Christopher Kloeble: Almost Everything Very Fast

Not to mention the fact that Albert’s hair was as red as hers.

But even more precious to him than the photograph was a bottle-green barrette in which a pair of auburn hairs had snagged. He had lost one of them at Saint Helena, when he fell asleep holding it one evening, and on waking couldn’t distinguish it from the numberless others, his own, lying curled on the mattress. The second hair he kept in a homely makeup compact he’d bought at a flea market, and which he carried always on his person, like an asthmatic does his inhaler. At lonely moments, especially during his trips to visit Fred and back to the orphanage, he ran his hands across it, and it made him itch — like when a wound is healing.

That spring, when Albert discovered the photograph, he wiped it clean with a damp sponge and slipped it into a transparent plastic folder, which he carefully sealed with several layers of clear tape before stowing it away, wrapped in two shock-absorbing editions of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , in an attaché case covered with fake alligator skin that he’d taken from the attic, and which zipped shut with a comforting weeep. And with that he walked — optimistically smacking his gum, as only a teenager can — over to Fred’s next-door neighbor. She was a potter named Klondi, who lived rent-free in a huge old farmhouse, badly in need of repairs, on the main street. In return for her housing, she kept the space “in good order”—nobody but Klondi was allowed to set foot on the second floor of the place, because only she knew which boards you could step on without falling through to the first floor. But Klondi — whose passport displayed a less silly, more mundane name — much preferred — when she wasn’t working late into the night, shaping vases and coffee mugs and ashtrays with her hands — to groom the garden behind the farmhouse. During the daytime, even in spring storms and November snow, you’d find her there, transplanting a rhododendron or trimming the hedges.

“Hello?”

Albert stood before a gate some ten feet high, all overgrown with roses. The smell was as overpowering as the incense at Sunday Mass at Saint Helena.

“Anyone there?”

He preferred not to have her name in his mouth. There were words that left behind a stale aftertaste. Klondi was one of them, Father another.

“Yes, someone’s there,” answered a hedge to his left.

Albert spat his gum into an empty terra-cotta pot and, as he followed the voice, pondered how many cigarettes Klondi must have smoked in the course of her life to earn herself such a sepulchral basso. She was down on her knees in a flower bed, cutting up slugs with a pair of gardening shears. Pale slime welled from the severed halves. A cigarette was stuck in Klondi’s ferocious smile, her hair lay bundled over her shoulders in a pair of schoolgirl pigtails, which hardly concealed the fact that Klondi the onetime flower child had long since become a flower woman.

“Do you know why I spare the ones who carry around their own little houses?”

Albert glanced at the dying slugs seeping out on the pavement. “Because they’re nicer looking?”

“I’d prefer to put it thus: survival of the sexiest.” Klondi laughed — or coughed, it was difficult to distinguish. “Want one?” She offered him a half-empty packet of Gauloises.

Albert shook his head.

“Good boy. But you’ll still have to take the gum with you.”

“Huh?”

“That chewing-gum crap. In the terra-cotta pot.” She stood with a flounce, as if she were sixteen, and knocked the dirt from her knees. “I’ve got enough butts lying around already.”

“Okay,” mumbled Albert.

“Is that for me?”

He tightened his grip on the attaché case, which he was carrying under his arm. “No. Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“Can I show you something?”

She waved him forward, and he followed her to a granite table in the middle of the garden, which she slapped with the flat of her hand. He unzipped the case and handed her the photo. She tilted it into the light.

“Well, so?”

“Do you know the woman?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” She blew smoke from her nostrils. “Why?”

“Nothing important.”

He wanted to take the picture back, but she wouldn’t let it go. “Albert, in the eleven years you’ve been visiting your father, you’ve never once set foot on my property. Nothing important? I believe that right now there’s nothing more important to you than this photo.”

“Maybe.”

Glancing down, Albert noticed he’d stepped on one of the dead slugs. He wiped his sneakers on the grass.

“She … could be your mother.”

“Do you know her?”

“Nope. We never met. When you were born, at the beginning of the eighties, it wasn’t a good time for me. I preferred to steer clear of people.”

“Why?”

She cleared her throat and tapped with an earth-smeared index finger at the gap between Fred and the Red Lady. “You would fit into this picture. Right there.”

Albert peered at the photo more carefully. She was right.

“Do you know …,” he began, but wasn’t sure how to end the sentence without it hurting. Where she went? Why she abandoned us? Why she didn’t care about us? What she was thinking?

“I don’t know anything,” said Klondi and drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, as if she might be able to suck information from the butt. “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” She handed the picture back to him, and he immediately stowed it in the attaché.

“I wouldn’t keep searching,” she said. “I’m afraid nobody in this village will have anything to tell you. As far as they’re concerned, your father is a Virgin Mary. You’ll find nothing.”

At this early stage, nobody and nothing were words far too glib to make Albert call off his search. For three long years he behaved like a young detective during the holidays, roaming through Hofherr’s beer garden, accosting the diners just after they’d gulped down the last scraps of their meals — since, according to a radio crime series he’d been listening to late at night with a couple of other orphans, that was the ideal moment to take a potential informant by surprise — until at last a dirndl-clad barmaid chased him off with noises like ksss and psh , as if he were a stray dog begging for treats. For three long years Albert knocked at wickets, at garden gates, at front doors with frosted-glass panes, at open doors, at doors upon which, during Epiphany, trios of children in royal garb had scrawled the initials of the Three Kings, C + M + B , in chalk, and at doors that were locked and bolted. For three long years he schlepped his attaché case around with him, eagerly presenting his mug shot to every pair of eyes he encountered. For three long years he made photocopies of the picture, on which he spelled out with letters cut from the newspaper: HAvE yOu SeEn THIs wOMaN? RePORt it TO dRIaJES! and tacked them up on the bulletin board in front of the town hall, in the little shelter at the bus stop, on telephone poles and electrical boxes and over the logo of an American fast-food chain on the only advertising poster in Königsdorf, across from the only supermarket, until the community of Königsdorf, in the person of a man in a beige-green uniform, whom everyone referred to simply as the Village Fuzz, forbade him to paste them up on public property, on pain of a “hot ear.” For three long years, while staying with Fred, he answered every knock at the front door and ring of the telephone with hard-to-quash hopes for a female voice, a euphoric hug, and, naturally, red hair. And for three long years, people came forward — people who, in Albert’s opinion, must be suffering from dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, because they would solemnly proclaim to him that they certainly knew the man in the photograph: he was the invalid from the ’77 bus accident.