Brodeck Read online

  This was at the beginning of last fall. The war had been over for a year. Mauve autumn crocuses were blooming on the slopes, and often in the morning, on the granite crests of the Prinzhornï, which border our valley to the east, the first snows left a fresh, dazzling white powder, soon to melt away in the hours of full sunlight. It was just three months, almost to the day, since the Anderer arrived in our village, with his big trunks, his embroidered clothes, his mystery, his bay horse, and his donkey. “His name is Mister Socrates,” he said, pointing to the donkey, “and this is Miss Julie. Please say hello, Miss Julie.” And the pretty mare bowed her head twice, whereupon the three women who were present stepped back and crossed themselves. I can still hear his small voice when he introduced his beasts to us as though they were humans, and we were all dumbfounded.

  Schloss brought out glasses, goblets, bowls, cups, and wine for everybody. I was required to drink, too. As if to seal a vow. I thought with terror about the Anderer’s face, about the room he lived in, a room I was somewhat familiar with, having entered it at his invitation three times to exchange a few mysterious words while drinking some strange black tea, the likes of which I had never drunk before. He had several books with obscure titles, some of them in languages which aren’t written the way ours is; they must sound like sliding scree and clinking coins. Some of the books had tooled, gilt bindings, while others looked like piles of bound rags. There was also a china tea service, which he kept in a studded leather case, a chess set made of bone and ebony, a cane with a cut-crystal pommel, and a quantity of other things stored in his trunks. He always had a big smile on his face, a smile that often substituted for words, which he tended to use sparingly. He had beautiful jade green eyes, very round and slightly bulging, which made his look even more penetrating. He spoke very little. Most of all, he listened.

  I thought about what those men had just done. I had known them all for years. They weren’t monsters; they were peasants, craftsmen, farmworkers, foresters, minor government officials; in short, men like you and me. I put down my glass. I took the butter Dieter Schloss handed me, a thick slab wrapped in crystal paper that made a sound like turtledove’s wings. I left the inn and ran all the way home.

  Never in my life have I run so fast.

  Never.

  III

  ————

  hen I got back to the house, Poupchette had fallen asleep and Fedorine was dozing beside the child’s bed, her mouth slightly open, exposing her three remaining teeth. Amelia had stopped humming. She raised her eyes to me and smiled. I couldn’t say anything to her. I quickly climbed the stairs to our room and dove into the sheets as one dives into oblivion. I seemed to fall for a long time.

  That night I slept only a little, and very badly. I kept circling and circling around the Kazerskwir. The Kazerskwir—that was because of the war: I spent nearly two long years far from our village. I was taken away like thousands of other people because we had names, faces, or beliefs different from those of others. I was confined in a distant place from which all humanity had vanished, and where there remained only conscienceless beasts which had taken on the appearance of men.

  Those were two years of total darkness. I feel that time as a void in my life, very black and very deep, and therefore I call it the Kazerskwir, the crater. Often, at night, I still venture out onto its rim.

  Old Fedorine seldom leaves the kitchen. It’s her own private realm. She spends the nighttime hours in her chair. She doesn’t sleep. She declares that she’s past the age of sleeping. I’ve never known exactly how old she is. She herself says she doesn’t remember, and in any case, she says, not knowing didn’t prevent her from being born and won’t prevent her from dying. She also says she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t want death to take her by surprise; when it comes, she wants to look it in the face. She closes her eyes and hums a tune, she mends stories and memories, she weaves tapestries of threadbare dreams, with her hands resting on her knees in front of her, and in her hands, her dry hands, marked with knotty veins and creases straight as knife blades, you can read her life.

  I’ve described to Fedorine the years I spent far from our world. When I returned, it was she who took care of me; Amelia was still too weak. Fedorine looked after me the way she’d done when I was little. All the movements came back to her. She fed my broken mouth with a spoon, bandaged my wounds, slowly but surely put the flesh back on my bare bones, watched over me when my fever mounted too high, when I shivered as though plunged into a trough of ice and raved in delirium. Weeks passed like that. She never asked me anything. She waited for the words to come out of their own accord. And then she listened for a long time.

  She knows everything. Or almost everything.

  She knows about the black void that returns to my dreams again and again. About my unmoving promenades around the rim of the Kazerskwir. I often tell myself that she must make similar excursions on her own, that she too must have some great absences which haunt her and pursue her. We all do.

