Brodeck Read online

  He went to the kitchen and came back with the rabbit, arranged on a green earthenware platter and garnished with carrots, red onions, and branches of thyme. I couldn’t manage to move or say a word. The old man stepped to my side and served me copiously, then cut a thick slice of white bread for me and poured some limpid water into my glass. I wasn’t completely sure whether I was sitting in that house or lost in one of the numerous pleasant dreams that used to visit me at night in the camp.

  My host sat down across from me. “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to join you—at my age, one eats very little. But do please start.”

  He was the first man in a long time who addressed me as if I were a man, too. Tears began to flow from my eyes. My first tears in a long time, as well. I clutched the seat of my chair with both hands, as if trying to keep from falling into the void. I opened my mouth and tried to say something, but I couldn’t.

  “Don’t speak,” he said. “I’m not asking any questions. I don’t know exactly where you’ve come from, but I think I can guess.”

  I felt like a child. I made awkward, rash, incoherent gestures. He looked at me kindly. Forgetting my broken teeth, I fell upon the food the way I did in the camp when the guards threw me a cabbage stalk, a potato, or a bread crust. I consumed the whole rabbit, gobbled up the bread, licked my plate, devoured the pie. I still carried inside of me the fear that someone might steal my food if I ate it too slowly. My stomach felt full, as it had not done for months and months, and it hurt. I had the feeling that I was going to explode and die in that lovely house, under my host’s benevolent gaze; die from having eaten too much after being nearly dead from hunger.

  When I’d finished cleaning plate and platter with my tongue and picking up the scattered crumbs from the table with my fingertips, the old man showed me to my room. There a wooden tub filled with hot soapy water was waiting for me. My host undressed me, helped me step into the tub, sat me down, and bathed me. The water ran over my skin, which no longer had any color, my skin, which stank of filth and suffering, and the old fellow washed my body without repugnance and with a father’s tenderness.

  The next day, I woke up in a high, mahogany bed between fresh, starched, embroidered sheets that smelled like wind. On all the walls of the room, there were engraved portraits of men wearing mustaches and jabots; a few of them were in military attire. They all looked at me without seeing me. The softness of the bed had made my whole body ache. Getting up was difficult. Looking through the window, I could see the well-kept fields bordering the village; some of them were already sown, and in others, which were still being plowed, teams of oxen pulled harrows that gouged and aerated the soil. The earth in those fields was black and light, quite the opposite of ours, which is red and as sticky as glue. The sun was close to the horizon, its jagged line broken by poplars and birches. But what I took for dawn turned out to be dusk. I had slept all night and all day, sunk in a deep sleep without dreams or interruptions. I felt heavy, but at the same time relieved of a burden whose contents I couldn’t have described with any precision.

  Clean clothes had been laid out on a chair for me, along with some walking shoes of supple, strong leather, shoes meant to last forever. (I still wear them; they’re on my feet as I write.) When I finished dressing, I saw a man in the mirror looking at me, a man whom I seemed to have known in another life.

  My host was sitting outside on the bench in front of his house, as he’d been doing on the previous day. He was smoking a pipe, sending a pleasant smell of honey and ferns into the evening air. He invited me to sit at his side. I realized then that I hadn’t yet spoken a single word to him. “I’m Brodeck,” I said.

  He took a stronger pull on his pipe. For an instant, his face disappeared in the fragrant smoke, and then he repeated, very softly, “Brodeck … Brodeck … I’m very glad you accepted my invitation. I suspect you still have a long journey ahead of you before you reach home.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d lost the habit of words and the habit of thoughts.

  The old man spoke again. “Don’t be offended,” he said, “but sometimes it’s best not to go back where you came from. You remember what you left, but you never know what you’re going to find there, especially when madness has raged in men for a long time. You’re still young … Think about that.”

  He scratched a match on the stone bench and relit his pipe. By that time, the sun had definitively fallen to the other side of the world. All that remained of its light were reddish traces, spreading like scribbles of fire and licking along the borders of the fields. Above our heads, floods of ink were drowning the pale sky. A few bright stars already shone through the blackness, between the streaks of the last swifts and the first bats.

  “Someone’s waiting for me.” It was all I could manage to say.

  The old man slowly shook his head. I successfully repeated myself, but I didn’t say who was waiting for me; I didn’t say Amelia’s name. I had kept it closed inside me for so long that I was afraid to let it go, afraid it might get lost out in the open.

  I stayed in his house for four days, sleeping like a dormouse and eating like a lord. The old man looked upon me kindly as I ate and served me second helpings, though he himself never swallowed a thing. Sometimes he remained silent; sometimes he made conversation. It was a one-sided conversation, with him doing all the talking, but he seemed to enjoy his monologues, and as for me, I took a curious pleasure in letting myself be surrounded by his words. Thanks to them, I felt I was returning to the language, the language behind which there lay, prostrate, weak, and still sick, a humanity that needed only to heal.

  Having regained some of my strength, I decided to leave one morning, very early, while the sun was rising and the smells of young grass and dew rose with it and invited themselves into the house. My hair, which was growing back in patches, gave me the look of a convalescent who’d survived a disease no physician could have identified with any precision. I still had a lemony complexion, and my eyes were sunk very deep in their sockets.

