Almost Everything Very Fast (26 page)

Every morning the risk grew that he might run into his mother on the open street. And what then?

He slunk from his native village, covered with dirt. And swore to himself he wouldn’t return till he’d made his fortune.

With his last piece of silver he traveled to the Baltic Sea and signed on with a shrimp boat. Never once had any of his siblings managed to outfish him
,
and more often than not he’d even trumped his father. Arkadiusz possessed neither unusual baits nor a nose for propitious casting spots; he used common green flies that he found on the dunghills, and sat himself down by the water at whichever place happened to be closest. His success was just a question of time. It didn’t matter how stormy the weather, how many other anglers were splashing around to his right and his left, how far the mercury sank below zero—Arkadiusz waited. Once he’d decided to fill his bucket with trout, perch, salmon, the fish didn’t have a chance. They simply had less patience than he did. However, he had a difficult time conveying the value of this talent to the Prussian fishermen on the Baltic. When for the fourth successive time they found him still snoring in his bunk during working hours, the crew tossed him overboard.

As he was borne away by the waves, he watched the boat pulling off, and for the first time in his life felt hopelessly alone. There’s no sense in living, he thought, I’ll never amount to anything—and exhaling, he let all his muscles go slack and sank down into the frigid sea. His saturated clothing pulled him under, water smothered the moonlight, rushed into his ears, and he grew colder and colder, but the stream of bubbles spluttering upward from his nose and mouth simply didn’t give out, no matter how much he blew and snorted. Just when he felt as though his head was about to burst, his feet brushed up against something yielding, uneven. He stretched his hand out into that utter darkness, digging his fingers into grainy sand and silt. He’d reached the seafloor. The air was still streaming out of him, wherever it was coming from. This could take quite a while yet, he thought—maybe it’s a sign. Maybe it’s not supposed to end today?

Arkadiusz waited a little longer, just to be sure, but even after he’d counted out another minute in his head, he didn’t feel the need to draw breath, and so he pushed off from the bottom and swam back toward the surface, then into the harbor.

The Circus Rusch had erected its tents in the vicinity of the fishing village. Arkadiusz’s sopping clothes still clung to his body as, shivering, he begged for an audition with the circus director. A clown with hair as red as a rowan berry, bare chest, baggy pants, and a squeaky voice led him—turning somersault after somersault—to a miniature bathtub. Foam sloshed over its rim, its water steamed. Arkadiusz would’ve given anything to be able to plunge himself into it. When the clown left him alone, he looked quickly around, and dipped one hand into the hot water.

“Pfui!”
called a squashed sort of voice, and Arkadiusz whipped his hand from the water as if he’d been scalded. Behind the tub stood a dwarf, a towel wrapped around his waist, a bathing cap on his head.

“Who are you?” asked Arkadiusz.

“Who are
you?
” replied the dwarf, crossing his arms.

“My name is Arkadiusz, and I want to talk to the director.”

“The boss, eh? Well, you’re looking at him.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Oh sure,” said the dwarf, “just a bit of circus humor: me, a half-pint, the boss. Ha-ha.”

“Well, can I see him, then?”

“Irony, kid. Where did you grow up?”

“Poland. On the East Prussian border.”

“Big surprise.” He straightened his bathing cap. “All right, what do you want?”

“I want to join the circus.”

The director’s bushy eyebrows drifted upward. “And why, pray tell, should
your
name be up on a marquee?”

Arkadiusz smiled; he’d thought this through carefully. “I never come back from a fishing trip empty-handed.”

“My, my, remarkable. We can build you a big vat of water, set you on a pedestal beside it, and show the audience how you catch pike after pike.”

“Really? You’ll take me?”

“Tell me, kid, how have you managed to survive this long?” The circus director made a sweeping gesture, and suddenly held a coin in his pudgy little hand. “Here, for you. And now shove off. My bath’s getting cold.”

Arkadiusz fought back an impulse to snatch the gleaming coin. “Wait a minute! That isn’t all!”

The director removed his towel. Arkadiusz glanced away.

“What? It’s just my third leg.” He laughed.

