Almost Everything Very Fast (34 page)

I woke, and my hands were numb and stiff. I couldn’t say how long I’d been asleep. My legs wouldn’t move. The stairs down to the first floor were steep. I let my head sink to the cool floor and thought of Anni.

At least she’d assume I’d fallen in battle.

I’d never believed in God. I’d always been convinced that I didn’t need him, that I could live my life without having to arrange it around someone for whose existence there was no credible evidence. But after my brush with death in a Paris bedroom, I began to pray. Not out of thankfulness. I didn’t fold my hands, take myself to church, or consult a pastor; I simply sent my thoughts Godward—arbitrary thoughts, and not always friendly.

The doctors had told me that, due to the spinal injury, I’d never be able to walk again. What kind of a god was it who, just as I was about to slip into a peaceful sleep, had sent a woman, right on time, into the stairwell, whose hysterical screams had brought the soldiers stationed nearby at a run, only to leave me with half a working body? God could have left me lying there. Instead, he’d sent me (as I learned later from my medical file) on a journey through sick bays and hospitals, of which I have no memory apart from the acid reek of disinfectants and the stink of rotting flesh. At that time many people lost their faith because of the horrible things that had befallen them. For the same reasons, I found my faith. I realized that God must exist. He didn’t love and wasn’t righteous—rather, he was a sort of malicious scientist. And mankind was his experiment. By means of a sexual act, he’d robbed me of the ability to walk, left me for weeks at a stretch wishing I was dead. Yet he’d also manifested a definite irony, in that he’d unmistakably reanimated—as I found when a ward nurse with azure eyes helped me into a wheelchair for the first time—certain parts of my lower body.

I could have rejoiced, I could have been relieved, but instead I apologized to the ward nurse. To which she replied that I didn’t need to be ashamed, that it was a good sign.

She couldn’t know that my eternal desire for the proximity of women was what had led me to this wretched pass. I was twenty-seven years old, I was seated in a rolling steel contraption, and I had lost everyone whom I’d ever loved.

Two possibilities remained: I could end my life, or fundamentally alter it, and I chose the second because, as I now believe, I was too craven for the first. I resolved to forswear any romantic attachment to women. As difficult as it would be in the beginning to resist, over time my memories would fade, and with them my longings; I would forget what a kiss felt like, or the touch of a beloved person, or waking up to a warm body snuggling closer to me. And maybe I’d learn to be happy alone, and finally find peace.

In my letters to Anni I didn’t mention my misfortune, my now useless legs, so that she wouldn’t worry, or attempt to find me. As the German Reich expanded, the possibility that we’d ever see each other again dwindled. I struggled to suppress just how much I missed her, and held fast to the thought that the growing distance between us would at least make my dream of a fulfilling life without women easier to achieve.

My disability abetted it as well. No question about it, women felt less attracted to a man they had to squat in front of in order to look in the eye. Meanwhile I’d reached the final station of my odyssey through the various hospitals of the Reich, the Saint Helena Veterans’ Home in Upper Bavaria, which was run by the nuns from an adjacent convent. Their relief that at least one of the soldiers in their charge could contain his libido was palpable. Ludwig Wickenhäuser was one of the most beloved patients at Saint Helena. He believed in God, he shared with them his knowledge regarding burials—knowledge particularly useful at this moment in history—he understood their Bavarian, and understood, too, that they wanted to be perceived as female beings, though not in the single sense in which most female beings were perceived by men.

Presumably this quality was the reason that, once my wounds had healed and I had long since resigned myself to my new existence as a perpetual sitter, barely even needing their help any longer, they didn’t demand that I vacate my bed, but rather asked me if I’d stay on with them. I accepted their invitation, and moved into a ground-floor room furnished with a low bed, extra support handles in the bathroom, and a wheelchair ramp in front of a window overlooking the orchard, which I opened first thing every morning. I’d haul myself up onto the sill and lean out and breathe the perfume of the apple trees and think: here I might be able to learn to look for happiness right where I am, rather than in all those places I can’t be.

