Almost Everything Very Fast
Page 1
Almost Everything Very Fast
A NOVEL
Almost Everything
Very Fast
Christopher Kloeble
Translated from the German
by Aaron Kerner
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Kloeble and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich/Germany. First published with the title Meistens alles sehr schnell.
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English translation copyright © 2016 by Aaron Kerner
The translation of the portion of Adolf Hitler’s September 1, 1939, radio address that appears on page 254 is from Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, by Jürgen Trimborn, translated from the German by Edna McCown (Faber & Faber, 2008).
FLY ME TO THE MOON (In Other Words). Words and music by Bart Howard. TRO-© Copyright (Renewed) Palm Valley Music, LLC, New York, NY. International Copyright Secured. Made in U.S.A. All Rights Reserved Including Performance For Profit. Used by permission.
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FOR Saskya
Almost Everything Very Fast
Prologue
I haven’t forgotten a thing. I remember the beginning and the end, and all that lies between. I’ve seen a story become history and the other way around.
But nobody’s interested in that, not here. My senile neighbors can barely concentrate for a couple of minutes at a stretch, without having to put themselves down for a nap. And most of the young nurses have better things to do than listen to an eighty-year-old’s tales. They think they’re supposed to feel sorry for me. And yet I feel sorry for them. If only they knew what lies ahead of them! The poor things believe that their lives will spool out just the way they’ve imagined. Eventually, they’ll figure out that you can’t set a course for things. And I don’t mean that just figuratively: blood must flow. I try to explain it to them, I want to warn them. And what do they do? Pat me on the hand, and tell me I shouldn’t exaggerate.
My memory is better company. It grants me the scent of an incomparable bridal gown; grants me the love of women, many women; grants me the heat of a devastating conflagration; grants me the hope that my children are still alive out there, somewhere; grants me the glitter of gold, and the fear in the eyes of dead soldiers.
Nor is it frugal with pain.
Only, sometimes, I wish it would send me peace. Even when I’m asleep it won’t leave me alone and sends dreams after me. It’s always there. It won’t let me forget.
PART I
A Hero and a Son
Five Fingers
Up in the sky, the last two clouds were drifting slowly toward each other. A lightbulb with blurry edges, and a white, puffy shape that defied comparison.
Down below, Albert stood flanked by his suitcases in the patchy front yard of a house in Königsdorf, eyeing the doorbell, lost in thought. Anyone acquainted with Albert—admittedly something only few could claim—would know that he couldn’t help it. When he was younger the other kids had called him bookworm, or four-eyes, though he didn’t wear glasses and was anything but studious. Whenever some assignment was handed to him, he attempted to tackle it, whatever it might be, by thoroughly thinking it through. That was all. And it didn’t mean he always got good grades, either. For Albert, there was no sentence so surreal as I would never have thought of that. How could you not think of something? (He often thought.)
But the toughest assignment Albert had ever been given—the solution to which he’d been seeking for nineteen years now—was waiting for him behind the door whose bell he was touching, but hadn’t yet pressed.
On this particular afternoon Albert had a journey of more than seventeen hours behind him—on the night train, the commuter train, and finally bus 479, whose driver had made every single stop in the Bavarian uplands, from Pföderl via Wolfsöd through Höfen, though no one at all had gotten on or off—and now that he had only a tiny scrap farther to go, he wasn’t so sure he even wanted to arrive.
This is what Albert always thought when he came to Königsdorf: that he’d been coming to visit Fred since he was three years old, initially accompanied by a nun from the orphanage at Saint Helena, and later alone. That he and Fred had never grown particularly close. That when he was five (and, as far as Albert knew, Fred forty-six) he’d made sure that Fred had donned his water wings when, hand in hand, they’d leapt into the Baggersee. That only a few years later he’d started paying for Fred whenever they found themselves facing a cash register, because Albert could count up the change without having to use his fingers. That at the age of twelve, he’d tried to dissuade Fred from his dream of becoming an actor. (The latter had fully rejected this plan only later, on the grounds that he didn’t want, as he put it, people watching him while he worked.) That the following year, he’d still been vigilant about Fred’s water wings. That at fifteen he’d tried to explain the facts of life to Fred, who hadn’t wanted to hear, and had simply responded with a sheepish laugh. That Fred had never called him anything but Albert, and Albert had never called him anything but Fred. That he had never called him Father.
Fred was just Fred—this was the first rule in Albert’s life. It had been that way since he was born, and it would be that way this year as well.
For a few more months, in any case.
