Markus put a foot on the crate. “Everyone knows they are.”
“Liar.”
Now Markus stood on the crate. “I couldn’t care less if you believe it, Klöble.”
“I’m completely normal!” I shouted, louder than I’d intended, scooped up the rest of my clothes, and made off.
I didn’t see the final bubbles rising from the crate.
Jasfe and Josfer and Anni started singing a birthday song when I opened the front door of our house — and broke off as soon as they saw a half-naked boy with wet cheeks and reddened eyes. I was wrapped up in a blanket, stroked and kissed, and asked what had happened. All by itself, my voice grew higher and higher, faster and faster, as I told them about Markus, the rats and the bubbles and the Klöbles — the Klöbles above all.
My parents exchanged a troubled look, shook their heads, and said, as if with a single voice, “Children are cruel.”
“Markus told me you’re brother and sister.”
“Twaddle,” said Josfer.
And Jasfe: “Ridiculous twaddle.”
After that, the poppy-seed cake tasted so sweet, the hunting bow felt so smooth and strong in my hands, the songs so merrily sung gave my heart such a lift, that I fell into bed late that evening at peace and exhausted, and drifted off to sleep with nary a thought of Klöbles.
So as to have some time to themselves, Josfer and Jasfe occasionally sent us off to fetch fresh milk, or to hunt for mushrooms. One time they told us to go to church and say ten Hail Marys. I begged Anni to say my Hail Marys in my stead because, as I explained to her, I’d rather go and read. The truth was, I always felt like I was being watched in church — even a whisper would swell to a telltale murmur if you weren’t careful, and anyway, I couldn’t see why a prayer had to be repeated so many times. Certainly even God must get bored with it. Back at home, I slipped unnoticed through the parlor, overheard my parents’ heavy gasps, followed them, rounded the green-tiled oven, and, just as Jasfe and Josfer cried out, saw them.
It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed it. Before they noticed me, I slipped back to the front door, opened it, and slammed it loudly shut again.
When I walked back into the parlor they’d pulled their clothes on again, and everything was where it belonged.
Jasfe cleared her throat. “Hungry?”
I nodded, as though nothing were the matter.
After Anni had returned from church and everyone had sat down at the table, Josfer and I gulped down our food. Jasfe took barely a bite. She eyed the blade of her knife, lost in thought. Anni entertained the table with a description of the beautiful stained-glass window in the church, and mentioned, by the way, that for her birthday she wanted one just like it for her bedroom.
After the last mouthful, Jasfe asked everyone to follow her outside. It was dark, and candle flames flickered like will-o’-the-wisps behind the windows of neighboring houses. Anni sat herself down between Josfer and me on the wooden bench. Jasfe remained standing. She kissed Anni and me, and folded her hands. Gently, she spoke one word after another. Carefully set one sentence after the other. With brief pauses between them. So that we’d be able follow her little speech. So that we’d have time to understand. So that we wouldn’t think anything bad. She wanted to formulate sentences better than those she’d set before her father. Perfect sentences. Accurate. And true.
“Really?” cried Anni. “You, too?”
I stood up. “Brother and sister?” I said. “Ridiculous twaddle!”
Jasfe nodded. “I know.” Her chin shook. “My two beautiful, healthy children.” She wanted to hug me. I pushed her away and she fell. Josfer grabbed me by the arm. I tore myself away, and slammed into the back of the bench, splitting the skin of my elbow, and I ran to my room, shutting the door.
Later that night, when quiet had fallen on the house, I stole out to the kitchen and took the last piece of poppy-seed cake. On the way back, I pressed my ear to the door of my parents’ bedroom. The rustling of their sheets, amused chuckles, whispers, hurried stop-start breaths — the sounds penetrated the wood and filled my imagination with pictures. I wanted to let the cake fall to the floor, wanted to fling the door open and scream, “Do you know that they call you? Rats! Filthy rats!”
But I didn’t move. I stared at the closed door, polished off the cake. And with every bite, I swallowed my rage.
From then on, for all my parents’ soft-spoken confessions, for all their sincere but irritating devotion, for all their exaggerated indulgence of my malicious commentary or loafing, I had only one answer: “Leave me alone.”
Apart from that, I didn’t speak a word.
I Love You
When we sat together at the table eating dinner, when the fire crackled in the oven, the soup burbled in the pot, the beams creaked, when the smell of fried potatoes and ham and apple cider and wild garlic filled the room, when Jasfe admitted to some foolishness or other and everyone laughed — even me, almost — when I felt so comfortable, and thought that Jasfe was just my mama and Josfer just my papa and Anni just my sister and I just her brother, on those evenings when I felt so much love for them all that I wanted to scream, I would scratch at the wound on my elbow beneath the table, tear the scab away, and dig with my fingernails into the skin, until at last the arm went numb, numb and dead.
When at age ten I threw my Most Beloved Possession, a pillow, full of holes and stinking of onions, into the sacrificial bonfire, I observed how Josfer took a wooden comb from Jasfe, and in spite of her tears, hurled it onto the heap of brushwood, together with his best hunting knife. As always, a good many Segendorfers wept on the way home, but Jasfe more than any of them.
“Where’s Herr Kastanie?” Anni asked, whining like any six-and-a-half-year-old who didn’t want to admit what had happened to her favorite toy, a little man cobbled together from twigs and chestnuts.
“Jasfe,” said Josfer, “you never used that comb.”
She shook her head. “It belonged to our mother!”
The sight of her pain triggered something in me. Over the next few days various articles vanished from the kitchen and the hunting shack, including a cooking spoon, shoelaces, an apron, a leather strap, a clay bowl with salt in it, a piece of chalk, a bucket, and last but not least, a rabbit’s foot. Neither Josfer nor Jasfe blamed me. Which only encouraged me to steal more, hacking the stolen items into pieces when necessary and scattering them under the firewood in the hearth. Only Anni’s things I left in peace.
It was as if a door in my head, previously hidden, had suddenly sprung open, a door through which a hot wind blew. I burned a bouquet of wild-flowers picked by Jasfe, and I burned Josfer’s hammer. (The hammer’s head I buried in the swamp.) I spared neither Josfer’s dagger nor Jasfe’s doily, which covered the table between mealtimes. Once I even stretched my arm into the fire, and let the fuzz of bright blond hairs coating it singe. I wanted to see my parents weep, I wanted to make them unhappy, as unhappy as I’d been, struggling for air in that bowl of sewage.
Yet nobody took me to task for it. In the summer of 1924, Josfer sat on a sawed-off tree trunk during meals because he hadn’t had time to build a new chair, my parents’ bed was missing all four of its legs, and Jasfe was constantly having to sew herself new knickers.