Brodeck Read online

  Orschwir drooped, his shoulders sagging, like a man who’s made too great an effort. Buller laughed softly, stood up, and started walking around inside the tent, pacing back and forth as if deep in thought. Then he came to a stop in front of his two visitors. “Have you ever observed butterflies closely, Mr. Mayor? Or you, Mr. Schoolmaster? Yes, butterflies, any sort of butterflies at all. No? Never? That’s a shame … a great shame! I’ve dedicated my life to butterflies, you see. Some people focus on chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, philosophy, history; in my case, my entire existence has been devoted to butterflies. They fully deserve such devotion, but not many people are able to see that. It’s a sad state of affairs, because one could learn some lessons of extraordinary importance for the human race by contemplating these splendid, fragile creatures. Consider this, for example: the earliest observers of one species of Lepidoptera, known by the name of Rex flammae, noted certain behavior that seemed baseless at first; after further observations were made, however, it proved to be perfectly logical. I don’t hesitate to use the word ‘logical’ when speaking about butterflies, which are endowed with remarkable intelligence. The Rex flammae live in groups of about twenty individuals. It’s believed that some sort of solidarity exists among them; when one of them finds a quantity of food large enough to nourish the entire group, they all gather for the feast. They frequently tolerate the presence among them of butterflies not of their species, but when a predator suddenly appears, it seems that the Rex flammae warn one another, in who knows what form of language, and take cover. The other butterflies that were integrated with the group an instant earlier apparently fail to receive the information, and they’re the ones that get eaten by the bird. By providing their predators with prey the Rex flammae guarantee their own survival. When everything’s going well for them, the presence of one or more foreign individuals in their group doesn’t bother them. Perhaps they even profit from it one way or another. But when a danger arises, when it’s a question of the group’s integrity and survival, they don’t hesitate to sacrifice an individual which is none of their own.”

  Buller stopped talking and went back to pacing, but he didn’t take his eyes off Orschwir and Diodemus, who were sweating profusely. Then he spoke again: “Narrow-minded persons might find the conduct of these butterflies lacking in morality, but what’s morality, and what’s the use of it? The single prevailing ethic is life. Only the dead are always wrong.”

  The captain sat at his desk again and paid no more attention to the mayor and Diodemus, who silently left the tent.

  A few hours later, my fate was sealed.

  De Erweckens’Bruderschaf-—“The Brotherhood of the Awakening” I spoke of earlier—held a meeting in the little room reserved for it in the back of Schloss’s inn. Diodemus was there, too. In his letter, he swears to me that he wasn’t a member of the brotherhood and that this was the first time they’d ever invited him to a meeting. I don’t see why that’s important. First time, last time, what’s the difference? Diodemus doesn’t give the names of those who were present, just their number: six of them, not counting him. He doesn’t say it, but I believe that Orschwir must have been one of the others, and that it was he who reported Adolf Buller’s monologue on butterflies. The group weighed the captain’s words. They understood what there was to understand, or rather, they understood what they were willing to understand. They convinced themselves that they were the Rex flammae, the brilliant butterflies the captain had talked about, and that in order to survive, they would have to remove from their community those who didn’t belong to their species. Each of them took a piece of paper and wrote down the names of the alien butterflies. I presume that it was the mayor who gathered up the papers and read them.

  All the pieces of paper bore two names: Simon Frippman’s and mine. Diodemus swears he didn’t put down my name, but I don’t believe him. And even if that were true, the others couldn’t have had much difficulty persuading him to include my name in the end.

  Frippman and I had many things in common: we hadn’t been born in the village, we didn’t look like the people around here (hair too black, skin too swarthy), and we came from far away, from an obscure past and a painful, wandering, age-old history. I’ve related my arrival in the village, riding in Fedorine’s cart after having made my way amid ruins and corpses, orphaned of my parents and orphaned of my memory. As for Frippman, he’d arrived ten years ago, babbling a few words of the local dialect mixed with the old language Fedorine had taught me. Since many found him impossible to understand, I was asked to serve as interpreter. It seemed likely that Frippman had suffered a severe blow to the head. He kept repeating his last name followed by his first name, but apart from that, he didn’t know a lot about himself. As he appeared to be a gentle sort, people didn’t drive him away. A bed was found for him in a barn attached to Vurtenhau’s farm. Frippman was full of heart. He did day labor for this or that employer—haymaking, plowing, milking, woodcutting—without ever seeming to grow tired and received his wages in food. He didn’t complain. He whistled tunes unknown to us. The village adopted him; he let himself be tamed without difficulty.

