Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Having regained some of my strength, I decided to leave one morning, very early, while the sun was rising and the smells of young grass and dew rose with it and invited themselves into the house. My hair, which was growing back in patches, gave me the look of a convalescent who’d survived a disease no physician could have identified with any precision. I still had a lemony complexion, and my eyes were sunk very deep in their sockets.

The previous evening, I’d told the old man that I was thinking about continuing on my way, and he was waiting for me on his threshold. He handed me a gray canvas sack with leather shoulder straps. It contained two large round loaves of bread, a slab of bacon, a sausage, and some clothes. “Take them,” he said. “They’re just your size. They belonged to my son, but he won’t be coming back. It’s probably better so.”

The sack I’d just taken hold of suddenly seemed very heavy. The old man extended his hand to me. “Have a good journey, Brodeck.”

For the first time, his voice shook. So did his hand, which I clasped: a dry, cold, spotted hand that crumpled in my palm. “Please,” he said. “Forgive him … forgive them …” And his voice died, dwindling into a murmur.

—

t’s been at least five days since I left off writing this account. And then, a short while ago, when I took out the packet of pages I keep in a corner of the shed, some of them already had a bit of dirt and a yellow dust like pollen on them. I’m going to have to find a gentler hiding place.

The others suspect nothing. They’re convinced that I’m busy putting together the Report they asked me to write; they think I’m entirely absorbed by my task. The fact that Göbbler found me in my shed very late the other evening has worked in my favor. When I met Orschwir, quite by chance, in the street the following morning, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It seems you’re working hard, Brodeck. Keep it up.” Then he went on his way. It was very early. And I paused to reflect: despite the early hour, Orschwir has already been informed that at midnight I was in my shed, tapping on the typewriter keys. My reflections were interrupted by his voice, which came to my ears again through the freezing dawn mist: “By the way, Brodeck, where are you going with that sack in this weather?” I stopped. Orschwir watched me steadily as he seized both sides of his fur cap and pulled it down a little lower on his head. When he pounded his hands together to warm himself, big streams of vapor surged out of his mouth and rose in the air.

“Am I obligated from now on to answer any question anybody asks me?”

Orschwir produced a small smile, but his smiles greatly resemble grimaces. Then he shook his head slowly, very slowly, as he had done when I went to see him on the day after the Ereigniës . “Brodeck, you wound me. It was a friendly question. Why do you feel you must be on your guard?”

My breath failed me, but I was able to shrug my shoulders, in a way I tried to make as natural as possible. Then I said, “I’m going to see what I can figure out about the foxes. I have to write up a small report on them, too.”

While Orschwir weighed what I had said, he cast several glances at my sack, as if attempting to see what was inside it.

“The foxes? Ah, right… the foxes. Well, have a good day, Brodeck. Better not go too far from the village, though. And … keep me informed,” he said. Then he turned his back to me and continued on his way.

Two weeks or so previously, several hunters and foresters had told me about the foxes. While beating the woods to flush game on one of the first hunts of the season or cutting wood in the forest or simply coming and going, many of them had found dead foxes: young and old, males and females. At first, each of those who came upon the fox carcasses thought they’d died of rabies, which appears regularly in our mountains, does a little killing, and disappears. But none of the dead animals that were found showed any of the characteristic signs of the disease: tongue covered with white froth, pronounced thinness, eyes rolled back, coat dull and matted. On the contrary, the dead foxes were superb specimens and seemed to have been well nourished and in full health. At my request, Brochiert, the butcher, opened up three of them. Their bellies were filled with berries, beechnuts, mice, birds, and green worms. The foxes’ unmarked, unwounded bodies gave no indication of a struggle, so it appeared that they had not died violent deaths. And all the men who found the dead animals had been surprised at their position: lying on their side or on their back, with their forepaws extended as if they were about to take hold of something. Their eyes were closed, and they seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

When I first heard about this, I paid a visit to Ernst-Peter Limmat, who was the principal of the village school for two generations of pupils, including me. He’s over eighty now and hardly ever leaves his house anymore, but time hasn’t been able to dent or damage his brain. He spends most of his time sitting in a high-backed chair in front of his hearth, where a fragrant fire redolent of fir and hornbeam is always burning. He watches the flames, rereads the books in his library, smokes tobacco, and roasts chestnuts, which he then peels with his long, elegant fingers. When I visited him, he gave me a big handful of chestnuts, and after blowing on them, we ate them in small pieces, savoring their hot, oily flesh, while my drenched jacket dried by the fire.

Besides having taught hundreds of children to read and write, Ernst-Peter Limmat was without a doubt the greatest hunter and woodsman in our region. With his eyes closed, he could draw an accurate and detailed map of every forest, every boulder, every mountain crest, and every stream for many kilometers around.

In former days, when class was over, he would take a hike, greatly preferring the company of the tall firs, the birds, and the springs to the company of men. If school happened to be closed during hunting season, he’d sometimes disappear for days on end. We’d see him coming back, his eyes gleaming with pleasure and his game bag filled with grouse, pheasant, and fieldfare; occasionally he had a chamois slung across his shoulders, a beast he’d tracked all the way to the sheer rocks of the Hörni, where in the past more than one hunter had broken his bones.

The oddest thing about Limmat was that he never ate what he killed; he distributed his game among the neediest of the village. When I was little, it was thanks to him that Fedorine and I had meat to eat now and then. As for Limmat himself, he ate nothing but vegetables, clear broths, eggs, trout, and mushrooms; among these last, his decided preference was for the ones called “trumpets of death.” One day he told me that this type was the monarch of mushrooms, and that its sinister look served merely to repel fools and discourage the ignorant. Trumpets of death always adorned the inside of his house, hanging down everywhere in long garlands, and as they dried they filled the place with a smell of licorice and manure. He’d never married. A servant named Mergrite lived with him, a woman very nearly his own age; in the old days, wicked tongues used to say she surely did more than wash his clothes and polish his furniture.

I told him about the fox mystery, about the discoveries of the numerous carcasses, about their peaceful appearance. He searched his memory in vain, unable to recall any precedents, but he promised to consult his books assiduously and report back to me should he discover any references to similar cases in regions other than ours or in other times. Then our conversation turned to the winter, which was approaching with rapid strides, and to the snow, which was encroaching on the village from higher ground, slowly but surely descending the slopes of the mountains and the sides of the valley, and would soon be arriving outside our doors.