Authors: Nell Zink
Space, as any Kantian can tell you, is not forever. A struggling lover can demand his space and then want to see you again in two minutes.
And that’s how it was. I snuck past the restaurant to our room and washed my face. Olaf came back, still in his space. The chasm that separated us was no impediment to anything in particular. After all, it had been there the first time we jumped on each other like bugs. The difference was that now we knew about it.
He left again in an hour and said he would tell his wife it had been foggy.
The next day the man of God showed up at breakfast and took me for a walk. The berries were dried on the stems, the nuts were acorns and a few dank walnuts, and the roots were slimy, but it was beautiful.
Only a week later, the Reverend Gernot invited Stephen and me to his paternal home in Dessau to stay overnight. He fed us noodles in the dining room and opened three bottles of wine.
His parents had lived in a thick-walled mansion. The yard had old tulip poplars and dawn redwoods standing in a wilderness of brambles and volunteer pines. A small circle had been mown with a scythe to make room for a bench that faced a mass of feral rhododendrons across a pond with a fountain. There was one rotting birdhouse, nailed to an aged apple tree that had never been pruned. We could see it all through the veranda doors. He talked about the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm, central Europe’s largest remaining contiguous riparian forest. How the river, channeled by inflexible banks of stone, was eating ever deeper into the substrate and taking the groundwater with it, leaving the oaks and alders dead. How sad that would be. He spoke of silvery white willows and plovers. How the riverbanks, left to themselves, would play host to swallow populations adequate to make a dent in the mosquitoes. How ironic it was that Global Rivers Alliance never mentioned the Elbe, simply because it went on for hundreds of miles without a single dam. How easy it would be to take down levees built in the middle ages. You wouldn’t need heavy equipment. Just a shovel.
Ça veut dire
, civil disobedience. Instead of blather in cyberspace, facts on the ground.
For Stephen, the idea of direct action was like a cross between chocolate cake and the onset of mania. “Frat boys in Patagucci hoisting banners and calling it sabotage” he mocked. “Calling it direct action because it goes directly to the evening news. You know their big idea for the Elbe? A raft. Like they’re really gonna make it to the North Sea against the wind. These people embarrass me. But Gernot’s tear-down-that-wall thing, that is some serious shit. Respect!”
And thus it came about that armed with free time, relative solitude, and a pickaxe, we quietly set about dismantling the stonework that separated the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm from the Elbe.
Now, if you compare the stakeholders in the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm to the twenty billion denizens of cyberspace (that’s counting the duplicates), the potential audience for an act of sabotage looks vanishingly small. But Gernot had succeeded in weaving a fuzzy web of universal moral precepts that made even small-time vandalism stretch to the ends of time and space and beyond. I suppose that’s what theologians learn in school. For him, we must have been a refreshing change from activists who plan sit-ins in parks where it’s legal to sit and schedule vigils for Saturday nights. We didn’t pray for peace or play “Imagine” on the autoharp. We were the real deal. Birke could man the tables at the global car wash and bake sale.
He put us up at his dacha in Breitenhagen. It was basically one room, with an entry and a pantry and a niche to sleep in. It was heated, but with a strange stove where you had to dump kerosene on a cookie sheet and drop a match on it. The electric stovetop didn’t quite work, but there was a new electric teakettle.
Sabotage was hard labor in damp cold. Under the dirt, the dike was made of rocks the size of pomelos. I cleared detritus and yanked out grass by the roots, and Stephen wielded the pickaxe.
I was good for a two-hour shift. Seeing Stephen heave rocks, I felt I was not of peasant stock. I had narrow little hands like a lemur. Even my opposable thumbs were a work in progress.
After a week, our having hewn a gap in the dike wide enough to flood the neighboring swamp but with no outlet downstream, so that rather than saving the forest we might be replacing valuable wetlands with a lake, Stephen had had enough. He called me over to the bathtub.
He had found, on a shelf, a report by the Macedonian Ecological Society on the avifauna of the FYROM, and had noted glaring omissions in the area of woodland birds. “Look at this list! There are only three hundred and ten species on it. It’s like a field guide to the beaches of Macedonia.”
“Isn’t Macedonia landlocked?”
