Brodeck Read online

  When we reached S., it was in chaos. Half the city had been destroyed; its streets were filled with rubble and charred ruins. For a week, we were penned up in the train station with many other people of all sorts—men, women, children, entire families—some of them poor, some still wearing the symbols of their past riches and looking down on the others. There were hundreds of us. We were all Fremdër—in fact, that name had become our name. The soldiers never called us anything but that, indiscriminately. Little by little, we were already losing our individual existences. We all had the same name, and we had to obey whenever that name—which wasn’t a name—was spoken. We didn’t know what was awaiting us. Frippman stayed close to me, never leaving my side, sometimes holding my arm for many long minutes at a stretch, squeezing it between his hands like a frightened child. I let him do whatever he wanted. Facing the unknown is always better when you do it with someone else. One morning, the camp authorities carried out a selection process. Frippman was put in the column on the left, and they assigned me to the one on the right.

  “Schussa Brodeck! Au baldiegeï en Dörfe!”—“Good-bye, Bro-deck! See you soon in the village!”—Frippman called out, his face beaming, as his column was marched away. I couldn’t respond to him. I simply waved; I gave him a little wave of my hand so he’d suspect nothing, and especially not the great nothing I had a premonition of. I was sure we were both heading there, him first and me later, to the accompaniment of cudgel blows. He turned and walked away at a good pace, whistling.

  I never saw Frippman again. He didn’t come back to the village. Baerensbourg, the road mender, inscribed his name on the monument. Unlike mine, there was no need to erase it.

  Amelia and Fedorine remained alone in the house. The rest of the village avoided them, as if they’d suddenly caught some kind of plague. Diodemus was the only person who concerned himself with them, out of friendship and out of shame, as I’ve said. In any case, he tried to take care of them.

  Amelia practically stopped receiving commissions for her embroidery, but even though she no longer spent much time working on trousseaus and tablecloths and curtains and handkerchiefs, she hardly remained idle. She and Fedorine had to have food and warmth. I’d shown Amelia all the useful things the woods and stubble fields contained: branches, roots, berries, mushrooms, herbs, wild salads. Fedorine taught her how to trap birds with birdlime and string, how to snare rabbits, how to station herself under a tall fir tree, lure down a squirrel, and stun it with a thrown rock. The two of them didn’t go hungry.

  Every evening, Amelia jotted down in a little notebook—which I’ve since found—some words meant for me. Her sentences were always simple and sweet, and she wrote about me, about us, as if I were going to return in the next instant. She recounted her day and began every entry the same way: “My little Brodeck…” There was never any bitterness in what she wrote. She didn’t mention the Fratergekeime. I’m sure she omitted them on purpose. It was an excellent method of denying their existence. Of course, I still have her notebook. I often reread passages from it. It’s a long, touching account, in which days of absence unspool, one after another. It’s our story, Amelia’s and mine. Her words are like lights, counterpoints to all my vast darkness. I want to keep them for myself, for myself alone, the last traces of Amelia’s voice before she stepped into the night.

  Orschwir didn’t shift himself to visit them. One morning, he had half a pig delivered to them, and they found it outside the door. Peiper came to visit them two or three times, but Fedorine found him hard to bear. He would sit for hours next to the stove, emptying the bottle of plum brandy she brought out for him, while his speech became steadily more confused. One evening she went so far as to chase him out of the house with a broom.

  Adolf Buller and his troops continued to occupy the village. A week after Frippman and I were arrested, Buller finally gave the authorization to bury Cathor. The deceased had no family apart from Beckenfür, who had married his sister, and so Beckenfür took charge of the burial. “A filthy job, Brodeck, let me tell you … Not pretty, really not pretty… His head was twice its former size, like some strange balloon, with the skin all black and splitting, and then the rest, my God, the rest—let’s not talk about it anymore …”

  Aside from Cathor’s execution and our arrest, the Fratergekeime behaved most civilly toward the locals, so much so that the two events were quickly forgotten, or rather, people did all they could to forget them. It was during this time that Göbbler returned to the village with his fat wife. He moved back into his house, which he’d left fifteen years before, and was received with open arms by the whole village, and in particular by Orschwir; the two of them had been conscripts together.

