Brodeck (9 page)

XIV

————

t took me nearly two hours to reach Stern’s cabin, whereas normally one good hour is enough. But no one had opened a trail, and as soon as I passed the upper limit of the broadleaf trees and entered the forest of tall firs, the fallen snow became so thick that I sank into it up to my knees. The forest was silent. I saw no animal and no bird. All I heard was the sound of the Staubi, about two hundred meters below me, where it rushes into a fairly sharp bend and crashes into some large rocks.

When I passed near the
Lingen
, I turned my eyes away and didn’t stop moving. I even increased my pace, and the frigid air penetrated into my lungs so deeply that they hurt. I was too afraid of seeing the
Anderer’s
ghost, in the same position as before, sitting on his little stool, surveying the landscape, or maybe stretching out his arms to me in supplication. But supplication for what?

Even had I been in the inn when the others all went mad that night, what could I have done on my own? The least word, the least gesture from me would have meant my life, and I would have suffered the same fate he did. That thought, too, filled me with terror: the knowledge that if I had been in the inn, I wouldn’t have done anything to stop what happened, I would have made myself as small as possible, and I would have looked on impotently as the horrible scene unfolded. That act of cowardice, even though it had never actually taken place, filled me with disgust. At bottom, I was like the others, like all those who surrounded me and charged me with writing the Report, which they hoped would exonerate them.

Stern lives outside the world—I mean, outside our world. All the Sterns have lived the way he does, for as long as anyone can remember: staying in the midst of the forest and maintaining only distant relations with the village. But he’s the last of the Sterns. He’s alone. He’s never taken a wife, and he has no children. His line will die out with him.

He lives by tanning animal skins. He comes down to the village twice every winter, and a little more often in fine weather. He sells his furs as well as various objects that he carves from the trunks and branches of fir trees. With the cash thus acquired, he buys some flour, a sack of potatoes, some dried peas, tobacco, sugar, and salt. And if he’s got any money left over, he drinks it in fruit brandy and makes the climb back to his cabin dead drunk. He never gets lost. His feet know the way.

When I reached the cabin, I found him sitting on the threshold, busy with binding some dead branches together to make a broom. I greeted him. Always suspicious of visitors, he replied with a movement of his head but spoke no word. Then he got up and went inside, leaving the door open.

Many things, both animal and vegetable, were hung up to dry from the ceiling beams; the acrid, violent odors blended and clung to whoever was in the room. The fire in the hearth produced some stingy little flames and a great deal of smoke. Stern dipped a ladle into a kettle and filled two bowls with thick soup, a porridge of groats and chestnuts, which had no doubt been simmering since the early morning. Then he cut two thick slices of hard bread and filled two glasses with dark wine. We sat facing each other and ate in silence, surrounded by a stench, with its overtones of carrion, that many would have fled from. But as for me, I was familiar with stenches. That one didn’t bother me. I had known worse.

In the camp, after my stay in the
Büxte
and before becoming Brodeck the Dog, for a few long months I was the
Scheizeman
, the “shit man.” My task consisted of emptying out the latrines into which more than a thousand prisoners relieved their bowels several times a day. The latrines were large trenches a meter deep, two meters wide, and about four meters long. There were five of them, and my job was to muck them out thoroughly. To accomplish this task, I had only a few tools at my disposal: a big pan attached to a wooden handle, and two large tin buckets. I used the pan to fill the buckets, and then, under escort, I went back and forth to the river, into which I emptied their contents.

The pan, which only a few lengths of old string kept fastened to the handle, often came loose and fell into the latrine. When that happened, I had to jump down, plunge my hands into the mass of ordure, and feel around for the pan. The first few times I did this, I remember puking up my guts and the little they contained. Then I got used to it. You can get used to anything. There are worse things than the smell of shit. A great many things have no smell at all, and yet they rot senses, hearts, and souls more surely than all the excrement in the world.

The two guards who escorted me back and forth held handkerchiefs soaked in brandy over their noses. They kept a few meters away from me and talked about women, sprinkling their tales with obscene particulars that made them laugh and inflamed their faces. I stepped into the river. I emptied the buckets. And I was always surprised at the frenzy of the hundreds of little fish that arrived in a brownish whirl and wallowed in the filth, flicking their thin silvery bodies in every direction, as though driven mad by their stinking food. But the current quickly diluted it, vile though it was, and soon clear water and the movements of algae were all that could be seen, as well as the reflections of the sunlight, which struck the surface of the river and shattered it into a thousand mirrors.

