Brodeck

X

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’m still in the shed. I’m having trouble calming down. About half an hour ago, I thought I heard a funny sound coming from near the door, a sound like scraping. I stopped typing and listened closely. Nothing. I held my breath for a long time. No more sound. However, I was sure I’d heard something, and it wasn’t my imagination, because the sound started again a little later, only now it wasn’t near the door, it was along the wall. The sound moved slowly, very slowly, as if it were crawling. I blew out the candle, spun the page out of the typewriter, and stuffed what I’d written inside my shirt. Then I curled up in a corner behind some tools, near an old crate filled with cabbages and turnips. The sound hadn’t stopped. It was still moving, slowly but steadily, sliding along the walls of the shed.

This went on for a long time. Sometimes the sound stopped for a while and then started again. It moved around the perimeter of the shed, always advancing at the same slow pace. As I listened to it turning around me, I felt that I was caught in an invisible vise, and that an equally invisible hand was closing on me, slowly but surely.

The sound traveled along each of the four walls, making a complete circuit around the shed and returning to the door. In the most absolute silence, I watched the metal door handle pivot downward. I thought about all the tales that Fedorine knows by heart, stories in which objects speak, châteaux cross mountains and plains in a single night, queens sleep for a thousand years, trees change into noble lords, roots spring from the earth and strangle people, and springs have the power to heal festering wounds and soothe overwhelming grief.

The door opened, just barely, in the unbroken silence. I tried to shrink deeper into the corner, to envelop myself in darkness. I could see nothing. And I couldn’t hear my heart anymore. It was as if it had stopped beating, as if it too were waiting for something to happen. A hand took hold of the door and opened it wide. The moon stuck its face between two clouds. Göbbler’s body and bumpkinish head were outlined in the doorway. I was reminded of the silhouettes that street vendors in the Capital used to cut out; they worked in the big Albergeplatz market, scissoring smoke-blackened paper into the shapes of gnomes or monsters.

A gust of wind rushed through the open doorway, carrying the scent of frozen snow. Göbbler stood unmoving, searching the shadows. I didn’t budge. I knew that he couldn’t see me where I was, nor for that matter could I see him, but I smelled his odor, an odor of henhouse and damp fowl.

“Not gone to bed yet, Brodeck? You won’t answer me? But I know you’re there. I saw the light under your door, and I heard the typewriter …”

In the darkness, his voice took on some odd intonations. “I’m watching you, Brodeck,” he said. “Be careful!”

The door closed again, and Göbbler’s silhouette disappeared. For several seconds, I could hear his retreating footsteps. I imagined his heavy greased-leather boots and their muddy soles leaving dirty brown marks on the thin layer of snow.

I stayed in my corner, unmoving, for a good while. I breathed as little as I could and told my heart to calm down. I spoke to it as one speaks to an animal.

Outside, the wind began to blow harder. The shed started shaking. I was cold. All of a sudden, my fear gave way to anger. What did that chicken merchant want with me? And what was he up to, anyway? Did I watch his movements, or spy on his fat wife? Had he barged into my house without knocking just to make a few veiled threats? By what right? The fact that he’d joined the others in their awful deed didn’t make him a judge! The one real innocent among them all was me! It was me! The only one! The only one …

The only one.

Yes, I was the only one.

As I said those words to myself, I suddenly heard how dangerous they sounded; to be innocent in the midst of the guilty was, after all, the same as being guilty in the midst of the innocent. Then it occurred to me to wonder why, on that famous night — the night of the Ereigniës—all the men of the village were in Schloss’s inn at the same time; all the men except me. I had never thought about that before. I’d never thought about it because until then I’d told myself, quite naïvely that I was lucky not to have been there, and I’d let it go at that. But they couldn’t all have just happened to decide, at the same time, to go over to the inn for a glass of wine or a mug of beer. If they were all there, it must have been because they had an appointment. An appointment from which I had been excluded. Why? Why?

Another cold shiver ran over me. I was still in the dark: in the dark inside the shed, and in the dark about my question. And all at once the memory of the first day started bouncing around in my head like a saw in wood too green to cut. The day of my return from the camp, at the end of my long march, when I finally entered the streets of our village.

The faces of all those I encountered that day appeared before my mind’s eye: first, at the gate, the two Glacker girls — the older one, with a head like a garden dormouse, and her younger sister, whose eyes are buried in fat; then, in the narrow street that leads to the pressing sheds, Gott the blacksmith, his arms covered with red fur; in front of her café at the corner of Unteral Lane, old lady Fülltach; near the Bieder fountain, Ketzenwir, hauling on a rope attached to a sick cow; at the entrance to the covered market, holding his belly in his hands and talking to Prossa the forester, Otto Mielk, who when he saw my ghostly self opened his mouth so wide that his crooked little cigar dropped from his lips; and then all the others, some of whom emerged from their walls as though from their graves and formed a circle around me, surrounding me without speaking all the way to my house; and, especially, those who quickly withdrew into their own houses and shut their doors, as if I had come back carrying a full load of trouble or hate or vengeance, which I intended to scatter into the air like cold ashes.

