Nell Zink: The Wallcreeper

Gernot nursed a look of heartfelt sympathy throughout. His task was to contribute spiritual gravitas. There were pads and pens lying around, so I made note of a couple of things he said. “Energy sufficiency , not efficiency , is the best means of preserving God’s creation.” “The Water Framework Directive prescribes explicit process protection for the morphological dynamism of God’s creation.” He said it all in a soft, affectless voice while looking devout, even sheepish. Where was cynical, commanding, slightly loony Gernot? I started to think his job might be tying his hands.

I was hoping to join Stephen in the Balkans, but he didn’t want to have me. He said he was free and alone and seeing birds as he had never seen them before. Often seeing every other conceivable thing but birds before realizing what bird belonged where, then applying his new knowledge to identify potentially bird-infested locations and sitting down to wait. Birding at night. Learning new plant communities, new calls, new birds. Talking with friendly Macedonians in no language at all, attending their weddings, riding their ponies.

I objected that it’s not safe to ride a pony in sneakers (your feet can slip through the stirrups) and that he’s too big for a pony, but he said he had boots and the ponies in Macedonia are called horses. I found the boots troubling, as well as his willingness to believe untruths about animals he was sitting on, but he sounded so happy.

He called me from phone booths. The smartphone with the birdcall apps was gone by day ten, about the time he maxed out his car rental budget, so he recorded his birds on paper. He went native. The way he painted it, he was walking day and night like Robert Walser or De Quincey, crisscrossing the Baba range on scraps of funding mysteriously channeled from Swiss petroleum derivative heirs to Euronatur to a BirdLife partner organization that consisted of a veterinary student named Trajco to him, fit as a fiddle and happy as a grig, leading his feisty pack “horse” up fans of scree until his boots wore out. A confirmed career birder, prospecting for rarities that would be worth their weight in eminent domain once Macedonia joined the E.U., a hero-in-waiting who would shield future UNESCO heritage sites from hydropower with the magic of the Flora-Fauna-Habitats Directive.

Then it was June and he came home to go cold turkey on our couch in Berlin.

Which reminds me of something I maybe ought to point out about Macedonia. It’s a major opium producer, which I can imagine being a major attraction for Stephen. He had never mentioned it on the phone, but why would he.

I was sorry to leave Breitenhagen. The village sits on a knoll above a narrow bit of floodplain. Huge oaks shade the wetlands. The sun sets when it sets and not a minute sooner. That is, the same sun that slips behind mountains in Berne still white, and behind buildings in Berlin while fading to yellow, there rages orange and pink through the trees and melts to the horizon like a sun going down over the sea. The mist rises off the river, the already silvery willows and poplars go into silver overdrive, the wall of leaves shimmers, and the magenta sun proclaims, LSD Is A Crutch.

In August my sister was supposed to show up in Berlin, but I ended up visiting her in Tukwila. It happened because I went to Albania with Stephen in July. He said that with me to look over his shoulder he’d think twice about even ordering a beer.

There are only two ornithologists in Albania, so prospectors are welcome. You can get a feel for what’s out there by checking the market stalls in Shkodër, assuming you can identify birds without hearing their calls or songs, or seeing them stand up, or fly, or with their feathers on.

Organizing the hunters might have helped save habitats. But in Albania only the foreign investors were organized. The Moraca Gorge, for instance, was slated for destruction, with hydroelectric turbines that would theoretically (or rather: impossibly) churn through more water than is in all of Lake Scutari’s tributaries combined. Birke would have been ranting a blue streak. But Stephen just sat there, motionless by the river for days, counting birds on feeding flights. Then he sat by the lake and counted birds in the littoral zone the dam project will eliminate. Fighting entropy the only way he knew how, with tick marks in a notebook.

Now, day trips to the Berner Oberland are one thing, and long weeks of inaction in the piping hot hills of Albania quite another. Nothing against birds, but I had gotten used to moving around a lot. I couldn’t do lazy anymore. Even the helpmeet act was getting old. And Stephen didn’t need my help carrying stuff if he never moved.

Finally we went down to Ulcinj in Montenegro, where he could do the start of fall migration (honey buzzards) in the salt works and I had English tourists to talk to. And there one of them got me pregnant — a slender, girlish thing of nineteen, funny and whimsical. It dawned on me too late that such things are not always masters of coitus interruptus. I suddenly missed the no-fault abortions of the land of the free. In Germany, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone for having the wrong father, so you have to whine about how childbirth would be mental cruelty. Even Albania makes you get counseling. I was hoping for the kind of clinic where you buy a ticket from the cashier and hand it to a nurse’s aide without saying a word.

I told Stephen flat out why I wanted to go to Tukwila. He said he didn’t care whose baby it was. But I cared, a lot. I flew from Podgorica to SeaTac, which took a while, involved layovers in Bucharest, London, and Atlanta, and was no fun. I got my period on an airplane toilet. I disembarked pale and limp, and that was that.

There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition. Tukwila is one of the former, a staunch bulwark of defiance against the forces of rationalization that would shred the fabric of the universe to lint. I caught the bus from the airport with a young woman whose hair was lacquered into a ponytail as hard and shiny as a shrimp. Her telephone conversation with her mother revolved around small change that had vanished from her pants pocket the last time her mother did laundry. In addition, her boyfriend owed her eleven dollars, which didn’t make her mother’s malfeasance any easier to take — au contraire!

You couldn’t call it poverty, not of the spirit, anyway. There was nothing slatternly about her. Her look had been designed and executed as precisely as any Caduveo matron’s. She chose every word with care, and eventually came to an understanding with her mother, who agreed to lift the disputed amount from the boyfriend’s wallet the next time he came around. Her fingernails were glossy claws. Her skin was nearly as shiny as her hair. Her voice had the same stentorian sheen. She may have been twelve. Coming from a subculture in which a pose of stubby-pawed, forthright naïveté is held to embody youthfulness right up to death from old age, I couldn’t tell.

My sister had been happily in love with a loaded doctor, but she was way too big a feminist to be a parasite like me. When they broke up because she wasn’t making enough money to go skiing in the Andes with him on weekends or help him buy a house on the sound, she ended up in a former motel on Eastlake. But the city had no jobs for classics majors, so she got a job in Tukwila. Eventually she moved there to save gas money.

Her apartment was on the ground floor, next to an access road. It had high, slot-like windows like a spotter’s tower, creating the impression (from inside) that she lived in a basement. It was for security, I think; but I could have kicked my way into her apartment, if I’d put on her platform boots. I mean right through the wall. It was paneling over styrofoam over paneling, with studs every three feet. It was no more solid than a yurt. The floor was moist carpet on a concrete slab. In winter she blasted the heat, and in August she blasted the air conditioning. It still took her outfits days to drip-dry.