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  ICH BIN NICHTS read the placard the hanged man wore. We were quite aware that we were nothing. We knew it all too well. Each of us was a nothing. A nothing handed over to death. Its slave. Its toy. Waiting and resigned. Oddly enough, although I was a creature of nothingness, inhabiting nothingness and by it inhabited, the fact never managed to frighten me. I didn’t fear my own death, or if I feared it, it was with a sort of fleeting, animal reflex. By contrast, the thought of death became unbearable when I associated it with Amelia and Fedorine. It’s the death of others, of loved ones, not our own, which eats away at us and can destroy us. And that’s what I’ve been bound to struggle against, brandishing faces and features at its black light.

  XXII

  ————

  n the beginning, our village welcomed the Anderer as some kind of monarch. Indeed, there was something like magic in the whole affair. People in these parts aren’t open by nature. That can no doubt be explained, at least to some extent, by our landscape of valleys and mountains, of dense forests and hemmed-in vales, and our climate of rains and mists, of frosts and snowstorms and unbearable hot spells. And then, of course, there was the war, which failed to improve things. Doors and hearts were closed even more completely and padlocks were carefully affixed, concealing what was inside from the light of day.

  But at first, once the incredible surprise of his coming among us had passed, the Anderer was able, however involuntarily, to emanate a charm with the power to cajole even the most hostile, for everyone wanted to see him—children, women, and oldsters included—and he happily entered into the spirit of the game, smiling at one and all, lifting his hat to the ladies and inclining his head to the men. However, he never spoke the smallest word, and if there hadn’t been people who’d heard him speak the day he arrived, we might have considered him a mute.

  He couldn’t walk in the streets without being followed by a little band of laughing, idle kids, to whom he gave small gifts that seemed to them treasures: ribbons, glass marbles, lengths of gilded string, sheets of colored paper. He pulled all that out of his pockets, as if they were constantly full of such things; one would have thought there was nothing else in his baggage.

  When he went into old man Solzner’s stable to visit his two mounts, children came and watched him from the door, not daring to enter, nor did he invite them to do so. He greeted his horse and his donkey by name, always addressing them formally, stroking their coats, and slipping lumps of yellow sugar (which he extracted from a little garnet-colored velvet bag) between their gray lips. The children watched the spectacle with open mouths and staring eyes, wondering what was the language he used when he murmured into the animals’ ears.

  To tell the truth, he spoke more to his horse and his ass than he did to us. Schloss had received instructions to knock on his guest’s door at six o’clock every morning, but not to enter the room, and to place the tray on the floor in front of the threshold. The same items were always arranged on the tray: a round brioche—for which the Anderer paid Wirfrau in advance—a raw egg, a pot of hot water, and a large bowl.

  “He can’t be drinking hot water with nothing in it!” The man who uttered this cry of disbelief one evening was Rudolf Scheuling, whose gullet had admitted no liquid but schnick since he was twelve years old. In fact, what the Anderer drank was tea, strong tea that left large brown stains on the rims of cups. I tasted that tea once, when he invited me to his room to chat a bit and to show me some books. It left a taste of leather and smoke in the mouth, along with a hint of salt meat. I’d never drunk anything like it.

  For dinner, he went down to the big room. There were always a few curiosity seekers who came just to look at him, and especially to observe his manners, his delicate table manners: his distinguished way of holding his fork and knife, of sliding his blade into the breast of a chicken or the flesh of a potato.

  In the very beginning, Schloss made a real effort to search his memory for recipes worthy of the visitor, but he quickly gave up, at the request of the Anderer himself. Despite his round body and his red cheeks, he ate almost nothing. At the end of a meal, his plate was never empty; half the food was untouched. By contrast, he drank one large glass of water after another, as if always afflicted by a raging thirst. This conduct moved Marcus Graz, a beanpole as lean as a stray dog, to remark that it was a blessing that the Anderer didn’t piss in the Staubi, which he would have surely caused to overflow its banks.