In his office the cardiologist had waved the fingers of one manicured hand, and Albert had asked himself if the doctor always did it like that, if he
generally told his patients the number of months remaining to them with his fingers, to spare himself the search for sympathetic words. Five fingers. Albert had barely paid attention to them, had taken Fred by the hand and left the hospital with him, ignoring the doctor’s shouts, as later he would his phone calls.
Because he couldn’t talk about it with Fred, he prattled on about other things as they made their way home, especially about the foehn, how strong it was for this time of year, really unusually strong.
Fred had interrupted him: “Five fingers are bad.”
Albert had stopped in his tracks, searching for something to say.
“Five fingers are very bad, Albert.”
“Five fingers aren’t all that bad,” Albert had eventually answered.
“Really? How many do you have, Albert? How many fingers do you have until you have to go dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is five a lot?”
“Five is a pretty good number,” said Albert, as encouragingly as he could.
“I have five fingers!” A relieved laugh. “And you, Albert, I bet you have plenty of fingers, too.”
That same evening Albert had left town again, to take his high school exit exams. An obligation that, in light of the news, seemed to him as ridiculous as his decision to fulfill it.
Though in fact, all he really wanted was to get away.
Two months later, after the exams, most of his friends had vanished beyond the horizon. Australia and Cambodia were destinations especially popular with orphans; when they returned from a trip to Angkor or the outback, not only had they “found themselves,” also they had an idea of where they belonged in the world, and what they wanted to start doing with their lives. Supposedly. Albert, on the other hand—who’d never been able to understand why so many people assumed that answers unobtainable in the immediate neighborhood were awaiting them in far-off lands—had decided to move in with Fred. He hadn’t known what to expect, and still didn’t this afternoon, standing before Fred’s house—he knew only that, whatever it was, there wasn’t much time.
Three more fingers, thought Albert; he rang the bell, lowered his head, grabbed the handles of his suitcases, and stood there, motionless. The heat bored down into his skull. People would remember this summer for a long time. Contrary to all predictions, there had not been a storm for weeks now. The grass in Fred’s garden was rust-brown, even the chirping of the crickets sounded feeble, and the shimmering heat on the stretch of the main street that ran in front of the property was playing tricks on Albert’s eyes.
Ambrosial!
Now the door opened and on the top step there appeared a gangling, six-and-a-half-foot-tall giant, sheepishly dipping his head.
They stared at each other.
“Albert!” shouted Fred in his silvery voice, and before Albert knew what was happening to him, he’d been plucked off his feet and pressed hard against Fred’s bony chest.
“Hello, Fred.”
“You’re fat, Albert!”
“Thanks,” said Albert, looking him over—unsure, as he so often was, whether or not Fred was aware of what he was saying. Albert knew him well enough to sense that he didn’t really know him at all. In that respect, at least, he seemed like any other father.
Still, Albert had to admit to himself that Fred had a point. After a shower, Albert usually wound the towel around his body so that he wouldn’t have to look at his belly when he stepped in front of the mirror. Where all that auxiliary lard had sprung from he couldn’t quite explain. He didn’t think he ate and drank any more than other people. Presumably he didn’t move around enough: regular jogging, power walking, or even strolling would, as they say, “do him good.” But the notion of movement merely for movement’s sake didn’t especially appeal to him.
“Is it the holidays again?” asked Fred.
“No, not this time. This time I’m staying longer.”
Fred looked at him hopefully. “Till when?”
“Until …” Albert dodged his glance. “As long as possible.”
“As long as possible could be a long time!” shouted Fred merrily, clapping his hands. “That’s ambrosial!”
“Right. It’s great.”
“It’s ambrosial!” Fred lifted a forefinger in rebuke. “You need to read the encyclopedia more, Albert.”
With Fred, reading bore no necessary relation to understanding; he seldom saw beyond the sounds of the words that he scanned with the aid of his forefinger, to take note of their meanings. And even when he did, most of them slipped from his memory in short order, bursting like soap bubbles.
Fred tore the suitcases from Albert’s hands and marched into the house. Albert followed. He paused in the vestibule. Though the sugary odor of Fred’s home had been there to meet him whenever he’d arrived, year in, year out, it still managed to take him by surprise.
“Albert?” Fred turned back to him. “Are you feeling faint?”
“No.” Albert drew a deep breath. “It’s fine.”
