Almost Everything Very Fast (28 page)

“I like it out here,” she greeted him in the shadow of an apple tree. She acted as though two whole days hadn’t passed since they’d last spoken.

“You used to have agoraphobia, right?”

Alfonsa stopped. “What makes you say that?”

“The other sisters always used to praise me for getting you outside so often. Once I looked the word up in Fred’s encyclopedia.”

“You were still very small. And you had too much imagination.” Alfonsa went on. “Maybe that’s why your girlfriend thinks so highly of you.”

“Violet? She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Does she know that?”

Albert dodged her glance.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that we haven’t sufficiently prepared you here for the world of women.”

From the very beginning he hadn’t really thought of the sisters of Saint Helena as women. As teachers, tutors, yes, as parochial know-it-alls, oh certainly, but never as females—apart from a brief phase when, at the age of five, Albert had believed that the anatomical conspicuities specific to women were called “bad timing,” because he’d surprised Alfonsa while she was undressing in her room, and asked her, pointing, what
that
was.

Albert picked an apple, inspected it for wormholes, polished it on his pant leg, and took a bite. It puckered his mouth.

“They need more time,” said Alfonsa. “Another month at least.”

“In a month we won’t be here.”

“You could stay. What are you looking for elsewhere that isn’t here?”

Their eyes met for a moment.

“What in the world would keep me here?”

She smirked. “Shoelaces?”

“Sounds tempting.”

“Albert,” she said, stepped over to a crooked tree, plucked a rosy-cheeked apple, sniffed it briefly, and handed it to him. He took a cautious bite. You could taste the sun in it. “There were reasons not to tell you about her.”

Albert dropped the apple.

“You were three years old when you came to us. Not old enough to hear such things. And when you were old enough, I waited for the right moment to tell you. But it never arrived. Eventually I thought maybe it was better that way. There are certain things it’s better one never learns.”

“Then why precisely
now?
”

“Because we’ve been worried about you.” Typical of Alfonsa, not being able to say
I.
“When your call came, it confirmed our worries. We should never have let you go, especially not in this difficult situation with Fred. Only, you were so unbelievably stubborn. We didn’t see any other way to bring you back.”

“The ends justify the means,” said Albert.

“You could put it like that.” Alfonsa bent over, tasted Albert’s apple, and showed her teeth in a pleased grimace. “I’ve always had a way with the precocious ones.”

“I want to see her. For all I care, come along. But I want to get it over with.”

Alfonsa brought the apple to her mouth, paused, then bit even deeper. “Fred feeling better?” she asked with her mouth full.

Albert hated her chomping. “Yes.”

She looked at him. “Then what are we waiting for?”

As evening fell on the parking lot, Violet, Alfonsa, Fred, and Albert said good-bye to Klondi, who’d voluntarily given up her seat in the car. If they left right away, they could make it to the Zwirglstein by the next morning, including a rest stop during the night.

Klondi turned to Fred. “Take care of Albert, okay?”

“Albert is very young,” said Fred, knowingly.

“Albert is present,” said Albert, and mentioned yet again that it might be better if Fred stayed behind. They’d be gone for only twenty-four hours.

“But I want to come, too!”

“That’s not an especially convincing argument, Fred.”

“What isn’t an especially convincing argument?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I do have to come!”

“Why?”

“Because I want to meet your mom!”

Albert looked accusingly at Alfonsa.

She shrugged. “He has a right to know what’s happening.”

Albert felt a tingling at the back of his neck, he knew that any second now his thoughts would take off, and then he’d have to think about things he found deeply unpleasant to have running loose in his head. So he said, “Fine. Let’s get going.”

And so after three days they left Saint Helena with Alfonsa and a new destination, and without Klondi.

This woman scratches at the back of her unwashed head, which must be my mother’s head, no question about it, and asks: Who? And I repeat: Your son! And she repeats: Who? And I ask: Are you deaf? And she says: Very good! And I start again from the beginning: I’m your son. And she says: From where? And I say: That’s what I wanted to ask you. And she says: Not today. And I say: It’s me! And she says: Not that I remember. And I say: Can I come in? And she says: Sorry.

