Brodeck (2 page)

II

————

ight had dropped its cape over the village as a carter flings his cloak over the remains of his campfire. The houses, their roofs covered with long pinewood tiles, exhaled puffs of slow blue smoke and made me think of the rough backs of fossilized animals. The cold was beginning to settle in, a meager cold as yet, but we’d lost the habit of it because the last days of September had been as hot as so many baking ovens. I remember looking at the sky and seeing all those stars, crowded against one another like scared fledglings looking for company, and thinking that soon we would plunge, all of a sudden, into winter. Where we live, winter seems as long as many centuries skewered on a giant sword, and while the cold weather lasts, the immensity of the valley around us, smothered in forests, evokes an odd kind of prison gate.

When I entered the inn, almost all the men of the village were there. Their eyes were so somber and their immobility so stony that I immediately guessed what had happened. Orschwir closed the door behind me and stepped to my side, trembling a little. He fixed his big blue eyes on mine, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

My stomach started churning. I thought it was going to eat my heart. Then I asked, in a very weak voice—staring at the ceiling, wanting to pierce it with my gaze, trying to imagine the
Anderer’s
room, trying to imagine him, the
Anderer
, with his sideburns, his thin mustache, his sparse curly hair rising in tufts from his temples, and his big round head, the head of an overgrown, good-natured boy—I said, “Tell me you haven’t… you didn’t… ?” It was barely a question. It was more like a groan that escaped from me without asking permission.

Orschwir took me by the shoulders with both hands, each of them as broad as a mule’s hoof. His face was even more purple than usual, and a droplet of sweat, tiny and glistening like a rock crystal, slid very slowly down the bridge of his pockmarked nose. He was still trembling, and since he was holding me like that, he made me tremble, too. “Brodeck… Brodeck…” That was all he managed to say. Then he stepped backward and melted into the crowd. Everyone’s eyes were on me.

I felt like a tiny weak tadpole in the spring, lost in a great puddle of water. I was too stunned for my brain to work properly, and, oddly enough, I thought about the butter I’d come to buy. I turned to Dieter Schloss, who was standing behind the bar, and I said, “I’m just here to buy some butter, a little butter, that’s all…” He shrugged his narrow shoulders and adjusted the flannel belt he wore around his pear-shaped belly, and I believe it was at that very moment that Wilhem Vurtenhau, a rabbit-headed peasant who owns all the land between the Steinühe forest and the Haneck plateau, took a few steps forward and said, “You can have all the butter you want, Brodeck, but you’re going to tell the story. You’re going to be the scribe.” I rolled my eyes. I wondered where Vurtenhau could possibly have come up with that word “scribe.” He’s so stupid, I’m sure he’s never opened a book in his life, and besides, he said the word wrong; in his mouth, the
b
became a
p
.

Telling stories is a profession, but it’s not mine. I write only brief notices on the state of the flora and fauna, on the trees, the seasons, and the available game, on the water level of the Staubi River, on the snowfalls and the rainfalls. My work is of little importance to my administration, which in any case is very far away, a journey of many days, and which could not care less about what I write. I’m not sure my reports are still reaching their destination, or, if they are, whether anyone reads them.

The mails have been quite unreliable since the war, and I think it will be a long time before the postal service functions smoothly again. I hardly ever receive money anymore. I have the impression that I’ve been forgotten, or that they think I’m dead, or indeed that they no longer need me.

Alfred Wurtzwiller, the postmaster, makes the trip to the city of S. and back on foot once every fifteen days—he’s the only one who can go, because he alone has the
Genähmigung
, the “authorization”—and sometimes he gives me to understand that he’s brought back a money order for me and doles out a few banknotes. I ask him for explanations. He makes big gestures I can’t interpret. Sounds ground up like meat come out of his mouth, which is creased by a large harelip, and I can’t understand the sounds, either. He bashes a receipt three times with a big rubber stamp; I take up the crumpled, illegible document and the little money that comes with it. That’s what we live on.

“We’re not asking you for a novel.” The speaker was Rudi Gott, the blacksmith. Despite his ugliness—long ago, a horse’s hoof crushed his nose and shattered his left cheekbone—he’s married to a beautiful woman called Gerde who’s forever posing outside the forge, as if in eternal expectation of the painter destined to do her portrait. “You’ll just tell what happened, that’s all. The way you do in your reports.” Gott was clutching a big hammer in his right hand. His naked shoulders burst out of his leather apron. He was standing near the hearth. The fire burned his face, and the steel head of the tool he held gleamed like a wellpeened scythe blade.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell the story—that is, I’ll try. I promise you I’m going to try. I’ll write in the first person, I’ll say ‘I’ the way I do in my reports, because I don’t know how to tell a story any other way, but I warn you, that’s going to mean everyone. Everyone, you understand me? I’ll say ‘I’ but it’ll be like saying the whole village and all the hamlets around it, in other words, all of us. All right?”

