Authors: Nell Zink
Meanwhile, Stephen and I were reaching new heights of brokeness. George had noticed that Stephen’s activities bore only a tenuous relation to Global Rivers Alliance and hired Birke, who was nearly done with school, to replace him. I put in for another grant from the Tiff Foundation (that’s what I called my own money from before I got married) to cover my clothing allowance. I wasn’t eager to spend money on Stephen.
He suggested I get a job. Or rather, he said, “You know, that school where your sister works is K-12. If your sister can teach fifth grade, you can manage at least kindergarten, can’t you?”
“Fie upon you,” I said. I had been experimenting with hopeless attempts to muddle through Sir Walter Scott, but mostly getting nowhere.
“Seriously, man,” he said, “I need cash to go back to Albania for the international waterbird census. I mean, if Constance can go-go dance, can’t you do something slightly less humiliating? Like working the door somewhere? I know so many people who would give you a job.”
I put on a turtleneck with little owls on it, a blue cashmere sweater, and green gabardine slacks, clamped my hair into a bun, and went down to interview at SO36. I didn’t mention Stephen and said nothing about being Constance’s sister. They gave me a job anyway. I had returned to the world of work.
SO36 had a politically correct door policy. Even the drag shows were packed with minority guys who couldn’t get past the bouncers anywhere else. So it wasn’t long, maybe a month, before I saw a familiar face in the ticket window. It was Elvis, beaming with joy. He bounced up and down, he was so thrilled to see me. He said, “Tiff! Tiff! My love!” I said nothing. He plunked down five euros and I made change. “How are you? I think of you all the days. What you make now in Berlin? What you do later?” He extended his hand into my cage to be stamped.
I held his fingers and rolled the rubber stamp across the tendons of the back of his hand in slow motion, thinking, This is the man I had the best sex with of anyone in my entire life?
When my shift ended, I slunk out like a joker-slash-thief with my collar up and my hat pulled past my eyebrows. I woke Stephen to tell him I had quit my job. I distrusted my body for the first time ever.
Maybe my mind knows best! I thought. This unaccustomed thought shocked me. But I seriously considered it.
And I realized it was true. My body was swept away by the force of the thought like petals blowing off a rose. And there, at the center of the flesh, were the stamen and the pistil, sexual organs seeking not contact but exchange. Not to be pink and velvety-soft and oblivious, but to broadcast and receive spiky, irritating bits of information. The brain, wired to battle entropy with such resolve that anything repeated too often must become imperceptible or be violently rejected. Knowledge, an allergen. Boredom, the mind’s spring flood, the sole conceivable force for good, the sole means—for human awareness—of striving toward complexity. Diversity through flooding. Or something, because the allergy metaphor tended to make the spring flood be tears and snot, which couldn’t be right. I felt overwhelmed by a new mystic rationalism. I felt a great love for Stephen.
Stephen had a plan. Or rather, he had a desired outcome. The result of his efforts would be a Croatian conglomerate’s abandonment of a particularly sinister hydroelectric project in the Neretva Delta, and the plan was—was—he didn’t know.
“I could have told you that,” I said. “You can’t sabotage something that only exists on paper.”
His eyes lit up. “That’s it!” he said. “I have to go after something they’ve already built.”
After several days of reflecting, flat on his back in bed, he had decided on a target: Buško Jezero. He was in transports, overjoyed at his own ingenuity. He was going to build an absolutely huge bomb with manure and diesel fuel and blow up the dam, blocking the canal and disabling the hydroelectric plant so that the waters of Livanjsko Polje would fill the caves like they’re supposed to instead of powering techno bars in Dubrovnik.
“It’s sort of like what we did at the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm,” I conceded, “except we didn’t use a huge bomb. Somehow or other I think the public eye is going to look a little differently at any project involving a huge bomb.”
Stephen’s eyes glinted in a glassy way. He said, “I guess you’re right,” and rolled over.
He brought up children again. While slurping a rum and Coke in bed, he said dreamily, “I wish I had fathered a child by accident so now I could find out about it. Like, some cute fourteen-year-old would show up demanding to be told the meaning of life, and she’d be our daughter I didn’t know about. You have so many secrets, and my brain is like Swiss cheese, so why not?”