  I’m prepared to swear that it was Göbbler’s counsels which gradually sent the village over the edge. He pointed out to everyone how advantageous it was to be occupied by foreign troops, how there was nothing hostile about the occupation, no, quite the opposite; it guaranteed peace and security, and it made the village and the surrounding region a massacre-free zone. Admittedly, it wasn’t hard for him to convince people that it was in everyone’s interest for Buller and his men to stay in the village as long as possible. Clearly, a hundred men eating and drinking and smoking and having their clothes washed and mended bring a community a considerable infusion of money.

  With the consent of the whole village and Orschwir’s blessing, Göbbler became a sort of deputy mayor. He was often seen in Buller’s tent. In the beginning, the captain had viewed him with suspicion, but then, seeing the benefits to be derived from the feckless fellow and the rapprochement he championed, Buller began treating him almost like a comrade. As for Boulla, she opened her thighs wide to the whole troop and distributed her favors to officers as well as to the rank and file.

  “Well, what can I say? We got used to it.” Schloss told me that the day he came over to my table and sat across from me and got all teary-eyed while he talked to me. “It became natural for them to be here. After all, they were men like us, cut from the same block. We spoke about the same things in the same language, or close to it. Eventually, we knew almost all of them by their first names. A lot of them did favors for the old folks, and others played with the kids. Every morning, ten of them cleaned the streets. Others took care of the roads and the paths, cut wood, cleared away the piles of dung. The village has never been so clean, not before or since! What can I tell you? When they came in here, I filled their glasses—I sure wasn’t going to spit in their faces! How many of us do you think wanted to wind up like Cathor or vanish like you and Frippman?”

  The Fratergekeime stayed in the village for nearly ten months. There were no notable incidents, but the atmosphere worsened during the final weeks. Later, the reason why became clear. The war was changing both its location and its mind. Like a fire in spring, when the acrid smoke, agitated by the wind, panics and abruptly shifts direction, military victories abandoned one side and went over to the other. No news came to the village—not to the villagers, that is. If they were kept ignorant, they couldn’t become dangerous. But Buller, of course, knew everything. I like to imagine his face, ravaged by his tic more and more frequently in proportion as the messages arrive with their tidings of defeat, of disaster, of the collapse of the Greater Territory, which was meant to extend its sway over the whole world and last for thousands of years.

  Like dogs, the occupying troops sensed their leader’s confusion and became increasingly nervous. The masks fell again. The old reflexes returned. Brochiert, the butcher, was beaten before Diodemus’s eyes for teasing a corporal about his fondness for tripe. Limmat, having neglected to salute two soldiers on the street, was shoved around, and only the intervention of Göbbler, who happened to be passing at that moment, saved him from a severe clubbing. A dozen incidents of this type made everyone realize that the monsters had never left them, that they had simply fallen asleep for a while, and that now their slumbers were over. Then the fear came back, and with it the desire to keep it at bay.


  One afternoon—in fact, it must have been the day before the troops’ departure—some Dörfermesch, some “men from the village,” who had gone off with a sledge to the Borensfall forest to transport some timber, made a discovery near Lichmal clearing: under a jumble of fir branches, arranged to form a sort of shelter, three panic-stricken young girls, adolescents who clung to one another when they saw the men coming. They wore clothes that weren’t the same as those peasant women wore. Nor did their shoes bear any resemblance to clogs or boots. The girls had a little suitcase. They’d come from far, very far. They’d obviously been on the run for weeks, and then—God knows how—they’d reached that forest in the midst of a strange universe in which they were completely lost.

