Almost Everything Very Fast (16 page)

I woke before sunrise, stirred by sparrows quarreling over a worm in the boughs of the oak. I felt good, lighter. Fog swirled around Wolf Hill like a milky broth, lapping shyly just short of my feet, but out on the horizon the sun was coming up, dawn light shining in shades of forget-me-not blue, lilac purple, and dandelion yellow. And the wound on my elbow was itching. So the healing process has begun, I told myself.

A chubby man with a fat, crab-red face walked up to me, wearing wrinkled, wine-colored velvet pants and a coat of the same shade stretched across his belly. I hadn’t imagined a mortician looking like that. There was a gravedigger in Segendorf, but he was gaunt and pale, and wore a mud-splattered cloak from which his hands and head protruded as if from a tortoise’s shell, and even when he was younger his facial features had been slack, supposedly as a result of the sulfurous fumes from the Segendorf graveyard.

“Let’s go,” he said to me.

“Wait! My sister has to come with us.”

“How old is she? Seven?”

“Eight.”

He shook his head. “Either you come now or both of you stay here.”

I thought about Anni, how I couldn’t just leave her alone, she was naive and much too good-natured, she needed her brother. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.

“Do you have a knife?” I asked.

Wickenhäuser hesitated, reached into his breast pocket, and handed me a penknife with a sandalwood grip. I thanked him, bent down over a thin, conspicuously snake-like oak root, and carved three words, the best three words I could think of, into its bark. As deep as I could. Maybe Anni would find them someday. And maybe then she’d think of her brother.

“Let’s go, boy, the carriage is waiting.”

Wickenhäuser grabbed me by the collar and hauled me along behind him. The “carriage” was a rickety two-wheeled cart drawn by a mule named Hoss, and barely large enough to accommodate a driver and a coffin.

“Where are we driving?” I asked the undertaker.

“To your new home.”

“And where’s that?”

But no answer was forthcoming.

During the ride I had no choice but to sit on the coffin.

For six days and seven nights I juddered on Wickenhäuser’s cart across the deserted moorland’s broken roads. We hardly ever spoke to each other. My longing for Anni left me wordless. Occasionally, with no warning whatsoever, Wickenhäuser would belt out one of his own poems at full volume, his shrill voice scaring whole flocks of birds skyward.

Eventually I grew accustomed to this awkward form of locomotion, and was able to doze as we rode along, when I wasn’t softly repeating the verses to myself. The farther I traveled from Segendorf, the better I felt. I missed Anni fiercely, but with each new morning a strange intensity was growing in my breast. I was going to discover the world now. Explore strange places. Never eat poppy seeds again.

As the seventh night fell, Wickenhäuser stopped the cart and pulled me down from the coffin. I shook the feeling back into my limbs. Wickenhäuser pointed to a log cabin in a clearing in the middle of the forest: tree trunks stacked and wedged together, with a shingle roof on which yellowish lichen sprouted.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Your new home,” said Wickenhäuser.

“You live
here?
”

“Good Lord, no!” He slapped me on the shoulder. “This is where my mother lives.”

The old woman concentrated the light. Her white dress sucked every last atom of brightness into itself. Even after two days I still narrowed my eyes instinctively whenever I looked at her. The circumscribed space of the cabin offered no possibility for retreat. A misted window in the rear wall was the sole connection to the outside world, and in front of it there hulked an armchair in which I had passed the first two nights, just to the left of the stove and the fireplace, just to the right of a door that led to the bedroom I wasn’t allowed to enter, catty-corner from another door that walled off the stink of the latrine, and which was almost hidden behind an enormous wardrobe, from which there seeped the same ancient odor that had settled in Wickenhäuser’s mother’s white dress. It smelled like grease and dried flowers, and emitted a strangely bitter scent.

Since Wickenhäuser had introduced me to his mother, leaving that same evening to continue his journey toward a city called Schweretsried, where he worked as an undertaker, I hadn’t stepped outside at all, out of fear that the old woman would shut the door behind me and refuse to open it again, in which case I’d be forced to survive alone in the forest. Wickenhäuser’s mother always noticed when I meddled with the deadbolt, and then she’d scream hysterically. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before—her tongue was barely bigger than a uvula. A congenital defect. Each morning she wandered from the bedroom to the armchair, shooed me away, spitting, then sat herself down and closed her eyes. Sometime around noon, she’d moan:

“Uhh-iii!” (Hungry)

and I’d cook her some lentil soup, as the undertaker had instructed me. Two sacks of lentils by the chimney, filled to bursting, ensured that we were sufficiently provisioned. While eating, the old lady took elaborate care not to spill on her dress. She didn’t slurp, either. I’d never met anyone before who didn’t slurp. After the second bowl she’d be full, and caw:

“Uhhhn!” (Done)

at which point I’d take her dish away. Then she cried:

“Iii-uhh!” (Pillow)

and I’d prop up her head with a down cushion. Before long, she’d have dozed off. In the evening she’d abruptly open her eyes, beat the pillow, and march to the latrine. Finally, she’d disappear into the bedroom again.

Wickenhäuser had asked me to look after his mother for “a little while.” After a few days I asked myself how long that little while might last—a week? A month? Two months? Even if I slipped barefoot to the door in the dead of night and slid the bolt aside so slowly I could barely see it moving, the old lady would notice and start her panicked shrieking. For four days I tried to leave the house on the sly, without her hearing. While she was eating, while she slept, while she was answering the call of nature. I tried it before dinner, after dinner, early in the morning, late in the evening, and at high noon, tried it by way of the window, tried it while I was spelling out one of the newly memorized poems, and I even tried it through a little gap in the outer wall of the latrine.

