Almost Everything Very Fast (8 page)

Yet nobody took me to task for it. In the summer of 1924, Josfer sat on a sawed-off tree trunk during meals because he hadn’t had time to build a new chair, my parents’ bed was missing all four of its legs, and Jasfe was constantly having to sew herself new knickers.

On the day of the Sacrificial Festival, I was uncertain which Most Beloved Possession I should single out—my one-year-old pillow (which stank just as powerfully of onions as the one from the year before) or a box of matches—when they called me into the parlor.

“Have you decided?” asked Josfer.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

Jasfe brought me to the door. Anni was waiting outside, absentmindedly rocking Frau Puppe, the first doll she’d sewn together herself.

Jasfe pressed a torch into my hand. “You know what you have to do.” She stepped back into the house and locked the door behind her.

“We know who burned all of our things!” called Josfer through the door.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted back.

“Today is the Sacrificial Festival. Today you’re allowed to burn whatever you want. So go ahead! Burn the house!”

“But … but you’re still inside.”

“Someone remembers how to speak!”

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“Don’t you love us, Julius?”

“That’s our house!”

“
I’ll
burn it
, I
love you!” cried Anni, to whom no one was listening.

“Julius, those were our things that you threw in the fire.”

“But that was different!”

“Aren’t you brave enough?”

“I don’t want to do it!”

“I love you. I’ll do it,” said Anni softly, as I screamed, “I’m not going to do it! I hate you!”

My vision was so blurry with crying that I couldn’t tell Jasfe from Josfer when they stood beside me again, lifted me up and embraced me, kissed me.

“We love you,” they whispered. “We love you.”

“Me, too,” said Anni. “Me, too.”

After the Sacrificial Festival everyone went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how I should have answered my parents, how I wished I’d answered them, and how good it would have felt to say those words. I slipped from the house, walked to the Moorbach, and hung my feet in the water. I plucked marsh marigolds, threw them into the current, and asked myself where their journey would take them. I cleared my throat, and said, “I love you.”

Maybe that didn’t sound perfect—but then, what did sound perfect? On the way home I imagined how my parents’ faces would look when they heard me speak—first sleepy, then befuddled, and a moment later, happy—and had to smile. As I looked up at the night sky above the village, it seemed to me that this year the sacrificial bonfire was sending up a brighter glow than usual. But it wasn’t the festival. A house was burning. Our house was burning. Josfer and Jasfe’s house, and Anni’s, and mine. I ran toward it. The heat struck me in the face, and I flinched back. The fire had reached the second floor. There were no screams, I listened closely, I knew that in Segendorf people screamed at the slightest opportunity, but in my ears there was only a rumbling like that of a gigantic cooking pot on the boil, the fire whispering and hissing in a particularly hateful language. And I saw and I saw and I saw the flames dance through the rooms.

Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Anni. She looked at me anxiously, clutching a torch in both hands.

“I love them,” she said.

They set out right after lunch. Albert had trouble keeping up with Fred, who settled immediately into a brisk stride. As always when he left the house, Fred was wrapped in his royal blue poncho, which fluttered behind him like a cape as he walked and intensified his already imposing appearance. His tufted Tyrolean hat sat askew on his head. His bulky, sagging backpack, which suggested a cargo of junk, the encyclopedia doubtless among it, didn’t appear to be hindering him. Albert, on the other hand, had allowed himself to be persuaded into wearing a plastic raincoat, and was now sweating freely beneath a flawless blue sky.

In a decidedly unsporty tote bag Albert was carrying a few slices of buttered bread, a Tupperware container filled with bananas, a few peeled carrots, a bottle of apple spritzer, Fred’s medication, and a pack of cigarettes. And in his hip pocket, the makeup compact.

After they’d followed the main street a ways, they curved to the right down Ludwigstrasse, a narrow side street littered with dried cow patties, where at the age of eight Albert had taught Fred to ride his bicycle without training wheels. Albert had run back and forth beside him, pushing him along, encouraging him, nursing his skinned knees after each tumble, and wiping away his tears, until finally, during the May school holidays, Fred had rolled his first few feet sans training wheels, the wind blowing into his proud, radiant face.

