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  We heard steps above our heads. The stepper was Poupchette, who was scurrying around up there like a little mouse. Then there were other footfalls, slower and heavier, and a distant voice, Amelia’s voice, humming her song. Orschwir cocked his head back for a moment, and then he looked at me as if he were about to say something, but he changed his mind. He took out his tobacco pouch and rolled himself a cigarette. A great silence, hard as stone, settled over us. Having announced that he was needed at his farm, Orschwir, for no apparent reason, chose to linger. He took two or three puffs on his cigarette, and an aroma of honey and old alcohol permeated the air in the kitchen. Orschwir doesn’t smoke just anything. He smokes a rich man’s tobacco, very blond and finely cut, which he orders from far away.

  He gave the ceiling another look and then once again turned his appalling face to me. No more sounds could be heard, not the footsteps, not Amelia’s voice. Fedorine was ignoring us. She’d finished grating some potatoes and was rolling them in her hands, shaping them into little pancakes called Kartfolknudle; later she’d fry them in boiling oil and strew them with poppy seeds before serving them to us.

  Orschwir cleared his throat. “Not too lonely?”

  I shook my head.

  He seemed to reflect, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and began wheezing and choking. His skin turned as red as the wild cherries that ripen in June, and tears filled his eyes. At length the coughing subsided.

  “You need anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  Orschwir rubbed his two cheeks with one big hand, as if he were shaving them. I wondered what he could possibly be trying to say to me.

  “All right, then, I’ll be leaving.”

  He pronounced these words hesitantly. I looked him in the eyes, hoping to see what was behind them, but he quickly cast them down.

  I heard myself responding to him, but my words sounded so strange and threatening that they hardly seemed to come from me: “It’s really convenient for you to act as if they don’t exist, isn’t it? As if they’re not here, neither one of them. That suits you just fine, right?”

  The effect of this sally was that Orschwir fell completely silent. I saw him trying to ponder what I’d just said, and I could tell that he was turning my words over and over in his mind, taking them apart and putting them back together, but his efforts apparently came to naught, for he suddenly leapt from his chair, grabbed his cap, jammed it down over his skull, and left the house. The door closing behind him made its little noise, a high meow. And all at once, thanks to that simple little sound, I was on the other side of that door and it was two years ago, the day I came home.

  From the moment I entered the village, all the people I passed stared at me goggle-eyed and opened their mouths wide without producing a single word. Some of them went running to their houses to spread the news of my return, and all of them understood that I must be left alone, that they mustn’t ask me any questions yet, that all I wanted to do was to stand before the door of my house, put my hand on the knob, and push the door open, to hear its little noise, to enter my home once more, to find there the woman I loved, who had never left my thoughts, to take her in my arms, to squeeze her so tight it hurt, and to press my lips to hers again at last.

  Ah, the vision of those last few meters, culminating in that embrace, how often had I gazed upon it in my dreams! That day, when I opened the door, my door, the door to my house, my body was trembling and my heart was pounding as though about to burst through my chest. I couldn’t catch my breath, and I even thought for a moment that I was going to die there, that I was going to step over the threshold and die from too much happiness. But suddenly the face of the Zeilenesseniss appeared to me, and my happiness stiffened and froze. It was a little as though someone had shoved a big handful of snow between my shirt and my naked skin. But why, at that precise moment, did that woman’s face come floating up out of limbo and dancing before my eyes?

  In the last weeks of the war, the camp became an even stranger place than it had been before. Unceasing, contradictory rumors shook it like windy blasts, alternately hot and cold. Some recent arrivals murmured that the conflict was nearing its end and that we, who walked bowed down and looked like corpses, were on the winning side. This news restored to our eyes, the eyes of the living dead we had become, a gleam long since extinguished, but the fragile light couldn’t last. The guards let their confusion show for a few seconds before they quickly and brutally dispelled it: apparently determined to affirm that they were still the masters, they attacked the first one of us they got their hands on, kicking him, beating him with truncheons and rifle butts, and driving him down into the mud as though trying to make him disappear. Nevertheless, their nervousness and the constantly worried expressions on their faces led us to conclude that something big really was happening.

