My students didn’t know what an oxbow is. Some thought it had to do with pastures, others with plowing tools. They weren’t even embarrassed by their ignorance, as if they had a fundamental right to forget about what has been destroyed. Over breakfast on the last day of our summer stay at the glacier I asked them to pack their things before we climbed up for our last visit, and paid the proprietor of Zum Kogl a hundred schillings to deliver the luggage to the station in time for our train. After we had completed one final hike around the glacier I suggested that we make the first part of our return trip on foot. They asked why, and I explained that was the only way to really read a landscape. A few grumbled, but no one dared stay at the bus stop — the ongoing need to prove oneself is a powerful corrective. We gazed down into the valley. From above, the effect of human intervention is quite visible, it’s easy to see what we have done to nature. That was hardly a revelation, even for the students conditioned by city living who didn’t know what an oxbow was. I wanted them to spend at least one afternoon seeing with their own eyes, consciously observing the shrinking fens, the straightened rivers, our civilization’s attempts to impose its own discipline on the natural world. From one ledge where the valley opened up below us like an accordion file, I gave a short lecture about the river meadows as they used to be, until people started thinking of them as worthless land, like alien beings that had wandered into their anthropometric order and needed taming, which is why what we are looking at is land that has been drained and cleared and made useful, where the wet meadows have given way to apple orchards. First the natural state was wiped clean, then cultivation was introduced. But among hundreds of varieties of apple there are only a few that meet the reigning market standards — standards that doom any unregulated growth to failure. Taste and color are determined by chemical analysis. With the screen of our simplemindedness we have managed to sift out all natural variety. I closed my extemporaneous speech telling about a local farmer who a few years earlier was blessed with the tastiest harvest he’d ever had, but he’d been unable to sell because the size and shape of his fruit didn’t correspond to the supermarket norms, he was stuck with a rotting pile of apples he would have gladly given away if enough children had come by. A while later, when we stopped by an Alpine pasture for a snack, several of the students pulled polished Granny Smiths out of their backpacks, they looked at their standardized apples and exchanged embarrassed glances. As they bit into the fruit they may have wondered what a proper apple really tasted like. In one or two cases this curiosity might turn into a persistent yearning, but it would be foolhardy to hope for anything beyond that.
The pianist is waiting for me, very impatient. He always acts as though he’s bothered by my mere presence, but whenever I’m late he looks around to see where I might be, and if I keep him waiting longer he asks Erman the bartender for my whereabouts. After dinner we digest the day. I function as his discursive GPS, by referencing my own position in contrast to his, he is able to determine his coordinates. I ask if the Falklands make him feel a flash of patriotic pride, but he refuses to be baited. “The only beautiful women on this godforsaken island,” he answers, “are the Thai ladies in the souvenir shop.” Far from wasting his thirty years aboard cruise ships on touristic nonsense, the pianist has undertaken an extensive study of womanhood in a variety of habitats. As far as he’s concerned, women who hail from distant lands are the last wilderness on earth (when we’re alone he regales me with ribaldries that would certainly elicit an indignant huff from Mrs. Morgenthau). Like all connoisseurs he appreciates the uncommon, the unusual, the outlandish. If he ever retires — and I doubt he will, because for all his British chauvinism, which gets freshly creased and ironed every day, he is secretly afraid of English provincial life — he will undoubtedly relay his philogynous experiences in tones befitting such a man of the world. “By the way,” I say, “the beach is still mined.” He raises his gin and tonic, flips the coaster over with his left hand and places the glass irritatingly in the middle of the table. He seems excited, he has something up his sleeve, something he wants to tease me with, he can scarcely wait. I close my eyes. Behind me I hear clinking sounds as voices fill glasses, glasses run over, voices rinse the glasses out, I feel an acidic wave rising from the depths of my stomach. When I reopen my eyes the pianist is leaning forward and speaking in a conspiratorial voice: “If you only knew what was lying on the bottom of the ocean.”
“Gold?” I guess without enthusiasm. “Torpedos? Giant fan worms?”
“Nothing of the kind. Ships, powerful ships. And any number of compatriots.”
“Whose compatriots?”
“Yours.”
He leans back in his chair.
“I understand they’ve been here a while?”
“Ever since the First World War.”
“I’m not interested, we let that one go a long time ago, these days we’re more interested in fresher corpses.” The pianist nods, as if my reply was as easy to predict as the next move in a classic chess opening.
“Does the name Admiral Graf von Spee mean anything to you?”
“No, nothing, wait, von Spee … von Spee? When I was a student I used to live near a square called Graf-Spee-Platz.”
“Undoubtedly named after the same man. A prominent admiral.”
“Does he have a von in his name or not?”
“That’s immaterial. The fact is he’s one of your heroes.”
“And how exactly was he heroic?”
“He crossed two oceans and then showed up here in Stanley with his entire fleet, having got it in his head he would interrupt the British coal supply, even though he knew that he was hopelessly outgunned.”
The pianist’s voice whirred on, now he could take his hands off the handlebars, it was all downhill from here, an easy ride to his goal.
“At the time, Stanley was excellently protected by two battle cruisers, the H.M.S. Invincible and the H.M.S. Inflexible …”
“That was a very gentlemanly gesture, to give Admiral Graf von Spee such a clear warning.”