Sometimes the guards, in their drunken euphoria, allowed me to wash myself in the river. I would pick up a round, smooth stone and use it like a bar of soap, rubbing my skin with it to remove the shit and the dirt. Occasionally, I’d manage to catch some of the little fish that were still lingering around my legs, perhaps hoping for another portion. I’d quickly press their bellies with two fingers to squeeze out their guts and pop the fish into my mouth before the guards had time to see me. We were forbidden under pain of death to eat anything other than the two liters of fetid broth we were served in the evening and the chunk of hard, sour bread we got every morning. I chewed those fish for a good long time, as though they were savory delicacies.

Throughout that period, the odor of shit never left me. It was my true and only clothing. The result was that during the night, I had more room to sleep because no one in the hut wanted to be near me. Man is made thus: He prefers to believe himself a pure spirit, a creator of ideas and ideals, of dreams and marvels. He doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s also a material being, and that what flows out between his buttocks is as much a part of him as what stirs and germinates in his brain.

Stern wiped his bowl clean with a piece of bread and then, with a brief whistle, made a slender creature appear out of nowhere: a ferret, which he’d tamed and which kept him company. The small animal went to him and ate from his hand. Every now and then, while it was gobbling away, it cast a curious glance in my direction, and its round, gleaming little eyes looked like black pearls or ripe mulberries. I’d just told Stern everything I knew about the foxes and all about my visits to Limmat and Mother Pitz.

He got slowly to his feet, disappeared into the darkness on the far side of the room, returned, and spread out on the big table several handsome fox skins, bound together with a piece of hemp cord. “You can add these to your fox count,” he said. “Thirteen of them. And I didn’t have to kill them. I found them dead, and all in the position you describe.”

Stern took a pipe and filled it with a mixture of tobacco and chestnut leaves while I stroked the fox furs, which were glossy and thick. Then I asked him what all this could possibly mean. He shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his pipe, which crackled merrily, and exhaled great clouds of smoke that made me cough. “I don’t know anything, Brodeck,” he said. “I know nothing about it. Foxes—I can’t figure out foxes.”

He stopped talking and petted his ferret, which began wrapping itself around his arm and emitting little whimpers. Then he spoke again: “I don’t know anything about foxes. But I remember my grandfather Stern talking about wolves. There were still wolves around here in his time. Nowadays, whenever I see one, if it’s not a wolf ghost, it’s a stray come from far away. Once old Stern told me the story of a pack, a fine pack according to him, more than twenty animals. He enjoyed spying on them and stalking them a little, just to get on their nerves. And then one day, they’re all gone. He stops hearing them and stops seeing them. He tells himself they got tired of his little game and went to stay on the other side of the mountain. The winter passes. A heavy winter, full of snow. Then spring returns. He tramps through all the forests, as though he’s inspecting them, and what does he find at the foot of the big Maulenthal rocks? The remains of the entire pack, in an advanced stage of decay. They were all there, every one of them, old and young, males and females, all with their backs or their skulls broken. Now, as a rule, wolves don’t fall off rocks. Occasionally, one may take an accidental step into thin air, or slip, or the edge of the cliff may crumble under its feet, but just one. Not a whole pack.”

Stern fell silent, looking me right in the eye. I said, “You mean to tell me they all fell to their deaths of their own accord?”

“I’m telling you what old Stern told me, that’s all.”

“But what’s that got to do with the foxes?”

“Wolves, foxes, they’re more or less cousins. Family. Maybe man isn’t the only animal that thinks too much.”

Stern’s pipe had gone out. He relit it, grabbed the little ferret, which was now trying to get inside his jacket, and filled our wineglasses.

A great silence passed over us. I don’t know what Stern was thinking about, but I was busy trying to make what he’d just told me jibe with what old Limmat had said. I got nowhere. Nothing was clear; there was nothing I could incorporate into a Report that an official in S. would have accepted without scowling at it and thrusting it into the stove.