“It could happen,” I said. “Perhaps not with me, seeing as how I would have noticed if I had a kid when I was sixteen. It’s one of the advantages of being female. But maybe you have like six kids waiting to meet you in Philadelphia and three more in Tidewater, all lining up to collect child support. Maybe that’s why you were in such a hurry to leave the country.”
“Fat chance. When I met you, I was pure as the driven snow.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was a virgin.”
“Are you serious?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know. I just thought you were lousy in bed.”
“And you married me anyway?”
“You were cute!”
He opened his eyes wide. “Do you have any idea how cute
you
were? I mean, everybody wanted you. You were the unapproachable princess.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Well, whatever else you were, you kept it quiet around the office. Everybody thought I’d won the lottery.”
I tried to think back and couldn’t. “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.
“You can if it’s never been opened.”
“Don’t be crass.”
“I mean like in
Four Quartets.
The future is a faded song, a royal rose or a lavender spray, of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened. Like, you as a mom. That’s a book that’s never been opened. Most things never get opened and just depreciate down to nothing before you even know what they were. Which means life is a total write-down, as in pure profit, everything! Life has an infinite rate of return!”
He looked at me earnestly as if expecting me to know what he was talking about.
I let it pass, feeling I would understand in good time. “So you’ve had sex with me, Birke, Constance, and Omar’s wife. Am I missing anybody?”
“Hey, that’s a pretty good track record for a birdwatcher! I know guys with two thousand birds who’ve never gotten their pencil wet.”
“Yecch, Stephen. Where’d you pick up that kind of language?”
“That’s standard-issue geek-speak. Not really. But seriously, my grandfather got religion on his deathbed, and he made me swear I wouldn’t have premarital sex. And I didn’t, almost. Birke would have married me.”
“So, like, when you said Constance was the bomb,” I said, “you actually had no basis for comparison?”
Not long after, Stephen made another confession. We were perched on a barge on the Spree, enjoying a sunny day with a light fresh wind. We were drinking piña coladas and watching the coots sweep the water with bits of reed held in their bills the way they do, like little brownie scouts sweeping out a parish hall, inept and squeaking, and the DJ had put on Horace Andy (“Skylarking”).
“Do you remember way back when,” he began, “back in the day, when I saw Birke at Banja Luka with another guy and got all upset? And then I told you she hooked up with your boyfriend.”
“Yeah, and Olaf said he never touched her.”
“Well, there’s a reason.”
“Uh, to wit?”
“I was sort of off base about which guy you thought was ‘harmless.’ You told me you had the hots for a harmless guy. So the whole time in Lenzen” (that is, the half hour he and I were in the same room), “I keep seeing you with a Lutheran minister all into waxing poetic about ecological justice and frogs. You know the guy I mean. And you listening to him all ears and big Bambi eyes and I thought, whoa, Tiff’s got a brand new bag! I never thought you meant the fucking
lobbyist
!”
The little gears in my brain were grinding hard. “So after the Rhine Conference,” I said, “when you said Birke hooked up with my harmless crush, you meant
Gernot
?”
“I sure as shit didn’t mean the swinging dick
lobbyist
!”
I pictured Birke and Gernot together and laughed.
I kept laughing off and on for the rest of the day. I had another fit of giggling while falling asleep. I laughed cruelly at myself, thinking how I had huddled over the cookie-sheet stove in Breitenhagen. I pictured Birke in the rectory in Wittenberg, lounging by the fire on a tigerskin rug while Gernot brought her hot toddies.
Of course, as Stephen pointed out, they had something in common: rivers. They were both genuinely passionate about rivers. And I’m afraid we performed a number of improvised parodies of riparian hardcore porn over the course of the next several weeks.
I’d like to be able to say we invented riparian porn rather than merely satirizing it, but they say if you can think of it, there’s pornography about it, so we can’t have been the first. Somewhere out there, there’s explicit footage of after-hours goings on at Elbe-Saale-Camp. Which there isn’t. I mean, I can’t prove it, yet somehow I’m still certain, suggesting to my mind (via Occam’s razor) a corollary or rather alternative hypothesis: that all porn is about the same thing, a theme that is unitary, both able and liable to crop up anywhere and be juxtaposed with anything. Stephen had clearly invested a lot of energy in getting Birke to shut up about real existing rivers when they were in bed together—or at least he went to great lengths to include an element of surprise in his oral sex technique, something he had never done before—and found it personally rewarding to construct play-by-play rich in elaborately obscene riparian metaphor, particularly during oral sex when it was especially counterproductive. It all made perfect sense.
