Almost Everything Very Fast (17 page)

This change did not go unnoticed. One evening, the bedroom door was cracked wider than usual. I hesitated not one moment, only took a deep breath, and went in to her. I lay down beside her. Maybe, I thought, on that next-to-last night in Segendorf I’d actually crawled deep enough into myself, and now I’d emerged in that other, that wondrous place? She touched me only once, stroking my face before she fell asleep, with a motherly “Uhh-ehh,” giving me a warm moment in which I felt so at home, suspended in that letterless silence, that for the first time I was able to drift off without missing Anni.

My first love was, at the same time, my shortest. The next morning, a faint autumn morning, she lay stiff and cold beside me. I noticed it immediately on waking, but clenched my eyes shut and clung to her. Until the afternoon, I barely moved. The fall of her hair shimmered silver, her pale skin, generously strewn with age spots and birthmarks, made me think of porcelain. She smelled bitter, rancid, with a fading undertone of sweetness. Her eyes were open, and gleamed with every color from hazel to mossy green. I shut them, passing my hand across her face, feeling furrows and crow’s-feet, and dimples like Anni’s, and couldn’t look away, nor bring myself to give her a farewell kiss on the cheek.

The feeling of having to do something finally drove me from the bed. Anything would work, as long as it distracted me. I decided to cook. I went to fetch firewood. I hacked up five logs. And another ten for later. I lit a bundle of dry grass and stuffed it among the wood. I went to fetch water. A little brook snaked its way through the forest, five minutes distant. That day, I made it there in only three. By the time I got back, the fire was already blazing. I put the pot on, poured in some water, threw in a handful of lentils. And another. And another. Waited for it to boil. Softly, I said “Else” to myself, and felt scared by how unearthly it sounded—I tossed even more lentils into the water. And then it was finally boiling, and I scooped lentils from the pot with my bare hand, scalded myself and screamed, and sampled them anyway, and they were hard and grainy and tasted like nothing.

I forgot the pot, the fire, the lentils, slipped in beside Else again, and pressed my face into the pillow. I wouldn’t weep—I’d wept for my parents, I wouldn’t weep for Else, too. As long as I wasn’t crying, it couldn’t all be so bad. Only, my eyes didn’t know that. I drove my face deeper and deeper into the down pillow, until it was just a damp piece of fabric. Water on the pillow, nothing more. And Else was only resting, sure: just taking a little nap. I plucked every daisy I could find, and slipped them one after another into Else’s hair, until it looked as if they were sprouting from her head.

Toward evening I began to feel that Else’s smell had changed. The odor of grease had grown more dominant.

“Uhh-ehh,” I said to her. “Can you say that? Just once. Say Uhh-ehh one more time.”

I put my ear to her lips, and listened.

“Tell me. Uhh-ehh.”

I pressed closer.

“Uhh?”

As close as I could.

“Ehh?”

The next morning I stuck into my nostrils two scraps of fabric I’d torn from a rag, and cooked the morning bowl of lentils for Else; around noon I brought her a second helping, that evening the last, and once night fell I dumped all the cold lentils down the latrine. I began to tidy up the cabin, washing the window, eliminating the cobwebs, scrubbing the pots and bowls, polishing the flatware, and airing out the wardrobe. My new home should be shipshape, clean. Since Else had fallen into a deep sleep, I spent the night in the armchair again, ate barely anything, and looked forward to her awakening. Patience, it was all just a question of patience, of time, until she’d call me to her side. Soon.

How much time passed before footsteps approached and the door was opened? The leaves of the lindens and beeches had flushed to a fiery red. Cold seeped into the cabin through knotholes and cracks in the wood. I shivered in spite of the moth-eaten sheepskin I’d thrown around myself, having decided that an old woman like Else was in greater need of the blanket.

Wickenhäuser paid me no mind as he stepped into the cabin, hurled open the bedroom door, and froze. I stumbled over to him. As far as I could see, Wickenhäuser wasn’t breathing, wasn’t even blinking. For a couple of seconds he looked like a gravedigger. Then his face bloomed crab-red again and the piggy little eyes fixed themselves on me, a pale, emaciated boy who stood swaying beside him.

“Is she awake?” I asked.

