Brodeck (14 page)

XXI

————

want to go back to the first day, or rather to the first evening: the evening when the
Anderer
appeared in our village. I’ve reported his meeting with the oldest Dörfer child, but I haven’t described his arrival at the inn a few minutes later. My account is based on the statements I took from three different eyewitnesses: Schloss himself; Menigue Wirfrau, the baker, who’d gone to the inn to drink a glass of wine; and Doris Klattermeier, a young girl with pink skin and hay-colored hair, who was passing in the street when the
Anderer
arrived. There were other witness, both in the inn and outside, but the three named above related the events in almost exactly the same way, except for one or two small details, and I thought it best to rely on them.

The
Anderer
had dismounted to speak to the Dörfer boy and he walked the rest of the way to the inn, leading his horse by the reins while the donkey followed a few paces behind. He tethered the animals to the ring outside; then, instead of opening the door and entering the inn like everyone else, he knocked three times and waited. This was such an unusual thing to do that he had to stand there for a long time. “I thought it was a prankster,” Schloss told me. “Or some kid!” In short, nothing happened. The
Anderer
waited. No one opened the door for him, nor did he open it for himself. Some people, among them young Doris, had already gathered to observe the phenomenon: the horse, the ass, the baggage, and the oddly attired fellow standing outside the door of the inn with a smile on his round, powdered face. After a few minutes, he knocked again, but this time the three blows were harder and sharper. Schloss said, “At that point, I figured something out of the ordinary was going on, and I went to see.”

So Schloss opened the door and found himself face-to-face with the
Anderer
. “I nearly choked! Where did this guy come from, I thought, the circus or a fairy tale?” But the
Anderer
didn’t give him time to recover. He lifted his funny hat, revealing his very round, very bald pate, made a supple, elegant gesture of salutation, and said, “Greetings, kind sir. My friends”—here he indicated the horse and the donkey—“and I have come a great distance and find ourselves quite exhausted. Would you be kind enough to offer us the hospitality of your establishment? In exchange for our payment, of course.”

Schloss is convinced that the
Anderer
said, “Greetings, Mr. Schloss,” but young Doris and Wirfrau both swear that this was not the case. Schloss was probably so stunned by the strange apparition and its request that he lost his bearings for a few moments. He said, “I didn’t know how to answer him at first. It had been so many years since we’d had any visitors, except for the ones you know about! And besides, the words he used… He pronounced them in
Deeperschaft
, not in dialect, and my ear wasn’t used to hearing that.”

Menigue Wirfrau told me that Schloss hesitated for a few moments, looking at the
Anderer
and scratching his head, before he replied. As for the
Anderer
, it seems he stood motionless, smiling as if all this were perfectly normal and time—which was falling drop by drop into a narrow pipe—was of no importance. Doris Klattermeier remembered that his donkey and his horse didn’t move, either. She shivered a little when she told me that, and then she made the sign of the cross, twice. For most of the people in our village, God is a distant being composed of books and incense; the Devil, on the other hand, is a neighbor whom many of them believe they’ve seen once or twice.

At last, Schloss uttered a few words. “He asked the stranger how many nights he planned to stay,” according to Wirfrau. Wirfrau was kneading when I went to see him, naked from the waist up, his chest and the rims of his eyes covered with flour. He seized the big wad of dough with both hands, lifted it, turned it, flung it into the kneading trough, and repeated the process. He spoke without looking at me. I’d found a place to sit between two sacks and the woodpile. The oven had been humming for a good while, and the little room was hot with the smell of burning wood. Wirfrau went on: “For a while, the fellow seemed to be thinking the question over, smiling the whole time. He looked at the ass and the horse, and it was like he was asking them their opinion. Then he answered in his funny voice, ‘I should think that our sojourn will be rather extended.’ I’m sure Schloss didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t want to look like a dope, either. So he shook his head several times, and then he invited the stranger to step inside.”

Two hours later, the
Anderer
was lodged in the room, which Schloss had dusted in haste. The
Anderer
’s bags and trunks had been brought upstairs and his horse and donkey given beds of fresh straw in the stable just across from the inn, the property of one Solzner, an old man about as lovable as a whack from a club. At the stranger’s request, a basin of fresh, pure water and a bucket of oats were placed close to the animals. He went over to make sure they were well accommodated, taking the opportunity to brush their flanks with a handful of hay and whisper in their ears some words no one heard. Then he handed old Solzner three gold pieces, the equivalent of several months’ food and shelter for the beasts, bade them farewell, wished them a good night, and left the stable.

