Whichever version was the case, the only certain thing is that every single one led to the night before their wedding, when Anni sang and danced for Arkadiusz in their freshly timbered parlor, and for the first time showed herself to him entirely unencumbered by clothing. Thanks to a generous distribution of Most Beloved Possessions from our former home, the room already seemed lived-in. A green radiance compensated for so much that had burned: flowerpots clustered everywhere, vines hung from beams or climbed up over them, leaves reached toward windows, exhaling sweet scents and trembling with Anni’s dance, as she spun in place like a clumsy ballerina, and sang Arkadiusz’s name. He didn’t notice her awkward voice: as long as he could stare at her mouth, as round as a fish’s, smell her hair, cast his shadow on her pale skin, nothing sounded wrong at all. And it also didn’t feel wrong that he still hadn’t rushed back to help his own family; staying here in Segendorf, he told himself, meant that he could continue his search for the gold. Even if he knew very well that the real reason was something completely different: Arkadiusz was happy with his life as never before, and in marrying Anni he’d be prolonging this state of things, making her dance eternal.
Now she stood before him, so close that her breath grazed his face. Stark naked, she loomed over him. She looked at him, looked at him with glittering, sparkling, glowing eyes, and as he stretched his hand toward her, there was a knock at the door, and Anni flinched away. She furrowed her brow, wrapped herself in a knitted blanket, and opened it. Arkadiusz certainly couldn’t see me out there in the dark, but he observed something that he hadn’t seen for months now:
Anni shaking her head.
PART VII
Pushing the World
Saint Helena
For three days nobody knew whether Fred’s heart would decide for or against a premature halt. Albert stayed at his bedside. Alfonsa had set up a bunk bed in the infirmary, where Albert and Klondi slept; Albert below, naturally. Which meant that, for Albert, sleep was out of the question; when his worries didn’t keep him awake, Klondi did, with her tempestuous snoring. Every time they went to get something to eat, it felt wrong to Albert to sit at the nuns’ table in the dining hall, but Alfonsa, with whom he hadn’t exchanged a single word since their talk, insisted. Among the orphans, these interlopers constituted the subject of conversation. Most assumed they were a family. Some of them who knew Albert even believed he’d found his mother, and sat stewing with envy.
On the evening of the second day, Albert was sitting by Fred’s bed. Someone had neatly parted Fred’s hair with a comb. He slept with his mouth agape, and despite the state of his health still looked notably younger than he actually was. And yet, this man had at least sixty years behind him, probably even more; since no birth certificate existed, nobody could say for sure. Maybe, thought Albert, Fred really was a hero, one with superpowers: he aged slowly, was preternaturally strong, and, above all, was an imperturbable optimist.
Someone touched Albert’s shoulder.
“Do you believe in God?” asked Klondi.
Albert wasn’t in the mood to debate questions of faith. “No.”
“Me neither. But wouldn’t it be much simpler?”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Life. Wouldn’t it be much simpler if you could count on the fact that someone had a plan for it all, that the whole mess wasn’t in vain?” She didn’t even wait for an answer. “I prayed for the first time yesterday. Felt good.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“Come off it, sweetie. You aren’t the only one who cares about him.” She tucked the blanket tighter around Fred. “So, are you coming?”
“Where?”
She nodded toward the exit. “To pray.”
In the austere chapel of an orphanage in the Bavarian uplands, Albert sat down beside Klondi in the first row of pews, and folded his hands. Klondi was thinking—he was positive—of her dead daughter and her dead husband and a friend who didn’t have much longer to live now. He was thinking of a woman who should have been his mother for nineteen years, and of a man who’d never been his father.
And as for Violet: after the first night, her Beetle had vanished from the parking lot. Albert assumed she’d gone on her way, and regretted that; he hadn’t even been able to thank her for her help.
On the third day, however, they ran into each other in the kitchen while he was frying a couple of eggs under the critical eye of Sister Simone. Violet declined his invitation to breakfast.
That night, as Klondi once again struck up her snore solo, Albert stepped outside for a smoke and found the Beetle parked in the middle of a field where the orphans played soccer during the summer. The sunroof was open. Violet lay huddled on the backseat.
“Hello,” he said, and sitting up suddenly, she hit her head.
“You scared me!”
“Sorry.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“I’m here because you needed me. Until recently, anyway.”
“Actually, what I meant was: what are you doing in this field?”
Violet sat up, and as she rubbed the back of her head, Albert remembered how much he’d liked kissing her there, once.
“Can I have one, too?”
“You smoke?”
“No.”
Albert shrugged, lit a cigarette, and passed it to Violet, who propped herself in the open roof, sucked at it, and didn’t cough once.
“You’ve smoked before, though, right?”
“Surprised?” Violet smiled, pleased. “It’s my first time.” Then she said, “I found a tin box in the trunk. There’s a rock in it that looks almost like …”
“Gold.”
“Fred’s?”
“Yep.”
“It looks real.”
“It is real.”
“Must be pretty valuable.”
“No question.”
“Where did he find it?”
“In the sewers.”
