Brodeck Page 3

  I entered the farmyard, still deserted at this hour. It’s an immense yard, a little country all by itself, bordered by handsome piles of manure. The entrance is a large postern made of hand-turned wood, painted bright red, and carved with a motif of chestnut leaves; in their midst is the motto BÖDEN UND HERZ GELIECHT, which means, more or less, “Belly and heart united.”

  I’ve often pondered the meaning of that phrase. Someone told me the inscription had been added in Orschwir’s grandfather’s day, and on his orders. When I say “someone,” I mean Diodemus, the teacher, who spoke to me about the Orschwir motto. Diodemus was my elder by several years, but we got along like two old comrades. If he had the time, he liked to accompany me while I went around collecting information for my reports, and it was a pleasure to chat with him. He was an uncommon man, who often—not always, but often—showed good sense, who knew many things, doubtless many more than he admitted to knowing, and who had perfect command of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This last quality, in fact, was the reason why the previous mayor appointed him as the teacher, even though Diodemus wasn’t from the village and came from another village to the south of ours, about a four-day hike away.

  It’s been three weeks since Diodemus died, in circumstances so strange and so poorly defined that his death made me even more alert to all the little signs I was noticing around me. Fear began to brew gently in my brain. The day after he died, I started writing this account alongside the Report the others had already assigned me to do. I’m writing the two of them at the same time.

  Diodemus spent most of his free hours in the village archives. Sometimes I saw a light in his window very late at night. He lived alone, above the school, in a tiny, uncomfortable, dusty apartment. Books, documents, and the records of olden times were his only furniture. “What I’d like to do is to understand,” he confided to me one day. “We never understand anything, or if we do, not much. Men live, in a way, as the blind do, and generally, that’s enough for them. I’d go so far as to say that it’s what they’re looking for: to avoid headaches and dizzy spells, to fill their stomachs, to sleep, to lie between their wives’ thighs when their blood runs too hot, to make war because they’re told to do so, and then to die without knowing what awaits them afterward, but hoping that something’s awaiting them, all the same. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved questions, and I’ve loved the paths you must follow to find the answers. Sometimes, of course, I end up knowing nothing but the path itself, but that’s not so bad; at least I’ve made some progress.”

  Maybe that was the cause of his death: Diodemus wanted to understand everything, and he tried to give words and explanations to what is inexplicable and should always remain unexplored. On the day I’m referring to, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him; I think I smiled. Smiling costs nothing.

  But there was another time, on a spring afternoon, when we talked about Orschwir, about his postern and the phrase carved on it. This was before the war. Poupchette was not yet born. Diodemus and I had been sitting on the short grass in one of Bourenkopf’s stubble fields, which lie on the way to the valley of the Doura and, beyond it, to the border. Before going back down to the village, we rested for a while near a wayside cross that represented Jesus with an unusual face, the face of a Negro or a Mughal. It was the end of the day. From where we sat, we could see the whole village and cup it in one hand. Its houses looked like the little houses in children’s toys. A fine sunset was gilding the roofs, which were already glistening from the recent rain. Plumes of smoke rose from every dwelling, and in the distance, the slow, sluggish smoke clouds mingled with the shimmering air, blurring the horizon and making it appear almost alive.

  Diodemus took some pieces of paper out of his pocket and read me the last pages of the novel he was writing. Novels were his obsession; he wrote at least one a year, on whatever crumpled writing material came to hand, including strips of wrapping paper and the backs of labels. He kept his manuscripts to himself and never showed them to anybody. I was the only one to whom he occasionally read passages from his work. He read them to me, but he expected nothing in return. He never asked my opinion about the passages he read or the subjects they treated. So much the better, because I wouldn’t have been able to say anything. The stories were always more or less the same: complicated tales written in tortuous interminable sentences which evoked conspiracies, treasures buried in deep holes, and young women held as prisoners. I loved Diodemus. I was also very fond of his voice. Its music made me feel drowsy and warm. I would look out at the landscape and listen to the melody. Those were wonderful moments.

  I never knew Diodemus’s age. Sometimes I thought he looked quite old. On other occasions, I persuaded myself that he was only a few years my senior. He had a noble face. His profile looked like the head on an ancient Greek or Roman coin, and his curly jet-black hair, which lightly brushed the tops of his shoulders, made me think of certain heroes of the distant past who lie asleep in fairy tales and tragedies and epics, and whom a magic charm sometimes suffices to awaken or destroy. Or, perhaps better than a hero, one of those shepherds of Antiquity, who (as is well known) are more often than not gods in disguise, come among men to seduce them, to guide them, or to bring them to ruin.

  “Böden und Herz geliecht,” Diodemus concluded, chewing on a blade of grass as the evening gradually fell on our shoulders. “Funny motto. I wonder where the old fellow came across that. In his head, or in a book? You find some really bizarre things in books sometimes.”