  The previous evening, I’d told the old man that I was thinking about continuing on my way, and he was waiting for me on his threshold. He handed me a gray canvas sack with leather shoulder straps. It contained two large round loaves of bread, a slab of bacon, a sausage, and some clothes. “Take them,” he said. “They’re just your size. They belonged to my son, but he won’t be coming back. It’s probably better so.”

  The sack I’d just taken hold of suddenly seemed very heavy. The old man extended his hand to me. “Have a good journey, Brodeck.”

  For the first time, his voice shook. So did his hand, which I clasped: a dry, cold, spotted hand that crumpled in my palm. “Please,” he said. “Forgive him … forgive them …” And his voice died, dwindling into a murmur.

  XII

  ————

  t’s been at least five days since I left off writing this account. And then, a short while ago, when I took out the packet of pages I keep in a corner of the shed, some of them already had a bit of dirt and a yellow dust like pollen on them. I’m going to have to find a gentler hiding place.

  The others suspect nothing. They’re convinced that I’m busy putting together the Report they asked me to write; they think I’m entirely absorbed by my task. The fact that Göbbler found me in my shed very late the other evening has worked in my favor. When I met Orschwir, quite by chance, in the street the following morning, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It seems you’re working hard, Brodeck. Keep it up.” Then he went on his way. It was very early. And I paused to reflect: despite the early hour, Orschwir has already been informed that at midnight I was in my shed, tapping on the typewriter keys. My reflections were interrupted by his voice, which came to my ears again through the freezing dawn mist: “By the way, Brodeck, where are you going with that sack in this weather?” I stopped. Orschwir watched me steadily as he seized both sides of his fur cap and pulled it down a little lower on his head. When he pounded his hands tog
ether to warm himself, big streams of vapor surged out of his mouth and rose in the air.

  “Am I obligated from now on to answer any question anybody asks me?”

  Orschwir produced a small smile, but his smiles greatly resemble grimaces. Then he shook his head slowly, very slowly, as he had done when I went to see him on the day after the Ereigniës. “Brodeck, you wound me. It was a friendly question. Why do you feel you must be on your guard?”

  My breath failed me, but I was able to shrug my shoulders, in a way I tried to make as natural as possible. Then I said, “I’m going to see what I can figure out about the foxes. I have to write up a small report on them, too.”

  While Orschwir weighed what I had said, he cast several glances at my sack, as if attempting to see what was inside it.

  “The foxes? Ah, right… the foxes. Well, have a good day, Brodeck. Better not go too far from the village, though. And … keep me informed,” he said. Then he turned his back to me and continued on his way.

  Two weeks or so previously, several hunters and foresters had told me about the foxes. While beating the woods to flush game on one of the first hunts of the season or cutting wood in the forest or simply coming and going, many of them had found dead foxes: young and old, males and females. At first, each of those who came upon the fox carcasses thought they’d died of rabies, which appears regularly in our mountains, does a little killing, and disappears. But none of the dead animals that were found showed any of the characteristic signs of the disease: tongue covered with white froth, pronounced thinness, eyes rolled back, coat dull and matted. On the contrary, the dead foxes were superb specimens and seemed to have been well nourished and in full health. At my request, Brochiert, the butcher, opened up three of them. Their bellies were filled with berries, beechnuts, mice, birds, and green worms. The foxes’ unmarked, unwounded bodies gave no indication of a struggle, so it appeared that they had not died violent deaths. And all the men who found the dead animals had been surprised at their position: lying on their side or on their back, with their forepaws extended as if they were about to take hold of something. Their eyes were closed, and they seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

  When I first heard about this, I paid a visit to Ernst-Peter Limmat, who was the principal of the village school for two generations of pupils, including me. He’s over eighty now and hardly ever leaves his house anymore, but time hasn’t been able to dent or damage his brain. He spends most of his time sitting in a high-backed chair in front of his hearth, where a fragrant fire redolent of fir and hornbeam is always burning. He watches the flames, rereads the books in his library, smokes tobacco, and roasts chestnuts, which he then peels with his long, elegant fingers. When I visited him, he gave me a big handful of chestnuts, and after blowing on them, we ate them in small pieces, savoring their hot, oily flesh, while my drenched jacket dried by the fire.

  Besides having taught hundreds of children to read and write, Ernst-Peter Limmat was without a doubt the greatest hunter and woodsman in our region. With his eyes closed, he could draw an accurate and detailed map of every forest, every boulder, every mountain crest, and every stream for many kilometers around.

  In former days, when class was over, he would take a hike, greatly preferring the company of the tall firs, the birds, and the springs to the company of men. If school happened to be closed during hunting season, he’d sometimes disappear for days on end. We’d see him coming back, his eyes gleaming with pleasure and his game bag filled with grouse, pheasant, and fieldfare; occasionally he had a chamois slung across his shoulders, a beast he’d tracked all the way to the sheer rocks of the Hörni, where in the past more than one hunter had broken his bones.

