Almost Everything Very Fast (5 page)

But even more precious to him than the photograph was a bottle-green barrette in which a pair of auburn hairs had snagged. He had lost one of them at Saint Helena, when he fell asleep holding it one evening, and on waking couldn’t distinguish it from the numberless others, his own, lying curled on the mattress. The second hair he kept in a homely makeup compact he’d bought at a flea market, and which he carried always on his person, like an asthmatic does his inhaler. At lonely moments, especially during his trips to visit Fred and back to the orphanage, he ran his hands across it, and it made him itch—like when a wound is healing.

That spring, when Albert discovered the photograph, he wiped it clean with a damp sponge and slipped it into a transparent plastic folder, which he carefully sealed with several layers of clear tape before stowing it away, wrapped in two shock-absorbing editions of the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, in an attaché case covered with fake alligator skin that he’d taken from the attic, and which zipped shut with a comforting
weeep.
And with that he walked—optimistically smacking his gum, as only a teenager can—over to Fred’s next-door neighbor. She was a potter named Klondi, who lived rent-free in a huge old farmhouse, badly in need of repairs, on the main street. In return for her housing, she kept the space “in good order”—nobody but Klondi was allowed to set foot on the second floor of the place, because only she knew which boards you could step on without falling through to the first floor. But Klondi—whose passport displayed a less silly, more mundane name—much preferred—when she wasn’t working late into the night, shaping vases and coffee mugs and ashtrays with her hands—to groom the garden behind the farmhouse. During the daytime, even in spring storms and November snow, you’d find her there, transplanting a rhododendron or trimming the hedges.

“Hello?”

Albert stood before a gate some ten feet high, all overgrown with roses. The smell was as overpowering as the incense at Sunday Mass at Saint Helena.

“Anyone there?”

He preferred not to have her name in his mouth. There were words that left behind a stale aftertaste.
Klondi
was one of them,
Father
another.

“Yes, someone’s there,” answered a hedge to his left.

Albert spat his gum into an empty terra-cotta pot and, as he followed the voice, pondered how many cigarettes Klondi must have smoked in the course of her life to earn herself such a sepulchral basso. She was down on her knees in a flower bed, cutting up slugs with a pair of gardening shears. Pale slime welled from the severed halves. A cigarette was stuck in Klondi’s ferocious smile, her hair lay bundled over her shoulders in a pair of schoolgirl pigtails, which hardly concealed the fact that Klondi the onetime flower child had long since become a flower woman.

“Do you know why I spare the ones who carry around their own little houses?”

Albert glanced at the dying slugs seeping out on the pavement. “Because they’re nicer looking?”

“I’d prefer to put it thus: survival of the sexiest.” Klondi laughed—or coughed, it was difficult to distinguish. “Want one?” She offered him a half-empty packet of Gauloises.

Albert shook his head.

“Good boy. But you’ll still have to take the gum with you.”

“Huh?”

“That chewing-gum crap. In the terra-cotta pot.” She stood with a flounce, as if she were sixteen, and knocked the dirt from her knees. “I’ve got enough butts lying around already.”

“Okay,” mumbled Albert.

“Is that for me?”

He tightened his grip on the attaché case, which he was carrying under his arm. “No. Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“Can I show you something?”

She waved him forward, and he followed her to a granite table in the middle of the garden, which she slapped with the flat of her hand. He unzipped the case and handed her the photo. She tilted it into the light.

“Well, so?”

“Do you know the woman?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” She blew smoke from her nostrils. “Why?”

“Nothing important.”

He wanted to take the picture back, but she wouldn’t let it go. “Albert, in the eleven years you’ve been visiting your father, you’ve never once set foot on my property. Nothing important? I believe that right now there’s nothing
more
important to you than this photo.”

“Maybe.”

Glancing down, Albert noticed he’d stepped on one of the dead slugs. He wiped his sneakers on the grass.

“She … could be your mother.”

“Do you know her?”

