High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  Waclaw bought capers and a chicken and tomatoes and garlic and he cooked the chicken and took the broth with the tomatoes floating in it, and they poured it over the potatoes and sat in front of her house, the light of the candle flickering, it wasn’t yet dark.

  Elena praised the food, and he said he hadn’t cooked in a long time, and she asked why not, and he said they’d gone out to eat, he didn’t know how it all worked anymore. Her laugh reverberated through the big, nearly empty house, and then she led him to the door in her sandals and waved after him for a long time. He’d declined to take Alois’s old Kadett. But before she knew it, the body of the Fiorino had imprinted itself, and it drifted through her mind over the next days like a shadow whenever she looked at the long, bright lane.

  The pigeon basket was made of wicker. Waclaw traced the emblem branded in the wood with his finger as he set it on the passenger seat. Safe Return Pigeon Club. He remembered the stack of pigeon boxes, the vans, the cooing before they were released. The pigeon club, the timing clock at the start of the race. Jupp, are the pigeons back yet? Waiting. Sunday mornings. The lattice on the crate could be pushed aside, a few of the wooden bars had been replaced, the floor was covered with sawdust. The basket was as wide and high as two shoeboxes. Alois had added poles in the middle, the pigeon sharpened its beak on the young wood. Its neck shimmered green, the pattern of its wings, black-and-white checkered, was smooth and shiny. Its eye seemed made of glass but for the red glints, and he could feel its warm red feet when he weighed it experimentally in his hands. The bluish plumage. It looked at the three men and the woman who stood in front of the carrier box.

  She’s used to this, Alois said, she knows it’s time now.

  The girl climbed out of the Fiorino. A string of plastic beads swung from the rearview mirror. She grinned.

  Waclaw slept uneasily that night. He’d thought of his father, of his thin legs and his raw knees in the domain of the Esse. Short pants, pencil case, and the conjugations of a language where the word Esse meant “being,” or “life.” It seemed a region where possibilities could be imagined without one’s having any claim to them, as if they had to be lost, like the little dog they’d led through the estate on a long rope one summer and then buried with the neighbors’ children at the edge of the meadow. Life and Esse, life among the Esse, the place always seemed to mean something else, as if it had long since turned away from those who lived in it, toward this darkness that began with the heat. The marl layer in Westphalia raised the temperature by three degrees a hundred meters down, the coalfield region with all its darkness and dust arose from a fire, a heat that they knew nothing about. The Esse, always only a subjunctive form of life, days in three narrow heated rooms with a view of the curb and the newly built sewer system. Everything was progress, two pubs, a regional football club that, it was said, recruited its players from the area. It was a struggle with the Esse, at least for some.

  In the morning Waclaw watched the birds circling one last time. Alois, who embraced him in his light arms, he stood there in a checked cardigan and flat slippers, he’d stowed the feed cans with a water container on the truck bed, with just the two cans with the red band in the glove compartment. His eyes gleamed as he lifted the pigeon basket onto the passenger seat.

  And suddenly Waclaw saw him, sharply outlined, short, with his watery eyes and a fear in his old heart of which he, Waclaw, was the subject, and it was like the rustling of the trees, and briefly he thought that it was possible, that it might just be possible, for Alois to disappear in this rustling. Waclaw loaded the rest of the things. The duffel. The suit. The water. The blanket. Alois’s rather fragile figure as he slammed the tailgate.

  Waclaw turned around once more.

  It’s possible that you’ll wait for nothing.

  Alois seemed taken aback, and stood there, still. Then he looked up.

  He came back to him again, laid a hand on Waclaw’s shoulder to support himself, while with the other he seemed to reach toward Waclaw’s chin, but the movement dissolved into the air.

  He looked at him. He pointed again to his eyes with two fingers and looked up at him.

  No, Wenzel Groszak, he said. Do you understand? That’s not it.

  He stood there, hardly different than when Waclaw had seen him twenty years ago. He did not say: Of all of them you’re the only one who remembers. Just stood there and waved a simple wave.

