Brodeck (5 page)

VI

————

’m trying to return to those moments, to get as close to them as I can, but what I’d really like to do is to forget them and run away, run far away, on light feet and with a brand-new brain.

I have the feeling that I’m the wrong size for my life. I mean, I feel that my life is spilling over everywhere, that it was never cut to fit a man like me, that it’s full of too many things, too many events, too many torments, too many flaws. Is it my fault, perhaps? Is it because I don’t know how to be a man? Because I don’t know how to sort things, how to take what I need and leave the rest? Or maybe it’s the fault of the century I live in, which is like a great crater; the excesses of every day flow into it, and it’s filled with everything that cuts and flays and crushes and chops. My head—sometimes I think my head’s on the point of exploding, like a shell crammed with gunpowder.

That famous day, the day after the
Ereigniës
, wasn’t so long ago, and yet, in spite of everything, it’s slipping through my fingers. I remember only certain scenes and certain words, very exact and very clear, like bright lights against a deep black background. And I also remember my fear, my fear above all, which I’ve worn like a garment ever since. I can’t cast it off; in spite of my efforts, it’s grown tighter and tighter, as if it shrank a little more every week. The strangest thing is that back in the camp, after I became Brodeck the Dog, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Fear no longer existed for me there; I had moved well beyond it. For fear still belongs to life. Like hyenas circling carrion, fear cannot do without life. That’s what nourishes and sustains it. But I—I was out on life’s margins. I was already halfway across the river.

After I left Orschwir’s farm, I believe I wandered the streets. It was still quite early. My memory focused on the image of the pigs, lying on their sides and looking at me with their glaucous eyes. I tried to banish that vision, but it was tenacious. It planted roots I’ll never be able to destroy. Those animals, their enormous faces, their swollen bellies, and their eyes, their pale eyes, examining me. And their stench, too. Good God … My thoughts joined hands and did a dance together inside my skull. Everything—the hogs, the
Anderer’s
calm trusting face—spun in a saraband, with no music but the solo violin of Orschwir’s appalling serenity.

I found myself in front of Mother Pitz’s café, which stands against a wall of the old washhouse. I had no doubt headed there because I wanted to be certain I wouldn’t meet anyone, or at least not any man. Only old women frequented the café. You could see them there at any hour, but especially toward evening, drinking cups of herbal tea or little glasses of marc mixed with geneva and a bit of sugar. We call such drinks
Liebleiche
, “charmers.”

To tell the truth, that café isn’t altogether a café. It’s part of a house, a room adjoining the kitchen. There are three little tables covered with embroidered tablecloths, a couple of chairs around each table, a narrow chimney that draws badly, some green plants in glazed ceramic pots, and on the wall, a severely faded photograph of a young man, who smiles at the camera and smoothes his mustache with two fingers. Mother Pitz is over seventy-five years old. She’s bent in half, as though folded at a right angle. When kids pass her in the street, they call her
Die Fleckarei—
“the Bracket.” The young man in the photograph is her husband, Augustus Pitz, who died half a century ago.

I must be the only male villager who occasionally sets foot in Mother Pitz’s place. Sometimes she helps me, and that’s why I go there. She knows all the plants that grow on the plateau, even the rarest ones, and when I can’t find them in my books, I go and ask her, and we spend a few hours talking about flowers and grasses, about footpaths and undergrowth, about pastures grazed by sheep, goats, and cows, and also by the hungry wind, which never stops; about all the places where she can’t go anymore and hasn’t seen for a long time.

“My wings have been clipped, Brodeck,” she says. “My life was really up there, with the flocks in the high stubble. Down here I suffocate. The air’s too low. Down here it’s like being a worm, you creep along the surface of the earth and eat dust, but up there …”

She has the finest dried-plant collection I have ever seen: an entire armoire, filled to bursting with large books between whose dark-brown cardboard covers she’s pressed examples of flowers and plants from the mountain for years and years. She’s recorded below each specimen the place where it was collected, the day, the appearance of the sky, the scent of the plant, its exact color and its orientation, all in her careful handwriting, and occasionally she’s added a brief commentary that has nothing to do with the specimen in question.

That day, when I pushed open her door and the little bells jangled, she asked me at once, “So, Brodeck, you’ve come to see the Great Book of Dead Things again?” To be more precise, since she spoke in dialect, she called her herbarium
De Buch vo Stiller un Stillie
, which sounds softer and less tragic.

I closed the door as though someone were following me. I’m sure I was making a ghastly face and acting like a conspirator. I went and sat at the table deep in the corner of the room, the one that looks as though it wants to disappear. I asked Mother Pitz for something very strong and very hot, because I was shivering like an old wooden ratchet in the Easter wind. Although the fully risen sun was now reigning over the sky uncontested, I was freezing.

Mother Pitz returned quickly, carrying a steaming cup, and with a gesture bade me drink. I obeyed her like a child, closing my eyes and letting the liquid invade me. My blood grew warmer, followed by my hands and my head. I loosened my jacket collar a little, and then my shirt collar, too. Mother Pitz watched me. The walls moved gently, like poplar leaves, and so did the chairs, approaching the walls as though wanting to ask them to dance. “What’s wrong with you, Brodeck?” she asked me. “Have you seen the devil?”

