QUICKBORN.
Schlump.
Poppenbüttel.
I stared at a map of Hamburg’s subway system. My destination was one stop beyond Schlump, Marianne had said. Marianne Schnackenbusch was a translator acquaintance I’d run into at the Frankfurt Book Fair a week before. When she heard that we were both translating Gloria de los Angeles’s latest collection of short stories—she into German, I into English—she’d generously told me that I must come to stay with her in Hamburg after the fair. She and her partner Elke had loads of room, and I could stay as long as I liked.
It sounded perfect. I had a brief engagement in Paris first, but after that I was at loose ends. My translation was due at the end of November, and I didn’t have the money to go anywhere splendid to finish it. Certainly I could have stayed in my small attic room in Nicola’s house in London, but in truth I’d been rather avoiding Nicola since the arrival of the Croatian lesbian commune last summer. How was I to know that my blithe offer many years ago to reciprocate their hospitality in Zagreb meant that all six of them would turn up on Nicola’s doorstep in July?
Marianne and Elke’s flat was in an old area of the city called the Schanzenviertel. Leafy streets, tall graceful apartment buildings, graffiti, bikes everywhere, Turkish and Greek shops just opening up. I’d taken a night train from Paris and it was still early.
Marianne embraced me heartily at the door. “Please sit down, sit down and eat. You must be starving, all night on the train. You should have told us when you were coming. We could have picked you up.”
She was a big woman, with a mane of hennaed red-purple hair around a broad, eager face. She was barefoot and wearing a red silk robe. I knew from our brief talks at bookfairs that she was the daughter of a German Communist who had fled to Chile before the war, and a Chilean mother. She had told me that in addition to translating she also was a lecturer at the university in Latin American literature. I could see from the hallway that translation and teaching must pay better in Germany than in Britain: the flat looked enormous and was full of Oriental carpets and big leather sofas and chairs. There were bookshelves up to the tall ceilings.
“She’s a bit overwhelming,” my friend Lucinda in Paris had told me. “A combination of Latin American vivacity and Prussian forcefulness. But she’s generous to a fault; she’ll take care of you well.” Lucinda was as poor as I was and knew the value of visits to people with washer-dryers and fax machines. Lucinda sublet a studio about the size of an elevator carriage, and practiced one of the few literary occupations to pay less than translation: poetry.
Elke was already sitting at the kitchen table, which was spread with a huge number of plates of meats and cheeses and jars of spreads and preserves. She was much frailer-looking than Marianne—and older too—with narrow shoulders, short gray-blonde hair and round small glasses. If you didn’t see her wrinkles, she would remind you of a boyish Bolshevik in a Hollywood film about the Russian Revolution.
“Just coffee for now,” I said.
“No, no,” said Marianne, pushing all manner of things toward me, and settling herself. “No, you must eat. This is so exciting for me, having Gloria’s English translator here. There’s so much I want to talk over with you. I’m enjoying the stories so much; they just go like the breeze.”
I looked across the table in astonishment. We hadn’t had time in Frankfurt to discuss the literary value of Gloria’s work. I had only assumed she felt the same ambivalence I did. “Well, I always find Gloria to be fairly easy to translate,” I said cautiously. “There is a certain…similarity in all her work.”
“Yes,” said Marianne, delicately spreading layers of soft cheese on half a roll and then devouring it in a gulp. “That’s what I enjoy so much, how you can always count on her to write so lusciously. Other writers seem dry next to her, while she is sensual, opulent, rich, and vivid. I just sink into her books like a big feather bed, like a warm bath with perfume.”
“They do tend to have something of a bathetic effect,” I murmured.
“Yes, exactly,” said Marianne, but Elke said, “Cassandra means they’re sentimental drivel, my friend. And I’m afraid I agree.”
“No, she doesn’t mean that,” Marianne said good-humoredly. “After all, Cassandra has translated all Gloria’s books into English.”
Elke fortunately changed the subject. “I must be off soon to work. I wish I could stay and help Marianne show you around the city. But we have some problems at work that are rather worrisome.”
“Not just the usual problems between the bosses and workers,” said Marianne indignantly. “Threats. Terrible threats.”
“But don’t you work in a bird-watching society?” I asked, uncertain if Marianne had given me the right information or if I’d understood it properly.