  Simon Frippman and I were thus Fremdër—“scumbags” and “foreigners”—the butterflies that are tolerated for a while when everything’s going well and offered as expiatory victims when everything’s going badly. What was odd was that the men who decided to turn us over to Buller—that is, to send us to our deaths, as they must certainly have known!—agreed to spare Fedorine and Amelia, even though they were alien butterflies, too. I don’t know that one should speak of courage when referring to this omission, to this desire to spare the two women. I think rather that the gesture was like an attempt at expiation. Those who denounced us needed to keep a region of their conscience pure and intact, a portion that would be free from the taint of evil and would therefore allow them to forget what they’d done or at least give them the ability to live with it, in spite of everything.

  The soldiers kicked in the door of our house shortly before midnight. Not long before that, the men who’d participated in the meeting of the brotherhood had gone to see Captain Buller and given him the two names. Diodemus was there. In his letter, he says that he was crying. He was crying, but he was there.

  Before I had time to realize what was happening, the soldiers were already in our bedroom. They grabbed me by the arms and dragged me outside while Amelia screamed, clung to me, tried to beat them with her weak fists. They didn’t even pay attention to her. Tears were running down Fedorine’s old cheeks. I felt as though I’d become the little lost boy again, and I knew that Fedorine was thinking the same thing. We were already in the street. I saw Simon Frippman, his hands tied behind his back, waiting between two soldiers. He smiled at me, wished me a good evening as if nothing were wrong, and remarked that it wasn’t too warm. Amelia tried to embrace me, but someone pushed her away and she fell on the ground.

  “You’ll come back, Brodeck! You’ll come back!” she screamed, and her words made the soldiers burst out laughing.

  XXXII

  ————

  don’t feel any hatred toward Diodemus. I bear him no grudge. As I read his letter, I imagined his suffering more vividly than I remembered my own. And I understood, too. I understood why he’d been so assiduous in taking care of Fedorine and Amelia, visiting them every day, constantly doing things for them, and helping them all the more after Amelia entered into her great silence. And I also understood why, once he got over his initial astonishment, he greeted my return from the camp with such an explosion of joy, hugging me, making me dance, spinning around with me in his arms, laughing all the while and wheeling me faster and faster, until in the end I passed out. I had returned from the dead, but he was the one who could finally live again.

  Brodeck, all my life I’ve tried to be a man, but I haven’t always succeeded. It’s not God’s forgiveness I want; it’s yours. You’ll find this letter. I know if something happens to me, you’ll keep my desk, and that’s why
I’m going to hide the letter in it. I know you’ll keep the desk because you talk about it so much—it must be lovely to write at that desk, you say, and I write all the time. So sooner or later, you’ll find this. And you’ll read it, all of it. All of it. About Amelia, too, Brodeck. I’ve uncovered everything; I owed you that much. And now I know who did it. It wasn’t only soldiers—Dörfermesch, men from the village, were in on it, too. Their names are on the back of this sheet. There’s no possibility of a mistake. Do what you want with this information, Brodeck. And forgive me, Brodeck, forgive me, I beg you …

  I read the end of the letter several times, bumping up against those last words, unable to comply with Diodemus; I couldn’t turn the page over and look at the names. The names of men whom I necessarily knew, because our village is very small. Amelia and Poupchette were sleeping only a few dozen meters from where I was. My Amelia, and my adorable Poupchette.