Wickenhäuser grabbed me, threw his thick arms around me, and pulled me so powerfully against his round, firm gut that it drove all the air from my lungs.

White light stabbed at my eyes. I woke in a bright room. Attempting to free myself from the two blankets lying heavily on my chest, I tumbled from the bed and crawled, since I could barely feel my legs, to the window. Grabbing the curtain, I hauled myself up, and looked outside.

It was pitch-dark. Turning back to the room, I noticed a candle flame imprisoned in a glass ball. I’d never seen a lightbulb before. To me, it was fire that lived without oxygen. Holding myself upright with the help of a chair, I teetered over to the door, lost my balance, made a grab for the knob, slipped sideways, and slumped to the floor again. It cost me a good deal of strength to pull myself back onto the chair. Panting, I rested a minute. Now, with my back to the room, I looked up at the wall and the golden switch protruding from it. I bent forward, pressed it, and the sun went out. I screamed in terror, groped for the switch, shoved my thumb against it—it grew bright. I stared at the candle flame in the glass ball and pressed the switch again. The light was extinguished. I pressed. The light flared up. Pressed—on. Pressed—off.

Distracted by my discovery, I didn’t notice the door being pushed open. The sight of Wickenhäuser’s fat, crab-red face surprised me, I fell from the chair, and shadows sprang at me from all directions, blocking my ears, shutting my eyes. Before I hit the ground, my shoulder struck the switch: night. Dark. Out.

When I opened my eyes again, I lay in bed. Sunbeams slipped in through the window. Real sunbeams. Wickenhäuser sat on a chair watching me.

“You look like one of my clients,” he said.

I pointed to the lamp above him. “What’s that?”

“Electric light.”

“Electric …”

“How are you feeling?”

“Are you rich?”

“Don’t answer a question with another question. That’s impolite.”

“You are rich.”

“How would you know?”

“The innkeeper in Segendorf is rich. When you ask him if he’s rich, he always dodges the question, too.”

“Better go back to sleep, you little rascal.”

“What’s a rascal?”

“Sleep!”

Thanks to his business with the dead, Nathaniel Wickenhäuser was one of the few who had profited from the world war. Not just soldiers, but many of those left behind, whose hearts and thoughts had accompanied their sons, husbands, fathers to the front, had died as well. The inflation hadn’t harmed him either, since death didn’t take a break, even in the midst of an economic crisis—on the contrary, he put in overtime. In spite of the lucrative business, however, Wickenhäuser owned only Hoss, his mule, and a carriage on which there was just room enough for a single coffin. Wickenhäuser didn’t hold with automobiles. They were unreliable. He preferred to obtain his coffins from the countryside, where they were cheapest. He particularly esteemed the specimens from Segendorf, because of the quality of their wood, for which reason (as well as the waiting bed of Master Baker Reindl) he undertook these tedious trips. Behind their hands, people called him the Jew of Schweretsried. Wickenhäuser knew it; stepping into a pub, he sensed instinctively who among those present thought that about him, but Wickenhäuser didn’t mind, the role appealed to him. Wickenhäuser liked the Jews. And their suits. Secretly he dreamed of traveling to Paris one day, and there, in a shop on the Champs-Elysées, having an elegant frock coat cut for himself. Although he could easily have afforded a more favorable location, his own shop was all the way at the far end of the Marktstrasse. He appreciated the symbolism. His apartment, in which he spent two weeks nursing me back to health, was directly above the establishment. Three times a day he’d knock at the door of the guest room, three times a day I’d tell him to come in—he’d bring me oatmeal, semolina, or a steaming bowl of soup—and three times a day I expected him to ask me to leave the house. With the exception of lentil soup, which I strictly refused even to taste, I ate voraciously, and didn’t leave a scrap behind. Meanwhile my face was filling out, and whenever I sat on the toilet—flushing fascinated me nearly as much as the light switch—the water beneath me splashed as if I were discharging stones. During the day I yearned to go out into the fresh air, but Wickenhäuser ordered me to stay in bed. “You rascal,” he said. “I’ll decide when you go out.”

“What does
rascal
mean?”

“It means
Julius,
more or less.”

“And what, more or less, does
Wickenhäuser
mean?”

