Brussels job, he called me a harpy.

  I felt I’d never liked him and never
known him. And all because he never bent over backward to please me, even though we were together. I had thought that’s what boyfriends did. He started spending weeknights in town with Birke. Once she called me up, sounding excited, wanting to have a serious talk between old friends. It was mortifying. I realized they were both complete assholes, and if not for the one, I would never have met the other.

  Then he moved out and left me alone in Lehnin. The yard was mostly sheds filled with junk. The neighbors stared at me. The kayak had a big crack in the hull, exacerbated by incompetent repairs.

  For months I lay like a windfall peach contemplating its own bitter almond.

  Then I got up and called Gernot. He sounded delighted. For reasons that resist examination, I began by proposing marriage.

  “I will never, ever marry anyone, least of all you,” he said. “But you can live in Dessau rent-free if you redecorate. I’ll pay for the materials. Isn’t that what women want?”

  “I could kiss you!” I said.

  “Women are all the same,” he said. “Inscrutable guardians of inexpressible passions, and sentimental about money.”

  “I didn’t ask you to pay my rent,” I pointed out. “I just need you to save me.”

  “A universal error of women,” he said. “True sub-proletarians, always giving themselves body and soul because they have nothing else. In gratitude for crumbs of power and security that fall from others’ tables, helping those who need it least. Helping strong, successful, sexy men, for the love of God.” He sighed.

  “Isn’t letting me live in the house you helping me?”

  “Thanks for the compliment, darling, but you are mistaken. Where that house is concerned, I am the poorest of the poor. No private citizen can afford German craftsmen, and if I hire migrant laborers tax-free like a normal person, I lose my pension. To frame tax evasion as civil disobedience is difficult. Until retirement, I am tied to Wittenberg with chains of steel. The house must be lived in. But I can’t rent it out. It’s too big. It would need to be to cut up into apartments, and that would break my heart. To sell it would likewise break my heart.”