Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

And so, over time, nobody and nothing became things to be taken seriously.

One late-summer morning, the morning on which, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he’d shaved for the first time, after another fruitless six-and-a-half-week summer holiday, Albert sat in the second row of pews for morning Mass, his head lowered, his chin against his chest, his hands folded, and as the prayers dropped from his mouth, wished for the first time that he’d never found the photo. What was it, anyway? A two-dimensional, possibly factitious, and in any case ambiguous reproduction of reality, the mere assertion of a time that Albert understood only hazily. He remembered what Klondi had told him three years before — that he would find nothing. She’d called him a fourteen-year-old simpleton, and advised him to let the picture be, to let the case drop. That’s just what life was, she’d meant: a heap of puzzle pieces that never added up to one great whole, but merely filled you with false hope, because they let you believe that something like an answer — the truth! — existed out there, somewhere. Her last words rang in his head: “Those damned puzzle pieces,” she’d said, “are nothing but Hansel and Gretel crumbs.”

Where the Gold Comes From

Albert mulled over all of this, that night he spent sleepless in the BMW, and it left him, when morning came, with a feeling of helplessness. The fact that capitulation was part of recapitulation , he thought, seemed entirely appropriate.

On the other side of the windshield a dark blue was already mixing with the black, and the first birdsong heralded dawn. Albert pressed “eject,” and with a whirring sound the tape struggled from the slot. In the past, the two of them had sat here listening to the adventures of Benjamin Blümchen, the only talking elephant in the world. For a while, Fred had been entirely intent on the episode in which the elephant believed that acting meant you were lying. He’d replayed it again and again, ten times a day. Until Albert simply couldn’t help himself any longer, and threw the thing away. He could do precisely the same with Fred’s lump of gold and the cassette, he thought — then he wouldn’t have to waste any more thought on these Hansel and Gretel crumbs. He plunked the tape back into the box and reached for Fred’s nugget, marveling again at the weight of that little stone.

“All right, then,” he said.

Early that afternoon, Albert called Fred for lunch in the kitchen.

Within seconds the door sprang open. Fred was wearing his diving goggles, though outside the sun was shining. Usually Fred put them on when he stood by the bus stop in the rain. They’d belonged to his father. Sometimes Albert filled the bathtub with cold water, poured a packet of salt into it, and declared: “Voila! The Pacific!” Upon which Fred would leap with his goggles into the water, slosh around like an inebriated frog, and complain if the brine went up his nose.

Albert had cooked up some scrambled eggs with tomato. Fred pushed the tomatoes to the edge of the plate because “they didn’t taste good at all,” and Albert said, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred devoured all of the egg, but not the tomatoes, and Albert repeated, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred quickly rinsed off his plate, and Albert warned, “You aren’t getting any bread and honey,” but Fred swore that next time he’d eat “the healthy tomatoes,” at which point Albert did, in fact, smear some honey on the bread for him, while attempting to ignore Fred’s whispered self-praise: “That was a good trick.”

Albert’s best trick was mixing Fred’s medication into his food, without Fred noticing.

After the meal, Albert set the gold on the kitchen table. “Today I went to a jeweler in Wolfratshausen, who said we have almost enough here to buy a small house.”

“I already have a house.”

“Frederick, you’re going to tell me where you got this right now.”

“I found it,” grumbled Fred, fumbling with the clasp on the goggles.

“Where?”

A mulish stare.

“Sometimes I feel like a schoolmaster,” Albert said, sighing.

Fred shook his head. “But you’re Albert.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s plenty!”

Plenty was rarely so little, thought Albert, pouring himself a glass of milk and drinking it down.

“Albert!” Fred drew the cassette from the tin box, which Albert had set beside the sink. “You have a cassette, too!” His grin twitched. “A totally similar cassette.”

Albert emptied his glass so hastily that milk ran over his chin. “That’s your cassette.”

Fred held his breath. Silence. Then his grin returned: “You couldn’t sleep, Albert?”

“How did you know?”

“That tape makes an ambrosial noise, like water. And Mama said you always sleep best by the water.”

“Where did you get the tape?”

Fred bit his lips.

“Did somebody give it to you?”

“No.”

“Let me guess: you found it.”

“Yes.”

Albert rolled his eyes. “Where did you find it?”

This time Fred licked his lips like a contestant on a quiz show, confident of his answer, and even before he replied, Albert knew what that answer would be.

“The same place the gold came from!”

“Oh, there ,” said Albert, and set the glass down so heavily that the sound of it shocked even him. “Listen, Frederick, this is very important to me. I absolutely have to know.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“ What’s dangerous?”

“Everything!”

Albert thought for a moment. “And what if we keep an eye out for each other? I take care of you, and you take care of me. Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be less dangerous?”

Fred looked thoughtfully at the gold.

“The two of us on a quest for gold,” said Albert, sensing that this was his chance. “That would certainly be something.”

“It’s dangerous,” Fred softly repeated.

“Would it be a long trip?” asked Albert.

Fred wobbled his head. “It’s deep.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a long way below us.”

“Well, that much I understood.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because … forget it,” said Albert. His gaze fell on the HA scratched into the kitchen window, and he fought down the urgent desire to hurl something through it. Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.

He was about to flee the kitchen, in order to smoke a cigarette somewhere in secret, when Fred said, “You’ll have to dress yourself really well, though.”

Albert stood still. “Does that mean you’re actually going to show me?”

“It’s going to be soaking wet,” warned Fred. “From below and above!”

Albert nearly embraced Fred in relief, but held himself back, examining him. As always, Fred’s face wore an expression of childishly self-important seriousness, yet if Albert wasn’t mistaken, he could detect behind it an air of genuine worry, one so perturbing that he quickly looked away, and said, “Let’s go.”

The Sacrificial Festival

On a hot August night at the height of the summer of 1912, the village of Segendorf celebrated its three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival.

Three hundred and eighty-seven years earlier, a wandering monk, expelled from his monastery, had paused for a rest at the highest point of the very same hill. He’d dozed off in the shade of a little grove of spruce trees. God had appeared to the monk in his dream, demanding he prove his devotion to his creator by sacrificing his Most Beloved Possession. A princely reward awaited him. So it happened that, after awakening, the desperate monk, banished to this thinly populated region of the alpine foothills, approached the rocky bluff on the south side of the hill, drew out a bronze chalice (which he’d purloined from his former monastery as compensation, so to speak, for his exile), and, after a brief hesitation, allowed it to tumble down into the abyss. He waited. For a sign. Waited. And doubted. Then, at last, a delicate, tinny pling came echoing up over the lip of the cliff. There should have been a plong, bronze against stone, a plong, absolutely — but instead, there followed a pling-pling. It was mocking him, that pling-pling, calling: Come look for me! Come on down! Come to me! And the monk heeded its call.