Almost Everything Very Fast (19 page)

“When?”

“In the fall.”

“Fall? Why not spring?”

“They’re in a hurry.”

Wickenhäuser patted the mattress beside him. “Please.”

I sat down. “Do you think I should go see her?”

“I think that if you don’t go now, you never will. But I also think that if you go to her, you won’t come back.”

“Nonsense. What’s your opinion?”

“Rascal …”

“What’s your opinion?”

“I want you to stay.”

“Fine,” I said. “Now imagine another truth.”

“I … want … you … to …”

“Yes?” I prompted.

“… go.”

“Good. Go on.”

“You should set out tomorrow.”

“Very good.”

“Rascal? Stay here. Just for tonight.”

“But not for long.”

“Will you hold my hand?”

“No.”

I left the next morning. After a long back-and-forth I’d decided against taking Hoss; I could cover the bulk of the distance faster by bus, and the remainder on foot. I didn’t pack any of my suits; as long as I took little with me, I’d have enough of a reason to come back soon. Along with sufficient food for the trip, Wickenhäuser gave me a map whose southernmost marking was a ring in red ink, above which someone had scribbled
Segendorf.
Furthermore, as we were saying good-bye, the undertaker passed me a parcel that felt like it contained a pillow.

“Don’t open it until you’re sitting on the bus,” he cautioned me, and swallowed hard; he looked as dismal as a Segendorf gravedigger. He glanced mistrustfully at the bus. “You’ll come back?”

“Of course I will.”

“My lovely rascal,” Wickenhäuser said, laughing through his tears, “and what if I told you that I never delivered any of your letters to her?”

I dug my fingernails deep into the skin of my scarred elbow. “Anni doesn’t know anything?”

“Suppose she doesn’t?”

“Then,” I said, “then that would change everything.”

I gave Wickenhäuser a short, cold handshake, nodded, and took a seat at the back of the bus. The engine banged like a rifle shot. We lurched off down the road.

On a windy Indian summer evening in September, I walked past the triple-horned cow skull (the result of a highly questionable breeding experiment) that marked the northernmost border of the village. The first barnyards I passed seemed much smaller than I remembered. In my memories, the houses were massive skyscraping structures, but now my impression was that Segendorf consisted largely of flat, skewed buildings that you could watch sinking gradually into the swampy ground. Even the church, which had instilled such respect in me as a child, now seemed to resemble nothing so much as a poorly maintained mausoleum. I felt amazed that anyone could spend his whole life here. It wasn’t melancholy I was feeling, but surprise that I’d actually grown up in such a place.

To remain incognito, I steered clear of people on the street and made straight for the tavern, where I took a seat at a shaky wooden table. The air was full of rancid odors, the taproom empty, apart from the busty innkeeper.

“You from around here?” she bleated.

“Bring me something,” I bleated back.

“A pint?”

I nodded. With a filthy rag, the innkeeper spread a puddle of beer around on my table. I sat there till late at night, bolting down reams of red cabbage, dumplings, and leathery cuts of roast pork. After a trip as long as mine
,
anything tasted good. And the more often I bent deep over my beer stein, the more often the innkeeper looked across at me, asking whether I wanted anything else, making little detours past my table. After she’d put up the last of the chairs, she planted herself before me.

“You’re not from around here.”

“No.”

“Then you won’t know my barn.”

“No.”

“It’s out on the moor.”

I looked up at her.

“I’ll show it to you, it’s very comfortable.”

She showed me a couple of other things, too, before returning, in the gray dawn, across the labyrinth of rotting wooden planks that crisscrossed the moor, to her husband, who hadn’t kissed her with that kind of abandon in years. Like a kitten lapping up milk for the first time, she’d said.

I spent those first days after my arrival out on the moor. It was still too soon, I needed some time to figure out how I could meet my sister, from whom I’d been separated for six years. Almost every day the innkeeper came looking for me, bringing me horse knockwurst, freshly baked poppy-seed rolls, cracklings, Moosinger—a variety of cheese produced exclusively in Segendorf, which ripened only after an exceedingly long and damp storage—tepid milk, poppy-seed cakes, pickled frogs’ legs, poppy-seed buns, mushrooms, and eggs. In return, I deployed such knowledge as I’d acquired from the widows of Schweretsried, and hoped that her screams wouldn’t disturb anyone but blindworms, storks, and toads. It seemed to me as though, with every thrust that sent flabby waves rolling across the innkeeper’s backside, I was plunging deeper and deeper into my native town. I thrust, and she screamed. Soon, I was airing my own first screams as well. On those nights that the innkeeper couldn’t manage to slip from her husband’s bed, I explored the village. Behind every window I peeped through
,
someone was screaming. Screaming was part and parcel of Segendorf, like the Sacrificial Festival. Children in the dark screamed for light, husbands screamed for their wives, and the wives screamed because of their violent husbands. But nobody screamed as untiringly as the innkeeper.

“Can you go a third time?” she asked me, drizzling rose-hip marmalade on her heavy, pale upper thigh.

The better I got at imitating her screams, the louder and more piercing the innkeeper became.

One night, when I believed that I’d become familiar with every possible variety of scream, the sound of singing drew me to a greenish glowing window. The house lay at the edge of the village, not far from Wolf Hill, precisely where my parents’ house had once stood. Someone was carelessly (and tunelessly) singing a song. Unfortunately, bilious green vines behind the window and rank ivy in front of it obscured my view; I could make out only tessellated pieces of a plump female shape dancing in the room. There was a pink elbow, there beige ruffles, there a snatch of white skin, there the rounded tip of a nose, there a lock of hair. This girl, the third love in my life, of which I knew nothing at that moment, accompanied her swaying dance with a breathy voice, and in spite of its unpolished tone it was so serene and artless that I felt an urge to shatter the window and study her décolletage and throat and lips as they shaped a kind of music so beautiful it made you feel as if there were no such thing as right or wrong.