“Yes, yes,” said Elke. “Well, that’s what it was when it was originally founded. Sort of like your Audubon Society in America, I think. But you can’t watch birds nowadays without seeing how they are threatened by the loss of their habitats and so forth, and that has made some of the members very activist. We are trying to purchase land and writing letters to the politicians, as well as planning a big demonstration in two weeks. And of course some members are nervous about all this activism, which to them is like confrontation with the state.”
“But who is threatening whom?”
“Our whole organization got a threat in the mail, several threats. The first two weeks ago, and another last week, and yesterday one more. It’s about the cause we are working on now, trying to save a stretch of the Elbe River. It used to be that this section, not so far from Hamburg, marked the boundary between East and West Germany, and so it was never developed. If you go there, you see old farms and very little else. But now, with reunification, they want to build on either side, and worse—from our point of view, from the birds’ point of view, that is—they want to dredge the river to make it deeper, and make concrete sides and so forth, for shipping.”
Elke got up. “We don’t want this to happen, of course. There is very little left in Europe of undeveloped land, especially wetlands. So we’re fighting.” She wrapped a scarf several times around her neck and put on her jacket. “And someone doesn’t like it.”
As soon Elke left, Marianne began talking about Gloria’s writing again. “Just now I’m translating the story of the servant girl and the colonel,” she said.
“Oh yes, that one.”
“What a sly sense of humor Gloria has, don’t you think?”
“Well…”
“But that’s what I admire so much about Gloria. She is capable of slyness and subtlety, and also of great exuberance and broad strokes. She has such a large talent.”
“Broad strokes, yes,” I said weakly.
Marianne polished off the rest of the rolls and several more cups of coffee, chattering all the while about Gloria. She then showed me to my room, which was large and light. It overlooked an interior garden where the lindens and ashes were turning gold and yellow. “Here is the desk where you will work,” she said. It was old-fashioned, of walnut, a desk I had always dreamed of, with green blotting paper and a desk lamp with a warm brown paper shade. A tall bookshelf along one wall was filled with novels in French and Spanish. There was a red Turkish rug on the floor and a daybed covered with pillows.
“I hope this is all right,” Marianne said anxiously.
“It’s wonderful!”
“And the best thing is, at night, after you are finished translating your Gloria and I am finished translating my Gloria, we will have long evenings to discuss her.”
But today there was to be no work. Today Marianne had decided to show me the city of Hamburg. She drove me by the university and through parks with lakes and parks with statues. She bought me an expensive lunch at a restaurant just off the Rathaus Square and told me everything she knew about Hamburg’s history, which was quite a lot.
The stories she told me were reflected in the layers of the city: the few timbered buildings with a medieval touch, the tall, narrow buildings along Dutch-looking canals, squeezed in among modern offices in the international style. The city had a grandeur that was more in its substantialness than in any great elegance. It looked like a city where business was done and had always been done. It looked solid, commercial, successful. And yet this air of solidity and permanence was illusory too. For since the Middle Ages, the city had been destroyed over and over by fire, and during the last war the Allied bombings had flattened huge swathes of the city.
The harbor, the heart of Hamburg, where Marianne was taking me now, had been practically destroyed in those bombings. You would not guess it now. Huge container ships from around the world snaked slowly by, escorted by pilot boats. Around them, smaller working and pleasure boats churned up the river water that, on this bright fall day and from this distance, looked blue-green and sparkling. We strolled along the promenade and came to the inner harbor, where Marianne said she had a surprise for me.
“It’s funny,” I said, looking around me at the huge brick warehouses and the multitude of wooden docks. “I’ve never been here, and yet it seems familiar.”
“A dream?”
“No,” I said, suddenly remembering, “It was…it was a language course, on British television, many years ago, when I was first in London. It wasn’t an ordinary language course; it had a continuing plot, and it took place in Hamburg, around the red-light district and the harbor.”
“So you do know German!”
“Wie Bitte?” That was the name of the program, which translated as simply, “Please?” or “How’s That Again?”