In the meanwhile, the inn had filled with people, many of whom had come to gaze upon the prodigy with their own eyes. Although not curious by nature, I must confess that I myself was one of them. The news had flashed along the streets and into the houses at lightning speed, and there were a good thirty or more of us in the inn by the time the lukewarm night settled on the roofs of the village. For all that, our curiosity remained unsatisfied, because the
Anderer
went up to his room and stayed there. Downstairs the discussion was vigorous, as was the consumption of beverages. Schloss didn’t have enough hands to keep up with all the drinkers. He must surely have told himself that the arrival of a traveler was, when all was said and done, a good thing. He did as much business on that day as he did when there were fairs or funerals. Menigue Wirfrau couldn’t stop describing the arrival of the
Anderer
, his outfit, his horse and his donkey, and little by little, since everyone stood him a drink to loosen his tongue, he began embellishing his account and stumbling on every word at the same time.

But every now and then we could hear footsteps upstairs, and the room would fall silent while everyone held his breath. Our eyes were fixed intently on the ceiling, as if in an effort to pass through it. We imagined the visitor. We gave him form and flesh. We were trying to enter into the labyrinth of his brain when we hadn’t even set eyes on him yet.

At one point, Schloss went upstairs to ask him if everything was all right. We tried to overhear their conversation, but in vain; even those who leaned their big ears into the stairwell caught nothing. When Schloss came back down, he was immediately surrounded.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wanted a ‘collation.’”

“A ‘collation’? What’s that?”

“A light meal, he said.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What he asked me to do!”

Everyone was curious to see what a
collation
looked like. Most of the crowd followed Schloss into his kitchen and watched him prepare a large tray, on which he put three thick slices of bacon, a sausage, some marinated gherkins, a pot of custard, a loaf of brown bread, some sweet-and-sour cabbage, and a large piece of goat cheese, together with a jug of wine and a mug of beer. When he passed through the crowd of his customers, he carried the tray devoutly, and everyone made way for him in silence, as though for the passage of a holy relic. Then Wirfrau’s voice broke the spell: he was still describing the
Anderer’s
arrival at the inn. No one was listening to him anymore, but because of the state he was in, that fact escaped his notice. Similarly, a little later, he failed to observe that he had confused his kneading-trough with his bed; after preparing his dough in the latter, he went to sleep in the former. The following day brought him a raging hangover, while we got a day without bread.

When I returned home, Fedorine was waiting for me: “What’s going on, Brodeck?”

I told her what I’d learned. She listened to me attentively, shaking her head. “That’s not good. None of it. Not good.”

They were just a few simple words, but they irritated me, and I asked her curtly why she’d said them.

“When the flock has finally settled down, it must not be given any reason to start moving again,” she replied.

I shrugged my shoulders. I was in a lighthearted mood. I was—I haven’t realized this until today—I was probably the only person in the village pleased by the arrival of a stranger. I considered it a sign of rebirth, a return to life. For me, it was as though an iron door that for years had sealed the entrance to a cave had opened wide, and the air of that cave had suddenly received the wind and the beams of a bright sun. But I couldn’t imagine that sometimes the sun grows bothersome, and its beams, which light up the world, inadvertently illuminate what people are trying to bury.

Old Fedorine knew me like a pocket she’d put her hand into several thousand times. She planted herself in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and stroked my cheek with one trembling hand. “I’m very old, my little Brodeck, so very old,” she said. “Soon I won’t be around anymore. You must be careful. You’ve already come back once from a place people don’t come back from. There’s never a second chance. Never. And don’t forget: you have other souls in your charge. Think about them, both of them …”

I’m not very big, but only at that moment did I grasp how little Fedorine was. She looked like a child, a child with an old man’s face; a bent, wizened, thin, fragile creature with crumpled, wrinkled skin, a creature a small puff of air could have swept away like a collection of dust. Her eyes shone, despite the milky cloud obscuring them, and her lips moved. I took her in my arms and pressed her against me at length, and I thought of birds, little lost birds, the weak, sick, or disconsolate sparrows that can’t keep up with their fellows in the great migrations; toward the end of fall, you can see them, with their feathers drooping and panic in their hearts, perching on roofs or in the lower branches of trees, waiting resignedly for the cold that will kill them. I gave Fedorine several kisses, first on her hair, then on her forehead and cheeks, as I did when I was a child, and I recognized her smell, a smell of wax, of stoves, of clean cloth, the smell that has sufficed, almost since my life began, to bring a peaceful smile to my lips, even in my sleep. I held her against me like that for a long time, while scenes from the past flashed through my mind at lightning speed. My memory juxtaposed disparate instants, creating a bizarre mosaic whose only effect was to make me more aware of times that had fled away forever, moments that would never return.

Fedorine was there, I clasped her to me, and I could talk to her. I inhaled her smell; I felt her beating heart. It was as if mine were beating in her. Again I remembered the camp. The only thought that occupied our minds there was the thought of death. We lived in perpetual consciousness of our death, and this was, no doubt, the reason why some of us went mad. Even though man knows he’ll die one day, he can’t live for long in a world that offers him nothing but the consciousness of his own death, a world pervaded by death and conceived solely for that purpose.