  The guard who was my master stopped paying much attention to me. Whereas every day for weeks on end he’d amused himself by putting a leather collar around my neck, attaching a braided leash to it, and parading me around the camp—me walking on all fours, and him following behind, upright on his two legs and his certitudes—now I never saw him anymore except at mealtime. He came furtively to the kennel that served as my bed and poured two ladles of soup into my bowl, but I could tell that this game no longer amused him. His face had become gray, and two deep wrinkles I’d never seen before now furrowed his forehead.

  I knew that he’d been an accountant before the war and that he had a wife, three children—two boys and a girl—and a cat, but no dog. He was an innocuous-looking fellow with a timid manner, shifty eyes, and small, well-groomed hands, which he washed methodically several times a day while whistling a military tune. Unlike a great many of his colleagues, he didn’t drink and never visited the windowless huts where female prisoners (whom we never laid an eye on) were made available to the guards. He was a pale, reserved, ordinary man, who always spoke in an even tone, never raising his voice, but who had twice, before my eyes and without a second’s hesitation, bludgeoned prisoners to death for forgetting to salute him by lifting their caps. His name was Joss Scheidegger. I’ve tried hard to banish that name from my memory, but the memory doesn’t take orders. The best you can hope for is to deaden it a bit from time to time.

  One morning, there was a great deal of commotion in the camp: noises of every sort, shouted orders, questions. The guards scuttled about in all directions, gathering their kits together, loading multifarious objects onto carts. There was a new smell in the air, a sour, pregnant odor that surpassed the stench emanating from our poor bodies: fear had changed sides.

  In their great agitation, the guards ignored us completely. Before, we had existed for them as slaves, but that morning, we no longer existed at all.

  I was lying in the kennel, keeping warm among the mastiffs and watching the curious spectacle of our keepers preparing to make a rapid exit. I followed each movement. I heard each call and every order, none of which concerned us anymore. At one point, when the majority of the guards had already abandoned the premises, I saw Scheidegger heading for the hut near the kennels where the offices of the prison census authority were located. He stayed briefly in the hut and emerged with a leather pouch, which seemed to contain documents. One of the dogs saw him and barked. Scheidegger looked toward the kennel and stopped. He appeared to hesitate, darting glances all around, and having determined that no one was watching, he walked quickly to my kennel, knelt on the ground beside me, dug in his pocket, took out a little key with which I was quite familiar, and with shaky hands opened the lock on my collar; then, not knowing what to do with the key, he suddenly threw it down as if it were burning his fingers. “Who’s going to pay for all this?”

  It was a shabby, undignified question—an accountant’s question—and as Scheidegger asked it, he looked me in the eye for the first time, perhaps expecting me to give him an answer. His forehead was covered with sweat and his skin even grayer than usual. What was the meaning of his query? Was he hoping for forgive
ness? From me? He stared at me for several seconds, imploringly, fearfully. Then I started to bark. My barking was prolonged, lugubrious, melancholy, instantly echoed and extended by the two mastiffs. Scheidegger, terrified, bounded to his feet and ran away.

  Within a little less than an hour, there wasn’t a guard left in the camp. Silence reigned. Nothing could be heard, and no one could be seen. Then, timidly, one by one, shadows began to step out of the huts, not yet daring to take a real look around, and not saying a word. An unsteady, incredulous army, hesitating figures with sallow skin and hollow cheeks, began to fill the streets of the camp. Soon the former prisoners formed a compact, fragile crowd, still silent, which took the measure of its new circumstances by drifting aimlessly from one place to another, dazzled by the freedom none of them dared name.

  When this great tide of suffering flesh and bones turned the corner and moved toward the group of huts that housed the guards and their commanders, something incredible happened. Those in front raised their hands, without a word, and everyone stopped short as though frozen in place. Yes, it was an incredible sight: standing alone, facing hundreds of creatures that were gradually becoming men again, was the Zeilenesseniss. Completely alone. Immensely alone.

  I don’t believe in fate. And I no longer believe in God. I don’t believe in anything anymore. But I must admit that there seemed to be more than mere chance in that meeting between a throng of people in extreme misery and the person who was the living symbol of their tormentors.

