Almost Everything Very Fast (14 page)

Even though the Red Lady had proved a dead end, he didn’t want to give the compact up. Who knew, the hair might still belong to his real mother.

To his left and right stood gravestones of black marble, which gleamed as immaculately as if they were polished daily. Franz Stöger and Herbert Älig, both of whom had died this year. Stöger’s grave was snowed under with bouquets and wreaths; on one of the mourning ribbons, black against pale blue, stood the word
Why?
An idiotic question, since it was so easy to answer, thought Albert. Industrial accident, cholesterol buildup, car accident, testicular cancer—
that’s why.
Or might
Why?
really mean
Why now, of all times? Why just two days after his retirement? Why during our golden anniversary cruise? Why while we were arguing? Why not later? Why so late?

There was a simple answer for that, too:
because.
This whole search for meaning had already been getting on Albert’s nerves, even before he’d left the church—as early as possible, and much to Sister Alfonsa’s disappointment—on turning fifteen. There was no meaning, no reason, there was merely sooner-or-later. What was really repulsive about the question
Why?
was that it articulated a reproach to the dead on the part of those still living.
How dare you die before me? How dare you leave me alone here? Do you have even the slightest idea how badly I’m doing? You can’t just scoot off and leave me behind! What am I supposed to do now?
Mourning, thought Albert, is nothing but a word. People contrived it to make things simpler. But what you actually feel for the dead isn’t sorrow, isn’t pity either—what hurts so fucking bad when someone disappears forever is nothing more than the realization that you’ve been alone from your very first day in this world, and that you’ll stay that way till the end.

“This is a good spot!” shouted Fred, who lay on his back on an empty plot in the row of gravestones in front of Albert, flapping his arms and legs, making a grass angel. “You should give it a try!”

Albert walked over to Fred and stretched out beside him.

“You can see plenty from here,” said Fred. “You can see the clock tower of the church. That way I’ll always know how late it is. And you can see the moor. And you can see the whole sky.”

“And you can see me, when I come to visit you.”

“That’s ambrosial! Will you come a lot?”

“Every day. Maybe I’ll even bring someone with me now and then.”

“Klondi?”

“For instance.”

“Gertrude?”

“I doubt that horses are allowed in the cemetery.”

“Mama?”

Albert fingered his makeup compact, searching for the right words. But Fred gave him one of his big claps on the shoulder, and pointed at the wall at the edge of the cemetery, in which the funerary urns were kept: “That’s funny! Of course you can’t bring Mama with you. Because she’s already here.”

Albert smiled, acted amused.

For a few minutes they lay silently beside each other. Fred closed his eyes and ran his fingers through the grass. Before long it was too hot for Albert—he sat up, sniffed at Fred, nudged him, and looked him in the eyes.

“But I really
did
shower!”

“Go tell it to Gertrude.”

“Why?”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“
Tell it to Gertrude
is a figure of speech?”

“Don’t change the subject.
Have
you showered?”

Fred blinked.

While Fred steeped in the bath, a lit candle in his hand—dripping wax into the water to tell the future—Albert stood on the stairs in front of a framed photograph showing Anni spraying the driveway with a garden hose. She was wearing a dress—she wore dresses in all of her photographs—and the expression on her face was sober, thoughtful.

Albert said to the photo: “I’ve spoken with Britta Grolmann.”

He heard splashing, and glanced up at the bathroom door, which was standing ajar.

“What was it you wanted to hide?”

Albert turned away, descended three steps, then paused. Out of the corner of his eye he’d spotted a photo in which Anni was pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves.

“Does the gold have anything to do with it? Klondi mentioned that the cassette, the lilies, and a couple of other things were from her. But not the gold.”

A step farther down, Anni was mending a pair of blue jeans. She wasn’t even looking at the camera in that one.

“Ah, shit.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

Fred stood on the upper landing, wrapped in a bathrobe that barely reached his knees.

“Did you pour something pretty?”

Fred held up a little clump of candle wax. “A real skull!”

Albert looked straight at him. “It looks more like a piece of cheese to me.”

