Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

“But I really did shower!”

  “Go tell it to Gertrude.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “Tell it to Gertrude is a figure of speech?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Have you showered?”

  Fred blinked.

  While Fred steeped in the bath, a lit candle in his hand—dripping wax into the water to tell the future—Albert stood on the stairs in front of a framed photograph showing Anni spraying the driveway with a garden hose. She was wearing a dress—she wore dresses in all of her photographs—and the expression on her face was sober, thoughtful.

  Albert said to the photo: “I’ve spoken with Britta Grolmann.”

  He heard splashing, and glanced up at the bathroom door, which was standing ajar.

  “What was it you wanted to hide?”

  Albert turned away, descended three steps, then paused. Out of the corner of his eye he’d spotted a photo in which Anni was pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves.

  “Does the gold have anything to do with it? Klondi mentioned that the cassette, the lilies, and a couple of other things were from her. But not the gold.”

  A step farther down, Anni was mending a pair of blue jeans. She wasn’t even looking at the camera in that one.

  “Ah, shit.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.”

  Fred stood on the upper landing, wrapped in a bathrobe that barely reached his knees.

  “Did you pour something pretty?”

  Fred held up a little clump of candle wax. “A real skull!”

  Albert looked straight at him. “It looks more like a piece of cheese to me.”

  “It looks more like a real skull to me,” said Fred seriously. Lather hung in his beard.

  “Let’s go wash that off,” said Albert.

  Fred tugged at his sleeve and said softly, “It’s okay that you’re talking with Mama, you know. Mama said we should never forget her.”

  Before Albert could say, There’s not much about her for me to forget, Fred added, shrugging his shoulders, “We’re all Most Beloved Possessions.”

  “Are we?”

  Fred sighed, as if Albert once again didn’t understand anything. “Mama says everyone is somebody’s Most Beloved Possession.”

  Then he went back to the bathroom, to blow-dry his beard.

  Albert thought, maybe you can only love someone or something if you possess him, her, or it—partially, at least; and for the first time since he’d left Saint Helena, he missed Alfonsa. She would have liked this theory.

  Later, after Albert had gotten Fred into bed with the help of a few freely quoted passages from the A–F volume of the encyclopedia, he took a piece of paper, corralled all the thoughts that had been whirring around in his head, and wrote them out. In the past, that had always helped him: capturing all of his questions, doubts, dilemmas on paper. Letting everything out.

  The next morning, Albert’s bed was surrounded by crumpled pages, scrawled over with sentences difficult to decipher. He tossed them one by one into the trash can. On one of them, he found: Most Beloved Possession? Oxymoron!!! On another: My mother can stuff it. And: Things are going downhill. Downhill? Cliché! Better say (and then nothing). And: Life is a Hansel and Gretel crumb. Ha ha. And, on the only one that he folded up and stuck in his breast pocket: Really, we ought to act as if there were no unanswered questions. (Cue curtain)

  And for the next four weeks, that’s exactly what they did.

  Fred and Albert swam in the Baggersee, where Fred demonstrated how well he could do the dead man’s float.

  Fred and Albert counted all the green cars that passed the bus stop, with Albert keeping the tally, and Fred making sure that no “half greens,” like police cars, were accidentally counted.

  Fred and Albert found a rosebush on their doorstep, with an attached card reading I’m sorry, and Fred asked who it was from, and Albert lied, saying he didn’t know.

  Fred and Albert descended into the sewers together up to three times per week (Albert always twice as often on his own), and found Most Beloved Possessions in the treasure chest—among them a miniature pocket encyclopedia, green crayons, and a brand-new electric shaver.

  Fred and Klondi pulled weeds in her garden, and Albert watched them from afar.

  Fred and Albert fed weeds to Gertrude.

  Fred and Albert cooked spaetzle according to a recipe they found on the Internet, and an hour later ordered pizza, from which Fred scraped the “pukey tomatoes” with a spoon.

