Christopher Kloeble: Almost Everything Very Fast

When she came to, she was lying alone in the mud by the wooden bench. And later that evening, she was unable to hide from her brother the pale purple bruises on her throat.

From the next hunting trip with his father, only Josfer returned.

Nick was never found, and the twins never spoke about what had happened out on the moor. It was said in the village that Nick had been smothered by quicksand, and because he’d been unpopular in Segendorf, nobody asked any questions.

From then on, my parents shared a bed every night. Soon they couldn’t sleep unless they were lying naked beside one another, each with a hand resting on the other’s sex. Their hands were comforting shields — intimate, impermeable.

Klöble

I came into the world on a rainy day in May 1913. For a long time my parents couldn’t agree on a name, so they finally chose one that reminded them of their own: Julius. At my birth I emitted only a single scream, prolonged and furious. Then I piped down, struggling for a while in silence, waving my arms. The midwife worried I might suffocate — she didn’t understand that I was merely underwhelmed by the world into which I’d been hatched.

Three years later, at the birth of my sister, Anni, who was christened with the name of her grandmother, the screaming was shrill and continued for hours on end, until Anni, alongside our equally exhausted parents, at last fell asleep.

Even as a child my high forehead was flat, and my eyes lay too deep in their sockets for my taste, but my mother said they had a tantalizing glitter that made people want to grab them; my mouth was a little too small, my nose a little too wide, and my ears stood out just enough for people to smile but not laugh at them.

The fact that I was Anni’s brother would have escaped even a careful observer; our differences were more conspicuous than our similarities. Anni’s skin was as pale as mine was only on those spots that the light never touched. The curls of her hair, which reached all the way to her elbows, seemed wholly unmanageable, and the crown of her head rose no farther than my chin. Her mouth was bracketed, halfway to her earlobes, by a pair of dimples, which stubbornly persisted even when she wasn’t grinning or laughing, and the sight of her lips often reminded me of the words of Cobbler Gaiger, who in addition to footwear also produced remarkably sturdy fishing rods: “They’re as round as a fish’s.”

Everyone in Segendorf, apart from the Klöbles, had a clear idea of who’d fathered Anni and me, but our parents didn’t care that they were always the last ones served at the tavern, or given the leanest sausage at the butcher’s. And for two good reasons: neither Anni nor I was a Klöble.

So we grew up surrounded by the suspicion and malice of our peers, whose parents had filled them with grotesque, but essentially true, stories about Jasfe and Josfer. While we were in the crib, they’d pinch our bellies when our parents weren’t looking; as we took our first steps, they’d trip us, or push us into the mud; as we learned to lace our dirndls or button our shirts, the scornful, mistrustful looks of other mothers, mimicked by their children, nipped in the bud any hope of playing a single round of Fangamandl; and once we’d reached the age when we blushed if anyone saw us bathing in the Moorbach, people would steal our underwear. It didn’t take long for us to resign ourselves to our fate, the two of us exploring the cliff on our own to look for gold, running races together on a bet to the oak on Wolf Hill, or playing who-can-fill-the-cup-with-spit-first?

Yet sometimes I was, in fact, alone.

One summer evening I was gathering brushwood in a forest clearing when a pine-or sprucecone (I couldn’t tell them apart) struck me on the head. Above me the sky glowed an ominous pink. Five snickering boys came toward me through the bushes, their pockets bulging with pine-(or spruce-) cones.

“Heya, we just want to play,” shouted the smallest of them; his name was Markus, and his father ran a pig farm.

“I have to go home,” I said.

“You never want to play with us!” cried Markus.

The last time they’d played with me, they had stuffed my pants with stinging nettles. I said I was going now, and even as I did, I felt angry that my words sounded like an apology.

Markus was juggling a pair of cones. “We’re going to play ‘hunting’ now. We’re the hunters, get it? And you, you’re a wild boar.”

I clutched the brushwood to my chest, lowered my head, and ran. Three cones missed me by a hairbreadth, a fourth hit me on the neck. I dropped the wood. From behind me: jeering, screaming, clattering. As long as I kept up my pace, I could outdistance them, I thought, simply keep running, leaping, sidestepping. Trees sprang up in my path, branches threw themselves at my feet, sunbeams blinded me — but I didn’t stumble. The voices and noises remained behind me. I threw a glance back over my shoulder, and couldn’t make out any movement. My throat burned, snot ran from my nose. I listened to the forest: only the cries of ravens and the sighing wind. I took a step back, tripped on a root, and toppled over. A bed of moss cushioned my fall. Once I’d wiped the mud from my pants, I looked up. Markus was standing over me, offering his hand. “Heya. Need help?”

They shoved and dragged me to a deer stand where I sometimes climbed with my father when he was hunting. While the others held me down, Markus tied a rope around my ankles. They threw the line over one of the deer stand’s beams, and hauled on it together until I was suspended upside down. Only then did I notice the bowl they’d set on the ground beneath me, from which there arose a revolting stink. Sewage sloshed against the rim.

“Dinnertime, Klöble!” shouted Markus.

Then they let go of the rope.

Z as in Zwiebel

Weeks later, as Anni and I were collecting dust in a beer stein, out of which, with the help of a little wind and water, we intended to whip up a raincloud, we discovered a cookbook hidden in a fruit crate. It had once belonged to a cook’s apprentice from Franconia, who’d ventured into the swamp in search of escargots. He clearly hadn’t known that it was considered the sacred right of every Segendorfer to relieve any vagrant who set foot on their property of all — and particularly the most beloved — of his possessions.

Anni and I carried the cookbook into the kitchen and flipped carefully through it, handling each page as if it were a butterfly’s wing. Anni wanted Jasfe to read it to her, but our mother couldn’t tell an A from a B any more than Josfer could. In Segendorf, no one but Pastor Meier could read or write. I tucked the book away till later in the evening, then studied it by moonlight. I considered myself cleverer than others my age. And I was, too. All day long I struggled to teach myself the alphabet. The pictures revealed to me most of the sounds —B as in Bread, P as in Potato, and S as in Salt. It turned out that only a few of the ingredients were unknown to me, yet Pastor Meier explained what I couldn’t puzzle out for myself, and when I finally arrived at Z as in Zwiebel— onion — I laid the cookbook in Anni’s lap.

“Flip it open and pick a word,” I said.

“This one,” she said, tapping a little cluster of letters surrounded by an overwhelming throng of words.

“M-e-a-t-l-o-a-f,” I spelled out, and then pronounced: “Meeetlooooooaf.”