Fred paused beside a garden fence, stretched his arm over the wire, and waited. A white-and-brown-mottled foal broke from the shadow of an arborvitae hedge, trotted closer, and lifted its head so that Fred could stroke it between the ears. Albert watched as Fred tickled it, said hello, and asked how its day was going. He got the impression it enjoyed Fred’s company—it whinnied, as if at any moment it might break out into unceremonious chatter.

Fred waved him closer. “Gertrude? This is Albert.”

“Gertrude?” Albert took a step toward them, and the horse flinched.

“It’s okay,” Fred said to the foal, which was holding itself just out of reach. Albert wasn’t surprised; he tended to have this sort of effect on animals. Presumably they were able to sense that he still couldn’t grasp why most people had more pity for a stray cat than for a vagrant on the subway.

Albert cleared his throat. “Let’s get going.”

“Can’t we stay for a minute?”

“No.”

“But Gertrude—”

“No!” said Albert, louder than he’d intended. He really wasn’t in the mood for a petting zoo.

Fred pulled him aside. “When I’m dead, you have to come see Gertrude every day,” he whispered.

Albert hadn’t expected that; wiping the sweat from his forehead, he said, “I’m not good at these things.”

Fred clapped him on the shoulder. “It won’t take you long to learn.”

Then he said his good-byes to the foal. Fred had never mentioned Gertrude after returning from his rambles through Königsdorf, thought Albert; and if Fred didn’t mention something, it usually meant he’d been up to no good.

Fred interrupted Albert’s train of thought when he came to a halt in the middle of the street. “We’re there.”

Albert glanced around. Farm plots stretched away on either side. The sun stung them. Flies traced rectangles above dried cow dung.

Fred drew a crowbar from his backpack, kneeled, and began struggling to slip its end under the manhole cover.

“What are you doing? Stop it!” shouted Albert.

Fred turned to look at him, and with an aggrieved bass note the cover slid back into its recess. “We have to go down there.”

“What if someone sees us? What if a car comes along?”

Fred glanced at both ends of the street. “There’s no car coming.”

“Look, that’s not the point. We can’t just climb down into the sewer.”

“Why?”

“Because …” Albert thought for a moment. “Because it isn’t allowed.” He took the crowbar from Fred. “And you should ask me before you play around with something like that. You could hurt yourself.”

“But you told me I have to show you where the gold comes from!”

“From down there?”

Frenzied nodding of the head. “Can I have the crowbar?”

Albert pointed to the manhole cover. “Seriously—down
there?
”

“I need the crowbar now,” said Fred.

“Isn’t there any other way?”

With a single motion Fred was up on his feet, towering over Albert, grabbing the hand in which he held the bar. At first, Albert didn’t feel anything, he tried to pull his hand away, but it was held fast, and he struggled in vain to loosen Fred’s grip with the other.
“Let. Go.”
The pressure increased, it felt as if Fred were driving Albert’s fingers right into the crowbar’s iron. Fred’s hat had slid forward, hiding his eyes, his lips silently opened and closed. The pain fused with a numbness that wandered up along Albert’s arm. Just before it reached his elbow, he pushed himself backward with all his strength. “Fred, stop it!” he shouted, and Fred finally let go. Albert stumbled backward. The crowbar landed next to his feet.

Albert picked up his tote bag and walked away.

Beside Gertrude’s fence he examined his now dark-red hand, wiggling one finger after another. They didn’t seem to be broken. “The joke of it,” he shouted to the foal, “is that
I
worry about
his
health.”

Gertrude actually neighed.

At age six, Albert had once called Fred a retard because he’d broken his He-Man figure while attempting to turn him back into Prince Adam. In response, Fred had aimed a kick at Albert and broken two of the latter’s toes. While pretending to box, Fred had inadvertently given him plenty of shiners. Albert’s body was long accustomed to little wounds and bruises.