  Fred and Albert listened to Klondi’s cassette, and Albert admitted that the sound was like the distant noise of the ocean.

  Fred and Albert repainted Fred’s room in olive green, May green, turquoise, and reed green.

  Fred and Albert sat firmly belted in the BMW, and Albert cheered for Fred, who raced almost as fast as Michael Schumacher.

  Fred and Albert went to see Klondi, because this time Fred insisted that Albert come with him, and the three of them fired up the potter’s wheel, and Klondi made an ashtray, which she gave to Albert with a wink, whereupon Albert made a candy dish, which he gave to her also with a wink, while Fred made a “cobble-paving-stone,” which he kept for himself.

  Fred and Albert argued because in Fred’s opinion Albert smelled “smoky”—which Albert blamed on Klondi.

  Fred and Albert played chess, and Fred won almost every time because he was playing white, and all the white pieces could move like queens.

  Fred and Albert left a rosebush on Klondi’s doorstep, with a card that read, It’s okay, and Fred asked what was okay, and Albert said, “Everything.”

  Fred and Albert traced the outlines of their hands with green marker on the kitchen window, beside the initials HA, and inside the hands wrote Fred and Albert.

  The Biggest Bird in the World

  “What are you going to do when I go dead?”

  Albert, slowly revolving in an office chair, looked up from a notebook in a plastic cover—one that Alfonsa had given him once upon a time, so that he could record what he’d learned during his chess lessons. The notes Albert took, however, concerned other things entirely. The battered pages were filled with the various death scenarios that Albert had imagined for Anni and jotted down—like Fred his green cars—and in which a certain sealed kitchen window, shot through with a crack, invariably played a central role. In the past he’d found himself smiling after each entry, because with every new idea his hope had grown that he’d finally found the truth.

  Wind blows the window wide open and it shatters and Anni climbs up on a rickety chair to see if she can shut it for the night with glue, but then the chair starts to tip underneath her and she tries to stay up on it, but she’s pretty old and so she falls and that’s it for her heart.

  Or: Anni doesn’t want to be in Königsdorf anymore. She wants to take Fred and me and move in with our family, with my mother, and she has to hire moving men to help her because I can’t carry anything, I’m too small, and because she can’t carry anything, she’s too old. And Fred certainly can’t carry anything, because he’s Fred. But one of the moving men is like Fred, too, a little slow, and smacks the window with a long, golden pole that looks like a wizard’s staff, and that gives Anni such a shock that she gets hopping mad, and that’s it for her heart.

  Or: A couple of cretins like the ones here in the convent are throwing stones, and one of them flies through Anni’s window, but she’s not the kind just to put up with that, that’s for sure, and she scoops up the stone and goes to throw it back into the street. But she can’t. She hasn’t turned chicken, it’s not that—she feels a stab in her heart. She can’t do anything anymore. She sinks slowly to the floor, as if falling asleep.

  Or: Anni takes pills, because everything’s difficult with Fred, plenty of people do it, they even tell the priest about it in the confessional, people take an amazing number of pills, even people like Anni, so many that they feel tipsy, like someone who’s been sneaking the sacramental wine. S
he wants to get the window open. She smashes the window with something, so that she can grab the sky and pull it into the room. For real! She wraps herself up in the clouds and falls asleep and never wakes up again.

  Or: Anni goes on a trip with Fred and me. But she wants to take something with her, so that she can remember Königsdorf whenever she likes. So she takes the window, because the view from it was the most important view of all in the dark farmhouse. She packs the shards of glass in a couple of kitchen towels, but she doesn’t do it especially nimbly, she cuts herself and bleeds, bleeds a whole lot, and the whole pane goes pink, and Anni goes white, and all of her color, her whole heart, is in the window now.

  “You aren’t dead by a long shot,” said Albert.

  “I only have two fingers left.” Fred slouched on the red chaise longue, plucking lint from his hat. “That’s less than a lot.”

  “I don’t think so.” Albert snapped the chess notebook shut. “You know, that’s more than one thousand four hundred hours!”

