Brodeck Page 25

  Along the whole way, he spoke not a word. He hurried on as if the world’s fate depended on his speed, and I had trouble matching strides with his long legs. I saw that we were heading toward the sharp bend in the Staubi, where it curves around the fields of vegetables belonging to Sebastian Uränheim, the biggest producer of cabbages, turnips, and leeks in our valley, but I didn’t understand why. As soon as we got past the last house, I saw. I saw the big crowd on the riverbank, close to a hundred people, men, women, and children, all of them facing away from us and looking in the direction of the water. A surge of panic made my heart beat faster, and I thought, rather stupidly, of Poupchette and Amelia. I say “rather stupidly” because I knew they were at home. A few minutes earlier, I thought, when Diodemus came to get me, they were there in the house. Therefore, they can’t have been involved in whatever misfortune has just taken place out here. Thus making myself see reason, I joined the silent crowd.

  Nobody spoke, nor was there any expression on anyone’s face as I slowly pushed my way to the front. The scene was utterly strange: the expressionless features, the staring, unblinking eyes, the closed mouths, the bodies I jostled, standing aside to let me pass, and me going through them, as if they were insubstantial. After I passed, the crowd regained its shape and people popped back into their original positions, like rocking toys.

  I was perhaps three or four meters from the water’s edge when I heard the moaning, a sad, wordless, one-note song that got in your ears and froze your blood, though God knows it was hot that morning; after the great deluge and the carnival of waterspouts and lightning, the sun had reclaimed its rights. I had come almost all the way through the crowd. In front of me were only the eldest Dörfer boy and, at his side, his little brother Schmutti, who’s simpleminded and carries on two rather feeble shoulders a disproportionately large head, as big as a pumpkin and as hollow as the trunk of a dead tree. I gently pushed them aside, and then I could see.

  The crowd had gathered by the spot where the Staubi runs deepest. It can’t be much less than three meters to the bottom, but it’s a little difficult to gauge because the water is so clear and pure that the riverbed looks as though you could touch it with your finger.

  In my life, I’ve seen many men weep. I’ve seen many tears flow. I’ve seen many people crushed like nuts between stones until nothing was left but debris. That was part of the daily routine in the camp. But despite all the sorrow and tragedy I’ve witnessed, if ever I had to choose one from among my memory’s infinite gallery of suffering faces, of persons who suddenly realized that they’d lost everything, that everything had been taken from them, that they had nothing left, the person who would spring to mind would be the Anderer, and the face his face as it looked that morning, that morning in September, on the banks of the Staubi.

  He wasn’t weeping. He wasn’t gesticulating. It was as though he’d been divided in two. One part was his voice, his unceasing lament, which resembled a song of mourning, something beyond words, beyond all language, rising from the depths of the body and soul: the voice of grief. And then there was the other part, his trembling, his shuddering, his round head, which turned from the crowd to the river and back again, and his body, wrapped in a luxurious dressing gown, all brocade, totally alien to the landscape; the dripping skirts of his robe, saturated with mud and water, swayed against his short legs.

  I didn’t understand right away why the Anderer was in such a state, why he looked like an automaton doomed perpetually to repeat gestures of stark madness. I stared at him so hard, hoping to discover something in his face, in his partially open mouth, in his plenipotentiary minister’s bathrobe, that I didn’t immediately notice his right hand, which was clutching something that looked like a hank of long, slightly faded blond hair.

  It was the hair of his horse’s tail, which emerged from the Staubi like a mooring line with one end still attached to the quay and the other to an irretrievably sunken vessel. I could see two large masses below the surface of the water, calm, ponderous bulks which the river currents were very gently stirring. The sight was unreal and almost peaceful: the big horse and the smaller donkey, both drowned, floating underwater with wide-open eyes. Because of some unknown phenomenon, the donkey’s coat was decorated with thousands of minuscule air bubbles, as polished and shiny as pearls, and the horse’s full, flowing mane mingled with the algae which in that place grew in thick scarves. It was like looking at two mythological creatures performing a fantastic dance. An eddy made them execute a circular movement, a slow waltz, without any music apart from the intrusive and suddenly obscene song of a blackbird, which soon resumed poking its brown beak into the soft soil of the bank and pulling out long red worms. At first, I thought that a last reflex had made both horse and donkey curve their bodies and gather their legs so that all four hooves were nearly touching, the way one might curl up and roll himself into a ball in order to present nothing but a rounded back to danger or cold. But then I saw the cords and realized that in fact the beasts’ legs were hobbled and solidly bound together.

