Brodeck

IX

—

’m facing the back wall of the shed. The typewriter’s on the table in front of me. It’s very cold. My fingers are not alone in resembling stones; my nose, too, is as hard as a rock. I can’t feel it anymore.

When I raise my eyes from my page, searching for words, I confront the wall, and then I tell myself that maybe I shouldn’t have put the table against it. It has too much personality. It’s too present. It speaks to me of the camp. I encountered a wall there much like this one.

When we arrived at the camp, the first stop for all of us was the Büxte—the “box.” That’s what the guards called the place, which was a little stone room, about a meter and a half by a meter and a half. Once inside it, you could neither stand up nor lie down.

They drove us out of the railway cars with clubs and a great deal of yelling. Then we had to run to the camp. Three kilometers of bad road, amid shouts and barking dogs, which sometimes bit as well. Those prisoners who fell were finished off at once, bludgeoned by the guards. We were weak; for six days, we had eaten nothing and drunk very little. Our bodies were stiff and numb. Our legs could hardly carry us.

The person toiling along at my side was a student, Moshe Kelmar. We’d traveled to the camp in the same suffocating, crowded boxcar, talking for six days while the big metal vise we were in advanced at a snail’s pace through countryside we couldn’t even see, while our throats became as dry as straw at the end of August, and while the great mass of humanity around us moaned and wept. There was no air and no room. There were people of all ages in the car — old folks, little girls, young men and women. Very close to us, there was a young mother and her child of a few months. A very young mother and her tiny child. I shall remember them all my life.

Kelmar spoke Fedorine’s language, the ancient tongue she had deposited in me, and it came back to my lips quite suddenly and without effort. He knew a great number of books, as well as the names of many flowers; although he’d always lived in the Capital, far from our village and far from the mountains, he even knew the valley periwinkle, which is a sort of legendary flower in our region. He’d never set foot in mountain country, a fact that troubled him exceedingly. He had a young woman’s fingers, fine blond hair, and a delicate face. He was wearing a shirt that had been white, a shirt made of fine linen with an embroidered front, the kind you’d wear to a dance or a romantic rendezvous.

I asked him for news of the Capital, which I knew from my younger days, when I was a student. Back then, people from our province had to cross the border to go to the University. Even though it was located in the Fratergekeime’s capital city, our region had been connected to their country for so many years under the empire that we still felt at home there. Kelmar talked to me about the cafés where students went to drink hot wine and eat cinnamon cakes sprinkled with sesame seeds; about the Elsi Promenade, a walk around a pretty lake where in the summer you could invite girls to go boating and in the winter you could skate; about the main library on Glockenspiel Street, with its thousands of books in gilt bindings; and about the Stüpe canteen, where a fat woman named Fra Gelicke assumed the role of our mother, filling our plates with heaping servings of ragout and our bowls with sausage soup. But when I asked him about some of my very favorite places, Kelmar usually replied that he hadn’t seen them for at least three years, ever since the day when he and all those designated as Fremdër were confined to the old part of the Capital, which had been transformed into a ghetto.

Inside the ghetto, however, there was a place he frequented and about which he talked at length, a place so dear to me that the simple fact of evoking it again today makes my heart beat faster and brings a smile to my soul: the minuscule Stüpispiel Theater, with its tiny stage and its mere four rows of seats. The shows put on there were doubtless the worst in the city, but tickets cost almost nothing, and on cold days in November and December, the little room was as warm and pleasant as a hayrick.

One evening, I went there with a comrade of mine named Ulli Rätte, a fellow student and a lover of the good life, whose constant laughter sounded like a cascade of copper pieces and who was crazy about an apprentice actress. This girl, a roundish brunette, was playing a minor role in a pointless farce. I had nearly dozed off when a young woman took a seat two places away from me. Her unseasonably light clothing showed that her chief reason for coming to the theater was the same as mine. She shivered a little. She resembled a small bird — a fragile, lively willow tit. Her pale pink lips were slightly parted in a smile. She breathed on her small hands, turned in my direction, and gazed at me. An old mountain song says that when love knocks at the door, everything else disappears and the door is all that remains. And so our eyes spoke for more than an hour, and we left the theater like a pair of robots; it took the cold outside to wrench us out of our dream. A bit of snow fell on our shoulders. I dared to ask her to tell me her name. She gave it to me, and it was the most precious of gifts. In the course of the night, I kept murmuring that name, saying it over and over again, as if repeating it endlessly were going to make its owner appear before me, the angel with the hazel eyes: “Amelia, Amelia, Amelia …”

