Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

  When at age ten I threw my Most Beloved Possession, a pillow, full of holes and stinking of onions, into the sacrificial bonfire, I observed how Josfer took a wooden comb from Jasfe, and in spite of her tears, hurled it onto the heap of brushwood, together with his best hunting knife. As always, a good many Segendorfers wept on the way home, but Jasfe more than any of them.

  “Where’s Herr Kastanie?” Anni asked, whining like any six-and-a-half-year-old who didn’t want to admit what had happened to her favorite toy, a little man cobbled together from twigs and chestnuts.

  “Jasfe,” said Josfer, “you never used that comb.”

  She shook her head. “It belonged to our mother!”

  The sight of her pain triggered something in me. Over the next few days various articles vanished from the kitchen and the hunting shack, including a cooking spoon, shoelaces, an apron, a leather strap, a clay bowl with salt in it, a piece of chalk, a bucket, and last but not least, a rabbit’s foot. Neither Josfer nor Jasfe blamed me. Which only encouraged me to steal more, hacking the stolen items into pieces when necessary and scattering them under the firewood in the hearth. Only Anni’s things I left in peace.

  It was as if a door in my head, previously hidden, had suddenly sprung open, a door through which a hot wind blew. I burned a bouquet of wild-flowers picked by Jasfe, and I burned Josfer’s hammer. (The hammer’s head I buried in the swamp.) I spared neither Josfer’s dagger nor Jasfe’s doily, which covered the table between mealtimes. Once I even stretched my arm into the fire, and let the fuzz of bright blond hairs coating it singe. I wanted to see my parents weep, I wanted to make them unhappy, as unhappy as I’d been, struggling for air in that bowl of sewage.

  Yet nobody took me to task for it. In the summer of 1924, Josfer sat on a sawed-off tree trunk during meals because he hadn’t had time to build a new chair, my parents’ bed was missing all four of its legs, and Jasfe was constantly having to sew herself new knickers.

  On the day of the Sacrificial Festival, I was uncertain which Most Beloved Possession I should single out—my one-year-old pillow (which stank just as powerfully of onions as the one from the year before) or a box of matches—when they called me into the parlor.

  “Have you decided?” asked Josfer.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  Jasfe brought me to the door. Anni was waiting outside, absentmindedly rocking Frau Puppe, the first doll she’d sewn together herself.

  Jasfe pressed a torch into my hand. “You know what you have to do.” She stepped back into the house and locked the door behind her.

  “We know who burned all of our things!” called Josfer through the door.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted back.

  “Today is the Sacrificial Festival. Today you’re allowed to burn whatever you want. So go ahead! Burn the house!”

  “But … but you’re still inside.”

  “Someone remembers how to speak!”

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “Don’t you love us, Julius?”

  “That’s our house!”

  “I’ll burn it, I love you!” cried Anni, to whom no one was listening.

  “Julius, those were our things that you threw in the fire.”

  “But that was different!”

  “Aren’t you brave enough?”

  “I don’t want to do it!”

  “I love you. I’ll do it,” said Anni softly, as I screamed, “I’m not going to do it! I hate you!”

  My vision was so blurry with crying that I couldn’t tell Jasfe from Josfer when they stood beside me again, lifted me up and embraced me, kissed me.

  “We love you,” they whispered. “We love you.”

  “Me, too,” said Anni. “Me, too.”

  After the Sacrificial Festival everyone went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how I should have answered my parents, how I wished I’d answered them, and how good it would have felt to say those words. I slipped from the house, walked to the Moorbach, and hung my feet in the water. I plucked marsh marigolds, threw them into the current, and asked myself where their journey would take them. I cleared my throat, and said, “I love you.”

  Maybe that didn’t sound perfect—but then, what did sound perfect? On the way home I imagined how my parents’ faces would look when they heard me speak—first sleepy, then befuddled, and a moment later, happy—and had to smile. As I looked up at the night sky above the village, it seemed to me that this year the sacrificial bonfire was sending up a brighter glow than usual. But it wasn’t the festival. A house was burning. Our house was burning. Josfer and Jasfe’s house, and Anni’s, and mine. I ran toward it. The heat struck me in the face, and I flinched back. The fire had reached the second floor. There were no screams, I listened closely, I knew that in Segendorf people screamed at the slightest opportunity, but in my ears there was only a rumbling like that of a gigantic cooking pot on the boil, the fire whispering and hissing in a particularly hateful language. And I saw and I saw and I saw the flames dance through the rooms.

  Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Anni. She looked at me anxiously, clutching a torch in both hands.

  “I love them,” she said.

  PART III

  You Are My Mother

  Good at These Things

  They set out right after lunch. Albert had trouble keeping up with Fred, who settled immediately into a brisk stride. As always when he left the house, Fred was wrapped in his royal blue poncho, which fluttered behind him like a cape as he walked and intensified his already imposing appearance. His tufted Tyrolean hat sat askew on his head. His bulky, sagging backpack, which suggested a cargo of junk, the encyclopedia doubtless among it, didn’t appear to be hindering him. Albert, on the other hand, had allowed himself to be persuaded into wearing a plastic raincoat, and was now sweating freely beneath a flawless blue sky.

  In a decidedly unsporty tote bag Albert was carrying a few slices of buttered bread, a Tupperware container filled with bananas, a few peeled carrots, a bottle of apple spritzer, Fred’s medication, and a pack of cigarettes. And in his hip pocket, the makeup compact.

  After they’d followed the main street a ways, they curved to the right down Ludwigstrasse, a narrow side street littered with dried cow patties, where at the age of eight Albert had taught Fred to ride his bicycle without training wheels. Albert had run back and forth beside him, pushing him along, encouraging him, nursing his skinned knees after each tumble, and wiping away his tears, until finally, during the May school holidays, Fred had rolled his first few feet sans training wheels, the wind blowing into his proud, radiant face.

  Fred paused beside a garden fence, stretched his arm over the wire, and waited. A white-and-brown-mottled foal broke from the shadow of an arborvitae hedge, trotted closer, and lifted its head so that Fred could stroke it between the ears. Albert watched as Fred tickled it, said hello, and asked how its day was going. He got the impression it enjoyed Fred’s company—it whinnied, as if at any moment it might break out into unceremonious chatter.

  Fred waved him closer. “Gertrude? This is Albert.”

  “Gertrude?” Albert took a step toward them, and the horse flinched.

  “It’s okay,” Fred said to the foal, which was holding itself just out of reach. Albert wasn’t surprised; he tended to have this sort of effect on animals. Presumably they were able to sense that he still couldn’t grasp why most people had more pity for a stray cat than for a vagrant on the subway.

  Albert cleared his throat. “Let’s get going.”

  “Can’t we stay for a minute?”

  “No.”

  “But Gertrude—”

  “No!” said Albert, louder than he’d intended. He really wasn’t in the mood for a petting zoo.

  Fred pulled him aside. “When I’m dead, you have to come see Gertrude every day,” he whispered.

  Albert hadn’t expected that; wiping the sweat from his forehead, he said, “I’m not good at these things.”

  Fred c
lapped him on the shoulder. “It won’t take you long to learn.”

  Then he said his good-byes to the foal. Fred had never mentioned Gertrude after returning from his rambles through Königsdorf, thought Albert; and if Fred didn’t mention something, it usually meant he’d been up to no good.

  Fred interrupted Albert’s train of thought when he came to a halt in the middle of the street. “We’re there.”

  Albert glanced around. Farm plots stretched away on either side. The sun stung them. Flies traced rectangles above dried cow dung.

  Fred drew a crowbar from his backpack, kneeled, and began struggling to slip its end under the manhole cover.

  “What are you doing? Stop it!” shouted Albert.

  Fred turned to look at him, and with an aggrieved bass note the cover slid back into its recess. “We have to go down there.”

  “What if someone sees us? What if a car comes along?”

  Fred glanced at both ends of the street. “There’s no car coming.”

  “Look, that’s not the point. We can’t just climb down into the sewer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because …” Albert thought for a moment. “Because it isn’t allowed.” He took the crowbar from Fred. “And you should ask me before you play around with something like that. You could hurt yourself.”

  “But you told me I have to show you where the gold comes from!”

  “From down there?”

