On the evening of the second day, Albert was sitting by Fred’s bed. Someone had neatly parted Fred’s hair with a comb. He slept with his mouth agape, and despite the state of his health still looked notably younger than he actually was. And yet, this man had at least sixty years behind him, probably even more; since no birth certificate existed, nobody could say for sure. Maybe, thought Albert, Fred really was a hero, one with superpowers: he aged slowly, was preternaturally strong, and, above all, was an imperturbable optimist.
Someone touched Albert’s shoulder.
“Do you believe in God?” asked Klondi.
Albert wasn’t in the mood to debate questions of faith. “No.”
“Me neither. But wouldn’t it be much simpler?”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Life. Wouldn’t it be much simpler if you could count on the fact that someone had a plan for it all, that the whole mess wasn’t in vain?” She didn’t even wait for an answer. “I prayed for the first time yesterday. Felt good.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“Come off it, sweetie. You aren’t the only one who cares about him.” She tucked the blanket tighter around Fred. “So, are you coming?”
“Where?”
She nodded toward the exit. “To pray.”
In the austere chapel of an orphanage in the Bavarian uplands, Albert sat down beside Klondi in the first row of pews, and folded his hands. Klondi was thinking — he was positive — of her dead daughter and her dead husband and a friend who didn’t have much longer to live now. He was thinking of a woman who should have been his mother for nineteen years, and of a man who’d never been his father.
And as for Violet: after the first night, her Beetle had vanished from the parking lot. Albert assumed she’d gone on her way, and regretted that; he hadn’t even been able to thank her for her help.
On the third day, however, they ran into each other in the kitchen while he was frying a couple of eggs under the critical eye of Sister Simone. Violet declined his invitation to breakfast.
That night, as Klondi once again struck up her snore solo, Albert stepped outside for a smoke and found the Beetle parked in the middle of a field where the orphans played soccer during the summer. The sunroof was open. Violet lay huddled on the backseat.
“Hello,” he said, and sitting up suddenly, she hit her head.
“You scared me!”
“Sorry.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“I’m here because you needed me. Until recently, anyway.”
“Actually, what I meant was: what are you doing in this field?”
Violet sat up, and as she rubbed the back of her head, Albert remembered how much he’d liked kissing her there, once.
“Can I have one, too?”
“You smoke?”
“No.”
Albert shrugged, lit a cigarette, and passed it to Violet, who propped herself in the open roof, sucked at it, and didn’t cough once.
“You’ve smoked before, though, right?”
“Surprised?” Violet smiled, pleased. “It’s my first time.” Then she said, “I found a tin box in the trunk. There’s a rock in it that looks almost like …”
“Gold.”
“Fred’s?”
“Yep.”
“It looks real.”
“It is real.”
“Must be pretty valuable.”
“No question.”
“Where did he find it?”
“In the sewers.”
“What?!”
“Don’t ask me how it got there.”
He liked the way she blew the smoke through her nose. “You’ve really never …”
She flicked the cigarette into the field. “I’m leaving tomorrow.” She looked at him. “If you don’t need me.”
Of course he needed her, more than ever, but something in him shrank from saying it as long as she was waiting for him to say it.
“I was almost on my way yesterday. And then, halfway, I turned back. Stupid of me.”
“You could stay for another day,” he said, finally.
“And then?”
“I don’t know.”
“That hug the other day did me good,” she said suddenly, putting into words precisely what he was thinking.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand her. They’d been on the road together for three days now. Without Violet they’d all still be sitting in Königsdorf. That Violet had questioned Fred against Albert’s will, way back when, that had been a mistake — but she’d only wanted to help, wanted to see if she might be able to uncover something he’d missed. And wouldn’t it have been wonderful to find his mother with her by his side? To accomplish something so big together? Sure, she’d touched a sore point, but had it really been fair to split up with her on that account? In any case, it hadn’t been fair to call her up and beg her to drive Fred and Klondi and him to Saint Helena. For the sake of his mother. Whom Violet had been searching for. For which reason Albert had left her. And now they were here in a field, in the middle of the night, and everything that had happened between them lay months in the past, and he asked himself what, really, Violet had done wrong, and let his cigarette fall, and kissed her.
The next morning Fred opened his eyes, ignored the objections of the nurses, marched to the bus stop by the parking lot, and waved to Sister Simone, the cook, as she drove off to do her shopping in her leek-green VW.
Once Albert had managed to bring him back in, Violet served them breakfast.
Fred eagerly munched his food, as if making up for the meals he’d missed over the past few days. “Caramel pancakes!”
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” said Albert. “How are you feeling?”
Fred swallowed. “Ambrosial!”
“You look like it.”
“Aren’t you going to have some, too?” asked Violet, sitting down beside Albert and playing with his hair.
Albert glanced at the rolled-up pancakes. Fred stopped chewing. Violet urged him on with a nod. So Albert took one of the rolls, and tasted it. They were magnificent.
“Caramel,” said Albert.
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” Fred objected, and turned his attention back to his plate.
Albert said softly to Violet, “He’s feeling ambrosial.”
Her smirk was worthy of Sister Alfonsa. “He’s not the only one.”
Albert wasn’t sure if, as Violet would have put it, it had been the right thing to kiss her. He worried he was longing to be close to her only because he was feeling afraid of what was yet to come. The kiss had allowed him to forget — for a moment, at least — that Fred was dying, that his mother was living in an old-folks home on the Zwirglstein, which he’d have to set out for, sooner or later. Albert didn’t know what that would mean for him and Violet, and he didn’t want to worry about it anymore either, so he more than welcomed Alfonsa wanting to meet him out in the orchard.
“I like it out here,” she greeted him in the shadow of an apple tree. She acted as though two whole days hadn’t passed since they’d last spoken.
“You used to have agoraphobia, right?”
Alfonsa stopped. “What makes you say that?”
“The other sisters always used to praise me for getting you outside so often. Once I looked the word up in Fred’s encyclopedia.”
“You were still very small. And you had too much imagination.” Alfonsa went on. “Maybe that’s why your girlfriend thinks so highly of you.”