Brodeck (7 page)

In the aftermath, I’ve often thought about that child, her child. Did he die like her? Is he still alive? If he’s alive, he must be about my little Poupchette’s age. How has he turned out, that little one, who for months was nourished each morning on the warm milk from his mother’s breasts and the spectacle of hundreds of men hanged before his eyes? What does he dream about? What words does he use? Does he still smile? Has he gone mad? Has he forgotten everything, or does his young mind return to the juddering movements of bodies nearing death, to the strangled groans, to the tears running down hollow gray cheeks? To the birds’ harsh cries?

During my first days in the camp, when I was in the
Büxte
, I talked to Kelmar constantly, as if he were alive at my side. The
Büxte
was a windowless dungeon cell. The scant light of day came in under the big, iron-bound oaken door. If I opened my eyes, I saw the wall. If I closed my eyes, I saw Kelmar, and behind him, farther off, much farther off, Amelia, her sweet, narrow shoulders, and farther still, Fedorine, weeping and gently shaking her head.

I don’t know how long I remained in the
Büxte
with those three faces and that wall. A long time, no doubt. Weeks, perhaps months. But be that as it may, over there, in the camp, days, weeks, and months meant nothing. Time didn’t count.

Time didn’t exist anymore.

X

————

’m still in the shed. I’m having trouble calming down. About half an hour ago, I thought I heard a funny sound coming from near the door, a sound like scraping. I stopped typing and listened closely. Nothing. I held my breath for a long time. No more sound. However, I was sure I’d heard something, and it wasn’t my imagination, because the sound started again a little later, only now it wasn’t near the door, it was along the wall. The sound moved slowly, very slowly, as if it were crawling. I blew out the candle, spun the page out of the typewriter, and stuffed what I’d written inside my shirt. Then I curled up in a corner behind some tools, near an old crate filled with cabbages and turnips. The sound hadn’t stopped. It was still moving, slowly but steadily, sliding along the walls of the shed.

This went on for a long time. Sometimes the sound stopped for a while and then started again. It moved around the perimeter of the shed, always advancing at the same slow pace. As I listened to it turning around me, I felt that I was caught in an invisible vise, and that an equally invisible hand was closing on me, slowly but surely.

The sound traveled along each of the four walls, making a complete circuit around the shed and returning to the door. In the most absolute silence, I watched the metal door handle pivot downward. I thought about all the tales that Fedorine knows by heart, stories in which objects speak, châteaux cross mountains and plains in a single night, queens sleep for a thousand years, trees change into noble lords, roots spring from the earth and strangle people, and springs have the power to heal festering wounds and soothe overwhelming grief.

The door opened, just barely, in the unbroken silence. I tried to shrink deeper into the corner, to envelop myself in darkness. I could see nothing. And I couldn’t hear my heart anymore. It was as if it had stopped beating, as if it too were waiting for something to happen. A hand took hold of the door and opened it wide. The moon stuck its face between two clouds. Göbbler’s body and bumpkinish head were outlined in the doorway. I was reminded of the silhouettes that street vendors in the Capital used to cut out; they worked in the big Albergeplatz market, scissoring smoke-blackened paper into the shapes of gnomes or monsters.

A gust of wind rushed through the open doorway, carrying the scent of frozen snow. Göbbler stood unmoving, searching the shadows. I didn’t budge. I knew that he couldn’t see me where I was, nor for that matter could I see him, but I smelled his odor, an odor of henhouse and damp fowl.

“Not gone to bed yet, Brodeck? You won’t answer me? But I know you’re there. I saw the light under your door, and I heard the typewriter …”

In the darkness, his voice took on some odd intonations. “I’m watching you, Brodeck,” he said. “Be careful!”

The door closed again, and Göbbler’s silhouette disappeared. For several seconds, I could hear his retreating footsteps. I imagined his heavy greased-leather boots and their muddy soles leaving dirty brown marks on the thin layer of snow.

I stayed in my corner, unmoving, for a good while. I breathed as little as I could and told my heart to calm down. I spoke to it as one speaks to an animal.

Outside, the wind began to blow harder. The shed started shaking. I was cold. All of a sudden, my fear gave way to anger. What did that chicken merchant want with me? And what was he up to, anyway? Did
I
watch
his
movements, or spy on his fat wife? Had he barged into my house without knocking just to make a few veiled threats? By what right? The fact that he’d joined the others in their awful deed didn’t make him a judge! The one real innocent among them all was me! It was me! The only one! The only one …

The only one.

