Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

“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.”

“Your mom told you to smoke weed?”

“No! She told me drummers smoke weed to keep from getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“I thought they did it because drumming is boring and monotonous.”

“It’s not monotonous if you smoke weed. What I’m getting at is, wouldn’t counting birds down in Macedonia be a lot better use of my time? Who else can listen to birds and say what they are? Not a lot of people. If I stay here on the chain gang, I’ll be too crippled to even jerk off”.

“I thought you had a girlfriend.”

“Nah. Gernot’s got her number. He says she’s a screech owl.”

He had joked that his defection would go unnoticed. There was certainly no sign of life from GRA during his week in Breitenhagen. If the partner organizations missed him reading their press releases, they didn’t show it. He returned to Berlin to prepare for his surreptitious self-transfer.

Preferring Breitenhagen to Berlin, I proposed a shift in the focus of the project. I explained to Gernot that there was no point in simply flooding the woods, ecologically desirable as that might be, because no one would ever know. I wanted to take the stone cladding off the banks so they would wash out completely. I wanted ships to run aground. I argued that sabotage, being surreptitious, is not nearly as ecclesiastical as civil disobedience, where the point is to get caught.

He raised his eyebrows and said, “I’m not a martyr.”

“You don’t understand. That’s how civil disobedience works. You get punished by the authorities for doing the right thing, and then the papers expose their corruption and stoke the fires of public outrage.”

“Having a free press doesn’t mean anyone cares,” he said. “My central insight of the past twenty years.”

“Your congregation will back you up!”

“They’ll fire me, and then who will listen to me?”

“I don’t know. Me?”

So when the weather wasn’t too inexpressibly horrible, maybe twice a week, I snuck out and pried a few rocks off the shores of the Elbe, which soon began to remind me of the pyramid of Cheops.

When I heard a boat, I hid. Every afternoon a little cutter from the WSA (water and shipping office) in Magdeburg steamed by on a tour of inspection. But they must have needed glasses, because they never slowed down.

There wasn’t much else in the way of boats, just the occasional half-empty Czech steamer with a skipper staring dead ahead in a trance. Gernot said they paid more attention to riverside goings-on in summer, when I likely would have been naked.

Stephen and I had started on the landward side and piled the fruits of our labors on the ground, anticipating that the eventual cease-and-desist order would include demands for restoration and restitution which might be fulfilled more easily if we could find all the rocks. It was punishing, especially with one of those wheelbarrows with the wheel way out front so you carry half the weight yourself. Alone, I found myself working a little differently. I needed both hands to move a rock, even with a long pry bar. It was easiest to just let them roll into the river.

To my surprise, Gernot looked at the ruined riverbank and was well pleased. Apparently it had never crossed his mind that sabotage doesn’t look criminal if you get a young, middle-class housewife to do it. I looked like Jane Birkin in Slogan , if Slogan had been set in a scout camp in Poland. I worked the way Patty Hearst would have robbed banks if she’d never met the SLA. The militant wing of Global Rivers Alliance radiated innocent industry. If I have one talent in the world, that’s probably it. Looking innocent enough to make whatever it is I’m doing appear legal.

Gernot said there was no turning back. “This will be a god-send for the riparian ecosystem,” he said. “The river will gently flood the forest and raise the groundwater. No one will ever know. They’ll just wonder in a hundred years why the forest is still alive.” He occasionally helped me with an especially large rock, but never for more than three minutes before he would see something compelling on the ground or in the air and start rhapsodizing. For him, nothing in nature was distracted or lazy. Every nematode was pulling its own weight, the best way it knew how. It put his attitude toward me into perspective. He praised me with the same effusion he bestowed on chicory, voles, freezing rain, etc.

Every so often he would mention Jesus. Not in a Christian way for American ears; back in the GDR, dissent of any kind had made a person a de facto Christian. It was safer to be at odds with the authorities if you had a consulate to call. The crucifix on his lapel had symbolized access to a mimeograph machine and a telephone that wasn’t wiretapped. When its protective spell wore off, around time to do army service, he took up theology per se. He would have liked to know something about biology, he said, but it was not to be. His compromise was to keep a beat-up copy of Diversity Through Flooding displayed prominently on his dashboard. He claimed it was impossible to write a sermon without it.

Somehow Olaf could handle my being happily married, but my living in Gernot’s summerhouse after Stephen left for Macedonia made him quite insane. He came in the cottage door unannounced, pushed me against the wall, and said, “Why? Why?” He pinned my arms and squished me painfully, almost smothering me, literally, with kisses.

I had to turn my head to get a chance to answer: “Why what?”

“Why are you living with that old goat?”

“Because I’m tearing down the walls of the Elbe as civil disobedience to liberate the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm?” I said.

It took some explaining. He hadn’t known. When I was done explaining, to the best of my ability insofar as I understood the project, he looked more upset than before.

“Good God. It’s so dumb. What are you going to do next, spike the trees? This will set the dike relocation effort back ten years. Whose idea was it?”

I, correctly, blamed Gernot.

“This is the wrong time for radicalism on the Elbe,” he said. “It’s all wrong. It’s the Rhine you should be fighting for. Weren’t you busy trying to renege on the treaty of Versailles? What happened?”