Brodeck

XXVIII

—

’ve just read over my account from the beginning. I’m not talking about the official Report; I mean this whole long confession. It lacks order. I go off in all directions. But I don’t have to justify myself. The words come to my mind like iron shavings to a magnet, and I shake them onto the page without worrying too much about emending them. If my tale looks deformed or monstrous, that’s because it’s made in the image of my life, which I’ve been unable to contain, and which is in disarray.

On June 10, the day of the Schoppessenwass in honor of the Anderer, everyone in the village and quite a few people from outside gathered in the market square and waited in front of the little platform Zungfrost had built. As I’ve said, it had been a long time since I’d gazed upon such a dense concentration of humanity in so restricted a space. I saw only merry, laughing, peaceful folk, but I couldn’t help thinking about the crowds I’d seen back in the days when the Capital was seized by madness, right before Pürische Nacht, and with that thought in mind, I perceived the tranquil countenances around me as masks hiding bloody faces, constantly open mouths, demented eyes.

Viktor Heidekirch’s accordion was playing every tune we knew, and in the warm, soft air of that late afternoon, various strong aromas — of fried food, of grilled sausages, of doughnuts, of waffles, of Wärmspeck—mingled with the more delicate perfumes given off by the hay drying in the fields around the village. Poupchette inhaled them all with delight and clapped her hands at every old song that came out of Heidekirch’s squeezebox. Amelia and Fedorine had stayed home. The sun was in no hurry to disappear behind the crests of the Hörni. It seemed to be taking its time, extending the day a little so as not to miss the party.

All at once, you could tell that the ceremony was about to begin. Something like a wave ran through the crowd, gently moving it like the leaves of an ash tree stirred by a breeze. Viktor Heidekirch, perhaps at a signal arranged in advance, silenced his instrument. You could still hear a few voices, a few laughs, a few shouts, but they gradually died down, fading into a great silence. That was when I smelled the henhouse odor. I turned around and saw Göbbler standing two steps away. He greeted me by raising his odd beret, which was made of woven straw. “Going to the show, neighbor?”

“What show?” I asked.

With a slight wave of his hand, Göbbler indicated everything around us. He sniggered. I made no reply. Poupchette pulled my hair: “Black curls, Daddy, black curls!” Suddenly, about ten meters away on my right, there was movement, the sounds of shoes scraping the ground and shuffling as people stepped aside. We could see Orschwir’s great bulk cleaving the crowd, and behind him, following in his wake, a hat, a hat we’d come to know over the course of the previous two weeks: a sort of black, shiny bowler outside of age and time, unconnected to places or people, for it seemed to float freely in the air, as if there were no head beneath it. The mayor reached the platform and mounted it without a moment’s hesitation; then, as it were from on high, he made a ceremonious gesture, inviting the person under the hat, which was all we could see, to join him.

Very cautiously, accompanied by cracking sounds from the green wood, the Anderer climbed up and stood at Orschwir’s side. The platform was only a few meters high — less than three, in fact — and the stair that Zungfrost had nailed together comprised only six steps, but as you watched the Anderer hoist himself from one to the next, you might have thought he was scaling the highest peak of the Hörni mountains, so slow and effortful was his progress. When he finally reached the mayor’s side, the crowd uttered a murmur of surprise, because it must be said that many of those present were seeing for the first time the person they’d heard so much about — seeing him in flesh and blood and clothes. The platform was neither very wide nor very deep. Zungfrost, who was as thin as a lath, had made a guess as to the appropriate dimensions, probably basing his estimates on his own body. But Orschwir was something of a giant, tall and broad, and the Anderer was as round as a barrel.

The mayor was wearing his fanciest getup, which he generally put on three times a year for the grandest occasions — the village festival, St. Matthew’s Fair, All Souls’ Day. The only feature that distinguished this outfit from his everyday attire was a green braided jacket fastened by six frogged buttons. In order to survive where we live, it’s better to blend in, to not let anything stand out too far, to be as simple and crude as a block of granite emerging from a stubble field. This is a truth which Orschwir has long since understood. He keeps the pomp to a minimum.

The Anderer’s attitude was obviously different. He’d dropped in from the moon or somewhere even farther away; he knew nothing about our ways or what went on inside our heads. Maybe if he’d worn less perfume and pomade, and fewer ribbons, we would have found him less distressing. Maybe if he’d been dressed in coarse cloth and corduroy and an old woolen overcoat, he would have blended in more with our walls, and then, little by little, the village would have — not accepted him; acceptance requires at least five generations — at least tolerated him, as one tolerates certain cats or dogs that arrive out of nowhere, from the depths of the forest, most likely, and enliven our streets with their silent movements and their measured cries.

