Brodeck

XXXV

—

he next day was hangover day, when the skull pounds away like a drum, all on its own, and one isn’t sure whether what he remembers was dreamed or lived. I believe the majority of those who’d gone wild the previous night must have felt like great fools once they returned to the sober state; perhaps they’d obtained some relief, but they also knew they’d been damned stupid. Not that they were ashamed of their treatment of the Anderer, not at all; in that regard, their minds were set and nothing could change them; but when they thought about it, their furious attack on some scraps of paper could not have seemed the stuff of manly heroism.

The rain suited them fine. They didn’t have to leave their houses or encounter one another or converse or see in others’ eyes what they themselves had done. Only the mayor braved the storms that came sweeping over the village in rapid succession, as if it were April and not August. That evening, he left his house and went directly to the inn. When he arrived, he was soaked to the skin. Schloss was quite surprised to see his door open, since it had remained insistently shut all day long. Moreover, he hadn’t exactly spent the day wishing for customers. It had taken him hours to clean up after the revelers and wash everything, including the floor, all the while maintaining a roaring blaze in the hearth to dry the tiles and consume the rancid air. He’d just finished the long job. Everything — the room, the tables, the walls — had at last regained its customary appearance, as if nothing had happened the previous evening. And at this point, Orschwir made his entrance. Schloss looked at him as if he were a monster, a monster that had taken on a great deal of water, but a monster all the same. The mayor removed the big shepherd’s cloak he’d rigged himself out in and hung it on a nail near the fireplace. He took out a crumpled and rather dirty handkerchief, wiped his face with it, blew his nose in it, folded it up again, stuffed it in his pocket, and finally turned to Schloss, who was leaning on his broom, waiting.

“I have to talk to him. Go get him.”

It was, obviously, an order. No need for Schloss to ask Orschwir to specify who “him” was; there were only two people in the inn, Schloss and the Anderer. As he did each morning, Schloss had placed a breakfast tray — round brioche, raw egg, pot of hot water — in front of his guest’s door. A little later he’d heard, as he did each morning, footsteps on the stairs, followed by the sound of the little rear door opening and closing. That was the door his guest used when he went to visit his donkey and his horse in old Solzner’s stable, which shared a wall with the inn. Shortly thereafter, Schloss had heard the little door open again and the stairs creak again, and then that was all.

In a village like ours, the mayor is somebody. No innkeeper is going to argue with him about what he’s being told to do. So Schloss went upstairs and knocked on the door of his guest’s room. Almost at once, he found himself face-to-face with the Anderer’s smile and presented Orschwir’s request. The Anderer smiled a little more, made no reply, and closed the door. Schloss went back down and said, “I think he’s coming.”

Orschwir replied, “Very good, Schloss. Now, I suppose you have enough work to keep you busy in the kitchen, right?”

The innkeeper, no idiot, mumbled a yes. The mayor drew a complex, finely worked silver key from his pocket and opened the door to the smaller of the two public rooms in the inn, the one reserved for the Erweckens’Bruderschaf.

When Schloss told me all this, I asked him, “You don’t have a key to that door?”

“Of course I don’t! I’ve never even gone into that room! I have no fucking idea what it looks like. I don’t know how many keys there are or who has them, apart from the mayor, and Knopf, and most probably Göbbler, but I’m not even sure about him.”

Schloss came to our house not long ago. He waited until the night was black as pitch and scratched at the door like an animal. I suppose he’d crept along the walls of houses, careful to make no noise and especially trying to avoid being seen. It was the first time he’d ever stepped over our threshold; I wondered what in the world he could want. Fedorine looked at him as if he were rat droppings. She doesn’t like him; as far as she’s concerned, he’s a thief who buys a few commodities cheap and then sells them at very high prices. She calls him Schlocheikei, which in her ancient language is an untranslatable pun combining the innkeeper’s name with a word that means “profiteer.” Soon after he arrived, she made an excuse about having to put Poupchette to bed and left us alone. When she said Poupchette’s name, I saw a sad light glimmer in the innkeeper’s eyes, and I thought about his dead infant son; then, very quickly, the light went out.

