Authors: Nell Zink
Stephen never had a strategy about anything. He just went ahead and did stuff, then tried retrospectively to figure out why.
It made him a pawn of fate, relative to Olaf. All those contradictions occasioned by his passion to make his dreams come true while recursively extracting unrealistic from realistic dreams in order to denounce the former as vanities. Even his fucking was binary, a sorting process by which certain practices could be tried and found wanting or approved and accorded benchmark status.
What went on inside me was something else. I lay there in an aura worthy of Prince Myshkin, possessed by indeterminacy, feeling Olaf vividly and somehow (keeping our conversation impersonal was presumably part of his strategy) unable to recall that he was a married man who lived hundreds of miles away.
Wasserkraft Nein Danke
reached critical mass. Dozens of organizations had jettisoned its banner from their site and adopted the slogan themselves. They stopped waffling on hydro-electric and began solidly advocating decentralized solar and bat-safe wind. Donations to Global Rivers Alliance were down.
And so was public support for the Green Party and environmental causes generally. The electorate fumed that it had been deceived all those years into thinking dams were somehow green. It folded its collective arms and pouted. The mainstream media ridiculed
Wasserkraft Nein Danke
as the single whiniest own goal in league history.
But Birke’s idea had succeeded in moving public debate to the left. No one wrote anymore about whether hydroelectric power was good or bad, only about whether it was entirely necessary to remove all the dams on the Rhine at a cost of billions of euros. Commentators on the far right demanded that the existing dams on the Rhine be spared.
Of course, what effect the public discourse might have on actual construction projects was anybody’s guess. Such projects lumbered to their feet over periods of decades and moved, or melted, as inexorably as glaciers. Saving the world wasn’t exciting or dynamic. It was more like the pharma pipeline, except the malady it hoped to cure had pockets so deep they could have swallowed the environmental movement and every other eccentricity in civil society without a burp. You might stop them building a dam at a given site this decade, but maybe they never wanted to. The pockets—huge, deregulated private utilities—were mutually opaque and nominally in competition, but somehow or other they always seemed to share priorities. Or rather a single priority: freedom. They wanted to be able to plan as if nothing else on Earth existed. Their chief responsibility was to their investors, who wanted them to be the best pockets they could be. Places to store value. Deep and capacious, with space for liquid billions and no holes.
For the moment, industry backed away from the rivers. It started asking for woodlands for wind turbines and fracking as an alternative to lignite coal. Birke had won.
It was nearly impossible for me to see Olaf. When he came to Berlin, he was in meetings all day, and in the evenings he was expected at home. I didn’t have money to go lurking around Bonn for a week, waiting for his wife to give him a minute off. Stephen and I were so broke I was buying food at the flea market, fruits and vegetables of no known provenance and noodles that dissolved when the water boiled.
Olaf and I had coffee downtown in absurdly public venues like the Sony Center. He put his dates with me on his expense account as meetings with Global Rivers Alliance, the only way he could account to anyone for the lost time. He tried to schedule another evening talk that would keep him in Berlin overnight, but all the relevant club meetings were booked a year in advance. He told me not to worry my little head about pumped storage hydro-electric, because solar had a habit of delivering energy at peak demand.
I was in love. I thought about him constantly. I was terrified my animal cravings would die down before I got a chance to fuck him again, and all that good horniness would go to waste.
Olaf said his feelings were similar, and having taken months to consider tactics, decided on a dinner date to talk strategy with a locally prominent radical priest in the middle of Saxony-Anhalt. It seemed like an odd choice, but it would (a) keep him away overnight, since his wife could hardly demand he drive home from Saxony-Anhalt, (b) involve a priest, further contributing to her disorientation, and (c) give me a chance to see the Elbe, that meandering canal whose neatly scalloped banks, lined with Wilhelminian hunting lodges, Birke so readily compared to those of the Amazon. The priest would meet us for dinner in Breitenhagen, a village distinguished by its possession of a motel.
