When Albert read the report today, as a nineteen-year-old, he recognized in it some of what bothered him about Fred: most of all, the way he exaggerated, describing things so that you could never be quite sure if his mental disability was responsible, or his character, or some combination of the two.
But as a child he remembered he had loved Fred for this more than anything — that people called him a hero. Back then he’d seen Fred as an even greater hero than He-Man or Raphael, the turtle with the red bandanna, named for some other Raphael that Sister Simone was all gaga over. At Saint Helena, Albert bragged about Fred, thereby drawing the envy and hostility of all the other orphans who not only didn’t have heroes for fathers; they had no fathers at all. Why did he live in Saint Helena if Fred was so great, they asked him, and shook their heads maliciously. Albert ignored that. Sister Alfonsa had prepared him for such situations; he followed her advice, didn’t stick his tongue out at the other kids, and told himself that because they didn’t have anyone, they wanted to be like him, they were just being jealous, petty. And that helped Albert, who was the only one of the younger kids in the orphanage who knew what petty meant. At Saint Helena, Albert favored the lower mattress in the bunk bed, on the one hand because he was no lover of heights, and on the other because he could decorate the underside of the bed above him with what he wanted to be the last thing he’d see before falling asleep: Fred’s newspaper report. Even back then he had never called Fred Father. As a one-year-old he’d called him Ped, then Fed at two, and a few months later he was proudly gurgling Fred. Anni had told him to. And after Anni’s death, Sister Alfonsa wanted it to stay that way. Which confused Albert. Often he wanted to call him Papa, with an elongated second a that opened the throat and cleared the mind. Whereas Fred curled his tongue and sounded like an out-of-tune doorbell. Yet he trusted the nun, for in spite of his precocious mind, he was still small enough to believe that adults, among whom he counted Fred, knew everything, and always did what was right.
It wasn’t until age five that he realized how wrong he had been.
During a visit to Königsdorf he and Fred lay, as usual, on the chaise longue in the living room, in front of the television set. Albert couldn’t recall anymore which program had been playing at the time. He’d never cared much about that, for him the important thing was snuggling up against Fred and feeling his inextinguishable warmth. And that’s how it had been that evening when Albert, needing to go to the bathroom, had worked himself loose from Fred, whose gaze never slid from the TV even for a moment. After Albert had pressed the flush on the toilet, he stood there waiting, for Fred’s sake, until the sound of the rushing water had subsided, before opening the door again. When he bounced back into the living room, feeling almost perfectly happy, he saw it.
Even before Albert first beat Sister Alfonsa at chess, even before he wowed his teachers with essays cobbled together out of quotes cribbed from German writers (never getting caught), even before he began learning the English version of his favorite book, The Hobbit, by heart, even before he baptized a stray dog “Maxmoritz” and trained it to pilfer sausages from the convent kitchen, even before, bored by the inflationary use of kindergarten curse words like dummy or poopy butt, he started to call his envious peers “cretins,” even before he explained to said cretins, who, when exam time came around, scored worse than he did across the board, that his namesake, Einstein, had never been a poor student, merely Swiss — even before all of this happened, Albert understood for the first time just how little his father understood.
Fred was lying in exactly the same position on the chaise longue, but his gaze didn’t reach what was happening on the screen. He was staring in its direction with the concentrated yet unambiguously desperate expression of someone marooned on an island, scanning the horizon for ships.
The first words Albert addressed to Sister Alfonsa after that visit were “Is he crazy?”
Alfonsa greeted him with a bear hug and one of her standard tooth-concealing smirks — back when she was a child, people had put little stock in either tenderness or orthodontics. She was famous far beyond the walls of Saint Helena for her inscrutable facial expressions. Albert himself had once witnessed how an adventurous orphan — Rupert — had mistaken her smirk for a suppressed smile, as he clambered up onto the unstable roof of a garden shed accompanied by her shouts that he should definitely go on scrambling, there would be absolutely no consequences, she thought it was an excellent idea, if only all the boys were daring enough to try to break their necks. A penance of fifty Our Fathers had brought Rupert considerably closer to an understanding of the concept of irony. Some people thought everything Sister Alfonsa uttered was devoid of emotion. But even as a child, Albert had felt this was only half the story. It sometimes seemed to him as if she’d found her way to Saint Helena by mistake. Something about her just didn’t fit there. What exactly it was, he couldn’t say. But he had a suspicion it was connected with how seldom she left the building, and how often she listened to Frank Sinatra.
“Is Fred crazy?”
This time Albert pronounced the question as if he was expecting a yes. Sister Alfonsa shut the door to her office, and led him over to a little table on which a chessboard of stained boxwood was waiting. To the left and right of it stood wooden stools. Lately she’d been teaching him to play chess — an honor she bestowed only every few years on an orphan who, in her opinion, had great potential, or, as she phrased it, seemed “bright enough.” In Alfonsa’s lessons, chess pieces were dispensed with. In her opinion, a clever-enough mind could make do with checkers — memory would take care of the rest.
Albert hesitated, he had little desire to play, but he also sensed that he had no other option, if he wanted to hear her thoughts. Faint daylight fell through a tiny window — it was another of those murky autumn afternoons. Albert took his seat. His feet didn’t reach the floor. For a moment his hand hovered above his bone-white troops, before opening the game in classic fashion (pawn to e4). The nun mirrored his move (pawn to e5), and then sat down.
“You think your father is crazy?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we are, too.”
“No way.”
“How do you know?”
Albert made his next move (knight to f3), which she again mimicked (knight to f6).
“Okay,” she said, “let’s assume that we’re not crazy, and Fred is. Isn’t that merely our thesis, then?”
Albert wrinkled his forehead (knight takes pawn), Alfonsa didn’t (likewise).
“What’s a thesis?”
“A beginning.” She smirked. “In our society the stronger rule over the weaker. A clever little fellow like you declares: ‘Fred is crazy.’ And because Fred is hardly capable of refuting you, everyone concludes that you’re right.”
“I am right” (pawn to d3).
“So: guilty until proven innocent” (pawn to d6). “And what if we’re wrong?”
“…”
(Pawn takes knight, and likewise.)
“What if we’re crazy? What if the whole world is controlled by madmen, who lock away all the sane people like Fred, so that nobody gets wise to them?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Says who?”