  I remember telling the Anderer the story. It was two weeks after I’d come upon him sitting on the Lingen rock, contemplating the landscape and making sketches. I was returning home from a long hike I’d taken to check the state of the paths connecting the pastures in the high stubble. I’d left at dawn and walked a lot, and now I was hungry and thirsty and glad to be back in the village. I encountered him just as he was leaving Solzner’s stable, where he’d gone to visit his donkey and his horse. We greeted each other. I went on my way, but after a few steps I heard him speak: “Would this be an appropriate time for you to accept my recent invitation?”

  I was on the point of telling him I was exhausted and eager to get home to my wife and daughter, but all I had to do was look at him as he stood there expectantly, a broad smile on his round face, and I found myself saying exactly the opposite. My response seemed to make him happy, and he asked me to follow him.

  When we entered the inn, Schloss was washing down the floor, using a great deal of water. There were no customers. The innkeeper started to ask me what I was having, but he changed his mind when he realized I was following the Anderer up the stairs to his lodging. Schloss leaned on his broom and gave me a funny look, and then, seizing the handle of his bucket as if in anger, he violently flung the remaining water onto the wooden floor.

  A suffocating smell of incense and rose water pervaded the air in the Anderer’s room. Some open trunks stood in one corner, and I could see that they contained a quantity of books with gold-embossed bindings and a variety of fabrics, including silks, velvets, brocades, and gauzes. Other fabrics hanging on the walls hid the drab, cracked plaster and gave the place an Oriental flair, like a nomad encampment. Next to the trunks were two big, bulging portfolios, each apparently containing a great deal of material, but the ribbons binding them were abundantly knotted and the portfolios’ contents invisible. On the little table that served as his desk, some old, colored maps were spread out, maps that had nothing to do with our region; they depicted elevations and watercourses unknown. There was also a big copper compass, a telescope, a smaller compass, and another measuring instrument that looked like a theodolite, but of a diminutive size. His little black notebook lay closed on the table.

  The Anderer invited me to sit in the only armchair after removing from it three volumes of what I thought was an encyclopedia. From an ivory case, he took two extremely delicate cups, probably of Chinese or Indian workmanship, decorated with motifs of warriors armed with bows and arrows and princesses on their knees. He placed the cups on matching saucers. On the headboard of the bed was a big, silver-plated samovar with a neck like the neck of a swan. The Anderer poured boiling water into our cups and then added some dry, shriveled, very dark brown leaves. They unfolded into a star shape, floated for an instant on the surface of the water, and then slowly sank to the bottom of the cup. I realized that I’d watched the phenomenon as if it were a magic trick, and I also realized that my host had observed me with a look of amusement in his eyes.

  “A lot of effect for not much,” he said, handing me one of the cups. “You can fool whole populations with less than that.” He sat facing me on the desk chair. It was so small that his broad buttocks hung over both sides of the seat. He brought the cup to his lips, breathed on the brew to cool it, and drank it in little sips with apparent delight. Then he put down his cup, rose to his feet, rummaged around in the largest trunk, the one that contained the biggest books, and returned with a folio volume whose worn covers gave evidence of much handling. Among all the volumes in the trunk, all the books gleaming with gold and brilliant colors, the one in his hand was easily the dullest of the lot. The Anderer held it out to me. “Have a look,” he said. “I’m sure it will be of interest to you.”

  I took a quick peek, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The book was the Liber florae montanarum by Brother Abigaël Sturens, printed at Müns in 1702, illustrated with hundreds of colored engravings. I’d searched in all the libraries of the Capital without ever finding it. Later I’d learned that only four copies were believed to be in existence. Its market value was immense; many rich literary types would have given a fortune to possess it. As for its scientific value, it was inestimable because it listed all the flora of the mountain, including the rarest and most curious species that have since disappeared.

  The Anderer obviously perceived my confusion, which I made no effort to conceal. “Please,” he said. “Feel free to examine it. Go on, go on …”

  Then, like a child who’s just had a marvelous toy placed in front of him, I took hold of the book, opened it, and started turning the pages.

  It was like plunging into a treasure trove. Brother Abigaël had taken his inventory with extreme precision, and the extensive notes on each flower, each plant, not only recapitulated all the known lore but also added many details I’d never read anywhere else.