I admitted, “Actually, I didn’t progress very far with the lessons. I would usually get too caught up in the plot to remember that I was supposed to be listening for grammatical constructs. So then, after fifteen minutes of action, there would be questions—‘What was Peter doing in the red-light district that evening?’ ‘What did Astrid say when the killer pulled out his gun and shoved her in the back of the boat?’—I could never answer them.”
“But your German will come back if we practice it,” said Marianne, as she marched me down a flight of metal stairs to a wooden dock alongside one of the harbor walls. “Here it is.” She stopped in front of a boat called The Juliette. “It’s Elke’s boat. Actually, Elke owns it with some others, all of whom work for the bird-watching society. It’s become the official ship of their movement. They take it out on the Elbe with banners and invite journalists and TV stations.”
We stepped down onto the boat and Marianne unlocked the cabin. It was a beautiful old cruiser, roomy enough for ten or twelve people, with a small sleeping area and a minuscule toilet behind the pilot’s cabin.
“I wish the others who used the boat would pick up after themselves a bit better,” said Marianne, reaching for a bucket and rope that had been left in the middle of the captain’s room. “Elke always leaves it spotless.”
“Oh no,” she said, when she saw the contents of the bucket. It was a seagull with its neck twisted by a metal coil. A piece of paper was attached to the metal, but its message was so wet with blood it was hardly decipherable.
Marianne turned the color of her hair. “This is really the limit. I don’t think they should be trying to keep this quiet anymore. They should call the media right away.”
“What about the police?”
“Yes, them too. Not that I trust them to be helpful.”
I watched as Marianne put the bucket on the dock. I expected that we would follow it and that she would start looking for the nearest phone booth. But instead she turned the key in the engine, which started up with a promising rumble.
“If they think they’re going to destroy my pleasure in showing my friend the harbor and the river, they’re mistaken. We’ll deal with this when we return.”
It was an amazing thing to be out on the river among all the other boats. The container ships towered above us like apartment buildings, and even the tugboats seemed five times as large. The water, close now, was pale green, slightly dirty, with a smell that was more river than salt. We cruised past the promenade above and the port of Hamburg buildings, very grand and rounded, and then past the city, in the direction of the faraway sea, and Marianne pointed out restaurants and villas, beaches where there had once been swimming, and the large, brightly painted asylum ships that held foreigners who had come to Germany hoping for refuge or economic opportunity.
Outward bound, Marianne was in determinedly high spirits, telling stories of the river and trips they’d made, relating political problems with gusto and anger, and turning the subject again and again back to Gloria de los Angeles and her large talent.
“I tell you,” she said over the roar of the engine, “I have very little patience for some of these fiction writers who are deliberately obscure. I grew up in a very political family, my father was friends with Neruda, and I have always believed that writing should serve the people and be very accessible. There’s another Latin American woman writer, for example, whom some people rave about, but who I have absolutely no time for. They have asked me to translate her books, and I tell them, Why bother? She is self-indulgent and obtuse for no reason. I hope she never gets translated into German. We have enough of those kinds of writers already.”
“You don’t mean Luisa Montiflores?”
“Exactly! You know her?”
“She…” Actually, I had received a letter from Luisa only a few days ago. She’d found out from Nicola that I was in Germany and was demanding my help in finding a German translator. “Since you’re there, you must have contacts,” she wrote.
“Hey! Look out! Get out of our way! Whew. Now would you like a lesson in steering?”
That took all our energy for a while, and in truth, I found it exhilarating, if a bit terrifying, piloting The Juliette along the huge waterway. But as we came back into the inner harbor, I could see that Marianne was brooding more and more about the bird with the broken neck.
“Whoever these people are, they’re monsters,” she burst out finally.
“Who is it who wants to develop that stretch of the Elbe?”
“That’s just it. Many corporations, shippers, industrialists stand to gain from it. They’re so powerful anyway, why would they resort to such cheap, ugly tricks?”
“They must be more afraid of Elke and her group than you realize.”
“Well, I’m calling Elke and getting her to stage a press conference with that poor bird. As soon as we get back.”
But when we returned to The Juliette’s berth, the bucket had vanished.
