Brodeck

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.

Inside that head of his, which was covered with lumps from paternal beatings, the child — he was about twelve — had a brain filled with knowledge, and his face lit up when he talked about birds. By contrast, his pupils became dull and lusterless again when he turned toward his father and remembered his presence, which our conversation had made the kid forget for a while. Hans paused and contemplated his parent, who was snoring open-mouthed, with one side of his face flattened against the old wood of the tabletop, his cap askew, and white saliva oozing between his lips.

“When I see a dead bird,” Hans Dörfer said to me, “and I pick it up in my hand, tears come into my eyes. I can’t make them not come. Nothing can justify the death of a bird. But if my father croaked all of a sudden, right here, right next to me, I swear I’d dance around the table and buy you a drink. I swear!”