Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

“You’re alive!” Anni threw her arms around me, tearing me from my thoughts. Else’s scent rose into my nostrils, and Anni’s warmth to my head, and both at once were almost too much.

“You’re alive!” Anni repeated.

“Not for long, if you keep squeezing that hard.”

Anni let go of me and looked into my eyes and said almost voicelessly, “You’re alive.”

I handed her the bundle. “For your wedding.”

She smiled at me, moved, and tore it open.

“Do you like it?”

“… yes.”

“Are you going to wear it?”

“Julius, I already have a dress.”

“It can’t be as beautiful as this one.”

“I believe it is.”

“What you decide to believe is always the truth.”

“Then I believe that my dress is more beautiful.”

“At least try it on.”

“No can do.”

“Why not?”

“Because … it … it stinks.”

“It has a bit of an odor!”

“Julius. It stinks. And I don’t want to quarrel with you over a dress right now. You’re here! You’re alive!” Once again she clung to my throat, and she kissed my cheek and gave back Else’s dress. “Today is truly the most beautiful day of my life,” she whispered in my ear, and I kept to myself that I hoped life wouldn’t go downhill for her from here.

“Is that Julius?” someone asked, in an accent I’d never heard before. A lanky man appeared beside Anni, slipped an arm around her waist, and offered me his hand. “I am Arkadiusz. It is a pleasure to meet you. Anni has told me about you so often. You must be a terribly special person.”

I gave him a firm shake. That’s right, I thought, and: so much friendliness can’t possibly be genuine.

“You will stay with us, of course,” said Arkadiusz.

I knew I should have refused, and let the two of them insist, and then act as if I were pondering the situation, and let the two of them insist even more, and then manifest a little interest with some polite formulation, à la “If it really isn’t too much of a bother for you …” and then, hewing to the rule of third-time’s-a-charm, allow them to insist once more, in order to give in at last with an ironic “Well, if that’s the way it has to be.”

Instead of which I flashed my teeth in a Segendorfish smile, and said, “Gladly.”

Now my future brother-in-law threw an arm around me, too. “Welcome!”

That was too much of a good thing for my taste. I asked Anni if I could speak to her alone, and she turned to Arkadiusz and looked at him imploringly. He nodded immediately. And though that was just what I’d wanted, I would’ve preferred him to be a little less understanding. This man seemed flawless.

A little later, Anni and I were racing the way we used to, up to the top of Wolf Hill. I let her win. We stretched ourselves out in the shadow of the oak, and she told me about how she’d met Arkadiusz. Over the next few weeks we’d go back there again and again to talk about the past six years.

“You actually want to do it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Get married.”

Her amused laugh robbed me of any hope that I might be able to foster some doubt in her. She could have left it at that, but she took my hand and said, “Arkadiusz is the most beautiful, the best man there is. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love him.”

When Anni went off to finalize the preparations for the wedding, I went looking for distractions. I needed distractions. Right away. Unfortunately, the innkeeper was no longer an option. Still, I had an idea of where I might go.

Mina turned out to be sensational. A multiple widow couldn’t have acquitted herself better. Out in the barn, we helped each other explode. The whole time, Mina wore the wedding dress. I’d made her a present of it. Over her tanned skin, the fragile white seemed somehow darker, nearly gray, and suited Mina’s hair — which had become more gray than blond by now — perfectly.

“When are we getting married?” she asked, rolling herself on top of me and thereby ending our pause for breath.

“My sister’s first,” I said.

“But I already have a dress! We have to get married, too!”

“We will.”

“Did you come back to Segendorf because you wanted to marry me?”

“Why else would I come back? You have to look after that dress. So that I can lead you to the altar in it.”

“I’ll look after it perfectly!”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” she said — and exploded once again.

Mina took her promises very seriously. While all the women in Segendorf were dolling themselves up for Anni and Arkadiusz’s wedding — pinking their cheeks with drops of blood, gracing their high-piled hair with wild-flowers — she folded her wedding dress up and laid it away in a box, in the safest place in the world: under her bed. She didn’t let even a fleck of dust anywhere near it. Every morning after getting up, and again before her evening prayers, she wiped the lid clean with care. As the Sacrificial Festival approached, she told the dress, “From now on, you’re no longer my Most Beloved Possession.” And once the Sacrificial Festival was over: “From now on, you’re once again my Most Beloved Possession.” Sometimes, long after I’d moved in with Anni and Arkadiusz, she brought me the box, and lifted the lid to remind me of its brightness, and whenever she did I’d smile and lie, telling her how much I was looking forward to our wedding, I could barely wait, but she had to be patient just a little while longer. And Mina was patient. Simple enough, since she was up to her ears in work, helping her mother at the bakery (at seven seconds, she held the Segendorf record for pretzel preparation). But in the evenings, when she’d run through her daily ration of patience and had nothing to think about but her intended, the handsome Julius Habom, all she wanted was to be able to fall asleep, to recharge herself, and the more she wanted to fall asleep, the wider awake she felt. Then she had no alternative but to pull on the wedding dress. She slipped out into the Segendorf night, looking for all the world like the ghost of a bride. She stood before our house, not approaching the door, but rather moving from window to window until she’d found me and waved to me, and distracted me from watching Anni, who for her part had eyes only for Arkadiusz; she danced with him, tickled him with the ends of her hair, fed him raspberry marmalade, kissed him, sat on his lap, rubbed his neck, read to him from the Bible, held his hand. As though I weren’t even there.

On one of those nights when Mina was once again circling the house, she noticed a shape crouching by the kitchen window. Pig Farmer Markus. In his eyes, she told me — and it disturbed me to hear this — she recognized the same look with which I observed Anni. His right hand gripped a hunting knife. Mina hid herself behind a wheelbarrow. Markus raised his arm — as he did, a bit of his hair shifted oddly — and scratched something into the kitchen window. When he was done, he looked at the result with satisfaction. Then he slipped away. Mina glided over to the window and examined it. Markus had left a pair of similar-looking signs behind, of which the first came together at its tip; and though Mina couldn’t read, she felt that these were more than just a couple of scratches.

“It’s just a couple of scratches,” I said to her when we met in the barn the next evening and Mina told me about what she’d seen. “What are you doing at our house at night, anyway?”