She was holding my two hands in her own, and her face was quite close to mine. She had big green eyes, very beautiful, with flecks of gold all round the edges of her irises. I remember thinking that eyes have no age, and that when you die, you still have the eyes you had as a child, eyes that opened upon the world one day and haven’t ever let it go.

She gave me a little shake and repeated her question.

What did she know, and what could I tell her? The previous night, only men had been present at Schloss’s inn, and it was with those men that I had come to an agreement. After I returned home, I had said nothing to my women, and in the early hours of the following morning, which was not yet over, I had left the house before they awakened. The others, all the others, hadn’t they done the same with their wives, their sisters, their mothers, their children?

She kept gently pressing my hands, as if she were trying to squeeze the truth out of them. I spoke the words in my mind: “Nothing’s wrong, nothing at all, Mother Pitz. Everything’s normal. Last night, the men of the village killed the
Anderer
. The killing took place at Schloss’s inn, very simply, like a game of cards or a verbal agreement. It had been building up for a long time. Me, I arrived right after it happened, I’d gone there to buy some butter, and I had nothing to do with the slaughter. I’ve simply been charged with writing the Report on it. I’m supposed to explain what went on from the time he arrived in the village and why they had no choice but to kill him. That’s all.”

Those words never passed my lips. They remained inside. I tried to let them out, but they didn’t want to leave. The old woman stood up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a small pink enamel saucepan. She poured the rest of the brew into my cup and motioned to me to drink it. I drank. The walls started swaying once more. I was very hot. Mother Pitz went away again. When she came back the next time, she was carrying one of the large books that contained her dried plant collection. The label on the cover read
Blüte vo Maï un Heilkraüte vo June
, which can be translated as “May Flowers and June Simples.” She placed the book on the table in front of me, sat down beside me, and opened the book. “Whatever you’ve got, Brodeck, have a look at my little
Sullies
and they’ll take your mind off of it.”

Then, as if he had been summoned by those words, I was aware of the
Anderer
standing behind me and adjusting the gold-rimmed eyeglasses, as I’d often seen him do, on his kind, round, overgrown child’s face; he smiled at me before bowing his big head, adorned with frizzy sideburns, to contemplate the desiccated leaves and lifeless petals in Mother Pitz’s book.

I’ve already noted that he spoke but little. Very little. Sometimes, when I looked at him, the figure of a saint crossed my mind. Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they’re mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.

VII

————

have to tell the story of the
Anderer’s
arrival among us, but I’m afraid: afraid of waking ghosts, and afraid of the others. The men of the village, I mean, who are no longer with me the way they used to be. Yesterday, for example, Fritz Aschenbach, whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, failed to return my greeting when we met on the slope of the Jornetz. He was coming down from cutting firewood; I was going up to see whether I might still be able to find some chanterelles. For a moment, his silence dumbfounded me. I stopped, turned around, and said to his back, “What’s this, Fritz, you don’t tell me hello?” But he didn’t even slow down or turn his head. He contented himself with spitting copiously to one side; that was his sole reaction. Maybe he was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see or hear me—but thoughts of what? Thoughts about what?

I’m not crazy. I’m not going crazy. Nevertheless, there’s Diodemus’s death to consider, too. (Another death! And a strange death indeed, as I shall soon describe.) Since my time in the camp, I know the wolves outnumber the lambs.

De Anderer
arrived late in the afternoon of May 13, which will be a year ago next spring. A gentle, blond-tinged year. Evening came on tiptoe, as if unwilling to bother anyone. In the fields surrounding the village, and in the high pastures, as far as the eye could see, was a vast ocean of white and yellow. The green grass practically disappeared under a dandelion carpet. The wind swayed the flowers or brushed them or bent them, according to its whim, while above them bands of clouds hastened westward and vanished into the Prätze gap. A few patches of snow on the stubble fields still held out against the early-spring warmth, which was slowly lapping them up, reducing them from one day to the next, and would soon change them into clear, cold pools.

It was around five o’clock, perhaps five-thirty when Gunther Beckenfür, who was busy mending the roof of his shepherd’s hut, looked up and saw, heading his way on the road that comes from the border—a road on which nothing has been seen since the end of the war, on which no one travels anymore, and on which it would have occurred to no one to travel—a strange crew.

“Coming on like a real slow train, they were.” That’s Beckenfür talking, answering my question. I write down every word he says in a notebook, literally every word. We’re at his house. He has served me a glass of beer. I’m writing. He’s chewing on the cigarette he has just rolled for himself, half tobacco and half lichen, which fills the room with a stench of burned horn. His old father’s sitting in a corner; his mother’s been dead for a good while. The old man talks to himself. The words rumble and gurgle in his mouth, where no more than two or three teeth remain, and he shakes his fragile starling’s head continuously, like one of the moving cherubs in a church. Snow has started falling outside—the first snow, the one that delights children, the one whose whiteness blinds. We can see the flakes drifting close to the window, like thousands of curious eyes turned on us, and then, as though frightened, rushing away in great clouds toward the street.