  In the evening, he’d take only a bowl of soup, and even then it was light fare, more a broth than a soup, and after that he’d bow to whoever was in the inn and go upstairs to his room. The light in his window shone late. Some even said they had seen it all night long. In any case, people wondered what he could be doing up there.

  Early in his sojourn among us, he spent a good part of each afternoon walking every street in the village, methodically, as if he were making a grid or a survey. No one really noticed, because to see what he was doing you would have had to follow him all the time, and only the children did that.

  Dressed like something out of an old, dusty fable full of obsolete words, he trudged along, slightly slew-footed, his left hand on a handsome cane with an ivory pommel and his right clutching the little black notebook which came and went under his fingers like some odd sort of tamed animal.

  Sometimes he took one of his beasts out for a bit of air. He chose either the horse or the donkey, never both at the same time, and he led the animal by its bridle, patting its sides as they walked, down to the banks of the Staubi, a little upriver from the Baptisterbrücke, where the grass was fresh and thick and the grazing good. He himself placed his large buttocks on the riverbank and remained unmoving, watching the current and the bright eddies, as if he expected a miracle to rise up out of them. The children stopped some distance behind him, a little higher up on the slope. They all respected his silence, and not one of them threw a stone into the water.

  The first event took place two weeks after the Anderer’s arrival in our village. I think it was the mayor’s idea, even though I couldn’t swear it. I’ve never asked him because that’s not important. What is important is what happened that evening, the evening of June 10.

  By then everyone in the village knew that the Anderer was only a transient presence within our walls, but it also seemed clear that he was preparing for an extended sojourn. During the day on June 10, news spread that the village, led by the mayor, was going to welcome the new visitor in a fitting manner. There would be a speech, some music, and even a Schoppessenwass, which is the dialect word for a kind of large table, laden with glasses, bottles, and food, which is traditionally set up on certain popular occasions.

  Zungfrost got busy near dawn, building a small platform (which looked rather more like a scaffold, to tell the truth) near the covered market. His hammer blows and his screeching saw could be heard even before the sun started to gnaw away at the blackness of the night; the sound pulled many an onlooker from his bed. By eight o’clock, everyone had heard about the reception. By ten, there were more people in the streets than on a market day. In the afternoon, Zungfrost began painting some large, shaky letters on a wide paper banner hung above the platform. They turned out to be an expression of welcome, WI SUND VROH WEN NEU KAMME, an odd formulation which had issued from Diodemus’s brain. While Zungfrost finished his job, two peddlers, alerted to the opportunity in some unfathomable way, arrived and began offering the villagers gathered around the market blessed medals, rat poison, knives, thread, almanacs, seeds, pictures, and felt hats. I knew the peddlers, having often encountered them on mountain roads or forest paths. Dirty as earthworms, with hair black as ink, the two were father and son. People called them De Runhgäre, “the Runners,” because they were capable of covering considerable distances in very few hours. The father greeted me. I asked him, “Who told you there was a celebration today?”

  “The wind.”

  “The wind?”

  “The wind says a lot, if you know how to listen.”


  He looked at me mischievously as he rolled himself a cigarette. “Have you been back to S.?”

  “I don’t have authorization. The road’s still closed.”

  “So what do you live on? The wind?”

  “No, not the wind. The night. When you know it well, the night’s a fairy cape. All you have to do is put it on, and you can go wherever you want!”

  He burst out laughing, and his laughter exposed his four remaining teeth, planted in his jawbone like the memories of trees on a desolate hill. Not far from us, Diodemus was absorbed in watching Zungfrost, who was putting the finishing touches on his letters. Diodemus gave me a little wave, but only later, when we were side by side and the ceremony was about to begin, did I ask him the question that was troubling me somewhat: “Was that your idea?”

  “What idea?”

  “The sentence on the banner.”

  “Orschwir told me to.”

  “Told you to what?”

