High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  She turned down the little bluish gas flame. She stirred the pot with her powerful arms. The kitchen tiles were large, irregular stones, and behind the thick walls outside the low window, evening was falling. He said that people didn’t go out there for no reason, that it was old wishes and expectations that they hoped they could fulfill. He said that they didn’t know enough. That no one warned them. He said that the distance got into them, but not in a friendly way. That there was nothing to get out there. She looked at him. Then she said that she didn’t know anything about it, but that it had always been easy to lose oneself in something, for there was no end to the wishes other than time, which would catch up with them all. But that the farms were changing too, and soon no one would be needed anymore. She struck her heart. Come un essere umano. As people. But then there would always be some kind of work. She shooed away flies with one hand. This here is another world, she said. But Waclaw slowly shook his head. Not another world, he said slowly.

  Then she paused for a moment. You remind me of someone, she said. Then she looked at the ground, her husband came in. His steps were small and he hardly lifted his feet. He sat down at the table and looked at them both from his dark corner. He said it would soon be fall and the rain would start. The man asked Waclaw how far he wanted to go. In a few weeks the first snow would fall on the mountains in the north.

  Waclaw left them in the kitchen and went into the cold hallway, and it smelled of ripe fruit and sugar, and he knew the smell. He lay in the darkness, and he knew the smell.

  After eight days Waclaw packed his things. The clothes were washed and dried. He’d dug a drainage ditch for several days. For the autumn rains, the man had said. Then he’d seen Waclaw’s back. They both knew that it wouldn’t last. He’d split firewood. A few times he’d thought about how much a doctor would cost. Sometimes he stood leaning forward, resting on the axe handle.

  Middays they’d drunk a light wine, and the woman had fried big slices of bread in oil.

  The man asked few questions.

  He said that Waclaw was a good worker.

  Colombe? Waclaw asked. Pigeons? and pointed to the sky.

  The man seemed to think briefly.

  He pointed to the high trees.

  Not here, he said. Ci sono troppi falconi.

  In the nights, Waclaw had lain awake.

  He had the address in his breast pocket and he knew it by heart. Other than that, there was nothing.

  18

  Hawthorns

  The grasses stood like bushy yellow spears, and it wasn’t yet late when he found the hut and laid himself on the bales of hay and took off his boots, which were scratched, and the soles worn down. The shadows of the trees shimmered silent and violet.

  In the twilight he heard shots from a nearby wood. From the shelter he could see the dry tips of the corn plants, and then he heard a cracking and saw the tall stalks bending, and something running through the field, but he couldn’t see the animals. He could smell them. The heavy mineral smell of the wallows in the pigs’ bristly skin. They ran. Someone shot at them. He withdrew farther behind the bales and waited, but the shots didn’t return. He lay awake in the night and thought of Francis, how he lay there listening, and every step echoed against the taut screen of his fear. As if a person were just a membrane that everything could pass through. The wind pressing against the cabin walls. In his sleep he heard animals panting. He didn’t set out until the day was bright. He found fresh tire tracks on a path, but he saw no one.

  He came through a ravine between the fields; large beeches grew on its slopes, and a wind came up, the first rain in weeks beat the dry leaves off the branches. A warm, penetrating rain soon hung over the fields, and he walked. That night he’d seen the first winter constellation rising on the horizon, and the Milky Way revolved above him as it did over all.

  He’d thought of Alois’s brother, Vincenz, who’d given him work in the apple orchard back then, Alto Adige, the summer in South Tyrol when he went to work with Jacek for the money they so desperately needed. When he still thought that Milena. When they were still thinking of names. When they were still making plans that later seemed to him far too large. From a distance he felt that he could look at their time together as if under a glass dome, and at their limits, too. Their inner Königsberg. Milena had picked up this expression. A thinker, she said, who spent his whole life in one place. If there’s us, then that’s enough. He could hear her. Maybe she was trying to convince herself that it was a good thing that they couldn’t travel, maybe it was more than that. Their inner Königsberg. What do you mean freedom, she’d asked Waclaw when he brought her earrings of bright green feathers.