  Why was she still there, when all the guards had left? She too must have left, and then she’d come back, no doubt in haste, to fetch something she’d forgotten. The first thing we heard was her voice. Her ordinary voice, sure of itself, enlivened by her sense of her power and her privileges; the voice of superiority, which sometimes gave the order to hang one of us and sometimes sang nursery rhymes to her child.

  I didn’t understand what she said—I was standing rather far from her—but I could tell that she was speaking as though nothing had changed. I’m sure she didn’t know she was alone in the camp; she didn’t know she’d been abandoned. I’m sure she thought there were still guards on hand, ready to execute the least of her orders and to beat us to death if she desired them to do so. But no one answered her call. No one came to her side to serve her or aid her. No one in the crowd facing her made a move. She kept on talking, but little by little, her voice changed. The words came faster and faster at the same time as their intensity decreased; then her voice exploded and became a howl before fading away again.

  Today, I imagine her eyes. I imagine the eyes of the Zeilenesseniss when she began to realize that she was the last of them, that she was alone, and that perhaps—yes, perhaps—she would never leave the camp, that for her, too, it was going to be transformed into a grave.

  I was told that she began to strike the men at the head of the crowd with her fists. No one replied in kind; they simply made way for her. And so she gradually moved deeper into the great river of walking dead, unaware that she would never emerge from it, for the waves closed in again behind her. There was no outcry, no complaint. Her words disappeared with her. She was swallowed up, and she met an end in which there was no hatred, an end that was almost mechanical—a fitting end, in short, an end in her own image. I truly believe, even though I couldn’t swear it, that no one laid a hand on her. She died without suffering a blow, without a word addressed to her, without even so much as a glance cast upon her, who had felt such contempt for our glances. I imagine her stumbling at some point and falling to the ground. I imagine her stretching out her hands, trying to catch hold of the shadows moving past her, over her, on her body, on her legs, on her delicate white arms, on her stomach and her powdered face; shadows that paid her no attention, that didn’t look at her, that brought her no help but didn’t attack her, either; moving shadows that simply passed, passed, passed, treading her underfoot the way one treads dust or earth or ashes.

  The next day, I found what remained of her body. It was a poor thing, swollen and blue. All her beauty had vanished. She looked like a Strohespuppe, a “straw fairy,” one of the big dolls children make by stuffing old dresses with hay; Strohespuppen are paraded through the village on the feast of St. John and then, as night falls, tossed into a great fire, while everyone sings and dances to the glory of summer. Her face wasn’t there anymore. She no longer had eyes or a mouth or a nose. In their place I saw a single wound, enormous and round, inflated like a balloon, and attached to it was a long mane of blond hair mingled with clumps of mud. It was by her hair that I recognized her. In former days, while I crept along the ground, acting the dog, her hair had appeared to me like filaments of sunlight, blinding and obscene.

  Even in death, she kept her fists so tightly clenched that they resembled stones. Part of a prettily worked golden chain dangled from one hand. At the end of that chain, no doubt, there was a medal, one of those delicately engraved medals that represent a male or female saint and are placed around infants’ necks when they’re baptized. Perhaps that very medal was the reason why she returned; perhaps she’d noticed it was missing from her child’s small, soft chest. She’d reentered the camp, counting on leaving it again very quickly. She must not have known that once you abandon Hell, you must never go back there. But in the end, there’s no sort of difference between dying from ignorance and dying under the feet of thousands of men who have regained their freedom. You close your eyes, and then there’s nothing anymore. And death is never difficult. It requires neither a hero nor a slave. It eats what it’s served.

  XVII

  ————

  eer leaves no stain, nor does eau-de-vie, but wine!”

  Father Peiper was launched on a litany of complaints. He stood at his stone sink, dressed in his shirt and underpants, scrubbing his white chasuble with a large brush and a bar of soap. “And right on the cross, to boot! If I can’t get this out, idiots and zealots will see it as a symbol! We’re already weighed down with symbols! We traffic in symbols! It’s no use adding to them!”

