Almost Everything Very Fast (12 page)

At first, Marina didn’t hear him. But then, when one of the cries of the pastor, who had meanwhile reached the dip between the Segenhügel and Wolf Hill, finally reached her ear, she turned with a jerk. At which point a pair of branches broke: the one she’d been gripping with her hand and the one on which she’d been standing. The pastor made it to the base of the oak. Marina fell with a short, high shriek. And stopped short, suspended. The frills on the shoulders of her dress had been skewered by a branch, and Marina dangled like a ripe fruit among the oak boughs. That seamstress who’d altered the old bridal gown into Marina’s moon-white dress would curse herself later—the old-fashioned ruffles had smelled so pleasantly of dried flowers that she hadn’t had the heart to replace the almost antique material with new fabric.

When the ruffles tore, Marina didn’t scream a second time. Maybe because she thought she’d gotten off with a simple scare. She hit the ground a few feet in front of the pastor.

When it was time for the burial, the whole community gathered at Königsdorf’s cemetery, which had never been so lively. Klondi didn’t know how to act, she wanted to take Ludwig’s hand, but he wouldn’t let her. No one gave her a friendly glance, they all thought it was her fault, and all of them sympathized with Ludwig, who had lost a daughter. Why would they feel anything for Klondi? Everybody in this one-horse town knew she’d withdrawn from her role as mother, that she’d wanted little to do with Marina. They thought: she’s probably glad. Klondi couldn’t reveal to anyone that there was, actually, something to that. Naturally she would have done anything to save Marina’s life, naturally she would have traded her own life for her daughter’s, naturally she cried herself to sleep every night, naturally she’d started smoking weed again—yet for the first time she felt that strange happiness she’d been waiting for since Marina’s birth. She’d loved her daughter, she could see it only now that she was standing by her grave, she was grateful for every day she’d spent with Marina, and if someday she should succeed in showing this happiness to Ludwig, then maybe he’d forgive her and take her hand.

And Ludwig, the bus driver on line 479, who now lived alone in the semidetached house where he’d originally moved with his family, and who never answered Klondi’s phone calls, burned the bridal gown on his compost heap, using a bit too much ethanol, so that he nearly went up with it, and the neighbors had to call the fire department. That was all the same to Ludwig, as long as the white scrap of bad luck was destroyed. He bawled drunkenly while they extinguished the bonfire in his garden. The next morning he resolved that he’d let himself grow a full beard, since his unshaven cheeks would not bother anyone ever again. After the divorce, he’d allowed himself to drink only after Marina had gone to sleep and it was dark outside. After Marina’s death he started drinking even before the sun was up. That’s how it was in October, November, and nothing had changed in December. In January he frequently found himself wondering whether it had just gotten dark, or whether it was going to be light soon. In February he went raging, blind drunk, through Klondi’s garden, nearly drowning himself in the frog pond, at which point she had him committed to a rehab clinic. And in March, after a long talk with Klondi, he finally grew sick and tired of his self-pitying existence, shaved himself, had a successful interview with his former employer, and for the first time after a six-month hiatus, sat sober again behind the wheel of a bus.

For three days, everything went smoothly. On the fourth day, a doddery old one-legged man asked him whether that sweet little Marina of his was already in school. Ludwig asked him to get off the bus. On the fifth day he saw Marina in his rearview mirror, dancing in the bus’s central aisle in her moon-white dress. On the sixth day she sat in his lap while he made his rounds, and criticized his driving. On the seventh day he drank a thimbleful of vodka for breakfast, and she disappeared, and that was a tremendous relief. On the eighth day he filled a 1.5-liter mineral-water bottle with vodka, and took a swig from it at every stop. From the ninth to the twenty-first day he emptied half a bottle daily, despite which he was the most punctual and friendliest driver in the whole district. On the twenty-second day, the boss choked on a cough drop during their weekly meeting, and Ludwig offered him a drink of water. On the evening of the twenty-second day, Ludwig was dismissed. For a week after that, things were dark, black.

Then, on April 4, 1977, Ludwig ironed his bus driver’s uniform, took a long time in dressing, secured his necktie with a Windsor knot, put on his official cap, called Klondi up and told her about the month that had just gone by, saying he was sorry for all of it, and hung up before she could reply, then slipped into the garage of his former employer, illuminated the line 479 indicator on one of the buses, took a swig from a mineral-water bottle, which contained nothing but mineral water, and turned on the engine. Outside it was raining. Three-quarters of an hour later, at 6:15, fifteen minutes early, Ludwig arrived in Königsdorf.

