Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

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.