Brodeck (29 page)
Authors: PHILIPPE CLAUDEL
Tags: #Literary, #Investigation, #Murder, #1939-1945, #Fiction, #Influence, #Lynching, #World War, #Fiction - General
XL
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got out the old cart, the one we arrived with, Fedorine and I, a long time ago. I never thought we were going to need it again one day. I never thought there would be another departure. But maybe there can only be departures, eternally, for those like us, for those made in our image.
Now I’m far away.
Far away from everything.
Far away from the others.
I’ve left the village.
Then again, maybe I’m nowhere anymore. Maybe I’ve left the story. Maybe I’m like the traveler in the fable, in the unlikely event that the hour of fables has come.
I left the typewriter in the house. I don’t need it anymore. Now I write in my brain. There’s no more intimate book. No one will be able to read it. I won’t have to hide it. It’s nowhere to be found, forever.
When I got up this morning, very early, I felt Amelia lying against me and saw Poupchette asleep in her little bed with her thumb in her mouth. I took both of them in my arms. In the kitchen, Fedorine was ready and waiting for us. The bundles were already made up. We left without making any noise. I took Fedorine in my arms, too; she weighs nothing, she’s so old and frail. Life has worn her thin, like a cloth that’s been washed a thousand times. I started walking, carrying my three treasures like that and pulling the cart. There’s an old story, I think, about a traveler who left this way, fleeing his burning city and carrying his old father and his young son on his shoulders. I must have read that tale somewhere. Yes, I must have read it. I’ve read so many books. Could it be something Nösel told us about? Or maybe I heard it from Kelmar or Diodemus.
The streets were quiet and the houses asleep, and so were the people inside those houses. Our village was like unto itself, like a flock, as Orschwir had said, yes, a flock of houses pressed against one another, tranquil under the still-black but already starless sky, and as inert and blank as every stone in their walls. I passed Schloss’s inn. A little light was shining in his kitchen. I passed Mother Pitz’s café, Gott’s forge, and Wirfrau’s bakery, and I heard the baker kneading his dough. I passed close to the covered market and the church and in front of Röppel’s hardware store and Brochiert’s butcher’s shop. I passed all the fountains and drank a little water as a sign of farewell. All those places were alive, intact, preserved. I stopped a moment in front of the monument to the dead and read there what I’d always read: the names of Orschwir’s two sons; the name of Jenkins, our policeman who died in the war; Cathor’s name, Frippman’s name, and mine, half effaced. I didn’t linger, as I felt Amelia’s hand on my neck. I’m sure she was trying to tell me to go on; she’d never liked it when we passed the monument and I stopped to read the names aloud.
It was a beautiful night, clear and cold, a night that seemed to have no desire to end, wallowing in its own darkness, turning round and round in it, as one sometimes likes to remain between warm sheets on a cold morning. I skirted the mayor’s farm and heard the pigs moving about in their pens. I also saw Lise,
Die Keinauge
, cross the farmyard, holding a bucket that seemed to be full of milk and overflowed at every step, leaving a little white trail behind her.
I went on. I crossed the Staubi on the old stone bridge. I stopped a moment to listen to the murmur of the water one last time. A river tells many stories, if you know how to listen to it. But people never listen to what rivers tell them, or forests, or animals, or trees, or the sky, or the rocks on the mountainsides, or other people. Nevertheless, there must be a time for listening as well as a time for speaking.
Poupchette hadn’t woken up yet, and Fedorine was dozing. Only Amelia had her eyes wide open. I carried the three of them along without any trouble. I felt no fatigue. Shortly after we crossed the bridge, I saw
Ohnmeist
about fifty meters away. He seemed to be waiting for me, as if he wanted to show me the way. He started trotting as I approached, and he went ahead of me like that for more than an hour. We climbed the path in the direction of the Haneck plateau. We passed through the great conifer woods, with their pleasant aromas of moss and needles. Snow formed gleaming corollas at the feet of the tall firs, and the wind swayed the tops of the trees and made their trunks pop and creak. When we reached the upper limit of the forest and started to cross Bourenkopf’s stubble fields,
Ohnmeist
broke into a run and climbed atop a boulder. The first rays of the dawning sun shone on him then, and I perceived that he was no longer a masterless dog, no longer the
Ohnmeist
that walked down our streets and through our houses as though everything were part of his realm, but a fox, a very handsome and very old fox as far as I could judge. He struck a pose, turned his head in my direction, gazed at me for a long time, and then, with one agile, graceful bound, disappeared among the broom.