  The Dörfermesch gave them food and drink. They flung themselves on the food as though they hadn’t swallowed a bite for days. Then they followed the men trustingly to the village. Diodemus thought that the men didn’t yet know, as they made their way back to the village, what they were going to do with those girls. I’d like to believe him. In any case, however, they realized that the girls were Fremdër, and they knew that each step, each meter along the path that led to the village brought them closer to their fate. As I’ve said, Göbbler had become an important man, the only person in the village whom Captain Buller had really accepted, and so the men brought the three girls to Göbbler’s house. He was the one who convinced the Dörfermesch that they should hand the three over to the Fratergekeime as a means of gaining their favor, calming them down, taming them. While Göbbler dispensed this advice, the three young girls waited outside, in front of his house. They were still waiting when rain suddenly began to come down in torrents.

  The heavens sport with us. I’ve often thought that if the rain hadn’t started beating down on the roof tiles so hard, maybe Amelia would never have looked out the window. And in that case, she wouldn’t have seen the three drenched, trembling, thin, exhausted young girls. She wouldn’t have gone outside and invited them to come in and sit by the fire. She wouldn’t have been out there with them when the two soldiers, alerted by one of the men from the village, appeared and took hold of the girls. Therefore, she wouldn’t have protested. She wouldn’t have screamed at Göbbler, as I’m sure she did, that what he was doing was inhuman, and she wouldn’t have slapped his face. The soldiers wouldn’t have seized her. They wouldn’t have taken her away with the three girls. And so she wouldn’t have taken that first step toward the abyss.

  Rain. Just rain, pelting the roof tiles and the windowpanes.

  The Anderer listened to me. From time to time, he poured some hot water into his glass and added a few tea leaves. All the while I talked, I clutched the old Liber florae montanarum in my arms as if it were a person. The Anderer’s benevolent silence and his smile encouraged me to continue. It soothed me to talk about all that for the first time, to speak of it to that stranger, with his queer looks and his queer clothes, and in that place, which so little resembled a room.

  I told him the rest in a few words. There wasn’t much left to say. Buller and his men were breaking camp, and despite the driving rain, there was much feverish activity in the market square. The air was filled with orders, shouts, and the sound of shattering glass as dozens of drunken men, laughing, stumbling, and exchanging insults, drank their bottles dry and dashed them to the ground. Buller, his head jolted by his tic with ever-increasing frequency, was observing the whole tumult, standing rigid like a picket just inside the flap of his tent. At that paradoxical moment, the Fratergekeime were still the masters, even though it was already clear to them that they had lost. They were fallen gods, mighty warriors with a premonition that soon they’d be stripped of their weapons and their armor. With their feet still in their dream, they knew they were hanging upside down.

  Such was the scene when the little procession arrived: the three girls and Amelia, escorted by the Dörfermesch and the two soldiers. Very quickly, Amelia and the girls became prey; all four were surrounded, shoved, touched, groped. Accompanied by great outbursts of laughter, they disappeared into the center of a circle that closed behind them, a circle of inebriated, violent men, who drove them toward Otto Mischenbaum’s barn amid shouted obscenities and crass jokes. Mischenbaum, a farmer nearly a hundred years old, had never engendered any progeny—“Hab nie Zei gehab, nieman Zei gehab!” (“Never had the time, never ever had the time!”)—and spent most of his days shut up in his kitchen.

  Amelia and the girls vanished into the barn.

  They were swallowed up in there.

  And then, nothing more.

  The next day, the square was deserted but littered with innumerable shards of glass. The Fratergekeime had left. All that remained of them was a sour odor of wine, vomited brandy, and thick beer, which lay in puddles all over the square. After that sickening night, during which some soldiers and a few men from the village, with Buller’s mute blessing, had done great harm to bodies and souls, the doors of all the houses were shut. Nobody yet dared to go outside. And old Fedorine went knocking, knocking, knocking at all those doors. Until she came to the barn.