  V

  ————

  rschwir was sitting at one end of his kitchen table, a table four meters long, carved in a single piece from the bole of an oak tree several hundred years old—one of those trees that stand like lords in the heart of the Tannäringen forest. A young serving girl stood beside him. I didn’t know her. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with a pretty, round face, like the face of the Virgin in certain very old paintings. Despite her rosy cheeks, she was pale, and so in a way resembled a peony. She moved so little that she might have been taken for a dressmaker’s mannequin or an unusually large doll. Later, I learned that she was blind. This seemed strange, for her eyes, although somewhat fixed, appeared to see everything around her, and she moved about easily, never bumping into furniture or walls or other people. She was a distant cousin whom Orschwir had taken in; she’d come originally from the Nehsaxen region, but her parents were dead, their house destroyed, and their lands confiscated. The villagers called her Die Keinauge, “the No-Eyed Girl.”

  Orschwir dismissed her with a whistle, and she went away soundlessly. Then, gesturing, he bade me approach and sit down. In the morning, he looked less ugly than usual, as if sleep had tightened his skin and softened his imperfections. He was still in his undershorts. Around his waist, a leather belt awaited the trousers it was destined to hold up. He’d thrown a goatskin jacket over his shoulders, and his cap of otter fur was already on his head. On the table before him was a gently steaming plate of eggs and bacon. Orschwir ate slowly, occasionally pausing to cut himself a slice of brown bread.

  He poured me a glass of wine, looked at me without the least sign of surprise, and simply said, “So how are things?” Then, without waiting for a reply, he directed his attention to the last rasher of bacon, a thick chunk whose fat, rendered almost translucent by the cooking, dripped onto his plate like melted wax from a candle. He carefully carved the bacon into small, even-sized pieces. I watched him, or rather I watched his knife, which that morning he was using to feed himself, as naturally as you please, and which the previous evening had no doubt been thrust several times into the Anderer’s body.

  It’s always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts in person. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in the open air, they fly away from me. And the war did nothing to improve things; it ma
de me even more silent. In the camp, I saw how words could be used and what could be required of them. Before then, before the camp, I used to read books, especially books of poetry. During the time of my studies in the Capital, Professor Nösel instilled this taste in me, and I had retained it as a pleasant habit. I never forgot to stick a volume of poems in my pocket when I set out to gather information for my reports, and often, surrounded by the great spectacle of the towering mountains, the shouldering forests, and the checkerboard pastures, while the sky above seemed to look on, contented with its own infinite expanse, I would read verses aloud. The ones I liked and read again aroused in me a kind of agreeable buzzing, like an echo of some confused thoughts which lay in the deepest part of myself, but which I was incapable of expressing.

  When I returned from the camp, I put all my books of poetry in the stove and burned them. I watched the flames as they consumed everything, first words, then sentences, then whole pages. The smoke that rose from the burning poems was neither better nor nobler nor more charming than any other smoke. There was nothing special about it. I later learned that Nösel had been arrested during the first raids, like a number of professors and others whose occupation it was to study the world and explain it. He died shortly afterward in a camp similar to mine, a camp little different from hundreds of other camps which had sprung up all over the place on the other side of the border like poisonous flowers. Poetry had been of no use to him in the matter of his survival. Perhaps it had even hastened his demise. The thousands of verses, in Latin, Greek, and other languages, which he kept locked in his memory like the greatest of treasures, had availed him nothing. I felt certain that he, unlike me, had refused to act the dog. Yes, that was it. Poetry knows nothing of dogs. It ignores them.

  Orschwir mopped his plate with a piece of bread. “Brodeck, Brodeck, I can see you haven’t had much sleep,” he began, speaking softly, in a tone of muffled reproach. “I, on the other hand—well, it’s been a long time since I’ve slept so well, quite some time indeed. Before, I couldn’t so much as close my eyes, but last night I felt like I was six or seven years old again. I laid my head on the pillow, and three seconds later I was asleep …”

  By this time, the sun had fully risen, and its white light entered the kitchen in oblique rays, which struck the scarlet flagstones of the floor. Farm sounds could be heard: animals, servants, creaking axles, unidentifiable thwacks, and snatches of conversation.

  “I want to see the body.” I spoke the words without realizing what I was doing. They came almost of their own accord, and I let them pass. Orschwir looked surprised and upset. His face changed in an instant. He froze, like a shellfish when you douse it with a few drops of vinegar, and quite suddenly, his features regained all their ugliness. He lifted his cap, scratched the crown of his head, stood up, turned his back to me, walked over to one of the windows, and planted himself in front of it.

