Even before Albert first beat Sister Alfonsa at chess, even before he wowed his teachers with essays cobbled together out of quotes cribbed from German writers (never getting caught), even before he began learning the English version of his favorite book, The Hobbit, by heart, even before he baptized a stray dog “Maxmoritz” and trained it to pilfer sausages from the convent kitchen, even before, bored by the inflationary use of kindergarten curse words like dummy or poopy butt, he started to call his envious peers “cretins,” even before he explained to said cretins, who, when exam time came around, scored worse than he did across the board, that his namesake, Einstein, had never been a poor student, merely Swiss—even before all of this happened, Albert understood for the first time just how little his father understood.
Fred was lying in exactly the same position on the chaise longue, but his gaze didn’t reach what was happening on the screen. He was staring in its direction with the concentrated yet unambiguously desperate expression of someone marooned on an island, scanning the horizon for ships.
The first words Albert addressed to Sister Alfonsa after that visit were “Is he crazy?”
Alfonsa greeted him with a bear hug and one of her standard tooth-concealing smirks—back when she was a child, people had put little stock in either tenderness or orthodontics. She was famous far beyond the walls of Saint Helena for her inscrutable facial expressions. Albert himself had once witnessed how an adventurous orphan—Rupert—had mistaken her smirk for a suppressed smile, as he clambered up onto the unstable roof of a garden shed accompanied by her shouts that he should definitely go on scrambling, there would be absolutely no consequences, she thought it was an excellent idea, if only all the boys were daring enough to try to break their necks. A penance of fifty Our Fathers had brought Rupert considerably closer to an understanding of the concept of irony. Some people thought everything Sister Alfonsa uttered was devoid of emotion. But even as a child, Albert had felt this was only half the story. It sometimes seemed to him as if she’d found her way to Saint Helena by mistake. Something about her just didn’t fit there. What exactly it was, he couldn’t say. But he had a suspicion it was connected with how seldom she left the building, and how often she listened to Frank Sinatra.
“Is Fred crazy?”
This time Albert pronounced the question as if he was expecting a yes. Sister Alfonsa shut the door to her office, and led him over to a little table on which a chessboard of stained boxwood was waiting. To the left and right of it stood wooden stools. Lately she’d been teaching him to play chess—an honor she bestowed only every few years on an orphan who, in her opinion, had great potential, or, as she phrased it, seemed “bright enough.” In Alfonsa’s lessons, chess pieces were dispensed with. In her opinion, a clever-enough mind could make do with checkers—memory would take care of the rest.
Albert hesitated, he had little desire to play, but he also sensed that he had no other option, if he wanted to hear her thoughts. Faint daylight fell through a tiny window—it was another of those murky autumn afternoons. Albert took his seat. His feet didn’t reach the floor. For a moment his hand hovered above his bone-white troops, before opening the game in classic fashion (pawn to e4). The nun mirrored his move (pawn to e5), and then sat down.
“You think your father is crazy?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we are, too.”
“No way.”
“How do you know?”
Albert made his next move (knight to f3), which she again mimicked (knight to f6).
“Okay,” she said, “let’s assume that we’re not crazy, and Fred is. Isn’t that merely our thesis, then?”
Albert wrinkled his forehead (knight takes pawn), Alfonsa didn’t (likewise).
“What’s a thesis?”
“A beginning.” She smirked. “In our society the stronger rule over the weaker. A clever little fellow like you declares: ‘Fred is crazy.’ And because Fred is hardly capable of refuting you, everyone concludes that you’re right.”
“I am right” (pawn to d3).
“So: guilty until proven innocent” (pawn to d6). “And what if we’re wrong?”
“…”
(Pawn takes knight, and likewise.)
“What if we’re crazy? What if the whole world is controlled by madmen, who lock away all the sane people like Fred, so that nobody gets wise to them?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Says who?”
“Me.”
“All children are mad,” said Alfonsa.
