“She … could be your mother.”
“Do you know her?”
“Nope. We never met. When you were born, at the beginning of the eighties, it wasn’t a good time for me. I preferred to steer clear of people.”
“Why?”
She cleared her throat and tapped with an earth-smeared index finger at the gap between Fred and the Red Lady. “You would fit into this picture. Right there.”
Albert peered at the photo more carefully. She was right.
“Do you know …,” he began, but wasn’t sure how to end the sentence without it hurting. Where she went? Why she abandoned us? Why she didn’t care about us? What she was thinking?
“I don’t know anything,” said Klondi and drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, as if she might be able to suck information from the butt. “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” She handed the picture back to him, and he immediately stowed it in the attaché.
“I wouldn’t keep searching,” she said. “I’m afraid nobody in this village will have anything to tell you. As far as they’re concerned, your father is a Virgin Mary. You’ll find nothing.”
At this early stage, nobody and nothing were words far too glib to make Albert call off his search. For three long years he behaved like a young detective during the holidays, roaming through Hofherr’s beer garden, accosting the diners just after they’d gulped down the last scraps of their meals — since, according to a radio crime series he’d been listening to late at night with a couple of other orphans, that was the ideal moment to take a potential informant by surprise — until at last a dirndl-clad barmaid chased him off with noises like ksss and psh, as if he were a stray dog begging for treats. For three long years Albert knocked at wickets, at garden gates, at front doors with frosted-glass panes, at open doors, at doors upon which, during Epiphany, trios of children in royal garb had scrawled the initials of the Three Kings, C + M + B, in chalk, and at doors that were locked and bolted. For three long years he schlepped his attaché case around with him, eagerly presenting his mug shot to every pair of eyes he encountered. For three long years he made photocopies of the picture, on which he spelled out with letters cut from the newspaper: HAvE yOu SeEn THIs wOMaN? RePORt it TO dRIaJES! and tacked them up on the bulletin board in front of the town hall, in the little shelter at the bus stop, on telephone poles and electrical boxes and over the logo of an American fast-food chain on the only advertising poster in Königsdorf, across from the only supermarket, until the community of Königsdorf, in the person of a man in a beige-green uniform, whom everyone referred to simply as the Village Fuzz, forbade him to paste them up on public property, on pain of a “hot ear.” For three long years, while staying with Fred, he answered every knock at the front door and ring of the telephone with hard-to-quash hopes for a female voice, a euphoric hug, and, naturally, red hair. And for three long years, people came forward — people who, in Albert’s opinion, must be suffering from dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, because they would solemnly proclaim to him that they certainly knew the man in the photograph: he was the invalid from the ’77 bus accident.
And so, over time, nobody and nothing became things to be taken seriously.
One late-summer morning, the morning on which, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he’d shaved for the first time, after another fruitless six-and-a-half-week summer holiday, Albert sat in the second row of pews for morning Mass, his head lowered, his chin against his chest, his hands folded, and as the prayers dropped from his mouth, wished for the first time that he’d never found the photo. What was it, anyway? A two-dimensional, possibly factitious, and in any case ambiguous reproduction of reality, the mere assertion of a time that Albert understood only hazily. He remembered what Klondi had told him three years before — that he would find nothing. She’d called him a fourteen-year-old simpleton, and advised him to let the picture be, to let the case drop. That’s just what life was, she’d meant: a heap of puzzle pieces that never added up to one great whole, but merely filled you with false hope, because they let you believe that something like an answer — the truth! — existed out there, somewhere. Her last words rang in his head: “Those damned puzzle pieces,” she’d said, “are nothing but Hansel and Gretel crumbs.”
Where the Gold Comes From
Albert mulled over all of this, that night he spent sleepless in the BMW, and it left him, when morning came, with a feeling of helplessness. The fact that capitulation was part of recapitulation, he thought, seemed entirely appropriate.
On the other side of the windshield a dark blue was already mixing with the black, and the first birdsong heralded dawn. Albert pressed “eject,” and with a whirring sound the tape struggled from the slot. In the past, the two of them had sat here listening to the adventures of Benjamin Blümchen, the only talking elephant in the world. For a while, Fred had been entirely intent on the episode in which the elephant believed that acting meant you were lying. He’d replayed it again and again, ten times a day. Until Albert simply couldn’t help himself any longer, and threw the thing away. He could do precisely the same with Fred’s lump of gold and the cassette, he thought — then he wouldn’t have to waste any more thought on these Hansel and Gretel crumbs. He plunked the tape back into the box and reached for Fred’s nugget, marveling again at the weight of that little stone.
“All right, then,” he said.
Early that afternoon, Albert called Fred for lunch in the kitchen.
Within seconds the door sprang open. Fred was wearing his diving goggles, though outside the sun was shining. Usually Fred put them on when he stood by the bus stop in the rain. They’d belonged to his father. Sometimes Albert filled the bathtub with cold water, poured a packet of salt into it, and declared: “Voila! The Pacific!” Upon which Fred would leap with his goggles into the water, slosh around like an inebriated frog, and complain if the brine went up his nose.
Albert had cooked up some scrambled eggs with tomato. Fred pushed the tomatoes to the edge of the plate because “they didn’t taste good at all,” and Albert said, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred devoured all of the egg, but not the tomatoes, and Albert repeated, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred quickly rinsed off his plate, and Albert warned, “You aren’t getting any bread and honey,” but Fred swore that next time he’d eat “the healthy tomatoes,” at which point Albert did, in fact, smear some honey on the bread for him, while attempting to ignore Fred’s whispered self-praise: “That was a good trick.”
Albert’s best trick was mixing Fred’s medication into his food, without Fred noticing.
After the meal, Albert set the gold on the kitchen table. “Today I went to a jeweler in Wolfratshausen, who said we have almost enough here to buy a small house.”
“I already have a house.”
“Frederick, you’re going to tell me where you got this right now.”
“I found it,” grumbled Fred, fumbling with the clasp on the goggles.
“Where?”
A mulish stare.
“Sometimes I feel like a schoolmaster,” Albert said, sighing.
Fred shook his head. “But you’re Albert.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’s plenty!”
Plenty was rarely so little, thought Albert, pouring himself a glass of milk and drinking it down.