  Fred let his hat fall from his hands.

  “Around ninety thousand minutes.”

  “That’s a lot,” said Fred, savoring the number: “ninety thousand.” He bent to pick up his hat. Albert opened his notebook again.

  “Are there still ninety thousand?”

  “Yes,” said Albert, without looking up.

  “How about now?”

  “Still the same.”

  A thud came from the kitchen. Fred and Albert looked up at each other.

  Fred ran to the kitchen. Albert laid aside his notebook and followed. After they’d spent several minutes searching in vain for the source of the noise, Albert’s eyes fell on the kitchen window; he rushed outside, around the house, and found a robin lying in the grass below the pane; it was jerking its legs and wings, and its beak opened and shut soundlessly. Fred shoved Albert aside. In both hands he held a shovel, which he let fall with a crash. The bird’s last sound was high and shrill.

  “How about now? Is it still ninety thousand?” asked Fred, as if nothing had happened.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you kill the bird?”

  “It made him happy.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t so bad, maybe he could have managed.”

  “Mama says birds that don’t fly can’t fly. Mama says I’m the biggest bird in the world.”

  “Come again?”

  Fred said louder: “I’m the biggest bird in the world!”

  “Next time we’re going to wait a bit before we kill any animals.”

  “Okay, Albert,” said Fred, and lowered his head. “Are you …”

  “No,” said Albert, “I’m not mad.”

  Fred proposed burying the robin in the garden, next to a rowan bush, because it’d have plenty of visits from its friends there. An ambrosial thing.

  “I’m sorry, bird,” said Fred, and crossed himself before the grave.

  Albert shut his eyes.

  I let the light wind lift me up,

  I love to glide with outspread wings

  Leaving every bird behind.

  Reason? That’s a rotten thing—

  Reason and speech bring all to naught.

  Flying freshens me with strength

  And teaches me lovelier lessons still.

  Fred smiled. “You can talk the way people sing.”

  “That’s by Nietzsche.”

  “Is he one of your friends?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Albert thought about the time Alfonsa had first read to him from Beyond Good and Evil. It was the day the dart had pierced his cheek. Albert had lain in the Saint Helena infirmary, the left half of his face swaddled in bandages, the taste of iodine in his mouth. The slightest blink or movement of his lips had sent stabbing pains through his head. When Alfonsa stepped into his room, he’d assumed she was planning to punish him with the shoelaces again. But she passed over the episode without a word, and instead sat down beside the bed, opened the volume of Nietzsche, and started to read. Albert’s six-year-old mind had glided over every third word, but Alfonsa’s emotionless voice had soothed him and given him the feeling that his wound was just an insignificant injury, something that would soon be healed.

  Now, standing with Fred beside the tiny grave, this memory sparked such a need for comfort in him that he immediately walked into the house and called Alfonsa. It was only when she answered with a cool “Yes?” that it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to her since leaving for Königsdorf.

  “It’s me.”

  “Albert.” Was he wrong, or was there a faint trace of pleasure in her voice?

  They were silent.

  “I wanted to call you,” he said finally.

  “I figured that much.”

  Somehow, he’d imagined this differently. How was he supposed to tell someone who’d never been all that good at hugging that he wanted to wrap his arms around her? And what’s more, to tell her over the telephone?

  “We buried a robin today,” said Albert.

  “An exciting day, then,” said Alfonsa. “Anything else?”

  “Fred only has ninety thousand minutes left.”

  “You know what I think about that.” That he and Fred would be in better hands at Saint Helena. Before Albert had left, she’d taken every possible opportunity to make that clear to him. Which had only strengthened his conviction that he and Fred had to spend their remaining time in Königsdorf. At Saint Helena he would be forced to share Fred with nuns and orphans, at Saint Helena Fred wouldn’t be able to go through his usual daily routine, at Saint Helena Albert would never have learned about the gold, about the chest in the sewers, and about Britta Grolmann.

