Almost Everything Very Fast (6 page)

He was about to flee the kitchen, in order to smoke a cigarette somewhere in secret, when Fred said, “You’ll have to dress yourself really well, though.”

Albert stood still. “Does that mean you’re actually going to show me?”

“It’s going to be soaking wet,” warned Fred. “From below
and
above!”

Albert nearly embraced Fred in relief, but held himself back, examining him. As always, Fred’s face wore an expression of childishly self-important seriousness, yet if Albert wasn’t mistaken, he could detect behind it an air of genuine worry, one so perturbing that he quickly looked away, and said, “Let’s go.”

On a hot August night at the height of the summer of 1912, the village of Segendorf celebrated its three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival.

Three hundred and eighty-seven years earlier, a wandering monk, expelled from his monastery, had paused for a rest at the highest point of the very same hill. He’d dozed off in the shade of a little grove of spruce trees. God had appeared to the monk in his dream, demanding he prove his devotion to his creator by sacrificing his Most Beloved Possession. A princely reward awaited him. So it happened that, after awakening, the desperate monk, banished to this thinly populated region of the alpine foothills, approached the rocky bluff on the south side of the hill, drew out a bronze chalice (which he’d purloined from his former monastery as compensation, so to speak, for his exile), and, after a brief hesitation, allowed it to tumble down into the abyss. He waited. For a sign. Waited. And doubted. Then, at last, a delicate, tinny
pling
came echoing up over the lip of the cliff. There should have been a
plong,
bronze against stone, a
plong,
absolutely—but instead, there followed a
pling-pling.
It was mocking him, that
pling-pling,
calling: Come look for me! Come on down! Come to me! And the monk heeded its call.

Down below, gleaming metal ran like a jagged scar through the stone. The monk caressed every inch of it, as if he were kissing the Holy Father’s Piscatory Ring. The newly uncovered vein of gold considerably eased his ascent from destitute drifter to bishop. He consecrated the spot, calling it Segenhügel, the Blessed Hill; and soon, thanks to the exploitation of its gold deposits, the village of Segendorf sprang up nearby. Before it had time to develop into a thriving community, however, Segendorf began to wither. On the one hand, the mine petered out within months; on the other, the landscape itself significantly contributed to the settlement’s ruin. Hereabouts there was little but fields scattered with scarlet corn poppies; the Moorbach, a piddling tributary that wound its way around the Segenhügel; lean game; and hostile grasses that sliced at your hands if you tried to pluck them. When the villagers decamped, the old, the sick, and the idiotic were left behind. Along with the tradition. At first the remaining Segendorfers celebrated the discovery of the gold mine each summer by flinging their Most Beloved Possessions over the edge of the cliff. But as too many animal cadavers had begun to pile up at the foot of the hill, contaminating the drinking water, they decided instead to kindle a sacrificial bonfire each year on the market square, so as to celebrate the ritual in a more civilized fashion.

Back then the population of Segendorf numbered no more than three hundred souls. Of course, there were barns and cowsheds and cesspits, the cobbler right next to the general store, the butcher just behind, and the smithy not much farther off; of course, Segendorf had a moor to the east and the west, and the sheer rock walls of the Alps to the south, and to the north, the sole road that led into the village (and ended there as well); and, of course, just beyond the town limits there was Wolf Hill, atop which an oak tree spread its limbs, and beneath which local women were knocked up every year when spring rolled around. But for anyone who took the map as gospel, Segendorf didn’t exist at all. The place had barely changed since its founding. Light was still generated with sulfur matchsticks, candles, or torches, the people still scrubbed their clothes in the Moorbach, and the next parish was a ten-day march away. The residents first heard about World War I only after it had been lost.

In 1912 all the villagers gathered in the market square, as they did every year, formed a spiraling line, and, one by one, hurled something dear to their hearts onto the flaming pyre of high-piled brushwood. The flames swallowed them noisily, rewarding those assembled with warmth and light.

That same night, in the granary—Segendorf’s largest structure, after the church—a secret was conceived. Among sacks bursting with oats, wheat, poppy seeds, and barley, sacks that in the gloom resembled limbless torsos, fourteen-year-old Josfer Habom explored the body of his sister, Jasfe, with his lips; and although both felt unbearably hot, they trembled as if there were a killing frost.

It was said that no Segendorfer could compete with my parents’ beauty. So tantalizing was Jasfe’s glance, so striking Josfer’s dimpled chin, that the pair were never invited to weddings, lest the bride or groom begin to have second thoughts about the business at hand.

Anne-Marie Habom, my grandmother, had died giving birth to the twins, and my grandfather Nick Habom, one of Segendorf’s numerous hunters, and a considerably unattractive man, concerned himself only with putting enough food on the table and making sure that the two had a warm bed to sleep in. He never said more than was absolutely necessary. He was respected for that. In spite of his dwarfish stature, Nick was a man who loomed large in people’s memories. Many maintained that the vertical crease between his eyebrows divided not merely his forehead but also the compartments into which he sorted mankind: those whom he liked—and the rest, among whom he numbered his children. Just recently, he’d broken Josfer’s nose because the latter’s hand had slid between his sister’s thighs while they were bathing—“Don’t put your hands on each other!” he’d bellowed. Since then, Josfer’s beauty had been marred. But Nick’s harshness drove the two children even closer together. Though they didn’t dare oppose him openly, and kept their hands to themselves, as he had ordered them to do, they nevertheless took advantage of every minute they were alone to secretly rub their pale bodies against each other. Until they were crimson.

