Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

Anni ran to the BMW and woke Fred and forbade him to leave the house. Anni stripped off all her clothes and burned them in the oven. Anni washed her body and her face and her hair and got dressed again. Anni locked Fred in the house. Anni found Pastor Meier and told him that during the night she’d secretly seen her own brother shoot Markus, which she couldn’t reconcile with her Christian conscience, no matter how much I meant to her, and that was why she was here, to make sure that justice was done. Anni crossed herself and whispered that her brother had fled south. Anni brought the wedding gown to Master Baker Reindl, and didn’t need to use many words, because the mother’s look showed that she understood immediately. Anni let her know how sorry I was, and that I trusted she would destroy this white scrap of misfortune. Anni raced to the deer stand in the forest, where she and I and Josfer had gone so often together (and from which I’d once been dunked into a bowl of sewage), and asked herself, while she was waiting there for me, exactly where in the North I’d hide myself and when we’d see each other again and if I’d be gone for as long as last time and, not least, how you were supposed to say good-bye to someone who’d never actually returned.

Maybe it’s best not to say it at all, thought Anni, once the sun had passed the zenith and there hadn’t yet been any sign of me. The fear that they might have captured me left her when she reappeared in the village. Men in uniforms led her away.

She was interrogated for seventy-two hours, given no sustenance, nothing more than a glass of water once in a while, but didn’t stray a jot from her story. In the end not even the police were a match for her tenacious head-shaking.

When she returned home, Fred seemed more dead than alive. Whole hanks of hair had fallen from his scalp, his skin was as gray as lead. When she forced him to swallow a gulp of milk, he threw up. His first words were “I own a speedster!”

“As far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want with it,” she said. “But I’m never going to touch that thing.”

“Where were you?” he asked her, and Anni looked him in the eye and asked, “Where were you? ”

“Here.”

“And before that?”

“There.”

“And what did you do there?”

He blinked. “Nothing.”

“You have to tell me everything, Fred. It’s important. Very important. Otherwise I won’t be able to protect us.”

He didn’t answer.

“Frederick!”

He leapt to his feet, and at first Anni thought he was going to run away, but he snatched up a sheet of paper and a charcoal pencil, an early present from Markus for his ninth birthday, and began to draw. Anni watched him, her eyes following each line. She didn’t intervene when she realized what Fred was drawing, she let him go on, because she’d decided that this was going to be Fred’s last sketch. If they were going to have a chance at survival, he’d have to give it up, he mustn’t ever draw a picture again, especially not of what had happened that night in Segendorf. Anni would do anything to drive it out of him, and she’d manage it, if it was the last thing she did. She’d give him something else, a replacement, something to fill his mind and time with instead, words from the encyclopedia, maybe, or some simple task, something he’d do every day, something that would never come to an end, and that’s how they’d be able to live, live safely, and she stroked the top of Fred’s head and said, “That’s going to be good.”

Paris

Anni sent me Fred’s drawing with her first letter because, as she realized, she could neither keep it nor throw it away. Her handwriting was oddly angular, and many of the words she’d set down she’d made incredibly tiny — perhaps in an effort to render them less threatening.

After unfolding the picture, I’d laid my hand against Mina’s, so that our fingertips touched, and said good-bye to her. By now I was good at not crying when I felt the need to. Then I placed the gold in the palm of her hand, and wrapped it up in the paper. Mina would look after it for me.

Anni’s first letter reached me two weeks after my arrival in a military hospital on the western front. It was addressed to Ludwig Wickenhäuser, the name I’d assumed for my own safety. Julius Habom was wanted in the German Reich for the murder of a local official, and didn’t have much of a life expectancy.

Not that my chances on the front were any better. They’d drafted me, but I told myself, now that I’d never be able to see Anni again, it was all the same to me how the rest of my life, from which I had little to hope for, played out — just as long as I didn’t have to spend it alone.

I immediately found myself back among old acquaintances. Since I was a former undertaker, a shovel, rather than a rifle, was placed in my hands, and I reported for duty, disposing of the fallen. Once, just after I’d arrived at the hospital, I asked my superior for coffins. He laughed me out of the room, and pointed to the bins where the quicklime was kept. The ragged, scorched, and mutilated corpses disturbed me less than they did my colleagues. I could see what they were thinking as they worked: That’s a son. That’s a brother. That’s a father. That’s a child.

They’d soon get used to it, understanding that death comes in many shapes, and that some are simply more unambiguous than others. I’d already passed that stage long, long ago. I didn’t see dead men, only ears and feet and shoulder blades. When there were just too many, we had to bury them with backhoes under tons of sand and soil. Sometimes, if I happened to come across a few daisies, I’d lay them on the graves. The only thing that troubled me was the dead soldiers’ fear, which didn’t drain from their eyes when their hearts finally stopped beating; that fear reminded me of the look in Anni’s eyes the last time I’d seen her.

It emerged from her letters that no one suspected her of Markus’s murder. She phrased it thus: “No one here in the village believes that I’ve slaughtered a pig.”

She’d succeeded in weaning Fred from his drawing by giving him other tasks to keep him busy. Every day she sent him to the bus stop to count cars the same color as his beloved Speedster; she spurred him on to search the sewers for Arkadiusz; she read to him from the encyclopedia and reported that by now, at least, he could read and write one letter: A.

When Paris was taken and I marched with the army along the Champs-Elysées, impressed by the city, and by how quickly it had fallen, I thought of Wickenhäuser and his dream of having a frock coat cut for himself here. I didn’t believe that, as someone as keen on men as on women, and known as he was as the Jew of Schweretsried, he could still be among the living. It was only years later that I learned he’d hidden himself away in Else’s log cabin in the forest, and had died there of the cold at the war’s end, too terrified of uniformed monsters to venture from the house in search of firewood.

In France, even I had trouble with the women. I couldn’t speak to them. And if they understood German, it was worse: for obvious reasons, my mother tongue wasn’t particularly attractive to Frenchwomen. Which is why I used hand signals, instead, to convey to them that I was deaf and dumb. My most convincing arguments, however, were little crumbly chips from the gold nugget. Some of them I invested, naturally, in foodstuffs — above all, milk, and whenever I was able to scare some up, bacon — but those hours I spent in the company of lovely women silenced, if only briefly, an entirely different hunger, one not to be underestimated. In bed the Frenchwomen were much more particular than their German counterparts, they seemed to know exactly what they wanted, and I was always freshly impressed with the intensity of their lovemaking, as if it were the last time.