Yes, I was the only one.

As I said those words to myself, I suddenly heard how dangerous they sounded; to be innocent in the midst of the guilty was, after all, the same as being guilty in the midst of the innocent. Then it occurred to me to wonder why, on that famous night—the night of the
Ereigniës—
all the men of the village were in Schloss’s inn at the same time; all the men except me. I had never thought about that before. I’d never thought about it because until then I’d told myself, quite naïvely that I was lucky not to have been there, and I’d let it go at that. But they couldn’t all have just happened to decide, at the same time, to go over to the inn for a glass of wine or a mug of beer. If they were all there, it must have been because they had an appointment. An appointment from which I had been excluded. Why?
Why?

Another cold shiver ran over me. I was still in the dark: in the dark inside the shed, and in the dark about my question. And all at once the memory of the first day started bouncing around in my head like a saw in wood too green to cut. The day of my return from the camp, at the end of my long march, when I finally entered the streets of our village.

The faces of all those I encountered that day appeared before my mind’s eye: first, at the gate, the two Glacker girls—the older one, with a head like a garden dormouse, and her younger sister, whose eyes are buried in fat; then, in the narrow street that leads to the pressing sheds, Gott the blacksmith, his arms covered with red fur; in front of her café at the corner of Unteral Lane, old lady Fülltach; near the Bieder fountain, Ketzenwir, hauling on a rope attached to a sick cow; at the entrance to the covered market, holding his belly in his hands and talking to Prossa the forester, Otto Mielk, who when he saw my ghostly self opened his mouth so wide that his crooked little cigar dropped from his lips; and then all the others, some of whom emerged from their walls as though from their graves and formed a circle around me, surrounding me without speaking all the way to my house; and, especially, those who quickly withdrew into their own houses and shut their doors, as if I had come back carrying a full load of trouble or hate or vengeance, which I intended to scatter into the air like cold ashes.

I could paint them, those faces, if I had colors and brushes and the
Anderer’s
talent. Most of all, I’d want to paint their eyes, in which at the time I read only surprise. Now that I seem to know them better, I realize that they contained a great many things; they were like the ponds that summer leaves behind in the drained peat bogs in Trauerprinz glade, which harbor all manner of aggressive rot, tiny grinders ready to chew to bits anything that might hinder them from accomplishing their narrow destiny.

I had recently returned from the bowels of the earth. I was lucky to get out of the
Kazerskwir
alive, to climb up out of that pit, and every step I took away from it had seemed like a resurrection. My body, however, was the body of a dead man. In the places I passed through on the long road back, children fled weeping at the sight of me, as if they had seen the devil, while men and women came out of their houses and approached me, turning in circles around me, almost touching me. Some gave me bread, a bit of cheese, a roasted potato, but others treated me like a wicked thing, throwing pebbles and spitting at me and calling me filthy names. None of that was anything compared to what I had left behind. I knew that I had come from too far away for them, and it wasn’t a matter of mere kilometers. I came from a country which had no existence in their minds, a country which had never appeared on any map, a country no tale had ever evoked, a country which had sprung from the earth and flourished for a few months, but whose memory was destined to weigh heavily for centuries.

How I was able to walk so far, to trample all those paths under my bare feet, I couldn’t say. Perhaps quite simply because, without knowing it, I was already dead. Yes, maybe I was dead like the others in the camp, like all the others, but I didn’t know it, I didn’t want to know it; and maybe by refusing I’d managed to elude the gatekeepers of the Underworld, the real Underworld, who had such a multitude arriving just then that they’d allowed me to turn back, telling themselves that, after all, I was bound to return sooner or later and take my place in the great cohort.

I walked and walked and walked. I walked to Amelia. I was heading for her. I was going home. I never stopped repeating to myself that I was going home to her. Her face was on the horizon, her sweetness, her laugh, her skin, her voice of velvet and gravel, and her accent, which gave each of her words a certain awkwardness; when she spoke, she was like a child who stumbles on a stone, nearly falls, regains its balance, and bursts out laughing. There was also her fragrance, a scent of infinite air, of moss and sun. I spoke to her as I walked. I told her I was coming home. Amelia. My Amelia.

To be fair, I must point out that not all those whom I met on my long road treated me like a stray dog or a plague-stricken beggar. There was also the old man.