  I don’t know if Fedorine was ever young. I’ve always seen her twisted and bent, covered with brown spots like a medlar long forgotten in the pantry. Even when I was a small child and she took me in, she already looked like a battered old witch. Her milkless breasts hung down under her gray smock. She came from afar, far back in time and far away in the geography of the world. She had escaped from the rotten belly of Europe.

  This was a long time ago, at the beginning of another war: I stood in front of a ruined house from which a little smoke was rising. Was it perhaps my father’s house, my mother’s? I must have had a family. I was a full four years old, and I was alone. I was playing with a hoop half consumed by the fire. Fedorine passed by, pulling her cart. She saw me and stopped. She dug in her bag, brought out a beautiful, gleaming red apple, and handed it to me. I devoured the fruit like a starveling. Fedorine spoke to me, using words I didn’t understand, asked me questions I couldn’t answer, and touched my forehead and my hair.

  I followed the old woman with the apples as if she were a piper. She lifted me into the cart and wedged me among some sacks, three saucepans, and a bundle of hay. There was also a rabbit with pretty brown eyes and tawny fur; its stomach was soft and very warm. I remember that it let me stroke it. I also remember that Fedorine stopped on a bend in the road (broom was growing along its borders) and, in my language, asked me my name. She told me hers—“Fedorine”—and pointed down below us at what remained of my village. “Take a good look, little Brodeck. That’s where you come from, but you’ll never go back there because soon there will be nothing left of it. Open your eyes wide!”

  So I looked as hard as I could. I saw the dead animals with their swollen bellies, the barns open to the four winds, the crumbled walls. There were also a great many puppets lying in the streets, some with their arms crossed, others rolled up into balls. Although they were big puppets, at that distance they seemed tiny. And then I stared at the sun, and it poured burning gold into my eyes and made the tableau of my village disappear.

  I tossed and turned in the bed. I was certain that Amelia wasn’t sleeping any more than I was. When I closed my eyes, I saw the Anderer’s face, his pond-colored irises, his full amaranth-tinged cheeks, his sparse frizzy hair. I smelled his violet scent.

  Amelia moved. I felt her warm breath against my cheek and lips. I opened my eyes. Her lids were closed. She seemed utterly tranquil. She’s so beautiful that I often wonder what it was I did to make her take an interest in me one day. It was because of her that I didn’t founder back then. When I was in the prison camp, it was her I thought about every minute.

  The men who guarded us and beat us were always telling us that we were nothing but droppings, lower than rat shit. We didn’t have the right to look them in the face. We had to keep our heads bowed and take the blows without a word. Every evening, they poured soup into the tin bowls used by their guard dogs, mastiffs with coats the color of honey and curled-up lips and eyes that drooled reddish tears. We had to go
down on all fours, like the dogs, and eat our food without using anything but our mouths, like the dogs.

  Most of my fellow prisoners refused to do it. They’re dead. As for me, I ate like the dogs, on all fours and using only my mouth. And I’m alive.

  Sometimes, when the guards were drunk or had nothing to do, they amused themselves by putting a collar and a leash on me. I had to crawl around like that, on all fours, wearing a collar attached to a leash. I had to strut and turn round in circles and bark and dangle my tongue and lick their boots. The guards stopped calling me “Brodeck” and started calling me “Brodeck the Dog” and then laughing their heads off. Most of those who were imprisoned with me refused to act the dog, and they died, either of starvation or from the repeated blows the guards dealt them.

  Some of the other prisoners never spoke to me except to say, “You’re worse than the guards, Brodeck! You’re an animal, you’re shit!” Like the guards, they kept telling me I was no longer a man. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Me, I’m alive. Maybe they had no reason to survive. Maybe they had no love lodged deep in their hearts or back home in their village. Yes, maybe they had no reason to go on living.

  Eventually the guards took to tying me to a post near the mastiffs’ kennels at night. I slept on the ground, lying in the dust amid the smells of fur and dogs’ breath and urine. Above me was the sky. Not far away were the watchtowers and the sentinels, and beyond them was the country; the fields we could see by day, the wheat rippling with fantastic insolence in the wind, the clumped stands of birch, and the sound of the great river and its silvery water were all quite near.

