Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

“Did you think I wanted something from you? Because of yesterday?”

“Interesting thought. How did you hit on that?”

“You’re old enough to be my grandfather!”

“Exactly.”

I’d never seen her so upset. Her lips were a thin, straight line, and so many unspoken emotions were swirling in her eyes that I would have liked to spend longer staring into them, reading them.

Instead, I asked, “Is there anything else?”

She left my room without another word, and I turned back to the window, through which a sudden gust of wind drove a flurry of light-pink petals. Footsteps approached, and even before I could turn again Alfonsa was standing beside me, leaning down, giving me a rough kiss. Then she plucked an apple blossom from my hair, showed me her smirk for the first time, and left.

I didn’t lock my door that evening. After midnight, when I was already stretched out in bed, I heard the door open, then close again. In the dark I couldn’t distinguish a thing. The sound of bare feet on a stone floor. The covers were lifted and a cool, slender body wrapped in a nightgown snuggled up to me. She laid her hand on my chest. Her breath grazed my throat.

“Sleep well,” she said.

“You, too,” I said.

The next morning I woke alone. I washed and dressed myself, wondering if I’d imagined it all.

At breakfast in the dining hall Alfonsa sat down across from me. “Sleep well?” she asked.

I looked at her. Her face was as expressionless as ever.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Very well, actually.”

She smirked again. “Me, too.”

This smirk was enough to make me ask myself, ask myself seriously, why on earth I hadn’t ever wanted this. Soon she visited me every night. Until I couldn’t fall asleep without feeling her body next to mine. Like teenagers we hid under the blankets and laughed into the pillows and whispered stories to each other and kissed with half-opened eyes. As aware as we were of the impossibility of our relationship, we were just as aware of the possibility of a bit of happiness. Probably, I thought, it would be the last of my life. Who would have chosen to forgo that?

“Can you feel that?” she asked.

I lay in the bathtub, it was nighttime, the only light came from a solitary candle doubled by my shaving mirror, and Alfonsa, who sat by the tub on the chess stool in her nightgown, rolled up one sleeve, dipped her hand into the water, and touched my ankles.

I shook my head.

Her hand wandered up my leg.

“What about that?”

Again, I shook my head.

“And that?”

This time I nodded.

Whenever we encountered each other by day in the hallways of Saint Helena, we’d make a promise with a nod of the head, one we’d fulfill when we met in secret after dark. It had been so many years; since my accident, I hadn’t touched a single woman like that. So I was all the more amazed at how simple and satisfying it was. Alfonsa came to appreciate the advantages of an experienced man, and I to appreciate her smirk in all its variations. Making love with her was like a gentle dance, not especially spirited, but proceeding in small, even steps, always looking each other in the eye. In me she saw her second happiness, and in her I saw my fourth love. I revealed my real name to her, and she her history to me. And it was only in the mornings, when her hair, so seductively red in the glow of each evening’s candles, turned suddenly traitorous by daylight, so that I had to spend hours searching my mattress for strays that might give us away — it was only then that I asked myself where all of this was leading.

End

It ended as it does so often: with a beginning. During our last evening stroll, in September 1982, Alfonsa told me that she was two months pregnant. As I didn’t immediately react to the news, she said, “You don’t seem surprised.”

I was sixty-nine years old, the son of twins, I came from a town where such terrible things had happened that nobody used its old name anymore, a Frenchwoman had turned me into a cripple, and last but not least, I was the father of innumerable children; I wasn’t so easily surprised any longer. But I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was going to abandon her now, and so I said, “Of course I am.”

Alfonsa looked at me from the corner of her eye, walking silently by my side. I felt sorry for her; she was so young, so inexperienced.

We stopped before the convent’s main entrance. I tried to sound as sensitive as possible. “We have to tell the others.”

And there, after months of waiting, I saw her smile, not smirk, for the first and only time. A pitying, honest, unlovely smile that I’d rather not have seen. “I already have.” She crouched down and took my hands. “We’ll definitely find a nice place for you.”

“For me?”

“There are a couple of good nursing homes in Bavaria.”

I pulled my hands away. “I’ve lived at Saint Helena for almost forty years!”

“You can’t stay here. How could the sisters tolerate a man in their midst who’d gotten one of them pregnant?”

“I don’t know,” I said, detecting a sulky tone in my voice I didn’t like. “But that’s my child as well.”

“Julius,” even considering it was her, she spoke with disturbingly little emotion, “do you want to raise this child? Do you want to change its diapers? Feed it? Do homework with it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” said Alfonsa, sitting down on the step before the door, leaning back, supporting herself with her elbows, and looking at the sky. Suddenly she didn’t seem so young and inexperienced anymore. “I might have, once. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’m not really cut out to be a mother.”

“Abortion?” I asked.

“Adoption,” she replied.

All of a sudden I felt very old and slow. “You’re going to give it away, just like that?”

“Him. I’m going to give him away,” she said. “We’re having a son.”

“A son,” I said, more to myself than to her.

Alfonsa stood and brushed the dust from her cloak.

“Wait,” I said. “Maybe there’s another way.”

She looked at me in silence.

“Do you know,” I asked, “what a Most Beloved Possession is?”

On April 5, 1983—as I lay in my new, distinctly more humble room at the Zwirglstein, staring up at the plasterboard ceiling, and began, for the first time in decades, to scratch my elbow — our son was born. The infirmary at Saint Helena was white like apple blossoms. The little scarlet head of our son formed the only contrast — a drop of blood in the snow. One of the wrinkles on his forehead was so deep, it was as if he’d been brooding for nine long months over when and how he’d finally be able to give that imprisoning belly the slip. Because of that thoughtful crease, Alfonsa named him Albert. Her cheeks were red, but they were no match for his — flushed as a putto’s in a painting. And Albert, our Albert, didn’t scream at all, because he had no reason to. After all, he was there with his mother, in the safest place in the world.

Alfonsa

Albert walked slowly toward Alfonsa, and as he approached her told himself that he was approaching the woman who’d brought him into the world; he attempted to see that woman in her, to find some evidence of it in her gaze, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t manage it. Before him stood Sister Alfonsa.