Brodeck Page 19

  I didn’t leave for the camp of my own accord. I was arrested and transported there. The Fratergekeime had entered our village barely a week previously. The war had begun three months before that. We were cut off from the world, and we didn’t know very much about what was happening. The mountains often protect us from commotion and turmoil, but at the same time they isolate us from a part of life.

  One morning we saw them coming, a lengthy, dusty column marching up the border road. Nobody tried to slow their progress, and in any case such an effort would have been futile; furthermore, I think the deaths of Orschwir’s two sons were on everyone’s mind, and if there was one thing everyone wanted to avoid, it was any more death.

  Besides, the most important fact, the one necessary for understanding the rest, was that those troops who were coming to our village, helmeted, armed, and emboldened by the crushing victories they’d inflicted on every force they’d encountered, were much closer to the inhabitants of our region than the great majority of our own country’s population. As far as the men around here were concerned, our nation barely existed. It was a bit like a woman who occasionally reminded them of her presence with a gentle word or a request, but whose eyes and lips they never really saw. The soldiers entering our village as conquerors shared our customs and spoke a language so close to ours that a minimum of effort sufficed for us to understand and use it. The age-old history of our region was mingled with that of their country. We had in common legends, songs, poets, refrains, a way of preparing meats and making soups, an identical melancholy, and a similar propensity to lapse into drunkenness. When all’s said and done, borders are only pencil strokes on maps. They slice through worlds, but they don’t separate them. Sometimes borders can be forgotten as quickly as they’re drawn.

  The unit that took over the village comprised about a hundred men under the command of a captain named Adolf Buller. I saw very little of him. I remember him as a man of small stature, very thin, and afflicted with a tic that caused him to jerk his chin abruptly to the left every twenty seconds or so. He was riding a filthy, mud-covered horse, and he never let go of his riding crop, a short riding crop with a braided tip. Orschwir and Father Peiper had stationed themselves at the entrance to the village to welcome the conquerors and implore them to spare its people and its houses, while doors and shutters were closed and locked everywhere and all the inhabitants of the village held their breath.

  Captain Buller listened to Orschwir’s muttering without getting off his horse. A soldier at his side bore a lance at the end of which a red-and-black standard was attached. The following day, that standard replaced the flag mounted atop the village hall. You could read the name of the regiment the company belonged to, DER UNVERWUNDBARE ANLAUF (“The Invulnerable Surge”), as well as its motto, HINTER UNS, NIEMAND—“After Us, No One.”

  Buller didn’t reply to Orschwir. He jerked his chin twice, gently moved the mayor aside with his riding crop, and advanced, followed by his soldiers.

  One might have thought he was going to demand that his men be given beds and warm lodging within the thick walls of the houses, but he did no such thing. The troop moved into the marketplace, unpacked some large tents, and pitched them in the twinkling of an eye. Then the soldiers knocked on all the doors with orders to collect and confiscate all weapons, which mostly turned out to be hunting rifles. They did it without the least brutality and with the greatest politeness. By contrast, when Aloïs Cathor, a crockery mender who always liked playing crafty, told them there were no weapons in his house, they aimed theirs at him, ransacked the rabbit cage he lived in from top to bottom, and wound up discovering an old rifle. They waved it in front of his nose and brought them, Cathor and the rifle, before Captain Buller, who was sipping an eau-de-vie in front of his tent while his orderly stood behind him with the flask, ready to serve a refill. The soldiers explained the affair. Cathor adopted a mocking tone. Buller sized him up from head to foot, drained his glass of brandy, suffered his little nervous tic, pointed his riding crop to summon a lieutenant with pink skin and hay-colored hair, and whispered a few words in his ear. The young man assented, clicked his heels, saluted, and left, taking with him the two soldiers and their prisoner.

  A few hours later, a drummer passed through the streets, crying out an announcement: The entire population, without exception, was to gather in front of the church at seven o’clock in order to assist at an event of the greatest importance. Attendance was obligatory for all, under pain of sanctions.