  I watched him work and said not a word. I was in a corner of his kitchen, sitting on a rickety chair with a frowsy straw bottom. The air in the room was hot and heavy and reeked of dirty dishes, hardened cooking fat, and cheap wine. Hundreds of empty bottles stood here and there, dozens of them holding burning candles, their fragile flames stretching toward the ceiling.

  Peiper stopped scrubbing his vestment, tossed it with a gesture of vexation into the stone sink, and turned around. He looked at me and started, as if he had forgotten my presence. “Brodeck, Brodeck,” he said. “Have a drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t need it yet. Lucky you …”

  In his quest for a bottle that still had some wine in it, he shifted a great many empties, producing a crystalline, incoherent music before finding the one he sought. He grabbed it by the neck as though his life depended on it and poured himself a glass. Picking it up with both hands, he raised it to eye level, smiled, and said in a solemn voice heavy with irony, “This is my blood. Take and drink ye all of it.” Then he downed the contents in one gulp, slammed the glass on the table, and burst into loud laughter.

  I had just come from the village hall, where—in compliance with Orschwir’s command—I’d gone to discuss the progress of my Report.

  Night had fallen suddenly on the village that evening, like an ax striking a chopping block. Over the course of the day, big clouds had moved in from the west and stalled over our valley. Blocked by the mountains as though caught in a trap, the clouds had begun to gyrate madly, and then, around three o’clock in the afternoon, a glacial north wind had arrived and split them wide open. Their gaping bellies released a great deal of dense snow, a deluge of stubborn, numberless flakes, serried like the resolute soldiers of an infinite army and clinging to everything they touched: roofs, walls, paving stones, trees. It was the third of December. All the snowfalls of the previous weeks had been mere tokens, and we knew it; the snow that
came down that day, however, was no laughing matter. It was the first of the big snows, to be followed by others, whose company we would have to endure until spring.

  In front of the village hall, Zungfrost—“Frozen Tongue”—had lit two lanterns and placed them on either side of the door. With the aid of a large shovel, he was piling the snow into two mounds, leaving a path like a trench between them. His clothes were covered with snowflakes, which clustered and clung to him in a way reminiscent of feathers, so that he looked like a large fowl.

  “Hello, Zungfrost!”

  “Hel… hel… hello, Bro … Brodeck! It’s real… real… real… really com … com … coming down!”

  “I’m here to see the mayor.”

  “I … I know. He … he … he’s waiting for you upstairs.”

  Zungfrost is my junior by a few years. He always smiles, but he’s not simpleminded. In fact, if you look closely at his smile, it could just as easily be a grimace. His face froze one day long ago; his face, his smile, and his tongue all froze. At the time, he was a kid of seven or eight, and we were in the depths of another frigid winter. All the village children, both young and not so young, had gone to a bend in the Staubi where the surface of the river was completely frozen. We slid around on the ice. We shoved one another. And then someone—it was never clear who—threw Zungfrost’s afternoon snack, a slice of bacon stuffed into a chunk of bread, far out onto the ice. The kid watched his sandwich skidding across the surface, getting farther and farther away, until it stopped about a meter or two from the other bank of the river. Then he began to cry, shedding big, silent tears as round as mistletoe berries. The rest of us laughed, and then someone yelled, “Stop crying! Just go get it!” There was a silence. We all knew that the ice must be thin where the sandwich had come to rest, but no one said anything. We waited. The kid hesitated; then, maybe out of defiance, to show that he wasn’t afraid, or maybe simply because he was very hungry, he started moving out across the ice, crawling slowly on all fours. Everyone held his breath. We sat down on the riverbank, pressing against one another, and watched the kid as he advanced like a cautious little animal. We could tell he was trying to make himself as light as possible, even though he wasn’t very heavy to begin with. The closer he got to his sandwich, the more our little group of spectators managed to recover from our original amazement, and we began to cheer him on, beating out a cadence whose rhythm grew faster and faster. At the moment when he stretched out his hand toward the bread and bacon, everything went awry. The ice beneath him suddenly withdrew, like a tablecloth snapped off a table, and he disappeared without a cry into the waters of the river.