“Why?”
“As the stronger of the two of us, I’ve just decided it.”
“I’m not crazy!”
“You are now.”
Albert slammed down a game piece beside the board. “I don’t want to play anymore!”
“It was just an illustration.” She tousled his hair. “Do you really want to know what I think?”
He nodded, and looked at her obliquely from below, to express that he wanted to be taken in her arms.
“You are both perfectly insane.”
No ambiguity intended. Albert might have understood less than half of what she was saying—even his brightness had limits—but he could feel that this time she was speaking with admiration.
“That’s good,” he said and, just to be safe, added, “right?”
“That’s special,” she said, “and the very reason why you can only ever call him Fred. He’ll never be a proper father.”
“I can explain it to him!”
Sister Alfonsa smirked. “Nobody can do that. Not even you.”
A week later Albert ran away from the orphanage for the first time. Over the following month, he absconded on four separate occasions. Thereafter he repeated his escape attempts with reliable regularity. On average he made around twenty per year. At first he failed because of the bus drivers, who wouldn’t let some squirt, especially a smart-alecky squirt, ride unaccompanied by a grown-up. Often enough, the other orphans ratted him out. But even when an attempt succeeded, the nuns were barely ruffled; they knew where he was going every time. And why.
“I’m your son,” said Albert to Fred.
“You’re Albert,” said Fred to Albert.
“And I’m your son,” said Albert. “And you’re my father.”
“I’m Fred.”
“And my father.”
Fred blinked.
“Do you understand me?” asked Albert.
“I always understand everything,” said Fred.
“What did I say?”
“You said, Do you understand me? I understand you, Albert.”
“And before?”
“You said, And my father.”
“Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” said Fred, “and I’m hungry.”
“I come from you,” said Albert. “Without you, I wouldn’t exist.”
And Fred said, “Thank you. That’s nice. Can we make pancakes with raspberry jam? Pancakes with raspberry jam are ambrosial.”
Later, at Saint Helena—there was always a later-at-Saint-Helena—Albert would fight his disappointment by reading Fred’s newspaper report each night before falling asleep, and imagining that the child Fred had saved was him, not some girl called Andrea, who, after the bus accident, had left Königsdorf, along with her mother, forever.
He always hoped, and sometimes believed, and occasionally knew, that someday Fred would come and rescue him—that in the middle of the night Fred would storm into the dormitory, flip on the lights, run to his bunk, and take Albert with him. Where to was negligible—all that mattered was that it be away.
But the passing years withered his hope. Even his boundless longing couldn’t shield him from that. Again and again he ran to Fred, counter to Sister Alfonsa’s claim; it will work this time, he told himself, incorrigible; this time Fred will get it—and then Fred got nothing at all. It was all the same as ever. And Fred was simply Fred.
Albert put Fred’s report away again and pulled o
n a bathrobe. Out in the garden, he lit a cigarette. He could risk smoking only late at night. Fred had admonished him, “Smoking makes you sick!” and Albert didn’t want to provoke him needlessly. The smoke vanished into the night. As his gaze fell on the BMW, he flicked the butt over the garden fence; it flew in a high arc into the main street, like a crashing glowworm. Albert kicked at the car’s fender, expecting that it would hurt, but he barely felt a thing. It seemed as if this fender had been designed for him to kick, so he gave it another go, and slammed the hood for good measure, clobbered it with both fists. He hoped someone would happen along and try to stop him—then he’d be able to pummel or be pummeled. But nobody came.
Out of breath, he let himself fall into the BMW’s passenger seat, and flipped open the glove compartment. He took out the tin box and placed it on the dashboard. The streetlamp’s flattering orange light concealed some of its dents, and gave it a coppery sheen. Albert would have preferred that the box held no gleaming stone, but rather some piece of solid evidence: mementos, some kind of a clue, say, a diary by Anni, or a sheaf of family photographs, or at least some documents—he knew nothing about his ancestry, his family, he knew nothing about his mother. Albert had an infinite number of questions, and his only hope for an answer was Fred.
