Brodeck Read online

  “I loved my wife, too, you know. Maybe that seems strange to you, because as you may remember she wasn’t very beautiful, but now she’s not here I feel like I’m living only half a life. Nothing’s important anymore. If Gerthe had been here during the war, who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have served the Fratergekeime. I felt strong in her presence … Maybe I would’ve spat in their faces. Maybe I would’ve grabbed the big knife I cut onions with and stuck it in their bellies. And then, if she’d been here, maybe … maybe the Murmelnër would still be alive, maybe I would’ve got myself killed before I let anything happen to him under my roof…”

  I felt my stomach churning. A touch of nausea. The hot wine didn’t agree with me. It wasn’t warming my insides, it was nibbling at them, like a little animal in my stomach, suddenly trying to get a bite of everything within reach. I looked at Schloss as though I’d never seen him before. It was as if a bank of fog had dissolved, bit by bit, and behind it an unsuspected, oddly harmonious landscape was visible. At the same time, I wondered whether Schloss might be trying to fool me. It’s always easy to regret what happened after it happens. Regret costs nothing. It allows you to wash your hands and your memory, to cleanse them thoroughly and make them pure and white. But all the same, what Peiper told me about confession and the sewer—that was really something! All the men of the village must have passed through his confessional eventually, and Schloss probably wasn’t the last of them. And then I remembered too clearly his attitude and his face on the night of the Ereigniës—he hadn’t exactly hung back. He didn’t seem then to disapprove of the crime committed within his walls, whatever he might say to me now. He hadn’t looked like a man seized by the terror and horror of what had just taken place.

  I wasn’t sure what to think. I’m still not sure what to think. That’s evidence of what is, without a doubt, the camp’s great victory over its prisoners; that is, over those it didn’t kill. The others, the ones who came out of it alive, like me—all of us still carry a part of it, deep down inside, like a stain. We can never again meet the eyes of other people without wondering whether they harbor the desire to hunt us down, to torture us, to kill us. We’ve become perpetual prey creatures which, whatever they do, will always look upon the dawning day as the start of a long ordeal of survival and upon nightfall with an odd feeling of relief. Disappointment and disquiet ferment in us. I think we’ve become, and will remain until the day we die, the memory of humanity destroyed. We’re wounds that will never heal.

  “Maybe you don’t know we had a baby before the war,” Schloss went on. “It was when you were far away, studying at the University, and maybe Fedorine didn’t write you about it. The baby didn’t live long—four days and four nights. It was a boy. The midwife, old Paula Beckenart, may she rest in peace, said he looked just like a little Schloss. She helped him out of Gerthe’s belly on the seventh of April. Outside the birds were chirping and the larch buds were becoming as big as plums. The first time Paula placed him in my arms, I thought I wouldn’t know how to hold him. I was afraid I’d squeeze him too tight or smother him with my big hands, and I was also afraid of dropping him. I imagined him breaking apart like crystal. Gerthe laughed at me, and the little one hollered and waved his arms and legs. But as soon as he found Gerthe’s breast, he started sucking her milk and didn’t stop, as if he wanted to empty her completely. I’d had Hans Douda make a cradle from the trunk of a walnut tree. It was a fine piece of wood he was saving to make a wardrobe, but I put the gold coins on his workbench and the deal was done.”

  Schloss had big, dirty fingernails. As he told me about his child, he made an effort to clean them—without even looking at them—but they stayed black.

  “He really occupied that cradle. He beat the bottom of it with his little feet as hard as he could. He made a pretty noise, like the sound of ax blows coming from deep in the forest. Gerthe wanted to call him Stephan, and I preferred Reichart. To tell the truth, we’d been caught off guard; we’d both persuaded ourselves that the baby had to be a girl. We had a name ready for the little girl who never came: Lisebeth, because Lise was my mother’s name, and Gerthe’s mother was Bethsie. But when the little man made his appearance and the midwife held him up in the air, we had no name for him. Throughout the four days of his short life, Gerthe and I squabbled constantly over his name, laughing the whole time. I’d say, ‘Reichart’; she’d reply, ‘Stephan.’ It became a game, a game that ended in hugs and kisses. And so when the child died, he didn’t have a name. He died nameless, and I’ve blamed myself for that ever since, as though it was part of what killed him.”

