Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

It was pitch dark and foggy. I don’t know why that surprised me. The year had gotten away from me. Indian summer had fooled me into thinking six o’clock was already time to grab my boots and binoculars and run out before it was too late.

Stubbornly, it stayed dark. Whenever the bike stopped moving, the dynamo stopped turning and the light vanished, leaving me blinded from its former glare on the fog. I stood at the spot where the dike had been relocated (the sign by the road allowed no doubts) and saw that everything around me was black. Everything. But I could hear birds: geese grumbling and complaining like couples fighting over blankets, lapwings elbowing each other, a curlew begging God for blessed sleep. Something big passed over my head in near silence, just a whoosh of feathers. There were no songbirds, just the crypto-human voices of avian insomniacs, and I started to sob uncontrollably.

For the first time in years — or perhaps since infancy, when I hadn’t known other people existed — I was certain I was alone, and my prompt gut reaction was to abandon all hope.

Now, in town, you never know whether the neighbors are home. Even in the backcountry of Yosemite, there are those other people with a pass. Nearly anywhere you go, someone might hear or see you. But not on a levee by the Elbe two miles from the nearest town in dense fog at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in September. They say in space no one can hear you scream, but why would a person with a sense of dignity scream anywhere else?

Much later, reading a map, I noticed that the ninety-degree bend in the river — the reason they had moved the dike — had an old traditional name: “The Evil Place.”

Fifth wheels always cry! one might protest. But at the time, Stephen’s affair with Birke seemed perfectly fair to me. I hadn’t forgotten about Elvis. My relationship with Stephen was contractual. By coming along to Lenzen, I had signed on the wrong dotted line. It was my responsibility to face the consequences.

The first rays of the sun brought hope, if only that I might soon see something.

The second set of rays, after a brief glimpse of something horizon-like, lit the fog from behind, and the abyss-slash-void became a gray wall. I rode back to a place where there had been less fog, an island of semi-transparent air where it was warmer, and sat down next to the bicycle, waiting for the first trees to appear. They appeared. But sunrise was still a long way away. I gave up and rode back.

At breakfast Stephen wanted to know where I had spent the night.

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “We talked in the bar to those communication designers and then I went to bed? You are so on drugs.”

Birke’s talk was a triumph. The time was ripe for Wasserkraft Nein Danke. She could be as grandiose and radical as the day is long. She was not accountable. The privilege of youth. Men three times her age swore to borrow her idea and take the lead in implementing it. They had waited too long to make the dangers of hydroelectric power clear. Young people (why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money) would follow the call, power companies would bend the knee, Birke would get free banner ads on everybody’s website.

Stephen and Birke held court at their information table, handing out exquisite pamphlets on visibly recycled paper (not the white kind), framed by the apocalyptic blue of a very large Wasserkraft Nein Danke poster. Behind them, water plunged from a spillway. That’s all the poster showed: water in a state of collapse — the real, existing state of collapse that every dam represents, the collapse of a river and its ecosystem. And posing in front of it, Stephen and Birke, ready to be swept away.

As I stood there drinking apple juice from the buffet and watching them, Olaf touched my arm.

We sat next to each other on the back porch and looked out and down at the walled gardens. He told me how much he enjoyed visiting the green ribbon, where nothing much had ever been built. He loved the stillness, the emptiness. It was something worth fighting for.

I had seen the emptiness, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Or maybe it wasn’t all that empty where he was. I asked him whether he had children.

He claimed partial responsibility for a herd of rare sheep and explained that you need sheep to maintain the emptiness.

“What about the stillness?” I asked. “Don’t they wear bells and bleat?”

He admitted that even birds, tempting as it may be to stylize their presence as stillness, are actually pretty loud.

We walked down into the lower garden and sat on a bench. He looked into the pond and remarked favorably on the lack of goldfish. I thought of all the spawn-guzzling carp I had admired in the past and felt abashed. I shrank at the vulgarity of raptures over beauty, nature’s most irrelevant and unnecessary quality.

That is, I couldn’t quite approve of the way the harmless man looked, but I was ready to follow him around like a puppy. He was that reassuring.

I stood up to escape back into the hotel. He remained seated. As we shook hands I couldn’t help noticing how close his wedding ring (Germans wear them on their right hands) was to what Allen Ginsberg called the center of the flesh, and I realized I had a problem.

After Global Rivers Alliance’s successful Nature Protection Days, Birke proceeded to Berlin. She vanished into her accustomed social milieu, whatever that was. Her internship in the environmental movement was about to end, and Berlin was where she was in school, studying media design. She had to visit old friends and see about a sublet.

Stephen and I returned to Berne without her. He looked spent and weary.

When Birke reappeared in Berne to pack her things, he cheered up, but her going-away party may have included some kind of unpleasant scene. Perhaps their parting.

A week later, he went to visit her and cheered up again for several minutes. I mean the minutes between when his taxi arrived from the airport early Monday morning and when the alarm went off so he could go to work. He was down.

The posters went up in three languages in bus shelters all the way to Rotterdam. Birke gave interviews to curious reporters. A magazine devoted to social entrepreneurship and social investment labeled her one to watch.

“Social entrepreneur” meant something different in old books than it does now. The new definition didn’t fit Birke. There was nothing capitalistic about Global Rivers Alliance. The impact investment community would sponsor a project if you promised them thirty percent, and pat themselves on the back for not actually drinking your blood. They couldn’t get their head around rivers.

But they liked Birke. She gave great interviews, effervescing with ideas. In person she was pretty enough to surprise people who had only seen the publicity photos. She became known.

Stephen didn’t become known. He was the pale figure with pale hair in the background, barely distinguishable from the wall. Stephen and I had about twenty fights, all including the following exchanges:

“You’re going to work for your girlfriend. ”

“No, she’s working for me. I’m the executive director.”

“ Geschäftsführer is an administrative post. She calls the shots, and it’s George’s money.”

“I’m the one investing. My labor is worth more than George’s money.” (I had to hand it to him for that one.)

“You’re throwing away your life to move to a town with dubstep [tone of contempt].”

Baleful glare, followed by allusions to migratory waterfowl.

“Why not wait for your transfer to come through?”

“How long do you think I’ve been waiting already?”