Authors: Nell Zink
He held up his hand as though giving me the finger, but the only finger raised was his pinkie.
“To them,” he continued, “every bird is unique, with different needs, incredibly complex, and nature is gone and never coming back. They’re just fighting to get more wells in the game park. They want all the animals to have some water rights and maybe live past tomorrow in subsidized housing. They don’t give a shit about game-changers like let’s bomb the Rhine back into the stone age, because you can’t predict what the results will be. They’re like, let’s use this public policy instrument to expand this puddle over here and attract some waders. And I realize the point of running a media campaign is A, to delude like-minded people into thinking there are other like-minded people and B, to make them think things are way better than they are. Like, people of Europe, decide your future! Make your choice, whether you want to have wild rivers! But there’s no democracy and no wild rivers. Whether or not everything gets fucked up beyond all recognition is going to be decided by the same people who decide everything else. Rich companies. And they can’t put their money to work without fucking shit up. When they try, like by investing in something nonexistent like credit default swaps instead of something tangible like renewable energy, we rag on them even harder. When the Taliban blew up the giant buddhas, the mistake they made was saying they did it as a matter of principle and not as an investment. Principles are inherently dead. They’re based on past experience. If you say you have principles, you’ve just admitted you have no hope of ever getting rich.”
As for Birke, he had gotten as far as Banja Luka, the bar in Kreuzberg where he was supposed to meet her. The weather was cold, but the outside tables were open for smokers. There he saw her with another man, and he became very, very angry. In his rage, he realized he had never really been attracted to Birke. What fascinated him was the vulnerability of European rivers.
I asked who the guy was.
“That guy you’re so into. The harmless guy.”
“No way,” I said.
“Yeah, what a weasel. But you know Birke. Anything for the cause.”
People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.
It has nothing on unrequited love. Stephen stopped sleeping. He spent his nights staring at the TV with the sound off. He took Provigil so he could go to work. He looked weak and ashen as a ghost. On my knees by the couch, I begged him to take a few weeks off.
He quit his job. He abandoned the stent and the stock options as if he had never heard of money.
I tried to take it philosophically. I had enough cute clothes to last ten years, if I washed them carefully in the soft water they have in Berlin.
Global Rivers Alliance would continue to be headquartered in Berne. George, the president, was paying rent to himself—never a bad idea for a small businessman—and Switzerland is a fine address for any charitable foundation, like a cross between Aspen and The Hague. Stephen would operate out of a defunct machine shop on a concrete slab on the east side of Berlin, sharing a table with other freelancers he’d never met. Imagining the marble floors and receptionist of the home office in Berne would help his visitors tolerate the sound of officemates slurping lattes and nattering away on video conference calls.
Stephen the underemployed non-birder was a lonely person.
Secretly he was working to create majestic panoramas of mud where birds could plunge their beaks to just shy of the eyeballs, but all he ever talked about was wind, solar, and the need to invest in a smart power grid. His emotional detachment from his talking points made him strident.
He had been right about one thing. GRA’s main line item was his opportunity cost. Birke wanted to reissue the
Wasserkraft Nein Danke
posters tinted red as a cascade of foaming blood. According to Birke, blood was trending with young people (vampires), plus it was time for a knockout punch.
If he had still been working in Berne, he could have printed and distributed the red posters with his pocket money whether George liked them or not. Now they had to sell their ideas, not give them away, and in the creativity glut that was Berlin, not even George was buying.
Our place in Berlin was several hundred yards from party central, meaning roughly speaking the Kottbusser Tor subway station. We lived on the ground floor in the back, with access to the street through a massive wooden gate.
Our windows looked out on a muddy courtyard. The loveless gray coating of cement that had been slapped on the brick wall opposite was corroding to a height of fifty feet. Above that, it had flaked off entirely, leaving the clumsy, gap-filled brickwork disconcertingly bare all the way to the sky. When I leaned my head out the window and looked up, I could see a bit of blue, on nice days.