  Shortly before the stipulated hour, everyone left his house. In silence. The streets were soon filled with a strange procession; no one said a word, and people didn’t dare to raise their heads, to look around them, to meet others’ eyes. We walked along together, Amelia and me, holding hands tightly. We were afraid. Everyone was afraid. Captain Buller was waiting for us, riding crop in hand, on the parvis in front of the church, surrounded by his two lieutenants, the one I’ve already mentioned and another one, squat and black-haired. When the little church square was full, everyone was standing motionless, and all noise had stopped, he spoke.

  “Villagers, ladies and gentlemen, we have not come here to defile or to destroy. One does not defile or destroy what belongs to him—what is his—unless he is afflicted with madness. And we are not mad. As of today, your village has the supremely good fortune of forming part of the Greater Territory. You are in your homeland here, and this homeland is our homeland, too. We are henceforth united for a millennial future. Our race is the first among races, immemorial and unstained, and so will yours be, if you consent to rid yourselves of the impure elements which are still to be found among you. Thus it is imperative that we live in perfect mutual understanding and total frankness. Lying to us is not good. Attempting to deceive us is not good. One man has made such an attempt today. We trust that his example will not be followed.”

  Buller had a delicate, almost feminine voice, and the curious thing was that the uncontrolled chin movement that made him look like a robot gone haywire disappeared while he spoke. He’d hardly finished his speech when, with flawless protocol, as if everything had been rehearsed numerous times, Aloïs Cathor was brought into the square, escorted by the two soldiers who had him in their charge, and led before the captain. Another soldier walked close behind them, carrying something heavy that we couldn’t make out very well. When he placed it on the ground, we could see that it was a timber log, a section about a meter high cut from the trunk of a fir tree. Then everything went very fast. The soldiers grabbed Cathor, forced him to his knees, laid his head on the log, stepped back. They were quickly replaced by a fourth soldier, whom no one had yet seen. A big apron of dark leather was strapped to his chest and legs. In his hands he held a large ax. He moved very close to Cathor, raised the ax, and—before anyone even had time to catch his breath—brought the blade down forcefully on the pottery mender’s neck. The cleanly severed head hit the ground near the block and rolled a little. A great stream of blood gushed out of Cathor’s body, which jerked about spasmodically for several seconds like a decapitated goose before all movement ceased and the corpse lay inert. From the ground, Cathor’s head looked at us. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he’d just asked us a question and none of us had answered it.

  It had happened so quickly; the awful scene had transfixed us all. Stunned as we were, the sound of the captain’s voice cleared our heads, only to plunge us into even greater astonishment: “This is the fate of those who wish to play games with us. Think about it, villagers! Ladies and gentlemen, think about it! And in order to assist your reflections, the head and the body of this Fremdër will remain here! Burial is forbidden under pain of suffering a similar punishment! And one further word of advice: Cleanse your village! Do not wait for us to do it ourselves. Cleanse it while there’s still time! And now disperse, go back to your houses! I wish you a good evening!”

  His chin gave a little jerk to the left, as if to shoo a fly. He smacked his riding crop against the seam of his trous
ers, did an about-face, and departed, followed by his lieutenants. Amelia was trembling against me and sobbing. I held her to my chest as best I could. In a very soft voice, she kept repeating, “It’s a bad dream, Brodeck, isn’t it? Isn’t it just a bad dream?” She kept staring at Cathor’s headless body, slumped against the block.

  “Come on,” I said, putting my hand over her eyes.

  Later, when we were already in bed, someone knocked at our door. I felt Amelia flinch. I knew she wasn’t asleep. I kissed her on the nape of her neck and went downstairs. Fedorine had already admitted the visitor; it was Diodemus. She was extremely fond of him. She called him the Klübeigge, which means “scholar” in her old language. He and I sat at the table. Fedorine brought us two cups and poured us some herbal tea that she’d just prepared with wild thyme, mint, lemon balm, and fir-tree buds.

  “What do you intend to do?” Diodemus asked me.