I walk tirelessly. I’m happy. Yes, happy.
The summits around me are my accomplices. They’re going to hide us. I turned around a few moments ago, near the wayside cross with the strange and beautiful Christ, to take a last look at our village. There’s usually such a fine view from that spot—the village looks small, the houses like tiny boxes. If you stretched out your arm, you could almost scoop them up in the palm of your hand. But this morning, I saw none of that. It was no use looking; I didn’t see anything. Although there was no fog, no clouds, no mist, there was also no village there below me. There was no village anymore. The village, my village, had completely disappeared. And with it, all the rest: the faces, the river, the living beings, the sorrows, the springs, the paths I’d just taken, the forests, the rocks. It was as though the landscape and everything it contained had receded as I passed. As if, at every step, the set were being dismantled behind me, the painted backdrop rolled up, the lights extinguished. But I, Brodeck, am not responsible for any of that. I am not guilty of that disappearance. I have neither provoked nor desired it, I swear.
I’m Brodeck, and I had nothing to do with it.
Brodeck is my name.
Brodeck.
For pity’s sake, don’t forget it.
Brodeck.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Here and there in these pages, the reader will find phrases which I have consciously borrowed from other authors without asking their permission. May they pardon me and accept my thanks.
Alle verwunden, eine tödtet
(“They all wound; one kills”) is a motto inscribed on an eighteenth-century German carriage clock made by Benedik Fürstenfelder, a watchmaker in Freidberg, and put up for auction in a French salesroom a few years ago.
Talking is the best medicine
is a sentence drawn from Primo Levi’s story “The Molecule’s Defiance.”
Hasn’t the hour of fables come?
is a question asked in André Dhôtel’s
La chronique fabuleuse
.
I’ve learned that the dead never abandon the living
is a slightly altered version of a line I found in Fady Stephan’s lovely book
Le berceau du monde
.
I write in my brain
is, if I remember correctly, a remark made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his
Confessions
.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Marie-Charlotte d’Espouy, Laurence Tardieu, and Yves Léon, who through their joint efforts managed to save
Brodeck
from the irretrievable digital depths of my computer.
I would also like to mention, in connection with this book, several persons who have been important to me at different moments in my life and who, having passed away during the two years I worked on my novel, accompanied my thoughts as it unfolded: Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, Laurent Bonelli, Marc Vilrouge, René Laubiès, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, Patrick Berhault, Jacques Villeret.
And finally, my thanks go to the entire team at Éditions Stock, my French publisher, who, under the leadership of Jean-Marc Roberts, have honored me with their trust and their friendship, and also to Michaela Heinz, faithful reader and dispenser of precious advice from the other side of the Rhine.
a cognizant original v5 release october 07 2010
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philippe Claudel is the author of many novels, among them
By a Slow River
, which has been translated into thirty languages and was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2003 and the
Elle
Readers’ Literary Prize in 2004. His novel
La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh
was published in 2005, and
Brodeck
won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2007. Claudel also wrote and directed the film
I’ve Loved You So Long
, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein, which opened in movie theaters in the United States in the fall of 2008 and in thirty other countries around the world.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Éditions Stock
English translation copyright © 2009 by John Cullen
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.nanatalese.com
Originally published in France as
Le rapport de Brodeck
by Éditions Stock, Paris, in 2007. Copyright © Éditions Stock, 2007. This edition published by arrangement with Éditions Stock.
DOUBLEDAY
and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Claudel, Philippe, 1962–
[Rapport de Brodeck. English]
Brodeck : a novel / Philippe Claudel; translated from the French by John Cullen.
p. cm.
I. Cullen, John. II. Title.
PQ2663.L31148R3713 2009
843.92—dc22
2008038252
eISBN: 978-0-385-53009-5
v3.0