Klondi didn’t dare show up at the burial of her ex-husband. She didn’t even want to think about everyone who would be there, his family, friends,
her
family—she preferred to roll herself a joint, using the page of the newspaper containing a photograph of a certain Frederick A. Driajes, the hero of the bus accident, the son of her neighbor. Klondi smoked on the balcony of her crumbling farmhouse, because she suspected the rotting old balcony wouldn’t be able to bear her weight much longer, and as she stood there waiting, she remembered how often Ludwig had thrown her weed away, and how she’d hated him for it, and how she’d loved him for it. She didn’t know much about his family or his childhood in Königsdorf, Ludwig had never wanted to talk about it; in all those years, the only thing she’d succeeded in getting from him was that his mother had died when he was ten, after which his father had taken off—and it was in spite of that, or maybe because of it, that Ludwig had become so strong, always knowing what he wanted, and what he didn’t. He wanted children, a wife, a house, and a job. And he’d been happy with them. Klondi envied him that, what she wanted was to think less, not always to be turning every decision over and over in her mind until she had absolutely no idea what to do. Ludwig had helped her, he’d been the arrow pointing the way for her, for him she’d given up smoking pot and moved from Bremen to Osterhofen in Upper Bavaria, and she’d slept with him, seduced him, like in a soft-core video, in an abandoned barn during a hike on Herzogstand Mountain, staring him straight in the eyes the whole time, and finally, finally she felt certain of something, of this, because he was only the third man she’d ever been with, and were she to have her way, he’d be the last, too. The balcony, however, didn’t support this plan. Even bouncing and shaking wouldn’t make it collapse. So Klondi started tending to her garden again. Plants didn’t contradict you, plants didn’t look at you awry, plants didn’t pretend they knew how it felt when your daughter died and your ex-husband dragged two people with him into the grave. Plants didn’t say,
None of this is your fault
, which immediately made you think, all of this is my fault. Plants were simply there. As fertilizer Klondi used an algae-ish biomass that she collected at least two times a week from a runoff pipe of the Königsdorf sewer system. She lingered there, wandering the tunnels for hours, enjoying the echoes of her footsteps, feeling safe. Up above, life was sheer torment, but down here, it couldn’t find her.

After a couple of years, though, it did find her. During one of her subterranean expeditions she saw Fred climbing into the sewer in his diving goggles, and at first she felt like fleeing and getting stoned on her balcony, but then she wound up following him, as softly as she could, maybe out of curiosity, maybe because it didn’t seem quite right that an invalid like him—heroism notwithstanding—should be tramping around in the sewers alone. Fred led her to a wooden chest, which he carefully opened and spent a long time looking into, motionless, like someone deeply disappointed.

Which made her think of the porcelain box. It had always sat on the highest shelf in her parents’ kitchen, filled to the brim with pink peppermint candies that Klondi’s father would give her for good grades or when she mowed the lawn, according to how good the grades were or whether she’d done the mowing without his having to remind her. Actually, he didn’t
give
them to her, he
awarded
them to her. Helping herself to one was strictly forbidden. Klondi’s father called these bits of apportioned affection
Gold Medals
, and accordingly awarded them rarely. Otherwise he allowed no sweets in the house, so that Klondi continued to rejoice in the reward of a sweet long after puberty had set in. She was fifteen when, after a long spell without a Gold Medal, she decided to open the porcelain box with her own hands. She clambered up onto a chair, stretched, grabbed the box, set its lid aside, pulled out one of the candies, licked the sugary peppermint coating, laid it on her tongue, sucked it, and quickly replaced the lid before she could stuff any more of them into her mouth. She was just climbing down from the stool when her father stepped into the kitchen. All he said was “We had an agreement.”