  The oddest thing about Limmat was that he never ate what he killed; he distributed his game among the neediest of the village. When I was little, it was thanks to him that Fedorine and I had meat to eat now and then. As for Limmat himself, he ate nothing but vegetables, clear broths, eggs, trout, and mushrooms; among these last, his decided preference was for the ones called “trumpets of death.” One day he told me that this type was the monarch of mushrooms, and that its sinister look served merely to repel fools and discourage the ignorant. Trumpets of death always adorned the inside of his house, hanging down everywhere in long garlands, and as they dried they filled the place with a smell of licorice and manure. He’d never married. A servant named Mergrite lived with him, a woman very nearly his own age; in the old days, wicked tongues used to say she surely did more than wash his clothes and polish his furniture.

  I told him about the fox mystery, about the discoveries of the numerous carcasses, about their peaceful appearance. He searched his memory in vain, unable to recall any precedents, but he promised to consult his books assiduously and report back to me should he discover any references to similar cases in regions other than ours or in other times. Then our conversation turned to the winter, which was approaching with rapid strides, and to the snow, which was encroaching on the village from higher ground, slowly but surely descending the slopes of the mountains and the sides of the valley, and would soon be arriving outside our doors.

  Like all the other old men, Limmat had been absent from Schloss’s inn on the night of the Ereigniës, and I wondered if he’d been informed of what had happened. I wasn’t even sure whether he’d known or been told about the Anderer’s presence in our village. I would certainly have liked to talk to him about the affair and get it off my chest.

  “I’m delighted to see you haven’t forgotten your old teacher, Brodeck,” he said. “Indeed, I’m touched. Do you remember when you first came to school? I remember your arrival very well. You looked like a skinny dog, with eyes too big for the rest of you. And you spoke a gibberish only you and Fedorine understood. But you learned fast, Brodeck, very fast. Not just our language; the rest, too.”

  Mergrite came in, bringing two glasses of hot wine. It smelled of pepper, orange, cloves, and anise. She added two logs to the fire, sending showers of bright sparks into the darkness, and then disappeared.

  “You weren’t like the others, Brodeck,” my old schoolteacher went on. “And I don’t say that because you weren’t from here, because you came from far away. You weren’t like the others because you always looked beyond things … You always wanted to see what didn’t exist.”

  He fell silent, cracked open a chestnut, slowly ate it, drank a mouthful of wine, and threw the pieces of nutshell into the fire. “I’m thinking about your foxes again. The fox is an odd animal, you know. We say foxes are sly, but in fact, they’re a lot more than that. Man has always hated foxes, doubtless because they’re a little too much like him. Foxes hunt for food, but they’re also capable of killing just for the fun of it.”

  Limmat paused for a while and then began to speak again, in a pensive voice: “So many people have died these last years, in the war, as you know better than anyone in the village, alas. Maybe the foxes are only imitating us, who knows?”

  I didn’t dare tell my old teacher that I couldn’t put that sort of thing in my account. The officials in the administration who read what I write—if what I write is read at all anymore—would understand nothing, and perhaps they’d think I’d gone mad and decide to do without my services altogether, in which case the paltry sums I receive so irregularly, the money my family lives on, would stop coming to me at all.

  I stayed a little longer in his company. We spoke no more about foxes but about a beech tree which some woodcutters had recently felled—because it was sick—on the far side of the Bösenthal. According to them, the tree had to be more than four centuries old. Limmat reminded me that in other climates, on distant continents, there were trees that could live two thousand years. He’d already taught me that when I was a child, and at the time, I thought that God, if he existed, must be quite a strange character, who chooses to allow trees to live peacefully for centuries but makes man’s life so brief and so hard.

  After presenting me with two garlands of trumpets of death and walking m
e to his threshold, Ernst-Peter Limmat asked me for news of Fedorine, and then, more gently, more gravely, he inquired about Amelia and Poupchette.

  The rain hadn’t stopped, but now some heavy flakes of wet snow were mingled with it. A little stream flowed down the middle of the street, making the sandstone cobbles gleam. The cold air smelled good, a combination of smoke and moss and undergrowth. I thrust the dried mushrooms into my jacket and went back home.

  I asked Mother Pitz the same question about the foxes. Her memory isn’t as good as the old teacher’s, and she’s surely not the expert he is on the subject of game animals and pests, but back in the days when she used to drive her beasts to and from the mountain pastures, she covered all the local roads, side paths, and stubble fields so thoroughly that I hoped she might be able to provide some sort of explanation. By tallying all the figures reported by my various sources, I’d arrived at a total of eighty foxes found dead—a considerable figure, if you think about it. Unfortunately, the old woman had no memory of ever having heard of such a phenomenon, and in the end I realized that she couldn’t possibly care less about it. “I’ll be glad if they all croak!” she declared. “Last year, they carried off my three hens and all their chicks. And then, they didn’t even eat them! They just ripped them to shreds and disappeared. Your foxes are Scheizznegetz’zohns, ‘sons of the damned.’ They’re not even worth the blade of the knife that slits their throats.”

  In order to speak to me, she’d interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange and rearrange the deck into pairs, conjuring up wedding celebrations and mended destinies, all the while drinking little glasses of mulberry liqueur. I could see that I was disturbing their concentration.