ICH BIN NICHTS read the placard the hanged man wore. We were quite aware that we were nothing. We knew it all too well. Each of us was a nothing. A nothing handed over to death. Its slave. Its toy. Waiting and resigned. Oddly enough, although I was a creature of nothingness, inhabiting nothingness and by it inhabited, the fact never managed to frighten me. I didn’t fear my own death, or if I feared it, it was with a sort of fleeting, animal reflex. By contrast, the thought of death became unbearable when I associated it with Amelia and Fedorine. It’s the death of others, of loved ones, not our own, which eats away at us and can destroy us. And that’s what I’ve been bound to struggle against, brandishing faces and features at its black light.

XXII

————

n the beginning, our village welcomed the
Anderer
as some kind of monarch. Indeed, there was something like magic in the whole affair. People in these parts aren’t open by nature. That can no doubt be explained, at least to some extent, by our landscape of valleys and mountains, of dense forests and hemmed-in vales, and our climate of rains and mists, of frosts and snowstorms and unbearable hot spells. And then, of course, there was the war, which failed to improve things. Doors and hearts were closed even more completely and padlocks were carefully affixed, concealing what was inside from the light of day.

But at first, once the incredible surprise of his coming among us had passed, the
Anderer
was able, however involuntarily, to emanate a charm with the power to cajole even the most hostile, for everyone wanted to see him—children, women, and oldsters included—and he happily entered into the spirit of the game, smiling at one and all, lifting his hat to the ladies and inclining his head to the men. However, he never spoke the smallest word, and if there hadn’t been people who’d heard him speak the day he arrived, we might have considered him a mute.

He couldn’t walk in the streets without being followed by a little band of laughing, idle kids, to whom he gave small gifts that seemed to them treasures: ribbons, glass marbles, lengths of gilded string, sheets of colored paper. He pulled all that out of his pockets, as if they were constantly full of such things; one would have thought there was nothing else in his baggage.

When he went into old man Solzner’s stable to visit his two mounts, children came and watched him from the door, not daring to enter, nor did he invite them to do so. He greeted his horse and his donkey by name, always addressing them formally, stroking their coats, and slipping lumps of yellow sugar (which he extracted from a little garnet-colored velvet bag) between their gray lips. The children watched the spectacle with open mouths and staring eyes, wondering what was the language he used when he murmured into the animals’ ears.

To tell the truth, he spoke more to his horse and his ass than he did to us. Schloss had received instructions to knock on his guest’s door at six o’clock every morning, but not to enter the room, and to place the tray on the floor in front of the threshold. The same items were always arranged on the tray: a round brioche—for which the
Anderer
paid Wirfrau in advance—a raw egg, a pot of hot water, and a large bowl.

“He can’t be drinking hot water with nothing in it!” The man who uttered this cry of disbelief one evening was Rudolf Scheuling, whose gullet had admitted no liquid but
schnick
since he was twelve years old. In fact, what the
Anderer
drank was tea, strong tea that left large brown stains on the rims of cups. I tasted that tea once, when he invited me to his room to chat a bit and to show me some books. It left a taste of leather and smoke in the mouth, along with a hint of salt meat. I’d never drunk anything like it.

For dinner, he went down to the big room. There were always a few curiosity seekers who came just to look at him, and especially to observe his manners, his delicate table manners: his distinguished way of holding his fork and knife, of sliding his blade into the breast of a chicken or the flesh of a potato.

In the very beginning, Schloss made a real effort to search his memory for recipes worthy of the visitor, but he quickly gave up, at the request of the
Anderer
himself. Despite his round body and his red cheeks, he ate almost nothing. At the end of a meal, his plate was never empty; half the food was untouched. By contrast, he drank one large glass of water after another, as if always afflicted by a raging thirst. This conduct moved Marcus Graz, a beanpole as lean as a stray dog, to remark that it was a blessing that the
Anderer
didn’t piss in the Staubi, which he would have surely caused to overflow its banks.

In the evening, he’d take only a bowl of soup, and even then it was light fare, more a broth than a soup, and after that he’d bow to whoever was in the inn and go upstairs to his room. The light in his window shone late. Some even said they had seen it all night long. In any case, people wondered what he could be doing up there.

Early in his sojourn among us, he spent a good part of each afternoon walking every street in the village, methodically, as if he were making a grid or a survey. No one really noticed, because to see what he was doing you would have had to follow him all the time, and only the children did that.

Dressed like something out of an old, dusty fable full of obsolete words, he trudged along, slightly slew-footed, his left hand on a handsome cane with an ivory pommel and his right clutching the little black notebook which came and went under his fingers like some odd sort of tamed animal.