  Schloss fell silent and bowed his head. He stopped moving entirely, as though he’d ceased to breathe. My mouth tasted like cinnamon and cloves, and the gnawing in my stomach hadn’t let up.

  “Sometimes I dream about him at night. He reaches out to me with his tiny hands, and then he leaves, he goes away, like there’s some force carrying him off, and there’s no name I can call out, there’s no name I can say to try and hold him back.”

  Schloss had lifted his head and spoken those last words with his eyes fixed on mine. His eyes were big, overflowing; they took up too much space; I felt as though they were crowding me out. He was surely waiting for me to say something, but what? I knew well that ghosts can cling stubbornly to life and that sometimes they’re more present than the living.

  “One morning I woke up and Gerthe wasn’t in bed anymore. I hadn’t heard anything. She was kneeling beside the cradle and not moving. I called her. She didn’t reply. She didn’t even turn her head toward me. I got up and went over to her, crooning the names, Stephan, Reichart… Gerthe leaped to her feet and pounced on me like an animal gone crazy, trying to hit me, tearing at my mouth, scratching my cheeks. I looked into the cradle and saw the baby’s face. His eyes were closed, and his skin was the color of clay.”

  I don’t know how long I stayed with Schloss after he told me that. I also can’t recall whether he kept talking about his child or just sat there in silence. The fire in the hearth died down. He didn’t add more wood. The flames went out, and then the few embers. It got cold. At some point, I stood up and Schloss accompanied me to the door. He clasped my hand at length, and then he thanked me. Twice. For what?

  On the way back, my head was buzzing, and I had the feeling that my temples were banging together like cymbals. I found myself saying Poupchette’s name aloud, again and again: “Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette, Poupchette …” It was like throwing little stones into the air, pebbles of sound that would bring me home quickly. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Schloss’s dead baby, about all the things he’d told me, about the few hours the child had spent in our world. Human life is so strange. Once you’ve plunged into it, you often wonder what you’re doing here. Maybe that’s why some, a little cleverer than the others, content themselves with opening the door a crack and taking a look around, and when they see what’s inside, they want nothing more than to close that door as fast as possible.

  Maybe they’re right.

  XXI

  ————

  want to go back to the first day, or rather to the first evening: the evening when the Anderer appeared in our village. I’ve reported his meeting with the oldest Dörfer child, but I haven’t described his arrival at the inn a few minutes later. My account is based on the statements I took from three different eyewitnesses: Schloss himself; Menigue Wirfrau, the baker, who’d gone to the inn to drink a glass of wine; and Doris Klattermeier, a young girl with pink skin and hay-colored hair, who was passing in the street when the Anderer arrived. There were other witness, both in the inn and outside, but the three named above related the events in almost exactly the same way, except for one or two small details, and I thought it best to rely on them.

  The Anderer had dismounted to speak to the Dörfer boy and he walked the rest of the way to the inn, leading his horse by the reins while the donkey followed a few paces behind. He tethered the animals to the ring outside; then, inste
ad of opening the door and entering the inn like everyone else, he knocked three times and waited. This was such an unusual thing to do that he had to stand there for a long time. “I thought it was a prankster,” Schloss told me. “Or some kid!” In short, nothing happened. The Anderer waited. No one opened the door for him, nor did he open it for himself. Some people, among them young Doris, had already gathered to observe the phenomenon: the horse, the ass, the baggage, and the oddly attired fellow standing outside the door of the inn with a smile on his round, powdered face. After a few minutes, he knocked again, but this time the three blows were harder and sharper. Schloss said, “At that point, I figured something out of the ordinary was going on, and I went to see.”