  I didn’t know what to do or say. And even if I had spoken, I’m not sure that the Anderer, shut up inside his lamentation, would have heard me. He was trying to drag the horse out of the water—without success, of course, because the animal’s weight was so disproportionate to the Anderer’s strength. Nobody helped him. Nobody made a move in his direction. The assembled multitude’s sole movement was a backward surge. The crowd had seen enough. Here and there, people began to leave. Soon no one remained except the mayor, who had arrived after everyone else, accompanied by Zungfrost, driving a team of oxen. Zungfrost contemplated the spectacle without appearing in the least surprised, either because he’d already seen it, or because he’d been told about it, or because he was in on it. As for me, I hadn’t moved. Orschwir looked at me suspiciously and addressed me without even acknowledging the presence of the Anderer.

  “What do you think you’re going to do, Brodeck?”

  I didn’t see why the mayor was asking me that question or how I could reply to it. I was on the verge of saying, “A horse and a donkey don’t tie their legs together all by themselves,” but I decided to keep silent.

  “You’d best do like the others, Brodeck, and go home,” Orschwir continued.

  Basically, he was right, so I started to do what he said, but before I could go three meters, he called me back: “Brodeck! Please take him back to the inn.”

  Zungfrost had succeeded, I don’t know how, in making the Anderer release his grip on Miss Julie. Now he stood on the river-bank, unmoving, his hands hanging down, and watched the stammerer tie the horse’s tail to a heavy leather strap whose other end was attached to the oxen’s yoke. I put my hand on the Anderer’s shoulder, but he didn’t react. Then I slipped my arm under his, turned, and started walking away. He let himself be led like a child. His keening had stopped.

  One man alone couldn’t do away with two beasts like that. Nor could two men manage it. Such a job would require several men. And, besides, what an expedition! To enter the stable—at night, no doubt—wasn’t much of a trick. Nor was getting the animals out, because they were docile, good-natured, anything but wild. But then, by the riverside (because it can have happened nowhere else), to make the two beasts lie on their sides, maybe by pushing them over, to seize their legs, put them together, and bind them solidly, and then to carry or drag the animals to the water and throw them in—that was quite a feat. After careful consideration, I believe there couldn’t have been fewer than five or six of them, five or six beefy fellows who, on top of everything else, had to be unafraid of getting kicked or bitten.

  The cruelty of the animals’ death didn’t seem to strike anyone. Some villagers declared that such beasts could be nothing less than demonic creatures. Some even murmured that they had heard the beasts talking. But most people said that what had happened was maybe the only way to get rid of the Anderer, the only way to compel him to get the hell out of our village and go back to where he came fr
om, that is, to a far-off place nobody even wanted to think about. This imbecile savagery was, among other things, rather a paradox, since killing the Anderer’s mounts in order to make him understand that he must go away deprived him of the only quick means of leaving the village. But murderers, whether of animals or of men, rarely reflect on the deed they do.

  XXXVII

  ————

  ’ve never killed any donkeys or horses.

  I’ve done much worse.

  Yes, much worse.

  At night, I walk along the rim of the Kazerskwir.

  I see the railway car again.

  I see the six days I spent in the railway car.

  I see the six nights again, too, and especially, like a never-fading nightmare, the fifth of those nights.

  As I’ve already said, we were held for a week at the train station in S., and then we were separated into two columns and put on trains. We were all Fremdër. Some rich, some poor. Some from the city, others from the country. Such distinctions were quickly blurred. We were shoved into big, windowless freight cars. There was a bit of straw, already soiled, on the wooden floor. Under normal conditions, each car had room for about thirty persons to sit very close together. The guards pushed more than double that number into our car. There were cries, moans, protests, tears. An old man fell down. Some people near him tried to raise him up, but the guards thrust in still more prisoners, causing unpredictable, abrupt movements among those already there. The old man was trampled by the very people who had tried to save him.