“Nope. We never met. When you were born, at the beginning of the eighties, it wasn’t a good time for me. I preferred to steer clear of people.”

“Why?”

She cleared her throat and tapped with an earth-smeared index finger at the gap between Fred and the Red Lady. “You would fit into this picture. Right there.”

Albert peered at the photo more carefully. She was right.

“Do you know …,” he began, but wasn’t sure how to end the sentence without it hurting.
Where she went? Why she abandoned us? Why she didn’t care about us? What she was thinking?

“I don’t know anything,” said Klondi and drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, as if she might be able to suck information from the butt. “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” She handed the picture back to him, and he immediately stowed it in the attaché.

“I wouldn’t keep searching,” she said. “I’m afraid nobody in this village will have anything to tell you. As far as they’re concerned, your father is a Virgin Mary. You’ll find nothing.”

At this early stage,
nobody
and
nothing
were words far too glib to make Albert call off his search. For three long years he behaved like a young detective during the holidays, roaming through Hofherr’s beer garden, accosting the diners just after they’d gulped down the last scraps of their meals—since, according to a radio crime series he’d been listening to late at night with a couple of other orphans, that was the ideal moment to take a potential informant by surprise—until at last a dirndl-clad barmaid chased him off with noises like
ksss
and
psh
, as if he were a stray dog begging for treats. For three long years Albert knocked at wickets, at garden gates, at front doors with frosted-glass panes, at open doors, at doors upon which, during Epiphany, trios of children in royal garb had scrawled the initials of the Three Kings,
C + M + B
, in chalk, and at doors that were locked and bolted. For three long years he schlepped his attaché case around with him, eagerly presenting his mug shot to every pair of eyes he encountered. For three long years he made photocopies of the picture, on which he spelled out with letters cut from the newspaper: HAvE yOu SeEn THIs wOMaN? RePORt it TO dRIaJES! and tacked them up on the bulletin board in front of the town hall, in the little shelter at the bus stop, on telephone poles and electrical boxes and over the logo of an American fast-food chain on the only advertising poster in Königsdorf, across from the only supermarket, until the community of Königsdorf, in the person of a man in a beige-green uniform, whom everyone referred to simply as the Village Fuzz, forbade him to paste them up on public property, on pain of a “hot ear.” For three long years, while staying with Fred, he answered every knock at the front door and ring of the telephone with hard-to-quash hopes for a female voice, a euphoric hug, and, naturally, red hair. And for three long years, people came forward—people who, in Albert’s opinion, must be suffering from dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, because they would solemnly proclaim to him that they certainly knew the man in the photograph: he was the invalid from the ’77 bus accident.

And so, over time,
nobody
and
nothing
became things to be taken seriously.

One late-summer morning, the morning on which, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he’d shaved for the first time, after another fruitless six-and-a-half-week summer holiday, Albert sat in the second row of pews for morning Mass, his head lowered, his chin against his chest, his hands folded, and as the prayers dropped from his mouth, wished for the first time that he’d never found the photo. What was it, anyway? A two-dimensional, possibly factitious, and in any case ambiguous reproduction of reality, the mere assertion of a time that Albert understood only hazily. He remembered what Klondi had told him three years before—that he would find nothing. She’d called him a fourteen-year-old simpleton, and advised him to let the picture be, to let the case drop. That’s just what life was, she’d meant: a heap of puzzle pieces that never added up to one great whole, but merely filled you with false hope, because they let you believe that something like an answer—the truth!—existed out there, somewhere. Her last words rang in his head: “Those damned puzzle pieces,” she’d said, “are nothing but Hansel and Gretel crumbs.”

Albert mulled over all of this, that night he spent sleepless in the BMW, and it left him, when morning came, with a feeling of helplessness. The fact that
capitulation
was part of
recapitulation
, he thought, seemed entirely appropriate.