“I wanted to talk to you, Brodeck. I have to talk to you. I have to try again to make you see I’m not your enemy, I’m not a bad man. I know you didn’t really believe me that other time. I’m going to tell you what I know. You can do what you want with it, but I warn you, don’t say you got it from me, because if you do, I’ll deny everything. I’ll say you’re lying. I’ll say I never told you that. I’ll even say I never entered your house. Understand?”

I didn’t reply to Schloss. I hadn’t asked him for anything. He’d come on his own. It was up to him to say his piece, without trying to obtain anything at all from me.

Eventually, he told me, the Anderer came downstairs, and the mayor showed him into the little room used by the brotherhood. Then he closed the door behind them.

“Me, I stayed in my kitchen the way Orschwir suggested. But here’s the thing: the closet where I keep the brooms and buckets is built into the wall, and the back of the closet is nothing but planks of wood. I don’t think they were nailed up straight in the first place, and over the years they’ve developed openings as big as eyes. Now, the back of the closet faces their little room. Gerthe knew it. I’m sure she listened to what was said and done in there on certain evenings, even if she never would admit it to me. She knew very well I’d be furious.”

So on the evening in question, Schloss did what he had never before allowed himself to do. Why? Men’s actions are very bizarre; you can cudgel your brains endlessly about human behavior without ever getting to the bottom of it. Did Schloss consider eavesdropping the way for him to become a man, to defy a prohibition and pass a test, to change camps definitively, to do what he thought was just, or to satisfy a curiosity too long suppressed? Whatever his motive, he wedged his big body in among brooms, shovels, buckets, and old dusting rags and glued his ear to the planks.

“Their conversation was weird, Brodeck, believe me! Very weird … In the beginning, you would have thought they understood each other very well; they didn’t need a lot of words; they spoke the same language. The mayor started by declaring that he hadn’t come to apologize. What had happened the previous evening was no doubt regrettable, but it was pretty understandable, he said. The Anderer didn’t move.

“‘The people here are a little uncouth, you see,’ the mayor went on. ‘If they have a wound and you throw pepper in it, they’re going to kick your butt hard and more than once. And your drawings were big handfuls of pepper, weren’t they?’

“‘The drawings are of no importance, Mr. Mayor. Don’t give them another thought,’ the Anderer replied. ‘Had your people not destroyed them, I would have done so myself…’”

At this moment in the recital of his tale, which he was declaiming as if he’d learned it by heart, Schloss paused: “One thing you have to know, Brodeck, is that their conversation was full of long silences. When one of them asked a question, it was a good while before the other replied, and vice versa. I’m sure they were sizing each other up, those two. They reminded me of chess players and the little games they play between moves. You understand what I’m trying to say?”

I made a noncommittal movement with my head. Schloss looked at his hands, which he was pressing together, and went on with his story. Orschwir’s reply to the Anderer was a question: “May I ask you what it was, exactly, that you intended to do when you came to this village?”

“Your village appeared to me to be worthy of interest.”

“But it’s far away from everything.”

“Perhaps that was the very reason. I wished to see what sort of people live far away from everything.”

“The war brought its ravages here as it did elsewhere.”

“‘War ravages and reveals—’”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, Mr. Mayor. It’s a verse translated from a very ancient poem.”

“There’s nothing poetic about war.”

“Of course not, of course not…”

“I think it would be best for you to leave the village. You stir up — whether intentionally or not — you wake up things that have gone to sleep. No good can come of that. Leave the village, please …”

Schloss didn’t remember the rest word for word, because Orschwir abandoned his short phrases and lost himself in an interminable series of confused ramblings. But I know Orschwir’s too crafty to rattle on at random. I’m sure he weighed his thoughts and his words, one by one. He was just feigning uncertainty and confusion.