  He was the first to die in our car.

  A few minutes later, having loaded the freight onto the cars, the guards slid the big iron doors shut and bolted them, plunging us into darkness. The only daylight that entered the car came through a few small cracks. The train started moving with a great lurch, which served to press us even more tightly together. The journey began.

  It was in these circumstances that I made the acquaintance of the student Kelmar. Chance had placed us side by side. Kelmar was on my right, while on my left was a young woman with a child in her arms, a baby a few months old. She held the child close the whole time. We felt our companions’ heat and smelled the odors of their skin, their hair, their perspiration, their clothes. You couldn’t move without making your neighbor move. You couldn’t get up or shift position. The occasional jolts of the train further compressed us. People spoke in low voices at first; later, they didn’t speak at all. There was some weeping, but very little. Sometimes a child hummed a tune, but most of the time there was silence, nothing but silence, and the sound of the axles and the iron wheels pounding the rails. Sometimes the train rolled along for hours without stopping; sometimes it remained at a standstill, but we never knew where or why. Over the course of six days, the big door was opened only once, and that wasn’t until the fifth day, nor was it done with any intention of letting us out; hands with no faces behind them doused us with several buckets of tepid water.

  Unlike some of our more provident companions, neither Kelmar nor I had brought anything to eat or drink. But strangely enough—at least for the first few days—we didn’t suffer much from hunger and thirst. We talked softly to each other. We evoked memories of the Capital. We discussed the books we’d read, the comrades we’d had at the University, and the cafés I used to pass with Ulli Rätte, the same cafés in which Kelmar, who came from a well-to-do family, used to meet his friends to drink burned brandy and beer and large cups of creamy chocolate. Kelmar told me about his family: about his father, who was a fur merchant; about his mother, who spent her days playing piano in their great house on the banks of the river; and about his six sisters, who ranged in age from ten to eighteen. He told me their names, but I can’t remember them. I talked to him about Amelia and Fedorine, about our village and its surroundings, its landscapes, its springs, its forests, its flowers, and its animals.

  Thus, for three days, our food and drink were words, and we nourished each other with them in the stinking heat of the railway car. Sometimes at night we managed to sleep a little, but when we couldn’t, we continued our conversations. The child in the young woman’s arms made no sound. He took her breast when she gave it to him, but he never demanded it. I watched him with the nipple in his little mouth, creasing his cheeks in his effort to draw out some milk, but his mother’s breasts looked flaccid and empty, and the baby soon grew tired of sucking in vain. Then his mother produced a glass demijohn enclosed in wicker-work and poured a little water into his mouth. Others in the car had similar treasures—a bit of bread, a chunk of cheese, some cookies or sausage or water, which they guarded jealously and kept under their clothes, next to their skin.

  In the beginning, I was very thirsty. My mouth burned. I felt as though my tongue was becoming enormous and dry, like an old stump, filling my mouth to the point of bursting. I had no more saliva. My teeth were like red-hot daggers, thrusting their little points into my gums. I believed they were bleeding, but then I passed my fingers over them and saw that it was only an illusion. Gradually, bizarrely my thirst disappeared. I was feeling weaker and weaker, but I wasn’t thirsty anymore. And barely hungry. The two of us, Kelmar and I, kept on talking.

  The young woman paid no attention to us. She surely must have heard us, however, and I know she could feel me as I felt her, her hip against mine, her shoulder, sometimes even her head, striking my head or leaning on me in sleep. She never said a word to us. She held her baby close, and likewise her equally precious demijohn, rationing the water methodically and sparing only a little at a time for herself and her child.

  We had lost all sense of time and place. I don’t mean the immediate place we were in, bounded by the dimensions of the freight car, but the geography our train was slowly lumbering through. What direction were we traveling in? What was our destination? What regions, what countries were we crossing? Did they exist on any maps?