  The sun was high over the land. He wiped butter off the paper with the last bit of bread, his fingers gleamed. He’d also eaten the boiled eggs the woman had given him. Cars whooshed by not far away. He’d followed the signs, he’d walked along the road for a while, someone had yelled something at him through an open car window, it hadn’t sounded friendly. He’d eaten the bread and the ham. There were lots of insects, and the dust of the cars rushing by stuck in his pores. The place he was looking for lay far off in the hills, which in the morning were nothing more than watery shades of green. The sun rose slowly, the stones were still cold. He washed, and then walked the road toward the mountains, freezing. He noticed how slow he was.

  A few times he saw signs pointing toward Genoa. Genova. Cruise ships. The harbor of emigrants, and the harbor for oil, for the supertankers, for liquid natural gas. Haven, the tanker that had broken in two off the coast while discharging its cargo. The Ligurian Sea. Ramshackle pipes. Mátyás, who’d stood in front of the square lighthouse, who’d wanted to hear nothing of the pipelines that ran from here to the center of the country. The refineries on the coast. A few mountains separated Waclaw from the harbor in the south. He thought of the key that he’d left with Eugenio. Haven. Just like that. What they’d set out for. It was harder for him now to think about the beginning, about the first weeks when everything had suddenly seemed to glow. Mátyás and he, the cozy feeling of a kitchen when they sat in the mess hall, betting a few cents on cards. Secretly Waclaw had thought of the pine bench, of his father and Alois, tired after their shift, under the low hanging lamp.

  In the afternoon he came to roads that were narrow and unsealed at the edges. He saw young people jumping off rocks into the river, and the way the water grew dark blue in the deeper spots. Just a sound when the bodies met the water’s surface. Klackklack.

  The roads grew steeper. Fornovo di Taro, he took a bridge over the river. The landscape reminded him of the old women in the community who brought the word oregano back from the trips they could finally take as widows, as if the taste alone could hold open a door they’d seen only briefly: a light far beyond the estate. The way they boarded the bus, the hopeless way they spruced themselves up for the journey. Oregano had something to do with these hills. With this light, which slowly sank and cast a spell over the landscape. Klackklack.

  He left the plains and walked northwest toward the mountains. He saw an old mill in a valley. He talked to no one. The sun was already low when he reached the riverbank. Small fish jumped between the stones in the shallow water, the heat had driven the river far into the middle of the riverbed. Soon the whole valley lay in shadow. That night he hung his jacket on a tree, and in the morning he smoothed the cloth, and washed himself thoroughly between the worn stones. He set out before it was light.

  Somewhere in the distance he heard a train. Gas stations gleamed like graveyard candles against the darkness of the mountains. He thought of the brightly lit windows that would appear one after the other, and he thought about how this day would have a direction, because he carried an old piece of paper in his pocket. The sun lifted itself above the ridge of the mountains as if in slow motion. Goats. The road was barren and wound up the slope in bend after bend, between hills and slopes marked by this dryness: yellow, crackling, groaning under the light and with the soughing so
und of the motorcycles dangerously cutting the curves. Waclaw was thirsty, and around midday he came upon a paninoteca where he bought white bread and asked about water, and when the baker brushed off his hands and asked him where he was going, he had no feel for the word that he carried in his mouth, as if he were standing too near a large picture that made no sense close up.

  He paid the man and said he didn’t know how far it was. As if the place were only a name, like the sign for a town that was long gone. His mouth was dry, as if with great excitement.

