Fly-Fishing the 41st (18 page)

“Yes, I make the chocolates. If you want, you can meet me at the shop tomorrow morning. I will show you this fish.”

“I would like to see the trout. I will be there with my friend in the morning.”

I left the man to his fishing and walked back down to the pool where Johannes had been diving.

I told Johannes about the old man and the peculiar native trout he spoke of that is now extinct that he kept in his freezer.

“This guy is old,” I said. “I think he was in the war.”

“Which war?”

“World War Two.”

“Did you tell him we were fishing?” asked Johannes.

“No.”

“Good, you never know, he could be a warden.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

 

We drove over the pass to the coast to spend the night and had dinner in the town of Porto. We started at the bar with a beer and then drank several glasses of pastis on empty stomachs. I spoke about my excitement to see the frozen trout.

“So, it's just a frozen fish,” Johannes said, “I prefer them live.”

“But it's a native fish and they're no longer around. The man said they were unique.”

“How does he know, he's just a
chocolatier.
”

“And you are?”

Johannes smiled. “Well, we'll see, maybe he knows what he is talking about.”

For dinner we ate
salade niçoise
and thin linguini with mussels in a white wine and garlic sauce. It was nice to be up in the mountains and by the coast in the same day, neither one very far from the other here. Corsica was not a very big island.

After dinner we had another drink.

“We have covered a lot of territory, you and I,” Johannes said. “We have drunk pastis in five countries by five different names.” He was talking about the clear anis-flavored drink we had that turned cloudy when you added water. Johannes listed them. “Raki,
aslan sütü,
ouzo,
Anis del Mono,
Pernod, pastis, Ricard.”

We went without speaking for some time, watching what went on around us. The sea air had a bit of September melancholy in it.

 

The next morning was our last in Corsica. We had to make the town of Bastia by evening to catch the ferry to Livorno, Italy. But first we had an appointment with the old fly fisherman at the
chocolaterie
in Castirla.

“The trout of Corsica have lived through a lot,” the old man repeated when I entered the shop with Johannes, though I think he was talking more about himself. He was wearing an apron and wiped his hands on it.

“I suppose you've come to see the trout,” he said. “Well, I'm sad to say I looked for it all yesterday afternoon and into the night and could not find it. I took everything out of my two freezers and put it back in three times over.” The old man took his pipe, which had been sitting in an ashtray, and lit it. “When I asked my wife if she had seen my trout she said she threw it out with some other old fish five years ago. I'm sorry, monsieur, it was a large trout with big red spots. I'll tell you what they looked like, the spots were like ripe
raspberries. But, can I give you some complimentary chocolates to take with you?”

I took some chocolates that he had put in a small wax-coated paper bag.

“Thank you, monsieur,” I said to the
chocolatier.
Johannes and I headed for the door.

“Typical of a wife to throw out the old man's trout,” Johannes said as we were leaving.

“Hold on,” I said and went back inside.

“Can I ask you one more thing?” I said to the man. “Do you have any locally made flies for trout fishing? I would like to bring one or two home as a souvenir.”

“Why, yes,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth to speak. “I have the best Corsican flies, made with feathers from my friend's prize gamecocks. Let me go in the back room and get one or two for you. I always keep my fly-fishing rod nearby.”

The old man gave me two beautifully tied dry flies that were blue gray in color, the stiff hackles of the feathers bristling from the hook like an insect's legs. I thanked him and left the chocolate shop.

Johannes made a point of reminding me that I had cost us some time, that if we had not stopped at the chocolate shop then we could have fished another stream on the way to Bastia. Now we had no time. We caught the overnight ferry to Livorno, Italy, at twilight.

We made landfall at dawn and saw a red sun rising over a field of dried corn as we drove through the city of Pisa. From the hillside above town we could see the famous leaning tower glowing red with reflected light, like a piece of penne pasta cloaked in marinara sauce. We were headed up into the Apennine Mountains in north central Italy to fish one last stream before returning to Sankt Veit.

Johannes spoke briefly about not wanting to return to work. Then he began talking about how it was mushroom season and where we were fishing might be a good place to find
Steinpiltz,
or
stone mushrooms. His tone was peaceful as we spoke about other places where we wished to travel.

“If I can get the time off, I would like to go with you on your latitude trip to Central Asia. There are many interesting trout there that I have not seen. This will take a lot of planning, but I have good information on the trout, and a few contacts. It is best to know people, if you can arrange it.

“I hope you will stay in Sankt Veit as long as you want. We have rooms on the third floor that are usually occupied by young bakers who are training here, but they are open now. No one is using them. You can have an apartment and we can plan our travels.”

“I'll take it,” I said, referring to the third-floor room, “but I'll have to repay you somehow.”

“You can buy me a beer,” Johannes said.

So I became a temporary resident of Sankt Veit an der Glan.

S
ANKT
V
EIT
: B
ARS
80, P
OPULATION
10,000

S
ankt Veit had a special tax for buying flowers to adorn the central square, its own torte (called the
St. Veitertorte
), and a city wall built in the thirteenth century. That summer, for the second time in fifteen years, Sankt Veit had been voted the most beautiful town in Austria. I found it charming and clean, a model place to live, but many of its residents found it isolated and boring.

I had settled comfortably into my third-floor room and had made it a bit like home. I hung up clippings and photos and some of my paintings. I spread out sprigs of dried flowers and leaves that
I had collected. Before me on the desk I put a single fig leaf, on the hard surface of which I wrote a poem, the first poem I had written in a long while.

