Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

He never received any answering letters. “Circus people,” the boss asserted, once again having emptied a bottle of redcurrant schnapps all by himself, “have no settled address. They drag around from place to place. From wallet to wallet.”

All of this came to an end with the stock market crash in 1929. Coming in from the west, Black Thursday sloshed across Europe like a wave, and turned into Schwarzer Freitag. Numerous performances were canceled. The circus schlepped through the boondocks for a few more weeks, the audience numbers plummeted, and finally the boss put everyone on unpaid leave. At that point they were camped in Schweretsried. For a few days Arkadiusz had been tormentedly considering whether or not he should try his luck alone. He had finally received a letter from his mother; in it, she complained of how badly the family had been doing since the last, ill-fated harvest, and stressed how much she was relying on his support. During a conversation at the Iron Pine Tavern, he overheard rumors of a monk and a vein of gold and a village hidden far out on the moor. They told him the people out there weren’t kindly disposed to strangers — which didn’t disturb him at all, he wasn’t looking for friends. His head held a single word, tolling as loud as a church bell: GOLD. And it boomed louder every day that passed without wages. Until, plagued by the thought that somewhere far away his family was starving, he made a decision.

It was hard for him to leave the circus troupe. The boss promised him he could come back anytime, THE INEFFABLY FLEXIBLE YING gave him a French kiss, and HANS THE TATTOOED SNAKE insisted that he wasn’t crying, there was just something in his eye.

During those first days of his journey south, Arkadiusz spent more time crying than not; he was alone again, he’d left both his real and his adopted family behind. The only thing that kept his spirits up was that gold-golden vein of gold; it drove him onward, deeper onto the moor. At night by the campfire, he gnawed on the perch he’d caught, and dreamed of returning to his homeland as a savior.

A convoy of automobiles pulls to a halt before his parents’ house, and his siblings flock around him, shouting for joy, as he leads his mother, nearly fainting with pride, from car to car, presenting her with wine from Champagne, beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea, lynx pelts from the Pyrenees, and gold bars, each stamped with his personal seal: a fisherman.

Two weeks later Arkadiusz arrived in Segendorf. He took that for a good omen. Cheerfully, he walked into the tavern, ordered a wheat beer, and told a walleyed barmaid about the gold. Her jaw dropped, she clapped her hands gleefully, and ran outside. A moment later, she returned with a gray-haired couple, likewise walleyed. Her parents said they’d be happy to assist him on his treasure hunt, very happy. When could they begin? Tomorrow? Today?

Now?

Arkadiusz had never been one of the quickest, but he wasn’t that slow, either. In the first pair of eyes he saw how they’d follow him to the gold and help him dig it up; in the second, how they’d hold the gleaming stones up to the sun and perform a dance of joy; and in the third, how they’d knock his head in with a shovel, and bury him out on the moor.

Arkadiusz excused himself, saying he had to use the latrine, and left Segendorf as quickly as he could.

He came across the Moorsee during his forays through the underbrush, and used it thereafter as both food source and landmark. Swimming in it reminded him of the moment when he’d nearly rendered his life to the Baltic. Since then he’d changed greatly — he wore a full beard, he had been initiated into love by female devotees of THE FOUR-MINUTE-AND-FORTY-THREE-SECOND MAN throughout the republic, and now — the gold, the goal, his triumph clearly visible — he was shortly to return to his homeland, a hero.

Each day that passed with no sign of the gold vein, without even a trace of the stone through which said vein might run, didn’t dampen his spirits, but heightened his sense of euphoria. Indefatigable, he clambered up trees, dove to the bottom of the Moorsee, dug through the soil, and collected every suspicious pebble. Again and again he forgot to go fishing, since each night in his dreams he found himself feasting at tables heaped high with food.

His quest would have ended unhappily if one day he hadn’t spotted a plump young woman on the snow-flocked surface of the frozen Moorsee. A little voice inside him, which sounded suspiciously like the boss’s, began grousing, saying he shouldn’t let some little provincial floozy throw him offtrack, the golden prize was close enough to touch! But Arkadiusz kept looking at the girl. Each of her gestures seemed perfection itself, and woke in him the desire to touch her. The way she tapped her boots, and skidded across the ice, and smoothed back her hair — so beautiful, so simple!

Later, he sought out the place where she’d been sitting, and found a red spot in the white. He carefully carved out the drop of blood, carried the snowball back to his camp, and regarded it thoughtfully. As dawn broke he punched a hole through a thin spot in the Moorsee’s ice, undressed himself, and slipped into the water. He hadn’t thought any of this through; as he glided with strong strokes through the frigid black, he hoped that some idea would come to him.

All that came was a desire to see the girl again.

It was fulfilled a few days later. She had followed him into the forest, and now she stood not five steps away from him. After that, everything went much too fast: he said something, she said something, he moved closer, smelled her, her scent, so real, and she spoke, and he spoke, and touched a lock of her hair, and then she said more and more and more, uncanny things that filled him with fear and in which she lost herself, which rose around her like a wall, an enclosure of evil that he had to tear down by slapping her, and once he’d done it he couldn’t pull his hand from her cheek, her pink cheek, and when she slapped him in return she couldn’t take her hand from his beard, even stroked it with her finger, her index finger, briefly, he felt it, while he looked into her eyes and she looked into his, and he recognized the bottom of the sea, felt it on his cheek and with his fingers, and pushed off, saying, “Anni,” rushing toward the surface again, up, higher, breaking through the surface, filling his lungs with air and his heart with Anni’s voice.

Anni and Arkadiusz

In 1930, on the night before their wedding, Anni and Arkadiusz stole away and rushed to their new home. There my sister sang and danced for Arkadiusz in a dress with beige ruffles, which she’d put on for only one purpose: so that he could tear it off. The way the rough fabric scratched her skin made her feel as though she had sloughed off a redundant Yesterday and slipped into a fresh, form-fitting Now. Only once did she interrupt her swaying dance and stand listening, because she thought for a moment she’d heard a strange, yet familiar, voice. Mine. She breathed Arkadiusz’s scent, which he renewed every time he immersed himself in the Moorsee, and his breath told her that deep inside him many good things were sleeping. Naked, she sang out his name, and there were as many ways to pronounce it as there were reasons to love Arkadiusz Kamil Driajes.

She’d brought him to Segendorf as a stranger, anticipating the usual: suspicious glances, shouts of “Klöble,” and brandished pitchforks.

And rightly so. Not five minutes after they’d crossed the borders of the village, the innkeeper spat on the floor at Arkadiusz’s feet, Blacksmith Schwaiger applauded, and a somebody with an angry scowl motioned Anni away from him. And what did Arkadiusz do? He let go of Anni’s hand, made for the somebody, and before the latter knew what was happening, took his hand. Arkadiusz gave it a hearty shake, with his slightly inclined servant’s posture, and congratulated the somebody on his divine farmhouse. Since Anni was well aware of how horribly brawls in Segendorf tended to end, she shut her eyes. As no savage fracas followed, she hazarded a second look: Blacksmith Schwaiger had stopped applauding, the somebody was still gripping Arkadiusz’s hand, and the expression on his face was remarkably friendly, given that a Pole had stepped into Segendorf without warning, holding hands with the somebody’s adopted daughter — a bit skeptical, yes, but with sympathy beginning to flash from the corners of his eyes.