  Frenzied nodding of the head. “Can I have the crowbar?”

  Albert pointed to the manhole cover. “Seriously—down there?”

  “I need the crowbar now,” said Fred.

  “Isn’t there any other way?”

  With a single motion Fred was up on his feet, towering over Albert, grabbing the hand in which he held the bar. At first, Albert didn’t feel anything, he tried to pull his hand away, but it was held fast, and he struggled in vain to loosen Fred’s grip with the other. “Let. Go.” The pressure increased, it felt as if Fred were driving Albert’s fingers right into the crowbar’s iron. Fred’s hat had slid forward, hiding his eyes, his lips silently opened and closed. The pain fused with a numbness that wandered up along Albert’s arm. Just before it reached his elbow, he pushed himself backward with all his strength. “Fred, stop it!” he shouted, and Fred finally let go. Albert stumbled backward. The crowbar landed next to his feet.

  Albert picked up his tote bag and walked away.

  Beside Gertrude’s fence he examined his now dark-red hand, wiggling one finger after another. They didn’t seem to be broken. “The joke of it,” he shouted to the foal, “is that I worry about his health.”

  Gertrude actually neighed.

  At age six, Albert had once called Fred a retard because he’d broken his He-Man figure while attempting to turn him back into Prince Adam. In response, Fred had aimed a kick at Albert and broken two of the latter’s toes. While pretending to box, Fred had inadvertently given him plenty of shiners. Albert’s body was long accustomed to little wounds and bruises.

  Gertrude snuffled in the direction of his hand, which he was extending over the fence.

  “What now?”

  A glider was circling in the sky above them, making the usual glider noises, sounding like summer. Albert glanced around to see if Fred was following him. With his undamaged hand he lit a cigarette. Gertrude cropped with her teeth at a tuft of grass. Albert was hot—he pulled off the raincoat, tangling himself up in the process. The plastic didn’t want to let him go. He tossed it away into one of the plots. For a while he stood doubtful in the street, trembling. He knew that, left on his own, Fred wouldn’t budge from the spot. Once he’d spent two whole days sitting in the BMW without any food because of some fight that Albert could no longer remember the reason for, and who knows how long he would have kept waiting if Albert hadn’t eventually given in. Fred was at least as stubborn as Albert, and precisely because he knew he had to go back and get him, he didn’t want to. He flicked his cigarette to the curb.

  Now Fred had managed to make Albert feel like a child.

  The asphalt’s heat drilled up through the soles of his shoes.

  Albert sat down in the shadow of Gertrude’s fence, closed his eyes, and imagined that Fred would come for him, just this once, that Fred would come and apologize, that they’d talk everything out, and laugh about it, and clap each other on the shoulders.

  He was nineteen years old now, but as far as his wishes were concerned he still felt just like the three-year-old who’d stood on the steps of Saint Helena, arms defiantly crossed, refusing to set foot in his new home. Who’d countered all of Sister Alfonsa’s rigorous pleading with “Bert won’t.” Whose granny—fully half of his known family—had just died. A stubborn child who’d spent his first night at the orphanage in front of the orphanage, curled up on a doormat stamped with the word AMEN. Who’d been woken early in the morning by the tolling of the bells, and had immediately realized that Sister Alfonsa had spent the whole night there with him, just behind the door in the entrance hall. Who’d suddenly felt a tremendous hunger, and followed this new ersatz family member into the kitchen, where he’d been allowed to dunk a few rock-hard dinner rolls from the previous day into honeyed milk. A child who stopped calling himself Bert only when Sister Alfonsa threatened him with five hundred shoe tyings. A child whose mental capacities had not only earned him chess lessons but also allowed him to write, at age four and a half, in one of Fred’s encyclopedias, when the latter, during a picnic, was weeping over Anni’s death: Downt be saad. Who, while playing cops-and-robbers in the woods, for which purpose the orphans armed themselves with darts that they’d fling every which way with no restraint whatsoever, had incurred a scar the length of a matchstick at the left-hand corner of his mouth, a scar that could transform itself in the blink of an eye into a laugh line. And the only child in Saint Helena with a father who couldn’t be a father, in contrast to the many parents who didn’t want to be.