That evening there was a meeting in Marianne and Elke’s flat, attended by eight of the core birdwatchers. Several were mild looking older people, and only one was under thirty—a quiet, bald-headed woman with astonishing tattoos. Two men came together, one very tall and one very round, and a middle-aged couple brought a new baby. They were the only two whose names I caught, Karin and Helmut. The baby was named Sappho, which seemed promising, though she did have an uncommonly pointed head. Marianne decided to take part in the meeting, but I retired to my room, so as not to be in the way, and was soon working on my translation under the light of the lamp at the beautiful desk.
Maybe I was too much of an elitist. Gloria’s books had reached millions of people and given them a great deal of enjoyment. Who was I to judge? Maybe my long years of association with Luisa Montiflores, who hated Gloria de los Angeles and everything she stood for with a terrible passion, had made it impossible for me to look at Gloria objectively. I reread the paragraph I was translating:
“He took her passionately; she responded as if in a dream. They coupled frenetically, hour after hour, without eating, without drinking any more than each other’s torrid sweat. Days passed, weeks. One day he got up, as if an alarm clock had rung. He looked at his beard in the mirror, at his wasted feverish limbs. And he left.”
It was sort of like a warm bath, scented with patchouli oil. But it was not great literature. I must hold my ground. Actually, I must state my true opinion before I could hold it. But I trembled.
About an hour into the meeting, baby Sappho began crying, a noise that started far off down the hall in the living room and came closer, until it remained outside my closed door. In between the shrieks were the voices of her two parents, who started out trying to calm her down but seemed to move into another topic: problems with the way the birdwatchers’ meeting was going. Helmut, who had seemed sweet and eager to please when I met him, the very picture of a proud, forty-five-year-old father, sounded very aggrieved indeed, though it was hard, because of my limited German, to understand why. Karin seemed defensive. The only words I caught were “capitalists,” and “polizei.”
Too bad I hadn’t paid more attention long ago to that Wie Bitte? series. Why not? I willed myself back many years, to Bayswater, to the small shabby parlor of the house where I’d been staying with a girlfriend and her mother (right from the beginning, no place of my own!). I’d met the girl in Madrid and had followed her to London. She was working as a translator, which I thought so fascinating that I decided to try it myself. She was actually quite a boring girl. Her idea of a good time was to sit at home watching language programs. My idea of a good time was to figure out how to get her mind off television. Her mother had eventually asked me to leave—when the series wasn’t even over yet!
Sappho finally grew calm, and the pair went back to the meeting. Eventually everyone left, and it sounded like even Elke and Marianne had gone to bed. To my surprise, I ran into Elke on my way to the bathroom, and she was dressed to go out. It was almost midnight. She looked more like a Russian revolutionary than ever, in her black leather jacket, Palestinian scarf, and leather cap.
“I’m going to sleep on the boat tonight with one of the others,” she explained. “We want to make sure that nothing happens to The Juliette. We’re planning a demonstration this weekend on the Elbe with several boats, and The Juliette is to lead them.”
“What is the nature of the threatening letters?” I asked. “Has the group been able to come up with any ideas about who wrote them?”
“Who actually wrote them and who they want us to think has written them might be two very different things.”
“What do you mean?”
“They seem to me to be written by an educated person trying to sound simple-minded. They’re in computer type, but with a few words misspelled. Come,” she said, and led me back into the comfortable living room where Marianne was listening to the stereo with earphones on and a pile of papers beside her. She looked like a large red bear in her dressing gown. “I’m reading student translations,” she shouted happily.
Elke took up a folder from the coffee table and pulled out a computer-printed letter. “Here’s the first one: BIRD-LOVERS BEWAR. YOU CAN NEVER WIN AGAINST US. GIVE UP BEFORE YOU ARE SORRY.”
She held up another. “And later on they write, IF YOU GO ON WITH THE PLANED DEMONSTRASION, YOU WILL REGRET IT.”
“They do seem sort of fake, don’t they?” I agreed. “But how did he or she know about the demonstration?”
“A good question, since we had at that point not made a public announcement. Still, it was no great secret.”
“Could it be a spy or infiltrator?”
“No one wants to say so, but some of us believe it is someone in the group, maybe not the core group, but the larger one. Big corporations don’t send little notes saying, Drop this cause or you’ll be sorry. They have lawyers, and money to bribe the politicians. Why would they strangle a seagull and put it on our boat? It’s quite childish, really.”
“Have you raised the issue in the core group? At the meeting tonight?”
