“Me.”
“All children are mad,” said Alfonsa.
“Why?”
“As the stronger of the two of us, I’ve just decided it.”
“I’m not crazy!”
“You are now.”
Albert slammed down a game piece beside the board. “I don’t want to play anymore!”
“It was just an illustration.” She tousled his hair. “Do you really want to know what I think?”
He nodded, and looked at her obliquely from below, to express that he wanted to be taken in her arms.
“You are both perfectly insane.”
No ambiguity intended. Albert might have understood less than half of what she was saying — even his brightness had limits — but he could feel that this time she was speaking with admiration.
“That’s good,” he said and, just to be safe, added, “right?”
“That’s special,” she said, “and the very reason why you can only ever call him Fred. He’ll never be a proper father.”
“I can explain it to him!”
Sister Alfonsa smirked. “Nobody can do that. Not even you.”
A week later Albert ran away from the orphanage for the first time. Over the following month, he absconded on four separate occasions. Thereafter he repeated his escape attempts with reliable regularity. On average he made around twenty per year. At first he failed because of the bus drivers, who wouldn’t let some squirt, especially a smart-alecky squirt, ride unaccompanied by a grown-up. Often enough, the other orphans ratted him out. But even when an attempt succeeded, the nuns were barely ruffled; they knew where he was going every time. And why.
“I’m your son,” said Albert to Fred.
“You’re Albert,” said Fred to Albert.
“And I’m your son,” said Albert. “And you’re my father.”
“I’m Fred.”
“And my father.”
Fred blinked.
“Do you understand me?” asked Albert.
“I always understand everything,” said Fred.
“What did I say?”
“You said, Do you understand me? I understand you, Albert.”
“And before?”
“You said, And my father.”
“Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” said Fred, “and I’m hungry.”
“I come from you,” said Albert. “Without you, I wouldn’t exist.”
And Fred said, “Thank you. That’s nice. Can we make pancakes with raspberry jam? Pancakes with raspberry jam are ambrosial.”
Later, at Saint Helena — there was always a later-at-Saint-Helena — Albert would fight his disappointment by reading Fred’s newspaper report each night before falling asleep, and imagining that the child Fred had saved was him, not some girl called Andrea, who, after the bus accident, had left Königsdorf, along with her mother, forever.
He always hoped, and sometimes believed, and occasionally knew, that someday Fred would come and rescue him — that in the middle of the night Fred would storm into the dormitory, flip on the lights, run to his bunk, and take Albert with him. Where to was negligible — all that mattered was that it be away.
But the passing years withered his hope. Even his boundless longing couldn’t shield him from that. Again and again he ran to Fred, counter to Sister Alfonsa’s claim; it will work this time, he told himself, incorrigible; this time Fred will get it — and then Fred got nothing at all. It was all the same as ever. And Fred was simply Fred.
Albert put Fred’s report away again and pulled on a bathrobe. Out in the garden, he lit a cigarette. He could risk smoking only late at night. Fred had admonished him, “Smoking makes you sick!” and Albert didn’t want to provoke him needlessly. The smoke vanished into the night. As his gaze fell on the BMW, he flicked the butt over the garden fence; it flew in a high arc into the main street, like a crashing glowworm. Albert kicked at the car’s fender, expecting that it would hurt, but he barely felt a thing. It seemed as if this fender had been designed for him to kick, so he gave it another go, and slammed the hood for good measure, clobbered it with both fists. He hoped someone would happen along and try to stop him — then he’d be able to pummel or be pummeled. But nobody came.
Out of breath, he let himself fall into the BMW’s passenger seat, and flipped open the glove compartment. He took out the tin box and placed it on the dashboard. The streetlamp’s flattering orange light concealed some of its dents, and gave it a coppery sheen. Albert would have preferred that the box held no gleaming stone, but rather some piece of solid evidence: mementos, some kind of a clue, say, a diary by Anni, or a sheaf of family photographs, or at least some documents — he knew nothing about his ancestry, his family, he knew nothing about his mother. Albert had an infinite number of questions, and his only hope for an answer was Fred.
Albert looked at the fingers of his left hand. A tiny, faint, dwindling hope.
Out of some indeterminate need, he opened the tin box and took the gold in his hand. Beneath it, at the bottom of the box, was an audiocassette; on its yellowed label was written: My Most Beloved Possession. The ornate, schoolgirlish handwriting didn’t at all resemble Fred’s chicken-scratch script. Albert retrieved Fred’s Walkman from the living room, went back to the car, slipped the tape in, pushed the button from “off” to “on,” and saw the little red light by the time display come on.
He pressed “play.” A crackling, at first. Then a persistent, slowly swelling white noise, which seemed vaguely familiar, and demanding. A sort of audible silence. He searched through the tape, rewinding and fast-forwarding, laying his ear against the speaker, examining side A and side B.
Nothing.
He climbed over the center console and sat behind the wheel, pulled one of Fred’s diaries out of the pocket in the door, and flipped through it. He ran his hand across one page covered in magenta scribbling, whose odor echoed the sweetish atmosphere of the house, and felt the slight unevenness of Fred’s notes, pressed into the paper. Monday, 5/24/2002: 76 green cars, 8 green trucks, no green motorcycle. Tuesday, 5/25/2002: 55 green cars, 10 green trucks, 2 beautiful green motorcycles, 1 green tractor. Wednesday, 5/26/2002 …
Albert tossed the diary onto the backseat, switched off the Walkman, and felt the weight of Fred’s gold in his hand.
Hansel and Gretel Crumbs
Stumbling across clues that led him nowhere was nothing new to Albert. For years now he’d been trying to ferret out something about his origins, and especially about his mother. That he was a half orphan, or rather, as he privately thought — and which, given Fred’s mental state, seemed like a justifiable term — a two-thirds orphan, didn’t discourage him at all, but spurred him on. Earlier, no visit to Fred’s house had gone by without at least one trip to the attic. Whenever he clambered up the ladder to the loft, he was overcome by a tremendous excitement, though he’d soon rummaged through all the crates, all the bags and chests, all the boxes and duffels and bins and binders, many times over. Maybe, just maybe, he’d overlooked something. Even the word attic seemed to promise so much truth. Somewhere up there in the house’s memory there must be tucked away the critical clue that would point Albert toward his mother’s whereabouts.
Albert hadn’t been able to coax much from it, though: merely a photograph and two hairs.
He’d turned up the picture two days before his fourteenth birthday; it had been tucked in a battered wallet among Canadian banknotes showing the image of the Queen, who gazed serenely into the future. In the photograph, Fred had the posture of a schoolboy caught cutting class. Slouching, head lowered, he squinted in the direction of the camera. His right hand was stuck in his hip pocket, his left arm bent strangely sideways, as if someone had ordered him to do so, and he was holding hands with a freckled young woman whose chin-length, curly red hair sat on her head like some sort of outlandish hat, and who was nowhere to be seen in any of the other pictures Fred possessed. Her expression was a blend of pride and giddiness. She looked like she might step out of the photo at any moment.