  But in fact I was very far from that place. I wasn’t leashed to a post. I wasn’t wearing a leather collar. I wasn’t lying half naked near sleeping dogs. I was in our house, in our bed, pressed against Amelia’s warm body and no longer couched in the dust. I was warm, and I could feel her heart beating against mine. I heard her voice, speaking to me the words of love she was so good at finding in the darkness of our room. For all that, I came back.

  Brodeck the Dog came home alive and found his Amelia waiting for him.

  IV

  ————

  he morning after the Ereigniës, I got up very early. I shaved, dressed, and left the house without a sound. Poupchette and Amelia were still sleeping, while Fedorine was in her chair, dozing and talking a little. She spoke words without coherence or logic in a strange babble drawn from several languages.

  Daylight was just beginning to bleach the sky, and the whole village was still bound up in sleep. Very softly, I closed the door behind me. The grass in front of the house was drenched with whitish, almost milky dew, which quivered and dripped on the edges of the clover leaves. It was cold. The peaks of the Prinzhornï looked higher and sharper than usual. I knew that this was a portent of bad weather, and I told myself that before long snow would begin to fall on the village, enveloping it and isolating it even more.

  “Zehr mogenhilch, Brodeck!”

  I jumped as though caught in some shameful act. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I had nothing to feel guilty about, but I nevertheless leapt like a kid called to order by the goatherd’s switch. I hadn’t recognized the voice, even though it belonged to Göbbler, our neighbor.

  He was sitting on the stone bench built against the wall of his house, leaning forward and steadying himself on the stick he held with both hands. I’d never seen him sit on that bench before, except perhaps once or twice on one of the rare summer nights when the air is stifling and oppressive and there are no cool breezes to refresh the village.

  Göbbler’s a man past sixty, with a rough-hewn face; he never smiles and seldom speaks. A milky veil is slowly covering his eyes, and he can’t see farther than five meters. The war brought him back to the village, although people say he occupied a position in some administration in S. for years before his return; but no one knows exactly which administration that was, and I don’t think anyone has ever asked him. Now he lives on his pension and his henhouse. Moreover, he’s come to resemble his roosters a little. His eyes move in the same way, and the skin hanging down below his neck has ruddy patches like wattles. His wife, who’s much younger than he, is called Boulla. She’s fat and fond of talking; she smells of grain and onion. They say that a great heat burns between her legs, and that it would take many buckets of water to extinguish it. She seeks men as others look for reasons to exist.

  “Yes, indeed, up very early!” Göbbler repeats. “So where are you going?”

  It was the first time he’d ever asked me a question. I hesitated. I got fuddled. Words stumbled in my mouth and collided with one another, like stones in a mountain torrent. With the tip of his stick, Göbbler pushed back a snail that was calmly moving toward him and then turned it over. It was a little snail with a yellow-and-black shell and a fine, delicately marked body, full of innocent grace. Caught by surprise, the creature took a few moments to withdraw its body and its fragile horns into its shell, whereupon Göbbler raised his stick and brought it down on the little mollusk, which exploded like a walnut. Then, without taking his eyes off the debris of the snail’s shell and body, now reduced to a slimy, beige pulp, he murmured, “Be careful, Brodeck. Be careful. There’s been trouble enough already.”

  He turned his eyes toward me and smiled, drawing back his lips. It was the first time I’d ever seen him really smile, and I got my first glimpse of his teeth. They were gray and pointy, very pointy, as though he’d spent many an evening filing them down. I made no reply. I almost shrugged my shoulders, but I stopped myself. A great shudder ran up and down my back. I pulled my cap down to my ears, pressed the flaps against my temples, and moved away without looking at him again. There was a little sweat on my forehead. One of his cocks crowed, followed by all the others. Their shrieks struck my head like a series of blows. Gusts of wind from the depths of the valley swirled around me, laden with odors of beechnuts, of peat bogs, of heather and wet rock.

