The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (14 page)

“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.”