Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

I put my ear to her lips, and listened.

“Tell me. Uhh-ehh.”

I pressed closer.

“Uhh?”

As close as I could.

“Ehh?”

The next morning I stuck into my nostrils two scraps of fabric I’d torn from a rag, and cooked the morning bowl of lentils for Else; around noon I brought her a second helping, that evening the last, and once night fell I dumped all the cold lentils down the latrine. I began to tidy up the cabin, washing the window, eliminating the cobwebs, scrubbing the pots and bowls, polishing the flatware, and airing out the wardrobe. My new home should be shipshape, clean. Since Else had fallen into a deep sleep, I spent the night in the armchair again, ate barely anything, and looked forward to her awakening. Patience, it was all just a question of patience, of time, until she’d call me to her side. Soon.

How much time passed before footsteps approached and the door was opened? The leaves of the lindens and beeches had flushed to a fiery red. Cold seeped into the cabin through knotholes and cracks in the wood. I shivered in spite of the moth-eaten sheepskin I’d thrown around myself, having decided that an old woman like Else was in greater need of the blanket.

Wickenhäuser paid me no mind as he stepped into the cabin, hurled open the bedroom door, and froze. I stumbled over to him. As far as I could see, Wickenhäuser wasn’t breathing, wasn’t even blinking. For a couple of seconds he looked like a gravedigger. Then his face bloomed crab-red again and the piggy little eyes fixed themselves on me, a pale, emaciated boy who stood swaying beside him.

“Is she awake?” I asked.

Wickenhäuser grabbed me, threw his thick arms around me, and pulled me so powerfully against his round, firm gut that it drove all the air from my lungs.

Second Love

White light stabbed at my eyes. I woke in a bright room. Attempting to free myself from the two blankets lying heavily on my chest, I tumbled from the bed and crawled, since I could barely feel my legs, to the window. Grabbing the curtain, I hauled myself up, and looked outside.

It was pitch-dark. Turning back to the room, I noticed a candle flame imprisoned in a glass ball. I’d never seen a lightbulb before. To me, it was fire that lived without oxygen. Holding myself upright with the help of a chair, I teetered over to the door, lost my balance, made a grab for the knob, slipped sideways, and slumped to the floor again. It cost me a good deal of strength to pull myself back onto the chair. Panting, I rested a minute. Now, with my back to the room, I looked up at the wall and the golden switch protruding from it. I bent forward, pressed it, and the sun went out. I screamed in terror, groped for the switch, shoved my thumb against it — it grew bright. I stared at the candle flame in the glass ball and pressed the switch again. The light was extinguished. I pressed. The light flared up. Pressed — on. Pressed — off.

Distracted by my discovery, I didn’t notice the door being pushed open. The sight of Wickenhäuser’s fat, crab-red face surprised me, I fell from the chair, and shadows sprang at me from all directions, blocking my ears, shutting my eyes. Before I hit the ground, my shoulder struck the switch: night. Dark. Out.

When I opened my eyes again, I lay in bed. Sunbeams slipped in through the window. Real sunbeams. Wickenhäuser sat on a chair watching me.

“You look like one of my clients,” he said.

I pointed to the lamp above him. “What’s that?”

“Electric light.”

“Electric …”

“How are you feeling?”

“Are you rich?”

“Don’t answer a question with another question. That’s impolite.”

“You are rich.”

“How would you know?”

“The innkeeper in Segendorf is rich. When you ask him if he’s rich, he always dodges the question, too.”

“Better go back to sleep, you little rascal.”

“What’s a rascal?”

“Sleep!”

Thanks to his business with the dead, Nathaniel Wickenhäuser was one of the few who had profited from the world war. Not just soldiers, but many of those left behind, whose hearts and thoughts had accompanied their sons, husbands, fathers to the front, had died as well. The inflation hadn’t harmed him either, since death didn’t take a break, even in the midst of an economic crisis — on the contrary, he put in overtime. In spite of the lucrative business, however, Wickenhäuser owned only Hoss, his mule, and a carriage on which there was just room enough for a single coffin. Wickenhäuser didn’t hold with automobiles. They were unreliable. He preferred to obtain his coffins from the countryside, where they were cheapest. He particularly esteemed the specimens from Segendorf, because of the quality of their wood, for which reason (as well as the waiting bed of Master Baker Reindl) he undertook these tedious trips. Behind their hands, people called him the Jew of Schweretsried. Wickenhäuser knew it; stepping into a pub, he sensed instinctively who among those present thought that about him, but Wickenhäuser didn’t mind, the role appealed to him. Wickenhäuser liked the Jews. And their suits. Secretly he dreamed of traveling to Paris one day, and there, in a shop on the Champs-Elysées, having an elegant frock coat cut for himself. Although he could easily have afforded a more favorable location, his own shop was all the way at the far end of the Marktstrasse. He appreciated the symbolism. His apartment, in which he spent two weeks nursing me back to health, was directly above the establishment. Three times a day he’d knock at the door of the guest room, three times a day I’d tell him to come in — he’d bring me oatmeal, semolina, or a steaming bowl of soup — and three times a day I expected him to ask me to leave the house. With the exception of lentil soup, which I strictly refused even to taste, I ate voraciously, and didn’t leave a scrap behind. Meanwhile my face was filling out, and whenever I sat on the toilet — flushing fascinated me nearly as much as the light switch — the water beneath me splashed as if I were discharging stones. During the day I yearned to go out into the fresh air, but Wickenhäuser ordered me to stay in bed. “You rascal,” he said. “I’ll decide when you go out.”

“What does rascal mean?”

“It means Julius, more or less.”

“And what, more or less, does Wickenhäuser mean?”

He laughed. “Certainly not rascal. I’m not pretty enough for that. But you, you have the potential to become one.”

“But I don’t want that at all.”

“Go back to sleep!”

The first time Wickenhäuser let me out on my own was to go to Else’s funeral, and I didn’t have to be asked twice. For the occasion the undertaker laid out a black suit on the bed for me.

“It might not fit me,” I said.

“Trust me, my little rascal. I have a good eye for bodily dimensions.”

I was amazed: the sleeves weren’t overlong, nor did the suit pinch; there wasn’t even any need for provisional pinning or bunching. Nothing at all like my best and worst — since seldom worn and thus terrifically uncomfortable — lederhosen back in Segendorf, which had been pulled from the closet exclusively for Sunday Masses. I used to have to stuff hay into my formal leather shoes. I’d never before been able to break in my clothes before they’d started to reveal their defects, but this new funeral attire felt like sheer layers of colored air, not like cloth at all. And yet it protected me, this new outfit, disguised me, and allowed me to walk the road to the church without being noticed. So fascinated was I by my brand-new exterior that I ran after Wickenhäuser thoughtlessly, like a child following his father, and the town of Schweretsried flowed past me unnoticed, as if I’d traversed it already a thousand times.