  Thumper

  When Albert came back, Fred was standing in exactly the same spot where he’d left him. Beside him was Tobi, a man of Albert’s age, who was seldom seen standing still. One couldn’t call what he did moving, exactly—it was more of a wriggling mated with a shuffling. The reeling of a land rat who suddenly finds himself shipboard.

  Albert hid himself by the curb behind a Dumpster, which reeked sourly of discarded wine bottles.

  Tobi was a well-known figure in the village, huge and vigorous, with an arrogant peasant haughtiness; he gave a quick, wheezy laugh, yet all he said was “Freddie.” He said it eagerly, as if sure it would fluster its target. But Fred didn’t move. Tobi’s disappointment showed itself in a shuffling of the feet; they wanted to move on, no rest for them, that’s what they were famous for. Whenever he was on the road in his milk truck, making his rounds from farm to farm in order to suck up the fresh milk with a hose like an elephant’s trunk and deliver it to the creameries in the uplands, his feet jammed the pedal all the way to the floor. These impatient feet of his had made him the quickest, most cost-effective driver in eleven towns; their distaste for the brake pedal meant that the milk didn’t slosh around, keeping it from going bad on the way. Today, however, Tobi’s truck was nowhere to be seen.

  His second “Freddie” had the same effect as the first, which is to say, none whatsoever. Tobi circled Fred, ran his hand across his freckled face, scratched his neck. The heat was getting to him. His feet writhed in their loafers as he stepped closer to Fred, clapped one hand to his pursed lips, and let out an ululation—“U-U-U!”—waited a moment, then repeated the whole operation: “U-U-U!”

  Albert knew it was time for him to step in, he ought to go over and send Tobi home, clearly, directly, no two ways about it. “Go sleep it off, fella,” something like that, and then, once Tobi had absented himself, Albert would take Fred by the hand, no, in his arms, and say he was sorry for leaving him alone so long and, most important, offer him some sort of reward for all the strain he’d suffered—for example, panc
akes with raspberry jam.

  And just at that moment, Fred raised his hand to his mouth, and went, “U-U-U!” Tobi nodded, his feet formed themselves into an arrow aimed in Fred’s direction, and he replied, “U-U-U!” Now they took turns, and Albert closed his eyes and clutched the makeup compact in his pocket. To Albert, Fred’s voice sounded euphoric, like that of a child who’s unexpectedly come across a playmate.

  But Tobi’s strained laughter made Albert uneasy; he thought better of his impulse to rush over, for the time being. He was no match for Tobi.

  Tobi slapped Fred in the face. Which didn’t immediately stop the U-U-Us. They merely slowed for a moment, then took up their previous tempo again, a few halftones higher, clearly in hopes that this new friend had intended something other than the obvious by the gesture—a nice pat on the cheek, maybe. “U-U-U,” went Fred, and Tobi’s feet pointed at him again, and then came the second slap, right to the middle of Fred’s face, and he fell silent. The Tyrolean hat sailed off his head. Fred’s lips trembled, he mumbled something Albert couldn’t make out, but which he supposed was an apology, because this last one had been, unmistakably, a slap, and anyone who gets hit in the face has clearly done something wrong, has been bad. Fred let his hands, his head, his shoulders sink, his whole body melt, and Tobi, whose feet were now merrily dancing, moving closer to each other with every step, slapped him again, this time with his left hand—pasted him so powerfully that Fred lurched sideways.

  Ludwigstrasse was an unfrequented strip of tar in an isolated backwater. Where were the cars when you needed them? Albert was hoping Fred would resist, but he was also a little frightened of what would happen if he did. More than a little. Again he peeped around the corner of the Dumpster, and this time saw that Tobi, who had just swung for the fourth time, was waving his arm in the air like a schoolboy keen to give an answer. Tobi was looking straight at Albert. Just then Fred took a step toward Tobi, and stopped. The tip of Fred’s nose was nearly grazing the truck driver’s cheek, there was something almost conspiratorial about the way the two were standing. Fred whispered something that caused Tobi to lower his hand again. His feet had stopped moving. Relieved, Albert drew a deep breath, forced himself to let go of the makeup compact, and hoped Tobi would finally retreat.