I could paint them, those faces, if I had colors and brushes and the Anderer’s talent. Most of all, I’d want to paint their eyes, in which at the time I read only surprise. Now that I seem to know them better, I realize that they contained a great many things; they were like the ponds that summer leaves behind in the drained peat bogs in Trauerprinz glade, which harbor all manner of aggressive rot, tiny grinders ready to chew to bits anything that might hinder them from accomplishing their narrow destiny.

I had recently returned from the bowels of the earth. I was lucky to get out of the Kazerskwir alive, to climb up out of that pit, and every step I took away from it had seemed like a resurrection. My body, however, was the body of a dead man. In the places I passed through on the long road back, children fled weeping at the sight of me, as if they had seen the devil, while men and women came out of their houses and approached me, turning in circles around me, almost touching me. Some gave me bread, a bit of cheese, a roasted potato, but others treated me like a wicked thing, throwing pebbles and spitting at me and calling me filthy names. None of that was anything compared to what I had left behind. I knew that I had come from too far away for them, and it wasn’t a matter of mere kilometers. I came from a country which had no existence in their minds, a country which had never appeared on any map, a country no tale had ever evoked, a country which had sprung from the earth and flourished for a few months, but whose memory was destined to weigh heavily for centuries.

How I was able to walk so far, to trample all those paths under my bare feet, I couldn’t say. Perhaps quite simply because, without knowing it, I was already dead. Yes, maybe I was dead like the others in the camp, like all the others, but I didn’t know it, I didn’t want to know it; and maybe by refusing I’d managed to elude the gatekeepers of the Underworld, the real Underworld, who had such a multitude arriving just then that they’d allowed me to turn back, telling themselves that, after all, I was bound to return sooner or later and take my place in the great cohort.

I walked and walked and walked. I walked to Amelia. I was heading for her. I was going home. I never stopped repeating to myself that I was going home to her. Her face was on the horizon, her sweetness, her laugh, her skin, her voice of velvet and gravel, and her accent, which gave each of her words a certain awkwardness; when she spoke, she was like a child who stumbles on a stone, nearly falls, regains its balance, and bursts out laughing. There was also her fragrance, a scent of infinite air, of moss and sun. I spoke to her as I walked. I told her I was coming home. Amelia. My Amelia.

To be fair, I must point out that not all those whom I met on my long road treated me like a stray dog or a plague-stricken beggar. There was also the old man.

One evening, I came to a small town on the other side of the border, in the land of the Fratergekeime, in their country, a place which had been strangely spared, and where all the houses were still standing, still intact: no holes, no yawning gaps, no collapsed roofs, no burned barns. The sturdy, well-preserved church overlooked the little cemetery spread out at its feet between some carefully tended vegetable gardens and an alley lined with lime trees. None of the shops had been pillaged in any way. The town hall was unharmed, and some pretty cows with brown coats and peaceful eyes were silently drinking from the troughs of the big fountains, while the boy in charge of the beasts, which were on their way to the milking shed, played with a red wooden top.

The old man was sitting on a bench set against the façade of one of the last houses on the way out of town. He seemed to be sleeping, his hands resting on a holly-wood cane and his pipe gone out. A felt hat covered up half of his face. I’d already passed him when I heard him call me. He had a slow voice, a voice very like a brotherly hand placed on a shoulder: “Come … come here …”

For a moment, I thought I’d dreamed his voice. Then he said, “Yes, I’m talking to you, young man!”

That was a funny thing for him to call me, “young man.” I even felt an urge to smile. But I didn’t know how to smile anymore. The muscles of my mouth, my lips, and my eyes had forgotten how to do it, and my broken teeth hurt.

I was no longer a young man. I had aged several centuries in the camp. I had exhausted the topic. But the longer we prisoners labored in our strange apprenticeship, the more our bodies melted away. I had left home as round as a ball, but in the camp I watched as my skin got closer and closer to my bones. In the end, we all looked the same. We’d become shadows, each of us indistinguishable from the rest. We could be mistaken for one another. A couple of us could be eliminated every day, because a couple of others could be added immediately, and no one could tell the difference. The camp was always occupied by the same silhouettes and the same bony faces. We weren’t ourselves anymore. We didn’t belong to ourselves anymore. We weren’t men anymore. We were all of the same sort.