Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

  On the night of the three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival, the pair stole away and raced to the granary. Sneezing, they undressed themselves in the dusty air, tied their hands together behind their backs, and fondled each other with their feet, caressed each other with their noses, kindled each other with their tongues. They smelled sweetly of elderberries, and holy water, and down pillows aired in the west wind.

  The next morning Jasfe was seized with elation. While outside a warm wind scattered the ashes of the Most Beloved Possessions that lay charred in the market square, spinning gray-black dust devils through vegetable gardens, inflaming eyes and coating windowpanes with sooty muck, she felt a pleasurable tingling beneath her belly button that grew stronger and refused to fade, as if Josfer were still kissing that spot, and would be forever.

  In the months that followed, Jasfe concealed her swelling belly from curious eyes. Her dread of her father was surpassed only by the fear that she might give birth to a Klöble.

  When it came to begetting children, Segendorfers weren’t always choosy. It frequently happened that somebody’s brother was also his cousin, or somebody’s daughter also her sister. Quite a few local families had produced a “Klöble”—a “clumsy, stupid fellow.” Mothers of such children were spat upon. They were accused of having no pride, of having seduced their own fathers, sons, brothers, because—hideous, impudent, and slothful as they were—no other man would take them. Klöbles were known for chewing sorrel all day long, fiddling with themselves shamelessly in public, and playing patty-cake with cow dung. They also argued passionately among themselves about whether God existed, somebody none of them had ever seen; and about why nobody believed in them, the Klöbles, although they were easily visible. And whether, perhaps, they wouldn’t be visible any longer, once people started believing in them. The incest had another side effect, though—it helped Segendorf remain hidden behind a wall that had never been built: anyone who wanted to could have seen and entered the town. But nobody from elsewhere wanted to see it. Much less enter it.

  In spite of her fear of having a Klöble, Jasfe would, of course, still love such a child; that’s what she told herself, and what Josfer told her—but a perfectly healthy child would be easier to love.

  For five long months she wore a shawl wrapped tightly as a corset around her belly, and endured the pain. Only then did she decide to confess the pregnancy to their father. She searched carefully for the appropriate words, weighing one sentence after another for days, until she saw that the right moment had come.

  While Josfer checked the toad traps in the swamp, Jasfe sat down beside Nick on the wooden bench in front of their house. In the evening light her father picked filth from beneath his nails with a hunting knife, and whistled a melancholy tune. Jasfe gathered her courage and spoke her first sentence. She spoke her second sentence. She spoke her third and fourth and fifth sentences. And after she’d spoken her last sentence, she waited. Calmly, Nick laid the knife down beside him, pressed his lips together, drew a deep breath, and grabbed her by the neck. Only then could she see the minuscule tears slipping down his face. Silently he increased the pressure. Black spots flecked her vision, multiplied, melted together, and she tumbled into a lightless void.

  When she came to, she was lying alone in the mud by the wooden bench. And later that evening, she was unable to hide from her brother the pale purple bruises on her throat.

  From the next hunting trip with his father, only Josfer returned.

  Nick was never found, and the twins never spoke about what had happened out on the moor. It was said in the village that Nick had been smothered by quicksand, and because he’d been unpopular in Segendorf, nobody asked any questions.

  From then on, my parents shared a bed every night. Soon they couldn’t sleep unless they were lying naked beside one another, each with a hand resting on the other’s sex. Their hands were comforting shields—intimate, impermeable.

  Klöble

  I came into the world on a rainy day in May 1913. For a long time my parents couldn’t agree on a name, so they finally chose one that reminded them of their own: Julius. At my birth I emitted only a single scream, prolonged and furious. Then I piped down, struggling for a while in silence, waving my arms. The midwife worried I might suffocate—she didn’t understand that I was merely underwhelmed by the world into which I’d been hatched.

  Three years later, at the birth of my sister, Anni, who was christened with the name of her grandmother, the screaming was shrill and continued for hours on end, until Anni, alongside our equally exhausted parents, at last fell asleep.

  Even as a child my high forehead was flat, and my eyes lay too deep in their sockets for my taste, but my mother said they had a tantalizing glitter that made people want to grab them; my mouth was a little too small, my nose a little too wide, and my ears stood out just enough for people to smile but not laugh at them.