Stern fed the dying fire a few bundles of dried juniper twigs. We spoke for perhaps an hour longer, about the seasons and the winter, about game and woodcutting, but concerning foxes no more was said. Then, seeing that the light was beginning to fade from the sky and I wanted to get home before night, I bade Stern farewell. He accompanied me outside. The wind had risen and was agitating the tops of the tall firs. This caused the branches to shed some large clumps of snow, but the gusting wind broke them up into fine powder, which covered our shoulders like frozen white ash. We shook hands, and then Stern asked me, “How about the
Gewisshor?
Is he still in the village?”

On the point of asking Stern what he was talking about, I remembered that some people had referred to the
Anderer
like that—the
Gewisshor
, the “Learned Man,” the “Scholar”—probably because that was the impression he made. I didn’t answer right away, and suddenly I was cold. And I thought that if Stern was asking me that question, then he didn’t know anything, and on the famous night of the
Ereigniës
, he wasn’t in the inn. So there were at least two of us with no blood on our hands. I didn’t know what to say to him.

“He went away…”

“Then wait,” Stern said and went back into the cabin. When he came out again a few seconds later, he was carrying a package, which he handed to me. “He ordered that from me. It’s already paid for. If he doesn’t come back, you can keep it.”

The package contained an unusual kind of soft hat, a pair of gloves, and a pair of slippers, all in handsome marten fur, beautifully dressed and sewn. I hesitated, but I ended up sticking the package under my arm. That was when Stern looked me in the eye and said, “You know, Brodeck, I don’t think there are any foxes anymore. They’re all dead. They’ll never come back.”

And as I made no reply, not knowing what to say, he shook my hand without another word, and after a few moments’ hesitation, I started off down the trail.

XV

————

s I’ve already related, at the moment when the
Anderer
first arrived in the village and passed through the gate with his animals, night was approaching, creeping down like a cat that’s just spotted a mouse and knows she’ll soon have it in her jaws.

It’s a funny time of day. The streets are deserted, the encroaching darkness turns them into cold, gray blurs, and the houses become shifty silhouettes, full of menace and insinuation. Night has the curious power of changing the most everyday things, the simplest faces. And sometimes it doesn’t so much change them as reveal them, as if bringing out the true natures of landscapes and people by covering them in black. The reader might shrug off everything I’m saying here. He might think I’m describing childish fears, or embellishing a novel. But before judging and condemning, one must imagine the scene: that man, come from out of nowhere—for he really did arrive from out of the blue, as Vurtenhau said (now and again Vurtenhau enunciates a few truths amid a great mass of idiocy)—anyway, as I was saying, one must imagine that fellow, dressed like a character from another century, with his strange beasts and his imposing baggage, entering our village, which no stranger had entered for years, and moreover arriving here just like that, without any ado, with the greatest of ease. Who wouldn’t have been a little afraid?

“I wasn’t afraid of him.”

That’s the Dörfer boy, the eldest, answering my questions. He was the first person in the village to see the
Anderer
when he arrived.

Our conversation takes place in Pipersheim’s café. The boy’s father insisted that we should talk in the café rather than in the family home. He must have figured he’d have a better chance here of downing a few shots in peace. Gustav Dörfer’s a small, drab creature, always bundled in dirty clothes that give off an odor of boiled turnips. He hires himself to the local farms, and when he has a few pennies, he drinks them up. His wife weighs twice as much as he does, but the size disadvantage doesn’t keep him from beating her like a dusty rug when he’s drunk, after trashing the premises and breaking a few of the remaining dishes. He’s given her five children, all of them puny and glum. The eldest is named Hans.

“And what did he say to you?” I ask Hans. The kid looks at his father, as though requesting an authorization to speak, but Dörfer couldn’t care less. He has eyes only for his glass, which is already empty, and he contemplates it, clutching it with both hands and gazing at it with a look of painful melancholy. Pipersheim’s watching us from behind the bar, and I signal to him to refill Dörfer’s glass. Our host puts a hand to his mouth and removes the toothpick he’s constantly sucking, the cause of his punctured, bleeding gums and distressing breath. Then he grabs a bottle, comes to our table, and pours Dörfer another drink. Dörfer’s face brightens a little.

“He asked me the way to Schloss’s inn.”

“Did he know the name, or were you the one who said it?”

“He knew it.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“I gave him directions.”

“And what did he do?”

