Brodeck

IV

—

he morning after the Ereigniës, I got up very early. I shaved, dressed, and left the house without a sound. Poupchette and Amelia were still sleeping, while Fedorine was in her chair, dozing and talking a little. She spoke words without coherence or logic in a strange babble drawn from several languages.

Daylight was just beginning to bleach the sky, and the whole village was still bound up in sleep. Very softly, I closed the door behind me. The grass in front of the house was drenched with whitish, almost milky dew, which quivered and dripped on the edges of the clover leaves. It was cold. The peaks of the Prinzhornï looked higher and sharper than usual. I knew that this was a portent of bad weather, and I told myself that before long snow would begin to fall on the village, enveloping it and isolating it even more.

“Zehr mogenhilch, Brodeck!”

I jumped as though caught in some shameful act. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I had nothing to feel guilty about, but I nevertheless leapt like a kid called to order by the goatherd’s switch. I hadn’t recognized the voice, even though it belonged to Göbbler, our neighbor.

He was sitting on the stone bench built against the wall of his house, leaning forward and steadying himself on the stick he held with both hands. I’d never seen him sit on that bench before, except perhaps once or twice on one of the rare summer nights when the air is stifling and oppressive and there are no cool breezes to refresh the village.

Göbbler’s a man past sixty, with a rough-hewn face; he never smiles and seldom speaks. A milky veil is slowly covering his eyes, and he can’t see farther than five meters. The war brought him back to the village, although people say he occupied a position in some administration in S. for years before his return; but no one knows exactly which administration that was, and I don’t think anyone has ever asked him. Now he lives on his pension and his henhouse. Moreover, he’s come to resemble his roosters a little. His eyes move in the same way, and the skin hanging down below his neck has ruddy patches like wattles. His wife, who’s much younger than he, is called Boulla. She’s fat and fond of talking; she smells of grain and onion. They say that a great heat burns between her legs, and that it would take many buckets of water to extinguish it. She seeks men as others look for reasons to exist.

“Yes, indeed, up very early!” Göbbler repeats. “So where are you going?”

It was the first time he’d ever asked me a question. I hesitated. I got fuddled. Words stumbled in my mouth and collided with one another, like stones in a mountain torrent. With the tip of his stick, Göbbler pushed back a snail that was calmly moving toward him and then turned it over. It was a little snail with a yellow-and-black shell and a fine, delicately marked body, full of innocent grace. Caught by surprise, the creature took a few moments to withdraw its body and its fragile horns into its shell, whereupon Göbbler raised his stick and brought it down on the little mollusk, which exploded like a walnut. Then, without taking his eyes off the debris of the snail’s shell and body, now reduced to a slimy, beige pulp, he murmured, “Be careful, Brodeck. Be careful. There’s been trouble enough already.”

He turned his eyes toward me and smiled, drawing back his lips. It was the first time I’d ever seen him really smile, and I got my first glimpse of his teeth. They were gray and pointy, very pointy, as though he’d spent many an evening filing them down. I made no reply. I almost shrugged my shoulders, but I stopped myself. A great shudder ran up and down my back. I pulled my cap down to my ears, pressed the flaps against my temples, and moved away without looking at him again. There was a little sweat on my forehead. One of his cocks crowed, followed by all the others. Their shrieks struck my head like a series of blows. Gusts of wind from the depths of the valley swirled around me, laden with odors of beechnuts, of peat bogs, of heather and wet rock.

On Püppensaltz Street, our main street, old Ohnmeist was going from door to door. Ohnmeist’s a dog, but of a very unusual kind. He gets his name from the fact that he has no master and has never wanted one. He avoids other dogs and children, makes do with very little, and goes around begging for food under kitchen windows. He accompanies whomever he fancies to the fields and sleeps under the stars, and when it’s too cold, he scratches on the doors of barns; people are glad to give him a little hay to lie on and some soup to eat. He’s a big, gangling beast, brown with reddish spots, about the size of a griffon but with a pointer’s short, dense fur. No doubt his blood is a mixture of many strains, but it would be a clever man who could say which ones they were. As he ambled over to sniff me, I remembered how, whenever he crossed the Anderer’s path, Ohnmeist would give two or three little yelps of joy and wag his tail in all directions. Then the Anderer would stop, remove his gloves — beautiful gloves of fine, soft leather — and stroke the animal’s head. It was very strange to see the two of them like that, the dog placid and happy, quietly accepting the Anderer’s caresses, when ordinarily none of us could get close to the beast, much less touch him, and the Anderer, patting the big fellow with his bare hand and looking at him as if he were a human. That morning, Ohnmeist’s eyes were both bright and shifty. He walked beside me for a while, occasionally uttering a brief, melancholy groan. He kept his head low, as if it were suddenly too heavy for him, too filled with distressing thoughts. He left me near the Urbï fountain and disappeared down the narrow street that leads to the river.

