Almost Everything Very Fast (7 page)

Yet sometimes I was, in fact, alone.

One summer evening I was gathering brushwood in a forest clearing when a pine-or sprucecone (I couldn’t tell them apart) struck me on the head. Above me the sky glowed an ominous pink. Five snickering boys came toward me through the bushes, their pockets bulging with pine-(or spruce-) cones.

“Heya, we just want to play,” shouted the smallest of them; his name was Markus, and his father ran a pig farm.

“I have to go home,” I said.

“You never want to play with us!” cried Markus.

The last time they’d played with me, they had stuffed my pants with stinging nettles. I said I was going now, and even as I did, I felt angry that my words sounded like an apology.

Markus was juggling a pair of cones. “We’re going to play ‘hunting’ now. We’re the hunters, get it? And you, you’re a wild boar.”

I clutched the brushwood to my chest, lowered my head, and ran. Three cones missed me by a hairbreadth, a fourth hit me on the neck. I dropped the wood. From behind me: jeering, screaming, clattering. As long as I kept up my pace, I could outdistance them, I thought, simply keep running, leaping, sidestepping. Trees sprang up in my path, branches threw themselves at my feet, sunbeams blinded me—but I didn’t stumble. The voices and noises remained behind me. I threw a glance back over my shoulder, and couldn’t make out any movement. My throat burned, snot ran from my nose. I listened to the forest: only the cries of ravens and the sighing wind. I took a step back, tripped on a root, and toppled over. A bed of moss cushioned my fall. Once I’d wiped the mud from my pants, I looked up. Markus was standing over me, offering his hand. “Heya. Need help?”

They shoved and dragged me to a deer stand where I sometimes climbed with my father when he was hunting. While the others held me down, Markus tied a rope around my ankles. They threw the line over one of the deer stand’s beams, and hauled on it together until I was suspended upside down. Only then did I notice the bowl they’d set on the ground beneath me, from which there arose a revolting stink. Sewage sloshed against the rim.

“Dinnertime, Klöble!” shouted Markus.

Then they let go of the rope.

Weeks later, as Anni and I were collecting dust in a beer stein, out of which, with the help of a little wind and water, we intended to whip up a raincloud, we discovered a cookbook hidden in a fruit crate. It had once belonged to a cook’s apprentice from Franconia, who’d ventured into the swamp in search of escargots. He clearly hadn’t known that it was considered the sacred right of every Segendorfer to relieve any vagrant who set foot on their property of all—and particularly the most beloved—of his possessions.

Anni and I carried the cookbook into the kitchen and flipped carefully through it, handling each page as if it were a butterfly’s wing. Anni wanted Jasfe to read it to her, but our mother couldn’t tell an
A
from a
B
any more than Josfer could. In Segendorf, no one but Pastor Meier could read or write. I tucked the book away till later in the evening, then studied it by moonlight. I considered myself cleverer than others my age. And I was, too. All day long I struggled to teach myself the alphabet. The pictures revealed to me most of the sounds
—B
as in
Bread, P
as in
Potato,
and
S
as in
Salt.
It turned out that only a few of the ingredients were unknown to me, yet Pastor Meier explained what I couldn’t puzzle out for myself, and when I finally arrived at
Z
as in
Zwiebel—
onion—I laid the cookbook in Anni’s lap.

“Flip it open and pick a word,” I said.

“This one,” she said, tapping a little cluster of letters surrounded by an overwhelming throng of words.

“M-e-a-t-l-o-a-f,”
I spelled out, and then pronounced: “Meeetlooooooaf.”

“You can read! You can read!” screamed Anni, leaping up and running to our parents. “He can read! He can read!” she cried again, and dragged Jasfe and Josfer back to me. Deep into the night I read them one word after another: “Veeeeeeeeniiiiisooon” and “Eeemmeeentaaaleeer” and “Caaaaaroooots” and “Tiiiiimm, no, thhyyyyymmme.” It became a game, the favorite game in the Habom household. After every evening meal I would sit on one side of the table, Anni, Jasfe, and Josfer on the other, and teach them the alphabet. Anni learned to read the recipes markedly faster than our parents, and Jasfe faster than Josfer. But I learned faster than all of them. As time passed I succeeded in reproducing whole sentences without a single error: “Mix ingredients into a loose dough, let rise, then knead.” Or: “Prop the oven door open slightly with the help of a wooden spoon, to allow the humidity to escape.” And my favorite of all, because of the fascination produced by the list of ingredients I couldn’t understand: “Stir in the finely diced candied orange and lemon zest.”

