Almost Everything Very Fast (27 page)

In 1930, on the night before their wedding, Anni and Arkadiusz stole away and rushed to their new home. There my sister sang and danced for Arkadiusz in a dress with beige ruffles, which she’d put on for only one purpose: so that he could tear it off. The way the rough fabric scratched her skin made her feel as though she had sloughed off a redundant Yesterday and slipped into a fresh, form-fitting Now. Only once did she interrupt her swaying dance and stand listening, because she thought for a moment she’d heard a strange, yet familiar, voice. Mine. She breathed Arkadiusz’s scent, which he renewed every time he immersed himself in the Moorsee, and his breath told her that deep inside him many good things were sleeping. Naked, she sang out his name, and there were as many ways to pronounce it as there were reasons to love Arkadiusz Kamil Driajes.

She’d brought him to Segendorf as a stranger, anticipating the usual: suspicious glances, shouts of “Klöble,” and brandished pitchforks.

And rightly so. Not five minutes after they’d crossed the borders of the village, the innkeeper spat on the floor at Arkadiusz’s feet, Blacksmith Schwaiger applauded, and a somebody with an angry scowl motioned Anni away from him. And what did Arkadiusz do? He let go of Anni’s hand, made for the somebody, and before the latter knew what was happening, took his hand. Arkadiusz gave it a hearty shake, with his slightly inclined servant’s posture, and congratulated the somebody on his divine farmhouse. Since Anni was well aware of how horribly brawls in Segendorf tended to end, she shut her eyes. As no savage fracas followed, she hazarded a second look: Blacksmith Schwaiger had stopped applauding, the somebody was still gripping Arkadiusz’s hand, and the expression on his face was remarkably friendly, given that a Pole had stepped into Segendorf without warning, holding hands with the somebody’s adopted daughter—a bit skeptical, yes, but with sympathy beginning to flash from the corners of his eyes.

That night he allowed Arkadiusz to sleep on a heap of straw in the barn, and the night after that, by the hearth in the parlor.

And that was by no means all. In December Markus and his gang tipped a bucket of pig’s blood over Arkadiusz’s head, and found the whole business rather comical; but as soon as January, they were helping him tear down the ruins of our old house—a demonstration of his breath-holding trick had made a deep impression on them. In March, though the thaw had barely set in, half the town was sawing, hammering, and drilling, putting up a new home for the couple-to-be.

For Arkadiusz, it was all just a matter of patience. Segendorfers were no different from fish in a frozen lake; to catch them, all you needed to do was stand watch long enough at the hole in the ice. He said hello and hello and hello, smiled and smiled and smiled, begged and begged and begged, asked and asked and asked. For days, sometimes weeks at a time, people would pay him no attention at all, and he simply held his breath. If he’d learned anything at the Circus Rusch, it was this: to carry on. Generally speaking, the supply of human patience was limited—but his own was infinite. Eventually he always reached the point where someone would return his greeting, his smile, do him a kindness, give him an answer. And then he’d seize the moment, and catch his fish.

For Anni, on the other hand, Arkadiusz was and remained a shape-shifter. As such, he could assume any form that would bring him some benefit: for Farmer Obermüller’s widow, he was Farmer Obermüller, and for the somebodies, he was a well-bred lackey. For Anni herself, Arkadiusz was sometimes our mother or our father, when he held her close; sometimes me, when he romped around with her; sometimes a recalcitrant child, when she tried to teach him to read and write; and sometimes merely a mellow thirty-four-year-old man.

For those who were able to look a little deeper, Arkadiusz was simply a foreigner. Someone whom Segendorf was willing to tolerate because they were happy finally to be getting rid of Anni—daughter of the Habom siblings, who’d murdered Nick Habom and been burned alive in their own house—a fourteen-year-old girl with a fanatical need to clean her body, who’d stripped Markus of half his scalp, who wandered through the wilderness, who played with Mina the Klöble. A bad match for any man. What a relief that her love had struck someone from elsewhere!

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.

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, Violet 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.