Philippe Claudel - Brodeck

Widow Bernhart pulls down the metal shutter of her grocery store at sunset; after that, the only place where you can buy a few provisions is Schloss’s inn. It’s also the most popular of the taverns. It has two public rooms. The one at the front is the larger of the two; its walls are blackened wood, its floor is covered with sawdust, and you practically fall into it when you enter because you have to go down two steep steps carved into the very sandstone and hollowed out in the middle by the soles of the thousands of drinkers who have trod there. And then there’s the smaller room in the back, which I’ve never seen. It’s separated from the first room by an elegant larch-wood door with an engraved date: 1812. The little room is reserved for a small group of men who meet there once a week, every Tuesday evening; they drink and smoke either tobacco from their fields in porcelain pipes with carved stems or bad cigars from who knows where. They’ve even given themselves a name: De Erweckens’Bruderschaf , which means something like “the Brotherhood of the Awakening.” A peculiar name for a peculiar association. No one knows exactly when it was created or what its purpose is or how you get into it or who its members are — the big farmers, no doubt, maybe Lawyer Knopf, Schloss himself, and definitely the mayor, Hans Orschwir, who owns the most property in these parts. Likewise unknown is what they get up to or what they say to one another when they meet. Some say that room is where essential decisions are taken, strange pacts sealed, and promises made. Others suspect that the brothers dedicate themselves to nothing more complex than the consumption of brandy and the playing of checkers and cards, accompanied by much smoking and jocularity. A few people claim to have heard music coming from under the door. Maybe Diodemus the teacher knew the truth; he rummaged everywhere, in people’s papers and in their heads, and he had a great thirst to know things inside and out. But the poor man, alas, is no longer here to speak of what he knew.

I almost never go to Schloss’s inn because, I must confess, Dieter Schloss makes me uneasy, with his darting mole’s eyes, his bald pink cranium, his eternally sweaty forehead, his brown teeth that smell like dirty bandages. And then there’s another reason, namely that ever since I came back from the war, I don’t seek out human company. I’ve grown accustomed to my solitude.

The evening when the Ereigniës took place, old Fedorine had sent me to the inn to get a bit of butter because we’d run out and she wanted to make some little shortbreads. Ordinarily, she’s the one who fetches provisions, but on that baleful evening my Poupchette was lying in bed with a bad fever, and Fedorine was at her side, telling her the story of “Bilissi and the Poor Tailor,” while Amelia, my wife, hovered nearby, ever so softly humming the melody of her song.

I’ve thought a great deal about that butter since then, about the few ounces of butter we didn’t have in the pantry. You can never be too aware of how much the course of your life may depend on insignificant things — a little butter, a path you leave to take another path, a shadow you follow or flee, a blackbird you choose to kill with a bit of lead or decide to spare.

Poupchette’s beautiful eyes shone too brightly as she listened to the old woman’s voice, the same voice I’d listened to in days gone by, coming from the same mouth — a younger version of the same mouth, but already missing a few teeth. Poupchette looked at me with her eyes like little black marbles, burning with fever. Her cheeks were the color of cranberries. She smiled, stretched out her hands to me, and clapped them together, quacking like a duckling. “Daddy, come back Daddy, come back!”

I left the house with the music of my child’s voice in my ears, mingled with Fedorine’s murmuring: “Bilissi saw three knights, their armor bleached by time, standing before the doorstep of his thatched cottage. Each of them carried a red spear and a silver shield. Neither their faces nor even their eyes could be seen. Things are often thus, when it’s far too late.”

—

ight had dropped its cape over the village as a carter flings his cloak over the remains of his campfire. The houses, their roofs covered with long pinewood tiles, exhaled puffs of slow blue smoke and made me think of the rough backs of fossilized animals. The cold was beginning to settle in, a meager cold as yet, but we’d lost the habit of it because the last days of September had been as hot as so many baking ovens. I remember looking at the sky and seeing all those stars, crowded against one another like scared fledglings looking for company, and thinking that soon we would plunge, all of a sudden, into winter. Where we live, winter seems as long as many centuries skewered on a giant sword, and while the cold weather lasts, the immensity of the valley around us, smothered in forests, evokes an odd kind of prison gate.

When I entered the inn, almost all the men of the village were there. Their eyes were so somber and their immobility so stony that I immediately guessed what had happened. Orschwir closed the door behind me and stepped to my side, trembling a little. He fixed his big blue eyes on mine, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

My stomach started churning. I thought it was going to eat my heart. Then I asked, in a very weak voice — staring at the ceiling, wanting to pierce it with my gaze, trying to imagine the Anderer’s room, trying to imagine him, the Anderer , with his sideburns, his thin mustache, his sparse curly hair rising in tufts from his temples, and his big round head, the head of an overgrown, good-natured boy — I said, “Tell me you haven’t… you didn’t…?” It was barely a question. It was more like a groan that escaped from me without asking permission.

Orschwir took me by the shoulders with both hands, each of them as broad as a mule’s hoof. His face was even more purple than usual, and a droplet of sweat, tiny and glistening like a rock crystal, slid very slowly down the bridge of his pockmarked nose. He was still trembling, and since he was holding me like that, he made me tremble, too. “Brodeck… Brodeck…” That was all he managed to say. Then he stepped backward and melted into the crowd. Everyone’s eyes were on me.

I felt like a tiny weak tadpole in the spring, lost in a great puddle of water. I was too stunned for my brain to work properly, and, oddly enough, I thought about the butter I’d come to buy. I turned to Dieter Schloss, who was standing behind the bar, and I said, “I’m just here to buy some butter, a little butter, that’s all…” He shrugged his narrow shoulders and adjusted the flannel belt he wore around his pear-shaped belly, and I believe it was at that very moment that Wilhem Vurtenhau, a rabbit-headed peasant who owns all the land between the Steinühe forest and the Haneck plateau, took a few steps forward and said, “You can have all the butter you want, Brodeck, but you’re going to tell the story. You’re going to be the scribe.” I rolled my eyes. I wondered where Vurtenhau could possibly have come up with that word “scribe.” He’s so stupid, I’m sure he’s never opened a book in his life, and besides, he said the word wrong; in his mouth, the b became a p .

Telling stories is a profession, but it’s not mine. I write only brief notices on the state of the flora and fauna, on the trees, the seasons, and the available game, on the water level of the Staubi River, on the snowfalls and the rainfalls. My work is of little importance to my administration, which in any case is very far away, a journey of many days, and which could not care less about what I write. I’m not sure my reports are still reaching their destination, or, if they are, whether anyone reads them.