Brodeck

XXXVII

—

’ve never killed any donkeys or horses.

I’ve done much worse.

Yes, much worse.

At night, I walk along the rim of the Kazerskwir.

I see the railway car again.

I see the six days I spent in the railway car.

I see the six nights again, too, and especially, like a never-fading nightmare, the fifth of those nights.

As I’ve already said, we were held for a week at the train station in S., and then we were separated into two columns and put on trains. We were all Fremdër. Some rich, some poor. Some from the city, others from the country. Such distinctions were quickly blurred. We were shoved into big, windowless freight cars. There was a bit of straw, already soiled, on the wooden floor. Under normal conditions, each car had room for about thirty persons to sit very close together. The guards pushed more than double that number into our car. There were cries, moans, protests, tears. An old man fell down. Some people near him tried to raise him up, but the guards thrust in still more prisoners, causing unpredictable, abrupt movements among those already there. The old man was trampled by the very people who had tried to save him.

He was the first to die in our car.

A few minutes later, having loaded the freight onto the cars, the guards slid the big iron doors shut and bolted them, plunging us into darkness. The only daylight that entered the car came through a few small cracks. The train started moving with a great lurch, which served to press us even more tightly together. The journey began.

It was in these circumstances that I made the acquaintance of the student Kelmar. Chance had placed us side by side. Kelmar was on my right, while on my left was a young woman with a child in her arms, a baby a few months old. She held the child close the whole time. We felt our companions’ heat and smelled the odors of their skin, their hair, their perspiration, their clothes. You couldn’t move without making your neighbor move. You couldn’t get up or shift position. The occasional jolts of the train further compressed us. People spoke in low voices at first; later, they didn’t speak at all. There was some weeping, but very little. Sometimes a child hummed a tune, but most of the time there was silence, nothing but silence, and the sound of the axles and the iron wheels pounding the rails. Sometimes the train rolled along for hours without stopping; sometimes it remained at a standstill, but we never knew where or why. Over the course of six days, the big door was opened only once, and that wasn’t until the fifth day, nor was it done with any intention of letting us out; hands with no faces behind them doused us with several buckets of tepid water.

Unlike some of our more provident companions, neither Kelmar nor I had brought anything to eat or drink. But strangely enough — at least for the first few days — we didn’t suffer much from hunger and thirst. We talked softly to each other. We evoked memories of the Capital. We discussed the books we’d read, the comrades we’d had at the University, and the cafés I used to pass with Ulli Rätte, the same cafés in which Kelmar, who came from a well-to-do family, used to meet his friends to drink burned brandy and beer and large cups of creamy chocolate. Kelmar told me about his family: about his father, who was a fur merchant; about his mother, who spent her days playing piano in their great house on the banks of the river; and about his six sisters, who ranged in age from ten to eighteen. He told me their names, but I can’t remember them. I talked to him about Amelia and Fedorine, about our village and its surroundings, its landscapes, its springs, its forests, its flowers, and its animals.

Thus, for three days, our food and drink were words, and we nourished each other with them in the stinking heat of the railway car. Sometimes at night we managed to sleep a little, but when we couldn’t, we continued our conversations. The child in the young woman’s arms made no sound. He took her breast when she gave it to him, but he never demanded it. I watched him with the nipple in his little mouth, creasing his cheeks in his effort to draw out some milk, but his mother’s breasts looked flaccid and empty, and the baby soon grew tired of sucking in vain. Then his mother produced a glass demijohn enclosed in wicker-work and poured a little water into his mouth. Others in the car had similar treasures — a bit of bread, a chunk of cheese, some cookies or sausage or water, which they guarded jealously and kept under their clothes, next to their skin.

In the beginning, I was very thirsty. My mouth burned. I felt as though my tongue was becoming enormous and dry, like an old stump, filling my mouth to the point of bursting. I had no more saliva. My teeth were like red-hot daggers, thrusting their little points into my gums. I believed they were bleeding, but then I passed my fingers over them and saw that it was only an illusion. Gradually, bizarrely my thirst disappeared. I was feeling weaker and weaker, but I wasn’t thirsty anymore. And barely hungry. The two of us, Kelmar and I, kept on talking.

The young woman paid no attention to us. She surely must have heard us, however, and I know she could feel me as I felt her, her hip against mine, her shoulder, sometimes even her head, striking my head or leaning on me in sleep. She never said a word to us. She held her baby close, and likewise her equally precious demijohn, rationing the water methodically and sparing only a little at a time for herself and her child.

We had lost all sense of time and place. I don’t mean the immediate place we were in, bounded by the dimensions of the freight car, but the geography our train was slowly lumbering through. What direction were we traveling in? What was our destination? What regions, what countries were we crossing? Did they exist on any maps?

Today I know that they existed on no map and came into being as our train rolled over them. Our freight car and all the other cars like ours — carriages in which, as in ours, dozens of women, children, and men, gasping for air, consumed by thirst, fever, and hunger, were pressed against one another, sometimes the dead against the living — our car and the other cars were inventing, from one minute to the next, a country, the land of inhumanity, of the negation of all humanity, and the camp was going to be that country’s heart. That was the journey we were making, the likes of which nobody had ever made before us — I mean not so methodical, so thorough, so efficient a journey as ours, which left no leeway for the unforeseen.