He continued unerringly. “Reading this, you’d never know the place had trees. There could be anything in there. I’ve been thinking a lot about my involvement with GRA. I’m not a new-media person and I never will be. That whole holistic, we-are-the-world, network-of-nodes thing. Getting all keyed up about the interconnectedness. I don’t actually get it. My whole training was about last-ditch interventions for people with prognoses so bad you could get regulatory approval for a marlinspike and crazy glue. I was doing unskilled labor, on a meta level. Meta-unskilled work, like a Rube Goldberg mousetrap with five hundred moving parts. So the whole time with GRA I’m missing the fact that I have skills. There’s a kind of biologist I already
am.
Avian population ecologist!” He rolled over to face me, seizing the gunwale of the tub with both hands as he sought eye contact. “So I’m a bird-damaged fuck. So what? Bird damage is a good thing! Plenty of people out there can’t tell a willow warbler from a chiffchaff! Liking thousands of birds enough to be able to tell them apart is of indisputable value, whereas social networking is so repetitive I’m going to go fucking crazy, and it’s making me nearsighted, which is just what a birder needs. I was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from mousing even before we came to the bayous of Siberia.” He held up his right wrist. “My mom told me if you smoke weed you won’t get it, but it’s not working.”
“Your mom told you to smoke weed?”
“No! She told me drummers smoke weed to keep from getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“I thought they did it because drumming is boring and monotonous.”
“It’s not monotonous if you smoke weed. What I’m getting at is, wouldn’t counting birds down in Macedonia be a lot better use of my time? Who else can listen to birds and say what they are? Not a lot of people. If I stay here on the chain gang, I’ll be too crippled to even jerk off”.
“I thought you had a girlfriend.”
“Nah. Gernot’s got her number. He says she’s a screech owl.”
He had joked that his defection would go unnoticed. There was certainly no sign of life from GRA during his week in Breitenhagen. If the partner organizations missed him reading their press releases, they didn’t show it. He returned to Berlin to prepare for his surreptitious self-transfer.
Preferring Breitenhagen to Berlin, I proposed a shift in the focus of the project. I explained to Gernot that there was no point in simply flooding the woods, ecologically desirable as that might be, because no one would ever know. I wanted to take the stone cladding off the banks so they would wash out completely. I wanted ships to run aground. I argued that sabotage, being surreptitious, is not nearly as ecclesiastical as civil disobedience, where the point is to get caught.
He raised his eyebrows and said, “I’m not a martyr.”
“You don’t understand. That’s how civil disobedience works. You get punished by the authorities for doing the right thing, and then the papers expose their corruption and stoke the fires of public outrage.”
“Having a free press doesn’t mean anyone cares,” he said. “My central insight of the past twenty years.”
“Your congregation will back you up!”
“They’ll fire me, and then who will listen to me?”
“I don’t know. Me?”
So when the weather wasn’t too inexpressibly horrible, maybe twice a week, I snuck out and pried a few rocks off the shores of the Elbe, which soon began to remind me of the pyramid of Cheops.
When I heard a boat, I hid. Every afternoon a little cutter from the WSA (water and shipping office) in Magdeburg steamed by on a tour of inspection. But they must have needed glasses, because they never slowed down.
There wasn’t much else in the way of boats, just the occasional half-empty Czech steamer with a skipper staring dead ahead in a trance. Gernot said they paid more attention to riverside goings-on in summer, when I likely would have been naked.
Stephen and I had started on the landward side and piled the fruits of our labors on the ground, anticipating that the eventual cease-and-desist order would include demands for restoration and restitution which might be fulfilled more easily if we could find all the rocks. It was punishing, especially with one of those wheelbarrows with the wheel way out front so you carry half the weight yourself. Alone, I found myself working a little differently. I needed both hands to move a rock, even with a long pry bar. It was easiest to just let them roll into the river.
To my surprise, Gernot looked at the ruined riverbank and was well pleased. Apparently it had never crossed his mind that sabotage doesn’t look criminal if you get a young, middle-class housewife to do it. I looked like Jane Birkin in
Slogan
, if
Slogan
had been set in a scout camp in Poland. I worked the way Patty Hearst would have robbed banks if she’d never met the SLA. The militant wing of Global Rivers Alliance radiated innocent industry. If I have one talent in the world, that’s probably it. Looking innocent enough to make whatever it is I’m doing appear legal.
