Brodeck Page 18

  Before going on to reproduce the rest of what Orschwir said on this occasion, standing on the platform and speaking in the twilight of a mild day so far removed from the cold and the feeling of terror on the night of the Ereigniës, I must allude to the mayor’s moment of confusion and embarrassment when, early in his speech, he said “my dear sir, Mister …,” paused, looked at the Anderer, and waited for him to supply his name, the name that nobody knew. But the Anderer remained mute, smiling without parting his lips, so that the mayor, after repeating “Mister … Mister … ?” several times in a gently questioning tone, was obliged to continue his speech without having obtained any satisfaction.

  “You are the first, and for the time being the only, person to visit our village since the long, grievous months when the war held this part of the world in its atrocious grip. In former days, and for centuries, our region was traversed by travelers who came up from the great plains of the south and took the mountain route on their way to the distant northern coasts and the port cities. Such travelers always found this village a pleasant, auspicious stopping place, and the old chronicles refer to it by the ancient name Wohlwollend Trast, ‘Kindly Halt.’ We don’t know whether such a halt is the purpose of your stay here. But however that may be, you honor us by your sojourn in the bosom of our modest community. You are as it were the first sign of a springtime of humanity, returning to us after too long a winter, and we hope that after you others will come to visit us and that we will thus gradually reestablish our connection with the community of mankind. Please, my dear Mister …”—and here, once again, Orschwir stopped and looked at the Anderer, giving him the opportunity to say his name, but that name was not spoken, and Orschwir, after clearing his throat one more time, returned to his text—“my dear sir, please don’t judge us too severely or too quickly. We have gone through much adversity, and our isolation has no doubt reduced us to living on the margins of civilization. Nevertheless, to those who really know us, we’re better than we might appear to be. We have known suffering and death, and we must learn again how to live. We must also learn not to forget the past but to overcome it, by banishing it far from us and making sure that it no longer overflows into our present and even less into our future. In the name of every man, woman, and child, and in the name of our beautiful village, which I have the honor to administer, I therefore bid you welcome, my dear”—and this time, the mayor did not pause—“sir, and now I shall yield the floor to you.”

  Orschwir looked at the crowd, refolded his pages, and shook the Anderer’s hand, while the applause mounted up to the pink-and-blue sky, where some apparently drunken swallows were challenging one another to speed trials along incoherent courses. The applause gradually died down and silence fell again, heavily. The Anderer smiled, but no one could say at whom or what. At the countryfolk crowded into the first row, who hadn’t understood much of the speech and couldn’t wait to drink the wine and beer? At Orschwir, whose mounting anxiety grew more and more palpable as the silence persisted? At the sky? Maybe at the swallows. He had yet to pronounce a single word when there came a sudden, violent gust of wind, of very balmy, even hot wind, the kind that makes animals nervous in their stalls and sometimes irritates them so much that they begin kicking wildly at walls and doors. The wind assailed the welcome banner, tore it in half, and wrapped itself in the two parts, twisting and ripping off large sections, which swiftly flew away toward the birds, the clouds, the setting sun. The wind departed as it had come, like a thief. What was left of the banner sagged down. Only two words remained: “Wi sund”—“We are.” The rest of the sentence had disappeared into thin air, vaporized, forgotten, destroyed. Once again I noticed a chicken smell, very close to me. Göbbler was at my side, and he spoke into my ear. “We are! What are we, Brodeck? I wonder what we are …”

  I made no reply. Poupchette hummed as she sat on my shoulders. She’d clapped very hard during every round of applause. The incident with the banner had distracted the crowd for a few seconds, but now it had calmed down again, and it was waiting. Orschwir was waiting, too, and if you knew him even slightly, you knew that he wouldn’t be able to wait much longer. Maybe the Anderer could sense that as well, for he moved a little, rubbing and stretching his cheeks with both hands; then he brought them down in front of him, joined them as if he were going to pray nodded his head to left and right, smiling all the while, and said, “Thank you.” That was it: “Thank you.” Then he bowed ceremoniously, three times, like an actor on the stage at the end of a play People looked at one another. Some of them opened their mouths so wide that a round loaf of bread could have slipped in without difficulty. Others elbowed their neighbors and exchanged questioning looks. Still others shrugged their shoulders or scratched their heads. Then someone started applauding. It was as good a way as any to ease the embarrassment. Others imitated him. Poupchette was happy again. “Fun, Daddy, fun!”