Outside the gate was a playground where teenagers drank vodka day and night. It opened on to a park that faced a bridge over a canal. The youth of many nations gathered on the bridge to play guitars and drums at all hours. We felt lucky to be in the back, except when the youth of many nations found our gate ajar and slipped inside to take a shit.
Our apartment was both larger and more modern than the one in downtown Berne. But perceptions are relative. Berlin was known for high-ceilinged rentals dating from the turn of the second-to-last century that reflected the tastes of an ascendant middle class. It lacked quaint medieval niches like our place in Berne. We had a third-tier proletarian’s apartment, and it felt like the tenement it was. Dim and dank, with uneven walls. I counted forty-four bicycles in the morass below our windows, some tightly bound to the drainpipes with clematis. Under them were plastic toys that would outlast the building next door by millennia.
My budget was a little different than it had been in Berne, but Stephen let me buy paint. For several days he swore to refrain from buying maxi singles, before he remembered that DJing is a way to make money.
In spring the flies returned in force. They were a constant presence all winter. The courtyard had three large garbage cans for bio-trash. The lids were irreparably crooked and the neighbors were—I don’t know whether inebriated or simply careless—somehow not in command of their actions, so that the ground around them was strewn with banana peels and melon rinds. When the temperature dropped below freezing, the compost froze solid and couldn’t be emptied, and when the temperature rose the maggots swarmed.
I am proud (as a housewife) to say that I don’t know whether Rudi ate flies. But the combination of high wall, missing bricks, and bugs made me think he could have made a home with us, had he lived and Berlin been at 15,000 feet.
My German was getting better, and I met people. I learned that I wasn’t a feminist. Even men in their seventies, talking to me after meetings about an impending block party or the proper sorting of garbage, would raise their eyebrows when I said I had followed my husband from Philadelphia to Berne and then Berlin. I couldn’t come up with a step I’d taken in life for my own sake. On my own behalf, to make myself happy, I’d done all kinds of things, all of them with the aim of staying close to a man. It hadn’t occurred to me to be ashamed of myself. I’d thought love was a socially acceptable motivation. But to right-thinking Germans, I was a mindless whore, and historically I had never felt more normal than in the company of other mindless whores (e.g., Elvis).
I met someone who was the right kind of wife. Her husband played trumpet in a ska outfit whose contrabass player sometimes improvised to Stephen’s minimal drive-by or whatever it was called that week. When I met her she had a kid on her shoulders and a baby on the ground at her feet, and she was talking gaily about India with a vendor of Indian junk at the flea market. The vendor was impressed, and I, too, was impressed. She was young the way an actual young person is young. Not like weary, defeated Stephen and me. She confirmed my suppositions about her sterling qualities as a wife by inviting me for coffee and serving a cake she had baked herself using yeast. I never did understand yeast.
Like me, she had moved to Berlin to be with her husband. The key difference was the kids. I envied her with a pang. An educated woman with little kids (I didn’t imagine her having acquired them by any other means than hot sex) is a model of feminist, as well as feminine, virtue. Even her struggle to get strangers to take the kids off her hands is a feminist cause. Her work, bringing up the model citizens of tomorrow, is something society feels it ought to value and is constantly proposing as potentially eligible for pension benefits, unlike my work, which neither involved actual labor nor was anything but an end in itself, on good days, and otherwise not even that.
The next time we had coffee, she said she had been a Slavic languages major at an international program in Krakow and abandoned her studies when the first baby came. That was about nine months after Hermann’s band played Krakow. She had barely remembered him, but she looked him up online. She hadn’t planned to drop out, but it was absolutely impossible to be an adequate mother and have a life, she said. She didn’t resent her children. She said they were every bit as interesting as verbs.
Olaf, the harmless man, e-mailed the Global Rivers Alliance info-address to invite us to a slide lecture on storks at a NABU meeting in Pankow.
Stephen said, “This might interest you. Everyone else on the planet over the age of twelve has something better to do with their time.”
My emotions at the prospect of seeing Olaf could best be described as ecstatic moping.