Sometimes he took one of his beasts out for a bit of air. He chose either the horse or the donkey, never both at the same time, and he led the animal by its bridle, patting its sides as they walked, down to the banks of the Staubi, a little upriver from the Baptisterbrücke, where the grass was fresh and thick and the grazing good. He himself placed his large buttocks on the riverbank and remained unmoving, watching the current and the bright eddies, as if he expected a miracle to rise up out of them. The children stopped some distance behind him, a little higher up on the slope. They all respected his silence, and not one of them threw a stone into the water.

The first event took place two weeks after the
Anderer’s
arrival in our village. I think it was the mayor’s idea, even though I couldn’t swear it. I’ve never asked him because that’s not important. What
is
important is what happened that evening, the evening of June 10.

By then everyone in the village knew that the
Anderer
was only a transient presence within our walls, but it also seemed clear that he was preparing for an extended sojourn. During the day on June 10, news spread that the village, led by the mayor, was going to welcome the new visitor in a fitting manner. There would be a speech, some music, and even a
Schoppessenwass
, which is the dialect word for a kind of large table, laden with glasses, bottles, and food, which is traditionally set up on certain popular occasions.

Zungfrost
got busy near dawn, building a small platform (which looked rather more like a scaffold, to tell the truth) near the covered market. His hammer blows and his screeching saw could be heard even before the sun started to gnaw away at the blackness of the night; the sound pulled many an onlooker from his bed. By eight o’clock, everyone had heard about the reception. By ten, there were more people in the streets than on a market day. In the afternoon,
Zungfrost
began painting some large, shaky letters on a wide paper banner hung above the platform. They turned out to be an expression of welcome, WI SUND VROH WEN NEU KAMME, an odd formulation which had issued from Diodemus’s brain. While
Zungfrost
finished his job, two peddlers, alerted to the opportunity in some unfathomable way, arrived and began offering the villagers gathered around the market blessed medals, rat poison, knives, thread, almanacs, seeds, pictures, and felt hats. I knew the peddlers, having often encountered them on mountain roads or forest paths. Dirty as earthworms, with hair black as ink, the two were father and son. People called them
De Runhgäre
, “the Runners,” because they were capable of covering considerable distances in very few hours. The father greeted me. I asked him, “Who told you there was a celebration today?”

“The wind.”

“The wind?”

“The wind says a lot, if you know how to listen.”

He looked at me mischievously as he rolled himself a cigarette. “Have you been back to S.?”

“I don’t have authorization. The road’s still closed.”

“So what do you live on? The wind?”

“No, not the wind. The night. When you know it well, the night’s a fairy cape. All you have to do is put it on, and you can go wherever you want!”

He burst out laughing, and his laughter exposed his four remaining teeth, planted in his jawbone like the memories of trees on a desolate hill. Not far from us, Diodemus was absorbed in watching
Zungfrost
, who was putting the finishing touches on his letters. Diodemus gave me a little wave, but only later, when we were side by side and the ceremony was about to begin, did I ask him the question that was troubling me somewhat: “Was that your idea?”

“What idea?”

“The sentence on the banner.”

“Orschwir told me to.”

“Told you to what?”

“To come up with something, some words …”

“Your sentence is pretty odd. Why didn’t you write it in
Deeperschaft
?”

“Orschwir didn’t want me to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

Right there and then I didn’t know, either, but later I had a chance to reflect. The
Anderer
was a mystery. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew where he came from or why he was here. And nobody knew whether he understood when people spoke in dialect. The sentence painted on the banner was perhaps a means of discovering the answer to that last question. A most naïve means, to be sure, and in any case it failed in its purpose, for that evening, when the
Anderer
passed the platform and saw the inscription, he paused briefly, ran his eyes over the words, and then continued on his way. Did he understand what he read? No one knows; he said nothing about it.

Although it’s possible that Diodemus hadn’t intended to be ambiguous, the banner slogan he came up with sounded funny. It means—or rather it can mean—different things, because our dialect is like a springy fabric: it can be stretched in every direction.

“Wi sund vroh wen neu kamme”
can mean “We’re happy when a new person arrives.” But it can also mean “We’re happy when something new comes along,” which isn’t at all the same thing. Strangest of all, the word
vroh
has two meanings, depending on the context: it’s equivalent to “glad” or “happy,” but it also has a connotation of “wary” or “watchful,” and if you favor this second area of meaning, then you find yourself contemplating a bizarre, disquieting statement which nobody perceived at the time but which hasn’t stopped resounding in my head ever since, a kind of warning freighted with a small load of threats, a greeting like a knife brandished in a fist, the blade shaken a little and glinting in the sun.