Gertrude snuffled in the direction of his hand, which he was extending over the fence.

“What now?”

A glider was circling in the sky above them, making the usual glider noises, sounding like summer. Albert glanced around to see if Fred was following him. With his undamaged hand he lit a cigarette. Gertrude cropped with her teeth at a tuft of grass. Albert was hot—he pulled off the raincoat, tangling himself up in the process. The plastic didn’t want to let him go. He tossed it away into one of the plots. For a while he stood doubtful in the street, trembling. He knew that, left on his own, Fred wouldn’t budge from the spot. Once he’d spent two whole days sitting in the BMW without any food because of some fight that Albert could no longer remember the reason for, and who knows how long he would have kept waiting if Albert hadn’t eventually given in. Fred was at least as stubborn as Albert, and precisely because he knew he had to go back and get him, he didn’t want to. He flicked his cigarette to the curb.

Now Fred had managed to make Albert feel like a child.

The asphalt’s heat drilled up through the soles of his shoes.

Albert sat down in the shadow of Gertrude’s fence, closed his eyes, and imagined that Fred would come for him, just this once, that Fred would come and apologize, that they’d talk everything out, and laugh about it, and clap each other on the shoulders.

He was nineteen years old now, but as far as his wishes were concerned he still felt just like the three-year-old who’d stood on the steps of Saint Helena, arms defiantly crossed, refusing to set foot in his new home. Who’d countered all of Sister Alfonsa’s rigorous pleading with “Bert won’t.” Whose granny—fully half of his known family—had just died. A stubborn child who’d spent his first night at the orphanage
in front
of the orphanage, curled up on a doormat stamped with the word
AMEN.
Who’d been woken early in the morning by the tolling of the bells, and had immediately realized that Sister Alfonsa had spent the whole night there with him, just behind the door in the entrance hall. Who’d suddenly felt a tremendous hunger, and followed this new ersatz family member into the kitchen, where he’d been allowed to dunk a few rock-hard dinner rolls from the previous day into honeyed milk. A child who stopped calling himself Bert only when Sister Alfonsa threatened him with five hundred shoe tyings. A child whose mental capacities had not only earned him chess lessons but also allowed him to write, at age four and a half, in one of Fred’s encyclopedias, when the latter, during a picnic, was weeping over Anni’s death:
Downt be saad.
Who, while playing cops-and-robbers in the woods, for which purpose the orphans armed themselves with darts that they’d fling every which way with no restraint whatsoever, had incurred a scar the length of a matchstick at the left-hand corner of his mouth, a scar that could transform itself in the blink of an eye into a laugh line. And the only child in Saint Helena with a father who
couldn’t
be a father, in contrast to the many parents who didn’t want to be.

When Albert came back, Fred was standing in exactly the same spot where he’d left him. Beside him was Tobi, a man of Albert’s age, who was seldom seen standing still. One couldn’t call what he did
moving
, exactly—it was more of a wriggling mated with a shuffling. The reeling of a land rat who suddenly finds himself shipboard.

Albert hid himself by the curb behind a Dumpster, which reeked sourly of discarded wine bottles.

Tobi was a well-known figure in the village, huge and vigorous, with an arrogant peasant haughtiness; he gave a quick, wheezy laugh, yet all he said was “Freddie.” He said it eagerly, as if sure it would fluster its target. But Fred didn’t move. Tobi’s disappointment showed itself in a shuffling of the feet; they wanted to move on, no rest for them, that’s what they were famous for. Whenever he was on the road in his milk truck, making his rounds from farm to farm in order to suck up the fresh milk with a hose like an elephant’s trunk and deliver it to the creameries in the uplands, his feet jammed the pedal all the way to the floor. These impatient feet of his had made him the quickest, most cost-effective driver in eleven towns; their distaste for the brake pedal meant that the milk didn’t slosh around, keeping it from going bad on the way. Today, however, Tobi’s truck was nowhere to be seen.