As soon as Anni had any difficulty spelling out a word, she’d fix her impatient eyes on me. That look! Even back then I wasn’t good at refusing her anything, and whispered the answer to her every time.

On the afternoon of my ninth birthday, I stood immersed to my knees in the Moorbach, soaping myself up, scrubbing myself down. My body was cold, but since my thoughts were back at home, I didn’t feel it. Jasfe had baked a poppy-seed cake for me, and Josfer had been working for days in his workshop. (I had my fingers crossed for a hunting bow.)

I closed my eyes to wash my face, and when I opened them again Markus was sitting on the bank before me. He was alone, and greeted me with a friendly nod; beside him lay a wooden crate, which suddenly began to shake. Markus pushed the lid aside. Amid a litter of straw and rotten vegetables, two rats were mating. “Heya,” he said. “Know what they’re doing?”

I rolled my eyes. “Making babies?”

“Good! You aren’t so dumb after all.” Markus slapped me on the back. “But I’ll bet you didn’t know that they’re brother and sister, did you?”

I slipped into my pants. “They’re just rats.”

Markus closed the crate and shook it hard. “Yep. Rats.” Then he threw it into the river. Bubbles streamed from between the slats. “I call them Jasfe and Josfer.”

“You idiot.”

“Why? They’re definitely brother and sister.”

The bubbles from the crate grew smaller and smaller; I wanted to pull it from the water. “My parents aren’t.”

Markus put a foot on the crate. “Everyone knows they are.”

“Liar.”

Now Markus stood on the crate. “I couldn’t care less if you believe it, Klöble.”

“I’m completely normal!” I shouted, louder than I’d intended, scooped up the rest of my clothes, and made off.

I didn’t see the final bubbles rising from the crate.

Jasfe and Josfer and Anni started singing a birthday song when I opened the front door of our house—and broke off as soon as they saw a half-naked boy with wet cheeks and reddened eyes. I was wrapped up in a blanket, stroked and kissed, and asked what had happened. All by itself, my voice grew higher and higher, faster and faster, as I told them about Markus, the rats and the bubbles and the Klöbles—the Klöbles above all.

My parents exchanged a troubled look, shook their heads, and said, as if with a single voice, “Children are cruel.”

“Markus told me you’re brother and sister.”

“Twaddle,” said Josfer.

And Jasfe: “Ridiculous twaddle.”

After that, the poppy-seed cake tasted so sweet, the hunting bow felt so smooth and strong in my hands, the songs so merrily sung gave my heart such a lift, that I fell into bed late that evening at peace and exhausted, and drifted off to sleep with nary a thought of Klöbles.

So as to have some time to themselves, Josfer and Jasfe occasionally sent us off to fetch fresh milk, or to hunt for mushrooms. One time they told us to go to church and say ten Hail Marys. I begged Anni to say my Hail Marys in my stead because, as I explained to her, I’d rather go and read. The truth was, I always felt like I was being watched in church—even a whisper would swell to a telltale murmur if you weren’t careful, and anyway, I couldn’t see why a prayer had to be repeated so many times. Certainly even God must get bored with it. Back at home, I slipped unnoticed through the parlor, overheard my parents’ heavy gasps, followed them, rounded the green-tiled oven, and, just as Jasfe and Josfer cried out, saw them.

It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed it. Before they noticed me, I slipped back to the front door, opened it, and slammed it loudly shut again.

When I walked back into the parlor they’d pulled their clothes on again, and everything was where it belonged.

Jasfe cleared her throat. “Hungry?”

I nodded, as though nothing were the matter.

After Anni had returned from church and everyone had sat down at the table, Josfer and I gulped down our food. Jasfe took barely a bite. She eyed the blade of her knife, lost in thought. Anni entertained the table with a description of the beautiful stained-glass window in the church, and mentioned, by the way, that for her birthday she wanted one just like it for her bedroom.