  But the most extraordinary part of the work, the primary reason for its reputation, was to be found in its illustrations, in the beauty and delicacy of the plates that accompanied the commentaries. Mother Pitz’s herbaria were a precious resource that had often helped me to revise or complete my reports and sometimes even to focus and direct them. All the same, what I found there had lost all life, all color, all grace. Imagination and memory were required to envision that entombed, dry world as it once had been, full of sap and suppleness and colors. Here, on the other hand, in the Liber florae, it seemed as though an intelligence combined with a diabolical talent had succeeded in capturing the very truth of flowers. The disturbing precision of lines and hues made each subject appear to have been picked and placed on the page just a few seconds before. Summer snowflake, lady’s slipper orchid, snow gentian, healing wolfsbane, coltsfoot, amber lily, iridescent bellflower, shepherd’s spurge, genepy, lady’s mantle, fritillary potentilla, mountain aven, stonecrop, black hellebore, androsace, silver snowbell—they danced before me in an endless round and made my head spin.

  I’d forgotten the Anderer. I’d forgotten where I was. But suddenly, the spinning stopped short. I turned a page, and there before my eyes, as fragile as gossamer, so minuscule that it seemed almost unreal, its blue, pink-edged petals surrounding and protecting a crown of golden stamens, was the valley periwinkle.

  I’m certain I cried out. There in front of me, in the ancient, sumptuous volume lying across my knees, was a painting of that flower, a testament to its reality, and there was also, peering over my shoulder, the face of the student Kelmar, who had spoken so much of the valley periwinkle and made me promise to find it.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  The Anderer’s voice drew me out of my reverie. “I’ve been looking for this flower for so long …” I heard myself saying, in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

  The Anderer looked at me with his delicate smile, the otherworldly smile that was always on his face. He finished his cup of tea, set it down, and then said, in an almost lighthearted tone, “Things in books don’t always exist. Books lie sometimes, don’t you think?”

  “I hardly ever read them anymore.”

  A sile
nce fell that neither of us sought to break. I closed the book and clasped it to me. I thought about Kelmar. I saw us getting down from the railway car. I heard the uproar again, the cries of our companions in misery, the bawling guards, the barking dogs. And then Amelia’s face appeared before me, her beautiful, wordless face, her lips humming their never-ending refrain. I felt the Anderer’s kindly eyes on me. And then it all came out of its own accord. I started talking to him about Amelia. Why did I speak of her to him? Why did I tell him, whom I knew not at all, things I’d never confessed to anyone? No doubt I needed to talk more than I was willing to admit, even to myself; I needed to relieve the burden that was weighing down my heart. Had Father Peiper remained the same, had he not turned into a wine-soaked specter since the end of the war, would I perhaps have confided in him? I’m not so sure.

  I’ve suggested that the Anderer’s smile didn’t seem to belong to our world. But that was simply because he himself didn’t seem to belong to our world. He wasn’t part of our history. He wasn’t part of History. He came out of nowhere, and today, when there’s no more trace of him, it’s as if he never existed. So what better person for me to tell my story to? He wasn’t on any side.

  I told him about my departure, about being led away by the two soldiers, while Amelia lay on the ground behind me, weeping and screaming. I also told him about Frippman’s good humor, his heedless assessment of what was happening to us and of what would be our inevitable fate.

  We left the village that same evening, bound by the hands to the same tether, walking under the watchful eyes of the two soldiers on horseback. The journey took four days, during which the guards gave us nothing but water and the remains of their meals. Frippman was far from despair. He kept talking about the same things as we trudged along, doling out advice concerning sowing, the phases of the moon, and cats, which, he declared, often chased him through the streets. He told me all this in his gobbledygook, a mélange of dialect and the old language. It was only over the course of those few days I spent with him that I realized he was simpleminded; before, I’d just considered him a bit whimsical. Everything filled him with wonder: the motions of our guards’ horses, the sheen of our guards’ polished boots, the glint of their uniform buttons in the sunlight, the landscape, the bird-song. The two soldiers didn’t mistreat us. They hauled us along like parcels. They never addressed a word to us, but they didn’t beat us, either.