One evening, I came to a small town on the other side of the border, in the land of the
Fratergekeime
, in their country, a place which had been strangely spared, and where all the houses were still standing, still intact: no holes, no yawning gaps, no collapsed roofs, no burned barns. The sturdy, well-preserved church overlooked the little cemetery spread out at its feet between some carefully tended vegetable gardens and an alley lined with lime trees. None of the shops had been pillaged in any way. The town hall was unharmed, and some pretty cows with brown coats and peaceful eyes were silently drinking from the troughs of the big fountains, while the boy in charge of the beasts, which were on their way to the milking shed, played with a red wooden top.

The old man was sitting on a bench set against the façade of one of the last houses on the way out of town. He seemed to be sleeping, his hands resting on a holly-wood cane and his pipe gone out. A felt hat covered up half of his face. I’d already passed him when I heard him call me. He had a slow voice, a voice very like a brotherly hand placed on a shoulder: “Come … come here …”

For a moment, I thought I’d dreamed his voice. Then he said, “Yes, I’m talking to you, young man!”

That was a funny thing for him to call me, “young man.” I even felt an urge to smile. But I didn’t know how to smile anymore. The muscles of my mouth, my lips, and my eyes had forgotten how to do it, and my broken teeth hurt.

I was no longer a young man. I had aged several centuries in the camp. I had exhausted the topic. But the longer we prisoners labored in our strange apprenticeship, the more our bodies melted away. I had left home as round as a ball, but in the camp I watched as my skin got closer and closer to my bones. In the end, we all looked the same. We’d become shadows, each of us indistinguishable from the rest. We could be mistaken for one another. A couple of us could be eliminated every day, because a couple of others could be added immediately, and no one could tell the difference. The camp was always occupied by the same silhouettes and the same bony faces. We weren’t ourselves anymore. We didn’t belong to ourselves anymore. We weren’t men anymore. We were all of the same sort.

XI

————

he old man ushered me into his house, which smelled of cool stones and hay. He pointed to a handsome, polished sideboard and told me to drop my bundle there. To tell the truth, it didn’t contain very much: two or three tattered rags I’d extracted one morning from the ashes of a barn, and a piece of blanket that still smelled like fire.

In the front room, which was very low-ceilinged and completely covered with fir paneling, a round table stood ready, as if I’d been expected. Two places had been laid, facing each other over a cotton tablecloth, and in a terra-cotta vase there was a bouquet of fragile, touching wildflowers, which moved at the least breath of air, spreading fragrances that were like memories of perfumes.

At that moment, with a mixture of sadness and joy, I remembered the student Kelmar, but the old man put a hand on my shoulder and, with a little movement of his chin, signed to me that I should sit. “You need a good meal and a good night’s sleep,” he said. “Before my servant left, she cooked a rabbit with herbs and a quince pie. They’ve been waiting just for you.”

He went to the kitchen and came back with the rabbit, arranged on a green earthenware platter and garnished with carrots, red onions, and branches of thyme. I couldn’t manage to move or say a word. The old man stepped to my side and served me copiously, then cut a thick slice of white bread for me and poured some limpid water into my glass. I wasn’t completely sure whether I was sitting in that house or lost in one of the numerous pleasant dreams that used to visit me at night in the camp.

My host sat down across from me. “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to join you—at my age, one eats very little. But do please start.”

He was the first man in a long time who addressed me as if I were a man, too. Tears began to flow from my eyes. My first tears in a long time, as well. I clutched the seat of my chair with both hands, as if trying to keep from falling into the void. I opened my mouth and tried to say something, but I couldn’t.

“Don’t speak,” he said. “I’m not asking any questions. I don’t know exactly where you’ve come from, but I think I can guess.”

I felt like a child. I made awkward, rash, incoherent gestures. He looked at me kindly. Forgetting my broken teeth, I fell upon the food the way I did in the camp when the guards threw me a cabbage stalk, a potato, or a bread crust. I consumed the whole rabbit, gobbled up the bread, licked my plate, devoured the pie. I still carried inside of me the fear that someone might steal my food if I ate it too slowly. My stomach felt full, as it had not done for months and months, and it hurt. I had the feeling that I was going to explode and die in that lovely house, under my host’s benevolent gaze; die from having eaten too much after being nearly dead from hunger.

