Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

“Yeah, and Olaf said he never touched her.”

“Well, there’s a reason.”

“Uh, to wit?”

“I was sort of off base about which guy you thought was ‘harmless.’ You told me you had the hots for a harmless guy. So the whole time in Lenzen” (that is, the half hour he and I were in the same room), “I keep seeing you with a Lutheran minister all into waxing poetic about ecological justice and frogs. You know the guy I mean. And you listening to him all ears and big Bambi eyes and I thought, whoa, Tiff’s got a brand new bag! I never thought you meant the fucking lobbyist !”

The little gears in my brain were grinding hard. “So after the Rhine Conference,” I said, “when you said Birke hooked up with my harmless crush, you meant Gernot ?”

“I sure as shit didn’t mean the swinging dick lobbyist !”

I pictured Birke and Gernot together and laughed.

I kept laughing off and on for the rest of the day. I had another fit of giggling while falling asleep. I laughed cruelly at myself, thinking how I had huddled over the cookie-sheet stove in Breitenhagen. I pictured Birke in the rectory in Wittenberg, lounging by the fire on a tigerskin rug while Gernot brought her hot toddies.

Of course, as Stephen pointed out, they had something in common: rivers. They were both genuinely passionate about rivers. And I’m afraid we performed a number of improvised parodies of riparian hardcore porn over the course of the next several weeks.

I’d like to be able to say we invented riparian porn rather than merely satirizing it, but they say if you can think of it, there’s pornography about it, so we can’t have been the first. Somewhere out there, there’s explicit footage of after-hours goings on at Elbe-Saale-Camp. Which there isn’t. I mean, I can’t prove it, yet somehow I’m still certain, suggesting to my mind (via Occam’s razor) a corollary or rather alternative hypothesis: that all porn is about the same thing, a theme that is unitary, both able and liable to crop up anywhere and be juxtaposed with anything. Stephen had clearly invested a lot of energy in getting Birke to shut up about real existing rivers when they were in bed together — or at least he went to great lengths to include an element of surprise in his oral sex technique, something he had never done before — and found it personally rewarding to construct play-by-play rich in elaborately obscene riparian metaphor, particularly during oral sex when it was especially counterproductive. It all made perfect sense.

We went back to Albania in October. Instead of sticking to the coast, we headed up into the mountains by bus — the Bjeshkët e Namuna, the “enchanted” or “cursed” mountains, depending on your perspective.

You can get tired of Albanian buses if you value fresh air or your life. Two villages after Thethi, Stephen suggested horses. I found out something I hadn’t known. He couldn’t walk uphill. He would take ten steps up a mild grade and then wait.

That sort of explained why he had commuted so cheerfully by car between our first apartment and the corporate campus and didn’t like downtown Berne. And why he loved Berlin (flat as a pancake) and never visited my sister. And rented that place that was almost a basement, and drove up roads in Switzerland it had been totally illegal to drive up, and gave the appearance of being addicted to pills: Stephen had a bad heart.

I didn’t advertise how dull I was by sharing my belated insight. I just asked what was wrong with the southern coastal wetlands, like maybe Butrinti. He said Italian tourists hunt in packs and he would rather get into shouting matches with one gun-toting maniac at a time.

I favored renting a car. Neither of us knew how to ride a motorcycle. We couldn’t imagine making it up the grades with mopeds, but we could easily imagine tumbling to our deaths. Stephen thought a horse would be nice, like he had in Macedonia. Birds like them, and you can fuel up on whatever happens to be growing on the ground. But the scheme turned out to be impracticable. Trekkers had made the “horse” scene a seller’s market.

We compromised on a donkey. No ecotourist was heartless enough to ride a donkey, so the price was still relatively Albanian.

I didn’t know much about donkeys. My boarding school had a “coon-jumping mule,” a term on whose origins I refuse to speculate, and I had ridden it plenty of times when we were giving the thoroughbreds a rest for whatever reason. It could jump over a four-foot fence from a standstill, like a jack-in-the-box. It had nothing in common with this diminutive stoic. With or without Stephen on its back, its pose was the same. Its general demeanor suggested that the burden of Stephen was no heavier than the burden of existence. On steep paths Stephen would dismount and hold fast to its mane, like a climber being short-roped by a Sherpa. It seemed strong as Godzilla. I named it Brighty.

Once I got used to the visuals, there seemed nothing odd to me about a rider whose sneakers almost dragged the ground. Stephen didn’t use a saddle, just a folded blanket to keep donkey hair from working its way through his pants. I held the rope and carried our stuff in a backpack, and we fit right in. Albania is the West Virginia of Europe. Single mothers there dress and live as men.

I identified with Brighty. Her humble patience, her long-lashed eyes, the graceful way she picked out a route to nowhere with her tiny feet. We were one. Stephen told me where to go, and I led Brighty, on whom Stephen sat. A trinity. Three beings with a single will. I had never envisioned myself wearing a backpack larger than my torso and leading my husband through ancient live oaks on a donkey, wowing each village in turn like Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, but then again, I never did have much imagination.

Stephen came clean about his Macedonian pony adventure. When he had decided to try riding, the one person in town who knew English and could answer his questions was a Catholic missionary, who referred him to a farmer who had a spare pony. It was spare for the reason that it hadn’t been ridden in years. Its shaggy pelt was caked with mud and its hooves needed trimming. Stephen cleaned and filed its hooves, brushed its coat to a fine gloss, and dressed its wounds. He decided it cleaned up pretty good, so he climbed aboard and rode across the fields into a swamp, where the pony panicked, never having been that close to trees in its life. It lay down and cowered, then rolled. He succeeded in calming it, but not himself, as hundreds of deerflies descended and began biting them both cruelly. He improvised blinders and a fly whisk from the surrounding vegetation and remounted. They moved forward. The woods were hot and damp, and they both sweated unconscionably. The pony was unhappy and so was Stephen, so that when it took to sprinting, determined to get out of the trees at any price, he gave it its head. He threw himself to the ground to avoid being killed by a low branch, but he held on to the reins, and the pony didn’t drag him more than maybe ten feet. Being Stephen, he then assumed that their relationship had nowhere to go but up.

Since there wasn’t much for Brighty to eat, we had to book her into overnight lodgings the same as ourselves. The farmers sometimes fed her armfuls of leaves ripped off the trees with pruning hooks. Their livestock was goats and sheep with long dreads and ferocious coin-slot eyes. Their cars were egg-shaped from running into rocks.

Albania was no wilderness; there were even marked trails. But it wasn’t exactly crowded. We were pretty much left to ourselves. On the way up Pllaja e Pusit, two American-looking guys whizzed past us on mountain bikes doing forty miles an hour without saying a word. They terrified Brighty and made us take an hourlong break during which we saw Fringilla coelebs and Motacilla alba , two birds you might consider noteworthy if they were to appear in flocks of one million plus or open their mouths and speak. The friendlier tourists were not much better. Without a language in common, no upscale traveler could adequately convey the native wit and creativity that had inspired him to take some travel guide’s hint to go to Albania before capitalism turned it into Montenegro. Finns or Tuscans or whatever would remark of Brighty, “Good car!” and we would say, “Good car for good roads!” Everyone would laugh, and they would pet her nose, causing her to stand still for upwards of fifteen minutes so we had plenty of time to discuss the location of the closest good town or good restaurant with good food while uninteresting birds flowed past in waves. We met a group of women from England, but they didn’t get the donkey-backpack-surrendered wife thing. We didn’t see any more English guys. They were scarce away from the waterfront bars.