  “To come up with something, some words …”

  “Your sentence is pretty odd. Why didn’t you write it in Deeperschaft?”

  “Orschwir didn’t want me to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Right there and then I didn’t know, either, but later I had a chance to reflect. The Anderer was a mystery. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew where he came from or why he was here. And nobody knew whether he understood when people spoke in dialect. The sentence painted on the banner was perhaps a means of discovering the answer to that last question. A most naïve means, to be sure, and in any case it failed in its purpose, for that evening, when the Anderer passed the platform and saw the inscription, he paused briefly, ran his eyes over the words, and then continued on his way. Did he understand what he read? No one knows; he said nothing about it.

  Although it’s possible that Diodemus hadn’t intended to be ambiguous, the banner slogan he came up with sounded funny. It means—or rather it can mean—different things, because our dialect is like a springy fabric: it can be stretched in every direction.

  “Wi sund vroh wen neu kamme” can mean “We’re happy when a new person arrives.” But it can also mean “We’re happy when something new comes along,” which isn’t at all the same thing. Strangest of all, the word vroh has two meanings, depending on the context: it’s equivalent to “glad” or “happy,” but it also has a connotation of “wary” or “watchful,” and if you favor this second area of meaning, then you find yourself contemplating a bizarre, disquieting statement which nobody perceived at the time but which hasn’t stopped resounding in my head ever since, a kind of warning freighted with a small load of threats, a greeting like a knife brandished in a fist, the blade shaken a little and glinting in the sun.

  XXIII

  ————

  n the afternoon of that same day, I brought Amelia and Poupchette along with me on an excursion. We climbed all the way to Lutz’s cabin. It was formerly a shepherd’s refuge, but it hasn’t been used for two decades. Rushes and meadow buttercups have slowly overgrown the surrounding pastures. The grass has retreated before the advancing moss. Some ponds have appeared; at first, they were merely puddles, but eventually they transformed the place into a kind of ghost, the ghost of a meadow not yet completely metamorphosed into a marsh. In an effort to understand and explain this transformation, I’d already written three reports on it, and each year around the same time I returned to the spot to measure the extent and nature of the changes. The cabin is west of the village, about a two-hour walk away. The path leading to it is no longer as clearly marked as it once was, when the tread of hundreds of pairs of clogs gave it renewed depth and form every year. Paths are like men; they die, too. Little by little, they get cluttered and then overwhelmed; they break apart, they’re eaten by grass, and in the end they disappear. After only a few years have passed, all that remains is a dim outline, and most people eventually forget that the path ever existed.

  Poupchette, riding on my shoulders, chattered to the clouds. She spoke to them as if they could understand her. She told them to get a move on, to suck in their big bellies, and to leave the sun alone in the wide sky. The air coming down off the mountains gave fresh pinkness to her cheeks.

  I was holding Amelia’s hand. She was beside me, walking along at a good pace. Sometimes her eyes rested on the ground and sometimes they stared off toward the far horizon, which was serrated by the jagged peaks of the Prinzhornï. But in either case, I could tell that her gaze never really came to rest on her surroundings, whether near or far. Her eyes seemed like butterflies, marvelously flitting about for no apparent reason, as though shifted by the wind, by the transparent air, but with no thought to what they were doing or what they saw. She marched on in silence. No doubt, the quickened rhythm of her breathing prevented her from humming her eternal song. Her lips were slightly parted. I clutched her hand and felt her warmth, but she noticed nothing. Perhaps she no longer knew how much the person at her side loved her.

  Once we reached the cabin, I had Amelia sit on the stone bench by the door, and then I set Poupchette down next to her. I told Poupchette to be good while I made my rounds and recorded my data. I assured her I wouldn’t be long. I promised that after I finished we’d sit there and eat up the Pressfrütekof and the apple-walnut cake that old Fedorine had wrapped in a big white cloth for us.