We went back to Albania in October. Instead of sticking to the coast, we headed up into the mountains by bus—the Bjeshkët e Namuna, the “enchanted” or “cursed” mountains, depending on your perspective.
You can get tired of Albanian buses if you value fresh air or your life. Two villages after Thethi, Stephen suggested horses. I found out something I hadn’t known. He couldn’t walk uphill. He would take ten steps up a mild grade and then wait.
That sort of explained why he had commuted so cheerfully by car between our first apartment and the corporate campus and didn’t like downtown Berne. And why he loved Berlin (flat as a pancake) and never visited my sister. And rented that place that was almost a basement, and drove up roads in Switzerland it had been totally illegal to drive up, and gave the appearance of being addicted to pills: Stephen had a bad heart.
I didn’t advertise how dull I was by sharing my belated insight. I just asked what was wrong with the southern coastal wetlands, like maybe Butrinti. He said Italian tourists hunt in packs and he would rather get into shouting matches with one gun-toting maniac at a time.
I favored renting a car. Neither of us knew how to ride a motorcycle. We couldn’t imagine making it up the grades with mopeds, but we could easily imagine tumbling to our deaths. Stephen thought a horse would be nice, like he had in Macedonia. Birds like them, and you can fuel up on whatever happens to be growing on the ground. But the scheme turned out to be impracticable. Trekkers had made the “horse” scene a seller’s market.
We compromised on a donkey. No ecotourist was heartless enough to ride a donkey, so the price was still relatively Albanian.
I didn’t know much about donkeys. My boarding school had a “coon-jumping mule,” a term on whose origins I refuse to speculate, and I had ridden it plenty of times when we were giving the thoroughbreds a rest for whatever reason. It could jump over a four-foot fence from a standstill, like a jack-in-the-box. It had nothing in common with this diminutive stoic. With or without Stephen on its back, its pose was the same. Its general demeanor suggested that the burden of Stephen was no heavier than the burden of existence. On steep paths Stephen would dismount and hold fast to its mane, like a climber being short-roped by a Sherpa. It seemed strong as Godzilla. I named it Brighty.
Once I got used to the visuals, there seemed nothing odd to me about a rider whose sneakers almost dragged the ground. Stephen didn’t use a saddle, just a folded blanket to keep donkey hair from working its way through his pants. I held the rope and carried our stuff in a backpack, and we fit right in. Albania is the West Virginia of Europe. Single mothers there dress and live as men.
I identified with Brighty. Her humble patience, her long-lashed eyes, the graceful way she picked out a route to nowhere with her tiny feet. We were one. Stephen told me where to go, and I led Brighty, on whom Stephen sat. A trinity. Three beings with a single will. I had never envisioned myself wearing a backpack larger than my torso and leading my husband through ancient live oaks on a donkey, wowing each village in turn like Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, but then again, I never did have much imagination.
Stephen came clean about his Macedonian pony adventure. When he had decided to try riding, the one person in town who knew English and could answer his questions was a Catholic missionary, who referred him to a farmer who had a spare pony. It was spare for the reason that it hadn’t been ridden in years. Its shaggy pelt was caked with mud and its hooves needed trimming. Stephen cleaned and filed its hooves, brushed its coat to a fine gloss, and dressed its wounds. He decided it cleaned up pretty good, so he climbed aboard and rode across the fields into a swamp, where the pony panicked, never having been that close to trees in its life. It lay down and cowered, then rolled. He succeeded in calming it, but not himself, as hundreds of deerflies descended and began biting them both cruelly. He improvised blinders and a fly whisk from the surrounding vegetation and remounted. They moved forward. The woods were hot and damp, and they both sweated unconscionably. The pony was unhappy and so was Stephen, so that when it took to sprinting, determined to get out of the trees at any price, he gave it its head. He threw himself to the ground to avoid being killed by a low branch, but he held on to the reins, and the pony didn’t drag him more than maybe ten feet. Being Stephen, he then assumed that their relationship had nowhere to go but up.