Arkadiusz met the director’s gaze. “I can do something you’ve never seen before.”

“I’ve seen
everything.
”

“Not this. I can hold my breath.”

At that the director’s gaze, already narrow by nature, grew narrower yet. “Me, too. And I’ve already done it much too long today.”

“I can hold my breath for a very long time. Very, very long!”

“How long?”

“Well … I’m not sure.”

“So you’d like to be the Incredible Pole who doesn’t know how long he can hold his breath?”

Arkadiusz drew a deep breath, leaned forward, and stuck his head into the tub. Underwater he counted the seconds, bubbles clinging to his face, the bitter taste of soap on his tongue, his eyes burning; and every time he reached the point when he thought he’d have to surface, to give up, he tensed his diaphragm and released a few more reserves of oxygen.

The director didn’t interfere. He simply stood there with his mouth hanging open, watching bubble after bubble after bubble burst.

Four minutes and forty-three seconds later, Arkadiusz wasn’t Arkadiusz Kamil Driajes anymore, but rather ARKADIUSZ THE FOUR-MINUTE-AND-FORTY-THREE-SECOND MAN. For years he toured with the Circus Rusch, first through the German Empire, and later the Weimar Republic, holding his breath in a huge glass bell jar constructed expressly for him, before anxious adults and astonished children. Since all performances took place in the afternoon and evening, he could usually sleep in. He saved the lion’s share of his pay for his eventual homecoming. In letters to his mother and siblings—which, since he was illiterate, he dictated to his boss, in exchange for a third of his wages—he described the Cologne cathedral, the Leipzig city hall, Munich’s Frauenkirche; he recited hilarious and heartrending anecdotes from his wild nights out, which struck him as trite and banal as soon as they’d been written out on paper; he rhapsodized about his passionate love affair with THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING, a contortionist, who could balance herself on two fingers; he praised Bavarian wheat beer, lamented his breakup with THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING, and cited with disgust the various hateful slogans with which their circus wagons had been smeared in the course of their travels:
“Wer nicht zum deutschen Volk gehört, der bleibt nicht lange unversehrt”;
he didn’t mention that, thanks to the inflation, people were paying millions for a sack of potatoes, briquettes, a jacket, a pair of decent shoes or pants, which meant that they didn’t have money to treat themselves to an hour or so in a drafty patchwork tent that stank of sawdust and horse apples; instead, he claimed the circus was doing so well that he stoked his stove with twenty-thousand-mark notes that fluttered around in his wagon like confetti; moreover, he bragged about how he’d already mastered the German language, and told them how people salaciously misinterpreted his stage name, and how since the Treaty of Versailles no German walked the streets with his head held high.

He never received any answering letters. “Circus people,” the boss asserted, once again having emptied a bottle of redcurrant schnapps all by himself, “have no settled address. They drag around from place to place. From wallet to wallet.”

All of this came to an end with the stock market crash in 1929. Coming in from the west, Black Thursday sloshed across Europe like a wave, and turned into Schwarzer Freitag. Numerous performances were canceled. The circus schlepped through the boondocks for a few more weeks, the audience numbers plummeted, and finally the boss put everyone on unpaid leave. At that point they were camped in Schweretsried. For a few days Arkadiusz had been tormentedly considering whether or not he should try his luck alone. He had finally received a letter from his mother; in it, she complained of how badly the family had been doing since the last, ill-fated harvest, and stressed how much she was relying on his support. During a conversation at the Iron Pine Tavern, he overheard rumors of a monk and a vein of gold and a village hidden far out on the moor. They told him the people out there weren’t kindly disposed to strangers—which didn’t disturb him at all, he wasn’t looking for friends. His head held a single word, tolling as loud as a church bell:
GOLD.
And it boomed louder every day that passed without wages. Until, plagued by the thought that somewhere far away his family was starving, he made a decision.

It was hard for him to leave the circus troupe. The boss promised him he could come back anytime, THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING gave him a French kiss, and HANS THE TATTOOED SNAKE insisted that he wasn’t crying, there was just something in his eye.