  “You’re calling because it isn’t working out,” she said. “Think it over.”

  “I have,” he said. “We’ll manage.”

  At that moment, Fred stepped into the living room and looked at him, puzzled. Albert almost never used the telephone (his conversation with Britta Grolmann had been an exception, one he’d kept secret from Fred), and people rarely called them, mostly telemarketers, whom Fred jabbered at so interminably that they were glad to hang up. Fred asked him whom he was talking to, so loudly that Albert couldn’t understand what Alfonsa said to him next, and he would have entirely missed those words that he’d never be able to forget, if Alfonsa hadn’t cleared her throat and repeated, “I could show you who your mother is.”

  PART IV

  Three Loves

  1924–1930

  A Pair of Boots

  Between 1525 and 1924, seventeen houses in Segendorf burned to the ground. But most of them not in the sacrificial bonfire. My parents’ house was number eighteen. All the hamlet’s inhabitants formed a chain from the Moorbach to the village center, passing buckets of water along as fast as they could, though, admittedly, they concentrated their collective effort on the neighboring houses, to prevent the conflagration from spreading.

  Everyone agreed that a flying spark must have been responsible for the blaze.

  No one had seen how, before I’d fled, I’d torn the torch away from Anni and hurled it into the burning house, how I’d taken her face in my hands and looked her in the eyes and said, “I love you.”

  Up on Wolf Hill, I curled up against the side of the oak that faced away from Segendorf and wept. I drew in my legs, pressed my knees against my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and buried my face there. I wanted to make myself as small as possible, so that nobody would be able to find me, and I thought, if I make an effort, then maybe I can crawl inside myself, and reach someplace better. I stayed there till late in the night, scratching at my wound and spelling out one word after another: H-o-t, b-l-a-z-e, f-i-r-e, d-e-v-o-u-r, s-m-o-k-e, J-o-s-f-e-r, J-a-s-f-e, J-o-s-f-e-r …

  It didn’t help much.

  The west wind carried smoke and ash my way. I fell asleep with my index fingers plugging my nostrils.

  During the night, I found myself wandering through a burning
house. I knew I was dreaming, there was no noise at all, the ceiling fell in, the chimney exploded—yet none of this disturbed the silence. I strode calmly from room to room, and finally reached my own. Heading for bed, I laid myself down between my parents, and drew up the covers.

  “I love you,” I said to them, surprised that they were alive, and what’s more, that they didn’t answer.

  “I love you,” I repeated.

  My parents snored.

  “ILOVEYOUILOVEYOUILOVEYOU!”

  Someone or other prodded me. I shot up, grabbing at something smooth, sleek, and redolent of leather, and saw a girl whose polished boots rose past her knees.

  “You’re Julius Habom,” she said. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Mina Reindl was my age, but at least a head taller than me. Her hair shimmered, now gray, now blond, her tanned skin made you think of lacquered wood, and as she stood there inspecting me, she didn’t blink once. Typical Klöble. A few months before, her father had fallen victim to a rabid fox. Since then, the rumor had gone around that her mother, the master baker, had developed a weakness for an undertaker from out of town—certain nocturnal screams supposedly proved it.

  Mina stamped her foot—I still had hold of her leg.

  “I like it when you grab my leg,” she said. “You can grab my head, too. If you want.”

  I let go.

  “I hold my own legs, too, sometimes. But you hold them much better. You have beautiful eyes. Did you sleep up here? There are rabid bears out here, and wolves, and …”

  “Foxes.”

  “Yes, exactly!” She gave me an amiable smile, and that made me relax a bit. My stomach growled.

  “Why are you making that noise?”

  I shrugged. “You smell like bread.”

  A short time later, I was munching on rolls with bacon in them. Mina had smuggled them out of the bakery.

  “Come with me. We’ll look for your sister,” said Mina.

  “No, I’m never going back there.”

  “But I’m not bringing you rolls every day. That’s bad for business.”

  “I don’t need you.”