  The sun burned. A single crow sitting with shining feathers on a heap of sand. The dust on the leaves of the bushes near the road. In the afternoon he approached the place, Bobbio, and soon afterward he saw the house. The light fell uneasily on a narrow dirt road, hawthorn trees stood on both sides, a girl with a light sun hat squatted by a few dried-up puddles and played with stones. Waclaw searched for some clue, something that would tell him he was in the right place, but he didn’t know what that could be. It was an old house with a red tile roof; lemon trees stood in large buckets next to the entrance. For a while he looked at the path and the light that fell uneasily through the branches. Then he heard something that sounded like someone hitting a pot with wood. A name was called out. Enni? Enni! The girl, who now seemed to notice him, looked up and ran in sandals to the house.

  Un uomo!

  Beyond the lemon trees he could now see a woman on the steps. She wore a light-colored dress and picked up the girl, propping her on her hip, then looked at Waclaw.

  He left the duffel on the edge of the path and walked slowly toward her; the woman remained on the highest of the three steps. She whispered something to the girl and put her down. The door was open and framed them both in darkness.

  He greeted them, and his voice was hoarse. He felt her eyes trace downward, the gray dust on his trousers reached to above his knees. He kept his distance, and then said Alois’s name. He asked if the address was correct.

  Then he showed her the paper.

  He came a bit closer, said his name, and held it up to her with his long arm. She looked at the stamps, the address.

  A-l-o-i-s? She said the name like a foreign word and looked at Waclaw, uncomprehending. He waited. In the distance, in the direction from which he’d come, he saw a plane flash silent and high in the sky, a metal projectile.

  She looked for a long time at the handwriting, small and angular in the middle of the paper, surrounded by a large white frame, like a shy girl pushed to the center of the dance floor.

  Then she looked up.

  Dio, she said softly, are you serious?

  She wiped the sweat from her brow with the underside of her forearm. Her hands were covered in earth.

  That’s a long time ago, she said.

  Waclaw looked at the letter she held in her hands.

  Do you speak German?

  She nodded her head in the direction of the mountains.

  Tutti questi turisti, she said, I have to.

  He hesitated.

  And Alois—he’s not here?

  She looked past Waclaw to the duffel that lay on the path.

  Enzo never lived here, she said.

  He wiped his hand on his trousers and looked at the ground. He felt awkward when she looked at him, and he needed time to think.

  But there were no thoughts. There was only an image: he was kneeling on the ground in Alois’s loft, holding a pigeon in both hands. Alois sat before him on a bucket, he had a needle and thread in his hand. A crow had attacked the pigeon, and Waclaw held it around the neck, felt the throbbing under its feathers. Clouds trembled in its water dish, and for several moments all was quiet, as if there were only this pounding, ragged, and he listened fearfully for each further heartbeat. How strange that it kept going.

  He’s not here, he repeated slowly.

  No, she said quickly. She took a step toward him.

  He wrote down this address because the mail wasn’t reaching him at first. Maybe they were too lazy to drive up there just for him.

  A-l-o-i-s, she said again. No one calls him that here. You’ve come all this way to see him?

  Waclaw nodded.

  But it’s far. In this heat, you won’t make it to him today.

  She looked at him again. His arms, poking out of the sleeves.

  I can drive you, she said then.

  Enni, dai! We’re driving the man to him.

  The girl sat in the back seat and chewed on the ear of a stuffed bunny. Elena had introduced herself quickly, brushed some sand off the passenger seat, then rapped the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. You’re in luck, she said. The Citroën jolted in zigzags over the narrow curves, stones hit the bottom of the car, and through the cracked windshield the landscape was a juddering green.

  In less than half an hour, she drove the way that would have taken him half a day on foot. Elena laid her arms on top of the steering wheel, he could see the light skin shimmering under her armpits.

  Visiting, she said, I think you’re the first for that.

  The air whooshed through the cracked window, a few houses passed. The road rose upward, and he liked it when the turns pressed him into his seat.

  I hope you’re not bringing bad news?

  Elena talked loudly and looked straight ahead. She drove around some potholes, and Waclaw shook his head. Genoa, he said then, he’d worked there, near the harbor.