We had dinner in the motel bar. Olaf and Gernot, the high-church Anglican pastor of Wittenberg, talked shop. They seemed to know each other well. The conversation was over my head, mostly involving those government agencies I can never keep straight. Even in a single German state (there are sixteen) there will be a ministry of the environment, transportation and reactor safety, known until two years ago by some completely different name, coexisting happily with a department of energy and the environment, an institute for transportation and consumer protection, and a bureau of renewable energy, agriculture and forestry. Olaf paid attention to more than one state at a time, plus the federal government and the counties.
And so did the radical priest. It was somehow part of his work as a fisher of men. He conducted it with regal seriousness while picking daintily at macaroni and cheese.
He was not the person I was expecting to be presented to as somebody’s slam piece. I based this assessment on his table manners and the quality of his suit. I felt reduced to my lowest common denominator, as if I hadn’t been reduced enough already. So the only thing about their conversation that really stuck in my mind was how often they said the names of other women. They called them “colleagues,” and I was jealous. I’d seen enough German lady environmentalists to know that most of them could be my lesbian grandmother, but I felt inferior to them all. They were colleagues, and what was I? They were out there somewhere being taken seriously for doing serious work, saving nature from whatever, while I studiously fucked not only their husbands but even my own as though miming reproductive acts were my sole aim in life. I could be defined as an irrelevant distraction even for Stephen, who was obviously fonder of Birke. I was the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Unless sex is worth something. I mean, if Marx was right—if sex is work and marriage involves sex—then I was creating value added. Otherwise, I was a distraction. Olaf could have ordered schnitzel or a penniless Ukrainian instead.
That train of thought may have been inspired by his choice of “sausage salad,” a salad made almost entirely of bologna and raw onions drizzled with vinegar. He piled it on to slices of bread with a knife and ate it in a way that was hard to watch. I had forgotten all about men with simple tastes. When a guy sets you on a life list with blatantly aspirational qualities, you feel exclusive, but maybe all you did was say yes the way the bottle of Chateau Lafite says yes when he takes it down from the rack. The longer Olaf talked to Gernot, the more challenging and purposeful his work seemed. Maybe he had taken me on for contrast.
The sordidness of my reflections was dragging my mood through the cocoa powder, as the Germans say, and I recalled that the author of
Philosophy in the Boudoir
did not come to a good end, so I joined in the conversation. “I like birds,” I said.
“I will never understand the attention paid to birds,” Olaf promptly replied. “They are by far the most exhaustively researched vertebrate group. They are conspicuous, diurnal, and enjoy a high level of general acceptance. Far more vulnerable now are the small mammals.” He touched my hand (Germans eat with their hands on the table) when he said “small mammals.”
“Birds without small mammals would get hungry,” Gernot agreed.
I laughed nervously. Sad to say, I inferred at the time that Gernot was thinking: Why is this delightful demimondaine dating a plebeian? Shouldn’t she be with me? But I know now that no one on Earth, or at least no one outside the grounds of the Playboy Mansion, is as venal as I am, and that he was entertaining thoughts so radiant and lofty that I couldn’t begin to conceive of them: That since the church runs most day care centers, it would have to take the lead in hazel dormouse monitoring. You can’t count dormice without an army of very short people to look for empty hazelnuts. My preoccupation with my internal monologue—the sort of thing it is always better to write down than to indulge in at dinner—had blinded me to competing subtexts.
Olaf nodded and voiced his agreement. “Birds are key indicators of intact ecosystems, but small mammals are the staff of life.”
“I hope that’s large mammal,” I said, pointing at the bologna salad.
Olaf began to aver that vegetarianism misses the mark in a country where grazing has helped maintain biodiversity for thousands of years, but before he could tell me anything else I already knew, his phone vibrated.
He excused himself and walked out into the stairwell.
I pulled his plate toward me and arranged several strips of marinated bologna on a slice of gray sourdough. I said, “Olaf knows all about birds.”
“He is an expert,” the priest said. “But you have not been in Europe for long. You will find that almost anyone can show you many things, even a little child.”
“My husband knows all about birds,” I said, offended. “I don’t need a child to tell me about birds.”