We’d stopped counting the hours, the nights, the appearances of the sun through the cracks. In the beginning, such calculations had helped us, as had our efforts to orient ourselves, to say that we were traveling east, or rather south, or now in a northerly direction. But then we gave up what was only a source of sorrow. We made no more estimates and had no idea where we were. I don’t even think we hoped to arrive anywhere. The desire to do so had abandoned us.

Only much later, in thinking over that terrible journey, in trying to remember it, in trying to relive it, did I come to the conclusion that it lasted six days and six nights. And since reaching that conclusion, I’ve often thought that such a period of time was no accident. Our tormentors believed in God. They were well aware that, according to the Scriptures, it had taken Him six days to create the world. I’m sure they told one another they needed six days to start destroying it. Destroying it in us. And if the seventh day was the day of rest for Him, for us, when the guards opened the doors of the freight cars and drove us out with their truncheons, it was the end.

But for me and for Kelmar, there had also been the fifth day. That morning, the door of the freight car was opened a little and buckets of water thrown at us — warm, muddy water, which splashed over our filthy, jumbled, and in some cases dead bodies, and which, instead of refreshing and soothing us, did the opposite; it burned us and scalded us. That stale water recalled to our memories all the pure, clear, limpid water we’d drunk so avidly in days gone by.

The thirst came back. But this time, no doubt because our bodies were nearing extinction and our enfeebled minds were abandoning themselves to delirium, the thirst we felt made madmen of us. Let no one misunderstand me: I’m not seeking to excuse what we did.

The young woman beside me was still alive, and so was her baby. They were breathing rather feebly, but nonetheless they were breathing. It was their demijohn of water that had kept them alive, and in that demijohn, which seemed to Kelmar and me inexhaustible, there was still some water. We could hear it lapping against the inner sides of the bottle at every movement of the freight car, making a beautiful and unbearable music reminiscent of little streams, of flowing springs, of fountain melodies. The exhausted young woman more and more frequently closed her eyes and let herself drop into a sort of thick sleep out of which she would awaken abruptly, with a start, a few minutes later. Over the course of the past several days, her face had aged ten years, and so had her baby’s face, which took on the strange features of a little old man reduced to the proportions of a newborn.

Kelmar and I had long since stopped talking. Each of us was coping as best he could with the shocks and aftershocks in his brain. We were both trying to reconcile, if possible, our past history and our present state. The car stank of enervated flesh, of excrement and sour humors, and when the train slowed down, it was assailed by countless flies, which abandoned the peaceful countryside, the green grass, and the rested soil to penetrate between the planks and fall upon us, rubbing their wings together as a commentary on our agony.

I believe we saw what we saw at the same instant. Then we turned our heads toward each other with the same movement, and that exchange of looks contained everything. The young woman had dozed off once again, but unlike the previous times, her weakened arms had loosened their grip on her child and her big glass bottle. The baby, who weighed very little, remained attached to his mother’s body, but the demijohn had rolled onto the floor near my left leg. Kelmar and I understood each other without saying a word. I don’t know if we gave the matter any thought. I don’t know if there was anything to think about, and I especially don’t know if we were still capable of thinking. I don’t know what it was, deep down inside of us, that made the decision. Our hands grasped the demijohn at the same time. There was no hesitation. Kelmar and I exchanged one last look, and then we drank in turn, he and I, we drank the warm water from its glass container, we drank it to the last drop, closing our eyes, swallowing greedily, drinking as we’d never drunk water before, in the certainty that what was flowing down our throats was life, yes, life, and the taste of that life was putrid and sublime, bright and insipid, happy and sorrowful, a taste I believe I shall remember with horror until my dying day.

After screaming for a long time, the young woman died. Her child, the baby with the pale, wrinkled little body, the worried brow, and the swollen eyelids, survived her by a few hours. Before she died, she called the people around her thieves and murderers and struck out at everyone within her reach. Her fists were so small and weak that I felt her blows as caresses. I pretended to be asleep. So did Kelmar. The little water we’d drunk had given us back much of our strength and cleared our heads as well — cleared them enough for us to regret what we’d done, to find it abominable, and to keep our eyes shut, not daring to open them and look at her and look at ourselves. The young woman and her baby would doubtless have died in any case, but this thought, however logical it may have been, did not suffice to erase the ignominy of the crime we’d committed. That crime was our tormentors’ great triumph, and we knew it. Kelmar even more than I, perhaps, at that moment, since shortly afterward he chose not to go on. He chose to die quickly. He chose to punish himself.

As for me, I chose to live, and my punishment is my life. That’s the way I see things. My punishment is all the suffering I’ve endured since. It’s Brodeck the Dog. It’s Amelia’s silence, which I sometimes interpret as the greatest of reproaches. It’s my constantly recurring nightmares. And more than anything else, it’s this perpetual feeling of inhabiting a body I stole in a freight car with the help of a few drops of water.