High as the Waters Rise

by Anja Kampmann

  The woman considered him now. Her stockings had slipped down, he saw the dry skin of her calves, her legs were little more than lines. Wait, she said. She turned around and went into the next room. Waclaw waited. The same cupboards and the same white veneer. Then she stood before him again. She gave him a scrap of paper that looked like it had been saved for exactly this situation, a copy, an address, a phone number. My son, she said again, ask him.

  Then she looked almost apologetically behind her into the room and at the table. A used fork lay next to the plate. Sauce clung to the fork. It’s for the hedgehog, she said.

  As he drove through the streets, he saw everything from a great distance, as if it were a place in the future that stood there, abandoned. Nothing more to see, sweetheart. He drove as through a ghost town in a Western. The air was clearer, the Colt was no longer smoking, the villains and the good guys remained in black and white. Rows of shopping carts that pulled lost-looking people behind them, a soccer field that had seen some investment, where boys ran around in jerseys, the colors off, as if they’d been treated with chemicals. And then again the closeness of the houses, white window frames, privet hedges. He thought of Cairo, the bags of trash on the roofs, the junk, the grayed satellite dishes, a long wait for the last decisive signal. He gave the bird water to drink.

  26

  Gladioli

  The beer sign next to the Birkeneck was torn down, it was a big building with a hip roof and dirty red roof tiles. The stucco was dark with damp. All the windows were still whole, and the curtains closed behind them, old lace, yellowed with the years, with a lighter stripe where a cord had once held them back. Now even the curtains looked fragile, as if one were only allowed to whisper in the room. Or as if behind them the men were still playing one last round—the Pröses from the pit, who’d tanked up here every week; the eldest had drowned himself in the rain barrel. Thursdays bowling with the pastor, Sunday-morning pints, they staggered out of St. Ludgerus, across from Wacholderweg, just a couple steps down Birkenstraße, then a round of Dortmunder Kronen, collars undone, the incense forgotten. Those with black lung kept smoking anyway, the men stood at the bar or played Doppelkopf in the corner, and whoever could, bought a round: grain alcohol, beer, the pastor, the undertaker, the roofer, and between them young Willi Pröse, who couldn’t stand it down there and spent his daily wages as quick as he could, never any daylight, the bad air, Willi, who drank too much, always.

  Waclaw had seen them all, he’d set the pins back up. Little Willi and the men who stood at the bar too long while dinner was already on the stove back at home; the soup, the roast, and they still stayed a little longer, let the women wait, stood there, duhn, tipsy, suddenly calm, without a word to say about the mate who’d kicked it, out of the game, the rattling coughs.

  Now it was quiet in front of the Birkeneck. The narrow sidewalk, privet, the old firs and the lawns. As he drove on he passed a boy, an eye patch bulging beneath his glasses, he wore a neck pouch and had his hand pulled up far inside the sleeves of his sweater. The street in front of him seemed endless. There were fewer children here than before, or they stayed inside. And there it was again, the smell of the Esse, like someone had drawn on the street with a piece of coal on a hot summer day.

  Waclaw drove the Fiorino slowly, as if walking, he left Fuhlenbrock behind, drove down the Quellenbusch, the bells of St. Suitbert rang no more, excavators were digging up the churchyard, they were building, and he was tired, and his mouth was dry. In the rearview mirror someone looked at him, someone who’d learned to withdraw far behind his eyes.

  He bought liverwurst and rolls at a butcher shop, and he asked about a guesthouse, but the man just shook his head. There was the old iron gate of the car repair shop, behind it a bluish light, he thought of Alois and his Kadett. All the gasoline stains in front of the house, the dark green of the driver’s-side door. I’ll drive it as long as I can.

  The flower shop was across from the cemetery on the Westring and it was closed. Lunch break. Women and men with walkers came toward the gates from various directions. The light was bright on their faces, long shadows on the sidewalk. A woman lifted a rosary to her face and kissed it.