“No…”
“Why not?”
“Because it is so much easier and more usual to see evil outside oneself. Everyone says we must be vigilant, and sooner or later the culprit will reveal himself.”
That sounded like a line from Wie Bitte? And suddenly I had a dreamlike flash of disaster in a dark harbor, of someone being knocked on the head and thrown into the water. The lesson on indirect objects perhaps.
But as Elke went out the door, I thought, If a child strangled a seagull we would not call it childish. We would find it most disturbing.
The next days fell into a pattern. At seven every morning (Marianne was under the impression because I had arrived on the night train from Paris that I was an early riser, which is far from the truth), Marianne would give a crisp rap to my door and call out, “Breakfast, Cassandra,” or alternately, “Frühstuck, Cassandra.” Since hearing about Wie Bitte? she had begun playfully to test my knowledge of German by throwing words into our Spanish and English conversation. The more words I knew the more she threw. “By the end of your visit, we’ll be speaking German all the time.”
In theory I had the days to myself, in my lovely peaceful room, but Marianne was always knocking and breaking into my thoughts, asking if I wanted more coffee, bringing in little trays with snacks, telling me she was going out shopping—did I want to come and choose my favorite foods, oh yes, it would be amusing, wouldn’t it, for me to visit one of the little Turkish shops in the neighborhood, and important too, to meet some Turks face to face, they were having such a hard time in this terrible place, she had experienced it herself, growing up in Santiago among free-spirited Communists and then coming to the university here and having to make her way, having to become more German than the Germans, but, oh, she really shouldn’t be interrupting me, and she closed the door softly and apologetically, tip-toeing away. Half an hour later she would be back, wanting to show me an interview with Gloria in a Berlin newspaper or an article in a Chilean journal or a photocopy of a speech Neruda gave from exile. Sometimes the flat would fill with music from her expensive CD player. Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring was a great favorite of hers.
She was so good-natured and enthusiastic, so clearly pleased to have me as a visitor, that I felt churlish turning down her invitations or pretending I didn’t hear her calling me, or even fantasizing about locking my door. Still, when Elke asked me one day if I’d like to go on a local birdwatching expedition, I responded so willingly that she was taken aback. If my friend Lucy Hernandez had been there, she would have been quite surprised. She’d tried for years to put a pair of binoculars in my hands and to explain to me that a robin and a sparrow are not the same thing.
“It’s not a serious trip,” Elke warned me. “But every month Karin takes a group to one or another of Hamburg’s parks and points out local birds and discusses some topic, like nest-building or migratory patterns. It’s nice for beginners and for parents with children.”
“I’m dying to go,” I assured her.
A few hours later I was sitting on a bench with Karin in a park thick with golden-leafed trees while she breast-fed baby Sappho. I had learned the difference between a robin and a sparrow, had even learned their German names. That would show Lucy. The rest of the small group was wandering around a small pond, staring at the ducks and, in the case of the children, feeding them.
“Is Sappho your first?” I asked Karin. In the bright daylight, she looked older than she had at the evening meeting. Well over forty, with gray streaks in her dark hair.
“Yes. Is it so obvious? I keep wanting to pretend to everyone that it’s dead easy, though clearly it would have been much easier fifteen years ago! Helmut is even worse, of course. We’re trying to share childcare, in the progressive fashion. Which means that each of us is convinced the other doesn’t do it quite correctly.”
She yawned. The autumn sunlight stopped pleasantly short of being hot, but it was still sleepy-making. “Just last night, in fact,” Karin said, “We were having a fight. We were up late discussing this whole business again of the threats to the group. Helmut takes it very seriously. He doesn’t want me to take the baby on the demonstration for fear of violence.”
“Are you expecting violence?”
“Oh, there’s always something with the police,” Karin said, shrugging. “I’ve been in demonstrations over the years where I narrowly escaped being beaten badly. But of course I plan to keep the baby well away from any of that. It’s important that we have babies and children at the demonstration. We want to show how destroying the wetlands and bird habitats will affect their future.”
“How did the bird-watching go?” Elke asked when I returned. Marianne was mercifully at the university, no doubt lecturing her adoring students about Gloria de los Angeles. Elke poured me a glass of wine, and I sank into one of the huge leather sofas.