On the night of the three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival, the pair stole away and raced to the granary. Sneezing, they undressed themselves in the dusty air, tied their hands together behind their backs, and fondled each other with their feet, caressed each other with their noses, kindled each other with their tongues. They smelled sweetly of elderberries, and holy water, and down pillows aired in the west wind.

The next morning Jasfe was seized with elation. While outside a warm wind scattered the ashes of the Most Beloved Possessions that lay charred in the market square, spinning gray-black dust devils through vegetable gardens, inflaming eyes and coating windowpanes with sooty muck, she felt a pleasurable tingling beneath her belly button that grew stronger and refused to fade, as if Josfer were still kissing that spot, and would be forever.

In the months that followed, Jasfe concealed her swelling belly from curious eyes. Her dread of her father was surpassed only by the fear that she might give birth to a Klöble.

When it came to begetting children, Segendorfers weren’t always choosy. It frequently happened that somebody’s brother was also his cousin, or somebody’s daughter also her sister. Quite a few local families had produced a “Klöble”—a “clumsy, stupid fellow.” Mothers of such children were spat upon. They were accused of having no pride, of having seduced their own fathers, sons, brothers, because—hideous, impudent, and slothful as they were—no other man would take them. Klöbles were known for chewing sorrel all day long, fiddling with themselves shamelessly in public, and playing patty-cake with cow dung. They also argued passionately among themselves about whether God existed, somebody none of them had ever seen; and about why nobody believed in them, the Klöbles, although they were easily visible. And whether, perhaps, they wouldn’t be visible any longer, once people started believing in them. The incest had another side effect, though—it helped Segendorf remain hidden behind a wall that had never been built: anyone who wanted to could have seen and entered the town. But nobody from elsewhere wanted to see it. Much less enter it.

In spite of her fear of having a Klöble, Jasfe would, of course, still love such a child; that’s what she told herself, and what Josfer told her—but a perfectly healthy child would be easier to love.

For five long months she wore a shawl wrapped tightly as a corset around her belly, and endured the pain. Only then did she decide to confess the pregnancy to their father. She searched carefully for the appropriate words, weighing one sentence after another for days, until she saw that the right moment had come.

While Josfer checked the toad traps in the swamp, Jasfe sat down beside Nick on the wooden bench in front of their house. In the evening light her father picked filth from beneath his nails with a hunting knife, and whistled a melancholy tune. Jasfe gathered her courage and spoke her first sentence. She spoke her second sentence. She spoke her third and fourth and fifth sentences. And after she’d spoken her last sentence, she waited. Calmly, Nick laid the knife down beside him, pressed his lips together, drew a deep breath, and grabbed her by the neck. Only then could she see the minuscule tears slipping down his face. Silently he increased the pressure. Black spots flecked her vision, multiplied, melted together, and she tumbled into a lightless void.

When she came to, she was lying alone in the mud by the wooden bench. And later that evening, she was unable to hide from her brother the pale purple bruises on her throat.

From the next hunting trip with his father, only Josfer returned.

Nick was never found, and the twins never spoke about what had happened out on the moor. It was said in the village that Nick had been smothered by quicksand, and because he’d been unpopular in Segendorf, nobody asked any questions.

From then on, my parents shared a bed every night. Soon they couldn’t sleep unless they were lying naked beside one another, each with a hand resting on the other’s sex. Their hands were comforting shields—intimate, impermeable.

I came into the world on a rainy day in May 1913. For a long time my parents couldn’t agree on a name, so they finally chose one that reminded them of their own: Julius. At my birth I emitted only a single scream, prolonged and furious. Then I piped down, struggling for a while in silence, waving my arms. The midwife worried I might suffocate—she didn’t understand that I was merely underwhelmed by the world into which I’d been hatched.

Three years later, at the birth of my sister, Anni, who was christened with the name of her grandmother, the screaming was shrill and continued for hours on end, until Anni, alongside our equally exhausted parents, at last fell asleep.

Even as a child my high forehead was flat, and my eyes lay too deep in their sockets for my taste, but my mother said they had a tantalizing glitter that made people want to grab them; my mouth was a little too small, my nose a little too wide, and my ears stood out just enough for people to smile but not laugh at them.

The fact that I was Anni’s brother would have escaped even a careful observer; our differences were more conspicuous than our similarities. Anni’s skin was as pale as mine was only on those spots that the light never touched. The curls of her hair, which reached all the way to her elbows, seemed wholly unmanageable, and the crown of her head rose no farther than my chin. Her mouth was bracketed, halfway to her earlobes, by a pair of dimples, which stubbornly persisted even when she wasn’t grinning or laughing, and the sight of her lips often reminded me of the words of Cobbler Gaiger, who in addition to footwear also produced remarkably sturdy fishing rods: “They’re as round as a fish’s.”

Everyone in Segendorf, apart from the Klöbles, had a clear idea of who’d fathered Anni and me, but our parents didn’t care that they were always the last ones served at the tavern, or given the leanest sausage at the butcher’s. And for two good reasons: neither Anni nor I was a Klöble.

So we grew up surrounded by the suspicion and malice of our peers, whose parents had filled them with grotesque, but essentially true, stories about Jasfe and Josfer. While we were in the crib, they’d pinch our bellies when our parents weren’t looking; as we took our first steps, they’d trip us, or push us into the mud; as we learned to lace our dirndls or button our shirts, the scornful, mistrustful looks of other mothers, mimicked by their children
,
nipped in the bud any hope of playing a single round of Fangamandl; and once we’d reached the age when we blushed if anyone saw us bathing in the Moorbach, people would steal our underwear. It didn’t take long for us to resign ourselves to our fate, the two of us exploring the cliff on our own to look for gold, running races together on a bet to the oak on Wolf Hill, or playing who-can-fill-the-cup-with-spit-first?