But the Anderer’s toilette, especially on that day, achieved the opposite of blending in: white jabot, frothing between two black satin lapels; watch chain, key chain, and chains for I don’t know what else covering his paunch with golden hardware; dazzling cuffs and matching buttons; navy-blue frock coat, woven belt, impeccable gibrette, braided trousers; polished shoes and garnet gaiters; not to mention the rouge on his cheeks — his fat cheeks, as full as perfectly ripe apples — his shiny mustache, his brushed side whiskers, or his rosy lips.

He and the mayor, squeezed together on the little platform, formed an odd couple better suited to a circus big top than to a village square. The Anderer was smiling. He’d doffed his hat and was holding it with both hands. He smiled at nothing and looked at no one. People around me began whispering: “Teufläsgot! What kind of a queer duck is this?”

“Is it a man or a balloon?”

“A big ape, I’d say!”

“Maybe that’s the fashion where he comes from.”

“He’s a Dumkof, that’s what he is. Off his rocker!”

“Quiet down, the mayor’s about to speak!”

“Let him speak. We can still admire the prodigy next to him!”

With great difficulty, Orschwir had extracted from one of his pockets two pieces of paper, each folded four times. He smoothed them out for a long moment, trying to put on an air of self-assurance, because it was obvious to his audience that he was somewhat overwhelmed and even uneasy. The speech he read was worth its weight in gold, and I’m going to reproduce it in its entirety. Not that I remember it verbatim; however, a few days ago I simply asked Orschwir for it, because I know he archives everything relating to his office. His reply was, “What do you want it for?”

“For the Report.”

“Why are you going back so far? We didn’t ask you to do all that.”

He made that last observation in a mistrustful tone, as if he suspected a trap. I said, “It’s just that I thought it would be a good idea to show what a friendly welcome our village gave him.”

Orschwir pushed his ledger aside, took the pitcher and the two glasses that the No-Eyed Girl handed him, poured two glasses of beer, and shoved one over to me. It was plain that my request annoyed him. He hesitated for a while, but in the end he said, “If you think it’ll be good for us, then do it.”

He took a little piece of paper, slowly wrote a few words on it, and held it out to me: “Go to the village hall and show that to Hausorn. He’ll find the speech and give it to you.”

“Did you write it?”

Orschwir put his beer glass down and gave me a look that managed to be both irritated and sympathetic. Then he spoke to Die Keinauge in a gentle voice I’d never heard him use before: “Leave us, Lise, will you?”

The little blind girl inclined her head in a slight bow and withdrew. Orschwir waited to answer me until after she’d closed the door behind her. “You see that child, Brodeck? Her eyes, as you know, are dead. She was born with dead eyes. Of all the things you can contemplate around you — that sideboard, that clock, this table my great-grandfather made, that corner of the Tannäringen forest you can glimpse through the window — of all that she can see nothing. Of course, she knows it all exists because she feels it, she inhales it, she touches it, but she can’t see it. And even if she should ask to see it, she wouldn’t be able to see it. So she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t waste time making such a request because she knows no one can fulfill it.”

He stopped and took a long pull on his beer.

“You ought to make an effort to be a little like her, Brodeck. You ought to content yourself with asking for what you can have and for what can serve your purpose. The rest is useless. All it can do is distract you and put I don’t know what kinds of ideas in your head and set them boiling in your brain, and all for nothing! I’m going to tell you something. That night when you agreed to write the Report, you said you would say ‘I,’ but ‘I’ would mean all of us. You remember saying that, right? Well, tell yourself that all of us wrote that speech. Maybe I read it, but we all thought it up together. Be content with that, Brodeck. Another glass?”

At the village hall, Caspar Hausorn made a face when I handed him the mayor’s note. He was about to say something, but he restrained himself at the last instant. He turned his back to me and opened two large drawers. After shifting several registers, he took out a dark-brown cardboard box, which contained dozens of sheets of paper in various sizes. He glanced at them quickly, one by one, until he came to the pages with the speech, which he handed to me without a word. I took them and was about to stick them in my pocket, but he stopped me abruptly. “The mayor’s message says you have the right to read the pages and copy them, but not to remove them.”

With a movement of his head, Hausorn indicated a chair and a small table. Then he adjusted the eyeglasses on his nose and returned to his desk and whatever he’d been writing. I sat down and started copying the speech, taking great care to record every word. From time to time, Hausorn raised his head and gazed at me. The lenses of his glasses were so thick that if you looked through them they made his eyes seem disproportionately large, the size of pigeons’ eggs, and although he was a man whose fine, well-modeled features women had always appreciated, when I saw him like that I thought about an enormous insect, a kind of giant, furious fly attached to the neck of a decapitated human body.

“My dear friends, both those from our village and those visiting from elsewhere in the vicinity, and you, my dear sir, Mister … It is with great pleasure that we welcome you within our walls.”