  So Schloss opened the door and found himself face-to-face with the Anderer. “I nearly choked! Where did this guy come from, I thought, the circus or a fairy tale?” But the Anderer didn’t give him time to recover. He lifted his funny hat, revealing his very round, very bald pate, made a supple, elegant gesture of salutation, and said, “Greetings, kind sir. My friends”—here he indicated the horse and the donkey—“and I have come a great distance and find ourselves quite exhausted. Would you be kind enough to offer us the hospitality of your establishment? In exchange for our payment, of course.”

  Schloss is convinced that the Anderer said, “Greetings, Mr. Schloss,” but young Doris and Wirfrau both swear that this was not the case. Schloss was probably so stunned by the strange apparition and its request that he lost his bearings for a few moments. He said, “I didn’t know how to answer him at first. It had been so many years since we’d had any visitors, except for the ones you know about! And besides, the words he used… He pronounced them in Deeperschaft, not in dialect, and my ear wasn’t used to hearing that.”

  Menigue Wirfrau told me that Schloss hesitated for a few moments, looking at the Anderer and scratching his head, before he replied. As for the Anderer, it seems he stood motionless, smiling as if all this were perfectly normal and time—which was falling drop by drop into a narrow pipe—was of no importance. Doris Klattermeier remembered that his donkey and his horse didn’t move, either. She shivered a little when she told me that, and then she made the sign of the cross, twice. For most of the people in our village, God is a distant being composed of books and incense; the Devil, on the other hand, is a neighbor whom many of them believe they’ve seen once or twice.

  At last, Schloss uttered a few words. “He asked the stranger how many nights he planned to stay,” according to Wirfrau. Wirfrau was kneading when I went to see him, naked from the waist up, his chest and the rims of his eyes covered with flour. He seized the big wad of dough with both hands, lifted it, turned it, flung it into the kneading trough, and repeated the process. He spoke without looking at me. I’d found a place to sit between two sacks and the woodpile. The oven had been humming for a good while, and the little room was hot with the smell of burning wood. Wirfrau went on: “For a while, the fellow seemed to be thinking the question over, smiling the whole time. He looked at the ass and the horse, and it was like he was asking them their opinion. Then he answered in his funny voice, ‘I should think that our sojourn will be rather extended.’ I’m sure Schloss didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t want to look like a dope, either. So he shook his head several times, and then he invited the stranger to step inside.”

  Two hours later, the Anderer was lodged in the room, which Schloss had dusted in haste. The Anderer’s bags and trunks had been brought upstairs and his horse and donkey given beds of fresh straw in the stable just across from the inn, the property of one Solzner, an old man about as lovable as a whack from a club. At the stranger’s request, a basin of fresh, pure water and a bucket of oats were placed close to the animals. He went over to make sure they were well accommodated, taking the opportunity to brush their flanks with a handful of hay and whisper in their ears some words no one heard. Then he handed old Solzner three gold pieces, the equivalent of several months’ food and shelter for the beasts, bade them farewell, wished them a good night, and left the stable.

  In the meanwhile, the inn had filled with people, many of whom had come to gaze upon the prodigy with their own eyes. Although not curious by nature, I must confess that I myself was one of them. The news had flashed along the streets and into the houses at lightning speed, and there were a good thirty or more of us in the inn by the time the lukewarm night settled on the roofs of the village. For all that, our curiosity remained unsatisfied, because the Anderer went up to his room and stayed there. Downstairs the discussion was vigorous, as was the consumption of beverages. Schloss didn’t have enough hands to keep up with all the drinkers. He must surely have told himself that the arrival of a traveler was, when all was said and done, a good thing. He did as much business on that day as he did when there were fairs or funerals. Menigue Wirfrau couldn’t stop describing the arrival of the Anderer, his outfit, his horse and his donkey, and little by little, since everyone stood him a drink to loosen his tongue, he began embellishing his account and stumbling on every word at the same time.

  But every now and then we could hear footsteps upstairs, and the room would fall silent while everyone held his breath. Our eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling, as if in an effort to pass through it. We imagined the visitor. We gave him form and flesh. We were trying to enter into the labyrinth of his brain when we hadn’t even set eyes on him yet.