I had my own idea, which I’d mulled over at length during the course of my agitated night: I had to speak to Orschwir, the mayor. I had to see him, and he had to tell me what it was that he and the others expected from me. I was almost at the point of doubting my reason. I wondered if I’d understood Göbbler’s words correctly, or if perhaps I’d dreamed him sitting there on his bench, or if the scene at the inn the previous night — that clamp of bodies tightening around me, that vise of faces, that request, and that promise — if all that weren’t made of the same stuff that composed some of my stranger dreams.

Orschwir’s house is the only one that truly has the forest at its back. It’s also the biggest house in our village. It gives an impression of affluence and power, but in fact it’s only a farmhouse, a big farmhouse, old, prosperous, paunchy, with immense roofs and walls whose granite and sandstone form an irregular checkerboard, and yet people think of the place as something of a manor house, a château. What’s more, I’m sure Orschwir’s pleased to think of himself, if only occasionally, as lord of the manor. He’s not a bad man, although he’s as ugly as an entire barbarian regiment. People say it was his ugliness, strangely enough, which assured his conquests in former days, when he was young and went to all the dances. People talk a good deal, and so often with nothing to say. One thing that’s sure is that Orschwir wound up marrying the richest girl in the region, Ilde Popenheimer, whose father owned five sawmills and three water mills. In addition to her inheritance, she gave her husband two sons, each the spitting image of his father.

The resemblance didn’t matter much. I speak in the past tense because, in any event, they’re both dead. They died right at the beginning of the war. Their names are carved on the monument the village put up between the church and the cemetery. The statue depicts a woman, swathed in great veils and kneeling on the ground; it’s hard to say whether she’s praying or meditating revenge. The inscribed names include GÜNTER AND GEHRART ORSCHWIR, AGED TWENTY-ONE AND NINETEEN YEARS. My name was on the monument as well, but after I returned, Baerensbourg, the road mender, erased it. The job caused him a great deal of difficulty — it’s always a very delicate undertaking to remove what is written in stone. I can still manage to read my first name on the monument. This makes me smile, but the thing gives Amelia the creeps. She doesn’t like to pass it.

According to a persistent whisper, Orschwir owes his position as mayor to the deaths of his sons; their sacrifice, however, was anything but heroic. They killed themselves at their lookout post while playing with a grenade like a pair of children. After all, that’s what they were, big children still, who thought the war would suddenly make men of them. The explosion could be heard in the village. It was our first explosion. Everyone ran to the little sentry box, which had been built to overlook the road to the border. The post stood right in the middle of the Schönbehe pasture and atop its highest elevation, a hill sheltered by a great brown-red boulder covered with lichen the color of jade. Nothing much was left, either of the box or of the boys. One had died pressing both hands against his belly, trying to hold in his guts; the other’s head, blown clean off by the blast, stared at us fixedly. We buried them two days later, wrapped in sheets of white linen and lying in the oaken coffins which Fixheim, the carpenter, had fashioned with great care. Those two were our first war dead. Father Peiper, who in those days still drank only water, pronounced a sermon on the themes of chance and deliverance. Few of us understood it, but the congregation very much liked the words he chose, most of them rare or very old, and the way he sent them rolling among the pillars, the vaults, the clouds of incense, the soft light of the candles, and the stained-glass windows of our little church.

I entered the farmyard, still deserted at this hour. It’s an immense yard, a little country all by itself, bordered by handsome piles of manure. The entrance is a large postern made of hand-turned wood, painted bright red, and carved with a motif of chestnut leaves; in their midst is the motto BÖDEN UND HERZ GELIECHT, which means, more or less, “Belly and heart united.”

