Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

“Really, it’s my fault,” he said. “I should have left you alone to think things through.”

“No,” I said. “Seeing you is a nice surprise.”

“Are you really okay here by yourself?” he asked.

I said, “It’s weird being alone. I thought I would be married to Stephen forever. It never crossed my mind that we’d ever split up. Not really. It’s like I was a part of him, and he was a part of me. We did that classic couples thing, where you delegate functions to each other and end up losing basic competencies, but we were always together, so it was no problem. Now I have to figure out what aspects of myself I let him adopt and represent, and what parts of me are actually him.”

“Hmm,” he said. “That sounds like a load of pop-psychological bullshit.”

“You have a wife,” I said. “You know what it’s like.”

“Had a wife.”

I acquired a stricken look of my own. The Olaf of my dreams was a married man and lived on the Rhine. This was the Elbe, and the day after Christmas. I looked down at the flowers. Pink roses. He clearly had something in mind.

He looked at them, too, and remarked, “That was probably the first time in your life a man turned you down for sex.”

“Not true,” I said. “Some guys can’t get it up after two drinks.”

While he was demonstrating his sobriety with a rhetorically impressive account of various inner struggles surrounding his divorce, it crossed my mind that, Stephen’s being an incubus aside, and beyond his haunting my waking nightmares as a hairy mass of suet in a universe that resounded with screaming, he had abandoned me for Birke and found quite extraordinarily high praise for my sister, while I had respected his privacy so much that I let him outsource his health to a donkey and die slower than Anne Brontë in Mrs. Gaskell’s life of Charlotte — i.e., like a dog. When it came to relationships, I concluded, I could possibly take tips even from Olaf. I admitted that what I had just said about being part of Stephen had been a pack of lies.

“That’s good,” Olaf said. “Because if I catch you being a part of me, I’ll give you somebody to be a part of.”

It was a proposal of marriage and children. I smiled. My future spread before me like a picnic. I would marry Olaf and study to be an expert on woodlands. He would smile on me beneficently as I grew into the role of well-informed conversational partner and competent working mom. I was liberated from all doubts of my self-worth and said not a word.

We had sex and went for a walk. I leaned my head on his scratchy tweed coat. A woodpecker bobbed up in front of us like an apparition, then tucked in its wings and fell away into the core zone.

Olaf said, “By the way, I live near Berlin now.”

I said, “That’s nice. I was always wondering when you’d figure out Bonn isn’t the capital anymore.”

“I work for Global Rivers Alliance.”

I couldn’t jump away. I pushed hard, but he kept his arm around my shoulder.

“They got a huge grant,” he continued. “They have some important donors, defectors from the WWF. It’s going to be a powerful organization. Birke’s a competent fundraiser, but she needed somebody with liaison experience to do the actual work. You can’t just raise money for its own sake.”

“No, I guess you can’t!”

“Are you upset?”

“Can we go home now?”

“Sure.” He turned us around.

“Are you sleeping with Birke the way everybody else is?” I asked.

He sighed. “No. You have a one-track mind. You think Birke needs my help? She’s doing me a favor, not the other way around. Life is not fair. Listen, I came here to ask you to move in with me.”

“I don’t think I can move to Berlin. For one, seeing that stupid twat get rich off Global Rivers Alliance would kill me.”

“The GRA office is in Berlin, and my place is in Lehnin.”

“Lenin?”

“Kloster Lehnin. It’s south of Potsdam. I have bullfinches and wrens. I have squirrels. Come on, say yes. I always wanted a girlfriend with a one-track mind.”

I stopped walking and stomped both feet in frustration. I actually hopped in place on the snow like an angry robin. I said, “I am through being people’s sex slave! I want to study organic forestry!”

He backed away from me and said, “You really mean it.”

“Birke majored in design. She wouldn’t know a river if it bit her on the butt. I don’t want to be that kind of activist. I want to be the kind that makes a difference! The kind with a policy job! I want an education! I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged” (here I used the term for the poor in spirit from the Sermon on the Mount), “but I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!”

“The forest service is more hierarchical than the Vatican. They have two missions, to harvest trees and shoot deer. You wouldn’t last a week.”

“Germany has freedom of conscience! I’ll take it to the European Court of Human Rights if I have to!”

“What if I said I adore you? That I miss your fierce volubility every day?”

“What’s ‘volubility’?” (The German was over my head.)

“My life would be so much more fun if you lived in Lehnin. You can study something sensible in Potsdam. There are lakes everywhere up there. There’s a kayak in my shed. I have a big yard. Move in with me, you dingbat. It’s half an hour to Berlin. Nothing would remind you of Stephen. You wouldn’t even have to see your sister. Global Rivers Alliance is paying me serious money, at least for the first year.”

I said, “Okay.”

Gernot came to visit. He said he saw it coming. He said, “Olaf knows what he wants. That’s normal for a bird, but exceptional in a human being.”

“Olaf just wants to breed and feed like everybody else,” I said.

“You’re underestimating birds,” he said. “When he came to see you, did he eat or impregnate anything? False alarm. He came to sing his song.”

“Um, you could be right,” I said.

“When I tell my congregation there’s more to life than food and sex, I’m just singing my song. From over their heads, like a bird in the pulpit, and people respond. No information changes hands, but it doesn’t matter. Preaching really is like birdsong. If you find the melody, the fiction soars upward and joins the invisible truth. People respond to the truth in the lie. The way a bird responds when it hears its song. The males back off, and the females crouch down.”

I frowned and said, “The females crouch down?”

He continued, “Tiffany, you must try to understand that it takes conditions of artificial scarcity to make satisfying basic needs seem beautiful. Our society works hard to make food and sex as scarce as beauty and love.”

“You’re up to your neck in food and sex!”

“So what?” he said. “They can’t stop me from being afraid you’re leaving.”

“I’m not leaving! I’m going to Potsdam. It’s like half an hour.”

“Of course. And what about when GRA assigns Olaf to open an office in Brussels? I wouldn’t be surprised. Do you speak French?”

“Brussels!” I said. “I always wanted to live there!”

“My love, you have the attention span of a fish.”

“But I’m going to improve it in school in Brussels. I bet they have international programs in English. In ten years I’ll be really educated and purposeful. I don’t mean with a one-track mind, like I have now, but a force to be reckoned with, like Olaf or Batman.”

He shook his head and let go of my hands. “A butterfly among the birds,” he said.

I sat up straight. “Do you mean I remind you of the wallcreeper?”

“No. I meant Olaf is going to feed you to his young.”