  “I went inside, Brodeck.” That’s Fedorine, telling me the whole story while she feeds me with a spoon. My hands are covered with wounds. My lips hurt so badly. My broken teeth hurt so badly, as if their fragments were still cutting into my gums. I’ve just come back after two years out of the world. I left the camp, I walked along highways and byways, and now I’m home again, but I’m still half dead. And so weak. A few days ago, when I finally stepped into my house, I found Fedorine there, and the sight of me made her drop the big earthenware dish she was wiping. Its pattern of red flowers was dispersed to the four corners of the room. I found Amelia, too, more beautiful than ever, yes, even more beautiful than she was in all my memories, and those aren’t empty words. She was sitting by the stove, and despite the noise of the breaking dish, despite the sound of my voice calling her name, despite my hand on her shoulder, she didn’t raise her eyes to me but kept humming a song that pained my heart, “Schöner Prinz so lieb / Zu weit fortgegangen,” the song of our first kiss. And as I said her name, as I said it once more with the great joy I felt at seeing her again, as my hand patted her shoulder and stroked her cheek and her hair, I saw that her eyes didn’t see me, I understood that she didn’t hear me, I understood that Amelia’s body and Amelia’s wonderful face were there before my eyes, but that her soul was wandering somewhere else, I didn’t know where, but in some unknown place, and I swore to myself that I’d go to that place and bring her back, and it was at that precise moment, at the moment when I made that vow, that I heard for the first time a little voice I’d never heard before and didn’t know, a child’s little voice, coming from our bedroom and rubbing the syllables against one another, the way you rub flint to make sparks fly, and producing a joyous, free, disorderly cascade of melody, a playful babbling that I now know must be the closest thing to the language of the angels.

  “I went into the barn, Brodeck. I went inside. It was very silent and very dark. I saw some shapes on the floor, little shapes lying in a heap, not moving. I knelt beside them. I know death too well not to recognize it. There were the young girls, so young—none of them was twenty—and all three had their eyes wide open. I closed their eyelids. And there was Amelia. She was the only one still breathing, but weakly. She’d been left for dead, but she didn’t want to die, Brodeck, she didn’t want to die, because she knew you’d come back one day, she knew it, Brodeck … After I went over to her, while I was kneeling with her face pressed against my belly, she started to hum that song she hasn’t stopped humming since … I rocked her in my arms, I rocked her and rocked her for a long, long time …”

  There was no more water in the samovar. Gingerly, I put the Liber florae down beside me. It was almost dark outside. The Anderer opened a window, and a scent of hot resin and humus permeated the room. I’d talked for a long time, no doubt for hours, but he hadn’t interrupted me. I was on the point of apologizing for having opened
my heart to him like that, without shame and without permission, when chimes sounded directly behind me. I spun around brusquely, as if someone had fired a shot. It was an odd sort of old-fashioned clock, the size of a large watch, made in days gone by to be hung inside carriages. I hadn’t noticed it before. Its delicate golden hands indicated eight o’clock. The watch-case was made of ebony and gold, and the numbers of the hours were of blue enamel on an ivory background. Under the axis of the hands, the watchmaker, Benedik Fürstenfelder, whose name was engraved on the bottom of the frame, had inscribed a motto in fine, slanted, intertwining letters: ALLE VERWUNDEN, EINE TÖDTET—“They all wound; one kills.”

  * * *

  s I stood up, I read the motto aloud. The Anderer likewise got to his feet. I’d talked a lot. Too much, perhaps. It was time for me to go home. Somewhat confused, I told him he mustn’t think that… He interrupted me by swiftly raising his small, chubby hand, like the hand of a slightly overweight woman. “Don’t apologize,” he said, his voice nearly as imperceptible as a breath. “I know that talking is the best medicine.”

  XXXIII

  ————

  don’t know whether the Anderer was right.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to be cured of certain things. Maybe talking’s not such good medicine, after all. Maybe talking has the opposite effect. Maybe it only serves to keep wounds open, the way we keep the embers of a fire alive so that when we want it to, when we’re ready for it, it can blaze up again.