I’ve often pondered the meaning of that phrase. Someone told me the inscription had been added in Orschwir’s grandfather’s day, and on his orders. When I say “someone,” I mean Diodemus, the teacher, who spoke to me about the Orschwir motto. Diodemus was my elder by several years, but we got along like two old comrades. If he had the time, he liked to accompany me while I went around collecting information for my reports, and it was a pleasure to chat with him. He was an uncommon man, who often — not always, but often — showed good sense, who knew many things, doubtless many more than he admitted to knowing, and who had perfect command of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This last quality, in fact, was the reason why the previous mayor appointed him as the teacher, even though Diodemus wasn’t from the village and came from another village to the south of ours, about a four-day hike away.

It’s been three weeks since Diodemus died, in circumstances so strange and so poorly defined that his death made me even more alert to all the little signs I was noticing around me. Fear began to brew gently in my brain. The day after he died, I started writing this account alongside the Report the others had already assigned me to do. I’m writing the two of them at the same time.

Diodemus spent most of his free hours in the village archives. Sometimes I saw a light in his window very late at night. He lived alone, above the school, in a tiny, uncomfortable, dusty apartment. Books, documents, and the records of olden times were his only furniture. “What I’d like to do is to understand,” he confided to me one day. “We never understand anything, or if we do, not much. Men live, in a way, as the blind do, and generally, that’s enough for them. I’d go so far as to say that it’s what they’re looking for: to avoid headaches and dizzy spells, to fill their stomachs, to sleep, to lie between their wives’ thighs when their blood runs too hot, to make war because they’re told to do so, and then to die without knowing what awaits them afterward, but hoping that something’s awaiting them, all the same. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved questions, and I’ve loved the paths you must follow to find the answers. Sometimes, of course, I end up knowing nothing but the path itself, but that’s not so bad; at least I’ve made some progress.”

Maybe that was the cause of his death: Diodemus wanted to understand everything, and he tried to give words and explanations to what is inexplicable and should always remain unexplored. On the day I’m referring to, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him; I think I smiled. Smiling costs nothing.

But there was another time, on a spring afternoon, when we talked about Orschwir, about his postern and the phrase carved on it. This was before the war. Poupchette was not yet born. Diodemus and I had been sitting on the short grass in one of Bourenkopf’s stubble fields, which lie on the way to the valley of the Doura and, beyond it, to the border. Before going back down to the village, we rested for a while near a wayside cross that represented Jesus with an unusual face, the face of a Negro or a Mughal. It was the end of the day. From where we sat, we could see the whole village and cup it in one hand. Its houses looked like the little houses in children’s toys. A fine sunset was gilding the roofs, which were already glistening from the recent rain. Plumes of smoke rose from every dwelling, and in the distance, the slow, sluggish smoke clouds mingled with the shimmering air, blurring the horizon and making it appear almost alive.

Diodemus took some pieces of paper out of his pocket and read me the last pages of the novel he was writing. Novels were his obsession; he wrote at least one a year, on whatever crumpled writing material came to hand, including strips of wrapping paper and the backs of labels. He kept his manuscripts to himself and never showed them to anybody. I was the only one to whom he occasionally read passages from his work. He read them to me, but he expected nothing in return. He never asked my opinion about the passages he read or the subjects they treated. So much the better, because I wouldn’t have been able to say anything. The stories were always more or less the same: complicated tales written in tortuous interminable sentences which evoked conspiracies, treasures buried in deep holes, and young women held as prisoners. I loved Diodemus. I was also very fond of his voice. Its music made me feel drowsy and warm. I would look out at the landscape and listen to the melody. Those were wonderful moments.

I never knew Diodemus’s age. Sometimes I thought he looked quite old. On other occasions, I persuaded myself that he was only a few years my senior. He had a noble face. His profile looked like the head on an ancient Greek or Roman coin, and his curly jet-black hair, which lightly brushed the tops of his shoulders, made me think of certain heroes of the distant past who lie asleep in fairy tales and tragedies and epics, and whom a magic charm sometimes suffices to awaken or destroy. Or, perhaps better than a hero, one of those shepherds of Antiquity, who (as is well known) are more often than not gods in disguise, come among men to seduce them, to guide them, or to bring them to ruin.

“Böden und Herz geliecht,” Diodemus concluded, chewing on a blade of grass as the evening gradually fell on our shoulders. “Funny motto. I wonder where the old fellow came across that. In his head, or in a book? You find some really bizarre things in books sometimes.”