  “What good would that do, Brodeck? Didn’t you see your fill of corpses during the war? And what does one dead man look like, if not another dead man? You must tell the story, in sequence, one event after another. You mustn’t forget anything, but you mustn’t add useless details, either. They’ll make you veer off your course, and you’ll run the risk of confusing or even irritating your readers. Because you will be read, Brodeck, don’t forget that; you will be read by people who occupy important positions in S. Yes indeed, you will be read, even though I have a feeling you don’t believe it…”

  Orschwir turned around and looked me up and down. “I respect you, Brodeck, but it’s my duty to put you on your guard. It’s my duty as mayor, and as … Please don’t leave the path, I beg you, and don’t go looking for what has never existed—or what doesn’t exist anymore.”

  He drew up his great carcass to its full height, yawned, and stretched his huge arms toward the ceiling. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  He was a good head taller than I was. We left the kitchen and entered a long corridor which wound its way through the entire house. I had the feeling we’d never get out of that corridor; it made my head spin and filled me with dread. I knew Orschwir’s house was big, but I would never have imagined it to be so labyrinthine.

  It was an ancient structure, frequently remodeled, and it bore witness to a time unconcerned with alignment or logic. Diodemus told me that the oldest walls of the house dated back more than four centuries. According to an act he’d found in the archives, the Emperor stopped there in the fall of 1567, on his way to the marches of Carinthia and an encounter with the Grand Turk. I walked behind Orschwir, who stepped out smartly, displacing a quantity of air. I felt as though I were being pulled along in his wake, drawn by his scent, a combination of leather, night, fried bacon, beard, and unwashed skin. We met no one. Sometimes we went up a few steps or down two or three others. I would be hard put to say how long we walked—a few minutes, a few hours—because that corridor erased all the reference points of space and time. Finally Orschwir stopped in front of a large door covered with weathered green copper and square nails. He opened the door, and the milky light behind it dazzled me. I had to stand still for a moment with my eyes closed before I could open them to the light again. And see.

  We were about to step out into the area behind the house. I had never gotten a look at this part of Orschwir’s property except from very far away, while hiking up in the mountains. I knew that the sheds and outhouses back here sheltered the mayor’s entire fortune, and before him his father’s fortune, and that of his father’s father. A pink, noisy fortune, which spent its time wallowing in mud. A squealing fortune, which produced a diabolical racket all day long.

  Orschwir’s gold was swine. For several generations, his family had lived on and grown rich from hog fat. They had the largest pig farm for fifty kilometers around. Every morning, vehicles left the property—carrying either freshly killed corpses or panic-stricken, squealing animals bound for slaughter—and drove to the villages, the markets, and the butcher shops in the surrounding region. These daily rounds constituted a well-ordered ballet which not even the war had managed to disrupt. People eat in wartime, too. At least some of them.

  For three months after the war began, there was a long moment of stupefied calm when everyone gazed eastward and cocked an ear for the sound of marching boots, a specialty of the still-invisible Fratergekeime. (That’s the word in our dialect for those who came here to spread death and ashes, for the men who made me become an animal, men very much like us. Having gone to university in their Capital, I happened to know them well. We associated with some of them, since they often visited our village, brought here by business and trade fairs, and spoke a language which is the twin sister of ours and which we understand with little difficulty.) When the calm ended and our border posts were suddenly swept aside like paper flowers scattered by a child’s breath, Orschwir was not even slightly worried: He kept on raising, selling, and eating his pigs. His door remained immaculate; no obscenities were painted on it. Although the conquerors marching in triumph through our streets bore at least a little responsibility for the idiotic deaths of his two sons, he had no qualms about selling them the fattest of his hogs in exchange for the pieces of silver they pulled out of their pockets in handfuls, having no doubt stolen them somewhere along the way.

  In the first pen that Orschwir showed me, dozens of piglets a few weeks old were playing on fresh straw. They chased one another, collided with one another, and poked one another with their snouts, all the while emitting little cries of joy. Orschwir tossed them three shovelfuls of grain, which they rushed to devour.

  In the next pen, eight-month-old hogs were walking around, jostling and challenging one another. You could feel their strange, gratuitous violence and aggressiveness, which nothing in evidence justified or explained. They were already large, thick beasts, with drooping ears and brutish faces. An acrid stench assailed my nostrils. The straw the animals sprawled on was filthy with their excrement. Their grunts caromed off the wooden wa
lls and struck my temples. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  Farther on, in the last pen, pale, immense, long-loined adult hogs were dozing. They looked like so many small boats. They all lay on their sides, panting through open snouts, and wallowing in black mud as thick as molasses. Some of them watched us with great weariness. One might have thought them giants changed into beasts, creatures condemned to a fearful metamorphosis.

  “The ages of life,” Orschwir murmured. I’d nearly forgotten his presence, and the sound of his voice made me jump. “First you saw innocence, then stupid aggression, and now, here, wisdom.” He paused for a while and then began speaking again, slowly and very softly. “But sometimes, Brodeck, wisdom’s not what we think it is. The creatures you see before you are savage beasts. Truly savage, however much they look like beached whales; brutes with no heart and no mind. With no memory, either. Nothing counts but their belly, their belly; they think of one thing and one thing only, all the time: keeping that belly full.”