  “What do you mean, what do I intend to do?”

  “I don’t know, look, you were there, you saw what they did to Cathor!”

  “I saw it.”

  “And you heard what the officer said.”

  “That it’s forbidden to touch the body? It reminds me of a Greek story Nösel used to tell back in the University, about a princess who—”

  “Forget the Greek princesses! That’s not what I want to talk about,” Diodemus blurted out, interrupting me. He hadn’t stopped wringing his hands since he sat down. “When he said we have to ‘cleanse the village,’ what do you think he meant?”

  “Those people are madmen. I watched them at work when I was in the Capital. Why do you think I came back to the village?”

  “They may be mad, but they are nevertheless the masters, ever since they deposed their Emperor and crossed our borders.”

  “They’ll leave, Diodemus. In the end, they’ll leave. Why would they want to stay with us? There’s nothing here. It’s the ends of the earth. They wanted to show us that they have the power now. They’ve shown us. They wanted to terrorize us. They’ve done it. They’re going to stay a few days, and then they’ll go somewhere else, somewhere farther along.”

  “But the captain threatened us. He said we’re supposed to ‘cleanse the village.’”

  “So? What do you propose to do? Get a bucket of water and a broom and tidy up the streets?”

  “Don’t joke, Brodeck! You think they’re joking? There wasn’t anything innocent about what he said. He wasn’t speaking at random! He chose every word carefully. Like the word Fremdër he used to refer to poor Cathor.”

  “That’s the word they use to talk about anybody they don’t like. They’re all Fremdër, all ‘scumbags.’ I saw that word painted on many a door during Pürische Nacht.”

  “As you well know, it means ‘foreigner,’ too!”

  “Cathor wasn’t a foreigner! His family’s as old as the village!”

  Diodemus loosened his shirt collar, which seemed to be strangling him. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand, gave me a fearful look, turned his eyes to his cup, took a quick sip, looked at me furtively once more, cast his eyes down again, and then said, almost in a murmur, “But you, Brodeck? You?”

  XXXI

  ————

  know how fear can transform a man.

  I didn’t always know that, but I learned it. In the camp. I saw men scream, beat their heads against stone walls, hurl themselves on wire with barbs as sharp as razors. I saw them vomit, soil their pants, empty their bowels entirely, expel all the liquids, all the humors, all the gases their bodies contained. I saw some pray while others renounced the name of God and covered it with obscene insults. I even saw a man die of it—of fear, I mean. One morning, our guards played their little game and picked him as the next to be hanged, but when one of them stopped in front of him, laughed, and said “Du!” the prisoner didn’t move. His face betrayed no emotion, no distress, no thought. And as the guard started to lose his smile and lift his club, the man fell down dead, all at once, before the other even touched him.

  The camp taught me this paradox: man is great, but he can never measure up to his full greatness. It’s an impossibility inherent in our nature. When I made my vertiginous journey, when I descended one by one the rungs of the sordid ladder that carried me ever deeper into the Kazerskwir, I was not only moving toward the negation of my own person but also, at the same time, proceeding toward full awareness of my tormentors’ motivations and full awareness of the motivations of those who had delivered me into their hands. And thus, somehow, toward a rough outline of forgiveness.

  It was the fear others felt, much more than hatred or some other emotion, that had made a victim of me. It was because fear had seized some of them by the throat that I was handed over to torturers and executioners, and it was also fear that had turned those same torturers, formerly men like me, into monsters; fear that had caused the seeds of evil, which we all carry, to germinate inside them.

  There’s no doubt that I badly misjudged the consequences of Aloïs Cathor’s execution. I’d grasped its horror, its odious cruelty, but I hadn’t envisioned the inroads it was going to make in people’s minds, nor had I understood how much Captain Buller’s words, examined and sifted through dozens and dozens of brains, would distress them; I hadn’t considered that those words could induce the others to make a decision whose victim would be me. And there was also, of course, Cathor’s remains, his head lying on the ground a couple of meters from his body, with the sun shining down and all the ephemeral insects which in those days of early fall were born in the morning, died at night, and spent the hours of their brief existence zooming around the corpse, reveling in the banquet, whirling, zigzagging, buzzing, driven wild by the great mass of flesh putrefying in the heat.

