Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

“Maybe. And now …”

“The opposite?”

Wickenhäuser nodded.

“If I were an undertaker, I could earn a lot of money.”

“Good.”

“I could keep you company.”

“Very good.”

“I could eat orange marmalade every day. I could own a flush toilet. And electric lights.”

“Right, keep going!”

“I could collect money from the church, which has deep pockets. I could console people. I could always wear nice suits. I could keep the best plot in the graveyard for myself. I could do something respectable.”

Wickenhäuser slapped the coffin lid with a loud bang. “ And you could have any woman you want.”

That same evening he introduced me to a girl my own age whom he’d brought to the house.

“Her name is Stephanie,” he said, at which the girl briefly wrinkled her brow. As we introduced ourselves, I was surprised by her strong handshake. Wickenhäuser slapped me on the shoulder and winked at us. He hurriedly wrapped himself in his coat, and opened the front door. An urgent appointment, he said, he might be gone a long time.

Then we were alone.

The girl, who presumably wasn’t called Stephanie, was neither pretty nor ugly. You wouldn’t have turned to look at her in the street, at any rate. Without a word, she began to unbutton her dress. I didn’t move, just watched, as she peeled away one layer of clothes after another and took off her jewelry. Her body was petite, her skin pale and firm. Next, she started to undress me. It all seemed so strange, but nevertheless, I let it happen. Her touch wasn’t unpleasant. She knew how to fill a young man with self-confidence, when to groan, when not to snicker. I stopped her only once — when she went to kiss the scar on my elbow. While I was sleeping with her, I thought, fascinated: I’m sleeping with a woman. And I asked myself why I’d waited so long to try something that felt so good. I was hardly irritated by the fact that in the hours we spent together she barely looked me in the eye; that was just part of her profession, I told myself.

Sometime around midnight she dressed again, nodded a good-bye, and left the house.

I never saw her again.

At breakfast the next morning I felt Wickenhäuser watching me. I let him fidget for a while, and picked the salt from my pretzel as always, as if there were nothing to discuss. Only after washing the dishes did I say, “Okay then.”

“What do you mean?” asked Wickenhäuser, though I think he knew immediately what I was talking about.

“I’ll stay.”

In Schweretsried I saw the world, and that was exactly what I wanted. Wickenhäuser showed me the business of death, and, since I learned quickly, the undertaker never had to repeat an instruction. At first I served as assistant; later on , rascal came to mean partner.

Back then, the pastor of Schweretsried marveled at how strikingly often baptisms followed hard on funerals in the same family. So many husbands, it seemed, had sired children shortly before their demise. The preacher ascribed this to the righteous equity of the Lord. The Grace of Heaven, so to speak. At the regulars’ table in the Iron Pine he told Wickenhäuser about this joyous miracle; the latter smiled and shook his head. “What a rascal!”

“Who?” asked the pastor. “God?”

“Sure,” said Wickenhäuser. “Who else?”

Wickenhäuser explained to me things no woman would have been willing to explain herself. After each burial ceremony, I’d ask the widows in a whisper to follow me into the office for some final paperwork. They never refused; their eyes were puffy with weeping, and their thoughts weren’t running as smoothly as usual. In the newly furnished guest room — my office — I offered them a seat on my bed. None of them suspected anything. Patiently I asked the widows if they were satisfied with my services. They always said yes. Slowly I scooted my chair closer, and proposed a slight discount. They always welcomed it. I sat beside them on the bed, and warily slipped an arm around them. At which point they’d always cuddle up to me. Finally I admitted what exceedingly intense feelings I cherished for them. (The truth is always what one decides to believe.) Most of them tensed up, leapt from the bed, and excused themselves, polite, aloof; but some, more than a few, gratefully kissed my face. They smelled of makeup applied too thick, and sweetish sweat. In bed they were quiet, almost noiseless, as if they didn’t want to wake their departed husbands.

Wickenhäuser assured me that I could have my fun with the widows, as much and as often as I liked, none of them would ever dare to confess such a misstep. But he warned me that I should never, at no point whatsoever, look one of those women in the eye. That’s why he’d taken care that my first time hadn’t been anything special. As far as Wickenhäuser was concerned, making love didn’t mean sleeping with someone; in his opinion making love meant that you created love, you actually made love. “It happens quicker than you’d think,” Wickenhäuser pointed out, and added with a significant smile: “And then suddenly all you’ll want is to be with that one person.”

On weekends, guests were no longer invited over. Instead, the two of us celebrated alone, and it would be wrong to say we didn’t have a good time, playing our rhyming games. If one of us recited badly, that is, without rhyming, we’d have to take a hearty swig of brandy.

This happened fairly frequently.

I love to play: whenever I’ve a chance

I cry aloud and dance a wild dance.

My cheeks flush ruddy as a crimson star

And now and then, I’ll shout: You’ve gone too far!

Many men have met their jolly doom, my dove,

By hiking up my skirt beneath the moon above.

You call me pert: I like that well enough,

But not as much as I love making … merry.

These evenings usually ended — more often than I liked — with the undertaker, emboldened by alcohol, begging me to share his bed. To make a little love.

I turned him down. To me, Wickenhäuser was a teacher and a business partner, nothing more. Hidden in my affection for him I sensed the possibility of a love that I didn’t want to permit. To love someone again the way I’d loved Else was too great a risk for me. Because one morning the undertaker, too, would fail to wake up.

I sometimes capitulated to Wickenhäuser’s pleas purely out of pity, and slept beside him, under separate blankets. Even when he wept and wistfully described that moment in the log cabin when, for the first and only time, we’d embraced, I refused to take him in my arms, and corrected him, saying that on that particular occasion, he’d been the only one doing the hugging. This melancholy, which by day withdrew behind the sparkle in Wickenhäuser’s eyes, broke out again at night. It was only following his visits to Segendorf that Wickenhäuser was able to suppress it for a few days — or, at best, weeks — at a time, and I asked myself what Master Baker Reindl was able to give the undertaker that he couldn’t find among such a rich assortment of men and women here in Schweretsried.

For me, Segendorf lay far in the distance, as if the first eleven years of my life had been merely a dream, one that was fading with every day. Anni helped me with that. My sister answered none of the letters I sent with Wickenhäuser, never returned a single greeting. Which is why I never went with him to Segendorf. I took it to mean she didn’t want any contact with me. And whenever I tried to understand why, Wickenhäuser consoled me, saying I shouldn’t stew over it, and instead enjoy the freedom I had here in Schweretsried. He told me that of all God’s cruelties, the greatest was saddling a man with family.