Almost Everything Very Fast

by Almost Everything Very Fast Christopher Kloeble

“No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be lonely.”

  “Maybe. And now …”

  “The opposite?”

  Wickenhäuser nodded.

  “If I were an undertaker, I could earn a lot of money.”

  “Good.”

  “I could keep you company.”

  “Very good.”

  “I could eat orange marmalade every day. I could own a flush toilet. And electric lights.”

  “Right, keep going!”

  “I could collect money from the church, which has deep pockets. I could console people. I could always wear nice suits. I could keep the best plot in the graveyard for myself. I could do something respectable.”

  Wickenhäuser slapped the coffin lid with a loud bang. “And you could have any woman you want.”

  That same evening he introduced me to a girl my own age whom he’d brought to the house.

  “Her name is Stephanie,” he said, at which the girl briefly wrinkled her brow. As we introduced ourselves, I was surprised by her strong handshake. Wickenhäuser slapped me on the shoulder and winked at us. He hurriedly wrapped himself in his coat, and opened the front door. An urgent appointment, he said, he might be gone a long time.

  Then we were alone.

  The girl, who presumably wasn’t called Stephanie, was neither pretty nor ugly. You wouldn’t have turned to look at her in the street, at any rate. Without a word, she began to unbutton her dress. I didn’t move, just watched, as she peeled away one layer of clothes after another and took off her jewelry. Her body was petite, her skin pale and firm. Next, she started to undress me. It all seemed so strange, but nevertheless, I let it happen. Her touch wasn’t unpleasant. She knew how to fill a young man with self-confidence, when to groan, when not to snicker. I stopped her only once—when she went to kiss the scar on my elbow. While I was sleeping with her, I thought, fascinated: I’m sleeping with a woman. And I asked myself why I’d waited so long to try something that felt so good. I was hardly irritated by the fact that in the hours we spent together she barely looked me in the eye; that was just part of her profession, I told myself.

  Sometime around midnight she dressed again, nodded a good-bye, and left the house.

  I never saw her again.

  At breakfast the next morning I felt Wickenhäuser watching me. I let him fidget for a while, and picked the salt from my pretzel as always, as if there were nothing to discuss. Only after washing the dishes did I say, “Okay then.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Wickenhäuser, though I think he knew immediately what I was talking about.

  “I’ll stay.”

  In Schweretsried I saw the world, and that was exactly what I wanted. Wickenhäuser showed me the business of death, and, since I learned quickly, the undertaker never had to repeat an instruction. At first I served as assistant; later on, rascal came to mean partner.

  Back then, the pastor of Schweretsried marveled at how strikingly often baptisms followed hard on funerals in the same family. So many husbands, it seemed, had sired children shortly before their demise. The preacher ascribed this to the righteous equity of the Lord. The Grace of Heaven, so to speak. At the regulars’ table in the Iron Pine he told Wickenhäuser about this joyous miracle; the latter smiled and shook his head. “What a rascal!”

  “Who?” asked the pastor. “God?”

  “Sure,” said Wickenhäuser. “Who else?”

  Wickenhäuser explained to me things no woman would have been willing to explain herself. After each burial ceremony, I’d ask the widows in a whisper to follow me into the office for some final paperwork. They never refused; their eyes were puffy with weeping, and their thoughts weren’t running as smoothly as usual. In the newly furnished guest room—my office—I offered them a seat on my bed. None of them suspected anything. Patiently I asked the widows if they were satisfied with my services. They always said yes. Slowly I scooted my chair closer, and proposed a slight discount. They always welcomed it. I sat beside them on the bed, and warily slipped an arm around them. At which point they’d always cuddle up to me. Finally I admitted what exceedingly intense feelings I cherished for them. (The truth is always what one decides to believe.) Most of them tensed up, leapt from the bed, and excused themselves, polite, aloof; but some, more than a few, gratefully kissed my face. They smelled of makeup applied too thick, and sweetish sweat. In bed they were quiet, almost noiseless, as if they didn’t want to wake their departed husbands.