“It was wonderful to be outside, out of the house,” I said. “Elke, are you expecting violence at the demonstration? A real confrontation with the police?”
“We’re not going to instigate it. It may be provoked.” She sipped her wine thoughtfully, the sober Bolshevik.
“By the police?”
“Possibly. But to tell you the truth, I’m also a bit worried by a few people in the core group, not the older ones, but Astrid, for instance, that young woman with the tattoos who says so little. She is an environmental scientist and understands a tremendous amount about biological diversity, but other than that I don’t know much about her. She is a bit vague about her past.”
“I like the DNA spiral up her arm,” I admitted, and Elke smiled.
“Well, Astrid did tell me she thought you looked intriguing.”
“What about those two men in the leather jackets, Tall and Round?”
“I know them pretty well,” Elke said. “The tall one, Peter, I worked with long ago on anti-nuclear issues. He was quite combative then. Sometimes I’ve wondered if Peter is trying to push our group into a stronger and more aggressive stance. At other times, I think he is very clear-sighted about our difficulties, and that’s good.”
“And the round one?”
“Until now Kurt hasn’t been very politically active. I think he just follows Peter’s lead. But he is quite sincere in his interest in birds. He is a very enthusiastic volunteer.”
“What about Karin?”
“Karin used to be a heavy-duty politico, but all that’s changed now that she’s with Helmut. He was never involved in anything during the seventies and eighties, though how that’s possible, I don’t know.”
“Karin said he’s nervous about the demonstration.”
“I can’t imagine him strangling a seagull,” Elke said. “He’s not that type.”
“Could any of them have written those letters?” I persisted. “And why?”
Elke shook her head. “Anyone could have done it. Why, I don’t know. Maybe someone wants to create a feeling of threat. So that our group will feel more isolated, more fearful, and be easier to manipulate. It’s happened before.”
I was going to press her further, but the door swung open and Marianne, arms full of papers, books, and groceries, burst in. “Tonight I’m going to make Chilean food,” she said radiantly and gave both of us kisses. You really couldn’t dislike her. Even though you knew she was going to keep you up half the night.
A week passed, two. I began to suspect that Marianne did not sleep, for I rarely saw her working. She was forever in my room or catching me in long conversations when I was on my way to the bathroom. I wrote to Lucinda that perhaps one should make a new vow: never to stay with strangers just to use their washer-dryers. I wrote to Nicola, hinting that I might be willing to return to London sooner than expected. I wrote to my editor Simon saying the translation was going a little more slowly than I’d planned. On the other hand, my German was improving.
The night watches at The Juliette seemed to be having their effect. There had been no more incidents and only one letter, which the birdwatchers had promptly turned over to the press. The media had become quite involved, and everyone was expecting a great deal of publicity for the demonstration on Saturday. All Friday was taken up with preparations, sign-making, phone calls, photocopying of fact sheets.
Friday evening, when Karin called to say that Sappho was under the weather and she wouldn’t be able to spend the night on The Juliette, I saw my chance. Elke had asked Astrid to substitute. I’d been wanting to see where that DNA spiral ended up.
“Why don’t I come too?” I offered.
“What a good idea,” said Marianne instantly. “Astrid, Elke, Cassandra, me, we’ll all spend the night there. It will be fun, like a party.”
We arrived about eleven, Elke in black leather, Marianne in a big quilted jacket and a dozen scarves, and me in some scavenged warm clothes. Astrid was planning to meet us there. There was a thick fog over the river and a smell of oil and fish. The docks were lit, with weak, eerie yellow lamps, but there were few people about. Water slapped against the docks, and intermittently came the hollow blast of a fog horn, lonely and yet warning of danger.
The Juliette looked normal, untampered with, as we unrolled our sleeping bags and lit the lantern. Elke poured us some tea from a Thermos and Marianne chattered.
“Last night I translated the story about the married woman and the servant boy, Cassandra. Isn’t it a good one?”
“Is that the one where they couple frenetically or where they frenetically couple?” I said.
Elke laughed and then turned it into a cough.
“I admit,” said Marianne without blushing, “that there is a certain amount of heterosexual romance in the stories, but…”
“Romance!” said Elke. “It’s nothing but soft pornography in the tropics!”
