Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

“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.

—

he fact remains that the Anderer made a couple of calm remarks on that fateful spring day, smiling all the while, then got back on his horse, abandoned Gunther Beckenfür without another word, and continued on to the village. Beckenfür stood there for a long time, watching him go until he disappeared behind the Kölnke rocks.

But before he reached the village, he must necessarily have stopped somewhere. I’ve worked out the times, and there’s a gap between the moment when Beckenfür lost the Anderer from sight and the instant when he passed through the village gate, at dusk, under the eyes of the eldest Dörfer boy who was hanging about, reluctant to go home because his father was roaring drunk again and threatening to disembowel him. It’s a gap that not even the indolent gait of the Anderer ’s horse can sufficiently explain. Upon reflection, I think he stopped near the river, by the Baptisterbrücke, at the place where the road makes a curious winding turn in a field of grass as tender as a child’s cheek. I can’t see where else he might have gone. The view is very beautiful in that spot, and if someone doesn’t know our region, that’s the place where he can feel it like a piece of fabric, for from there he can see the roofs of the village, he can hear its sounds, and above all, he can be amazed by the river.

The Staubi isn’t a watercourse that fits the landscape it’s in. One would expect to find here a sluggish, meandering stream, overflowing and spreading out into the meadows and bogging down among the golden-headed buttercups; one would expect slow-moving algae, as soft as wet hair. Instead we have an impetuous, romping torrent, which hisses, cries, collides, churns up gravel, and wears down the rocks showing through its surface as it hurls water and foam into the air. The Staubi’s a true, untamed mountain savage, clear and sharp as crystal; you can see the gray flashes of trout in its depths. Summer and winter, its water is cold enough to chill the inside of your skull, and occasionally, during the war, creatures other than fish were found floating in the river, blue creatures, some of them still looking a bit astonished, others with their eyes well closed, as if they’d been put to sleep by surprise and tucked into lovely liquid sheets.

From my conversations with him, I’m certain that the Anderer took the time to observe our river. Staubi — it’s a funny name. It means nothing, not even in our dialect. No one knows where it came from. Diodemus himself, in all the pages that he read and rummaged through, failed to find its origin or its meaning. They’re strange, names are. Sometimes you know nothing about them, and yet you’re always saying them. Basically, they’re like people: I mean like the ones whose paths you cross for years but never know, until one day, before your eyes, they reveal themselves to be what you would never have imagined them capable of being.