There was a hubbub, a noise like a draft animal relaxing in its harness and grunting a little, and then they said, “Agreed, do it like that, but be careful. Don’t change anything. You must tell the whole story. You must really say everything, so that the authority who reads the Report will understand and forgive.”

I don’t know who’ll read it, I thought. Maybe he’ll understand, but forgiveness is another matter entirely. I didn’t dare advance this point of view openly, but I thought it in the deepest part of myself. When I said yes, a sound filled the inn, the sound of relief, and fists were unclenched. Hands were removed from pockets. It was as though a crowd of statues had become men again. As for me, I was breathing very hard. I had come within inches of something. I preferred not to know what.

This was at the beginning of last fall. The war had been over for a year. Mauve autumn crocuses were blooming on the slopes, and often in the morning, on the granite crests of the Prinzhornï, which border our valley to the east, the first snows left a fresh, dazzling white powder, soon to melt away in the hours of full sunlight. It was just three months, almost to the day, since the
Anderer
arrived in our village, with his big trunks, his embroidered clothes, his mystery, his bay horse, and his donkey. “His name is Mister Socrates,” he said, pointing to the donkey, “and this is Miss Julie. Please say hello, Miss Julie.” And the pretty mare bowed her head twice, whereupon the three women who were present stepped back and crossed themselves. I can still hear his small voice when he introduced his beasts to us as though they were humans, and we were all dumbfounded.

Schloss brought out glasses, goblets, bowls, cups, and wine for everybody. I was required to drink, too. As if to seal a vow. I thought with terror about the
Anderer
’s face, about the room he lived in, a room I was somewhat familiar with, having entered it at his invitation three times to exchange a few mysterious words while drinking some strange black tea, the likes of which I had never drunk before. He had several books with obscure titles, some of them in languages which aren’t written the way ours is; they must sound like sliding scree and clinking coins. Some of the books had tooled, gilt bindings, while others looked like piles of bound rags. There was also a china tea service, which he kept in a studded leather case, a chess set made of bone and ebony, a cane with a cut-crystal pommel, and a quantity of other things stored in his trunks. He always had a big smile on his face, a smile that often substituted for words, which he tended to use sparingly. He had beautiful jade green eyes, very round and slightly bulging, which made his look even more penetrating. He spoke very little. Most of all, he listened.

I thought about what those men had just done. I had known them all for years. They weren’t monsters; they were peasants, craftsmen, farmworkers, foresters, minor government officials; in short, men like you and me. I put down my glass. I took the butter Dieter Schloss handed me, a thick slab wrapped in crystal paper that made a sound like turtledove’s wings. I left the inn and ran all the way home.

Never in my life have I run so fast.

Never.

III

————

hen I got back to the house, Poupchette had fallen asleep and Fedorine was dozing beside the child’s bed, her mouth slightly open, exposing her three remaining teeth. Amelia had stopped humming. She raised her eyes to me and smiled. I couldn’t say anything to her. I quickly climbed the stairs to our room and dove into the sheets as one dives into oblivion. I seemed to fall for a long time.

That night I slept only a little, and very badly. I kept circling and circling around the
Kazerskwir
. The
Kazerskwir—
that was because of the war: I spent nearly two long years far from our village. I was taken away like thousands of other people because we had names, faces, or beliefs different from those of others. I was confined in a distant place from which all humanity had vanished, and where there remained only conscienceless beasts which had taken on the appearance of men.

Those were two years of total darkness. I feel that time as a void in my life, very black and very deep, and therefore I call it the
Kazerskwir
, the crater. Often, at night, I still venture out onto its rim.

Old Fedorine seldom leaves the kitchen. It’s her own private realm. She spends the nighttime hours in her chair. She doesn’t sleep. She declares that she’s past the age of sleeping. I’ve never known exactly how old she is. She herself says she doesn’t remember, and in any case, she says, not knowing didn’t prevent her from being born and won’t prevent her from dying. She also says she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t want death to take her by surprise; when it comes, she wants to look it in the face. She closes her eyes and hums a tune, she mends stories and memories, she weaves tapestries of threadbare dreams, with her hands resting on her knees in front of her, and in her hands, her dry hands, marked with knotty veins and creases straight as knife blades, you can read her life.

I’ve described to Fedorine the years I spent far from our world. When I returned, it was she who took care of me; Amelia was still too weak. Fedorine looked after me the way she’d done when I was little. All the movements came back to her. She fed my broken mouth with a spoon, bandaged my wounds, slowly but surely put the flesh back on my bare bones, watched over me when my fever mounted too high, when I shivered as though plunged into a trough of ice and raved in delirium. Weeks passed like that. She never asked me anything. She waited for the words to come out of their own accord. And then she listened for a long time.

She knows everything. Or almost everything.