  I began taking my measurements. I quickly found the landmarks on which I based my findings every year, namely various big stones that had once enclosed the sheepfold and marked property boundaries. By contrast, I had some trouble locating the sandstone trough that stood almost exactly in the center of the pasture. The trough was carved from a single block of stone; when I saw it for the first time as a child, it had seemed to me like some kind of vessel abandoned there on solid ground, a ship made by the gods and now an encumbrance to men, who were neither clever enough to make use of it nor strong enough to move it.

  Eventually, I found the trough in the middle of a big pond whose surface area, curiously enough, had tripled over the course of a year. The mass of stone was completely submerged and nearly hidden from sight. Glimpsed through the transparent prism of the water, the trough no longer put me in mind of a vessel, but rather of a tomb. It looked like a primitive, heavy coffin, long since emptied of any occupant, or perhaps—and this thought gave me chills—awaiting the man or woman destined to lie in it forever.

  I jerked my eyes away and looked for the silhouettes of Poupchette and Amelia in the distance, but all I could see were the crumbling cabin walls. My girls were on the other side, invisible, vanished. I abandoned my measuring instruments on the edge of the pond and ran like a madman back to the cabin, calling out their names, seized by a deep, violent, irrational fear. The cabin wasn’t very far away, but I felt as though I’d never reach it. My feet slipped on the slick earth. I sank into soggy holes and quagmires, and the soft wet ground, which made sounds like the groans of the dying, seemed determined to suck me in. When I finally got to the cabin, I was exhausted and out of breath. My hands, my pants, and my hobnailed boots were covered with black mud that stank of beechnuts and waterlogged grass. I couldn’t even shout out Amelia’s and Poupchette’s names anymore, even though I had run so hard to reach them. And then I saw a little hand reach around a corner of the wall, pick a buttercup, break off its stem, and move on to another flower. My fear disappeared as quickly as it had overcome me. Poupchette’s face came into sight. She looked at me. I could read her astonishment in her eyes. “Dirty Daddy! All dirty, Daddy!” She started laughing, and I laughed, too. I laughed very hard, very, very hard. I wanted everyone and everything to hear my laughter: all the people in the world who wished to reduce me to an ashy silence, and all the things in the world that conspired to swallow me up.

  Poupchette was proudly holding the bouquet of buttercups, daisies, and forget-me-nots she’d gathered for her mother. The flowers were still quivering with life, as if they hadn’t noticed that they’d just passed the gates
of death.

  Amelia had strayed away from the cabin, walked to the edge of the pasture, and stopped on a sort of promontory, beyond which the slope splits and shatters into broken rocks. Her face was turned toward the vast landscape of plains spreading out beyond the border, an indistinct expanse that seemed to doze under scraps of fog. Amelia was holding her arms away from her body, a little as though she were preparing to take flight, and her slender silhouette stood out against the distant, pale, blue-tinted background with a grace that was almost inhuman. Poupchette ran to her mother and flung herself against her thighs, trying in vain to get her short arms around them.

  Amelia hadn’t moved. The wind had undone her hair, which streamed in the wind like a cold brown flame. I approached her with slow steps. The wind carried her perfume to me, as well as snatches of her song, which she’d started humming again. Poupchette jumped up and managed to grab one of her arms. She pressed the flowers into her mother’s hand. Amelia made no effort to hold on to the bouquet; her fingers remained open, and one by one the flowers blew away. Poupchette dashed about right and left, trying to catch them, while I kept moving very slowly toward Amelia. Her body, outlined against the sky, seemed to be suspended in it.

  Schöner Prinz so lieb

  Zu weit fortgegangen

  Schöner Prinz so lieb

  Nacht um Nacht ohn Eure Lippen

  Schöner Prinz so lieb

  Tag um Tag ohn Euch zu erblicken

  Schöner Prinz so lieb

  Träumt Ihr was ich träume

  Schöner Prinz so lieb

  Ihr mit mir immerdar zusammen