  Wickenhäuser assured me that I could have my fun with the widows, as much and as often as I liked, none of them would ever dare to confess such a misstep. But he warned me that I should never, at no point whatsoever, look one of those women in the eye. That’s why he’d taken care that my first time hadn’t been anything special. As far as Wickenhäuser was concerned, making love didn’t mean sleeping with someone; in his opinion making love meant that you created love, you actually made love. “It happens quicker than you’d think,” Wickenhäuser pointed out, and added with a significant smile: “And then suddenly all you’ll want is to be with that one person.”

  On weekends, guests were no longer invited over. Instead, the two of us celebrated alone, and it would be wrong to say we didn’t have a good time, playing our rhyming games. If one of us recited badly, that is, without rhyming, we’d have to take a hearty swig of brandy.

  This happened fairly frequently.

  I love to play: whenever I’ve a chance

  I cry aloud and dance a wild dance.

  My cheeks flush ruddy as a crimson star

  And now and then, I’ll shout: You’ve gone too far!

  Many men have met their jolly doom, my dove,

  By hiking up my skirt beneath the moon above.

  You call me pert: I like that well enough,

  But not as much as I love making … merry.

  These evenings usually ended—more often than I liked—with the undertaker, emboldened by alcohol, begging me to share his bed. To make a little love.

  I turned him down. To me, Wickenhäuser was a teacher and a business partner, nothing more. Hidden in my affection for him I sensed the possibility of a love that I didn’t want to permit. To love someone again the way I’d loved Else was too great a risk for me. Because one morning the undertaker, too, would fail to wake up.

  I sometimes capitulated to Wickenhäuser’s pleas purely out of pity, and slept beside him, under separate blankets. Even when he wept and wistfully described that moment in the log cabin when, for the first and only time, we’d embraced, I refused to take him in my arms, and corrected him, saying that on that particular occasion, he’d been the only one doing the hugging. This melancholy, which by day withdrew behind the sparkle in Wickenhäuser’s eyes, broke out again at night. It was only following his visits to Segendorf that Wickenhäuser was able to suppress it for a few days—or, at best, weeks—at a time, and I asked myself what Master Baker Reindl was able to give the undertaker that he couldn’t find among such a rich assortment of men and women here in Schweretsried.

  For me, Segendorf lay far in the distance, as if the first eleven years of my life had been merely a dream, one that was fading with every day. Anni helped me with that. My sister answered none of the letters I sent with Wickenhäuser, never returned a single greeting. Which is why I never went with him to Segendorf. I took it to mean she didn’t want any contact with me. And whenever I tried to understand why, Wickenhäuser consoled me, saying I shouldn’t stew over it, and instead enjoy the freedom I had here in Schweretsried. He told me that of all God’s cruelties, the greatest was saddling a man with family.

  In the cool summer of 1930, when I was a handsome seventeen-year-old, the undertaker returned from another excursion to Segendorf. “Have a look, rascal,” he said, pulling the tarp from a hazel coffin. “We’ve picked up another bargain.”

  “How much?” I asked, excited.

  Wickenhäuser whispered it in my ear.

  “In that case, you’re buying me
dinner tonight,” I said solemnly, hesitated, and pushed two more words over my lips: “Did Anni …”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is she doing okay?”

  “She looks gorgeous. But not as gorgeous as you.”

  “Did you ask if she wants to come see me?”

  “She’s a village kid, rascal.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “The girl runs away as soon as I drop your name.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time. I’ve finally decided not to go back. It’s too far away.”

  “What about Reindl?”

  “She understands. Besides, she isn’t getting any younger.”

  That evening I tossed and turned in bed, and kept examining my elbow; the scar was pale; unless someone was looking for it, they wouldn’t notice. When Wickenhäuser had spoken about my sister, she had tugged hard on that thread around my chest. I didn’t understand how a lack of news from Segendorf could so preoccupy me—as if it were bad news.

  I threw off the covers and walked in the dark to the door of Wickenhäuser’s bedroom, paused, and while I was debating whether or not to knock, heard a conspicuously unshrill voice: “Come on in.”