On May 7, 1945, the Wehrmacht capitulated; and that night, so did I. It ran counter to my intentions in every sense, but I had to find out if there was any way I might live the life that suddenly, with the war’s end, seemed possible again, and that I still wanted more than anything.

I wrote to Anni and begged her to visit me. Without mentioning, of course, that a journey by wheelchair to Königsdorf would have been impossible for me.

She arrived at Saint Helena two weeks later, on a humid May morning. I waited for her in the chapel; it was cooler there, and less oppressive. I was sitting before the altar in my wheelchair when I heard footsteps approaching, pausing, then approaching again. Anni’s first word was a question: “Julius?”

It had been five years since anyone had called me that, and the last person who’d used my true name had been my sister. Maybe, I thought, it was a sign that she’d come to fetch me back to my life.

I turned to face her.

When people say that someone they haven’t seen for years has barely changed, they’re generally lying; they just want to flatter. But Anni hadn’t changed at all. Her curls, her full cheeks, her shaking head—they were all exactly as I’d pictured them, night after night.

Still, she didn’t move an inch.

“Don’t I get a hug?”

She crouched, and laid her hand on mine: “Are you all right? What’s happened?”

“A bullet. Right in the spine.”

She examined the wheelchair. “How long will you need this?”

I didn’t say anything and she understood and flung her arms around my neck.

I slipped my own arms around her, and felt her warmth. “It has its positive side, too. I’ve gotten a whole new perspective on things, down here.”

She pulled away and slapped me. “You should have written me about this!”

“I should have.”

And she hugged me again, this time so fiercely that the wheelchair rolled backward and we knocked against a pew, laughing.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

It sounded different coming from Anni than it did from me.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Where?” she asked.

“Who cares. Away, that’s all that matters.”

“You mean for good? In your state?”

“I can handle it.”

“And Fred?”

“Fred’s better off in Königsdorf.”

“I can’t leave him there by himself.”

“Fine, then he can come, too.”

“But what are we supposed to live on?”

“I have enough gold.”

“We can’t just disappear like that.”

“Why not? I love you,” I said.

“I do, too,” she said, and kissed me on the brow, and I held her tight and kissed her on the mouth.

“Don’t, please,” she said.

“Because you don’t like it?”

“Because it isn’t right.”

“It was for our parents.”

“Yes, for our parents.”

As I went to kiss her again, she flinched away.

“I can’t be close to you without being with you,” I said finally.

“And I can’t be close to you if you want to be with me,” she said, and didn’t even shake her head.

We fell silent and looked at the altar and the floor and quickly into each other’s eyes, then at the altar again; we listened to each other breathing; we waited for one of us to say something.

Anni didn’t send me any more letters. I wrote to her every week, and thought about her every day. I pursued the pain, I embraced it. In the evenings, when I lay down to sleep and positioned my legs beside each other with my hands, I imagined Anni, only a few miles away, kissing some man, a handsome, clever, witty, and successful man, whom she loved more than anything, and who, while I strained to wrap the blanket around my body, lifted her with a laugh and threw her over his shoulder and carried her into the bedroom on healthy legs.

After sending hundreds of letters to Anni without getting a single reply, I received two lines from her: “Please don’t write anymore. I’m sorry. A.” I read these words over and over, searching for clues and ambiguities, for signs that we might be closer to each other again someday. What finally robbed me of all hope was that
A.
An
A
was all I was worth to her, just a pointy
A.

My last letter to her contained nary a word. I simply returned Fred’s drawing of Mina’s hand.

Thirty-six years later, I asked myself how thirty-six years could possibly have passed without my noticing. Saint Helena was the kind of place that let you forget that the outside world existed at all. Especially if, like me, you didn’t read the papers, listen to the radio, or watch TV. I’d given them up for good after the news of the ’77 bus accident reached us. My son Ludwig had died and taken two people with him. I didn’t even try to read Fred’s report in the newspaper. I didn’t want to remember that place, those people. That wasn’t my life anymore.