She knows about the black void that returns to my dreams again and again. About my unmoving promenades around the rim of the
Kazerskwir
. I often tell myself that she must make similar excursions on her own, that she too must have some great absences which haunt her and pursue her. We all do.

I don’t know if Fedorine was ever young. I’ve always seen her twisted and bent, covered with brown spots like a medlar long forgotten in the pantry. Even when I was a small child and she took me in, she already looked like a battered old witch. Her milkless breasts hung down under her gray smock. She came from afar, far back in time and far away in the geography of the world. She had escaped from the rotten belly of Europe.

This was a long time ago, at the beginning of another war: I stood in front of a ruined house from which a little smoke was rising. Was it perhaps my father’s house, my mother’s? I must have had a family. I was a full four years old, and I was alone. I was playing with a hoop half consumed by the fire. Fedorine passed by, pulling her cart. She saw me and stopped. She dug in her bag, brought out a beautiful, gleaming red apple, and handed it to me. I devoured the fruit like a starveling. Fedorine spoke to me, using words I didn’t understand, asked me questions I couldn’t answer, and touched my forehead and my hair.

I followed the old woman with the apples as if she were a piper. She lifted me into the cart and wedged me among some sacks, three saucepans, and a bundle of hay. There was also a rabbit with pretty brown eyes and tawny fur; its stomach was soft and very warm. I remember that it let me stroke it. I also remember that Fedorine stopped on a bend in the road (broom was growing along its borders) and, in my language, asked me my name. She told me hers—“Fedorine”—and pointed down below us at what remained of my village. “Take a good look, little Brodeck. That’s where you come from, but you’ll never go back there because soon there will be nothing left of it. Open your eyes wide!”

So I looked as hard as I could. I saw the dead animals with their swollen bellies, the barns open to the four winds, the crumbled walls. There were also a great many puppets lying in the streets, some with their arms crossed, others rolled up into balls. Although they were big puppets, at that distance they seemed tiny. And then I stared at the sun, and it poured burning gold into my eyes and made the tableau of my village disappear.

I tossed and turned in the bed. I was certain that Amelia wasn’t sleeping any more than I was. When I closed my eyes, I saw the
Anderer’s
face, his pond-colored irises, his full amaranth-tinged cheeks, his sparse frizzy hair. I smelled his violet scent.

Amelia moved. I felt her warm breath against my cheek and lips. I opened my eyes. Her lids were closed. She seemed utterly tranquil. She’s so beautiful that I often wonder what it was I did to make her take an interest in me one day. It was because of her that I didn’t founder back then. When I was in the prison camp, it was her I thought about every minute.

The men who guarded us and beat us were always telling us that we were nothing but droppings, lower than rat shit. We didn’t have the right to look them in the face. We had to keep our heads bowed and take the blows without a word. Every evening, they poured soup into the tin bowls used by their guard dogs, mastiffs with coats the color of honey and curled-up lips and eyes that drooled reddish tears. We had to go down on all fours, like the dogs, and eat our food without using anything but our mouths, like the dogs.

Most of my fellow prisoners refused to do it. They’re dead. As for me, I ate like the dogs, on all fours and using only my mouth. And I’m alive.

Sometimes, when the guards were drunk or had nothing to do, they amused themselves by putting a collar and a leash on me. I had to crawl around like that, on all fours, wearing a collar attached to a leash. I had to strut and turn round in circles and bark and dangle my tongue and lick their boots. The guards stopped calling me “Brodeck” and started calling me “Brodeck the Dog” and then laughing their heads off. Most of those who were imprisoned with me refused to act the dog, and they died, either of starvation or from the repeated blows the guards dealt them.

Some of the other prisoners never spoke to me except to say, “You’re worse than the guards, Brodeck! You’re an animal, you’re shit!” Like the guards, they kept telling me I was no longer a man. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Me, I’m alive. Maybe they had no reason to survive. Maybe they had no love lodged deep in their hearts or back home in their village. Yes, maybe they had no reason to go on living.

Eventually the guards took to tying me to a post near the mastiffs’ kennels at night. I slept on the ground, lying in the dust amid the smells of fur and dogs’ breath and urine. Above me was the sky. Not far away were the watchtowers and the sentinels, and beyond them was the country; the fields we could see by day, the wheat rippling with fantastic insolence in the wind, the clumped stands of birch, and the sound of the great river and its silvery water were all quite near.

But in fact I was very far from that place. I wasn’t leashed to a post. I wasn’t wearing a leather collar. I wasn’t lying half naked near sleeping dogs. I was in our house, in our bed, pressed against Amelia’s warm body and no longer couched in the dust. I was warm, and I could feel her heart beating against mine. I heard her voice, speaking to me the words of love she was so good at finding in the darkness of our room. For all that, I came back.

Brodeck the Dog came home alive and found his Amelia waiting for him.