Albert looked at the fingers of his left hand. A tiny, faint, dwindling hope.
Out of some indeterminate need, he opened the tin box and took the gold in his hand. Beneath it, at the bottom of the box, was an audiocassette; on its yellowed label was written: My Most Beloved Possession. The ornate, schoolgirlish handwriting didn’t at all resemble Fred’s chicken-scratch script. Albert retrieved Fred’s Walkman from the living room, went back to the car, slipped the tape in, pushed the button from “off” to “on,” and saw the little red light by the time display come on.
He pressed “play.” A crackling, at first. Then a persistent, slowly swelling white noise, which seemed vaguely familiar, and demanding. A sort of audible silence. He searched through the tape, rewinding and fast-forwarding, laying his ear against the speaker, examining side A and side B.
Nothing.
He climbed over the center console and sat behind the wheel, pulled one of Fred’s diaries out of the pocket in the door, and flipped through it. He ran his hand across one page covered in magenta scribbling, whose odor echoed the sweetish atmosphere of the house, and felt the slight unevenness of Fred’s notes, pressed into the paper. Monday, 5/24/2002: 76 green cars, 8 green trucks, no green motorcycle. Tuesday, 5/25/2002: 55 green cars, 10 green trucks, 2 beautiful green motorcycles, 1 green tractor. Wednesday, 5/26/2002 …
Albert tossed the diary onto the backseat, switched off the Walkman, and felt the weight of Fred’s gold in his hand.
Hansel and Gretel Crumbs
Stumbling across clues that led him nowhere was nothing new to Albert. For years now he’d been trying to ferret out something about his origins, and especially about his mother. That he was a half orphan, or rather, as he privately thought—and which, given Fred’s mental state, seemed like a justifiable term—a two-thirds orphan, didn’t discourage him at all, but spurred him on. Earlier, no visit to Fred’s house had gone by without at least one trip to the attic. Whenever he clambered up the ladder to the loft, he was overcome by a tremendous excitement, though he’d soon rummaged through all the crates, all the bags and chests, all the boxes and duffels and bins and binders, many times over. Maybe, just maybe, he’d overlooked something. Even the word attic seemed to promise so much truth. Somewhere up there in the house’s memory there must be tucked away the critical clue that would point Albert toward his mother’s whereabouts.
Albert hadn’t been able to coax much from it, though: merely a photograph and two hairs.
He’d turned up the picture two days before his fourteenth birthday; it had been tucked in a battered wallet among Canadian banknotes showing the image of the Queen, who gazed serenely into the future. In the photograph, Fred had the posture of a schoolboy caught cutting class. Slouching, head lowered, he squinted in the direction of the camera. His right hand was stuck in his hip pocket, his left arm bent strangely sideways, as if someone had ordered him to do so, and he was holding hands with a freckled young woman whose chin-length, curly red hair sat on her head like some sort of outlandish hat, and who was nowhere to be seen in any of the other pictures Fred possessed. Her expression was a blend of pride and giddiness. She looked like she might step out of the photo at any moment.
Albert studied the picture with a magnifying glass and narrowed eyes for hours at a time. A stamp on the back confirmed: it had been taken in 1983, the year of Albert’s birth.
He showed it to Fred.
“Who’s that?”
“Who?” asked Fred.
“The woman next to you, what’s her name?”
“She’s pretty. The Red Lady.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Fred, who is she?”
“She’s the Red Lady.”
“Do you know her real name?”
“No.” Fred rolled his eyes. “But maybe it’s in the encyclopedia?”
“Were you in love?”
“With the encyclopedia?”
“With the woman, Fred, the woman.”
“She’s pretty …”
“Did you … kiss her?”
“Mama says you shouldn’t kiss girls.”
“But she was a woman, right? And pretty. And if you really love someone, then you definitely kiss them. You even give me a kiss, sometimes.”