“Birds are not indicators,” he said. “They are ends in themselves. But now is not a good season for birds. I can show you nuts, berries, and roots. Would you like to come into the forest tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I’ll be busy with Olaf,” I said. “Perhaps another time.”
“You should come again in the spring,” he said. “I would very much like to show the birds and amphibians to someone as sensitive as you are.”
He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed that I was neither aging nor androgynous. His soft preacher eyes rested on mine as if to say, Do me now, thou tramp.
I should say in my own defense that German girls, even very respectable ones, call the procedure for getting an educated man into bed “
aufreißen.
” You rip him open, like a bag of chips. Otherwise he just sits there, giving you to understand through a series of guarded observations that sex is not entirely comme il faut. I.e., every word Gernot said gave him plausible deniability.
I thought, Like all educated Germans, this man treats feminine wiles like fresh chewing gum on the sidewalk and dispenses compliments as if he had been hired as middle management by God, yet unlike the others he is uninterested in forcing me into the kind of serious conversation I am incapable of having. He wants to show me berries!
Or was he kidding, making a joke that would have been understood by someone capable of subtlety?
I didn’t know. All I could do was feel his eyes on mine and give it a sexual interpretation. I was to be pitied, although I liked him very much.
“Do you know the Holy Roman Empress Tiffany?” he asked. “She came here from Byzantium to marry Otto the second and was demonized for taking baths and eating with a fork.”
I had my unambiguous offer. I glanced away from his eyes momentarily to take in the rest of him.
And there I saw that he was on the old side. Fifty at the absolute minimum. What’s more, he knew it, and he was treating me like a kid. Not the mindless whore I naïvely accused myself of being, but a bright and pretty child, one he rather liked. And all at once I recognized him. He had been in Lenzen, at the bar in a clerical collar, discoursing to the drunken masses on how frogs find love.
I awoke from my democratic slumber—my stubborn conviction that everyone regards me as an equal—and ran upstairs to find Olaf. He and his little shoulder bag were gone. I could have gone out earlier to see what he was up to, instead of sitting there mulling over the notion of trading him for a guy old enough to have potency issues. Like any sexual partner, Olaf was unable to compete with the allure of novelty. But that was not, strictly speaking, his fault. I had forgotten his existence almost as a thought experiment. And now he was gone, and I was stuck in the boondocks with a twit who made fun of me to my face. The bus only runs on weekday mornings to take kids to school, and hitchhiking was out of the question, given the traffic density.
I decided to run faster than Olaf could drive. People do it in movies all the time. I skittered back downstairs from the room, took the front stoop in a flying leap, and ran the cobblestones the length of the village, down the middle where they were sort of halfway smooth. And there he was, idling at a bus stop around the corner, talking on the phone. I slowed to a walk. He saw me and waved me away.
I stood next to the driver’s side window, raised my fist to knock, and thought better of it. I looked around. A nearby house lowered its blinds. Presumably Breitenhagen had not witnessed a public scene on this order in a while, not since its last unhappy wife raised her voice in mild complaint in 1805. It was that kind of idyllic place.
Olaf finished his conversation. He rolled the car window down and said, “I can’t see you right now. I need my space.”
“I need you here,” I said.
“I need to get home,” he said firmly.
He put the car in gear and accelerated, speeding away past a field of geese and what had once been winter wheat. The geese rose in a single chaotic clump, honking and shoving, and flew off across the river as if somebody had slapped them, flying at least half a mile before each one managed to find a slot behind another and form the customary Vs against the pale western sky.
I turned and walked back toward the motel. Then I veered to the left, down the knoll into the frost-dusted fields, my eyes smarting with heat and cold.
I was headed toward the river, I don’t know why. But I didn’t get very far. In a buckthorn hedge, I saw a family of long-tailed tits. The white-headed, Scandinavian kind. Fluffy, spherical, high on carotene. Like the water snakes, but way cuter as they flowed through the twigs looking for a place to sleep. I stood as though rooted to the ground, or rather as though connected to everything around me by guy-wires in three dimensions. As though I, they, and the earth were all integral parts of an indispensable scenery.