When I’d finished cleaning plate and platter with my tongue and picking up the scattered crumbs from the table with my fingertips, the old man showed me to my room. There a wooden tub filled with hot soapy water was waiting for me. My host undressed me, helped me step into the tub, sat me down, and bathed me. The water ran over my skin, which no longer had any color, my skin, which stank of filth and suffering, and the old fellow washed my body without repugnance and with a father’s tenderness.

The next day, I woke up in a high, mahogany bed between fresh, starched, embroidered sheets that smelled like wind. On all the walls of the room, there were engraved portraits of men wearing mustaches and jabots; a few of them were in military attire. They all looked at me without seeing me. The softness of the bed had made my whole body ache. Getting up was difficult. Looking through the window, I could see the well-kept fields bordering the village; some of them were already sown, and in others, which were still being plowed, teams of oxen pulled harrows that gouged and aerated the soil. The earth in those fields was black and light, quite the opposite of ours, which is red and as sticky as glue. The sun was close to the horizon, its jagged line broken by poplars and birches. But what I took for dawn turned out to be dusk. I had slept all night and all day, sunk in a deep sleep without dreams or interruptions. I felt heavy, but at the same time relieved of a burden whose contents I couldn’t have described with any precision.

Clean clothes had been laid out on a chair for me, along with some walking shoes of supple, strong leather, shoes meant to last forever. (I still wear them; they’re on my feet as I write.) When I finished dressing, I saw a man in the mirror looking at me, a man whom I seemed to have known in another life.

My host was sitting outside on the bench in front of his house, as he’d been doing on the previous day. He was smoking a pipe, sending a pleasant smell of honey and ferns into the evening air. He invited me to sit at his side. I realized then that I hadn’t yet spoken a single word to him. “I’m Brodeck,” I said.

He took a stronger pull on his pipe. For an instant, his face disappeared in the fragrant smoke, and then he repeated, very softly, “Brodeck … Brodeck … I’m very glad you accepted my invitation. I suspect you still have a long journey ahead of you before you reach home.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d lost the habit of words and the habit of thoughts.

The old man spoke again. “Don’t be offended,” he said, “but sometimes it’s best not to go back where you came from. You remember what you left, but you never know what you’re going to find there, especially when madness has raged in men for a long time. You’re still young … Think about that.”

He scratched a match on the stone bench and relit his pipe. By that time, the sun had definitively fallen to the other side of the world. All that remained of its light were reddish traces, spreading like scribbles of fire and licking along the borders of the fields. Above our heads, floods of ink were drowning the pale sky. A few bright stars already shone through the blackness, between the streaks of the last swifts and the first bats.

“Someone’s waiting for me.” It was all I could manage to say.

The old man slowly shook his head. I successfully repeated myself, but I didn’t say who was waiting for me; I didn’t say Amelia’s name. I had kept it closed inside me for so long that I was afraid to let it go, afraid it might get lost out in the open.

I stayed in his house for four days, sleeping like a dormouse and eating like a lord. The old man looked upon me kindly as I ate and served me second helpings, though he himself never swallowed a thing. Sometimes he remained silent; sometimes he made conversation. It was a one-sided conversation, with him doing all the talking, but he seemed to enjoy his monologues, and as for me, I took a curious pleasure in letting myself be surrounded by his words. Thanks to them, I felt I was returning to the language, the language behind which there lay, prostrate, weak, and still sick, a humanity that needed only to heal.

Having regained some of my strength, I decided to leave one morning, very early, while the sun was rising and the smells of young grass and dew rose with it and invited themselves into the house. My hair, which was growing back in patches, gave me the look of a convalescent who’d survived a disease no physician could have identified with any precision. I still had a lemony complexion, and my eyes were sunk very deep in their sockets.

The previous evening, I’d told the old man that I was thinking about continuing on my way, and he was waiting for me on his threshold. He handed me a gray canvas sack with leather shoulder straps. It contained two large round loaves of bread, a slab of bacon, a sausage, and some clothes. “Take them,” he said. “They’re just your size. They belonged to my son, but he won’t be coming back. It’s probably better so.”

The sack I’d just taken hold of suddenly seemed very heavy. The old man extended his hand to me. “Have a good journey, Brodeck.”

For the first time, his voice shook. So did his hand, which I clasped: a dry, cold, spotted hand that crumpled in my palm. “Please,” he said. “Forgive him … forgive them …” And his voice died, dwindling into a murmur.