Kelmar and I got out of the freight car at the same time. Like the others, we began to run, protecting our heads with our hands. The guards yelled. Some of them even managed to laugh as they yelled. You might have thought it was just a big comedy, but people were groaning and there was an odor of blood. Kelmar and I grew breathless. We were very hungry and very thirsty. Our legs were unsteady, our joints full of rust. We ran as best we could. The road went on and on. The morning began to drop its pale light on the fields around us, even though the sun had yet to appear in the sky. We passed a big, twisted oak, part of whose foliage had been scorched by lightning. It was shortly after that when Kelmar stopped running. All of a sudden.

“I won’t go any farther, Brodeck,” he said.

I told him he was crazy. The guards were going to catch up with us, I said, and then they would fall on him and kill him.

“I won’t go any farther,” he repeated. “I can’t go on living with that… with what we did.”

I tried to grab him by the sleeve and pull him along willy-nilly. He didn’t budge. I pulled harder. A piece of his shirt remained in my hand. The guards, far off, had by now noticed something. They stopped talking and looked in our direction.

“Come on, come on, quick!” I begged him.

Kelmar calmly sat down in the middle of the dusty road. He said again, “I won’t go any farther,” very softly, very calmly, like someone speaking aloud a serious decision which he has pondered for a long time in the silence of his thoughts.

The guards started walking toward us, faster and faster, and then they began to shout.

“Kelmar,” I murmured. “Kelmar, come on, get up, I beg you!”

He looked at me and smiled. “You’ll think of me when you get back to your country, Brodeck. When you see the valley periwinkle, you’ll think about the student Moshe Kelmar. And then you’ll tell our story. All of it. You’ll tell about the freight car, and about this morning. You’ll tell the story for me, and you’ll tell it for everyone else …”

The small of my back was suddenly aflame. A second truncheon blow cut my shoulder. Two guards were upon us, shouting and striking. Kelmar closed his eyes. A guard shoved me, bellowing at me to get moving. Another blow from his club split my lips. Blood ran into my mouth. I started to run again, weeping as I ran, not because of the pain but because I was thinking of Kelmar, who had made his choice. The shouting receded into the distance behind me. I turned around. The two guards were savaging him as he lay on the ground. His body rocked from right to left, like a poor puppet attacked by wicked boys intent on the fun of breaking its every joint. And some hideous shortcut in my mind brought me to the evening of Pürische Nacht, the Night of Purification.

I have never found the valley periwinkle in our mountains; I have, however, seen it in a book, a precious book. It’s a low-growing flower, with deep-blue petals that appear to be fused shut, never really willing to open. But maybe it no longer grows anywhere. Maybe Nature decided to withdraw it permanently from the big catalogue and deprive humans of its beauty because they didn’t deserve it anymore.

At the end of the road and the end of my run was the entrance to the camp: a large gate of handsomely worked wrought iron, like the entrance to a leisure park or a pleasure garden. There were two sentry boxes, one on either side, painted pink and bright green; the guards inside them stood stiff and straight, and above the gate was a large, gleaming hook, like a butcher’s hook for suspending entire carcasses of beef. A man was hanging from the hook — his hands tied behind his back, a rope around his neck, his eyes wide open and bulging from their sockets, his tongue thick, swollen, protruding between his lips — a poor fellow who resembled us like a brother. His skinny chest bore a placard, on which someone had written in their language, the language of the Fratergekeime (which in the old days was the double of our dialect, its twin sister), ICH BIN NICHTS, “I am nothing.” The wind made his body sway a little. Not far away, three crows watched and waited, craving his eyes like sweetmeats.

Every day a man was hanged like that at the entrance to the camp. When we got up in the morning, each of us thought that perhaps today it would be his turn. The guards rousted us out of the huts where we slept in heaps on the bare ground and lined us up outside. We stood and waited like that for a long time, whatever the weather; we waited for them to choose one of us as that day’s victim. Sometimes the choice was made in three seconds. On other occasions they rolled dice or played cards, with us as the stakes. And we had to stand there, close to them, and wait, un-moving, in perfect ranks. Their games went on and on, and in the end, the winner had the privilege of making his choice. He walked though our ranks. We held our breath. Everyone tried to make himself as insignificant as possible. The guard took his time. Eventually, he stopped in front of a prisoner, touched him with the end of his stick, and simply said, “Du.” The rest of us, all the rest of us, felt a mad joy welling up in the depths of our hearts, an ugly happiness that would endure only until the following day, until the new ceremony, but which allowed us to hold on, to keep holding on.