During those first days of his journey south, Arkadiusz spent more time crying than not; he was alone again, he’d left both his real and his adopted family behind. The only thing that kept his spirits up was that gold-golden vein of gold; it drove him onward, deeper onto the moor. At night by the campfire, he gnawed on the perch he’d caught, and dreamed of returning to his homeland as a savior.

A convoy of automobiles pulls to a halt before his parents’ house, and his siblings flock around him, shouting for joy, as he leads his mother, nearly fainting with pride, from car to car, presenting her with wine from Champagne, beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea, lynx pelts from the Pyrenees, and gold bars, each stamped with his personal seal: a fisherman.

Two weeks later Arkadiusz arrived in Segendorf. He took that for a good omen. Cheerfully, he walked into the tavern, ordered a wheat beer, and told a walleyed barmaid about the gold. Her jaw dropped, she clapped her hands gleefully, and ran outside. A moment later, she returned with a gray-haired couple, likewise walleyed. Her parents said they’d be happy to assist him on his treasure hunt, very happy. When could they begin? Tomorrow? Today?

Now?

Arkadiusz had never been one of the quickest, but he wasn’t
that
slow, either. In the first pair of eyes he saw how they’d follow him to the gold and help him dig it up; in the second, how they’d hold the gleaming stones up to the sun and perform a dance of joy; and in the third, how they’d knock his head in with a shovel, and bury him out on the moor.

Arkadiusz excused himself, saying he had to use the latrine, and left Segendorf as quickly as he could.

He came across the Moorsee during his forays through the underbrush, and used it thereafter as both food source and landmark. Swimming in it reminded him of the moment when he’d nearly rendered his life to the Baltic. Since then he’d changed greatly—he wore a full beard, he had been initiated into love by female devotees of THE FOUR-MINUTE-AND-FORTY-THREE-SECOND MAN throughout the republic, and now—the gold, the goal, his triumph clearly visible—he was shortly to return to his homeland, a hero.

Each day that passed with no sign of the gold vein, without even a trace of the stone through which said vein might run, didn’t dampen his spirits, but heightened his sense of euphoria. Indefatigable, he clambered up trees, dove to the bottom of the Moorsee, dug through the soil, and collected every suspicious pebble. Again and again he forgot to go fishing, since each night in his dreams he found himself feasting at tables heaped high with food.

His quest would have ended unhappily if one day he hadn’t spotted a plump young woman on the snow-flocked surface of the frozen Moorsee. A little voice inside him, which sounded suspiciously like the boss’s, began grousing, saying he shouldn’t let some little provincial floozy throw him offtrack, the golden prize was close enough to touch! But Arkadiusz kept looking at the girl. Each of her gestures seemed perfection itself, and woke in him the desire to touch her. The way she tapped her boots, and skidded across the ice, and smoothed back her hair—so beautiful, so simple!

Later, he sought out the place where she’d been sitting, and found a red spot in the white. He carefully carved out the drop of blood, carried the snowball back to his camp, and regarded it thoughtfully. As dawn broke he punched a hole through a thin spot in the Moorsee’s ice, undressed himself, and slipped into the water. He hadn’t thought any of this through; as he glided with strong strokes through the frigid black, he hoped that some idea would come to him.

All that came was a desire to see the girl again.

It was fulfilled a few days later. She had followed him into the forest, and now she stood not five steps away from him. After that, everything went much too fast: he said something, she said something, he moved closer, smelled her, her scent, so real, and she spoke, and he spoke, and touched a lock of her hair, and then she said more and more and more, uncanny things that filled him with fear and in which she lost herself, which rose around her like a wall, an enclosure of evil that he had to tear down by slapping her, and once he’d done it he couldn’t pull his hand from her cheek, her pink cheek, and when she slapped him in return she couldn’t take her hand from his beard, even stroked it with her finger, her index finger, briefly, he felt it, while he looked into her eyes and she looked into his, and he recognized the bottom of the sea, felt it on his cheek and with his fingers, and pushed off, saying, “Anni,” rushing toward the surface again, up, higher, breaking through the surface, filling his lungs with air and his heart with Anni’s voice.