  At one point, Schloss went upstairs to ask him if everything was all right. We tried to overhear their conversation, but in vain; even those who leaned their big ears into the stairwell caught nothing. When Schloss came back down, he was immediately surrounded.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted a ‘collation.’”

  “A ‘collation’? What’s that?”

  “A light meal, he said.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What he asked me to do!”

  Everyone was curious to see what a collation looked like. Most of the crowd followed Schloss into his kitchen and watched him prepare a large tray, on which he put three thick slices of bacon, a sausage, some marinated gherkins, a pot of custard, a loaf of brown bread, some sweet-and-sour cabbage, and a large piece of goat cheese, together with a jug of wine and a mug of beer. When he passed through the crowd of his customers, he carried the tray devoutly, and everyone made way for him in silence, as though for the passage of a holy relic. Then Wirfrau’s voice broke the spell: he was still describing the Anderer’s arrival at the inn. No one was listening to him anymore, but because of the state he was in, that fact escaped his notice. Similarly, a little later, he failed to observe that he had confused his kneading-trough with his bed; after preparing his dough in the latter, he went to sleep in the former. The following day brought him a raging hangover, while we got a day without bread.

  When I returned home, Fedorine was waiting for me: “What’s going on, Brodeck?”

  I told her what I’d learned. She listened to me attentively, shaking her head. “That’s not good. None of it. Not good.”

  They were just a few simple words, but they irritated me, and I asked her curtly why she’d said them.

  “When the flock has finally settled down, it must not be given any reason to start moving again,” she replied.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I was in a lighthearted mood. I was—I haven’t realized this until today—I was probably the only person in the village pleased by the arrival of a stranger. I considered it a sign of rebirth, a return to life. For me, it was as though an iron door that for years had sealed the entrance to a cave had opened wide, and the air of that cave had suddenly received the wind and the beams of a bright sun. But I couldn’t imagine that sometimes the sun grows bothersome, and its beams, which light up the world, inadvertently illuminate what people are trying to bury.

  Old Fedorine knew me like a pocket she’d put her hand into several thousand times. She planted he
rself in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and stroked my cheek with one trembling hand. “I’m very old, my little Brodeck, so very old,” she said. “Soon I won’t be around anymore. You must be careful. You’ve already come back once from a place people don’t come back from. There’s never a second chance. Never. And don’t forget: you have other souls in your charge. Think about them, both of them …”

  I’m not very big, but only at that moment did I grasp how little Fedorine was. She looked like a child, a child with an old man’s face; a bent, wizened, thin, fragile creature with crumpled, wrinkled skin, a creature a small puff of air could have swept away like a collection of dust. Her eyes shone, despite the milky cloud obscuring them, and her lips moved. I took her in my arms and pressed her against me at length, and I thought of birds, little lost birds, the weak, sick, or disconsolate sparrows that can’t keep up with their fellows in the great migrations; toward the end of fall, you can see them, with their feathers drooping and panic in their hearts, perching on roofs or in the lower branches of trees, waiting resignedly for the cold that will kill them. I gave Fedorine several kisses, first on her hair, then on her forehead and cheeks, as I did when I was a child, and I recognized her smell, a smell of wax, of stoves, of clean cloth, the smell that has sufficed, almost since my life began, to bring a peaceful smile to my lips, even in my sleep. I held her against me like that for a long time, while scenes from the past flashed through my mind at lightning speed. My memory juxtaposed disparate instants, creating a bizarre mosaic whose only effect was to make me more aware of times that had fled away forever, moments that would never return.

  Fedorine was there, I clasped her to me, and I could talk to her. I inhaled her smell; I felt her beating heart. It was as if mine were beating in her. Again I remembered the camp. The only thought that occupied our minds there was the thought of death. We lived in perpetual consciousness of our death, and this was, no doubt, the reason why some of us went mad. Even though man knows he’ll die one day, he can’t live for long in a world that offers him nothing but the consciousness of his own death, a world pervaded by death and conceived solely for that purpose.