On the other side of the windshield a dark blue was already mixing with the black, and the first birdsong heralded dawn. Albert pressed “eject,” and with a whirring sound the tape struggled from the slot. In the past, the two of them had sat here listening to the adventures of Benjamin Blümchen, the only talking elephant in the world. For a while, Fred had been entirely intent on the episode in which the elephant believed that acting meant you were lying. He’d replayed it again and again, ten times a day. Until Albert simply couldn’t help himself any longer, and threw the thing away. He could do precisely the same with Fred’s lump of gold and the cassette, he thought—then he wouldn’t have to waste any more thought on these Hansel and Gretel crumbs. He plunked the tape back into the box and reached for Fred’s nugget, marveling again at the weight of that little stone.

“All right, then,” he said.

Early that afternoon, Albert called Fred for lunch in the kitchen.

Within seconds the door sprang open. Fred was wearing his diving goggles, though outside the sun was shining. Usually Fred put them on when he stood by the bus stop in the rain. They’d belonged to his father. Sometimes Albert filled the bathtub with cold water, poured a packet of salt into it, and declared: “Voila! The Pacific!” Upon which Fred would leap with his goggles into the water, slosh around like an inebriated frog, and complain if the brine went up his nose.

Albert had cooked up some scrambled eggs with tomato. Fred pushed the tomatoes to the edge of the plate because “they didn’t taste good at all,” and Albert said, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred devoured all of the egg, but not the tomatoes, and Albert repeated, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred quickly rinsed off his plate, and Albert warned, “You aren’t getting any bread and honey,” but Fred swore that next time he’d eat “the healthy tomatoes,” at which point Albert did, in fact, smear some honey on the bread for him, while attempting to ignore Fred’s whispered self-praise: “That was a good trick.”

Albert’s best trick was mixing Fred’s medication into his food, without Fred noticing.

After the meal, Albert set the gold on the kitchen table. “Today I went to a jeweler in Wolfratshausen, who said we have almost enough here to buy a small house.”

“I already have a house.”

“Frederick, you’re going to tell me where you got this right now.”

“I found it,” grumbled Fred, fumbling with the clasp on the goggles.

“Where?”

A mulish stare.

“Sometimes I feel like a schoolmaster,” Albert said, sighing.

Fred shook his head. “But you’re Albert.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s plenty!”

Plenty was rarely so little, thought Albert, pouring himself a glass of milk and drinking it down.

“Albert!” Fred drew the cassette from the tin box, which Albert had set beside the sink. “You have a cassette, too!” His grin twitched. “A totally similar cassette.”

Albert emptied his glass so hastily that milk ran over his chin. “That’s
your
cassette.”

Fred held his breath. Silence. Then his grin returned: “You couldn’t sleep, Albert?”

“How did you know?”

“That tape makes an ambrosial noise, like water. And Mama said you always sleep best by the water.”

“Where did you get the tape?”

Fred bit his lips.

“Did somebody give it to you?”

“No.”

“Let me guess: you found it.”

“Yes.”

Albert rolled his eyes. “Where did you find it?”

This time Fred licked his lips like a contestant on a quiz show, confident of his answer, and even before he replied, Albert knew what that answer would be.

“The same place the gold came from!”

“Oh,
there
,” said Albert, and set the glass down so heavily that the sound of it shocked even him. “Listen, Frederick, this is very important to me. I absolutely
have
to know.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“
What’s
dangerous?”

“Everything!”

Albert thought for a moment. “And what if we keep an eye out for each other? I take care of you, and you take care of me. Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be less dangerous?”

Fred looked thoughtfully at the gold.

“The two of us on a quest for gold,” said Albert, sensing that this was his chance. “That would certainly be something.”

“It’s dangerous,” Fred softly repeated.

“Would it be a long trip?” asked Albert.

Fred wobbled his head. “It’s deep.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“It’s a long way below us.”

“Well, that much I understood.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because … forget it,” said Albert. His gaze fell on the
HA
scratched into the kitchen window, and he fought down the urgent desire to hurl something through it. Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.