  The fact that I was Anni’s brother would have escaped even a careful observer; our differences were more conspicuous than our similarities. Anni’s skin was as pale as mine was only on those spots that the light never touched. The curls of her hair, which reached all the way to her elbows, seemed wholly unmanageable, and the crown of her head rose no farther than my chin. Her mouth was bracketed, halfway to her earlobes, by a pair of dimples, which stubbornly persisted even when she wasn’t grinning or laughing, and the sight of her lips often reminded me of the words of Cobbler Gaiger, who in addition to footwear also produced remarkably sturdy fishing rods: “They’re as round as a fish’s.”

  Everyone in Segendorf, apart from the Klöbles, had a clear idea of who’d fathered Anni and me, but our parents didn’t care that they were always the last ones served at the tavern, or given the leanest sausage at the butcher’s. And for two good reasons: neither Anni nor I was a Klöble.

  So we grew up surrounded by the suspicion and malice of our peers, whose parents had filled them with grotesque, but essentially true, stories about Jasfe and Josfer. While we were in the crib, they’d pinch our bellies when our parents weren’t looking; as we took our first steps, they’d trip us, or push us into the mud; as we learned to lace our dirndls or button our shirts, the scornful, mistrustful looks of other mothers, mimicked by their children, nipped in the bud any hope of playing a single round of Fangamandl; and once we’d reached the age when we blushed if anyone saw us bathing in the Moorbach, people would steal our underwear. It didn’t take long for us to resign ourselves to our fate, the two of us exploring the cliff on our own to look for gold, running races together on a bet to the oak on Wolf Hill, or playing who-can-fill-the-cup-with-spit-first?

  Yet sometimes I was, in fact, alone.

  One summer evening I was gathering brushwood in a forest clearing when a pine-or sprucecone (I couldn’t tell them apart) struck me on the head. Above me the sky glowed an ominous pink. Five snickering boys came toward me through the bushes, their pockets bulging with pine-(or spruce-) cones.

  “Heya, we just want to play,” shouted the smallest of them; his name was Markus, and his father ran a pig farm.

  “I have to go home,” I said.

  “You never want to play with us!” cried Markus.

  The last time they’d played with me, they had stuffed my pants with stinging nettles. I said I was going now, and even as I did, I felt angry that my words sounded like an apology.

  Markus was juggling a pair of cones. “We’re going to play ‘hunting’ now. We’re the hunters, get it? And you, you’re a wild boar.”

  I clutched the brushwood to my chest, lowered my head, and ran. Three cones missed me by a hairbreadth, a fourth hit me on the neck. I dropped the wood. From behind me: jeering, screaming, clattering. As long as I kept up my pace, I could outdistance them, I thought, simply keep running, leaping, sidestepping. Trees sprang up in my path, branches threw themselves at my feet, sunbeams blinded me—but I didn’t stumble. The voices and noises remained behind me. I threw a glance back over my shoulder, and couldn’t ma
ke out any movement. My throat burned, snot ran from my nose. I listened to the forest: only the cries of ravens and the sighing wind. I took a step back, tripped on a root, and toppled over. A bed of moss cushioned my fall. Once I’d wiped the mud from my pants, I looked up. Markus was standing over me, offering his hand. “Heya. Need help?”

  They shoved and dragged me to a deer stand where I sometimes climbed with my father when he was hunting. While the others held me down, Markus tied a rope around my ankles. They threw the line over one of the deer stand’s beams, and hauled on it together until I was suspended upside down. Only then did I notice the bowl they’d set on the ground beneath me, from which there arose a revolting stink. Sewage sloshed against the rim.

  “Dinnertime, Klöble!” shouted Markus.

  Then they let go of the rope.

  Z as in Zwiebel

  Weeks later, as Anni and I were collecting dust in a beer stein, out of which, with the help of a little wind and water, we intended to whip up a raincloud, we discovered a cookbook hidden in a fruit crate. It had once belonged to a cook’s apprentice from Franconia, who’d ventured into the swamp in search of escargots. He clearly hadn’t known that it was considered the sacred right of every Segendorfer to relieve any vagrant who set foot on their property of all—and particularly the most beloved—of his possessions.