I fell to my knees and pressed my hot face into the dewy grass. A moment later I was running toward the cliff and standing at the edge of the abyss, where the monk had sacrificed his Most Beloved Possession 405 years before. In contrast to the monk, however, it wasn’t an object I hurled away from me. My own scream, which told of polished leather boots and a gleaming bridal gown, of lentils and walks around a log cabin, of homemade verses, lonely widows, tailored suits, and an undertaker’s melancholy, pierced through the whole village, tore Blacksmith Schwaiger from his uneasy sleep, drove the residual ashes of the Sacrificial Festival before it, burrowed into the soil, plucked at the leaves of the oak on Wolf Hill, and brought a brief pause to the dancing of a girl named Anni Habom. And as I turned my back to the abyss, the latter returned an echo—soft and delicate, but so unambiguously clear that there could be no doubt whatsoever that this place was my home.

It went:
pling.

Albert crossed the main street. By the town hall he hung a left, following a narrow, tarred footpath downhill, past a playground and a meadow where he and Fred had often gone sledding. Before long he’d leave the last farmhouse behind and reach the glider airfield. The thought of it made him nervous. During their conversation three days ago, Sister Alfonsa had refused to tell him over the telephone what she knew about his mother. So he’d just have to come to Saint Helena—those were her last words before Albert hung up, immediately regretting it. Since then, every attempt he’d made to reach her had failed. Fearful of missing her call, he hadn’t left the phone for a moment. Under normal circumstances he would have been well on the road to Saint Helena by now; to ferret out something about his mother, he would gladly have undertaken a much longer journey. There was one thing holding him back: panic gripped Fred whenever he had to board a bus. Albert traced it back to the traumatic experience of the bus accident. And Albert himself had neither car nor driver’s license. So he’d dialed Violet’s number, the only number that could help get the two of them swiftly to Saint Helena.

Their breakup was already half a year behind them. Albert hadn’t expected that the mere thought of seeing her would stir up the desire for something that was officially in the past. It made him think of the warning you saw printed on the side-view mirrors of American-made cars:
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

The same thing applied to the past.

A year before, in the autumn of 2001, Albert had been sitting on the bus, reading the backs of heads. On a good, that is, a busy day, the selection would surely have been larger. But given the slim offering on hand, he began much as he did when watching TV: by flipping around. The asymmetrically shaved nape of the teen to his left simply bored him—it wasn’t evidence of a cheap hairdresser, an underprivileged family, rather the opposite: the homemade shave on either side of her lime-green hair was an expression of rebellion; she was probably on her way back from hanging around the provincial train station, frightening elderly people, flinging beer cans, and kissing the new Alsatian pup her daddy had bought her for Christmas.

And that woman whose little chignon resembled a puffy sandwich roll? How completely tickled she’d be if somebody plopped down in the seat beside her. To loosen her bun and let the long hair tumble free, how divine that would make her feel! She certainly didn’t have it easy, what with two kids and the house to look after, and her husband, whom she called “the old man” while talking on the phone with her girlfriends, just as her mother had done with her father. I certainly don’t have a smooth time of it, the tilt of her head declared, but what can I do, the world’s hard on me, I give it my all, but nobody’s interested, except maybe you—yes, you. Won’t you sit next to me and loosen my bun?

Albert yawned and pressed himself into his window seat in the last row so that he wouldn’t appear in the rearview mirror of the bus driver. Sheer habit. On this October 7, 2001, his last escape from Saint Helena was months behind him. There was no reason to run away any longer: he was of legal age, nobody could force him to stay there. But, as it is with things you’ve done for a long time, whether willingly or not, it was difficult to break a habit. To let himself appear in rearview mirrors, to deny himself chess duels with Sister Alfonsa, to forgo Sister Simone’s goulash or Fred’s newspaper report fixed to the upper slats of his stealthily squeaking bunk bed, would have been a violation of the rules of the past fifteen years of Albert’s life. The orphanage was his home—where else was he supposed to live? With Fred?

The bus pulled to a stop and Albert glanced away from the aisle, so as not to ruin his game if someone new should get on. Outside, a line had formed in front of a dry cleaner’s. Three of the waiting housewives carried IKEA bags filled to bursting. Nobody was chatting, they consulted their watches, they rolled their eyes: they weren’t happy. The bus drove on, and only then did Albert notice the small female head in the row before him. Dark-blond hair screened her neck and hid her ears. It was unusual for someone to sit directly in front of him. In his experience, people generally took the seat that would allow them to be as far as possible from their fellow riders. Someone should write a dissertation on that, he thought. The young woman was wearing a washed-out gray shirt with a soberly cut collar. She was doing something to her face with one hand. Gnawing her fingernails, applying lipstick, scratching her nose? No. She had a cell phone. Albert couldn’t tell what she was looking at on the tiny screen. Not texting, that was for sure, her thumbs weren’t moving. In 2001 not everyone in the Bavarian uplands had a cell phone. Her clothing suggested she could hardly have afforded a cell plan. It was more likely a gift from her not-especially-imaginative boyfriend for their one-year anniversary. If she were from the city she would have long since found herself a new man, but since the selection out in the country was humbler, she had to content herself with the kind of guy who compensates for lack of imagination with kindness. The only question was, how much longer? As soon as graduation was in the bag, and she’d enrolled at some Bavarian university, various fellow students would become keenly aware of her sassy way of tucking her naturally blond hair behind her ears. And said enticing fellow students would be in direct competition with her carpenter boyfriend, who expected nothing more from life than a solid mortgage and healthy offspring.