Albert draped his jacket on a coat hook beside Fred’s royal blue poncho, within whose collar a childish script warned: This belongs to Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes! A plaque by the doorbell bore the selfsame name. Nobody addressed him by his full moniker. Quite possibly because nobody knew how to pronounce it. Naturally, there were a couple of oafs in Königsdorf—permanent fixtures at Hofherr’s beer garden, where they sat nursing their glasses—who maintained he was slow in the head, and called him Freddie-are-you-stupid? But for most people, he was simply Fred, the hero of the bus accident of ’77, who spent half the day at Königsdorf’s only bus stop in order to tally the green cars that passed along the town’s main street and wave to their drivers.
As Fred set down the suitcases by the stairs and proceeded into the living room, Albert felt a fit of déja-vu coming over him; or, to be more precise, a déja-vu of many previous déja-vus.
He thought: First, they’d sit themselves down on a worn-out, cherry-red chaise longue, precisely where they always sat, and no matter what he touched, thousands of crumbs would adhere to Albert’s hands, reminding him that, now, he rather than the nurse would have to provide Fred with at least one warm meal per day, tie his shoelaces, make sure his teeth were kept spruce and the house spick-and-span. His eyes would fall on the world map fixed to the wall, where a ring drawn with a green felt-tip marker, which was supposed to indicate Königsdorf, actually encircled all of Bavaria. He would ask Fred how things were going, to which, of course, the answer would be “Ambrosial,” and the next moment Albert would be asked to read aloud from Fred’s favorite book, the silver encyclopedia, as he so often had in the past, before bedtime or afternoon naps. Fred would snuggle up to him, lay his head, pleasantly warm, in spite of the heat outside, in Albert’s lap, and close his eyes, and Albert would hardly dare to move. Still, he’d open the encyclopedia and begin reading somewhere, say at Billiards, and wouldn’t get any farther than Binary star. Fred would snore, looking much younger in his sleep, midforties at the most. Albert would flip the book shut, then slip a pillow under Fred’s head and lay a short fleece blanket over his long, long legs. In the kitchen, Albert would have something to eat, soothing his stomach with thick slabs of brown bread while running his eyes across the crack-shot window above the sink, whose lower-left corner was adorned with two taunting letters, HA. He didn’t know who had left them behind, nor when, but since they’d been scratched into the pane from the outside (six tiny scratches, Zorro style), he could only assume that they were the initials of his grandmother, Anni Habom. Albert would lean forward, his left hand braced on the sink, and breathe on the window, and on the clouded pane he would trace his own initials beside those of his grandmother—AD—thick as his finger. And watch them fade. Later, in his bedroom on the second floor, he’d make sure that there was enough of Fred’s medication left in the little nightstand by the bed. Only then would he allow himself to be wooed by the sagging mattress, and feel the exhaustion creeping over him, though he wo
uldn’t be able to fall asleep.
And that’s just what happened.
Though the whole time Albert was telling himself that he ought to be feeling something special—not déjà-vu, but dernier-vu. After all, he’d come home for the very last time.
Most Beloved Possessions
Albert had lain on his bed for barely ten minutes, leaden, empty, and with a towel over his eyes—the sun was still blazing in through the curtains, as though this day would never end—when Fred burst in: “Are you sleeping?”
Albert waved him over—what else could he do?—and Fred plopped himself down on the mattress.
“Tell me,” said Albert, observing Fred’s chin, “when was the last time you shaved?”
Fred blinked. “Yesterday.”
“You’re sure?”
Fred blinked again: “Totally sure.”
“You may have missed a few spots.”
More blinking.
“Frederick …”
“Mama says I look handsome!”
Fred was particularly fond of bringing Anni into play, in order to stress that this, that, or another notion hadn’t sprung from his own head, but from that of a significantly higher authority. An authority who had last said anything to Fred sixteen years earlier, when Albert had been three years old. Albert’s memories of her barely deserved the name; it sometimes occurred to him that he might simply be imagining them, since he’d spent so much time examining the innumerable photographs of her in Fred’s house, comparing her features with his own, searching for resemblances. She had lived to age seventy, an apparently hard life, saddled with chronically high blood pressure (as revealed by the cardiologist’s postmortem diagnosis). In the end, her condition had led to systolic heart failure; that is, her heart had succumbed to its own imposing bulk, and Albert’s grandmother, his last real link to the past, had died. That much he knew. In a handful of file folders, whose primary function had been to support the bottommost shelf of a rickety bookcase, he’d discovered a scrappy collection of documents revealing mainly that she hadn’t been insured. Evidently she’d never set foot in a hospital or doctor’s office. No one had ever told her how many fingers she had left.