  Anni and I carried the cookbook into the kitchen and flipped carefully through it, handling each page as if it were a butterfly’s wing. Anni wanted Jasfe to read it to her, but our mother couldn’t tell an A from a B any more than Josfer could. In Segendorf, no one but Pastor Meier could read or write. I tucked the book away till later in the evening, then studied it by moonlight. I considered myself cleverer than others my age. And I was, too. All day long I struggled to teach myself the alphabet. The pictures revealed to me most of the sounds—B as in Bread, P as in Potato, and S as in Salt. It turned out that only a few of the ingredients were unknown to me, yet Pastor Meier explained what I couldn’t puzzle out for myself, and when I finally arrived at Z as in Zwiebel—onion—I laid the cookbook in Anni’s lap.

  “Flip it open and pick a word,” I said.

  “This one,” she said, tapping a little cluster of letters surrounded by an overwhelming throng of words.

  “M-e-a-t-l-o-a-f,” I spelled out, and then pronounced: “Meeetlooooooaf.”

  “You can read! You can read!” screamed Anni, leaping up and running to our parents. “He can read! He can read!” she cried again, and dragged Jasfe and Josfer back to me. Deep into the night I read them one word after another: “Veeeeeeeeniiiiisooon” and “Eeemmeeentaaaleeer” and “Caaaaaroooots” and “Tiiiiimm, no, thhyyyyymmme.” It became a game, the favorite game in the Habom household. After every evening meal I would sit on one side of the table, Anni, Jasfe, and Josfer on the other, and teach them the alphabet. Anni learned to read the recipes markedly faster than our parents, and Jasfe faster than Josfer. But I learned faster than all of them. As time passed I succeeded in reproducing whole sentences without a single error: “Mix ingredients into a loose dough, let rise, then knead.” Or: “Prop the oven door open slightly with the help of a wooden spoon, to allow the humidity to escape.” And my favorite of all, because of the fascination produced by the list of ingredients I couldn’t understand: “Stir in the finely diced candied orange and lemon zest.”

  As soon as Anni had any difficulty spelling out a word, she’d fix her impatient eyes on me. That look! Even back then I wasn’t good at refusing her anything, and whispered the answer to her every time.

  Ridiculous Twaddle

  On the afternoon of my ninth birthday, I stood immersed to my knees in the Moorbach, soaping myself up, scrubbing myself down. My body was cold, but since my thoughts were back at home, I didn’t feel it. Jasfe had baked a poppy-seed cake for me, and Josfer had been working for days in his workshop. (I had my fingers crossed for a hunting bow.)

  I closed my eyes to wash my face, and when I opened them again Markus was sitting on the bank before me. He was alone, and greeted me with a friendly nod; beside him lay a wooden crate, which suddenly began to shake. Markus pushed the lid aside. Amid a litter of straw and rotten vegetables, two rats were mating. “Heya,” he said. “Know what they’re doing?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Making babies?”

  “Good! You aren’t so dumb after all.” Markus slapped me on the back. “But I’ll bet you didn’t know that they’re brother and sister, did you?”

  I slipped into my pants. “They’re just rats.”

  Markus closed the crate and shook it hard. “Yep. Rats.” Then he threw it into the river. Bubbles streamed from between the slats. “I call them Jasfe and Josfer.”

  “You idiot.”

  “Why? They’re definitely brother and sister.”

  The bubbles from the crate grew smaller and smaller; I wanted to pull it from the water. “My parents aren’t.”

  Markus put a foot on the crate. “Everyone knows they are.”

  “Liar.”

  Now Markus stood on the crate. “I couldn’t care less if you believe it, Klöble.”

  “I’m completely normal!” I shouted, louder than I’d intended, scooped up the rest of my clothes, and made off.

  I didn’t see the final bubbles rising from the crate.

  Jasfe and Josfer and Anni started singing a birthday song when I opened the front door of our house—and broke off as soon as they saw a half-naked boy with wet cheeks and reddened eyes. I was wrapped up in a blanket, stroked and kissed, and asked what had happened. All by itself, my voice grew higher and higher, faster and faster, as I told them about Markus, the rats and the bubbles and the Klöbles—the Klöbles above all.