It was quiet out in Pankow. I could hear chickadees chirping as I stumbled over the cobblestones. When Olaf saw me, he smiled.
I probably projected a sense of relief. I had been half expecting him to arrive with Birke on his arm and her name tattooed on his neck. “It’s great to see you!” I said.
“It’s great to see you!” he said, turning away to shake someone’s hand.
I felt: He knows I have a crush on him, he knows I know about his thing with Birke, he knows it hurts me, and he knows I don’t hold it against him. In short, he knows I’m desperate, yet submissive, and that he can do anything he wants with me, especially ignore me. I stood there with a lost look, feeling as though I had been ordered and not picked up, as the Germans say.
His presentation was designed to promote tourism to the European Stork Village of Rühstädt. The Rühstädt storks nest on every available roof. When they return from Africa in March, they eat worms. Then they eat the town’s plentiful frogs. They have kind eyes and patient smiles. Not just any town can become a European Stork Village (ESV). There is a strict evaluation process, and if the interests of, say, industrialized agriculture are put above those of storks, the town will be bounced right out of the program and its storks deployed elsewhere. But Rühstädt valued its storks, which are fun for the whole family. The town was like a safari park, with storks climbing all over everything, catching mice, thrashing the life out of lizards, following cows around. It was like vacationing in the baboon enclosure at the zoo, except they had no thumbs and couldn’t grab anything out of your hands and tear it apart. They were after other quarry. Human beings to storks were just a way of mowing the lawn, and nothing pleases them more than a whiff of decaying socialism. If you plot Germany’s stork nests on a map, you can see where East Germany used to be, because it’s where the storks are now. The ESV Rühstädt, Olaf concluded, offers the ultimate in stork experience. The audience was free to infer its superiority to state government-approved SVs and the various other self-styled/consensus SVs that haunt self-published municipal media. Immediately after the talk, Olaf approached me and asked if I would like to go out somewhere for a drink. He didn’t even take time to ditch the local chairman. He just herded me toward the coat rack. I said yes.
We agreed to try a bar that was a few feet away on the corner. We looked in the window (skinheads, bikers) and kept walking.
It was a humid night with warmth in the wind. It was very dark. Inside of a dozen yards, the darkness and other factors made the distance back to the meeting room and the tram stop seem unbridgeable and the distance to Stephen and Birke intergalactic. We walked for five minutes, passing two or three more bars. I thought maybe Olaf was so restless in my presence that he was walking at random. Instead he touched my arm in front of a run-down townhouse and said, “This is it.” He opened the door with an old four-sided socialist key and shepherded me inside. Still in the hallway, standing by the mailboxes, he said, “I’ve been wanting to do this,” and put his arms around my waist.
It was not what I had been expecting. He was sweet, and serious, and his mustache tickled. We crept to his rented room and had sex in a very single-minded way.
He said he was a lobbyist with the European Environmental Bureau and had friends in Pankow. He was a close follower of political developments and the soul of calm, which I suppose is a chicken-egg problem. He called the policies he was trying to influence “my themes,” as in my cards, the hand I’ve been dealt. The things it has been given to me to care about. While Stephen was busy getting all fired up to run hard all day every day as if what activists do is be active, Olaf sat coolly regarding his hand and deciding which cards to keep face down. Where I was concerned, his strategy had apparently been to abstract me from the presence of anyone we both might know and get me into bed before considering consequences and further options. He said with surprise that he had not slept with Birke, although she was a very persuasive speaker and clearly an asset to Global Rivers Alliance.
We didn’t talk about anything personal. We had more sex. I don’t think I laughed once. Then it got to be about eight o’clock, and we went to sleep.
Stephen was not going to be happy.
Stephen was not happy. When I saw him again the next afternoon, he greeted me with a hard-on and the word “homewrecker.” I didn’t mind. My privates were so raw from overuse that I couldn’t think of any other body part. When I closed my eyes I still felt Olaf’s dick. But I felt guilty about reducing Olaf to body parts the way he had reduced me, so I kept my eyes open to watch Stephen fuck me, which he did as if his marriage depended on it.