“It looks more like a real skull to me,” said Fred seriously. Lather hung in his beard.

“Let’s go wash that off,” said Albert.

Fred tugged at his sleeve and said softly, “It’s okay that you’re talking with Mama, you know. Mama said we should never forget her.”

Before Albert could say,
There’s not much about her for me to forget
, Fred added, shrugging his shoulders, “We’re all Most Beloved Possessions.”

“Are we?”

Fred sighed, as if Albert once again didn’t understand anything. “Mama says everyone is somebody’s Most Beloved Possession.”

Then he went back to the bathroom, to blow-dry his beard.

Albert thought, maybe you can only love someone or something if you possess him, her, or it—partially, at least; and for the first time since he’d left Saint Helena, he missed Alfonsa. She would have liked this theory.

Later, after Albert had gotten Fred into bed with the help of a few freely quoted passages from the
A–F
volume of the encyclopedia, he took a piece of paper, corralled all the thoughts that had been whirring around in his head, and wrote them out. In the past, that had always helped him: capturing all of his questions, doubts, dilemmas on paper. Letting everything out.

The next morning, Albert’s bed was surrounded by crumpled pages, scrawled over with sentences difficult to decipher. He tossed them one by one into the trash can. On one of them, he found:
Most Beloved Possession? Oxymoron!!!
On another:
My mother can stuff it.
And:
Things are going downhill. Downhill? Cliché! Better say
(and then nothing). And:
Life is a Hansel and Gretel crumb. Ha ha.
And, on the only one that he folded up and stuck in his breast pocket:
Really, we ought to act as if there were no unanswered questions. (Cue curtain)

And for the next four weeks, that’s exactly what they did.

Fred and Albert swam in the Baggersee, where Fred demonstrated how well he could do the dead man’s float.

Fred and Albert counted all the green cars that passed the bus stop, with Albert keeping the tally, and Fred making sure that no “half greens,” like police cars, were accidentally counted.

Fred and Albert found a rosebush on their doorstep, with an attached card reading
I’m sorry
, and Fred asked who it was from, and Albert lied, saying he didn’t know.

Fred and Albert descended into the sewers together up to three times per week (Albert always twice as often on his own), and found Most Beloved Possessions in the treasure chest—among them a miniature pocket encyclopedia, green crayons, and a brand-new electric shaver.

Fred and Klondi pulled weeds in her garden, and Albert watched them from afar.

Fred and Albert fed weeds to Gertrude.

Fred and Albert cooked spaetzle according to a recipe they found on the Internet, and an hour later ordered pizza, from which Fred scraped the “pukey tomatoes” with a spoon.

Fred and Albert listened to Klondi’s cassette, and Albert admitted that the sound was like the distant noise of the ocean.

Fred and Albert repainted Fred’s room in olive green, May green, turquoise, and reed green.

Fred and Albert sat firmly belted in the BMW, and Albert cheered for Fred, who raced almost as fast as Michael Schumacher.

Fred and Albert went to see Klondi, because this time Fred insisted that Albert come with him, and the three of them fired up the potter’s wheel, and Klondi made an ashtray, which she gave to Albert with a wink, whereupon Albert made a candy dish, which he gave to her also with a wink, while Fred made a “cobble-paving-stone,” which he kept for himself.

Fred and Albert argued because in Fred’s opinion Albert smelled “smoky”—which Albert blamed on Klondi.

Fred and Albert played chess, and Fred won almost every time because he was playing white, and all the white pieces could move like queens.

Fred and Albert left a rosebush on Klondi’s doorstep, with a card that read,
It’s okay
, and Fred asked what was okay, and Albert said, “Everything.”

Fred and Albert traced the outlines of their hands with green marker on the kitchen window, beside the initials
HA
, and inside the hands wrote
Fred
and
Albert.

“What are you going to do when I go dead?”