Or:
This woman explains that the woman I’ve come to see was her sister, and that her sister is no longer with us.

Or:
This woman grabs her shotgun as I introduce myself, and shoots me in the chest, and I think to myself: what the hell’s happening here? And then she shoots me in the head.

Or:
This woman scolds me, saying, It’s about damned time, where’ve you been roving around all these years? She screams, Get inside this minute and wash your hands and go straight to your room, no supper for you, you’re grounded!

Or:
This woman throws her arms around me and says she’s so sorry, she says it’s all her fault, but she was young, and now she’s older, she says, can’t we start again from the beginning, and I tell her I’m sorry, but I’m much too old to start again from the beginning.

Or:
This woman has drool dripping from her mouth. She grins, finding just insanely ambrosial the fact that she’s the one who made me.

Albert sat in the passenger seat, reading his chess notebook. Violet steered with her left hand. Curve upon curve. Her right rested on Albert’s upper thigh. Which didn’t bother him. They weren’t far from the goal now, and no matter what he’d hoped to get from it, hoped to achieve, getting it over with would be a basically good thing, he told himself. The same went for a woman’s hand, like Violet’s, on his upper thigh: basically good.

Her fingers stirred almost imperceptibly. “It’s lovely to be with you,” she said.

Albert glanced over his shoulder. Alfonsa’s eyes were closed, but he didn’t believe she was sleeping. Ever since they’d hit the road, she’d been conspicuously reserved.

Fred, on the other hand, sat staring out the window, his eyes flicking left to right, again and again, as if he were reading an encyclopedia.
Pushing the world
, that’s what he called it. Fixing on something—a street sign, a tree, a license plate—holding it fast with his gaze, and shoving it aside with his eyes. Maybe he was right, thought Albert, maybe we all only believe we’re moving, when in fact we never really move at all. We simply push life past us.

“Thanks,” said Violet.

“For what?”

“You got me out of there. That internship at K&P was hell.” She told him about her days at the production company, confirming what he’d read in her eyes at the airstrip. “I don’t know what I want to do now, but there’s no way I’m ever going back there.”

“A few days ago you sounded completely different.”

“You, too.”

“What do you mean?”

Now she pinched his upper thigh. “You know exactly what I mean.”

There was too much expectation in her grin for Albert’s liking. On the other hand, a grin, too, was basically good. Why ask questions and risk breaking the mood?

The same thought occurred to him three and a half hours later, on the sagging mattress of a motel over whose front door the word
Gasthof
floated in black letters against a light-blue ground, as Violet sat on him, naked, rotating her hips. But there was one question he simply couldn’t suppress: about the pill he hoped she hadn’t forgotten to take. Violet just laughed, leaned over him, licked his upper lip. Which hardly reassured him. Forgotten pills were a by-no-means-insignificant part of their common past, as were small-hour journeys back and forth across the Bavarian uplands in search of the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy, and the patronizing commentaries of the smart-aleck pharmacists who’d clearly never made a single mistake in their whole lives, and finally, forty-eight hours in the company of an unbearable Violet, plagued by nausea and intestinal cramps, cursing, sweating, and smelling oddly of leeks.

Albert grabbed her shoulders. She stopped short and merely chuckled a single word: “Rough!” Then kept going, even more eagerly. Dark-blond hair tickled his chest. A basically less-good feeling crept over him. It wasn’t so easy to separate himself from Violet, she took his efforts for play and clung tightly to him, giggling that they were “making
serious
whoopee,” and pressing him into the mattress, until he finally tossed her away with a bounce and jumped from the bed.

“Did you take it or not?”

She was still grinning. “Albert, calm down.”

“What?!”

“Let’s stop with the little game.”

Albert slipped into his boxers. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Violet rolled her eyes. “Just come back to bed.” Her voice took on a salacious tone. “Want to read the back of my head?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“All right, fine.” She stretched herself. He knew that she knew how much he liked the way she looked. “What do you suggest?”

“Have you taken it, or not?”