  Today I know that they existed on no map and came into being as our train rolled over them. Our freight car and all the other cars like ours—carriages in which, as in ours, dozens of women, children, and men, gasping for air, consumed by thirst, fever, and hunger, were pressed against one another, sometimes the dead against the living—our car and the other cars were inventing, from one minute to the next, a country, the land of inhumanity, of the negation of all humanity, and the camp was going to be that country’s heart. That was the journey we were making, the likes of which nobody had ever made before us—I mean not so methodical, so thorough, so efficient a journey as ours, which left no leeway for the unforeseen.

  We’d stopped counting the hours, the nights, the appearances of the sun through the cracks. In the beginning, such calculations had helped us, as had our efforts to orient ourselves, to say that we were traveling east, or rather south, or now in a northerly direction. But then we gave up what was only a source of sorrow. We made no more estimates and had no idea where we were. I don’t even think we hoped to arrive anywhere. The desire to do so had abandoned us.

  Only much later, in thinking over that terrible journey, in trying to remember it, in trying to relive it, did I come to the conclusion that it lasted six days and six nights. And since reaching that conclusion, I’ve often thought that such a period of time was no accident. Our tormentors believed in God. They were well aware that, according to the Scriptures, it had taken Him six days to create the world. I’m sure they told one another they needed six days to start destroying it. Destroying it in us. And if the seventh day was the day of rest for Him, for us, when the guards opened the doors of the freight cars and drove us out with their truncheons, it was the end.

  But for me and for Kelmar, there had also been the fifth day. That morning, the door of the freight car was opened a little and buckets of water thrown at us—warm, muddy water, which splashed over our filthy, jumbled, and in some cases dead bodies, and which, instead of refreshing and soothing us, did the opposite; it burned us and scalded us. That stale water recalled to our memories all the pure, clear, limpid wat
er we’d drunk so avidly in days gone by.

  The thirst came back. But this time, no doubt because our bodies were nearing extinction and our enfeebled minds were abandoning themselves to delirium, the thirst we felt made madmen of us. Let no one misunderstand me: I’m not seeking to excuse what we did.

  The young woman beside me was still alive, and so was her baby. They were breathing rather feebly, but nonetheless they were breathing. It was their demijohn of water that had kept them alive, and in that demijohn, which seemed to Kelmar and me inexhaustible, there was still some water. We could hear it lapping against the inner sides of the bottle at every movement of the freight car, making a beautiful and unbearable music reminiscent of little streams, of flowing springs, of fountain melodies. The exhausted young woman more and more frequently closed her eyes and let herself drop into a sort of thick sleep out of which she would awaken abruptly, with a start, a few minutes later. Over the course of the past several days, her face had aged ten years, and so had her baby’s face, which took on the strange features of a little old man reduced to the proportions of a newborn.

  Kelmar and I had long since stopped talking. Each of us was coping as best he could with the shocks and aftershocks in his brain. We were both trying to reconcile, if possible, our past history and our present state. The car stank of enervated flesh, of excrement and sour humors, and when the train slowed down, it was assailed by countless flies, which abandoned the peaceful countryside, the green grass, and the rested soil to penetrate between the planks and fall upon us, rubbing their wings together as a commentary on our agony.

  I believe we saw what we saw at the same instant. Then we turned our heads toward each other with the same movement, and that exchange of looks contained everything. The young woman had dozed off once again, but unlike the previous times, her weakened arms had loosened their grip on her child and her big glass bottle. The baby, who weighed very little, remained attached to his mother’s body, but the demijohn had rolled onto the floor near my left leg. Kelmar and I understood each other without saying a word. I don’t know if we gave the matter any thought. I don’t know if there was anything to think about, and I especially don’t know if we were still capable of thinking. I don’t know what it was, deep down inside of us, that made the decision. Our hands grasped the demijohn at the same time. There was no hesitation. Kelmar and I exchanged one last look, and then we drank in turn, he and I, we drank the warm water from its glass container, we drank it to the last drop, closing our eyes, swallowing greedily, drinking as we’d never drunk water before, in the certainty that what was flowing down our throats was life, yes, life, and the taste of that life was putrid and sublime, bright and insipid, happy and sorrowful, a taste I believe I shall remember with horror until my dying day.