Gernot said there was no turning back. “This will be a god-send for the riparian ecosystem,” he said. “The river will gently flood the forest and raise the groundwater. No one will ever know. They’ll just wonder in a hundred years why the forest is still alive.” He occasionally helped me with an especially large rock, but never for more than three minutes before he would see something compelling on the ground or in the air and start rhapsodizing. For him, nothing in nature was distracted or lazy. Every nematode was pulling its own weight, the best way it knew how. It put his attitude toward me into perspective. He praised me with the same effusion he bestowed on chicory, voles, freezing rain, etc.
Every so often he would mention Jesus. Not in a Christian way for American ears; back in the GDR, dissent of any kind had made a person a de facto Christian. It was safer to be at odds with the authorities if you had a consulate to call. The crucifix on his lapel had symbolized access to a mimeograph machine and a telephone that wasn’t wiretapped. When its protective spell wore off, around time to do army service, he took up theology per se. He would have liked to know something about biology, he said, but it was not to be. His compromise was to keep a beat-up copy of
Diversity Through Flooding
displayed prominently on his dashboard. He claimed it was impossible to write a sermon without it.
Somehow Olaf could handle my being happily married, but my living in Gernot’s summerhouse after Stephen left for Macedonia made him quite insane. He came in the cottage door unannounced, pushed me against the wall, and said, “Why? Why?” He pinned my arms and squished me painfully, almost smothering me, literally, with kisses.
I had to turn my head to get a chance to answer: “Why what?”
“Why are you living with that old goat?”
“Because I’m tearing down the walls of the Elbe as civil disobedience to liberate the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm?” I said.
It took some explaining. He hadn’t known. When I was done explaining, to the best of my ability insofar as I understood the project, he looked more upset than before.
“Good God. It’s so dumb. What are you going to do next, spike the trees? This will set the dike relocation effort back ten years. Whose idea was it?”
I, correctly, blamed Gernot.
“This is the wrong time for radicalism on the Elbe,” he said. “It’s all wrong. It’s the Rhine you should be fighting for. Weren’t you busy trying to renege on the treaty of Versailles? What happened?”
“That was your old girlfriend,” I said. “I say forget the Rhine. It’s past saving. It’s a drainage ditch. The Elbe is where it all goes down. I like the Elbe. It has real cable ferryboats, not the tourist kind. It has dioxins and nuclear waste. It makes the other rivers seem so plastic.”
He hung his head. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have talked some sense into you. The Tree Farm is year-round osprey habitat. Do you know you’re disturbing ospreys?”
“Gernot told me to keep quiet.”
“The Elbe is Germany’s last free-flowing river. Nine hundred cubic meters a second. It’s way out of your league.”
I frowned.
He was silent, briefly. Then he piped up, “You do know Gernot was an IM, right?”
An ee-em, short for
inoffizieller Mitarbeiter
, meaning unofficial employee: an East German Stasi informant who entrapped friends and neighbors for the sake of professional advancement.
“That’s impossible,” I countered. “The guy never worked a day in his life.”
But it seemed plausible enough. If a guy has a fancy job in the public eye (German preachers are civil servants and Wittenberg is not the most obscure venue), and all he ever talks to you about is the oft-overlooked beauty of voles, etc., you could get suspicious. You could start wondering whether you’re apprenticing with an anarcho-sensualist renegade or just easily led.
In Olaf’s view, Gernot must be doing something to get off, and it was more likely to involve my ass than voles, while his media-shyness suggested one thing only: guilt. Olaf didn’t believe in the innocence of people with critical faculties. The injustice of mortal existence cried out with greed for euphoria. Delicacy had no place in Olaf’s world.
It was a difficult discussion. But eventually Olaf weighed his life’s work against the value of keeping me off the streets of Berlin, and my lax morals won. The ospreys would have to take a back seat, because he and I were that most common of endangered species: adulterers. The love that dare not speak its name. Not so long ago, it would have been legal for Stephen to shoot us on sight. We had to stick together. As for Gernot’s being a Stasi fink, when I brought it up, Gernot got mad. As in really angry. He demanded to know what person of despicable character, compared to whom pig-dogs are models of rectitude, would stoop so low as to retail an accusation that had made the rounds in 1990 but was disproven more conclusively with each passing year, since by this time everybody and his brother had pored over Stasi files looking for evidence of persecution (if it turned out they had targeted you, you had joined the democratic resistance retroactively, which is definitely the easiest way), but none had yet unmasked him.