He laughed. “Certainly not
rascal.
I’m not pretty enough for that. But you, you have the potential to become one.”

“But I don’t want that at all.”

“Go back to sleep!”

The first time Wickenhäuser let me out on my own was to go to Else’s funeral, and I didn’t have to be asked twice. For the occasion the undertaker laid out a black suit on the bed for me.

“It might not fit me,” I said.

“Trust me, my little rascal. I have a good eye for bodily dimensions.”

I was amazed: the sleeves weren’t overlong, nor did the suit pinch; there wasn’t even any need for provisional pinning or bunching. Nothing at all like my best and worst—since seldom worn and thus terrifically uncomfortable—lederhosen back in Segendorf, which had been pulled from the closet exclusively for Sunday Masses. I used to have to stuff hay into my formal leather shoes. I’d never before been able to break in my clothes before they’d started to reveal their defects, but this new funeral attire felt like sheer layers of colored air, not like cloth at all. And yet it protected me, this new outfit, disguised me, and allowed me to walk the road to the church without being noticed. So fascinated was I by my brand-new exterior that I ran after Wickenhäuser thoughtlessly, like a child following his father, and the town of Schweretsried flowed past me unnoticed, as if I’d traversed it already a thousand times.

Then, by Wickenhäuser’s side, I stepped into the parish church, and saw the casket. On its side a brass plate was mounted, upon which
ELSE
was etched in curving characters. So different from those lines of lentils, arranged with a shaking hand. In the cool air of the church hung the odors of wood polish, candle wax, and, above all, incense. There was no trace of grease, dried flowers, or bitterness.

I swallowed my tears. No one, especially not Wickenhäuser, was to know what I felt—I cried inside, didn’t squeeze the tears out of my eyes, but rather pulled them into my head, down my throat, and stowed them away in my belly.

On the way home after the funeral, Wickenhäuser said, “Let’s celebrate!” and we turned in at the Iron Pine Tavern; Wickenhäuser ordered for himself an ale and for me a sweet dumpling.

“Don’t make such a face, rascal.”

“I’m not sad,” I lied.

“Good,” he said, “neither am I,” not much better at lying.

“But she was your mother!”

“That’s what she always claimed, anyway.”

“If she wasn’t, why did you take care of her?”

“Me? It was you who took care of her!”

The ale and the dumpling arrived. For the first time in my life I tasted custard, it was almost like fresh honey, only much better, and while I delightedly shoved spoonful after spoonful into my mouth, Wickenhäuser described to me how for years on end his parents had prevented him from leaving the house: with stories about monsters that lived in the cities, with a crushing daily round of chores, and panicked screams if he ever so much as touched the latch without permission. After his father had died in the war, his mother had sat silent all day long, wrapped in her bridal gown, staring through the walls, and through Wickenhäuser. In the end, it wasn’t that he’d been fleeing
into
the great wide world, but fleeing
from
her.

“She hated me,” said Wickenhäuser.

“Why do you think that?”

“She made me feel as if I’d killed my father.”

“But he died in the war.”

Wickenhäuser heaved a that’s-just-how-she-was sigh.

“I don’t believe that a mother can actually hate her children,” I said.

“If that’s the case, how come you aren’t with yours?”

I didn’t say anything.

“My little rascal.” Wickenhäuser wiped a bit of vanilla custard from my chin with his napkin. “We’re all better off without our parents.”

That same night I shunted my memories of Else from the living to the dead side of things. It didn’t show much sense, letting thoughts of people who didn’t exist anymore make you sad.

December arrived, and with it the first frost, and the recognition that between Wickenhäuser and me there existed a sort of unspoken agreement. As long as I didn’t make a nuisance of myself, Wickenhäuser wouldn’t send me away. The undertaker was single, and appreciated the company. Every once in a while he invited over men who wore makeup like women, or a woman and a man who both wore makeup like women, or, rarely, just women without makeup. Such visits were as much of a passion for Wickenhäuser as a support for the bereaved. On many a Friday, but most often on Saturdays, before sunrise and from out of the foggy gray, they would step into the house, wrapped in long cloaks. On such occasions the fire leapt merrily in the hearth, and Wickenhäuser would recite new poems for his guests in his shrill voice, which I could hear all the way from where I lay up on the second floor: