Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

Arkadiusz spent weeks looking for work, with no results, and more and more often he found himself slipping up shadowy side streets to avoid friends and acquaintances whom, once upon a time, he would have invited to share a bottle of vodka; he was ashamed of the tattered and desperate shape that stared back at him from mud puddles. The conquering of the proudest woman in Poland, whoever she was, had been deferred to some other day. After that cold, wet November, even half-moldy stew salvaged from the garbage cans looked delicious to him, and there were so many holes and tears in his clothes that they showed more skin than they hid. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried, it was just that work wasn’t generally associated with sleeping in, but rather with getting up at an hour when even roosters were still asleep. And rising early was not one of Arkadiusz’s strong suits. No matter how often he promised himself to hop out of bed in the morning, as soon as his eyelids fell shut, he slept like the dead, arms folded behind his head, as if nothing and no one could do him any harm. Shaking, cold water, barked threats — none were of any help.

Every morning the risk grew that he might run into his mother on the open street. And what then?

He slunk from his native village, covered with dirt. And swore to himself he wouldn’t return till he’d made his fortune.

With his last piece of silver he traveled to the Baltic Sea and signed on with a shrimp boat. Never once had any of his siblings managed to outfish him, and more often than not he’d even trumped his father. Arkadiusz possessed neither unusual baits nor a nose for propitious casting spots; he used common green flies that he found on the dunghills, and sat himself down by the water at whichever place happened to be closest. His success was just a question of time. It didn’t matter how stormy the weather, how many other anglers were splashing around to his right and his left, how far the mercury sank below zero — Arkadiusz waited. Once he’d decided to fill his bucket with trout, perch, salmon, the fish didn’t have a chance. They simply had less patience than he did. However, he had a difficult time conveying the value of this talent to the Prussian fishermen on the Baltic. When for the fourth successive time they found him still snoring in his bunk during working hours, the crew tossed him overboard.

As he was borne away by the waves, he watched the boat pulling off, and for the first time in his life felt hopelessly alone. There’s no sense in living, he thought, I’ll never amount to anything — and exhaling, he let all his muscles go slack and sank down into the frigid sea. His saturated clothing pulled him under, water smothered the moonlight, rushed into his ears, and he grew colder and colder, but the stream of bubbles spluttering upward from his nose and mouth simply didn’t give out, no matter how much he blew and snorted. Just when he felt as though his head was about to burst, his feet brushed up against something yielding, uneven. He stretched his hand out into that utter darkness, digging his fingers into grainy sand and silt. He’d reached the seafloor. The air was still streaming out of him, wherever it was coming from. This could take quite a while yet, he thought — maybe it’s a sign. Maybe it’s not supposed to end today?

Arkadiusz waited a little longer, just to be sure, but even after he’d counted out another minute in his head, he didn’t feel the need to draw breath, and so he pushed off from the bottom and swam back toward the surface, then into the harbor.

The Circus Rusch had erected its tents in the vicinity of the fishing village. Arkadiusz’s sopping clothes still clung to his body as, shivering, he begged for an audition with the circus director. A clown with hair as red as a rowan berry, bare chest, baggy pants, and a squeaky voice led him — turning somersault after somersault — to a miniature bathtub. Foam sloshed over its rim, its water steamed. Arkadiusz would’ve given anything to be able to plunge himself into it. When the clown left him alone, he looked quickly around, and dipped one hand into the hot water.

“Pfui!” called a squashed sort of voice, and Arkadiusz whipped his hand from the water as if he’d been scalded. Behind the tub stood a dwarf, a towel wrapped around his waist, a bathing cap on his head.

“Who are you?” asked Arkadiusz.

“Who are you? ” replied the dwarf, crossing his arms.

“My name is Arkadiusz, and I want to talk to the director.”

“The boss, eh? Well, you’re looking at him.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Oh sure,” said the dwarf, “just a bit of circus humor: me, a half-pint, the boss. Ha-ha.”

“Well, can I see him, then?”

“Irony, kid. Where did you grow up?”

“Poland. On the East Prussian border.”

“Big surprise.” He straightened his bathing cap. “All right, what do you want?”

“I want to join the circus.”

The director’s bushy eyebrows drifted upward. “And why, pray tell, should your name be up on a marquee?”

Arkadiusz smiled; he’d thought this through carefully. “I never come back from a fishing trip empty-handed.”

“My, my, remarkable. We can build you a big vat of water, set you on a pedestal beside it, and show the audience how you catch pike after pike.”

“Really? You’ll take me?”

“Tell me, kid, how have you managed to survive this long?” The circus director made a sweeping gesture, and suddenly held a coin in his pudgy little hand. “Here, for you. And now shove off. My bath’s getting cold.”

Arkadiusz fought back an impulse to snatch the gleaming coin. “Wait a minute! That isn’t all!”

The director removed his towel. Arkadiusz glanced away.

“What? It’s just my third leg.” He laughed.

Arkadiusz met the director’s gaze. “I can do something you’ve never seen before.”

“I’ve seen everything. ”

“Not this. I can hold my breath.”

At that the director’s gaze, already narrow by nature, grew narrower yet. “Me, too. And I’ve already done it much too long today.”

“I can hold my breath for a very long time. Very, very long!”

“How long?”

“Well … I’m not sure.”

“So you’d like to be the Incredible Pole who doesn’t know how long he can hold his breath?”

Arkadiusz drew a deep breath, leaned forward, and stuck his head into the tub. Underwater he counted the seconds, bubbles clinging to his face, the bitter taste of soap on his tongue, his eyes burning; and every time he reached the point when he thought he’d have to surface, to give up, he tensed his diaphragm and released a few more reserves of oxygen.

The director didn’t interfere. He simply stood there with his mouth hanging open, watching bubble after bubble after bubble burst.

Four minutes and forty-three seconds later, Arkadiusz wasn’t Arkadiusz Kamil Driajes anymore, but rather ARKADIUSZ THE FOUR-MINUTE-AND-FORTY-THREE-SECOND MAN. For years he toured with the Circus Rusch, first through the German Empire, and later the Weimar Republic, holding his breath in a huge glass bell jar constructed expressly for him, before anxious adults and astonished children. Since all performances took place in the afternoon and evening, he could usually sleep in. He saved the lion’s share of his pay for his eventual homecoming. In letters to his mother and siblings — which, since he was illiterate, he dictated to his boss, in exchange for a third of his wages — he described the Cologne cathedral, the Leipzig city hall, Munich’s Frauenkirche; he recited hilarious and heartrending anecdotes from his wild nights out, which struck him as trite and banal as soon as they’d been written out on paper; he rhapsodized about his passionate love affair with THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING, a contortionist, who could balance herself on two fingers; he praised Bavarian wheat beer, lamented his breakup with THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING, and cited with disgust the various hateful slogans with which their circus wagons had been smeared in the course of their travels: “Wer nicht zum deutschen Volk gehört, der bleibt nicht lange unversehrt”; he didn’t mention that, thanks to the inflation, people were paying millions for a sack of potatoes, briquettes, a jacket, a pair of decent shoes or pants, which meant that they didn’t have money to treat themselves to an hour or so in a drafty patchwork tent that stank of sawdust and horse apples; instead, he claimed the circus was doing so well that he stoked his stove with twenty-thousand-mark notes that fluttered around in his wagon like confetti; moreover, he bragged about how he’d already mastered the German language, and told them how people salaciously misinterpreted his stage name, and how since the Treaty of Versailles no German walked the streets with his head held high.