  We’re rarely at the sea, she yelled. You’re in luck.

  Her daughter in the back seat stared at him unswervingly.

  Then Elena pointed to a chain of hills and turned with a jerk onto a gravel road. It’s up there.

  The crags were light and overgrown with the same bushes that Waclaw had been seeing for days. A single dark stone house stood hard against the slope. As the hand brake ratcheted, the girl pushed open the door, ran across the yard to the house, and pulled the doorbell. They heard the note swell and slowly die away over the valley. Elena wiped her forehead. His car isn’t here. You’ll have to wait. He nodded. She called to the girl. Then she turned around. He’ll call me if something’s wrong.

  19

  The Lantern

  The bucket hit the water hard. He heard the echo and pulled it up through the narrow, shadowy cylinder. He washed himself, and the water was clear and cold, and older than the low house and the glow of the province and older than the silence of the meadows all around. The light turned yellow, the jacket lay over his knees. He sat on the edge of the well and waited. Gasoline stains shimmered in every color on the gravel lot in front of the house. He kept his head down, and he could hear the pigeons. The low cooing. He could see the loft: a gable, half-timbering, three compartments, and the landing board. He wasn’t sure what Alois still knew about him.

  It was late when he heard the engine, and shortly thereafter he saw a bluish cloud shooting up the narrow dirt road. An old green Kadett that braked abruptly on the forecourt. The driver’s-side door had been replaced, its paint was a bit darker.

  An older man got out and stopped next to the dented metal. He looked in Waclaw’s direction, saw the thin man sitting on the edge of the well next to a large bag.

  Then he came toward him.

  His legs were so badly bowed that his feet almost brushed each other as he walked, and he seemed to have gotten even smaller. He wore a shirt with short sleeves and a collar from a different era. His forehead shone. He asked in Italian what Waclaw wanted here, and Waclaw stood there, tall and narrow as a trellis, and didn’t move.

  Waclaw gave Alois some time to look him over, time to fish an old pair of glasses out of his pocket, to take the slip of paper that Waclaw held out to him. The skin on his arms seemed almost transparent, and where the old scar from the red-hot oven had been ran a white line to the elbow. The wrinkles on his face gave him the look of an astonished child, harmless, like someone who had never put in all those shifts at the coking plant. Harmless, Waclaw thought, and watched him take the paper and hold it close to his face to rea
d. His glasses were dirty, and he breathed in heavily, as if it were hard for him to understand what he read. Waclaw gave him time to furrow his brow, to turn the paper this way and that and then, slowly, to look up at him.

  Alois? Waclaw said.

  His heart leaped softly when the man suddenly looked him in the face and embraced him, his head briefly pressed under his chest, light, old, a bright gleam on the back of his head. Damn you, boy, he said. Didn’t I say you should have got on home long ago? He ran a hand over Waclaw’s back. Then he looked at him and called him too thin and weather-beaten.

  Later they sat on a stone bench behind the house, the shade under the grapevines buzzed with warmth. The last insects were flying, and before them in the valley the shadows of the hills expanded and stretched. They could see far, and the darkness came like an old dancer climbing wearily onto his stage. They didn’t turn on a light, because of the mosquitos. They drank a dry grappa. It was clear and good.

  I didn’t think I would find you, Waclaw said.

  Alois leaned forward and pointed to his eyes with two fingers. But here I am, he said, and patted Waclaw’s arm. Then he eyed the dark cloth of the suit, and Waclaw just nodded.

  They’d put out all the lights except for a little glass lantern, and when they didn’t speak for a while, they could hear a dog, its teeth scraping over something that sounded like a hollow bone. It must have been somewhere in the darkness of the meadow.

  Alois said: Katrina, Mexico, really? He said: Your father mentioned it back then. Then he shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t believe that Waclaw had been caught up in that business.

  Then he lifted his glass. To you, my boy. Who do you drink to?