  He thought of the seventeen-meter-high wooden cross that they’d set up on Prosper out of old shaft guides, a huge rotting crucifix for their pope, John Paul II, who visited the mine after the warm April days had passed, 1987, the Prosper-Haniel pit. The miners’ choir sang while it rained, and the faces were proud, as if that alone could save them. Waclaw’s father had stood in the rows in his miner’s uniform with its gleaming brass buttons, he had no more air for the notes, he joined in softly for the Glückauf, and the image of that day remained stretched in front of the open window where he then sat all the time.

  The crucifix was a last hint of the tracks underground, all the oil cans, mile-long shafts that no one would see again, not the women, not the children, and not the man from Rome with that white coat that he couldn’t share and couldn’t throw over them before he left.

  Around one, the sign on the door was flipped, and a woman pushed out a cart with flower arrangements that all looked quite robust, as if they ought to be left outside, fir sprigs and boxwood and red berries, meant to last a long time. On a long table next to them were grave candles in various sizes.

  The shop was a low red brick building with deep-set windows, and the woman was changing the water in the buckets for the cut flowers when Waclaw came through the door. She looked over her shoulder at him. Just a sec, she said. Then she went into a little side room, he heard a switch, and a fluorescent light on the wall went on. Underneath it the flowers shimmered in all their colors: yellowish, bluish, reddish, but like at a carnival stall, the colors all looked wrong and green-tinted. He’d seen flower stalls in Bucharest, two-wheeled carts between rows of Ceaușescu-era apartment buildings. The tarps over the flowers billowed in the wind, as if only the thin sheet of plastic could hold the light in.

  The woman stood obliquely behind him, she waited. A tall vase of gladioli stood in the corner and he pointed to it. She put on an apron and went quickly to the bucket.

  I’m afraid they’re not so fresh anymore, she said.

  She pointed to the lower blossoms, which were dark red and wilted. Can you take them off? he asked. She nodded. He said he would take all of them, and then the woman smiled. She put on glasses and cut the stems with a sharp knife. Her perm was half grown out.

  I’ll give you a deal.

  Waclaw watched her and waited. What’s with the Birkeneck? he asked. Doesn’t anyone go anymore?

  The woman cut the flowers.

  It’s been like that for ages, she said. Are you from around here?

  Suddenly a voice came from the back of the store. That’s all over and done with.

  The woman turned and gave Waclaw an apologetic look.

  Come up here.

  Waclaw went up the two steps. To his right stood shelves full of empty vases, colorful rods, decorative bits and bobs for floral arrangements. On the left were a few flowerpots, a big chest that hummed like a refrigerator. Behind it was a small grated window and a man sitting on an old stool, both hands propped on a cane. Waclaw saw the silver pommel with the big hands folded upon it like tired animals. The man’s head and upper body were obscured in darkness.

  You must come from here, asking questions like that? he barked.

  Waclaw stood and tried to make out more of the man in the darkness.

  The bars of the window were distinct shadows.

  The old man leaned forward.

  Am I right?

  My father was here. He heard his own voice. Hewer in Prosper.

  There was a pause. Waclaw’s eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and he saw the man’s crooked jaw.

  It’s all going to be filled in, he said. It’ll be gone soon, it’s all ending.

  He heard a suppressed cough. Breaths like steps dragging across the floor. The woman cleared her throat.

  Excuse me—r />
  She rustled the paper for the gladioli.

  Excuse me, she said again.

  Would you like plastic film or paper?

  Tell him where your flowers come from, the old man began again. It’s all from elsewhere, and the mine’s going to be flooded.

  Flooded? Waclaw said.

  Give it a rest, the woman said.

  Paper. His own voice sounded hoarse, and he turned around.

  I’ll take paper.

  The man banged the leg of the table with his cane.

  It’s over here, no one’s needed anymore. They’re pumping water in, and it won’t ever come out. It’s over.

  And what will happen then? the old man whispered, his voice suddenly harsh.