“It’s not! It’s beautiful writing. Help me, Cassandra. Help me defend Gloria from my unromantic girlfriend.”
“It’s not beautiful,” I mumbled, thinking, Now I have to leave Hamburg by the morning train. I’m glad my clothes are all washed.
“What?” said Marianne. “Wie bitte? I didn’t hear you.”
“What’s that noise?” said Elke, sitting bolt upright.
“Where?”
“On the dock, coming down the dock. Is it footsteps?”
“It’s just Astrid,” said Marianne. “Astrid,” she called out, but there was no answer.
The footsteps stopped, not far away. They didn’t move away again.
“You’d better call some of the others on the cellular phone,” I said.
“Yes.” But Elke searched and could not find it. “We must have forgotten it.” She took the flashlight and shone it out on the dock. There was not a sound.
“Probably just rats,” said Marianne determinedly. “Now, Cassandra, tell me what you were saying. I didn’t hear it…about Gloria.”
“I’m going out to investigate,” Elke said.
“No, Elke,” said Marianne, but Elke slipped up the short ladder and on to the dock. We saw her light flicker down the dock and then disappear.
“Elke!” Marianne shouted. There was only the sound of the fog horn.
“I’ll go see what’s happening.” I said.
“Don’t leave me alone, Cassandra!”
“I’ll be back in a second.”
I crawled out of the boat on my hands and knees, keeping my flashlight extinguished. I made my way over to the harbor wall and inched along it in the direction that Elke had disappeared. The cement was cold and clammy. The fog was by this time so thick I could see almost nothing. Not even the boat I’d just left.
My nerves were wound to the highest degree, so that when I heard the thump of someone leaping onto the boat, and Marianne’s shriek, cut off, I froze and couldn’t move. Who was more important for me to save, Elke or Marianne? Let me rephrase that: Who, given the fact that my feet seemed to be stuck to the wet wooden planks of the dock, could I save?
The question soon became more than academic. There was nothing more to be heard from Marianne, except some banging on wood. Had he—she?—shoved her in the tiny water closet? After a few minutes, the boat’s engine started. Was he planning to steal the boat with Marianne on it? Was he planning to dump her into the river somewhere?
Adrenaline finally unlocked my knees. I fell forward and started creeping back on my belly over the dock to The Juliette. Whoever was driving the boat didn’t seem terribly practiced; he maneuvered clumsily away from the berth, knocking against the pilings. As the boat began to pull away, I jumped as quietly as I could into the stern, which was open and had a table and built in seats. I barked my knee sharply on one of the seats.
Limping and crawling, I made my way to the door that connected the back of the boat with the middle sleeping cabin. It was locked. I would have to squeeze around the side of the boat to the pilot’s cabin in front. But the boat was hardly stable enough at the moment for any tricky maneuvers. I hung on as the unknown pilot made an ungainly turn away from the other berths, putting us in the direction of the river. I thought of those huge container ships out there somewhere in the fog. This idiot hadn’t even put on any lights.
Very faintly, from the dock that had completely disappeared in the thick white mist, I heard feet running and a thin cry, “Marianne! Cassandra!” Well, at least Elke was safe and could get help. Preferably before we sank or were involved in a major collision.
For we were heading out of the inner harbor into the huge, invisible river.
Now it was time to move. I inched as slowly and carefully as I could along the right side of the boat, trying not to look down into what seemed awfully black, cold-looking water. Forward, forward, I thought. Just think forward. Around us there seemed to be nothing but a damp brackish cloud. Finally I squeezed to the right-hand door. How could I possibly get in without being seen? I peeked through the window. No sign of Marianne. At the wheel on the other side of the cabin was a figure all in black, with a ski mask, not exactly a sight to inspire confidence. I thought it was a he, but couldn’t tell much more in the shadows. Was it Tall or Round? Was it Astrid?
A fog horn went off somewhere close-by, and I almost lost my balance and toppled into the water. I grabbed the door handle, and it turned and gave, propelling me into the little cabin and straight at the figure at the wheel.
“You will pay for this,” I unexpectedly said in German (Wie Bitte?’s lesson on future tense maybe?), and grabbed the wheel and gave it a sharp turn. The boat made an abrupt change of direction and the momentum knocked the figure to the other side of the boat, out through the left door, which had swung open in the turn.