  As for the Anderer, he replaced his hat on his head, climbed down the steps to the platform as slowly as he’d mounted them, and disappeared into the crowd before the eyes of the mayor, who stood there dumbfounded and unmoving, his arms hanging at his sides, while the surviving fragment of the banner teased the fur of his cap and the people at his feet abandoned him, moving briskly toward the trestle tables, the mugs, the glasses, the pitchers, the sausages, and the brioches.

  XXIX

  ————

  omeone’s been in the shed! Someone’s been in the shed! It was Göbbler, I know it was! I’d swear to it! It couldn’t be anybody but him! Besides, there are tracks, footsteps in the snow, big, muddy tracks going toward his house! He didn’t even hide them! They think they’re so powerful, they don’t even bother to hide the fact that they’re all spying on me, that they’ve got their eyes on me every moment.

  It was enough for me to be away for barely an hour, off to buy three balls of wool for Fedorine in Frida Pertzer’s tiny shop, which offers a little of everything—gold braid, needles, thread, gossip, buttons, cloth by the meter—and that gave him enough time to enter the shed and rummage through everything! Everything’s upside down! Everything’s been overturned, opened, moved! He didn’t even try to put things back in order after he went through them! And he forced the desk drawer open, the one in Diodemus’s desk—he broke the drawer and left it on the floor! What was he looking for? He wanted what I’m writing, that’s certain. He hears the typewriter too much. He suspects I’m writing something other than the Report! But he didn’t find anything. He couldn’t find anything! My hiding place is too sure.

  A short while ago, when I discovered what had happened, I was furious. I didn’t stop to think. I saw the tracks, I rushed over to Göbbler’s, and I banged on his door with the flat of my hand. The night was rather advanced, and the village was sleeping, but there was a light in Göbbler’s house, and I knew he wasn’t asleep. His wife answered the door. She was wearing a nightgown, and when she saw that it was me, she smiled. Against the light from inside, I could distinguish the outlines of her big hips and her immense breasts. She’d taken down her hair.

  “Good evening, Brodeck,” she said, repeatedly passing her tongue over her lips.

  “I want to see your husband!”

  “Aren’t you feeling well? Are you sick?”

  I shouted his name at the top of my voice. I kept shouting it. There was movement upstairs, and soon Göbbler made his appearance, with a candle in his hand and a nightcap on his head.

  “Why, Brodeck, what’s going on?”

  “You tell me! Why did you ransack my shed? Why did you break the desk drawer?”

  “I assure you, I haven’t done any—”

  “Don’t take me for an idiot! I know it was you! You’re always spying on me! Have the others put you up to it? The footprints lead to your house!”

  “The footprints? What footprints? Brodeck… Do you want to come in and have some herb tea? I think you’re—”

  “If you ever do it again, Göbbler, I swear I’ll—”

 
“You’ll what?”

  He stepped close to me. His face was a few inches from mine. He was trying to see me through the whitish veil that covers his eyes a little more every day. “Be reasonable,” he said. “It’s nighttime. Take my advice and go to bed. Take my advice.”

  Suddenly Göbbler’s eyes frightened me. There was nothing human about them anymore. They looked like ice eyes, frozen eyes, like the eyes I saw once when I was eleven years old and a caravan of men from the village had gone to collect the bodies of two foresters from the hamlet of Froxkeim who had been carried off by a snowslide on the Schnikelkopf slopes. The villagers had brought down the remains in large sheets suspended from poles. I saw them pass not far from our cabin while I was out getting water from the stream. I noticed that the arm of one corpse was hanging out of the sheet and beating time on the ground, and I also saw the other man’s head through a tear in the cloth. His stare was fixed and white, with a flat, full whiteness, as if all the snow that killed him had poured itself into his eyes. I cried out, dropped the water jug, and went running back to the cabin to fling myself against Fedorine.

