Brodeck

VI

—

’m trying to return to those moments, to get as close to them as I can, but what I’d really like to do is to forget them and run away, run far away, on light feet and with a brand-new brain.

I have the feeling that I’m the wrong size for my life. I mean, I feel that my life is spilling over everywhere, that it was never cut to fit a man like me, that it’s full of too many things, too many events, too many torments, too many flaws. Is it my fault, perhaps? Is it because I don’t know how to be a man? Because I don’t know how to sort things, how to take what I need and leave the rest? Or maybe it’s the fault of the century I live in, which is like a great crater; the excesses of every day flow into it, and it’s filled with everything that cuts and flays and crushes and chops. My head — sometimes I think my head’s on the point of exploding, like a shell crammed with gunpowder.

That famous day, the day after the Ereigniës, wasn’t so long ago, and yet, in spite of everything, it’s slipping through my fingers. I remember only certain scenes and certain words, very exact and very clear, like bright lights against a deep black background. And I also remember my fear, my fear above all, which I’ve worn like a garment ever since. I can’t cast it off; in spite of my efforts, it’s grown tighter and tighter, as if it shrank a little more every week. The strangest thing is that back in the camp, after I became Brodeck the Dog, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Fear no longer existed for me there; I had moved well beyond it. For fear still belongs to life. Like hyenas circling carrion, fear cannot do without life. That’s what nourishes and sustains it. But I–I was out on life’s margins. I was already halfway across the river.

After I left Orschwir’s farm, I believe I wandered the streets. It was still quite early. My memory focused on the image of the pigs, lying on their sides and looking at me with their glaucous eyes. I tried to banish that vision, but it was tenacious. It planted roots I’ll never be able to destroy. Those animals, their enormous faces, their swollen bellies, and their eyes, their pale eyes, examining me. And their stench, too. Good God … My thoughts joined hands and did a dance together inside my skull. Everything — the hogs, the Anderer’s calm trusting face — spun in a saraband, with no music but the solo violin of Orschwir’s appalling serenity.

I found myself in front of Mother Pitz’s café, which stands against a wall of the old washhouse. I had no doubt headed there because I wanted to be certain I wouldn’t meet anyone, or at least not any man. Only old women frequented the café. You could see them there at any hour, but especially toward evening, drinking cups of herbal tea or little glasses of marc mixed with geneva and a bit of sugar. We call such drinks Liebleiche, “charmers.”

To tell the truth, that café isn’t altogether a café. It’s part of a house, a room adjoining the kitchen. There are three little tables covered with embroidered tablecloths, a couple of chairs around each table, a narrow chimney that draws badly, some green plants in glazed ceramic pots, and on the wall, a severely faded photograph of a young man, who smiles at the camera and smoothes his mustache with two fingers. Mother Pitz is over seventy-five years old. She’s bent in half, as though folded at a right angle. When kids pass her in the street, they call her Die Fleckarei—“the Bracket.” The young man in the photograph is her husband, Augustus Pitz, who died half a century ago.

I must be the only male villager who occasionally sets foot in Mother Pitz’s place. Sometimes she helps me, and that’s why I go there. She knows all the plants that grow on the plateau, even the rarest ones, and when I can’t find them in my books, I go and ask her, and we spend a few hours talking about flowers and grasses, about footpaths and undergrowth, about pastures grazed by sheep, goats, and cows, and also by the hungry wind, which never stops; about all the places where she can’t go anymore and hasn’t seen for a long time.

“My wings have been clipped, Brodeck,” she says. “My life was really up there, with the flocks in the high stubble. Down here I suffocate. The air’s too low. Down here it’s like being a worm, you creep along the surface of the earth and eat dust, but up there …”

She has the finest dried-plant collection I have ever seen: an entire armoire, filled to bursting with large books between whose dark-brown cardboard covers she’s pressed examples of flowers and plants from the mountain for years and years. She’s recorded below each specimen the place where it was collected, the day, the appearance of the sky, the scent of the plant, its exact color and its orientation, all in her careful handwriting, and occasionally she’s added a brief commentary that has nothing to do with the specimen in question.

That day, when I pushed open her door and the little bells jangled, she asked me at once, “So, Brodeck, you’ve come to see the Great Book of Dead Things again?” To be more precise, since she spoke in dialect, she called her herbarium De Buch vo Stiller un Stillie, which sounds softer and less tragic.

I closed the door as though someone were following me. I’m sure I was making a ghastly face and acting like a conspirator. I went and sat at the table deep in the corner of the room, the one that looks as though it wants to disappear. I asked Mother Pitz for something very strong and very hot, because I was shivering like an old wooden ratchet in the Easter wind. Although the fully risen sun was now reigning over the sky uncontested, I was freezing.

Mother Pitz returned quickly, carrying a steaming cup, and with a gesture bade me drink. I obeyed her like a child, closing my eyes and letting the liquid invade me. My blood grew warmer, followed by my hands and my head. I loosened my jacket collar a little, and then my shirt collar, too. Mother Pitz watched me. The walls moved gently, like poplar leaves, and so did the chairs, approaching the walls as though wanting to ask them to dance. “What’s wrong with you, Brodeck?” she asked me. “Have you seen the devil?”

She was holding my two hands in her own, and her face was quite close to mine. She had big green eyes, very beautiful, with flecks of gold all round the edges of her irises. I remember thinking that eyes have no age, and that when you die, you still have the eyes you had as a child, eyes that opened upon the world one day and haven’t ever let it go.

She gave me a little shake and repeated her question.

What did she know, and what could I tell her? The previous night, only men had been present at Schloss’s inn, and it was with those men that I had come to an agreement. After I returned home, I had said nothing to my women, and in the early hours of the following morning, which was not yet over, I had left the house before they awakened. The others, all the others, hadn’t they done the same with their wives, their sisters, their mothers, their children?

She kept gently pressing my hands, as if she were trying to squeeze the truth out of them. I spoke the words in my mind: “Nothing’s wrong, nothing at all, Mother Pitz. Everything’s normal. Last night, the men of the village killed the Anderer. The killing took place at Schloss’s inn, very simply, like a game of cards or a verbal agreement. It had been building up for a long time. Me, I arrived right after it happened, I’d gone there to buy some butter, and I had nothing to do with the slaughter. I’ve simply been charged with writing the Report on it. I’m supposed to explain what went on from the time he arrived in the village and why they had no choice but to kill him. That’s all.”

Those words never passed my lips. They remained inside. I tried to let them out, but they didn’t want to leave. The old woman stood up, went to the kitchen, and returned with a small pink enamel saucepan. She poured the rest of the brew into my cup and motioned to me to drink it. I drank. The walls started swaying once more. I was very hot. Mother Pitz went away again. When she came back the next time, she was carrying one of the large books that contained her dried plant collection. The label on the cover read Blüte vo Maï un Heilkraüte vo June, which can be translated as “May Flowers and June Simples.” She placed the book on the table in front of me, sat down beside me, and opened the book. “Whatever you’ve got, Brodeck, have a look at my little Sullies and they’ll take your mind off of it.”

Then, as if he had been summoned by those words, I was aware of the Anderer standing behind me and adjusting the gold-rimmed eyeglasses, as I’d often seen him do, on his kind, round, overgrown child’s face; he smiled at me before bowing his big head, adorned with frizzy sideburns, to contemplate the desiccated leaves and lifeless petals in Mother Pitz’s book.

I’ve already noted that he spoke but little. Very little. Sometimes, when I looked at him, the figure of a saint crossed my mind. Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they’re mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.