Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

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.”