  He didn’t start the engine of the Fiorino, just released the handbrake and let out the clutch and the pickup rolled down the little hill. The pigeon basket sat on the seat next to him, covered with a plain, dark cloth. But the way Alois had smoothed it said that for him it was more than just a flight. His bare feet in the slippers, the blue of his veins that early morning.

  He would check his loft each day. He would wait. Waclaw rolled down the narrow path and looked back until Alois disappeared. His waving in the rearview mirror: that remained, amid the greenish yellow of the roads. They drove north. They were on their way.

  23

  And the Alps Were a Horse Rearing Up

  The engine hummed, wind brushed his temples. He heard the gravel crunch. He took the small roads, they grew steeper, and he left the fields behind him, the dry edges of the ditches and the rustling of small animals at the side of the road. They were under way. He brushed the lattice with his long fingers, and when the turns pressed the pigeon to the side, he felt its feathers through the bars. Something light. It seemed as if she were leaning against his hand.

  He now scanned the sky with concern, looking for birds of prey. The first time his father went for a treatment he had brought Waclaw back a simple, diamond-shaped plastic kite with a bird of prey printed on it. That day the pigeons didn’t come back to the loft for hours. Waclaw thought of falcons, diving down from high crags. Sometimes even at sea his eyes had searched the sky, as if something could still come from there, a shadow, a flash, nothing more. The whole Strait of Hormuz, it was said, was guarded by falcons.

  The villages he passed through were small and old, there were long-disused arches and towers, fountains, traffic circles and flower beds, colorful as a model railway that someone had laid out with great care, someone with the power to decide what belonged in his world and what didn’t, a craftsman with miniature chisels and a powder to make the water shimmer, paint to color the stones and the eternal summer. There were no storms here, nothing was lost. He drove.

  The walls were terra-cotta red, and bells hung in the towers like a forgotten choir, soundless. Few people. All day the peaks of the alps towered in the north like the foothills of another world. He didn’t drive straight toward them. In the evening he lay down not far from the truck at the edge of a flat, bush-covered cliff. The few towns he had seen during the day glowed weakly in the twilight, a thin film lay over the countryside like an arch of dust. He took out the pigeon and held her wings together and pressed her gently to his chest. He let her pick grains from his hand and ran his hands through the feed. The sun soon sank behind a rock face. He had no light, not even a lighter. There was only the soft cooing, and he almost had to smile because the evening, everything about this evening, seemed so simple. His clothes would get clammy, and the tarp would surely be too thin for a night at this elevation. When the meadow grew damp, he lay down on the truck bed.

  Rain pelted the roof of the truck during the night, he heard it getting stronger and then abating. Through the small crack he’d left for air, he could hear how the drops made a sea of the slopes, it swelled and undulated, there was the brown of that night, but only briefly. It sounded like a long recitation in which days and nights began to resemble each other, the same steady beat, as if the meanings, too, were starting to match, there were no more towns, just the pelting that surrounded him, and the bird that slept beside him.

  At dawn he sat in the driver’s seat with a bottle of water, next to him Enni had her head in her feathers. The sun was stuck behind the mountains. He’d dipped water from a stream, and the gurgling be
tween the stones, which slowly ate a path through the rock, was like a great echo of something he didn’t understand. He’d sat wet and shivering on the cliff. Why can’t you just drive. Idiot. He wanted to hear his own voice. How long had it been since he’d heard Milena’s. He remembered the airport departures board, in front of which Mátyás had tossed a coin, how they’d bought everything they needed when they got there and then left it behind in the hotel rooms, and always the clear feeling that he was leaving more behind than just those things.

  He could see the estate again, the pigeons in their big circles, a falcon that swooped down from on high, and how the flock dispersed in all directions, but differently, like something that would find its way back together blindly. A single feather fell down through the gray summer sky of the mining town.

  The bird waited on the passenger seat. The shadows wandered. But no trace of moon or sun, just the high crags against this early blue. It was different than on the sea. The mountains, everything about these mountains, was more powerful than he’d thought. Power lines. Trails.

