Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

Stephen catalogued bird after bird. The only ones you could see clearly were the big BOPs circling out of the range of gunfire. One toted a partridge — Stephen’s first and last partridge, it turned out. Most flitted past us like sparks arcing, emitting squeaks that identified them to Stephen but not to me. One day we got to a dead ewe in time to catch the goose-stepping of the griffon vultures arriving to deliver its breech birth along with everything else except its rumen, bones, and pelt. Before I closed my eyes, it sky-rocketed to first place on the list of the most repellent spectacles I had ever witnessed, lending a vivid symbolic figuration to events I had hitherto refused to name.

Stephen whispered that he was scanning the periphery for the white Egyptian vultures that specialize in crime scene cleanup, but the steppes were No Bird’s Land. Birds were willing to fly in from distant mountain peaks for a free meal, but they didn’t care to set up shop. Only the migrants didn’t know any better, to their sorrow.

We saw the moa a few times. Stephen would hear it shift its weight in the underbrush, mostly when we were having sex. He would put his hand on my mouth and whisper, “Listen. The moa.” He would prop himself up on his elbow and look around. The moa would stand up in the bush where it had been hiding and walk away, reviewing its cell phone video, assault rifle hanging low like a bass guitar.

When we couldn’t take the mountains anymore, we gave Brighty to a single mother who promised to feed her, and caught the bus headed for Pustec. Just inches from the lumpy rock, there’s a smooth, modern road. We flew down — that’s how it felt after all that time without wheels, like gliding — and alighted on Lake Prespa in the evening.

We got off at a lonely bus stop in front of an empty hotel. Walking felt cumbersome, like when you take off your skates after hours at an ice rink. We crossed the wide, flat plain of scrub where the lake had once been until we reached the shoreline. The transparent water was so smooth it seemed like a blob of mercury resting in a spoon. The orange sun dyed our shadows on the water blue.

It was clear and cold. Stephen got in as far as his thighs and stood there being a wimp. He started walking forward again and lost his balance. He splashed around for a bit on his knees. He asked, “Is this necessary?” in a tone of irritation and was suddenly underwater.

I thought of sinkholes and underground rivers. He tried to pull himself back to his feet by using the surface of the water as a banister. He went under again. I reached him and pulled his shoulders up. He looked at me, demanding answers. I dragged him back to the flats and nestled his head in gravel. I ran toward the road and back again. I did CPR, which I had learned on a rubber dummy in school, but it was pretty much a joke, since he was mostly in the water, with water in his lungs. And at some point after that he was dead. Of a heart attack, I think, but nobody really knows.

A hunter helped me carry Stephen onto the grass. He called an ambulance while I put on my clothes.

I’m calling him a hunter because he had a rifle, but actually he was just a guy out riding around on a moped. It’s not like you’d call every Yemeni with an AK-47 a paramilitary. I mean, obviously he would have shot us if we hadn’t been human. That’s why you could go for months without seeing any animal other than a bird. Birds are braver than the other animals, because they have an ace up their sleeve: flight. Maybe Europe had flightless birds once, but nobody ever saw them because they hid instead of fleeing. And then they were gone, like the lavender in the book that was never opened. The marbled teal is almost gone. It doesn’t hide. It flies away, low and slow and in a straight line.

All in all, I have nothing non-symbolic to say about Stephen’s death and will stop now, almost. I had known that dying turns people into an incoherent jumble of meaningless forces that gets rolled round in earth’s diurnal course like rocks and stones and trees, because I read it in The Education of Henry Adams. Henry’s sister dies of tetanus after an accident, and he makes it abundantly clear that nothing could have been more pointless. I hadn’t known about ghosts and zombies. I thought they were pop-culture pseudo-folklore that turns up in B-movies because all you need is makeup. But Stephen kept breathing long after he was dead. Even his feet breathed. And after he was gone, he became a ghost. I would realize he was dead, and feel I’d seen a ghost.

Maybe if Henry Adams had written more about his wife.

Some nice nurse found Trajco’s number in Stephen’s wallet. Trajco, the amateur ornithologist with a thing for beaches. He arrived a day later. I was sitting in the hospital lobby staring at nothing. Thinking it might help me commune with Stephen, who had become nothing.

Trajco hustled me to a hotel. He more or less sat on me for a day and a night. He assured everyone I would be fine once I was back with my sister in Berlin.

Constance flew out to pick me up in Skopje. Her presence calmed me instantly. She had seen me in worse crises, like spankings for lying to protect her. She had that steadying family influence. So soothing, yet always unpleasant in one way or another. In her case the problem was intimacy and easy familiarity. She confessed that she felt seriously guilty for sleeping with Stephen. I said, Please don’t! He really enjoyed it! At which point she got all sanctimonious because whatever else her flaws, she wasn’t a swinger, plus she had been really attracted to him, unlike me. At the time it blew my mind that anybody could feel guilty about anything unless he had personally murdered Stephen. But she wanted to feel something; and regarding his existence as over, she went mining for feelings in their shared past and came up with not being sorry she’d fucked his brains out.

By the time we got to Berlin, I decided I’d had enough steadying and wanted to go home. But when I tried to turn the key in the door to our apartment, it kept slipping out from between my thumb and forefinger. I literally couldn’t get inside. I went back to Prenzlauer Berg and waited for Constance in a café.

She promised to deal with all the paperwork and so on related to the proper disposal of Stephen’s body. And she did. It took weeks. She became my hero.

Omar called. He said, after swearing me to secrecy, that the pump was an artificial heart and Stephen wanted to work on it and that’s why he was so desperate to get a transfer to Berlin.

At the funeral, I finally met Stephen’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.

Stephen turned out to have a major life insurance policy he had let lapse. If I had liquidated the Tiff Foundation to pay our bills in Berlin, I would have been a millionaire.

Gernot invited me to stay in Breitenhagen. Inside: peace and stillness, the cookie-sheet stove, his books. Outside the fields stretched to the horizon and laggard cranes plowed their heavy, slump-shouldered course through the sky, tootling as they went. The moon glazed the Elbe silver and I walked through the snow. Crunch, crunch. Physically, Breitenhagen was the anti-Berne. A world without end. To see a definite horizon, you had to go inside and pull the curtains.

On Boxing Day, while Gernot was at church, Olaf came to see me. He brought flowers and a store-bought cake and set them on the table. He looked older, just like me.

“I doubt you’re happy to see me,” he said. “I doubt you’re happy about anything.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “If I keep moving around, I’m fine, and if I wake up at night, I go out. Then I feel better.”

He suggested we take a walk.

I suggested we go to bed, occasioning a stricken look. I apologized.