Albert, slowly revolving in an office chair, looked up from a notebook in a plastic cover—one that Alfonsa had given him once upon a time, so that he could record what he’d learned during his chess lessons. The notes Albert took, however, concerned other things entirely. The battered pages were filled with the various death scenarios that Albert had imagined for Anni and jotted down—like Fred his green cars—and in which a certain sealed kitchen window, shot through with a crack, invariably played a central role. In the past he’d found himself smiling after each entry, because with every new idea his hope had grown that he’d finally found the truth.

Wind blows the window wide open and it shatters and Anni climbs up on a rickety chair to see if she can shut it for the night with glue, but then the chair starts to tip underneath her and she tries to stay up on it, but she’s pretty old and so she falls and that’s it for her heart.

Or:
Anni doesn’t want to be in Königsdorf anymore. She wants to take Fred and me and move in with our family, with my mother, and she has to hire moving men to help her because I can’t carry anything, I’m too small, and because she can’t carry anything, she’s too old. And Fred certainly can’t carry anything, because he’s Fred. But one of the moving men is like Fred, too, a little slow, and smacks the window with a long, golden pole that looks like a wizard’s staff, and that gives Anni such a shock that she gets hopping mad, and that’s it for her heart.

Or:
A couple of cretins like the ones here in the convent are throwing stones, and one of them flies through Anni’s window, but she’s not the kind just to put up with that, that’s for sure, and she scoops up the stone and goes to throw it back into the street. But she can’t. She hasn’t turned chicken, it’s not that—she feels a stab in her heart. She can’t do anything anymore. She sinks slowly to the floor, as if falling asleep.

Or:
Anni takes pills, because everything’s difficult with Fred, plenty of people do it, they even tell the priest about it in the confessional, people take an amazing number of pills, even people like Anni, so many that they feel tipsy, like someone who’s been sneaking the sacramental wine. She wants to get the window open. She smashes the window with something, so that she can grab the sky and pull it into the room. For real! She wraps herself up in the clouds and falls asleep and never wakes up again.

Or:
Anni goes on a trip with Fred and me. But she wants to take something with her, so that she can remember Königsdorf whenever she likes. So she takes the window, because the view from it was the most important view of all in the dark farmhouse. She packs the shards of glass in a couple of kitchen towels, but she doesn’t do it especially nimbly, she cuts herself and bleeds, bleeds a whole lot, and the whole pane goes pink, and Anni goes white, and all of her color, her whole heart, is in the window now.

“You aren’t dead by a long shot,” said Albert.

“I only have two fingers left.” Fred slouched on the red chaise longue, plucking lint from his hat. “That’s less than a lot.”

“I don’t think so.” Albert snapped the chess notebook shut. “You know, that’s more than one thousand four hundred hours!”

Fred let his hat fall from his hands.

“Around ninety thousand minutes.”

“That’s a lot,” said Fred, savoring the number: “ninety thousand.” He bent to pick up his hat. Albert opened his notebook again.

“Are there
still
ninety thousand?”

“Yes,” said Albert, without looking up.

“How about now?”

“Still the same.”

A thud came from the kitchen. Fred and Albert looked up at each other.

Fred ran to the kitchen. Albert laid aside his notebook and followed. After they’d spent several minutes searching in vain for the source of the noise, Albert’s eyes fell on the kitchen window; he rushed outside, around the house, and found a robin lying in the grass below the pane; it was jerking its legs and wings, and its beak opened and shut soundlessly. Fred shoved Albert aside. In both hands he held a shovel, which he let fall with a crash. The bird’s last sound was high and shrill.

“How about now? Is it still ninety thousand?” asked Fred, as if nothing had happened.

“Why did you do that?”

“What?”

“Why did you kill the bird?”

“It made him happy.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so bad, maybe he could have managed.”

“Mama says birds that don’t fly can’t fly. Mama says I’m the biggest bird in the world.”

“Come again?”

Fred said louder:
“I’m the biggest bird in the world!”

“Next time we’re going to wait a bit before we kill any animals.”

“Okay, Albert,” said Fred, and lowered his head. “Are you …”

“No,” said Albert, “I’m not mad.”

Fred proposed burying the robin in the garden, next to a rowan bush, because it’d have plenty of visits from its friends there. An ambrosial thing.