No luck.

Either the old lady groaned:

“Uhh-iii!”

Or she cawed:

“Uhhhn!”

Or she called:

“Iii-uhh!”

When she woke me again on the fifth day, shoving me from the warm lap of the armchair, I ran furious to the door, flung it wide open in spite of the screaming, and stepped outside. My feet had barely touched the soil when everything went quiet. I stepped back inside, thinking all the screaming had finally finished her off. But she wasn’t gasping for breath on the floor. And she wasn’t clawing at her chest. She stood upright beside the armchair, stroking the cushion as if it were a dog’s neck, and smiling dreamily.

“Uhh-ehh?” she asked.

I cleared my throat, bewildered.

At which point she rushed over to me and slipped her arm through mine. “Uhh-ehh!”

What was I supposed to do? I liked her smile. Together we stepped out into the daylight. The sun dazzled me; I blinked.

“Uhh-ehh!” urged the old lady, and licked her lips. Her white dress glittered like new-fallen snow. “Uhh-ehh!”

She showed me the way. Our stroll took us once around the cabin, then the old lady began to wheeze so alarmingly that I moved her toward a dirty gray chair on the porch. Only she didn’t want to let go of my arm. As she sat gulping air, I knelt beside her. Before long her head tipped to one side, and softly she began to snore. As soon as I dared to move, she tightened her grip and snuggled her head into my shoulder. This close to her, that ancient odor was especially strong. Even as she slept, the smile didn’t slip from her face. And something peculiar was happening to my lips and eyes, to my cheeks. I wished I had a mirror, a window, or just a puddle of water, but even without them I knew what this was.

I was smiling.

The next day we went out for a walk before lunch. The old lady gathered the hem of her dress so that its skirt wouldn’t drag in the dust. This time we rounded the house twice: a porch with a chair, a blunt ax, piled cordwood, the opaque window, rusty saw blades and nails, a big rock, flat and level like a table, and beside it a slew of daisies, a worm-eaten wooden chest with a padlock, spiderwebs, a metal bucket filled with slate, a tattered snakeskin nailed to the wall, the porch with the chair …

Now and then, the old lady cheerfully said:

“Uhh-ehh!”

and tugged at my arm. Later on, she ate three bowls of lentil soup.

“Uhhhn!”

“Iii-uhh!”

Within a week we’d increased our daily workout to six circuits of the cabin. Sometimes we even went counterclockwise. The old lady was breathing more smoothly now, and it was rare that I had to support her. Three times a day she spooned her soup, and three times a day she disappeared into the latrine. At night she left the door to her bedroom open a crack. While eating, she muttered:

“Uhh-ehh.”

While walking she panted:

“Uhh-ehh!”

After getting up, and before going to bed, she’d greet or take leave of me with

“Uhh-ehh.”

Strangely, only I grew sunburned from our walks. The skin of my face was peeling. Delicately the old lady pulled shreds of it from my forehead; I put up with it.

“How come you live here?”

The old lady shrugged her shoulders.

“My name’s Julius. How about you?”

She dangled an especially long strip of skin in front of my nose.

“Eh.”

“What?”

“Eh.”

“Can you write? Yes?”

The old lady nodded.

“I can read,” I said.

She clapped her hands.

“Do you have any chalk?”

She shook her head.

“Coal, we can use coal.”

Again she shook her head, and when I made to stand up, she pushed me back into the armchair, took a plate from the kitchen, shoveled a dishful of lentils onto it, and laid it in my lap.

“Hungry?”

She sighed, bent over, and shaped four letters from the lentils.

“Else? Your name is Else?”

“Eh!” She nodded, erased her name, and wrote:

“Du”—
the informal “you.”

“My name’s Julius.”

She shook her head, and tapped her hand against her chest.

I understood, and repeated, addressing her informally as
Du:
“
Your
name is Else.”

“Uhh-ehh!” she shouted.

“What does that mean? What is it? Write it, write it out!”

Else pressed her lips together, crossed her arms behind her back, and stepped from one foot to the other like a little girl caught red-handed. What I read in the lentils was this: For more than sixty years Else had lived in this cabin, she’d been born here, married here, gotten pregnant here, and one day, like her ancestors, she’d be buried in the forest. Her parents had chosen her husband for her, and over forty-five years she’d first gotten to know and then to love him. When at the end of World War I (this was the first time I’d heard of it) she learned that her husband had fallen at Verdun in France, she’d thrown open the wardrobe and pulled on the most expensive fabric she owned: her wedding dress. Bedecked in that whitest of white embroidery, she’d managed to suppress the fear of being as alone as she now was. Since then that whiteness had shrouded her in comforting memories—of her husband’s desperate groping for the dress’s buttons on their wedding night, of the napkin with which her mother had so frequently patted her mouth, of her grandfather’s pale hair, of the first time she’d seen her baby boy, of the wreath of daisies she’d worn on her head at her wedding.

By now, the dress wasn’t blinding to me anymore. Instead, it shone. I polished off each spoonful of lentils with gusto, and the tastiest were the ones that Else had used for writing. At night, I peeped through the cracked bedroom door, trying in vain to see more than I could smell: grease, dried flowers, and bitterness. Every day I plucked a daisy and adorned the edge of Else’s plate with it. On the velvet nap of the pillowcase I wrote
I love you,
wiping the letters away before Else could read them. I conversed with her with the help of the lentils, observing carefully how she bent her fingers, clenched her hands, swung her arms.