Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

“Are there still ninety thousand?”

“Yes,” said Albert, without looking up.

“How about now?”

“Still the same.”

A thud came from the kitchen. Fred and Albert looked up at each other.

Fred ran to the kitchen. Albert laid aside his notebook and followed. After they’d spent several minutes searching in vain for the source of the noise, Albert’s eyes fell on the kitchen window; he rushed outside, around the house, and found a robin lying in the grass below the pane; it was jerking its legs and wings, and its beak opened and shut soundlessly. Fred shoved Albert aside. In both hands he held a shovel, which he let fall with a crash. The bird’s last sound was high and shrill.

“How about now? Is it still ninety thousand?” asked Fred, as if nothing had happened.

“Why did you do that?”

“What?”

“Why did you kill the bird?”

“It made him happy.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so bad, maybe he could have managed.”

“Mama says birds that don’t fly can’t fly. Mama says I’m the biggest bird in the world.”

“Come again?”

Fred said louder: “I’m the biggest bird in the world!”

“Next time we’re going to wait a bit before we kill any animals.”

“Okay, Albert,” said Fred, and lowered his head. “Are you …”

“No,” said Albert, “I’m not mad.”

Fred proposed burying the robin in the garden, next to a rowan bush, because it’d have plenty of visits from its friends there. An ambrosial thing.

“I’m sorry, bird,” said Fred, and crossed himself before the grave.

Albert shut his eyes.

I let the light wind lift me up ,

I love to glide with outspread wings

Leaving every bird behind.

Reason? That’s a rotten thing—

Reason and speech bring all to naught.

Flying freshens me with strength

And teaches me lovelier lessons still.

Fred smiled. “You can talk the way people sing.”

“That’s by Nietzsche.”

“Is he one of your friends?”

“Sometimes.”

Albert thought about the time Alfonsa had first read to him from Beyond Good and Evil. It was the day the dart had pierced his cheek. Albert had lain in the Saint Helena infirmary, the left half of his face swaddled in bandages, the taste of iodine in his mouth. The slightest blink or movement of his lips had sent stabbing pains through his head. When Alfonsa stepped into his room, he’d assumed she was planning to punish him with the shoelaces again. But she passed over the episode without a word, and instead sat down beside the bed, opened the volume of Nietzsche, and started to read. Albert’s six-year-old mind had glided over every third word, but Alfonsa’s emotionless voice had soothed him and given him the feeling that his wound was just an insignificant injury, something that would soon be healed.

Now, standing with Fred beside the tiny grave, this memory sparked such a need for comfort in him that he immediately walked into the house and called Alfonsa. It was only when she answered with a cool “Yes?” that it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to her since leaving for Königsdorf.

“It’s me.”

“Albert.” Was he wrong, or was there a faint trace of pleasure in her voice?

They were silent.

“I wanted to call you,” he said finally.

“I figured that much.”

Somehow, he’d imagined this differently. How was he supposed to tell someone who’d never been all that good at hugging that he wanted to wrap his arms around her? And what’s more, to tell her over the telephone?

“We buried a robin today,” said Albert.

“An exciting day, then,” said Alfonsa. “Anything else?”

“Fred only has ninety thousand minutes left.”

“You know what I think about that.” That he and Fred would be in better hands at Saint Helena. Before Albert had left, she’d taken every possible opportunity to make that clear to him. Which had only strengthened his conviction that he and Fred had to spend their remaining time in Königsdorf. At Saint Helena he would be forced to share Fred with nuns and orphans, at Saint Helena Fred wouldn’t be able to go through his usual daily routine, at Saint Helena Albert would never have learned about the gold, about the chest in the sewers, and about Britta Grolmann.

“You’re calling because it isn’t working out,” she said. “Think it over.”

“I have,” he said. “We’ll manage.”

At that moment, Fred stepped into the living room and looked at him, puzzled. Albert almost never used the telephone (his conversation with Britta Grolmann had been an exception, one he’d kept secret from Fred), and people rarely called them, mostly telemarketers, whom Fred jabbered at so interminably that they were glad to hang up. Fred asked him whom he was talking to, so loudly that Albert couldn’t understand what Alfonsa said to him next, and he would have entirely missed those words that he’d never be able to forget, if Alfonsa hadn’t cleared her throat and repeated, “I could show you who your mother is.”

A Pair of Boots

Between 1525 and 1924, seventeen houses in Segendorf burned to the ground. But most of them not in the sacrificial bonfire. My parents’ house was number eighteen. All the hamlet’s inhabitants formed a chain from the Moorbach to the village center, passing buckets of water along as fast as they could, though, admittedly, they concentrated their collective effort on the neighboring houses, to prevent the conflagration from spreading.

Everyone agreed that a flying spark must have been responsible for the blaze.

No one had seen how, before I’d fled, I’d torn the torch away from Anni and hurled it into the burning house, how I’d taken her face in my hands and looked her in the eyes and said, “I love you.”

Up on Wolf Hill, I curled up against the side of the oak that faced away from Segendorf and wept. I drew in my legs, pressed my knees against my chest, wrapped my arms around them, and buried my face there. I wanted to make myself as small as possible, so that nobody would be able to find me, and I thought, if I make an effort, then maybe I can crawl inside myself, and reach someplace better. I stayed there till late in the night, scratching at my wound and spelling out one word after another: H-o-t, b-l-a-z-e, f-i-r-e, d-e-v-o-u-r, s-m-o-k-e, J-o-s-f-e-r, J-a-s-f-e, J-o-s-f-e-r …

It didn’t help much.

The west wind carried smoke and ash my way. I fell asleep with my index fingers plugging my nostrils.

During the night, I found myself wandering through a burning house. I knew I was dreaming, there was no noise at all, the ceiling fell in, the chimney exploded — yet none of this disturbed the silence. I strode calmly from room to room, and finally reached my own. Heading for bed, I laid myself down between my parents, and drew up the covers.

“I love you,” I said to them, surprised that they were alive, and what’s more, that they didn’t answer.

“I love you,” I repeated.

My parents snored.

“ILOVEYOUILOVEYOUILOVEYOU!”

Someone or other prodded me. I shot up, grabbing at something smooth, sleek, and redolent of leather, and saw a girl whose polished boots rose past her knees.

“You’re Julius Habom,” she said. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

Mina Reindl was my age, but at least a head taller than me. Her hair shimmered, now gray, now blond, her tanned skin made you think of lacquered wood, and as she stood there inspecting me, she didn’t blink once. Typical Klöble. A few months before, her father had fallen victim to a rabid fox. Since then, the rumor had gone around that her mother, the master baker, had developed a weakness for an undertaker from out of town — certain nocturnal screams supposedly proved it.