“He wrote down what I said in his little notebook.”

“And then?”

“And then he gave me four marbles. Pretty ones. He took them out of a bag and said, ‘For your trouble.’”

“‘For your trouble’?”

“Yes. I didn’t understand at first. People don’t say that here.”

“How about the marbles? You still have them?”

“Peter Lülli won them off me. He’s really good. He’s got a whole bagful.”

Gustav Dörfer wasn’t listening to us. His eyes were riveted on his glass and its liquid contents, which were disappearing too fast. The boy drew his shoulders up around his ears. His forehead bore bruises and scabs and bumps and little scars, some fading, some brand new, and his eyes, when you managed to catch and hold them for a few moments, spoke of blows and suffering, of the wounds that constituted his harsh, inalterable daily lot.

I recalled that notebook, which I’d often seen in the
Anderer’s
hands. He wrote down everything in it, including, for example, the directions to an inn located only about sixty meters from where he was standing. The longer his sojourn among us lasted, the larger his little notebook began to loom in people’s minds, and although his producing it on every possible occasion had at first seemed like nothing but an odd compulsion, a comical tic good for smiling at or gossiping about, it quickly became the object of bitter recriminations.

I particularly remember a conversation I overheard on August 3, a market day. It was coming to an end, and the ground was littered with spoiled vegetables, dirty straw, pieces of string, crate fragments, and other inert objects, which seemed to have been left in the market square by the receding waters of an invisible tide.

Poupchette loves the market, and so I take her there with me almost every week. The little animals in their pens—kids, bunnies, chicks, ducklings—make her clap her hands and laugh. And then there are the smells, of fritters and frying and hot wine and roasting chestnuts and grilled meat, and also the sounds, the voices of every pitch and timbre, mingling together as though in a giant basin: the cries, the calls, the chatter of the vendors hawking their wares, the prayers of those selling holy images, the feigned anger essential to proper bargaining. But what Poupchette looks forward to most of all is when Viktor Heidekirch arrives with his accordion and begins to play filling the air with notes that sound sometimes like laments and sometimes like cries of joy. People make way for him and form a circle around him, and suddenly the noise of the market seems to die out, as if everyone were listening to the music, as if it had become, for the moment, more important than everything else.

Viktor turns up at every party and every wedding. He’s the only person in the village who knows music, and also just about the only one in possession of a working musical instrument. I believe there’s a piano in the back room of Schloss’s inn, the one where the
Erweckens’Bruderschaf
meets, and there may be some brass instruments in there as well. Diodemus affirmed that there were, having seen them, he said, one day when the door wasn’t completely closed, and when I teased him about being so well informed, declaring that he must know the room very well and suggesting that maybe he was, in fact, a member of the brotherhood, his face darkened and he told me to shut up. Viktor’s accordion and his voice are also a part of our local memory. That day, he made the women weep and the men’s eyes turn red with his rendition of “Johanni’s Complaint,” a song about love and death whose origins are lost in the mists of time. It tells the story of a young girl who loves but isn’t loved in return, and who, faced with the prospect of seeing the ruler of her heart in another woman’s arms, prefers to step into the Staubi at twilight on a winter day and lie down forever in the cold, moving water.

When de abend gekomm Johanni schlafft en de wasser
Als besser sein en de todt dass alein immer verden
De hertz is a schotke freige who nieman geker
Und ubche madchen kann genug de kusse kaltenen

Sometimes Amelia comes with us. I take her arm. I lead her. She lets herself be guided, and her eyes gaze at things only she can see. On the day of the conversation I want to record, she was sitting on my left, humming her song and moving her head back and forth in a gentle rhythm. On my right, Poupchette was chewing a sausage I’d just bought for her. We leaned against the biggest of the columns supporting the entrance to the covered part of the market. In front of us, a few meters away, old Roswilda Klugenghal, who’s half madwoman and half vagrant, was digging around in some garbage, looking for vegetables and offal. She found a twisted carrot, held it up for inspection, and talked to it as if it were an old acquaintance. At that moment, the voices coming from the other side of the column became audible, voices that I recognized at once.