“It was pretty sly,” Schloss said. “In the end, everything he said was a veiled threat, but it could also be taken to mean just the opposite. And if the Anderer had ever objected to being threatened, Orschwir could always have claimed he’d been misunderstood. Their little encounter lasted for a while longer, but I was getting numb in the closet, and I needed air. My ears were buzzing. I felt as though bees were flying around me. I have too much blood in my head, and sometimes it knocks me for a loop. In any case, at some point I heard them get up and head for the door. And before he opened it, the mayor said a few more words, and then he asked his last question, the one that struck me the most, because his voice changed when he said it, and I know that not much gets to him, but I heard a little fear in his tone. But before that, he said, ‘We don’t even know your name.’”

“‘How important can it be now?’ the Anderer replied. ‘A name is nothing. I could be nobody or everybody’

“Several long seconds passed before Orschwir went on: ‘I wanted to ask you one more question. It’s something that’s preyed on my mind for a good while now.’

“‘I am at your service, Mr. Mayor.’

“‘Were you sent here by someone?’

“The Anderer laughed, you know, his little laugh, almost like a woman’s. Then, after a long, long pause, he finally said, ‘It all depends on your beliefs, Mr. Mayor, it all depends on your beliefs. I shall let you be the judge …’

“And then he laughed again. And that laugh — I tell you, Brodeck, it sent a chill up my spine.”

Schloss was talked out. He looked exhausted but at the same time relieved to have let me in on his secret. I went and got two glasses and a bottle of brandy.

While I was filling the glasses, he asked, with a hint of anxiety, “Do you believe me, Brodeck?”

“Why wouldn’t I believe you, Schloss?”

He bowed his head very low and sipped his brandy.

Whether Schloss told me the truth or not, whether the conversation he reported took place or not, in the exact terms that I’ve transcribed or in other more or less similar terms, the indubitable fact is that the Anderer did not leave the village. What’s likewise indubitable is that, five days later, when the rain stopped and the sun appeared again and people started coming out of their houses and talking to one another, you could hear the last bit of the exchange between the mayor and the Anderer repeated everywhere. Those words were worse than the driest tinder, ready to burst into flames! If we’d had a priest with a functioning brain, he would have thrown buckets of holy water on that blaze; he would have put it out with some well-chosen words and a little common sense. But instead, Peiper poured a little more oil on the fire the following Sunday with his drunken raving during his sermon, babbling something — in what connection, I don’t know — about the Antichrist and the Last Judgment. I don’t know who spoke the word “Devil” first, either, whether it was the priest or someone else, but it suited most of the congregation, and everyone seized upon it. Since the Anderer didn’t want to give his name, the village had found one for him. A name made to his measure. A name which has been put to much use over the centuries, but which never wears out. A name that’s always striking. Effective. Definitive.

Stupidity is a sickness that goes very well with fear. They batten on each other, creating a gangrene that seeks only to propagate itself. Peiper’s sermon and the things the Anderer was supposed to have said combined to make a fine mixture indeed!

He still suspected nothing. He continued to take his little walks until Tuesday, September 3. He didn’t seem surprised when people no longer returned his greetings or crossed themselves in self-defense when they passed him. Not a single child followed him anymore. Having been sternly warned at home, the children all took to their heels as soon as they saw him coming a hundred meters away. Once the cheekiest of them even threw a few stones at him.

Every morning, as was his habit, he went to the stable to visit his horse and his donkey. But in spite of his arrangements with Solzner and the sums he’d paid the stable owner in advance, the Anderer noticed that his animals had been left to themselves. Their drinking trough was empty, as were their mangers. He didn’t complain; he performed the necessary chores himself, rubbed down his two beasts, groomed them, whispered in their ears, reassured them. Miss Julie displayed her yellow teeth, and Mister Socrates bobbed his head up and down while waggling his short tail. This happened Monday evening; I witnessed the scene myself on my way home from a day in the forests. Since I was behind the Anderer, he didn’t see me. I was on the point of stepping into the stable or coughing or saying something, but I did nothing. I stood in the doorway, unmoving. Unlike their master, the animals saw me. Their big soft eyes rested on me. I remained for a moment, hoping one of them would react to my presence — with a little kicking, say, or a grunt or two — but they did nothing. Nothing at all. The Anderer kept on stroking them with his back to me. I continued on my way.