  “Don’t ever tell me again what I have to do, Göbbler.”

  I left without giving him time to reply.

  I’ve spent the last hour putting the shed back in order. Nothing’s been stolen, and for a good reason: there’s nothing to steal. My manuscript is too well hidden; no one will ever be able to find it. I’m holding the pages in my hands. They’re still warm, and when I bring them up to my face and inhale, I smell paper, ink, and another scent, the smell of skin. No, no one will ever find my hiding place.

  Diodemus had a hiding place, too, and I’ve just discovered it, completely by chance, when I was trying to fix the desk drawer. I turned the desk over and laid it on the floor feet up, and that’s when I saw, on the underside of the desktop, a large envelope. It was glued there, right over the drawer that was supposed to hide it. When the desk was upright, the drawer was empty, but above it, glued and impossible to suspect, was the envelope.

  Its contents were really quite varied. I’ve just sorted through them. To begin with, there’s a long list in two columns, one headed “Novels Written” and the other “Novels to Be Written.” The first list includes five titles: The Young Girl by the Water, The Amorous Captain, Flowers in Winter, Mirna’s Bouquets, and Agitated Hearts. Not only do I recognize those titles but I also know all about the novels themselves because Diodemus used to read to me from them. We’d sit in his little house, which was cluttered with books, registers, and loose sheets of paper liable at any moment to catch fire from the candles, and I’d always have to struggle against drowsiness, but Diodemus was so enraptured by his stories and his words that he wouldn’t even notice my frequent dozes.

  I smiled as I read the list, for those titles brought back all those times I’d spent in Diodemus’s company, and I envisioned his handsome face—like something on a medal—and the way it became animated when he read. When I perused the other part of the list, the “Novels to Be Written,” I couldn’t help bursting into laughter at the thought of what I’d escaped. Diodemus had put down the names of more than sixty novels-to-be! Most of the titles resembled one another and gave off a distinct whiff of rose water. But two of them stood out, and Diodemus had underlined them both several times: The Treason of the Just and Remorse. This last title, in fact, had been copied four times over, each time in bigger letters, as if his pencil had stammered.

  On another sheet of paper, he’d drawn up a sort of genealogical tree for his own family. There were the names of his parents, his grandparents, and his great-grandparents, along with their dates and their places of birth. There were also uncles, aunts, cousins, and distant ancestors. But there were likewise some great voids, some holes, some lines that stopped suddenly at a blank space or a question mark. Thus the tree contained both full, abundant branches, almost cracking under their load of names, and naked limbs, reduced to a simple line that died out unadorned. I thought about the strange forests of symbols and dead lives that our trees would compose if they were all lined up together side by side. My tree would disappear under the suffocating branches of the many families that for centuries have safeguarded their memory as their most precious inheritance. In fact, mine wouldn’t be a tree at all, just a puny trunk. Above my name, there would simply be two stems, cut very short, bare, leafless, and resolutely mute. But could I possibly, all the same, find a place for Fedorine, the way one can sometimes graft a sturdier plant onto a sickly one in order to give it some of the other’s strength and sap?

  The envelope also contained two letters. They had been read and reread so often that the paper they were written on was reduced to a thin film about to fall apart at the creases. They were signed “Magdalena” and had been sent to Diodemus a long time ago, well before he came to settle in the village. Both were love letters, but the second spoke of the end of love. It spoke of it in simple terms, without grand phrases, without mawkish expressions or effects. It spoke of the end of love as a truth of existence, an event which cannot be striven against and which forces man to bow his neck and accept his fate.