Johannes took me on several weekend excursions to Slovenia, where the mountain rivers were getting colder and the marble trout were preparing to spawn. We visited a place he knew, on a tributary of the Soča, where very large marble trout were digging redds in the dime-sized gravel (a redd is a kind of nest where the trout lays its eggs and then buries them). The spot was at an overlook by a ledge. On the top of the ledge there was some ice I had not seen, and I slipped and fell part of the way down. Thankfully, I did not hit my head on a rock, but I banged up my left knee and for the whole day I was limping, though I thought nothing of it.

I fished several times for a large salmonlike fish called a
Huchen
that were purported to live in the nearby Drau, a large tributary of the Danube (the fish is sometimes called the Danube salmon). The sun no longer gave any heat; it was cold, and occasionally it snowed. I did catch one about five pounds and a brown trout of equal size, casting and retrieving large shiny spoons. These catches encouraged me to continue trying for one of the very big fish, like the one I saw hanging on the wall of a Sankt Veit pub.

Johannes spent his spare time writing of his scientific findings during our travels that summer for the journal
Österreichs Fischerei.
He also had cleared three months for travel the following summer, and we were both working to secure visas and permits for travel. The countries we were considering, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, were not all easy to get into. Several travel advisories dissuaded Americans and Europeans from travel in remote regions of Central Asia.

I spent most of my time with Johannes and Ida and their children, Mariela and Benedikt, but my companions were not all members of the Schöffmann family. I had made friends with some other
Sankt Veiters. One was Klauss, a tall blond student of abstract philosophy.

One night out at the bar where the big
Huchen
hung on the wall, I got very drunk and was introduced by Klauss to the bartendress. She was a young brown-haired girl with brown eyes, a round face, and slim body. She gave me a complimentary drink. Johannes showed up and had a drink with Klauss and me. The girl and Johannes had looked at each other, talked in German, and laughed. I was not too drunk to notice that I was being set up.

I stayed until the early morning when the bar had closed. I watched the girl clean the bar top, stack the clean glasses, load the washer with dirty ones, and then she followed me to my room and spent the night. I was afraid that people would know I had a girl in my room, but then I didn't care. She was passionate and eager and her wrists smelled like alcohol. The cool Austrian, almost autumn night was beckoning through the window. I was experiencing a form of companionship and intimacy I had not felt since my stay with Yannid in Rouen.

I shared with the girl, whose name was Alexandra, my master plans for travel that winter and the following summer, my maps, my drawings of fish, my journals, the conglomeration of clippings and photos and pages written on with notes I hoped to distill into a book. She took an interest, and for the next two weeks we spent a good deal of time together. All the observations and thoughts I had been holding inside I told to her. She spoke English well. I took her fishing on the Drau and explained the angler's hope of catching a big fish.

She was leaving soon to study in Vienna but continued spending time with me up until the day she left. When she did I wished her a good journey.

“It's not so far,” she said, referring to Vienna. “You will have to come visit and we will go skiing.”

“I will,” I said.

I was slightly solemn when she had gone and Ida teased me.

“Ah,” Ida said. “My son is in love.” I suppose I had spent enough time above the bakery to be adopted.

October left and November came. The cornstalks in the valley at the foot of the Alps had turned golden and been cut. The life in the trees had been drawn into their roots. The first flakes of snow fell, collecting on the insignia for the Schöffmann bakery on the wall of the building outside my window, a large pretzel, and on the cobble street. I already was dreaming of warmer days and trout fishing. I was happy, arranging my fishing equipment on my bed, taking inventory of my flies.

But one morning I woke in my bed and as I was sitting up to look out the window onto the rooftops of town, I noticed that my left knee had fluid in it. I got up and went about my day, read, showered, and tried to ignore it. An hour later the amount of fluid in my knee had doubled and I had trouble bending it. I walked down the three flights of stairs, and by the time I got to the bakery where Ida worked I was having trouble walking. Ida asked me why I was limping.

“I don't know,” I said, “it just happened.”

“Too much dancing,” she laughed.

At night it throbbed like a bad tooth and I experienced a rush of nightmarish thoughts as I lay awake. The next morning there was so much fluid in my knee that I couldn't see my kneecap and the skin around it was stretched to the tautness of a drum.

After two weeks of hoping the fluid would go away on its own, the swelling only became worse, so I decided to seek medical attention. I thought of the fall I had taken off the ledge in Slovenia when we had gone to see the marble trout spawning in the Soča. Maybe I had strained it, had walked too much and too rigorously, had not rested it.

The doctor I visited did not know what was wrong either. He said to wait a few days and if my situation did not improve he would remove the fluid with a needle.

Those few days passed with no improvement, so when I returned, the doctor inserted a needle below my kneecap and extracted nearly a liter of yellow fluid. I left his office with a bandage around my knee and by afternoon the joint had filled up with fluid again. I returned the next day and the doctor did not venture to guess what was wrong but sent me to a rheumatologist.

As I walked down the streets of Sankt Veit trying to conceal my limp, people asked me what was wrong. “I hurt my knee when I fell off a ledge,” I said. “It's injured.” The word
injured
for me carried in its connotation a hope for recovery. “Or maybe,” I said, “I picked up a strange parasite in Turkey that affects your joints. It's a tough bug, but I'm going to beat it.”

I could get around with some pain, but I began to worry—what would happen if my other knee went out too?

Already I had trouble doing basic things, kneeling down to sit on the toilet or getting in the backseat of a car, because I could not bend my knee. These were new challenges I faced. I became irritable because I did not want to be delayed by having to struggle with so many petty things that should come easy. I refused to think of all the things in life I had taken for granted, the most immediate one being the ability to walk.

The rheumatology specialist I visited was named Peter, someone I recognized from some bars in Sankt Veit. I looked to be the only person under seventy in his waiting room.

When the doctor saw me he lay me on an examination table and aspirated my knee with a long needle, following that with a cortisone shot in the same place.