“Would it be so terrible if I hadn’t?”

“Are you nuts?!”

Now for the first time her grin flickered. “Okay, look, this is getting ridiculous. Truth is, you’re afraid of losing me, and I’m afraid of losing you. Neither of us can imagine ourselves with anyone else. We need each other. We love each other.”

And suddenly, as she was expressing it so unambiguously, it became clear to Albert: he didn’t love her.

Violet took his silence for agreement. Her grin was bright white again. She leapt from the bed and threw her arms around him. Her cheerful breathing brushed his ear. “Of course I remembered to take it.” He could feel her heartbeat clearly, and her skin was much too warm. “But maybe—in the future, I mean—I shouldn’t take it anymore?”

He could have answered her honestly. He could have confessed that the mere idea of having children struck him as absurd, that he certainly wouldn’t be producing any offspring, not in this life. He could have explained that he felt differently than she did, yes, that he asked himself whether what he felt for her wasn’t simply the blind clinging of a two-thirds orphan to another human being. He could have explained how incomprehensible it was that she still wanted him. He could have ended this love story, which was more substantial in their heads than in reality, once and for all. But what did he do?

He returned her hug.

The problem, thought Albert, when someone loved you the way Violet loved him, was that you were always being pressured to ponder whether it was possible for you to love her, too. And when you arrived at the conclusion that you didn’t love her, you started asking yourself whether you might not be able to, after all. If maybe all it would take was a little effort, a few relaxed days spent together, some heart-to-heart talks, a couple of tender interactions with each other.

By the time the sun came up they were on their way again. Violet had paid for both rooms, she’d rustled up a couple of poppy-seed rolls from a local bakery for breakfast, filled the car with gas, and on top of all that somehow managed to pick Albert a little bouquet of wild-flowers, which now, strapped tight in the Beetle’s passenger seat, he held in one sweaty hand, amazed at how sure you could be that you didn’t love someone, while in the backseat Fred snoozed in an impossible position, and Alfonsa listened to Frank Sinatra on her Walkman, and Violet chirped: “The road is all ours.”

For a hundred miles, Albert pretended to be asleep. It was the only way to evade, somewhat, Violet’s grip. Again and again she’d say his name and ask if he was awake in a tender tone of voice that left no room for any doubt that he would never be able to fulfill her expectations. Or she’d stroke his cheek. Which raised goose bumps on him. He told himself that a woman’s love he couldn’t return was better than no love at all. But he couldn’t find any comfort in that. Not today.

Violet told Fred that before she’d met Albert on the bus, she hadn’t believed in love at first sight, because she’d thought you couldn’t love someone if you didn’t know them. “Now I think otherwise,” she said. “Maybe you can
only
really love people you don’t know. Once you get to know them, it complicates everything.” For a fraction of a second her voice quavered. “They become … different.”

“I know,” said Fred, decisively: a clear sign that he hadn’t been able to follow her.

Albert’s eyelids stirred. These kinds of conversations were pretty much the opposite of what you wanted to hear when you were about to meet your mother for the first time after nineteen years. His mother. What a word! It sucked all the other thoughts from his head. Albert attempted to calm himself by silently reciting
The Hobbit.
Till he got to the part with the dragon that lived in Mount Erebor. If only he could have fallen asleep! It was more exhausting than he’d thought to keep his eyes closed for two whole hours. His left leg was all pins and needles, but he thought it was smarter not to change his position, so as not to blow his cover. He was forcing himself not to clutch at the makeup compact. The wild-flowers smelled too wild. The seat belt cut into his throat. And Violet warbled: “Albert, sweetie, are you awake?”

Mother. Mother. Mother.

Crunching gravel. Albert blinked: they’d arrived at the lower terminus of the mountain gondola, at last. They parked by the main entrance, where a few travelers bustled. In spite of the cloudless sky, the day was autumnally gloomy. Albert climbed out of the car and stretched his limbs; he showed Fred where the toilets were, and watched him trudge toward them, his rumpled poncho tossed over his shoulder, hat set crooked on his head.