Almost Everything Very Fast (35 page)

Even ten months after Alfonsa had lost her child, no one was able to convince her to step out into the open. The growing worry and helplessness among the nuns led to the decision to transfer Alfonsa to Saint Helena. Since the end of the war, the alpine cloister had become famous for its success in treating and curing all sorts of illnesses.

Alfonsa expressed her disappointment that they were sending her away by not saying “Sister” even once. During the drive to Saint Helena she hid herself under a wool blanket on the backseat, took one sleeping pill after another, and ignored every offer by the nuns to pause at a rest stop so she could stretch her legs or use the bathroom.

Two days after her arrival, Alfonsa appeared in my room. I turned my wheelchair away from the window to inspect her: a redheaded twenty-year-old with an expressionless face, stepping silently over to my bed.

“We haven’t been introduced,” I said, friendly, and extended my hand. “Ludwig Wickenhäuser.”

She ignored the hand and said, “Sister Alfonsa,” while quickly and efficiently replacing the bedsheets.

I made another attempt: “Alfonsa means ‘Ready for battle,’ no?”

She paused for a moment, then resumed beating the pillow even harder.

“How do you like Helena so far?”

“A dream.”

“You’ll settle in soon. Where do you come from?”

“From out there.”

“Did you always want to be a nun?”

“Yes. You, too?”

“I guess you’ve decided not to make any friends, hmm?”

“Not with a cripple, anyway.”

I rolled over and planted myself in her path. “I’m not one of your sisters. Get ahold of yourself, and don’t make this unnecessarily difficult. I mean to live for a few more years—so let’s try to get along. Because as far as I know, Sister Alfonsa, you couldn’t leave this place even if you felt like it.”

She pressed the dirty sheets to her chest, stepped around the wheelchair, and slammed the door behind her.

Our next encounters passed without a word. She thought I wouldn’t be able to tell, but I was familiar with women like her from way back. They didn’t spare so much as a look for the people, especially the men, whom they liked, or the women they compared themselves to, and simply turned away from them, thereby making it all the more obvious how much they longed to be spoken to and embraced. After so many quiet years I was excited to see if I could make this lady with her thin lips smile.

One evening after sunset I asked Alfonsa to come with me into the orchard to pick apples.

“It’s dark,” she said.

“I know,” I said, rolling outside and beckoning her to follow.

She remained standing at the door, watching me.

“Come on,” I called.

Even back then my eyes were well past their prime, but unless I was very much mistaken she hesitated slightly at the threshold, before disappearing.

From then on I invited her each evening to come into the orchard with me. And each evening she turned me down—but stood there looking after me a little longer every time.

Almost two months passed before, one night when the crescent moon was especially thin, she took a first step outside.

“One more,” I encouraged her. “Just a little one.”

So we edged our way forward, night after night. The other nuns trusted me, and gave me a free hand. In my thirty-six years there I’d never once tried to approach one of them, and they had no idea what I’d been like before. After so much time, I barely knew myself.

Winter had long since arrived, and there were no more apples to pick, when Alfonsa finally stepped all the way out to my wheelchair.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“How did you know I could do it?”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “But I figured, when the air is black, it swallows up space, the whole sky, and makes the outdoors feel much smaller.”

She looked around. “It’s as if I were in a room. A very, very big room.”

“What you decide to believe is always the truth.”

“Thank you, Ludwig.” Even now, there was no emotion visible in her face. “I owe you one.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re doing better. That’s reward enough.”

“I owe you one,” she repeated seriously.

“What could a young woman like you do for a sixty-eight-year-old?”

Alfonsa suppressed a comment. “Don’t you want anything? Anything at all? There must be something.”

I replied: “Uhh-ehh.”

I should have simply asked her for a smile. Instead I suggested she accompany me on my nightly rides. Around the convent. Counterclockwise.

We kept our conversations superficial, out of fear of giving too much importance to this relationship of ours. We were bound by our common experience of how dangerous it was to let someone get too close to you. That experience had brought us both to this place. We were outsiders at Saint Helena, we felt we’d been cheated out of a better life, but had come to terms with it. In another world, we would have been happier. In this one, we were learning to treasure the greatest possible happiness available to the unhappy: contentedness.

For my sixty-ninth birthday, in May 1982, Alfonsa gave me a cassette with her favorite songs by Frank Sinatra, and I had to confess to her that I didn’t own a tape player, whereupon she brought me her own after our walk that night, and plugged it in beside my bed and pressed “play.”
And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end, my fickle friend, the summer wind.

We sat facing each other, I on the wheelchair, she on the stool she always used when I gave her chess lessons, and listened to the music. Alfonsa’s upper body was leaning a bit to the side, her hands were folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the turning cogs in the cassette player. Even when she was more or less relaxed, she lived up to her name. I suddenly felt that she felt I was watching her, and I shut my eyes so that our gazes wouldn’t meet, and made as if I were concentrating on the music. Now I could feel that she was watching me, and didn’t dare open my eyes until the last track on side A ended with a heavy click. Alfonsa stood, flipped the tape to side B, pressed “play,” and asked, before Frank Sinatra started in again, if she could lie down next to me on the bed, just lie there next to me. I smiled for the both of us and said that wouldn’t work, and she nodded immediately, as if she’d expected that answer, and we went on listening.
Take (get a piece of) my (these) arms, I’ll never use them.