I waited for the splash and looked around frantically for the life preserver. Some lighted shape, a buoy I hoped, appeared and disappeared, but not before we ran into it. I struggled to recall my very brief lesson in river piloting from Marianne.
Yes, Marianne. I had to get her out of the toilet, but I was afraid to let go of the wheel. In fact my hands were now frozen fast to the wheel. And meanwhile, where was that life preserver? Where was, in fact, that splash of a human body hitting water?
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shape clinging to the side of the boat. He—for now he was not just provisionally but actually masculine—had managed not to fall, but to hold on to the left side just as I had on to the right. I couldn’t see him well, still, and was afraid to turn my eyes from the window in front of me, though I could see very little in that direction either. He was shouting to me in German.
“Speak English!” I shouted back.
But if he could, his brain was as jammed as mine was, and it wouldn’t come out.
I forced myself to remember some basic conversation. “What’s your name, please?”
“Helmut.”
“Helmut. The father of Sappho?”
“Yes, yes.”
“What are you doing?”
But I couldn’t understand his response. “Wie bitte?” I shouted back, seeing something boat-shaped on the right, and jerking the wheel so that we missed it by inches.
“I only wanted. Only wanted to scare Karin. Not to go to the demonstration. I hate violence.”
“What about that seagull?”
“A mistake. I’m sorry.”
Should I believe him? My mind said yes, but my instincts were still all wrapped up with that damned television program, once forgotten in my memory bank, now resurrected and imposing itself on reality.
There was the harbor at night. There was a murderer on the loose. There was a boat and a man overboard. There was a chase. There were a lot of people crying, “Halt! Polizei!” There was a big crash, and just before the crash had been the Imperative. Watch out for that boat up ahead. Turn! Turn!
What the hell was he saying now? I could barely hear for the banging on the w.c. door behind me. “Hold on, Marianne!” I called, and then to Helmut, “Wie bitte?”
“Turn!” he was suddenly screaming in English.
“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I wrenched the wheel around, but not quite quick enough. And that’s all I remember for a while.
I had a mild concussion, but the doctor said I didn’t have to stay in the hospital long. Bed rest for a week or two and then I should be able to return to normal. Marianne was of course pleased to nurse me. She came into my lovely guestroom every half hour to see how I was doing and to chat. Helmut had been taken into custody but had been released. After his wild ride on the side of the boat, he was only too happy to confess to the officers on the police boat that had caught up with us and that, in fact, I seemed to have run straight into. He’d been worried about Karin as he said. He’d told her he wouldn’t be home in time for her to go stay on The Juliette with Elke. He thought only Elke would be on the boat and that if he lured her off, he could take The Juliette up the river and then sink her somewhere. Not very nice, but it could have been worse. For him, of course, it was worse, because they wanted to charge him with kidnapping and reckless endangerment of life. But the birdwatchers refused to press charges. Their demonstration had gone off splendidly, with only a little healthy bashing here and there, and there was hope for the future that the Elbe wetlands might be saved.
“Of course Karin is not speaking to him at the moment,” Marianne reported. “But in the end she’ll probably forgive him.” She looked wistfully at me from the side of the bed. “If only I hadn’t been locked in the toilet. I could have helped you, Cassandra. I could have steered us to safety.”
I had been let off with only a very stern warning never never ever to attempt to pilot a boat in the Hamburg harbor again.
My punishment was to lie in bed at Marianne’s and have her read Gloria de los Angeles to me, first in Spanish, and then, to improve my German, in her translated version. When I got better, however, Astrid took me out one day to the banks of the Elbe and showed me how to identify the birds that lived on the river and in the marshes. I tried to get her to show me the full extent of her tattoos, and finally, in reluctance and pleasure, she did. But the next time I saw her she was with Karin, who had not made up with Helmut after all. They planned to struggle for the ecological revolution and to bring up little Sappho together.
I forgot the difference between a robin and a sparrow.
Days passed. Weeks. One day I got up, as if an alarm clock had rung. I looked in the mirror at my forehead, the bump now turning a mellow jonquil-plum color, and I saw my wasted limbs. And then I took the boat train to London.