After the last mouthful, Jasfe asked everyone to follow her outside. It was dark, and candle flames flickered like will-o’-the-wisps behind the windows of neighboring houses. Anni sat herself down between Josfer and me on the wooden bench. Jasfe remained standing. She kissed Anni and me, and folded her hands. Gently, she spoke one word after another. Carefully set one sentence after the other. With brief pauses between them. So that we’d be able follow her little speech. So that we’d have time to understand. So that we wouldn’t think anything bad. She wanted to formulate sentences better than those she’d set before her father. Perfect sentences. Accurate. And true.

“Really?” cried Anni. “You, too?”

I stood up. “Brother and sister?” I said. “Ridiculous twaddle!”

Jasfe nodded. “I know.” Her chin shook. “My two beautiful, healthy children.” She wanted to hug me. I pushed her away and she fell. Josfer grabbed me by the arm. I tore myself away, and slammed into the back of the bench, splitting the skin of my elbow, and I ran to my room, shutting the door.

Later that night, when quiet had fallen on the house, I stole out to the kitchen and took the last piece of poppy-seed cake. On the way back, I pressed my ear to the door of my parents’ bedroom. The rustling of their sheets, amused chuckles, whispers, hurried stop-start breaths—the sounds penetrated the wood and filled my imagination with pictures. I wanted to let the cake fall to the floor, wanted to fling the door open and scream, “Do you know that they call you? Rats! Filthy rats!”

But I didn’t move. I stared at the closed door, polished off the cake. And with every bite, I swallowed my rage.

From then on, for all my parents’ soft-spoken confessions, for all their sincere but irritating devotion, for all their exaggerated indulgence of my malicious commentary or loafing, I had only one answer: “Leave me alone.”

Apart from that, I didn’t speak a word.

When we sat together at the table eating dinner, when the fire crackled in the oven, the soup burbled in the pot, the beams creaked, when the smell of fried potatoes and ham and apple cider and wild garlic filled the room, when Jasfe admitted to some foolishness or other and everyone laughed—even me, almost—when I felt so comfortable, and thought that Jasfe was just my mama and Josfer just my papa and Anni just my sister and I just her brother, on those evenings when I felt so much love for them all that I wanted to scream, I would scratch at the wound on my elbow beneath the table, tear the scab away, and dig with my fingernails into the skin, until at last the arm went numb, numb and dead.

When at age ten I threw my Most Beloved Possession, a pillow, full of holes and stinking of onions, into the sacrificial bonfire, I observed how Josfer took a wooden comb from Jasfe, and in spite of her tears, hurled it onto the heap of brushwood, together with his best hunting knife. As always, a good many Segendorfers wept on the way home, but Jasfe more than any of them.

“Where’s Herr Kastanie?” Anni asked, whining like any six-and-a-half-year-old who didn’t want to admit what had happened to her favorite toy, a little man cobbled together from twigs and chestnuts.

“Jasfe,” said Josfer, “you never used that comb.”

She shook her head. “It belonged to our mother!”

The sight of her pain triggered something in me. Over the next few days various articles vanished from the kitchen and the hunting shack, including a cooking spoon, shoelaces, an apron, a leather strap, a clay bowl with salt in it, a piece of chalk, a bucket, and last but not least, a rabbit’s foot. Neither Josfer nor Jasfe blamed me. Which only encouraged me to steal more, hacking the stolen items into pieces when necessary and scattering them under the firewood in the hearth. Only Anni’s things I left in peace.

It was as if a door in my head, previously hidden, had suddenly sprung open, a door through which a hot wind blew. I burned a bouquet of wild-flowers picked by Jasfe, and I burned Josfer’s hammer. (The hammer’s head I buried in the swamp.) I spared neither Josfer’s dagger nor Jasfe’s doily, which covered the table between mealtimes. Once I even stretched my arm into the fire, and let the fuzz of bright blond hairs coating it singe. I wanted to see my parents weep, I wanted to make them unhappy, as unhappy as I’d been, struggling for air in that bowl of sewage.