  The nauseating smell permeated the whole village. The wind seemed to be on Buller’s side. It went to the church square, loaded itself with the miasmal exhalations of carrion, and then rushed gusting and swirling down every street, dancing a jig, slipping under doors, penetrating incompletely closed windows and disjointed tiles, and bringing all of us the fetid spoor of Cathor’s death.

  Throughout this time, the soldiers behaved with the most perfect propriety, as if everything were normal. There was no thieving, no plundering, no violence, no demands. They paid for whatever they took from the shops. Whenever they encountered women, young or old, they raised their caps. They chopped wood for elderly widows. They joked with the children, who got scared and ran off. They saluted the mayor, the priest, and Diodemus.

  Captain Buller, always displaying his tic and flanked by his two lieutenants, took a walk through the village streets every morning and every night, striding along on his short, thin legs. He walked fast, as if someone were waiting for him somewhere, and paid no attention to those he met on his way. Sometimes, wielding his riding crop, he flailed the air or drove off bees.

  The inhabitants of the village were all dazed. There was very little in the way of conversation. Communication was kept to a minimum. Heads were bowed. We weltered in our astonishment.

  After Diodemus left my house on the night of the execution, I never saw him again. I’ve learned everything I’m about to write from the long letter he left me.

  One evening, the third evening of the Fratergekeime’s presence in the village, Buller summoned Orschwir and Diodemus. Orschwir was sent for, obviously, because he was the mayor, but Diodemus was a surprising choice. Anticipating a question Diodemus would never have dared to ask, Buller observed that the village teacher must necessarily be less stupid than the other villagers and could even be capable of understanding him.

  Buller received the two men in his tent. It contained a camp bed, a desk, a chair, a sort of traveling chest, and a canvas wardrobe like a slipcover under which were hanging what looked like a few articles of clothing. On the desk, there was some paper printed with the regimental letterhead, along with ink, pens, blotting paper, and a framed photograph showing a thickset woman surrounded by six children ranging
in age from about two to about fifteen.

  Buller was writing a letter at his desk with his back to Orschwir and Diodemus. He took his time finishing the letter, reread it, slipped it into an envelope, sealed the envelope, and placed it on the desk; then, finally, he turned to face his guests, who—it goes without saying—were still on their feet and hadn’t moved a muscle. Buller gazed at them in silence for a long time, obviously trying to divine something about the men he’d be dealing with. Diodemus felt his heart beating as though it would burst, and his palms were clammy with sweat. He wondered what he was doing there and how long the ordeal would last. Buller’s tic made his chin jerk at regular intervals. He picked up his riding crop, which lay handy on the bed beside him, and stroked it slowly, gently, as if it were a pet. At last he said, “Well?”

  Orschwir opened his mouth wide, found no reply, and looked at Diodemus, who couldn’t even swallow, much less speak.

  “Well?” Buller said again, without indicating any genuine impatience.

  Gathering all his courage, Orschwir managed to ask in a strangled voice, “Well what, Captain?”

  This question elicited a smile from Buller, who said, “The cleansing, Mr. Mayor! What else would I be talking to you about? How much progress have you made with the cleansing?”

  Once again, Orschwir stared at Diodemus, who lowered his head and tried to avoid his companion’s eyes. Then the mayor, who’s ordinarily so sure of himself, whose words sometimes sting like whips, whom nothing impresses, who naturally behaves like the rich, powerful man he is, began to stammer and fall apart in the face of a uniformed creature little more than half his size, a minuscule fellow afflicted with a grotesque tic, who sat there caressing his riding crop like a simpering woman. “The thing is, Captain,” Orschwir said. “The thing is, we … we didn’t entirely … understand. Yes. We didn’t understand … what you … what you meant.”