With that, the age of the Gold Medals was over. Klondi never dared ask if she could have one, and her parents behaved as if they’d never existed. The porcelain box remained where it had always been, and sometimes Klondi felt the desire to look inside, to see whether there were still any sweets in there, but she was afraid she might find the box empty, washed clean and odorless. Her relationship with her parents, never characterized by any great warmth, gradually devolved into a sort of vague familiarity, lacking any common ideas or interests. The thought that these two, of all people, had brought her into the world seemed as strange to her as the notion that she was therefore duty-bound to love them. By the time Klondi moved to Bremen in the mid-sixties to study landscape architecture and discovered the finer points of toking up (while rolling a joint she liked to mix dried peppermint with the tobacco), she considered her parents mere pitiful slaves to the capitalist system. Even the unemployed bus driver in her communal house couldn’t sway her from this conviction. Sure, he had a beautiful smile. But what could some kid who’d grown up in his grandmother’s bakery in a backwater town in Upper Bavaria, and was called Ludwig to boot, possibly know about the class struggle?

Klondi didn’t dwell on Fred’s excursion through the sewers. At first, anyway. Everyone’s looking for something he’ll never find, she told herself, a painful experience, but one that was part of life. As far as she could judge, Fred had survived his mother’s heart failure, and it would eventually occur to him that
his
porcelain box, the chest—whatever he was waiting to find in it—would remain empty. Besides, it didn’t concern her at all, maybe she’d completely misinterpreted the whole thing. It wouldn’t have been the first time, her head never gave her any peace unless it was weighing every option, and in this case it had come to the 100 percent correct conclusion that she ought to mind her own business, avoid the sewers for a while, keep out of Fred’s way, fire up the bong again, that was it.

But the very next day, while shopping at the supermarket, she found herself standing in front of the candy rack, and a few hours later she was secretly observing Fred as he opened the chest, reached in, and pulled out a bag of peppermints. He munched the whole lot of them then and there, and Klondi had to cover her mouth to stifle her giggling, a strange, delighted, girlish giggling that bubbled out of her as if someone were tickling her most sensitive places. Soon enough, Klondi was following her walks in the sewers with excursions aboveground, in the course of which she’d not-quite-accidentally run into Fred at the bus stop and start chatting with him. Fred would show her what he’d found in the chest; his papa, he’d brag, would never let a mere accident stop him from bringing Most Beloved Possessions.

Another time, Klondi made herself comfortable on a deck chair in the garden, squinted up into the sun, and pressed the button with the red dot on a tape recorder. She wanted to tell Fred a story about a woman who had stumbled across a new source of courage in the sewers. She wanted to thank him. But Klondi wasn’t quite sure how to begin, and brooded about it so long that she fell asleep. Later, after she’d treated her sunburn with a cheese poultice and slices of aloe, she discovered that the wordless sighing of the tape was probably better than anything she would have been able to say. The peaceful breathing of a woman who could finally sleep again—she couldn’t have expressed herself better with words.

During that time, Klondi traded one old habit for three new ones:

She didn’t go out on her balcony anymore.

Instead, she put Fred’s wishes into the chest, turning them into Most Beloved Possessions.

And she laughed, almost always alone, whether in her garden, by the frog pond, or in the sewers, simply laughed, delighted by the sound.

And she began taking pottery lessons, which she frequently interrupted and finally broke off, because the only pottery instructor for miles around had an unusually keen nose for cannabis. Which didn’t, of course, prevent her from carrying on by herself. Her teacups and ashtrays sold well enough to support her, even if only to day-trippers from Munich, stopping over on their way to the Alps. Königsdorfers took care not to get involved with her.

Except once, she said to Albert, who had been listening to her silently this whole time. Except once. No more than these two words, and Klondi’s face, pregnant with significance, were necessary to tell Albert that she was talking about him, the visit he’d made to her at fourteen, searching for Hansel and Gretel crumbs, searching for his mother. His eyes had shone greedily, said Klondi, and she’d only wanted to help him, and so she’d told him to abandon all hope, and it had almost broken her heart when he’d shaken his head and his red hair had flopped about. She’d felt sorry for him, because he didn’t understand how good he had it without a mother. It had been the right decision not to help him further, she said, more to herself than to him. She regretted nothing. He’d had a decent life at Saint Helena. Of course she could have told him about the nurse, the woman next to Fred in the photograph, but back then she hadn’t thought it was a good idea. Albert had wanted a mother so badly that nobody would’ve been able to fulfill his expectations, and if she was telling him the truth today, it was only because she could see that he’d never find peace otherwise.