  Processions, he said. The pit ponies, their long blind shadows, freed of the weight of the carts, will come in darkness over the land. Where else are they supposed to go?

  Waclaw tried to make out his face more clearly, but he couldn’t. Behind the silver cane the darkness was impenetrable as a curtain.

  The woman touched Waclaw’s arm.

  Excuse me, she said again.

  The old man nodded.

  Go, he said. Just go. There’s nothing you can do.

  Come, she said. I’m sorry.

  She pulled him over to the cash register, she named a price.

  That afternoon he got lost in the streets and he parked the Fiorino and bought a newspaper. He took the basket under his arm and walked past tennis courts that were new, he took the old paths between the gardens, then walked along Rheinbabenstraße—single wooden doors with transoms, bases with red bricks—down to where the old freight tracks had once been.

  He walked hunched over, and he could be seen from far away, the tips of the gladioli bobbed against the basket, it smelled of fruit and compost heaps and dug-up earth. Now and then someone nodded over a fence, and there were red dahlias with big, full heads, and he knew their brilliance and knew that winter would follow them, heads of cabbage and then snow. At some point he found Alois’s house, small like the others, with a carport instead of flower beds, a lawn instead of the loft, and a terrace where the rabbit hutches had been. New windows and the old fence, blue window frames, rusty wire, and the sky empty, over the remaining gardens as well. No pigeons on the ridge of the roof. Not even the familiar metallic clanging of the railway cars behind the embankment. Maybe there were no more tracks, or nothing to be loaded.

  In a hotel room he’d once seen a report on British miners, their protests, their songs, Billy Bragg walked across the screen with his guitar, and he’d thought of his father, his dutiful Glückauf till the very end, the silent red of the dahlias.

  He sat for a while on the grass, then tore the paper and propped the flowers against the fence post. The sour cherry had grown huge. He looked at the tree and tried to engrave it on his mind, and imagined telling Alois about it. He stroked the pigeon’s breast with a blade of grass, he said: You’ll make it, old girl. The top of the cherry tree looked like a squashed Easter egg that had been painted under a strobe light, all the leaves, the light behind them. In the distance, the shadow of the slag heap, no different than it had been years ago, when they’d set out together, with that vague expectation, as if the Ruhr Valley were only a door that you had to push open to get to the real life that began beyond it, something different than the red and white of the altar boys and the golden chalices full of cold wine. Milena’s sister had enough space, a little house in Wiórek that they could move into, they could live in the countryside near Poznań for a while off of what they’d saved. They’d both looked out the window, Milena with the cocker spaniel, whose fur had always been gray in winter.

  The newspaper predicted stable weather for the coming days, a large boat had sunk south of Malta. He thought of the outboard motor he’d seen at Eugenio’s, the big pack of lifejackets he’d seen lying in the corner of the garage as he left.

  Waclaw looked at the pigeon. In three days you have to be gone. It would be risky to release her here: falcons between the houses, the complex terrain. Then he fed her and spoke softly to her. It’s crazy, he said, we just keep on driving, and we never know when to turn off. He ran his fingers over the grate. He would have liked to take her out. A married couple walked by, the woman’s hair was brown and hair-sprayed and she looked at him sternly. Their steps were the same length. Neither of them said hello. He cleared his throat. He placed the gladioli by the fence, for Federica or for all the Federicas, and left.

  27

  The Slag Heap

  Evening fell, and Waclaw took a room near the Pferdemarkt, he’d bought his first train not far from here: Borelmann’s Toys. He paid in advance and took a hot shower, then he went back down and fed the bird. He walked in the dusk: tanning salons and cocktail bars, the smell of hookahs, then residential areas. From under the barrel-shaped roof of a gymnasium he heard the squeaking of rubber soles and the bouncing of balls, behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of new buildings he saw tables where fathers, mothers, and children sat. A cat’s scratching post in a tiny ground-floor apartment, a little aquarium, the green shimmered behind the curtains. High-rises gleamed distantly beyond poplars, lighting up the district, still as an athlete after the race.