  My parents exchanged a troubled look, shook their heads, and said, as if with a single voice, “Children are cruel.”

  “Markus told me you’re brother and sister.”

  “Twaddle,” said Josfer.

  And Jasfe: “Ridiculous twaddle.”

  After that, the poppy-seed cake tasted so sweet, the hunting bow felt so smooth and strong in my hands, the songs so merrily sung gave my heart such a lift, that I fell into bed late that evening at peace and exhausted, and drifted off to sleep with nary a thought of Klöbles.

  So as to have some time to themselves, Josfer and Jasfe occasionally sent us off to fetch fresh milk, or to hunt for mushrooms. One time they told us to go to church and say ten Hail Marys. I begged Anni to say my Hail Marys in my stead because, as I explained to her, I’d rather go and read. The truth was, I always felt like I was being watched in church—even a whisper would swell to a telltale murmur if you weren’t careful, and anyway, I couldn’t see why a prayer had to be repeated so many times. Certainly even God must get bored with it. Back at home, I slipped unnoticed through the parlor, overheard my parents’ heavy gasps, followed them, rounded the green-tiled oven, and, just as Jasfe and Josfer cried out, saw them.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed it. Before they noticed me, I slipped back to the front door, opened it, and slammed it loudly shut again.

  When I walked back into the parlor they’d pulled their clothes on again, and everything was where it belonged.

  Jasfe cleared her throat. “Hungry?”

  I nodded, as though nothing were the matter.

  After Anni had returned from church and everyone had sat down at the table, Josfer and I gulped down our food. Jasfe took barely a bite. She eyed the blade of her knife, lost in thought. Anni entertained the table with a description of the beautiful stained-glass window in the church, and mentioned, by the way, that for her birthday she wanted one just like it for her bedroom.

  After the last mouthful, Jasfe asked everyone to follow her outside. It was dark, and candle flames flickered like will-o’-the-wisps behind the windows of neighboring houses. Anni sat herself down between Josfer and me on the wooden bench. Jasfe remained standing. She kissed Anni and me, and folded her hands. Gently, she spoke one word after another. Carefully set one sentenc
e after the other. With brief pauses between them. So that we’d be able follow her little speech. So that we’d have time to understand. So that we wouldn’t think anything bad. She wanted to formulate sentences better than those she’d set before her father. Perfect sentences. Accurate. And true.

  “Really?” cried Anni. “You, too?”

  I stood up. “Brother and sister?” I said. “Ridiculous twaddle!”

  Jasfe nodded. “I know.” Her chin shook. “My two beautiful, healthy children.” She wanted to hug me. I pushed her away and she fell. Josfer grabbed me by the arm. I tore myself away, and slammed into the back of the bench, splitting the skin of my elbow, and I ran to my room, shutting the door.

  Later that night, when quiet had fallen on the house, I stole out to the kitchen and took the last piece of poppy-seed cake. On the way back, I pressed my ear to the door of my parents’ bedroom. The rustling of their sheets, amused chuckles, whispers, hurried stop-start breaths—the sounds penetrated the wood and filled my imagination with pictures. I wanted to let the cake fall to the floor, wanted to fling the door open and scream, “Do you know that they call you? Rats! Filthy rats!”

  But I didn’t move. I stared at the closed door, polished off the cake. And with every bite, I swallowed my rage.

  From then on, for all my parents’ soft-spoken confessions, for all their sincere but irritating devotion, for all their exaggerated indulgence of my malicious commentary or loafing, I had only one answer: “Leave me alone.”

  Apart from that, I didn’t speak a word.

  I Love You

  When we sat together at the table eating dinner, when the fire crackled in the oven, the soup burbled in the pot, the beams creaked, when the smell of fried potatoes and ham and apple cider and wild garlic filled the room, when Jasfe admitted to some foolishness or other and everyone laughed—even me, almost—when I felt so comfortable, and thought that Jasfe was just my mama and Josfer just my papa and Anni just my sister and I just her brother, on those evenings when I felt so much love for them all that I wanted to scream, I would scratch at the wound on my elbow beneath the table, tear the scab away, and dig with my fingernails into the skin, until at last the arm went numb, numb and dead.