Fred put the sticker in his backpack. “My papa likes giving me things.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“No.” Fred leaned forward. “Have you ever seen him?”
“No, Fred. No, I haven’t.”
Before they began the trek homeward, Fred asked for refreshments. They sat back-to-back on the chest, sharing the bread they’d brought along, the peeled carrots, the bananas, and washed it all down with the apple spritzer. Fred ate with tremendous appetite, and though Albert was just as hungry, he held back so that Fred would have his fill.
They’d barely been under way for five minutes when Albert’s thoughts started off again. It was his own fault: he couldn’t fool himself. Whenever he tried it, a second voice immediately piped up in his head, contradicting him; and when the argument of these voices ran into a cul-de-sac, a third voice intervened, summing things up; and that summation was then pronounced aloud in a fourth voice, Albert’s own. In this case it said, “Are you sure, Fred, that nobody but you knows about the chest?”
Fred said, “No.”
“I mean, apart from you and your papa.”
“Besides my papa and me, only one person knows the chest is there.”
“Who?”
“You.”
Albert’s fingers fidgeted, they yearned to be holding a cigarette. To calm them he shoved his hands into his pockets and gripped the makeup compact.
Fred scratched at his nose. “You shouldn’t be sad because you don’t have a lily. Everyone will get a dead person’s flower eventually. Even you.”
“You think so.”
Emphatic nodding. “Definitely!”
Albert let go of the mirror and set down the tote bag. He stood on his tiptoes, took the hat from Fred’s head, and looked again at the lily. He ran his thumb along the stem. It had been cut smoothly. With a knife. Or a pair of garden shears.
A Surprise
Though his heart had been more or less calm ever since they’d left the sewers, the moment Albert stepped onto the property of Fred’s neighbor and read the name beside the door—Klondi, written out in a lovely schoolgirlish script — it immediately lost its cool, and he had trouble concealing the fact from Fred, who was waiting behind him while, for the second time in two days, he stood with lifted finger at a front door, and hesitated before ringing the bell.
“Albert?”
“Yes?”
“You have to ring.”
The gentle summer air was certainly more pleasant to breathe than that oxygen paste in the sewers, but now that he was outside again, at approximately three in the afternoon, Albert felt exposed. Too much space to think. Clearly delineated boundaries, like those at a Catholic orphanage, for instance, were more his speed. Only, how could you build a wall inside your head? How did you keep yourself from thinking: Klondi. It can’t be Klondi. Can it be Klondi?
Fred rang.
“Thanks,” said Albert.
“You’re welcome,” said Fred.
“Over here,” called a husky female voice from the garden. Fred and Albert stepped around the house, whose balcony slanted down and to the right like a lopsided smile. Klondi was sitting on a little patch of turf by the frog pond. Five years had gone by since Albert had come to ask her about his mother. The years hadn’t changed her, except that she now wore her silver-gray hair down and at shoulder-length. As they approached she plucked one greenish noodle after another from the saucepan lying in her lap, stuck their ends into her mouth, and sucked them in through her lips.
“Want a taste?” she asked. Albert declined. Fred dropped his eyes to the ground and flared his nostrils, semaphoring Yes. Klondi passed him a handful of noodles, which dangled from her fist like earthworms, and, taking them, he imitated her suction technique.
“It’s just like Lady and the Tramp, without dogs,” he said.
“I plucked the wild garlic myself. Sure you won’t partake?” asked Klondi, and offered the pot to Albert, who could feel his hunger waxing.
“No appetite.”
Fred and Klondi went on slurping happily. Which Albert endured for another minute and a half. Then he said, “We’ve found a Hansel and Gretel crumb,” and Klondi stopped eating and looked at him. Albert pointed to the lily in Fred’s Tyrolean hat.
“This isn’t the right time,” she said.
Albert was glad she wasn’t trying to lie. “I don’t think there is a right time for this.”
“But there’s a better one,” she said through gritted teeth, from which green shreds of wild garlic hung, and nodded at Fred, who was fishing in the frog pond with a long noodle.
“Can you wait here for a minute, Fred?” said Albert. “Klondi wants to show me something in the house.”
Fred dropped his noodle into the pond. “She should show me, too!”
Klondi laid her hand on Fred’s back. “I could do that. But then it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore.”
“A surprise for me?”
“Among others,” said Klondi.
Fred opened his backpack and retrieved the encyclopedia, then rolled onto his belly, and started reading at page one. Albert wanted to say something nice to him, but all that came to mind was “We won’t be long.”
No Harry Potter
The chill inside Klondi’s house, which had succeeded in holding fast against the surrounding summer, made Albert wish he had, in fact, accepted some of the spaghetti. A little inner warmth against the shivers. He followed Klondi into the kitchen, a replica of one of those cozy Alpine rooms you find pictured in German furniture-store brochures. A little seating area with wooden chairs whose backrests had heart-shaped holes sawed into them, white-and-blue-checked clay beer steins on the windowsill, a tiled stove, and a low ceiling supported by old, petrified beams, which even Albert, in spite of his undistinguished size, had to duck his head to clear.
“Cigarette?”
Klondi extended a packet of Gauloises, just as she had five years before.
“I don’t smoke,” he said coolly.
“Fibber. Want one or not?”
Klondi plucked two cigarettes from the pack, lit them both, stuck one between Albert’s lips, and drew deeply on the other, as if it were providing her with air. “God, finally! Were you the one who told Fred about lung cancer and smoker’s leg?”
Silently Albert shook his head; as always, Klondi had an overwhelming effect on him: in her presence he felt so young and inexperienced.
“Anyway, you can’t smoke anywhere near him without him going completely nuts.” Her cigarette bobbed up and down as she spoke. “I always have to find some excuse for the smell.”
“What color was your hair when you were younger?”
“At least sit down first.”
“No thanks.” Albert ground his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. “Look, are you my mother, or what?”
From somewhere in the depths of the house came a creak, eerily extended, like the parody of an opening door in a horror movie — though to Albert it also sounded a bit like indigestion — and as silence fell again, Klondi said, “Ah, well.”
Albert wasn’t surprised. Hundreds of times, thousands of times, he’d imagined this moment, fearing he might faint, hoping he’d be able to react without reproach, wondering whether they’d embrace, or smile, or weep, or all three at once, expecting to feel in every fiber of his body, and perhaps even beyond it, relief, confidence, joy.
But there was nothing.
He sat down on one of the chairs and looked at Klondi, who just stood there, tapping ash from her cigarette and letting it fall to the floor like snow.