  Wickenhäuser was sitting upright in bed. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “I knew you’d see through it, rascal.”

  “What?”

  “But I was hoping that if I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t go.”

  “Tell me, already.”

  “Your sister’s getting married.”

  “To whom?”

  “Fellow called Driajes.”

  “When?”

  “In the fall.”

  “Fall? Why not spring?”

  “They’re in a hurry.”

  Wickenhäuser patted the mattress beside him. “Please.”

  I sat down. “Do you think I should go see her?”

  “I think that if you don’t go now, you never will. But I also think that if you go to her, you won’t come back.”

  “Nonsense. What’s your opinion?”

  “Rascal …”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Now imagine another truth.”

  “I … want … you … to …”

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  “… go.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “You should set out tomorrow.”

  “Very good.”

  “Rascal? Stay here. Just for tonight.”

  “But not for long.”

  “Will you hold my hand?”

  “No.”

  I left the next morning. After a long back-and-forth I’d decided against taking Hoss; I could cover the bulk of the distance faster by bus, and the remainder on foot. I didn’t pack any of my suits; as long as I took little with me, I’d have enough of a reason to come back soon. Along with sufficient food for the trip, Wickenhäuser gave me a map whose southernmost marking was a ring in red ink, above which someone had scribbled Segendorf. Furthermore, as we were saying good-bye, the undertaker passed me a parcel that felt like it contained a pillow.

  “Don’t open it until you’re sitting on the bus,” he cautioned me, and swallowed hard; he looked as dismal as a Segendorf gravedigger. He glanced mistrustfully at the bus. “You’ll come back?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “My lovely rascal,” Wickenhäuser said, laughing through his tears, “and what if I told you that I never delivered any of your letters to her?”

  I dug my fingernails deep into the skin of my scarred elbow. “Anni doesn’t know anything?”

  “Suppose she doesn’t?”

  “Then,” I said, “then that would change everything.”

  I gave Wickenhäuser a short, cold handshake, nodded, and took a seat at the back of the bus. The engine banged like a rifle shot. We lurched off down the road.

  Third Love

  On a windy Indian summer evening in September, I walked past the triple-horned cow skull (the result of a highly questionable breeding experiment) that marked the northernmost border of the village. The first barnyards I passed seemed much smaller than I remembered. In my memories, the houses were massive skyscraping structures, but now my impression was that Segendorf consisted largely of flat, skewed buildings that you could watch sinking gradually into the swampy ground. Even the church, which had instilled such respect in me as a child, now seemed to resemble nothing so much as a poorly maintained mausoleum. I felt amazed that anyone could spend his whole life here. It wasn’t melancholy I was feeling, but surprise that I’d actually grown up in such a place.

  To remain incognito, I steered clear of people on the street and made straight for the tavern, where I took a seat at a shaky wooden table. The air was full of rancid odors, the taproom empty, apart from the busty innkeeper.

  “You from around here?” she bleated.

  “Bring me something,” I bleated back.

  “A pint?”

  I nodded. With a filthy rag, the innkeeper spread a puddle of beer around on my table. I sat there till late at night, bolting down reams of red cabbage, dumplings, and leathery cuts of roast pork. After a trip as long as mine, anything tasted good. And the more often I bent deep over my beer stein, the more often the innkeeper looked across at me, asking whether I wanted anything else, making little detours past my table. After she’d put up the last of the chairs, she planted herself before me.

  “You’re not from around here.”

  “No.”

  “Then you won’t know my barn.”

  “No.”

  “It’s out on the moor.”

  I looked up at her.

  “I’ll show it to you, it’s very comfortable.”

  She showed me a couple of other things, too, before returning, in the gray dawn, across the labyrinth of rotting wooden planks that crisscrossed the moor, to her husband, who hadn’t kissed her with that kind of abandon in years. Like a kitten lapping up milk for the first time, she’d said.