  On Püppensaltz Street, our main street, old Ohnmeist was going from door to door. Ohnmeist’s a dog, but of a very unusual kind. He gets his name from the fact that he has no master and has never wanted one. He avoids other dogs and children, makes do with very little, and goes around begging for food under kitchen windows. He accompanies whomever he fancies to the fields and sleeps under the stars, and when it’s too cold, he scratches on the doors of barns; people are glad to give him a little hay to lie on and some soup to eat. He’s a big, gangling beast, brown with reddish spots, about the size of a griffon but with a pointer’s short, dense fur. No doubt his blood is a mixture of many strains, but it would be a clever man who could say which ones they were. As he ambled over to sniff me, I remembered how, whenever he crossed the Anderer’s path, Ohnmeist would give two or three little yelps of joy and wag his tail in all directions. Then the Anderer would stop, remove his gloves—beautiful gloves of fine, soft leather—and stroke the animal’s head. It was very strange to see the two of them like that, the dog placid and happy, quietly accepting the Anderer’s caresses, when ordinarily none of us could get close to the beast, much less touch him, and the Anderer, patting the big fellow with his bare hand and looking at him as if he were a human. That morning, Ohnmeist’s eyes were both bright and shifty. He walked beside me for a while, occasionally uttering a brief, melancholy groan. He kept his head low, as if it were suddenly too heavy for him, too filled with distressing thoughts. He left me near the Urbï fountain and disappeared down the narrow street that leads to the river.

  I had my own idea, which I’d mulled over at length during the course of my agitated night: I had to speak to Orschwir, the mayor. I had to see him, and he had to tell me what it was that he and the others expected from me. I was almost at the point of doubting my reason. I wondered if I’d understood Göbbler’s words correctly, or if perhaps I’d dreamed him sitting there on his bench, or if the scene at the inn the previous night—that clamp of bodies tightening around me, that vise of faces, that request, and that prom
ise—if all that weren’t made of the same stuff that composed some of my stranger dreams.

  Orschwir’s house is the only one that truly has the forest at its back. It’s also the biggest house in our village. It gives an impression of affluence and power, but in fact it’s only a farmhouse, a big farmhouse, old, prosperous, paunchy, with immense roofs and walls whose granite and sandstone form an irregular checkerboard, and yet people think of the place as something of a manor house, a château. What’s more, I’m sure Orschwir’s pleased to think of himself, if only occasionally, as lord of the manor. He’s not a bad man, although he’s as ugly as an entire barbarian regiment. People say it was his ugliness, strangely enough, which assured his conquests in former days, when he was young and went to all the dances. People talk a good deal, and so often with nothing to say. One thing that’s sure is that Orschwir wound up marrying the richest girl in the region, Ilde Popenheimer, whose father owned five sawmills and three water mills. In addition to her inheritance, she gave her husband two sons, each the spitting image of his father.

  The resemblance didn’t matter much. I speak in the past tense because, in any event, they’re both dead. They died right at the beginning of the war. Their names are carved on the monument the village put up between the church and the cemetery. The statue depicts a woman, swathed in great veils and kneeling on the ground; it’s hard to say whether she’s praying or meditating revenge. The inscribed names include GÜNTER AND GEHRART ORSCHWIR, AGED TWENTY-ONE AND NINETEEN YEARS. My name was on the monument as well, but after I returned, Baerensbourg, the road mender, erased it. The job caused him a great deal of difficulty—it’s always a very delicate undertaking to remove what is written in stone. I can still manage to read my first name on the monument. This makes me smile, but the thing gives Amelia the creeps. She doesn’t like to pass it.

  According to a persistent whisper, Orschwir owes his position as mayor to the deaths of his sons; their sacrifice, however, was anything but heroic. They killed themselves at their lookout post while playing with a grenade like a pair of children. After all, that’s what they were, big children still, who thought the war would suddenly make men of them. The explosion could be heard in the village. It was our first explosion. Everyone ran to the little sentry box, which had been built to overlook the road to the border. The post stood right in the middle of the Schönbehe pasture and atop its highest elevation, a hill sheltered by a great brown-red boulder covered with lichen the color of jade. Nothing much was left, either of the box or of the boys. One had died pressing both hands against his belly, trying to hold in his guts; the other’s head, blown clean off by the blast, stared at us fixedly. We buried them two days later, wrapped in sheets of white linen and lying in the oaken coffins which Fixheim, the carpenter, had fashioned with great care. Those two were our first war dead. Father Peiper, who in those days still drank only water, pronounced a sermon on the themes of chance and deliverance. Few of us understood it, but the congregation very much liked the words he chose, most of them rare or very old, and the way he sent them rolling among the pillars, the vaults, the clouds of incense, the soft light of the candles, and the stained-glass windows of our little church.