“What?!”
“Don’t ask me how it got there.”
He liked the way she blew the smoke through her nose. “You’ve really never …”
She flicked the cigarette into the field. “I’m leaving tomorrow.” She looked at him. “If you don’t need me.”
Of course he needed her, more than ever, but something in him shrank from saying it as long as she was waiting for him to say it.
“I was almost on my way yesterday. And then, halfway, I turned back. Stupid of me.”
“You could stay for another day,” he said, finally.
“And then?”
“I don’t know.”
“That hug the other day did me good,” she said suddenly, putting into words precisely what he was thinking.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand her. They’d been on the road together for three days now. Without Violet they’d all still be sitting in Königsdorf. That Violet had questioned Fred against Albert’s will, way back when, that had been a mistake—but she’d only wanted to help, wanted to see if she might be able to uncover something he’d missed. And wouldn’t it have been wonderful to find his mother with her by his side? To accomplish something so big together? Sure, she’d touched a sore point, but had it really been fair to split up with her on that account? In any case, it hadn’t been fair to call her up and beg her to drive Fred and Klondi and him to Saint Helena. For the sake of his mother. Whom Violet had been searching for. For which reason Albert had left her. And now they were here in a field, in the middle of the night, and everything that had happened between them lay months in the past, and he asked himself what, really, Violet had done wrong, and let his cigarette fall, and kissed her.
The next morning Fred opened his eyes, ignored the objections of the nurses, marched to the bus stop by the parking lot, and waved to Sister Simone, the cook, as she drove off to do her shopping in her leek-green VW.
Once Albert had managed to bring him back in, Viole
t served them breakfast.
Fred eagerly munched his food, as if making up for the meals he’d missed over the past few days. “Caramel pancakes!”
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” said Albert. “How are you feeling?”
Fred swallowed. “Ambrosial!”
“You look like it.”
“Aren’t you going to have some, too?” asked Violet, sitting down beside Albert and playing with his hair.
Albert glanced at the rolled-up pancakes. Fred stopped chewing. Violet urged him on with a nod. So Albert took one of the rolls, and tasted it. They were magnificent.
“Caramel,” said Albert.
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” Fred objected, and turned his attention back to his plate.
Albert said softly to Violet, “He’s feeling ambrosial.”
Her smirk was worthy of Sister Alfonsa. “He’s not the only one.”
Albert wasn’t sure if, as Violet would have put it, it had been the right thing to kiss her. He worried he was longing to be close to her only because he was feeling afraid of what was yet to come. The kiss had allowed him to forget—for a moment, at least—that Fred was dying, that his mother was living in an old-folks home on the Zwirglstein, which he’d have to set out for, sooner or later. Albert didn’t know what that would mean for him and Violet, and he didn’t want to worry about it anymore either, so he more than welcomed Alfonsa wanting to meet him out in the orchard.
“I like it out here,” she greeted him in the shadow of an apple tree. She acted as though two whole days hadn’t passed since they’d last spoken.
“You used to have agoraphobia, right?”
Alfonsa stopped. “What makes you say that?”
“The other sisters always used to praise me for getting you outside so often. Once I looked the word up in Fred’s encyclopedia.”
“You were still very small. And you had too much imagination.” Alfonsa went on. “Maybe that’s why your girlfriend thinks so highly of you.”
“Violet? She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Does she know that?”
Albert dodged her glance.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that we haven’t sufficiently prepared you here for the world of women.”
From the very beginning he hadn’t really thought of the sisters of Saint Helena as women. As teachers, tutors, yes, as parochial know-it-alls, oh certainly, but never as females—apart from a brief phase when, at the age of five, Albert had believed that the anatomical conspicuities specific to women were called “bad timing,” because he’d surprised Alfonsa while she was undressing in her room, and asked her, pointing, what that was.
Albert picked an apple, inspected it for wormholes, polished it on his pant leg, and took a bite. It puckered his mouth.
“They need more time,” said Alfonsa. “Another month at least.”
“In a month we won’t be here.”
“You could stay. What are you looking for elsewhere that isn’t here?”
Their eyes met for a moment.
“What in the world would keep me here?”
She smirked. “Shoelaces?”
“Sounds tempting.”
“Albert,” she said, stepped over to a crooked tree, plucked a rosy-cheeked apple, sniffed it briefly, and handed it to him. He took a cautious bite. You could taste the sun in it. “There were reasons not to tell you about her.”
Albert dropped the apple.
“You were three years old when you came to us. Not old enough to hear such things. And when you were old enough, I waited for the right moment to tell you. But it never arrived. Eventually I thought maybe it was better that way. There are certain things it’s better one never learns.”
“Then why precisely now?”
“Because we’ve been worried about you.” Typical of Alfonsa, not being able to say I. “When your call came, it confirmed our worries. We should never have let you go, especially not in this difficult situation with Fred. Only, you were so unbelievably stubborn. We didn’t see any other way to bring you back.”
“The ends justify the means,” said Albert.