The “Du” walked off with the guards, who escorted him to the gate. They made him climb a stepladder to the hook. They made him detach the previous day’s hanged man, carry him down on his back, dig a grave for him, and bury him in it. Then the guards made the new victim put on the placard with the words ICH BIN NICHTS, looped the rope around his neck, made him climb to the top of the ladder, and waited for the arrival of the Zeilenesseniss.

Die Zeilenesseniss was the camp commandant’s wife. She was young and moreover inhumanly beautiful, with a beauty composed of excessive blondness and excessive whiteness. She often went walking inside the camp, and we were ordered under pain of death never to meet her eyes.

The Zeilenesseniss never missed the morning hanging. She approached the gate slowly, fresh-faced, her cheeks still ruddy from pure water, soap, and cream. Sometimes the wind carried her scent to us, a scent of wisteria, and ever since then, I can’t smell the fragrance of wisteria without retching and weeping. She wore clean clothes. She was impeccably dressed and coiffed, and as for us, standing a few meters away from her — eaten by the vermin in the rags we wore, which no longer had either shape or color, our bodies filthy and stinking, our skulls shaved and scabby, our bones threatening to poke through every square inch of our skin — we belonged to a different world from hers.

She never came alone. She always carried an infant in her arms, a baby boy a few months old swathed in gay clothes. She gently rocked the child, whispering in his ear or humming the melody of some nursery song. I remember one of them: “Welt, Welt von licht / Manns hanger auf all recht / Welt, Welt von licht / Ô mein kinder so wet stillecht”—“World, world of light / Man’s hand on everything / World, world of light / Be still, my child, my king.”

The baby was always calm when they arrived. He never cried. If he was asleep, she would awaken him with small, patient, infinitely tender gestures, and only when he opened his eyes at last, waved his little arms, wiggled his little thighs, and yawned at the sky would she signal to the guards, with a simple movement of her chin, that the ceremony could start. One of them would give the stepladder a mighty kick and the body of the “Du” would drop, his fall quickly ended by the rope. The Zeilenesseniss watched him for a few minutes, and as she did so a smile came to her lips. She missed nothing and observed everything: the jumps and jolts, the throaty noises, the outthrust, kicking feet, vainly searching for the ground, the expulsive sound of the bowels emptying themselves, and the final immobility, the great silence. At this point, sometimes the child cried a little, I daresay not so much from fright as from hunger and the desire to be suckled, but in any case his mother planted a long kiss on his forehead and calmly left the scene. The three crows took up their positions. I don’t know whether or not they were the same three every day. They all looked alike. So did the guards, but they didn’t peck out our eyes; they contented themselves with our lives. Like her. Like the commandant’s wife. The one we privately called the Zeilenesseniss. Die Zeilenesseniss: “the Woman Who Eats Souls.”

In the aftermath, I’ve often thought about that child, her child. Did he die like her? Is he still alive? If he’s alive, he must be about my little Poupchette’s age. How has he turned out, that little one, who for months was nourished each morning on the warm milk from his mother’s breasts and the spectacle of hundreds of men hanged before his eyes? What does he dream about? What words does he use? Does he still smile? Has he gone mad? Has he forgotten everything, or does his young mind return to the juddering movements of bodies nearing death, to the strangled groans, to the tears running down hollow gray cheeks? To the birds’ harsh cries?

During my first days in the camp, when I was in the Büxte, I talked to Kelmar constantly, as if he were alive at my side. The Büxte was a windowless dungeon cell. The scant light of day came in under the big, iron-bound oaken door. If I opened my eyes, I saw the wall. If I closed my eyes, I saw Kelmar, and behind him, farther off, much farther off, Amelia, her sweet, narrow shoulders, and farther still, Fedorine, weeping and gently shaking her head.

I don’t know how long I remained in the Büxte with those three faces and that wall. A long time, no doubt. Weeks, perhaps months. But be that as it may, over there, in the camp, days, weeks, and months meant nothing. Time didn’t count.

Time didn’t exist anymore.