Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Like all the other old men, Limmat had been absent from Schloss’s inn on the night of the Ereigniës , and I wondered if he’d been informed of what had happened. I wasn’t even sure whether he’d known or been told about the Anderer’s presence in our village. I would certainly have liked to talk to him about the affair and get it off my chest.

“I’m delighted to see you haven’t forgotten your old teacher, Brodeck,” he said. “Indeed, I’m touched. Do you remember when you first came to school? I remember your arrival very well. You looked like a skinny dog, with eyes too big for the rest of you. And you spoke a gibberish only you and Fedorine understood. But you learned fast, Brodeck, very fast. Not just our language; the rest, too.”

Mergrite came in, bringing two glasses of hot wine. It smelled of pepper, orange, cloves, and anise. She added two logs to the fire, sending showers of bright sparks into the darkness, and then disappeared.

“You weren’t like the others, Brodeck,” my old schoolteacher went on. “And I don’t say that because you weren’t from here, because you came from far away. You weren’t like the others because you always looked beyond things … You always wanted to see what didn’t exist.”

He fell silent, cracked open a chestnut, slowly ate it, drank a mouthful of wine, and threw the pieces of nutshell into the fire. “I’m thinking about your foxes again. The fox is an odd animal, you know. We say foxes are sly, but in fact, they’re a lot more than that. Man has always hated foxes, doubtless because they’re a little too much like him. Foxes hunt for food, but they’re also capable of killing just for the fun of it.”

Limmat paused for a while and then began to speak again, in a pensive voice: “So many people have died these last years, in the war, as you know better than anyone in the village, alas. Maybe the foxes are only imitating us, who knows?”

I didn’t dare tell my old teacher that I couldn’t put that sort of thing in my account. The officials in the administration who read what I write — if what I write is read at all anymore — would understand nothing, and perhaps they’d think I’d gone mad and decide to do without my services altogether, in which case the paltry sums I receive so irregularly, the money my family lives on, would stop coming to me at all.

I stayed a little longer in his company. We spoke no more about foxes but about a beech tree which some woodcutters had recently felled — because it was sick — on the far side of the Bösenthal. According to them, the tree had to be more than four centuries old. Limmat reminded me that in other climates, on distant continents, there were trees that could live two thousand years. He’d already taught me that when I was a child, and at the time, I thought that God, if he existed, must be quite a strange character, who chooses to allow trees to live peacefully for centuries but makes man’s life so brief and so hard.

After presenting me with two garlands of trumpets of death and walking me to his threshold, Ernst-Peter Limmat asked me for news of Fedorine, and then, more gently, more gravely, he inquired about Amelia and Poupchette.

The rain hadn’t stopped, but now some heavy flakes of wet snow were mingled with it. A little stream flowed down the middle of the street, making the sandstone cobbles gleam. The cold air smelled good, a combination of smoke and moss and undergrowth. I thrust the dried mushrooms into my jacket and went back home.

I asked Mother Pitz the same question about the foxes. Her memory isn’t as good as the old teacher’s, and she’s surely not the expert he is on the subject of game animals and pests, but back in the days when she used to drive her beasts to and from the mountain pastures, she covered all the local roads, side paths, and stubble fields so thoroughly that I hoped she might be able to provide some sort of explanation. By tallying all the figures reported by my various sources, I’d arrived at a total of eighty foxes found dead — a considerable figure, if you think about it. Unfortunately, the old woman had no memory of ever having heard of such a phenomenon, and in the end I realized that she couldn’t possibly care less about it. “I’ll be glad if they all croak!” she declared. “Last year, they carried off my three hens and all their chicks. And then, they didn’t even eat them! They just ripped them to shreds and disappeared. Your foxes are Scheizznegetz’zohns , ‘sons of the damned.’ They’re not even worth the blade of the knife that slits their throats.”

In order to speak to me, she’d interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange and rearrange the deck into pairs, conjuring up wedding celebrations and mended destinies, all the while drinking little glasses of mulberry liqueur. I could see that I was disturbing their concentration.

In the end, I concluded that the only person who could possibly shed light on the matter was Marcus Stern, who lives alone in the middle of the forest, an hour’s walk from the village. He was the person I was off to see on the morning when I ran into Orschwir.

—

he path that leads to Stern’s cabin begins its steep climb almost as soon as you exit the village. You enter the woods, go around a few hairpin curves, and in no time at all you’re looking down at the roofs. At the halfway point on the path, a rock shaped like a table invites the hiker to take a break. The rock is called the Lingen , from the dialect name of the little woodland sprites that are said to gather there and dance on it by moonlight, singing their songs, which sound like muffled laughter. Here and there on the broad rock, small cushions of milky green moss soften its hard surface, and heather provides bouquets of flowers. It’s a fine place for lovers and dreamers. I remember seeing the Anderer there one day in high summer — on July 8, in fact (I make a note of everything) — around three o’clock in the afternoon, that is, in the very hottest part of the day, when the sun seemed to have stopped its course across the sky and was pouring its heat like molten lead on the world. I had gone there to pick some raspberries for my little Poupchette, who’s crazy about them. I wanted to surprise her when she woke up from her afternoon nap.

The forest was alive and humming with busy bees and darting wasps, with frenzied flies and horseflies buzzing around in every direction, as if seized by a sudden madness. It was a great symphony, which seemed to arise out of the ground and emerge from the air. In the village, I hadn’t come across a living soul.

Although brief, the climb unsteadied my legs and winded me. My shirt was already soaked through, covered with dust, and sticking to my skin. I stopped on the path to catch my breath, and that was when I noticed him: a few meters away from where I stood, his back turned to me, there was the Anderer , contemplating the roofs of the village from a position on the rock. He was sitting on his strange, portable seat, which had been an object of fascination for everyone the first time we saw him deploy it. It was a folding stool, big and sturdy enough to support his ample buttocks, but when collapsed and stashed away, it looked like a simple cane.

In that landscape, all greenery and bright yellow, his dark clothing, his eternal, impeccably ironed black cloth frock coat, cast a shadow that looked out of place. Drawing a little closer to him, I noticed that he was also wearing his ruffled shirt, his woolen waistcoat, and gaiters on his heavy, highly polished shoes, which reflected light like the shards of a mirror.