  The tractor-trailers still had their lights on, they came straight out of the night. He drove on side roads, he wasn’t in a hurry to get north. He turned on the radio. A man with a guitar sang that red rose empire.

  The road wound up the slope in hairpin turns, and there were few trees, and he was tired when he saw two people in the distance standing at the side of the road. He’d put Mátyás’s old cassette in the tape deck, and it droned away, as if struggling to draw a clear outline around their time together. He steered the pickup far to the other side of the road as he approached them, he didn’t want to slow down, even though he saw that they were looking in his direction. They seemed small under the high cliffs, a man and a woman, stooped. They were dressed warmly, coats bulged over their shoulders, and underneath, what looked like various layers of wool. He didn’t want to stop. He saw their hands, drawn upward by the thumbs, and he drove more slowly and finally the pickup came to a stop on the slope with its rear end sticking up. He listened to the last notes of the song before rolling down the window.

  Next to the driver’s side stood a small older woman, her face half-buried in a tower of woolen layers. Her hair lay on her coat collar in a flat braid, and she smiled up at him uncertainly, without opening her mouth. He turned off the engine. She pointed in the direction of the pass that led left into the mountains and north, and he nodded. But then he pointed to the seat next to him. Non c’è posto per voi, he said. Uno, he said, one seat. The woman waved the man over. He had remained by the rocks, looking shyly toward the Fiorino as if he expected it to start moving at any moment. As he came closer, he seemed hardly to lift his feet off the ground. She whispered something in his ear, and pressed his hand, and he nodded.

  They helped him onto the truck bed. He, too, was wrapped in many layers of fabric, and his hair was thin and gray. The woman tucked her coat around his legs and gave him a cloth to wind around his head. The clothes were faded, and the yellow patches on the coat were gray and dirty. Waclaw showed him how to sit, he looked small on the truck bed, and held on with hands that looked like they were used to hard work. He smiled at Waclaw, but Waclaw looked past him. He didn’t know why, but later, after the woman had sat down next to him and he had released the handbrake and they had the first few kilometers behind them, he heard himself using the few fragments of Polish he’d learned from his father, this language that belonged nowhere, for which he no longer had a place, only the smell of quince drying in the oven, perhaps of hay, perhaps the crackling of hay.

  He told her that he had no other language, and then he looked straight ahead, as if the space beyond the steering wheel were an unreachable place. He shrugged when the woman asked about his route, or about the bird, to whom it belonged, what he was planning to do with it. Gołąb, he said, pigeon, and nodded, and left it there, later, too, when she tried to tell him something, about a festival they were coming from. He wondered where they’d spent the night and why they had so much clothing on, but he didn’t ask. The woman asked him what the bird was called; he thought about it for a moment. Enni, he thought then, but said nothing.

  The river he’d seen that morning between the crags now ran next to the road, a washed-out mountain stream in a bed of large boulders. The road rose above it, keeping a respectful distance. He wondered whether the two old people had a name for the river, and whether they knew the area, and whether it would make a difference either way. But the woman next to him looked out with an expression of wonder and some apprehension, and kept turning around to look through the grated window at the truck bed where her husband lay like a black mummy, or like something that had drawn its wings in.

  He didn’t react when she knocked on the window.

  Waclaw’s telephone lay in the glove compartment, it was turned off. In the glove compartment was Sharam’s voice, and he could hear it. Don’t you get it, Wenzel? You take it with you, all of this here. And it was a port, Rotterdam, everything was big and powerful, the Keppel Verolme shipyard, and they were tiny between the pipes, and nearly nothing beside the base of the platform Saipem 7000, which was being prepared in dry dock. Sharam had stood there and looked at Mátyás, who smoked, his hands trembling. It eats you up, Sharam said, no one can survive it alone up there. And he’d meant the North Sea, Mátyás’s days on Troll, his extra shifts out there. Waclaw had listened, but preferred to look out at the water, and Mátyás said: Well, what? Sharam looked at him and clenched his jaws. Sometimes he didn’t need to say anything, he didn’t even shake his head. Then they left, Waclaw with Mátyás, over the melting tar and through the silent heat of the port, where in the distance the loading cranes drove back and forth as if they were looking for something, like in a shell game where everyone loses. They spent the next few nights out at clubs. The streets were full of fog in the early dawn.

