Brodeck

VII

—

have to tell the story of the Anderer’s arrival among us, but I’m afraid: afraid of waking ghosts, and afraid of the others. The men of the village, I mean, who are no longer with me the way they used to be. Yesterday, for example, Fritz Aschenbach, whom I’ve known for more than twenty years, failed to return my greeting when we met on the slope of the Jornetz. He was coming down from cutting firewood; I was going up to see whether I might still be able to find some chanterelles. For a moment, his silence dumbfounded me. I stopped, turned around, and said to his back, “What’s this, Fritz, you don’t tell me hello?” But he didn’t even slow down or turn his head. He contented himself with spitting copiously to one side; that was his sole reaction. Maybe he was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see or hear me — but thoughts of what? Thoughts about what?

I’m not crazy. I’m not going crazy. Nevertheless, there’s Diodemus’s death to consider, too. (Another death! And a strange death indeed, as I shall soon describe.) Since my time in the camp, I know the wolves outnumber the lambs.

De Anderer arrived late in the afternoon of May 13, which will be a year ago next spring. A gentle, blond-tinged year. Evening came on tiptoe, as if unwilling to bother anyone. In the fields surrounding the village, and in the high pastures, as far as the eye could see, was a vast ocean of white and yellow. The green grass practically disappeared under a dandelion carpet. The wind swayed the flowers or brushed them or bent them, according to its whim, while above them bands of clouds hastened westward and vanished into the Prätze gap. A few patches of snow on the stubble fields still held out against the early-spring warmth, which was slowly lapping them up, reducing them from one day to the next, and would soon change them into clear, cold pools.

It was around five o’clock, perhaps five-thirty when Gunther Beckenfür, who was busy mending the roof of his shepherd’s hut, looked up and saw, heading his way on the road that comes from the border — a road on which nothing has been seen since the end of the war, on which no one travels anymore, and on which it would have occurred to no one to travel — a strange crew.

“Coming on like a real slow train, they were.” That’s Beckenfür talking, answering my question. I write down every word he says in a notebook, literally every word. We’re at his house. He has served me a glass of beer. I’m writing. He’s chewing on the cigarette he has just rolled for himself, half tobacco and half lichen, which fills the room with a stench of burned horn. His old father’s sitting in a corner; his mother’s been dead for a good while. The old man talks to himself. The words rumble and gurgle in his mouth, where no more than two or three teeth remain, and he shakes his fragile starling’s head continuously, like one of the moving cherubs in a church. Snow has started falling outside — the first snow, the one that delights children, the one whose whiteness blinds. We can see the flakes drifting close to the window, like thousands of curious eyes turned on us, and then, as though frightened, rushing away in great clouds toward the street.

“They were barely moving, like the fellow was hauling a load of granite boundary stones all by himself. I stopped working and took a long look, just to see if I was dreaming. But no, I wasn’t dreaming, I definitely saw something, even though I wasn’t sure yet what it was. At first I thought it might be stray animals, and then I thought it was people who’d lost their way or vendors of some kind, because now I could see that there was something a little human about whatever it was. I remember shivering, a real shiver, and not from cold, but from remembering the war, the war and the road it came on, that shitty goddamned road that brought the people here nothing but bad luck and trouble, and there he was, a creature in the shape of a man, with his two beasts which I couldn’t tell what they were, there he was, coming toward the village on that very same road. He could only have come from over there, from the Fratergekeime, those shit-assed sons of infected old whores … Do you remember what they did to Cathor, those sick bastards?”

I nodded. Cathor was the pottery mender. He was also Beckenfür’s brother-in-law. After the Fratergekeime arrived in the village, he tried to play games with them, and he lost. Perhaps I’ll tell about him later.

“I was so fascinated I put down my roofing stones and my tools. I rubbed my eyes and squinted, trying to see as far as I could. It was a vision out of the past. I was flabbergasted. He looked like a fairground entertainer, with his fancy old-style clothes and a pair of circus animals for mounts. Like something from a variety show or a puppet theater.”

Where we live, the horses were slaughtered and eaten a long time ago. And after the war, no one ever gave serious thought to getting new ones. The people of the village didn’t want horses anymore. We preferred donkeys and mules. Real, beastly beasts, with nothing human about them and nothing to remind us of the past. And if someone was arriving on horseback, that necessarily meant that he had come from very far away and that he knew nothing about our region, or about what had happened here, or about our misfortunes.

It wasn’t so much that riding a horse looked old-fashioned; after the war, we all seemed to go back in time. All the misery that the war had sown sprouted up like seeds in an auspicious spring. Farm implements from days gone by — including rickety buggies and patched-up carts — were brought out of barns and mended one way or another with whatever had not been destroyed or stolen. People still work their fields with plowshares forged more than a century ago. Haymaking is manual labor. Everyone’s taken a few steps backward, as if human history has given man a violent kick in the ass and now we have to start over again almost from scratch.

The apparition was moving at a slow trot, looking (according to Beckenfür) left and right, stroking his mount’s neck, and often speaking to the beast (Beckenfür could see his lips moving). The second animal, tied to the horse, was an old but still robust donkey with upright pasterns. It stepped surely, showing no sign of weakness and never swerving, even though it had three large and extremely heavy-looking trunks lashed to its back, as well as various sacks dangling down on either side, like strings of onions hung up in a kitchen.

“Finally, though it took a while, he got close to where I was standing. I thought he looked like some sort of genie, or maybe the Teufeleuzeit my father used to tell me about when I was a little boy and he wanted to scare the crap out of me. It lived in burrows all over the valley, among the foxes and the moles, and fed on lost children and fledglings. Anyway, the new arrival was wearing a strange, melon-shaped hat that looked as though it had been planed. He took it off and greeted me with great ceremony. Then he started dismounting from his horse, a pretty mare with a clean, shiny coat. An elegant, graceful animal, she was. He let himself slide down the side of her belly, very slowly, breathing hard and rubbing his own paunch, which was big and round. When he got his feet on the ground, he dusted off his operetta outfit, namely a kind of frock coat made of cloth and velvet, covered with crimson braids and other froufrous. He had a balloon for a face, with tight skin and red, red cheeks. The donkey groaned a little. The horse answered and shook her head, and that’s when the odd fellow smiled and said, ‘What magnificent country you live in, sir. Yes, truly magnificent country …’

“I figured he was pulling my leg. His animals hadn’t moved — they were like their master, too polite. Right under their noses there was a lot of fine grass, but they didn’t so much as give it a nudge. Other beasts would have had no problem grazing away, but they contented themselves with looking at each other and occasionally exchanging a few words, animal words. Then he pulled out a fancy little watch on a chain and seemed surprised at the time, which made his smile even broader. He nodded in the direction of the village and said, ‘I must arrive before nightfall…’

“He didn’t say the name of our village. He just moved his head in that direction. And then he didn’t even wait for a reply. He knew very well where he was going. He knew! And really, that’s the strangest part of the whole thing, the fact that he wasn’t some hiker who got lost in the mountains, he was actually trying to get to our village. He came here on purpose!”

Beckenfür fell silent and drained his fifth glass of beer. Then he stared dully at the tabletop, whose nicks and scratches formed mysterious patterns. Outside the window, the snow was now falling steadily and straight down. At this rate, it could be piled up a meter high on the roofs and in the streets by morning. And then we, who were already on the margins of the world, would be still more completely cut off from it. That’s often a terrible thing: For some people, isolation can lead only to fantastic ruminations, to a brain full of convoluted, unsound constructions. And when it comes to that game, I know many players who manage to perform some peculiar feats of mental architecture on snowy winter evenings.