“You could put it like that.” Alfonsa bent over, tasted Albert’s apple, and showed her teeth in a pleased grimace. “I’ve always had a way with the precocious ones.”
“I want to see her. For all I care, come along. But I want to get it over with.”
Alfonsa brought the apple to her mouth, paused, then bit even deeper. “Fred feeling better?” she asked with her mouth full.
Albert hated her chomping. “Yes.”
She looked at him. “Then what are we waiting for?”
As evening fell on the parking lot, Violet, Alfonsa, Fred, and Albert said good-bye to Klondi, who’d voluntarily given up her seat in the car. If they left right away, they could make it to the Zwirglstein by the next morning, including a rest stop during the night.
Klondi turned to Fred. “Take care of Albert, okay?”
“Albert is very young,” said Fred, knowingly.
“Albert is present,” said Albert, and mentioned yet again that it might be better if Fred stayed behind. They’d be gone for only twenty-four hours.
“But I want to come, too!”
“That’s not an especially convincing argument, Fred.”
“What isn’t an especially convincing argument?”
“You don’t have to come.”
“I do have to come!”
“Why?”
“Because I want to meet your mom!”
Albert looked accusingly at Alfonsa.
She shrugged. “He has a right to know what’s happening.”
Albert felt a tingling at the back of his neck, he knew that any second now his thoughts would take off, and then he’d have to think about things he found deeply unpleasant to have running loose in his head. So he said, “Fine. Let’s get going.”
And so after three days they left Saint Helena with Alfonsa and a new destination, and without Klondi.
Love Story
This woman scratches at the back of her unwashed head, which must be my mother’s head, no question about it, and asks: Who? And I repeat: Your son! And she repeats: Who? And I ask: Are you deaf? And she says: Very good! And I start again from the beginning: I’m your son. And she says: From where? And I say: That’s what I wanted to ask you. And she says: Not today. And I say: It’s me! And she says: Not that I remember. And I say: Can I come in? And she says: Sorry.
Or: This woman explains that the woman I’ve come to see was her sister, and that her sister is no longer with us.
Or: This woman grabs her shotgun as I introduce myself, and shoots me in the chest, and I think to myself: what the hell’s happening here? And then she shoots me in the head.
Or: This woman scolds me, saying, It’s about damned time, where’ve you been roving around all these years? She screams, Get inside this minute and wash your hands and go straight to your room, no supper for you, you’re grounded!
Or: This woman throws her arms around me and says she’s so sorry, she says it’s all her fault, but she was young, and now she’s older, she says, can’t we start again from the beginning, and I tell her I’m sorry, but I’m much too old to start again from the beginning.
Or: This woman has drool dripping from her mouth. She grins, finding just insanely ambrosial the fact that she’s the one who made me.
Albert sat in the passenger seat, reading his chess notebook. Violet steered with her left hand. Curve upon curve. Her right rested on Albert’s upper thigh. Which didn’t bother him. They weren’t far from the goal now, and no matter what he’d hoped to get from it, hoped to achieve, getting it over with would be a basically good thing, he told himself. The same went for a woman’s hand, like Violet’s, on his upper thigh: basically good.
Her fingers stirred almost imperceptibly. “It’s lovely to be with you,” she said.
Albert glanced over his shoulder. Alfonsa’s eyes were closed, but he didn’t
believe she was sleeping. Ever since they’d hit the road, she’d been conspicuously reserved.
Fred, on the other hand, sat staring out the window, his eyes flicking left to right, again and again, as if he were reading an encyclopedia. Pushing the world, that’s what he called it. Fixing on something—a street sign, a tree, a license plate—holding it fast with his gaze, and shoving it aside with his eyes. Maybe he was right, thought Albert, maybe we all only believe we’re moving, when in fact we never really move at all. We simply push life past us.
“Thanks,” said Violet.
“For what?”
“You got me out of there. That internship at K&P was hell.” She told him about her days at the production company, confirming what he’d read in her eyes at the airstrip. “I don’t know what I want to do now, but there’s no way I’m ever going back there.”
“A few days ago you sounded completely different.”
“You, too.”
“What do you mean?”
Now she pinched his upper thigh. “You know exactly what I mean.”
There was too much expectation in her grin for Albert’s liking. On the other hand, a grin, too, was basically good. Why ask questions and risk breaking the mood?
The same thought occurred to him three and a half hours later, on the sagging mattress of a motel over whose front door the word Gasthof floated in black letters against a light-blue ground, as Violet sat on him, naked, rotating her hips. But there was one question he simply couldn’t suppress: about the pill he hoped she hadn’t forgotten to take. Violet just laughed, leaned over him, licked his upper lip. Which hardly reassured him. Forgotten pills were a by-no-means-insignificant part of their common past, as were small-hour journeys back and forth across the Bavarian uplands in search of the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy, and the patronizing commentaries of the smart-aleck pharmacists who’d clearly never made a single mistake in their whole lives, and finally, forty-eight hours in the company of an unbearable Violet, plagued by nausea and intestinal cramps, cursing, sweating, and smelling oddly of leeks.
Almost Everything Very Fast Page 21