The next day when she came to make my bed, Alfonsa found my door locked. She knocked and called my name, but I simply stared at the shadow moving in the gap between the door and the floorboards, and said nothing. After a while she gave up and moved away, and I found the Mother Superior and asked her to assign me a different nun. It wasn’t Alfonsa’s fault, I explained, she simply reminded me of someone I didn’t want to be reminded of. I didn’t say that that someone was myself. The Mother Superior seemed to understand, and I left her feeling I’d done the right thing.

But that same evening, after dinner, Alfonsa followed me back to my room. “Why are you doing this?”

I acted surprised. “What have I done?”

“From tomorrow on I’m assigned to the kitchen.”

“Well?”

“Did you think I wanted something from you? Because of yesterday?”

“Interesting thought. How did you hit on that?”

“You’re old enough to be my grandfather!”

“Exactly.”

I’d never seen her so upset. Her lips were a thin, straight line, and so many unspoken emotions were swirling in her eyes that I would have liked to spend longer staring into them, reading them.

Instead, I asked, “Is there anything else?”

She left my room without another word, and I turned back to the window, through which a sudden gust of wind drove a flurry of light-pink petals. Footsteps approached, and even before I could turn again Alfonsa was standing beside me, leaning down, giving me a rough kiss. Then she plucked an apple blossom from my hair, showed me her smirk for the first time, and left.

I didn’t lock my door that evening. After midnight, when I was already stretched out in bed, I heard the door open, then close again. In the dark I couldn’t distinguish a thing. The sound of bare feet on a stone floor. The covers were lifted and a cool, slender body wrapped in a nightgown snuggled up to me. She laid her hand on my chest. Her breath grazed my throat.

“Sleep well,” she said.

“You, too,” I said.

The next morning I woke alone. I washed and dressed myself, wondering if I’d imagined it all.

At breakfast in the dining hall Alfonsa sat down across from me. “Sleep well?” she asked.

I looked at her. Her face was as expressionless as ever.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Very well, actually.”

She smirked again. “Me, too.”

This smirk was enough to make me ask myself, ask myself seriously, why on earth I hadn’t ever wanted this. Soon she visited me every night. Until I couldn’t fall asleep without feeling her body next to mine. Like teenagers we hid under the blankets and laughed into the pillows and whispered stories to each other and kissed with half-opened eyes. As aware as we were of the impossibility of our relationship, we were just as aware of the possibility of a bit of happiness. Probably, I thought, it would be the last of my life. Who would have chosen to forgo that?

“Can you feel that?” she asked.

I lay in the bathtub, it was nighttime, the only light came from a solitary candle doubled by my shaving mirror, and Alfonsa, who sat by the tub on the chess stool in her nightgown, rolled up one sleeve, dipped her hand into the water, and touched my ankles.

I shook my head.

Her hand wandered up my leg.

“What about that?”

Again, I shook my head.

“And that?”

This time I nodded.

Whenever we encountered each other by day in the hallways of Saint Helena, we’d make a promise with a nod of the head, one we’d fulfill when we met in secret after dark. It had been so many years; since my accident, I hadn’t touched a single woman like that. So I was all the more amazed at how simple and satisfying it was. Alfonsa came to appreciate the advantages of an experienced man, and I to appreciate her smirk in all its variations. Making love with her was like a gentle dance, not especially spirited, but proceeding in small, even steps, always looking each other in the eye. In me she saw her second happiness, and in her I saw my fourth love. I revealed my real name to her, and she her history to me. And it was only in the mornings, when her hair, so seductively red in the glow of each evening’s candles, turned suddenly traitorous by daylight, so that I had to spend hours searching my mattress for strays that might give us away—it was only then that I asked myself where all of this was leading.

It ended as it does so often: with a beginning. During our last evening stroll, in September 1982, Alfonsa told me that she was two months pregnant. As I didn’t immediately react to the news, she said, “You don’t seem surprised.”

I was sixty-nine years old, the son of twins, I came from a town where such terrible things had happened that nobody used its old name anymore, a Frenchwoman had turned me into a cripple, and last but not least, I was the father of innumerable children; I wasn’t so easily surprised any longer. But I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was going to abandon her now, and so I said, “Of course I am.”

Alfonsa looked at me from the corner of her eye, walking silently by my side. I felt sorry for her; she was so young, so inexperienced.

We stopped before the convent’s main entrance. I tried to sound as sensitive as possible. “We have to tell the others.”

And there, after months of waiting, I saw her
smile,
not smirk, for the first and only time. A pitying, honest, unlovely smile that I’d rather not have seen. “I already have.” She crouched down and took my hands. “We’ll definitely find a nice place for you.”

“For me?”

“There are a couple of good nursing homes in Bavaria.”

I pulled my hands away. “I’ve lived at Saint Helena for almost forty years!”

“You can’t stay here. How could the sisters tolerate a man in their midst who’d gotten one of them pregnant?”

“I don’t know,” I said, detecting a sulky tone in my voice I didn’t like. “But that’s my child as well.”

“Julius,” even considering it was her, she spoke with disturbingly little emotion, “do you want to raise this child? Do you want to change its diapers? Feed it? Do homework with it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” said Alfonsa, sitting down on the step before the door, leaning back, supporting herself with her elbows, and looking at the sky. Suddenly she didn’t seem so young and inexperienced anymore. “I might have, once. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’m not really cut out to be a mother.”

“Abortion?” I asked.

“Adoption,” she replied.

All of a sudden I felt very old and slow. “You’re going to give it away, just like that?”

“Him. I’m going to give him away,” she said. “We’re having a son.”