Nell Zink: The Wallcreeper

He picked out two walnuts from the bowl on the table and broke one against the other using both hands. He ate the weaker walnut, then tested the strength of the remaining walnut against a new walnut. It was something I’d seen him do dozens of times. At first I thought he was doing it to kill time in the silence, but after the same walnut won eight rounds I sort of got the picture.

“The strong walnut is boring,” I said. “It might as well be a rock.”

“It flatters itself that the nutcracker finds it especially attractive,” he said, reaching for the nutcracker.

“You’re unhappy because I’m marrying Olaf,” I said pointedly.

“I’m bitter,” he said. “All growing things are bitter.” He picked a thin lobe of grayish meat from the ruins of the especially hard nut, turning it this way and that, and set it down again. “Summertime is sour. What is mature turns sweet and falls, like your Stephen. You’re in love with endings now. And you believe that for Olaf, you’re the end.”

“I don’t expect him to love me forever. Just long enough to raise a couple of kids.”

“Aha. You admit openly that he loves you the most right now. Because you will never be younger, more playful, or more obedient. With luck, your children will supplant you and he will go on loving you for their sake. This is love as a deflationary spiral. A never-ending buyer’s market.”

“You really are bitter,” I said.

I went back to Berlin and gave notice to the landlord. I went through Stephen’s stuff. I took everything we owned (meaning almost everything but my clothes) down to the flea market by the Landwehr canal and priced it to sell. When evening came, I walked off and left it. I embarked on my new life.

There’s a bird called a nutcracker, but it lives on pine nuts. When a bird wants to crack an actual nut, he drops it a long way on concrete.

I.e., Olaf lost interest in sex the minute I moved in. He said it was me, and that being around a grieving widow was bringing him down. When I tried to strong-arm him into taking the Brussels job, he called me a harpy.

I felt I’d never liked him and never known him. And all because he never bent over backward to please me, even though we were together. I had thought that’s what boyfriends did. He started spending weeknights in town with Birke. Once she called me up, sounding excited, wanting to have a serious talk between old friends. It was mortifying. I realized they were both complete assholes, and if not for the one, I would never have met the other.

Then he moved out and left me alone in Lehnin. The yard was mostly sheds filled with junk. The neighbors stared at me. The kayak had a big crack in the hull, exacerbated by incompetent repairs.

For months I lay like a windfall peach contemplating its own bitter almond.

Then I got up and called Gernot. He sounded delighted. For reasons that resist examination, I began by proposing marriage.

“I will never, ever marry anyone, least of all you,” he said. “But you can live in Dessau rent-free if you redecorate. I’ll pay for the materials. Isn’t that what women want?”

“I could kiss you!” I said.

“Women are all the same,” he said. “Inscrutable guardians of inexpressible passions, and sentimental about money.”

“I didn’t ask you to pay my rent,” I pointed out. “I just need you to save me.”

“A universal error of women,” he said. “True sub-proletarians, always giving themselves body and soul because they have nothing else. In gratitude for crumbs of power and security that fall from others’ tables, helping those who need it least. Helping strong, successful, sexy men, for the love of God.” He sighed.

“Isn’t letting me live in the house you helping me ?”

“Thanks for the compliment, darling, but you are mistaken. Where that house is concerned, I am the poorest of the poor. No private citizen can afford German craftsmen, and if I hire migrant laborers tax-free like a normal person, I lose my pension. To frame tax evasion as civil disobedience is difficult. Until retirement, I am tied to Wittenberg with chains of steel. The house must be lived in. But I can’t rent it out. It’s too big. It would need to be to cut up into apartments, and that would break my heart. To sell it would likewise break my heart.”

“Can I take up the carpeting?”

He sighed again. “Here is my final offer, Tiffany. Stop following orders. Do what you want. Work selfishly. Without the experience of control, you will never have the experience of creativity. Stop giving yourself away, and you will have more to offer than your body and soul. Keep them and cultivate them. Learn, learn, and once again learn!” He said that last bit in Russian, quoting Lenin: Uchit se, uchit se, uchit se. I said I would take it under advisement.

After a while, I decided he might be on to something. I had been treating myself as resources to be mined. Now I know I am the soil where I grow. In between wallpapering, I wrote The Wallcreeper. Then I started on the floors. Then I took up playing the piano. I went back to school in Jena and graduated in hydrogeology. I worked for a while at the Federal Environmental Office (it was moved from Berlin to Dessau in 2005, presumably to decrease its influence), and quit to found an ecological planning bureau. I am proud to say that my environmental impact statements have helped make dredging the Elbe prohibitively expensive. It is now silting up and winds lazily among shifting sandbars, very good for canoeing. Children wade out to the islands. The house just keeps getting nicer and nicer. I pack it with furniture to keep Gernot from bouncing around. The movie version ends with a montage of Stephen in bed with different club kids (almost all girls) in Berne. Soundtrack: “Oh Very Young.”

Nell Zink was born in 1964 in southern California and grew up in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she majored in philosophy. Rather late in life she got a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Tubingen, Germany. She works as a translator for Zeitenspiegel Reportagen and lives in Bad Belzig, south of Berlin. Her fiction has appeared in n + 1. This is her first book.