Before going on to reproduce the rest of what Orschwir said on this occasion, standing on the platform and speaking in the twilight of a mild day so far removed from the cold and the feeling of terror on the night of the Ereigniës, I must allude to the mayor’s moment of confusion and embarrassment when, early in his speech, he said “my dear sir, Mister …,” paused, looked at the Anderer, and waited for him to supply his name, the name that nobody knew. But the Anderer remained mute, smiling without parting his lips, so that the mayor, after repeating “Mister … Mister …?” several times in a gently questioning tone, was obliged to continue his speech without having obtained any satisfaction.

“You are the first, and for the time being the only, person to visit our village since the long, grievous months when the war held this part of the world in its atrocious grip. In former days, and for centuries, our region was traversed by travelers who came up from the great plains of the south and took the mountain route on their way to the distant northern coasts and the port cities. Such travelers always found this village a pleasant, auspicious stopping place, and the old chronicles refer to it by the ancient name Wohlwollend Trast, ‘Kindly Halt.’ We don’t know whether such a halt is the purpose of your stay here. But however that may be, you honor us by your sojourn in the bosom of our modest community. You are as it were the first sign of a springtime of humanity, returning to us after too long a winter, and we hope that after you others will come to visit us and that we will thus gradually reestablish our connection with the community of mankind. Please, my dear Mister …”—and here, once again, Orschwir stopped and looked at the Anderer, giving him the opportunity to say his name, but that name was not spoken, and Orschwir, after clearing his throat one more time, returned to his text—“my dear sir, please don’t judge us too severely or too quickly. We have gone through much adversity, and our isolation has no doubt reduced us to living on the margins of civilization. Nevertheless, to those who really know us, we’re better than we might appear to be. We have known suffering and death, and we must learn again how to live. We must also learn not to forget the past but to overcome it, by banishing it far from us and making sure that it no longer overflows into our present and even less into our future. In the name of every man, woman, and child, and in the name of our beautiful village, which I have the honor to administer, I therefore bid you welcome, my dear”—and this time, the mayor did not pause—“sir, and now I shall yield the floor to you.”

Orschwir looked at the crowd, refolded his pages, and shook the Anderer’s hand, while the applause mounted up to the pink-and-blue sky, where some apparently drunken swallows were challenging one another to speed trials along incoherent courses. The applause gradually died down and silence fell again, heavily. The Anderer smiled, but no one could say at whom or what. At the countryfolk crowded into the first row, who hadn’t understood much of the speech and couldn’t wait to drink the wine and beer? At Orschwir, whose mounting anxiety grew more and more palpable as the silence persisted? At the sky? Maybe at the swallows. He had yet to pronounce a single word when there came a sudden, violent gust of wind, of very balmy, even hot wind, the kind that makes animals nervous in their stalls and sometimes irritates them so much that they begin kicking wildly at walls and doors. The wind assailed the welcome banner, tore it in half, and wrapped itself in the two parts, twisting and ripping off large sections, which swiftly flew away toward the birds, the clouds, the setting sun. The wind departed as it had come, like a thief. What was left of the banner sagged down. Only two words remained: “Wi sund”—“We are.” The rest of the sentence had disappeared into thin air, vaporized, forgotten, destroyed. Once again I noticed a chicken smell, very close to me. Göbbler was at my side, and he spoke into my ear. “We are! What are we, Brodeck? I wonder what we are …”

I made no reply. Poupchette hummed as she sat on my shoulders. She’d clapped very hard during every round of applause. The incident with the banner had distracted the crowd for a few seconds, but now it had calmed down again, and it was waiting. Orschwir was waiting, too, and if you knew him even slightly, you knew that he wouldn’t be able to wait much longer. Maybe the Anderer could sense that as well, for he moved a little, rubbing and stretching his cheeks with both hands; then he brought them down in front of him, joined them as if he were going to pray nodded his head to left and right, smiling all the while, and said, “Thank you.” That was it: “Thank you.” Then he bowed ceremoniously, three times, like an actor on the stage at the end of a play People looked at one another. Some of them opened their mouths so wide that a round loaf of bread could have slipped in without difficulty. Others elbowed their neighbors and exchanged questioning looks. Still others shrugged their shoulders or scratched their heads. Then someone started applauding. It was as good a way as any to ease the embarrassment. Others imitated him. Poupchette was happy again. “Fun, Daddy, fun!”

As for the Anderer, he replaced his hat on his head, climbed down the steps to the platform as slowly as he’d mounted them, and disappeared into the crowd before the eyes of the mayor, who stood there dumbfounded and unmoving, his arms hanging at his sides, while the surviving fragment of the banner teased the fur of his cap and the people at his feet abandoned him, moving briskly toward the trestle tables, the mugs, the glasses, the pitchers, the sausages, and the brioches.