Hübsche Nena
These are the beautiful duck-girls – sometimes they swim, sometimes they walk on land. But never do they waddle.
When on land, they draw and paint watercolors, using their bills to hold the brushes, dipping them in the fast-flowing Donau, and finishing their strokes with a sweep of the wing so lightly feathered one could be forgiven for imagining it to be the forearm of a human girl.
Their esthetics are impeccable, from their modest costumes, which easily shed water, to their eye for color, form and movement. They delight in picnicking in a ring upon the embankment, not just Pretty Nena and her three sisters, but in gatherings of eighteen and more.
I try not to look too closely at them for fear of falling in love, but find my cheeks burning whenever one of them glances toward me.
“That is very beautiful,” she says, appearing suddenly at my side. I look down at my attempt at painting, and only by force of will do not immediately cover up the crude image. “Oh no,” I say, “this is not really art…”
“May I see the others?” she asks.
Reluctantly I lay my portfolio before her, and she turns the leaves with her beak, pausing to nod, and emitting an occasional gasp which I hope signifies pleasure. Frequently, she utters some approving word, or gestures toward a detail which particularly moves her.
When she is finished, she sits and pats the ground beside her. “Lie back,” she half-commands. Above me, the leaves brush the sky with ephemeral black, and in the instant she is astride me, albeit facing my feet.
Can one describe her sounds: their swell and crescendo and ebb?
There, it is done. Does she utter this? Yet I hear her words.
Then she does speak. “You are a master of the brush. Who cares for lightning hurlers? Not I. And you may have noticed that I am no Leda, though my neck is said to be slender for my kind. Moreover I am told it is prettily ringed. And now, I am with egg.”
She walks to the river, waddling ever so slightly. I join her at the rushing edge. From here you can see the nine arches of the bridge, the storehouses, the merchants’ towers, the spires of the Dom.
“Climb on my back.”
“I am too heavy.”
“Climb on my back. Hold your paint book and colors high, in case the currents prove turbulent.”
“I am too heavy,” I repeat, even as she begins to paddle. Her head turns round upon its slender, well-ringed neck and she fixes me with one eye. “How else,” she says, “do you expect to get to the other side?”
Eric Darton’s books include Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). He is a founding editor of cablestreet.org, a triannual journal of world literature and visual art.