They belonged to four men: Emil Dorcha, a forester; Ludwig Pfimling, a stableboy; Bern Vogel, a tinsmith; and Caspar Hausorn, one of the mayor’s clerks. Four men already quite overheated, as they’d been drinking since dawn and the market’s festive atmosphere had done nothing to lower their temperatures. They spoke loudly, sometimes stumbling over words, but the tone of their conversation was very clear, and I quickly realized who its subject was.

“Did you see him? Like a weasel, he is, always sniffing around at everything,” Dorcha declared.

“That fellow’s nothing but
rein schlecht
, ‘pure bad,’” Vogel added. “Mark my words—bad and depraved.”

“He doesn’t hurt anybody,” Pfimling pointed out. “He takes walks, he looks around, he smiles all the time.”

“Outside smiles hide inside wiles—you forget the proverb. Besides, you’re so stupid and nearsighted, you wouldn’t see anything wrong with Lucifer himself!”

The speaker was Hausorn, and he’d spat out his words as though they were little pebbles. He went on in a milder tone: “He must have come here for some purpose. Some purpose that isn’t very clear and doesn’t bode well for us.”

“What do you think it is?” Vogel asked him.

“Don’t know yet. I’m racking my brains. I don’t know what it is, but a lad like him is bound to have something in mind.”

“He writes everything in his notebook,” Dorcha observed. “Didn’t you all see him a little while ago, sitting in front of Wuzten’s lambs?”

“Of course we saw him. He stayed there for minutes and minutes, writing stuff down and looking at the lambs the whole time.”

“He wasn’t writing,” Pfimling submitted. “He was drawing. I saw him, and I know you say I don’t see anything, but I saw him drawing. And he was so absorbed in what he was doing that you could’ve eaten off of the top of his head and he wouldn’t have felt anything. I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.”

“Drawing lambs?” Dorcha asked, apparently addressing Hausorn. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How should I know? You think I’ve got all the answers?”

The conversation came to a halt. I imagined it was over for good, not to be taken up again, but I was mistaken. After a while, a voice resumed speaking, but it had become very low and very serious, and I couldn’t identify it. “There aren’t many lambs around here, not among us, I mean … Maybe all that stuff he draws is a bunch of symbols, like in the church Bible, and it’s a way for him to say who’s who and who’s done what and how recently, so he can report it when he goes back where he came from …”

I felt the cold running over my back and rasping my spine. I didn’t like the voice or what it had said, even if the exact meaning of his words remained obscure.

“But then, if he’s using that notebook for what you’re talking about, it mustn’t ever leave the village!”

It was Dorcha who made that last remark; his was a voice I recognized.

“Maybe you’re right,” the other voice said. I still couldn’t make out whose it was. “Maybe that notebook should never go anywhere. Or maybe the person it belongs to is the one who can’t leave, not ever …”

After that, nothing. I waited. I didn’t dare move. Nevertheless, after a few moments, I leaned to one side and sneaked a look around the column. No one was there. The four had left without my hearing them. They’d disappeared into the air, like the veils of fog the southern breeze snatches off our mountain crests on April mornings. I even wondered whether I’d dreamed the things I’d heard. Poupchette pulled my sleeve. “Home, Daddy? Home?”

Her little lips were shiny with sausage grease, and her pretty eyes gleamed merrily. I gave her a big kiss on the forehead and put her on my shoulders. Her hands held on to my hair and her feet beat against my chest. “Giddyap, Daddy! Giddyap!” I took Amelia’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t resist. I hugged her against me, I caressed her beautiful face, I planted a kiss on her cheek, and the three of us returned home like that, while my head still resounded with the voices of the faceless men and the threats they had made, like seeds that asked nothing but time to grow.

Gustav Dörfer eventually passed out on the table in the café, less from drink than from weariness, no doubt: weariness of body, or weariness of life. His kid and I had long since stopped talking about the
Anderer
and changed the subject. It turned out, to my surprise, that the boy had a passion for birds, and he insisted on questioning me about all the species I knew and described in my reports to the administration. And so we talked about the thrushes and their close relatives the fieldfares, and about other birds as well: the March grays, which as their name indicates return to us around the beginning of spring; the crossbills, which abound in the pine forests; the wrens, the titmice, the blackbirds, the ptarmigans, the capercaillies, the mountain pheasants; the blue soldiers, whose unusual name comes from the color of their breast feathers and their propensity for fighting; the crows and ravens; the bullfinches, the eagles, and the owls.