  I don’t wish to transcribe here all or even part of those two letters. They don’t belong to me. They aren’t part of my story. As I read them, I thought that perhaps they had been the cause of Diodemus’s arrival among us, the reason why he put so much distance between his former existence and the daily life he’d built for himself, little by little, in the village. I don’t know if he succeeded in healing his wound, nor do I know if he really wanted to. Sometimes you love your own scars.

  I was holding in my hands fragments of Diodemus’s life, small but essential pieces which, if put together, offered insights into his departed spirit. And as I thought about his life, about mine and Amelia’s and Fedorine’s, and also about the Anderer’s—concerning which, to tell the truth, I knew almost nothing, and which I only imagined—the village appeared before me in a new light. I suddenly saw it as the final place, reached by those who leave the night and the void behind them; not the place for new beginnings but simply the place where everything may end, where everything must end.

  But there was still something else in the big brown envelope.

  There was another letter, a letter addressed to me. I seized it with great curiosity, for it’s not often you can hear a dead man speak to you. Diodemus’s letter began with these words: “Forgive me, Brodeck, please forgive me …” and ended with them as well.

  ’ve just finished reading that long letter.

  Yes, I’ve just read it.

  don’t know if I’ll be able to give an idea of what I felt as I read the letter. Besides, I’m not certain I felt anything. In any case, however, I can swear that there was no suffering. I didn’t suffer as I read Diodemus’s letter, which is in fact a long confession, because I’m missing the essential organs for experiencing suffering. I don’t possess them anymore. They were removed from me, one by one, in the camp. And—alas—they’ve never grown back since.

  XXX

  ————

  ’m sure Diodemus assumed I’d wind up thoroughly detesting him after reading the letter he wrote me. Diodemus believed that I was still a participant in the human order, but he was mistaken.

  Yesterday evening, after straightening up the shed and accidentally finding Diodemus’s hiding place and going through the contents of the brown envelope, I joined Amelia in our bed. It was late. I nestled myself against her. I embraced her warmth and the shape of her body and fell asleep very quickly. I didn’t even think about what I’d just read. My heart felt curiously light, while my body was heavy with weariness and disentangled knots. I dropped happily into sleep, as one does every night of his childhood. And I had dreams, not the dreams that ordinarily torment me, the black crater of the Kazerskwir and me circling around it, circling and circling—no; my dreams were peaceful.

  I found the student Kelmar again. He was very much alive and wearing his beautiful white linen shirt with the embr
oidered front. The immaculate shirt set off his suntanned skin and his elegant neck. We weren’t on the road to the camp. Nor were we in the railway car where we spent so many days and nights, crammed in with the others. We were in a place that recalled to me nothing that I knew; I couldn’t even say if it was inside a house or outdoors. I’d never known Kelmar this way. He bore no trace of any blow. His cheeks were fresh and clean-shaven. His clothes smelled good. He smiled. He talked to me. He talked to me at length, and I listened without interrupting him. After some time, he stood up, and I understood, without his having to tell me, that he had to go. He looked at me and smiled, and I have a clear memory of the last words we exchanged.

  “After what they did to us in the railway car, Kelmar, I should have stopped like you. I should have quit running and sat on the road.”

  “You did what you thought you should do, Brodeck.” “No, you were right. It’s what we deserved. I was a coward.” “I’m not sure I was right. The death of one man never makes amends for the sacrifice of another, Brodeck. That would be too simple. And then, it’s not up to you to judge yourself. Nor to me, either. It’s not up to men to judge one another. They’re not made for that.”

  “Kelmar, do you think it’s time for me to join you now?” “Stay on the other side, Brodeck. Your place is still over there.”

  Those are the last words I remember him speaking. Then I tried to get close to him, I wanted to take him in my arms and hold him tight, but I embraced only the wind.

  Contrary to what some claim, I don’t think dreams foreshadow anything at all. I just think they come at the right moment, and they tell us, in the hollow of the night, what we perhaps dare not admit to ourselves in the light of day.

  I’m not going to reproduce Diodemus’s entire letter. For one thing, I don’t have it anymore. I’m aware of what it must have cost him to write it.