  I spent those first days after my arrival out on the moor. It was still too soon, I needed some time to figure out how I could meet my sister, from whom I’d been separated for six years. Almost every day the innkeeper came looking for me, bringing me horse knockwurst, freshly baked poppy-seed rolls, cracklings, Moosinger—a variety of cheese produced exclusively in Segendorf, which ripened only after an exceedingly long and damp storage—tepid milk, poppy-seed cakes, pickled frogs’ legs, poppy-seed buns, mushrooms, and eggs. In return, I deployed such knowledge as I’d acquired from the widows of Schweretsried, and hoped that her screams wouldn’t disturb anyone but blindworms, storks, and toads. It seemed to me as though, with every thrust that sent flabby waves rolling across the innkeeper’s backside, I was plunging deeper and deeper into my native town. I thrust, and she screamed. Soon, I was airing my own first screams as well. On those nights that the innkeeper couldn’t manage to slip from her husband’s bed, I explored the village. Behind every window I peeped through, someone was screaming. Screaming was part and parcel of Segendorf, like the Sacrificial Festival. Children in the dark screamed for light, husbands screamed for their wives, and the wives screamed because of their violent husbands. But nobody screamed as untiringly as the innkeeper.

  “Can you go a third time?” she asked me, drizzling rose-hip marmalade on her heavy, pale upper thigh.

  The better I got at imitating her screams, the louder and more piercing the innkeeper became.

  One night, when I believed that I’d become familiar with every possible variety of scream, the sound of singing drew me to a greenish glowing window. The house lay at the edge of the village, not far from Wolf Hill, precisely where my parents’ house had once stood. Someone was carelessly (and tunelessly) singing a song. Unfortunately, bilious green vines behind the window and rank ivy in front of it obscured my view; I could make out only tessellated pieces of a plump female shape dancing in the room. There was a
pink elbow, there beige ruffles, there a snatch of white skin, there the rounded tip of a nose, there a lock of hair. This girl, the third love in my life, of which I knew nothing at that moment, accompanied her swaying dance with a breathy voice, and in spite of its unpolished tone it was so serene and artless that I felt an urge to shatter the window and study her décolletage and throat and lips as they shaped a kind of music so beautiful it made you feel as if there were no such thing as right or wrong.

  I fell to my knees and pressed my hot face into the dewy grass. A moment later I was running toward the cliff and standing at the edge of the abyss, where the monk had sacrificed his Most Beloved Possession 405 years before. In contrast to the monk, however, it wasn’t an object I hurled away from me. My own scream, which told of polished leather boots and a gleaming bridal gown, of lentils and walks around a log cabin, of homemade verses, lonely widows, tailored suits, and an undertaker’s melancholy, pierced through the whole village, tore Blacksmith Schwaiger from his uneasy sleep, drove the residual ashes of the Sacrificial Festival before it, burrowed into the soil, plucked at the leaves of the oak on Wolf Hill, and brought a brief pause to the dancing of a girl named Anni Habom. And as I turned my back to the abyss, the latter returned an echo—soft and delicate, but so unambiguously clear that there could be no doubt whatsoever that this place was my home.

  It went: pling.

  PART V

  Objects in Mirror

  Violet

  Albert crossed the main street. By the town hall he hung a left, following a narrow, tarred footpath downhill, past a playground and a meadow where he and Fred had often gone sledding. Before long he’d leave the last farmhouse behind and reach the glider airfield. The thought of it made him nervous. During their conversation three days ago, Sister Alfonsa had refused to tell him over the telephone what she knew about his mother. So he’d just have to come to Saint Helena—those were her last words before Albert hung up, immediately regretting it. Since then, every attempt he’d made to reach her had failed. Fearful of missing her call, he hadn’t left the phone for a moment. Under normal circumstances he would have been well on the road to Saint Helena by now; to ferret out something about his mother, he would gladly have undertaken a much longer journey. There was one thing holding him back: panic gripped Fred whenever he had to board a bus. Albert traced it back to the traumatic experience of the bus accident. And Albert himself had neither car nor driver’s license. So he’d dialed Violet’s number, the only number that could help get the two of them swiftly to Saint Helena.