“They were barely moving, like the fellow was hauling a load of granite boundary stones all by himself. I stopped working and took a long look, just to see if I was dreaming. But no, I wasn’t dreaming, I definitely saw something, even though I wasn’t sure yet what it was. At first I thought it might be stray animals, and then I thought it was people who’d lost their way or vendors of some kind, because now I could see that there was something a little human about whatever it was. I remember shivering, a real shiver, and not from cold, but from remembering the war, the war and the road it came on, that shitty goddamned road that brought the people here nothing but bad luck and trouble, and there he was, a creature in the shape of a man, with his two beasts which I couldn’t tell what they were, there he was, coming toward the village on that very same road. He could only have come from over there, from the
Fratergekeime
, those shit-assed sons of infected old whores … Do you remember what they did to Cathor, those sick bastards?”

I nodded. Cathor was the pottery mender. He was also Beckenfür’s brother-in-law. After the
Fratergekeime
arrived in the village, he tried to play games with them, and he lost. Perhaps I’ll tell about him later.

“I was so fascinated I put down my roofing stones and my tools. I rubbed my eyes and squinted, trying to see as far as I could. It was a vision out of the past. I was flabbergasted. He looked like a fairground entertainer, with his fancy old-style clothes and a pair of circus animals for mounts. Like something from a variety show or a puppet theater.”

Where we live, the horses were slaughtered and eaten a long time ago. And after the war, no one ever gave serious thought to getting new ones. The people of the village didn’t want horses anymore. We preferred donkeys and mules. Real, beastly beasts, with nothing human about them and nothing to remind us of the past. And if someone was arriving on horseback, that necessarily meant that he had come from very far away and that he knew nothing about our region, or about what had happened here, or about our misfortunes.

It wasn’t so much that riding a horse looked old-fashioned; after the war, we all seemed to go back in time. All the misery that the war had sown sprouted up like seeds in an auspicious spring. Farm implements from days gone by—including rickety buggies and patched-up carts—were brought out of barns and mended one way or another with whatever had not been destroyed or stolen. People still work their fields with plowshares forged more than a century ago. Haymaking is manual labor. Everyone’s taken a few steps backward, as if human history has given man a violent kick in the ass and now we have to start over again almost from scratch.

The apparition was moving at a slow trot, looking (according to Beckenfür) left and right, stroking his mount’s neck, and often speaking to the beast (Beckenfür could see his lips moving). The second animal, tied to the horse, was an old but still robust donkey with upright pasterns. It stepped surely, showing no sign of weakness and never swerving, even though it had three large and extremely heavy-looking trunks lashed to its back, as well as various sacks dangling down on either side, like strings of onions hung up in a kitchen.

“Finally, though it took a while, he got close to where I was standing. I thought he looked like some sort of genie, or maybe the
Teufeleuzeit
my father used to tell me about when I was a little boy and he wanted to scare the crap out of me. It lived in burrows all over the valley, among the foxes and the moles, and fed on lost children and fledglings. Anyway, the new arrival was wearing a strange, melon-shaped hat that looked as though it had been planed. He took it off and greeted me with great ceremony. Then he started dismounting from his horse, a pretty mare with a clean, shiny coat. An elegant, graceful animal, she was. He let himself slide down the side of her belly, very slowly, breathing hard and rubbing his own paunch, which was big and round. When he got his feet on the ground, he dusted off his operetta outfit, namely a kind of frock coat made of cloth and velvet, covered with crimson braids and other froufrous. He had a balloon for a face, with tight skin and red, red cheeks. The donkey groaned a little. The horse answered and shook her head, and that’s when the odd fellow smiled and said, ‘What magnificent country you live in, sir. Yes, truly magnificent country …’

“I figured he was pulling my leg. His animals hadn’t moved—they were like their master, too polite. Right under their noses there was a lot of fine grass, but they didn’t so much as give it a nudge. Other beasts would have had no problem grazing away, but they contented themselves with looking at each other and occasionally exchanging a few words, animal words. Then he pulled out a fancy little watch on a chain and seemed surprised at the time, which made his smile even broader. He nodded in the direction of the village and said, ‘I must arrive before nightfall…’

“He didn’t say the name of our village. He just moved his head in that direction. And then he didn’t even wait for a reply. He knew very well where he was going. He knew! And really, that’s the strangest part of the whole thing, the fact that he wasn’t some hiker who got lost in the mountains, he was actually
trying
to get to our village. He came here on purpose!”

Beckenfür fell silent and drained his fifth glass of beer. Then he stared dully at the tabletop, whose nicks and scratches formed mysterious patterns. Outside the window, the snow was now falling steadily and straight down. At this rate, it could be piled up a meter high on the roofs and in the streets by morning. And then we, who were already on the margins of the world, would be still more completely cut off from it. That’s often a terrible thing: For some people, isolation can lead only to fantastic ruminations, to a brain full of convoluted, unsound constructions. And when it comes to that game, I know many players who manage to perform some peculiar feats of mental architecture on snowy winter evenings.