Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

When we sat together at the table eating dinner, when the fire crackled in the oven, the soup burbled in the pot, the beams creaked, when the smell of fried potatoes and ham and apple cider and wild garlic filled the room, when Jasfe admitted to some foolishness or other and everyone laughed — even me, almost — when I felt so comfortable, and thought that Jasfe was just my mama and Josfer just my papa and Anni just my sister and I just her brother, on those evenings when I felt so much love for them all that I wanted to scream, I would scratch at the wound on my elbow beneath the table, tear the scab away, and dig with my fingernails into the skin, until at last the arm went numb, numb and dead.

When at age ten I threw my Most Beloved Possession, a pillow, full of holes and stinking of onions, into the sacrificial bonfire, I observed how Josfer took a wooden comb from Jasfe, and in spite of her tears, hurled it onto the heap of brushwood, together with his best hunting knife. As always, a good many Segendorfers wept on the way home, but Jasfe more than any of them.

“Where’s Herr Kastanie?” Anni asked, whining like any six-and-a-half-year-old who didn’t want to admit what had happened to her favorite toy, a little man cobbled together from twigs and chestnuts.

“Jasfe,” said Josfer, “you never used that comb.”

She shook her head. “It belonged to our mother!”

The sight of her pain triggered something in me. Over the next few days various articles vanished from the kitchen and the hunting shack, including a cooking spoon, shoelaces, an apron, a leather strap, a clay bowl with salt in it, a piece of chalk, a bucket, and last but not least, a rabbit’s foot. Neither Josfer nor Jasfe blamed me. Which only encouraged me to steal more, hacking the stolen items into pieces when necessary and scattering them under the firewood in the hearth. Only Anni’s things I left in peace.

It was as if a door in my head, previously hidden, had suddenly sprung open, a door through which a hot wind blew. I burned a bouquet of wild-flowers picked by Jasfe, and I burned Josfer’s hammer. (The hammer’s head I buried in the swamp.) I spared neither Josfer’s dagger nor Jasfe’s doily, which covered the table between mealtimes. Once I even stretched my arm into the fire, and let the fuzz of bright blond hairs coating it singe. I wanted to see my parents weep, I wanted to make them unhappy, as unhappy as I’d been, struggling for air in that bowl of sewage.

Yet nobody took me to task for it. In the summer of 1924, Josfer sat on a sawed-off tree trunk during meals because he hadn’t had time to build a new chair, my parents’ bed was missing all four of its legs, and Jasfe was constantly having to sew herself new knickers.

On the day of the Sacrificial Festival, I was uncertain which Most Beloved Possession I should single out — my one-year-old pillow (which stank just as powerfully of onions as the one from the year before) or a box of matches — when they called me into the parlor.

“Have you decided?” asked Josfer.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

Jasfe brought me to the door. Anni was waiting outside, absentmindedly rocking Frau Puppe, the first doll she’d sewn together herself.

Jasfe pressed a torch into my hand. “You know what you have to do.” She stepped back into the house and locked the door behind her.

“We know who burned all of our things!” called Josfer through the door.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted back.

“Today is the Sacrificial Festival. Today you’re allowed to burn whatever you want. So go ahead! Burn the house!”

“But … but you’re still inside.”

“Someone remembers how to speak!”

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“Don’t you love us, Julius?”

“That’s our house!”

“ I’ll burn it , I love you!” cried Anni, to whom no one was listening.

“Julius, those were our things that you threw in the fire.”

“But that was different!”

“Aren’t you brave enough?”

“I don’t want to do it!”

“I love you. I’ll do it,” said Anni softly, as I screamed, “I’m not going to do it! I hate you!”

My vision was so blurry with crying that I couldn’t tell Jasfe from Josfer when they stood beside me again, lifted me up and embraced me, kissed me.

“We love you,” they whispered. “We love you.”

“Me, too,” said Anni. “Me, too.”

After the Sacrificial Festival everyone went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how I should have answered my parents, how I wished I’d answered them, and how good it would have felt to say those words. I slipped from the house, walked to the Moorbach, and hung my feet in the water. I plucked marsh marigolds, threw them into the current, and asked myself where their journey would take them. I cleared my throat, and said, “I love you.”

Maybe that didn’t sound perfect — but then, what did sound perfect? On the way home I imagined how my parents’ faces would look when they heard me speak — first sleepy, then befuddled, and a moment later, happy — and had to smile. As I looked up at the night sky above the village, it seemed to me that this year the sacrificial bonfire was sending up a brighter glow than usual. But it wasn’t the festival. A house was burning. Our house was burning. Josfer and Jasfe’s house, and Anni’s, and mine. I ran toward it. The heat struck me in the face, and I flinched back. The fire had reached the second floor. There were no screams, I listened closely, I knew that in Segendorf people screamed at the slightest opportunity, but in my ears there was only a rumbling like that of a gigantic cooking pot on the boil, the fire whispering and hissing in a particularly hateful language. And I saw and I saw and I saw the flames dance through the rooms.

Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Anni. She looked at me anxiously, clutching a torch in both hands.

“I love them,” she said.

Good at These Things

They set out right after lunch. Albert had trouble keeping up with Fred, who settled immediately into a brisk stride. As always when he left the house, Fred was wrapped in his royal blue poncho, which fluttered behind him like a cape as he walked and intensified his already imposing appearance. His tufted Tyrolean hat sat askew on his head. His bulky, sagging backpack, which suggested a cargo of junk, the encyclopedia doubtless among it, didn’t appear to be hindering him. Albert, on the other hand, had allowed himself to be persuaded into wearing a plastic raincoat, and was now sweating freely beneath a flawless blue sky.

In a decidedly unsporty tote bag Albert was carrying a few slices of buttered bread, a Tupperware container filled with bananas, a few peeled carrots, a bottle of apple spritzer, Fred’s medication, and a pack of cigarettes. And in his hip pocket, the makeup compact.

After they’d followed the main street a ways, they curved to the right down Ludwigstrasse, a narrow side street littered with dried cow patties, where at the age of eight Albert had taught Fred to ride his bicycle without training wheels. Albert had run back and forth beside him, pushing him along, encouraging him, nursing his skinned knees after each tumble, and wiping away his tears, until finally, during the May school holidays, Fred had rolled his first few feet sans training wheels, the wind blowing into his proud, radiant face.