In 1981 I was living like an old man. I was an old man! I was facing my sixty-eighth birthday, and my days so resembled each other that only the weather allowed me to tell them apart. I sat at the window and looked out, saw white apple blossoms, saw how the fruit was plucked and fell to the ground, saw the nuns raking leaves and icicles forming on the branches.

At the end of the sixties, after the number of patients at Saint Helena had rapidly diminished and I’d had my last peak season as an undertaker, the Veterans’ Home was closed; the remaining dependents had been transferred to a modern institution at Bad Tölz. I remained at Saint Helena. I’d spent the greater part of my life with the nuns. This was my home, here I knew what to expect. At least, that’s what I thought.

That same year, Alfonsa arrived at Saint Helena.

Her parents had borne that particular title—which, like most people, they’d simply been given, without having earned it—for a whole ten hours before absconding, leaving her in the care of a Rhineland convent. That’s where Alfonsa had been born, and she asserted she was going to die in a convent as well. One word was guiding her from that first event to the last:
Sister.
The multifariousness of this word had always been the backbone of the religious order.
Sister
was considered the most stable of currencies, an all-purpose word in any circumstance. Thanks to
Sister,
you could express what you’d have to keep quiet about, otherwise.

At the age of five she’d appeared at night in the Mother Superior’s bedroom, and said, between sobs, “Sister”—meaning that she’d dreamed there were rats beneath her bed, a whole swarm of rats with red eyes, who wanted to gobble her up. At age eleven, she’d whispered, “Sister,” actually trying to convey that she thought there was something wrong with her, there was blood all over her bed and her legs. That same year she swallowed the second syllable of “Sister,” instead of asking whether the tickling she felt down below when, during Mass, she pressed herself against the pew in front of her, was one of God’s blessings. It wasn’t long before she said “Sister” through her teeth—withholding from the Mother Superior the fact that Alois from the tenth grade, who owned all of Frank Sinatra’s records, had stuck his forefinger into her, though only up to the first knuckle, and that it hadn’t been an especially pleasant sensation, she’d expected much better, but regardless, whenever the Body of Christ was laid on her tongue she couldn’t help thinking of the Body of Alois, and the way that his thing tasted like Parmesan cheese. A few weeks after her nineteenth birthday, she let a long pause fall between the two syllables of “Sister.” She was pregnant, and had scrapped her plan of eloping with Alois, because he—who’d always talked about living with her in a little apartment in a big city, where they could recite the lyrics from Sinatra songs to each other and scream “Fuck you, Jesus!” as often as they wanted—because this Alois had run off without her. In the third month of her pregnancy she lost the child, and said “Sister” soundlessly, wanting to know whether it would have been a girl. From then on, her “Sister” sounded emotionless, and concealed all the thoughts that burrowed within her: she didn’t know what she should do with her life, she would have liked to spend all day just lying in bed, reading, even if it was just the Bible, she couldn’t bring herself to go outside any longer, she simply couldn’t, she hated being forced, she wished someone would ask her how she was doing, nobody ever asked her how she was doing, they all just nodded at each other and scurried around and acted as if they were happy, but they weren’t, thought Alfonsa, they couldn’t possibly be happy, even she could see that, though she’d been happy only once, once, and it seemed to her that that was already a lot for a lifetime, as far as most people were concerned she should probably be glad, but she wasn’t glad, she had a crazy plan, she wanted to be happy twice in her life, the only problem was, to manage it she’d have to go outside, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that, it wasn’t happening, not yet, anyway, the convent itself was big and rambling and offered so much variety, what were a couple of months without the open sky above her, she could still see the sun, it even shone into her room, Alfonsa felt quite well inside, agoraphobia or no agoraphobia, she was unable to grasp why the nuns wouldn’t leave her alone, at nineteen she knew very well what was good for her, and she definitely preferred the shadows of the convent to the sky, because the sky knew no limits, the sky was immoderate and pretentious, the sky forced itself on everyone, a cheap promise in blue and white and gray, but the walls and ceilings and floors and corners of the convent won you over with their modesty and sincerity, like the ornaments in the library, Alfonsa could grasp them, touch them, they pressed themselves coolly against her skin and proved to her that they were there, dependable pieces of the world.