“Sure, but you aren’t the Red Lady. You’re Albert.”
“Did you kiss her, or not?”
“She kissed me.”
“Did you do anything else with her?”
Fred wrinkled his brow.
“Did she touch you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Down below?”
“Below where?”
“Down there.”
“No!”
“Fred?”
“M-hmm?”
“Can you tell me where the Red Lady went?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Of course, really!”
“Where?”
Fred pointed to the front door.
When Albert was brought back to Saint Helena after an escape attempt and for punishment was forced by Sister Alfonsa to tie his shoes two hundred times under strict supervision—knots, bows, double knots, unpick them, and start again from the beginning—the thought of the Red Lady gave him the strength he needed to keep going. At fifty knots, you hit that prickly border, the sound barrier of penitential shoelace tying, after which your fingertips go numb, skin begins to tear, laces dig into the sore places. With the image of the Red Lady in his head, Albert was able to continue with inflamed hands, never breaking off before the stipulated number. He held the record for the orphanage. If you added up all his offenses, by the age of fourteen he’d reached over four thousand knots—not including the regular ones he had to tie so as not to trip. What with the innumerable little scars that covered them, his hands looked like those of a craftsman. That he’d managed to survive this time, as he believed today, because the Red Lady in the photograph had filled him with strength—that was for him the decisive evidence that she must be his mother.
Not to mention the fact that Albert’s hair was as red as hers.
But even more precious to him than the photograph was a bottle-green barrette in which a pair of auburn hairs had snagged. He had lost one of them at Saint Helena, when he fell asleep holding it one evening, and on waking couldn’t distinguish it from the numberless others, his own, lying curled on the mattress. The second hair he kept in a homely makeup compact he’d bought at a flea market, and which he carried always on his person, like an asthmatic does his inhaler. At lonely moments, especially during his trips to visit Fred and back to the orphanage, he ran his hands acro
ss it, and it made him itch—like when a wound is healing.
That spring, when Albert discovered the photograph, he wiped it clean with a damp sponge and slipped it into a transparent plastic folder, which he carefully sealed with several layers of clear tape before stowing it away, wrapped in two shock-absorbing editions of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in an attaché case covered with fake alligator skin that he’d taken from the attic, and which zipped shut with a comforting weeep. And with that he walked—optimistically smacking his gum, as only a teenager can—over to Fred’s next-door neighbor. She was a potter named Klondi, who lived rent-free in a huge old farmhouse, badly in need of repairs, on the main street. In return for her housing, she kept the space “in good order”—nobody but Klondi was allowed to set foot on the second floor of the place, because only she knew which boards you could step on without falling through to the first floor. But Klondi—whose passport displayed a less silly, more mundane name—much preferred—when she wasn’t working late into the night, shaping vases and coffee mugs and ashtrays with her hands—to groom the garden behind the farmhouse. During the daytime, even in spring storms and November snow, you’d find her there, transplanting a rhododendron or trimming the hedges.
“Hello?”
Albert stood before a gate some ten feet high, all overgrown with roses. The smell was as overpowering as the incense at Sunday Mass at Saint Helena.
“Anyone there?”
He preferred not to have her name in his mouth. There were words that left behind a stale aftertaste. Klondi was one of them, Father another.
“Yes, someone’s there,” answered a hedge to his left.
Albert spat his gum into an empty terra-cotta pot and, as he followed the voice, pondered how many cigarettes Klondi must have smoked in the course of her life to earn herself such a sepulchral basso. She was down on her knees in a flower bed, cutting up slugs with a pair of gardening shears. Pale slime welled from the severed halves. A cigarette was stuck in Klondi’s ferocious smile, her hair lay bundled over her shoulders in a pair of schoolgirl pigtails, which hardly concealed the fact that Klondi the onetime flower child had long since become a flower woman.
Almost Everything Very Fast Page 3