Yet sometimes I was, in fact, alone.
One summer evening I was gathering brushwood in a forest clearing when a pine-or sprucecone (I couldn’t tell them apart) struck me on the head. Above me the sky glowed an ominous pink. Five snickering boys came toward me through the bushes, their pockets bulging with pine-(or spruce-) cones.
“Heya, we just want to play,” shouted the smallest of them; his name was Markus, and his father ran a pig farm.
“I have to go home,” I said.
“You never want to play with us!” cried Markus.
The last time they’d played with me, they had stuffed my pants with stinging nettles. I said I was going now, and even as I did, I felt angry that my words sounded like an apology.
Markus was juggling a pair of cones. “We’re going to play ‘hunting’ now. We’re the hunters, get it? And you, you’re a wild boar.”
I clutched the brushwood to my chest, lowered my head, and ran. Three cones missed me by a hairbreadth, a fourth hit me on the neck. I dropped the wood. From behind me: jeering, screaming, clattering. As long as I kept up my pace, I could outdistance them, I thought, simply keep running, leaping, sidestepping. Trees sprang up in my path, branches threw themselves at my feet, sunbeams blinded me — but I didn’t stumble. The voices and noises remained behind me. I threw a glance back over my shoulder, and couldn’t make out any movement. My throat burned, snot ran from my nose. I listened to the forest: only the cries of ravens and the sighing wind. I took a step back, tripped on a root, and toppled over. A bed of moss cushioned my fall. Once I’d wiped the mud from my pants, I looked up. Markus was standing over me, offering his hand. “Heya. Need help?”
They shoved and dragged me to a deer stand where I sometimes climbed with my father when he was hunting. While the others held me down, Markus tied a rope around my ankles. They threw the line over one of the deer stand’s beams, and hauled on it together until I was suspended upside down. Only then did I notice the bowl they’d set on the ground beneath me, from which there arose a revolting stink. Sewage sloshed against the rim.
“Dinnertime, Klöble!” shouted Markus.
Then they let go of the rope.
Z as in Zwiebel
Weeks later, as Anni and I were collecting dust in a beer stein, out of which, with the help of a little wind and water, we intended to whip up a raincloud, we discovered a cookbook hidden in a fruit crate. It had once belonged to a cook’s apprentice from Franconia, who’d ventured into the swamp in search of escargots. He clearly hadn’t known that it was considered the sacred right of every Segendorfer to relieve any vagrant who set foot on their property of all — and particularly the most beloved — of his possessions.
Anni and I carried the cookbook into the kitchen and flipped carefully through it, handling each page as if it were a butterfly’s wing. Anni wanted Jasfe to read it to her, but our mother couldn’t tell an A from a B any more than Josfer could. In Segendorf, no one but Pastor Meier could read or write. I tucked the book away till later in the evening, then studied it by moonlight. I considered myself cleverer than others my age. And I was, too. All day long I struggled to teach myself the alphabet. The pictures revealed to me most of the sounds—B as in Bread, P as in Potato, and S as in Salt. It turned out that only a few of the ingredients were unknown to me, yet Pastor Meier explained what I couldn’t puzzle out for myself, and when I finally arrived at Z as in Zwiebel—onion — I laid the cookbook in Anni’s lap.
“Flip it open and pick a word,” I said.
“This one,” she said, tapping a little cluster of letters surrounded by an overwhelming throng of words.
“M-e-a-t-l-o-a-f,” I spelled out, and then pronounced: “Meeetlooooooaf.”
“You can read! You can read!” screamed Anni, leaping up and running to our parents. “He can read! He can read!” she cried again, and dragged Jasfe and Josfer back to me. Deep into the night I read them one word after another: “Veeeeeeeeniiiiisooon” and “Eeemmeeentaaaleeer” and “Caaaaaroooots” and “Tiiiiimm, no, thhyyyyymmme.” It became a game, the favorite game in the Habom household. After every evening meal I would sit on one side of the table, Anni, Jasfe, and Josfer on the other, and teach them the alphabet. Anni learned to read the recipes markedly faster than our parents, and Jasfe faster than Josfer. But I learned faster than all of them. As time passed I succeeded in reproducing whole sentences without a single error: “Mix ingredients into a loose dough, let rise, then knead.” Or: “Prop the oven door open slightly with the help of a wooden spoon, to allow the humidity to escape.” And my favorite of all, because of the fascination produced by the list of ingredients I couldn’t understand: “Stir in the finely diced candied orange and lemon zest.”
As soon as Anni had any difficulty spelling out a word, she’d fix her impatient eyes on me. That look! Even back then I wasn’t good at refusing her anything, and whispered the answer to her every time.
Ridiculous Twaddle
On the afternoon of my ninth birthday, I stood immersed to my knees in the Moorbach, soaping myself up, scrubbing myself down. My body was cold, but since my thoughts were back at home, I didn’t feel it. Jasfe had baked a poppy-seed cake for me, and Josfer had been working for days in his workshop. (I had my fingers crossed for a hunting bow.)
I closed my eyes to wash my face, and when I opened them again Markus was sitting on the bank before me. He was alone, and greeted me with a friendly nod; beside him lay a wooden crate, which suddenly began to shake. Markus pushed the lid aside. Amid a litter of straw and rotten vegetables, two rats were mating. “Heya,” he said. “Know what they’re doing?”
I rolled my eyes. “Making babies?”
“Good! You aren’t so dumb after all.” Markus slapped me on the back. “But I’ll bet you didn’t know that they’re brother and sister, did you?”
I slipped into my pants. “They’re just rats.”
Markus closed the crate and shook it hard. “Yep. Rats.” Then he threw it into the river. Bubbles streamed from between the slats. “I call them Jasfe and Josfer.”
“You idiot.”
“Why? They’re definitely brother and sister.”
The bubbles from the crate grew smaller and smaller; I wanted to pull it from the water. “My parents aren’t.”