  He’d seen other big cities, he could usually find his way, but not here. Here he wasn’t sure what held these places together. Traffic jams in the distance, as if it were too early yet to just keep on driving, as if the cars were looking for something in this old darkness that was now beginning. He went to the Fiorino and took care of the pigeon: the water and one of Alois’s special cans. He took her out, hardly more than the meager weight of a few feathers in his hand. They drove a little way, there was a bit of rolled turf in front of a snack bar, bright green in the headlights, and on it the outlines of a few men at high tables, their bent backs, the bottles, dull outlines in the light. Where there had once been railyards were now meadows, the coking plant snorted in the distance like an old horse that wouldn’t be quieted.

  He drove in the direction of Kirchhellen, toward the shadow that the Haniel slag heap cast over the land. On the way he saw his father’s old factory gate; bushes and greenery had grown up around it. He talked to the pigeon and threw the cloth over the basket, then he locked the doors of the Fiorino and started up the path.

  There were few clouds, and somewhere a bell struck eight o’clock. People taking walks came toward him, he saw bicycle lamps hurtling down the slopes, a man in a black chef’s jacket walked with a girl on his arm, they laughed softly. As he walked up the slag heap, the lights farther below seemed to move, the streets, the houses, looked like something floating, distant. He took steep paths, dark earth that bicycle tires had eaten tracks into. Off the path he passed ramps that looked homemade, planks, jumps of barely a meter: all for a brief moment in the air.

  The soles of his boots were slippery, the wind picked up as he got higher. He walked the narrow edge of the crest, there were no more bushes up here, the heap fell away steeply to both sides, forming a crater in which an amphitheater had been planted. He could see down to rows of white concrete seats, in the middle lay a smooth circular surface, permeable like a membrane, as if here in the middle of the slag heap was a huge ear. Except that all was completely still. The twilight was red and blue over the land, lights all around, as if from a single large city, without a center. The smokestacks and the fires had disappeared, one district bordered on another, endlessly. He saw the old pit frame next to the Malakoff tower, the glow of the conveyor belts from Prosper. So he sat there, Waclaw, in his cowhide boots, and looked down.

  With Mátyás he’d heard the chirping of the lizards as they walked along the walls in search of mates. They’d sat in the courtyards, mango trees, mosquitos. He struck two stones together: it made almost the same sound.

  He sat like that for a long time and felt the air getting cooler, and it made him think of Cantarell, of the gigantic fields, which stopped yielding, little by little. Statfjord, even Brent dwindled,
in the North Sea. That someone had taken the trouble to name them all, and that they were now withering, petals and stamens collapsing to leave huge hollow spaces. At some point all that came up was sand and water. And that there was only water over them. That they’d take away the rigs. No trace, like none of it had ever existed.

  The North Sea, Petrov had said, is nothing compared to what they’re planning now. Goliath, he said, the Barents Sea, the water is a quarter of a mile deep, and then the frost, the storms, is that what you want? Soon they’ll only need specialists. Petrov had loved to talk about the first years. Boats that ran up to the platforms and traded a bottle of whiskey for twelve dollars over the railing. When there was still something like adventure in the air. As if the closeness of the cabins and the lousy grub were some kind of liberation. From what? And who the hell wanted to hear about that now?

  It had grown dark, and he was cold. A light wind caressed the crest of the heap. Someone had rammed wooden stakes into the ground, he didn’t know why. He walked crosswise down the slope, he slipped a few times, but without fear. The lights had started moving again, the glaring pits, in the distance still a few tall, flashing red smokestacks. He sat down on one of the ramps, dampness rose from the ground, he was tired. His feet dangled in the air, the splintery wood under his fingers.

  Far in the distance the highways shone in the darkness, as the silver pommel of the old man from this afternoon had shone. Just wait, he’d said.