  The last firs appeared, glowed in the early light, then no longer glowed, but were gray and dark in their own outlines, then the clouds came. He could hear the stream when they rested. He climbed down once more and filled the bottles and gave the bird water to drink.

  They drove slowly, and soon the Avers mountains were to their north and the western Alps to their left, and the woman sat smiling on the seat next to the pigeon basket, and it smelled of goat and wet wool. Before they reached the pass, he refilled the coolant and carefully put the truck in low gear. They reached the pass, where they were overtaken by other vehicles; the ascent began, the first trees had red caps. Half a meter under this asphalt was a pipeline that ran north, what did the two old people know of it, he drove, the Splügen Pass, pipes lay eighty centimeters under this asphalt, well packed, this grass was more than just a meadow for rams and goats. He knew that the new pipelines were monitored by drones: empty retinas, like the animal skulls in market halls, in front of which people played out their everyday dramas. He thought about this when they entered the short tunnel.

  They stopped around midday, and the man climbed wordlessly down from the truck bed and sat on a rock in the blazing sun. He moved his hands slowly, and the woman took out a pot fastened with rubber bands and plastic, and they ate strips of preserved mutton, and they offered it to Waclaw, and he chewed and chewed the strips, the meat was strong and tasted of herbs. He left the two alone in the sun, and while he looked after the bird, he saw them backlit like two old pilgrims, and they seemed unreal next to the smooth asphalt and the neon-green paint of the motorcycles. He thought of the figures he’d seen in Tangier dressed in cheap blankets with cords around their waists, their gazes fixed on the distance, but not the otherworldly distance of monks, just the crackling of fireworks on the other side of the strait, where Spain was. Feliz Año Nuevo!

  The church had arranged pilgrimages too, bus trips to the Vatican, 35 mm cameras and rosaries, and back in the Ruhr Valley the pastor read out a list of the people who hadn’t knelt before entering the pew at mass.

  Before they continued, he saw how the woman rubbed her husband’s hand
s warm, and how the old man took a long look up at the pass. They drove. But only when they were higher up in the dense fog, and the meadows were gray and the roofs little more than outlines, did he stop the Fiorino, and they brought the old man to the front, where he sat next to the woman, with the pigeon basket on his knees. The smell of wool and animals and damp filled the cab, and he opened the window a crack and took the switchbacks slowly. He saw the countryside under him disappear in fog, and the two old people seemed to slide even closer together on the passenger side. Mountain peaks emerged in the distance like the petrified shadows of something restless, something that had pressed the continents together and banished the edges of its ancestral land to eternal ice. The turns were tight and narrow, and the pigeon basket pressed against the man’s chest, the bird inside grew uneasy.

  Waclaw stopped. He felt queasy, the mountain air came cool through the open window, and the light fell white and silent, like something that had never touched dust, only these quiet heights. It wasn’t a road where you could stop. A convertible with the top closed passed him, flashing its brights. Two motorcycles. Below them the road lay like a dropped piece of string. The two old people said nothing, they seemed to be waiting for him to continue. The windows of the houses were small, they were hidden under layers of cloud, to their right a crude wall supported the hillside. They passed cows that grazed wild on the side of the road, everything seemed to crouch on the back of a huge animal or hollow space. He thought of broad beans, war elephants that he’d carved as a child out of the big white beans that his mother couldn’t stand to look at anymore, after the hard times. The pachyderms were given packs and adornments, the mountains were his knees under white sheets, he sat under the sideboard in the kitchen and carved elephants out of broad beans, elephants that tumbled from the slopes, somersaulted, they balked at the ice, some lay down gently in the snow to die. The woman reached for the string of beads swinging from the rearview mirror and asked whether he was traveling to his daughter. A daughter? she asked again. The beads clacked between her fingers. If she was looking at him, she didn’t move. He shook his head. Then he leaned forward as if he had to concentrate on the road to keep from missing the arched semicircle that led into the tunnel.